The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [175]
It was because Affenlight could tell that Schwartz felt the same way about Westish College that he did. If Affenlight were to list the things he loved, he wouldn’t include Westish—that would seem silly, like saying you loved yourself. He spent half his time frustrated with, ambivalent about, annoyed at the place. But anything that happened to alter the fortunes of Westish College, however small; anything that was done to or even said about Westish College, Affenlight took more seriously than if it were happening to himself. He would protect Westish from any danger. That attitude was taxing—it kept you ever vigilant—but it was invigorating as well. It served to expand the self far beyond its usual confines. And Mike Schwartz felt like that about Westish too. Schwartz might not realize it yet—hell, it had taken Affenlight thirty years to figure it out—but he felt like that too.
Contango had fallen fast asleep: so much for their constitutional. Affenlight went to the hall and brewed a pot of coffee. As he sipped a steaming mugful—MAMA AIN’T HAPPY—he decided to reward himself for a week well spent by setting aside the budget and working on his commencement remarks. The end of the academic year, after all, was fast upon them. He shuffled his chair to a neutral position—desk on one hand, window on the other—and opened a fresh legal pad. “We can make liquor to sweeten our lips,” he mumbled. “Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut tree chips.”
Commencement tended to be a wicked bit of fun for Affenlight. The hired keynote speaker—usually some middling politician or author or corporate head; they never pulled a big name—pontificated, told laborious stories, and displayed strange notions about the fears and desires of the newly minted graduates. By comparison—not that it was a competition—Affenlight always came out ahead. He kept his remarks brief and stuffed them with dubious Westish in-jokes and puns, to which the students, having been subjected to such groaners from their convocation onward, now responded with raucous laughter. These were their puns, this was their college, their president, and no one else could understand. Affenlight lifted a somber hand, pretending to admonish them for their laughter, and this made them laugh all the harder.
He knew from his own student days how the most formidable professors always garnered the biggest laughs; the slightest display of levity, however forced, was enough to send spasms of giddy relief through a lecture hall. See, Professor X is human too! Affenlight himself was now, and had been for a couple of decades, the beneficiary of such easy laughs. People vested him with a certain nobility—they saw him, rightly or wrongly, as the finished product of sixty years of devoted study. It wasn’t a bad position to be in—not so much worse, perhaps, than being young.
Then at the end of any address he would shift, just for a moment, into high oratorical mode. Quote a little Latin, thank the professors and parents, invoke the never-ending search for understanding—it was almost too easy to conjure up strong sentiment, but that was because he meant every word. The students would start to cry; so would some of the parents.
The students’ mistakes lay ahead of them, were prospective and therefore glorious. His own lay in the past. They might have been glorious too, his own mistakes—at least, he would not change them for anyone else’s. He regretted only a single loss—those years he’d missed of Pella’s life, and the string of errors that led to a loss like that was so thick and knotted that he’d never found one end of the string, so that he could follow it in and up and around and figure out why. Perhaps he’d been too permissive and tolerant a parent, and thereby forced Pella to grow up too fast. Or perhaps he’d never been tolerant enough to accommodate a girl of Pella’s talents. Or perhaps he’d raised her perfectly, but every other parent in the world had miserably erred, and so Pella, precisely because of her perfect upbringing,