Edward's Point

If retired professor of German Edward Irving might be said to have a Weltanschauung, he would have summarized it as an overwhelming need to remind his fellow men and women that all our striving for personal glory is for naught, and that anyone who holds a contrary opinion should reread Ecclesiastes 1:2. For all, he felt sure, was vanity.

After a youth marked by the usual obsession with achievement, Edward had fought to redress the balance, eschewing the accumulation of personal accomplishments and substituting for it a desire to be simply useful. In this way, he thought, he might transcend vainglory and eventually bow out of life as humbly as he’d entered it some sixty-seven years before.

He did not, of course, begrudge the youthful the same kind of competitive score-keeping that he had himself practiced. Anyone younger than 35 could be granted a dispensation. Edward felt no inclination to discourage those green children who romped with unravaged bodies through a world still redolent with possibility. No, it was those who should have known better by now, those preening fools who had made the challenging journey from innocence to experience and yet still insisted on trumpeting their wares who incited his acrimony.

One such individual, Edward thought, was Norman Cornflower, dubbed “Stormin’ Norman” by the sycophantic barnacles who followed in his considerable wake. Cornflower styled himself a Renaissance man. Not immune to curiosity, Edward had discovered via Facebook that Norman had self-published two books of poetry, or rather, prose poetry, since his free spirit scorned the shackles of conventional verse. Several watercolor studies of his native Iowa prairie were apparently displayed prominently in his comfortable home, and an eighteen-track album of original compositions had been strewn about various listening services for the edification of those who found the likes of John Prine wanting.

It had been Edward’s misfortune to have grown up with Cornflower. Cursed with a competitive streak that rivalled Michael Jordan’s, Edward felt that he had been playing catch-up to Norman since elementary school. There, in Mrs. Hill’s fourth grade class, Norman had beaten out Edward for the role of Scrooge in a 27-minute adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Content with the narrator’s part, Edward recalled feeling, for the first time, rivulets of sweat trickle down from his armpits as Norman delivered certain choice lines. Two years later Cornflower had recorded the final out of the Little League championship, spearing Edward’s line drive as it headed for its intended target: Norman’s head. In high school Anne Schirmer had politely turned down Edward’s invitation to accompany him to the dance because she had already promised Norman that she would do him the honor.

College had freed Edward from his nemesis. Though he still wrestled with inner demons as an undergraduate, Edward there found a number of like-minded friends, gazed into a few pairs of blue eyes, rekindled his love of the Beatles, and even lost his virginity one rainy afternoon to the sound of Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away.” As he climaxed, Edward recognized the incongruity of the moment and suppressed a smirk, afraid that it might be misinterpreted by the young lady who had been so kind as to agree to the encounter. Under the tutelage of caring, understanding professors, he had been groomed to enter graduate studies in German literature, and had then enjoyed a reasonably successful career before recognizing it was time to draw the curtain.

And so it was that Edward and his wife, Celia, found themselves with a satisfactory retirement income, a realization that they had endured all life had thrown at them, and a good deal of time on their hands. During their honeymoon they had experienced profound relief upon learning that parenthood held no appeal for either. And if each felt occasional pangs upon hearing that friends had chosen to repopulate the nation with miniature replicas of themselves, together they shared knowing and appreciative looks whenever they encountered examples of the willful behavior of children, or watched commercials that detailed the intricacies of saving for college.

They had both led useful lives, serving others while pursuing modest pleasures. Perhaps most importantly, they had kept themselves to themselves, sharing their skills and values only as appropriate and rarely parading their charms or humble talents in the hopes of impressing others. There was nothing wrong, they knew, with a suitably insular life. In the age of the amateur, they resisted the temptation to show off. In the words of the poet, they laid their stutt’ring lutes aside, better to catch what the others played. The plan now was simply to read a great deal and travel a little.

