by Howard Fast
On Tuesday evening, with the help of Silas, she had gotten most of the chores out of the way; after she had sent the children off to school, Silas did the breakfast dishes, and she was free and dressed and ready to leave the house by ten o’clock. She had planned to take the car, but now she realized that she had a whole day ahead of her and recalled what Ike Amsterdam had said, and the October weather was still so fine and clean that she decided to walk the two miles to the business section of Clemington, have lunch in town after the hairdresser, do some leisurely shopping, and then either take the bus back or walk back, depending on what time it was and how tired she felt.
This simple procedure delighted her and took on some of the quality of an adventure—if only because it was different from the normal course of events and because a long, unhurried walk with herself was a simple but undeniable luxury. The truth was that Myra had become more and more accustomed to avoiding her dreams and fancies, moving further away, year by year, from a world where all things were possible; whereupon she told herself that the knowledge that very few things were possible was a part of growing up.
She had grown up, and it embarrassed her to recollect her adolescence and to recall that Silas Timberman was Silas Timberman and none of the other things she had dreamed about; the thought made her resentful of herself. She put it aside with the sharp admonition that Silas Timberman was more than the dreams of many others had come to. She strode along with a good, solid stride, full of the wine of being alive and free and good to look on, and thought about many things, and about Silas as well. She had married a very simple man, a very direct and open and plain man, with ah unsatisfied hunger for knowledge. Was he clever, she asked herself? That was unanswerable, and certainly there was nothing of brilliance about him. His thoughts moved slowly and he never leaped to intuitive conclusions. He was not clever, but he lived well with people, and maybe that was being more clever than she knew.
That she herself was clever had always been taken for granted by her associates—and accepted with a certain degree of alarm by her parents. Sometimes she realized how much she based her two lectures a week—Studies in Classical Civilization, supported by the inexhaustible Symington Fund, and netting the Timbermans eight hundred dollars a year—on this quality of cleverness. Where Silas would doggedly have pursued an endless search for facts and more facts, Myra was capable of painting a background so amusing and diversified and populated by detail, that it filled all gaps. “I am not a scholar,” she would tell Silas with just a touch of resentment. “I’m a housewife, adding to the family budget.” Nor did she herself know whether her small opinion of what she did—and to some extent of what her husband did—was real or simulated.
As she walked along, down from the heights where the campus lay, an attractive, well-formed woman in skirt, sweater and jacket, she finished with these thoughts and put them aside. A tale entitled The Trouble with Silas would have to bear the subtitle, The Trouble with Myra. But neither point bore proper explanation so far as her own thoughts were able to go. Discontent could be pinned down to nothing singular, nothing valid, nothing understandable; it was simply that life leveled off. The high mountains and deep valleys of long ago disappeared, and here she was having an adventure out of a walk to the hairdresser. She didn’t mind. She was happier than she had been for a long while.
* * *
She was through at the hairdresser and leaving, just stepping out on the sunny sidewalk, with Rogmann’s Drugstore facing her and the Colony Moving Picture House calling her attention with its new splash of technicolor, when she heard her name called, “Myra! Myra!” with surprise and pleasure. A name can be spoken in a hundred different ways, and this was obviously someone delighted with seeing her in town at midday. She turned, and there was Ed Lundfest coming down the street with long strides, looking fine in gray flannels and a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, grinning and holding out his hand to her.
“Myra, of all people! What are you doing here?”
“Do you always take the edge off nice things? Can’t you see that I just had my hair done?”
“How should I see that? It was beautiful before. It’s beautiful now.” He took both her hands, and she thought of how she was always prepared not to like him and how inevitably she did like the healthy boyish enthusiasm of him, in spite of Silas’ often-expressed distaste for men who moved into middle age without ever leaving adolescence. A simple explanation was his obvious liking and admiration for her.
“I was at the dentist’s,” he explained. “Can you imagine anything in the world finer than leaving the dentist and meeting you?”
“A few things,” she smiled.
“Did you drive down?”
“No, I walked, Ed. I had a wonderful walk. I ran away from everything today and I’m having a holiday.”
“Until when?”
“Until about four o’clock.”
Then he asked her to have lunch with him, and when she hesitated, he pressed her; but she wanted to have lunch with him, because it was a part of her being the way she was today, and he didn’t have to press her very hard. They walked to his car and drove out to a place called The Cottage, a small place about ten miles up the river, where the food was not very good but where no one knew them and where they could sit and watch the river and have a bottle of wine—all of it adding up, on the part of Myra, to a fine and fitting surreptitious feeling of doing something wrong but not very wrong, and certainly very pleasant. When Ed Lundfest said that it was nice, she agreed with him. It was very nice; perhaps if it happened too often it would not be, but happening once like this, it was very nice indeed. He was not the most sensitive man in the world, but he seemed to recognize that today she was escaping from something, and he fitted himself to her mood and need. He did not mention Silas, nor did she mention his wife Joan. It was, Myra felt afterwards, a harmless and pleasant affair.
