George and Barbara Perkins

STONES STAND, WATERS FLOW is a memoir of change and endurance. The Perkins farm, where the author spent his early years, had sheltered Hancock and Adams in their 1775 flight from Lexington. The author’s life there was enriched by history and by legends of his English, Scottish, Welsh, French, and Indian ancestors. The years from 1930 to 1950 also included economic depression, wartime, and a mother’s breakdown.

Readers praise STONES STAND, WATERS FLOW:

"The book is “A legacy for future generations”

“Am loving it. It’s so lyrical and evocative”

"It’s a wonderful reflection on the educational opportunities available to our generation that so many of us were able to begin as we did and then to go so far as we did”

“It will make a great gift . . . will have to order 4 more!!!”

"What an amazing tale. . . And I dearly love the title, perhaps the most succinctly descriptive I've ever known. The book is a treasure."

ISBN: Hardcover: 9781425754129. Paperback: 978142575411-2.
Price: Hardcover: $31.99. Paperback: $21.99

RARE DAYS is a comic novel. Beginning in Ann Arbor, the narrative moves to an academic conference at a small college in Ohio, where scholars vie for intellectual attention, academic advancement, and love. The plot features an underemployed Ph.D., an eminent scholar in disguise, a well-meaning impostor, a Chinese innkeeper, a bumbling college president, a pit bull, and a cigar store Indian. Fraud and confusion abound.

The first few chapters appear below.

Caffeine Euphoria

Few people recognize a universal truth when they are suddenly blindsided by it. Fewer still are able to apply that truth to their personal lives. Among these are the immortal poets, the inspired few who manage to express their temporal glimpse into the eternal in words that will last through the ages.
Nevertheless, Langston Tenterfield possessed high hopes. Before him, gleaming white against the varnished Royal Stewart tartan surface of a coffeehouse table, lay a sheet of paper on which he had carefully inscribed the following lines:

In love with One, I love another
As constant press of time and place,
A welcome warmth and willing ways,
Conspire to blur the distant face.

With pen poised, he ran a second stanza through his head. He frowned. Despite considerable thought, he knew he had not improved the poem significantly beyond the shape it had first taken long ago in a city far to the east of where he now waited for inspiration.
Detaching his mind from the immediate problem, he looked up and saw a friend standing irresolutely on the sidewalk outside. The friend opened the door and came in. Lang waved, and then spoke.
“Over here, Broddy.”

*

In ordinary circumstances Broderick Blomquist would have turned on his well-worn heel to investigate the Southwestern Café with its dark and high-backed booths, the Broadway and Downtown Deli with its bagels and pumpernickel, or any one of several tile-floored restaurants with counter service and names like Oscar’s and Fanny’s before he would have ventured into a watering place called the Toffee Coffee.
But these were not ordinary circumstances. They were what you might call desperate.
Outside the Toffee Coffee, he had allowed himself a sigh, but he had screwed up his courage for this meeting, and once his courage had been screwed, he fancied himself not the kind of man to sit idly by while it unscrewed itself. He entered.
“Over here, Broddy.”
Standing just inside the door, he sidestepped a waiter carrying thistle-shaped pottery mugs filled with brown liquid and protuberances that looked like cinnamon sticks. He nodded in the direction of the voice and saw that in order to get to his friend he would have to choose a path between intervening tables. He sighed again, heaving it this time with a will, and found his way to Lang’s table without elbowing a stranger, dislodging a purse or book bag from a chair, or upsetting a tray of toffee coffees.
“Broddy, my man.” Lang pushed back his chair and drew himself to full height. With his left hand he gave a slight pull to the bottom of his tartan vest, and with his right he extended the glad hand of old friendship. Broddy, always conscious of his broad five foot nine when he stood next to long Lang, nevertheless smiled for the first time that morning and took the hand.
“ ‘My man,’ is it?” he said warily. “On the Diag yesterday it was ‘brother.’ My man, indeed.”
Lang waved his wariness away. Then he waved again, offering the chair that stood empty across the table from his own. Broddy sat, tentatively and upright.
Lang also sat, leaned forward, and surrendered his height advantage. Lang and Broddy now contemplated each other, blue eyes to brown, equals in height at the table (though Broddy was broader), just as most would have judged them equals in fortune in the game of life as they had played it to date. This equality on this Monday morning with the June sun casting short, vertical shadows through the louvered front window of the Toffee Coffee did not, however, extend itself to mood. Lang’s fair features were lit with a smile. Broddy’s equally fair features were darkened by a cloud that had followed him for three whole days in this otherwise sunshiny month. Lang spoke.
“Well said, Broddy. ‘Brother,’ it was on the Diag, and brother it is, and always will be. Your good Brother Langston is not one to jettison old and cherished habits in a day, but he did not speak casually. Brother you may be, but you are still his man.”
Lang paused and extended his arms expressively, palms up. He exuded his open self, the third person with whom he sometimes confronted the world, and appeared not to calculate. His eyes crinkled with good humor.
Broddy waited and fidgeted. “Brother you may be,” Lang repeated, and then returned to the main point, with variation, “but in the eyes of your good brother, you are still also his man. You’re looking good, Broddy.”
“In what sense?”
“There’s a bloom on your cheek, a spring in your walk, a song on your lips.”
“Never mind the bloom on my cheek,” said Broddy. “In what sense am I your man?”
“In the urgent sense that life has recently crept up all unawares and presented your friend Langston a heartfelt need of a man who is also a brother, a brother who blooms, springs, and sings, and preferably all at the same time.”
“Say on,” said Broddy.
“Your brother Lang finds himself becalmed in the doldrums of life, afloat on a Sargasso Sea of troubles, with an albatross necktie bouncing upon his Royal Stewart tartan. In such a situation his old companion naturally presents himself as just the ticket to puff a little wind into his sadly drooping sails. Describing his situation, I mix my metaphors and my allusions, but to one of your quick and sympathetic understanding I paint a picture.”
Broddy sighed and dropped his chin onto the practiced receptacle of both hands. “You mistake me, Lang,” he said. “‘Blooms, springs, and sings, indeed. Any fool can see there’s no bloom on my cheek, and if the fool had been following me around he would have noticed that there hasn’t been a trace of a bloom for three whole days. No spring in my walk either. And as for my song . . .” He ran his fingers against his cheeks, noting that they seemed unshaved, though God knows he had given it a try that very morning. Or was that yesterday? “Well, come off it, Lang. You saw me yesterday. We talked of Myrtle . . . ”
Here he stopped, stymied by feelings that lie too deep for words, or at least words twice said. When he mentioned Myrtle, his head drooped deeper into his palms. Even so, he caught through the blurred vision that was coming upon him unawares sometimes these days a watery view of his smiling friend. He was pretty sure that Lang wasn’t mocking him. “Damn it all,” he said. “I’m just not in the mood for blooming and springing.”
“Of course, you aren’t,” Lang said.
“Then what was all that stuff?”
“Stuff?”
“The blooming, springing, singing stuff.”
“Oh, that. Perhaps we should move beyond that.”
“How can we move beyond blooming, springing, and singing when you keep bringing them up?”
It was Lang’s turn to heave a sigh. The situation was beginning to look like an impasse. He drummed his fingers on the table, turned in his chair, got up, and walked slowly to the counter to place an order with a young woman adorned, as were all the staff in the Toffee Coffee, with a Royal Stewart vest, Royal Stewart arm garters, and a matching tam-o’-shanter. Like his own, which was a souvenir purchased for a modest price from an enterprising management, the employees’ vests were adorned with the words “Toffee Coffee,” written across the back. The script looked like the script on a Coca-Cola bottle and grabbed a viewer’s attention with a distinctive yellowish-brown hue intended to replicate the distinctive color of the Toffee Coffee brew.
“Two Royal Toffee Coffees, please.”
“Mickle or Wee?”
Lang looked at Broddy cradling his head at the table.
“Make them Mickle,” he said.
“To gang or to bide?”
“To bide.”
Back at the table, he thrust one of the steaming mugs under Broddy’s downcast nose, causing the unfortunate owner of the nose to lift his assaulted frontal feature up and away.
“What is it?” he sniffed.
“A Mickle Royal Toffee Coffee. Just the thing to float your boat.”
“Over the sea to Skye?”
Lang took pleasure in the rejoinder, not for its gemlike wit but for its evidence that his friend was trying to return them to their brotherly footing.
“Of course, I know you are not feeling your usual self right now,” he began. “I saw the change yesterday when you started with your Myrtle on the monitor and Myrtle on the printout and Myrtle suddenly not on the monitor and Myrtle not on the printout and I fully comprehended your mood. I also noticed how the absence of monitor cheer and printout happiness continued to crease your brow just now when you entered this emporium of caffeine euphoria. Nevertheless, I think you may be mistaken to carry your gloom so heavily.
“You will recall your old friend Tenterfield’s habit of speaking of the future as though it were the present. He confuses some people, he confesses, but it resides in his nature to perceive events in the full glory of mature realization well before the Nature who nurtures us all has found her way clear to enter rejoicing with the sheaves. In place of the wintry frostbite that ravages your cheeks now, I foresee a full blossoming of summer roses. Your feet now drag, but soon will bounce. Whereas the murmurs and whimpers that now cross your parched lips resemble nothing so much as the cries of a trampled sea slug, I see a better time coming, my brother. Soon you will drink deeply of the healing waters of love and raise your voice in glorious hallelujahs.”
“I doubt it,” said Broddy.
“And as for the ‘my man’,” Lang continued, undeterred, “foreseeing all, I expressed myself in a double sense that may have puzzled you at the time, but must now be clear.”
“Not so’s you could notice it,” Broddy said.
“Then I shall clarify. At the primary level of Communication, we have Sense Number One. This is the high five, chin up, go for the goal, drive for the basket, and slammin’ and jammin’ sense. We could call it the Attitudinal Sense. Seeing you down, I thought it good to buck up your manhood with timeworn words of wisdom. You may be down, but you are not out. Sometimes the game is won in overtime. It’s not over ‘til the fat lady sings. In your face, Lady Luck.”
Lang paused, stirred his Mickle Royal Toffee Coffee with its cinnamon swizzle stick, and took a slow sip. He had his friend’s attention, he knew, but not his wholehearted enthusiasm. Broddy had not touched his Toffee Coffee, and made no move to touch it now. “Carpe diem.” Lang said, raising his thistle cup. “Seize the day.”
Broddy looked glum. He failed to seize even his cup.
“Let us elucidate further,” Lang continued, measuring his words. “On the secondary level of Communication, we find Sense Number Two of the aforementioned phrase ‘my man.’ For this we must remain as open and honest with each other as we always have been, Brother Broddy, ever since our undergraduate days. If Sense Number One is the Attitudinal Sense, a mid-game locker room call to arms against a sea of troubles, Sense Number Two is the Operational Sense, wherein we take up arms and oppose the oncoming waves in order to bask in the summer sun with our boat rocking gently in calm waters. We must not give up the manly fight and flee in women’s attire over the sea to Scottish islands. In this Operational Sense, we must recognize that the slammin’ and jammin’ in your typical hard case sometimes requires the help of a little flimmin’ and flammin’.”
Broddy sprang to his feet, for he had heard this argument before.
“No, no, don’t interrupt.” Lang extended his right hand in a motion that resembled a high five (Sense Number One) and then changed the gesture to command (Sense Number Two), and waved his friend down into the chair again.
“I have a plan,” he said.
Broddy knew that in sitting down once more he accepted a commission. Memories flooded over him of commissions accepted in the past. Without revisiting those escapades in detail, he knew that all but a few of the horrors they engendered had dwindled with time to the warmth of comradely reminiscence. Against the palpable weight of his present despondency, he placed in the scales the idea of Broddy and Lang together again. The despondency grew lighter.
“Let’s get this straight,” he said. “It’s in the second, the Operational Sense, that I am your man?” he queried.
“You take my meaning marvelously,” Lang said.
“You want me to take up arms against a sea of troubles?”
“I think you’ve got it,” Lang said. “And opposing end them.”
“Go on,” Broddy said.
“I will, I will,” said Lang.

*

A good while later, both were smiling as they pushed themselves back from the table.
“You haven’t touched your Toffee Coffee,” Lang said.
“I don’t need no stinking sludge,” said Broddy in his Mexican bandit voice.
“Here’s looking at you, kid,”” said Lang. It seemed like old times.

