The Memoir of Arthur Lanning

By Jay Bynum

It is 1980 and American literati are trying to decide how to rank Faulkner, Hemingway, and Lanning. The first two are dead and Lanning is coming on strong, but Arthur Lanning is bad mannered in his arrogance and his insulation from his reading public. He claims to have been born in Richmond, but the newspapers research the claim and find nothing.
Suddenly he commits suicide above his isolated Sanctuary home in Idaho, and young Professor Zack Thohus is chosen to write his official biography. Thohus is a conscious Lanningphile; he frankly ranks Lanning ahead of Hemmingway. He is wondering, 6 months after the death, how he will be received at Sanctuary. He finds that it is solidly anti-Arthur. Beloved Ruth reveals her fifteen year marriage has never been consummated and, an early orphan, children had been her fondest hope.
Siley Alcott, the general factotum, agrees with friend Ruth in every way. None of Arthurs early promises to her have been fulfilled.
Zack, feeling himself a psychologic twin of Arthurs and something of a look-alike, is, of course, the central character. He knows something of the history of his own illegitimacy, and he has some of the same feelings Ruth has: a rich hunger for love, a thwarted parental need. He is falling in love with Ruth.
Ruths gynecologist thinks she may have two or three opportunities to become pregnant, and Ruths body temperature chart indicates she is starting ovulation. This is the second them of the novel: love is all there is of good sex, but sex is not all of love. Good sex is shared sex. (Divided sex: one for you, one for me, is not shared sex. Shared sex is this and we for us.) Rape is another planet: hate.
Well, if you are with me, the book ought to make it plain. Zack finds out that Arthur was a bloody bastard who didnt write all of the good books. And Ruth gets pregnant three times and the first one has hair in silver curls like Zack, and all of them are theirs.
In my books, the good guys with every time. Its the way my world is run. Amen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 11, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465330246

Jay Bynum

“In 1905, when cross-faith marriages were rare, my mother, daughter of a Baptist minister, married the grandson of a Catholic doctor. He’d finished and enlistment in the US Cavalry below Canada. I was the 8th of 9 children. We all went to one-room schools, helped on the family farm. I served 3 years in WWII, started college in San Francisco, finished a BA at UKC, an Med at KU, a PhD at UMKC, taught in France, Panama, Australia. Married a lovely Polish girl: we had 3 children, 6 bright grandchildren. I wrote Antic Creedoolies and Sallad Dayes. Never lived in Amherst.”

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Copyright © 2008 by Jay Bynum.

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Contents

Windfall:

The Apple Falls not Far

From the Tree

The Memoirs of

Arthur Lanning

World Acclaimed Author Lanning Dead of

Self-Inflicted Wound

Chronology of Lanning’s

Major works

Putting all of Lanning’s

ducks in a row:

The Definitive biography

Non-Senatorial

Encounter in a

Public Restroom

And Having Done That, Thou Hast Done, I Have No More

*Clio is the Muse of History

Catching Up With Clio*

Walter Landor: "Other Faces:

Pride, Envy, Malice

Are His Graces"

"Take Them Apart;

Put Him Together"

Not on the Menu

Chestnut Inn’s Portents

Sanctuary:

The Castle with

the Reverse Moats

Exit Pursued by a Bear

I Offer You Sanctuary

I Give You Full Rights

Love Is also Free-Willed

The White Hen and Aura Lea

The Navy Cross

Earnest Goals and Australia

Remembrance of a Different

Cup of Tea

Redressing at Redrock

The Odd Hybrid

Quality Control

Las Bandada

The Short Confession of

Diego McBride

Where the Effluent Swims Counterclockwise

‘Ghan to Hell

The Boongs’ NAS Car

Desert Death

Albert Unuru: Nigger Cowboy

A Short History of Sex

Windfall:

The Apple Falls not Far

From the Tree

TO: Mr. Chester A. Meade, President, Meade Publishers, Philadelphia, 2008.

In this report, (attached) memoirs is defined as the collected facts or witnessed events of the life of Arthur Amphion Lanning (optional from birth to death). It is supposed that presentation of these data—including any propositions, assumed or given, from which conclusions may be drawn—will enable the careful reader to determine Mr. Lanning’s influence on world literature, particularly, English literature, and on the lives of acquaintances in and out of literary circles. Some information was gathered from special sources as noted within.

