Reunion (6 page)

An oak tree’s branches brushed his second-floor window. He’d been startled more than once by scratching sounds, nights he’d sat here on an old slip-covered couch reading journals or grading essays, nights when he’d thought all was calm outside. Shut away in the English department, he’d be unaware of the storm rolling in until the wind began rising, the trees swaying like so many lithe dancers in one of those troupes his ex-wife, Angie, had liked dragging him to see. Now he saw the rain stream off the tiny narrow leaves without paying it much attention, as what he was hearing on the telephone preoccupied him.

“Let me see if I understand correctly,” he said, returning to his desk. It was piled with scholarly books whose pages had long since yellowed, books with cracked spines and worn corners and opinions, within their pages, that were hardly credited anymore. By contrast,
Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book
was faceup with a note stuck to the front, reminding him to bring it for this afternoon’s tutoring session with a third-grader named Chris; after hearing Mitch’s story of how his son Julian had
loved
the book
when he was a boy, Chris had grudgingly agreed to try reading it himself. A potted purple orchid with a name Mitch could never remember sat atop four copies of his most recent publication, a slim book that considered the role of women in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction. The legendary author hadn’t been too successful with women, a problem Mitch unfortunately shared.

He said, “I’ll need some sort of filming permit from the city
along with
whatever I arrange directly with you folks there at the Hemingway Home, yes?”

The man on the other end of the phone call, a volunteer with a gravelly voice, said yes, he believed so. However, he said, September was thick into hurricane season and if Mitch came then, he was taking his chances.

“I know—my parents live there in Key West. But I appreciate your advice. Unfortunately, I’m working against a number of factors, one of which is my, er, crew’s availability, and my own. I only have the fall semester to pull this project together. As I said, I’ll be down tomorrow and hope to start getting things in order; can you give me the name of the person to contact about permits?” When he had the information jotted in his date book, he thanked the man and hung up.

Literary Lions
, his under-construction biopic series about classic American authors, had seemed uncomplicated when he’d first come up with the concept, which he envisioned as ideal for public television. The money he might earn was likely to be modest, but as a tenured professor, he was doing fine. And as Julian had reminded him recently, he already had a lot more of everything—time, money, security, opportunity—than most of the world’s citizens. Mitch had admitted this was true, and said, “Now do we sing a chorus of ‘We are the World’?” It was a nervous tic of a joke, he knew it even as the words left his mouth. Julian had been generous about it, though, saying, “Sure, Dad—you start.”

Mitch propped his feet on his desk and leaned back. His old leather chair squealed with the motion, testifying that, while tenure equaled job security, there were no luxuries in the academe. If he could make
Lions
fly—the image made him chuckle—he would reward himself with a
new chair. That
if was
a big one, however, and
uncomplicated
was proving to be a bit enthusiastic on his part.

To begin with, writing the script for the first episode, the
pilot
, as it was called, was more challenging than he’d anticipated. He’d imagined it as something like prepping a lecture for twenty students. However, a few torturous nights of script writing had proven that a low-stakes lecture was nothing like crafting an entertaining and informative hour-long program for a million viewers, all armed with remote controls.

Okay, maybe a million was a little zealous, to start. Thousands, though—surely he could count on thousands.

The script was coming along.

Overcoming his anxiety about inviting Julian to direct and film the pilot had been difficult, too. It required actively facing the fourteen-year-wide chasm in their relationship, which had been only minimally bridged when they were together at the hospital in Miami last fall after Mitch’s father had a stroke.

In the hospital corridor that day, without the usual buffer of his parents and an occasion like Christmas or graduation, it had been hard to know how to greet Julian. He’d wanted to hug him, something he hadn’t done since Julian was a pre-adolescent, but sensed the desire wasn’t mutual. He patted his shoulder instead.

“Dad’s going to be all right,” he said, “but it’s really nice that you could get here.” Julian had been at the beginning of his Afghanistan assignment then; traveling to Miami had taken him the better part of two days. The strain showed in his tired eyes—or was that strain from his work? Mitch worried about his living conditions and his safety and his diet, and whether Julian had found the comforting companionship of a woman—none of which he felt entitled to ask about. So he said, simply, “How are things?”

“Busy. You?”

“Oh, fine—busy.” He searched for something more to say as the silence dragged out. Then, inspired, he’d blurted, “Hey, one of my grad students is a portrait photographer on the side.”

“Oh?”

“I thought you’d find that interesting. A lit major who’s also a photographer.” He knew he was trying too hard, knew his eagerness would be plain on his face. He was one of those people whose expressions translated every thought, every emotion as it happened.

But Julian wasn’t looking at him. “Sure, interesting,” he’d said.

“So … are you getting a lot of work?”

Julian nodded. “Too much.”

Julian’s chosen career was in documenting human tragedies, people who were victims of governments, of bureaucracy and neglect. That day, Mitch had stood there next to his mature, experienced, world-traveler son and for the first time felt just slightly lesser in comparison. A strange feeling—chagrin and pride and envy, none of which had any place in a Miami hospital ICU ward when a man they loved was laying ill a dozen feet away—and yet there it was.

“Good that you could get here,” he’d said again.

Before he found the nerve to call Julian a few weeks later, to ask for his help
with Lions
, he’d tried to anticipate all possible objections. There was Julian’s lack of interest in the subject matter—Hemingway, Julian had declared once during a Thanksgiving dinner at Mitch’s parents’ home, was too depressing. And Faulkner, God, spare him from ever reading Faulkner again! Even back then, as a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old, Julian hadn’t wanted to read about problems; he’d wanted to read about solutions.

