“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t.”
Nick got up. “I hope I’ve been some help,” he said. “You don’t know how much I’ve enjoyed having you here. I’m still amazed that I ever got to meet you. I hope you’ll drop by before you leave.”
“Maybe I will,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Nick walked back out to the big front room, nodded to the sullen woman at her computer, and made his way to the street. Sometimes he wished he had gone about living his life another way, that he had understood what Oral Roberts University was, or that after he’d graduated he’d made his way to someplace bigger, more exciting, more full of possibilities for the realization of ambition. On days like today, however, he had no doubts. There were very few men in the world lucky enough to make a significant difference in the lives of other people, and he was one of those men. There were few shacks in the hills these days, at least around here, and they sometimes went four or five months without the police being called in to break up a “domestic dispute.” He had ten-year-olds in his religion class who could read their way through Martin Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian and explain what it meant. He had more who could identify Plato and Aristotle and Gandhi and Leonardo da Vinci.
Nick couldn’t remember when he had first realized what was going on out there, something that had to do with books but, more important, had to do with minds. People had lived and died in the world who thought about all the same things he thought about, who wanted to understand what it meant to be a human being and how to be a good one, who looked at the manifest tragedy of human existence and turned it into El Greco’s Crucifixion and Dante’s Divinia Comedia. It was a seven-thousand-year-old conversation, a way of talking to the dead and having them talk back to you, and everything was better when you were a part of it. Even pain and suffering were better.
He walked back down Main Street to the church, only half realizing that he’d come out without his coat, again. They would build a high school soon, and Nick had already planned its curriculum. It would be a Great Books curriculum, and it would include all the books that mattered, the pagan ones and the Christian ones and the beautiful ones and the ugly ones. He would take these children of moonshine artists and grandchildren of coal miners, these one-step-away-from-going-barefoot-to-a-backyard-privy teenagers, and turn them into the next generation of American scholars. They would not be scholars in the new sense, holed up in universities and writing endless articles about the place of food in the novels of Jane Austen. They would be scholars the way John Adams had been a scholar, and Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. They would be men and women who lived in the Great Tradition the way fish lived in water.
It was a good thing he had come home to stay. Nicodemus Frapp did not experience the world as purposeless or random. He felt the meaning of it in his bones. The meaning of it for him was this, and he came back and back and back to the fact that he could never have been as happy as this doing anything else.
3
Catherine Marbedale was tired. She was tired in the ordinary sense, because it had been a bad day, and it was going to get worse. The student protestors were out of her office now, and the microphone was back in the hands of the people it belonged to, but there had been news cameras up here and not only local ones. The trial was going to start in a matter of days, and everybody was here, everybody wanted a chance to show the world what a backwards hillbilly place Snow Hill was. There were going to be protests. The parents from town would demand to know how she dared to try to stop their children from praying. The parents from the development would demand to know how she dared to let those other students “marginalize” their children by putting on a sectarian religious display. It went around and round and round, and next year it would go around again, and that’s why she was tired in the other way.
It hadn’t been what she’d wanted for herself, all those years ago. She hadn’t imagined that she would take a job in some godforsaken small town and then just sit there, year after year, getting older and grayer and weaker in the process. For a while she thought it would be enough as long as she and Margaret got away to Europe for the summers. They could walk through Florence and Madrid and Athens and see the art and talk about books. It was almost as if they were children again. Catherine Marbledale remembered her childhood. She remembered going to the library with Margaret and taking out all the best books, Anna Karenina and David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice and For Whom the Bell Tolls. She didn’t know how long it was before she discovered that you weren’t supposed to read like that, jumping around among the different time frames, paying no attention to literary history. She didn’t care. It was the best way to read, and she hadn’t read that way in many years.