Professor James Hadley was sweating in
his belted brown coat. Faithful to his lifelong practice, he had zipped in the
heavy fleece lining on the last Friday of October, that very morning, and,
sixty-eight degrees or not, he would not permit himself to remove it.
What a surprise, this warm Atlantic
breeze so late in the year! It seemed a shame to waste it going home to a supper
alone. Tempted to drive down to the waterfront, he dallied on the cement steps
of the former private home that housed the philosophy department. He thought of
taking a cruise on the Longfellow. He imagined sitting back on the lower
deck, listening to the captain’s piped-in, chuckling voice reciting those
tales of Casco Bay. Soon after the boat passed the Portland Head Light, the
engines would shut down and all passengers would gather on the upper deck, where
the crew would pass out bread to hurl at seagulls summoned by the familiar
whistle. Today was only Friday. Sunday was Professor Hadley’s day to ride
that boat. He frowned, recalling that the Longfellow would soon be docked
for the winter. No more rides until April. He was tired, a bit bored and lonely.
A little cruise might be just the lift.
The antennae of a long black bug trying
to crawl along the wrought-iron railing began palpating the web of flesh between
his thumb and forefinger. The professor moved his hand from the insect’s
path and said, “Oh! Look at me, standing here like the quintessential
absent-minded professor. Thanks for the wake-up call there, fellow.”
A young woman jogged by in shorts and
high-top sneakers with pull-on straps sticking out at the heels like wings. Her
short, blonde hair flared out above the sweatband and flew back like a second
set of wings on the sides of her head. Professor Hadley recognized her. She had
been in his intro class and had just declared a minor in philosophy. He called
out, “Hey! Julie Johnson! You look like Mercury whizzing across the
planet! Delivering messages from the gods, are you?”
“Hello, it’s you!” she
said between huffs as she circled back and jogged in place. “I’m on
a break from my work-study job at the bookstore. Actually, I do have a message.
I just sent you a slip in inter-campus mail. It’s about that book you
reordered for spring term, Perspectives on Life, Side-by-Side.”
“Oh?”
“It’s out of
print.”
“No!”
“Yeah, sorry. I know how much you
love that book. I came across another one I think you’ll like. I set a
copy behind the counter for you. Stop down! I’ll be there till
closing.” She waved and ran to the corner and around the block.
The professor steadied himself against
the railing. Out of print. Out of print after all these years! Couldn’t
they have waited one more semester till his retirement? He dreaded the prospect
of perusing alternative texts. He felt like just going home. Oh, bite the bullet
and get down to the bookstore, he told himself. He cut across the side yard to
the Law School parking lot and crossed Bedford Street to the main part of the
campus. As he was passing the Alumni House, which was once a farmhouse, he
looked skyward at the sound of a familiar clue that President Bush would be
spending the weekend at his Kennebunkport mansion. Grateful for any distraction,
the professor stood still and watched for several minutes as three helicopters
circled the coast like vultures.
Moving along again, his eyes still
watching the iron birds, he felt something like a shower of golf balls bouncing
off his shoes.
“Oh, sorry,” a woman’s
voice said. “I’m really sorry.” Tall, her shoulder-length hair
straight and black, the woman was dressed in a brown uniform with a
blue-and-white emblem of Maine embroidered on the breast pocket.
Just ahead in the middle of the walkway
was a small, three-wheeled pickup truck. The ruptured underside of a large
cardboard box hanging over the open tailgate was dropping tulip bulbs like giant
grains of sand in an hourglass.
The woman shoved the box securely onto
the truck and began gathering bulbs from the macadam walkway.
Professor Hadley stooped down.
“Let me help you,” he said. He began picking up bulbs and tucking
them in the crook of his left arm. “Where shall we put them?”
“Oh, thanks. Over there by that
round flowerbed in front of the Alumni House.”
After they picked up all the bulbs, they
pressed their palms on the bottom of the box, carried it over to the flowerbed,
and set it down on the brown grass. “There you are, miss.” Professor
Hadley’s eyes fell upon the brass fixture on the top of the stubby granite
post that stood in the center of the bed. “Ah, the sundial,” he
said. He stooped down, one knee bent on the grass. Leaning forward, he stretched
his arms toward the monument and ran his fingertips up and down the gray
granite. “I love sundials. They make me think of Aristarchus of
Samos.”
“Who?”
