The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  “Okay.” He shoves up the heavy, dusty sash. Cold air enters the stuffy office, clearing his head. The sun shines brilliantly.

  “... the admissions office ... responsible alumni ...

  Brian hauls the rope toward the window and begins shoving it out, knot after heavy knot; he is feeling better.

  “... insulting ... determination ...

  There is a shout from below. Glancing down through the still-bare trees, Brian can see people moving, pointing—

  “Come on,” he says to Dibble. “You’d better go first.”

  “Quick, damn it.” He pushes a chair toward the window. “Before they catch on.”

  Reluctantly, Dibble clambers onto the window sill. He squats there, a large, long-faced, pink-complexioned man with a stunned, furious look in his eyes, clinging to the rope with one hand and the raised sash with the other.

  “Uh, I don’t exactly—”

  “Hurry.” There are more shouts now; laughter; an uneven cheer.

  Dibble ducks under the sash and puts his other hand on the rope. His long, pink face appears on the outside, of the glass, the mouth working. “You sure it’ll hold?”

  “I tested it,” Brian says impatiently. Below on the quad the cheering grows; he can see figures running toward Burnham Hall across the muddy grass. “Go on. No, wait, damn it, you’ve got to turn around. Face me and get your feet—Okay. Watch out for that branch. Now.”

  Slowly, Dibble edges himself down over the broad stone sill. There are people at the windows of the adjoining building now, laughing and calling encouragement; people on the pedestal of the statue below. Some, with cameras, are already recording his faltering and protracted descent.

  Now Brian climbs onto the window sill. Holding the rope, he crawls under the sash and stands on the ledge outside, waiting for Dibble to reach ground, for he is not sure the rope or the pipe will bear both their weight. His heart is beating fast; he is exhilarated.

  He checks his watch: two minutes left. He has won; he has carried out his plan, and with time to spare.

  Tremendous cheering and waving below now, as Dibble nears the ground. Hands stretch up to him; flashbulbs go off. Dibble’s picture—and his!—will be in the local newspaper, perhaps even on television. Brian’s exploit will become part of Corinth history. Smiling, breathing deeply, he takes a few fatal seconds to look over the broad bright quadrangle to the library tower, landmark and symbol of the university; then down at the crowd, in which he recognizes several faces, including those of Wendy and Bill Guildenstern. Moving his arm from the elbow, he gives them a modest wave.

  Suddenly, from behind, there is a howling, trampling noise; cries of “No! Stop!” Brian swings around, kneels down on the stone ledge, and starts to lower himself out over it, feeling for the knots with his feet—

  But he is too late. Sara, scrambling over Dibble’s desk to the window, catches him by one arm. He wrenches away, but at the same moment two larger girls grab him, the first by his shirt, the other, very painfully, by his hair. Since he is holding the rope, he has only one hand free to push his assailants off, while they each have two; and Sara is clawing at his free arm again.

  “That’s it. Hang on to the bastard,” she hisses as still more protesters lay hold of Brian, and all of them together drag him across the sill, into a room full of screaming women and exploding flashbulbs.

  “All right, all right!” Brian shouts, feeling for the floor with his feet and pulling his arms free. Someone slams down the window behind him.

  “You let him get away! Whadda you do that for?” Pat screeches.

  “You cheated us!”

  Brian takes a deep breath, reminding himself that though outnumbered, he is superior in age, sex, status and political astuteness to the angry young women surrounding him.

  “I can explain,” he says loudly, deliberately. “If you’d all just calm down and listen to me—” He looks around, searching for a sympathetic face, a weak link in the circle; finding one: Jenny, whose expression is less angry than confused.

  “Let me explain.” He smiles at Jenny, whose huge eyes are blurred with tears. “I had to get Dibble out of here. He’s a very ill man; something serious could have happened to him,” he insists, putting his hand on Jenny’s soft arm. “You see—”

  “Yes?” Jenny turns toward Brian. Seizing his chance, he pushes her aside and makes a break for the open door, the friendly—or at least neutral—male faces beyond in the hall. But his foot catches on a pile of coats, and he stumbles.

