John Gardner - Freddy's Book

“How do you do?” I said, grasping his small, rigid hand. Awkwardly, hardly knowing what else to do — smiling and bending my head to show interest — I said, “Your son, did you say—?”

He glanced at me in horror, as if only now did he realize that he’d spoken it aloud. The others were all studiously gazing at their drinks.

I smiled harder, throwing him help. “I imagine all our sons can seem monstrous at times.” I laughed heartily and gave his small fingers another earnest squeeze.

“Oh no,” he said, looking at me sternly, almost indignantly, focusing hard through his thick, tinted glasses, “I mean it literally.” Then he glanced at those around us — blank faces, frozen winces. It was clear that even he, for all his singularity, was aware that he’d broken the polite conventions, darkened the tone of things. No wonder if he was flustered; he must have been as painfully aware as I was that his colleagues did not like him. Perhaps he scorned his students and graded too fiercely, with the result that his classes were smaller than other people’s, stirring his colleagues’ resentment. Perhaps he was believed to give out a crushing excess of information — he looked like that type — or shirked committee work, or consistently took the wrong side in things. Whatever the reason, he was clearly unpopular, and now, as often happens to people in that plight, having made a small mistake — perhaps not even knowing what mistake it was he’d made, he was evidently thrown into a panic. Unable to think of a way to back down, and having missed my invitation to make light of it, he looked to left and right, his expression grim, then back at me, his eyebrows lifted, eyes wild, and made his radical decision. “Ah!” he said, and then, loudly: “Excuse me!” Without another word, he snatched back his hand, ducking and turning at the same time, found a small opening in the crowd, and fled. I stared after him, no doubt with my mouth open.

“You must’ve got to him,” a fat, bearded red-head beside me said. He was laughing, his two plump, small-fingered hands closed fondly around what looked like a glass of straight bourbon. His hair was parted in the middle and curled up sharply on each side; if we hadn’t been so crowded, I’d have glanced down to see if he had satyr’s hooves. He let go of his glass with one dainty hand and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Never mind old Agaard,” he said, laughing again. If I’d been startled by Agaard’s look of woe, I was even more startled by the red-head’s look of merriment.

Before my friend the red-head could carry the matter further, one of the people I’d been talking with earlier broke in again, poking between us with his nose like a chicken, and, like it or not, I was caught up once more in the scholiast’s game, paring popular notions of the “queer” and “unearthly” from notions of the “monstrous.” Time slipped out from under me; I forgot all about Professor Agaard and his son, and at last, when there were only a few of us left, the clean-shaven, neatly combed graduate student who’d been assigned to my service made signs that, really, we ought to be on our way, if I was willing. I hated to leave such a sociable haven, even now that most of the others had gone home; but reluctantly I finished off my drink, found my hat and coat, and followed him down the steps and the icy, buckling sidewalk to where his car sat, alone under a streetlight at the corner. It was a foreign car, trim and new, the kind that makes a person of my size hug his knees. But I was in a mood to hug myself. Wonderful creatures, all of them! A splendid occasion!

It was just as we were pulling in at my motel — one dim light in the office, the sign turned off — that I remembered the brief, peculiar conversation with the doll-like old man and asked, “What is this business about Professor Agaard’s son?”

“Agaard?” the young man echoed, ducking his head, peering past the steering wheel, making sure he was approaching the motel in exactly the right way — that is, approaching where the sign said ENTER, not EXIT, and driving very slowly to outwit the malevolent ice.

“I believe he said his son is a ‘monster,’” I said.

The young man glanced at me as he’d have done if he believed my revealing the truth about the Agaards would bring ruin on the Department — throw him, with his degree now made worthless, to the wolves. It was nothing of the kind, I knew; nothing but the alarm of a young man uncomfortable where the rules turn vague, drawn against his will toward the fogbound marchland where honest concern and the gossip’s ingress merge. Surely the personal affairs of his professors were not his business, his eyes said, though his lips remained thoughtfully pursed. I knew him then; should have known him all along by the stiffness of his elbows as he drove: he was one of those good second brothers in the fairytales, the one you could almost but in the end not quite put your money on. Out of virtue, he believed, come success and security; turn aside for an instant, and the abyss will leap around you with a shout. Poor devil, I thought, trying to put on charity—“third and mightiest of the three magic rings,” as I like to say at meetings. (No one is amused.) Nevertheless, his look somewhat chilled me. I remembered the look of distaste all around me, those cobra glances, when the old man had spoken about his son. I half wished now that I’d made Professor Agaard stay longer and tell me what he meant. The young man stopped the car; wed arrived at the door. “I don’t think I know a Professor Agaard,” he said, and gave me a cool little smile. “I’m in American.” With two fingers he adjusted his glasses.

“I see,” I said. It was an interesting solution. My young friend would go far in this icy-hearted, ethical age. But then, of course, the poor fellow wanted to get home to his wife, be able to get up for his classes in the morning. It’s easy to be harsh; take the bolder way! I nodded, smiled again. Overhead, the stars shone like tiny bits of frost. I was depressed a little by that sudden reminder of the immensity of things, universe on universe, if the Hindus are right — giant after sprawling giant, each pore on each body a universe like ours. I opened the door. “I’m sorry to have kept you so late,” I said.

Gratefully, mindful of his manners, he stuck out his hand. I shook it. “Good-night, Jack,” he said.

“Good-night,” I said, and, after an instant, “Good luck to you, my boy!” I got out and carefully shut the door. He waved as he pulled away; I waved back. I went up to my dim, comfortable room, staggering just a little — increasing instability of the planet, no doubt; also too much gin — drew the covers back, undressed, went to bed and, at once, slept like a bear.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, rising late, I found a letter awaiting me at the desk. I opened it on my way to breakfast in the sun-filled café-restaurant, puzzled for a moment over the wobbly, old-man handwriting, awkward and full of starts as a minnow’s trail, dropped down to the signature, and felt a shock of something like morning-after guilt. The letter was from Professor Sven Agaard. With the full name before me, I realized at once that the queer old man I’d met last night was the well-known Scandinavianist, easily one of the most respectable historians of our time, though only for one fat book, published some thirty-five years ago. In fact, I’d assumed he was dead.

It was a long letter, and at first I could do nothing but stare at it in distress, though technically, of course, I’d done nothing wrong. Try as I might, I could make no sense of this guilt I was feeling, but there was no mistaking that it was guilt. It did not seem to me, though perhaps I was mistaken, that it was anything so simple as my not having recognized his name.