A Trap for Fools

by Amanda Cross

  It was a sound, perhaps a little old-fashioned, exploration of the Islamic contribution to the Western Middle Ages. As Kate probably knew, many fields these days were torn between conventional, political history and the more social and interpretative history less of governments than of everybody else. Yes, Kate had heard. Adams was emphatically in the first category, and while there was not anything in his book that could be called new or earthshaking, it was sound, an excellent summary and introduction to the subject.

  “In other words,” Kate said, abandoning her soup and accepting the suggestion of wine, “boring and unlikely to sell well or to bring prestige if not profits to its publisher. Why then was Harvard doing it?”

  Peter Pettipas feared that he had not made himself exactly clear. No reputable press, certainly not Harvard, would publish a book that did not make an important contribution to its field. Certain books were perhaps less theoretical than others, but were no less important for that, didn’t Kate agree?

  Kate did. She was sorry to have traduced Mr. Pettipas. No doubt the readers’ reports were excellent.

  Excellent. There had been two of them. Both had, it is true (Mr. Pettipas was being very confidential, an attitude made easier by his wise assumption that Kate could easily get access to the readers’ reports from Adams’s leavings), suggested that a tad more theory, a more evident methodology would have helped the book, but they would in no way oppose its publication.

  “Was there a subvention?” Kate asked, beginning on her tempura, washed down with a very nice white wine.

  Well, yes, there had been. Surely Kate knew that universities had funds, often from foundations and other sources, to provide subventions for worthy but slightly esoteric books.

  “I do know,” Kate said. “The Mellon Foundation, for one, has provided such funds. But I, was under the impression they were to enable the publication of the books of younger scholars not yet tenured. I didn’t know that they were used for the work of established scholars. Or did Adams offer the subvention out of his own pocket?”

  “No, no,” Mr. Pettipas said, savoring his raw fish. The university, or perhaps Adams’s department, had provided the subvention. Surely that was not unusual. Harvard was proud to publish the book, but no one could expect that the sales would justify the publication. This was no question of vanity publishing—Kate understood that, surely.

  Kate did. She turned the conversation to questions about Adams’s cooperation as an author. No one knew better than Kate how difficult some authors could be; she had read enough manuscripts for publishers and known enough editors to speak confidently on the matter.

  “I wouldn’t say he was exactly difficult,” Peter Pettipas responded, “but it would not be accurate to call him undifficult either.” Adams, in short, required careful understatement were his attitudes to be tactfully assessed. Kate was not surprised. “Adams was, however, remarkably prompt at all stages of book production; I could hardly complain about that.” Kate nodded, leaving unmentioned her impression that Pettipas would not have minded if Adams had been so unprompt as never to have delivered the final copyedited manuscript at all.

  “Do you edit all the books on Islam?” Kate asked. Pettipas explained his special areas as an editor, from which they went on to discuss Fundamentalism, a subject on which they could argue without feeling that they were letting their teams down. The dinner ended quite happily, with Kate promising to get in touch if she heard of any good books in his area, and Pettipas promising to answer any other questions should Kate find herself needing more answers. Kate returned home to flop into a large armchair and offer warm thanks for decadent Western upholstery.

  At Kate’s suggestion, Edna Hoskins and she had dinner some weeks later—one of those leisurely dinners between friends in which much ground is covered but there is still the sense, when the dinner is over, that much more could have been said had there been time. Kate had learned to count on Edna for insight into the strange workings of the university administration—not facts about personalities or decisions, but a grasp of how personalities prevailed and decisions were made. In the midst of Kate’s current endeavor, Edna served to reassure her that she was not taking part in a mug’s game.

  “I suppose I shall have to look into the situation of the black students,” Kate said, “and perhaps even the Zionist or Palestinian ones. I can’t look forward to trying to find out something I don’t want know. Still, one must be a cool-headed detective and pursue the truth at all costs.”

  “One must,” Edna agreed, with a sympathetic smile. “But I don’t myself believe that you’ll discover anything untoward. My personal hunch is that it will turn out that someone in the family did it or hired a push man for reasons of his or her own. But until that is established, suspicion surrounds us all.”

  “I may admit to having pushed him myself as a way to get out of this investigation in a hurry,” Kate warned.

  “You will be disproved in court under cross-examination, and with witnesses swearing you were with them at the relevant time. The truth will out.”

  “I wonder. I can’t tell you why, Edna, but the whole thing is beginning to look phony to me. Oh, I don’t mean just the investigation, but the university and all the far reaches of its bureaucracy. I’m operating within an institution I’m supposed to understand; I’ve been part of it long enough to understand it, but I more and more have the sense of taking part in someone else’s play, as Virginia Woolf so well put it. The question, dear Edna, is: Am I just waking up to how modern life works, beginning to see that it’s time someone invented a new plot, as Woolf also said, or are all of us in the university, any university, only puppets or marionettes? Oh, I know, we professors seem to have autonomy, but that’s just in the little field they leave us. Presidents of universities these days do nothing but raise money; what are they exchanging for it, besides a name on a building? And what are all those scientists and social scientists doing in exchange for the large grants, federal and other, that support them? And when an important decision is made about where the resources of the university go, who makes it, and why? Don’t bother answering; I’m just ruminating to little purpose.”