*

When he entered the Toffee Coffee, Broderick Blomquist enjoyed a mood no whit better than the trampled sea slug his friend so justly compared him to. When he left, he could have bloomed, sprung, and sung. More remarkably, he could have turned around and reentered the same place on his own, ignoring all other such places within walking distance of the Diag. He might even have purchased a Royal Stewart vest. Forgotten was the ravening hunger for the Midwestern Pastrami on Rye at the Broadway and Downtown Deli. Forgotten was the smell of cheese and onions lavished over the top of the house specialty chili at various and sundry vaguely Southwestern cafés. Forgotten were the wholesome tang of Oscar’s Cheeseburger Deluxe and the wharf-side aroma of Fanny’s Tuna Supreme. Forgotten was the Ploughman’s Lunch at—but that was in another country. Forgotten in his enthusiasm was the fact that for three whole days he had not hungered for any of those things, and some he had barely tolerated before that time.
A half hour with Langston Tenterfield could do that to you.
It could also leave you wondering.
Lang had unrolled as a map on a military campaign table a splendid plan for happiness, but a close observer would have noticed that the plan was murky in its details. In his present glow of enthusiasm, however, Broddy hardly cared for details. A half hour with Langston Tenterfield could do that to you, too. The great thing was that the plan ensured the happiness of two of them, Lang and Broddy. The happiness of four, if you counted the girls.
“Girls,” he thought to himself, and was self-aware enough to perceive that in his uncensored thoughts he had not yet learned to call them young women, as he would do if he spoke his thoughts aloud. The girls of his unreined imagination were an internal freedom he allowed himself, and as the reins fell off them, they became fillies and kicked up their heels. He imagined Myrtle and Gwendolyn doing that. Then drew the curtain.
And just in time.
“Well, if it isn’t Broderick Blomquist.”
The girl—young woman—who blocked his path and waited for him to come out of his fog, he saw foggily, was Hermione Trelawney. She was in fact the girl from another country. He had never thought of her as a filly, and his imagination recoiled from the image of her kicking up her heels. What had come over him? Perhaps it was the smell from the intoxicating brew he had just missed partaking of. Sludge, he had called it, but that was in jest. It must have been ambrosia.
“Hermione,” he said, and accepted her embrace and light peck on the cheek. He had once thought of her as a girl friend, but that brief memory had been burned away in the glow of the passion that emanated from both participants in her long affair with Langston. Some of that glow seemed still to enfold her, and he felt its waves washing in welcome warmth over his new hopes for a glorious future with Myrtle. Under that sun, he could feel, too, a great warmth enveloping Lang’s hopes for bliss with Gwendolyn. But what on earth had brought Hermione to Ann Arbor?
“What on earth brings you to Ann Arbor?” she asked.
“I live here,” he said. Lang might have kept in touch with her after England, but Broddy had not. He was pretty sure she had come to America and pursued a Ph.D. in the East, but knew no more.
“Well, fancy that. I would have thought . . . ”
“What?”
“Oh, something else.”
“Well, yes. Other things were possible, but in the end this seemed quite the right thing.”
“Oh, I see, quite.”
“Yes, quite.”
Amazingly, they had fallen thus quickly into their old way of talking
“But you must be doing something,” she said. “Something must have brought you here.”
“Yes it did. That is, it was here when I came, I suppose, and I fell into it. And you?”
“Me? I’m just passing through, on my way to an academic convention. I’ve only just today for Ann Arbor.”
An elderly man peered over his glasses, eyed them sternly, and all but elbowed them aside. Other people, young and old, were sidestepping left or right to get around them. A young couple undid their clasped hands and passed one on either side of them before joining hands again. Broddy and Hermione perceived they were blocking the sidewalk.
“Well,” she said.
“Yes, well.”
“We should get together.”
“Not free now, are you? For coffee, I mean?”
“I could be.”
Broddy’s cheek bloomed rosily.
“I know just the place,” he said. “They serve coffee in a thistle-shaped cup with a thistle embossed on the side.”
“Cor,” she said. “Gorblimey.”
He turned about and with a spring in his step guided her past the Downtown Deli, past Oscar’s and Fannie’s, past other places of curbside delectation, and into the Toffee Coffee, the palace of newborn hopes.

*

Langston Tenterfield left the Toffee Coffee walking on air somewhat less high above the sidewalk than the air that supported his easily persuaded friend. He was sure he would find a way to do Brother Broderick a good turn. He was also aware that he counted that good turn more heavily in the cashbox than strict disinterestedness in a case of a kindness to a fellow human being would allow because he was sure that in helping Broddy he would enrich his account books in the bank of Gwendolyn. Adding and subtracting from the balance sheet, he rolled through his memory the tape of his two recent conversations with Brother Broddy.

*

Conversation Number One. Time: Yesterday. Scene: the Diag on the University of Michigan campus, in front of the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library. A figure diminished by distance grows larger as it approaches from the direction of the Engineering Arch. To the viewer’s left, stage right, as the camera pans that way, there juts out from the Natural Science Building an imposing glass enclosure luxurious with green and greening plants. These do not matter much in the scene to follow, nor do the many glass panes, should they happen to be plastic; but if they are in truth glass, they stand in danger if the small figure that is approaching starts heaving stones. Numerous tall deciduous trees border the walkways. Enter Brother Langston from somewhere downstage. He stands tall in close-up, his person dwarfing that of the foreshortened person approaching from the Engineering Arch. Brother Langston is not down because he prides himself that he is never down. Nevertheless, his brow is furrowed.
There is a whiff of marijuana in the air. Someone has forgotten that the Hash Bash was a month ago.
A young lady and young man sit on a concrete bench, each with one leg crossed under the other and resting on the bench, while the other leg dangles freely. They face each other in earnest conversation. One man goes up and another comes down the library steps, both with books.
A bird sings.
The figure approaching from the Engineering Arch grows in size. Its features become recognizable, its lips part, a voice emerges.
“Lang!”
“Brother Broddy!”
They embrace.
Broddy heaves a sigh, but not a stone.
“Something wrong?”
“You know that woman I told you about? The one on the Internet?”
“Myrtle, I think you said her name was.”
“Yes, Myrtle.” Then glumly, “I don’t think that matters now.”
Langston, his soul troubled about Gwendolyn, and in a situation rare for him not sure what kinds of things matter and what do not, is pleased to recognize in himself an awakening of feeling for a fellow sufferer. It forms an important part of his philosophy that he should welcome such feelings for their evidence that he is not entirely self-absorbed, much as a botanist would welcome the green shoots from the potting soil in the nearby greenhouse and nurture them into fruitful maturity. He has never been a rock thrower, and abhors the practice in others.
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
“She won’t see me.”
“Has she ever seen you?”
“No, of course not.”
“H’m,” Lang says. This has the sound of a man stumped, but Brother Langston is not stumped. He is only thinking.
“Come,” Lang says, drawing his friend to a concrete bench situated diagonally across the Diag from the young man and woman, each with one leg still swinging.
Lang and Broddy sit, slightly facing each other, their feet firmly planted on the ground, though Broddy’s knees are not so high as Lang’s.
“Tell it from the beginning,” Lang says.
“I met her on the Internet.”
“And only on the Internet?”
“Only on the Internet.”
“That’s a major element of interest,” Lang says. “One might consider it a weakness that you have never met this woman of your dreams in her full and luscious flesh.”
“It’s not the flesh,” Broddy moans. “That’s the thing. It’s the mind. I love her for her mind. I don’t even know what she looks like. Not the flesh, the mind. That’s the whole thing. The mind.”
“You repeat yourself. Brother Broddy,” Lang says, “and begin to babble. Not that I view the development with alarm, for it is healthy to review our feelings from time to time, examining them in different lights. Your light so far seems to shine brightly on matters that matter. But let us push onward. You are unacquainted with this paragon’s features, you say?”
“Yes, completely.”
“And you would not recognize her if she were sitting across from you on a concrete bench swinging her pretty, sandaled, and sockless foot in the direction of some other gump’s large and muddy brogan?”
“Of course not. Anyway, she wouldn’t be.”
“Wouldn’t be?”
“She doesn’t live in Ann Arbor.”
This was a new twist. Despite the tens of thousands on the Internet within Ann Arbor and adjacent waters, Broddy had netted a fish from without.
“You’re sure?”
“She didn’t live here three days ago.” Broddy heaves a sigh of finality, but still no rock. His is a phlegmatic temperament. “Three days, that’s what it’s been, Lang. Three days of hell. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t drink. I can’t even think. There’s a movie or a book about my condition, but I can’t remember which it is or what it is. Something about a desert or a mountain or a leper colony or maybe all three. All three would make sense. She forbids me to see her. I mean to say she forbids me to send her messages on the Internet. I haven’t touched a keyboard for three whole days.”
“Three, you say,” Lang says.
“Three,” Broddy says, adding for expressive precision, “Three whole days and
nights.”
“I see,” Lang says.
“You see what?”
“I see that in your curious obsession with the number three you are forgetting the lovely Myrtle and being tortured into desperation by anguished images of the manly game of baseball—three strikes and you’re out and must go shag flies in the Queen Anne’s lace, while some freckled kid with a more potent bat takes your place in the batter’s box. But you must subdue these atavistic emotions that arise from the lower and animalistic side.”
Broddy groans.
Lang continues.
“Allow me to call upon the evolutionary higher, intellectual portion of your gray matter. Cast aside your chimeras and think for a moment, my friend. However attractive sporting analogies may be to men who yearn for a physical fitness witnessed seldom on the street but thrust into our most intimate lives by the inexorable magic of television, you and I are not sports heroes. Our lives are not games of sport. Even less so are our loves, Brother Broddy. Three is more than two. Yes, we accept that as a given. So is two more than one. But deeper still than the umpire’s rule of baseball, which stops at its paltry three, is the rule of counting, based in the goddess of nature’s time. Our days don’t stop after three. Or our nights either.
That’s mathematics, not baseball. And mathematics, poetry, and philosophy all unite to pose to us the rhetorical question ‘If three comes can four be far behind?’ We know the answer. There is always tomorrow.”
“When you are digging a hole,” Broddy says, countering logic with more logic, “the fourth shovel-full does nothing to get you out, it only gets you in deeper. It’s not the three that I mind, so much. It’s the idea of the four, and the five, and the six. I don’t think I can bear it.”
“Bear it you can,” Lang says, “and if you can, you must.”
“Shoulder the sky,” you mean, “and drink my ale?”
“It’s your choice.”
“But you mean I don’t have a choice.”
“Of course, you do, like all of us. We choose our destinies.”
Lang pauses to allow these words to resonate with the magisterial effect of their pithy wisdom. Then he continues.
“Your Myrtle, your paragon of unseen and uncommunicative attraction, does not live in Ann Arbor, you tell me. She does live where?”
“mbenson dot libe at bell dot edu.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
For a count of three, Lang stares as one amazed. Then he speaks.
“Say that again.”
“M as in Myrtle, B as in Benson, e-n-s-o-n also as in Benson, followed by a dot an at, a bell, another dot, and edu.”
“That’s astonishing.”
“What’s astonishing?”
“That you’ve been sending billet-doux to bell edu.”
“Don’t be funny. I’m not in the mood for punning.”
“I’m not being funny. Bell edu, you must know, is Bellwether University, in Lost Valley.”
“I don’t see how that helps.”
“It’s just that I’m going to Lost Valley in two days.”
“No. Lost Valley? In two days?”
“Yes. Lost Valley, in two days.”
Lending point to the numerical portion of the conversation, the clock on the Burton Carillon tower begins to gong out the one, then two, then three, and so on up to twelve strokes of the hour of noon. Striking on the hour each hour of every day, counting in units of sixty minutes, it mocks the briefer hours of fifty minutes by which students and faculty count the passing of each class. So flits our youth, in hours more swift than the clock can tell, Lang thinks, while we poor lads struggle to shoulder our small share of the sky and drink our meager portion of ale.
Then the carillon begins to ring out the old Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.”
“ ‘Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free,” the bells ring out.
“Meet me tomorrow at the Toffee Coffee,” Lang says. “We’ll talk.”
“ ‘Tis a gift to come down where we ought to be,” the bells sing.

