"It's good you're continuing again in your vocation,” the dean said. “I think you will find the students here to be different from those you might have had in the past, at other institutions. Some of them will not be as prepared as even the upper students at your private school were. On the other hand they'll bring to your classes a wealth of other experiences, life experiences. And you'll find them eager to get from you all that they can use in their own lives. Unlike some young people in other institutions, most of our students—and not all of them are young—they mostly know why they're here, they know what they want from this place, and they are ready to work to get it. They are remarkable people, many of them."
Pierce nodded. He was leaning forward, all ears. He thought he could descry what the dean meant, and what those students might be like, and in what sense his own case was theirs. He found himself moved by them, never having met any of them, and by the round man before him, by his tender gravity, his careful pomposity, and how he might have come by them, after what experiences, like his students'. Moved too by what he, Pierce, was being charged with: his old vocation.
"Frank Walker Barr,” said the dean, returning to pore over Pierce's slim résumé. “There's a name."
"Yes."
"You did your thesis with him."
"Yes.” No, not exactly, but Barr was certainly not going to come forward to deny it. Not any longer.
"He was never found,” said the dean.
"No. Never found."
Years had passed by then since Barr had disappeared into the sahará south of Cairo while on expedition with two other scholars. Never found: no rumor, no body, no story. He had (maybe, probably) walked out at night from the lodge where the party had stopped. The Valley of the Kings, the American papers said, but it was actually a nameless place to the south of that, near the ancient location of the island sanctuary of Philae.
"Remarkable."
"Yes."
"A great scholar."
"Yes."
Isis, still worshipped at Philae, said a writer at the end of the fifth century CE. It was Isis who “by roses and prayer” returned Lucius Apuleius from his asinine to his human shape when he was visited at last by a vision of her. Her vestiment was of fine silke yeelding divers colors, sometimes yellow, sometime rosie, sometime flamy, sometime (which troubled my spirit sore) darke and obscure, covered with a blacke robe whereas here and there the stars glimpsed. (It's Adlington's translation.) And she disdayned not with her divine voyce to utter these words to me: Behold Lucius I am come, thy weepings and prayers hath moved me to succour thee.
The desert sky is nothing like ours—Barr had used to say this to the students in his History of History seminars, Pierce among them—and as soon as you stand beneath it you know, he said, how certain you can be that the stars are gods, and near us.
I am she that is the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, cheife of powers divine, Queene of heaven, the principall of all the Gods celestiall, the light of the goddesses: at my wille the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of Hell be disposed. Leave off thy weeping and lamentation, put away thy sorrow; behold the healthfull day which is ordained by my providence; therefore be ready to attend my commandment.
Dawn winds rising as night turned pale.
Barr had written, in the draft of his last unfinished book, about how a lifelong student of myth, its cross-cultural transmission, its continual transformations, can feel at times like a parent watching children act out a story for their own pleasure: the way the plot is liable to be softened or hardened or curtailed or reversed, the boring or unintelligible parts flashed through with a gesture and the amusing parts repeated and expanded, characters swapped among actors so that one actor may end up battling with himself as another person, the whole transmuting suddenly into a different but similar tale, and never ending at all. “Any such student, as any parent, can tell you of the tedium these constant developments inspire, even as they assert again and again the endless willingness of the human imagination to play, the eternal primacy of the hand over the clay, the teller over the tale."
"Let us consider all this,” the dean said at the end of the day, “and get back to you. Real soon, I think."
* * * *
Roo had put up with Downside as long as she could, which was less long than Pierce, his general immobility her constant grief and burden. She'd knocked around the big once-fine old house that they managed feeling as though stuck daylong in the hour between rising and going to work: washing and tidying and readying and finding this and that, the whole place smelling eternally of morning, of unwashed boys and their belongings and their food and drink and their sneakers and unmade beds—the boys, too young anyway to be so far from home, and some of them very far from home, in effect exiled, following her on her rounds to ask pointless questions or tell tales about sports or homework or home, just to be near someone motherlike or mother-shaped, she thought: once, one sitting beside her on the sagging couch had simply bent his little cropped head and laid it in her lap without a word. It was the need that got her, when there didn't really seem to be a need for there to be a need. Why did they get sent so far from home?
