by Alison Lurie
He cannot blame his failure on ill fortune. He had been born with all the advantages: the son of a well-known professor, nephew of authors and lawmakers, grandson and great-grandson of ministers and judges; healthy, handsome, intellectually precocious, well-loved, well-educated. But after all these gifts had been bestowed, some evil fairy had flown in through the delivery-room window and whispered over his crib, “He should be a great man.” All his life, that imperative has haunted him. His colleagues, born into cultural or economic slums, the ugly, clumsy sons of provincial neurotics or illiterate immigrants, might be proud of having become Corinth professors—not he.
As if symbolically, when he reached adolescence Brian did not grow as fast as his peers at Andover, nor in the end as far. When he entered Harvard (at sixteen) he was still small for his age. He would catch up, his relatives said, and he believed them; but he did not catch up. He remained, though not a very short man, considerably below the average in height: five feet five, if he stood up straight and held his neck in a certain way. Erica was nearly three inches taller. When she married him, she gave away to a Congregational church rummage sale all the high-heeled shoes which showed her spectacular long legs to such advantage, and accepted a lifetime of flat soles, because he was going to be a great man.
All these years, Erica (unlike his relatives) has never either overtly or covertly accused him of disappointing her. Only once years ago, after a New York party at which several famous persons were present, had she even admitted, laughing as she spoke and pulling a yellow flowered silk petticoat over her dark curls, that she would like Brian to be famous too. Previous to that evening, and subsequently, she had denied any such wish; but Brian was not convinced.
Erica had also insisted that same evening that she didn’t hold it against him that he had not yet become famous. It was bad luck, that was all, like Muffy’s allergy to house dust, and would similarly be outgrown. After all, she had added, still laughing softly, leaning on his shoulder to steady herself as she took off her white silk sandals—he was already a famous professor: hadn’t he just been given the Sayle Chair of American Diplomacy at Corinth? Brian had replied that this meant very little—only that Clinton had retired and he was now the senior man in the field. But (as perhaps he had intended) she took this protest for modesty.
Erica still expected him to become a great man that evening—next year, or the year after. But Brian suspected even then, and knows now, that he will not. It is too late, for one thing: he is nearly as old as Lindsay, and five years older than Bobby Kennedy would have been. Erica knows it too, and affects not to mind; or possibly does not mind. She has said that she is glad of it, because she values their privacy and dislikes official social life of the sort she had to be involved in during the two years when Brian was head of his department. If he were to become any more prominent she would see less of him, she has explained, and more of people she doesn’t care for.
Brian has done his best to become a great man. He has written many long and serious political articles; he has served without pay on committees and commissions; he has offered himself at various times and more or less subtly to the Democratic, Independent Republican and Liberal parties as an adviser on foreign policy. But his theories have attracted no real interest; his opinions have been voted down, and his offers declined.
He regretted this not only for personal reasons but because he sincerely believed, even knew, that he had much to contribute. He was one of the few people he knew, for example, who realized that political expediency and idealism are not incompatible. Yet for years he had been misunderstood, just as the public figure he admired most, George Kennan, had been misunderstood; he had been considered either a fuzzy-minded theorist or a small-minded politician.
Even within the university he has been disappointed in his ambitions. He did not want the Sayle Chair, which carried with it no reduction in teaching load or significant increase in salary; what he wanted was the chair, and the desk, in the office of the Dean of Humanities, or some similar large office. Everyone agreed he had done well during his turn as department chairman, and several of his colleagues appeared to think he would make a fine dean; but when the opportunity came none of them nominated him for the post.
Brian’s most inward belief is that all these defeats and his size are connected: that his appearance is the objective correlative of a lack of real stature. Years ago, some invisible force had set a heavy hand on his head to keep him from growing any taller, as a sign to the world. And this sign had been heeded. The opinions and candidacy of a man barely five feet five, weighing a mere one hundred and thirty-five pounds, were seldom taken seriously. It was felt everywhere that he was in every sense a small man, not suited to authority over anything beyond a small department. Had he been even a few inches taller, he might have fulfilled his promise and the expectations of his relatives—obeyed the imperative spoken over his crib. Conversely, once he had fulfilled this promise, his size would not have mattered. He never spoke of this to anyone, but he thought about it—not every day, but frequently.
Throughout his adult life Brian had behaved so as to compensate for, even confute, the sign set on him by fate. He had decided in college that he could not afford to make jokes or mistakes as a larger man might, lest he be thought lightweight. For a quarter-century, therefore, he had done and said nothing which would have seemed frivolous, injudicious or immoral in a university president or a candidate for Congress.
Was it the realization that all this solemn self-regulation had been for nothing—a foolish mistake, a long joke on himself—that had made him susceptible to Wendy Gahaghan? Brian does not know. He is aware of no decision to cast off his self-discipline; certainly of no decision to cast it off for Wendy.
