The Grasshopper King Read online

  For the few students who remained, there was still the matter of Higgs’s deteriorating teaching. Often he would stop during a class and cock his head as if he’d heard an untoward noise; it would be a while before he started speaking again, and when he did, he sounded distracted and empty of conviction. The tiny pauses in his elocution grew to seconds, then to minutes, so that in an hour-long lecture there might be only fifteen minutes of actual speech. And more often than not, he let his class out at half-past. What he did say consisted mostly of difficult allusions which he left unexplained; he met all questions with a pained expression and an interval of weary silence. No one could explain Higgs’s behavior. There was speculation, among those who knew about it, that the rejection from Henderson was to blame; but the change in Higgs had started before Dr. Knabel’s news, and had if anything eased a bit with the arrival of Henderson’s letter. He seemed healthy. He expressed no bitter dissatisfactions. But the pauses kept growing longer; and the students kept growing fewer. They moved him from the auditorium in Gunnery Hall, now embarrassingly empty, to a seminar room at the department. Soon after that, his class was canceled altogether. No one had enrolled.

  Dean Moresby, worried, visited his daughter for lunch.

  “You’ve made a nice little place here,” he told Ellen. His daughter stood at the stove, grilling him a ham and cheese sandwich, humming along with the radio in the sitting room. She looked barely older than a teenager; though there was no trace left of the bracing, willful girl she’d been.

  She stopped humming. “If you say so, Daddy. It’s not as though we’ve redecorated. The basement’s a mess.”

  “I don’t exactly mean the decorations.”

  Ellen waited silently at the stove.

  “I mean—you can always tell the house of a happy married couple. It’s not so much a matter of what it looks like. There’s a certain sense of permanence. Your mother and I—”

  The two of them were quiet for a while as the smell of frying ham, greasy and reassuring, filled up the kitchen.

  “Are you trying to ask me something?” Ellen said. “I’d like it if you’d just ask.”

  “I don’t want to intrude.”

  “So it’s about Stanley.”

  He swallowed glumly. “Well, he hasn’t seemed to be himself, has he? And we just thought you might know if there was anything he needed, or wanted—we could certainly see to it, if it were something of that sort.”

  “Thank you for asking,” she said, “but no. You’ve been very generous already.”

  “And as your father,” he went on, “naturally I’ve been concerned . . .”

  “Oh,” she said. “That we’re on the outs.”

  There, now, was the willful girl.

  “If you think it’s necessary to put it that way.”

  “Well, you were right the first time,” Ellen said. “We’re perfectly happy.” She lifted the sandwich off the pan and set it on a plate before him; her frown smoothed out. The battle was over before he’d had a chance to take a swing: “If you think it’s necessary . . .” Pathetic! Resignedly he wished his wife were there. She had a finger on Ellen’s switch; with a single word she could have turned this into a screaming all-afternoon affair, just like in the old days.

  Ellen produced a scotch and water in a tall, heavy glass and set it on the table. The dean took down a third of the drink in one forceful, medicinal swallow. Sprightly drums pounded in the sitting room.

  “Your mother asked me to ask you something,” he said.

  “I guess I know what.”

  “It’s already nine years.”

  “Stanley believes in sharing the work of raising children equally,” Ellen told him. “And he’s very busy right now.”

  The dean adopted his warmest and most fatherly aspect; he was Santa, he was a Norman Rockwell cop on an ice cream stool. “It would be a big change,” he said. “Your mother and I would help you in any way we could.”

  “But we don’t need to change,” Ellen said. And Dean Moresby realized—as he sent his final hot slosh of scotch down the hatch—that he believed her.

  Whatever it was got worse. Higgs arrived at the department at dawn and left in mid-afternoon; he kept his office door locked when he was inside. He met all disturbances politely, but with such obvious forbearance that no one could stay for long; it was choking. Each visitor felt he’d flouted an article of some unforgiving etiquette of which only Higgs was aware. And there were steadily fewer visitors. Higgs spoke with hardly anyone; and when he did speak, each word seemed to have swum up from a deep and secret grotto, which at any moment could snap shut. He quit playing checkers. He published nothing.