*

Conversation Number Two. Time: Just a few minutes ago. Scene: the Toffee Coffee. Lang sits in a room full of small tables occupied by people in couples and trios. Olfactory hints of javas, cappuccinos, espressos, and mochas waft in soft undercurrents below and above the dominant odor of Toffee Coffee. He derives a small pleasure from attempting to separate and identify the fragrant currents and specify their levels of intensity. Here is a touch of vanilla, there an orange in this or that. Someone is stirring a mulled cider with a cinnamon stick. Broddy will not be long, and indeed he now appears outside the window, his portly figure slit in three by the vertical louvers that also slice the morning sunshine as it streams into the window from above the campus trees. He looks to his left and right, takes a tentative step backward, and seems about to turn as one who would abandon the meeting and run headfirst into the slough of his despond. Then he places his hand on the door, pulls it toward him, and steps purposefully into the room.
“Over here, Broddy. “
Broddy, looks, nods, takes his time, but arrives, accepts the glad hand of his friend, and seats himself.
Fast forward. The scene blurs and wiggles, freezes for a moment, then plays forward.
“I have a plan,” Lang says. The unfortunate truth is, he doesn't have a plan at all, or, to be scrupulously accurate, he possesses only a glimmer of a plan. Fortunately, in such straits he has been blessed with ample experience. Glimmers grow. In time they glitter. He will blow upon the spark, nourish it with small bits of tinder, watch and wait.
“The plan,” he says, “is this. Tomorrow morning I will drive to Lost Valley, seek out the libe at bell dot edu, and acquaint myself with the mysterious lost Myrtle of Lost Valley. I will persuade her of your undying devotion and send her back to the Internet bursting with regret for hasty actions, and overflowing with eagerness to redeem her portion of the short time allotted to each of us on this earth before we shuffle off to join the choirs of the Everlasting. In no more than a day or two, she will be filling a gas tank, purchasing a Greyhound ticket, pumping up bicycle tires, investigating the prices of walking shoes, purchasing a hot air balloon, or otherwise supplying sufficient hints to the astute observer that she is contemplating a trip from the backwaters of Lost Valley to the fair municipality of Ann Arbor.”
“Ha”
“‘Ha’”? What do you mean by ‘Ha’?”
“I mean ‘Ha.’ Put it another way. I mean ‘Ha’ and once again ‘Ha.’ What I mean is I don't see much of a plan there.”
“You don't? Perhaps I need to elaborate. You remember Gwendolyn Graceworth?”
“Of course I remember Gwendolyn. We were in the high school chess club together. She called me ‘Chubby.’”
“Well, never mind that. The point is that she is still in Lost Valley.”
“I had forgotten that, but I don’t seen how it helps.”
“You knew that I had been seeing her?”
“I did, but I thought that was over.”
“Sadly, Brother Broddy, you speak a temporary truth. But the love is real and lasting, or at least I think it is.” This was an awkward time for Lang’s mind to be playing out the words of his poem, ‘In love with One I love another,’ but that was precisely what that mysterious organ proceeded to do. Moreover, he was beginning to hear a tune accompanying the words, though he was not sure what tune it was. He shook his head and subdued the pesky strains. Then he resumed speaking. “It is true, as you suggest, that the shining verity of the love between your brother Langston and the lady Gwendolyn awaits its day of final triumph. But do you see my head bowed, my foot dragging, my Royal Stewart tartan worn with less than its customary aplomb? Gwendolyn and I will reunite, and she will help me help you to your Myrtle.”
“Gwendolyn had her ways,”" Broddy admits, thinking of an unusual Knight’s gambit.
“She still does.”
“And the plan?”
“Brother Broddy, my man, your tenacity amazes me. When you sniff an idea, you don't give it much of a head start before you start panting at its footsteps. As with foxes, so with ideas. It won't do to catch either of them in the open and rip them to shreds, scattering blood and fur in every direction. What your good huntsman wants is to find their trail, track them to their lairs, bark around the hole for a while, and then try them again another day to see if they will still go.”
Broddy recognizes in his friend, as he has many times before, a tenacity of purpose that outpaces his amazing own. In these exchanges it pays to back and turn sometimes, but with tenacity he returns to the pursuit. “I do think, Lang, that you could give me a bit more to go on. What is the plan, and how do I fit into it?”
“The plan, my dear Broddy, the plan. The plan is just now in the budding springtime of its development, and it will unfold itself in glorious colors of summer flowers as it prepares for the season of mellow fruitfulness. We must remain mum for now. The walls have ears. Tomorrow I leave for Lost Valley. Blind though Fate has chosen to make us as to the outcome of the path we have chosen, your role could not be more simple. They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Fast forward.
There is a rapid movement of two puppet-like figures at a table, jerked about as by a drunken puppeteer with the staggers. They speak, but their words are inaudible and their mouths move too fast for lip-reading. They jump up from the table and rush to the exit, where their mouths move upward at the edges in quick grimaces as they spasmodically shake hands. One hurries south, the other north. End of tape.

*

When Lang left the Toffee Coffee, he was pretty sure he had convinced his friend that he could bring about Myrtle's return to helpless adoration. In ensuring Broddy's happiness with Myrtle, he knew with the easy conviction of the young that he would also ensure his own happiness with Gwendolyn. He did not know how he was going to accomplish these ends, but in considering the thistle-shaped cup of his life it was his constant practice to envision the contents half full and rising. In his mind's eye, the level of contentment was approaching the point where the prickly part of the thistle would be engulfed and its lovely flower left floating on a sea of sweetness. In his progress along State Street, he took a skip to the left, spread his arms, and performed a slight bow, wholly oblivious to the fact that in so doing he forced two students with book bags into joining his parodic Shaker dance as they sidestepped to get out of his way.
“When we find ourselves in the place just right,” he sang in a voice barely audible to the students, who simply stared. He took another skip and bow in the other direction and continued his song, “We will be in Lost Valley in love and delight.”

IMAGES AND ICONS

It is a truth universally acknowledged that two single men of good fortune must be in want of two wives. So thought Dean Davidson one bright June morning, multiplying a timeworn and British nineteenth-century truth to fit the present conditions of his more expansive time and place. He stood at the eye of his office, hands clasped behind his back in a posture of general satisfaction, surveying the broad and green campus of Bellwether University. Of the two single men he had in mind, one was not Broderick Blomquist, for he had no reason to remember Mr. Blomquist from that worthy’s high school days in Lost Valley. It might even be debated whether, had he been acquainted with Mr. Blomquist, he would have expanded his maxim to the number three, for his cup of felicitous expectation seemed to tremble quite nicely with the fullness of the number two.
The Dean was thinking, first, of Langston Tenterfield, whom he had known from his—Langston’s, not the Dean's—undergraduate days at Bellwether College. He was thinking also of himself, Dean David Davidson. Married young, he had lived apart from his wife during most of the years of their greatest connubial bliss. Circumstances that seemed right then would now be hallowed by the all-excusing term “career move,” but on days like this, with the wind from the west and a blue and cloudless sky above, he had sometimes suffered the pangs of self-imposed celibacy.
There had been temptations. One of them was Gloria Westfall. “Winsome Westfall” she remained in his thoughts, though over the years she had become, if still winsome, winsomely formidable. But Gloria was married, and she appeared to have no eyes for others, even after her husband turned into one of the many who left Lost Valley and seemed unable to find it again. And for the Dean, for many years there was his wife in England, whom he saw each summer until her death. Now, although Gloria was a neighbor and co-worker in Lost Valley, the two had become comfortable in their separate lives.
No, the Dean’s connubial eye was focused on Yolanda Martinez, a rising young scholar of Multiculturalism who was formerly one of his students at Bellwether College, as the institution was known during the few years between its birth as a junior college and its recent elevation to a university.
He permitted himself a sigh. It was time for his morning stroll.
Leaving his office, he popped into Gloria’s, next door. “I’ll be back,” he said. “Take messages.” These were coming in now at a rate far above the usual, so it was best to be prepared. Of course, he knew that winsome and formidable Westfall would in all things be prepared and that she was backed in her preparedness by banks of half-time student assistants, that is to say, two, who sat at corner desks answering phones, stuffing envelopes, and fashioning paper-clip chains. One of them could work wonders on a computer.
“I’ve already two,” she said.
“Assistants?”
“You know that’s not what I mean” She smiled winsomely. “Messages.”
“In house, or out?”
“One in, one out.”
“Can they wait?”
“The out’s about housing. I’ll manage it. The in’s from Professor Rollins. He needs to see you.”
“He thinks he needs to see me.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Make him wait. I have business with the President. Tell him ten.”
“Ten’s his coffee break. He says it’s in the contract.”
“What contract?” The Dean knew what contract, but he’d rather talk to Gloria about the conditions of meeting with the Head of Communication and Literature than actually meet with him.
“The union contract.” Gloria knew that the Dean knew what contract, but she, too, enjoyed the frequent morning sparring. It gave them moments of a life together that was not entirely business.
“Department heads are not members of the union,” the Dean explained, not for the first time. “They count as management, though what on Lost Valley’s green and pleasant earth they manage I can’t conceive. Still, their position among the ranks of the managers was a point settled by arbitration many years ago.”
“Nevertheless, when it comes to things like coffee breaks, he claims the privileges of an employee.”
“All right. Tell him he can take his coffee at ten. The Dean will be available at ten-thirty. Meanwhile, I’m off.”
These little exchanges with his Executive Secretary helped the Dean to affirm his purpose in life. They provided regularity to an existence that a sharp critic might have perceived as irregular, if not aimless. Before he left, he was pleased to count two more telephone calls. Things were heating up.
Outside the office, he stood for a moment at the top of the sweeping staircase of Stonewall Manor and drank in the view down the stairs to the foyer, with its cigar store Indian. Old Huron stood alertly on guard by the right newel post. His left arm was raised and his hand was bent to shade his eyes as he peered toward the front door, and, when the door was open, across the campus lawn, to the footbridge over the river that bore his name or he its. In his right hand he held upright a bundle of five premium cigars. This, too, was part of the Dean’s daily cup of reasonably satisfactory tea. He still enjoyed the walk down the stairs that he had walked down so often in the past, resplendent in tuxedo, with a pretty undergraduate in an evening gown on each arm. He enjoyed the rich iconography of the Indian, presenting to the old world the abundant fruit of the new. Not for him the niggling objection of certain iconographers of the younger generation that the particular fruit so proffered had proved cancerous and that it had not been so much proffered as taken. The Dean enjoyed the vision of an Indian removed from his wilderness hut of bark and sheltered under the slate and copper roof of a white man's mansion that had become first a finishing school for young ladies, then the central building of a college, and now the center of intellectual life on the campus of a small university.
When he swung open the front door, revealing the pleasant prospect across the lawn to the Huron River, he liked to remember that the beaver that formerly damned its tributaries and the deer that drank at its banks were not far removed from its present waters. Plentiful in the woods near the town of Lost Valley, deer frequently fed at dusk in its orchards and cornfields, and sometimes wandered down Front Street and onto the Bellwether campus. Beaver still damned streams and tributaries not far from this one. And this one, without dams, was so shallow that a student could walk across it without getting wet much above the knees. In some of its shallows watercress grew in the shade of alder clumps, and its less-visited banks blossomed with the blues of forgotten flowers with names like Jill-o’er-the-ground and Quaker-maid. In sum, the Dean's Midwest had not traveled far from its Edenic past, and for him the central symbol was the Indian in the hallway. He drew a deep and thankful breath on the steps just beyond the front door.
Dean Davidson was no fool. He was not blind to the darker side of his vision. He was aware that thoughtful people might consider taming the wild Indian one of the lesser accomplishments of civilization, but he always liked to look on the positive side of earthly experience, and this was never truer than at the present time. Contemplating marriage to the lovely Yolanda Martinez, he viewed his anticipated bliss as emblematic of more general unions that might provide healing balm to the wounds of the world.
As for the business with the President of Bellwether U that he had hinted to Gloria necessitated his leaving the office, he was happy to be without such business. In hard cases, he sometimes found it helpful to place speech at variance with act. He enjoyed his daily walk.
“Good morning. Dean.”
“Good morning.”
At this time of year, when students were mostly absent from campus and struggling elsewhere to accumulate funds to cover the expenses of the fall semester, he took special pleasure in brief exchanges with the few he encountered on the green.
“Bullie’s in good form today.”
“So he is, so he is.”
They were talking of the university mascot, an undersized pit bull that was wildly barking and bouncing off the chain-link fence that enclosed his exercise area. To express the situation more accurately, it was his body that was bouncing off the fence, for his wild barking was emphatically not. The sound that emerged in undiminished volume between the diamond loops of wire was a deep-throated “Arf, arf, arf,” repeated a few times and followed by a higher-pitched “Yip, yip, yip,” the second sound clearly the result of a doggish recognition that bouncing against chain-link fencing could have its less than comfortable side.
“Arf, arf, arf,” went the bass to this concert, “arf, arf, arf.”
“Yip, yip, yip,” returned the treble, shorter and sweeter.
Then, for this seemed to be a dog of less than brilliant mind, there would be hardly a pause before the repetition of the same sequence, not once, but several times.
Although the dog could not escape his run, his racket, as an occasional stranger in town ungenerously termed it, was spreading beyond the bridge at the river and across the campus and on down to the intersection of River Street and Front. Most humans within hearing paid little attention, for they were used to it. Those of a philosophical mind who passed beyond reach of the sound—say on the State Road heading out of town for other parts of Ohio—fell thoughtful at times, contemplating in a new light the old questions concerning trees that fall in forests with no ears present to hear them. The dog was uncommonly ugly, with no name but his nickname, and no business on campus other than to stand as the in-between-games embodiment of the student in a dog suit and floppy ears who capered on the sidelines during athletic encounters. Although tolerated, Bullie was loved by few on campus besides Ripley Rollins, Head of Communication and Literature, and the departmental graduate assistant whose chief job was to feed and water him. His provocation for the arfs and yips this time was a squirrel that soon placed itself out of sight, flattened on the other side of a tree, twitching its tail. Bullie gave up and lay down in the shade.
His pleasant exchange with the student completed, the Dean walked on to the bridge, folded his arms on the top rail, and stood gazing at the water as it sparkled in the sun. In this morning of emblems and icons, he counted himself the very image of the single man of good fortune. It gave him special pleasure to recognize that in this he was twinned with another fortunate single man, as though the world on such a morning, in such an expansive country as this United States, in such a promising century as our own, needed no less than two single men of good fortune to represent the fullness of its blessings. That the other fortunate man was none other than his young friend Langston Tenterfield was most gratifying. One might almost have assumed they had grown up together, although in fact young Tenterfield was much more nearly the age of the Dean’s only daughter. Indeed, he had once nurtured fantasies of bringing the two together. Briefly, he thought he had succeeded. But an ocean is wide and Lost Valley narrow. He was happy with things as they were.
The dean had only to shift his position, and Stonewall Manor presented its full face in the distance, its I-shaped windows surveying the campus green that he had just traversed. Pleasantly inobtrusive, Bullie’s domain lay off the line of sight to the left, screened as though by the design of a purposeful landscaper by tall spruces, a clump of alders, and a line of low-lying shrubs. The other campus buildings, squared constructions of a gray sandstone modestly draped in ivy, graced the fringes of the large, rectangular open space of lawn and ruler-straight paths that separated Science and Arts, Administration, and the Student Union. Mostly clustered toward the river end, away from the temptations of the town, were the student dormitories. Behind him when he looked toward the campus rose the small hill that passed for a mountain in these parts and helped to give the somewhat lower area that stretched out and around the college the appearance of a valley. The Dean looked toward his own windows on the second floor of Stonewall. It had been the whim of the builder to shape the windows like I’s, with wider lights at top and bottom than the double-hung sashes that formed the vertical portion of the letter. Few looking in or out of those windows year after year could fail to be struck by the punning observation that the eye of the beholder was looking through the I of the builder’s ego. The Dean was not one of those few, for he had often made that observation, and made it again now.
Within his office, the I of his own ego dominated. It was difficult there to imagine a goodness of life that did not include his future with the most desirable Yolanda Martinez, whose imminent arrival would end the much too long while of their separation. Outside, by the river Huron, it was much easier to place the egotistic I at a distance nicely represented by the actual distance from his office window. On a shady bridge, he found it pleasant to put aside contemplation of his own future bliss and think of the joyful life that awaited Langston Tenterfield when he arrived at Bellwether to seek out, court, propose to, and marry the lovely Gwendolyn Graceworth. There were other considerations that for the moment he found it convenient to forget.
“David,” Lang’s voice on the Dean’s voicemail had informed him, “your good friend Langston is looking forward to clasping his good friend and fatherly Dean’s hand again in brotherly friendship. I won’t say much now, because of my overwhelming aversion to machines, especially electronic ones, which have the unpleasing effect of tying my tongue in knots. If I seem to gibber, that is the reason. There are quandaries for which I need your wisdom, some concerning Sister Gwendolyn, who remains much on my mind, as you must be aware. Not that either of us should find this at all surprising in an existence replete with the unexpected twists and turns of a haphazard and not always benevolent fate. We move toward wedded bliss, but there is not much I can say, or perhaps should say, until we meet—what I mean to say, of course, is until you and I meet. The walls have ears.”
There was a lot more. It seemed that some minor obstruction might present itself. Lang had a plan. He might have hinted at its nature, but interrupted his own thoughts with another reference to his lack of comfort with things electronic, and cut the monologue short somewhere in the middle of a sentence about a person named Broddy.
The minor obstruction, the Dean thought, was probably his young friend’s gypsy status. Like many recent Ph.D.s in English, Lang was without permanent employment. How he lived in detail, the Dean was not sure, but he knew the general picture. Lang taught part-time, filling in as needed on a semester-to-semester basis. There would be two or three classes at the big U in Ann Arbor, two or three more at the smaller U down the street, and probably two or three more at a neighboring community college.
Six or seven or more classes a semester, the Dean knew, was not unlikely for the gypsy scholar, and necessary if he was to keep his income above the poverty level. Among the “unexpected twists and turns of a haphazard and not always benevolent fate,” the Dean was sure, was the hoped-for Sudden University Opening, suited precisely to his talents, that would earn young Lang a full-time position teaching a third the number of classes for twice the annual income, with benefits to boot.

