by John Barth
Nor was the grave varsity situation the only cause of Rexford’s declining popularity. Stoker had returned to the Powerhouse with rapèd Anastasia after rescuing me from the noose, and in time had restored Furnace-Room output to three-quarters of its normal level; better than that he could not inspire Madge and the rest to do, by reason perhaps of his own loss of energy; even so, a part of the production was stored, or went up the Shaft in smoke, because New Tammany’s power-consumption had dropped to fifty percent of normal. The decrease was owing not to reduced demands for power in the College—they had never been higher—but to the problems of distribution raised by Rexford’s refusal to have any commerce with Maurice Stoker, whose presence he also forbade in the Great Mall area. This was the first of a series of prohibitions enacted by his administration in the following months: the ill-famed and short-lived “Open-Book Tests” designed to eliminate flunkèdness from New Tammany College. Dormitory-brothels were shut down, their madams prosecuted. Adultery was made a criminal misdemeanor and rape a capital felony on the one hand, while celibacy on the other—at least as represented by bachelor- and spinsterhood—was penalized by fines increased annually after age twenty-one. Homosexuals were flogged, irrespective of gender; flagellants were not. Although one glass of light wine was served with the evening meal in every dining-hall, drunkenness, even in the home, was punished severely, as were fights of any sort and even domestic altercations—wife-beating, in particular, was made punishable by long detention. Tower-Hall patronage was abolished; macing, graft, division of interest, and other abuses of office became grounds for expulsion from the College. Censorship was imposed upon all media of entertainment, communication, instruction, and artistic expression, with the aim of suppressing excess. Exotic dress, grooming, and behavior were condemned from all sides by bill-boards and Telerama messages, and—what was perhaps the most controversial measure of all—it was proposed that psychotherapy be made obligatory for extreme or intemperate personalities, to the end of schooling them in moderation. This last proposal the Chancellor ultimately vetoed as immoderate, though he himself had drafted it; but the press criticized him all the same—in guarded terms, out of respect for the censorship. So also did the rank and file of New Tammany undergraduates, who had used to adore him; they removed his sunny likeness from their walls and smirked at the rumors that Mrs. Rexford’s vacation from Great Mall would be permanent. Yet they submitted to the Open-Book reforms to a degree bespeaking some basic sympathy with their spirit. Criminal violence became rare; so too did loud merrymaking. Sharp cheeses and unsliced rye bread disappeared from menus. Nearly everyone had a C average. Greene Timber and Plastics (in the owner’s absence) developed a synthetic material said to be almost indistinguishable from real plastic, and a more efficient way of packaging containers. It was with a faint smile, a faint sigh, or a faint shrug that people nicknamed Tower Hall “Dead Center.” No one was happy; on the other hand, no demonstrations were mounted or measures proposed to repeal the new laws.
The Chancellor himself was only moderately concerned about these developments; neither did it stir him to hear that the Founder’s Scroll had got lost in the CACAFILE—which, reprogrammed by Mother’s office in accordance with my directive, seemed to have declared every volume in the Library sui generis and would file no two in the same category. The evidence of student-opinion polls, the complaints of his party-leaders and lieutenants that he’d never win the next election, the declining wattage of the Light House itself—nothing much troubled him.
“He’s not right bright these days,” Stoker said. But he said it languidly, with none of his old high-spirited contempt, and though he had regrown his beard and reverted to his motorcycle-costume, his hair was barbered, his leather jacket greaseless—and a curly black forelock hung upon his brow. “I’m glad he’s no kin of mine.”
