xv
The Daughter

There are men who, in a love relationship, instinctively seek a mother figure. They often go for older women, and always for women with large breasts. They are docile and make easy lovers, but they are also psychologically weak. Always they are dependent, frequently they have trouble holding a job, and sometimes they are alcoholic. Their wives end up with a child, not a husband.

There are men who marry their sisters. Brother-sister loves have the advantage of age balance and thus equality. Unfortunately, these couples often fight like brothers and sisters. Women who marry these men run a strong risk of black eyes.

Then there are men who marry a daughter figure. They seek younger women whom they can protect and provide for. They are strong, independent and generous. Their weakness is that they often try to run their wives’ lives, and women married to such men feel smothered.

Jack Creed was clearly a man who sought a daughter-lover. The child lover is a motif repeated in Western culture with varying degrees of eroticism, from those sepia Victorian engravings of Eros and Cupid, with budding breasts, flirtatious smiles, and phallic arrows; to high school cheerleaders; to Lolita and Baby Doll and American Beauty; to Mary Lou Retton and Bela Karolyi’s Nadia Comaneci and all those pixie gymnasts who bewitch American hearts every four years. American girls have heard so much “good touch/bad touch” talk that many fear any touch these days. They’ve heard so much about child abuse, incest and even psychic incest that some “recover” entirely imagined memories. The psychologists, sociologists and lawyers are having a field day. But Americans need look no further than the average family fourth-of-July outing to see that a tremendous amount of psychic energy passes back and forth between fathers and daughters . . . and between mothers and sons. Any psychologist worth her six-figure salary could have a field day, and probably a law suit if she wanted.

This is not to suggest anything overtly erotic to the relationship between Jenny Lynn and Jack Creed. It is strictly to observe that Jack preferred younger women, that Jenny Lynn was his number one female, and he was her number one male. Even when she was a child, and even when the two were of different opinions.

Jack and Jenny were nearly inseparable until 1985. Then, suddenly and dramatically, they were separated by great distances of geography and, for a time, point of view. Togetherness was a great joy. Distance pained both father and daughter. “My early adolescence was difficult,” Jenny told me, “because dad was in Wales or Lake-of-the-Woods, and because that’s just a hard time for anyone. I adjusted a little to his being away most of the time, and had some successes at school in the late eighties but those years were probably the worst of my life. I wouldn’t want to live through them again, even if it meant having dad alive again.” Unaware of Jenny’s problems, Jack felt pain the pain of distance, a sorrow reflected in the father-daughter poems written during this period: “Visiting the Father,” “The Distant Father,” and “The Father Writes to His Distant Child.”

Then came serious distance. The daughter broke from her father to find a life of her own. The father broke from his daughter and found Kelly Ayers. Both grew, and grew apart. The early nineties were more painful than the late eighties.

Finally there was conjunction. The two came together again as mutually respectful adults—perhaps brother and sister. In 1997 it was Jenny Lynn who, having returned from her own exile on the East Coast and opting not for Illinois but for Wisconsin, steeled Jack’s resolve in the Virginia Coyle suit.

Most vivid in my memory is the younger Jack and the younger Jenny: the indulgent father of the born dancer who could not sit still, the wild girl with eyes full of mischief and a pair of flying ponytails.

I remember little Jenny coming with her older brother, even before seeing daddy in daddy’s office, to visit Lucy Kramer, the Green Lollie Lady. Jenny’s feet kicking back and forth below the black naugahyde chair seat, Jenny ever so impatient with the polite talk Timm knew was a necessary prerequisite to opening that upper left hand desk drawer and winning a green lollipop for himself and his sister. I remember Lucy stalling, and Timm finessing. I remember Jenny and Timm entering our office, each with a green lolli, looking like dogs who had treed a cat.

I remember Timm and little Jenny stopping by Aunt Lucy’s office again on their way home. “Lollies all gone?” Lucy would ask.

“Yes, ma’am,” Timm would answer as Jenny looked on wide-eyed and expectant.

“We can’t let you go home without a lolli, now, can we?”

