The concept would have grown still larger had not a boy named Had-lock Mills—known as Heady, which was short for Headlock—come in from out of the entry gallery and said with a slight smirk, “Hoyt, there’s a young lady here to see you.”
Hoyt rose from the easy chair, put his dead beer can up on a walnut shelf, and said, “Sorry, guys, hospitality calls,” whereupon he left the room. He soon reappeared at the doorway with a pretty little brunette—clad in halter top, shorts, and flip-flops—behind him.
He looked back at her and said, “Come say hello to some of my friends, uhhh—come say hello.”
As she stepped forward, he put his arm lightly on her shoulders, and she said, “Hi!” and gave a little wave. She had a charming smile, which made her look even prettier.
The boys responded with smiles of their own, in a pleasant and gentlemanly fashion, plus a few Hi’s and polite waves and even a “Welcome!” from big Julian. Whereupon Hoyt said, “Well, see you guys,” and, his arm still resting lightly on her shoulders, steered the girl toward the stairway.
The boys sat in silence, merely exchanging glances. Then Boo said in a low voice, barely audible above the SportsCenter anchorman’s, “That’s the same girl, the one from last night. And couldn’t you tell? He still doesn’t know her fucking name.”
Charlotte looked from the professor, Dr. Lewin, to the windows to the ceiling and from the ceiling to the windows to Dr. Lewin. She was well into her second week of classes, and the puzzles and contradictions of Dupont kept mounting, unabated. She reckoned it was inevitable. She could now see that she had led a sheltered life up there behind the wall of the Blue Ridge Mountains—but even allowing for that, this…was odd.
The classroom was a spacious one on a corner, with two great English Gothic leaded-glass casement windows comprised of multitudes of small panes. Here and there, seemingly placed at random, were panes exquisitely etched with pictures of saints, knights, and what looked like characters from old books. If Charlotte had to guess, she would say that a couple of them came from The Canterbury Tales. And that knight…over there…certainly did look like Don Quixote on Rosinante…If anything, the ceiling was even grander. It was higher than any classroom ceiling she had ever imagined and was transversed by five or six shallow arches of a dark but warm wood. Where the arches met the walls, they rested atop carved wooden heads with comic faces that appeared to be looking down at open books, also carved of wood, just below their chins.
All that elegance was what made the personage of Dr. Lewin seem so curious. Last week, when the class first met, he had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants—nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of his gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up to the summit of his forehead—unaccountably addressing thirty college students, at Dupont, no less.
The title of the course was the Modern French Novel: From Flaubert to Houellebecq. At last week’s class Dr. Lewin had assigned Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for today. And today, as the transmogrified seven-year-old addressed the class, things, to Charlotte’s way of thinking, grew stranger and stranger.
Dr. Lewin had his nose in a paperback book he held open just below his chin, rather like the wooden heads that served as finials to the arches. Then he lowered the book, let the glasses flop down onto the bridge of his nose, looked up, and said, “For a moment let’s consider the very first pages of Madame Bovary. We’re in a school for boys…The very first sentence says”—he pushed the glasses back up on his forehead and brought the book back up under his chin, close to his myopic eyes—“ ‘We were at preparation, when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy dressed in “civvies” and a school servant carrying a big desk.’ And so forth and so on…uhmmm, uhmmm”—he kept his face down in the book—“and then it says, ‘In the corner behind the door, only just visible, stood a country lad of about fifteen, taller than any of us—’ ”
He lowered the book, flopped the glasses down onto his nose again, looked up, and said, “Now, you’ll notice Flaubert begins the book with ‘We were at preparation’ and ‘taller than us,’ referring to Charles Bovary’s school-mates collectively, presumably, but he never tells the story in the first person plural again, and after a few pages we never see any of these boys again. Now, can anybody tell me why Flaubert uses this device?”
Dr. Lewin surveyed the students through his binocular lenses. Silence. Evidently, everybody else was stymied by the question, even though it didn’t seem difficult to Charlotte. Charlotte was puzzled by something else entirely. Dr. Lewin was reading this French classic to them in English—and this was an upper-level course in French literature. Thanks to her high advanced placement scores, Charlotte had been able to skip the entry-level French course, but just about everybody else must be an upperclassman—and he’s reading to them in English.
She was in the second row. She started to raise her hand to answer the question, but being new, only a freshman, she felt diffident. Finally a girl to her right, also in the second row, raised her hand.
“So the reader will feel like part of Charles’s class? It says here”—she looked down at her book and put her forefinger on the page—“it says here, ‘We began going over the lesson.’ ” She looked up hopefully.
“Well, that’s it up to a point,” said Dr. Lewin, “but not exactly.”
Charlotte was astonished. The girl was reading one of the greatest of all French novels in an English translation—and Dr. Lewin hadn’t so much as made note of the fact. Charlotte quickly glanced at the girl on her left and the boy on her right. They were both reading the book…in English translation. It was baffling. She had read it in translation way back in the ninth grade under Miss Pennington’s tutelage, and she had spent the better part of the past three days reading it in the original, in French. Flaubert was a very clear and direct writer, but there were many subtle constructions, many colloquialisms, many names of specific objects she’d had to look up, since Flaubert put a big emphasis on precise, concrete detail. She had analyzed every line of it, practically disassembled it and put it back together—and nobody else was reading it in French, including the professor. How could that be?
Meantime, three other girls had taken a stab at the question, and each answer was a bit more off than the one before. As she craned about to see the girls, Charlotte noticed that the boys in the class seemed extraordinarily…big…reared back, as they were, in their desk–arm chairs. They had big necks and big hands, and their thighs swelled out tightly against the fabric of their otherwise baggy pants legs. And none of them lifted a hand or uttered a peep.
Although she couldn’t have said why, Charlotte somehow felt a compulsion to rescue the reputation of the entire class. So she raised her hand.
“Yes?” said Dr. Lewin.
Charlotte said, “Well, I think he does it that way because what the first chapter really is, is Charles Bovary’s background up to the time he meets Emma, which is when the real story begins. The last two-thirds of the chapter are written like a plain-long biography, but Flaubert didn’t want to start the book that way”—she could feel her face reddening—“because he believed you should get your point across by writing a real vivid scene with just the right details. The point of the first chapter is to show that Charles is a country bumpkin and always has been and always will be, even though he becomes a doctor and everything.” She looked down at her text. “ ‘Une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d’expression’ ”—she looked up at Dr. Lewin again—“ ‘comme le visage d’un imbécile.’ So you start the book seeing Charles the way we—the other boys—saw him, and the way we saw him is so vivid that all the way through the book, you never forget that what Charles is, is a hopeless fool, an idiot.”