Then there was the lack of funds from which to pay Julian very much beyond basic expenses, and his fear that his low-pay offer could be interpreted as disregard for the value of Julian’s skills, given how Mitch had so steadfastly resisted Julian’s photojournalism career choice. In Mitch’s limited experience, Julian was an emotional minefield, and while he didn’t blame him for it—blamed himself, in fact, he also didn’t relish treading there with no detector.

So when Mitch finally did place the call, he did it after two shots of whisky, then rushed through his pitch, making the project sound as appealing as possible, braced for resistance, for disdain. That he’d gotten neither was still difficult to believe.

He was both anxious and eager to see Julian, to spend some quality time with him, as the saying went these days. He was both anxious and eager to get the project underway, to open people’s eyes to the joy and value of literature. But… suppose
Lions
didn’t ultimately win the interest of PBS. Suppose he invested so much—his time, his money, his ego—only to see the door slammed in his face.

He stood up and went again to the window. There were worse things than rejection, worse things than disappointment. But he’d had enough of both.

A knock on his open door startled him, and as he turned toward the door, he stumbled slightly and reached for the bookcase for balance.

“Mitch!”

“I’m fine,” he said, holding off Brenda McCallum with a raised hand. “You surprised me is all.”

“You looked—”

“No, really, I’m fine. See?” He did a few soft-shoe steps on the bright Cuban rug to prove he was not about to end up as her husband had last April, in this very office. Craig McCallum, fellow professor, best friend and biking buddy, had suffered a brain aneurysm and died on Mitch’s small sofa while they’d all waited helplessly for the paramedics to arrive. Today was Mitch’s fifty-first birthday; Craig had been just fifty.

Brenda continued to watch him. “I saw your door was still open. Aren’t you running late?”

“Yes, but they won’t start without me,” he joked, and gathered the books he needed for the morning’s ENG 620: The Twentieth-century Novel. His fifteen graduate students, if they were all in attendance, would be seated around the conference table, most with their noses buried in
The Age of Innocence
because they’d failed to read all, or any, of what was to be discussed today. His late arrival would not be troubling.

Brenda was frowning at him. “What’s going on? You look funny.”

“Thanks for that vote of confidence.”

“You know what I mean. Odd.”

“Really, nothing at all. Just lost in thought. I’ve been on the phone with a guy in Key West, about how to shoot part of the
Lions
pilot there
at the Home and Museum. I’ll fill you in later.” He squeezed her shoulder and nodded for her to precede him to the door.

She took his hand. “Mitch …”

“Why don’t we get lunch when I’m done?” he said, letting her keep hold for a moment longer. “I’m in the mood for barbecue, how about you?”

n part because he was so distracted, he devised an exercise for his students that would take most of the class period. While they sat in groups of three or four outlining literary elements in the novel and discussing possible authorial intentions, he stood at the podium thinking about Brenda. Things were warming up between them, certainly. If he was ambivalent, well, that was to be expected. She was not only Craig’s widow; she was the chair of the English department. As his friend Tony had put it, if Mitch wasn’t careful, Brenda could easily have his balls in a sling.

Better, maybe, to think about Hemingway.

After decades of teaching, Mitch knew his ideas about literature weren’t going to change the world. Oh sure, he’d managed to impress his colleagues a time or two or three, he’d won teaching awards, he’d set at least a dozen students on the path to prominent literary scholarship. He’d also faced down a handful of annoyed undergraduates over the years who demanded to know what
the point
of it was. Who cared about evaluating whether Hemingway’s prose was more effective than Faulkner’s? What difference did it make that Hemingway had a tough time as a soldier, that even with the respect and awards—a Nobel for literature, for God’s sake, plus the devotion of a forgiving wife (or four)—he’d pointed a shotgun at his head and killed himself? What about what was happening to ordinary soldiers
now
, friends of theirs, in Iraq in the nineties, in Afghanistan and Iraq again today?

He’d nodded his agreement. He’d said, yes, my son feels this way too. There was no convincing some people—or he was not persuasive enough to convince them—that they would find their positions right there in the texts if they just gave the books a chance. Wharton, Hemingway,
Faulkner—they had it all: passion, romance, existential questions, the human condition imbued in every story. “Give it a chance,” he’d say. “Give me a break,” was the answer he usually got. Or, what Julian had said that day some fourteen years ago: “Get a life. That’s what
I’m
going to do.”

But what Julian hadn’t understood then was that not everyone was interested in, or equipped to travel,
his
chosen path, either. Some people were spotlights, some were reflectors. The world needed both. Yes, he’d pushed Julian too hard at the time, he saw that later. He’d been too passionate, too eager, too single-minded; he hadn’t recognized how Julian was already so much like him—and still was. Just not in the ways he had wanted him to be.

Well, he’d mellowed. Which didn’t mean he was any less passionate about literature’s relevance.
Literary Lions
grew from his urge to demonstrate that relevance in a new way … and, if he was fully honest, demonstrate his own relevance as well. Since Craig’s sudden death, he’d gone around feeling as though he had one foot in the grave. What was his legacy, other than a collection of articles, a couple of books read by approximately fourteen people, two failed marriages, and a strained relationship with his only son? With
Lions
, he hoped to rectify the past and revise his outlook for the future.

A future that appeared to want Brenda in it in ways he’d hardly imagined.

“Dr. Forrester?
Dr. Forrester?”
A student’s voice penetrated, finally.

“Sorry—you caught me daydreaming about, um, spending spring break in Key West,” he said. “What can I do for you?”