Read Online Flynn's World by Gregory McDonald - Free Book Online Page A

Elsbeth fell into the deep breathing of sleep, Flynn asked himself, “Now, why on earth would the Capriano kid quit the wrestling team?”
    His dreams that night touched upon some of the rigorous physical exercises he had been put through as a schoolboy in Germany. He had enjoyed that. He didn’t even remember ever being too cold in the snow.

EIGHT
     
    “God!” Grover pressed the palms of his hands against each side of his head. “Flynn! What are you doing to me?”
    After Professor Loveson’s lecture, Grover had preceded Flynn out of the lecture hall, rushed down the stairs, and onto the porch overlooking Harvard Yard.
    “In pain are you?” Flynn studied Grover’s face in the gray morning light. His skin was grayer than the day. His eyes bulged slightly. During the lecture, Flynn had observed that Grover breathed in increasingly short strokes. “Do you think I’m torturing you? Well, I am. For your sins.”
    “Torturing me?” Grover looked up the steps at Flynn. Students whirled around them between classes. “That was wonderful!”
    “What was?”
    “That old man. Professor Lovely?”
    “Loveson.”
    “Well, Loveson’s a lovely old man.”
    “Is he?”
    “I’ve never heard anyone talk that way in my whole life!”
    “I daresay.”
    Driving Flynn from Winthrop to Harvard Square, Grover had protested all the way. His main point was that it was bad enough to use a sergeant of police and a City of Boston vehicle to commute Flynn, “So your wife can use the station wagon,” but downright illegal to be using a Boston police vehicle in the City of Cambridge. What were they doing in Cambridge anyway? And at Harvard yet?
    As a sergeant of Boston police, Grover stressed to Flynn that he had much better things to do than to ride around outside his own jurisdiction. For one, he was on a committee to prepare for the Policepersons’ Ball.
    Flynn cursed his impeccable hearing.
    Nevertheless, he invited Grover to attend Professor Loveson’s lecture with him. It was a raw day.
    “I don’t know all the words he used, everything he was talking about,” Grover admitted, “or the names he used, people he referred to, but I was able to follow along pretty well. He talked for an hour straight!”
    “Fifty minutes.”
    “And he began at the beginning with an idea I didn’t much understand, and then he told me more and more about that idea, the history of it, where it came from, what everybody has had to say about it, back and forth, and by the time he finished I felt like I really understood what he had said in the first place! It was like listening to a piece of music! You know, it all hung together.”
    Flynn stared at his assistant. “And what is the idea that so excites you?”
    “Well, first . . .” Grover scraped his shoe on the bottom step. “That an idea comes from someplace. That it has a history. That it keeps turning up, like, when it’s needed. Except every time it turns up, it’s fuller somehow. There’s more to it.”
    “What idea in particular?”
    Grover said, “I never knew spaghetti originally came from China.”
    “I see.”
    Grover’s eyes were downcast. Was he embarrassed? “I never knew there’s always been an idea of God.”
    Flynn could think of nothing to say.
    Grover’s eyes flashed up at Flynn. “It’s the idea that’s important?”
    “And the attitude behind the idea,” Flynn ventured. “The need for the idea.”
    “God.” Grover looked at the other students coming and going. “It’s the idea that’s important?”
    “That’s the . . .” Flynn could not bring himself to say it.
    “Is that what all the kids here are studying?”
    Flynn said, “I’m not sure.”
    “I thought they were just studying to be doctors and lawyers and such like.”
    “That comes later,” Flynn said. “Traditionally, first they’re taught to think.”
    “What a gentleman,” Grover marveled. “So gentle. You can tell the way he speaks. Softly, but he makes you listen. He has