LITMIR.BIZ

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English Department hierarchy mattered to Maureen as it did to all of the wives. Possibly even more than it mattered to Stall.

      She sipped and set down her glass with great concentration. “Did you know his middle name was Red?”

      “Red? You mean a nickname?”

      “No. I mean his full name was Jack Red Leaf.”

      “You’re kidding.”

      Maureen shook her head in a way meant to be decisive. Some of her gin slipped over the rim of her glass.

      “Where’d you get that?” Stall slid his chair closer to his wife’s at the kitchen table. His knee touched hers.

      “From Sarah. She told me.”

      “When? Why? She just told you, Oh, by the way, my husband’s middle name is Red?”

      “Of course not. Don’t be an ass.”

      There it was. The anger that lived in the heart of Maureen from Across the Border. Where did it come from? Stall wondered. The gin only let it out, called it from its hiding place. What was the source of the anger in Maureen Stall?

      From the land beyond earnestly inebriated, Maureen looked at him and then at her martini as though she were having a hard time deciding which she liked best. Or least.

      “Sarah told me one night at a party—maybe it was the same party where you snuck into Jack’s study and pronounced it neat as a pin. Anyway, we were talking about marriage, you know, couples and how they meet, what attracts them, makes them want to be together.”

      Obscurely, Stall saw that he might not like where this was going. With women, it was tit for tat, and just as surely as Jack Leaf’s wife had told Maureen about her and Jack, so had Maureen given Sarah Leaf her tit. No, Stall didn’t mean that. It was the gin talking and not well, but the idea was clear. Stall feared what Maureen might have told Sarah about the attraction between the Stalls. Not because he knew what she might have revealed, but because he had no idea.

      Maureen said, “She said it was his skin.”

      “His skin?”

      “Yes, his skin. Come on, Tom. Think about it. The skin of Jack Red Leaf?”

      It came to Stall. “No!”

      “Yes, what else could it be?”

      “You’re saying he was an Indian? You’re saying Sarah told you that?”

      “Not in so many words. Her exact words were, From the first time I saw him, I loved his skin. His dark skin. It was so smooth. The man had no wrinkles. It covered him like caramel poured over a cake. You know what I mean, Maureen, and here she stopped and she sort of winked at me. We were both drinking, of course, and it was late at night in their house and most people were already gone, and you were off snooping in Jack’s study, and she winked and said, You know, Maureen, my husband’s full name is Jack Red Leaf.”

      “And you knew . . .”

      “Not until later. Not until I thought about it. And I started to wonder why she told me and what that wink meant. It was sort of a dirty wink, if you know what I mean.”

      Stall thought about it. She could only mean one thing. “You mean, uh, sexy dirty. That kind of dirty.”

      “Yeah, that kind. I think I know Sarah well enough to know when she goes sexy dirty late at night in her cups.”

      “What was she drinking? We, uh, ought to get—”

      “Oh, don’t be an ass. She was drinking firewater. I don’t know, probably bourbon. She likes bourbon. The question is, why did she want me to know what, apparently, nobody else knows or has even cared to think about? Why Jack Leaf’s skin was so dark.”

      “I don’t know . . .” Stall ignored the fact that his wife had called him an ass twice, and considered the question. “I just thought—I mean if I thought about it—I thought his skin was Mediterranean. Maybe Leaf was the Americanized form of Leafiano or something. You know, a lot of people—”

      “Oh God!” Maureen’s tone was infinitely weary, but Stall thought she was beginning to see the humor in this. The awful, absurd, but inescapable humor. Jack Leaf had been an underground man. And for some reason, his wife had sprinkled hints about his secret under the nose of the wife of the assistant department chairman. Jack Leaf was a Red Indian, and he was passing. Passing was serious business in the South, and Gainesville, Florida, was definitely the South.

      The important thing, the sobering thing (and God knew they needed sobering), was that nobody in an English department in a Southern land-grant university had ever even considered the possibility that a member of the graduate faculty might be an Indian. A Red man named Red Leaf. It would have been like asking yourself if a man with a very dark tan that never faded in winter was a Negro. To the bigoted minds that worked the farms and picked the oranges and pumped the gas out where the kudzu crept daily toward University City, there was not one inch of difference between a Negro and an Indian. Even English professors knew this. To the bigoted mind, Negroes and Indians were one and the same, and they were bad.

      Stall had grown up Southern and had rid himself to the best of his ability of the racial and social ideas of his parents and grandparents. He considered himself liberal in both the old and the new senses of the word. Maureen had not grown up Southern. She was from Oberlin, Ohio, a college town, and she counted professors among the men of her family going back generations. Stall had met Maureen Wiggins when he was a grad student at the University of Virginia just after the war, and in the process of choosing each other, they’d had many political discussions. It was Maureen who had vetted Stall. Stall believed that she had chosen the famously conservative Randolph-Macon College (“Randy Mac” to the boys of UVA) as the place to earn her BA in education at least partly so that she could spend four years there as a member of the opposition to all things Southern and especially the doctrine of separate-but-equal. She had made it clear to Stall that their relationship could go no further than casual dating (though they were strongly attracted to each other) unless he made sincere declarations to her of his liberal values. Like most young men his age, and especially young men who had been to war, Stall would have done almost anything to get a coed into bed, but with Maureen, sincerity came at no price. He really did hate everything that was small-minded and bigoted about the South. He had broken forever with some of his relatives over segregation, and in those days, in the certainty of youth, he knew that he would never regret these partings of ways.

      The phone rang. It was too late at night for polite phone calling, so Stall knew this ringing could be about only one thing, the death of Jack Leaf. He stood a little unsteadily and said, “I’d better get that.”

      Maureen stared at the jangling instrument that hung from the kitchen wall as though it might leap across the room and bite her.

      Stall said hello to the world outside this kitchen in his most confident voice.

      “Hello, Tom. Amos here. I’m sorry to call you so late at night and with such a sad thing to discuss.” The long-distance line was windy, and Harding sounded as far away as he was.

      Amos Harding, chairman of the English Department. Ancient Amos, whose life’s work—studies of the essays of Sir Thomas Browne—was considered by most of the younger graduate faculty so hopelessly out of date that it disqualified Harding as chairman. But Harding hung on, mostly by dint of Southern courtliness and a golfing friendship with Thomas Connor, president of the university. Stall walked a narrow line between Harding, whom honor required him to defend, and the younger faculty, who thought Harding kept the department firmly anchored in the nineteenth century.

      “Hello, Chairman Harding.”

      “Call me Amos, Tom, especially on a night like this. I’m calling to thank you for stepping into the breach when we needed you today.”

      The boy stood on the burning deck, Stall thought, then shook his head. All he had done was give a dead man the decency of a covered face and

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