  In December of 1971, Professor Rosso organized a conference to mark the 40th anniversary of Henderson’s first book, God of Bile. Higgs, to everyone’s surprise, agreed to deliver the opening address. His title was “Henderson and the Meaning of Grubs.”

  Despite Henderson’s decline from fashion, the turnout at the conference was substantial. News of Higgs’s turn inward had spread quickly through the erstwhile strongholds of Henderson scholarship, and his name, in those constricted circles, had acquired a connotation of intrigue. People who hadn’t deigned to write on Henderson in years had come, just to see what Higgs might say. Why not? The Henderson Society, flush with cash, had flown everyone in. There was a new donor, a transistor heir from Tokyo named Koiichi Kosugi, who’d found a Henderson pamphlet in his dead father’s army chest, and within a month had redug the channels of his family fortune. Opera and cancer wards were out; now the money flowed our way, toward Henderson and Henderson’s servants.

  The campus was overrun with Gravinicists, perched on every flat surface, spilling over with disagreement but eerily alike. They were men, they were not too old, their glasses were somewhat dirty and they favored greasy food; though none were fat. They talked in spurts. Not a few lisped. Their hair, what there was of it, was for the most part dark, and they had a shared habit, in concentration, of hooking their fingers into it and tugging; so that a group of them together, bent over plates of corned beef hash, of fat-flecked chili mac, resembled a troop of macaques at their grooming, waging their fervent, hopeless battle against the ecosystem of their own too-hospitable heads.

  When the time came for Higgs’s address, every seat in the auditorium was full, and there were scholars huddled in the aisle.

  Higgs climbed to the stage; the audience, as one, craned forward. Higgs looked around. As always, he had no notes. His eyes flicked from one curious face to another, betraying nothing; to the ceiling lights, trained on him; to the fire exits on each side; back down to the podium. He cleared his throat. The audience waited: a minute, then two, then five. Something in Higgs’s carriage, the determined set of his mouth and the angle of his jut over the podium, made him seem continuously on the verge of beginning. It was impossible to leave.

  It was forty minutes before Higgs—his audience still intact—said a word.

  “The ‘feasting grubs’ in the 1939 folio should be construed as referring to the banquet of maggots in the original Book III of God of Bile, rather than to the fall of the Basque provinces to the nationalists, as has been conventionally understood.”

  Interesting, came the murmurs from the crowd, yes, I see that, interesting! Now things were moving along! And they waited, pens cocked, free hands tangled in hair, to see how Higgs would continue.

  But Higgs was done. He had nothing to gather up; he walked off the left side of the stage and out the door.

  There was a pause. “This is sad,” one scholar said. “I saw him at Trieste,” said another. “Didn’t I meet you at Trieste?” Someone had a copy of the relevant folio and a crowd formed around him, bending to the pages, the folly of the heretofore prevailing viewpoint already becoming clear.

  Dean Moresby had hurried from the auditorium when he saw Higgs leave. He caught up with him on the low rise that immediately preceded his son-in-law’s house. Below him he could see the house, the cliff, and,
off to his left, the gray, morose water of the reservoir. Breathing hard, he put a hand on Higgs’s shoulder.

  “Stan,” he said (wincing), “what’s going on? What kind of an idea is that speech? What is your idea in making everybody wait for an hour and then, and then saying just the one thing and walking off?”

  “What else did you want me to say?” Higgs asked. And Dean Moresby didn’t have an answer.

  Less than a month later—to be precise, on the tenth of January, 1972, sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 P.M.—Higgs entered Happy Clappy’s, the undergraduate cafeteria, through the north door, and proceeded approximately ninety feet to the à la carte counter, where he ordered a cheeseburger, medium rare, with lettuce and mayonnaise. The student on grill duty was Cheryl Hister, a junior. She recognized Higgs. After the one-sentence address the school paper had run a photograph.

