It Will Come to Me (30 page)

Any children?

Yes, a son.

How old?

Mid-twenties.

Out of grad school then?

Never went, actually.

Ah! Yes! She knew of many such. Didn't Dennis O'Donnell at Penn have a son who kicked over the traces and became a furniture restorer? Very skilled, she'd heard. Made all kinds of money. The conversation trailed off, the epistemologist nodding and refolding her napkin. She was sitting with her back to the window, so it was only Ben who took note when one of a huddle of derelicts who'd been smoking and sharing a wheezy laugh in front of the Shining Star suddenly jackknifed at the waist and deposited a wad of phlegm the size of a robin's egg on the sidewalk.

Today there was no such gathering. The Shining Star was dark and bolted. A note taped to the chicken-wire-reinforced porthole in the aluminum door read:
BUS FOR HONEYCUTT HURRICANE SHELTER LEAVES
2
PM
. Perhaps he could hope that Isaac was on it. He could also hope it had left early enough to escape the gridlock on 117. Alternatively, he could hope—this had been his ace in the hole all along—that Martinez had somehow gotten him to safety.

What now? He'd canvassed all the places Isaac had been known to frequent in the past two years. All he could think to do was to get back into the car and retrace his route, east on Ferris, right at the Dufour. The sun was sinking now, and the light was the color of unfiltered pineapple juice. When he thought to turn on the car radio it was a voice from another era that he heard—not the light facetious tenor of today's radio announcers but a deep calm baritone, like Edward R. Murrow's on the /
Can Hear It Now
records that had so impressed and frightened him when he and his father listened to them in the late 1950s. The voice was interrupted every few seconds by an alarming double beep, and it informed him that the voluntary evacuation advisory for Gingris
County had been canceled. As of 4:45
PM
, a new advisory had been issued: shelter in place.

E
very Lola building constructed in the last six years had been designed to withstand a Category Four hurricane. Horace Dees was one of these, and it had other features that made it suitable for use as a shelter—an auxiliary generator and showers in both the men's and women's restrooms on the third floor.

And so it was that campus security opened the doors to Horace Dees (and three other campus buildings) at six thirty on the evening of September 24. Ben and Ruth were among the earliest arrivals. They brought with them only Ruth's canvas satchel and a small suitcase containing changes of underwear, toilet articles, Ben's altruism manuscript, a light thermal blanket, and a flashlight. At the last minute Ruth added two novels and a flask of single-malt scotch. As they locked the house, a soft drizzling rain was beginning, and as they walked through their neighborhood past houses boarded up with plywood (a useless precaution, according to the special Hurricane Heather edition of the
Spangler Advocate)
a capricious breeze kicked up. The sky, Ruth observed as she took Ben's arm, was as deep a shade of charcoal gray as she'd ever seen, and it gave the dying light a peculiarly intimate radiance. By the time they reached the outer parking lots of Lola, true dusk was spreading and the breeze had become a tree-tossing wind. The campus was so absolutely flat that they could see all four lighted shelter buildings, shining like passenger ships plowing through a darkening sea.

A few cars had been left parked on the access road, their hazard lights blinking. As Ben and Ruth walked toward Horace
Dees, a pack of undergraduate males came barreling past them, whooping and shouting, their eyes and teeth gleaming in the gloaming. Were they drunk? No, just excited, as Ruth herself (but not Ben) would have been at their age. The steadily gathering wind, the creaking trees, the skittering leaves: what anarchic joy she'd have felt at nineteen, out on a night when a hurricane was starting to blow. How she would have identified with this wild Heather—”Be thou me, impetuous one!” But now she saw that the rowdy boys were turning into the driveway of Dryden Commons, one of the lit buildings. They were Lola students after all, sensible at heart.

When they arrived at six fifty, the lobby was nearly empty. Barbara Bachman seemed to have imported a stack of coolers and baskets full of food; she and three of her children were setting up a sandwich-making beachhead at the other end of the room. They seemed very far away, their chirruping voices swallowed by echoes. The only other person present was Jean-Henri Deslauriers, a gouty bachelor who'd been teaching entry-level French conversation for thirty years without a promotion. Sitting just outside the foyer on a flimsy folding chair, his cane on his lap and an old-fashioned valise at his feet, he looked the part of a refugee. The lobby was dim; only the wall sconces were lit. That and the echoes and Jean-Henri's stoical presence gave the room the feeling of a vast, shadowy European train station.

