The Grasshopper King (4 page)

In the midst of this, in March of 1965, Higgs received a letter from Dr. Georg Knabel, Henderson's dentist. Higgs had located the man years before, in connection with the matter of the gold crown. The dentist had responded to Higgs's inquiries with one uninspiring sentence: “I recall Henderson only as a particularly contrary patient.”

But now Dr. Knabel had come through. He had gone to London for a three-day conference on cosmetic prosthodontics, and on the last night, careening drunkenly down Fleet Street with his fellow whiteners and unsnagglers, he had seen Henderson in a window. Was he sure? Higgs wrote back. Absolutely sure. He had recognized the upper left canine, his handiwork.

Armed with the dentist's description and a business map of London, Higgs was able to narrow the list of possible addresses to a few dozen. To each of these addresses he sent a letter, respectful but not obsequious, in perfect Gravinic, stating the author's admiration for Henderson's work, summarizing his research thus far, and gently inquiring as to Henderson's possible interest in a mutually beneficial correspondence.

Twenty of the letters returned unopened in the first two weeks, stamped “
NO SUCH OCCUPANT
.” More trickled in over the days that followed, each bearing the same gray message. Before long there was only one letter left extant. Months went by. Higgs's colleagues did their best to encourage him. Surely, they said, Henderson was lingering over his response. No doubt he was tossing draft after draft out into the beery, ancient street.

But when the letter came back it was Higgs's own, sealed in a new envelope; under Higgs's signature, a single Gravinic word was scrawled in red. The closest translation of Henderson's response is “bastard”—but the English word fails to capture the specific connotation of a son who, not content with dishonoring his mother by his illegitimacy, rapes her upon achieving manhood and abandons her to the poverty of soiled women. In Gravinic there was no firmer way to say no. Higgs must have been disappointed; but he could not have been surprised.

Soon afterwards, Coach Mahemeny retired. His replacement, a marginal ex-Piston named LaBart, found his players' dedication to Gravinic more troublesome than Mahemeny had.

“You can't paddle a ship with two oars,” he told Dean Moresby significantly. “You can't have two captains in the middle of the stream.”

“You're making sense,” Dean Moresby said.

LaBart recruited players from his home territory: the flat, sun-blasted counties around Los Angeles. The new boys, shivering and dull-eyed, had no interest in Higgs's class, or any class. LaBart enrolled them all in the brand-new mass communications department, to graduate from which they had only to perform mock sportscasts once a week and pass a multiple-choice test at the end of senior year.

So Higgs's course was cut in half, and subsequently it continued to dwindle. The ideological savor of those years had reached even to Chandler City, and it was becoming increasingly clear that Henderson was not—as they called it then—relevant. His views on women and racial minorities were retrograde, and his attachment to patriarchal
militarism, in the person of Kaiser Wilhelm, was no longer endearing. The feeling was not restricted to our university. On the contrary, because of Higgs's presence it was weaker there than elsewhere. Gravinicists worldwide were turning away from Henderson in favor of other, more palatable artists. A particular favorite was a poet from Henderson's own hometown, a woman who for thirty years had worked loyally on the line at the provincial collective bread factory, tucking a revolutionary stanza into the crease of each loaf as it rolled by. The remaining Henderson scholars became defensive and mistrustful, exchanging beleaguered late-night calls from their home phones. There were further failed attempts to track down Henderson in London; he'd moved, or had convinced the post office to bounce his mail. This surprised no one. Their journal diminished to a dittoed newsletter, then gave out. Their field had settled into the status of a shared peculiarity; like it or not, they were in with the matchbook collectors now, the cat fanciers, and the Esperantists.

For the few students who remained, there was still the matter of Higgs's deteriorating teaching. Often he would stop during a class and cock his head as if he'd heard an untoward noise; it would be a while before he started speaking again, and when he did, he sounded distracted and empty of conviction. The tiny pauses in his elocution grew to seconds, then to minutes, so that in an hour-long lecture there might be only fifteen minutes of actual speech. And more often than not, he let his class out at half-past. What he did say consisted mostly of difficult allusions which he left unexplained; he met all questions with a pained expression and an interval of weary silence. No one could explain Higgs's behavior. There was speculation, among those who knew about it, that the rejection from Henderson was to blame; but the change in Higgs had started before Dr. Knabel's news, and had if anything eased a bit with the arrival of Henderson's letter. He seemed healthy. He expressed no bitter dissatisfactions. But the pauses kept growing longer; and the students kept growing fewer. They moved him from the auditorium in Gunnery Hall, now embarrassingly empty, to
a seminar room at the department. Soon after that, his class was canceled altogether. No one had enrolled.

Dean Moresby, worried, visited his daughter for lunch.

“You've made a nice little place here,” he told Ellen. His daughter stood at the stove, grilling him a ham and cheese sandwich, humming along with the radio in the sitting room. She looked barely older than a teenager; though there was no trace left of the bracing, willful girl she'd been.

She stopped humming. “If you say so, Daddy. It's not as though we've redecorated. The basement's a mess.”

“I don't exactly mean the decorations.”

Ellen waited silently at the stove.

“I mean—you can always tell the house of a happy married couple. It's not so much a matter of what it looks like. There's a certain sense of permanence. Your mother and I—”

The two of them were quiet for a while as the smell of frying ham, greasy and reassuring, filled up the kitchen.

“Are you trying to ask me something?” Ellen said. “I'd like it if you'd just ask.”

“I don't want to intrude.”

“So it's about Stanley.”

He swallowed glumly. “Well, he hasn't seemed to be himself, has he? And we just thought you might know if there was anything he needed, or wanted—we could certainly see to it, if it were something of that sort.”

“Thank you for asking,” she said, “but no. You've been very generous already.”

“And as your father,” he went on, “naturally I've been concerned . . .”

“Oh,” she said. “That we're on the outs.”

There, now, was the willful girl.

“If you think it's necessary to put it that way.”

“Well, you were right the first time,” Ellen said. “We're perfectly happy.” She lifted the sandwich off the pan and set it on a plate before him; her frown smoothed out. The battle was over before he'd had a
chance to take a swing: “If you think it's necessary . . .” Pathetic! Resignedly he wished his wife were there. She had a finger on Ellen's switch; with a single word she could have turned this into a screaming all-afternoon affair, just like in the old days.

Ellen produced a scotch and water in a tall, heavy glass and set it on the table. The dean took down a third of the drink in one forceful, medicinal swallow. Sprightly drums pounded in the sitting room.

“Your mother asked me to ask you something,” he said.

“I guess I know what.”

“It's already nine years.”

“Stanley believes in sharing the work of raising children equally,” Ellen told him. “And he's very busy right now.”

The dean adopted his warmest and most fatherly aspect; he was Santa, he was a Norman Rockwell cop on an ice cream stool. “It would be a big change,” he said. “Your mother and I would help you in any way we could.”

“But we don't need to change,” Ellen said. And Dean Moresby realized—as he sent his final hot slosh of scotch down the hatch—that he believed her.

Whatever it was got worse. Higgs arrived at the department at dawn and left in mid-afternoon; he kept his office door locked when he was inside. He met all disturbances politely, but with such obvious forbearance that no one could stay for long; it was choking. Each visitor felt he'd flouted an article of some unforgiving etiquette of which only Higgs was aware. And there were steadily fewer visitors. Higgs spoke with hardly anyone; and when he did speak, each word seemed to have swum up from a deep and secret grotto, which at any moment could snap shut. He quit playing checkers. He published nothing.

In December of 1971, Professor Rosso organized a conference to mark the 40th anniversary of Henderson's first book,
God of Bile
. Higgs, to everyone's surprise, agreed to deliver the opening address. His title was “Henderson and the Meaning of Grubs.”

Despite Henderson's decline from fashion, the turnout at the conference was substantial. News of Higgs's turn inward had spread quickly through the erstwhile strongholds of Henderson scholarship, and his name, in those constricted circles, had acquired a connotation of intrigue. People who hadn't deigned to write on Henderson in years had come, just to see what Higgs might say. Why not? The Henderson Society, flush with cash, had flown everyone in. There was a new donor, a transistor heir from Tokyo named Koiichi Kosugi, who'd found a Henderson pamphlet in his dead father's army chest, and within a month had redug the channels of his family fortune. Opera and cancer wards were out; now the money flowed our way, toward Henderson and Henderson's servants.

The campus was overrun with Gravinicists, perched on every flat surface, spilling over with disagreement but eerily alike. They were men, they were not too old, their glasses were somewhat dirty and they favored greasy food; though none were fat. They talked in spurts. Not a few lisped. Their hair, what there was of it, was for the most part dark, and they had a shared habit, in concentration, of hooking their fingers into it and tugging; so that a group of them together, bent over plates of corned beef hash, of fat-flecked chili mac, resembled a troop of macaques at their grooming, waging their fervent, hopeless battle against the ecosystem of their own too-hospitable heads.

When the time came for Higgs's address, every seat in the auditorium was full, and there were scholars huddled in the aisle.

Higgs climbed to the stage; the audience, as one, craned forward. Higgs looked around. As always, he had no notes. His eyes flicked from one curious face to another, betraying nothing; to the ceiling lights, trained on him; to the fire exits on each side; back down to the podium. He cleared his throat. The audience waited: a minute, then two, then five. Something in Higgs's carriage, the determined set of his mouth and the angle of his jut over the podium, made him seem continuously on the verge of beginning. It was impossible to leave.

It was forty minutes before Higgs—his audience still intact—said a word.

“The ‘feasting grubs' in the 1939 folio should be construed as referring to the banquet of maggots in the original Book
III
of
God of Bile
, rather than to the fall of the Basque provinces to the nationalists, as has been conventionally understood.”

Interesting, came the murmurs from the crowd, yes, I see that, interesting! Now things were moving along! And they waited, pens cocked, free hands tangled in hair, to see how Higgs would continue.

But Higgs was done. He had nothing to gather up; he walked off the left side of the stage and out the door.

There was a pause. “This is sad,” one scholar said. “I saw him at Trieste,” said another. “Didn't I meet you at Trieste?” Someone had a copy of the relevant folio and a crowd formed around him, bending to the pages, the folly of the heretofore prevailing viewpoint already becoming clear.

Dean Moresby had hurried from the auditorium when he saw Higgs leave. He caught up with him on the low rise that immediately preceded his son-in-law's house. Below him he could see the house, the cliff, and, off to his left, the gray, morose water of the reservoir. Breathing hard, he put a hand on Higgs's shoulder.

“Stan,” he said (wincing), “what's going on? What kind of an idea is that speech? What is your idea in making everybody wait for an hour and then, and then saying just the one thing and walking off?”

“What else did you want me to say?” Higgs asked. And Dean Moresby didn't have an answer.

Less than a month later—to be precise, on the tenth of January, 1972, sometime between 8:30 and 9:00
P
.
M
.—Higgs entered Happy Clappy's, the undergraduate cafeteria, through the north door, and proceeded approximately ninety feet to the à la carte counter, where he ordered a cheeseburger, medium rare, with lettuce and mayonnaise. The student on grill duty was Cheryl Hister, a junior.
She recognized Higgs. After the one-sentence address the school paper had run a photograph.

“That comes with fries or baked potato, Professor Higgs,” Cheryl said. “Which would you like?” Higgs thought for a good long time.