The Four Johns

Chapter 14

Professor Burton made a stabbing gesture toward a chair.

“Sit down, Gray.”

Mervyn sat down in the straight-backed oak chair. The interview was proceeding exactly as imagined. Professor Burton had commanded Mervyn to drop by on a matter “connected with” his work.

Professor Burton leaned back, placed the tips of his fingers together and inspected Mervyn with cold curiosity. Then he said in a disagreeable voice, “A most unsavory affair, Gray.”

Mervyn nodded warily.

The head of the English department cleared his throat, arranged some papers on his desk. “I’ve followed the case closely. Deplorable, deplorable. It’s a wonder to me you’re not in jail.”

“They spoke to me rather harshly,” Mervyn admitted.

“Please do not misunderstand me, Gray. Faced with the same incredible circumstances, who am I to say that I would act with more courage? This does not mean, of course, that I condone your conduct—”

“Of course,” said Mervyn humbly.

“...but merely that I hold with Crabbe: ‘That all men would be cowards if they dare,/Some men we know have courage to declare.’ Hrrm! Well! All this to one side. I trust you understand, Gray, that under the circumstances it is manifestly impossible for you to assume a schedule of classes this fall?”

Mervyn said nothing.

“Oh,” said Professor Burton, “after a year or two — perhaps three, or four — who knows? In Pope’s phrase, ‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot,’ haha! Well, let us hope for the fickleness of public memory, eh, Gray?” He glanced at Mervyn rather uneasily. “Do you have any plans?”

“Since you just gave me the ax, Dr. Burton,” Mervyn said with a sigh, “I’ve hardly had much time to think about the future.”

“Of course. Quite so.” Burton rapped on his desk with his long white fingers, regarding a bust of Shakespeare on the other side of the room. Suddenly he said, “Gray. Do you know the Castel Poldiche? Near Villefranche?”

“I beg your pardon?”

The professor repeated his question.

Mervyn shook his head. “I can’t say that I do.”

“One of the oldest inhabited structures of France. The great hall dates from the eleventh century. Well, a few weeks ago a crypt was opened, yielding among other treasures a coffer containing a number of twelth-century secular manuscripts. There are: six planhs, apparently the work of Bertran de Bon; an autobiographical poem by one Cleanthe de Marbolh; a long chanson de geste, signed merely ‘Blaye’ — quite probably Jaufre Rudel, Prince of Blaye, who is known to have frequented Castel Poldiche during the Guerre des Amantes — and a great deal of material less easily identified. Are you interested?”

“Very much so!”

Professor Burton beamed. “It so happens that the Searcy Foundation is willing to provide a research grant of seven thousand five hundred dollars — possibly as high as ten thousand — for the study of these manuscripts. Annotation, attribution, translation — the usual. A two-year grant. It seems to meet your requirements...”

Later, Mervyn sat in a quiet grove of laurel and oak, on a moldering marble bench, a gift to the university from the Class of 1903. Susie came up the path, waving a greeting. “Have you been waiting long?”

“Ten minutes or so.”

Susie seated herself. She was wearing a black skirt and a short-sleeved sweater the color of old ale. Never, thought Mervyn, had she seemed more precious and desirable, and more remote. In a calm voice she asked, “How did everything go?”

“I’m fired.”

Susie looked troubled at that. “Oh, well, it isn’t as if it came as a shock.”

“However, there’s something else.”

“Oh?”

He told her about the find in the south of France, and the handsome research grant. “It would mean living in France for a year or two. Perhaps at Castel Poldiche itself, where the manuscripts were discovered.”

“Sounds like fun! Oh, Mervyn, I’m so glad for you.”

Mervyn said abruptly, “Will you come with me, Susie?”

She sat for a moment or two looking off down a slope of lawn. “It wouldn’t work, Mervyn. There’s too much darkness between us. Whenever I looked at you I’d see Mary, and the river, and I’d hear the ghastly splash. And when you looked at me—”

Mervyn said, “Susie. It wouldn’t have to be that way—” But Susie shook her head. “Maybe not for you, Mervyn. But I’m a female.” She rose, smiling. “Summer’s over, fall’s coming on, new semester. I can’t stand sociology. I’m going to transfer into something more interesting. What, I don’t know.

