The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  There were eleven requests for recommendations from students and former students; these Kate guiltily put aside, swearing to herself that she would get up half an hour early and do them when she was fresh, in every sense of the word. Publishers wanted her opinion about books (“We will, of course, pay a small honorarium”). Announcements of meetings on every conceivable subject (either she was more in demand, or deans were more numerous and given to busy work, almost certainly the latter) did not require a written response. She tore up several publishers’ announcements of freshman English handbooks (there is some advantage in growing long in the tooth, let it not be forgotten) and put aside for future perusal publishers’ catalogues of forthcoming books. This brought her to a letter from England. Now, who on earth, Kate wondered, but not for long. “Dear Kate,” the letter began, “this is from me, Phyllis, your friend that was. I am no more because there is no place for women at Oxford, be they neither students nor dons. To think that I complained about overwork. If I ever do so again, you have my permission to slap me sharply in the face, three times. Hugh is madly happy, of course, and no one at Oxford worries about wives. They are expected to have a good tea ready, to keep the children in hand, and to see to the laundry. What a life, even without children.

  “Which is to say please, if there remains any charity in your soul, come for a couple of weeks after classes and visit Oxford and talk to me; I yearn for conversation with a sane human being, especially one with views on America—you know, Nixon, the oil crisis, and the Equal Rights Amendment. I’ll gladly pay your fare if you are no longer rich and can’t afford it. Also, I’ll put you up here, but, candidly, I don’t advise it. When you arrive (you see I say ‘when,’ not ‘if’; I’m already counting on it) and see the place, you’ll understand my apparent lack of hospitality. I’ll reserve you a room at the best local hotel, the moment I hear that you will come, and when. Were you male, one could get you an invitation somewhere, even All Souls, who knows, but being female, you will have to pig it in a hotel. Write yes by return mail. That will give me hope for the next weeks, and a reason to go on living. I can’t just leave Hugh and go home, or travel, because that will prove to all the world that I am nothing but a compulsive idiot and unable to spend a year with my husband like a proper wife, as everyone has long suspected. And they’re right, damn it.”

  Reed appeared in the doorway, recalling Kate from a daydream of Oxford and long thoughts of rediscovering Cecily Hutchins, and Dorothy Whitmore, or at the least, chasing their ghosts through what remained of the Oxford of their youth.

  “Drink? Or are you on the verge of a peroration and not to be jostled?”

  “I’d love a drink, and some conversation. I hope your day was all right, because I don’t mean to ask you about it; I want to tell you about mine.”

  “Bound to be more interesting than mine, even if you only watched Leo play baseball. I take it there is more than that.”

  “Much more,” Kate said, as they settled down in the living room and Reed brought in the tray with the makings of drinks. “First of all, I’ve had a letter. From Phyllis, who is going mad from boredom and the female life in Oxford generally. She’d like me to visit her when my term is over, in May. Any objections?”

  “I knew Phyllis’s taking a year off like that was madness. We both told her repeatedly, If I remember, and with rising emphasis, that she should not immure herself in Oxford because she would simply cease to exist as a person. It appears that she has.”

  “And yet, you know,” Kate said, accepting a martini, “I think I understand Phyllis very well. It’s why, if you’ve no violent objections, I’ll join her for a week or two. Quite apart from wanting a change of pace and a vacation from her job, and all that, she’d been as besotted with the idea of Oxford all her life as I have been. Somehow one always assumes that at Oxford one will end up mysteriously dining in hall with someone from a Michael Innes novel. But of course, it isn’t like that at all. Yet you know, if someone were to ask me to come dine at the high table even today, I’d go like a shot—all the way across the Atlantic. Phyllis probably felt the same. She couldn’t really believe that she’d end up never meeting anyone at Oxford except as Hugh’s wife, and not often then. Oxford dons treat their wives the way most Americans treat their lovers, as a sort of shameful necessity. Still, if, knowing all that, I had one wish right now, it would be to be connected for a time with an Oxford college and dine at the high table, chat in the SCR, and have port in the combination room.”

  “You are an incurable romantic,” Reed said, “and you loathe port. But I see nothing wrong with acting out one’s dreams, if only to discover that they never had a shred of reality about them. But I trust, Kate, I do most earnestly trust, that you are not going off to Oxford on some mad chase after that author your student was working on. Oh, my God, I see that you are. You shall doubtless find that she spent her entire Oxford career writing inferior poetry, attending mixed parties, and making speeches, and was sent down with a poor third after flirting with the dons on the viva voce.”

  “Well”—Kate looked sheepish—“I would never have thought of it on my own bat. But it did occur to me that if I were to go there to help Phyllis face the facts about England, I might just case the joint—meaning Somerville College, where Cecily Hutchins and Dorothy Whitmore and Max’s mother came up for their last Trinity term over half a century ago. You know, Reed, they bicycled on Broad Street, under the gaze of the twelve Caesars, and fed the carp in the pool at Christ Church, and sat beneath the great copper beech in the Wadham garden. And somehow I long to follow in their footsteps.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Reed said, “and after only one martini. A bad, bad case. Can it be that cases of Anglophilia, like poison ivy, get worse each time?”

