That Day the Rabbi Left Town Read Free Page B

meeting, at the start of the Summer Session, that Mordecai Jacobs was informed by Professor Sugrue, the head of the English Department, that he had been granted tenure with the accompanying raise in rank from assistant to associate professor. As a result, he felt he could now propose to Clara Lerner.
    Later, in the faculty cafeteria, he saw Professor Roger Fine, the other Jewish member of the English Department, and told him the good news. “I suppose Thorvald Miller was also promoted,” he added.
    Fine shook his head. “Nah, not likely.”
    â€œWhy not? He came here about the same time I did.”
    â€œIt used to be that way: if you were hired the third year, you got tenure. Nowadays, it’s a matter of scholarship and publication. You’ve had a couple of papers published—”
    â€œThree.”
    â€œAll right, three. That’s pretty darn good, and they’ve all been in the PMLA , not one of the phony journals that have sprung up in recent years. Besides, your field is Old English, which practically implies scholarship, whereas his field is Modern Literature. People read modern novels and poetry for pleasure. No one is going to read Beowulf for pleasure. Thorvald Miller is a nice guy, but they don’t grant tenure for niceness.”
    Curiously, when he told Thorvald Miller about his good fortune, his view was much like that of Roger Fine, and he manifested neither envy of Jacobs nor resentment at having been passed over. “Oh, you were sure to get it, Mord. You’re a scholar and they don’t want to lose you. Me, I’m just run-of-the-mill. Maybe I’ll get tenure in time if I can hang on long enough.”
    They were friends and worked out together at the gym almost every afternoon when their last classes were over. Jacobs looked scholarly. He was twenty-nine, of medium height, olive-skinned, with dark brown hair surmounting a high forehead. His gray slacks were rarely pressed. One was apt to assume that the suede leather patches on the sleeves of his tweed jacket actually covered holes in the elbows. He was slim and wiry and played a good game of squash.
    Miller, thirty-one, was several inches taller, six feet, with a heavy, muscular body. He was blond with a bulging forehead and wide cheekbones. He was always properly dressed. His mother, who lived with him and kept house for him, saw to that. He usually wore suits, and they were always pressed. He wore bow ties and only white shirts, and because he thought they were healthy, white socks. The net effect was that of a farm boy dressed up for a visit to the city.
    Although the two had no interests in common other than the college, they usually lunched together, and when Jacobs had made arrangements to see Clara Lerner, his fiancée in Barnard’s Crossing, Miller drove him out, dropped him off at her house, and then went on to his own house, which was in another section of the town. He picked Jacobs up the following morning to take him into Boston if he had stayed over.
    Although Jacobs had come from a small town in Pennsylvania to study at Harvard, any awe of Cambridge and Boston that he might have had, had long since been dissipated by the time he had taken his doctorate. To him, Boston was merely the city adjoining Cambridge, and he attached no prestige to teaching at Windermere.
    He had accepted appointment there in preference to others that had been offered because he thereby had ready access to both the Widener Library at Harvard and the Boston Public Library, as well as because his fiancée lived in Barnard’s Crossing and worked in Boston.
    To Miller, on the other hand, Boston was still the Athens of America, and the fact that he had obtained a teaching position in a Boston college was a matter of constant self-congratulation. He had come from a small farming town in South Dakota, and had received his doctorate from a state university of no great academic distinction. So he was charmed by this