Lost and Wanted(64)

“Has it been any better working at home?”

Charlie shrugged. “I’ve had good days. Like when I get to eleven without a migraine. And then other days Terrence takes Simmi to school, and I go into the bedroom and close the blinds and just lie there in the dark until the sitter brings her home.”

“It’s good you have the sitter.”

“We didn’t used to—Terrence used to pick her up most days. But he’s been spending way more time at Zingaro or at Ray’s place. He says it’s because they’re so busy—and they are. But I also think it’s because he’s afraid to come home.”

“Afraid?”

“I’m no picnic when I’m sick.”

“I’m sure you’re not that bad.”

“I am. I get really angry at myself when I can’t work.”

“But that’s because you’re sick.”

“Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s because I can’t see the point.”

“The point of working?”

“It’s a really long haul, Helen. This is my whole life. Balancing the meds, being exhausted. A great day is when I feel okay. I can’t even remember what it was like to feel normal. My mom’s like, ‘You’re a fighter.’ But I don’t know if I am.”

    “You are.”

“You think? Because sometimes I think if it wasn’t for Simmi, I’d just be done with it.”

I didn’t know what she meant, and then I saw it on her face. “Charlie!”

“Do me a favor and don’t ask if I’ve thought about how I’d do it.”

“Have you thought about how you’d do it?”

Charlie looked startled, and then she laughed. “I love you, Helen.”

“I love you, too.”

She sat back in her chair, poked at a piece of seaweed in a desultory way, then put the chopsticks down on a ceramic rest made to look like a fish. She didn’t look at me, but her mouth was set in a way I recognized, refusing pity.

“But I am tired,” she said.





7.


At some point that night, Charlie told me that she’d walked Terrence and Simmi through Harvard Yard, because they’d been in Cambridge for the afternoon, and her parents had suggested it. She had resisted opening “that can of worms” initially—since the difference in her education and Terrence’s was such an issue for her parents—but both Terrence and Simmi had loved Harvard. Terrence had said that it was one of the few places that turned out to be just what you expected—in a good way. Simmi had liked the library steps; she had wanted to climb up and hop down again and again. It was only while Charlie was standing in front of that library, watching her daughter do an unwitting Shirley Temple routine on its marble steps, that she had realized Pope might actually be in there. She knew that several women, slightly younger than we were, had gotten together to make a complaint against him, and that they had been successful in ensuring that he no longer taught undergraduates.

“They called me to say they were writing a letter,” Charlie said. “I think that woman, Trisha, might have given them my name—that pissed me off. I wanted to put the whole thing behind me, and so I said I didn’t have anything definitive to say about him. Now I really wish I’d added my name.”

    Charlie hadn’t been part of the official complaint, but she had looked Pope up more than once online, and seen that as a retired professor of such eminence—a professor whose retirement was quietly insisted upon, but might well have been voluntary considering his age—he retained an office, not in the Comparative Literature Department on Quincy Street, but in Widener Library itself. She told me she thought about going in and telling him what she was doing now, how much she earned as a supervising producer, and what she thought of the way he’d behaved.

She said she’d almost done it. She was going to tell Terrence and her parents that she was nostalgic, and wanted to go up and see the Francis Child Memorial Library on the third floor. But then she asked herself what would be the point. Someone like her friend Josh could learn, if she took the time to explain his mistake to him, and if he really cared to listen. But a seventy-year-old professor? She said it would be for herself that she was doing it, and she questioned why she still needed anything from a person like Professor Pope.



* * *



—

The first time I met Pope, I was looking for Charlie in that third-floor room where she liked to study. This was in the spring of our junior year, before cell phones, when you would guess where someone might be, and go try to find them. Once Charlie had dragged me up a little-used staircase, to show me the view of the star-shaped paths from above, and then forced me to read a poem she liked on the subject of the trees in Harvard Yard. I remember remarking that it didn’t seem like a good poet would write a poem about Harvard, and Charlie had been impatient with me, told me that I knew nothing, that a great poet could write a poem about a comic strip or a shovel or her own ass and say something profoundly true.

This time Charlie wasn’t there: I knew her schedule by heart, and when I looked at my watch, I realized she must be at her tutorial. I was so eager to tell her my news—I had gotten a summer internship at Fermilab outside Chicago, where the Tevatron particle accelerator was then operating—that I decided to go to Pope’s office and wait for her. I asked a student, who directed me; when I reached the room number he’d given me, I could hear Charlie’s voice coming from inside.