by John Barth
I myself was not impressed. “Disappearing ink!” I flung the phial down, angered afresh at the revelation that the men in yellow had after all been aware of everything that had happened in the gorge: had understood G. Herrold’s plight and Anastasia’s, but had suffered the one to drown and the other to be raped without lifting a finger in either’s behalf. “Dunce take it!”
“Oh, don’t!” Anastasia snatched it up at once from the sand. “Really—excuse me, George, I’m sure you’re a thousand times brighter than I am, but I really don’t think …” She blushed. “Would it be all right if I kept it for you? In case you change your mind?”
“That might be smart, Georgie,” Max agreed. “These things mean more than they seem to, sometimes. I’d like to have time to think it over before you throw it away.”
I shrugged. “You’re the advisor.” Anastasia gratefully returned the phial to her pocket, as if it were a precious gem, and I pressed her again to account for her marriage to the notorious Stoker, which it seemed to me she had been pleased to digress from explaining. My tone was even a bit peremptory, for I was on the one hand impressed by her clearly self-sacrificial behavior with Croaker, her husband, Max, The Living Sakhyan, and myself, and on the other hand vaguely uneasy about it: it disturbed me to see her equally submissive to everyone, the flunkèd as well as the not. Yet sincere as this concern of mine was (which it made me feel quite Grand-Tutorish to express), in the main I was simply flattered by the novelty of being stood in awe of, especially by that lovely creature—so ready to obey, one could not resist commanding her! Out of all these feelings I demanded to know whether she had wed of her free will or been abducted like the captive brides of old, in which latter case I intended by some means to slay her captor and set her at liberty.
“Oh, you couldn’t do that!” she said—amused, alarmed, and pleased at once, as it seemed to me. “I mean, I guess you could, if you’re a Grand Tutor, but—”
“It’s not your business to start slaying people,” Max told me; “what you want to do is keep them from slaying each other. Besides, you got no kind of weapons, thank the Founder, and Maurice Stoker’s got his own private Riot Squad.”
It occurred to me to point out to him that my stick had once been deadly tool enough, and to argue that it was not without good precedent I contemplated using it again: Enos Enoch Himself had flung the Business Administration concessionaires bodily from Founder’s Hall, and had declared to His protégés that He came to them not with diplomas but with a birch-rod, armed Tutors always prevailing where unarmed ones failed. But Anastasia forestalled me by protesting that while she had not exactly volunteered to marry Stoker, she had willingly assented to the match at the time of its arrangement by her guardian, Ira Hector, and further that she would not dream of deserting one who needed her so absolutely as did her husband—however violently he himself denied that need.
“I knew it!” Max cried out. “A pact between the meanest mind on campus and the flunkèdest!” Ira Hector, he reminded me, was the wealthy and infamously selfish older brother of the former chancellor of NTC; from humble beginnings as a used-book peddler he had risen to his present position as head of a vast informational empire, controlling the manufacture and distribution of virtually every reference-volume published in the West-Campus colleges. Ready to line his pockets at anyone’s expense, he was despised and catered to by liberals and conservatives alike (though always closer in spirit to the latter); while he preached the virtues of free research, what he practiced was the stifling of competition, the freedom of the clever to oppress the ignorant and stupid. Yet so enormous was his wealth and so ubiquitous his influence, every New Tammany chancellor had to come to terms with him; and Max himself, how vehemently soever he had used to rail in the Senate against Ira Hector’s unprincipled monopolies and graft, was obliged to admit that they were perhaps the necessary evils of Bourgeois-Liberal Studentism, his own philosophy. As was the case with Maurice Stoker too, however, the fact that Ira Hector was indispensable made him in Max’s view no less a wretch; as he put it (reversing a much-quoted remark of Ira Hector’s own): one might have to lick his boots, but needn’t praise the flavor.
“Now, you’re too hard on Uncle Ira,” Anastasia chided. “You must try to understand him.”
Max sniffed, but it was remarkable how the girl calmed his indignation with a pat on the knee. “So he’s got a heart of gold,” he complained with a smile. “Like Dean Midas he has!”