When it became apparent to me that writing Mr. Lanning’s biography was no longer desirable—or even possible—I confided in Ms. Alcott and Mr. Baker. The former suggested that we invite Dr. Seminger to Sanctuary to help us recognize our options. I suggested the exclusion of Mrs. Lanning from our conference. Mrs. Lanning denied that alternative, and she and Otto Seminger were very valuable additions. Both championed truth in text, both advocated making this report totally available for novelization by the consensus author, and both supported Ms. Alcott’s refusal to write the novel. I remain available as a resource person to your firm and to any member of the Sanctuary conference. I appreciate the earlier trust you had in me and I hope it continues. Zachary Thohus, June, 2008.

The Memoirs of

Arthur Lanning

Arthur Lanning died June 14, 1983. His last published work was Absolution for an Ape, in 1981. It was well received by the reading public but earned less than lukewarm praise from critics. Dr. Otto Seminger, a foremost Lanning scholar, said It is very uneven with very good paragraphs that crackle with humor and psychological sense—the kind of writing that gave novel its name—eroded finally by paragraphs that are mean, ill-bred, bigoted. Dr. Thohus’ report was not published by Meade in 1988, or ever. Meade finally gathered the extant five copies used in the Sanctuary confluence. Agreeing with Dr. Thohus’ conclusions and following his definition of memoirs (above), I accepted his generous offer of the complete data in his Memoirs of Arthur Lanning. Thohus’ offer was affirmed by Meade, who (through Winthrop) had commissioned it). My own interviews with his special sources impressed me with his honesty and thoroughness. I don’t claim generation of his conclusions but I agree with them sufficiently to accept the responsibility of their becoming a part of this novel. JB, 2008.

When I Am Come to Know the Darkening Cave

(Title and first line of poem in Starfall, autobiography of A. Lanning)

(Lanning wrote Starfall in 1970; it won the Conroy award for biography that year. His autobiography was humorous, tragic, direct, well written, deserving of the Conroy. Permission to use this extract—and others throughout the novel—was granted by Meade Publishing Company and Lanning Estate.)

Starfall: I want to talk about death.

A long time ago when I was very young—as they are wont to say—I lived with my mother in rural Virginia. We were generally alone, and sometimes lonesome between my father’s furloughs. He was doing six more years on a cavalry retirement enlistment, helping the Sioux stay on the reservation in North Dakota. By marrying a career horse soldier, my mother spat in the face of dependence; she was a clenched-teeth woman who knew she could out-face any emergency. She’d look down at me from the corners of her eyes, not quite smiling, and say, I’ve got my ducks in a row.

Young as I was, I knew her motto had nothing to do with ducks—we had no ducks. We also had no geese, but she often said, A goose wakes into a new world every day. That was easy to figure out. The Warrens, who lived in the closest house on our RFD, had both ducks and geese. Most of them stayed near the Warrens’ big old pond, but once a day the whole flock would waddle up the woven-wire fence to the open gate into the new shoots of winter wheat where they would graze for hours, sometimes even surprising a late-living grasshopper which they would chase awkwardly across the little spears of wheat. When time to return to the pond came, they might still be a hundred yards up the fence. The geese would go directly to the fence and stick their heads through many squares between them and the pond, assuming that if they got their heads through the fence, their bodies and wings would follow. That was stupid.

The younger ducks would follow their old mama, rocking along in a row, to the open gate. They didn’t seem stupid to me—just dumb. I think what mother meant was she was just about as ready for an unlikely event as she could ever be, but I never knew how she got from those dumb ducks to the good sense of wariness and being prepared. I never asked. I had a notion that there were some things she couldn’t talk about.

Like every summer—when you’d want to keep the doors and windows open at night—there seemed to be at least two or three mad dog scares. Neighbors, if they had phones, would call other neighbors—if they had phones. Mother didn’t have a phone; the Warrens did. If they got an emergency phone call they’d run into the winter wheat field far enough for us to hear their shouts, and you would feel the fear in their voices and your hair would seem to stand straight up on the nape of your neck. I didn’t know electricity then—rural electricity didn’t become an option until after 1942—but that feeling in the hair on my neck was electric. Then I wanted to close the doors and windows and stack chairs and anything else I could move against the doors. But that wasn’t the worst part. I slept with mother until I was ten. Winter or summer, she’d take me to the privy before we went to bed, and she’d say as she got into bed, Don’t wake me up unless you have to. And I never did wake her, but oh, God! how badly I needed to. I’d go to sleep all right, but I would have a nightmare about a mad dog. Now, I still don’t know what a mad dog looks like, but I knew what my mad dog looked like: he’d be coming through the open window in our bedroom, he’d have bleached-white fangs 2-3 inches long with foam dropping off them and off his muzzle, and his eyes would be deep luminous red and they would be aimed at me.

