Bad Characters Read online

  The moving men, aided by Mrs. Pritchard, the housekeeper who had taken care of Dr. Bohrmann since Hedda’s death, and by a crew of students who were staying on for the summer term, had everything in place by midday and had even cleared away the excelsior and the cartons and barrels, and, on the dot of noon, the jocund old professor fired a shot into the sky from a harquebus he himself had restored to working order, the boys gave a cheer, and Dr. Bohrmann opened up a keg of beer. To each of his helpers in turn he genially raised his glass and said “Prosit.” Momentarily, as he saluted them, he wished he had bedrooms enough to lodge every one of these warmhearted lads who talked like cow hands but whose minds were critical and tough and appreciative of his own appreciations. He was sorry, so very sorry, that he had no sons. But he erased his useless regret by telling himself that the next best thing to a son was a student and the Lord knew he had a host of those.

  When the beer was gone, and the last raffish jalopy had roared away, and Mrs. Pritchard was in the kitchen making his lunch, he went into his new library, handsomely appointed in blackwood and saffron upholstery, and, sitting before his windows that commanded a view from the plains to the tundra, he smiled on everything as if he were smiling on a gathering of intimate friends. Then his smile ebbed and his eyes grew grave, for he realized that in a year or two there would be no more of his students to come and match wits with him as they ate apples and pecans and fanned the fire on his hearth with bellows. Once they were out in the world, they seldom came back to Adams, and when they did, they were not the same, for they had outgrown their lucubrations; they were no longer so fervent as they had been, and often their eyes strayed to their wristwatches in the midst of a conversation. Dr. Bohrmann sighed at his sad loss of the young, and he sighed again, sorely missing Hedda; she had laughed so charmingly, he had liked her so extremely well. He thought of her sitting opposite him over a backgammon board, her fingers approaching and then withdrawing from the men, and his heart broke with longing for the sweet look of her perplexity. But then he chided himself for his unphilosophical egocentricity, and reminded himself of the marvels that were to emerge in his gardens and of the quotidian pleasure he was to know in this house with its kingly prospects, and, ashamed that he had brooded even for a minute, he resolutely turned to the morning mail, separating the journals and bulletins from the letters.

  * * *

  For many years, Dr. Bohrmann had kept up a prodigious correspondence with all manner of people all over the world—with a handful of relatives scattered by war and pogroms, with the friends he had known at Freiburg and in Montreal, with his fellow-invalids and the doctors in the tuberculosis sanitarium, with philosophers he had argued with at meetings of learned societies. And besides these, he wrote to a great many people he had never met. His was a nature so benign, so full of generous heart, that whenever he read a book he liked, or a short story or a poem in a magazine, whenever he heard on the radio a piece of music by a contemporary composer, he wrote the author a letter of congratulation—a careful, specific letter that showed he had read or listened with diligence and discrimination. More often than not this ingratiating overture led to a lasting friendship by mail, and, through the years, Dr. Bohrmann grew as conversant with these friends’ families and pets and illnesses and sorrows and triumphs as if he had frequently dined at their houses. One time, Rosalind Throop, the greatly gifted young woman novelist in Johannesburg, flatteringly asked him to send a photograph of himself, saying, “Since the shape of your heart is now so clear to me, I am impelled to know the shape of your face as well.” He sent a snapshot of himself and Hedda, up to their knees in columbines, a grand reach of snowy peaks behind them, and Mrs. Throop wrote by return mail, “What are these flowers you and the Frau Professor wade in? Only last night, before the photograph came, I dreamed I met you in a meadow in the Cotswolds abloom with Michaelmas daisies, and you said to me, ‘We must gather our daisies quickly, for the snows are on their way.’ And here in the picture you stand in flowers and at your back there is snow!” Thereafter, in their letters they made allusions to their pastoral encounter in England, where neither of them had ever been, until it no longer seemed fantasy.

