Professor Wyckhuis would stand at the front of the classroom and lecture, his gaunt face tilted to the podium, his bare scalp growing red with fervor. He\u2019d occasionally whirl toward the board behind him and scribble out etymologies, the chalk popping and splintering in his hand.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
After class I\u2019d join him for coffee in the Union. He would smoke cigarettes and touch his stout mustache and gently answer my questions about the Platonists and the Church Fathers, or describe his own scholarly projects: translations of commentaries by obscure saints and monks and mystics.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I once confessed to him that I was given to daydreaming, to making stories, and he, in a typically tender gesture, proposed that I might think of it as prayer and submit gratefully to it. We were walking beneath the trees of the quad, and he explained that the imagination might be exercised to understand our fears, and delight in the works of God, and grieve for our sins.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cThen,\u201d he said, \u201cif our devotion is deepened, and our minds not scattered, we may be called to the contemplative life.\u201d He bowed his head and briefly closed his eyes to recite the words of\u2014he later told me\u2014a French parish priest, speaking so softly that I had to lean toward him. \u201cThe interior life is like a sea of love, in which the soul is plunged, and is drowned in love.\u201d And then he opened his eyes and looked at me. \u201cJust as a mother holds her child\u2019s face in her hands to cover it with kisses, so does God hold the devout man.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The story was that he\u2019d left the priesthood in order to marry, his eyes still wetting with emotion whenever he\u2019d speak of his wife, an elementary school teacher from Missouri, who\u2019d passed from this earth twenty years before.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And there was also a competing and more dramatic story, that his wife had been a French girl, whom he\u2019d impregnated when she was still at the lyc\u00e9e. It was then that he\u2019d left the Church and married, and it was shortly afterwards that she and the baby died, the new bride hemorrhaging during childbirth, the infant\u2019s neck bound with the umbilical cord.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If true, did he blame himself for the deaths of the schoolteacher or the French girl and the innocent child for whom he\u2019d given up God, and whom God, in a show of spite and bile, cast to dust?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A reckless undergraduate was said to have mentioned the rumors to him, and he was reported to have smiled and said, \u201cCharming,\u201d and then, touching the student\u2019s sleeve, \u201cIt is of course always easier to love the dead than the living.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He once admitted to me that he\u2019d stopped on the way home from campus the night before to buy a copy of Playboy<\/em>. \u201cI was angry,\u201d he said, nodding his head. \u201cI was very angry with God.\u201d He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray upon the cafeteria table. \u201cSo then,\u201d he said, his jaw thrust forward, and he shook his fist in the air.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Once, late at night, Greta and I were leaving a party at a house just off campus, and we saw him walking slowly along the dim sidewalk across the street, in the direction of his own house, two or three blocks away. Twice he stumbled, the second time falling to his knees.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cOh, Joe,\u201d Greta said, and we started toward him, but one of the hosts of the party, a graduate student, who was standing on the lawn and talking to some girls, said, \u201cI\u2019ll get him,\u201d and trotted across the street, helped him up, and then, his arm around the old professor\u2019s shoulder, escorted him home.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There was a small memorial service for Professor Wyckhuis in January of my senior year. His body had already been flown to Antwerp, where a lone surviving brother was to bury him. As Greta and I stood in the dim chapel near campus, I felt thin and frightened, as if I\u2019d been scooped out.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cJoe?\u201d I could hear Greta\u2019s whisper at my shoulder, feel her hand on my arm.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Later, outside in the glare of the winter sun, she told me that I\u2019d begun to whine, a sound so slight and high pitched that she at first become aware of it only at the breaking of her own breath.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When he heard I was engaged, Professor Wyckhuis told me not to enter into marriage easily. He said that only those who\u2019ve never been married or are destined for divorce think that they\u2019ll not tolerate woundings or pain. I could smell tobacco on his sweater as he sat near me, clenching his hands. \u201cIt is like faith,\u201d he said. \u201cSome do not understand the necessary agony<\/em> of the relationship with God, and so their faith . . . ,\u201d and he suddenly splayed his fingers, like an object scattering.