There was a screen over the window and the porch was also screened and the screen doors were hooked. I knew mother kept a .32 revolver in her shoe just under the bed where she could reach it. But I would be wet—really wet—with sweat, scared to not wake her but also scared to wake her. I’d finally go back to sleep, but if I dreamed, it happened again. And sometimes three or four nights in a row, until the fear hazed over and finally retreated to the remotest niches in my mind. I suspect that it, like man’s obstinate dread of snakes, lurks somewhere within us, already coiled for striking, or, like the African cobra standing at its terrible height ready to spit death at us. Only, to me, it is not just death of humanness, but also death of the soul.

Maybe, like the fear of snakes, the fear of death is generic first, and then genetic, too. My mother, in all of her bravado, feared death, too, and it was a snake that undid her, a harmless little garden snake, a pea-green snake the color of the pea vines where it was wont to habituate, lurking there among the green vines to eat the pests that came to eat the vines. I was eight, and carried the stewpot for her while she picked the fat pea pods and dropped them under the bail of the pot. Father was already enroute home on his summer furlough and she wanted to have new potatoes and peas for his first dinner home. The snake must have dropped into the pot while I watched three crows herd a hawk to safety, glad to leave the rabbit we had startled from our garden. We finished and went into the kitchen, where I set the pot on the counter. We first spotted the snake when he raised his sleek head from his camouflage atop the pea pods. The kitchen, he decided, was not a likely snake haven and he looked for evidence of another.

Mother yelled, A God-damned snake! and she raced to the bedroom for her gun. The tiny serpent was frantic for egress and had just found the crack where the kitchen screen door hook had caught on the outside facing of the door. God-damned snake! she yelled again and took off his head with her first shot and divided him into three equal, still-writhing parts with her next two shots. Only then did her eyes close, and her head dropped, her shoulders shook, her trigger finger carefully avoiding the fourth shot. If he had found a mouse hole into the walls I would have burned the house. Find the dustpan and the broom and bury the snake back of the privy.

As I buried the snake I thought Mother thought she had shot her fear and had killed death but it didn’t seem likely that either one would long abide in that shallow hole behind the privy. Still shaken, she was lying on the bed when I got back, and it was obvious that her old enemies were still with her. And I knew where mine were.

And, roughly, when they would strike. It first came to me when I was walking barefoot across the stubble of the Warrens’ wheat field to ask Mr. Warren if he would take me and our car into Rocky Mount to wait for father’s train. Death would not come on a day like that early spring day: sunny, warm without being hot; no clouds in the sky. No. It would be a January day with dark clouds, huge as in pregnancy, scurrying across the sky, driven by an honest dagger wind, the ground frozen to resist pick and shovel. I had seen pictures of funerals in India, and that’s what I would have for my January funeral: a hot fire to burn the remains of my body. And it would come on either side of my fourth score of life.

The portents I read as I grew older affirmed that. It relieved me of some of the dread and my nightmares dwindled. When my mother died—early, I thought for her long-lived parents—the bad dreams came back. When a girl, I knew and liked, died—they said she had drowned herself—the dreams almost reasserted themselves in strangeness and fear. Now the need to fear myself was the strangest fear I knew. There was nowhere to turn. Father would not talk about it. The threats I can see are almost enough, he said.

My father, Sergeant Henry Arthur Lanning, was—may I say it?—an unusual person for an enlisted soldier on the still roiling American frontier of the early 1900s: studious, almost scholarly, quietly confident. He never drank, did not smoke. I have frequently thought that my birth may have been the only spontaneous event of his life—and he likely thought it was a near failure. There was a twenty-years gap in the ages of my parents: he was 10 years older than mother, and outlived her by ten years.

