Lucinda observed, making Cass give vent to a chortle so disloyal that it certainly ought to have been swiftly followed by a stab of guilt, considering Mona’s devoted mindfulness toward him, especially during the ravaged weeks and months that had followed the post-aphasic Pascale’s first words to him from her hospital bed, which, in their percussive rhythm and impeccable precision, “I must of necessity break your heart,” were as reflective of the poet that Pascale was
(La Sauvagerie et la certitude, Prix Femina, 1987) as they were effective in dampening the desire of her husband to live out any and all possible forms of his future-it had been entirely by mistake.
Lucinda had thought that Cass Seltzer was someone else entirely. To be precise, she had thought that Cass Seltzer was their mutual colleague Sebastian Held, to whom she had been introduced last week at the welcome party that she thought the university had thrown for her. (Actually, she had been wrong. The party had been in honor of all the newly arrived faculty.)
Lipkin, a small man with a booming, pedantic, overenunciating style, was an excitable lecturer, who rose onto his well-shod tiny tiptoes as he hammered home his points. He was already launched at full steam in his oratorical trajectory, irrigating the first row with his spittle, speed-clicking his way through the PowerPoint presentation that swerved abruptly from brain scans of sophomores, neuroimaged in the throes of moral deliberation over whether they should, in theory, toss a hapless fat man onto the tracks in order to use his bulk to save five other men from an oncoming trolley, to sweeping conclusions that claimed to deliver final justice to John Rawls, not to speak of categorically laying to rest the imperative-rattling ghost of Immanuel Kant.
“He Kant possibly mean that” had been the quip of Cass’s that had been anointed by Lucinda’s titter.
Cass had never been good at this sort of thing, making fun and making light, but Lucinda’s proximity, or, more to the point, her having so deliberately chosen proximity to him, had revved up his wit. The Katzenbaum auditorium was subterranean and windowless, but it seemed to have become ungloomed ever since Lucinda claimed her seat, as if some of the dazzle from outdoors had been tracked in on the bottom of her shoes.
It was one of those September days, the sky looking like an inverted swimming pool, and the white-gold liquor of afternoon light drizzling through the leaf-heavy trees and pooling on lawns and walkways and the gleaming crowns of Frankfurter’s youth. Cass had quoted the line “Glory be to God for dappled things” to himself, which was from a favorite poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as he made his way across the stippled campus. “Glory be to God for dappled things- / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings.” And then that stunning second stanza, beginning, “All things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)…”
