Lucky Hank

Lucky Hank is the ironic nickname Paul Rourke gives William Henry Devereaux, Jr., and its meaning changes as Hank’s fortunes move between apparent safety and real trouble. At first, Rourke uses it to predict that Hank will outlast the people around him; later, he applies it to Hank’s dwindling time as department chair. By the end, after jail, hospitalization, and an alarming urinary crisis, Hank accepts that he is lucky—but in a more deliberate sense, grounded in what he has survived and what he still has.

A Prediction of Survival

Rourke gives the nickname its sharpest early meaning while discussing the university’s threatened job cuts with Herbert Schonberg. Herbert is trying to make Hank understand that the cuts affect him too, but Rourke dismisses the effort: Hank, he says, does not take things seriously, and would turn the matter into satire. Then Rourke makes a broader prediction: after he, Herbert, and Dickie Pope are gone, Hank will be the last one left on the payroll. “He isn’t called Lucky Hank for nothing.” The phrase sounds less like praise than a diagnosis of Hank’s knack for remaining in place while other people confront the consequences.

Hank’s own response to that meeting lends the nickname a more immediate, slippery quality. Herbert and Rourke have come to get something from him, but leave without it. Hank feels good because he knows what they wanted and knows they did not get it; he is, as he puts it, still at large. In the same passage, Occam races around the deck, delighted by the imagined contests in which he is the fastest and bravest dog. Hank’s private sense of escape sits beside that exuberant, make-believe victory. The episode does not establish that Hank has secured lasting safety; it shows him enjoying a reprieve and recognizing how provisional it may be.

Luck Turns into a Reproach

That provisional feeling surfaces when Hank sees Julie Devereaux framed in a window, on the phone and not responding to his wave. Her expression is difficult for him to read, but he imagines that Lucky Hank’s luck may be running out. The nickname thus becomes a way of anticipating reversal, not simply congratulating himself on having escaped another confrontation.

The phrase also acquires a moral edge in Hank’s dealings with Meg Quigley. When he learns that her father, Billy Quigley, once wanted to be a writer and wrote a novel, Hank is genuinely surprised. He thinks of the unfinished novels by other members of the English department, which he had been asked to read before grievances began to be filed against him. Billy’s decision to keep his novel to himself increases Hank’s regard for him. But the week is already turning against Hank: instead of being offered a bite of peach, he finds himself accused, and describes himself as “Judas Peckerwood” to both Meg and her father. The contrast between that betrayal and the lucky nickname underscores how little protection his apparent survival offers from damaged loyalties or a worsening reputation.

Rourke’s Teasing and the Chairmanship

At a restaurant, Rourke greets Hank as Lucky Hank and remarks that he must be celebrating because he has one more week as chair. The nickname now carries a pointed limit: Hank remains in the position for the moment, but the remark makes that remaining week sound like a brief stay of execution. Hank answers by ordering lobster rather than engaging with the taunt. Rourke then mentions that June Barnes had leaned across the table to kiss her husband, Teddy Barnes, and asks Hank how long he has known that the search for a new chair has been canceled. The exchange joins Hank’s uncertain administrative position to Rourke’s habit of turning observation into provocation.

Their relationship later changes without erasing its history of hostility. Hank fears that selling land to Jacob Rose, after refusing to sell to Rourke, will enrage his old enemy further. Yet Rourke, now dean, apparently no longer holds the same grudge; Jacob suggests that the job has made him set personal animosities aside. Hank offers a different explanation: Rourke may have exhausted his supply of meanness during their earlier conflict. In June, while playing Sunday-afternoon basketball with Jacob, Teddy, Rourke, and others, Hank forgets his age and position in the beauty of the game. After a missed shot, he crashes the boards and takes one of Rourke’s elbows, leaving him with a fractured cheekbone and a black eye. The injury seems to satisfy Rourke. Later, when Hank and Lily Devereaux encounter him during a run, Rourke merely nods and calls him Lucky Hank, almost affectionately. The old insult has not disappeared; its delivery has softened along with their antagonism.

The Nickname Reconsidered

The story’s closing consideration of luck follows a series of events that put Hank in jail and then in the hospital. Taking his mother’s somber advice, he makes a list of things a man like him might be thankful for. Its first item is his health. Tests conducted by Phil Watson find no tumor and no abnormality in Hank’s prostate; he is again urinating freely, regularly, and without discomfort. Watson’s likely explanation is a rare condition he calls hysterical prostate, brought on partly by stress and aided by Hank’s overuse of antihistamines. The episode that had made his body seem inexplicably unreliable ends, for now, with reassurance rather than a diagnosis of serious disease.

That list gives Lucky Hank a meaning different from Rourke’s prediction of professional survival. Hank has not been spared humiliation, injury, arrest, hospitalization, or the fear produced by his symptoms. Nor does the phrase establish that his troubles are over. Instead, it marks a change in what he is willing to count: not merely the fact that he remains on the payroll or has another week as chair, but the return of ordinary bodily function and the absence of a tumor. The nickname begins as a joke about being the last person left; it ends as a name Hank can measure against specific reasons for gratitude, without pretending that luck has kept misfortune away.