“He’s more generous than you think,” Anastasia said. “But he’s so afraid somebody will make fun of it, or take advantage of him, he wouldn’t admit it for the campus.”
“He don’t have to,” said Max. “He owns the campus already.”
But she pointed out with spirit that her own rearing in the rich man’s house was proof enough that his selfishness was not complete. “He didn’t have to take me in. Grandpa Reg said Mother was so upset when I was born, she wasn’t able to take care of me, and he sent me to the Lying-In Hospital for Unwed Co-eds—which by the way Uncle Ira built with his own money …”
Max asked indignantly why Chancellor Hector had not staffed his own house with nurses, which he could easily have afforded to do, and thus spared both Virginia Hector and Anastasia a disgraceful connection with the New Tammany Lying-In.
“He wanted to,” she replied. “But Mother wasn’t herself, you know … I guess I reminded her of so many unhappy things, she couldn’t bear to have me in the house, and of course she knew they’d take care of me in the hospital. I don’t hold it against her that she felt that way: it must have been a bad time for her, having been Miss University and all and then being jilted and left pregnant … Oh dear: I didn’t mean it that way!”
Max closed his eyes, shook his head, and waved away her apology.
“Anyhow it was only for a few weeks,” Anastasia went on. “Then Uncle Ira (actually he’s Mother’s uncle) had a nursery fixed up in his house, and that’s where I was raised. It was a wonderful childhood, and I was terribly grateful to him when I was old enough to understand all he’d done for me. And Mother, you know, she wasn’t always upset: lots of times she’d come to visit, or take me out somewhere. Even when she’d have her spells where she’d say I was no daughter of hers, we were still friends.”
Seeing the pain in Max’s countenance, she changed the subject brightly: “As for Uncle Ira, he was sweet as could be! Not a bit like you think! I didn’t see him very much, he’s so busy all the time, and he pretends to be such an old bear: but I’d slip into his study and climb up on his lap and kiss him, or hold my hands over his eyes—even when I was big I used to do it—and he’d have to laugh and kiss me before I’d go away. And every night he’d come up to make sure I got my bath, and tuck in my covers—he never would let the nurse do it. And talk about careful, when I was old enough to go out with boys! He was an orphan himself, you know, and grew up practically on the streets; he told me his mother was taken advantage of by a bad man who talked her into leaving Grandpa Reg and him when they were kids, and he had to take care of Grandpa Reg when he was just a little boy himself, selling old books off a pushcart on the Mall. I guess he’d seen so many bad things in his life, especially young girls being taken advantage of—anyhow he wouldn’t let me go out with boys at all. It wasn’t he didn’t trust me; it was the boys he didn’t trust, even the nice ones. He said he knew what it was they were after, whether they knew it or not, and even if they’d never thought of trying to take advantage of me, they’d think of it soon enough when I was alone with them. Stupid me, I hardly knew what a boy was, much less what Uncle Ira was talking about; I used to come in and perch on his lap and pester the poor man to death, to tell me what was so awful that the boys would do. He’d try to put me off, and tell me I was getting too big to sit on his lap like that; but I wouldn’t take no for an answer …”
“I hate this,” Max said.
“I know what you’re thinking; just what Maurice says. But you’ve got to remember he was a lonely
old man, and worried to death that the same thing would happen to me that had happened to his mother and his niece and all those girls in his hospital. And even if it wasn’t completely innocent, I’m sure he thought it was; he was probably fooling himself the way he said those nice boys were, that he drove away from the house when they tried to make dates with me. If I’d had a grain of sense I’d have thought of some better way to handle him, without hurting his feelings; but I was so dumb, and naturally I was curious, too, when he tried to show me what was what.”
Here I interrupted to protest that I didn’t understand what was being alluded to, and thus had no way of judging how it bore upon the question of her marriage. Anastasia looked at me curiously, and Max reminded her that I too had been raised in isolation from normal campus family life, if not exactly in the same ignorance of natural facts.
“But don’t tell us what’s none of our business,” he added; “it was just about you and Stoker we wondered.”