  “He’s not explaining anything, he’s trying to escape!” squeals Linda Sliski. “Stop him, everybody!” And she takes her own advice, giving Brian a vicious shove sideways.

  “No! Damn it, this is ridiculous,” he explains. “You don’t understand—” He is down on one knee now; he tries to rise, but several girls are in the way.”

  “Oh no you don’t, you dirty fink.” Sara grabs hold of him again. “Shut that door!” she barks.

  “Hey—wait—really—” In a blaze of flashbulbs, shouting, and struggling, Brian is pushed heavily to the floor, knocking his head on the edge of a chair. Three of the protesters, braying, holding him down; and pretty Jenny, in a painful reversal of all his fantasies, sits on him. The door to Dibble’s office is slammed; is locked.

  A week later. The crisis is over; Corinth University is back to normal. Brian has in a sense recovered from his captivity: his bruises have healed; the lump on his head is subsiding. In another, more serious sense, he will never recover.

  His opinion of women, for instance, has been permanently altered. Previously, generalizing from his mother and Erica—whom he now realizes to be exceptional—he had believed them to be essentially different from men: weaker and less rational, but also gentler, finer, more sensitive. The two hours he spent imprisoned in Dibble’s office were a revelation. It was not only the recriminations and the tears (Jenny’s) which he had to face, though they were bad enough. (“You know what it’s like to be nagged and scolded by one woman for an hour?” he said to Leonard Zimmern on the telephone that evening. “All right, multiply that by two hours and fourteen women.”) Far worse was the aggression, the coarseness, the brutality. The protesters refused to listen to his arguments or explanations, finally even to allow him to speak. (“If you don’t shut your big mouth we’ll gag you,” Pat had threatened.) Also they would not let him see Bill Guildenstern or anyone from the dean’s office, even in their presence; they would not bring him anything to eat or drink; and when he announced a need to visit the washroom they suggested he piss in Dibble’s wastebasket.

  While Brian remained a captive a bitter debate was taking place in the department Office. Frightened by the latest turn of events, and the increasing convergence of sightseers and journalists on Burnham Hall, creating the impression of a public demonstration or riot, Bill was trying to negotiate a settlement with Dibble. But Dibble was not feeling conciliatory; indeed his demands had escalated. Instead of the “bumbling campus cops” he was now insisting that the university send in armed state troopers to clear his office and “teach those vicious juvenile delinquents a lesson.” The suggestion that somebody might get hurt in the process seemed to delight him. After two hours of discussion Bill had got nowhere, though he had been joined in his effort by several representatives of the department and the administration, and finally by a long-distance call from Dean Kane, who spoke to Dibble from Austin, Texas, for twenty-five minutes without making any impression on him.

  Outside Bill’s window the large crowd was beginning to churn and shout. Several posters had appeared, the red paint not yet dry on some of them; struggles were starting between members of the Safety Division and some students who had brought a ladder, and others armed with water pistols. The mood of the mob was light-hearted, but it might turn nasty at any moment. Bill got back on the line to Dean Kane in Texas and secured his permission to concede to the protesters.

  Two hours after he had entered Dibble’s office, Brian was released.
He had, and still has, the small satisfaction of having his strategy adopted; and the greater though more private satisfaction of knowing that his old enemy is about to abandon the field—for J. Donald Dibble, overruled and as he thinks betrayed by his chairman and dean, has tendered his resignation from the university.

  But this gain is as nothing to the loss—to the realization that the fate Brian had amused himself by imagining for Dibble is to fall instead on him. It is due in part to a journalistic accident: the fact that one of the shots of Brian struggling with the protesters happened to come out well. In a week rather low on news, this striking photograph was seized upon by the editor of the Corinth Courier and reproduced across four columns on page one. It was almost a classic image of the women’s liberation threat, at once comic and symbolic: a small middle-aged man, his face expressing fear and outrage, being wrestled to the floor by long-haired young Amazons.