I remember summer nights at Burr Oak Park, I with my children Audra and Austin, Jack with Timm and Jenny, campfire guttering to dark, sleeping bags calling in the tents behind us, Lou and his crew out for the burgers and marshmallows, a Cardinals game on the radio, stars overhead. Jenny would lean against Jack’s shoulder or curl up in his lap, worn out after an evening of pitching tents, gathering wood, hiking trails, playing wiffle ball, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. She’d start sucking her thumb and twirling a pony tail, as she always did when she was tired. Inevitably she fell asleep in Jack’s lap. He’d hoist her over his shoulder like a 20-pound sack of potatoes, and carry her to her sleeping bag in the huge cave-like tent. Invariably she awakened as he shifted her position, or as he brushed the flap upon entering. “I’m not tired, Dad,” she’d protest briefly. Then she dropped off again until the morning.

Timm and Austin would hit the sack as well, and Lou, who was never much for camping, would gather his brood and drive them home. Then there would be only Jack and I and the voice of Jack Buck on KMOX, and the glowing coals below, the distant stars above.

Then we’d talk.

I remember the years of Park and Rec summer slow-pitch softball. Jenny had always been jealous of the attention Timm received for Little League baseball, and when Riverton organized a summer softball league for girls, she recruited my Audra and Lou’s Shelley Lynn to join her on a team. This was, as I recall, the summer after Jack taught all those kids at Busiris, after his first escape to Wales. Jenny was a natural: trim, fast, quick reflexes and athletic instincts. Jenny, Timm and Jack had been playing backyard football and baseball for years, and Jenny could sock the cover off a ball. A good fielder with an accurate arm, Jenny was assigned to the outfield, then to shortstop, then to first base. Then she got it into her mind she wanted to pitch.

“You’ve never pitched in your life,” Jack told his daughter.

“Pitching is where the action is,” she told him.

“Pitching is tough, even slow-pitch softball.”

“I can hang,” she told him.

So Jenny Lynn Creed told her coach she used to be a pitcher, and he let her throw a couple of innings. She walked about ten batters, the coach sent her back to shortstop, and Jack ached with embarrassment and the frustration of seeing a child in pain he could do nothing to ameliorate.

Jenny Lynn ached scarcely at all. She came home after the game, dredged up two boards about as wide as home plate, paced off what seemed to be the distance between the mound and the plate, and spent the rest of the day throwing her two practice softballs and a couple of bean bags first from one board to the other, then from the other to the first, four practice pitches and walk to the opposite board, four more practice pitches, and walk, break for supper, out again after supper and toss, toss, toss. The following morning Jack borrowed half a dozen softballs from his buddies in the Busiris Athletic Department, and Jenny spent another day practicing.

Over the objections of all the other girls, she talked the coach into another start and pitched the rest of the season. Shelley took over first base, and Audra moved to a starting position in right. Jenny was starting pitcher for her division in the all-star game. Jack and I were watching from the bleachers when one parent asked Jack, “Is it true that your daughter hasn’t walked a batter all season?”

After that summer Jenny pitched every year for a Park and Rec squad, and then for her school slow pitch team. Her background in ballet gave her agility, grace, and a wiry strength. Although slight and willowy, she managed the conversion from slow to fast pitch softball and pitched for Riverton Central. Later at Wisconsin she converted to utility infielder. She was quick on the bases and a good punch hitter. “A banjo hitter,” Jack used to call her. “Like her old man. Like Pete Rose.”

Jenny Creed was probably the only woman in Riverton Central history to letter in cheerleading and softball.

Cheerleading also began in grade school, and Jack took as much pleasure in it as in softball. Jack was always close to cheerleaders, whom he understood as did few faculty members. He argued regularly with Lou, me, Jerry Jones, Victoria Nation . . . the entire department. “Cheerleaders are not stupid people,” he would tell us. “That’s just one more inaccurate sexist stereotype. Some are dumb, and some of them are quite bright.” He would cite May O’Hara and Carolyn McQuillan, both English majors who captained the squad, both magna cum laude graduates. Or Cassy Peterson, another bright English major-cheerleader. On one occasion, I think, he even cited Leanna Robertson and the Bucks dance line. “The trouble with intellectuals is they think that just because somebody looks good, they have to be stupid. My freaks think that way too. There are a lot of very smart jocks, and a lot of very smart cheerleaders.”

“It’s a T and A show,” Victoria Nation told him long before she knew Jenny Lynn was a cheerleader. If Victoria had been male, Jack would have punched her. Instead he gave us another Jack Creed Lecture on the Girls of Dance Line, Cheerleading, and the Pompon Squad.

