What Happened to Pnin

Everybody said he was a private man. He kept to himself, generally, except at the university, of course. There he was quite a popular figure, well liked by students and by his peers. Even the administration admired him and respected his judgment. Of his private life most people knew nothing, but he often confided in me. We had been friends since childhood. He grew up down the road from me, but moved away from home when he went to college, and I didn't see him again until he showed up at the university for his first job. He's been here ever since. He has lived alone at the same address for years. His wife died many years ago, and his daughter married and moved to Seattle. I see him in town from time to time, and he always nods pleasantly, but apart from that and the occasional time when I bump into him at the supermarket or the dry cleaner's I rarely see him outside of school. We used to have coffee together in the student center on a fairly regular basis, and that's how we kept up. Obviously his final episode at the university created quite a stir, but afterward things settled down again quite quickly. I, for one, however, have a good idea how it all happened, and I was, unfortunately, a party to the last act. My husband thinks I make too much of it, but I don't. I think the man was badly used.

One evening as he was nearly finished grading a stack of student papers, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a great weariness. He stopped halfway through reading the paper and began absent-mindedly drawing in the middle of the typewritten sheet. He began by sketching with his pencil in the air, then found it on the page. He drew carefully, swiftly, and with an unerring hand. As he proceeded, a smile grew on his face. It grew and grew until he was positively beaming. Pnin hadn't had so much fun in years. He allowed the drawing to take over his whole awareness. His right brain swept control from the rigid, grammar-oriented left brain, and his drawing became fluid and graceful. His pencil was waltzing on the page. There was music in his ears. There was grace in his rhythms.

Then with a sweep of his hand he turned to the next typewritten page and began another drawing. He was grinning, humming, and creating, Picasso-like, masterpiece after masterpiece as he paged through the paper. He lost all sense of time, and he worked on into the morning hours. Finally, he closed the paper, put it on the stack of completed ones, turned out the light on his desk, and went to bed.

He arose at seven with the alarm, showered, brushed his teeth, and made his coffee. He drank down the coffee in long sips as he finished grading the last three papers. With the coffee his mind cleared and began to glow with its usual left-brain clarity. He must have felt peculiarly light and buoyant this morning as if he had slept especially well the night before or had had pleasant dreams. He gave the students good grades for the papers, dumped them in his briefcase, and was off to the university.

He half wondered why he was in such a good mood this morning. Was it the cheery phone call from his daughter? The weather? He was humming to himself as he walked along the tree-arched paths. It must be the weather, he thought. Spring will be coming soon.

Pnin was especially well-dressed, even dapper. He always was. He took great pride in being a fashion plate, as you know. His typically professorial tweedy jacket, minus the elbow patches, was well coordinated with his trousers, tie, socks, and shirt. He lived only a few blocks from the tree-studded campus. He had lived in the same apartment for all the twenty-five years he had been at the university and had seen the campus edge itself closer and closer to his home. He was beginning to feel a little hemmed in by stones and mortar, by the university's granite walls.

He was thinking of how to escape from the alma mater's embrace, looking forward to retirement, peace and quiet, and most of all, his own time. I am sure it was one of his dreams. It wouldn't be long now, he imagined. He was almost at the head of the gowned procession that marched in such grand splendor every fall and spring. They all looked like birds in their gorgeous plumage, like male birds, of course, they being the more colorful, he used to say when it was still okay to say such things. The plainer ones were from the lesser universities or had lesser degrees, so the analogy continued. The only challenge to the comparison were the ones with the faded, graying garb at the head of the line, he chuckled. He was clearly in a good mood this morning as he strode along toward campus. Damn good coffee, he thought. I like that blend. Gets me off to a good start.

