“And what am I supposed to do with my car?” Bitter had protested.
“You really want a suggestion, Eddie?”
“Why don’t I drive my car to Chicago, and you pick me up there?”
-we can make another trip if you like,” Canidy said. “But it would make more sense to leave your car here and then turn it over to The Plantation.”
“Why do I feel I am somehow being screwed?”
“After you really screw somebody one day, you’ll be able to tell the difference,” Canidy said. “In the meantime, don’t rock the boat.”
Canidy arrived in Cedar Rapids just after five in the morning and was afraid that he would disturb his father. But when he got to the campus, there was a light on in the apartment’s tiny kitchen. His father was awake, shaved, and dressed, except for the tweed jacket he wore over his clerical dickey.
They shook hands. His father’s hand felt soft and gentle in his.
Gentle and old.
The Reverend George Crater Canidy, Ph.D., D.D., headmaster of St. Paul’s School, long widowed, lived in a small apartment in the dormitory between the chapel and the Language Building, where he had his office. It was inconceivable that he would live off campus. For in a very real sense, the Rev. Dr. Canidy and St. Paul’s School were one and indivisible.
Canidy told his father that he was being released from the Navy to go to China and work in the fledgling Chinese aircraft industry. With his engineering degree, that was credible. He did not want to tell his father that he had been given a job where bonuses were paid for the number of people killed.
The Reverend Dr. Canidy was pleased. He quickly concluded that his son was going to China as a practical missionary, to bring to its downtrodden masses the Godgiven miracles of Western technology. It wasn’t quite the same thing as his son going to spread the Christ, but it was far better than his being gospel of the Lord Jesus a sailor in the Navy. It would do no harm to let his father believe that, Canidy decided.
As always, as the morning wore on, the feeling came to Canidy that rather than coming “home,” he was visiting a school he had long ago attended. Though there was a photograph of his mother on the table beside his father’s chair in the living room, it produced no e emotional response. He didn’t really remember her. But of cours ‘, he corrected himself, he did. What he remembered was the horrible smell in the hospital room where she had taken so long to die.
His mind had mostly shut that out, he thought, and in doing so had erased everything, including the good memories. There must have been good times. It was just that he couldn’t remember her. It wasn’t until he saw him-touched his hands-that he remembered what a good man, what a good friend, his father was, and again became aware of the depth of his feeling for him.
He was also aware that he had to be sort of a disappointment to his father, although his father of course didn’t show it. His father would have been most happy had his son followed in his footsteps if not as a priest, then as an academic.
But Canidy’s scholastic prowess was not the result of a love for scholarly things. He wanted to fly, and the price of that was academic success. He could not hang around Cedar Rapids airport, his father told him, while his grades were bad. The payment for his Saturday flying lessons was staying on the headmaster’s list. He had simply raised his grades and kept them at a commendable level by paying attention to what was asked of him. His father’s proud belief to the contrary, he had never really had to “put his nose to the grindstone and keep it there” nor had he ever demonstrated “remarkable self-discipline.”
Canidy often wondered if a son’s duty to his father included doing what the father, who was presumably the wiser, wanted him to do with his life. If that was the case, he was the undutiful son. He wanted neither to mold the characters of young men, which his father had once told him he considered the highest of privileges, nor to care for other people’s souls.