“It’s a lot of hard work, is what it is. And yes, it is sex, Victoria. There is real sex involved, even at the junior high school level. Sex means vulnerability. Unbelievable vulnerability to a junior high school girl. It takes courage to move like that in front of five hundred people. Let alone five thousand people at a Bucks games, not to mention the television audience. It takes practice and discipline. You have to be in shape, and you can still get hurt, physically as well as mentally. Cassy Paterson nearly broke her ankle last winter.”

Victoria persisted. “It demeans the personhood of all women.”

“Persons are unities of body, mind and spirit,” Jack told Victoria. “Cheerleading celebrates the female body and spirit. It’s in a league with dance and gymnastics. Cheerleading showcases women the way athletics showcases men and women. It’s a form of athletics.

“It’s not a matter of sound mind or sound body. A sound body complements a sound mind. You think just because you have ideas, you don’t have a body? Bullshit. What do you do for your body? You run off to some feminist feel good camp, pump yourselves up with a lot of talk, shimmy around a campfire like a bunch of overweight water buffaloes. You convince yourself you are artists dancing with the goddess, and that gives you female goddess power over the men around you. Bullshit.

“The trouble with you, Victoria, is you’re lazy. You and women like you are too lazy to discipline yourselves to meet the standards set by cheerleaders. Look carefully at those women: they’re not naturally beautiful, not most of them. They train their bodies and take care of their hair. It’s a lot of hard work and discipline. You want to see dancing the way it should be done, watch the cheerleading squad. Watch the Busiris dance line. Watch the Honey Bears. That’s female power . . . female body power. Every bit as legitimate as female brain power, because it’s an art form.”

Jenny did not hear that conversation, but she grew up among Jack’s cheerleader students. They were her babysitters when she was young and her role models as she watched them perform at Bucks home games. She understood her father’s philosophy of cheerleading as an art form, and it became her own. Her dissatisfaction with Bryn Mawr came as much from other students’ denigration of her softball and cheerleading accomplishments as from homesickness, class differences, and disillusionment with the women’s studies program and the East Coast.

The acorn, finally, does not fall far from the oak, and Jack believed that in America smart was not enough. “Death of a Salesman is a great play,” he told me once, “but Miller is wrong. In America, you do have to be well liked. And good looking and athletic. American men must be handsome and strong; American women must be athletic and lovely. We must raise our children in a tradition of sports and beauty, as well as art and intellect. Watch your television set and you’ll see who the system takes care of. Victoria Nation, a member of the losers’ club, knows exactly what I mean. Which explains her attempts to exact a pathetic little revenge on members of the winners’ club.”

During the middle 1980s, Jack spent more time with his daughter than with his son, who was already running with his pack. Jenny was still interested in jigsaw puzzles, the Riverton zoo, and night walks around the old neighborhood. Jack bought a zoom lens for his camera just so he could take close-up photos of his ballerina daughter . . . and, later, his cheerleader daughter and his conference champion fast-pitch softball player daughter. Jack never missed a spring dance recital, except for his year in Wales. And that year he went considerably out of his way to bring Jenny not one but two pairs of Freed ballet slippers all the way from mysterious and far-off London. It was Jack who, in addition to the $1200 he sent each month to Riverton to support Rose Marié and the kids, footed the bills for ballet lessons, athletic equipment, cheerleading uniforms, and summer camps.

The break between Jack and Jenny came not with his resignation from Busiris, but with his withdrawal to Wales and Lake-of-the-Woods. Despite the rumors and gossip in February 1985, Jack’s departure from Busiris had virtually no impact on his daughter. Rose Marié was more tense than usual, but the relationship between Jenny’s parents had always been brittle. Dinner was served punctually as always, and her dad was available more than ever. The summer of 1985 was every kid’s dream, an orgy of attention and, as she once put it, “one fun thing after another.”

After such an idyll, fall was an abrupt shock. Her mother’s temper improved and dinner was served as usual, but there were no more fun trips and no more fun dad. A Christmas visit and an Easter visit to England were small compensation for nine long months. Neither were the many letters, some containing poems, or the pair of ballet slippers.

Then came Jack’s move to Lake-of-the-Woods, nearly as distant as Wales. There were more visits and calls and letters, but a maturing Jenny Lynn could read the future: a dad gone from her life, on the streets of a distant city, laughing, busy with his many appointments . . . his sixteen-year-old daughter, once the apple of his eye, ignored, discarded, forgotten in Illinois. “I admit I felt a little abandoned,” Jenny remembered. “All children of divorces and separations do. I never felt it was my fault, though, which is another thing they’re supposed to feel. I don’t think I blamed Dad much, either. At first I blamed Mom for not following Dad to Wisconsin, because I didn’t know any better. Then I wised up a little and realized he didn’t really want her in Wisconsin. Then I figured he didn’t want me in Wisconsin either because of Kelly.”