Meanwhile Barney far away got worse and worse without her. Something debilitating drained him of his cheer, and when it was diagnosed as cancer (prostate) he at first summoned his considerable will to protect and sustain what was left of his wonderful life, but by then the odds had tipped out of his favor; the cancer metastasized; weekends Roo packed a bag and left the house to Pierce while she went with her father through that, his needs the reverse of the needs of her growing boys, but just as demanding. Barney somehow did fine day to day, anyway as long as she came often, to notice new things that ought to be seen to, and to get him out to doctors. Roo soon learned that, like the dead Egyptians Pierce told her about, the only way you made it all right through this passage was if you had a guide and a mentor, somebody to fight for you and negotiate for you at every station. That was Roo. Her only sustenance was what she learned, about what to do and how to do it, learning more every day from men and women who knew, the doctors and nurses and the social workers, they were all called caregivers now.
"You should see,” she told Pierce on returning late. “You should listen to them talk to these old men.” She meant the nurses, shift after shift. Barney was in a VA hospital by then, mostly men, mostly but not all old. At their kitchen table Pierce gave her coffee, which she had come to need at all hours of the day and night though it seemed to have no effect on her. “They have this—I don't even know what to call it. Humility. The good ones do, not all."
"Humility."
"I mean that they just keep on seeing these guys as people, no matter how far off they go; even when somebody stops responding, stops talking, seeing, eating, thinking. I mean they're realistic, they know what's happening, they try to be very truthful and observant, but they don't write them off, not ever."
"Uh huh."
"They talk to them. Hi, how are you today. Somebody just this side of a cadaver. One nurse told me: I know he's not in there anymore, but he's still right around here somewhere. He can hear. He minds if I don't say hi."
"Uh huh."
"How do they. That humility. It's what you have to have. Never thinking you know when somebody's life ought to be written off. It must be so hard. You could pretend, but it's not like being a used-car salesman. It would be hell to go to that job every day and pretend. You just couldn't. Your heart would die."
Pierce listened, pondering the limits of his own humility, his own humanity. He'd never liked Barney, and he wanted to stay as far from Barney's yellow canines and domineering intimacies as he could get. But his own father. Himself. If you do not know how to die never trouble yourself, Montaigne said. Nature will fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will do all that part for you; take you no care for it. Maybe not, not these days.
When
Barney had at last made it over (his cropped head, too, laid upon her lap) Roo told Pierce she wanted to go to school and study nursing. “It's a future I can see,” she said to Pierce. “But also it's really the first one I think I can get to."
"Okay. I'll help."
"It's actually a good job. A good career. Steady."
"Yes."
"It's gonna cost, though. You have to trust me."
"I trust you,” he said.
* * * *
After a further interview, Pierce was hired by the community college.
"It was a tough decision,” the dean said. “I hope you don't mind my saying that. I myself was a definite yes vote. I thought we could overlook some of the gaps in your CV.” He leafed through the file he held. “You know we never got a letter from the dean of Barnabas College. A Dr. Santobosco?"
"Really."
"No matter. You impressed me, Pierce, and not only with the accomplishments. You can't always go on those alone. You have to go with what you see."
"I hope,” Pierce said, “to live up to your expectations. I certainly will try to. You have my promise.” And he meant this, with all his heart, as he had meant so little in his life; almost, indeed, couldn't get through the saying of it for a hot lump that rose in his throat. He got to his feet, and shook the dean's great fat warm hand.
"First we'll go down and look at your office,” said the dean, taking a big ring of keys from his pocket. “You'll be sharing with Mrs. Liu, whom you've met, she's Elements of Communication."
"Yes."
They went down through the plain halls of a standard utilitarian building, the dean greeting students with a raised hand as though in blessing.
"In here."
A battered gray desk, near another similar but different one; steel shelves and a gooseneck lamp; and a wide window.