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n His brother had directed that his personal property be given away or destroyed. And so in rounds\u2014faculty colleagues, graduate students, and then undergraduates\u2014we strolled through his house\u2014polite shoppers at an abandoned flea market\u2014bending to examine books, peering into dark closets, smoky with old sweaters, glancing at the chipped china in the kitchen, looking for something to take with us.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Everyone stepped softly past the bathroom. Devil\u2019s madness.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The walls in the living room and bedroom were yellowed and bare, the dresser and table tops white with dust. I stood before his narrow bed and picked up from the pillow his glasses, the gold spindly frames, the lenses smudged, the nose pads mossy with oil and skin.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And then my face began to ache, as if I\u2019d been struck, and I left his house without taking anything.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n During the time that I knew him, Professor Wyckhuis battled insomnia. We rarely spoke about it, but I\u2019d sometimes notice a weary edginess as we had coffee, as he answered my questions, sometimes struggling to recall a name or find a word.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cHave you seen a doctor?\u201d I would ask.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cYes, yes,\u201c he would say, nodding, and he\u2019d shrug. \u201cBut it is the cigarettes, I think.\u201d Or he\u2019d simply smile and recall the words of some medieval monk. \u201cSuffering is short pain and long joy,\u201d he\u2019d say.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Once, during the fall of my senior year, he stopped me on the quad and gave me a copy of his latest book, a translation of The Cloud of Unknowing<\/em>. He offered it to me and then bowed. \u201cA gift,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On the title page he had written, in his small, cramped hand, \u201cTo Joseph, Thank you for your spiritual help in the past. I wish you the best always: Deus providebit<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When Greta became pregnant, she and I would walk the small Kansas town to which we\u2019d moved, out to a graveyard on its north edge, five flat acres in a pocket of mulberry trees. It was there that we decided upon the name Hannah. We\u2019d been taken with the tall and graceful headstone of a woman named Hannah Jane Flax, who was born in 1859 and died in 1947, and who was surrounded by family members, some\u2014a husband, two children, and a grandchild\u2014preceding her there, all now lying peacefully beneath blizzards and droughts, removed from the welter of the world. Greta saw her in those terms\u2014a life lived deeply and then the serene and slow re-absorption into the earth. I tried to reckon the anger and the grief of those left living, that which had been loosed over the years on these few acres, the weight of accumulated mourning, still, surely, in the air, the damp of it on our skin.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I labor at forgiveness, thinking of Professor Wyckhuis\u2019s instruction, his quoting of Francis of Paola, that the recollection of injury adds to our anger and nurtures our sin. \u201cIt is,\u201d he said, touching his breast, \u201ca rusty arrow and poison for the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He once told me that Qoheleth, delivering one of most brutally honest books in the Bible, revealed that traditional wisdom has failed, that we can\u2019t know God, that we lack control, and that life is short and death certain. \u201cHowever,\u201d he said, crouching, bending close to the surface of the cafeteria table, his fingers poised as if to pluck from it a crumb of bread, \u201cjoy can still come to us in small portions.\u201d And he looked up at me and smiled. \u201cWe need to be attentive.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The story was that Professor Wyckhuis\u2019s landlady found him dead in his bathtub, three days after Christmas. In the wastebasket were, supposedly, empty bottles of lorazepam and Tylenol and a spent blister pack of Sudafed. On the bath mat was a half-full three liter bottle of Rosso di Montalcino. His wine glass wavered on the bottom of the tub, between his legs, beneath the skin of cold water.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The story was that at the beginning of his last final exam in December, he wrote upon the board, Faith is the agent of things un-hoped for, as the thief proved.<\/em>\u00a0And the students laughed, and he winked and wished them luck, and left the room, and the building, a graduate student arriving to proctor and pick up papers. And no one on campus ever saw him again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I once confessed to him that I was given to daydreaming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5174,"template":"","categories":[9,48,49],"tags":[854,1036,1443,203,1444,1445,1446,1447,1448,223],"class_list":["post-5140","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-fiction","category-literary-features","tag-aging","tag-catholicism","tag-college-professors","tag-grief","tag-higher-education","tag-mark-walters","tag-priests","tag-professor-wyckhuis","tag-religious-education","tag-suicide"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n