I was ready to protest that I regarded it as quite my business (without knowing exactly why) to right or avenge any wrongs done to those whom I—well, esteemed—as I esteemed Max himself, and had vowed to clear his name. But the protest was unnecessary; Anastasia declared she felt obliged to speak in more frank detail than normally one might: first, because we might else misjudge her Uncle Ira’s motives; second, because these incidents from her early youth were not unrelated to her subsequent marriage; and third, because if I was indeed a Grand Tutor, it was not hers to decide what ought to be told me and what ought not, but rather to open her heart trustingly and completely as she did in her nightly petitions to the Founder, without whose forgiving comfort and understanding she would long since have perished under the burden of misconstruction put upon her actions by her husband and others. The memory of these same misconstructions, presumably, brought tears to her eyes: I could not imagine a face more piteously appealing.
“I never mean to hurt anybody!” she said. “It says in the Scroll that Love is the Founder, and all I ever mean to do is help people, like in the Infirmary and the Psych Clinic. How can you help them except to find out what it is they need and then give it to them, if you have it? But it always seems to do damage somehow, when I do it!”
“Now pfui on that,” Max consoled her, and I too declared it unthinkable that so generous a heart could do other than good.
“Well, take that time in Uncle Ira’s study …” She was clearly encouraged by our words, though her expression remained doubting. “He said in a way he thought of me as his daughter and in a way he didn’t, and I naturally supposed he meant because he was really my great-uncle instead of my father. So when he started explaining what it was the boys wanted, there was no reason to think he wasn’t just trying to help me. I still think he was; I know he was, even later on! He’d been working on some accounts that night, as usual, and there were double-entry ledger-sheets spread on his desk; when he drew some pictures on them for me, to show me what he was talking about, I was a little upset, but he had to do something like that because I was so stupid. But he couldn’t draw right, he said so himself: the people in the pictures had the funniest expressions on their faces! I told him if his drawing of the girl’s parts was right, then there must be something wrong with mine, the proportions were all different; but I said I was pretty sure mine must be okay because they were just like Miss Fine’s, my language-tutor’s, and when Miss Fine and I used to play with each other she always said mine were the nicest she’d ever seen.”
Though her tone remained glib as a child’s, Anastasia blushed furiously. Max also, but not I, though my blood pulsed.
“You see how dumb I was! I was going to show him then and there to make sure, in case Miss Fine had just been being polite, and I told him I couldn’t for the life of me see why he was so angry at her, when my other tutors and governesses and maids had all done and said the same kind of things. I said if he promised not to be angry with Miss Fine I’d teach him all the games I’d learned to play—I liked him better than Miss Fine anyway, because she would bite sometimes; what’s more he had whiskers, and I was sure they’d be fun—but I wasn’t certain about men, he’d have to show me … He couldn’t talk for a while: I thought he was shy, the way some of the maids were the first time I’d ask if I could play with them; I never dreamed what I was doing to the man. I even touched him …”
“Yi.”
“Well,” Anastasia said, “to make a long story short, he gave me a good spanking, big as I was, and fired all the tutors and maids except an old cook and housekeeper who weren’t any fun to play with anyhow. After that he wouldn’t trust anybody to teach me unless he was in the room too, and every night he’d lecture to me in his study about how flunkèd my tutors and maids had been. I’d agree, and try hard to believe it, but I just couldn’t understand what was wrong with something so nice.”
“I know what you mean!” I exclaimed, thinking of my own difficulties with moral education. “I’m still not sure I understand!”
Her eyes were bright and yet wondering, as if she was pleased by my words but not certain she wasn’t being baited.
“After all,” she said, “it wasn’t from some book I learned to do what I’d been doing, but from my cats and dogs and my teachers, so that it not only seemed like the naturalest thing in the University for people to take their clothes off and have fun with each other, but the passèdest thing, too, especially if the other person was old or not pretty or needed something very badly, and you pleased them so much. The first teacher I ever had explained that to me, and I loved her such a lot I guess I never could get her idea out of my head. She was the sweetest lady!”
