Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [35]
“Hello, Chancellor.”
“Hello, Dr. Gaskell.”
“Gentlemen,” she said, nodding coolly, and then leveling toward me the same administrative and vaguely condescending green eyes. She had slipped off her wobbly high heels, and the silver beaded purse was nowhere to be seen.
“He was sick, but I think he’ll be fine,” she said, looking both generally and specifically disgusted. “No thanks to you and your idiot friend.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“Go on, take Antonia home. I’ll look after Mr. Leer.”
“All right.” I leaned against the, door, letting in a blast of cool April air. “Sara,” I said, lowering my voice, almost mouthing the words. “I didn’t get to tell you—”
“Later,” she said, lightly pushing me out the door with the bare toes of her right foot, “You’ll tell me later.”
“I’m going to have to,” I said to Miss Sloviak, as we hurried through the rain back to the leafy end of campus where I had left my car. The air was warm and fragrant with lilac and as we ran it was hard not to hear the clatter of Miss Sloviak’s heels as the very signature of romantic haste. When we got back to the car she stood beside me at the trunk, and her eyes grew very large when I lifted the lid:
“I had a little accident,” I said. “I know this looks pretty bad.”
“Listen,” said Miss Sloviak, yanking her pony-skin suitcase out from under the stiff brush of Doctor Dee’s tail, “all I—yhew!—all I want to do is get home and never see any of you authors ever again, okay?”
“I know how you feel,” I said, looking down sadly at what remained of Doctor Dee.
“Poor thing,” said Miss Sloviak, after a moment. She set her bag on the lip of the trunk, pulled it free from its plastic sleeve, and unzipped it. “He kind of gave me the creeps, though, with those eyes.”
“Sara doesn’t know yet,” I said. “I couldn’t tell her.”
“Well, don’t worry about me,” said Miss Sloviak, as she detached her long black curls and laid them in the valise with a look of affectionate regret, like a violinist retiring her instrument for the night. “I’m not going to say anything.”
THE STORY GOES THAT I sucked too avidly at my mother’s breast, and caused an abscess to bloom in the tender flesh of her left nipple. My grandmother, less kind in those days than afterward, disapproved strongly when at seventeen my mother had married, and managed to instill her daughter with a powerful sense of ill-equipment for the task of mothering me; the failure of her breast to bear up to the ardor of my infant lips filled my mother with shame. She didn’t go to the doctor as quickly as she ought to have. By the time my father found her, collapsed across the keys of the hotel’s piano, and got her into the county hospital, a staph infection had already taken hold of her blood. She died on February 18, 1951, five weeks after giving birth, and thus, naturally, I’ve no memory of her. I can, however, manage to recall a few things about my father, George Tripp, called Little George to distinguish him from my paternal grandfather, his namesake, from whom I’m supposed to have inherited my Big George body and appetites.
Little George gained a regrettable measure of fame in our part of the state when he killed the young man who, among other prospective achievements, was to have become the first Jewish graduate of Coxley College in its eighty-year history. My father was a policeman. In killing this bright young man, whose father owned Glucksbringer’s department store on Pickman Street, across and two doors down from the McClelland Hotel, he believed, without much justification as it turned out, that he was defending himself from an armed assailant. He