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had delivered a paper on Hemingway to members of its English department. |
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Cobb squinted at the address. "Argyle-on-the-Hudson?" he drew out the syllables as if it were a town in Uzbekistan. "What's it near?" |
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Cobb snorted. "That's what I thought." Charlie lived in Back Bay, two trolley stops from campus. He once said he'd rather be mugged than live in the country. "Better you than me." |
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His voice was cut by police sirens Dopplering by. Calvin had become so inured to the city sounds that he barely noticed. What in Argyle-on-the-Hudson were birdsong and chapel bells. |
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Cobb's eyebrow arched quizzically. "I just don't get it." |
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Calvin nodded at the window. "What, that I could leave all this?" The Middlesex campus, which squatted on Columbus Avenue just beyond Mass. Ave., consisted of tightly packed white brick cubes that had as much collegiate charm as a turpentine factory. |
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"Okay, it's not Harvard Yard, but you're a tenured full professor at a respectable university in the heart of Boston." He kicked a stack of cardboard boxes beside his desk. It was full of applications from people responding to a department ad for a Romantics scholar. "One opening and three hundred applications. There are people in here who'd give an arm for your job." |
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He was right, of course. Boston was the academic Gold Coast, with more institutions of higher learning within a ten-mile radius than anywhere else in the world, and a quarter-million college students who kept the city young and smart. Though Middlesex State was a lackluster place, with a Papa Gino's in the student union, a ghetto at its flanks, and trolley tracks bisecting the campus, it still lay at the heart of America's cultural map. |
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"You're leaving Mecca for the goddamn boonies." |
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"That wouldn't be my wording, but something like that." And Calvin had a flash of New York Poly's campusa splendid array of Gothic buildings, oak trees and rolling greens perched above the Hudson River. The English department, located beside a sleepy duck pond, was a solidly built structure of gray stone and brick, festooned with ivy and looking like it grew naturally out of the site. The campus looked like Oxford University in miniature. It also had a wonderful gym with a machine for every muscle. |
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