By seven thirty, Heather was making landfall on Survivor's Island (Category Four, 151 mph winds, gusts up to 170, storm surge 18 feet) and the lobby was swarming with academic life. Faculty and staff were arriving steadily, carrying suitcases and backpacks, blankets and pillows, board games and bags of provisions. They'd brought children too, of course—eye-rolling adolescents,
scampering preschoolers, wailing toddlers, sleeping infants in front packs. And they'd brought pets: five cats vocalizing in carrying cases, two squawking cockatoos, assorted mice and guinea pigs and hamsters quivering under piles of cedar shavings, one unblinking iguana, four nervously prancing dogs. Of these, two were Big and Baby, chaperoned by Bobby Mitten-Kurz, who circulated through the room accepting good wishes for Roberta. She was resting, he explained to anyone who asked, at the Pavilion of the Pines Hospital. Yes, that was an officially designated hurricane shelter. They'd had quite a scare on her account and on Baby's as well, but all seemed to have ended happily. He'd picked up Baby at a vet's office all the way over in Sharp City this morning and he was fine, just a little shaky and spooked. Bertie's confusion had been alarming at first, but it turned out the problem was really only that her blood-pressure medication needed adjustment. They'd kept her in the hospital for a night's observation, just to be sure the new dosage agreed with her. He'd be there himself, he said, if they'd allowed it.

It was odd, Ben thought, to look around him and see in the flesh what he'd so often heard lauded in the abstract. This was the Lola community—or at least the humanities part of it—flowing into the lobby and milling about as if awaiting orders, its multiple faces flickering with anxiety and confusion. He'd seen this group assembled before, but only to mark the ceremonies of the academic calendar, never for atavistic reasons of safety and survival. There was Dolores and her husband and two of their older grandchildren, divesting themselves of hats and raincoats in the foyer. And there was Muriel Draybrooke in her damp tweeds, doggedly pushing her way through the crowd toward the sandwich table. There were the Federmans, back from Majorca, Sissy
smiling gamely and waving at acquaintances, Bruce looking exasperated. He was relieved to see that Rhoda was present, standing over by the glassed-in shelves where faculty books were displayed, talking to a young couple from the History Department. He saw Beth Mapes and the doctor in scrubs who was said to be her partner. He spotted the timid young Philbys and a few of the other current graduate students and wondered where the missing ones might be: they could have joined the evacuees, he supposed, or found shelter elsewhere. Was he responsible for them? With graduate students, that was always the question.

He knew nearly everyone here, if only by reputation, but in some cases he had to adjust for the effects of aging or make inferential guesses. The hurricane had flushed out people who hadn't shown themselves in decades. It took him a moment to recognize a famous emérita, the author of a definitive history of the Spanish Civil War, now inching along with the help of a walker, her elderly son clearing a path. For the first time he laid eyes on the legendarily anorexic daughter of the History Department secretary. He spotted a reclusive poet with multiple chemical sensitivities and a young ethnomusicologist who'd been on medical leave since exposing himself to a group of Korean middle schoolers in the parking garage of Crossgates Mall. He witnessed some particularly stiff encounters between rivals who for years had been arranging their schedules to avoid meeting one another. He saw two scenes of joyful reunion.

He hadn't gone far in his wanderings before an eddy of shop-talking gossipers formed around him, all demanding to know the latest about the fallout from the Charles Johns incident. Was the SCAC inspector still in the hospital? (No.) Was the inspector suing the university? (Not as far as Ben knew.) Was Ricia Spottiswoode
leaving the university now that Charles had been fired? (Yes.) And who would take over as dean? (It hadn't yet been announced, was Ben's evasive answer, although Marcy Bainbridge had told him unofficially that it was Josh Margolis.) Excusing himself from his questioners, he was surprised to find a number of them stepping forward to shake his hand, as if somehow he'd been credited with the vanquishing of Mitten-Kurz. Dorit Rubenfeld, a dark and bosomy Israeli anthropologist, pulled him toward her and planted a moist kiss on his left ear. Where was Ruth? He'd have given a lot for her to see that.