Kelly Ayers posed a serious problem for teenaged Jenny. So too did the divorce Kelly seemed to precipitate, although Rose Marié had long understood that Jack intended to “hang around Riverton” (the phrase dates to the Lily Lee years and is his, not hers) only until Jenny graduated from high school. That Jack should begin to talk divorce as spring of 1990 neared did not surprise her. “I was surprised it didn’t come up years ago,” she told Linda. Nor was Timm at all surprised when Jack had broached the subject of a formal divorce to his children even before mentioning it to Rose Marié. “Frankly, I’m out of there, dad,” he wrote from Annapolis. “Do what you have to do. By all means necessary.”

Jenny told Jack simply, “I could handle that.”

The divorce began in January of 1990 and ended, finally, on July 26, 1991. Once Rose Marié and her lawyer got wind of the volleyball player in Jack’s life, they intuited, correctly, that she was the catalyst for the divorce and further assumed, incorrectly, that she was probably pregnant and Jack would offer the sun, the moon and the stars in return for a quick resolution. Confronted with what he considered outrageous demands, Jack stalled. The divorce, which had begun quietly, turned into a real War of the Roses, which took a subtle toll on Jenny’s relationship with her dad. “I don’t know how I would have wanted him to behave,” she admitted later. “I wanted him to stand up to Mom. I was basically sympathetic with Dad, and I’d been fighting Mom for years. That’s a natural thing in adolescent girls. But all of a sudden there was this Kelly person, more my age than Mom’s. She was really more a threat to me than to Mom, because Dad apparently loved her, and he loved me, but he never loved Mom, so where could he find love for her except by taking love from me? That was kind of the way things looked. Dad was willing to break up the Creed family unit as I knew it for this other . . . girl.”

On April 17, 1990, the cumulative weight of distance, talk, Kelly Ayers, and the divorce collapsed around Jenny Lynn Creed. Denny McPhearson, a male classmate whose father taught at Busiris, told her that an accusation of statutory rape had ended her father’s employment at Busiris and thus his life with her in Riverton.

The accusation connected with something Rose Marié had said about Jack “having an eye for young girls, especially his students,” and it fit with what she knew of this coed named Kelly.

Mentally Jenny inventoried everything her father had ever said or done involving her or her friends. “I couldn’t remember ever feeling molested, harassed, or even uncomfortable, so the picture didn’t fit. But something about it stuck, and this guy was very adamant. He’d been trying to get me to go out with him and had every reason to be making a good impression, not screwing with my mind. ‘I’m really sorry to be the one to tell you,’ he said. ‘I thought you knew. Everyone else does.’

“It was the ‘everyone else does’ that really wrecked me. The thought of my father with a girl my age devastated me. And of course I was thinking of Dad in 1990, not of dad in, for all I knew, 1972. So that made things even more grotesque.

“Anyway, I was unbelievably upset. I was crying and everything. I just left school immediately, cut practice and drove out to Burr Oak. I didn’t know what to do, really, just be alone and think. But dad’s ghost was there, and I couldn’t think straight, so I drove to my best friend’s, Pam Meyer. By then school was finished. Pam came home and could see I was really upset. I was all red around the eyes and incoherent. I couldn’t tell her what the problem was, and she kept making all kinds of wild guesses. Finally I said, ‘It’s just something about my mom and dad.’

“Then Mom called looking for me, because I hadn’t shown up for softball, and my car was gone, and some kids had noticed I was upset. Pam covered and said I would be home soon, so that was okay. Mrs. Myers invited me to stay for dinner, but I told her I wasn’t very hungry. I just kept nearly breaking down.

“Finally Pam said, ‘Look, Jenny, I’m supposed to be your best friend. You can share anything with me, and I’ll never tell a living soul, you know that. There’s nothing I wouldn’t tell you.’

“So I just asked her, ‘Tell me honestly, Pam, what do you think of my dad?’

“ ‘Neat guy,’ she said. ‘Everybody says so. Everybody says you’re lucky. Except, of course, you’re not, because he’s up in Wisconsin.’

