Beet

by Roger Rosenblatt

  “Oops! I better keep my mouth shut. I’m not standing in the Free Speech Zone.”

  He turned to Peace. “You know, pal, all this tsuris might not be bad for you. You’ve led a pretty charmed life. You’ve earned it insofar as anyone can. But life ain’t charmed. So this may be your initiation into the club. Welcome. I wish the club didn’t exist.” A sigh and a quick recovery. “But don’t despair. We’re coming up on How to Prepare for the Holidays Day! I’m thinking strychnine. How about you?”

  They went quiet. “Livi said I was happiest in Sunset Park.”

  “That’s the kind of neighborhood I grew up in. I don’t recall too many ecstatic moments.”

  “She didn’t mean that. She meant the quality of the kids. They were raw and rough, but—I don’t know—they had a lovely sort of innocence. When I read them stories or told them stories. Anything, really. Stories from Shakespeare, or stories of ballplayers, it made no difference. You could see their faces unfrown, open up.”

  “They were off-guard.”

  “In a way. At any rate, they were transported out of Sunset Park for a while.”

  Manning studied him. “You’re an aristocrat,” he said.

  “Hardly.”

  “I’m talking about E. M. Forster’s definition of an aristocrat. A good, decent person who does the right thing and doesn’t show off about it. No wonder you’re unfit for human company.”

  “Got one more game in you?” Peace stood and flipped Manning the ball. They went at it again. “Where do you think you fit in all this, Derek?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well”—hitting a long jumper from the corner—“you’ve been here a fair number of years. Why don’t you do something about it?”

  “’Cause I think it’s hopeless, if you must know”—missing a chippie. Peace took back the ball.

  “So if it’s hopeless, what do you do with the rest of your life? You’ve got twenty years before retirement, whether it’s here or somewhere else.” Peace spun around him and floated it in for a basket.

  “I can look after myself.” Manning gave Peace a what-are-you-getting-at squint, and missed another easy shot. “I’ll leave the rescue of civilization to you.”

  “That’s just another wisecrack.”

  “Are you baiting me?”

  “If you had the guts you find missing in our colleagues, you’d help fix this mess yourself.” Peace was ahead six to nothing. Manning was missing by more with each shot. His hair stood straight as quills.

  “You’re trying to tick me off, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe.” Now it was seven-zip, eight, nine.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been called gutless.”

  “It’s been a while since Margaret died.”

  Pop! Manning shot a left so fast, Peace was on his ass in half a second. He reached up to his nose and examined the blood in his hand. Manning knelt next to him and wiped away more blood with his own hand.

  “Hey! Peace!”—tears in his eyes.

  “I went over the line. I was trying to get your goat.”

  “It worked.” He took off his T-shirt and gave it to Peace, to stanch the bleeding, and helped him to his feet. “Is it broken?”

  “Nope.” He slapped Manning’s shoulder. “Not enough behind it.”

  Manning was holding the ball on his hip. “You think I crawled into a shell after Margaret, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you had. But I don’t think you’re the man you’re becoming. A good-hearted wiseass who lives on the sidelines.” Peace held up his fists, pretending to fend off another punch.

  “Say, wasn’t this conversation supposed to be about you?” Manning said. “Between your troubles and mine, I like it better when it’s yours. You can keep the shirt.”

  “Derek? My remark about Margaret? It wasn’t aristocratic.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was.” Manning noted the clock on the scoreboard. “Gotta go.”

  “Derek…?”

  “Not another word. We’re square.”

  “Shalom?” said Peace.

  “Peace,” said Manning.

  That night after supper, as Livi sat reading in the one soft living room chair, Peace took the kids on the couch with him to tell them a story. He had not done that for a while. They sat on either side of him as he told them about the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County, and Rip van Winkle, and a story of Chekhov’s that he made clear and simple. He found they were happier when he cast the old stories in his own way, rather than reading from books where he had to explain some of the words. It was the story they wanted, none so much as a story from Peace’s own life. So, when he was done with the masters, he dredged up—he did not know why—a story told him by his father, whose father had told it to him, about a boy in a boat sailing down the path of the moon. As he finished the two children fell asleep, leaning against him like books on a shelf.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE THOUGHT OF DISRUPTING A CCR MEETING STRUCK Matha as both redundant and an unnecessary sidestep for the MacArthur Five, which had recently been reduced to the MacArthur Four. Jamie Lattice e-mailed Betsy Betsy that he had contracted mono and had no strength for anything but lying in bed and reading stories about the Algonquin Round Table. Bagtoothian volunteered to go to Lattice’s sickbed and “snap his scrawny neck.” But Matha said they all should concentrate on the task at hand, the “subtext” of which, she informed her comrades, was to make Professor Porterfield appear antistudent.

  “What good will that do?” asked Goldvasser the night they met in Matha’s room. “I thought we weren’t like supposed to attack Porterfield.”

  “I changed my mind. If Porterfield fails, the school fails,” she said, as if she believed it.