  To South Africa and to Japan, to Scotland and France, to Israel and Germany, he sent presents of books and subscriptions to magazines and CARE packages; to his friends’ children he sent arrowheads and feathered Indian headbands. His correspondents sent him presents in return, and now and then someone dedicated a book to him. When he had been obliged to write of Hedda’s death, they mourned sincerely and worried over his solitude, but they took heart once again when he started building his house, of which he sent them photographs.

  There was another side to the coin, for often an admiring reader wrote him an appreciation of or an objection to an essay of his that had appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas or in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale; he was a prolific writer and, by his own wry, rueful admission, a prolix one. (Once he had written to Mrs. Throop, “I have read your new novel with the monster’s green eye. How you write! If I had but a tittle of talent! I have instead a galloping cacoëthes scribendi and you don’t go to Heaven on the strength of that! May I be summoned by the Gabriel horn when I’m about a modest business—gathering toadstools, e.g., or making Jap squiggles.”) But in spite of the turgid vocabulary and the Germanic, backward syntax of his monographs, Dr. Bohrmann had a wide following, and really nothing in the world pleased him more than a letter from someone who had read him through to the end.

  At the time he withdrew from society, after Hedda’s death, he acquired a new correspondent, a young man named Henry Medley, who taught English at a college in Florida, and who had come across Dr. Bohrmann’s “A Reinquiry into Burke’s Aesthetic.” This princely lad (Dr. Bohrmann did not stint in his use of laudatory adjectives when he described his partisans) had been inspired to look further into the philosopher’s work, and painstakingly he compiled a complete bibliography, which included early studies that Dr. Bohrmann had forgotten altogether and, in some cases, would have preferred to disown. Medley’s dossier, gradually revealed in the course of a two-year exchange of letters, was this: he came from the upper regions of New York State and he was in his early twenties; he was the only child of a lawyer father, who had been dead for many years, and of a pedigreed but impecunious mother, who had been reduced to the status of paid companion to “a dragon nearly ninety who hurles her hideous taile about a Hudson-River-Bracketed den. It’s here I spend my holidays, keeping a civil tongue in my head.” He had worked his way through Harvard by tutoring the rich and retarded, and he had caught swift glimpses of Europe one summer when he had escorted a band of adolescents on a bicycle tour. He wrote Miltonic epics and Elizabethan songs which, someday, when the time and the poems were ripe, he hoped to show Dr. Bohrmann.

  Medley had apparently read everything and forgotten nothing, and his immense letters, written on onionskin in a hand so fine that it could only be properly seen through a magnifying glass, were the most learned Dr. Bohrmann had ever got from anyone. When he mentioned that he was taking up Japanese, Medley sent him a list of “musts” to read; when he announced that he was going to build a modern house, Medley wrote at length on Frank Lloyd Wright vs. Miës van der Rohe; he knew about opera, medicine (he could quote from Sydenham, Pliny the Elder, René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec), painting, horticulture (“You speak of planting peonies and I presume to warn you, lest you don’t know, that they are extremely crotchety. They detest any direct contact with manure and they detest being encroached upon by the roots of trees. And plant shallow!”). He knew movies and jazz and Marx and Freud and Catullus and the Koran, military strategy, iconography, geography, geology, anthropology, theology; he was amused by such cryptosciences as phrenology, alchemy, and astrology; he knew about wines and fish and cheese; he read German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek. He played tennis, swam among coral reefs, and during his Christmas vacations in the North he skied; he repaired the dragon’s electrical
appliances and designed his mother’s clothes. Dr. Bohrmann wrote him once that his name was so apt it could have been taken from the dramatis personae of an allegorical play.

  Once in a while, when Medley replied in five close-written pages to something that in Dr. Bohrmann’s letter had been virtually no more than a parenthetical musing, Dr. Bohrmann was annoyed and brought him to book for his excess. One time he wrote, “I think you have made a Jungfrau out of the hill of a pygmy mole. My reflections don’t all deserve such attention, dear boy, and I fear I must have expressed myself more abominably than usual to inspire you to this support of my wisecrack about Euripides. I can’t possibly agree with you that he has ‘the shabbiest mind in history.’ My joke was no good to begin with and I am much ashamed.” By return post came an apology so abject that Dr. Bohrmann was further ashamed; nevertheless, he continued to scold Medley whenever he committed that sin he so much deplored—of impassioned, uncritical agreement.