*

“Er,” thought Ripley Rollins. Then, after mulling things over in silence for a while and deciding it suited the circumstances, he voiced the thought. “Er.”
There was a long pause while the portraits of famous authors and orators on his walls, and also the dictionaries, telephone directories, and pamphlets on the care and feeding of pit bulls and goldfish that lined the bookcases of the Head of the Department of Communication and English Literature at Bellwether University reflected on what the professor might mean by this singular communication. “Er?” questioned the Bell Bellwether and Lost Valley Telephone Directory and Tourist Guide, figuratively raising its eyebrows toward the wall. “Er,” affirmed the sepia-toned face of a Great Author, nodding from its gilt frame, both picture and frame recent gifts from the Alumni Association Literature and Lifelong Learning Club. Unlike Ripley Rollins, these entities did not speak their thoughts aloud.
“Er,” Professor Rollins repeated, enunciating more clearly and speaking more loudly than the first time. Rising from his chair, he shrugged his shoulders into his suit jacket, which seemed to fit him loosely. Then he stepped around his desk and moved toward the door as though to punctuate his thought with decisive action.
“Did you call, sir?” This was the voice of the graduate student who kept the desk in the outer office and fed the dog.
“Er,” Professor Rollins said once more. “Yes.” Then, after some more thought, “Yes. I believe I did.”
“I'm sorry, sir. I wasn’t sure.”
“Er.”
Practiced in these exchanges, the student waited.
Rollins looked at the clock on the wall. He had first checked his wristwatch in his inner office, and then checked his watch for accuracy against the digital alarm he kept in his desk drawer. There was no doubt about it. All clocks and watches agreed that the time was ten-thirty. He had finished his coffee, carefully wrapped the crumbs from his oatmeal cookie in a napkin and deposited them in his wastebasket. He had placed the cup and spoon on the tray by the coffee pot, where they would be picked up by the graduate student and cleaned at some time before noon. He was pretty sure there was something else he was supposed to do.
“It’s ten-thirty,” he ventured.
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Did you check my e-mail?”
“Yes, sir. There was nothing more.” Detecting a look of disorientation, he explained. “Nothing more, I mean, in addition to those things we looked at just before you took your coffee break.”
“Oh, yes, those,” Professor Rollins said, relieved. “Let me know if anything more comes in. It’s the Conference, you know.”
“Yes, sir. The Conference. It’s on everyone’s mind.”

*

Professor Rollins returned to his office and stood looking out his I window. Behind him, Edgar A. Guest and William Jennings Bryan stared in the same direction, but neither of those worthies could inspire clarity in a mind that for the moment seemed a tad fuzzy. Nor could Ralph Waldo Emerson or Matthew Arnold on the wall to the right of the Head, or Emily Dickinson or Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth to his left. When the cloud of fuzziness lifted for a minute, it was only to reveal a mind burdened with a sense of impending doom.
He was certain that 10:30 was important to him. Counting himself a careful and meticulous man, he found it galling that his normally quick mind had failed to clamp down on the reason. He could find nothing for that hour on the calendar on his desk. Was it something about President Baker? Surely, he could not have failed to note a scheduled meeting with that formidable presence. Yet, the President had made it excruciatingly clear that he expected Great Things from the Conference and it would be reasonable to expect he might want a progress report. “A lot is riding on this, Rollins,” he had said. “A lot.” Rollins could feel a line of sweat forming just above his eyebrows.
Ten-thirty-five. The Conference was on everyone’s mind. Only yesterday the Dean . . . That was it! The Dean! His mind snapped shut on that blessed title like a steel trap. The Dean had wanted to see him at ten-thirty. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. Was the Dean coming to him, or was he supposed to go to the Dean’s office? He was pretty sure the Dean was coming to see him. The Dean liked to gad about.
Outside he could see Bullie leaping against the fence again, though he could not see why. On the spring breeze there was borne to him a chorus of arfs and yips, music to his ears, for to his practiced sensibility it was clear that the dog's voice was in good form and he no longer suffered from the hoarseness that had plagued him lately. But the music carried with it a note of melancholy. Rollins was aware that for all the healthy volume and timbre in the voice, there was genuine pain behind the yips. So is it ever in this life, where our happiest moments so often arrive mixed with an oxymoronic tinge of bittersweet. The lips curl upward in a smile, and a tear falls from the corner of one eye. This moment seemed special to Rollins for its shared sympathy. He felt with the dog the pleasurable pain that kept him leaping forward and falling back.
“Excuse me, sir.” It was the graduate assistant, from the outer office.
“Yes, what is it?”
“It’s Dean Davidson, sir.”
That settled it, then. The Dean was coming to him, and his life grew brighter again. “Show him in.”
“No need to.” This was the Dean himself, who was entering quite jauntily on his own. “May I?” He took a chair. Rollins retreated behind his desk. Truth to tell, the professor was always a little awed by Dean Davidson, who seemed to have been a Dean since the beginning of time. As far as time was counted at Bellwether University, he very nearly had been.
“So what’s new?” the Dean asked.
“I was just thinking, er, you know, of that bird.”
“Bird?”
“The one that sings so beautifully at night, all sweet and sad at the same time. We used to do a poem about him in 101, Intro to Com and Lit. Night something. Nighthawk, maybe. No, hawk doesn't seem right for the sweet part of it. You know the one I mean.”
“Nightingale?”
“Yes, that’s it. The nightingale. Anyway, according to the Greeks, he got his voice from a massive head injury—or he may have bitten something like a fence and hurt his tongue—do birds have tongues? So the voice is sad and sweet at the same time. The remarkable thing is that the voice wouldn’t have been so beautiful if he hadn’t hurt himself.”
“I know the story,” the Dean said, “although not the head injury or tongue part. There is a universal truth in it.”
“Truth? It’s a myth, I think. At least that’s what we used to teach in Com and Lit 101. Anyway, I was just now thinking of the bird and wondering if the pain is always worth it. It occurred to me that you could get a soft pad and put it up on the wall.”
“A pad on the wall?”
“Yes. A pad like they have in the outfield of a baseball park so that players who run head first into the wall don't get hurt. Or don't get hurt very much.”
The Dean looked around the office for a nightingale, or a nighthawk, which would be more likely in these parts, or a birdcage that needed padding, but perceived none of these things. The Conference, he knew, was on everyone's mind. He was beginning to think that perhaps it had been too much on Professor Rollins's mind and was causing a more than usual confusion in that noble organ.
“A pad, you say?”
“Yes, a soft pad on the wall, all around, so that when you run your head into it, you don't get hurt.”
The Dean looked at the wall as if to confirm that anyone running his head against it might get hurt. It seemed so. The ornamental fruit and pointed leaves on the gilt frame of the latest Great Author seemed especially dangerous in the room if you supposed that at any moment people might run at them headfirst. He looked at the broad forehead of the Head of the Department of Communication and Literature in an attempt to identify signs of contusion. There were none. A Sherlock Holmes might have noticed that Rollins had been perspiring and that he had drawn a cloth of some kind across his forehead to remove the beads of sweat that had gathered there, thereby giving his skin its present shiny glow. From those small clues, the great detective might have inferred that Rollins was nervous about something. From that point it would be an easy deduction that the Conference was the likely cause. But the Dean was no Sherlock Holmes. He skipped the clues and leapt to the fact at hand.
“You are thinking of padding the walls of the office?” he ventured.
“The office?” Rollins looked wildly about. He found these mental leaps of the Dean disturbing to the flow of reasoned conversation. “What on earth for?”
“I may have gotten the wrong impression, but I thought you were worried about people running their heads into it, damaging the plaster and bloodying the picture frames.”
Rollins gaped.
“Students, perhaps?” Skilled at this kind of maneuvering from long years on the job, the Dean took one of his favorite tacks, a twist to the rudder that brought the boat around and gave it a good wind toward home. Much at Bellwether turned on students.
“Students? No, no. I haven't had a student bang her head on the wall for quite a few years. They don’t seem to take things as seriously as they used to. Or perhaps it's we who don't ask them to take things as seriously as we used to. No, no. Not students. I was thinking of Bullie.”
“You’re going to bring him up here and keep him in the office?”
“Er,” Rollins said. A pit bull in his office was a suggestion he hadn't entertained. Still, he decided to drop it. “Er, that is. I’m not going to bring him up here, unless you advise it. I don’t think the room would be safe for students then, or anyone else. I meant his run. Why couldn’t we put a pad around it?”
“It’s a thought,” the Dean said.