To him life was a series of equations: mathematical, psychological, logical, and he would have come close to smiling if he had thought of the niceties of their ages. His mind ran in ergos: mother was a forlorn woman in a world of masculine evil, ergo she must provide her own defense, ergo she needed an equalizer, ergo she must have a gun, ergo it must be light, powerful—well, he had the .32 made for her by the fort’s armorer, and he taught her how to shoot. Perhaps he even struck the ergos off in his mind if not on a wall-hung list. When he died—well past eighty—it was precisely like turning off a lamp after duty-day’s end. (I have her gun, yet. Besides genes, it’s about all I have of either. It seems to meld two verbs: intransitive and intransitive.

One night, doing deck-watch aboard the Hammann, a destroyer, somewhere in the West Pacific in WWII (who the hell would know where a ship was at night during a war—maybe the Captain, the guys on radar and radio, the helmsman?) I wrote a poem about him. I called it

prophecy

(There was a slight depression where his stone lay

Broken, with only this, the name worn away.)

He lived in the ordered seasons of his mind

With a sense to leave the others to the sun.

His appointed ease he took with few or none,

Left the cheerful deaf to lead the orate blind.

No other’s creed was his, and his was just this:

To go along, when he could, with each days’ turn,

And let the others—days and men—char and burn;

At smoke or moan to refuse to see or list.

To forbear to pile up sticks or lay up stone;

To find the natural gate, nor seek for keys,

To see his numbered days had finally turned—

The very pith of life had withered and burned;

Forgo, then, prolongation of prayer: to cease,

To shun the crowd, to go as he came, alone.

(It was his notion to go toward light or night

And—this above all—to do it quick and quiet.)

Between watch and the sack, I drew a broken monument around the poem, scribbled below it: My poem owes nothing to Ozymandias: we don’t know Shelley’s subject even if we know his name. Call my subject Everyman: we don’t know his name even if he’s my father. All of us have fits of doubt; they test our faith, and we cope with them but we don’t love them.

World Acclaimed Author Lanning Dead of

Self-Inflicted Wound

Eriston, June 14, 1983—Arthur Amphion Lanning, one of America’s most respected writers, died last night in an Eriston hospital, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Lanning, seriously wounded, was discovered at 9:30 P.M. last night by Ruth Lanning, his wife of 17 years, said a spokesperson for the Christian County sheriff’s office.

Park rangers and paramedics went four miles into the Snowmass Canyon wilderness area to bring Lanning out on a litter jeep. At Sanctuary, Lanning’s mountain retreat, he was transferred to an ambulance helicopter and surgeons began emergency operations in an attempt to save his life.

He is said to have suffered massive brain damage and critical loss of blood. He died at 10:47 P.M. in Mountain Medical Center as doctors tried to repair damage to his left carotid artery, one of two critically important blood vessels to the brain.

Officials refused to discuss the circumstances of his death other than saying the wound was probably self-inflicted and occurred at one of his favorite spots miles above his home. Law officials would not speculate about possible causes of the gunshot. They would say only that the wound was from a gunshot. He never regained consciousness. There will be an autopsy.

There was at least a suggestion that Lanning’s life might have been saved had the ambulance helicopter been immediately dispatched to transport him from the wilderness area. The craft did not become available until a medical team had returned from a complicated birth on the remote Ciel de Oro Reservation. Ironically, the helicopter’s purchase and maintenance had been funded by Lanning.

Nonsense, said a hospital staff member who requested anonymity. We could not have saved his life had he shot himself on the operating table. Most of the trauma to the brain was caused by the massive shock in the brain area.

Mrs. Lanning is in seclusion at the family home in the barely accessible area above Snowmass Canyon. Esilas Alcott, Lanning’s secretary, said Mrs. Lanning, the beloved Ruth of Lanning’s prose, would have no statement. Alcott said plans for burial and memorials were incomplete. The author had often expressed through his writing a desire to be cremated at death.

Lanning has been internationally acclaimed as one of the great figures in modern English literature. He produced ten novels, three volumes of short stories, a few poems, and many essays. Starfall, his autobiography published in 1970, was a record-setting best seller here and abroad.

He won many literary awards, among them the Conroy prize for fiction in 1964 for Conquer and Fortify, and for biography in 1970 for Starfall. In 1954 he was awarded the Nash Medal-Grant, the coveted international prize for literature for Wall the City.

Lanning, 63, claimed to having been born April 2, l920 in a rural Virginia home near Richmond. The sparse facts of his birth and his parentage frequently disagree. Even researched Navy records about his enlistment and service are uncertain. Both parents, he admitted, preceded him in death. He had no other relatives and massive efforts to connect his threads of existence to contemporary Lanning families has failed. He frequently said his childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia was responsible for his abiding love of mountains and wilderness areas and for his reluctance for publicity despite his highly visible lifestyle.

