Harry

Harry is lying again. That is to say, again he is telling an extensively edited story about himself. He has a repertoire of stories about his childhood, his first marriage, his career. He has told and retold them many times; they are well polished by loving use. None of them is true. Each was at least approximately true the first time he told it, but with each retelling Harry has added a dramatic touch here, a bit of ironic coincidence there, making the story just a little more beautiful, perfect, false.

It's not that Harry likes to lie, or even wants to. He can't help himself. He is an improver. He can't help editing his daughter Belletriste's eighth-grade English composition homework. He can't help editing short stories he reads in the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly. As he reads, little modifications in wording, or even plot, pop automatically into his mind. When he finishes reading a story, he is never sure whether a phrase or plot twist was the author's or his own. Harry also loses track of the reality behind his stories about himself. This often gives him a feeling of Alzheimer-like disorientation. He has felt this way ever since early childhood. For example, there is the story he is telling now, about how he escaped the draft by propositioning the corporal at the induction center. Did it really happen? Did it happen the way he tells it? He can't remember. All he remembers is his own voice telling the story, telling it years ago. It seems as if he used to tell it long before he was old enough to be drafted.

Harry lives in a world of words. He can never remember faces or places – just words. For that matter, even some words escape him. Proper nouns are elusive. He remembers what his students say to him in or out of class, but he is never sure about their names. Harry remembers what the host of the bed-and-breakfast says about checkout time, but he has no idea what the name of the establishment is. Things his wife Hilda tells him are particularly elusive. She has learned to hand him lists: lists of chores, lists of things to pick up at the Grocery Mart. He often loses the lists.

When something unexpected happens, Harry never seems to know what to say or do. A main reason he is so absent-minded, he knows, is that he is always preoccupied imagining embarrassing or terrible things that might happen, and rehearsing how to deal with them. Unfortunately, the embarrassing or terrible things that happen to him are never ones he rehearsed.

A few moments ago, Harry finished telling his colleague, Jake Frankenberg, about the odd way he got his master's in music theory. The point of the story was that there is no relationship between Harry's academic training and the subject he now teaches – remedial English. He and Jake are the Remedial English Department of Montcalm and Wolfe, a tiny privately owned family-business junior college squeezed up against New York State's Canadian border. The students are mostly poor and only semi-literate. They come to the school hoping to get enough education to get a better job, or just a job – many are unemployed and have their tuition paid by the State. Harry likes to say that this part of New York has never recovered from the depression caused by the Revolutionary War. He has many such little quips. When Hilda wants him to feel good, she sometimes tells him he should have been a comedian. He likes that thought. He likes to imagine he is on a stage somewhere, or standing in front of a combo in an intimate night club, telling his stories to a little microphone he holds in one hand as he struts back and forth in front of an audience of happy, well-dressed people, all of whom are hanging on his every word and laughing uproariously at everything he says.

Many of the students at the school are French-Canadian. The north edge of campus is the U.S.-Canada border. About once a year, Harry pretends to work himself into a rage at the French-Canadians' poor command of English. He gives an entire lecture in French. He is proud of his ability to do this, and likes to think that his command of French is a source of legend about him among the French-Canadian students. He has dreams of some day teaching a course on French literature.

Harry and Jake are standing in the drab hallway adjoining the College's main auditorium, where the monthly all-College faculty meeting has just ended. The hallway is lined with dark green student lockers similar to lockers in a train depot, though instead of keys they have combination locks. They are vestiges of the era when the building was a public high school. Pasted on many lockers are hand-lettered Student Senate election posters with slogans like: “Come Hell 'n High Water, I'll Vote for Helene Highwater” or “A Vote for LeVesque is a Vote for a Basketball Team.” Tired looking colleagues brush past, nodding but not stopping to talk. Harry senses they are uneager to get trapped into listening to one of his stories. This does not displease him; he thinks they make a dull audience.

Just now, Harry is telling Jake that the corporal at the induction center at first didn't understand what Harry was talking about. Harry says, “I told him I'd love to see him without his uniform on, and he thought I meant I wished he were a civilian!” He carefully phrases what he says so that the exclamation mark after “civilian” is clearly audible.

