The Grasshopper King Read Online Free PDF Page A

outs.”
    There, now, was the willful girl.
    â€œIf you think it’s necessary to put it that way.”
    â€œWell, 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 achance 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.
    â€œYour mother asked me to ask you something,” he said.
    â€œI guess I know what.”
    â€œIt’s already nine years.”
    â€œStanley 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.”
    â€œBut 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