No he hadn't been an alcoholic, or insane, nor had he burned down his life smoking in bed, or thrown it away by mistake like a winning lottery ticket, but he was as grateful as if he had done a thing like that, and been saved, for no reason. Lucius thou art at length come to the port and haven of rest and mercy: thus said many-colored Isis to Lucius the Golden Ass, not an ass anymore at last. Neither did thy noble linage, thy dignity, thy doctrine, or any thing prevale, but that thou hast endured so many servil pleasures, by a little folly of thy youthfulnes, whereby thou hast had a sinister reward for thy unprosperous curiositie; but howsoever, the blindness of Fortune tormented thee in divers dangers: so it is, that now unawares to her, thou art come to this present felicitie: let Fortune go, and fume with fury in another place.
"Welcome to our family,” the dean said.
* * * *
So Pierce and his wife became urban pioneers in that city, which was a real city in a real conurbation and not just a hallucinatory compound of fears and longings, omphalos of a smoky underworld—say it was Holyoke, or Bridgeport, or Albany. It was a city that had got rich very quickly about the middle of the nineteenth century and then slowly got poor again. When it was rich, and the rich didn't mind living near the factories and mills and canals that supported them, the city had built splendid neighborhoods of huge houses, houses that now nobody wanted, for most of those who could afford to live in them wanted to live farther away. Even Roo and Pierce—moved as they were by the big echoey rooms with parquet floors, the curved bay-window glass, the massy radiators and tubs that the desperate salesmen pointed out—in the end couldn't feature managing so much.
But then they found, beyond those proud sad streets and their great trees, in the direction of the (former) farmlands, one of those little suburbs that about 1910 developers were arranging out at the end of the trolley lines, places designed to be the best of town and country. Once surrounded by rose-burdened walls, entered through rough ivy-clad brick gateways (gone when he and she drove through in the Rabbit), it was surrounded now by a shabby nameless precinct of the city, and overlooked by a medical building done in raw concrete (they would see its minatory red cross in their bedroom window in the leafless winter). But it still clustered around its own little rocky sunken parkland and duck pond, and the Tudor red-brick and Queen Anne shingled houses were nearly all still there, some clad in vinyl siding, some with fiberglass carports or chain-link fences. Several of them were for sale.
The one they got, where they still are, was at the end of Peep o’ Morn Way, right on the Glen (as the parkland was called). It was absurdly narrow and tall; two stories faced on the street, and another went down behind as the house fell off a steep ledge into its little garden and backyard down in the Glen. Oh it was cute. Tall trees watched over it and its neighbors; its paneled door sheltered shy behind an arched trellis and a fence; a little gate opened in the fence by the house's side, and a winding wooden stair went down and around the house until it reached the backyard far below. Down there they could glimpse, as they stood by the gate, a wooden bench, and pots and potting tools, and a pair of old gardening gloves.
It was probably the gloves that sold it.
It was large for them, three stories large, though each story was no more than two or three rooms deep or wide; they had no plans to fill it further when they bought it. No firm plans, though looking back Pierce can see himself propelled by an unspoken urgency toward propagation. Roo had always told him she couldn't imagine growing old all alone, and he came to know that what Roo could not imagine she would not allow to befall her: she would instead bring into being what she could imagine.
7
On the fourth anniversary of their marriage, Roo won an office pool at the dealership in Cascadia that the salesmen had put her name into, a sort of memorial to her or to Barney. The prize, to Pierce's horror, was a pair of tickets to Rome and four days-three nights in a chain hotel to which Barney's dealership was somehow connected.
"Uh-uh,” he said to her.
"What?"
"I don't want to go back to the old Old World,” Pierce said. “Besides, I'm not sure it still exists to return to."
"Let's not be silly,” Roo said with something like patient indulgence. “I am not returning anywhere. I've never been, and I think it would be a good and great thing to see what you've seen."
"You don't want to see what I've seen."
"You'd be good to go with. You could explain it all to me. The churches, the pictures. The meaning of it all.” It had surprised Roo that, on the odd occasions (other people's weddings or christenings, chance, curiosity) when they found themselves in a Catholic church, Pierce was able to decode the surreal images in plaster and stained glass, the woman with the toothed wheel, the man in brown with the lily, the man who wasn't Jesus bound to a pillar and pierced with darts, the effulgent bird and crown, the random letters, INRI, XP, JMJ. “Couldn't you?"