“I asked if she’d ever heard anything bad about him from anybody. She said no. I said ever? She said never. I said, ‘on your honor?’ She said, ‘On my honor. I wouldn’t lie to you. You’re my best friend. I wish my boyfriend was more like your dad.’

“Then I told her what I’d heard. She couldn’t believe it. ‘Dennis said everybody at school knew, and he thought I did too.’

“ ‘Dennis is a geek. He doesn’t really like you, Jenny.’

“ ‘Did you ever hear anything like that?’

“ ‘That’s ridiculous. He’s just saying that to hurt you, because you’re going out with Andy and not him and he hates Andy. Dennis is jealous. That’s why he hates you.’

“ ‘I never really understood why dad quit Busiris,’ I told her.

“ ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Pam reasoned. ‘If he did something like that, he’d be in trouble with the cops. Or her parents. Not Busiris. Besides, kids at the university are over eighteen. Dennis is a geek.’

“ ‘That’s what I thought. It’s pretty awful.’

“ ‘There’s only one way you’re going to find out for sure, though,’ Pam said. ‘You got to ask your dad. Or your mom.’

“ ‘Mom can’t be objective.’

“ ‘Then you have to ask your dad. He loves you and will tell you the truth. You can’t go through the rest of your life with something like that hanging over your head.’ ”

Jack did not hear of the conversation between Pam Myers and his daughter. He didn’t even know Dennis McPhearson. What he did know was that when he returned from school that evening, about 8:30, he received a long distance phone call from an obviously distraught and, he thought, slightly distant daughter, which began, “I’ve got something important to ask you, Dad, and I can’t talk very long because mom’s due home at nine.”

Jenny began by asking Jack why he’d left Busiris. Jack answered with what he saw as the reasons behind the excuses: the meanness of the environment, the unhappiness of his life, the protracted battle between himself and the institution. He did not mention Lily Lee, Annie Brower, Shirley Friedman, or Leanna Robertson.

“One of the kids at school said you had to leave,” she told him.

“That’s technically true,” Jack admitted. “I was fired. Well, that’s not technically true. It was suggested that I resign, and I took the suggestion.”

“Why did you get fired?” Jenny asked her father.

“It’s very complicated,” Jack told her, “and I don’t really understand it myself. I think I was ready to resign, and people there knew it. They gave me a little push, and I did it.”

“It must have been pretty bad to get you fired.”

“I personally don’t think that anything I did to or at Busiris before February of 1985 was bad enough to get me fired,” Jack told the daughter he loved. “If I had been vice president, and I honestly mean this, I would have given me a fat raise and a promotion.”

“One of the kids at school said you got fired for statutory rape.” Jenny started crying softly over the phone.

Jack was stunned. “I can’t tell you why I got fired,” he answered finally, “but I can guarantee you it was not for statutory rape, and anybody who says it was should be sued for slander.”

“He said everyone at school knows. He said he thought I knew.”

“That’s just a lie,” Jack said, increasingly angry.

“Then why did you go?” Jennifer wanted to know.

“Because I felt it was right to go. Because the people at Busiris were dishonorable people, and I thought I should not have anything more to do with dishonorable people.”

“What were the reasons, Dad?” Jenny wanted to know.

“I can’t tell you the specifics. The whole thing is classified,” Jack told her. “But I can guarantee it had nothing to do with statutory rape. Absolutely. That’s a terribly mean accusation to make. There aren’t any children at Busiris. Children are your mother’s department at Helping Hands.”

For twenty minutes Jack tried to convince his daughter he had not lost his job for molesting girls under the age of eighteen. In his craw stuck the truth that he’d lost his job in part because he’d been accused of molesting girls over the age of eighteen. Further in his craw stuck the truth that he had not molested anyone. But how to defend himself, this time to his own daughter, against charges that could not be articulated?

Finally Jenny said, “I hear Mom’s car. I better hang up now. I still love you lots, Dad.” Then she hung up the telephone.

Jack’s reaction was confused. At first, he sat in angry confusion, mentally cursing Reich and Hauptmann and Busiris. “It was the very scenario I’d pictured back in 1985. The worst gossip circulates and, in the absence of facts, assumes the aura of a possible truth. There’s no defending yourself except a public hearing, which is impossible because the accusers are granted anonymity and exemption from cross-examination. Even a public investigation risks self-incrimination. Stella pooh-poohed my fears, but there it all was, years later, coming from my own daughter. The fuckers had fucked me over good.”