“Aristarchus of Samos. He lived
around 270 B.C. He had a sundial, and he surmised that the earth revolved around
the sun.”
“I learned that Copernicus was the
first to say the earth went ’round the sun.”
“Ho, no. It was Aristarchus of
Samos. Centuries before Copernicus! Most people don’t realize that. In any
case, sundials are wonderful, don’t you think? Beautiful, quiet. If it
were up to me, and if the sun never hid behind clouds or mountains, I’d
say let’s get rid of all these ticking, ringing, beeping clocks and just
use sundials.”
“I like sundials, too. A Micmac
Indian taught me how to tell time by a sundial when I was a little girl. I love
planting flowers around this one. You a gardener?”
The professor chuckled. “No, no. I
hardly know a pansy from a petunia. Maybe I should take up gardening, though.
I’ll be retiring soon. I’ll have lots of time on my hands. My wife
passed away many years ago. Gardening might be just the thing. That is, if
I’m not too old to learn.”
“Oh, well, here! If you want to
learn, I can show you something right now.”
“I’m afraid I must get to
the bookstore, you see.”
“C’mon. A five-minute
gardening lesson. How ’bout it?”
“All right.”
The groundskeeper took a crate of hand
tools from the truck, dropped it noisily near the flowerbed, and went back for
some long-handled tools. The professor, still genuflecting before the sundial,
tumbled sideways as he dodged the rake she hurled from the truck like a spear.
Her hair swung forward and back with the throw.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. She
picked up the iron rake and combed through the lumpy soil that had been turned
over. Then she dragged the rake, teeth upward, over the soil, smoothing it. She
knelt down and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Now watch what I
do.” She stabbed a trowel into the earth. Pulling the soil toward her,
holding it in place with the trowel, she dropped a bulb into the hole and
glanced at the way it landed. The professor noticed that if it looked okay to
her, whatever okay was, she removed the trowel and let the earth fall over the
bulb. Then she scraped a little extra over the top and patted it down. There was
something mysteriously tender in the way she patted the soil, as if she had just
hidden some sweet, sacred object known only to her. This tenderness surprised
him as he recalled dodging the rake only moments before.
If the bulb was not okay, he noticed,
she reached in and did something to it before covering it.
“How come you fuss with some of
them and not others?” he asked.
“Because they’re supposed to
point straight up to heaven like steeples.”
“What happens if the point is
facing down? Or sideways?”
“Nothing, really. Most of them
sorta squirm themselves right somehow. Come Easter, tah-daah, tulips! Straight
up!” Her voice was husky and confident.
A staticky voice called from the radio
in the groundskeeper’s leather holster. “Base to
forty-six.”
Lifting the radio to her mouth, she
answered, “Forty-six.”
“The trashcan outside the Campus
Center is overflowing?”
“Ten-four.” She put the
radio back. “Well, it’ll probably have to wait till Monday,”
she said with a shrug. “They won’t like it, but what can I do? I
punch out in less than an hour. I still have this planting to finish and all the
tools to put away. My little girl has a dentist appointment at four. I
can’t be late picking her up from the daycare.”
“And I still have to get to the
bookstore. Thanks for the gardening lesson.”
“Any time.”
Professor Hadley walked down the hill to
the Campus Center, a one-story gray building with the bookstore on the south
end. He stood before the double doors, surprised by an impulse to pray for the
courage to hunt for a new intro text after all these years. But having never
satisfactorily deduced whether there was, in fact, a God, he dismissed the urge
as foolishness. “Shame on you,” he said to his reflection in the
glass doors. “Bite the bullet and get yourself into that
bookstore.”
Stepping inside, he draped his coat
neatly over his left arm and dawdled in the common area of the Campus Center,
looking at posters and announcements. When he entered the bookstore, Julie
Johnson called and waved from behind the register. She reached under the counter
and pulled out a paperback called, The Devonshire Philosophy Reader. She
held it out to him. His trembling hands held empty space like the hands of a
first-time father afraid to take the newborn infant from a goading nurse.
Julie came out from behind the counter.
“Go on, take it.”
He let her place the book in his hands.
He pressed it against his chest for a moment. Then he handed it back with an
expression of distaste, as if it had just wet down the front of his shirt. He
shook his head. “I’m—I’m sorry. It was kind of you to
set this aside for me, but— Are you sure the one I want is out of
print?”