“Not so young, I bet,” Max ventured, and Anastasia confirmed his suspicion with a merry smile, though her eyes still shone with the earlier tears.
“Well, right or wrong, I couldn’t feel ashamed of what I’d done, even though I was ashamed at having done something I should be ashamed of—you see the difference, don’t you, George?” I nodded, hoping I did. “But at least I saw how I’d upset Uncle Ira, so I pretended to feel the same as he did about it. I was only sixteen or so when this happened with Uncle Ira, but I guess I’d become sort of an expert at guessing what people needed, sometimes even before they guessed it themselves; and being brought up the way I was, I couldn’t help trying to please them, whether I understood what I was doing or not. If I’d been allowed to go out with any of those nice boys, I’d have seduced them before they ever got their nerve up to kiss me, and probably I’d’ve thought I was a real Graduate for doing it!”
This intuition, she went on, plainly showed her that while Ira Hector was honestly horrified by her behavior, he also relished chastizing her for it. In particular, she observed, it had done him a campus of good to administer that spanking: time and again he alluded to it; teased or threatened her, according to his mood, with the prospect of another, and never failed, when he kissed her good-night, to swat her playfully athwart the haunches “in case she thought he couldn’t do it again if he had to.” Finally one day when he was in a rage over political reverses (young Lucius Rexford, the chancellor-to-be, had just won his party’s nomination and had pledged to break up the reference-book monopoly if and when he defeated the incumbent Reginald Hector in the final elections), she had deliberately perched on his lap and asked permission to attend the next Freshman Cotillion, knowing clearly what his reaction would be: quite as she had foreseen, his wrath leaped its bounds; with an oath he turned her over his knee (a feat he never could have managed without her cooperation), snatched up a ruler from his desk, and bestowed on her backside a swingeing admonishment. Nay further, it being evening and she forewarned of his ill humor, she had donned for the occasion a summer night-dress which scarcely covered her at all, so that it was fetching flesh he smote, more often than not, until he was winded and could smite no more. Whereupon, marvelous to relate, he found his wrath spent with his strength: he begged her pardon, wept for what must surely have been the first time in his li
fe, and astonished her utterly by granting her request. Moreover, he was quoted next day in the NTC newspapers as believing Lucky Rexford to be “not near as close to Student-Unionism as most so-called liberals are.”
Needless to say, Anastasia thanked her guardian profusely for having chastised her, declaring that a good old-fashioned hiding was just what today’s adolescents required now and then to confirm in them the old-fashioned virtues; the two went hand-in-hand, as it were, and she dearly hoped that whenever her behavior displeased him he would once more put her straight. He did, once a week at least, for a year or so thereafter, nor ever remarked, so far as she could tell, that her willfulest days coincided with his most irascible. He became, in consequence, less fearsome than his oldest subordinate could recall having known him, and showered privileges upon his ward—the more readily as she feigned herself loath to accept them …
“The truth was,” she said with a sigh, “all I had to do, if a boy wanted to be alone with me after that, was ask Uncle Ira to please not leave us alone, and he’d say, ‘Nonsense, I trust you absolutely—any girl who’d ask to be spanked just for dreaming a naughty dream!’ (I used to do that.) So he’d leave us alone together, and of course I’d let the boy do whatever he pleased—it was just as nice as with girls, if not nicer, and the dear things were so surprised and grateful; it would almost make me cry to see how happy I could make them! Then afterwards Uncle Ira would want to know if anything had happened, and I’d blush and say that the boy had kissed me three times, or touched my breast when I wasn’t watching out. And if I saw he needed cheering up himself, I’d start to cry and say I had to admit it had been kind of exciting, after all, and did it flunk me forever to have such a feeling? And he’d say, ‘No, my dear, that’s perfectly natural, and the Founder doesn’t flunk you for feelings; it’s what you do that counts. But the danger,’ he’d say, ‘is that you won’t be able to keep your actions separate from your feelings.’ And I’d kiss him and say, ‘You’re right, Uncle Ira: I need discipline!’ Then out would come the ruler …”