Even as a political scientist he finds it impossible to determine when and how the affair had begun. Possibly it dated from the day two and a half years ago when he became aware that Miss Gahaghan, a small hippie-type blonde in his graduate seminar on American Institutions, was prominent among those students who remained after class to speak to him more often than necessary, and made excuses to consult him during his office hours. This might have been viewed variously: as apple-polishing, infantile dependency or simple academic anxiety. Which, Brian did not trouble to determine, since it would presumably end with the course.
American Institutions ended, but Miss Gahaghan, who had received a grade of B-plus from Brian, continued. She audited his undergraduate lectures; she waylaid him in the department office. Apparently she had formed some sort of attachment to him. This had happened before with students, and Brian had handled it, always successfully, as he tried to handle it now. That is, he began, slowly but steadily, to turn down the thermostat of his manner from faintly warm to neutrally cool. In the past he had never had to go below about 55 degrees to chill affections sufficiently; but Miss Gahaghan was not discouraged even by lower temperatures. She continued to come to his office; and he let her continue. He did not, in fact, turn the temperature down to freezing. Why not?
Principally, he thinks, because Wendy was not a graduate student in his department, but in Social Psychology. She had taken his course more or less by accident, and discovered an enthusiasm for American history which he believed to be largely real, even if it was confused in her mind with enthusiasm for him. One of her ambitions was to go into the wilderness and live in a commune based on mutual cooperation and mystical philosophy. Her department treated such groups as examples of social pathology. From Brian she learned that they were in the mainstream of the American Utopian tradition.
“All those dumb old uptight behaviorists, they think anybody who believes in love and community is a deviant,” Wendy exclaimed when these facts fully dawned upon her. Brian had smiled noncommittally; though he did not admit it, he shared her descending opinion of the graduate school of Social Psychology. He believed most of the men in Wendy’s department to be self-seeking fools, and their courses to be composed in equal parts of common sense and nonsense—
that is; of the already obvious and the probably false.
He was pleased, but not surprised, that Wendy should consult him rather than her adviser (a cynical, nervous young man called Roger Zimmern who was a cousin of Leonard’s). He liked to answer questions, to explain things. What made explaining things to Wendy especially gratifying was that she wanted nothing from him but knowledge—or so he thought in the beginning. Her reactions were naïve sometimes, overemotional often, but never bored or contrived. There was no academic reason for her to listen to what he said, or read the books he suggested. He was not responsible for her examinations, her financial support, or her M.A. thesis; he would not have to recommend her for jobs or fellowships. He never saw in her eyes as he spoke the dull-red stare of academic duty and boredom; or the hard glaze of self-concealment as a prelude to self-advancements—the yellow signal “Caution” which glowed so often in the eyes of his own graduate students. Her gaze was pure green light.
Wendy’s conversation also had a certain interest. She was outspoken about her professors and courses as no student in Political Science would have been, and it amused Brian to learn about another department from the underside in this way; the more so perhaps because she did not always know how much she was revealing. He encouraged her, as he would not have done had he expected to see more of her. But he assumed that the coming summer would mean the end of the acquaintance. Wendy would have her degree; she was planning to hike around Europe and then teach high school and live in a commune she had heard of in Massachusetts.
But in September of the following year she was back in graduate school and back in Brian’s office. Europe was a great trip, but you couldn’t stay there long without bread; the commune was a good scene until there got to be too many freeloaders, runaway kids and old acidheads! the Green River school system was a bad, ugly trip and scene. Brian was not sorry to see Wendy again: her letters from Holland, Yugoslavia and Green River had been amusing; he had missed her reports on the psychology department, and was glad to have them resume.
What was even more important, or soon became so, was the news Wendy brought of the “youth scene.” Brian had known for some time that he and his colleagues were not living in the America they had grown up in; it was only recently though that he had realized they were also not living in present-day America, but in another country or city-state with somewhat different characteristics. The important fact about this state, which can for convenience’ sake be called “University,” is that the great majority of its population is aged eighteen to twenty-two. Naturally the physical appearance, interests, activities, preferences and prejudices of this majority are the norm in University. Cultural and political life is geared to their standards, and any deviation from them is a social handicap.
Brian had started life as a member of the dominant class in America, and for years had taken this position for granted. Now, in University, he finally has the experience of being among a depressed minority. Like a Chinaman in New York, he looks different; he speaks differently, using the native tongue more formally, the local slang infrequently and as if in quotation marks; he likes different foods and wears different clothes and has different recreations. Naturally he is regarded with, suspicion by the natives.
Of course Brian does not have to spend all his time in University. In the evenings, on weekends, and during most of the summer he can return to the real world, where other standards are in effect. The trouble is, he can see quite well that the “real world” is growing to resemble University more every year, as the youth culture becomes more dominant; and he is aware that all he has to look forward to is the prospect of joining the most depressed minority group of all, the Old.
Brian had never attempted to pass as a native of University, although he realized there were certain rewards for doing so. He did not want to become assimilated, and rather despised those of his colleagues who did. He felt no impulse at all to take drugs, curse policemen, wear beads or study Oriental religions. At the same time, as a political scientist, he felt increasingly that it was his job to know something about these developments.
