Beet

by Roger Rosenblatt

  On Sensitivity Day this year, Manning once again planned to press his motion to add white Protestants from New Canaan, Connecticut, to the poorly-thought-of list, which had been tabled last year for being “frivolous.” He was delighted to learn it was expected to pass with enthusiasm. And a protest was awaited from the Robert Bly Man’s Manliness Society against the event itself, which the Bly group condemned as “sissyish.”

  The day was known by its celebrants as “S Day,” and had its own hand signal, like the victory V. Since forming the S required the use of both hands touching at the thumbs (the left held below the right, so that the letter would be backward to the ones who made it yet correct for those facing it), one could not give the sign while holding packages, or holding anything. That sometimes made for physically awkward moments as books, groceries, and occasionally babies had to be laid on the ground before the signal could be given. But since fewer than a dozen faculty members, and no students, remembered either the S sign or how to make it, the inconvenience was deemed minor.

  Also on the school calendar was How to Prepare for the Holidays Day—“my second favorite,” said Manning—always held the week before Thanksgiving, the components of which were so complicated and muzzy, the problem that once occupied a mere town meeting on Sensitivity Day now required a day of its own. The activities included formal debates regarding public displays of religious symbols such as “The Crèche: Pro or Con?” and “The Menorah: Yes or No?” along with panel discussions of “Atheist Rights,” which involved the suggestion that the baby Jesus be removed from the Nativity scene. The panel “Should We Place a Menorah in the Crèche?” was the most successful.

  The highlight of every How to Prepare for the Holidays Day was a sermon in the Temple by Dr. Bucky Lookatme, the college chaplain (a full-blooded Cherokee who had been converted to Christianity by Billy Graham himself, when the evangelist’s train had made a whistle stop at Lookatme’s Arizona reservation), on the ever-popular topic “Godspeak.” Lookatme had tobacco-colored skin with a birthmark stain on his forehead in the shape of California. At the pulpit, he appeared less pastor than apparatchik, and with the backing of Bollovate and Huey had taken to selling his Sunday sermons for fifteen dollars apiece, with a fifty-fifty split for the college. His best seller was “On the Highway to Heaven, What Are You Paying for Gas?” His perennial issue was nothing as simple as whether God should be addressed as He, She, or It, but rather, Should God be allotted divine superiority as compared to humans? Chaplain Lookatme had come up with this problem all by himself, but once he stated it, several of the faculty agreed it was crucial. The point was, said Lookatme, that God Him-, Her-, or Itself would not wish to be thought of as existing on a higher plane than mortals. He or She or It was more of a Friend.

  Manning intended to participate in this discussion as well. He was going to propose abandoning such archaisms as the opening of the Lord’s Prayer, and substituting “Our Buddy Which art in heaven.”

  While only one-sixteenth of the college and community observed either Sensitivity Day or How to Prepare for the Holidays Day, the events were fully incorporated into official college life, and foreshortened the term. Some hours were also eaten up by Matha’s radicals, who continued to pace in the two Pens with placards reading “The CCR Will Not Go Far.” Goldvasser wore a sandwich sign that read, “Free the Des Moines 7,” but no one seemed sufficiently interested to point out his errors.

  All this made a difficult schedule more so for Professor Porterfield, who, after the first weeks of meetings of the CCR, was beginning to wonder if any amount of time, extended or shrunk, would accomplish what everyone wanted. Ideally, when the new curriculum was presented, the faculty would rise to their feet, every man and woman, cheer, sing the college song (whatever its words might be) and weep openly that in its darkest hour in the darkest season, good old Beet had been rescued by its own resourcefulness and goodwill.

  On the road leading to his house, he drove past other professors’ houses, which looked much like his own. Past the cords of wood and the mounds of mulch and the separated garbage. Past the swirls of smoke from the chimneys. Past the conversations in those houses, which, when they diverted from the threatened closing of the college, focused on an upcoming trip sponsored by the Boston Museum of Trips, or on the incomparable can-you-believe-it spaghetti squash at the Natural Nature Food Shop, or on the antique birdcage in the shape of a pagoda acquired at last Sunday’s Isn’t This Precious! Flea Market, or on the latest “fascinating if plodding” book they all were reading; or on one another.