  It had been a challenging interchange; the chap was brilliant, though undisciplined and incorrigibly highfalutin. “Don’t be so hard on the dumb blondes in your classes,” Dr. Bohrmann once wrote him. “What sort of world would it be if we didn’t have the Philistines to judge ourselves by? God bless ’em.” After that, Medley barely mentioned his trials when he confronted girls in his classrooms who had never heard of Aristotle. But while Medley’s voracity was greater than his digestion, Dr. Bohrmann was sure that time would balance his chemistry. No one, these days, was mature at twenty-four. Often, after some especially felicitous letter—for when the boy was at his best and dropped his airs, he was a charmer—Dr. Bohrmann was moved to wish that Henry Medley had been his son. What a delight it would have been to nurture and prune a mind like that! To have a son in whose lineaments he could read dear Hedda’s face and his own mind—ah, that would be a harvest for the autumn of an old philosopher’s life!

  * * *

  Today, as if to salute him on his first day in his new house, there was a letter from Medley, as thick as ever, and sent, as always, by airmail. It was posted from the Hudson River town, since his teaching in Florida was over until fall, and he was back with his mother and the dragon, who had got, he wrote, “a barkless dog to match the dummy piano, on which for years she has been playing the Ballades of Chopin. That is, she says she is playing Chopin.” The first five pages of the letter—there were seven altogether, written in that microscopic hand—gave an account of a few days he had spent in New York on his way up from Florida; he had gone to the museums, and reported his reactions to Matisse and Rembrandt, he had heard some contemporary chamber music, and he had found a set of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for twenty dollars. He enjoined Dr. Bohrmann to read the article on the alphabet without delay, and from that he went on to say that he had resumed his study of philology and that he found Holthausen’s glossary to “Beowulf” far inferior to Klaeber’s.

  As he read on, Dr. Bohrmann shifted his position from time to time to ease the arthritic pain in his left hip, remembering that in the confusion of moving today, he had forgotten to take his pain-killing pills. He was, on the whole, in remarkably good health for a man of his age, but he was wearing out in the joints and the eyes—not grievously but in a bothersome way. The energy expended on Medley’s New York stay made his legs and his heart ache. Page six of the letter began, “Now for the surprise, which I hope you will accept with as much pleasure as I take in the telling of it.” We all like surprises and Dr. Bohrmann was no different from the rest of us; hoping for news of the arrival of a box of oranges from Florida perhaps, or something edible that was indigenous to upstate New York, he polished the magnifying glass and read on. He learned that Medley was getting a free automobile ride to the West with some former Harvard classmates who were going out to dig in Arizona, and that he would like to propose himself, “as our English cousins say, for a week or two weeks, or however long you enjoy me as your vis-à-vis. I will come with my own quarters (pup tent), and my own kitchen (portable grill), and hope you will give me houseroom in your back yard, though, should I detract from the aspect, I’ll go up to your famous mesa. If my calculations are correct, and if we are not hindered by any act of God, and if, etc., I should be on your doorstep, with my camp, my typewriter, a change of shirt, and a sheaf of poems, on the 25th of June.” He went on to say that he was anxious to do some mountain climbing and visit a cattle ranch and tour the ghost towns; that he had all sorts of ideas for Dr. Bohrmann’s Oriental garden, which he would disclose on his arrival; that he had enough questions to ask, and theories to expound, and half theories to solidify, to last “til two each morning for a lifetime.” He added, in a postscript, “Since I’m leaving tomorrow, I’m afraid there will be no way for you to put me off. But the cordiality of your letters, dear sir, gives me confidence in your welcome. I cherish the prospect of your midnight oil.”

