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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: A New Life
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Now she tells me.
“I can’t do it,” Levin sighed.
“Doesn’t how close we once were mean anything at all to you?” Nadalee asked.
“It does, but not to make me dishonest.”
She looked at him bitterly. “Weren’t you dishonest in sleeping with me?”
“How so?”
“To your obligations?”
“Yes.”
“Then would it make you any more so to raise my grade just a teeny, to a B minus?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes brimmed. He found her a tissue but she flung it away, shot him a cold look, and left the office.
Levin was afraid of the worst: When her father yanked her out of college she would take him along for the ride—the end of his short careless career as a college instructor. Ah, if I could begin all over again, he thought.
That night he was back at his desk at the office, reading through Nadalee’s d.o. Possibly in the mad rush he had made a mistake. Levin first went through her paper to see that he hadn’t skipped a page or marked any right answers wrong. He hadn’t. Then he checked the count on each page—correct—and totaled the eight page scores. He added them three times and got three different figures, one twenty-two points higher than that on her paper. He flung down his pencil.
He hurried across the hall to Bucket, who obliged by doing the addition on Milly’s adding machine. It came out twenty-two points higher than the original score. Referring to the grade distribution sheet, Levin saw she would easily make a B minus, giving her the B she needed. He was elated yet irritated by his carelessness.
“Something wrong?” Bucket asked.
“What do you do if you’ve sent the registrar a wrong grade?”
“I suggest you ask the secretary for a ‘change of grade card’ and say a prayer.”
“Really? What for?”
“The registrar doesn’t like to change grades.”
Levin, in his office, kicked himself for not having checked his additions. He took his pile of exams to Milly’s desk and sat there re-adding scores on the machine. By one A.M. he had uncovered three more errors. One wasn’t serious—did not affect the student’s letter grade; but three of the four were. Nadalee must, of course, be raised. A veteran in her class had to go up from B to A minus; and a girl in another section had to have her grade lowered from B to straight C. The instructor held his head.
Early that morning, the Friday before the vacation began, he asked Milly for three “change of grade” cards. She handed
them to him, concerned behind her harlequin glasses. “They’re hardly ever used, Mr. Levin.”
He filled them out on her desk, writing “error in addition” for “reason for change,” and then took them across the hall for Gilley’s signature.
Gerald’s face slowly flushed.
“For Pete’s sake, Sy, three? Why, the registrar will go right through the roof. You have no idea of all they have to do right now. They’ll be working through Saturday and Sunday and all of next week while the rest of us are loafing on our vacations. Each of these cards means half a dozen different changes for each student. It’s a mess of clerical work, and they just can’t spare that much time. The worst of it is it’s entirely possible this girl you want to drop to a C may already have her transcript. Now what do you think she’s going to feel like to get notice of this change?”
Levin, his beard prickly, was apologetic. “I’m sorry, Gerald, but a mistake is a mistake.”
Gilley studied the three cards. “I’ll tell you what we could do. Why don’t you just turn in the two grade raises and never mind the other one? The girl will have a fit if she finds out her mark has been reduced. She could make trouble not only for you but for the department. Her father or some relative might call the president’s office and the next thing you’d be sweating on his carpet, and we’d be hearing about it.”
Levin, mopping his face, answered, “I would show him the evidence.”
“It would still reflect on our good name.”
“Still,” said Levin, “if two changes are going to be made, why not the third? It’s only logical.”
After reflecting another minute, Gilley, his face resembling a lightly boiled beet, glumly gave in.
“But for crying in the sink, be careful in the future.”
Levin promised and hastily left. Later he telephoned Nadalee and told her about his error.
“You mean I had B minus all the while?”
He admitted it.
“Then thanks for nothing.”
She hung up hard but he felt comparatively clear in conscience.
 
During the long winter vacation it rained continuously, the sky a low thick motionless raincloud, the warmish wet-cold season without dry corner. After daylong rain it rained all night, the dark, liquescent, dripping from trees. When he woke in the night to heft his life, he listened to the rain as natural history, the Pacific extending itself over the land. Huge sopping clouds floated over breakers threading the beaches and struck against mountainsides, rain pouring from an armada of smashed hulls, drenching the craggy crawling forests, drowning green hills black, soaking the grasslit fields. In the dark Levin remembered the rain of his childhood, blown in wind against the faces of tenements, engulfing the leafless backyard tree in foaming bursts; but when it had ended—after a day, three, a week—it had ended and enter light, the worshipful sun. Here was no sense of being between rains; it was a climate, a condition, the water burbling, thick, thin, fine, ubiquitous, continuous, monotonous, formless. Once in a while he saw two rainbows in the same sky but after rainbows it rained. Wherever Levin went he went in rubbers, raincoat, umbrella; the only other man he saw with an umbrella was Professor Fairchild. Students stood bareheaded in the pelting rain, talking leisurely, even opening a book to prove a point. Meanwhile Levin had grown neither fins nor duckfeathers; nor armorplate against loneliness.
Bullock had invited him to drive to San Francisco with him, Jeannette, and the kids, and Levin was willing, but at the last minute George had to change his plans. Levin considered attempting the drive—for experience—in his Hudson, but he had tormenting visions of boiling over on every mountain top, being stuck in innumerable ditches, breaking down in snow, having to be towed and repaired until he was bankrupt.