  “That comes with fries or baked potato, Professor Higgs,” Cheryl said. “Which would you like?” Higgs thought for a good long time.

  “Potato,” he said.

  “Potato?” Rosso asked. Around him sat the members of the emergency faculty committee, nursing stale coffee. “You’re sure that’s what he said? Potato?”

  “I told you,” Cheryl said tearfully. “I asked him which he wanted and he said ‘Potato.’” She dragged one frilly sleeve across her nose. They’d made her wear her Happy Clappy’s uniform for the reenactment.

  “You’re doing fine,” Rosso told her. “Nobody’s saying otherwise.”

  He directed a gathering-in gesture at the row of wan faces flanking him, soliciting consensus. Oh no, came the murmur. Nobody’s saying that.

  “But I want you to think back very carefully now, one more time, and tell me if Professor Higgs might have said anything besides ‘Potato.’”

  “Potato,” Cheryl said. “That is absolutely the last thing and then I gave him his cheeseburger. Which he ate and then left. Can’t I go home?”

  The rest of the committee was growing restless. It had been two hours and they’d learned nothing. Dean Moresby leaned forward. “I think we ought to end this,” he told Rosso.

  “All right,” Rosso said, reluctantly, “the meeting is adjourned. Thank you, Cheryl.” Still crying, clutching her starched sides, the girl fled.

  What had happened? In brief: the word “potato” was the last one Higgs had spoken. After eating his cheeseburger he’d gone back to his office and begun writing letters: a note authorizing Ellen to make financial arrangements in his name, references for his few persisting graduate students, a petition for sabbatical, effective at once and continuing until such time as Higgs saw fit to end it. Since then he had not spoken to anyone, nor had he communicated in writing. The professors and the Dean had tried every flavor of cajolement and threat; all in vain.

  Only Ellen seemed unperturbed. “I suppose he’ll talk again,” she said, “when he has something to talk about.” After she’d gone, the committee members buzzed at her equanimity. Rosso wondered aloud how long she’d keep it up. Rosso, Dean Moresby reflected, hadn’t known the girl when she was twelve.

  Months went by; Higgs remained speechless. His story went out as human interest on the AP wire. In April, Harry Reasoner arrived on campus to film a piece on Higgs for 60 Minutes. The segment, when it aired, implied strongly that the whole enterprise was a veiled act of protest against the war. A movement, Reasoner hinted darkly, might be on its way. In those days it was possible to imagine such a thing; silent professors on every corner, accusing and significant, our homegrown variety of torched monk. But it didn’t catch on.

  Higgs retreated to his house on the cliff. Every so often the student paper ran an article: “PROFESSOR STILL IN SECLUSION” or some such, on the back page, under the comics. That was all.

  One afternoon in September, Ellen responded to a knock on the door to find her father on the stoop, accompanied by two professors she didn’t know, a nervous-looking graduate student, and a pair of technicians laden with tape recorders, microphones, and yards of wire.

  She stepped into the doorway and crossed her arms. “What’s this all about, Daddy?”

  Eyes fixed on the lintel, he explained: the Henderson scholars had formed a plan. Recalling that Higgs’s shorter pauses had invariably concluded with some concentrated insight, they had reasoned that the current silence promised a breakthrough on a previously unimagined scale, a Grand Unified Theory of Henderson. They were terrified of missing it, when it came. They had no reason to be confident that Higgs would publish, or even repeat himself for their benefit. So the Henderson Society had arranged a substantial fund to assure that Higgs’s next words would not go unwitnessed. The nervous graduate student would sit all day with Higgs; the tape recorders would run all night. In this way an exhaustive record could be kept.

  “Absolutely not,” Ellen said. “There will not be strangers in this house bothering my husband.” She shut the door and barred it.

  “Honey, be reasonable,” Dean Moresby said through the door. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Out of the question.”

