334
RICHARD STERN
The only arms that ever held her. How long was it going to go
on like this? She couldn't even get a man over for supper. For
talk.
For an exchange of troubles. The enamel crown was off, the pulp
cavity cut away, and the tiny, mean, piranha nerves of the dentine
sang out in the iron cold of February. Today's
Sun-Times
remarked
that a marine had pole-vaulted sixteen feet, twenty years to the
day after another man had pole-vaulted fifteen. A photographer,
rapacious for a shot, had knocked down the bar and the record
might not be official. Dr. Hobbie had said he'd come for supper,
but the garage had his car. The grain of the world was wrong.
What could she do? She was a Ph.D. in English history, a low-grade
instructor at a high-grade university.
If
she wrote a few more articles
and a good book, they'd give her six years an an Assistant Professor
and then maybe tenure. She could get a tenure job right now
at lots of women's colleges. Down south, where the streets didn't
look like an illustration of the Inferno, where women were loved.
But she wouldn't live down south again. She'd gone a year to
w.e.
in Greensboro, and she wouldn't live in a place where Mr. Givens
would have to sit in the back of a bus and drink from a different
water fountain. Maybe she'd go back east, nearer relatives, nearer
the marrying girls of her class at Wheaton. But she'd left such
dependence and such competition behind. She was a scholar. She
knew her stuff. She loved to work, to find out what happened, to
read two hundred-year-old periodicals, to trace in detail the rise of
sentimentality, the alteration in the attitudes toward children, toward
women, toward pain, toward dirt. But now, now. Tonight. Sbe
could not read, not listen to the radio, not steam a kettle. Sbe stared
at the arrested chaffinches in her stained rug border, the bricks and
boards which held the books she'd dragged around for years with
her, east, west, south, her swelling paunch.
It
was a terrible night.
Only self-consciousness kept her going. She brooded on until the
room turned fuzzy with fatigue and then she went off to sleep in
the troglodyte's arms.
Miss Wilmott did not see Dr. Hobbie again until Spring. She
was writing an article on the use of opium in England during the
first two decades of the nineteenth century, and it took up every
minute of the time that she did not give her classes, committee
