Part 2

The Good Husband
by Gail Godwin

(Page 2 of 6)

"Oh, I can always spare the time for one of your famous teas," said the chairman, laughing.

January's calendar flipped over into February, then on into March. Gresham P. Harris, president of Aurelia College, mounted the stairs behind Magda's husband. "Last time, we went thataway," remarked the president lightly when Francis, at the top of the stairs, turned right, not left toward Magda's study with the nice fire burning.

"Magda is staying in bed today."

"Oh, I see," said the president, preparing himself not to show anything as he followed Francis Lake toward a room at the other end of the hallway. "Magda, Magda," was all he said, when he saw his brilliant star lying gray and docile under the blanket in the big four-poster bed. She was small, she who three months ago would have been described by her aficionados as "statuesque," and by her enemies (for of course she had those, too) as overweight. Since his last visit to the house, she must have dropped twenty or thirty pounds. And the wiry white stuff bursting out of her scalp belonged to someone else. Some wild old woman ... or man. The glossy dark red hair that had been distinctly hers, though everyone knew it came out of a package, still lay in straggles of its former glory on either side of her pillows. It had the look of having just been brushed out for his visit, probably by Francis Lake.

The president sat down in the chair Magda's husband placed for him on the right side of the bed. Left alone in the room by Francis in the direct range of the dying woman's penetrating gaze, he gained a few moments of respite by plucking at the knees of his perfectly creased trousers and surveying the neat lines of his black-stockinged ankles and thep9olished black wing-tip shoes below. He was a well-groomed, fastidious man who appeared younger than his fifty-eight years. He and Magda were the same age. Years ago, they had been graduate students at the same time in Ann Arbor, but they hadn't known each other. These days he also gave his smooth, dark hair a little help from a package. College presidents were expected to look younger now.

I, too, could be struck by cancer and waste away in a few months, the president suddenly realized. His gaze meeting Magda's snapping dark eyes at last, he had the distinct feeling that she had read his thought word for word. It made it easier for him to speak naturally.

"Well, Magda, this distresses me. I guess I was hoping for a miracle. Now that this Gulf War is over, I've rescheduled our Twenty-fifth Anniversary Alumni Cruise around the British Isles for August-our first cruise ever, to honor Aurelia's first graduating class of sixty-six. I had my heart set on your being the star lecturer. We thought we'd use a 'literary heritage' theme."

"I'd be honored, Gresh, if I weren't already booked for another journey." "Are you in much pain?"

"It comes and goes. It has a life of its own. I've named it the Gargoyle. Every day its grin stretches wider at my expense, but of course from its point of view, I'm the impediment. I'm the thing in the way of its development and growth." She laughed weakly. "If it had a language, I wonder what it would name me." Then she grimaced in obvious pain.

That was the sort of remark that made her the popular and compelling teacher she was. He wished he had more like her. She hadn't come cheaply, of course, when he snared her five years ago. Better be glad she hadn't followed up on the meteoric early brilliance of that first book, or he'd never have captured her for Aurelia. There'd been chapters of its successor, spread out between long-too long-intervals in the quarterlies, but not nearly enough to show for twenty-five years of scholarship from the precocious author of The Book of Hell: An Introduction to Visionary Mode. He still recalled how flattened with envy he had been, all those years ago back in Ann arbor, when her outrageous young triumph had flashed across the academic firmament. His own age and already published. And from the same university. (Though at least he had been in a different field: he was doing history and poly sci.) Not only published, but her picture in Time magazine. "The Dark Lady of Visions." Her dissertation published before it had even been defended! Though later he'd heard that there had been some backlash by resentful professors that had delayed her degree for several years.

Her eyes were closed; she was focused on her pain. Her Gargoyle. An ovarian cancer that had gone too far. According to Ray Johnson, that champion disseminator of other people's business, the word was that she'd flat out rejected chemo when that new Indian doctor Rainiwari, who could be somewhat blunt, told her what her chances were ... or, rather, weren't. "In that case," she'd told Rainiwari, "I'd prefer to spend the time I have left studying for my Final Exam, rather than studying my disease." The president leaned forward and steadied himself with a hand on either of his charcoal-pinstriped knees. His first impulse had been to reach out and lay one of his hands on top of hers, which were clenched upon the blanket. But at present it seemed like an intrusion. The skin of Magda's hands had acquired a glossy, yellowish sheen; whereas her formerly high-colored face had been dulled to a powdery gray pallor. These mysterious details of an individual's dying: what would his own details be like?

He put his face nearer to hers. "We want to set up an endowed chair in your name," he murmured, moved as much by the sorrowful huskiness that had crept appropriately into his announcement as by the magnanimous gift he offered.

The eyes opened. Dark, receptive pools, though ambushed by pain. Then the cracked corners of her mouth tipped upward in an irrepressible smirk. Why, she was expecting it, thought the president.

"The Magda Danvers Chair of Visionary Studies, we were thinking of calling it," he continued. "I was talking to Ray Johnson. If we use the word 'studies' rather than 'literature,' we include the visual arts, which you've been doing all along anyway. It would leave things wide open for exciting linkups between departments. Our art chairman Sonia Wynkoop is having her Roman sabbatical, as you know, but I'm sure she'll be amenable to the idea when she returns. Maybe we'd include music and science as well. Colleges that stay in business these days are getting away from the old departmental isolation. Everyone's had their fill of the specialists, each keeping his acquirements to himself behind arcane jargons. The trend now is back to shared knowledge and cooperation. The Rounded Person."

Copyright © 1995 by Gail Godwin.