After making a thorough study of web sites and far too many YouTube videos, the couple had decided on a trip to Yorkshire. Due to the nature of his work, Germany had been a frequent destination, and now Edward was eager to grant his wife the right to choose a new destination. She has always loved the works of James Herriot, and so they had quickly settled on those northern English dales so celebrated in his books. York itself would be their base, but they were also eager to visit the small towns in its vicinity. The owner of their B&B suggested Knaresborough, and so three days into the trip they had taken the bus there, unsure of their ability to drive on the wrong side of the road.

Knaresborough indeed proved charming, and as they sat, beers in hand, regarding the stolid glory of the old bridge that spanned the river Nidd, all seemed right with the world. Edward and Celia exchanged a smile, clinked glasses, and wondered if they might consider themselves among the lucky few who had actually won the battle of life without suffering many casualties. They began to plan the perambulations that would grant them a little exercise and the opportunity to get to know the village even better.

A few fellow tourists were punting on the river, taking advantage of the “low low!” rates offered by Biggins’ Boat Rental and realizing once launched how difficult it was for novices to guide a flat-bottomed boat on even a river so calm as the Nidd. Edward could hear their conversations echoing about in the stillness, as well as the exchanges of locals serving drinks and doing their best to be polite to the day-trippers. Their accents were charming, particularly the legendary monophthong on display as the natives observed young men on the river trying to “sayve fayce” in front of their feminine companions. Edward was also following a conversation being held at a nearby table by a German couple, who were apparently confident in the knowledge that their disparagement of the local cuisine would remain incomprehensible to others. The idyll was shattered, however, when he beheld a large, balding man descending on him. By his side was a small woman. It had been many years since Edward had seen him in person, but from his perusal of Facebook he instantly knew the behemoth’s identity.

Ever the academic, Edward’s first wish was to don the cloak of invisibility, zealously guarded by the dwarf Alberich in Das Nibelungenlied. Rivulets of sweat ran down his chest now, just as they had that lamentable day in Mrs. Hill’s class. Decades of experience had taught Celia to recognize signs of discomfort in her husband’s face. She instantly knew something was amiss, but before she could give voice to her concern, the looming man began to speak.

“As I live and breathe, it’s Edward Irving! What are the chances?” Norman Cornflower had arrived, as if summoned by the gods to remind Edward that he was not the author of his own fate. As he spoke, Norman clapped his hand possessively on the shoulder of his old classmate.

Three possibilities presented themselves to the retired German professor. First, he could claim he understood no English, being simply a Bavarian accountant on holiday with his American wife. Second, he might dash his beer in Norman’s face, take Celia by the hand, and head for the Pennines. Third, he could make the monumental effort to assert himself, tell Norman to go to hell, and resume his vacation, shaken a bit, but fortified by the new respect he might feel for himself.

Instead, he merely asked Norman and the woman who accompanied him to sit down, and introduced the pair to his wife. And as Edward listened to this bully of humility rattle on about the coincidence of encountering again one of his dearest childhood friends, he stole a brief glance at the woman by his side. She was small in every way. Her face was small-featured, her eyes porcine. She couldn’t have been an inch over five feet high, and when she finally spoke (to Celia, as if ceding the main conversation to the husbands), her voice, too, was little more than a squeak. It seemed to Edward that Norman had chosen a partner who would in no way compete with his immensity. She was, he mused, a presence willing to be subsumed by his vast pomposity.

As Norman rambled on and on with the momentum and inevitability of contagion, his face flushed crimson with pride, and Edward simultaneously attempted to follow the conversation the two women were holding. Celia was sketching the details of how she and Edward had met, their years at Grinnell College, and how much they were enjoying Knaresborough. As Norman held forth about the Norman characteristics of the nearby castle (here he guffawed at his wordplay), Edward fastened onto a phrase he’d now heard Celia use three times in three minutes. She and Edward had met “by chance” in the library. As an undergrad, she had been doing research for a paper on the mad German author E.T.A. Hoffmann, the subject of Edward’s thesis. “By chance” they had a mutual friend, who had subsequently told each more about the other. And quite early in their marriage they had learned “by chance” that neither had any desire to reproduce.