Jake is depressed. He explains to Harry that he thinks his wife is having an affair with the head of the school's accounting department. Jake feels that he cannot do anything about the affair, first because he feels that he is so ugly that he can sympathize with his wife's wanting a lover, and second because his rival has helped him do the family income tax return for the past few years, and therefore knows all his financial secrets. Jake is afraid that if he antagonizes his accountant, the man will get him into trouble with the IRS. Jake has no taste for trouble with anybody. About ten years ago, he had a brain tumor removed from his left frontal lobe. The surgery left him with a vertical scar extending up from over his left eye and disappearing under his receding hairline. The scar, his name, his tall, gaunt frame, and his big square jaw together ensure that everyone thinks of him as “Frankenstein.” The surgery also left him with a psychic scar. He can't bear the thought of quarreling with anyone. He used to be a quiet, determined, depressed man. Now, he is no longer determined: just quiet and depressed.

Right now, however, he isn't even quiet. He is uncharacteristically talkative. Jake is telling Harry about his wife's sudden walks, when abruptly she announces she has to get out of the house, and then comes back as many as five hours later, looking disheveled, and unwilling to explain where she has been. He tells Harry that his wife got herself a post office box whose key she refuses to let Jake use, and she now picks up mail at the post office. Her explanation, which Jake finds unconvincing, is that utility bills were getting lost, and they nearly had the power shut off a couple of times.

Harry is sympathetic. He is also perversely pleased. He regards Jake's complaint as new evidence that the students and faculty of Montcalm and Wolfe are all wounded, incomplete people, people with some sort of flaw that has made them sink down to the toilet-bowl level of Montcalm and Wolfe, down from the electric, active surface of life in modern America to the festering, moribund stratum of decaying unlife that is Montcalm and Wolfe. Harry is perversely pleased because he likes confirmation of his cynical appraisal of his career. He likes to think of himself as a failure, as a wounded, incomplete person. He likes to enjoy a sort of bitter, perverse satisfaction at the dramatic perfection, the poetic justice of his failure. “I am a genius manqué,” he likes to say. He imagines himself teaching a literature course, a poetry course preferably, in which he passes judgment on various famous and not-so-famous poets. “It takes a genius manqué to know who is a genius,” he imagines himself saying.

Jake's complaint makes Harry wonder how he would feel if Hilda began acting like Jake's wife. He finds the thought oddly titillating. “Why don't you suggest that the three of you form a ménage à trois?” he asks, and instantly regrets the suggestion, for he expects Jake to find it upsetting. It sounds too flip, as though Harry didn't take Jake's suffering seriously.

To Harry's surprise, Jake stops talking and appears to consider the suggestion. After about thirty seconds, he shakes his head glumly, staring down at the top of Harry's head. “No, it wouldn't work,” he sighs. “I'd find it too upsetting if I had to watch them embracing.” The thought brings tears to his eyes. Harry starts to feel ashamed of himself for making Jake feel worse. “Really, Jake,” he says, “I just asked you that to show you how farfetched the idea is. I think your wife does have some sort of secret, but I doubt she is having an affair. More likely, she has started some new project she is not sure will work out, and she doesn't want to tell you about it until she is sure she won't be humiliated. Maybe she has been working on a novel, and she is collecting rejection slips in her post office box.”

Jake somberly considers this possibility, then shakes his head slowly from side to side. “Thanks, Harry,” he says. “Please don't ever tell anybody what I just told you. I think I'm just going to have to talk to a private detective. I know it's expensive, but I can't stand the uncertainty.” Jake walks off down the hall.

Little groups of faculty members are drifting toward the entrance to the parking lot. It is mid-December, and the lot is paved with ice and slush. Harry zips up the bulky winter coat Hilda picked up at the secondhand shop. Once out of doors, he steps carefully, planting his feet straight down with no forward thrust as they touch the slushy ice. He keeps his head bowed, making sure each foot lands on a level, safe spot, and simultaneously avoiding the eyes of his colleagues.