  In all his life, Dr. Bohrmann had never had a house guest (it would, of course, be unthinkably infra dig to let the kid pitch a tent in the yard when there was an unused bedroom), not through any want of hospitality but because it was a matter that had never arisen, and he was so surprised by Medley’s precipitous and inexorable assignment to him of the role of host that, while he never drank before five and seldom then drank spirits, he called to Mrs. Pritchard for the whiskey bottle and a glass.

  Mrs. Pritchard, who was shaped like a pear and wore a blue mustache under a fleshy and ferocious bill, was punctual to the point of addiction (the professor said that she suffered from “chronic chronomania”), and, moreover, the slightest breach in routine sent her into a flushed and flustered minor nervous breakdown. “Whiskey? In the middle of the day?” she shouted from the kitchen, appalled. “But you’ve already had your beer, and I’m putting the soufflé in. This nice soufflé with chives in will be a fizzle.” But she came bustling into the library anyhow with the whiskey and some ice, and, setting them down beside him, she said, “I declare! Are we going to have meals any which way just because we’ve moved into a modernistic house?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dr. Bohrmann thoughtfully. “I don’t know what our life is going to be from now on, Mrs. Pritchard. We have a guest arriving—a Mr. Henry Medley.”

  “A guest for lunch? You might have told me!”

  “No, no. Not a guest for lunch today. On Friday a young man is arriving to spend several days—perhaps weeks. Who knows? He offers to live in a wigwam under the trees. But we’ll give him the spare room, Mrs. Pritchard.”

  Mrs. Pritchard gaped like a landed fish, but all she managed to say was, “He can’t come Friday. Friday is your night for bridge, and the Streets and Miss Duveen are coming to dinner. You might have remembered that when you invited him.”

  “Well, the fact is, I didn’t exactly invite him,” said Dr. Bohrmann. “He is dropping out of the blue, so to speak. He is springing full grown out of the Hudson River.”

  “You mean you don’t know him? Do you mean to tell me that I am to fetch and carry for a total stranger? A strange young man?” Mrs. Pritchard keenly disliked the young, and when students came to call, she was as rude to them as she could possibly be without actually boxing their ears.

  Dr. Bohrmann, flinching under his housekeeper’s snapping eyes, timorously said, “If we don’t like him, we’ll turn him out. But I think we’re going to like him. I think we’re going to find him a man of parts.”

  “Then why do you have to have whiskey just the selfsame minute I’ve put my soufflé in the oven?” Mrs. Pritchard, as she often said of herself, was nobody’s fool. With this retort, she went back to the kitchen, and the needless bangings and crashes that came from it indicated plainly that she did not mean to take Medley’s intrusion lying down.

  As the professor drank, he was in a tumult of emotions, a most uncommon condition for him, a placid man. He was a little uneasy at contemplating a change of pace in his life (the remark about the midnight oil alarmed him; he had gone to bed at ten o’clock ever since he could remember),
and he was a little scared of Medley’s erudition; part of the pleasure, shameful to be sure, of teaching at Nevilles had been that for the most part his students were as green as grass. But, on the other hand, he was touched to think of having a daily companion of such enthusiasm; they could walk together on the mesas and dispute matters pertaining to God and man and, in lighter moods, they could go to the movies. He began to consider how he might influence and temper his young friend’s thought; in his imagination Henry Medley became so malleable that Dr. Bohrmann, with tenderness and tact, molded him into one of the most impressive figures on the intellectual scene of the twentieth century. How about adopting him? He could be a sort of monument to Dr. Bohrmann after Dr. Bohrmann’s bones were laid to rest, beside Hedda’s.

  He caught himself up in the midst of his daydream and said to himself, “Come off it, Bohrmann,” and turned aside to read a lighthearted scenic postcard from Mrs. Throop, sent from Durban, where she was having a holiday with her children. “I like gathering sea shells beside the Indian Ocean so very much better than writing novels,” she wrote in a relaxed and generous hand, “and I do it so much better. These lovely shells! Jon is making a collection of them, to repay you for the arrowheads. You see, you’re a daily part of our life.”

  Darling Mrs. Throop! He wished he could adopt her. He wished that all his distant friends were coming to bless his house.