As he entered the granite building that housed his office, he noticed the air inside was still a bit wintry, contrasted with the liveliness of the spring air outside. These old stone buildings hold the cold, or the heat, he observed to himself as he climbed the footworn stairs to his office. He unlocked the oak door, entered, and threw his briefcase on a table next to his desk. The rest of the morning was taken up with a blur of boring-important meetings at which he said, as usual, the properly sententious words at just the right moment. Momentous concerns were being discussed, the future of the university and such other business as he had heard every year since he had been there. These people were always reinventing the wheel, he thought. Giving old ideas new jargon. Phrases like "course proliferation" became "curricular efficiencies," and so on, and on. Despite all this, for some reason he was feeling especially pleased with himself today.

There had been days lately when he had been feeling tired, bored, and depressed. He dragged through one meeting after another and one class after another as though there were no end. Even his colleagues seemed to have gotten less interesting. They, too, were suffering from the curious malaise, whatever it was. We all were, I suppose. Whatever it was, it seemed to be growing, on Pnin at least. The depression followed him like a rain cloud over water. There had been much complaining around the dining tables of the Faculty Club. No one was happy about anything. Of course the dean, the provost (especially the provost, who was new), and the president were the biggest villains, but few ever dare to brave them face to face. That included Pnin. He would just grumble and sip his thin onion soup, wipe his lips on the cloth napkin, drop it by his plate, and silently slip off to the privacy of his office. There more often than not, he would fall into a sleep that lasted an hour or more before he roused himself for the rest of the afternoon's obligations. The first of which was usually a prolonged trip to the men's room one flight down where he struggled with his recalcitrant bowels, asking them to do what they had refused to do for him in the morning. That done, he felt better and a small spark of energy would get him through the rest of the day till it was time to walk home and fix dinner.

But today he felt quite buoyant, maybe he should have said boyish, as though he were going to do something surprising, I don't know, anyway despite the wintry air of his office, he had spring in his heart. He was too energized to take his nap, so he went through the pile of mail he had let build up, mostly book advertisements from publishers wanting him to choose their textbooks, and announcements of committee meetings. After he had thrown most of them out, he sorted the papers on his desk, and lined up all his pencils. Finally he went to class.

It was his last class of the day, and he thought he spoke quite brilliantly that afternoon. He was animated from beginning to end, and the students responded by being positively cheerful, rather than their sullen, old selves. At the end of class he handed back the papers, and he noticed with pleasure that there was a gasp and a stir near the back of the room in the vicinity of that beautiful student to whom he had given the A. Suddenly, for some unknown reason feeling shy, like a little boy who might have done something wrong but wasn't sure, he hurried out of the room and set off for home without stopping at his office.

At home, he opened the windows to let in the warm spring air. It was moist and vibrant with the promise of the coming season, rich with the immanence of birdsong. He decided to treat himself with a dinner of lobster au gratin from the freezer. He had gotten it several weeks ago to have for a celebratory dinner, and he felt this was it. Into the microwave it went. After his sumptuous dinner accompanied by a fine Chardonais, and after a brewed (rather than instant) cup of coffee, he settled down in his reading chair, put his feet up, and began to reread the book he had plucked from the back of his bookshelves in a devil-may-care mood, Lolita. Once again the warm smile must have crept across his face, and he relaxed into the total sumptuousness of the evening. School work did not cross his mind at all that night, and once again he slept deeply and peacefully.

He does not often remember his dreams, but this time he did remember what he had dreamed about. He was a little boy again, and he was sitting by the bank of his favorite stream on a warm, lazy summer afternoon. He told me about this because we both knew the spot. The air was filled with the hum and buzz of small insects; the ground was peopled with wildflowers and grasshoppers. He was watching an otter play in the stream near his feet. It dove and circled, and dove and circled playfully, seemingly oblivious to the silent watcher on the stream bank who was participating in its movements as though they were his own. Its shiny, dark brown fur was slick in the water, and its body was lithe and graceful as it arched and dove. Was the creature really oblivious to the watcher, or was it just pretending to be? Was it really showing off to a kindred spirit? His fishing rod and a book were at his side where he had laid them. There were no fish; the otter must have scared them into hiding, but he was enjoying the day. In the branches above his head birds were singing. A nuthatch was fishing for bugs on the tree trunk nearby, head down. Clouds drifted lazily in the sky, and he was at peace with the world, for he was far from the tyrannies of his strict father and mother, having sneaked away for the afternoon without them noticing. He thought them strict then, but now admitted that they probably weren't too bad. And they probably knew that he had sneaked away all those times and were chuckling about it. Both of them were university professors.

