The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [199]
Dean Melkin looked very sad. “Ah,” he said. “Hm… it’s college policy that all freshpersons live in the dormitories, we find it encourages a robust immersion in college life. Even our nontraditional students…” There seemed to be a war going on within him, between his devotion to college policy and his desperate desire to accommodate her. Pella couldn’t help sagging in her chair a little, to magnify her grief—damned if she wanted to pretend to live in the dorms, to hustle from her and Mike’s place to weekly popcorn parties in the RA’s room.
“I’m sure it can be arranged,” Dean Melkin decided quickly, smiling for her benefit. “Your adjustment to Westish is the vital thing.”
Pella thanked him profusely, and thanked him some more, and stood to leave. But the look on Dean Melkin’s face had become so perplexed, so somehow needy, that she let her butt fall back in the chair.
“So you’re doing okay?” he said.
Pella nodded.
“Your father was a very interesting man. He had a… a way about him.” Dean Melkin plucked at the gold-painted buttons on the cuffs of his jacket. “Nothing meant more to him than having you here.” He looked up at her, his expression only growing in perplexity, so that it could even be called tortured.
“It was very sudden,” he said.
“Yes.” Pella nodded with the somberness that was both expected of her and easy to muster.
“That is to say… it was very sudden, then? There wasn’t some kind of… precipitating illness?”
“No,” Pella said. “Not at all.”
“Ah. Aha.” Dean Melkin wrinkled his turned-up, slightly fetal nose. He seemed dispirited by the lack of a precipitating illness. “It was very sudden, then, but it wasn’t… that is to say, it was…” He hesitated, pursed his lips. “It was a matter of natural causes?”
“Sure.” Pella peered at Dean Melkin, trying to figure out what he was saying. “What other kind of causes are there?”
“Oh, well. None, I suppose.” He looked up at her, his expression deeply pained. “But there wasn’t any way in which it could have been… or been construed as… intentional?”
What? Suddenly it felt like their entire meeting, not to mention his summerlong pursuit of her, had been building toward this moment of anxious prying. “My father died of a heart attack,” Pella said sharply. “For which my family has a strong genetic predisposition. The men, at least. The women live forever.”
“Ah.” Dean Melkin sank into his chair. He looked, though still uncomfortable, perceptibly relieved. “Well, then. It couldn’t have been avoided, could it?”
What was going on? Did Dean Melkin think that her dad wanted to kill himself? Why in the world would he think such a thing? Maybe because her dad had been so ruddy and hale and energetic; maybe it was difficult for Dean Melkin to imagine him just ceasing to live. But her dad was also so cheerful, so downright life-affirming, in his public persona, that she couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that he might commit suicide. And not just thinking it but thinking it with sufficient intensity to ask her about it, as Dean Melkin had essentially done, which was truly bizarre, not to mention seriously unprofessional.
Unless there was some reason for Dean Melkin to think it. Some inside info, some hurt or scandal or hidden rot in her dad’s life that she didn’t know about but that other people did. Was she going too far? Was she living inside her head again?
But Dean Melkin was sitting right there, acting so bizarrely, still fiddling with the buttons on the cuffs of his too-big imitation-dean jacket, not that he wasn’t a real dean, but he looked more like a watery kid who wanted someday to be a dean, and her point was that she’d arrived here in an okay mood, really the best mood she’d been in all summer, and it was Dean Melkin whose agitation was agitating her, whose strange behavior and strange words were causing her to think strange thoughts. It wasn’t her. It was him, and she had to get to the bottom of it. And if she thought of hurt and scandal in relation to her dad, well, she could think of only one possibility. Of one person.