  The following day the picture appeared in the New York Times, accompanied by a photograph of Dibble’s escape and an account of the crisis. The story was picked up by a news service, and by the end of the week had been carried nationwide—though in most cases the photo of Dibble, which only showed a man climbing up or down a rope against a building, was printed much smaller or not at all. Several papers, apparently finding the facts too complex, omitted mention of Dibble entirely, giving their readers the impression that it was Brian Tate who had offended so many young women. And such is the power of the graphic image that even those who were able to read something like the true story laid down their papers thinking of Tate as a violent opponent of the new feminism—otherwise, why were all those girls attacking him?

  Already the effects of all this are beginning to manifest. Brian has been claimed as an ally by Corinth antifeminists, several of whom have telephoned to congratulate him on his stand. Encouraging letters have begun to arrive from persons he has never met, both in Hopkins County and elsewhere. A few of these letters are brief and rational; but most are long and hysterical, expressive of fanatical misogyny. (“Jesus will Bless you for your Sufferings at the hands of those Filthy Bitches, those Foul Jades of Satan’s Womb—for they are not True Wombmen but Barren Whores ... predicted one such letter, typed on the stationery of an Oldsmobile agency in southern New Jersey.)

  Not all Brian’s fans are male; he has received many sympathetic letters from self-styled “old-fashioned” women, some of them members of an organization he had not known existed called Happy American Homemakers. Two of these hinted strongly that if Brian were ever to-find himself in Cape Neddick, Maine, or Wichita, Kansas, they would be happy to make him at home.

  All these letters Brian has been able to read with ironic detachment, if not with indifference. What he finds harder to take is what he calls his hate mail, all from women. It ranges from the hurt queries of former favorite students and female relatives (including his mother and aunt) to ugly postcards and thick letters from angry feminists, abusing and cursing him—sometimes in language far stronger than that of the Oldsmobile salesman. These letters and cards come to the political science department, where the cards at least can be and probably are read by Helen Wells and her three assistants before they are placed in Brian’s mailbox. Because of the story in Time, where Brian’s name was irritatingly modified by the adjectives “small, square-jawed, recently separated,” they often remark that it is no wonder his wife threw him out. Another frequent theme is the supposed insignificant size or absence of his sexual organs. Reading this mail, Brian often thinks that if he were not already convinced of the basic aggressiveness and coarseness of women, he would be so now.

  Apart from this unpleasant correspondence, Brian has had to endure many inquisitive telephone calls and proposals for interviews (“My Woman Problem” was the title suggested to him by one free-lance journalist who had a “connection” and hoped to get the resulting article into Penthouse); also the mock jovial remarks of colleagues, the glances and whisperings of students, and the sniggering recognition of people in local stores and gas stations (“Say, aren’t you the professor who ...).

  Other wars end eventually in victory, defeat or exhaustion, but the war between men and women goes on forever. Now, through a journalistic accident, it is as if Brian has stepped in front of J. Donald Dibble on that perpetual battlefield, deflecting onto himself both the jeers of the public and the armed wrath of the American bitch-goddess in all her forms. Meanwhile Dibble, the real enemy, escapes. He has received many fewer letters, almost none of them abusive; soon he will be on some other campus, his part in the crisis forgotten.

  But Brian must remain in Corinth, where recent events will pass into university history, and that garbled news story, that vulgarly comic photograph, will haunt him for the rest of his life. In a horrible way, he has got his wish; the spell spoken over his cradle has come true, and after trying for forty-seven years he has become a famous man.

  16

  MID-APRIL; THE HARD bright cold has broken, and it has been raining for nearly a week. The ditches and creeks and gorges are full of churning milk chocolate; the new grass is plastered flat against muddy lawns; clouds hang low to the ground. In the house on Jones Creek Road cold water streams down the windowpanes; water drips through the roof of the back porch, just as it did last autumn. Brian promised to fix the roof then, but he did not. He Will probably never fix it now.

