told me," Scott says as they move down the hall together.
"When did Maggie find out about it?"
"I don't know, a couple months ago, I guess. I think she told me about it around the time they were still negotiating with the university about your Dad's papers."
"When I told her about it yesterday, she acted like it was brand new to her."
"Maybe she didn't tell me. Maybe Sy was the one who told me about it. I don't remember."
"Come on, Scott. How long has Maggie been back in contact with Dad? It's clear she doesn't want me to know about it. She hasn't exactly lied to me about it, but she's inferred that she's only been back in contact with him a few weeks."
Scott looks at Simon as they move down the faculty office hallway, but he doesn't say anything. He grabs his keys, unlocks his door with an easy gesture and holds the door open for Simon. "Maybe you should ask Maggie about that?"
"Why wouldn't she tell me? Why not just tell me the truth?"
"I think she worried how you'd react. Besides, you and Maggie haven't been particularly close since your Mom died," he says, setting his satchel on his desk chair.
"So, this is your office," Simon says, changing the subject.
"This is it. Is it as small as you thought it would be?"
Scott's always had an inferiority complex about his work, and it's written all over his demeanor. But from what Simon has heard about Scott's poems, not to mention his scholarly work, he's really good at what he does.
Simon moves to the bookshelf on the back wall of the office, runs his fingers over the spines of the university's literary journal. "I see the journal is still going."
"It is. I'm the editor."
"Really? How long?"
"This spring was my sixth issue."
"That must be rewarding."
"It's been alright, but I'm ready to be done. It's a lot of extra responsibility."
"Any of your poems in these?"
"I have two in the second issue. We had some extra space. Otherwise, it seems unfair to put my work in at the expense of the students and other faculty," he says. "What about you? We're always looking for submissions."
"I haven't written much of anything since… Well, it's been a long time."
"Really?"
"It just never occurs to me anymore. I don't think much about it."
"That's a shame. You were really good."
"I was okay."
"You're always your own toughest critic."
"That's what they say," Simon says. "But those people probably never showed their work to my dad."
"He does know his stuff."
"That he does."
"What do you think of Laura?" Simon asks Scott, as they sit at a table in a mostly empty university coffee shop.
"She's great. She's really smart, and she's been a great help to your dad this past year."
"Anything about her I should know if I were thinking about taking this job?"
"Not anything I know. She's a sweet girl, a hard worker from what I've seen, and a great teacher from what I've heard from students," Scott says. "The only thing I ever heard—and I genuinely think it was only gossip—was that there might've been something going on between her and your dad."
"Really?"
"Just gossip, I'm sure."
"God, if the age difference is bad between he and Susannah… Can you imagine? It can't be true," Simon says, trying as best he can not to show the anger and hurt that's flashing inside him.
"Look, there's a lot of people here that are jealous of your dad's success, or jealous of Laura for the attention she gets from him. So, people talk. You know how it is. I mean, sure, he's affectionate towards her, and this affection could appear to an outsider as something more than it is, but I always saw it as more of a paternal thing. He really took her under his wing. And that was good for her because, like many of the English students who come here to complete their studies, she came here because of him."
"So, you don't think anything ever happened?"
"I can't say for certain, but I know that your dad really does seem to love Susannah, and I can't imagine him doing anything to jeopardize that."
"You say she came here to learn from him, is she a poet, too?"
"That I can't say. I've never seen any of her work. She's never submitted anything to the Review. But I have heard her read before, and she's a brilliant reader."
"How so?"
"She has this great quiver in her voice when she's reading something emotional, but it's strange—unique. A lot of people get that shake in their voice simply from nerves, and the day I heard her read was… I was walking by her class, the door was open, and she was reading Auden's "Ode to the Medieval Poets." She had just started reading the stanza that starts, 'Age quite so repulsive.' I stopped to listen because it's one of my favorites. And it just floored me. I must've read that poem hundreds of times. It's in many of our anthology textbooks, and I've taught it a lot over the years. But she'd read it in a way that made me think I'd never known it at all. And it didn't sound like nerves to me. It also didn't sound like the kind of quiver someone gets in their throat when their moved to tears, either. It was just that she felt it so much. But it wasn't a display of emotional weakness. It felt stronger, more magical, really. And the sincerity… she wasn't performing for the class. I got the sense that she would've read it the same way without any audience at all. It felt wholly sincere."
