Beet

by Roger Rosenblatt

  “When do you suppose they will like come for us?” asked Goldvasser of Matha.

  “Never. No one knows we’re here,” said Betsy Betsy. All realized at once that their revolutionary gesture would remain unrecognized until daylight unless they did something to call attention to it.

  “Maybe we should leave,” said Jamie Lattice meekly, as he said most things. He was afraid that if he were kicked out of college, no one in New York would invite him to a book party, which suggested how much he had to learn.

  “I’ll go outside and yell, ‘We’ve got MacArthur!’ said Bagtoothian. “‘What are ya gonna do about it!’”

  “To whom?” asked Betsy Betsy. “Everyone’s gone home. Look out there. The students, the proctors, the administration, everyone’s asleep.”

  Matha reached into her backpack and produced a bullhorn. “Let’s wake ’em up, then,” she said, and stuck the bullhorn out the front window. “Beet College!” she shouted, “We are the…” She turned back to the others. “Do we have a name?”

  “The MacArthur Five,” said Goldvasser, who blushed at his own ingenuity.

  Matha continued: “We are the MacArthur Five! We have taken over MacArthur House to express our frustration with the system.” She’d read that sixties students used the word system to mean the enemy. “We will remain in this building until our demands are met! Join us, comrades!”

  Startled out of his forty-three-minute slumber, Peace thought he’d been awakened by a nightmare. “Join us, comrades!” Where the hell was he? He went to his office window, peered into the night, but saw nothing. All had gone quiet again in MacArthur. He went back to the couch, but not to sleep. “Join us, comrades!” It must have been a nightmare.

  The comrades regrouped and sat in their circle. The grandfather clock ticked away.

  “Matha?” asked Betsy Betsy, after a while. “What are our demands?”

  “You’re right,” said Matha. “We don’t have any. Let’s make some up.”

  They huddled for a few minutes and came up with a list, but it wasn’t easy. Since the sixties, all the conventional demands made by erupting college students had been acceded to, indeed anticipated, not only at Beet, but at practically every institution of higher learning in America. The MacArthur Five could not think of a single ethnic or gender or sexual orientation studies program to ask for that was not already in place. In some instances, the college had come up with a course of study based on a group that did not yet indicate its existence in, much less its anger at, the wider society. The most recent was a lecture series on the Boopa, a stationary race of Bolivian pygmies who have no words for hello or good-bye.

  In contemplating their list of demands, the student radicals supposed they could always call for a reversal of contemporary trends and demand a return to the traditional dead-white-males curricula of the 1950s, but they knew that the faculty—many of whom had been students in the 1960s—would accept the revisionist program at once because it represented a usurpation of the current curricula and would sound revolutionary. What good are demands, the students asked themselves, if they are readily met?

  “Does Beet have like ROTC?” asked Goldvasser. “What is ROTC, anyway?”

  They could always protest the presence of the U.S. military on campus, an evergreen of campus disruptions for forty years. But here again such a demand would be difficult. For one thing, there was no such presence to speak of, on Beet’s campus or anyone else’s, except for the service academies. (Oddly, a few antimilitary protests had occurred at those institutions, but they met with scant success.) The draft was history. And there was the other impediment regarding this issue—that more than a few students actually wanted to enlist these days, going so far as to say that serving in Iraq might be preferable to sitting through another two years of classes on Latina pride (mainly a complaint of Latino students).

  “How about demanding they get rid of the Old Masters in the college museum?” said Betsy Betsy.

  “Why do that?” asked Lattice, who was paying more attention to an open window.

  “Because they’re all men,” said Betsy. “Where are the Old Mistresses?” Bagtoothian asked Matha if he could kill her.