* * *
Silas was leaving the Faculty Club at about twelve forty-five, when he heard his name called, and he turned around and someone said, “Talk of the devil!” Ike Amsterdam was sitting at a table with Hartman Spencer, Alec Brady and Susan Allen; and they were smiling at his abstraction. “We were talking about you loud enough for you to hear,” Susan Allen said, and they made room for him and pulled over a chair. They were half way through their lunch, and when he explained that he had already eaten, they insisted that he have another cup of coffee with them. He looked at his watch, saw that he had a half-hour, and decided that it would be pleasant to sit with them for a while, and it was more pleasant because they were so obviously pleased. It always came as a little bit of a shock to Silas that people liked him and desired his presence. He sat down next to Susan Allen, an attractive woman in her late twenties, who taught the history of art and whose husband was an instructor in English Literature, both of them friends of himself and of Myra, and both of them valuing the friendship inordinately, as younger people will sometimes do with older people they like and admire. She poured coffee for him, and he stirred it thoughtfully as she asked.
“And you’re not curious about what we were saying, Silas?”
Hartman Spencer, who had won the Chalmers Award for his work on cosmic rays, was a short, square-built man of about fifty, with the hammered, mashed-in face of a professional boxer—which he had been for three years—and the gentle, inquiring smile of a saint, which he was not. Utterly devoted to Amsterdam, he had already made himself something of an international reputation in astro-physics, and was now engaged in writing a rather revolutionary monograph on the origin of the universe. Now he said.
“Silas wouldn’t be curious about that. No good man is ever perturbed by what others say about him.”
“Save us from good men,” said Ike Amsterdam. “They are a pestilential breed and more concerned for their reputations than a woman is for her looks. Leave Silas out of the category.”
“It’s interesting, Ike,” Susan Allen remarked, “that you can’t defend a man without insultin
g a woman.”
“I am neither defending Silas nor attacking him.”
Alec Brady watched them all, ate and watched them, his expression rather quizzical and reserved at once. He was a tall, long-faced, balding man in his middle forties, a full professor of European History, the author of three important books on the Napoleonic Wars, a captain of infantry in the Second World War and—a fact which he sedulously kept from public knowledge—a holder of the Distinguished Service Medal. He was not easy to know, and at the same time, one of the few men Silas wanted to know better. Like Silas, he lived close to his family, his wife and two children, and like Silas, he gave the impression of being singularly free of ambition. He was one of those men who rarely delivered judgments of others, a reticence that seemed to stem more from a particular understanding than from a desire to please and be liked.
When Silas turned to him, a little uneasy at being the subject of conversation and somewhat gratified at the same time, he smiled and asked.
“How is the family, Silas?”
Silas said they were good, very good. Susan Allen was saying, “You certainly are,” to Ike Amsterdam, maintaining that he never spoke of anyone without attacking or defending, and then Spencer returned to his original statement. There were good people. If Amsterdam chose to give the word historical connotations, that was something else. But if you made an inversion of good, and extended it as a principle, where were you then?
“Precisely where we are,” Amsterdam replied. “Fat, well-fed, well-curried, well-cared-for pedants, performing our mechanical daily routine by rote, housed, fed and clothed by millionaires who tolerate this institution for the technical experts it turns out, and who provide a window dressing of liberal arts to go with the ivy on the phony granite walls. That’s where we are. Obedient and cheerful purveyors of what passes for culture in a world gone insane, passing out a smattering of ignorance to becloud the otherwise undefiled minds of the new herrenvolk.”
Susan Allen whistled and grinned. Spencer shook his head and returned to his mashed potatoes. “You don’t leave much room for argument,” Brady smiled, and Susan Allen asked,
“Have you ever heard anyone argue with Ike?”
“Everyone argues with me,” Amsterdam snorted. “The fools as well as those with a modicum of common sense. This is the holy age of conformity, and if I should hold one small opinion not registered and stamped with the official seal of approval, I would be met with argument, rancor and fear.”
“Ike has made this general,” Susan Allen explained to Silas, “and as a matter of fact, when you walked by, he was holding forth on it. He chose you as his example, and stated that so mild and agreeable a subject as American literature would either be pruned to conform, or else he who taught it would find himself in very hot water. I don’t find it so with the history of art. No one has yet told me who to elevate and who to relegate to the cellar, and I doubt if anyone very much cares. How do you feel about it, Silas?”
“Well—I don’t know. This is a time of stress, I suppose, and a certain amount of give and take has to go by the boards. But that doesn’t mean that anything basic has changed. You can make out a good case, Ike, for the oligarch’s hold on the university, but it seems to me to be a little old hat. You set up a straw man and knock him over, which isn’t quite fair either. Of course the rich support the colleges; everyone knows that and it’s been that way for a long time, but that doesn’t mean they dictate the curriculum or the content of the various courses. Fortunately, I don’t think they give a damn—or would know what to do if they did.”
“You underestimate them,” Brady put in. “One of the worst mistakes a pedagogue can make, Silas, is to consider that the rich are fools. It’s simply not true.”