Jack left the farmstead, walking out into the wet spring night, railing aloud against Reich and Hauptmann. “I still love you lots, Dad,” echoed in his head. It was the “still” that hurt. Jenny at least had convicted him.

Jack walked a mile down the road, long, angry strides. The conversation replayed itself. He rehearsed what he had said, what he should have said. For a moment, finally, his wrath directed itself against the women who had played along with Reich and Hauptmann and Nation, girls not much older than his daughter. Then his pace slowed and he turned around.

Back at the farm house, he put a sheet of paper in his typewriter and started to type a letter. “Daughter whom I love and have missed so much,” it began. Jack stopped typing and began to weep.

After fifteen minutes, another idea took possession of him. From the Red Files in the living room he fished his copies of the Busiris documents and his diaries for 1985, the year in Wales, and his first year in Lake-of-the-Woods. He selected also his own portfolio of letters from the Busiris days, reviews of books, newspaper articles, citations and commendations, most importantly letters from colleagues and students congratulating him on what a fine fellow he was. These I have read: there were dozens of them, many indicating one degree or another of intimacy and affection. Finally he took the file marked “Lily Lee Martin.” These he placed on the passenger’s seat of the 1966 Mustang and, without phoning Kelly Ayers, began driving south.

It was 10:00 p. m.

Down the black ribbon of County F drove the red sports car with the gold and blue “U. S. N. A.” decal on the back window. Edgewater. Birchwood. Mikaga. Campa. Rice Lake. Rain driving across the valley. The interstate and Chippewa Falls. Eau Claire. Tomah. Mauston. Jack was oblivious to the landscape of birch and pine, opening at points to fields and water shining darkly in the sporadic moonlight. His mind spun out across the landscape to other geographies, other times, to evening campfires at Burr Oak Park; to afternoons at the Riverton Zoo; to a little bed-and-breakfast in Betws-y-Coed, Wales, and the epic 1983 adventure in the United Kingdom, and the golden summer of 1985, and the empty Fulbright in Swansea, and the reasons for its emptiness. To every dance recital and softball game and Riverton Central football or basketball game he had endured for the sake of his children. To the great Bucyrus Bucks game against UCLA and Notre Dame, where Timm had watched his heroes on court, and Jenny had watched her heroes on the perimeter of the court. To the grade school conferences, where he’d heard like a litany, “You have the most wonderful child, you have the most wonderful child, you have the most wonderful child.” To the birthdays, the vacation visits to Grandma and Grandpa, to each Christmas eve and Easter morning, to church, to school, to fishing expeditions in Burr Oak Park and north to Wisconsin, to the simple, empty afternoons—all too few—playing catch with a softball, playing run-and-throw with a sponge football across the living room and hallway floors in the home in Riverton.

Camp Douglas. Mauston. Lyndon Station. A spire of limestone jutting up from the sheltering valley. The Dells. Portage.

The breaking of the North Country woods.

1:00 a.m. Jack’s mind expands with the news. Moscow cutting oil and gas supplies to Lithuania. Consumer prices up .5% in March, 8.5% annually. Genetic link found to alcoholism. Cubs defeat Mets 8-6 in thirteen innings after Strawberry strikes out with bases loaded. Cards 4-4 after loss to Pittsburgh.

What, Jack wonders, is to become of Lithuania? Of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and brave Poland? Anything that could conceivably involve the Navy? Is .5% inflation a good number or the start of another run of inflation akin to what he had weathered in the seventies? Would Strawberry’s K-2 cost the Metsees a pennant? What would the backward view show of this night, ten, twenty years hence? A night like any other night, inconsequential against the enormous expanses of space and time? A night of decision?

Jack thinks back ten, twenty years. What was he doing twenty years ago this night?

Jack remembers vividly the moment he wrote “C” beside Shirley Friedman’s name on a grade sheet. The day he read “Howl” to a class containing Leanna Robertson. They were spur-of-the-moment decisions made in the heat of a hundred other things to do. He had given them perhaps ten minutes’ thought. Who possibly can weigh the consequences of each of his actions? The first cell to go cancerous? Strawberry was expecting fastball when he got a curve. If the pitch had hung. If the pitch had broken a split second sooner. Or later. Two inches closer to the plate. Who can identify the minute fulcrum on which swings the movement of our life?