Even as he marveled at his wife’s good manners and her ability to adapt to any situation with a natural grace that further endeared her to him, Edward couldn’t help but reflect that it all could have been so different. He pondered the vigor of accident, freakishness, fate. Were humans mere playthings in the hands of providence? At the same time, he wondered how his little life might possibly matter, be noteworthy, or register with kismet. He suddenly felt as tiny as—what was her name again?—Norman’s wife, to whom he had been introduced only moments earlier.

Should he speak now, attempt to stem the flow of all these words belching forth from the well-lubricated voice box of Norman Cornflower? What had he to say? What had he ever had to say? For a brief moment—as long as it took Norman to take a pull at his beer, refueling for a fresh assault—Edward wondered if life might, in fact, be best left to that sort. Norman was a large man who had made a large impact on life. The founder of a company that had introduced a series of tools to help patients recover from traumatic brain injuries, Norman’s amassed fortune had left him free to indulge the right hemisphere of his own cerebrum to his heart’s content. And what if his efforts were those of a dilettante? How did they differ from the academic claptrap that he himself had produced in order to be promoted to the rank of full professor? Had anyone ever read his publications? And, if they had, had anyone spent more than a minute contemplating what they might mean?

“. . . and so I can’t help but wonder at the coincidence of our meeting in sight of that magnificent bridge before us,” Norman was saying. “The union, the coming together, the connection it enables. It reminds me of a song on my album, ‘In Trust of My Trestle.’ Perhaps you know it?”

A wry smile played on Edward’s face as he imagined pushing Norman off the edge of a bridge. Within a moment, however, the smile made way for a scowl, as he wondered if the water below him might even register a splash were he to throw himself off a bridge. Might he simply disappear forever without so much as a sound, unnoticed like Icarus in Brueghel’s painting?

“. . . my son, Michael, from my first marriage,” Norman added, in an undertone, “is, in fact, a civil engineer. He’s designed a few of those puppies himself!”

Edward seized on the parenthetical mention of what he assumed must have been Norman’s failed first marriage and began to imagine a woman who had eventually been able to assert her individuality and grown tired of serving as flying buttress to his thrusting vault. Edward had never been unfaithful to Celia, thus fulfilling his own version of Hippocrates’s maxim to “first, do no harm.” Edward felt sure that Norman would not be able to make the same claim. Even if that first wife might eventually have been liberated, she would certainly have had no way to reclaim all those years lost playing vassal.

On the other hand, that marriage had produced a son. As he pondered all this, Edward desperately sought to devise a remark worthy of rejoinder. Some of his students had, in a minor way, briefly been like sons and daughters to him. But what might they have gone on to achieve that could compare to the accomplishments of a civil engineer?

At this point, Celia and Norman’s second wife—Lorna, he now remembered—proposed a walk to work off the caloric qualities of good Yorkshire ale. The two couples made their way inland from the river, noting the tidy habits of the residents, who made no claims toward ostentation. The village seemed just the kind of quiet place Edward admired.

As they ambled, each childhood acquaintance paired off with the other’s wife. Edward knew it was foolish to feel jealous, but as Lorna’s voice sounded in his ear, he recognized a visitation of the green-eyed monster. “And so Norman has developed a theory,” Lorna began to explain, in a quiet voice that finally succeeded in capturing Edward’s attention. Edward scolded himself for his woolgathering. He had entirely missed her earlier remarks that served as the introduction to her thesis. “Life, he’s often told me, is a scorecard.” Her tiny eyes sought Edward’s to drive home her point. “Getting a good degree is worth so many points, you see. Then the job is even more important, since what is education, after all, but a means to that end?” She paused again, as if hoping Edward might signal his agreement. When he failed to, she went on. “Once financial security has been attained, then marriage is another big point-getter. Various awards accumulate until you’ve hit a total—can’t remember the exact figures, but Norman would be happy to provide the details. Getting married is worth a good many points, of course. Having children builds on that. Then, finally, retirement once you’ve met your total.”