  As for siding with the workers—another ripe issue of the sixties—there simply weren’t all that many workers around Beet. The town was principally composed of professionals who provided employment for other professionals, of retirees, and of bored people, who covered all the strata, and who counted upon the college to relieve their monotony. The only involvement they sought from Beet College were the adult learning courses, and for the older male adults, the sight of girls in short skirts about whom they could daydream of leading new lives in seaside shacks on the Maine coast. This is not to say there were no workers around at all. Last year Goldvasser tried to unionize two plumbers who worked in the college maintenance department. He was wearing a hard hat at the time, which the plumbers offered to drive straight up his ass.

  Making a list of demands in the contemporary world, the MacArthur Five determined, was not what it used to be. But then, as Matha reminded them, their goals had changed as well. They wanted to close the college, bring it down so they could party day and night, and for as long as possible avoid seeking the jobs un available to them anyway. Ideally, the demands they came up with would be so out of reach for the administration and the faculty, they would never be considered seriously. When that happened, they reckoned, the rest of the students would get angry and stand with them out of the usual undergraduate ennui and a mounting contempt for their elders brought on by their excessive attention to the students’ wishes. And this marshaling of support would be essential, because at present the student radicals at Beet constituted 0.27 percent of the undergraduate population of 1,800, which is to say, five.

  So the band of revolutionaries finally produced the sort of demands they knew no one at Beet would accept. They were:

  Buy back the Henry Moore! Pay higher than the selling price if necessary, but get it back! [Bollovate and the trustees would never go for that.]

  Fire Louie! [They would not do that either. Huey was the perfect titular leader for the trustees’ purposes—though equally servile and incompetent, he could be difficult to replace.]

  Fire Bollovate! [Out of the question.]

  No more pigs-in-blankets in the school cafeteria! We’re sick of them! Off the pigs! [A deliberately madcap demand to appeal to campus libertines.]

  Dissolve the CCR! [Matha feared it might actually do something under Professor Porterfield. It had to go before it saved the college.]

  [And consequently] Fire Porterfield! [Their ace in the hole, because they knew it could never happen.]

  The list was completed at dawn. Matha moved to the window again and read the demands in an overexcited southern accent that made them sound more like a schedule of playtime activities announced by a games steward on a cruise ship. She waited and watched. At first, not a single Beet student emerged from the dorms. Then from out of the woods an Arab figure ran toward them, shouting ecstatically. “I shall join you, brothers and sisters! Let us destroy this house of Satan!”

  Matha opened the door a crack, saw who it was, said, “Not you, Akim. We only take earthlings,” and slammed the door shut. Akim sat on the cold grass in front of MacArthur, attempted to face Mecca, eventually gave up, and slunk back to his cave.

  In his room, Ferritt Lawrence toyed with the idea of infiltrating the group so that he could report the takeover firsthand. He could be embedded with them—yes, embedded. But then, realizing he would be more like a real journalist if he reported the event as he reacted to it emotionally, he stayed put. The other students waited for Matha to finish reciting the demands and returned to sleep.

  That was not an option for Peace, who now understood that what he’d heard earlier did not come out of his beleaguered mind. The lone faculty member on campus that night jumped up and jogged toward MacArthur. Still at the window, Matha called to the disheveled visitor.


  “What’s the matter, Professor Porterfield? Did your wife make you spend the night on the couch?”

  “What are you doing, Matha?”

  “What does it look like? We’re taking over a building.”

  “To accomplish what?”

  “You heard our demands.”

  “You can’t be serious. The faculty is trying to save the college, and you people are occupying a building?”

  “Matha,” Lattice whispered to her. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe we should leave.” Bagtoothian asked if he could kill Lattice.

  “Go away, Professor Porterfield. Go meet with your little committee. See where it gets you. Don’t you know they’re going to close the place anyway?”

  She slammed the window shut. Peace went to phone Huey. Next he called Manning, whom he reached on his cell. This was a Tuesday, and Manning was paying his weekly visit to Margaret at the Beet village cemetery. It was approaching eight o’clock when he arrived and stood beside Peace. “Who’s in there? The Junior League Madame Defarge?”