Harry's car is a 1995 Civic, bought used two years ago by Hilda, who makes all the family's major purchases. Hilda has a doctorate in art history, and she has been patient about Harry's career, or lack of it. Harry regards her as long-suffering and unattractive. He married her because she told him she was pregnant, and he felt it was the right thing to do. That was twenty-two years ago. Two nights after their wedding, she miscarried. Harry sometimes tells that story, but only when Hilda is not around, and to people who promise not to repeat it to Hilda. He is reasonably certain that by now Hilda knows he tells that story, and hates him for it.

Driving home through the dark, quiet streets of the little town of Coeurville (pronounced “curvilly” by the natives), Harry tells himself about how his friend Jake told him he thought his (Jake's) wife was having an affair. He edits Jake's story: let the rival be the dean – that would be more dramatic. He invents an embarrassing confrontation, in which Jake comes home and finds the dean in the master bedroom with his pants off. The pants are badly ripped at the seam. The dean explains that he had dropped by to chat with Jake and split his pants trying to help Jake's wife replace a light bulb in the garage. He is waiting in the bedroom while Jake's wife goes to the store to buy some thread in a color that will match his pants, so she can sew up the rip.

Harry wonders what Jake would do. Would he accuse the dean? Would he accept the explanation? What would the two talk about while they waited for Jake's wife to return? What, anyway, is Jake's wife's name? Jody? Anita?

Harry has his usual trouble edging the car into the garage. He is not a bad driver at speeds greater than fifteen miles per hour, but for some reason his control goes to pieces when the car is going slowly. He tends to oversteer. This makes him a very bad parker, and makes getting the car into the garage a harrowing chore. Trying to get into the garage, he puts dent after dent in whatever car he owns, which may be a reason Hilda always buys older cars.

For years, the garage door has refused to slide more than halfway down, but after he gets the car into the garage, Harry always takes the trouble to slide the door down as far as it will go. Although she knows this annoys Harry, as usual Hilda left the door up. Harry feels that this invites theft. When he points this out to Hilda, she usually counters that leaving the door halfway down is an even stronger invitation, which he feels makes no sense at all. From time to time, they have talked about having the door repaired, but they never seem to get around to it, except when money is short. Somehow, whenever they are behind on the mortgage payments, they get repair estimates from contractors. Then they decide they can't afford the work.

Harry has his usual trouble finding the house key. He does not use a key ring, because he is afraid he will lose it, and thereby lose all his keys at once. With his keys separate, he feels safer. Even if he loses his house key, he can go back to his office, and wait there until someone is home to let him in.

Belletriste, his daughter, is already home, and she opens the door for him while he is still fumbling from pocket to pocket. She has prepared the evening meal. Hilda left a note: she has gone to Montreal for the day. She will be back some time before midnight. Belletriste doesn't like to cook the way she likes to clean, but she is good at it, as she seems to be good at everything.

Harry loves his only child. She is a slender blonde girl, tall for her age. Her front teeth are in braces. She gets all A grades in school, and she is a fanatical housekeeper. Hilda is quite slovenly about housekeeping, and until about three years ago the house was always a filthy mess, to which Harry was ashamed to invite anyone. However, when Belletriste turned ten, she took over most of the housekeeping duties, and ever since, the house has been at least presentable, and often more than that, often splendidly clean. Belletriste likes to invite girlfriends over to spend the night, and she makes sure that every room in the house meets her high standards. Luckily, she seems to need less sleep than the average child. After she does her homework, she stays up late into the night, with the television blaring at top volume, while she moves from room to room, vacuuming, sweeping, dusting, putting things away. Harry and Hilda lie in their bed, kept awake by the television and vacuuming roar, a little ashamed that their daughter has to do this sort of work.

Harry is both grateful for her housework and proud of her. He thinks she has a brilliant future. He sometimes wonders what it would have been like if she had been his wife.