  What Kate might have answered was never to be known; into the living room at that moment walked Leo. He immediately collapsed, as was his wont, onto a wing chair, which he nonetheless sprawled in as though it were a chaise longue. The effect, of a figure in pain posing for Michelangelo, was in no way diminished by Leo’s expression. It was not usual for Leo to appear at this hour, or in this way. His time before meals (when he attended meals) was devoted to sleeping, or telephoning, or drinking Coke and consuming calories in their sweetest and most lethal form. If he drank alcohol, it was not before meals, and not with Kate and Reed.

  Vigorously, Kate restrained herself from asking if anything was the matter. Leo’s appearance indicated a need to talk, and a direct question would be death to that necessity. There was a long silence, broken only by Reed’s ice cubes bumping in the cocktail shaker.

  “Wouldn’t it be illegal to try and bug someone in a locker room?” Leo at last asked.

  Reed’s spilling a good portion of one martini indicated he was as startled by the question as was Kate, “Illegal? Of course it’s illegal. At the same time, as is said about everything else these days, from bribery to assassination, everybody does it. As evidence in court, it’s worthless.”

  “What do you mean, everybody does it?” Kate asked.

  “There are times,” Reed said, “when I long to call you Goody Two-Shoes. Every businessman has a dictaphone with a plug all ready for his phone. He’s not supposed to use it without telling the other chap, but he just wants a record for his files, so he tells himself. It’s not unusual, as I understand it, to bug the company plane, and then send the chaps who are dealing with you on a merger home in it. What better way to find out what deal they’re ready to settle for? Or you bug the men’s room. These days the women’s room, too, I guess. You have heard of Watergate?”

  “But everyone in the White House knew.”

  “Everyone who was planning hanky-panky in the Oval Office; but what about the chaps on the other end of the line; of the visiting heads of state, if it comes to that? Probably they’re used to it.”

  “Can’t you go to jail for it?” Leo asked. “That’s what I told them.”


  “Leo,” Reed said, “I have a horrible feeling that we should stop discussing bugging locker rooms and all the legal aspects thereof, and get down to cases. Are you planning to bug a locker room?”

  “I’m against it,” Leo said.

  “How on earth would you do it?” Kate asked.

  “Really, Kate, I hardly think that’s the point at the moment.”

  “You sound just like a father in the movies,” Kate said. “Honestly, Leo, I’m horrified, of course, but madly curious.”

  “A lot of the guys go in for electronics; there’s all kinds of surveillance apparatus. The Pentagon owns loads.”

  “The question is not why you chose Swarthmore over Harvard, but how you got into either place, with all that clarity of mind and language. Never mind, you can explain it to me another time, when we’re making conversation, waiting for you to come up to bat.”

  “Harvard and Swarthmore is the whole point. Harvard anyhow. Oh, shit.”

  Looking at Leo, Kate realized that had he been ten years younger, or even eight, he would have begun to cry. That being unthought of in our culture, he was banging his fists, one into the other, and against his thighs. His body rocked back and forth in the chair, for whose legs and webbing Kate decided to abandon all consideration. Her mother, she thought with a certain satisfaction, would have worried about the chair above all else.

  “Leo,” Reed said, “is there a beginning to this story, or are you still collecting stray information and trying to get it to hang together? You know, you can tell us, and then forget you did. Or you can ask questions, and take them away in the corner and chew on them. But if you want to discuss this at all, and I rather get the impression that you do, could we try to get the points into some sort of order, rational, logical, or sequential, as you prefer?”

  For the first time Leo smiled, “Reed, you’re getting to talk like Kate. Does that always happen to married people?”

  “Alas, no,” Reed said. “Kate simply talks more like Kate, and not a bit like me.”

  “Well,” Leo said, “you know all about College Boards?”

  Reed and Kate stared at him. As rhetorical questions go, this could have stood as the model for them all. Perhaps there exist, somewhere, parental figures of a college-bound (as the jargon has it) adolescent who do not know about the College Boards, but one would have to guess that their relation with their progeny was offhand to the point of downright neglect. College Boards serve the college admissions officers as scholarship examinations serve whatever they call admissions at Oxford and Cambridge. You may get in on money and athletics, or a combination of both, but high scores on the College Boards are the surest way. No college will admit this, of course, but it is so nonetheless. Any student who is in the middle seven hundreds on both math and verbal tests—eight hundred being perfect—is in for serious consideration from any college admissions board anywhere. Many other factors are taken into account; where students with lower scores must be chosen, other factors loom large. If, however, a student has goodish recommendations, goodish grades, or a certain amount of discernible talent, but Board scores only in the five hundreds, his chances for the big colleges are not great.

  Kate had her own views on these tests, and she was, moreover, willing to expound them, asked or not. In her opinion, they were the lazy way out. Take medical schools, for instance, who had exams (now called Medical Boards) administered by the very same people, and Kate thought the results disastrous. Whatever medical schools said, they tended to take the student with A’s in organic chemistry and high Board scores, which went partway—Kate thought a very long way indeed—toward explaining the sort of doctors and medical care with which the country was saddled. But that was neither here nor there, and Kate tried to divert her mind from this byway.

