The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  John Randall, the grand old man of the department, last survivor from the days when it was known as the Department of Government, appears to Brian in the role of Cordell Hull. He is a large stiff elderly man, somewhat pompous and slow on the uptake, but with remarkable staying power; a Hegelian who lectures on political philosophy, often quoting by memory from Plato. It is John Randall’s view that if they admit the Pass-Fail Option, they will be breaking their moral contract with the university and failing to recognize true excellence. Students at Corinth are created equal in opportunity to attend lectures in Government (as he still calls it), but not equal in ability to comprehend these lectures. The petition should therefore be rejected, politely but in a firm and dignified manner.

  Brian’s principal enemy in the department, C. Donald Dibble, also opposes the petition, but more violently; just as he has for years opposed every proposal and blocked every suggestion for curriculum change made by Brian. It is largely due to him that the committee has accomplished almost nothing since September. A tense, talkative, rather paranoid bachelor, Don Dibble designates himself in interviews, of which he gives many on varied topics, as a “radical conservative.” Brian has privately designated him as Metternich. Dibble is a political philosopher of a more recent school than Randall’s, but he also quotes Plato frequently—and in Brian’s view deceptively. He has been trained at the University of Chicago to hunt out the basic political principles which are hidden in the undergrowth of even apparently obscure events. Occasionally he fails to flush any significant issues from the shrubbery, and refrains from involvement in the ensuing discussion; but not today. Hidden in the Pass-Fail Option, Dibble has discovered a wedge-shaped animal something like an elephant. If his colleagues let it into the department, he insists, they will be abdicating the responsibilities of power and yielding to mob pressure. Presently larger and larger elephants will enter behind it, and trample them all to death, which will be no more than they deserve.

  Chuck Markowitz, the youngest member of the committee, appears in the role of Castro. He is an awkward, engaging young radical who is also extremely well read. Normally Brian feels rather fond of Chuck, but today he is impatient with him. For one thing, Chuck is not only in favor of granting the demands of the petition; he is probably responsible, at least in part, for its having been written in the first place, and thus for the special departmental meeting on Tuesday which prevented Brian from having lunch with Wendy, and all the trouble which has followed from that. It is his fault that the five of them are sitting in this room now instead of attending to their personal or academic business. More generally, Brian holds it against Chuck that though over thirty he affects the costume of a radical undergraduate, and has allowed his hair to grow out until it resembles a small dirty black poodle dog sitting on top of his head.

  Chuck’s remarks in favor of the Pass-Fail Option are extensive and predictable. He dwells upon the stupidities and inequalities of the present grading system, with illustrative anecdotes; he extolls the superiority of independent study, and the success of free universities. “After all,” he concludes, grinning engagingly, “how can we really know what some kid has learned in our course? How do we have any right to grade him?” The faces of the other committee members harden at these words, and they silently give Chuck’s speech the grade of B-minus.

  Last to speak, as usual, is Hank Andrews, a skinny pale clever man who is Brian’s best friend in the department. Andrews has long ago adopted for himself the role of Machiavelli. In meetings he plays the part of the detached scientist, observing and occasionally manipulating political forces out of pure intellectual curiosity. It is impossible to guess what side Andrews will take on any question, since he is as likely to be motivated by cynical amusement as by either interest or principle. Today, after appearing to hesitate for some time, he has finally come out in favor of the Pass-Fail Option—largely, Brian suspects, in order to cause trouble. Andrews declines to consider any of the larger issues involved. He merely points out in his dry way that the Option has been allowed by several other departments with apparently little effect, and that the petition has been signed by over half their own majors. If its demands are not met, considerable ill feeling will be felt. There will be mutterings about monolithic bureaucracy; snide or angry letters and editorials will appear in the student newspaper.

  When Andrews ceases speaking there is a clamor of exclamation, among which the words “truckling” and “expediency” can be heard. The other three professors begin to repeat the arguments they have already put forth, and to make the points they have made half an hour ago or on Tuesday. Brian does not listen to them; he hears other voices arguing, demanding.

