In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs Read Online Free PDF Page B

expression and Brooke felt obliged to ask whether there was anything wrong.
    â€œYes,” Riley said, “but you don’t want to hear about it, believe me.” He said that he was having difficulties with the editor of his latest book.
    Brooke didn’t quite believe him. He wondered if it had something to do with the girl. Perhaps Riley had gotten her pregnant and was trying to dissuade her from having an abortion. “Let me know,” he said, “if there’s anything I can do.”
    â€œThat’s nice of you,” Riley said. “You know, you remind me of a guy I knew in high school who was voted Nicest in the Class. No kidding.” He hooked his arm over the seat and smiled at Brooke in a special way he had, curling his handlebars up and showing a flash of teeth. It looked as if he had somewhere come upon the phrase “roguish smile” and developed this expression to match it, and it drove Brooke absolutely crazy. “Tell me,” Riley said, “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
    â€œThe worst thing I’ve ever done?”
    Riley nodded, showing more teeth.
    For some reason Brooke panicked: his hands got wet on the steering wheel, his knees trembled, and he couldn’t think straight.
    â€œForget it,” said Riley after a time, and gave a little laugh, and hardly spoke again for the rest of the trip.
    Brooke finally calmed down, but the question persisted. What was the worst thing he had ever done? One night when he was thirteen, and home alone, and had just finished off all the maraschino cherries in the refrigerator and gotten bored with sighting in the neighbors on the scope of his father’s hunting rifle, he called the parents of a girl who had died of leukemia and askedto speak to her. That same year he threw a cat off a bridge. Later, in high school, he unthinkingly used the word “nigger” in front of a black classmate who considered Brooke his friend, and claimed that he had seduced a girl who had merely let him kiss her.
    When Brooke recalled these things he felt pain—a tightening at the neck that pulled his head down and made his shoulders hunch, and a tingling in his wrists. Still, he doubted that Riley would be very impressed. Riley clearly had him down for a goody-goody. And, in a way, he was; that is, he tried to be good. When you tried to be good you ran the risk of seeming a prig, but what was the alternative? Brooke did not want to know. Yet at times he wondered if he had been too easily tamed.
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    The panel discussion was not a success. One of the members, a young man named Abbot from Oregon State University, had recently published a book on Samuel Johnson which attempted to define him as a poet and thinker of the Enlightenment. The thesis was so wrongheaded that Brooke had assumed it to be insincere, but this was not the case. Abbot seemed to think that his ideas did him credit, and persistently dragged them into conversations where they had no place. After one very long tirade Brooke decided to set him right and did so, he thought successfully, with few words.
    â€œExcellent points,” said the chairwoman, a Dryden scholar from Reed College who wore sunglasses and blew smoke out of her mouth as she talked. Turning to Abbot she said, “Is your speech finished?”
    Abbot looked at her sharply, then nodded.
    â€œGood,” the chairwoman said. “To quote Samuel Johnson, that paradigm figure of the Enlightenment, ‘No one would have wished it longer.’”
    Abbot was crushed. His face went stiff with misery, and he sat without speaking for the rest of the discussion. Brooke felt embarrassed by the chairwoman’s treatment of Abbot, not only because she was unkind but because her unkindness was so distinctly professorial.
    When the panel ended he chatted with a woman he’d known in graduate school. They were joined by an athletic-looking fellow whom Brooke supposed to be