*

“The Conference, I suppose, is going well,” the Dean said not many minutes later, introducing a new topic.
“Yes. Yes, it is,” Professor Rollins said. Simultaneously with his saying it, he experienced a wafting away of the mental fog that descended upon him periodically and found himself bathed in the bright sunshine of purpose.
Contrary to the impression of him that might have been formed by a casual observer, Ripley Rollins was not a stupid man. Nor was an occasional haziness of mind a new condition that had come upon him with occasional restrictions of the blood flow to the cerebral cortex. A dreamy teenager, he had performed well enough in high school to enter a middling college. There a genuine love for the written word had driven him into more classes in literature than might have been warranted by a strict attention to his future economic well being. His mother had talked to him of usefulness in the world and tried to steer him toward a career in medicine or dentistry or at least the social sciences. His father had said usefulness be damned and had pushed for marketing or law.
But Ripley loved words in print, loved them with an almost helpless indiscriminateness rendered all the more poignant by the difficulty with which he framed his own cloudy thoughts into phrases that sometimes sang—he said so himself—with melodious communication. Not often, he admitted. Not nearly often enough. As a young man, he developed a sufficient sense of the look and feel of clear prose to understand that his own efforts, though prosaic enough, were seldom clear. Then he discovered Criticism. A kindly professor of English taught him to turn his gift for cloudiness into “A” papers by the simple device of affirming the presence of fog in any work he discussed. Although a device so simple seemed at first like cheating, Ripley soon learned that it was not. He entered a middling graduate school where he learned to give to fog a number of different names, fashionable one after another in their brief time. There he earned a Ph.D. and with it an appointment at Bellwether College, where he had taught happily ever since.
Ripley no longer read as much as he used to. Still, he continued in his love for the older works he continued to teach, even in the face of new curricular dictates that found those authors not as good as they used to be. He was sustained also by his love of dumb animals like Bullie. Shakespeare, Eliot (George or T.S.), Dickinson, or Frost, he knew, might be in or out, but custom, he knew, could not stale Bullie’s infinite variety.
“ ’Going well?’ you ask,” he said to the Dean. “Take a look at this.” He handed the Conference program across the desk. He was animated now. “This is the final mock-up. All we have to do is make sure it's right, send the word to the printer, and we'll have the finals sitting in my office by Wednesday morning. That’s hours before any of the participants arrive. Turn it over. Look at the back. Great picture of Bullie, isn’t it? That’s a kind of a key, an icon. We’re going to get on this, this, whatsis stuff—I can't think of the name of it now, but it has to do with keys, icons, codes, and stuff like that, you know, you don’t know what you’re seeing until someone slips you the key—we’re going to get on it and hang on like bulldogs.”
The Dean obliged him by turning the program over to see the picture of the famous pit bull superimposed on a view of Stonewall Manor, the dog slightly washed out so that the lines of the house came through. Although Bullie was much bigger than in life, he did not dominate the picture. Indeed, the Dean could imagine quite a nice conference session on iconography, with considerable discussion as to whether the whole was meant to suggest the primacy of Bellwether University (hinted through the foregrounding of its mascot) in the coming intellectual event or (since Bullie was nearly transparent) the effect should be read as affirming the importance of the event concerning which Bullie (the university) could be seen as nothing more than host or guardian.
“The President likes it,” Rollins said.
“I’m sure he does,” the Dean replied. He had turned back to the front, where he saw the same view of Stonewall Manor, minus the dog, but with a similarly transparent view of Old Huron, with one hand shading his eyes and his five cigars offered front and center. Much, the Dean thought, can be read into a conference program that begins with an Indian and ends with a dog. But he did not attempt to formulate a reading. Instead, he pondered the words printed on the front.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTICULTURAL

AND

MULTIDISCIPLINARY INITIATIVES: THE NOW AND THE HOW

If it specified the bow and the wow, the Dean thought, that would have helped a casual reader make sense of the dog on the back. On the other hand, if it said the pow and the wow, that would have pointed to the harmonious co-mingling, or powwow, that might be understood as one of the possibilities suggested by the artwork on the front. He did not voice these musings, however, but read on.

SPONSORED
by
THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
and
THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES
and
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ADULT LEARNING
at
BELLWETHER UNIVERSITY
Dr. Abel Baker, President

Area and Corporate Sponsors:
The Lost Valley Chamber of Commerce
Lost Valley Bank and Trust
Pleasant Valley Real Estate
Korner Kitchen
and
The Bing Inn, Chinese Restaurant, and Conference Center.

“Looks good,” the Dean said.
“I think so,” the Head of Communication and English Literature replied.
“Is there a problem?”
“Problem?”
“Yes, problem. You wanted to see me”
“Er. So I did. Er.”
“A problem with the program?” the Dean suggested. Then, observing the shadow of bewilderment that began to cloud the Head’s expression of sunny purpose, he thought it best to prompt him a bit. “I had a message this morning that you wanted to see me. Sensing something out of the ordinary, I dropped a few things and got here, as you see, not long after 10:30. Sorry I couldn’t have been more prompt, but you understand the press of business in a Dean’s office.”

Naming Names

“Good job I ran into Broddy,” Hermione said, heaving her bags into the back of the car before Lang could get around to the curbside.
“Running into Brother Broddy is almost always a good job,” Lang replied, arriving almost in time to assist her into her seat. He did manage to get a good grasp on the door and close it purposefully behind her, not without noticing that she still possessed great charms of hip and leg, to say nothing of . . . “Still’” he continued, “for the purpose of initiating the conversation on what might without a little friendly banter prove a tedious journey, I will pose a question. Why was it a good job on this particular occasion?”
“Because of you, of course.”
“My uncommon personal attractiveness?”
“Don’t be an oaf. You are just as Americanly attractive as you always were, and I am just as British.”
“Part British, part Brittle,” he reminded her.
“Yes. And you,” she said, “remain that strange New World mixture, part Scotch and part Soda.”
“Part Irish and part Ticklish,” he reminded her.
“Part Welsh and part Rabbit,” she countered.
“I thought you were sensitive on the Rabbit point.”
“Unfortunately, I still am. That’s when I learned I was part Brittle.”
“When it comes to that,” Lang conceded, “a little brittle is probably in the mix for both of us. Anyway, it’s good to see you. Do we kiss?”
“Bloody hell, no, we don't kiss. Maybe later.”
“Slap and tickle?”
“Maybe later.”
“You don’t change.”
“Nor you.” She had what some would call an infectious laugh, and with it she now infected Lang.
“If Brother Broddy hadn’t told you I was driving to Lost Valley today and expressly told you to call me, I would have met you on the highway anyway. You would have been standing by the side of the road with a thumb out and a skirt hiked above the knee and your good friend Brother Lang, the New World's epitome of chivalry, would have been unable to find it in his heart to drive on by. As they say in the movies, we were destined to take this trip together.”
“Righto. In point of fact, I was planning to take the bus.”
“And you weren’t going to call me to tell me you were in town?”
“No, I wasn’t. I considered the possibility that you might be at the convention, but of course I wasn’t certain even of that.”
Not far from Ann Arbor the landscape flattens out, leaving behind only a memory of small undulations near a river. The pilot of a small plane practicing his touch and goes from the Ann Arbor Airport circles monotonously over housing developments and shopping centers named Georgetown, Briarwood, and Stonebridge—names that seem strangely unconnected to the rich farmland this once was, the oak openings and fertile prairie the farms replaced, or the history of the generations of red and other-colored people that have touched this place in passing. The pilot does not have to rise far above the altitude required for his repeated take offs and near-landings to see the shopping centers and housing developments terminating in fields held for future development and those fields extended in cultivated squares in all directions around the city to the horizon. Here is a farmhouse, a barn, a silo. There is the city of Saline, named by an older convention for the prominent natural feature of its salt licks. In the distance is Tecumseh, named for the great chief whose leadership was important around here for reasons largely forgotten. There, set safely apart from grouped populations of towns and villages are the fenced clusters of forbidding buildings that formerly housed, separately, a men’s and a women’s prison, with Highway 23 lying between the genders like a sword. Despite these evidences of human presence, the overall impression is of a flat checkerboard, much of it empty. Roads run straight like ruler lines. It is unlikely that among the vehicles crawling by different routes toward the horizon the pilot concerned with perfecting his skills takes particular notice of the small blue car that carries Lang and Hermione toward Lost Valley. If he does, and if he is of a philosophical turn of mind, he may wonder how anyone who found a valley in this landscape could have afterwards lost it.
So wondered Hermione as she watched the landscape rush by for the first hour. “It’s like this all the way, isn’t it?” she said. “Bloody two hours more to Lost Valley. Where on earth did they get that name anyway?”
“I could tell you,” Lang said.
“Tell me.”
“Lost Valley was discovered,” Lang said, “by one Zebulon Swordfish, commissioned by a consortium of Prussian idealists to find a suitable location for the Fourierist Utopian community they intended to build in the glorious and fruitful New World. After struggling through the frequently vertical wilderness of western Pennsylvania he came to the flatland this side of Pittsburgh and pushed his team of oxen—they were named Babe, for the famous blue ox of Paul Bunyan, and Ruth, for the alien corn they would have to live on—he pushed Babe and Ruth to exhaustion in his attempt to find an earthly paradise without crossing the Mississippi. For that was the plan. In his sealed orders he found the words “Verboten to cross the Mississippi,” inked on parchment in Old High German script. Brother Swordfish circled here and there—like a swordfish in a tank one might say unless one disliked that kind of gratuitous verbal ornamentation—but he found this place too arid, that one cursed with swamp fever, and the next crawling with toads and snakes. Did I mention that he was Irish?”
“I don’t think the Irish have problems with toads.”
“No, probably not, but he had to think of everything. Anyway, he found the place. There was a river, a fertile valley, and rising next to the valley the small mountain or large molehill that he dignified by the name of Swordfish Peak. It was the only such protuberance, just as the valley was the only valley, on the face of the prairie for many miles around. His employers, he knew, would have no difficulty in finding their paradise. He planted a stake, named the valley, drew a map, and sent the Prussians a letter adorned with a compass rose and detiled directions to get there. Then, because he had no personal aversion to crossing the Mississippi, he succumbed to longstanding ambition and in a spirit of New World independence changed what he had always considered the pompous name ‘Swordfish’ to the less pretentious ‘Pike.’ Then he headed west.”
“You are telling me,” Hermione said, “that your Mr. Swordfish-Pike discovered a valley and named it ‘Lost’? He seems to have been operating from a rather improbable standard of nomenclature.”
“I don’t consider his standard at all improbable. He was an Irishman burdened by his mother with an Old Testament name and was employed by Teutonic visionaries to explore a land inhabited by Red Indians. In calling the valley “Lost” he may have been remembering his own name, “Zebulon,” which denominates, among other things, one of the twelve lost tribes of Israel. “Lost” may also have referred to the Indians about to be displaced. What standard of nomenclature would you want him held to? In imposing our own standards on earlier times, you must agree we engage in an unattractive species of anterior cultural imperialism.”
“It still seems pretty rum. Surely you can do better than that.”
Oddly, as by a species of ethereal osmosis, the same general perceptions began at this point to run through the heads of both traveling discussants. Considering the theory that Vivian Wayne’s astonishing fictions were in essence but mystifying substitutes for, to use a phrase from The Anxiety of Affluence, “words that lie too deep for thought,” it occurred to both that Lang’s improvisation on the history of Lost Valley formed a similar substitute for matters he did not want to examine closely just now. And, wonder of wonders, it occurred to both that Hermione’s avid interest mirrored any reader’s classic escapist motive for immersion in the world of fiction, so like and unlike the world we inhabit.
Therefore, granting that the story possessed its element of rummyness, Lang found himself happy to try to do better.
“O.K., then. Brother Langston’s good friend Sister Trelawney asks him to jettison sober history and test his powers of invention. Can he devise a better explanation than the one he has proffered? Well, suppose we accept the hypothesis that even when its history has been examined, the name ‘Lost Valley’ still seems an anomaly within the annals of nomenclature. Why would a geographical feature just discovered be named by its discoverer as though it were something he had just lost? Consider another possibility. On the map that Brother Swordfish sent to the consortium he wrote a name. The map exists today, and has been seen by older inhabitants of the town of Lost Valley. Some insist that Swordfish's handwriting spells out, clearly enough, ‘Lost Valley.’ Others say that what seems an ‘o’ was intended to be read as an ‘a’ and the name given by the intrepid explorer was ‘Last Valley’ for the good and sufficient reason that it was the last valley his visited, the one he settled on for the location of the consortium's Utopia. Scholars remain divided.”
“Scholars,” Hermione reminded him, “are always divided.”
So passed in informative conversation many minutes while the road hissed away like torn silk beneath the four tires that rolled two young people toward Lost Valley and the hallowed halls of Bellwether University. Lang’s improvisation on the concept of Loss in the name “Lost Valley” had proved a pleasant diversion from thoughts of his poem and of its personal history that had been running through his head since he had idly penned the first lines on a sheet of paper while waiting for Broddy in the Toffee Coffee. Even as he spoke of the explorations of Swordfish-Pike, the lines continued to weave in and out of his consciousness as a panoramic backdrop to speech.