  He should have suspected trouble from the way his wife sounded on the phone this morning—from the tension in her voice, the unnatural pauses. But he was unprepared for the assault which began when he opened the front door of his house an hour later and they met face to face—Erica’s white as if lit from within by fever, with wide ignited eyes. Her Jeanne d’Arc face, he had called it once: the face of a woman fighting, as she believes, for unselfish ends, fanatically certain she is in the right. When Erica herself is injured she merely becomes cross and depressed; but she can rise to flaming indignation over any injury, or possible injury, to a child. The younger the child, the hotter the flames. He has not seen them blaze this high since just before Matilda was born, when she battled two doctors and the management of a large hospital for the right to have the baby stay with her after birth instead of in the hospital nursery. “Do you know what the babies do up there in that place?” he remembers her demanding in a raised voice as they stood in the admitting office with her pains coming every eight minutes. “Each one is isolated from all human contact in a kind of horrible plastic cage. The lights are always on, glaring down into their eyes twenty-four hours a day, like some North Korean military interrogation, and they cry, that’s what they do, twenty-four hours a day, except when they’re too exhausted even to cry, for five days and nights. That’s their introduction to this world.”

  Today there was the same high fervor in her voice as she told him he had to marry Wendy—not so much for Wendy’s sake as for the sake of the almost nonexistent infant. And also, according to her, for his own. “You see, Wendy believes in you,” Erica explained, walking rapidly up and down the sitting-room carpet. “She thinks—no, it’s more than that, she knows you are a great man and that you are writing a great book. And I don’t know that, not any more. But I do know it’s wrong to hold on to a man you don’t believe in, when there is someone else who does.”

  Brian had tried to argue calmly with her, to explain that she mustn’t involve herself in his mistakes; but he couldn’t get her to listen, or even stand still. “I don’t agree that it’s not my concern,” she insisted passionately while he followed her up and down the long room. “That’s what the ‘Good Germans’ said. After all, Wendy came to me; I have to help her. I don’t want to be like those people in Dante who did neither good nor evil, but were always just for themselves.”

  After this interview there followed another just as bad, or worse, with Wendy at the Zimmerns’—where it turns out she has been staying ever since she disappeared—and in the oppressive presence of Danielle Zimmern. Danielle as well as Erica has known all along that Wendy never left Corinth, but she has concealed this from him. In the same way, she and Erica have concealed from Wendy that he has been anxiously and continually seeking her. For Erica, in her present emotional state, there is perhaps some excuse. For Danielle, none.

  Considering Danielle, Brian grimaces so that Chuck Markowitz, at whom he happens to be gazing, stumbles over a sentence. He thinks that he has never really liked Danielle; he has suspected that she does not like him, and now he is sure of it, Very likely she is behind the whole thing. She has somehow convinced Erica that the Jeanne d’Arc thing to do is to give him up, or in less noble language throw him out. She wants him out of the way so that she, Danielle, need not see him any mor
e, and so that Erica also will be a divorced woman. Misery loves company, especially ideological misery—and for some time Danielle has sounded more and more like an ideologue. Since Leonard left she has nursed a grudge against men, which she has recently attempted to generalize and dignify as radical feminism. If he didn’t know what he knows about her promiscuity at the time of the separation, he might wonder if she were a lesbian. And after all, promiscuity proves nothing; it might even suggest that Danielle cannot really love any man. No doubt she is attractive in a way—but isn’t there something heavy, something bovine (or “oxlike” might be a better word) about her good looks? He remembers that when he danced with her at parties it sometimes seemed as if she were trying to lead, and he was always uncomfortably aware that she must weigh nearly as much as he.