Unlike his other students, Wendy Gahaghan did not conceal the nonacademic side of her life from Brian. In simple, confiding tones, she related how she and her friends smoked hash, deceived draft boards, “lifted” goods from store counters, and made casual, violent love. When something politically or culturally controversial happened in University, Wendy came and told Brian what the students thought about it, concealing nothing, as if unaware that he was the enemy. In return he tried not to be the enemy: he made an effort never to show shock or disapproval, merely a steady interest.
Gradually Brian began to look forward to Wendy’s appearance, especially at times of crisis—to think of her as his Native Informant. He began to be aware that because of her visits he was pulling ahead of his colleagues in knowledge of student motives and reactions—even sometimes ahead of those who attempted to ape these reactions. They were disguised as natives, but he understood the indigenous customs and language better than they; often he could tell them what SDS or the Society to Legalize Marijuana was going to do next. Scrupulously, he declined to reveal his sources. Indeed, he often concealed the fact that he had a source, preferring for several reasons to suggest that he had many student informants; or that he was only brilliantly guessing, theorizing as a political scientist, about what might happen.
The final reason Brian had not discouraged Wendy’s visits, he thinks—indeed, had begun to encourage them—was that he didn’t believe she could ever constitute any threat to his emotional or physical equanimity. He would have been on his guard if she had been anything like his wife at that age. But Erica had been exceptional: an honor student, elegantly dressed, extraordinarily pretty; she was president of the Arts Club, an editor of the literary magazine, and one of the most popular girls in her class—always surrounded by admirers and friends.
Wendy, by contrast, was an ordinary female graduate student. She was “not plain, indeed quite attractive by conventional standards, but she was completely undistinguished—a well-rounded baby-faced ash-blonde, with pink cheeks and lank silky hair. She dressed usually in Indian style, but—like his children when they were small—confusing the Eastern and Western varieties. She wore, indiscriminately, paisley-bedspread shifts, embroidered velvet slippers, fringed cowhide vests and moccasins, strings of temple bells, saris, shell beads, sandals, and leather pants very loose in the ankle and tight in the ass. In spite of all this paraphernalia, she never looked like either sort of Indian. Rather, with her round pink freckled face and limp yellow hair, she resembled a solemn schoolchild got up for a Thanksgiving or United Nations Day pageant. Even when not in costume, she often tied a beaded or embroidered strip of cloth tightly across her brow in the shape of a headache.
“Don’t you mind that thing around your head?” he had once asked her. “It looks uncomfortable. Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Uh uh,” Wendy replied, smiling eagerly—for at this point Brian almost never made any comment on her appearance. “It feels good. It’s like—It kind of, you know, keeps my brains together.”
“I see.” Brian could not help smiling back, for it was true that Wendy tended to be, not so much scatterbrained (which suggests a restless movement of ideas) as mentally diffuse. Simple facts she knew very well—like the names of books she had studied and courses she had taken—became hidden in fog from time to time, causing her to stamp her foot and exclaim that she was “too stupid.” Sometimes whole areas of information seemed to drift toward the misty periphery of her consciousness and fall off the edge.
Publicly Brian held this to be the result of too much marijuana and not enough sleep, and scolded her for it; but privately he suspected it was also due to lack of interest in graduate study. Wendy was intelligent enough, but her mind was not scholarly. Until very recently, girls like her, whatever their SAT scores, didn’t usually go to graduate school. But nowadays, if they hadn’t found someone to marry as undergraduates, the
y continued their education and their search, often in fields like psychology or sociology which seemed relevant to the situation.
With the slightest encouragement, Wendy would have transferred into Political Science, but Brian had no intention of giving this encouragement. He had already disregarded several hints, so he was ready when she mentioned the matter openly, on November 11—but he was not prepared for what followed.
When Brian told her that no, he definitely did not think she should enter his department and do a thesis on Utopian communities under his direction, Wendy’s pale-blue eyes watered; she blinked her flaxen eyelashes. “You think I couldn’t do the work,” she asked or stated, her pink-smudged lower lip wobbling with the effort not to cry. “You think I’m not smart enough.”
No, that wasn’t it at all, Brian replied. It just seemed to him that at this stage in her graduate career ...He went on repeating his arguments while Wendy, in a trembling voice, repeated hers. As he spoke it occurred to Brian that if Wendy wanted to, she could probably transfer into the department without his help. She was a hard-working, conscientious girl; her record in general was good. He was not on the graduate admissions committee this year; to stop her, he would have to make a written statement casting doubts upon either her sanity or her honesty. That he should even think of doing so cast doubts upon his own.
But, glancing at her again as she spoke, at her lank lemonade-blond hair parted in the middle Indian style and descending smoothly over her cheeks like the flaps of a wigwam, he realized that Wendy, like the squaw or Hindu maiden she affected to be, would never do anything he did not advise—because his approval was more important to her than her education. And at that moment, as if she had read his thoughts, Wendy said hesitantly, looking first up at him and then down at the notebooks in her lap,