"I suppose I could. A lot of it."
"We'd come home different,” she said. “I mean by a different way. Barney used to say—I don't know where he got this—that the Roman legions when they went somewhere to conquer something always came back by a different way. That's how they mapped the world.” She did that herself, in the states of the New World, accumulating knowledge. She liked houses that were planned so that you could go from room to room in a circle to return to where you started, rather than having to retrace your steps. She never wanted to retrace her steps. Pierce seemed to himself to be one who never did anything else.
He was right, though, that the City, however Eternal, was not there to return to. The place to which they arrived, after passing eastward through the night and raising the sun over the Middle Sea, was not the place he had been before, only resembling it in certain sly ways, places with the same names and histories but otherwise different. It was midsummer, and the streets and squares were filled with crowds of people young and old but mostly young, and from all over the world, laughing girls with bare brown midriffs and crowds of boys behind them, passing from place to place, standing six deep to toss coins into the Trevi Fountain, clustered beneath Bernini dolphins and playing guitars and flutes
and radios for one another in the transfiguring sun.
But it wasn't just that, the crowds and sun, it was the place itself, which had somehow shrunk or contracted into a small brightly colored place, a toy-town, all its funny old monuments and historic sites open and the people passing in and out. Places it had taken him so long to find, places he had never found, turned out to be mere steps from one another, clustered together like a theme park, no longer containing the past, just a pleasant setting for the present to occur in. Where were the endless dark avenues he had trod in confusion, the puzzles of entwined streets impossible to escape from? Where were the shuttered prisons and palaces he had come upon by chance, so far from one another?
"Oh, hey,” Roo said. “Look at the elephant!"
It was in a little piazza no more than a New York block from the Pantheon; he must have walked around it again and again without ever stepping through this little passage, or that one, or the other one. For a long time he stood before it, watched Roo walk up to pat it. She laughed at the little beast, more Dumbo than Jumbo in size, and the absurd great weight of the figured obelisk it bore on its back.
"What's it say?” Roo said to him, pointing to the tablet beneath the elephant, the writing that explained it all, in a dead language. “What's it mean?"
Pierce opened his mouth, shut it again. As though in a Rose Bowl parade or carnival or mass demonstration, he observed a set of explanations proceeding to the forefront of his mind from the deep old interior: a line of floats and figures great and small, in groups and singly, mounted and afoot, led by the elephant they stood before. Hooded sodalities bore the Crux ansata and papyrus rolls brought from the fall of Constantinople, Colonna and Botticelli the great folio of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, open to the page where the elephant is shown. There came theriomorphic deities of Egypt, made into parables by Baroque symbologists, Hermes with finger to his lips bearing a smaragdine tablet, rendered with hieroglyphics that supposedly said As above, so below but actually didn't. Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit who studied the Egyptian picture language, including the symbols cut into this very obelisk, and proved they were the unsayable terms of a mystic philosophy. Sir Flinders Petrie and the Invisible College in its winged car, Pope Alexander and Io, queen of Egypt, the crater of Mercurius, the arcana of the Masons carried by apron-wearing men in drip-dry shirts and fezzes. Walking alone, the gloomy Huguenot figure of Isaac Casaubon who showed that Hermes Trismegistus wasn't really Egyptian at all. All moving forward, and then moving past, moving on. The Monas, in Father Kircher's version, that collected a Cobra, a Scarab, the Ptolemaic planetary nest, and more into John Dee's bare bony symbol. The same symbol cut in a ring. His cousins on a ragged hill in Kentucky marked with it. Charis feeding him snowy coke from her poison ring, asking why people think Gypsies can tell fortunes. Julie Rosengarten in a New York slum apartment lifting her hand to him, the nails painted with symbols, Sun, Eye, Rose, Heart, saying, It makes a lot of sense. Rose Ryder moving her finger over a wineglass rim and raising a faint eerie wail.