  “Have you read Lewis Thomas?” Edna asked. “He points out that endless committees have tried to figure out who governs academic institutions and how they should do it. More time has been spent on this than on seeking a cure for cancer. He asks: ‘Who is really in charge, holding the power? The proper answer is, of course, nobody.’ ”

  “The proper answer, or the real answer? Maybe committees always avoid the stark truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “I don’t know. By those who have the most power and can control the most money. Or by those who are most afraid of the future.”

  “That,” Edna said, “is either profound or nonsense.”

  “Like me who said it,” Kate remarked. “I alternate. Be a little patient with me, Edna, and answer this: Suppose a certain policy, any kind of policy—academic, financial—to do with governance is made. Who watches to see that it’s carried out?”

  “Everyone watches. Those who wanted it, to see that it’s done; those who didn’t want it, to point out the disastrous results. Very little in academia happens in the dark beyond the original decision.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. I was chosen for this bit of investigation because I knew the territory; I was supposed to make fewer mistakes and jump to fewer wrong conclusions than someone from the outside. But do I know the territory? That’s the question. Do I really know how anything works outside my own department or, at best, the faculty in general?”

  “The faculty, or some of its members, know everything, I can promise you that. Very little escapes their notice and, usually, their protestations. What has brought on this terrible doubt?”

  “Many days of fruitless investigation. I have talked to the members of Adams’s department. I have talked to most of his stude
nts—he didn’t have many. I have seen his university records and know more about his medical plan and his vacation plans than I know of Reed’s. I’ve had dignified powwows with various members of the administration, including the president, who gave me fifteen minutes between raising his five-hundred and first and five-hundred and third million. I’ve talked to the vice president in charge of academic affairs, and the vice president in charge of internal affairs, our own Matthew Noble. I have been reencouraged by the provost. Do you know what I’ve learned? Nothing. Watch my lips, as they say on television: nothing. Not just nothing about Adams; nothing about anything. Nothing, period. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  “Not necessarily; to me it suggests that you knew more than you knew you knew.”

  “Beautifully Socratic, my dear Edna, but doubtful.”

  “Your problem is that you think there’s something to find out. Oh, there are secrets and confidentialities, and you’ve learned most of them in the course of this investigation. They just don’t strike you as very profound. Maybe they aren’t, but they’re as profound as anything gets around this place. Example: You just told me that you discovered Adams was backing for tenure a young man no one else in the department looked on very favorably. That may not have struck you as the most exciting thing since bottled beer, but not many people outside the department know that, or the stink he made about it for everybody. Whether it has anything to do with his being pushed, I can’t say, but I think you’re suffering from what a feminist has called the onion syndrome: there isn’t any center to be found. You don’t peel off the leaves until you get to the center, as with an artichoke. You just cut straight through the whole onion, finding concentric circles and a characteristic and rather pungent odor.”

  “You do me good, Edna. What is it about you that always makes me feel better for having been with you?”

  “My motherly presence; surely you’ve noticed. My comfortable shape, my lack of sexual competition, my reasonableness. As well as the fact that I’m very smart.”

  “I deny I have ever sought or appreciated motherliness.”

  “That’s because you think of motherliness as like your own mother, or the mothers of your childhood friends. There is something all women like in an older, intelligent, assuaging female creature, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Women don’t know how to define that comfort, because they find it so rarely, and because the word comfort seems to imply mindlessness. But it’s comfort most of the world wants from God and Jesus, to name only the deities nearest to hand, and for women real comfort, united with intelligence and power, does not lie with men.”

  “You can’t be serious, Edna. I refuse to believe it.”

  “I am partly. Think about it; you’ll eventually see what I mean, even you. How many women older than you are there in your life, or have there ever been, who have real power, whose minds you respect, and who are capable of being loved?”

  “All right, you’re right. A bit right, anyway.” Kate sipped her wine and smiled at her friend. How would one describe Edna? She was a solid person, not fat, not stout, but, well, stout would have to do to describe her. She was unadorned, capable of being briskly businesslike, no one’s fool, no interest in clothes, which in her case consisted entirely of suits, panty hose, and the most comfortable shoes that were still worthy to be called pumps. Her smile lit up her face and most of the room—if that was a cliché, it was one Edna was born to validate. Her reading glasses were attached to a string around her neck to prevent her putting them down and losing them, but they were, in fact, usually pushed up onto her short, straight, gray hair. Kate, looking at her, realized with a start that what she felt for Edna was certainly love; it was friendship, and devotion, and collegiality, but it was also love. And that was an astonishing thing. Could Edna’s many children and long marriage, her general air of having long kept an open house for all her children’s friends, have something to do with it? Pray not, Kate thought. Intelligent sympathy had to be the prevailing note, and an understanding of power, an ease with power. She is not afraid to exercise control directly, Kate thought. Perhaps it seems like love to me because Edna has no need to be manipulative to try for what she wants.