  Peace took a wrong turn, the first time that had ever happened.

  “Sold the Moore?” Livi said at an early supper that evening. “Jesus! They really must be strapped. I must say, I really don’t get it. I mean, it’s okay by me if they close the joint tomorrow. But I don’t see how a college can go out of business like a falafel stand.”

  Whenever they looked forward to a rare night out, they pushed up the family dinner hour so they could dine with the children.

  “I think it’s losing too much,” said Peace, as he passed the brussels sprouts to Robert, who made the gag-me sign and passed them to Beth, who pretended to vomit.

  “Eat right or die,” said their mother. The pair were now attempting to cause each other’s water glasses to topple over by kicking the table legs.

  The children were still fuming over the previous night’s Halloween costume fiasco. Weeks earlier, they’d planned to go trick-or-treating as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Beth, the elder, naturally assumed she would be Sherlock; besides, she looked beyond cute in the deerstalker cap. But Robert too thought he would be going as Sherlock, precisely because Watson was the elder. In the end, after a shouting match that lasted an hour, they both went as Sherlock, each pointing out the other to their trick-or-treat patrons as an impostor.

  At least Livi had not contended with the Concerned Parents of Beet, which annually published a list of unacceptable and inappropriate Halloween costumes. The offensive outfits were hobo, witch, gypsy, old man, old woman, devil, and Indian princess. Last Halloween Livi threatened to dress up herself as a half-Jewish princess, but Peace persuaded her to let it alone.

  “Tell me something,” she said to her husband, attempting to ignore the brother-sister act at the table, which now consisted of each plunging a pencil into the other’s mashed potatoes. “What difference does it make if the college carries a deficit?”

  Peace admitted he did not understand the complexities of the matter, or very much at all about college finances. He had no knowledge of discounted tuitions, earmarked donations, or fund accounting, and until lately, had never supposed he needed any. All he knew was that Beet had an operating budget of around $60 million, which depended on sustaining an endowment of $265 million, which had held steady until Bollovate, Huey, and the new board came in. But now the trustees complained that more money than ever was going toward scholarships. Health care costs were up. Equipment—everything from computers to staplers—was way up.

  “I guess it’s easiest to think of the college as a mom-and-pop store,” he said, unhappy to make the analogy. “With zero in the endowment, there’s nothing left to invest. All the profits, which pay the bills, come from tuition and gifts. We need more students and more gifts.”

  “How do you lose $265 million in a couple of years?” Livi asked. “That’s a hell of a lot of staplers. And what will the esteemed board of trustees do if it should turn out that Beet is sunk?”

  “Sell the property, I guess.”

  “To pay the bills?” Livi crossed her eyes. “And how could they sell something as old as Beet College? Who owns the land?”

  Peace ate two brussels sprouts, chewing very slowly. Should he have paid more attention to money matters?

  “Well,” said Livi, “if the CCR’s dumb-ass report is supposed to save the place—something I must tell you I find hard to swallow—why don’t you write it yourself? Let your committee yak away, you create the report out o
f your own good mind, then tell ’em they did it.”

  “They’re not stupid,” said Peace.

  Livi said nothing.

  Beth and Robert were approaching the end of a breath-holding contest, and glowed like radishes. “Out!” said Livi, to the children’s satisfaction.

  “Besides,” said Peace, “it’s not playing fair. The report is supposed to be a collective decision.”

  “Ooo la la, M. Candide! I love collective decisions,” said Livi. “Love love love!”

  She examined her husband’s troubled face. “Have you ever heard of Dupuytren’s contracture?” she asked. “It’s a disorder of the palm. Thick tissues, like a scar, develop under the skin. It takes a while to grow and eventually it restricts the motion of the hand, causing one finger to drop involuntarily. The condition starts out invisible, with no pain, and winds up very serious.”

