by John Barth
Two paces from him Hermann had halted, put his hands on his hips, and said, “Shoot, Moishian!” But Max with a shrug had returned the pistol, butt-foremost, and replied, “Shoot your own self.”
“What I meant,” he told us now, “he should kill me, he wants a killing. It’s a Moishian way of talking …”
Peter Greene nodded admiringly. “You Moishians are the most, what I mean inwise. Moishians and darkies, y’know?”
But either this final charity from Max had driven Hermann mad, or his Siegfrieder training made it impossible for him to flout a direct order from any source. He’d muttered, “Ja wohl,” clicked his boot-heels, and shot himself accurately through the head.
“Magnificence!” Leonid cried, and did a hopak. “George tells this Rexford, you don’t get Shaft!” He hugged Max carefully. “Stupidy, sir, you didn’t say before!”
Max shook his head. When the shock had passed, he said, he’d seen his guilt. Even if he’d not directly ordered Hermann’s suicide, he was the cause of it; moreover, so far from feeling remorse, he found himself trembling with satisfaction over the dead Moishiocaust. Having dragged the body into the woods, he would even have burned it, to complete his revenge, but Hermann’s lighter had got soaked in blood and refused to catch. He’d gone then to the roadside and brooded until Croaker and I overtook him next day, by which time he’d come round to seeing he was flunked, and choosing to suffer for the crime of murder.
He smiled. “Then Georgie told me what he told me, up in the Visitation Room, and I wouldn’t listen, I didn’t believe him since the Powerhouse, also since Bray.” Nevertheless, my criticism of his motives had taken root in his mind and grown, further nourished by debate with Leonid, until he’d despaired of choosing either death or liberty for the right reason.
“Ah, Max!” I said warmly. “You’re passed already, Shaft or no Shaft! You see that now, don’t you?”
He did. “So it’s vanity I take the Shaft or I don’t: so flunk me! What matters is the right choice, not the right reason. Pfui on Entelechus.”
“Pfui on the right choice, too,” I said, and he saw my point at once, so clearly that his application of it to Leonid left me little to add:
“You should stay or go, which you please,” Max told him; “go back to Chementinski or transfer to New Tammany, and don’t worry what’s selfish what’s not. Assert your self! Embrace! You got to suppress something, suppress unselfishness.”
Leonid objected that he had in his late frustration tried just that course, but felt no passèder than before.
“Forget passèder!” Max advised.
Leonid scratched his beard, but I affirmed Max’s counsel enthusiastically. Their recent bind I compared to the cell in which the Nikolayans had once detained him, pointing out that in this case too the door was open; he need but shut his eye to Reason and stride forth. Hadn’t he given me the Pass-key himself?
“It mysteries me, that talk!” he said. “But never mind! You I open door for; go make wife of Mrs. Anastasia!”
I replied that he must put by self-effacement and vie for her himself, without scruple or restraint; certainly without deference to me. For not only was marriage incompatible with Grand Tutorhood, in my opinion; passionate love was too, adulterous or not, by reason of its exclusiveness. If I had allowed myself any such emotion in the past (especially on discovering that My Ladyship was not my sister), I was to that extent flunked; if I should in the future, it would be purely because failure is passage. In any case, let all try for her who would, and the best man win; I was too sensible now of my faults to join the contest.
“By George!” Leonid cried—a kind of pensive shout. “My head spin! I’m such a dumb, I have to think about!”