“Absolutely. There may be some
used copies floating around, but we couldn’t guarantee enough for your two
sections spring term. You don’t have to decide today. You can borrow this
book over the weekend. It’s a lot like Perspectives on Life,
Side-by-Side. Pairs of opposing views on the same topic. Readings from
ancient to modern times. Lots of topics. The selections on women are even
better.”
“Yes, as I recall, you
didn’t like the Schopenhauer-versus-Germaine-Greer selections.”
“Good old Schopenhauer. Ugh. Women
are merely big children who should never be entrusted with money, even their
own. I didn’t care for some of the theological selections
either.”
“Oh, yes, I remember you
didn’t like Saint Thomas Aquinas versus Bertrand Russell.”
Julie rolled her blue eyes. “Yes,
five ways of proving there’s a God. Then the same five criteria to prove
there isn’t. Pretty dry stuff. No offense. I wish you’d look over
this book. How ’bout it? Won’t you take it for the weekend? It has
wonderful photographs and sketches!”
“Sketches! In a philosophy book?
See, that’s what I mean about these so-called modern texts. Full of
gimmicks!”
“Oh, these are beautiful. I love
the photo in the section on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It brings out the spirit
of that man so, so— There are quotes from his letters that make his
philosophical writings a little easier to understand. For me, at least. Here,
why not take the book for the weekend and see for yourself? I put a bookmark on
the Teilhard page for you.”
Professor James Hadley, staring at the
book, slipped on his coat and buttoned it. “Oh, all right. It’s
about time I looked at something new. Thanks for setting this aside for me. You
kept me from falling into nothing but a big, empty chasm. And thanks for your
persistence, my friend. See you on Monday.”
He went out and looked up the hill. Gray
clouds were gathering near the deep orange sun that squatted on the horizon. The
door swung open behind him. Julie poked her head out and said, “Professor
Hadley, don’t forget to turn your clock back this weekend!”
He laughed. “Oh, I never forget a
thing like that. But thanks.” He started up the hill, the textbook under
his arm, out of sight. After ten paces or so, he stopped and unbuttoned his
coat.
When he got to the Alumni House, he saw
that the little three-wheeled truck was still on the walkway, but the
groundskeeper was throwing her tools into the truck bed in a frenzy. He
quickened his step. “Say, what’s the hurry? Is something
wrong?”
“The daycare called. My
kid’s got a real high fever. I just had to drop those tulip bulbs in any
which way and cover them over. Hey, how ’bout punching me out?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She pointed to the south and spoke fast.
“The tool shed is over that way.” She pointed to the east.
“The garage where I park the truck is all the way down by the Campus
Center, but the time room where I gotta punch my timecard,” she said,
pointing north, “is in Payson Smith Hall up here. I gotta pick up my
daughter! Would you punch my timecard out for me?”
“I won’t get in trouble,
will I? Or get you in trouble?”
“Naw, the student grounds crew
punched out at 2:30. So did the daytime building crew. The night crew’s
already punched in. You won’t run into anybody in the time room,
especially if you wait till the last minute to go there.”
“Okay. What do I do?”
The groundskeeper pointed across the
lawn to the west end of Payson Smith Hall, a long, three-story brick building.
“Go in this end of the building. Go down the stairs to the basement, head
down the hall to the center of building, and through the door that says,
‘Maintenance Time Room.’ There’s a rack of cards on the wall
next to a punch clock. My card says, ‘Theresa McKnight.’ Slide it
into the slot under the clock face. Line up the out-Friday space with the red
dot below the six. Then push the flat metal bar the card is resting on. Only do
me a favor. Don’t punch me out until three-thirty exactly, or
they’ll dock me fifteen minutes, okay?”
“I suppose I could do that. You go
on. I hope your little girl’s okay.”
“Thanks.” She jumped into
the truck, swung the door shut, and took off. Her departure was so abrupt and
the resulting stillness so stark that the professor felt as if a door that
separated him from the whole world had been slammed shut. Nearby, brittle brown
oak leaves, clinging stubbornly to branches, began to rattle like death. He
looked at the sundial and tried to tell the time. It was no use. The sun had
disappeared behind a cloud. He checked his watch. Only eight past three.
He began to feel guilty and nervous
about the crime he was about to commit. In his thirty-four years on this campus,
he had never broken one rule, much less conspired with someone to do something
sneaky and wrong. Oh, if only he had had more time to think about it! He would
have said no. But now that he’d given his word to Theresa McKnight, he had
to do it. Or did he? He thought about the sick child, the worried mother, the
mother thoughtful enough give him that little gardening lesson. He looked at the
flowerbed, picturing her hands patting the soil over each bulb.