Ah, there she was, leaning against the far wall, paging through the
Lola Lantern
, isolating herself in her beckoning way. Striking out in her direction, he saw that a crowd of school-age children had been allowed to gather in one of the lecture halls adjoining the lobby to watch cartoons on an overhead monitor. Adults were drifting in and out of another such room, checking on Roush and Mirielle's continuing coverage. (Heather was weakening slightly, but still a strong Cat Three, clocked at 119 mph as she came through Old Prison Farm Corners.) Ariel Bachman snaked through the crowd with pen and notepad, offering a choice of sandwiches in her piping, tremulous voice. Ben ordered a turkey and cheese on sourdough for himself and hummus with tomato and onion on pumpernickel for Ruth.

But now, just as he was approaching her, Ruth put down the
Lantern
and moved away. In a moment he saw why: Ricia and Charles had just arrived; they were standing in the entryway, surveying the scene. No doubt Ruth had been watching for them. Josh Margolis was signaling to him from another quarter of the room, but now Ben was waylaid again, this time by Dwight Alsop of the English Department, demanding to know his opinion of
Dreddle's new core distribution requirement proposal. He hadn't given it much thought, Ben confessed. Well, it had to be stopped, Alsop said. It was quite mad, quite unreasonably restrictive, and it would mean a drastic reshuffling of the curriculum and a serious decline in the number of majors. Behind Alsop's head, a window pulsed with lightning. Was that the wind, that high, faint keening he kept thinking he was hearing over the shoptalk jabber?

Baring his teeth apologetically, Ben backed away, pointing to the sandwiches he was carrying as if they constituted a self-explanatory excuse. He had hoped to be swallowed quickly by the crowd, but just in the last few moments some critical mass had been achieved and a diasporizing impulse had begun to break the aggregation into constituent couples and groups. These were rapidly moving away from one another and drifting up the stairs and down the hallways to offices and lounges and other private places where the parts could escape the whole.

I
t wasn't the first time,” Charles was saying, “I'm sorry to say. I seem to have a penchant for it. I had a job in a paper factory, just before I met Ricia, working the night shift. There was a person there, a foul-mouthed fellow who simply could not restrain himself from baiting me. I ignored him for months and then one night I picked him up and carried him out the back and dropped him off the truck ramp.” He passed the flask to Ricia, who took a quick pull and offered it to Ruth, who took a longer one. “It's a switch that gets thrown. I can't anticipate it. I can't guard against it.”

“He doesn't know his own strength,” said Ricia. “This has always been a problem.” She ran her fingers lightly over Charles's
shoulder. Charles leaned into the caress, his eyebrows rising slightly, as if in puzzled recognition of something he'd forgotten. “I think he needs taming. Do you think he needs taming, Ruth?”

“No,” said Ruth. The flask had traveled around several times now. “I think he's perfect,” she added. The three of them were sitting in a pond of soft light at the far end of Ricia's otherwise darkened office. Ricia had inherited a sagging foam-rubber couch that had been doing the rounds of faculty offices for years. She'd festooned it with pillows and throws and pulled up a pair of university-issued chairs to make a conversational grouping and set it all off from the rest of the room with two rice-paper screens. The effect was provisional and theatrical and it brought Ruth back to the days of her youth, when she spent many hours in settings and situations like this—often bored, always excited. It was amazing, she was thinking, how little she felt excluded by Charles and Ricia's intimacy. Not excluded at all, in fact. Welcomed into it, rather.

“Thank you, madam,” said Charles, toasting her with the flask. “I only wish Dr. Lee Wayne Dreddle shared that sentiment.”

“Oh, do you care?” asked Ruth. “I'd have given a lot to have you stay, both of you, but I didn't think you—”

“I don't really,” said Charles. “It's just that I'd been banking on having something to put on my resume. I'd been looking for some kind of academic work in Providence. I was hoping for an adjunct position at Brown, but I'd have settled for a community college. We don't need the money, strictly speaking, but I don't feel quite right about being a kept man—a completely kept man. I'd like to contribute to the common weal, but I'm too arthritic
for heavy labor now. Do you think I could take advantage of this temporary state of anarchy and smoke a cigarette here, Ricia? Would it set off some kind of alarm?”