“Oh, my God! You’re wearing your bowling shoes,” Ignatius cast a pink and blue and yellow eye over the side of the bed down past his mother’s hanging slip and drooping cotton stockings. “Only you would wear bowling shoes to your child’s sick bed.”
But his mother did not rise to the challenge. She had the determination, the superiority that comes with intense anger. Her eyes were steely, her lips thin and firm.
Everything was going wrong.
. . .
Dr. Talc had had them both in separate classes one grim semester, during which they had disrupted his lectures with strange noises and impertinent, venomous questions that no one, aside from God, could possibly have answered. He shuddered. In spite of everything, I he must reach Reilly and extract an explanation and confession. One look at Mr. Reilly and the students would understand that the note was the meaningless fantasy of a sick mind. He could even let the administration look at Mr. Reilly. The solution was, after all, really a physical one: producing Mr. Reilly in the abundant flesh.
Dr. Talc sipped the vodka and V-8 juice that he always had after a night of heavy social drinking and looked at his newspaper. At least the people in the Quarter were having rowdy fun. He sipped his drink, and remembered the incident of Mr. Reilly’s dumping all of those examination papers on the heads of that freshman demonstration beneath the windows of the faculty office building. The administration would remember it, too. He smiled complacently and looked at the paper again. The three photographs were hilarious. Common, bawdy people — at a distance — had always I amused him. He read the article and choked, spitting liquid onto his smoking jacket.
How had Reilly ever sunk so low? He had been eccentric as a student, but now…. How much worse the rumors would be if it were discovered that the note had been written by a hot dog vendor. Reilly was the sort who would come to the campus with his wagon and try to sell hot dogs right before the Social Studies Building. He would deliberately turn the affair into a three-ring circus. It would be a disgraceful farce in which he, Talc, would become the clown.
Dr. Talc put down his paper and his glass and covered his face with his hands. He would have to live with that note. He would deny everything.
manwithoutqualities 