  “Yes,” Reed said, watching Kate’s face as her thoughts rapidly covered the familiar territory. “We know about College Boards. What comes next?”

  “I didn’t take any SAT’s this November, but some other guys—”

  “What did you take?”

  “I took achievement tests, at another time, in special subjects; that’s altogether different.” Leo’s voice had immediately attained that tone reserved for adolescents explaining something not for the first time to parents, or adults they could treat as parents. That they themselves frequently required explanations many times repeated never, of course, occurred to them. Adolescence was not the time for such thoughts: one cannot be thoughtful and have an identity crisis simultaneously, which, Kate thought, is the best reason for learning manners when young I’ve ever heard. She dragged back her wandering thoughts. “Yes,” she said, “I remember now: you didn’t take the SAT’s over because you’d done so well on them the first time.”

  “Well, frankly, I figured, why push your luck?”

  “A wise decision, I’m sure. Who did take them over? I mean,” she hastened to add before sounding dimwitted and being immediately reprimanded, “whose luck needed pushing?”

  “Ten guys. Their names don’t matter at this point,” Leo said darkly. “Except that one of them was Ricardo.”

  “Ah, and one gathers he did rather better the second time around.” Reed began, it was clear to Kate, to hope that he was dealing with a simple case of juvenile resentment.

  “A lot better.” Leo’s voice was so full of sarcasm his lip began to curl, an effect Kate could not remember having noticed before. “He got 760 on the verbal, and 420 on the math.”

  “Well, 420 wouldn’t get him into Harvard would it?” Kate had the feeling she often got when Leo explained why a catcher couldn’t be left-handed. Not so Reed.

  “In other words,” Reed said, “someone took the test for him, but he was too smart to try to get a high score on the math.”

  “Exactly. Of course, when you can get a perfect score yourself on the math, it’s a little hard to know how many mistakes to make on purpose, and . . . the guy who took them, he mucked it up a bit. But the 760 on the verbal got him, the first guy, into Harvard, along with all his other so-called qualifications. I think it shits.”

  “Leo,” Kate said, putting down her drink and feeling, suddenly, cold sober. “Surely there’s some surveillance, surely someone—”

  “Surely, crap.” Kate decided, under the circumstances, to ignore Leo’s language, which always increased in obscenity in proportion to his emotion.

  “How was it done, then?”

  “Look, there’s a room full of guys taking the test, from schools all over the city. You sign your name and fill out a form. So the guy, the first guy, learns to write like the second guy; who’s to know? That’s only one way of cheating. The commoner way is on the achievement tests; you say you want to take four: history, math, French, chemistry. Then you spend all four hours on one, cancel the scores on the others, which you’re allowed to do, and have had four hours on a test that other people only get one on. I know a guy who did that, and someone found out, and the College Board people did nothing. They can’t afford to. They’ve got a monopoly, and they don’t want to make waves.”

  “Leo,” Kate said. “May we ignore ways of cheating on the achievement tests for a moment, though I shall return to that at a later time and become hysterical? For the moment we are with the SAT’s. You are telling us that one boy can take the test for another, and there is no way this can be prevented. These tests are not policed at all?”

  “Nope. Of course, the first guy forged the second guy’s name and went as him.”

  “Wasn’t Harvard suspicious of this sudden rise in the score of the boy we may perhaps call Ricardo?”

  “Not really; they do actually happen sometimes. Also, by this time Ricardo had started to play up his writing grandmother, and he’s a pretty smooth guy—he sounded like maybe he was going to write great novels, and he is good in English, and the teachers in English who like him don’t know he’s a shit, and they’ve all
heard of his grandmother. Once Harvard had that new SAT score, well, O.K.”

  “Is it possible,” Reed said, “that in my own living room I am discovering why so many fools and knaves are lawyers? Can you get someone to take the Law Boards for you?”

  “Relax, Reed,” Leo said. “I wondered about that, too. They fingerprint you there. No way.”

  “Do you know something?” Kate said. “Leo can sneer if he wants to, but I can’t imagine such a thing happening at the Theban.”

  To her surprise, Leo, who sometimes grew tired of hearing the virtues of the Theban expounded, agreed with her. “That’s exactly what’s getting to us. Some of us,” he added darkly. “The whole school’s been a PR trip from the beginning—success was all that mattered, smoothness, grades, being cool. Naturally this happened.”

  “It occurs to me to wonder—well, many things,” Reed said. “To start with the least important, who is, or was, Ricardo’s grandmother?”

  “Cecily Hutchins,” Kate said.

  “My God. I might have guessed, I suppose. Who else could it possibly have been, given the Fansler family?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean by that remark,” Kate said.

  “Neither do I,” Reed agreed. “Leo, I get the picture, more or less, leaving out for a moment the start of this conversation, which had to do with electronic surveillance in locker rooms. I trust we shall return to that, as MacArthur to the Philippines. What is it, in the midst of all this, that’s bugging you, if you’ll forgive the expression. That someone cheated, that the system doesn’t work, that boys you like better didn’t get into the college they wanted because they were honest—where’s it at?”