So he stayed home without much to do, though there were one or two little invitations, and he was looking forward to Bullock’s apparently annual New Year’s Eve shindig that Gerald had been rubbing his hands over. He read a lot, sometimes putting down his book to think of Nadalee, often with desire. One night he went to the tavern to see if Laverne was there but she had quit. He thought of the barn with nostalgia. The new waitress did not interest him so he left after one beer. During the week he visited Millard Scowers and O. E. Jones, and on Christmas night saw four hundred of Dr. Kuck’s color slides. All eight Buckets—be had phoned several times and knocked on their door twice—had apparently left town. Levin thought of telephoning Avis but remembered her operation. The town had little to offer of entertainment. One night the instructor drove ninety miles to see a foreign film. The next day he drove two hundred, coming and going, to inspect the University at Gettysburg. While in the art gallery there, he bowed his head for the return of the liberal arts to Cascadia College. In the evening he searched the pages of the Easchester
Commercial Budget
for some local cultural event to attend, but what were Zonta, Daughters of the Nile, Men’s Loyalty Club? He was too young for Let’s Be Forty but considered dropping in at a meeting of You and Me because he had heard boy met girl there. Before he could go, Levin was sick in bed.
He had caught a miserable cold. His throat burned, sour nose dripped, head ached, and he sneezed in bunches. Sleep was hard to come by; when he dozed, his raspy breathing woke him. Bullock called to say Jeannette had the flu and they were canceling out for New Year’s. Levin felt himself grow depressed. He thought of Nadalee endlessly, had got her without deserving to—fruit for teacher—a mean way to win a lay. His escape to the West had thus far come to nothing, space corrupted by time, the past-contaminated self. Mold memories, bad habit, worse luck. He recalled in dirty detail each disgusting defeat from boyhood, his weaknesses, impoverishment, undiscipline—the limp self entangled in the fabric
of a will-less life. A white-eyed hound bayed at him from the window—his classic fear, failure after grimy years to master himself. He lay in silence, solitude, and darkness. More than once he experienced crawling self-hatred. It left him frightened because he thought he had outdistanced it by three thousand miles. The future as new life was no longer predictable. That caused the floor to move under his bed.
Levin fell into sadness, an old kind; this lonely man remembering this lonely man in the dark of a dirty room. So it went for ages, too long to think about. After came apathy; a rock with a cold in the head lay in bed, his own monument. But apathy he bore on the edge of shrieking; in iron desperation he concentrated on the sad golden beauty of a fifth of whiskey. The vision made him terribly thirsty. He reached for a bottle and found himself staring into a pair of brown eyes. Levin shuddered, no one had entered, was he already drunk? Then he saw Pauline Gilley watching him through the glass top of the back door, something like pity in her eyes. When she knocked, he craftily kept his mouth shut, but she had turned the knob and was already breathlessly in the room, naming, as she placed them on the table, what she had brought him: “Nosedrops, anti-histamine, vitamin C, a lemon for your tea, and some oranges and cookies. Excuse me for coming in the back way, but Gerald said Mrs. Beatty naps in the afternoon, and I didn’t want to ring the bell.”
She had removed her coat and was unknotting the black scarf on her head. Talking all the while, she picked things up, hung up his clothes, straightened the papers on his desk, saying as though it mattered she would have come before but Gerald hadn’t told her until today that Levin was sick. “I had asked about you and he said George had said you had a bad cold. I’m terribly sorry.”
He answered nothing, beard clotted, hair matted with sweat, the sick waste of a man. Whatever she thought she must do, let her do it and go.
Then she was sitting in a chair by his bed, facing the mess
he was, knitting an obscene gray sock. “I wish you had phoned me.” Her voice was at times inaudible. It made no difference.
“There’s no need for you to be alone when you’re sick. My father used to say that did more harm than the illness. Would you like me to read to you? I’ve brought
The Woodlanders,
a book I like very much.”
He waited with shut eyes for her to go. It was a matter of time. She had stopped talking. Now he heard, as he stared at the ceiling, the click of her knitting needles. When the sound was gone she would be. He waited for that so he could take up his thirst.
“The children aren’t our own,” she was saying. “We adopted little Mary last year and Erik the year before, after being childless since we were married.”
Levin waited with cunning patience and after long silence she put away the needles and got up. The rain had stopped. Under golden clouds the setting sun flooded the room. In the light she was knotting her scarf and then he no longer saw her. Afterwards his nose bled and he could smell the lemon and oranges she had left.
Levin got up and dressed. He pulled on rubbers but omitted the umbrella. Going out the back way, he walked along wet streets, sunlight glistening on the branches of black-trunked trees, to where the houses ended and he could see the sunset over the fields. The sun had sunk behind the mountains but the sky flamed rose. Clouds in surprising shapes and colors floated over his head. One looked like a fat red salmon. Another was a purple flower. One was a golden-breasted torso out of Rubens. His thirst was gone; everything was wet, trees, puddled roads, the grassy evening earth. His misery had exhaled itself. He was once more the improved Levin.
It was that goddamned cold, he thought. If I had kept that in mind I could have saved myself pain. He regretted not having said a kind word to her; but he felt like a man entering a new life and entered.
He returned to class still dissatirred with his teaching. English 11, “more a college course,” Gilley had described it, though an improvement over last term’s course, still depended too heavily on
The Elements.
Sometimes Levin interrupted drill in Workbook Form B, to speak of a good novel or read aloud a poem, the only poem some of them would hear in college, possibly in their lives. Sometimes, between a comma and semicolon, he reformed the world. But since that was irrelevant to the subject matter of the curriculum, he felt uneasy. Who am I anyway, the fourth Isaiah? And he failed more papers than he had last term. He lectured his students for the thinness of their themes, for their pleasant good-natured selves without a critical attitude to life. Then he was conscience-stricken for not patiently teaching.
A few people disappeared from his classes. When he got their withdrawal slips he assumed they had dropped English or left college, until he learned they had been in to see Gilley, who had arranged their transfer to other comp courses. Gerald admitted this to Levin once when they were alone in the coffee room. “Better take it easy, Sy. These kids have every right to be treated with respect.”

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