No less did I—about my last words in particular, whose truth I realized only as I spoke them. Desire I understood, and Camaraderie; to Friendship, Respect, and Loyalty I was no stranger, either in the goat-pens or on Great Mall; certainly not to buckly Rut. I had “loved” Hedda and Redfearn’s Tom, Lady Creamhair, Max my keeper, dead G. Herrold; I “loved” studentdom and Truth, and Anastasia’s dear escutcheon. But what did I know of Love between human men and women, that emotion held to include and yet transcend these others? My connection with Anastasia—the sidecar-bite, our Memorial Service, my former jealousy on Bray’s account, and the rest—seemed merely odd to me now: at best an intimation of what that much-sung Love might be, and a flunking measure of my distance from it. What she “saw in me,” had ever seen, I could not see, since failure had opened my eyes. Anastasia: the name, like the lady girl, went stranger and more dark as I considered it. What thing was Anastasia? The mystery’s nub, it seemed to me now, was a phenomenon I’d taken for granted before my fall, but which since baffled, even appalled me: I mean her continuing high regard for me, however indiscriminate and quirked. Why did she heed my flunkèd counsels? Why had she mated with Harold Bray, or pledged to—on my account but against my wish—back when she’d thought him the true Grand Tutor and but pitied me? Why had she pledged to now again, to free me, and declared belief in me against my own denial? I couldn’t fathom her at all, not at all. And under my assertion, however sincere, that a Grand Tutor (not that I was one) oughtn’t to permit himself the luxuries either of loving or of being loved, in the passion-way, there lay a dark suspicion that I was incapable of both.
“She needs a proper human man, not a goat-boy,” I said to Max, who acknowledged the possibility with a shrug of his hand.
Peter Greene said “Haw,” and popped a pimple. Since the night of the rape his aversion to mirrors had changed into gloomy fascination. Throughout his detainment he had used to stare at his reflection in anything shiny, growling oaths and making horrid faces. Now he had managed to get my stick from Croaker, and aided by the mirror near its tip was bursting pustules on his cheek, cursing himself with every pinch. “Y’all don’t see through her the way I do. (There, you ugly bastard!) Didn’t she admit she brought it on her own self, out in the alley? A flunker like me!”
He would have embarked then on his usual lament: that all his life he’d been a gosh-durn baby, knowledge-of-the-campuswise; that he’d thought himself a fine fellow, even a Graduate, his marriage a success, his self-education and career things to be proud of, his alma mater the gem of the University, Anastasia the flower and pattern of maiden girlship—until I and Dr. Sear had opened his eye to the truth. But as he began that drear recital, Max made inquiry of me with a glance, as if to ask “Him too?” I nodded, and broke into Greene’s complaint.
“Look here … Pete,” I said, “you’re okay.”
“You durn tootin’,” he grumbled, thinking I’d affirmed his condemnation-in-progress of New Tammany’s Quiet-Riot policies. “Lawless academical adventurism, is what it is.”
“I mean you,” I persisted. “I was wrong before. You were okay, until you took my advice.”
“And what the heck altogether?” Max said smiling. “Like you used to say, it doesn’t matter nothing.”
Greene regarded us suspiciously, yet with a rueful expression, as if afraid we were baiting him but admitting he deserved no better use. I took my stick from him and suggested cordially that it was time he stopped looking in mirrors.
“Can’t see much in that one anyhow,” he admitted. “All pussed up.”
Leonid grunted amiably. “You got face like old whore’s behind.”
“Say what you want,” Greene sadly invited us. “I know I’m flunked.”
I declared then my conviction that he was not—or hadn’t been until I’d flunked him. My interpretation of Bray’s Certificate, I wanted to tell him, had been as mistaken in his case as in the others. Enos Enoch said Become as a kindergartener, and I’d flunked Peter Greene on the grounds that beneath his sentimental illusions lay much guile, much guilt, much that was failed. How tell him now that he was blinder than before—or as blind, but faileder? Better to deceive himself about the worth of things than about their want of it! That Miss Sally Ann had several t
imes horned him I was fairly sure; but that she was no “floozy” I was certain. New Tammany College, as best I could judge from much reading and a little observation, was neither a Graduate School on the one hand nor a Dunce’s College on the other; in its history and present state there was much to wince at—and much to take pride in: a few Ira Hectors, a few Lucky Rexfords, and many Peter Greenes, for better and worse. Whom too I thought him wronger about than before: he was not “all right,” surely not “all wrong,” but in his former error he’d at least been generous, cheerful, energetic, and on the whole more agreeable than not, whereas now …
But there was no time for such analysis, nor did I think it would much touch him. Stoker approached with a jingle of keys and a mocking whistle. Therefore I repeated Bray’s quotation from the Founder’s Scroll—Passèd are the kindergarteners—and declared my suspicion that kindergarteners were neither innocent nor simple except to sentimental eyes; only ingenuous, as Greene had been, was yet, and doubtless ever would be.
