I
He drove along by the river, the early October light coming across the water in a sheen of light gold. The leaves were starting to turn, and he looked forward to the coming weeks of term, when he’d drive through this double colonnade of trees, and there’d be tints in the sky, and the leaves would be changing colour, russets, reds, purples, golds, browns. He always thought it kind of poignant that his working year should begin when most people felt like the year was starting to end.
It was early but he didn’t feel tired. He’d had a good break, though the news on the radio was bad, but then the news was always bad. He switched it off and thought of those months away, the little villa in Provence, the pool, the pinks and burnt oranges of the houses in their village, the cafés and restaurants, Nick laughing as he toasted his old man’s fiftieth birthday in the garden of L’Étoile, the confirmation of his professorship.
He came off the river road and cruised along towards the campus. Not long now till his first class. He always started with ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, a way of getting his classes into writing the cleanest sentences they could. A few slides on Hemingway’s life, a handout on the Iceberg Principle, and then they discussed the story.
Every time he read it, he felt he was experiencing the same kind of pleasure in Nature Nick Adams did, though he’d never camped out or gone fishing. He liked Nick Adams so much he’d called his own son Nick, and as he pulled into the campus, he thought of him now, newly graduated, the kind of son a father dreamed of, tall, dark, good-looking, athletic, self-reliant. Also impulsive, stubborn, argumentative sometimes, but always about the right things.
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