“Isolating a specific gene in the human DNA complex is like finding the dead light bulb in one room of one apartment of one city on the North American continent.”

Everything is causal. Nothing is inevitable.

Until something is, and you’re over the edge.

Live your three-score years and ten, and then you are dead for billions of years.

Jack’s mind too breaks free of Wisconsin, free of the radio, spreading now across the great prairie opening around him, across the continent, across the waters to parents, brothers, sisters, the folks asleep on the Island, Rose Marié’s parents somewhere, now, in Jersey, Timm in Annapolis, Lily Lee somewhere in the great American immensity with her husband and her kids. Carolyn McQuillan, now who knows where? Paul Popowski, now who knows where? May O’Hara. Lynette Taylor. Terry Cunningham. Billy Joe Allen. André Washington. His editors, his writer friends. Kesey and Bly, Etter and Blei. Mr. Dylan himself. His enemies as well, Berthold Reich—how sleeps his head this April night? Blondie Robertson, who knows where? Shirley Friedman, who knows where? Repentant yet? Understanding yet? Giving even a moment’s thought to the mischief she had worked? And Rose Marié—how sleeps her innocent head this April night, with the kiss of spring upon the land, and the warm, moist breath of spring seeping through the auto’s closed windows?

2:15 and the Illinois border. The red Mustang coasts to a stop in front of a sign reading “Buckle Up, Its Our Law.” With a red felt-tip embossed “Novum State University” Jack adds the missing apostrophe. Then he returns to the Mustang, buckles up, and continues south.

Rockford. Mendota. Peru, asleep now in the morning stillness. The empty streets of the tiny river villages, asleep in the moonlit stillness. South into warmth. South into memories. South into the history stored in the documents by his side, in the tiny, mysterious, infinite complexity of his memory, his imagination.

5:47 and Riverton. This town too asleep. Jenny Lynn sleeping? Jack cannot imagine. He has driven nearly eight hours now and formulated no plan. How to explain his life, the reasons for all the things he had done? How to argue his case before the only jury that really counts?

At 5:55 Jack’s red Mustang coasts to a stop in front of the house that was once his home. More history, more life in need of explanation, more explanation he can never offer. “The reason we repress pain,” he thinks, “is that dealing with it all is simply too devastating.” He sits for a minute or two, staring at the house. “This is a fine house,” he thinks. “It would serve somebody well.” He hopes it serves Jenny well, and, for that matter, he hopes it serves Rose Marié well too.

At 6:00 a.m. Jack unlocks the front door of the house that was once his home. A thousand times he has opened this door. Muffled cries of “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!” breathe from the curtains, echo through the infinite complexities of his memory. But not in his ears. “If all time is eternally present. . . .” There is no sound in the house.

Quietly Jack ascends the carpeted stairs of the house that was once his home, past the closet that once contained his clothes, outside the bedroom he and Rose Marié once shared. Pulse racing, breath short, he passes Timm’s bedroom, door open, still filled with his trophies and citations, with his Riverton Central letter jacket, with, yes, his stuffed Teddy Bear. Past Rose Marié’s door, shut fast, the sound of snoring from behind. Through Jenny Lynn’s open door, Jenny sprawled across her bed, a bare pitcher and basin on the dresser, her softball uniform on the floor beside a pile of notebooks and textbooks. She sleeps soundly, Jack thinks, in the cave of her canopy bed.

Then, in his daughter’s bedroom, in the house that was no longer his, Jack realizes that there is no plan.

In the gathering dawn he bends quietly over the sleeping form and kisses her lightly on the cheek. Silently he removes the red felt-tip from his pocket and the Minnesota Twins baseball cap from his head and sets them atop her books. Turns. Hesitates. Returns and picks them up again. Noiselessly he backs out of the room, silently descends the stairs, lets himself silently out the door. He puts the Mustang in neutral and pushes it a block down the road before starting the engine. By 6:15 a.m. on April the 18th, Jack is out of Riverton.

At 8:15 he phones the department secretary asking her to cancel his day’s classes and let Kelly know he’ll be in touch by early evening. By mid-afternoon he is back on the farm, writing a brief letter to his daughter: “I couldn’t explain it in a hundred years, but just trust your father on this one. My departure from Busiris had nothing to do with statutory rape.”

