Mind Change
Page 2
They embraced, they laughed, they cried, they coffeed, they croissanted, and, of course, they remembered.
For the past, Nina remembered Faulkner writing, is never dead. It’s not even past.
And that past stared down at them as they dream/remembered, out of the benevolent-looking eyes of Thomas Herndon, whose painting hung upon the far wall.
And it bubbled up as gas out of the ground as one memory trod upon another and they narrated detailed accounts of sharp memories, inaccurate memories, or just plain lies.
They had both been pretty much the same person at that time in their lives. Small-town Mississippi girls, conservative upbringings, no lurid adventures from youth and none planned or plotted for in the future. Girls whose greatest sins consisted perhaps in oversleeping and missing class, or misunderstanding an assignment.
They could have been expected to turn out exactly the same.
And yet that had not happened.
Nina had become—actually remained—Nina.
Lucinda had become head of one of the country’s leading universities.
What her life must be like, wondered Nina, as the first cup of coffee became the second and the campus surrounding the great house filled with students passing, laughing, flirting, and thinking of everything other than mathematics or literature.
“I love them,” Lucinda said finally, exiting from reveries about the past and returning to bucolic reality. ”They don’t keep me young; nothing can do that. But I continually see myself as one of them. And that helps.”
“You look marvelous, Lucy. You really do. Being president agrees with you.”
The woman sitting across the table from her smiled:
“I hope I’m doing it well. I’m not Thomas. I haven’t his vision. But I did learn from him.”
“Do you talk with him?”
“Constantly.”
“So do I, with Frank.”
“I wish they could be here.”
“They are.”
“Yes. I suppose that’s true. And you are here. I’m so glad of that, Nina.”
“Me too. Although I’m a little scared.”
“Of what?”
“Oh, it’s like I said when you called a few weeks ago. What if the students laugh at me? What if the professors laugh at me? I’m just a high school teacher.”
“Don’t say ‘just.’”
“All right, but you know what I mean.”
“No one’s going to laugh at you, Nina. But––”
Something happened to Lucinda Herndon’s expression at that point.
Nina was not sure how it changed. But change it did.
It darkened, as the woman’s eyes seemed to fix on something invisible that was happening beyond the glass wall and out in the middle of campus.
“––but Nina, I have to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“I’m glad you’re here. For other reasons.”
“Which are?”
A shake of the head.
“It’s difficult to go into now. But I’m going to need you.”
“You? Need me?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t understand why.”
“Well, there are several things. You’re a prominent leader now, because of your work with the Lissie Party. Everyone admires your accomplishments. I trust you. I trust your judgment when difficult situations arise.”
“How difficult can any of this be?”
The darkness of expression intensified, and the gaze toward something unseen grew more focused.
“I don’t know. I can’t predict the future. There have been some difficulties between me and various faculty members.”
“What kind of difficulties?”
“There is always tension between teaching and research. Many faculty members want to have more leave time and less classroom time. The president is often caught in the middle in these matters. But I’ve reached a decision: if the faculty want less classroom time—very well, that’s what they shall get.”
“So there’s no problem, then.”
“There will be a––”
Then she thought for a time, and smiled.
“No. I’ll not say more about it now. Suffice to say that there will be a meeting of the general faculty tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. I’d like for you to attend it with me.”
“Why, Lucy? I’m not on the real faculty.”
“Yes, you are, Nina. More than you know.”
“Well, if you want me to. I’d be excited to see some of the professors.”
“It will be an exciting meeting, I promise you that. Why don’t you come here around 8:30, and we’ll walk together to Grierson Hall, where the meeting will take place?”
“Fine.”
“What are your plans for the day?”
“Well, I got a call yesterday from the English department. The room they’ve assigned me for an office is ready. I want to go see it. After that, apparently I’m to be taken over to the administration building. I’m supposed to meet and be congratulated by some of the administrators.”
“Wonderful. I’m sure you will enjoy the experience. And it’s good that you meet these people today because tomorrow they––”
The president stopped herself.
“––well, never mind that for now. It’s just that it may be more difficult to get their full attention tomorrow.”
“Because the semester starts next Wednesday?”
“Because of various things that will happen. But, as I say, don’t worry about any of them now. Just enjoy the campus. You’re going to have an exciting semester, Nina.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“As am I, Nina. As am I.”
They both rose, and the young woman who had greeted her showed her to the door.
She walked out into the campus, savoring its smell, its appearance—its very texture.
She did find herself wondering, though, as she made her way toward the red brick building that loomed before her, what was bothering Lucinda.
That dark shadow that seemed to fall over her otherwise bright features.
Well, she decided, probably nothing very serious.
