My Last Innocent Year(17)

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I have to admit, I was worried for a while, but here, the way you bring in Darwinism. ‘Wharton’s society is a tightly constructed ecosystem and Countess Olenska the contagion that must be cast out.’” His face broke into a lopsided smile, and I couldn’t help but smile, too. I had no idea if my thesis was shaping up into something or not. I just stuck five pages into Tom’s mailbox every week and waited for him to pass judgment. “So, what’s next?”

I told him about the section I was working on about the iconoclastic Mrs. Mingott, Ellen Olenska’s grandmother and fiercest defender, who shocks New York society by living above Thirty-Fourth Street and placing her bedroom on the ground floor. It was an arrangement old New York found shocking because from the sitting room, one might catch “the unexpected vista of a bedroom.” Such arrangements, Wharton wrote, “recalled scenes in French fiction” by providing “the stage-setting of adultery.”

“Okay,” Tom said, reaching for his rolling papers. “But when are you going to write about money? Money’s the engine for everything in this world, even if no one wants to talk about it. It’s one of those ‘unpleasant’ topics they avoid at all costs. They hate the nouveaux riches, but they need them to survive. The joke is New York was always a commercial society. Its aristocracy was never based on birth—it was based on money. They just liked to pretend otherwise.” He drizzled tobacco into the trough he’d created and licked the cigarette shut.

Tom hadn’t been a fan of Wharton when we started working together. He’d largely dismissed her work because of her social conservatism and wealth and had only reluctantly agreed to be my adviser. But he’d warmed to her since then, which I took as a compliment. I’d learned a lot from him, too. I’d always loved Wharton’s novel about doomed love in old New York, but Tom had pushed me to examine the social forces that roiled beneath the surface. “We think our stories are personal,” he told me, “but we’re all products of our time.”

He handed my pages back to me. “Keep going, Isabel. You can do it. I know you can.” He lit his cigarette, took a puff. “How’s the fiction seminar going?”

“Good so far.”

“Connelly’s an old friend of mine. I’ll put in a word.” He smiled again, and I remembered what Andy had said about the divorce, the way he’d hinted at something ominous. But Tom seemed to be his normal, gregarious self, and I was happy to think Andy might be wrong.

“Thanks a lot,” I said. “So I’ll see you next week?”

“Actually, Isabel, do you have a minute? I wanted to talk to you about something—something other than Wharton.” Tom rested his cigarette on his ashtray as a gust of wind rattled the window. “I don’t think we need to meet every week anymore. You’re in pretty good shape and, well, I’m going through a bit of a rough patch at home. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Joanna and I are getting a divorce.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I assumed professors knew we gossiped about them, but I didn’t know if I was supposed to acknowledge it.

“I could get the department to assign you to a different adviser,” he continued, “but I don’t think that’s necessary. I’ll still sign off on your pages, so it shouldn’t affect your progress. And, as charming as these meetings are, I’m not sure they’re entirely necessary.”

I nodded, although I found them vital. But I understood why Tom didn’t want to ask the department to find me a different adviser because asking the department meant asking Joanna.

“I’m sorry about all this,” he went on. “None of it is your fault. What do they call it? Collateral damage?” He laughed. “Joanna and I have been together for more than twenty years, so I guess you could say we’ve had a good run. Twenty years. God, I feel old saying that. And the whole time, we were always able to talk to each other, you know? Like, really talk. Some couples lose that. Not us, despite everything.” He stressed the word so intensely, I could feel the weight of it across the room.

Tom turned his face toward the window. I unwrapped another candy. Outside, a few students were walking across the green, hunched over to protect themselves from the wind.

“It got hard when Joanna’s career took off. She was constantly on the road. But I was so proud of her! And when she wanted to move to New Hampshire, I said fine, even though it was a detour for my career. My career. What a joke.” He looked down at his hands. I noticed he was still wearing his wedding ring. “Are your parents divorced, Isabel?”

“Mine? No.”

“That’s good. Because I think all of this is hardest on Igraine. Poor thing. Joanna was the one who wanted a kid,” he said, as though I’d suggested otherwise. “People said things change after you have a child. I thought, well, they don’t know Joanna. They don’t know us.” His cigarette was still resting on the ashtray, gradually turning to ash. He picked it up and took a shaky drag. “We went through a lot to have her, but I wouldn’t trade any of it. Igraine is the light of my life! More than that—she’s everything to me.” There was that word again. “Does your mother work?”

“My mother? I mean, not really. She was an artist.”