LITMIR.BIZ

      THREE

      In the early hours of morning as he lay next to Maureen’s sweetly breathing warmth, Tom Stall remembered sudden deaths. There had never been a departmental suicide before, but an old professor’s heart had stopped in the jury box at the courthouse downtown, and another had died of a stroke on a fishing boat far out on Newnans Lake, the professor, not so elderly, found slumped over the tiller of his outboard motor. When these things happened, the junior members of the department were asked to take on the burdens of extra classes. Who would take over Jack Leaf’s summer term class in research methodologies? And what about the two classes Leaf was scheduled to teach in the fall? It was probably too late, even in a university town teeming with academic labor, to hire someone new to teach early American lit (all those Puritans). American Romanticism might be easier to cover.

      Listening to Maureen’s sibilant breathing and watching the dawn grow more certain at the window across the room, Stall resolved to tell Amos Harding that he would cover Leaf’s research methodologies class for the remaining two weeks of the summer term. There were only five students in the class. Research Meth, as it was called, was a required course and a thing of withering boredom both to teach and to take. The students who came for the summer term were often tedious themselves: zealots who had gone without the rest and adventure of a vacation before the rigors of grad school, hard-drivers who thought the summer course would put them a few steps ahead of students who arrived in the fall.

      Stall had taught the course as a newcomer ten years ago and had considered it a waste of time. Students should either know research methods from their undergraduate studies or should learn them double-time as they grappled with real courses such as the ones he taught in modern British and American poetry and fiction. As he lay watching the shapes of his bedroom resolve themselves out of darkness, a sudden image of Jack Leaf’s hands with traces of white chalk dust on them came to Stall. He did not want to visit the classroom where five students would ask him what had happened to Professor Leaf, but he had to do it.

      Stall slipped from the bed as quietly as he could, showered with the bathroom door closed, and went downstairs to make himself a cup of coffee. Maureen was letting their daughter sleep late these last few days of summer. Soon enough they’d all be awakened at six o’clock by the crashing sounds of Corey readying for school. There was no sleeping after Corey’s first footfalls on her bedroom floor, but Stall wouldn’t mind the early mornings. He’d get to his office a good hour before anyone else entered the English building and work on his article about Graham Greene’s religious conversion. He was publishing articles one by one and planning to collect them into a not-so-slim volume. A collection wouldn’t count as a book to the most stringent of his colleagues, but it, and his administrative skills, and the good opinion of Amos Harding, might be enough to get Stall the chairmanship when Harding retired. And then what?

      Stall had not thought much about what came the day after he occupied the old leather chair behind the big Victorian pedestal desk in Amos Harding’s office. A good life, he hoped, and a long one. More of his own research and writing—without the pressure of vying for promotion. A chance to demonstrate his leadership skills and his vision for the future of the department. That vision had not yet come into sharp focus, but no matter. As times changed, the department would change naturally with them.

      Stall stood at the kitchen sink drinking his coffee and looking at the backyard. The bird feeder, placid in the morning cool, needed cleaning. Perhaps, as chairman, he’d be able to afford a yardman. Corey entered, bleary but cheerful, and began to make herself a breakfast of toast and peanut butter. “Daddy, can I go to Jeannie’s house?” Jeannie Mears was the daughter of the sociologist who lived down the block.

      “Sure, honey. Drink some milk.”

      Toast in hand, Corey headed for the door. Her sneakered footsteps were receding down the driveway when Stall realized that she had not given him his ritual peck on the cheek. The peck had gone away with the advent of the “training brassiere,” which gave Stall what his grandfather had called “the fantods” every time he hugged his daughter. Not that she let him hug her much anymore. She was moving into that terrain where Daddy’s best use was as an ally against Mother, who, as the other woman in the house, had become a blood enemy. Stall had heard about this, seen some of it. He hoped the Stall family version of the old story would be mild.

      He waited a while for Maureen to come down, picturing the look on her face, the one they called Hangover Hell, as she groped her way into the kitchen, her nose pulling her forward, homing in on the aroma of coffee. She did not come down, so Stall went up. He wanted to talk to her before he went to President Connor’s office in Tigert Hall, a place he had visited only once, when the president’s secretary, Mrs. Braithwaite, a miraculous typist, had done some work for him. He had paid her, received from her immaculate hand the manila envelope holding his modest contribution to American Letters, and had watched her type for a few moments before leaving. Never had fingers moved so fast (literally a blur) and never with fewer mistakes. And she did it all with the serenity of a nun at vespers. The look on her face was not concentration and it was far from effort, it was beatitude.

      But Stall feared the president’s office as any young professor would, and especially he feared Amos Harding’s

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