And then she forgot the matter.
Not realizing how completely wrong she was.
CHAPTER THREE: IMPRESSIONS OF ELLERTON
She left and walked to Williams Hall, where the English Department was housed. She was shown to her office, which was bare and somewhat off-putting. She nodded to several people who were typing on computers in rooms up and down the hall, but she found them bare and off-putting too.
Finally, she found herself drawn to a classroom. It looked not too different from any of the countless high school classrooms she had inhabited. Desks, blackboard, overhead projector, window opening out onto the world below, which in this case was the oak-lined campus of Ellerton and not the practice football field of Bay St. Lucy.
She walked in.
And the same thing happened that always happened when she entered an empty classroom. It became a theater. Actors began appearing before her, entire scenes playing themselves out, passions unfolding, and life or death struggles taking place.
She had only to sit in any one of the stark desks and let it all happen.
Beowulf, trapped in the coils of the horrible dragon, unable to move, conscious now that, as the beast breathed fire down upon him, his shield was beginning to melt. The pain as the beast’s fangs entered his neck, and the sight of his own blood gushing upward like slender twin fountains. But Wiglaff, good Wiglaff, the only one of his men loyal enough to stay and fight with him—this Wiglaff, somehow slipping a sword into that one hollow and vulnerable spot in the animal’s impenetrable scales, lunging, twisting, extinguishing the dragon’s fire.
Now a relaxation in the grip of the coils.
And Beowulf, summoning the last of his strength, swinging his own sword blindly, cutting off the dragon’s head with the one mighty blow—and dying.
All of this she saw in what others had perceived as an empty classroom.
Could she make the students see it?
Could she build that bridge between the mind of the Anglo-Saxon singer and the minds of the fifteen or so young people who would be sitting here in the next few days?
“Are you new faculty?”
This from a voice behind her.
She turned and saw a slender man of almost indeterminate age, bespectacled, dressed in a gray sweater and blue jeans, and standing framed in the doorway.
“I’m Nigel Davis. I’m a medievalist.”
“I’m Nina Bannister. I’m a—Nina Bannister.”
“No, I mean, what is your specialization?”
Nina thought about that for a while, gave up trying to think of a specialization, and simply said:
“I’m just a teacher. I was imagining a scene from Beowulf.”
Nigel Davis beamed:
“Ah, the seventh century epic! Just a bit earlier than the period I write about. What a peristaltic work though! I remember reading Geddings’ thoughts about it last year. I don’t know why I would have been reading Geddings. Just playing, I imagine. I do that a lot. But you have to love Geddings, of course. A structuralist, a real Derrida man attacking oral poetry of the early Saxon age. Oh God, what did he write? Well, you can imagine. Something along the lines of: ‘the singer (if one can apply that kind of primitive labeling to the rhetor in question) following both kinds of holism which both structuralism and deconstruction seem committed to. Twisting the principal of immanence away from any belief in functioning linguistic states as necessary conditions for intelligible totality.’ Don’t you just love that stuff?”
Nina paused for a while, and finally said:
“I do. I like it when Beowulf cuts off the dragon’s head, too.”
But Nigel Davis, the medievalist/structuralist, seemed not to hear, and merely continued:
“It’s all so Derrida! Quasi-transcendental as a type of holism. It doesn’t even depend on functioning states but rather is just, in itself, a kind of sufficient condition for the very idea of totality. What will you be teaching?”
It took some moments for Nina to realize that she had actually understood the last few words, but she finally did so, and answered:
“Freshman English.”
The man before her seemed taken aback:
“They have you teaching freshmen?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that was usually done by adjuncts.”
“Well, I am a kind of adjunct, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a high school teacher.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were in the department.”
Nina thought of saying, I’m a Golden Age Teacher, but did not know how Derrida might have put that thought, and settled for saying: “No. I’m not.”
“Well. Nice to have met you. All of you people do good work down there. Have a nice time visiting the campus.”
With that, Nigel Davis turned and walked away.
Were they all going to be like that? she wondered.
Maybe Lucinda was wrong.
She wasn’t anything that ended in ist. Not a structuralist, not a medievalist, not a modernist—just a Nina.
Maybe she didn’t belong here.
She did not stay here for long, there being no laughter in the building and no amity in the hallway—but instead met a young woman who was assigned to be her guide, and was taken by this person to the administration building.
Every university has a suite of offices that are much nicer than anything else on campus, and that seek to imitate life at the highest corporate levels, or what academia imagines the highest corporate levels to be. The floors are carpeted––beige carpeted––the desks wide and expansive, the windows wide and expansive, the music muted and the furniture leather, usually green leather. The president has an office there, as does the Provost or Chancellor, the Vice President, the Bursar—and more people than Nina would have thought possible.