Simon takes a slow drink of his coffee. His mind is swimming with thoughts of Laura, seeing her in front of that class with an open book in her hand, reading aloud. And he's suddenly never wanted to hear an Auden poem so much in his life.
"I don't mean to try and sell you on the job. It's a big decision, and I'm sure you're taking a lot of stuff into consideration, but if I have any influence, I'd love to have you here. And I know Maggie would love it, too. She's missed you."
"I've missed her, too," he says. "It's strange, though. She's different than I remember. She seems happier."
"Oh, yeah. She's much happier than she was last time you were here."
"Not just from the last time I was here. She seems happier now than I ever remember her being," Simon says. "What happened?"
"It sounds too simple and cruel to say that it was your mom, but I think it's true. Your mom cast such a shadow over that house, over Maggie, and, frankly, over our relationship. It's difficult to overstate the effect she had on us."
"I know how it was living in that house. I lived it, too, but I guess I wonder how she turned it around. I always thought Maggie would be unhappy, that she was somehow hard-wired to be like mom."
"I worried about it, too. I thought she was heading down that path for sure, especially after your mom died. For several months, she was in a real dark place. She wouldn't leave the bedroom, kept the lights off, would barely talk to me."
"Sure sounds like Mom."
"I know, and listen, I started to think our relationship was doomed. Remember, Maggie and I lived with your mom after your dad left, and I felt the dreariness of it. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life dealing with anything close to that. So, one day I told her straight out that I wouldn't stay if things didn't improve, that if she needed professional help, she needed to get it, or if she thought she were simply blue, she needed to at least make an attempt to shake it off.
"And to help I bought some canvasses, took them to our room, set up the easel with her paint box, and started bringing flowers in every morning. It had been a long time since she'd painted, and I thought a nudge might get her moving again. For the first few days, she wasn't budging. Then, one morning, I opened up her paint box, and you could smell those paint smells—you know, the oils and that faint scent of turpentine. I decided to leave it open and left for the day. She told me later that it was the smells that got her up, got her moving again. She got up to shut the box, but as she was standing there, she saw the bouquet of flowers—she hadn't even noticed I'd been bringing them in—and she was moved to paint."
"How long after mom's death was that?"
"I don't know. It seemed like longer than it was, but I'll bet it was two months."
"And things turned around that quick?"
"It was dramatic. I remember the day after she painted that first bouquet of flowers. I got home and she had packed up everything in your mom's room and moved it all up to the attic. All that was left in the room was the bed, an empty nightstand and dresser, and that painting of flowers she'd painted. Then, she left the house for the first time in months, bought a gallon of light yellow paint and painted your mom's room. After the room was painted, she shut the door and left the windows open for a month. She told me not to shut them, said the room needed some airing out. That's when I knew she was going to be okay."
"And she's been fine ever since?"
"She has her moments. She still gets depressed, but no more or less than I do. And she's kept herself going. She loves teaching those kids at home. Those private lessons really keep her feeling useful. And she even teaches classes at the cultural center now."
"She told me."
"She tell you anything else?"
"About what?"
"Nothing," Scott says, shaking his head. "It's not important."
"Everything's alright with you guys?"
"Yeah, it's not that, honestly. We're great. I'm happy. She's happy. Everything's fine," he says. "Other than what's happening with your dad, things couldn't be better."
After Simon left Scott, he drove around town for awhile, not quite knowing what to do with himself. He didn't want to go back to Scott and Maggie's, and he told Susannah he wouldn't be