He was a desultory school-goer and a poor student, a high school dropout, who ran away from home at sixteen and joined the merchant marines. His personal history has all the credence of cultural myth. A veteran of World War II, he served aboard a destroyer in the Pacific for almost four years. From that point forward his personal saga is verifiable

Following discharge from the service, Lanning qualified for college entrance and enrolled at Colony College in Massachusetts. He completed degree requirements in literature in 1949 but was never graduated. His oft-repeated favorite irony was Mrs. Lanning’s being graduated from Colony, magna cum laude, ten years after his departure.

Mrs. Lanning is the former Ruth Priyont of Stonefort, Illinois. They had no children and she is his sole survivor. His death came on the anniversary of their marriage.

Lanning and Ernest Hemingway had often been grouped literarily as macho high rollers who roved the world seeking adventure and ideas. Both survived serious plane crashes, Hemingway in Africa, and Lanning near Alice Spring, Australia in 1970. There is an obvious similarity of deaths: Hemingway was a suicide 22 years earlier. Lanning is generally rated ahead of Hemingway by literary critics. His masterpiece, Wall the City, is sometimes called the best American novel.

Expressions of loss, to Mrs. Lanning and the literate public, have been made by world leaders, critics, and artists from around the world. In a phone conversation of condolence to Mrs. Lanning, President Ronald Reagan said, His loss was almost as shocking as losing a star from the flag, such was his importance to this society, this age.

Chester A. Meade, founder of the company which publishes Lanning’s books, in an early morning interview, said, Starfall, indeed.

With Lanning’s untimely death, we may have lost what we would have lost if Shakespeare had died just after having written Julius Caesar, said Dr. Otto Seminger, professor, critic, and Lanningphile.

Chronology of Lanning’s

Major works

1947-1948 : Sa Ovi Hoc, poetry

Some lesser prose pieces

1949: Alpha Zed, short stories

Five novels:

1950: Ad Mort Per Asper

1951: Incredible Circles

1953: Wall the City

1956: The Charming Lyre

1958: Salad Days

Two volumes of short stories:

1959: All the Little Apple Trees

The Center of the Circle Is Everywhere

Five Novels:

1960: Seas Incarnadine

1961: Naughty Worlds

1964: Conquer and Fortify

1966: The Faults of Stars

1971: Absolution for an Ape

1965: Apollo and Diana, essays

1970: Starfall, autobiography

Begun 1971: Celluloid River, unfinished novel

Putting all of Lanning’s

ducks in a row:

The Definitive biography

Like almost everyone else, Thohus was three or four people—probably all of them males. The first and youngest was Zee. When he was beginning to talk, his first name gave him a great deal of trouble. At first it sounded like /uh/; it was his mother’s fault. She didn’t baby talk to him: his name was Zachary and she pronounced it that way, with the voiced sibilant and the vowel schwa, etc. He found his way to the /e/. Then on her model he invented the unvoiced sibilant and his name became almost zee. He got pretty good at saying it: just screech the vowel and flap his tongue in his open mouth. He almost trained his mother, but she was pretty stubborn and hung in there. From first grade on, the Zee began to lose ground to Zack. For one thing, wider social contacts: most importantly, classmates and teachers, and other adults who wandered into the process that was making him a social creature, people like grocery clerks with candy samples, barbers who cut his hair, baby sitters, crossing guards, but never a father. He, of course, was still fond of Zee and would be for the rest of his life. He might fall on the third stair step and roll down, and run to his mother, crying Zee hurt arm right there. She’d kneel, examine his wound; if blood showed, the arm deserved a Mother Goose band aid. If it was worse than that, she’d pull him onto her lap in a kitchen chair and rock him. She was being a good mother and he liked that.