She was led from office to office, and the various university administrators, apprised of her coming were waiting in lobbies to meet her:
The first:
Office of Vice-Provost.
An elderly distinguished-looking man peered at the two of them through the glass wall for an instant or so, standing completely motionless, beside his desk. Then he smiled and beckoned for them to come in.
They did, and he, smiling, ambled toward them:
“Come in, come in. I’m Charles Matheson. I’m the Vice-Provost. It’s so good to meet you.”
He was a tall, silver-haired, slender man, dressed so impeccably that Nina could not stop looking at his shirt. It was a shirt that had trimming like a tree or a car has trimming. It began as sky blue, but there were fine strips of white running vertically through it, and a collar of the same white, and it was all set off by a superb pair of galluses, navy blue, hooked to his ash-gray slacks by the miniature leather anchors of a pirate frigate.
“So good to have you on campus, Ms. Bannister!”
“So good of you to have me.”
“Dr. Herndon—Lucinda—has told all of us about you, and about your exploits. Congratulations on winning the first Golden Age of Teaching award. I’m certain we can all learn from your expertise.”
“I’m going to be the one learning.”
“Oh, no, no; I can assure you that––”
And from that moment on, the next hour dissolved into a dark murky liquid filled with polite, but essentially meaningless, phrases.
She was introduced to the Assistant Dean of Curriculum Development (Did he really develop the entire curriculum? she wondered. Or did he just assist someone else in developing it? And, she wondered, somewhat morbidly, if he and his direct supervisor were to die suddenly, would there no longer be any curriculum at all?) This assistant dean gushed over her for a while, and then he led her to the offices of other administrators.
––all of whom were waiting for her.
The first one led her to the second, and on and on.
“Hi there, I’m Annette Dunwoody; I’m Vice President of Academic Affairs!”
“Nice to meet you!”
“Nice to meet you!”
And blah blah blah
And blah blah blah
Then:
“I’m Peter Richards! I’m Director of Associated Degree Programs!”
“Nice to meet you!”
“Nice to meet you!”
And blah blah blah
And blah blah blah
Then:
“Hi there; I’m Peter Jarvis. I’m Assistant Vice President for Remediation and Innovation.”
“Nice to meet you!”
“Nice to meet you!”
And blah blah blah
And blah blah blah
Then:
“I’m Naomi Jannings-Todd. I’m Assistant to the Associate Director of the Business/Public Services Division!”
“Nice to meet you!”
“Nice to meet you!”
And blah blah blah
And blah blah blah
Then:
“Hi, there. I’m John Gordon, Associate Vice President of Career and Technical Programs!”
“Nice to meet you!”
“Nice to meet you!”
And blah blah blah
And blah blah blah
And more and more of them as the building, an eight-armed octopus, seemed to be digesting her and the aide leading her through it. She could only hope that at some future time, the process of administrative digestion completed, she would be forced out at some inconspicuous nether end.
Procurement Systems Director, Associate Vice President for Research and Planning, Vice President for External Partnerships, Executive Director of Statewide Security and Safety, Assistant Vice President for K-12 Initiatives, Vice President for Business and Computing Technology, and on and on and on and on As though it would never end!
There was one more office to visit, one more bureaucrat to speak with.
The Provost.
His was the second largest office in the university, of course (after the president’s), and he had the most administrative assistants (three), all of whom smiled at her occasionally as she sat in the waiting room.
The wait lasted fifteen minutes.
Then one of the assistants gestured to her and said, quietly:
“The Provost can see you now, Ms. Bannister.”
She rose, crossed the carpeted room, and entered yet another den of administrativeness.
“Ms. Bannister.”
A huge man rose to meet her. He was at least six foot six, she found herself thinking, and completely bald. Head-shaven bald, skin glistening.
He could have been a professional wrestler, and he was made even more evil looking by a sharply pointed black goatee.
“Please, sit down. I’m Charles Iverson, Provost.”
“Nina Bannister.”
“I know that. It’s good to have met you, Nina. I’m sorry you’ve come.”
She paused to let that sink in, then asked:
“Pardon?”
“I’m sorry you’ve come to teach here. I don’t think it’s appropriate. I told that to Lucinda Herndon when I found out about her plan. Which was only a week ago.”
Nina was shocked.
It was proving to be worse than she could ever imagine.
The professors either ignored her or spoke in a language she could not understand; the bureaucrats bored her silly; and the second highest-ranking academic officer at the university—as well as the biggest man she’d ever seen—opened his conversation by telling her she was not wanted.