  For months Brian has hardly spoken to Danielle, but now she has somehow forced herself into his private affairs and is standing over them like a policewoman, so that he hardly dared touch Wendy when they met today, and did not dare kiss her. Yes, a policewoman; or an MP guarding prisoners of war—for, seen together, she and Wendy might have come from different countries, even different races. He recalls with a pang how small, soft and young Wendy looked, hunched on the Zimmerns’ grotesque Victorian sofa with her bare feet up and her pink freckled arms wrapped protectively around her knees. She seemed reduced in size—not only in relation to the oxlike Danielle, but in contrast to Erica, whom he had just left. On one of her plump feet there was the angry, scraped mark of some recent injury. Her eyelids drooped, and her face was the weary, flattened face of child refugees in news photographs.

  Danielle did most of the talking during this scene, telling Brian what he was to do and when. Wendy hardly spoke, except to say how grateful she was to Danielle, and even more to Erica—how fantastic Erica had been, what a really cool person she was. And then, even less confidently, almost whispering: “I was thinking, what Erica says about kids needing more than just good heredity. I mean that’s straight, you know? I wouldn’t want just anyone to have this baby. It’d have to be somebody that could understand it and educate it right. Kids are so impressionable, even bright kids. I mean, suppose they gave it to Republicans or something: its mind could get all warped like. That’s why I gotta do it myself.”

  Still, subdued though she was, there is no doubt that Wendy was pleased, even overjoyed by the idea that he might marry her. Like a refugee in a first-aid station, afraid to test her sudden luck, she did not ask if he really would do it; she only looked at him—dumbly, longingly.

  The arguments of the committee are subsiding. Hank Andrews turns toward Brian, who has said nothing for the last half-hour, and asks his opinion. There is a pause while everyone waits for him to step forward in his usual role of George Kennan—to make a structural analysis of the conflict and propose a compromise which all of them can, though grudgingly, accept; that is why he is chairman.

  But today Brian has difficulty remembering his lines. To gain time he asks that Chuck read the petition again. He rests his forehead on his fist and gives the impression of a person listening, while he looks around the table at his colleagues, imagining what political advice they would give if they knew of his own dilemma.

  Chuck-Castro might advise him to leave Erica because she represents middle age and the past as against youth and the future. On the other hand, with his belief in freedom of choice and suspicion of all institutional structures, he is hardly likely to recommend a forced marriage to Wendy. He will probably encourage Brian to assert his right to self-determination; to resist the attempts of other persons to lay their trip upon him, or force him into their bag.

  Randall-Hull will also stress individual freedom, along with individual responsibility. He will enjoin Brian to stand on principle: to uphold his public reputation as a man of moderation and integrity, and to honor his past commitments—with specific reference to those made in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  As for Dibble-Metternich, he will see in Erica and Danielle’s plan what he has detected in other instances: a monstrous conspiracy of women. Or if not a conspiracy, a hysterical revolt against male authority and (on Erica’s part at least) against their own best interests. He will demand that Brian suppress this revolt by any means possible, not excluding physical force.

  Brian cannot guess what advice Andrews-Machiavelli would give him, though he is sure to recommend guile rather than oratory or violence. Very possibly he would suggest that Brian attempt to divide and conquer the three adversaries who are now joined against him.

  The reading of the petition is almost done; it is time for Brian to speak. Luckily, the issue is comparatively simple. As in most cases, it is a matter of containment, of separate spheres of influence. The Pass-Fail Option must itself be made optional, with each instructor deciding whether or not to allow it in his courses. Wearily summoning up his usual casually authoritative manner, Brian suggests that they recommend this to the department. And, after some routine oratory, his suggestion is accepted.

  Brian tries to accelerate the rest of the meeting, but it is past four when he returns to his office. He shuts the door but does not turn on the light, so as not to be interrupted while he plans his counteroffensive.

  Fortunately, he has not yet committed himself to any position. Although stunned by Erica’s assault, he had somehow retained his presence of mind: he had not said anything unforgivably insulting. More important, though moved by pity and concern for Wendy, he had not promised her anything.