Max rolled his eyes. “You said that right.”
Greene squinted. “You’re pulling my leg, George. Not that I don’t have it coming, ‘As-ye-sow’wise.”
I assured him of my sincerity, though in fact I used a small lie to make my point. Didn’t he know, I asked him, that his acne had actually been clearing up before he overcame his thing-about-mirrors? “When you saw your own pimples you started squeezing them all the time”—so much was true—“and that made more of them. Even so they’re not as bad as you think; you see the spots on the mirror as spots on your face.”
This unpleasant argument impressed him; he would clean Sear’s mirror and make a count. But I insisted he have no more to do either with mirrors or with Kennard Sear, should that unfortunate man survive.
“I don’t get you,” Greene protested. “You told me your own self—”
“Never mind what I told you. I was wrong.” Of two false arguments that came to mind then, I chose one and was pleased to see Greene supply the other himself.
“Suppose a man’s nearsighted,” I said. “Things two meters off will be twice as blurred as things one meter off. Right?” I hurried on before he could answer. “So he learns to allow for that error, and he’s okay. Now when he looks in a mirror from one meter’s distance he corrects the image for a meter of error, either in his head or with his eyeglasses, and thinks he’s seeing clearly—but he’s not, because the image he sees is really two meters distant, a meter each way …”
Max closed his eyes until Leonid began to make noises of dissent, whereupon he went to confer with him in whispers. Greene frowned. Stoker had paused a few cells from ours to accept certain bribes from a shameless co-ed, before whose eyes he dangled the key-ring. I pressed on to the shakiest part of my argument before he should overhear it.
“So anything he sees in a mirror twenty meters from him will be distorted forty times. He couldn’t recognize it at all! Put a mirror up to life, you get a double distortion.”
“Quadruple,” Max corrected, very gravely. “On account the image is also backwards.”
“I hate!” Leonid said, and although his glare suggested he meant deception as well as distortion, he shook Greene’s shoulder with rough goodwill. “You wrong about you! I like okay!”
Greene cocked his head, much moved. “I don’t know. I swear to Pete … That durn window by the funhouse that I told you-all about—you know what I decided a while back, when I was in jail here?” He looked from one to the other of us. “Come to me it weren’t any window at all, but a gosh-durn mirror!”
Max pretended astonishment.
“It was me talking dirty to Sally Ann!” Greene said bitterly. “I chunked that rock at my own self, that I thought was the Peeping Tom!”
Leonid feigned horror. “Impossity, Peter Greene!”
“Sure it is!” Greene laughed and sprang up with more vigor than he’d displayed since the rape. “Couldn’t nobody see their own reflection so far off, all that distortion!”
“Night-time too,” I reminded him—relieved, but not unappalled, that he’d taken my bait so readily and swallowed it whole.
“Plus a funhouse mirror yet,” Max added, “that it’s made to distort things.”
This too Greene seized uncritically, disregarding its implications. “I could’ve been right in the first place!”
“You were,” I encouraged him. “Till I misled you.”
Leonid pounded his back. “Okayship! No more hate! Mrs. Anastasia too!”
Stoker had come to our door at last, and grinned malevolently through the bars—waiting, I guessed, to refuse to unlock me. But I saw in Leonid’s reference to My Ladyship a chance to complete the re-Tutoring of Peter Greene, in whose eye stood tears already of relief; and Stoker’s mock, I was willing to gamble, would abet me.
“Don’t you realize,” I said to Greene, “that Anastasia dismissed the complaint because she loves you? She knows how much you admired her, and how upset you were at what you saw in Dr. Sear’s office—or thought you saw, through the one-way mirror …”
Greene blinked strongly. “By jimmy gumbo, George! Do you mean to stand there on your two hind legs and tell me—”
Thinking he saw what was afoot, Stoker joined in happily: “You didn’t think it was really Stacey you jumped on, did you? My wife’s a virgin, Greene!”
“I be durn,” Greene said stiffly. “You can’t fool me.”