  Erica cannot afford to have the porch roof repaired, or the electric frying pan; she cannot pay to get the fender of the station wagon straightened out where some clumsy and dishonest person backed into it in the university parking lot last month, and then drove off without leaving a note. She is barely able to meet expenses on what Brian gives her, although she is now working twenty hours a week at a very demanding job. She cannot afford anything nice any more: roast beef or a new novel, or trips to New York, or tickets to the concert series; she hasn’t bought a new dress in months.

  And except for the children, who complain about how dull meals are, nobody notices. Nobody seems to think it strange that Erica doesn’t have her car repaired or wear a new dress or go to concerts any more. She is no longer one of their company, a member of the local academic aristocracy, but a leftover housewife and ill-paid editorial assistant. Brian, however, has kept his position as a professor, and become in addition a man-about-town. Also, since a week ago Thursday, a national hero of reactionary antifeminism, with his photograph in every newspaper in America.

  In a way it is unfair that Brian should have this reputation. He had gone beyond his obligation to the political science department in trying to rescue Dibble, who is a very disagreeable person and has never done anything for him. Besides, it is bad for Brian’s or anyone’s character to be punished for doing the right thing, while they are rewarded for, or at least get away with, their misdeeds.

  But in another sense it is only poetic justice that her husband should take Dibble’s place as a feminist scapegoat; for Brian has also injured women, not in the abstract, but specifically and personally. It is only right that they should take revenge on him; and that everyone should see what he is really like under his mask of rational virtue.

  And in fact, judging by the remarks made to Erica by her acquaintances, everyone does see—with the single exception of Wendy Gahaghan. Although her former roommate and best friend, Linda Sliski, received an ugly bruise on her leg while struggling with Brian, Wendy remains loyal to him. Of course Wendy’s capacity for dumb devotion was apparent from the beginning. There was a time when Erica thought Brian deserved such devotion; when she felt guilty for not providing it herself, and eager to pass on the task to someone else. She still feels guilty; but now because she had encouraged Wendy to believe in a false god, and thus given Brian what he had always wanted and no longer deserved—what in the long run can only be bad for him, and worse for her.

  With a sigh, Erica drags the pail out from under the kitchen sink and fills it with hot water. It is her day off, but since she cannot afford help, she usually spends most of it cle
aning house. She has to hurry today, because she is meeting Sandy at noon. She adds detergent and scouring powder to the pail, wondering why she is doing this, when nobody will care if the floor is dirty. The children never notice; and Sandy isn’t coming here, and if he were wouldn’t notice either. This is discouraging, though in a way nicer than Brian—who always noticed, and sometimes complained.

  Sandy is nicer than Brian in many ways, Erica thinks, lifting the pan out of the sink. He is kinder and more considerate, with a better sense of humor, and he knows much more about gardening and carpentry and art and music and old children’s books. Though he has refused to attend any more parties, he will go with her to places and events Brian used to scorn: an art opening or a tour of the new fire station or a house sale or a bird walk. This is important, now that Jeffrey and Matilda are rudely unwilling to accompany her, and Danielle more and more often busy with her boring Dr. Kotelchuk.

  Sandy is an agreeable companion on all such excursions. His work at the Krishna Bookshop seldom seems to get in the way—though he has warned her that it may do so this summer, when he and his students begin working on their “meditation center.” They have already bought land about twenty miles from Corinth in a barren wooded area, and are planning to clear it and build a cabin with their own hands, including Sandy’s hands. For a moment Erica gazes out the kitchen window across the fields to the west, in the direction of the proposed meditation center, frowning. Then she opens the cellar door to unhook the sponge mop from the wall within, and shuts the door quickly so as not to be reminded that the cellar also needs to be cleaned.

  Putting the mop into the pail to soak, she sets the kitchen chairs on top of the kitchen table, thinking that in spite of his odd beliefs Sandy is easier to talk to than Brian. He does not, as she had feared he might, try to convert her to his faith; he never lectures her or tells her what to read or what to think. He listens much better than Brian; also he has a wonderful memory and can tell amusing stories about his childhood and his adventures in California and the Far East.