This as he returned me to my cell—to some cell, anyhow—from one of his offices, early in my confinement. I had testified in Max’s behalf during his trial for the murder of Herman Hermann and conversed afterwards with Stoker for several hours, during which he told me most of the foregoing and other things as well, with a kind of bored persistence. He had been convinced, he said, that I was as much a fraud as Bray; for that very reason he’d taken my advice and ceased to define passage by his wholesale flunkèdness. His aim—which he pursued because he had no faith in it—was, I gathered, to lead the Chancellor and others to failure by no longer exemplifying and tempting them to it (thereby himself to fail, I suspected, and thus, by his inverted logic, to pass—the same end he’d originally pursued, only essayed now by transvaluated means); and he supposed he had succeeded. Shaven and suited, he’d gone to the Light House in order at once to embrace and to deny kinship with Lucius Rexford, whom he met returning from the aborted Summit Symposium. The two had made polite, if distracted, conversation, even toasted each other’s health in Dry Sack; but though the Chancellor was astonished to see him there and gratified to hear that the claim of their fraternity would need be denied no more, Stoker had distinctly felt that for the first time Lucky Rexford disliked him in addition to repudiating him. To be sure, the Chancellor was distraught by the events at the University Council, by Mrs. Rexford’s chilly announcement that she’d be dining out that evening, and (what Stoker hadn’t been aware of) not least by my several counsels to him, which though he’d scoffed at them he couldn’t forget. Nevertheless Stoker felt so clearly the distaste that took the place of Rexford’s former envious rejection, he himself cut the interview short, and readily agreed to the Chancellor’s suggestion that they meet no more. In a curious heat then, he had throttled through the Light-House gate with his company—not in excess of the posted speed-limits—just as Anastasia and I had happened to taxi past en route to the Library from Dr. Sear’s. When shortly afterwards the crowd had gathered before Tower Hall, and he learned their purpose, he’d put his new persona to the further test I’d witnessed, soothing the demonstrators instead of inciting and clubbing them at once as was his wont. Bray’s admonition there in the lobby—to “be himself, for Founder’s sake”—accounted for his subsequent partial regression: who was himself? and for Whose sake did he do anything? Confused, he had retired to Main Detention, exchanged the business-suit for his customary garb, and returned to Great Mall just in time to stop the lynching.
“But why’d you stop it?” I asked him. “If you’d decided my Tutoring was false and Bray’s was true …”
He shrugged. “Stacey’s orders.”
I could scarcely believe him. “You took orders from Anastasia?”
“I couldn’t decide what was what,” he said listlessly. “And Peter Greene humping her like that, it kind of upset me …”
I remarked that My Ladyship’s sexual misfortunes had never previously dismayed him; he was even responsible for not a few of them.
He sighed. “That was before. You’ve seen how she is lately. I don’t know, George: I think there’s something wrong with our marriage.”
I believed I knew what he meant, for though I’d seen Anastasia several times since being detained, and accounted for some features of her behavior as owing to my counsel and others to her misguided faith in my Grand-Tutorhood, I couldn’t finally say I understood My Ladyship at all. Her permitting Harold Bray to service her in exchange for Certifying me I comprehended, revolting as was the idea; his later amnesty-offer and invitation to me to set right the damage I’d done I refused, assuming they were bought with the same coin. But when she brought my mother to visit me she was cold, even priggish, far beyond the simple chastity I’d enjoined on her. She was unsympathetic not only to the vulgar prisoners who shouted obscenities and exposed themselves to her in the Visitation Room—and whom she once must passively have comforted with her sex—but also to her husband, despite his having ceased to abuse her. If formerly she had embraced the hateful as well as the dear in studentdom, accepting indiscriminately lust with love and receiving upon her with equal compassion police-dogs and Grand Tutors, now s
he seemed as catholic in her rejection: would no more of me or even of Leonid (who truly, passionately loved her) than of Peter Greene, who professed disgust with her and all her gender.
Anastasia’s character, in fact, was one of two chief subjects of debate among my friends in Main Detention; it always came up when Peter Greene and Leonid were within talking distance of each other.
“Keep-her-legs-togetherwise,” Greene would declare to him, “I used to think she was a durn nice girl, same as you do now. I’d of swore she was the GILES her own self if you’d of stepped up and asked me! Didn’t I sock you one in the Living Room for saying she weren’t no virgin? But it’s no use her putting on airs now, by golly: I’ve seen what I’ve saw!”
“And done what you did,” Max would remind him.
Leonid then would shout “Irrelevanceness!” or “Dumbnicity!” and, seizing his new friend by the hair (if they were in a common cell) or shaking a cordial fist, would harangue him on his blindness to the real nature of Anastasia’s virtues.
“Is the GILES!” he would declare of her. “Excuse, George: you know what! Virgins bah! All this chastehood, all this niceship—what’s the word it is, Dr. Spielman, sir?”
“Schmata,” Max would offer, who had grown fond of Moishian terms since his detention. “Dreck.”
