Reunion. Therese Fowler

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       Chapter Three

      Outside Mitch Forrester’s Chapel Hill office window, the trees were a green haze of new leaves, the only real color on this gray, rainy morning. Spring weather had a solid hold on North Carolina, as was evident by the number of students who’d been showing up to class in shorts and flip-flops this last week before spring break. It was scheduled late this year, so they were more than ready. Today would be a mess of dripping plastic ponchos and wet umbrellas, slick floors and poorly attended classes.

      An oak tree’s branches brushed his second-floor window. He’d been startled more than once by scratching sounds, nights he’d sat here on an old slip-covered couch reading journals or grading essays, nights when he’d thought all was calm outside. Shut away in the English department, he’d be unaware of the storm rolling in until the wind began rising, the trees swaying like so many lithe dancers in one of those troupes his ex-wife Angie had liked dragging him to see. Now he saw the rain stream off the tiny narrow leaves without paying it much attention, as what he was hearing on the telephone preoccupied him.

      “Let me see if I understand correctly,” he said, returning to his desk. It was piled with scholarly books whose pages had long since yellowed, books with cracked spines and worn corners, and opinions, within their pages, that were hardly credited anymore. By contrast, Dr Seuss’s The Sleep Book was face-up with a note stuck to the front, reminding him to bring it for this afternoon’s tutoring session with a third-grader named Chris; after hearing Mitch’s story of how his son Julian had loved the book when he was a boy, Chris had grudgingly agreed to try reading it himself. A potted purple orchid with a name Mitch could never remember sat atop four copies of his most recent publication, a slim book that considered the role of women in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction. The legendary author hadn’t been too successful with women, a problem Mitch unfortunately shared.

      He said, “I’ll need some sort of filming permit from the city along with whatever I arrange directly with you folks there at the Hemingway Home, yes?”

      The man on the other end of the phone call, a volunteer with a gravelly voice, said yes, he believed so. However, he said, September was thick into hurricane season and if Mitch came then, he was taking his chances.

      “I know—my parents live there in Key West. But I appreciate your advice. Unfortunately, I’m working against a number of factors, one of which is my, er, crew’s availability, and my own. I only have the fall semester to pull this project together. As I said, I’ll be down tomorrow and hope to start getting things in order. Can you give me the name of the person to contact about permits?” When he had the information jotted in his date book, he thanked the man and hung up.

      Literary Lions, his under-construction biopic series about classic American authors, had seemed uncomplicated when he’d first come up with the concept, which he envisioned as ideal for public television. The money he might earn was likely to be modest—but as a tenured professor, he was doing fine. And as Julian had reminded him recently, he already had a lot more of everything—time, money, security, opportunity—than most of the world’s citizens. Mitch had admitted this was true, and said, “Now do we sing a chorus of ‘We Are The World’?” It was a nervous tic of a joke, he knew it even as the words left his mouth. Julian had been generous about it, though, saying, “Sure, Dad—you start.”

      Mitch propped his feet on his desk and leaned back. His old leather chair squealed with the motion, testifying that, secure as a professor’s job was, there were no luxuries in the academe. If he could make Lions fly—the image made him chuckle—he would reward himself with a new chair.

      That “if ” was a big one, however, and “uncomplicated” was proving to be a bit enthusiastic. To begin with, writing the script for the first episode, the “pilot,” as it was called, had been more challenging than he’d anticipated. He’d imagined it as something like prepping a lecture for twenty students. However, a few torturous nights of script writing had proven that a low-stakes lecture was nothing like crafting an entertaining and informative hour-long program for a million viewers, all armed with remote controls. Okay, maybe a million was a little zealous, to start. Thousands, though—surely he could count on thousands.

      The script was coming along.

      Overcoming his anxiety about inviting Julian to direct and film the pilot had been difficult too. He’d had to face the fourteen-year-wide chasm in their relationship, which had been only minimally bridged when they were together at the hospital in Miami last fall after Mitch’s father had a stroke.

      Without the usual buffer of his parents and an occasion like Christmas or graduation, it had been hard to know how to greet Julian. He’d wanted to hug him, something he hadn’t done since Julian was a pre-adolescent, but sensed the desire wasn’t mutual. He patted his shoulder instead.

      “Dad’s going to be all right,” he said, “but it’s good that you could get here.” Julian had been at the beginning of his Afghanistan assignment then. “How are things?”

      “Busy. You?”

      “Oh, fine—busy.” He searched for something more to say as the silence dragged out. Then, inspired, he’d blurted, “Hey, one of my grad students is a portrait photographer on the side.”

      “Yeah?”

      “I thought you’d find that interesting. A lit major who’s also a photographer.” He knew he was trying too hard, knew his eagerness would be plain on his face. He was one of those people whose expressions translated every thought, every emotion as it happened.

      But Julian wasn’t looking at him. “Sure, interesting,” he’d said.

      “So … are you getting a lot of work?”

      Julian nodded. “Too much.”

      Julian was making a name for himself documenting human tragedies, people who were victims of governments, of bureaucracy and neglect. That day, Mitch had stood there next to his mature, experienced, world-traveler son and for the first time felt just slightly lesser in comparison. A strange feeling—chagrin and pride and envy, none of which had any place in a Miami hospital ICU ward when a man they loved was lying ill a dozen feet away—and yet there it was.

      “Good that you could get here,” he’d said again.

      Before he found the nerve to call Julian a few weeks later, to ask for his help with Lions, he’d tried to anticipate all possible objections. There was Julian’s lack of interest in the subject matter—Hemingway, Julian had declared once during a Thanksgiving dinner at Mitch’s parents’ СКАЧАТЬ