  Pumped, as they put it, by their success at MacArthur House, the group agreed to storm the CCR meeting scheduled for the following day, which was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and afforded an excellent opportunity to leave the campus in turmoil before the holiday break. They stayed up all night working out their tactics and rehearsing the spontaneous things they would yell in unison. Bagtoothian, Goldvasser, and Betsy Betsy also realized that since the CCR meetings were held in Bacon, their attack offered them an opportunity for a twofer.

  “As long as we’ll be in the library anyway, why not just stay and take it tomorrow?”

  There were five reasons not to, Matha told them. They had to occupy Bacon at night, when no one would be around. They had to break in to add drama. For maximum effect, the Bacon takeover had to come on the eve of the faculty meeting at which the new curriculum would be presented, that is, the night of December 18. Thanksgiving was coming up, and she had plans. And finally, she said so.

  “Do I have to do all the thinking around here?” She glowered at her retinue. They smiled sheepishly. “For fuck’s sake,” she said, leaving them sitting on the floor as she parked herself at her laptop.

  Bagtoothian went over to a corner of the room and set small paper fires on which he squirted loops of lighter fluid.

  “Will you stop that!” Matha yelled at him. He looked up at her like a dog, not understanding what he’d done wrong.

  She had been in a foul mood all day. As the others chatted conspiratorially, she wrote a furious letter to the editor of Beet magazine, the alumni publication, for rejecting one of her poems. Besides student poetry, the magazine published articles by professors about why they liked being at Beet; affectionate memoirs by Beet alumni; crossword puzzles the solutions to which were data from Beet’s history; the Riddle of the Month, to which the answer was always “Beet”; a droll essay by the editor on how things had changed since he was a student—for the better, and yet for the worse too, and yet not at all; and an editorial expressing the hopes that one day the publication might be recognized as a real magazine. Matha’s poem was the first piece they’d ever rejected, and they had no form letter to send her saying her work was not for them, or that it did not meet their needs at present, so they j
ust sent back the poem scribbled with the words “no good.” In her note she called the editor a “fuck-shit.”

  By dawn the students were exhausted, yet managed to form a ragged line on the Chillingworth staircase and proceed to Chuck E. Cheese’s, whose hours had been expanded to 24/7. By now, Chuck E. Cheese’s had company in the visitors’ parking lot. So successful was one fast food outlet that Bollovate and the trustees, with Huey’s concurrence, decided to add a Denny’s franchise as well, and then a Pizza Hut and a Popeye’s. The parking lot was growing into a fast-food megalopolis, the trailers flashing their lights day and night like an Atlantic City slot machine. To all this success an objection was voiced by the college nutritionist, who for thirty-two years had labored to make the campus cafeterias the New England college model for healthy eating. But her protest was brief, since she was fired.

  In fact, though the fast-food joints were raking it in, many students complained of recurrent tummy aches. Faculty cracked that the parking lot was just as honky-tonk as the strip mall outside town. But that was no longer true. The strip mall had been denuded by its college competitors.

  In town itself, eateries were suffering, and a few went out of business altogether. The This Little Piggy Muncheonette could not stay open without student customers, who now did not need to leave campus to do their munching. The building was boarded up and abandoned, leaving its totemic pink fiberglass pig forlorn and stranded on the roof.

  Peace awakened about the same time as Matha and her cohorts were chowing down Breakfast Pizza Meat Patties with Double Ham Sausage and Triple Cheese Sauce, and coffee shakes. For the first time since mid-October, he felt something interesting begin to form in his mind as he approached the day—a constructive thought regarding his task with the curriculum. It was an ice blink of an idea that flashed on the horizon, came and went, and came again and stayed. For once, he did not drag himself to the breakfast table. Beth and Robert ate docilely, apparently having agreed upon an armistice—a sign, he knew, of their unhappiness at the prospect of the move to New York and their parents living in separate places. But he had stood shoulder to shoulder with their mother, assuring them that the new arrangement, however uneasy it made them at the outset, would work. On this morning, after some hours of genuine deliberation rather than self-recrimination, Peace was beginning to believe that himself.

  He took a few notes, trying to recall the ideas or half-ideas that had come to him during his wakeful hours. He slipped the material into a manila folder, which he labeled “CCR,” and then went off to meet with the committee. He would have e-mailed his notes to Mrs. Whiting’s replacement in the English Department, but there wasn’t any. Three other departments, History, Economics, and Physics, had lost their assistants at the same time, under circumstances similar to Mrs. Whiting’s, and were without clerical help. Huey had sent around a memo explaining this as a temporary measure. “A bit of belt-tightening,” he said.

  Livi waved Peace a lingering good-bye. Though she and the children would wait till Thanksgiving weekend to head for New York, she had begun to pack some things, books mainly. She had secured a furnished apartment and a school for Beth and Robert. She told Boston North she would be leaving at the end of the month. Her fellow ER doctors threw her a surprise party in which the overplayed joke was to give their cherished colleague of four years a great big hand.

  Off Peace went for the nine o’clock meeting. Off went the MacArthur Four for the same destination. All arrived at the door of the Bacon conference room at once—the seven committee members and the four revolutionaries—as nine bells rang from the Temple. Confronting one another, both groups hesitated. Smythe, not sure what was happening, went around shaking everyone’s hand. Kramer did likewise. On the way in, Matha stifled the urge to wind roses around the balusters.