“I love!” Leonid then would roar, with reference equally to the words, his idol Max who supplied them, his grumbling and perhaps pinioned cellmate (who had given up exercise and vitamin-pills), and My Ladyship. “Never mind goodity! Pfui! Pfui!”
What he meant I can more easily paraphrase than reproduce in his idiom: to believe in Grand Tutors and Founders was against his curriculum, but he would not dismiss as did everyone else the notion that the GILES could possibly be female or that Anastasia, despite her sexual history, might be it. On the contrary, it was just that aspect of her biography and former nature that Commenced her in Leonid’s eye; he loved her as blindly (it seemed to me) as earlier had Peter Greene, but for just contrary reasons: as a quintessential rapee, an absolutely unselfish martyr to studentdom’s lust—his own included, for he’d once knelt before her in a corner of the Powerhouse, confessed an overmastering desire, and not been denied its satisfaction. He would none of my suggestion that her very docility perhaps aroused the lust that made her its victim. “Nyet!” he would shout, slamming one fist into the other and plunging as always about the cell. So far from learning the flunkèdness of her innocence, he would school me in the passèdness of her guilt.
“Lustity I spit on!” he cried. “Chastiness same like!” Celibate co-eds, in his view, were a kind of misers, Ira Hectors of the flesh, and rapists a kind of burglars or book-pirates: flunkèd men whose flunkèdness was made possible by the corresponding flunkèdness of private property. Neither would Graduate if he were Grand Tutor; none save the generous should pass. “But nyet!” he would then avow further. Had he called her a mere rapee? Insufficienthood! There was no merit in being robbed; that mischance befell miser and philanthropist alike. Anastasia, he maintained, was like a man who not only gives alms to the poor and greedy but bestows his whole wealth among them, share and share alike, lest they be led to steal it: “A Reginald Hector of sexness!”
I smiled at this analogy, ironically more telling than he knew, but declined to argue the point or disabuse him of his esteem for the former chancellor. It was between him and Greene that the argument raged, as it had since their first encounter at Stoker’s Randy-Thursday party; only now, thanks to Greene’s disillusionment, it was flunkèd versus passèd promiscuity rather than the latter versus passèd maidenhood. Otherwise they were the cordiallest companions—except when Greene’s bitter hallucinations and Leonid’s epileptoid fits made one or the other unapproachable.
“No durn good,” was Greene’s new refrain, whether he was speaking of Anastasia, “Miss Sally Ann,” New Tammany College, or himself. “No gosh durn good! What I mean, Truth-Beauty-and-Goodnesswise, y’know?” Though convinced that Anastasia had got what she deserved from him (“Flunking hussy, leading me on she hadn’t never been touched, and all the time selling it faster’n O.B.G.’s daughter!”), he did not excuse himself of the felony. He was flunked, he saw plainly now; had always been flunked, in every wise. He had despoiled the forests and destroyed their aboriginal inhabitants, vaunted his uncouthness, ridden roughshod with his vulgar wealth; he had been no husband to his wife (who however he was sure now had betrayed him many times over), no father to his children (wastrels and delinquents though they were). Let them Shaft him; he deserved no less a penalty, even from a college he saw now to be corrupt from Belfry to Basement. Or, if the whore he’d alleyed and her pimp the false Grand Tutor chose to hush the thing up, let them acquit him: once free he’d divorce his wife, resign from his enterprises, quit the Junior Enochist League and all it stood for, perhaps even defect to the East Campus—or blow his brains out, he was not sure which. In earnest of these resolves he had already abandoned razor and soap: his chin bushed orange; his scent approached the late Redfearn’s Tom’s.
It turned out that he was neither convicted nor acquitted. In the morning of the day at hand—the first of Max’s trial—the case against him was dismissed, and he left Main Detention.
“She wouldn’t testify!” Stoker exclaimed to me, referring to his wife. I was only slightly less baffled than he. My Ladyship had decided to press no charges—so the prosecuting barrister had announced, plainly chagrined—because “mature reflection” had led her to believe that she’d doubtless invited and provoked Mr. Greene’s assault, and doubtless been gratified by it in some flunkèd wise. As her statement was read, Anastasia regarded me coolly across the court-room, where I sat with other prospective witnesses in the Spielman case.
“Generostness!” Leonid wept later, when he heard the news. “GILES-hoodhood!”