  The next day Kate met with the young black woman who had been first mentioned to her by Humphrey Edgerton that night before Reed went away. Arabella, whose last name was Jordan, came to Kate’s office with the air of one adopting the mien of compliance for reasons of her own, but not expecting her airs to fool anyone. Kate had no trouble getting the message. She decided immediately that the danger of seeming a bully was less than the danger of trying to seem understanding. The problem was that there was no comfortable ground on which the two of them could meet. Kate might feel comfortable there, and Arabella Jordan might pretend to feel comfortable, but only one of them would be herself. Angry, Arabella would probably be closer to her real self, which was what Kate wanted to get in touch with.

  “Professor Edgerton suggested that I talk to you,” Kate began. “He said you understand what it is I’m investigating.”

  “Humphrey explained it to me. You call me Arabella, I’ll call you Kate. OK?”

  Kate nodded. There was no question who was going to seem to be in charge of this interview. Kate’s hope was to influence the direction from time to time. She knew that she was coming on as an adversary, and that, in a certain sense, she had no choice.

  A witness had come forward to say, not to Kate but to one of the administrators, the news passed on to Kate by Matthew Noble, that Arabella had been seen in Levy Hall on the Saturday of Adams’s death, seen not with Adams but, as the message had reached Kate, “lurking around the halls.” Kate had returned home from her dinner with Edna to receive this news from Noble, and had left messages all over campus on the following day, starting with Humphrey Edgerton, that she wanted to see Arabella around four that afternoon. The student grapevine, as it always could be counted on to do, had functioned admirably. Arabella sat in front of her, looking ready for anything. Which was more than Kate was.

  “I’m assuming you know my connection with the investigation into the death of Professor Adams,” Kate began.

  “I know who you are and what you’re doing,” Arabella responded, dismissing that opening gambit.

  “Yes. It has been noticed that you were in Levy Hall during the Saturday when Professor Adams died. Would you mind telling me why you were there and what you were doing?”

  “If I don’t tell you I’ll have to tell the police,” Arabella said. “I get that. Don’t know why it took them so long to get on my trail. Plenty of people saw me there that Saturday. I was there most of the day, the afternoon anyway. What was I doing?” she asked herself, before Kate could. “I was working in an office they’ve given us, seeing folks, planning insurrections and revolutionary activities. Whenever Adams spotted me—we called him Canny, by the way, like you’re Kate—he used to really sweat. I mean, I got to him. All of us did. He kept longing for the good old days when only gentlemen attended his university, and everybody definitely knew who was running things. We ‘colored-folk’ wouldn’t have even been allowed to enter the building the front way. Now that we’re inside, he didn’t understand why we don’t just study and try to make something of ourselves; why are we only interested in making trouble? And so on. Do you want me to continue along that line?”

  “If you like,” Kate said.

  That was not the expected response. But Arabella decided to continue as though she had received the correct cue. “Why can’t we be satisfied with our remarkable progress and stop asking for more? After all, one generation ago, counting a generation as thirty years, we couldn’t even vote in Mississippi and quite a few other places.”

  “I don’t understand much,” Kate said, “but I have grasped that once any oppressed people are no longer ‘kept in their place,’ they want more and more, even, God help us, equality with the oppressor. All tyrants underst
and that, whether in Mississippi or South Africa or, regarding women, anywhere; which is why they are so reluctant to give away the first rights. I just need to know in some detail exactly what you were doing on that Saturday, not because I want to argue the history of either blacks or institutions, at least not at this moment, but because I’m stuck with an awful investigation of which, if you want to know, I wish I had never heard.”

  “I guess you took on more than you could chew,” Arabella said with a certain satisfaction. Kate felt a surge of anger, immediately suppressed, not only because anger would get her nowhere and give Arabella a useless edge, but because she was right: Kate had taken on more than she could chew, and, she feared, a good deal more than she could swallow.

  “Please try to give me a step-by-step account of what you did that day. I will pass on only what is necessary to the investigation. Didn’t Humphrey tell you—well, that you could refuse to talk to me?” The trouble is, Kate thought, I either sound servile or bossy; we haven’t got a language yet. Or am I exaggerating; would this be the same with any student in the same situation? Kate remembered that Toni Morrison had said somewhere that white women were wholly different from black women, but white and black men were the same.

  “I got there at maybe one o’clock, maybe half past. I didn’t really notice,” Arabella, to Kate’s relief, began. “We have a key to the building, and an office we can use. We don’t make bombs there or anything, whatever you or the others like you think; we talk, we help each other, and if there’s a real issue, we organize. Like getting this university or any other to stop doing business with South Africa. We have demonstrations and like that. Mostly we rap. It’s no picnic being black in this lily-white mausoleum, I do assure you. Sometimes we just like to look at each other’s black faces.”