“You’ll be in France doing just what you want to do, and you’ll forget all about me. You’ll devastate all those cute little French girls, and I’ll marry John Boce” — she said this with a crooked grin — “and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

And she went off quickly.

At the lower end of the San Joaquin Valley sprawl the cotton ranches, drab, dusty, broken only by stands of haggard eucalyptus trees. In the fall, mechanical harvesters whir and clank along the untidy white rows like invaders from Mars, leaving behind broken stalks and shriveled foliage. Now the fields will be deserted, and during the late fall and winter months they present the dreariest of landscapes.

After the winter rains, when the old plants rot and the soil is damp, caterpillar tractors pull gang plows and harrows across the fields. It is the blithest time of the year. The air flows crisp and cool and smells of overturned earth. Crows flap back and forth; far to the east rises the snow-capped Sierra Nevada.

On a particularly fine morning in this season, a car came careening along one of the back roads and lurched to a stop. A girl jumped out and ran to the roadside fence.

The driver of the approaching tractor, intent on his plows, did not see her until he made his turn. Then he gaped in disbelief. He cut off his motor, leaped to the ground and came sprinting awkwardly across the furrows.

The girl held out her hands and he hugged her across the low barbed wire. And he kissed her, and she kissed him. And after a while Mervyn said, “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“Finding you,” said Susie. “And I’ve had one devil of a time doing it.” She laughed. There were things in her face Mervyn had never seen before — little adjustments of shadow, quirks of line, a certain fixing of the flesh. She’s grown up, Mervyn thought. And she is perfectly beautiful. “I started looking, oh, months ago. As soon as I heard how idiotic you’d been about that grant.”

Mervyn climbed the fence and tore his pants and did not even know it. “I can’t explain exactly why I turned it down, Susie. I just knew I had to. Maybe I felt the need of sweating the mucky guck out of my system. There’s nothing like field labor to set things straight. I haven’t regretted this.”

Susie rested her head on his sweat-soaked shoulder. “I have. Being spiritless and negative.”

“You spiritless and negative.”

She laughed again, squeezed him. “So I came to tell you I was a fool. Mr. Gray, I’m at your disposal. In every way. The south of France, or Berkeley or” — she glanced at the tractor and then out across the endless field — “or agriculture, if it comes to that, which I shamelessly hope it won’t.”

“It won’t,” Mervyn said. “I’m quitting.”

“Mervyn!”

“As of this second. Drive me over to ranch headquarters. I’ll collect my check, and we’ll go over to the bank in Delano—”

“And then?”

“Once I asked you to marry me.”

“In a joke. That’s one subject females have no sense of humor about.”

“No, I think I meant it even then. In a perverted sort of way. Of course I knew you’d say no.”

“I almost said yes. Even though I hated you.”

“You almost said yes?” Mervyn cried.

“I’ll have to ream some of that soil out of your ears,” Susie said tenderly, stroking his sweaty hair.

“You don’t hate me now?”

“Does this feel like hate?”

“We can make Las Vegas by four this afternoon.”

“Mervyn.”

“What?”

“When I found out where you’d hidden yourself—”

“I wasn’t hiding.”

“Well, I went to see Professor Burton, and I asked if that grant was still open. He growled and grumbled and finally said the manuscripts had waited eight hundred years, so they could probably hang on for another month or two. In case you were still interested. Are you?”

Mervyn nuzzled her. “Pottering around a mess of moldering manuscripts... I don’t know, Susie. It doesn’t seem important any more.”

“But it’s fun, isn’t it?”

“Fun?” Mervyn seemed startled. “I guess it is at that. I never thought of it just that way...”

“You never thought, period,” Susie said firmly. “Also, it’s the way to get your Ph.D. and a professorship.”

“Teaching,” Mervyn said, shaking his head. “Who wants to be a teacher?”

“You do,” she said. “And if you find you really don’t, why, there’s always a tractor and a cotton field.”

So they went over to Susie’s car and drove back up the road, leaving simmering silence behind them.

In the field, the tractor stood dejectedly.

The crows swooped with relief and settled to the freshly turned earth and began scouting for worms.

And only a long time later did it occur to Mervyn, recalling that extraordinary reunion with Susie Hazelwood Gray in the cotton field, that not once had either of them mentioned — or thought of — poor Mary.