“But what about the other way?” Susan Allen said. “You have all your answers in Russia, where the schools belong to the people, as they put it. Suppose Silas—or I, for that matter, or Ike, or you, Alec—suppose we opened the wrong text, or praised the wrong picture, or claimed that your cosmic rays, Hart, don’t do whatever the comrades prescribe for them—then Silas would find himself in a comfortable and quiet cell, or in Siberia.”
“How do you know?” Ike Amsterdam demanded.
“It’s common knowledge, isn’t it? It’s something they’ve gone to no trouble to conceal, it seems to me.”
Brady said, “Without getting into a long argument about Russia, Sue, isn’t it a hell of a note when we have to justify our own actions by saying it’s worse somewhere else?”
Silas looked at his watch and then rose. “My time’s up. The great god has asked to see me, and I mustn’t be late.”
“Cabot?” Ike Amsterdam asked. Silas nodded, and as he walked away, Spencer said.
“I hope he doesn’t find the argument resolved.”
“Not Silas Timberman,” Brady said, and Susan Allen half-cynically added, “The good man.”
“If he is,” Ike Amsterdam observed, “God help him.”
* * *
In some ways, the presidency of Clemington University was a far cry from the leadership of such famous eastern colleges as Harvard, Princeton or Columbia; in other ways it was not, for Clemington had a unique relationship to the whole middle area of the nation and the whole central concentration of industry and agriculture. If fewer career diplomats emerged from Clemington than from certain eastern universities, this was more than balanced by those who were later to become leaders of heavy industry, congressmen, senators, not to mention governors and mayors of western cities. A secretary of state, a governor of Illinois, and a Supreme Court justice had each in turn been president of Clemington; and it had occurred to others as well as Anthony C. Cabot that it was time this region as well as the culture and industry of the region should be honored by a higher post.
Therefore, people who understood the curious workings of American politics felt that Anthony C. Cabot had been well advised, some years before, to accept the call that made him president. His had been an interesting if not unusual career, and one well planned and regulated. Coming from a wealthy family, he had himself been a student at Groton and Yale and had then entered the diplomatic service. Seven years of this brought him the ministry of a middle-sized, not too important South American republic, from which he resigned to run for Congress on the Republican ticket. Elected to the House, he served several terms before it was felt that the time had come for him to enter the Senate—and he survived as a senator through a good deal of the Roosevelt Administration. In Congress, he remained a diplomat, never placing his name on any important, consequential legislation, never allowing himself to be publicly grouped with the die-hard enemies of Roosevelt or with the independent Republicans who occasionally supported the administration. Without submitting any proof of the qualities, he gained a reputation for calm intelligence, judicious non-partisanship in the nation’s good, and thoughtful open-mindedness. Eight years before, he had wisely decided not to run for re-election, but to accept, under public pressure, the presidency of a great university, because, as he usually put it,
“In this arena will be fought the battle so decisive in this great world struggle—the battle for a free and upright youth who will never falter in the contest against tyranny.”
In October of 1950 he had just passed his sixtieth birthday, and all in all, the years had dealt well with him. He had a fine, commanding figure, a great shock of white hair, and a head that inevitably called for the adjective leonine. A firm chin gave him an appearance of forcefulness, and a high, wide brow balanced the force with an indication of deep thought and sober judgment.
All of this was public knowledge and only surface deep. There were very few men at the university who knew him well, who were his friends and intimates, and Silas was not among them; and when all was said and done, he knew as little about Cabot as most people did. The president’s aloofness had become traditional among the faculty, but Silas was slower than others to judge him on that score, sensing how often aloofness stems from a deep f
ear of people rather than from any basic dislike. He did know that Cabot could, on occasion, be most charming, which rather counted against the theory of fear, but Silas had never been sufficiently concerned to speculate unduly upon the matter.
He was concerned now, if the truth be told. That morning, he had found a note in his box, asking him to stop by the president’s office at one-fifteen, if he could manage it, and since the time coincided with the beginning of a two-hour break in his classes, he felt it was a little more than a casual matter. If a summons from Cabot was not too usual, it was nevertheless not a singular matter, and in a routine sense not a disturbing one. The fact that it disturbed Silas meant simply that he was in a condition to be disturbed by any number of things. Yet whenever he attempted to pin down the source of this condition and analyze it, he came to a dead end in his thinking and resorted to a variety of rationalization. He knew that things were changing; he knew that people were becoming different; he knew that he himself was becoming different; yet he could not successfully articulate a definition of that difference.
Whereupon, he was nervous and ill at ease as he entered the Main Building and climbed the arched marble stairs to President Cabot’s office. The Main Building, which dated from the immediate post-Civil War period, was magnificent in an ornate and thoughtless manner, and this mahogany and marble decor carried into the office of the president. Silas had imagined that Cabot enjoyed its similarity with the old government office buildings in Washington, and indeed the red carpeting, the over-sized desks and over-stuffed black leather chairs made a good setting for a man like Cabot.
