Free My Dearest Friend by Nancy Thayer Page A

“Well, I thought it might make me more … accessible to the students.”
    “I believe the point of college is to raise the students to our level, not to sink to theirs,” Hudson said.
    Jack looked at Hudson. Hudson looked levelly back at Jack. When Jack had been an undergraduate at Westhampton in the seventies, he had admired the hell out of Hudson. No, he had worshiped Hudson. He had wanted to
be
Hudson. One of the main reasons he had wanted to teach at Westhampton College was Hudson Jennings.
    “Would you like me to remove it?” Jack asked, letting his bafflement show on his face, trying to say in that way: I didn’t realize you’d gotten so inflexible.
    “I think so, yes,” Hudson said, smiling now. (Was he amused by Jack?) “By the way, I dropped by to tell you that we hope we’ll see you and your charming wife at the faculty picnic next Friday evening. At the faculty club. It will be a cookout unless it rains.”
    “Great!” Jack said. “We’ll be there. I know Carey Ann’s eager to meet some of the other wives.”
    Hudson went on down the hall then, and now here Jack was, driving home with Prince and his motorcycle jammed in the backseat of his car. He felt that Hudson had been uptight and dictatorial and that he himself had been a wimp. Prince wouldn’t have given in to Hudson so fast. But what could he have done? Jumped up and poured out his soul? “Well, you see, sir, I think this big stand-up of Prince that few other people have kind of helps out my
image;
it’s sort of like my mascot, especially now that I have to teach this neoclassic crap, which is so cut-and-dried. Jesus Christ, Alexander Pope! Prince has more
poetry
in his left sideburn than all of the neoclassicists put together. Butyou’ve hired me to teach the stuff, and I will, and I’ll do a good job of it. I’ll lie about it and pretend I like it, but God, at least let me let my students know that I’m not like that, that I’m modern, alive, I don’t like a cold, closed, rigid literature.”
    Well, of course he couldn’t have said all that. But perhaps he should have tried harder. Not given in so easily. Saying what? “If you’ll look closely, sir, you’ll see that Prince’s clothing is not unlike the clothing of the lords and bards of the neoclassic age. My instincts are that when my students see this cutout, they will
subconsciously
become more receptive to the work of the eighteenth century because it will be linked in their minds with this ‘poet’ of the twentieth century.” That would have been good, that sounded pretty reasonable, he should have tried that. After all, what if Hudson had only been testing him to see how much of a yes-man he was, or if he had the guts to stand up for what was right?
    He was getting paranoid. Hudson wasn’t doing that. Hudson hated that stand-up of Prince; it was as simple as that. Now Jack didn’t know where he’d put it. He wanted it somewhere visible to him daily, as an antidote to his life, which was so bound up by rules.
    Oh, God, how awful, to be thirty-one and already as stuck in life as if both feet were sunk in cement! He couldn’t change now, he couldn’t take risks now; he had a family to support. Although that was not fair, not fair to Carey Ann and Alexandra; he hadn’t been an adventurer before marriage; he’d never been an adventurer at all. He had always been so
careful
that, looking back, he saw that he had been just short of cowardly. It was his parents’ fault, probably (he loved both his parents and knew if he accused them of this, they’d agree): they had been happy, in a mundane way (although, a voice in the back of his mind argued, don’t you know enough by now to know that happiness is never mundane?). They were both college professors in Boston—his father taught English literature, his mother taught in the history department. They had married just out of college and had two children, a boy and a girl, and their lives had been neatly packaged and