This dream of his was part dream and part actual recollection, for he had spent many such afternoons as a boy, and he cherished the memory. I know, because I once found him dreaming down by that stream, Robbin's Run, and he chased me away. It was his private place of refuge, there under those overhanging willows, a natural grotto, the stream gurgling and tinkling as it ran in its little channel. The dream was a dream he dreamed often in the nights of his later years, and it always made him feel good.

I once saw him down there with his easel and paints. He did oil paintings when he was a kid, but I don't think he has done any for years now. I think he even won a prize once. Gave it up because he didn't think he could make a living at it, and pressure from his parents. He always shows up at gallery openings and such, though, so he must keep that spark of an old love. That and taking walks, he loves to walk, especially in the open fields outside of town when the weather is nice.

Anyway, when he arrived at his office in the morning there was an envelope taped to his door. He took it down, unlocked the door, and tossed the letter on his desk. He went over to his reclining chair next to the window and picked up the book beside it, the Works of Andrew Marvell. He was rereading the poems for class. Marvell was one of his favorite poets; although the list of poems he was particularly fond of was short, he found them poignant and moving, especially "To His Coy Mistress," with all its sad ironies: "Had we but world enough, and time," "An age at least to every part." "But at my back I always hear / Time's wingÆd chariot hurrying near." More and more, lately, that poem had had a special poignancy for him. He was moved every time he tried to teach it in class, but it seemed as though the students did not understand the intricate interlacings of meaning, and he would end feeling unable to explain it. Later in the morning when he returned to his desk, he saw the letter. He probably would have let it lie there till later, except he noticed it was from the dean's office. With an irritated sigh he picked up the silver letter opener and slit the envelope.

The dean looked particularly troubled and ran his hand through his hair several times before he spoke. "Pnin," he said abruptly, "how do you explain these drawings on Ms. Pruewitt-Devlin's paper?"

Puzzled, he took the paper from the dean's hand and began to page through it. There on page four someone had drawn a large male member, complete with accessories, in a most realistic and relaxed manner. He grimaced slightly, then suppressed a twinge of a smile at the irony of it. On the next page it had grown more attentive to something. That something appeared on the next page, and in close-up view on the succeeding page. More drawings followed, making seven in all. Quite an explicit (I might say), set. The last two drawings were of naked women dancing hand-in-hand in a circle as though in a May Day dance, quite Picasso-like, and joyous, hair streaming, intertwining in sweeping rhythms.

Pnin didn't know what to do. Certainly he had no notion of how they got there, and he began ransacking his mind for an explanation, although something devilish in him prodded him to lie and say he drew them. Again that smile flittered around the corners of his lips. Self-consciously, he wet them. He wondered what Miss Pruewitt-Devlin really thought of them. Was she really angry? She, of all people! Of course it would be a grave violation of the new rules in the Revised Faculty Handbook, ch. xxiv, sec. 6, governing Sexual Harassment. He should know, he helped frame them into the present immortal handbook prose.

"Sir," he heard himself saying, "I have no notion how such a collection of rubbish should have gotten on Ms. Pruewitt-Devlin's paper. This is quite shocking indeed! Certainly you don't think I am capable of such a thing? This is a fine paper. As you see it is an A paper, but with regard to these other markings, I have no idea how such a thing could come about. I suppose any one of those testosterone-laden young bucks around here could have drawn such a thing-- although it is quite well drawn, isn't it?" He caught himself grinning and quickly passed the back of his hand across his mouth.