“No, I swear it!” Stoker cried, and feigned a whisper. “I was born with no balls, see, and Stacey’s got a thing about dildos. Look, I’ll show you.” He seemed prepared to open his trousers for our inspection—whether in earnest or not I never learned, for Greene professed disbelief and disgust, at the same time blushing with hopeful doubt.
“You can’t tell me she’s a virgin!” he said. “Not after what I done to her!”
His tone implied that he could nonetheless entertain the fantastic idea of her having been unserviced thitherto—despite what he’d seen and heard! I considered suggesting that he himself had deflowered her in the alley. But I hesitated, uncertain whether that notion would please him or burden him with new guilt. Either way, I decided, the responsibility might involve him with My Ladyship in a manner not conducive to restoring his marriage, and my object was merely to revive his esteem for Anastasia, as for himself and the other things he’d valued in time past. While I considered the problem, Stoker solved it, thinking only to make further sport.
“I know you’re the Dunce’s own cocksman,” he said, “despite what Georgina tells me. But if you really believe it was Stacey in that alley, you’re blind as a bat.”
“Who was it then?” Greene said angrily. “And who was it owned up in court it was her own durn fault? Her twin sister?”
Stoker laughed. “Of course! Didn’t George think once that he and Stacey were twins? Well she did have a twin, back in the Unwed Co-ed’s Hospital where Ira Hector got her; but it was a twin sister …”
Greene held his ears. “Y’all quit, now!” But Stoker, inspired, went on to declare that Anastasia and her twin sister, though alike in appearance as his right eye to his left, were of contrary dispositions, to My Ladyship’s frequent mortification. For while Anastasia was not only chaste but downright frigid—as Greene himself had observed, surely, by her demeanor in court and in the Visitation Room—her twin sister, raised in an orphanage, had early turned to vice, and was in fact a floozy!
“It’s the Founder’s truth,” he vowed with a grin. “She’s a hot one, that Lacey—Lacey’s what they call her, from her black lace drawers—”
“She weren’t wearing any drawers!” Greene cried—triumphantly but wretchedly, for despite his scorn he had begun to listen with a wincing care.
“Naturally she wasn’t,” Stoker replied, and as Leonid, Max, and I looked on astonished, he improvised a remarkable story: “Lacey’s” notorious promiscuity, he declared, was commonly attributed to resentment of her luckier twin, whose reputation had indeed been damaged by Lacey’s
playing whore in her name. But in his own estimation—and he called on me, with a wink, to support his analysis—the unhappy girl’s motives were more complex: indeed, it seemed to him that “Lacey’s” wantonness but confirmed Anastasia’s virgin chastity, and he wondered (that is, pretended to wonder) whether the girl didn’t flunk herself deliberately—out of some hopeless love for her sister, say, or to set an instructive bad example.
I regarded Stoker sharply. “What a very curious idea. Like the Dean o’ Flunks, you mean?”
“In black panties!” Stoker laughed. “Except when she doesn’t wear any at all, to make Stacey look flunkèder.”
“Foolishnish!” Leonid shouted, who had heard enough. “Stop this!”
But Stoker maintained with the same earnestness that his wife, for all her protestations of contempt for “Lacey’s” misconduct, often took the blame for her errant twin—whether out of love, or guilt for her own comfortable childhood, or some perverse envy, he wouldn’t venture to say, though he inclined to the last hypothesis.
“Pass her heart!” Leonid cried, tearful himself now with compassion. “That Mrs. Anastasia, all the time takes blame! I love, George!”
I nodded approval. He shook his great fist then at Stoker. “Dog pig! And falsifer!” Max and me also he accused of exploiting Greene’s “stupihood,” and declared that my account of Anastasia’s behavior in court was the only true thing we’d said to his blue-eyed friend. “All these mirror, and virginicy, and Lacey-pant—bah! Stop this sisterness!”
Greene rubbed his orange beard. “I don’t know, Leo. I don’t much trust a durn mirror, one-way or two-. And it was kind of dark there, back of the Old Chancellor’s Mansion …”
Leonid clutched him by the shirt-front. “Don’t believe, Peter Greene! I have done! What word? My own self … I have love Mrs. Anastasia! No Lacey-pant!”
Greene choked and flung himself away. “Doggone you! You watch how you talk, now, Alexandrov!”