In love with One, I love another
As constant press of time and place,
A welcome warmth and willing ways,
Conspire to blur the distant face.

And now he added the second stanza, which seemed more important at this moment than it had the day before.

Wholly in love, the one I love,
Knows not the distant She,
Which prompts the thought, as she to I,
So I to Her may be.

“Scholars,” Hermione reminded him, repeating the point to fill in a moment of silence, “are always divided.” What precisely she meant by that was as obscure to him as the hypothetical difference between “Lost” and “Last,” but she was certainly capable of a devilish ambiguity. Not only scholars are always divided, he thought. By the mysterious osmosis that still seemed to be working, she thought much the same thing. She had admired his poem when he first wrote it, and then had not admired it. In the end she had mocked it by setting it to country music wholly inappropriate to its seventeenth-century metaphysical wit and spiritual urgency.
They both had a lot to think about. Both were listed on the program for the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTICULTURAL AND MULTI-DISCIPLINARY INITIATIVES that Professor Ripley Rollins was even then polishing to a presentational perfection, checking spelling, verifying topics, and playing with different shadings for his overlaid images of cigar store Indians and dogs. For Hermione, there was a panel discussion on which she had been paired with a scholar from Australia of whom she knew nothing more than his name, Ned Warrigal. She had high hopes for the panel, since from it might come a publication that would tip the scales toward her promotion and tenure at the small Pennsylvania college where she taught. For Lang, there was the plenary session on The Anxiety of Affluence, which he was counting upon to earn him a scholarly reputation that would pluck him from the ranks of academic gypsies. He would no longer trail his caravan from one part-time position to another, unfolding his tent and selling his wares on obscure corners on the outskirts of college campuses, but would earn a full-time job in a stable environment at the center of a campus, where he might become affluent enough to afford anxieties. In pursuit of this dream he had written marvelous letters to the famous but invisible Vivian Wayne. Receiving no answer, he had faxed him messages, had e-mailed and FedExed him to a fare-thee-well. Surely Vivian Wayne would appear at the conference, if only out of curiosity about the psyche that engendered such pursuit.
A promotion and tenure for Hermione. A real job for Lang. A lot, as President Abel Baker of Bellwether University was fond of pointing out to Professor Ripley Rollins, Head of Communication and English Literature, was riding on this conference.

*

Once Ripley Rollins got his teeth into a subject he was not unlike the university mascot, Bullie. He hung on, sometimes beyond the patience of victims and bystanders. Unless distracted. Dean Davidson, on the other hand, was a more than usually patient man. Had he been born in a time and to parents given to choosing for their children such character-defining names as Increase or Capability or Hope, Faith, or Charity, he might have grown to manhood under the sobriquet Tranquility Davidson. As it was, a biographer focused on this juncture of his life would have found it difficult to discern whether he was tranquil by nature or by nurture. The name Tranquility, had it been given him, would have settled the question only for those who believe that in naming there is destiny.
When the Dean came to Bellwether, after his Rhodes Scholar year at Oxford and his subsequent brief teaching in the American provinces, he was returning to the general area of his birth. At that time the school was still Bellwether Junior College, a young ladies’ finishing school with a reputation as the Wellcliffe of the Midwest. A young, handsome dean with an English polish applied to fundamental Midwestem virtues was considered a catch by President Baker, whose own Bellwether career was also in its infancy. The school wanted tone. Young David Davidson wanted an income. The match was made. He hoped one day to bring his wife and daughter from England, but at first he was not sure he would stay in Lost Valley. Since the school paid well enough to facilitate his annual trips abroad, the arrangement continued, and proved a blessing for the school. Bellwether Junior College by great good luck acquired a Dean who passed as an eligible bachelor but was not eligible, and he honored his position. For the first few years his duties consisted largely of donning a tuxedo, looking handsome, chatting wittily, and escorting young ladies in evening dresses to cotillions celebrating birthdays and comings-out.
“Tough work, but somebody has to do it,” went the joke in Lost Valley. Putting the irony aside, in fact it wasn't always easy. Not all the young ladies were wholly satisfied to depart from school finished only in mind, manners, and morals, which was essentially what the curriculum offered, and sometimes the Dean became the object of attentions neither promised to the young ladies in the school catalog nor listed among the fringe benefits in the faculty contract. He remained tranquil. And tranquility tested in such fire served him later during the turmoil of Bellwether’s becoming a four-year college that admitted young men, not all of whom, confronted with the yearnings of their feminine classmates, were blessed with the good manners and compassion of the Dean. Now, with the new university status affirmed by events like the International Convention, the Dean's placid steadfastness was being tried anew.
At the present moment he was bothered, figuratively speaking, to discover the seat of his pants in the bulldog jaws of Ripley Rollins. Patiently, he suggested to the Head of Communication and English Literature that he didn’t see what his responsibilities as Dean had to do with the presence or absence of scholars at a conference.
“Not scholars,” Rollins said. “VIVIAN WAYNE. I don’t care much about the others. If young Tenterfield fails to show up, I can take over for him or call in Alf Hedge or Yolanda Martinez. If that fellow from Australia fails to show I wouldn’t be surprised, but then we can count Australia the loser.”
“Australia the loser?” the Dean said. “If it helps your argument, though I don’t see where it is heading, I will concede that if one of their scholars fails to make his Qantas connections for a convention in Lost Valley, U.S.A. the shame will bring down whatever liberal or conservative government currently prevails in Canberra. So let’s hear the rest of it.”
“It’s not a joke,” Rollins said.
“All right, then. Leaving Australians aside, I am aware that you think Vivian Wayne’s presence here important. Because I recognize that our president also believes the presence of the great critic is important, I am willing to assert that as a good dean, I, too, think it important. But I repeat that I can see little I might do and nothing that seems my responsibility. Here’s a consideration still more to the point: why on earth would he not come?”
“Because he never goes anywhere,” Rollins wailed. “And the thing is,” he continued, “President Baker has set up the Ceremony of the Happy Huron Heritage to precede the session on Wayne. There’s the wampum, the beaded moccasins, the three arrows, the drum, and the Eagle headdress. He couldn’t find good ones to buy, so he got them on loan from some place in Wyoming.”
“Never goes anywhere?”
“Not often, but he did send Patterson to Wyoming and Patterson came up with the stuff. He’s got it in his office. He dresses up in it sometimes and beats the drum.”
“Patterson?”
“Not Patterson, Baker. The stuff’s in Baker’s office. Patterson couldn’t be trusted to keep it safe. Sometimes when it’s quiet and the window’s open I hear drumbeats. And chanting. You must have heard it. I suppose it’s practice for the Ceremony of the Happy Huron Heritage. It will be bigger and better than ever this year.”
The Dean greeted this news with brief silence. From the wall nearby the sober face of Edgar Guest seemed to be telepathically communicating to him the message “It takes a heap of chanting to make a house a wigwam.” The Dean was momentarily inspired to pass the thought on to Rollins. “It takes a heap,” he began, then thought better of it and let it go.
“A heap?” Rollins looked perplexed.
“A heap,” said the Dean, retrieving the point. “I think we are dithering, heap big dither. Do you mind if we return to the curious suggestion that an internationally renowned novelist and literary critic who has allowed his name to be printed on the program for a conference at Bellwether University might at the last moment absent himself from the proceedings? As a reader who cares little for the rituals of fandom, I don’t believe I will shed many tears if he stays home. But as a Dean approving programs and requisitions for the Department of Communication and English Literature and otherwise standing between that Department and the prodigious wrath of the President and Board of Trustees of our fair university I think I begin to perceive that I have an interest.”
The Dean opened the program and turned it to face Professor Rollins. Then, pointing, he elucidated. “It seems to say here that Vivian Wayne will reply to a scholarly paper delivered by Langston Tenterfield. I know that we can count on Tenterfield. Indeed, I recently had a message from him and am looking forward to an early meeting. On the other hand, I don’t know Wayne and I believe you don’t, either, but we both respect his reputation. Now suddenly you tell me you don't expect him to come.”
In deepening sorrow, Rollins confessed, “He never goes anywhere.”
“We have touched on that tune before,” the Dean said. “Let’s skip the tap dance, straw hat, and the flourish of the bamboo cane that goes with it. Can you elaborate?”
“That’s all I know.”
“But you have correspondence? You have the usual agreement to an honorarium? You have papers signed?”
“That’s just it. I don’t have any of those things. Young Tenterfield is taking care of the whole session. He arranged it from beginning to end. I thought he would send correspondence, but he hasn’t.”
“Tenterfield has not sent any correspondence?”
“Maybe he’s bringing it with him.”
“Let us hope so,” the Dean said. “Anyway, if there was a problem, he would have told you or mentioned it on my phone. But precisely what do you mean when you say that Vivian Wayne never goes anywhere?”
“Just that. He goes nowhere. He holds no academic position. He attends no academic conferences. He gives no lectures. He grants no interviews. Nobody even knows what he looks like.”
Patience has its rewards. The Dean was beginning to find the conversation more and more interesting. Here was a man who voluntarily relinquished the tens of thousands of dollars in annual income that can accrue to such a star from his guest appearances. The Dean thought such a refusal must be hard, and he wondered what kind of a man would persist in the practice year after year. Were there no pangs of regret? No temptations, say, to appear and speak from behind a screen or from under a sheet like the ghost of critics past or yet to come? Why not from inside a black box? Although the Dean’s academic discipline was History, not English, he knew something of the famous Vivian Wayne, whose writings reverberated throughout the Humanities, but he did not know of his lack of a public face. He knew that he was counted a great critic, mostly on the basis of one volume, The Anxiety of Affluence.
That had come, he believed, after the novels.