When Belletriste was little, the happiest times in Harry's life were when he put her to bed. At first, Harry and Hilda took turns, but by the time Belletriste was four, it was Harry's regular assignment, one that he had more or less insisted on. He would tell the child long, complicated stories that continued from night to night, starting each night from the last thing she remembered the previous night before she fell asleep. When she was less than six, most of the stories were fairy tales, fantastic continuing adventures of beautiful princesses all of whom had names quite similar to Belletriste, names like Belletrice, Bellissima, or Belle Star. Later, he began to tell stories about himself. He would stand near the doorway of her dark bedroom, afraid to sit for fear he would fall asleep, and tell about his first date, or how he chose the college he went to – for its rural location remote from any likely atomic bomb target. She gradually got to know his entire repertoire. Sometimes he worried about whether it was healthy for her to know so many intimate and often embarrassing secrets of his life, but it did not seem to do her any harm. She had always been a quiet, mature, sensible person, more like an adult than a child.

When he first started telling stories about himself, she would often mention them to Hilda, and sometimes this led to sharp exchanges between Harry and his wife. She accused him of using their daughter as a psychotherapist. Hilda told him, if he needed therapy that badly, he should get professional help. She hinted there was something vaguely incestuous, bordering on child abuse, in his sharing so many intimate secrets with his little daughter.

He never quite got the strength to stop telling Belletriste his stories. Neither did he get the courage to ask Belletriste not to mention them to her mother, but somehow she got the message. For several years now, Hilda has been under the impression that he has taken her advice and stopped talking to Belletriste about things for which, according to Hilda, their daughter is not yet ready. Actually, since Belletriste turned ten, they have talked this way much less often, because now Belletriste usually stays up past his bedtime. However, they do sometimes have such conversations, most often when they are alone in the house during the day, while Hilda is out somewhere.

Tonight, Belletriste has found or bought some attractive colored napkins that match the old place mats she has unearthed. She has placed a bunch of artificial flowers in a vase between their two place settings. The scruffy old kitchen table looks almost festive.

“Dad,” Belletriste asks, “did you have many girlfriends before you married Mom?” She is signaling her readiness for an intimate, adult conversation. She often does this by asking personal questions about his past.

“Oh, yes,” he replies, rising to the bait. “For example, there was Mandie.”

“Were you ever unfaithful to Mom – after you two were married?” This is a surprising question, not on the script. He is a little shocked. The truthful answer, he knows, would be “Yes, once, not long after we were married, and it was a disaster. It terrified me so much that it never happened again.” Instead, he says, “Even if the answer were 'Yes,' which it isn't, don't you think I would have to say 'No'?”

She replies without hesitating; she appears to be ready for his answer. “You know you can trust me. One of the great things about having you for a father has been that you have always trusted me. And I have always trusted you.”

His heart melts. How can he lie to this lovely, sweet, sensitive innocent? How can he violate the bond of trust between them? He hears himself say, “Well, there was one peculiar episode just after we got married. That was the only time. I made sure nothing ever happened again. I had gone to an AAUP convention. I got drunk at a party for graduates of LaSalle University, where I got my Master's degree. There was a girl there, a woman, with whom I once had a relationship. I wound up in her room. I was very drunk. In the morning I felt terrible. It didn't help when she told me she was just recovering from a disease. I was terrified that I had caught it. I didn't know what to tell your mother.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn't say anything. I avoided her for a couple of weeks. When nothing happened, I just forgot about the whole thing. Later, I got a letter from the woman, in which she told me that she loved me. Your mother found the letter, but I was able to convince her that nothing had happened between us, that the letter referred to things that had happened a long time ago, things that I had told your mother about.”

“You should have told her the truth. I know that sometimes it is better to lie, but only when you can lie successfully. Dad, you are basically a very honest person. You should never try to lie about anything that important. You can't do it. I'm sure Mom knew you had a guilty secret five minutes after you got back from the convention.”

There is a pause. They look at each other while they eat. He thoughtfully chews on a small slice of steak, thinking about describing his affair with Mandie to his daughter. Before he can speak, she asks, “How about Mom? Has she ever been unfaithful to you? That you know, that is.”