Then Jack slept for a few hours. In the evening he phoned Kelly. He said merely that his daughter was having problems which had nothing to do with the divorce and he’d made a quick trip to Riverton. Kelly let the matter drop. She knew what Timm and Jenny meant to Jack, and besides, she had wisely decided to stay out of whatever went on down in Riverton. As a result of her ignorance, however, Kelly interpreted the growing split between Jack and Jenny more as a result of the divorce, and her relationship with Jack, than it might have been. Looking back in 1996, she voiced second thoughts. “I know Jack was trying to avoid anything that might make him look bad, or remind me of our age differences. And he always told me that what was going on between him and Jenny had nothing to do with us. Probably it was the right call. But maybe if he’d explained the whole situation, I would have blamed myself a little less.”

For the balance of 1990, and into 1991 and 1992, the whole situation was not good. Jenny never knew of Jack’s midnight ride. She shut Dennis McPhearson out of her life, but, afraid of what she might find, made no investigation of her father’s resignation. When Jack telephoned next, she made no mention of the incident. Her written response to his letter was a strained version of “I still love you.” Jack, who had formulated no answers, was more than happy to let it ride. Still, a new reserve had crept into Jenny’s telephone voice and into her relationship with her father. On his next visit, Jack noted that his daughter seemed to duck his fatherly hugs. Over the course of weeks and months, she was increasingly “busy” during his visits, “away” when he called.

Jack’s calls and visits became less frequent.

Jenny’s reassessment of her father was encouraged by the late eighties consciousness-raising talk at the high school warning women against predatory men and alerting them to the dangers of rape, assault, and harassment. She began to see in her debonair, fun-loving rogue of a father suggestions of the dangerous psychopath hysterical feminists and date-rape counselors like to portray lurking inside even the most innocuous looking dates, husbands, fathers, strangers, and guys next door.

“There was a poster my senior year at Central,” she told me, “one of those ‘When Does a Date Become a Rape?’ things—they were all over Bryn Mawr—with this gorgeous hunk of a fraternity guy on it, and all these inflated statistics about date rape and harassment underneath. I used to walk by it and think, ‘That guy looks like pictures of dad when he was younger.’ I couldn’t help making the connection, which was exactly what the people who made up the poster wanted you to do. ‘Any male you know could be a rapist,’ they tell you. Subtly it becomes ‘every male you know is a rapist.’ That’s probably what they want you to think too. Some radical feminists actually say that: all heterosexual intercourse is rape, so every heterosexual male is a rapist. It’s very insidious, I now realize. Lesbian propaganda. The posters and the talks did me a lot of harm, and it was years before I got my head straight. Sometimes I think that I still make that subconscious association between the guy on those posters and every other male I meet. If I were the victim type, or just somebody looking for quick cash, I think I’d have a good law suit—against whoever printed and posted those posters.”

Rose Marié, as ignorant of the entire episode as Kelly Ayers, sensed she had gained some mysterious edge which could be exploited, if not in the divorce court, at some future time. Disappointed at receiving only the house in Riverton with all its furnishings, half of Jack’s retirement, and forty-eight $1,200 alimony-child support payments, when the time came to select a college for Jenny, Rose elected to assert her advantage. “I certainly don’t want my daughter going to Wisconsin, near her father” she admitted to my wife.

“Madison is a good school. She’d get in-state tuition there.”

“She can get in-state tuition at Illinois. Besides, tuition is Jack’s problem. Let Mr. Moneybags worry about tuition. Or is he too broke paying for his little bed partner?”

Rose Marié made sure Jenny visited at least six different elite East Coast schools, including Radcliffe, Mt. Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Brown. “Dad said ‘nothing east of the Appalachians,’ ” Jenny told her mother.

“I’m sure he wants only the best for you. As do I,” Rose Marié assured her daughter.

Jack did, but Bryn Mawr was a large lump to swallow. Women’s Studies at Bryn Mawr was even larger.

Jack sent Jenny a copy of “Women’s Lib.: the Conservative Revolution.”

“You told Timm, if the good ones won’t do it, the assholes will,” she reminded him.

“I don’t think you’re going to be happy there,” Jack told Jenny on the telephone.

“You said it’s my call.”

“It’s your call,” Jack agreed.

“Songs of the North Country better get me a bunch of readings and talks,” he thought to himself. “Or another Pulitzer.”

Kelly Ayers said nothing.

On her eighteenth birthday, Jack sent Jenny $3,000 toward her first term’s tuition and another letter: