experience is reversed. We enter into the souls of those whom we knew in life. They enter also into us and feel and judge us from within. On the outside chance that this old Canadian woman has it right, I must try to take up this matter with you. It’s not as though I had tried to murder you, but my offense is palpable all the same.
…In this life between birth and death, while it is still possible to make amends…
I wonder whether you remember me at all, other than as the person who wounded you—a tall man and, in those days, dark on the whole, with a mustache (not worn thick), physically a singular individual, a touch of the camel about him, something amusing in his composition. If you can recall the Shawmut of those days, you should see him now.
So at the very least I can try to reduce the torments of the afterlife by one.
It may appear that I come groveling with hard-luck stories after thirty-five years, but as you will see, such is not the case.
I traced you through Miss Da Sousa at Ribier College, where we were all colleagues in the late forties. She has remained there, in Massachusetts, where so much of the nineteenth century still stands, and she wrote to me when my embarrassing and foolish troubles were printed in the papers. She is a kindly, intelligent woman who
I never thought that I would envy people who had retired, but that was when retirement was still an option. For me it’s not in the cards now. The death of my brother leaves me in a deep legal-financial hole. I won’t molest you with the facts of the case, garbled in the newspapers. Enough to say that his felonies and my own faults or vices have wiped me out. On bad legal advice I took refuge in Canada, and the courts will be rough because I tried to escape. I may not be sent to prison, but I will have to work for the rest of my natural life, will die in harness, and damn queer harness, hauling my load to a peculiar peak. One of my father’s favorite parables was about a feeble horse flogged cruelly by its driver. A bystander tries to intercede: “The load is too heavy, the hill is steep, it’s useless to beat your old horse on the face, why do you do it?”
“To be a horse was
I have a lifelong weakness for this sort of Jewish humor, which may be alien to you not only because you are Scotch-Irish (so Miss Da Sousa says) but also because you as a (pre-computer) librarian were in another sphere— zone of quiet, within the circumference of the Dewey decimal system. It is possible that you may have disliked the life of a nun or shepherdess which the word “librarian” once suggested. You may resent it for keeping you out of the modern “action”—erotic, narcotic, dramatic, dangerous, salty. Maybe you have loathed circulating other people’s lawless raptures, handling wicked books (for the most part fake, take it from me, Miss Rose). Allow me to presume that you are old-fashioned enough not to be furious at having led a useful life. If you aren’t an old-fashioned person I haven’t hurt you so badly after all. No modern woman would brood for forty years over a stupid wisecrack. She would say, “Get lost!”
Who is it that accuses me of having wounded you? Eddie Walish, that’s who. He has become the main planner of college humanities surveys in the State of Missouri, I am given to understand. At such work he is wonderful, a man of genius. But although he now lives in Missouri, he seems to think of nothing but Massachusetts in the old days. He can’t forget the evil I did. He was there when I did it (whatever
So let’s go back again to Ribier College. Walish and I were great friends then, young instructors, he in literature, I in fine arts—my specialty music history. As if this were news to you; my book on Pergolesi is in all libraries. Impossible that you shouldn’t have come across it. Besides, I’ve done those musicology programs on public television, which were quite popular.
But we are back in the forties. The term began just after Labor Day. My first teaching position. After seven or eight weeks I was still wildly excited. Let me start with the beautiful New England setting. Fresh from Chicago and from Bloomington, Indiana, where I took my degree, I had never seen birches, roadside ferns, deep pinewoods, little white steeples. What could I be but out or place? It made me scream with laughter to be called “Dr. Shawmut.” I felt absurd here, a camel on the village green. I am a high-waisted and long-legged man, who is susceptible to paradoxical, ludicrous images of himself. I hadn’t yet gotten the real picture of Ribier, either. It wasn’t true New England, it was a bohemian college for rich kids from New York who were too nervous for the better schools, unadjusted.
Now then: Eddie Walish and I walking together past the college library. Sweet autumnal warmth against a background of chill from the surrounding woods—it’s all there for me. The library is a Greek Revival building and the light in the porch is mossy and sunny—bright-green moss, leafy sunlight, lichen on the columns. I am turned on, manic, flying. My relations with Walish at this stage are easy to describe: very cheerful, not a kink in sight, not a touch of darkness. I am keen to learn from him, because I have never seen a progressive college, never lived in the East, never come in contact with the Eastern Establishment, of which I have heard so much. What is it all about? A girl to whom I was assigned as adviser has asked for another one because I haven’t been psychoanalyzed and can’t even begin to relate to her. And this very morning I have spent two hours in a committee meeting to determine whether a course in history should be obligatory for fine-arts majors. Tony Lemnitzer, professor of painting, said, “Let the kids read about the kings and the queens—what can it hoit them?” Brooklyn Tony, who had run away from home to be a circus roustabout, became a poster artist and eventually an Abstract Expressionist. “Don’t ever feel sorry for Tony,” Walish advises me. “The woman he married is a millionairess. She’s built him a studio fit for Michelangelo. He’s embarrassed to paint, he only whittles there. He carved out two wooden balls inside a birdcage.” Walish himself, Early Hip with a Harvard background, suspected at first that my ignorance was a put-on. A limping short man, Walish looked at me—looked upward—with real shrewdness and traces of disbelief about the mouth. From Chicago, a Ph. D. out of Bloomington, Indiana, can I be as backward as I seem? But I am good company, and by and by he tells me (is it a secret?) that although he comes from Gloucester, Mass., he’s not a real Yankee. His father, a second-generation American, is a machinist, retired, uneducated. One of the old man’s letters reads, “Your poor mother—the doctor says she has a groweth on her Virginia which he will have to operate. When she goes to surgery I expect you and your sister to be here to stand by me.”
There were two limping men in the community, and their names were similar. The other limper, Edmund Welch, justice of the peace, walked with a cane. Our Ed, who suffered from curvature of the spine, would not carry a stick, much less wear a built-up shoe. He behaved with sporting nonchalance and defied the orthopedists when they warned that his spinal column would collapse like a stack of dominoes. His style was to be free and limber. You had to take him as he came, no concessions offered. I admired him for that.
Now, Miss Rose, you have come out of the library for a breath of air and are leaning, arms crossed, and resting your head against a Greek column. To give himself more height, Walish wears his hair thick. You couldn’t cram a hat over it. But I have on a baseball cap. Then, Miss Rose, you say, smiling at me, “Oh, Dr. Shawmut, in that cap you look like an archaeologist.” Before I can stop myself, I answer, “And you look like something I just dug up.”
Awful!
The pair of us, Walish and I, hurried on. Eddie, whose hips were out of line, made an effort to walk more quickly, and when we were beyond your little library temple I saw that he was grinning at me, his warm face