  “What are you doing here?” Peace asked the students.

  “We’re stopping this illegitimate committee,” Matha answered, striding into the conference room ahead of the others.

  “And why are you doing that?” asked Peace.

  “Because it’s illegitimate,” Matha said. She sat in Peace’s place at the head of the oak table and gestured for her comrades to join her at the other seats. The committee members collected in a corner. Peace remained standing in the doorway.

  “Why do you say it’s illegitimate?” he said, calm as toast.

  Matha made a plaguey frown. Her voice was beginning to soar to Dixie again. “Because the committee is against the students!”

  Bagtoothian said, “Yeah!”

  Goldvasser started to say “Yeah!” but reconsidered.

  “So legitimacy is determined by whether or not something is good for the students?” asked Peace.

  “That’s right!” said Matha.

  “Do the students want Beet College to survive?” asked Peace, and before Matha could shut Bagtoothian up, he hollered, “Yeah!”

  Peace looked over the four revolutionaries and decided to talk to them like real people. “Look,” he said. “We ought to be in this together. The trustees aren’t kidding about closing the college, and they don’t seem to care that your lives and ours [he indicated his colleagues] will be turned upside down. Look around you. Look around, Matha. This magnificent library houses all anyone would need to lead an informed and moral life. Now the library and the college could go down in a matter of weeks. And nobody will ever get them back. And we’ll all go away as if we were never here. And why? Because the people in control of us say so. Because we’re not making enough money. Does that make sense to you? You, Matha? Go back to your rooms and let us do our work. We’ll save this place if you’ll let us.”

  Smythe, Booth, Heilbrun, Lipman, Kettlegorf, and Kramer stared at him as if they were seeing their colleague for the first time. They were on the verge of believing what he said, and they were not at all persuaded they liked the faint affection they were feeling. Was it affection? Or collegiality—perhaps it was that? Or magnanimity? Or the simple desire to help? Whatever its source, the sensation was short-lived, and when it faded, they were themselves again. One thing for sure: they had not felt anything like it before.

  But Matha was certain of her feelings. And she was particularly nettled by Peace’s reverence for Bacon. Unmoved, she began to shout, “The CCR is illegitimate! You’re illegitimate! Beet College is illegitimate!” She pounded on the conference table. The other three joined her. At this point a young woman librarian rushed in to remind them severely that this was a library, and to cut it out or she’d call the campus police.

  “Don’t do that,” said Goldvasser.

  “Fuck off,” said Matha. But by then a crowd of students who had been in the Reading Room had congregated at the conference room door beside Professor Porterfield. The group included Max Byrd, who told the MacArthur Four that a few people were actually in the library to get some work done.

  “You fuck off too, kiss shit, ass kick, kick shit!” Matha yelled at Max, who looked at the spoiled southern girl and exploded in a laugh. So did the librarian. So did the students gathered in the doorway, and however cautiously, so did the members of the CCR—all but Peace, who regarded Matha as one would any child out of control. She caught the look, and was livid.

  At the reverberation of the laughter, Matha turned a shade of crimson that Peace had not seen since his college days. Bagtoothian wanted to punch someone, but found to his discomfort that he was laughing too, as was Goldvasser, as was Betsy Betsy, who was alternately tittering and apologizing for it. Now all but one of the MacArthur Four were laughing, and the other students and the CCR members were laughing even harder, and this went on for half a minute, producing a noise more alarming than joyful.

  Peace was not laughing. Matha was not laughing. She stood as though frozen, caught like a shoplifter in the act, and then she fled, brushing past Peace and flashing him a glare of hatred colored by humiliation. Back to Chillingworth she ran, up the stairs and into her room. She wanted nothing to do with her comrades, who tried to fol
low her, but whom she dismissed with a disgusted flutter of the hands. She wanted nothing to do with anyone again, because this was the worst—absolutely the worst—moment of her life. Believe it or not, so far it was.

  It occurred to Peace to go after her. Whatever nonsense she spouted, she was a student and therefore someone in his charge. And clearly the girl was troubled far beyond things political. It wasn’t that he thought all people redeemable, whatever their ages. And he really did not know Matha; she might remain this unattractive forever. He simply felt sorry for her, sorry for her vexation and shame, sorry for anyone who suffered ridicule for something so small and meaningless. He promised himself to seek her out later and try to help her, which was his job.

  Lying on her side in bed, the sounds of merry derision still playing in her memory, Matha wept great globular tears, and when she was all wept out, she slept.

  She dreamed she was standing naked on the stage of the Ninety-second Street Y in New York to read her poems, and yet there was a Century 21 sign dangling on chains over her head. She began to read her internationally acclaimed work, “My Phone Was Ringing Off the Hook,” but discovered that the lines had been changed to include phrases like “priced to sell” and “location location.” The meter had been altered—a jumble of iambs, choriambs, and a duple foot—but when she tried to explain the changes to the audience, they shouted, “The meter is running.”

  And then, as the gods occasionally spring from mechanical devices, her cell phone rang, and Matha was awakened by the opening bars of “The Internationale” and by the voice of Ferritt Lawrence.