The dean looked stern. "Frankly, Pnin, I could not imagine that you would be capable of doing such an unthinking deed, but it was my duty to call you in, you know, and make a good show of it. You understand, don't you? Clearly some puerile prank, by one of our oversexed would-be cartoonists. I will get back to Ms. Pruewitt-Devlin and tell her I have investigated the matter and can find no reason to lay the charges against you. Sorry about the whole matter. I would like to get to the bottom of it, though.

"By the way, what do you think of the latest resolution sent up from faculty senate? Have you got a minute? In that case, I would like to go over it with you."

Walking back to his office Pnin felt somehow deflated and offended, I am sure. The whole thing was quite annoying really. He felt unsettled, but couldn't figure out why. His old left brain seemed quite befogged by the whole incident. At lunch he slumped into his chair and ate without relish, not taking notice of any of the conversations that swirled around the table, or in fact, the slight grins and nods that inclined in his direction. I had coffee with him later, and he seemed quite dispirited by the whole thing, but didn't talk much.

It was raining as Pnin walked home. His large black umbrella was tipped against the wind that blew the rain at him from behind, and drops fell from the back of the umbrella into the heel of his shoes and dogged him the whole way. When he got home he changed his socks and poured himself a hefty glass of Scotch and settled down to read his copy of The Ivy which had arrived in the day's mail. He got so engrossed that he forgot about dinner until his stomach and the empty Scotch glass reminded him. He spent the rest of the night preparing for the next morning's lectures.

That night he dreamed of the sea. He was sailing alone on a fine yacht down to Bermuda. The boat was rolling on the swells in a peaceful rhythm. The day was bright and clear with a fair breeze. As night came on a golden sun dropped swiftly into the western horizon like a coin into a slot. As the stars came out he watched the constellations emerge, and as he did, he saw a dragon forming itself in the sky, and one clawed foot reached down toward him, brushing the mainsail which suddenly became a giant birdswing. The huge body of the dragon overshadowed his frail craft as it winged its way across the ocean like a sparrow fleeing a large cat. He wound up, safe from the cat, under a forsythia bush in his garden. When he woke, soaked in perspiration, all memory of the dream had fled, but not the sense of unease that accompanied it.

It was not until several dreary, rainy days later he learned that Xerox copies of the now famous artwork were circulating around campus. In his classes the men were suddenly all there and very attentive and communicative. Of the women, some were sullen and appeared angry; others bantered and smiled behind their hands or cast sidelong glances at the men. He didn't know whether he was being accused by the students of being the artist, or a victim of a clever hoax by a cynical lower-class cartoonist. On the other hand, that might not be it at all. He was at a loss to know what to do. In the Faculty Club no one mentioned it to him. He wondered how many people had seen the underground copies. What were they thinking? He shuddered when he thought of his daughter receiving such a drawing, obviously the work of a demented mind. When he opened his mail that afternoon, he discovered to his horror that someone had sent him a condom. Now why would he need that? he wondered.

Surely his colleagues wouldn't believe he had done such a thing. He, the always upright Pnin whose classes were always so proper and his dress and demeanor impeccable in the best Ivy League tradition. He had, after all, graduated from Yale University in its golden years. Surely they wouldn't believe him capable of such masterful drawing, such sweeping lines. He was no California type. They really were quite good, though, he thought. He visualized them in his mind's eye. He wished he could see them again. He thought it would be nice to have a set of the Xerox copies, just for curiosity's sake, of course.

The more he daydreamed the more clearly he thought he could visualize the drawings. Their bold honesty. The fine, graceful lines. Worthy of Picasso. He found, to his irritation, he was beginning secretly to covet the drawings. He yearned for them, must hold them in his hands. Not the copies, either. He wanted the originals. He must have the originals, they would be much more valuable. He must have them. He would frame them and put them on his wall at home in his study. They really were quite elegant. He was anxious, too, to know precisely what the words were underneath those drawings. He could feel himself beginning to take a kind of scholarly interest in the papers.

