The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [201]
She didn’t want to think about Dean Melkin, he was the last scourge-slash-person she wanted to think about, but something he’d said kept flitting through her mind, flitting and flitting until finally it just stuck there in the middle and nothing could get around it. “Nothing meant more to him,” Melkin said, “than having you here.” It was true, wasn’t it. It was all too true. She’d never know what her dad’s last minutes or hours or days were like, but one thing she knew was that Dean Melkin was right, and that no matter what had happened between her dad and Westish, her dad would have wanted her here. If she lashed out at Westish, in whatever impotent way she could lash out, then she’d be doing it for her, not for him. If she wanted to do something for him, it wouldn’t be that.
She wouldn’t tell Owen. To tell Owen would only make him feel awful and guilty, like he’d contributed to her dad’s death, and for what? For the sake of the sound of her voice. And to tell Mike would be pointless. She would keep it between her and her dad. And she would keep ramming the Affenlight name down the throat of Westish College, over and over, but not like that, not in a vindictive way—she would do it like her dad would want her to do it. She would settle in. She would read the letters of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. She would be, to whatever extent was possible, at peace.
Without Pella realizing it, her wanderings had carried her, for the first time since the funeral, to the edge of the cemetery. Now she braced herself, entered the gate, and walked within sighting distance of her dad’s grave. She didn’t get too close; it was enough, it was hard enough, to be here, forty yards away, and to know that his flat headstone lay near that wide and knotty tree, which she recognized from the haze of the burial.
She would be here for the next four years, but he was gone, gone from this place, from every place, forever. That’s the deal, she thought, and the thought seemed to come from elsewhere, a visitation. That’s the deal.
She turned around, away from the headstone, and faced the lake. Waist-high waves flung themselves at the breakers. She thought of what she always thought of in a cemetery: her dad’s anecdote about Emerson digging up his wife Ellen’s body. Then, still gazing at the water, she remembered his old Harvard e-mail password, which she’d decoded as a kid without him knowing—landlessness, how obvious could you be? An idea was forming in her mind. Her dad had died as the president of Westish, his funeral had been full of pomp and circumstance, he’d been buried here in a spot of honor. And all of those were no small things. But there was a falseness to it too, to him being buried here. Now that he was dead he could be here and not be here; they, the Melkins and Gibbses of the world, could think he was here, while she would know the truth. He belonged out there, in the water, which he loved.
Maybe it seemed silly to construe an e-mail password as a person’s deepest wish, but now that the idea had occurred to her she knew that it was right. All the lashed sea’s landlessness again. Of course, she couldn’t do it alone. She headed back to the quarters, where they were still staying, to wait for Mike to come home.
79
Schwartz’s new job would start in mid-August, when football season began and the new school year’s budget kicked in. Till then he’d been working at Bartleby’s, picking up as many shifts as he could, but there wasn’t much need for bouncers during the slow summer months, and even when he filled in behind the bar, like tonight, he walked home half drunk with no more than forty dollars in his pocket.
When he got back to the quarters, Pella was curled in a leather armchair in what had been her father’s study, asleep. Schwartz scooped her up in his arms—she was several pounds lighter than she’d been in April, a change of which he did not approve. She murmured and squirmed, wrapped her arms around his neck, but didn’t awake. He supported her bottom with one hand;