“Yeah.” Dan smiled with worry as his father hobbled past him in the hallway. He didn’t recognize him, or realized he had no memory of what his father was like before he got sick.

“I’m sorry, Dan.”

Pat couldn’t summon what he really wanted to say.

“I’m just sorry it’s never clean.”

The next morning, Monday, Pat told Anne about the job in Miami. On Tuesday, Pat scheduled an appointment with Dr. Landis. On Wednesday afternoon, he dialed the hotline for Alcoholics Anonymous. On Thursday morning, he took the job offer. Late Friday, the machinists’ union walked away from the table, and the board of Eastern Airlines accepted the resignation of Chief Executive Officer Frank Borman.

June 3

[ JUNE 3 ]

“‘Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’”

Oglesby lowered The Oxford Book of English Verse and swung his teaching stick, an ancient driver made of persimmon wood nicknamed Carraway, across the blue carpet like a practice cut before addressing the class on his fairway. He was turned toward the windows, stained in a blazing early-summer light, the courtyard fused with green thoughts and clumsy cicadas and june bugs rising on the heat. It was the final day of school and time for one last drive on Gatsby before heading into the clubhouse.

“Gentlemen, what happens when the hero returns? When the war is over and our story ends? Remember back to the beginning of the year: Our hero is on a quest. And a hero, despite his flaws, must be polytropos and champion his fate. Consider Mr. Jay Gatsby: Like Odysseus, he has returned home from war. And like the long-lost king of Ithaca, he has endless parties going on in his house. Are there other similarities?”

Oglesby cocked an eyebrow and shifted his weight onto the one-wood. Rob McGhee raised his hand and spoke: “They are both kind of restless and unsatisfied.”

“Good, that’s right. There are accounts of Odysseus, like this Tennyson poem, where the story doesn’t stop and that take our hero back out on adventure. What does Tiresias tell him he must do in order to please Poseidon? Mr. Gilchrist?”

“That he must plant an oar where no man recognizes it from the sea . . .”

“Correct.” Oglesby recited two more lines from Tennyson without prompt from the book: “‘How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!’”

He then gave the sophomores the sly smirk that they had grown to know well: Who is clever enough to figure this out with me?