  He must begin, Brian decides, by taking what he imagines to be Andrews’ advice: he must separate his opponents. First, and most important, he must separate Wendy physically from Danielle so that he can talk to her alone. Even so, the interview will not be easy. Wendy will be disappointed, badly disappointed; and hurt even more than she has already been hurt—he can see her face now, her bruised bare feet. But she is not the only one; Brian himself feels a kind of sick physical despair to think that never again—Her bare legs, her wide small rump—

  But why never again? a voice remarks in his head. After all this is over, after Wendy has been to New York—and this must be arranged for as soon as possible—Of course they will have to be extraordinarily discreet from now on, he will tell her. He will hold her strongly, speak to her gently, explain what is best for all of them. He will speak of her graduate fellowship, of Erica’s precarious mental condition, of his book. “Trust me,” he will say; and perhaps, quietly, he will point out how much trouble and pain there has been because she didn’t trust him—didn’t confide in him and let him take the responsibility, make the decisions. And she will trust him; she will be grateful, because in spite of her panic and errors of judgment it is not “the end of everything,” and he still cares for her, wants her.

  Brian sits down at his desk in the fading light and dials Danielle’s number; but at the sound of Danielle’s voice he hangs up. He looks at the phone, considering whether he should call again and demand to speak to Wendy. But perhaps it would be better to see Erica first, to get that over with. Then he can phone and suggest that Wendy meet him somewhere. If he can’t get past Danielle, he will go to the house and remove her—by force if necessary, as Dibble would recommend.

  The interview with Erica will be in some ways even more painful, and certainly more difficult, as Erica’s feelings are more complicated. Wendy loves him; Danielle hates him. But his wife is caught in a cross fire of emotions; not only love and hate but jealousy, pity, shame, fear—he can see her now driven back and forth between them from one end of the sitting-room rug to the other. He sees her white feverish face—and next to it, Wendy’s face, staring at him with the same distracted fixity. The two faces, the four eyes, move together and merge into one.

  The unwelcome thought comes to Brian that two women who were in reasonably good shape when he met them are now, somewhat as a result of his actions, on the verge of nervous collapse. That he hasn’t intended this, that he is in fact extremely fond of them both, would be no defense to
anyone who knew his history; and if he does not act now with great decisiveness and diplomacy, everyone will know it.

  Erica will be hard to deal with, even to speak to at first. He must be prepared for this. She will perhaps always be convinced that she was right, just as she still believes she was right about rooming in. (Even now she sometimes harks back to this, blaming Matilda’s problems on the fact that her mother was overruled by the Boston Lying-in Hospital thirteen years ago.)

  And once Erica realizes that she has been overruled again there is no guarantee that she will accept it gracefully; that she will cease hostilities and let him move back into the house. But why should he need her permission? Is it not his house, with the principal, interest and taxes paid out of his earnings?

  If he tells Erica that he is coming home today—better yet, if he just comes home—She may not like it; but what can she do about it? She may sulk, but she is not going to call the police or become violent. Danielle Zimmern once threw a can of Snow’s New England Clam Chowder at Leonard (she missed), but Erica has never within his memory raised her hand against anyone. When the children were too young to reason with, she would pick them up and carry them into another room away from some forbidden object, rather than slap them—sometimes over and over again, with a stubborn womanly patience he could only marvel at.

  Even after he has reoccupied his own territory there will be difficulties in pacifying the natives. He must resign himself to a long, hard campaign. He must arm himself this time with better arguments, including those suggested in imagination by. his colleagues. He must, like Chuck, defend self-determination; like Randall he must speak of responsibility—of his and Erica’s moral obligation to carry out their sworn promises to each other, to society, and above all to Jeffrey and Matilda. He must point out to Erica that her plan was not only against her own interests—which in her present martyr’s mood will hardly weigh with her—but against the interests of The Children. How could she think of exposing them to so much pain, disruption and scandal?