That evening he spent hours going through his art books, studying styles. Whose style most closely mimicked that of the drawings? Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne? He couldn't make up his mind. The problem was that he had not had enough time in the dean's office to study the drawings, and besides, he didn't want to seem too interested--especially in such things as matters of style. Were the images getting dim? He was curious to study them again, at leasure, in private.

The next day he heard himself telling the dean--it was a lie, of course, but he would do anything to get them--that he was the one who had drawn them. Yes, he was willing to face the disciplinary board, but he wanted the drawings back. Yes, yes, he would be willing to take early retirement--for the good of all of course, of course. He shook the dean's hand gravely. The dean was not smiling. Pnin was smiling.

He heard the first birds of spring singing. As he half leaped, half skipped down the sidewalks to home, he silently shouted to the warm spring air, "Thank God! I'm free at last, free at last!" Under his arm was his leather portfolio containing the drawings.

Meanwhile the provost, having received a full report of the affair, was preparing a memo to the president in which she recommended that in addition to firing him, in view of the scandalous nature of the events, the name of Pnin be forever expunged and silently cut off from all university records. This was, I must say (although my skittish husband thinks I should keep quiet, but I am one of the few who truly know how the story ends), this was actually done. The computer substituted another name for his on all documents and grade sheets. I cannot tell you what the name was, although I was the one who programmed the instructions in at the terminal.

The provost, Dr. Castrabaum, insisted on being present as I deleted all references to Pnin in the university records. I could tell as soon as soon as she entered the area that it was she. There was a stir, then an unnatural silence, as though someone had suddenly opened a door during a snow squall and then shut it just as quickly. As I have said, she was relatively new to the university, having only arrived in the previous fall, replacing a very popular older colleague who retired with many laurels and praisesongs. She was a rather thin, frosty woman who dressed indifferently well in mostly grays and blacks and who, nevertheless, came with glowing recommendations from her previous place of employment, rather too glowing some thought, particularly my husband, but I was always willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

She was unwilling for me to do a simple search-and-replace routine, which would have done the trick in a matter of minutes, quite a painless death. Instead Provost Castrabaum insisted that I use the find function and bring each instance of Pnin's name up on screen, cut it, and then type in the fictitious new name. She stood just over my left shoulder peering intently at the monitor during the whole process. Were we not in a separate cubicle off the main area, my colleagues, if they could have seen, would have thought it odd. On occasion I felt her frosty hand on my shoulder or neck, and it made my skin creep when she touched me. I told my husband, Harold, that night, and he merely said perhaps her blood was "very snow-broth." The allusion was lost on me, so I let it pass. These Shakespeareans are always trying to slip something in on us (we lay people), a pun or something. Makes him too damn good at Scrabble, too. I always challenge and lose. The last word I lost on was "foin." Anyway, she seemed to take an inordinate glee in each cut, and it took more than five hours to go through all the records of Pnin's existence at the university. Finally, however, he was gone, and I had a terrible sense of loss as I deleted his name for the last time. I felt the university had lost a valued old friend; I certainly had, but there was no way around it. What was done was done. It was worse than dying without a funeral.

There it is. That is why today when you visit this place you will find no mention of the poor old fool's name, although I have heard it said that a strange unsettled ghost sometimes haunts certain locker rooms on the lower levels as well as some corners of the Faculty Club, particularly in spring when the birds are twittering in the parapets. The dean and the president have retired, and Dr. Castrabaum is president. No one will speak about these things. Not even my husband.

As for Pnin, it is rumored he cultivates his garden, has joined the AARP and a local sketch club. So far no one has noticed that his name appeared as a major benefactor to the President's Fund, in place of an Anonymous donor. They may not even notice it when the marble commemorative tablet for the new Art Gallery comes back from the stonecutter with August G. Pnin smuggled in among the P's.

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