Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [79]
I knew nothing about her. Nothing about her culture. I knew she lived with another Iranian, a short, sweet-faced girl named Parvine, that boys never went into their room. I heard they came from a strict culture and the two sexes just did not mix. I went to my classes, I read the assigned books and wrote papers and took blue book exams, but I thought mainly of workouts and her, how to get bigger and how to get closer to her.
BECAUSE THE campus was small and he lived on it, I saw more of my father than I had since I was a boy. I was eighteen and he was forty-one, and I began to learn the rhythm of his days. Every morning he got up early and drove to the Sacred Hearts church down in Bradford Square for the seven o’clock mass. He’d come home, eat breakfast, then write most of the morning. Just before lunch he’d put on running shoes and shorts and go for a run. If he had time he’d drive down through Bradford and across the Merrimack to Kenoza Lake. If he didn’t, he’d run a three-to-five-mile route through the quiet residential streets off campus, and he’d take a shower and shave his cheeks and throat, then eat a light lunch while he prepared for his afternoon classes.
His favorite classroom was on the second floor of the library, a small seminar room overlooking Tupelo Pond, a tiny man-made estuary on the campus you could cross by walking over a paved stone bridge, its four-by-four rails painted white.
As a full-time faculty member Pop was expected to hold office hours, but while he had one, he was never in it. If a student needed to meet with him to discuss his or her work, he’d suggest they talk in the student union building or down in Bradford Square over a beer at Ronnie D’s bar.
Before he’d married Lorraine, he might stay there quite a while, taking up a booth with four or five of his students, most of them young women, drinking and talking and flirting, maybe having a bar hotdog for supper. But since marrying Lorraine, he was expected to be home for a sit-down dinner and eat it with her and the kids at her antique dining table that took up most of the room.
“Nine thousand pounds,” he’d say over and over again. “That woman owns nine thousand pounds of furniture.” She did, and she’d had it moved up from Louisiana: carved bookcases and plush sofas, dishes and silver and shaded lamps, carpets and polished hardwood beds and bureaus and end tables.
Married housing on campus looked like small, split-level ski lodges. They had tiny kitchens and open carpeted rooms that led to sets of bedrooms at each end. There were sliding glass doors to an upper deck overlooking trees and a lawn and a paved walk to the other campus houses.
When she moved in, none of Pop’s bookshelves matched hers so she asked him to make a room for himself on the second floor. It held everything he owned: a few pine bookcases of hardcover books he’d been collecting on his own for years; his clothes and record player and stack of albums, mainly jazz—Stan Getz, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck and Cannonball Adderley. There was Dylan, too. And Kris Kristofferson and Joan Baez. He no longer owned the wooden black desk I remembered, but a metal study carrel that had come with the college. On it was his pipe collection, his humidor and ashtray, the manual typewriter he used after writing drafts longhand in bound notebooks. On the windowsill sat his collection of Akubra Australian cowboy hats he wore around campus and downtown, and in the middle of the floor was his new weight bench, the barbell lying across its upright forks. But in the rest of the house, there was little evidence of him or the life he’d lived so far, and whenever I’d stop by for a quick visit, he looked like he’d wandered into somebody else’s house and couldn’t find the door out of there.
But she didn’t look so happy either. After supper she’d put her kids to bed, then sit at the kitchen table sipping black coffee, smoking a More cigarette, and staring off into