Love and Glory

Chapter Twenty-Three

One of the things I did regularly was review the Boston papers in the periodical room at the main library, downtown. I had a sense that I ought to stay in touch with things back there, where I assumed she was. She might have moved, of course, but if she had, I had no way to know where, and maybe she hadn’t. It was a way of keeping in touch, like the journal.

In the Living section of The Boston Globe for August 11, 1962, was a picture of Archibald MacLeish drinking a glass of wine and talking with Professor John Merchent. The name clamored along my nervous system. It was him, and behind him, smiling at someone out of the picture... the clamor stilled. Everything stilled. The life in me suspended as I looked at her picture after eight years. I was, I thought afterward, like one of those prey animals, run down by a predator, whose last moments are catatonic as shock obscures both fear and pain. Had a tree fallen, it would have made no sound. Perhaps no movement.

When time began again I read the story. It was short. MacLeish had read poetry at Taft University in Walford, Mass. Merchent was a member of the University Forum Committee. With him was Mrs. Merchent. They were shown at a reception in the faculty club. “Okay,” I said out loud. “Okay.” No one in the periodical room paid any attention.

It had taken me seven years to get to the West Coast. It took me ten hours to go back east with a year’s savings in my pocket. I landed in Boston on a bright thick August morning. And went straight from the airport to Taft. I got a catalogue from the admissions office and read it. Merchent was an assistant professor in the English department. I went back to admissions. It was too late to apply for regular admission. School began in a month, but I could certainly enroll as a special student for the fall semester and meanwhile apply for regular admission in January.

Taft University was suburban Boston. It sat on a tree-shaded campus and looked, in fact, like most colleges look in the catalogue pictures: vines, bricks, grass, paths, fraternity row, the student commons, a chapel with a white spire. I was thirty years and two days old when I walked across the campus at nine in the morning to go to my first class. I was three thousand miles and one year distant from the morning when I woke up in despair on the edge of the Pacific. I was aware of the distance I’d traveled.

By January I was enrolled as a second-semester sophomore at Taft; and in early February the V.A., encouraged by a congressman from my district, restored my G.I. Bill. I did a paper on Eugene O’Neill that got an A (“You write with easy mastery,” the professor had commented in red ink at the end), a close reading of Marvell’s poem “Bermudas” which got an A- (“Clearly you know how to read, and read ingeniously, perhaps, in this case, a bit too ingeniously”), and a long, seminar paper in Shakespeare’s use of comic elements in the tragedies and histories (“You have given yourself, and us, a splendid course, and some genuine insights. A+). I still didn’t enjoy school and I still found most of the professors annoying, but my powers of concentration and my ability at self-discipline had enlarged through the years and I took some real pleasure in getting myself into an organized and active relationship with literature and with the past. After school I worked out at the Taft gym, ran the track, and worked three nights a week tending bar at the Holiday Inn on Mass. Avenue in Cambridge.

I had avoided taking Merchent’s course, and I had not seen Jennifer. I would do both, I knew, but I approached things in a kind of intuitive sequence, like a recovering heart patient, whose body somehow whispers to him, This, not that. You’re not ready for that. I saw Merchent several times in the hall, between classes, and looked at him carefully. Still tall, and blond, he had developed a small paunch. The paunch was something you probably noticed more quickly if you felt about him as I did. The eyes were a little pouchy, too, and his tan looked superficial, as if the pallor beneath were enduring, and the outdoor color an affectation. His clothes were splendid, and probably cost more than I had earned all told since last I saw him. And he seemed the darling of the female English majors who often gathered about him as he strolled from class. The graduate students closest to him, the younger women in a descending hierarchy of admirers, on the fringes looking on. The male students in my observation paid him very little heed.

Merchent didn’t notice me. He had no reason to. He’d seen me once, eight years ago. I hadn’t mattered to him much then. I didn’t now. But he mattered to me. Next semester I’d take his course.

The day after Washington’s Birthday the English department held a reception for its majors and faculty in the department lounge in Munson Hall. I went and Jennifer was there.