First was the novel V, welcomed by readers and critics alike as a young man’s brilliant turn on paranoiac uncertainty. V, the novel’s titular hero, was Victor Huguenot, a man whose family name suggested a French heritage and may have been a pun (“huge, not”), or, since it may not have been his true name at all, was perhaps primarily a pseudonym masking a mystery with unclear dimensions. “Victor,” V’s given name, was almost certainly intended as emblematic. By the end of the novel he emerged victorious over evil forces that pursued him relentlessly throughout, unless, perhaps, the same events that seemed to proclaim his victory had in another sense vanquished him. In the latter case, the name “Victor” was probably intended as an authorial irony, unless, as some suggested, the author’s intentions had gone astray, or didn’t matter. Almost immediately after publication the book found its way onto the conference circuit, prompting manifold reformulations of the controversies that divided scholars as to this point and that and what they all meant in the context of patronymic hegemony, feminism, bourgeois materialism, cultural relativism, Eurocentric privileging, queer studies, as well as many other approaches to history and literature, some of which were still more queer. Scholars, the Dean was aware, are always divided.
The interpretative freight train set in motion by the appearance of V might have continued down the same track indefinitely, delivering a shipment of articles and books here, taking on new paper there, revising, rethinking, rewriting, all along the lines perceived in the first reviews. Such was not its fate after the publication of I, a work laden with the traditional distinguishing characteristics of transparently autobiographical fictions, with names and places changed. Armed with the evidence of this book, scholars rushed to recognize that the V of V was probably not Victor at all, but Vivian, for Vivian Wayne, the author whose active and abundant life this second novel seemed to fictionalize. Although Victor was the name given to the central figure in the new narrative, when they understood that name as a fictional mask for Vivian the professors scurried back to their word processors. Everything had to be rewritten. The train had to be sent down a different track, chug-chugging and huff-puffing its way through many dark forests and interpretative miasmas.
Then came IV, a novel that deconstructed the illusion of health suggested by the first two books, for this one was centered in the mind of a terminally ill man being sustained by intravenous transfusions, the I.V. of the title. The train of critical analysis shunted on to yet another track and bumped and stuttered its way over a landscape in which the concept of illness provided the central metaphor to explain the complex intertextuality that lifted the mysterious Vivian Wayne’s great trilogy, V, I, and IV to a towering pinnacle of postmodern literary accomplishment.
Then, II and III appeared in rapid succession, and a scholar in Idaho proposed that the titles might not be letters of the alphabet at all, but Roman numerals indicative of interior temporal sequence, and published an essay saying so.

“Nobody knows what Vivian Wayne looks like?” the Dean asked. He had read some of the novels and had found them entertaining in the fairly straightforward way dear to historians of an earlier generation. It had not occurred to him that the complications might be worthy of the kind of textual exegesis that nineteenth-century scholars famously lavished upon the Bible. Nor had it occurred to him that Vivian Wayne might, like God, be invisible.
“There are no pictures. Photographers don't know where to find him. Look . . . ” Ripley Rollins held out a well-thumbed copy of The Anxiety of Affluence. “Here,” he said, tapping his finger on the bottom of the rear jacket flap, inside. “Here’s the author’s note. ‘Vivian Wayne lives at home with his dog’.”
“Curious,” said the Dean.
“I like the part about the dog,” said Rollins.
“So do I,” said the Dean. “It prompts such Humanistic reflections upon major questions of Scripture.”
“Er. What?”
“Nothing. I was thinking about something else. Perhaps I had it backward.”

*

Onstead Chisholm had seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by sanity. Determined to avoid that fate, he had early fed on honeydew and drank paradisiacal milk. Not for him the compromise between Desire and Need that turned his undergraduate acquaintances into accountants and dentists, retail sales specialists, and college administrators. His was a higher, more solitary vision. He was a Poet. So he proclaimed himself. So he gave evidence for in the disarray of the study to which he occasionally invited small groups of students to read short bursts of their own verse and listen to long bursts of his. So he demonstrated in out-of-town readings and in-town poetry slams on first Fridays of the month at the Red Chamber Room of the Bing Inn and Chinese Restaurant. So he proved in several thin volumes with his name on the spine that he displayed prominently on his office bookshelves. So he continued to prove by the frequent appearance of his poems in obscure and irregular literary journals with names like Juggernaut and Ozimuth and The Central States Monitor (formerly The Midwestern Cattle Breeder’s Bulletin), which had lately gone in for culture. Few who were not poets stepped into the circle that seemed woven round him thrice.
One of those was Eileen Crump Golzanger, Director of Graduate Studies in Communication and English Literature.
“Here,” Onstead Chisholm said, “is my latest. It’s for the program. See what you think. Shall I stand and declaim it?”
“Not here,” Eileen Crump, as she tended to think of herself these days, replied. “I would be enthralled to hear you read it later, though.” She accepted the poem with an acute sense that if Chisholm took it into his head to stand and declaim it in his stentorian voice at midday from a booth at the Korner Kitchen he might draw unwanted attention to their meeting. Like many people in positions of prominence, she welcomed attention essentially under two conditions. First, she took great pleasure when others focused their attention not so much on the declamations of nearby poets as on her own person and voice. Second, she found that the pleasure of centrality increased markedly when she felt in control of the situation. Neither of these conditions would be met if the poet sitting in relative quiet across the table from her took it into his head to stand and spout verse.
“Another Owls Feathers,” Onstead Chisholm said to the passing waitress. If he was not going to exercise his vocal chords, he could at least continue their customary lubrication with the best of the local brews.
Eileen Crump read silently.

Earth Air Fire Water
Rosin the sparrow hawk, flaming bourbon!
Furry is the kite of the sunny fleet
And the boulder refracts the phoenix’s ark.

Falcon, fagot, Indian Ocean’s child,
Finch’s glowworm, sea’s jackal:
Flag turned to ash on the vitriolic totem pole.

Flare in the aquarium, polar bear of the stars!
Lightning on the pickerel, the chestnut in jacklight,
The candle drops its dragnet on the lynx’s dragonfly.

The river is ivy, the macaw only a flash,
As the whales and politicians of the zodiac kindle
The waves of sugar that the chinook roasts.

“Wow” was Professor Crump Golzanger’s response.
“Neat, isn’t it?” said the bard.
“I wish I had the gift,” Crump said. Indeed, in a way, she did wish it. Although she had consciously overstated her enthusiasm when she said she would be enthralled to hear the poet read his work at a later time, that statement was merely her way of controlling a situation she saw as perilous. Now, reading the poem, she thanked her lucky polar bear of the stars that she had avoided the scene that would certainly have been created had he arisen and, in a loud voice, in a public restaurant, addressed the poem to her. Stumped for something to say, she read the poem twice more, becoming less puzzled and more anxious with each reading. If the poem were spoken to her, wouldn’t she become the “flaming bourbon,” whatever that was? And in her persona as flaming bourbon, wouldn’t she be requested to “rosin the sparrow hawk”? She blushed at the thought. Twice through and she flushed twice at the Freudian totem pole turning a flag to ashes and the candle dropping its dragnet on the lynx’s dragonfly. Twice her heart gave a little skip at the majestic “Flare in the aquarium, polar bear of the stars!” with its heart-stirring image of a remote and cold light brought to earth and quivering as flame in the tank of the fish master. It reminded her of the Northern Lights she had once seen, or had imagined she had seen, reflected from a wet street in Reykjavik.
“I think it’s one of my best,” said the poet, focusing his gaze upon her.
To be truthful, Onstead Chisholm’s eyes were not of the piercing blue of Icelandic pools. At their finest, in his youth, they had a brownish tinge in their center that kind friends could discover luxuriating in the shade of protruding and bushy eyebrows. Mostly, even in his tender years, they gazed inward rather than out. However, when he made the effort to beam them at young ladies of his fancy, they—the eyes, not the young ladies—shone as brown irises set into gleaming whites in a manner that they—the young ladies, not the eyes—sometimes found hypnotic. Time, beer, the milk of paradise, and the pressures of poetic inspiration had dimmed the whites and crisscrossed them with small red lines. Now, when one of his cruder drinking companions greeted him on Front Street with the customary “Close your eyes before you bleed to death” only the most myopic of passersby could fail to see what was meant. Nevertheless, when he directed these same eyes at Professor Crump after her second reading of his poem, even though they lacked the piercing blue of Icelandic pools, she felt pierced. Pierced and vulnerable. Perhaps, she thought, defensively, it was not yet time to drop the Golzanger, relic of a failed marriage though it was.
Generally speaking, she thought she had moved in her life beyond the problems posed by piercing eyes. The eyes immediately in question, she told herself, meant only that the owner wanted her reaction to a poem he had proclaimed as one of his best, even if he did seem determined to personalize it. Had he observed the blushes and flushes that had thrice warmed her cheeks? “It sings with lyric emotion,” she said, beginning her analysis with words carefully chosen for their safety. Then, more safely still, “Some of it. I’m afraid, I don’t get.” That much was completely honest, though she held back from revealing what she did get. “I think there are a number of things one could read into it.”
“Er,” said a voice behind her. Aflame in a sea of glowworms and totem poles, caught like a star in an aquarium, struggling like a dragonfly under a dragnet, kindled and roasted in waves of sugar by a savage fishy wind—and therefore more than usually appreciative of the twenty-seven inches of Formica tabletop that separated her from the man behind the piercing eyes—she jumped about a foot when a hand descended upon her shoulder.
“Er,” the voice repeated. She recovered her composure and saw, with the same quick apprehension that distinguished her poet friend, that the hand was not that of Ripley Rollins, nor the voice his either. It was Alf Hedge doing his famous imitation of their beloved leader. Hedge, like the Poet and the Director of Graduate Studies, appeared permanently stuck at the rank of Associate Professor on a campus where full professors in disciplines other than Communication and Literature proliferated like mushrooms under damp oak leaves. She would have been surprised indeed if the hand were the hand of Rollins. Surprise dissipated when she discovered it was Hedge’s hand. That did not mean she liked it. She shrugged the touch from her shoulder and moved toward the wall to make room for the newcomer on the bench beside her. At least now she would not be required to proceed with her analysis of the poem.
“At it again?” Hedge said.
“At what again?” Eileen Crump asked, still nervous from her recent insights into bardic inspiration.
“What?” Onstead Chisholm echoed.
“Whatever it is you two do behind the high walls of dark booths.”
“We have lunch,” Crump said, recovering and spearing a French fry.
“We soar on the wings of poesy,” Chisholm said, draining a glass.
“Can you write me a poem?” Hedge asked. His eyes were popping and his smile spread wide from his own forms of bardic inspiration. One of these was the immense satisfaction gleaned from his recent progress in pursuit of the lovely Myrtle Benson. Another followed closely upon the first. His cup filled nearly to overflowing from his latest conversation with Myrtle, he had hastened to his car and driven to the mall to top it off with another shot of the eye-filling ambrosia found in the display windows of Victoria’s Secret. He didn’t need to embarrass himself by going into the store to loll about and make no purchase, for he had discovered a secret known to none but himself. And maybe Victoria.
Hedge was familiar with the remarkable skill developed by weavers of ancient tapestries hanging in the great halls of European castles and manor houses. On some of these, he had read in the guidebooks, the fingers had worked into the design a squire or a milkmaid with eyes so cleverly contrived that when you entered the hall, you would find them staring directly at you. As you walked on and past the tapestry, the eyes continued to follow you until you left the room at the other end. The castle hosts habitually pointed out that marvel of design and noted with regret the passing of a lost art. Hedge had never managed to verify the existence of such tapestries for himself, for he had never been to Europe, but he didn’t much care. Neither squires nor long-dead milkmaids interested him all that much as objects of art or artifice.
What he had discovered, however, was that the medieval secret of constructing following eyes, lost to European art, was alive at the American mall. Consequently, he became a frequent watcher of the posters displayed in the windows of Victoria’s Secret. His pleasure was doubled by the certainty that none of the Philistines he counted as colleagues at Bellwether U were aware of this manifestation of an ancient art, for some of them would have scorned his appreciation had they been aware of it. No, to them he was only a frequent mall walker. Offered the bold stare of a scantily clad model, he would capture her gaze as he approached the window, turn his head to maintain contact as his eyes closed with hers in direct and mutual understanding, and turn to watch the acute sexual interest that followed him as he walked on past. In a world where women scarcely looked his way at all, he found it immensely gratifying that a beautiful model could not take her eyes off him even as he receded into the distance. As model replaced model in the window display, each took up the stare of her predecessor as though the word of his habitual coming was passed in hushed whispers from lovely lips. And each accompanied the invitation of her stare with a provocative frontal assault from her full and silken-clothed breasts, saucily thrusting toward him as he approached, and continuing their bold promise even as he regretfully passed out of sight.
Of such inspiration is poetry made.
“Can you write me a poem?” Hedge asked, apparently of the world at large.
Then, addressing Crump with the meticulous attention to detail that stood him in such good stead at the mall, he added the clarifying, “Not you, of course, but the Inspired One sitting across from us.” That much made clear, he beamed the full charms of his bulging eyes at those of the poet, exchanging stare for stare. He smiled his most winning smile. Both blinked once. “Can you?”
“Can, yes,” the poet replied, but he was not charmed. “Will, no.”
“Why not? I’ll give you the stuff. You just put it together. Love, of course, but not too heavy. Gathering rosebuds while you may and such like. Maybe even some clinging silk and liquifaction of her clothes, but no panting and no earnest pursuit of flesh. I don’t think she’d go for that. Sunny days. Languid clouds. Work in the name Myrtle.”
“As in Myrtle Benson?”
“As in Myrtle Benson. She’s feeling a little down about some bozo she met on the Internet and I’m trying to give her a lift.”
“And yourself a lift at the same time?” Crump put in, ever suspicious about men and their motives.
“Myself, too,” he admitted. “You never know what might develop.”
“What are you, mid-fifties? And she still in her twenties?” Eileen Crump was not often solicitous of the well-being of others. Still, it occurred to her once in a while that she herself had been a woman in her twenties. Some time ago.
“I’m not as young as I was,” Hedge admitted. “Nice of you to point that out. And, yes, now that you suggest it, I think maybe it is time to get serious again and settle down once more. Anyway, the main thing is she’s got this thing for her Internet pal. I think I can put a stop to that, and it would be an act of great kindness to provide a substitute.” Hedge was one of those men who smile out of a face not constructed for smiles, so that the result is disconcerting to onlookers. It was much as though a common object of low uses—a sink drainer, say—should develop lips and suddenly spread them in a smirk. Consequently, his was a smile saved for rare usage. He used it now for the third time within this short discussion, and then he winked. His tongue flicked out to moisten his lips.
“Work in some nice rhymes, Onstead” he said. “You can do that stuff easy.”