Lorna now paused, as if expecting Edward to take his turn, to bridge the conversational gap. But Edward found he could summon no words. He remembered Norman keeping track of everyone’s batting averages in Little League. He recalled that Norman’s season-ending figure of .412 had easily trumped his respectable .353. What, he wondered, might Lorna’s own life score be? Had marrying someone like Norman Cornflower immediately brought her sufficiency? And how many points had Norman’s first wife been deducted for her apparent failings?

They turned onto a scenic little avenue whose name set Norman off again. “Abbey Road!” he exclaimed, “what are the chances?” He then proceeded to rank all thirteen Beatles albums on a scale of one to ten.

In order not to suffer the fate of spontaneous combustion, Edward now took the opportunity to excuse himself, claiming that he’d just remembered something left behind at the riverside café. What he might have answered had he been pressed to name the item, he took no time to consider. He suddenly needed to be away from the windbag, the poet, the singer-songwriter, the artist, the father, the husband, the scorekeeper. Thinking of leaving Celia with Stormin’ Norman gave him a pang of guilt, but even his veneration for his partner could not surmount his desire for freedom. Head down, he retraced their steps. As he did so, he made a little inventory of how often Celia had come to his rescue, most notably during the composition of his first, and only, book. She had proven so helpful that Edward had even proposed their names appear as co-authors. Celia wouldn’t hear of it, though, and so he had let the matter drop.

In Knaresborough, the sun had begun its descent, but Edward felt that the chill he was experiencing had little to do with that fact. At certain glum moments he’d wondered if he were truly a valid inhabitant of the planet, spinning on and on around its axis. It seemed possible that a certain cowardly meekness might be kin to his desired humility. Had he wasted his time on the planet, content to accumulate enough points—to use Norman’s phraseology—to satisfy only a vague sense of duty, of merely having done enough? Weren’t the achievers like Norman the ones who had truly earned their status as earth dwellers?

He was still so musing when he reached his supposed goal. The tables at the café were now all empty, and he saw the Biggins attendant tying up a recently returned boat. Edward noticed that only one vessel remained on the water, still a good way from shore. The young steward—like so many these days—had shut himself off from the rest of the world via his Bluetooth earbuds. His head nodded to a beat only he could hear as he worked with the ropes. The trend had maddened Edward during his last year at Grinnell. Such voluntary isolation seemed the height of rudeness.

Thus, Edward was the only one who heard the loud splash. His head jerked toward the water. The ripples caused by flailing arms alerted him to the peril the day-tripper suddenly faced. In an instant Edward had disencumbered himself of his hiking boots and was in the water, efficiently heading for the struggling punter. His measured strokes cut through the water with practiced grace, and soon he had seized hold of the young man. Edward gently raised the head above the surface of the Nidd and, with appropriate but calm force, began to swim back with him to shore. The young man spluttered and even swore a bit during the return journey, while Edward wondered if he should report the inattentive Biggins employee to a supervisor.

Upon rejoining the group on Abbey Road, the disheveled, still slightly sodden Edward Irving suddenly noticed that he was now at least an inch taller than Norman Cornflower. He didn’t feel quite so cold upon gaining this knowledge.

“As I live and breathe, what the hell happened to you?” Norman asked him.

“Oh, I just fell in,” replied Edward laconically.

Celia took his hand, and together the couple studied the expressions that played across Norman Cornflower’s florid features.

(please note extra spacing here, denoting time lapse)

On the plane ride home, Edward and Celia exchanged a look of quiet satisfaction. The world below them looked remarkably ordered and calm, as if some benign creator’s plans had been fulfilled. It seemed unlikely that mere chance could have achieved such regulation after all. From this perspective, everything appeared measured and as countable as Norman Cornflower’s tallied system of consummation.

PAUL O. JENKINS

Paul O. Jenkins lives in New Hampshire, where he works as the library director at Franklin Pierce University. He admires the work of Frank O’Connor and Anton Chekhov.