Her question is unsettling. “Do you know something I should know?” he asks, “Or is this just early adolescent romanticism?”

“Neither,” she replies gravely. “I was just thinking. Mom certainly must have realized you had been up to something. When women think their husbands have been unfaithful, it tempts them to get even. You should have told Mom how unimportant your affair was, and how determined you were never to do it again. That would have helped keep her from getting involved herself, at least from getting involved in anything serious.”

Her reply is not reassuring. He wonders what Hilda is doing in Montreal. She has been away from home a lot lately. He had found the thought of her having an affair strangely exciting when he was chatting with Jake, but now he feels frightened. It would be very unsettling and disorienting to lose the stable anchor his marriage provides. He can't seriously imagine Hilda having an affair. He resolves to be a better husband.

Hilda is tall, five foot ten inches, and he is only five seven. She is blonde and slightly overweight. He often calls her “Brünhilda.” He does not think many men would find her attractive, but now, prompted by what Belletriste has been saying, he admits to himself that there must be men who would find her type quite provocative.

He starts to tell himself a story about a young man, a student at the University of Montreal, majoring in art history, who encounters Hilda in the University library, where she has been reading about Byzantine mosaics. He is writing a term paper on the same subject, and he notices that she has taken several important reference books to her cubicle in the stacks. He asks if he may borrow them overnight, and she asks him about his research. She discovers that his professor has failed to mention an important mosaic in a ruin fifty miles northeast of Istanbul. She has a collection of unpublished photographs of the mosaic, and she offers to bring them the next time she comes to Montreal. They make a date to meet at the library.

As he imagines all this, Harry gets more uncomfortable. He finds that he is unable to continue the story. He is afraid that it will end with Hilda and the young man in bed together. Belletriste has been watching him intently. “What are you thinking?” she asks. “Are you worrying about Mom having an affair?”

“I was wondering what she is doing in Montreal so much lately.”

“Why don't you go there with her some day and find out?”

He finds the suggestion worrisome. Why is Belletriste suddenly so interested in what her mother does in Montreal? “Why don't you go?” he asks.

“Don't you remember?” she answers, “I went with her last week. We went to the Montreal University library together. We met a young student there she is helping with his course work. I think he must be rich, because she told me he is paying her to tutor him.”

Harry blurts, “That's very strange. I was just telling myself a story about her tutoring a young student she met in the library. Have you mentioned this to me before?”

“No,” she answers, “but maybe Mom did. I think she tells you all sorts of things about her life, but you never remember.”

They hear a car pull into the driveway. It is Hilda. They watch through the kitchen window, as she swiftly pulls her car into her side of the garage, and then sits in the car for several minutes before she leaves it and comes into the house. While they wait for her to leave the car, Harry and Belletriste sit quietly at the kitchen table, not moving.

Hilda comes in the kitchen side door, which opens onto a path that leads from the garage. She looks strange. She appears to have been crying. “Harry,” she says, her voice hoarse, “we have to talk.” She sinks down into a chair next to Belletriste, and puts her head on her arms. She starts to sob.

Harry tries to think of what he should say if Hilda tells him she is involved with the student, but he can't think of anything appropriate. Besides, isn't he jumping to conclusions? There are so many other possible reasons why Hilda would be crying. He sits in his chair, staring at Hilda. Belletriste walks around behind Hilda and starts to massage Hilda's shoulders, pressing her forehead against her mother's hair and softly crooning, "Let it out. Let it all out."

Harry imagines Hilda telling about a bloody accident she saw on the highway. He feels vaguely guilty because it is Belletriste that is comforting Hilda. Isn't it his role? He stays in his chair, trying to formulate some comforting phrases. Before he gets very far, he realizes Hilda may have been going to the hospital in Montreal. He has often thought about what might happen if Hilda developed cancer. After all, her mother and grandmother both died of breast cancer. What should he say if she tells him she has cancer?

There are so many possibilities. He can't decide what to say because as soon as he starts to consider one possibility, another one distracts him. He starts to feel very frightened. It reminds him of how he felt at the induction center.