But it was Zack that made him a boy. The brusqueness of the name sounded like king of the hill, sharp as a tack, black eye, smack. It inclined him to go out for Mighty Mite FB but Zee talked him out of it. He was slim and tall, well coordinated, looked good in short BB trunks so he went out for basketball, and starred through junior high and high school. And it was Zack who had sex twice with Mary Ann Ryan. (It would have been three times except that Mary Ann’s parents got halfway to the movies when Mrs. Ryan discovered that she had forgotten her purse. Returning, she came in unannounced and found her daughter and friend in flagrante delicto on the rug behind the couch when Zack should have been helping her catch up on her math homework. Luckily, Mr. Ryan, he of the infamous temper, had waited in the car out front. Mrs. Ryan, remembering her own severely restricted youth, made an immediate deal: Mary Ann would find the purse while Mrs. Ryan let Zack out the back door to the alley, and Mary Ann would go to the movie with them. Naturally, Zack was disinvited to the Ryan home forever more, and Mary Ann suddenly wanted to enroll in Convent Gardens Girls School.) Zack had sex one more time in high school, but he wasn’t obnoxious and nobody was keeping score.

He went, as Zack, to college at Cincinnati and was surprised twice by Zachary: how much it had gained on Zack generally and how more often he thought of himself as Zachary. He put it down to the development of dignity and manners in him and his classmates. Oddly some still called him Zee; they were always only-children females, who still loved their fathers and feared their mothers were becoming alcoholic. He avoided them. Most of the guys called him Zack; so did most of the girls. He did a Masters at Cincinnati, too. Graduate school was a whole new education. The girls who were closer to Masters degrees called him Zachary. Zach thought they had just gone through decision and were opting for professional careers and, of course, doctorates. He gave one such girl a ride across campus on a cold, rainy day. When he let her out she said, Thanks, Zack. He watched her climb the steps to Ballington and liked the way she moved her gear. She turned at the top and waved. He smiled, ducked his head, and saw her gloves where she had sat. She was auctioning—going both ways. When he put her gloves into a campus-mail envelope he first kissed both palms but put in no notes.

He took the Graduate Record Examination and went out the top—scored so high the exam was no longer testing him. Dr. Hugh Denning, his advisor, a young assistant professor in the graduate program, was as proud as a new father of triplets. He was also high on the doctoral program at Toledo, his alma mater. You know, Zack, if you’ll apply for a teaching fellowship at Jones Junior High, I’ll write my old buddy, Dean Spear, and personally guarantee you’ll get the best deal anybody’s gotten anywhere. What do you say?

I think I’m supposed to say thank you, Dr. Denning, but what’s this business about Jones Junior High?

Denning laughed. You were born in Ohio and don’t know ‘Three cheers for Jones Junior High, It’s the best junior high in Toledo. It’s colors are black and white: White for courage and black for fight, fight, fight.’ Oh, well, maybe you’ll learn about it when you get there.

If it was Zack for Denning, it was Zack for the other Masters petitioners, and Thohus for the graduate English faculty. But when the letter from Dean Spear inviting Zack to accept a teaching fellowship at Toledo came, it began Dear Zachary. Zack was pleased. Dean Spear’s first greeting to him was "How’s that rapscallion Denning doing at Cincinnati?" The dean did say rapscallion, and that made Thohus unreasonably envious. Dean Spear taught him so many things: that Denning still had the highest GRE scores in Jones Junior High and, most important, to "Keep an eye on that young fellow Lanning who just wrote Wall the City. Don’t know him but it’s damned nearly as good as Light in August."

Near the end of Zack’s first semester at Toledo, Dean Spear sent for him. He leaned over his desk working industriously at the dottle in his meerschaum pipe, the recognized coat of arms of his deanship. This stuff, he tapped the pipe gently with his reamer-knife, used to float ashore in the three seas between Europe and Asia. He looked up suddenly to see if Zack understood his geography. Zack smiled and nodded. The dean returned to his cleaning. It’s about as dense as water and the lighter pieces floated. The Christians thought it was mortified sea foam. He looked at Zack and smiled widely at his own humor. "Actually, meerschaum is hydrous magnesium silicate. Sepiolite, he said, satisfied, and tapped the rest of the ash out on a paper towel spread on his desk. He wadded the paper about the ash and dropping it into his trash bin, began to tamp tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. Got it filled just right, lit it with a flick of a horizontal lighter, sighed, puffed. Thohus thought he detected maple and rum; it smelled good enough to eat. The pipe was a shiny dark brown and had probably been waxed a hundred times. Reading Thohus’ mind, the dean, showing his masterpiece as proudly as Prado its Maja nude, held the pipe up and said, This pipe was carved in Vienna. He puffed and looked at Thohus keenly. Zachary, he said, you need two things. We know you are very bright, and my reporters say you are a great