  Peace looked over his shoulder and saw Huey and Bollovate descending the steps of College Hall and walking hurriedly into the New Pen toward the occupied building. Other faculty members trickled in—three, ten, fifty.

  “Will they call the cops?” Lattice asked.

  “If it were up to Bollovate,” said Matha, “they’d be loading the rubber bullets right now.”

  Among the faculty members gathered, only Professor Lipman was noticeably upset. Her office was in MacArthur, and she blanched at the thought of the students riffling through her stash. Hidden away were secret memos from the New York Times, lists of favored and unfavored politicians, editors, artists, and so forth that would prove embarrassing if made public. Her treasury included two photos signed by Times critics concealed under stacks of manila envelopes in her bottom desk drawer. One was signed, “With luminous admiration, Chip.” The other: “All my brio, Ben.”

  The rest of her colleagues stood dazed and perplexed, blowing smoke in the cold air. For some, the takeover was like a hookah dream. It had been many, many years since any of the professors saw an occupied building, and they were trying to recall how to react. After conferring with Joel Bollovate, President Huey did nothing. So did the dither of deans. The students, still sleep-headed, remained in their beds, though Akim tried once more to stand with his beloved Matha, and again was turned away.

  “We have added one more demand!” yelled Matha over the bullhorn. “Amnesty for the occupiers!” The MacArthur Five cheered from inside.

  That addendum jogged the professors’ memories, and at last some of them recalled how to react to the takeover. They would join it. One by one in a growing line of ten, twelve, and more, they marched up to the door of MacArthur, knocked, and shouted, “Open up! We are with you!”

  “Are you people nuts?” Manning called to them. He and Peace stood with several members of their own departments, who said nothing as others approached MacArthur House.

  Now it was the MacArthur Five’s turn to be uncertain as to how to react. All they knew of student protests came from books and movies, none of which was clear on the matter of responding to sympathy. Bagtoothian said, “Let them in!” And so they did, with Professor Godwin leading the troupe and shouting, “Right on!” as he entered.

  All of Peace’s committee joined in except Smythe, who hung back to see which way the wind would blow. Professor Booth marched right behind Godwin. Professor Heilbrun repeated “Right on!” then Kramer. Heilbrun had on a Beckbury—navy herringbone jacket, plain waistcoat, and striped trousers. Kramer wished he’d worn his Continental Army uniform, with the musket and tricorne. Kettlegorf entered singing, “Let me in, I hear music.” On they came, their mood at once intense, festive, and bemused. Lipman rushed into her office, ascertained that nothing had been touched, and rejoined the others in the reception room, telling them that a protest like this was in the best tradition of the First Amendment.

  By three to one, the professors in the building now outnumbered the students, whom they ignored. They stood in a huddle and high-fived and hugged one another as Matha took one look at them and frowned.

  “We’re with you!” shouted Professor Godwin. The professors began to sing “We Shall Overcome,” but faltered when they could not remember the lyrics beyond the first words.

  “Right on!” said Professor Kramer again, growing bolder.

  “We don’t want you here,” said Matha.

  “We don’t?” asked Betsy Betsy.

  “No, we don’t,” said Matha. “Look at these people, will you? They’re not with us. They’re just putting on a show. They’re on a nostalgia trip.” And before the accuracy of her assessment had begun to sink in for her comrades, she added, “I’m out of here.”

  She flung open the door of MacArthur and stomped off in a rage, to be followed closely by the others, Jamie Lattice toddling ducklinglike behind her. Now the only occupiers of the building were faculty members. When they saw that the students had exited, they looked to one another, and then they left too, thus bringing to a close the shortest building takeover in the history of American education.

  And that might have been that, except for the fact that Beet College property had been invaded and occupied, and a few laws broken. The majority of adults who had remained outside MacArthur as well as those who went in knew something had to be done. Bollovate and thus Huey did as well.