At the counsel-table Greene muttered: “I knew she weren’t no better’n she should be, drive-a-man-to-drinkwise. They’re all of a feather.”
But Stoker, like myself, could accept neither of these interpretations.
“It’s what you’ve said about her all along,” I reminded him; and he agreed, but pointed out with a troubled sigh the same irony that puzzled me: her admission was—perhaps for the first time!—not true at all.
“Flunk if I know what’s come over everybody,” Stoker said. “Maybe you are the Grand Tutor.” I observed him narrowly: there was in his tone and expression no trace of his usual tease—nor did he lately, as of old, prompt one’s least-passèd aspects to the fore. For example, his remark did not tickle my vanity or ambition, as formerly it would have, but rather shamed me, and I answered calmly: “I don’t know any more whether Bray’s the Grand Tutor or not; there’s something extraordinary about him. But I know I’m not. I’m a total failure.”
My warden smiled. “Maybe Failure is Passage.”
The cell that Peter Greene had vacated I found occupied now by Croaker, fetched there from the Infirmary while I’d been in court.
“He’s diplomatically immune,” Stoker said. “We’re just boarding him till they fetch him back home.”
My black friend did not look well. Max and Leonid held his head as best they could while he vomited through the bars. He too was charged with rape, Stoker explained to us, and though he could not be prosecuted he had been declared non gratis in New Tammany College and was being held against his recall at the request of his Frumentian alma mater. Following my advice, it seemed, he had mutinied against Dr. Eierkopf: eaten every egg in the Tower Hall Belfry, fresh and otherwise, then jammed home the Infinite Divisor into the escapement of the clockworks and abandoned his master between Tick and Tock. Putting by all restraint, he had deflowered two co-eds, one male freshman, a trustee’s maiden aunt, a blue-ribbon gilt, and a cast-bronze allegorical statue in heroic scale of Truth Unveiled. In addition he had consumed indiscriminately raw chipmunks, aspen catkins, toadstools, dog-stools, and the looseleaf lecture-notes of his third victim, an economics major. The campus patr
ol had overtaken him at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel; yet they doubted they’d ever have subdued him, unless fatally, had not a remarkable occurrence quite nonplussed him.
“A certain married couple known to us both,” Stoker said, still with no sarcasm at all, “were spending the weekend at that motel, it seems, on the advice of the Grand Tutor. What happened between them isn’t very clear—Kennard’s in the Infirmary now, and Hedwig’s in the Asylum—”
I groaned.
“—but whatever it was, it must’ve unhinged poor Heddy entirely. Ever heard of a woman attacking a man?” Mrs. Sear, it appeared, had accosted Croaker in the motel lobby (whose occupants had fled when he strode naked through the glass door and commenced to make love to a soft-drink dispenser), removed her clothing, and leaped upon him, shouting lewd encouragements. Alas, what the vending-machine had mustered, she dismayed; so addled and unmanned him (of course, his stomach was troubling him by this time too) that he stood like ravished Truth while patrolmen shackled and sedated him. Mrs. Sear, altogether distraught, skipped circles about the lobby, chanting He was my bashful, barefoot beau in uncertain contralto, until the white ambulance-cycle arrived. It had been summoned in fact for Dr. Sear, who during the furor in the lobby was found by a chambermaid to be unconscious and discolored in his room, overdosed with sleeping-capsules. Thus husband and wife had left the motel together, neither aware of the fact. Mrs. Sear was committed and had subsequently regressed to the behavior of a five-year-old girl, according to Stoker; Dr. Sear had his stomach pumped in the outpatient wing of the Infirmary and so was spared for the Cancer Ward, where he presently languished in preparation for palliative surgery. Croaker himself, once subdued, became ill, incontinent, and helpless: went on all fours, forgot how to feed himself, and finally huddled day and night in one corner like a distempered beast. When presently the fever had passed and his appetites began to rewaken, he’d been transferred to Main Detention rather than to the NTC Asylum because of a dispute among the psychiatric faculty as to whether insanity was possible in sub-rational animals. The alternative proposed by the negative faction, composed largely of South New Tammanians—that he be exhibited in the Zoological Gardens—was rejected by the Office of Intercollegiate Relations lest it give offense to the emerging colleges of Frumentius, whose political support the Office was courting. Of Dr. Eierkopf’s fate there was no word.