  “This is a metaphor?” Peace asked.

  “Could be.” She gave him her business smile. “There’s only one way to get rid of Dupuytren’s contracture.”

  “And what is that, Doctor?”

  “Surgery.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE OCCASION OF THE PORTERFIELDS’ NIGHT OUT WAS THE visit of B. F. Templeton, known as The Great, the most popular poet in America, there to give a reading in Lapham Auditorium. The hall was named for the funder, the inventor of the asparagus tongs, who was also a Gilded Age press lord and amateur cornet enthusiast lampooned by political cartoonists of the day, including Thomas Nast, for blowing his own horn. Lapham sat six hundred in the orchestra, and two hundred more in the loge—the necessary capacity for the throng expected for The Great Poet Templeton. That was how he was always billed, as The Great Poet Templeton. Friends and critics sometimes referred to him as Templeton and B. F., but fans knew him as The Great.

  “I suppose we have to go,” said Livi when they finished their meal, hoping Peace would hear that as a question.

  “You don’t, honey, but if I didn’t show up, that’s all the committee would talk about at tomorrow’s meeting.”

  “Fascinatin’ group,” she said, adopting her best Jean Harlow. “So cultchered, don’t ye know? So refoined.”

  Cindy the sitter appeared at six, as promised. Beth and Robert hooted and cheered.

  “Don’t let them get the best of you,” said Livi as she put on her parka.

  “I came armed this time,” said the teenager. “A .38, a .45, and an Uzi.”

  “You’re sure that’s enough?”—the parents in unison.

  No one was more thrilled by The Great’s appearance than Matha Polite, who had selected herself to introduce the reading. This was The Great’s second visit to Beet, his first occurring over twenty years ago when he was just starting out, yet recognizable as a rising literary star. His poetry—even his detractors and competitors had to concede—was very good, a concatenation of colloquial Frost and mythological Seferis, with the mathematical precision of Empson and yet the boisterous lyricism of Dylan Thomas. He had much of Thomas in him, including a distant Welsh ancestry (though he had been born and reared in Point Pleasant, New Jersey). He drank as lustily as Thomas had, and lunged at as many undergraduate breasts as well, and as well. And he looked a bit like Thomas—shortish and fattish with a thick raddled nose and chirpy eyes that seemed to preemptively beseech everyone for forgiveness. His God’s gift, though, was his voice. If anything, it was even more musical than Thomas’s—so bell-like and equipped with its own echo, listeners would rotate their heads and sway to it in a demi-swoon, as they might sitting on a lawn at a Chopin piano concerto drifting over Tanglewood.

  Because The Great’s speaking fee was $20,000, Bollovate, upon learning of the event, attempted to have it canceled. That is, he got President Huey to try to call it off. But The Great’s reading had been set in stone a year in advance, and his contract called for full payment, even if the college backed out.

  “Twenty grand for poetry?” said Bollovate. “And what do we get out of it? I’ll tell you what. Poetry!”

  The students, especially those in English and American Literature, were delighted at the prospect of sitting at The Great’s feet, which were usually covered in woolly bedroom slippers worn even in the snow, as he suffered from gout. And the faculty too wanted to gain as much reflected glory as the poet would radiate. Smythe was the most enthusiastic, which is why, as soon as the date was nailed down, he’d volunteered to give a cocktail party to kick off the evening. When The Great stood on the threshold of Smythe’s house just off campus, he was upright and sober, and at first few people recognized him.

  “Sir! We welcome your return after a long and eventful journey as Penelope welcomed Odysseus,” said Smythe.

  “Not in the same way, I hope.”

  Smythe’s house was a gingerbread job so laden with rounded shingles and frosted shutters that the place looked edible. The walls were decorated with little prints of English churches and photographs of famous authors—all staring lifelessly into the camera like gulag prisoners, with Smythe at their sides, wearing a satin smile. In the parlor, Ada Smythe, who understood very little of the literary life but knew how to throw a party, had set up a full bar including a life-size ice sculpture of the Lacoste crocodile to honor her family. She asked her husband how he liked it. He told her, “Boring.”