*

While three tenured but not full-professored scholars at Bellwether University lunched in the Korner Kitchen across from the main entry to the campus, two untenured scholars without permanent venues pulled off the highway and into the parking lot of a Bill Knapp’s Restaurant to take refreshment before continuing their journey to Lost Valley.
At least Bill Knapp’s was the name that Lang gave to the restaurant, adding a sweeping flourish of his hand toward an establishment with another name.
Hermione wondered why. “The sign doesn’t say ‘Bill Knapp’s’,” she said.
“Alas, no. But Midwesterners have long memories. The departure of the Bill Knapp’s that used to stand here has been long-lamented.”
“Would you please spell that?” said Hermione.
Lang did, slowly, extending the moment.
“I suppose,” Hermione said, continuing her part of the quest for conversational topics that didn’t matter to substitute for those that did, “that you will tell me that ‘Bill Knapp’ is an anagram for an exotic bird once found in this area, but now extinct. No, don’t tell me, I want to guess. Perhaps a “pankbill” No, that won’t do. I’m missing a ‘p.’ I must use all the letters. Perhaps a ‘plankblip,’ a water fowl named for its plaintive, repetitive call, ‘plankblip, plankblip’.’’
“No,” Lang said. “I think Bill Knapp was the name of the founder.”
“Pity. I rather like ‘plankblip.’ It’s like the noise you make skipping stones across a pond.”
“Not to change the subject,” Lang said, weighing his words and speaking cautiously, “but I may need your help with a delicate matter at Bellwether U.”
In love with One, I love another, she thought. She chewed on the thought and found it bitter. “What kind of help?”
“It involves a broken love story.”

As constant press of time and place, she thought. “What kind of help?”
“It involves a woman named Myrtle Benson.”
A welcome warmth and willing ways . . . “What kind of help?"
“She works in the library at Stonewall Manor.”
Conspire to blur the distant face. “What kind of help?”
“It’s a complicated story, but the long and short of it is that Brother Broddy fell in love with this Sister Myrtle via the Internet. She dumped him, and I promised to patch things up.”
“So it’s not Myrtle, then?”
“What’s not Myrtle?”
“Nothing. What I meant to say is that patching up a broken love affair doesn’t sound like a difficult task for a bloke of your persuasive abilities.”
“Don’t be funny. Of course I have recognized almost from the cradle my ample endowment of winning ways and easy endearments, but I also have other things on my mind.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the question as to whether or not when we get to Lost Valley there will be some little sign—even the smallest would do—that the famous Vivian Wayne will be present for his part in the plenary session on “The Anxiety of Affluence: Vivian Wayne and the Margins of Contemporary Discourse” that has been arranged by one Langston Tenterfield, that is to say, yours truly.”
“You mean you haven’t a confirmation from Wayne?”
“Not a word.”
“And you don’t know if he’ll show up?”
“You express the matter with admirable succinctness.”
“What will you do?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“None at all?”
“Well, when you put it that way—yes, I do have a clue.” They exchanged glances and held them long for the first time that day. “I may need your help.”
“For what?”
“To employ your considerable persuasive powers over Brother Broddy.”
“To what purpose?”
“Shhh. The walls have ears. Let’s find ourselves a small pond and chuck stones at it. Soothed by the plaintive, repetitive call of ‘plankblip, plankblip’ perhaps we can talk more freely.”


Chapter 5, CHOICES ON A RARE DAY

A glorious morning prevailed into the afternoon in Lost Valley and generally throughout the Midwest, where opposing curves of isobars contained a steady high-pressure area that promised fair weather from Sioux Falls to Pittsburgh and from the blue waters of Thunder Bay to the blue grasses of Kentucky. Satellite pictures displayed only a few white, puffy clouds. It was the kind of day when children lying on the grass saw neither satellites nor clouds, but a vast field where scattered sheep munched on clumps of daisies. From the ground, the prevailing blue of the sky that complemented the blues of Thunder Bay and Kentucky was shot through with occasional vapor trails, which to the children appeared to tether the sheep on long leashes and to adults who happened to look up might have signaled the passing of jet planes from Newark or Los Angeles or Minneapolis to Columbus or Peoria or Where’s-Its-Face. Most children and adults would neither have known nor have cared that some of those jets carried scholars from far-flung institutions flying the next-to-last leg of their journey to Bellwether University to attend the International Conference on Multicultural and Multidisciplinary Initiatives: The Here and the Now.

In Lost Valley and at Bellwether University, many people knew and cared, but Dean Davidson did not let that ruin his day. He breathed deeply of the freshness and allowed a less than original thought to wash over his cerebral cortex. “And what is so rare as a day in June,” he observed to the Head of Communication, who stood next to him, fondling the ears and examining the nose of Bullie, the campus mascot.

“Er,” Ripley Rollins replied. “Er.”

“Stop right there,” the Dean interrupted, raising an admonitory finger. “I know what you are going to say, and it won’t do at all. ‘By a strict count known to every school child,’ I hear you thinking, ‘any day in September, April, and November, each of which has thirty, is equally as rare as a day in our present month. Most of the rest have thirty-one, making their days less rare, but February in fact has even rarer days, there being only twenty-eight, ‘til leap year gives it twenty-nine’.”

“Er,” Ripley Rollins observed, giving the dog’s back a rub.

“The fact is,” the Dean said, “If you will allow an old friend a moment of candor, as one scholar to another speaking in the privacy of the campus dog run, I deplore the way that professors of English insist on the statistics of their field. Surely you can see that the poet Lowell was counting something different than numbers when he used the adjective ‘rare’.”

“Er,” Rollins continued, patting Bullie’s haunches and then returning his attention to his nose—the dog’s, that is, not Rollins’s—to which he applied a salve that he extracted from a tin he—Rollins, not the dog—had taken from his jacket pocket.

“ ‘Er’?” the Dean asked. “Sometimes, my dear colleague, I think you count too much on the expressive possibilities of that word. Could you elaborate?”

“He’s hurt his nose. He’s rubbed it all rare.”
“Rare?”

“I mean raw.”

“What is so raw,” the Dean declaimed, “as a pit bull’s nose in June?” He stooped to take a closer look at Bullie’s organ of smell. “I see what you mean. Why don’t you put something on it?”

“I am,” the Head said, and he continued doing so. Then he wiped his hand on a rag that he carried for that purpose, closed the tin, and returned both tin and rag to his pocket. “That should help,” he said. “It’s a salve especially recommended in Galsworthy’s Ailments of the Pit Bull. He also suggests padding for the fence, and I have had the same thought.”

Clearly, Bullie appreciated the ministrations of his greatest admirer. When Ripley had given him one last pat and the two men had left the enclosure, locking the gate behind them, he waddled to a shady corner and flattened his small body sidewise on the grass.
“So long, old pal,” Ripley said. “I need to get back to the office.”

No such need weighed upon the Dean, who was not clear whether or not he was the old pal mentioned. He stood for a few moments looking at Bullie, whose warm ear was softly laid upon the earth as one who might try if it be in tune.

“Pssst,” Bullie said.

The Dean looked startled. A rational man with an open mind, he thought it possible that someone could teach a pit bull to say “pssst,” but he had never heard that syllable from this particular pit bull. He thought it also possible that a sleeping pit bull might emit a suspiration that could pass into the ear of an inattentive listener as the startling syllable “pssst.” He eyed the dog critically, cocking his head slightly to one side, as was his habit.

“Pssst” Bullie repeated, without opening his mouth, quivering his nostrils, or displaying other unusual vocal or breathing effort. “Pssst, over here.”
Then the Dean remembered his bad ear and made the necessary adjustment, turning his attention away from the apparent direction of the sound and toward the probable one. There, waving at him from behind a shrub, was Hermione Trelawney.

“It’s me,” she said. “Your long-lost daughter.”

“Hermione!” The Dean was not an expressive man, but he took her in his arms and ceremoniously kissed both cheeks. “Why are you hiding in the shrubbery?”

She kissed him back, catching him on his retreating chin, which she noted was meticulously shaved, just as she had known it ever since her childhood. Did it never, she wondered, grow a light stubble? Never trust a man with a mustache was a maxim he had taught her early, still less a man with a mustache and beard. She wondered if Broddy's disguise would be the right one. “The shrubbery?” she replied. “I didn’t know if I was welcome.”

“True, true,” said the Dean, admitting the justice of her observation. “There have been times when the sudden appearance of a child of my loins on the greensward of Bellwether University might have caused an embarrassing stir. At Spring Cotillions, for example. But I fancy those days are long gone. Come, let me show you the famous stairway and afterwards we can repair to my rooms for refreshment.”

She took his arm and they walked together to Stonewall Manor, talking of punting on the Cherwell and of field hockey and picnics by ruined abbeys and a mother who died too early. And of her studies in English Literature and of how they had always met in England or in the Eastern United States but never in Lost Valley.

“It was truly lost to me,” she said. “I used to think of it as surrounded by impenetrable mountains and jungles with rivers filled with piranhas and water moccasins. I couldn’t imagine what your life was like.”

“It was partly like that,” he said, giving a sweep of the hand. They had entered the foyer of Stonewall Manor, and his gesture took in the curving staircase with Old Huron offering his cigars by the newel post. “In the days when we were an all girls’ school—-I’m sorry, all women—-on festive occasions your father used to escort them down that stairway, sometimes one on each arm, he engagingly handsome in tuxedo and they all beautiful and gloriously gowned.”

“What was the point?”

“The point was that their parents were paying substantial tuition to send them to a junior college that was in truth not much more than a finishing school. They were daughters of farmers and shopkeepers and assembly-line workers who had heard of such goings-on as society comings-out and grand cotillions and understood that there were people in the world who ate off bone china with sterling silver and drank from crystal goblets. They were pleased beyond measure to see their daughters as small parts of that world and getting educations, too. All the young ladies here ‘came out’.”

“And then, I suppose, the Indian gave them a cigar.”

“You mock me. But the comings out were major events in the lives of the girls, young women, and no small part of my duties in those days.”

“But why you?”

“I had been to Oxford and could manage an accent that, if it was not quite English, was clearly of the great and bumpy world that lay somewhere beyond the depressingly flat Midwest. And as I had no wife, not here anyway, I was available in the best possible way—an escort young enough to be attractive and at the same time old enough and wise enough to pose no threat to youthful innocence.”

“Er.” Ripley Rollins was coming down the stairs and attempting polite conversation before continuing onward.

“Professor Rollins,” the Dean said. “Allow me to introduce to you Hermione Trelawney, who is one of the young scholars attending the Conference. Professor Rollins is Head of Communications and English and a s