The Linnet's Wings Spring 2015 | Page 113

Spring 2015 just the suggestion of Patricia. Yes, a distinct sense that music stopped as if the slamming of the car door interrupted it, startling whoever was playing. The girls haven’t sent someone over here to reason with him, have they? A face-to-face plea? Maybe one of their soft stupid husbands to drag him back? He looks up the hill past the garden shed and past the summer porch and past the slated side terrace to the driveway. A woman in a smock holds a vacuum. No, the maid service has arrived. He waves up at the woman as she pauses between garage and house and smiles and waves back. Again, Missy Misamore yells across the Diag. Professor! Do you have time to talk in your office? Oh, please, Professor! “Unlocked!” He calls up to the maid service. She waves back and disappears around the front of the house. Oh, Professor Stritch! You always look so angry! He moves his bars over to the big stone he has wrestled with for years, only recently renewing his struggle. Still, Missy Misamore will not leave him. Cursed, one might say. Haunted. But of course that is a supernatural idea totally outside the context of meaningful historical discourse. Yet there it is. Cursed. That meeting in his office all those years ago. And all over a grade she was never going to get and he wasn’t going to give. A stab at cum laude. And what would she do with it? Heiress to an office furniture empire in Grand Rapids. Was it just for bragging rights every Tuesday and Thursday at the club? Maybe feeble whacks at articles of local history for the hometown newspaper? The History of the Credenza in Business Furnishings. He brings himself up short with his vitriol. As with the telephone receiver, what is the use taking it out on an old name or a grade never handed out, deservedly or otherwise? No, it wasn’t the grade that bothered him about Missy Misamore. And it wasn’t even her throwing herself at him. The meeting in his office. The hardly-veiled flirting. The playing of her fingers at the buttons of her blouse, the crossing and uncrossing of her legs, her eyes flitting. Gad, those cheery eyes. But adept and knowing. It was not even that. It was not mentioning it to Patricia. Ever. To Patricia, of all people, who would have found it a wonderful joke. Absurd! He could hear Patricia’s laugh even now. If only he had told her then. But he never shared it. He buried it, lost it to the greater dialogue. He kept it to himself for some reason even though no act had been committed, no trust broken, no impropriety committed. (Certainly no grade changed!) He threw up his hands and waved Missy Misamore off and she left his office without gaining a thing. He had shown her the door. And all the while her damned smile and cheery attitude never wavered. Oh, Professor Stritch! You always look so angry! Was there a bit of temptation there? A lot of temptation? Were there actions there other than a stern waving off? Could he possibly backfill over history that much? No, it isn’t in him. Then that insipid young woman’s drawing attention to his demeanor. Her yelling it across the Diag whenever he passed. Oh, Professor Stritch! You always look so angry! He works hatless as is his habit. Even when young and he first bought the house he did not wear a hat and then in an era when all men wore hats. He signed the papers hatless downtown in Detweiler’s law offices and walked up the drive hatless with Patricia and then carried his bride over the threshold hatless. You’re too damned vain to wear a hat, dear. It was a repeated joke with Patricia. All these years working outside without a hat, digging up these stones. And now this big rock will not move from its hole though it seems all he has thought about, strategized for weeks on, dreamt of. He even planned The Linnet's Wings