  By the time of The Great’s late arrival, most of the faculty were present, standing like flamingos in a swamp, holding glasses and making burbling sounds as student-waiters, among them Max Byrd, presented trays of midget asparagus and new potatoes stuffed with cheddar. Until Professor Porterfield got there—somewhat after The Great, as at the last minute Livi had to be driven to the hospital to extract a bullet from a kid who’d accidentally shot himself with his father’s Glock—Max was the only person in the room who had read all the works of B. F. Templeton, excluding The Great himself.

  On the way to the party the Porterfields were talking about what they’d been talking about, off and on, for a year, and more intently lately, with more pain than progress.

  “It isn’t that I don’t want you to go back into practice. You know that,” said Peace. “But the timing is lousy, Liv. I need you here.”

  “If something turns up in Boston, I’ll be here. It’s only a forty-minute drive. But it’s been four years. I’m going to lose everything I’ve trained for.”

  “What if it’s New York?”

  Her voice was soft, controlled. “Then it’s New York. Look, darling, this place may not exist in a couple of months. And in any case, there’s no sense in both of us doing the wrong job.”

  “I’m not doing the wrong job.”

  “Of course you are. These people don’t deserve you.”

  “They’ll come around.”

  “When pigs fly.”

  Peace wasn’t as confident of his high opinion of his colleagues as he sounded. But he did believe in the value of saying he was. As the Chinese put it, “If you want to keep a man honest, never call him a liar.” Peace would have substituted “make” for “keep.”

  “The students deserve everything, Liv. And the faculty isn’t what you see. Most of them are better than you think.”

  “I sure hope so.” She looked out the car window at a clump of dead trees. “You were happiest in Sunset Park. You were doing something there.”

  “I’m doing something here. And don’t romanticize Sunset Park. That was no picnic either, babe, if you remember.”

  “I won’t romanticize Sunset Park if you don’t romanticize Beet.” She touched his elbow. “The trouble with you is you’re a hero.”

  “I’m not. I just want the college to realize what it is.”

  “To realize what it is! Oh, Jesus! You are a hero!” They rode in silence the rest of the way to the party.

  In the atmosphere of Smythe’s home, envy was as palpable as smog but, since it was also laced with longing, revealed itself in manic gaiety. All crowded around or edged toward The Great. Lipman clung to him like ivy, as did Jamie Lattice.
“It must be wonderful,” he said to the poet, “to be part of the New York literati!”

  “The New York literati? You mean journalists?” said Templeton, at once flinging the boy and Lipman into deep yet separate funks.

  No one hovered as close as Smythe or expressed his admiration more lavishly. Among other social skills, he was the undisputed master of the standing ovation, a skill he’d perfected some years earlier when Steven Spielberg visited the campus. He knew exactly how to begin the clapping, when to rise from his seat, how to extend his arms in an incomplete circle. He was certain this evening would afford the opportunity to strut his stuff.

  For his part, The Great was in his element—“a pig in shit,” he shouted to no one in particular as he tossed down his first neat Bushmills of the evening, not realizing that porcine references came out as less hilarious at Beet than elsewhere. He was much more comfortable surrounded by professors and students of literature than he was among his fellow writers. Lost in their own orbits, writers would spin away from him, whereas he drew a college crowd to him with centripetal force. Because he produced the works they merely researched or criticized, he understood that most of the faculty wished him dead. But he also divined that he was indispensable to their health, that without an occasional visit from him or some other of his ilk, their bitterness would turn inward and gnaw on its own tail. Grandly would he accept their flattery. Grandly would they flatter. They laughed too loud, and so did he.

  “So you’re the one who’s going to save the college by Christmas,” said Templeton, when Peace was introduced to him.

  “We’re going to try.”

  “‘We’ means a committee?”

  Peace nodded.

  “Ah well,” said The Great, in a rare lapse into sympathetic seriousness. He looked up. “You have an innocent face.”

  “So I’m told,” said Peace, who was growing sick of his face.