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t like to have to remind you that your house is owned by the university.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Think how terrible it will be if the police have to come.”

  After a meaningful interval Ellen pulled back the bar, allowed the intruders to file shamefacedly past. Higgs was sitting in the kitchen, eating corn chips one by one from an ancient-looking wooden bowl. Ellen stepped behind his chair and laced her fingers together; and in this conjugal tableau, silent and stubborn, they remained, as the workers installed the recorders and the mikes. But when the technicians started upstairs to the bedroom she balked.

  “But in case he should talk in his sleep . . .” her father explained.

  “He does not,” she said icily. And Dean Moresby ordered the men back downstairs. He didn’t want it to be any harder for his daughter than was necessary. And this was necessary: that, he believed. He was as convinced as he had been two decades before that in Higgs, somehow, lay the university’s salvation. With his decline the rest of the faculty had slunk back to its traditional malaise. The torrent of graduate applications was a dripping tap again. And LaBart’s boys had never really adjusted to the climate; the taller and more playful Eastern teams were drumming them off the court. A word from Higgs, he thought, the right word, could change everything back. Whenever he imagined letting go of that certainty he felt sick and confused. He did not expect Ellen to forgive him.

  And indeed, she never did. She made some inquiries about a suit; but the Henderson Society was wealthy, who knew how, and conversant with strange byways of influence, and it was clear before long that the scholars could mire any litigation perhaps indefinitely—certainly beyond her ability to pay a lawyer on Higgs’s salary. She had no money of her own with which to move out, and, under the circumstances, she couldn’t ask her father. So Ellen made do with a more personal defiance. Whenever the nervous graduate student, or one of the successors to his position, was with Higgs, she made a point of banging pots, vacuuming, knocking over chairs, running the blender empty. The radio was always on, as loud as it would go. She didn’t speak to her father. And Higgs didn’t speak to anyone.

  Thirteen years later, I, Samuel Grapearbor, graduated from Chandler State University—penniless, dissatisfied, experienced at nothing, in need of a job.

  PART TWO

  “The importance of the opening moves in a game of checkers cannot be overestimated. The first few moves determine the type of formation into which the mid-game will develop, and it is in the complicated mid-game that the student, if he is on unfamiliar ground, is apt to be forced into a position so inherently weak that it defies all efforts to successfully defend it.”

  —ARTHUR REISMAN,

  How To Win At Checkers

  CHAPTER 2

  A LITTLE ABOUT MYSELF

  Now that my younger self is about to enter the story, I find myself a little reluctant to
get on with it. So let me pause for a moment and explain how I came to be involved with Henderson, and thus with Higgs—a story, in its own way, as unlikely as the professor’s own.

  I was born in 1963 on the outskirts of Chandler City, in a three-room apartment above my parents’ business, the Grape Arbor Café and Grill. Eight months before, my parents had moved from New York, where they had operated a restaurant by the same name which enjoyed much traffic in the dignitaries of the nascent counterculture. Look it up: you can find my mother in any number of poems, minor, uncollected ones, from that brief and in its own way exalted period when people wrote poems in restaurants, on the backs of checks, or rather when anything written in a restaurant, on the back of a check, was a poem, simply by virtue of its staggering and implausible success at existing in the world. But those times were coming to a close. Our reputation had become great enough that thrill-seekers flooded the café after the plays let out, hoping for an overheard snatch of cool, or at the very least a whiff of reefer. And the poets, in their fickle way, were tiring of the spontaneity of unmediated experience; the most advanced ones were rhyming again. Many were going back to school. “It’s time to go,” my mother told my father; and when she read the story of Tip Chandler in a magazine, she knew where. My father, a mild man, dedicated to prudent consistency, demurred. But my mother kept at it. They would be close to the wilderness, she pointed out, and far from the draining pretentiousness of city life. And artists were bastards, who left insulting tips, if any. The disappointed thrill-seekers were no better. It wasn’t long before he came around.