What if someone saw him standing idle
there on the lawn? How would he explain himself? Ah, he thought, I’ll play
the absent-minded professor, lost in thought. He tried staring into space and
immediately fell into self-ridicule, but he was soon rescued by the feel of the
textbook under his arm. I’ll lose myself in a book, he decided. More
convincing. He looked at the red paper bookmark Julie had inserted in the
section on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He slipped his fingers in with the
bookmark. “Here I go,” he said.
But he would not open the book. He
clutched it against his chest while his mind leafed through all the dog-eared
facts he could recall about Teilhard. He knew who Teilhard was no matter what
some modern, gimmicky textbook was about to claim—philosopher, Jesuit
priest, mystic, if there really were such things, paleontologist. Silenced by
his church for his theories of evolution, for his concept of Noogenesis, for
doubting the existence of a historical Adam and Eve. Had dared to agree with
other scientists that the universe may have begun with a Big Bang. Died on
Easter Sunday in New York in 1955. Or was it 1956? It annoyed Professor James
Hadley not to be sure of his facts.
If this book is worth anything at all,
it will at least give the exact time of the man’s birth and death, he
thought. He swung the pages apart like floodgates.
His eyes beheld a black-and-white
photograph shot from behind a tangle of reeds and grasses on the banks of a body
of water reflecting the plants on the opposite shore. Against a sky of long,
gray clouds stood three pyramids, the second and third farther back. Beneath the
photograph was the caption:
The Pyramids of Giza. Some years later, memories of Egypt
were to
stimulate the writing of ‘La Vie Cosmique.’
Then there were Teilhard’s own words about a saying he had
recalled:
The world is still being created, and in the world it
is Christ who is
being fulfilled.’ When I had heard
and understood this saying, I
looked, and I saw, as
though in an ecstasy, that through all nature, I
was
immersed in God. (‘La Vie Cosmique,’ 1916) *
The professor’s eyes swam through
the photograph again and again. They turned to the flowerbed, which looked bare
and barren now, sad, unattended, forsaken by the rake-wielding woman who had
buried the bulbs so lovingly there. Her husky voice came back to him. “I
just had to drop those tulip bulbs in any which way and cover them
over.”
Suddenly he saw that the flowerbed
wasn’t empty at all. Anyone crossing the brown lawn would snub the bed as
if there were nothing to see but a small post of granite in a circle of plain,
dull soil. But he knew now. He stooped down and pressed his palm to the ground,
as though feeling for a heartbeat. He knew now. He knew. Beneath that soil were
bulbs buried any which way by loving, hurried hands trusting that they’d
squirm themselves right somehow and, tah-daah, come Easter, tulips! He could
almost see them mooching around on their roots, then sitting through the long
winter, alive and waiting for their time. Waiting. Suddenly bursting into
visible life!
The ground seemed to drop from under him
like a trap door. But he remained above the hole, sure-footed and full of
delight. His jaw dropped loose in complete surrender as waves of peace washed
over him, through him. His fingers released their grip on the textbook. It
tumbled to the ground.
Oh, no, the punch clock! He looked at
his watch, snatched up the book, and ran across the lawn toward to Payson Smith
Hall. His feet felt airborne. He flew down the stairs and flung wide the pair of
metal doors as easily as if they were made of paper. Though he could see the
movement of his own legs, he could not feel the floor. The black and white tiles
of the long hall passed under his feet like a filmstrip that his body was
suspended above.
He pushed the time-room door open,
effortlessly again, thinking he could have walked right through it. A forgotten,
black lunch can lay gaping on a blue, Formica-topped table, like a black hole.
Near the can lay a few crumpled napkins and some crumbs. The round face of the
punch clock on the wall presented itself to him like a cartoon, like something
unreal, non-existent in the space he occupied now. He watched his hands take
Theresa McKnight’s card and line up the out-Friday space with the red dot
below the six.
“Don’t punch me out till
exactly three-thirty,” she had told him.
He laughed, ecstatic, still floating on
waves of peace, his eyes fixed on the face of the clock. How crazy, he thought.
How crazy to be waiting for the hands of a clock to come around! How absurd!
There is no three-thirty. No yesterday. No today. No time.
When the big hand came around to the
six, he watched his thumbs press the bar. It made an awfully big bang.