  They all gave the matter some thought. And then they came to a decision. They would do what they always did when they did not know what to do. They would call a faculty meeting.

  CHAPTER 8

  “THE MEETING WILL COME TO ORDER,” SAID HUEY. “WE should proceed with a reading of the minutes.”

  “Forget the minutes,” Manning called from his seat. “Let’s deal with the so-called radicals.”

  “Shouldn’t we read the minutes?” Huey turned to Bollovate, who shook his head. “Well, then, we won’t read the minutes. Should we call the roll?”

  “I think we should have an invocation first,” said Chaplain Lookatme, who was standing by the door. “This is so important a meeting. Don’t you think we need the presence of our Friend?”

  “But we’ve never had an invocation before,” said Huey.

  “Our Friend won’t mind,” said Lookatme, with the coy, self-satisfied smile that came upon him when referring to his Friend.

  “Should we have an invocation?” Huey asked Bollovate, who said nothing.

  A debate ensued as to whether an invocation would be violating the separation of church and state. This gave rise to questioning whether a college was equivalent to the state, and did a chaplain represent a church? After half an hour, the faculty decided to send Lookatme packing. The man was crestfallen, but not so’s anyone would notice.

  “Our Friend will bless us anyway,” he said.

  “What a Pal!” said Manning.

  Peace sat behind Manning, and maintained a silence that was unusual for him. Not the fact of the silence itself; for four years he’d kept quiet at faculty meetings in the vain hope that they would get on with greater dispatch without a contribution from him. But the silence he kept on this day was more watchful, and in some ways a consequence of his assignment. If he were being asked to resuscitate the college, he had to think about the whole institution more analytically.

  The meeting was held, as were they all, in the Faculty Room, an airplane-hangar-like building unto itself on the north side of the Old Pen, which managed to be both muggy and drafty no matter the weather outside. It was among the oldest structures at Beet, its shell dating back to the days of Nathaniel himself, and originally had served as the area for pig auctions—called the volutabrum, or pigsty. When it was converted in the 1830s, someone at the inaugural meeting moved that the name be retained.

  Large gilt-framed oil portraits of former Beet presidents covered the four walls, surrounding the rows of chairs and looking down on the gathering like the elders of a church. Each was illuminated by
picture lights mounted in shiny brass. There was James Janes (1711–1766), Beet’s first president, a drunk and a womanizer who beat the students with the branches of a cherry tree and was known to French-kiss his dog, a beagle named Dr. Brewster. There was Duncan “The Sneaker” Raymond (1758–1820)—the soubriquet did not appear on the legend—whose cherubic grin and chubby red cheeks belied his arrest and conviction for embezzling college funds. A dandy, though a pudgy one, he’d posed wearing a red Glengarry and a Black Watch tartan kilt under which he reportedly had concealed the pilfered stash in Black Watch tartan garters. Directly beneath Raymond hung Nicholas McVitt (1781–1862), with the scrofulous face of one of the late stages of the picture of Dorian Gray, and who seemed to be looking up Raymond’s kilt. He was the only known male nurse to serve on both sides in the Civil War, and was tried for desertion by each.

  And there were several more rimose faces peeking out from handlebar mustaches and Smith Brothers beards, including that of President Chauncy Dicey (1929–2004), Huey’s immediate predecessor, a lepidopterist who committed suicide by shotgun in his office and whose likeness bore the look of someone who had just glanced out his penthouse window as King Kong was strolling by. Dicey had left no explanatory note, only a cassette on which he repeated the name Beet, with increasingly darker emphasis.

  Huey had not sat for his own portrait yet, though it was suggested the college might save money if they hanged the subject instead.

  “Is there old business?” said Huey.

  “The Self-Reinvention Center,” said Professor Hoffmann of Public Speaking. He’d proposed this idea at the last faculty meeting. “But I want to withdraw my motion.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Huey.