“I was hoping we might spend the day with the children,” said Sheila.
“That would be nice. Do they plan to get up?”
“Oh, Joel. I know they’re teenagers on the outside, but they’re just babies.”
“Babes on meth,” said Bollovate.
“Oh, Joel.”
“Anyway,” said her husband, “I have a business appointment this morning. At least, I hope I do.” Gus Tribeaux, his investigator to the stars, was arranging a meeting with Francis April, America’s last living Beet. Bollovate calculated it would take fifteen minutes and a hundred thousand dollars, make that seventy-five, to cheat April out of his inheritance. He also had something he wanted to bring up with that creep librarian La Cocque.
“You spend so little time with us these days,” sighed his wife. “So much to do. Eh?” Sheila was as fat as her husband, but not the same shape. Her body was zaftig down to the waist, at which point it spread out its territory, giving her the appearance of a record-setting yam.
“You want to maintain your life style, don’t you?” said Bollovate.
“Yes, I do. Which reminds me. I think we should go out to dinner again soon. It’s been so long. I hear Sow’s Motel in Beet has a nifty new dining room.”
Bollovate searched her expression for danger, but it was flat as a lake. His belly churned acid to the point of crapulence. He let the moment pass. He might not have been so confident had he known Sheila had employed a private op of her own, and contacted her own attorney, who happened to be Bollovate’s accountant. The couple sat in silence like Botero inspirations, over the expanse of the table, assessing each other as they would a wedge of strawberry cheesecake.
And Derek Manning? In the evening he called upon his friend to make sure he was okay. They did not say much. A few sentences about tomorrow’s Patriots game, a few more about the weather, one or two pro forma complaints about overeating on the holiday. Oh, yes. And were Livi and the kids okay? When Manning rose to go home, the phone rang.
“We made it. The movers are doing their thing. We’re fine.”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you.”
“Do you have food for dinner?”
“We’ll order Chinese. Or Japanese. Or pizza. Or Thai. This is New York, honey!” He was saddened by her excitement. “Hurry and come to us next weekend.”
“I’ll drive down Friday morning.”
“I love you, Peace. Oh, wait. Children!” The sound of scuffling. They were both at the phone. “Hi, Dad! Hi, Dad! My room is great! My room is greater! Love ya, Dad!” Livi reclaimed the receiver. “Please take care of yourself. Eat. Sleep. That sort of thing. Oh, Jesus! Children!”
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” said Peace. And the house was quiet again.
It would be all right, he would see to it. Livi was up to whatever lay ahead, and he would be too. He sat in the time-soiled leather chair with the ineradicable Coke stains and the horizontal streak Robert had etched with a butter knife. He looked out the window at the pine boughs and the smudges of clouds. He looked for a long time, and did not move in his chair until ten o’clock, when he climbed the stairs and headed for bed. Monday, he would have some terrible surprises flung at him. And that Saturday hadn’t exactly been a dandy either—except for this: at the end of it, Professor Porterfield knew definitely what new curriculum he would propose to the students and faculty of Beet College.
CHAPTER 17
BY NOW THE BEET STORY HAD BECOME A STAPLE OF THE news. Television crews moved onto the campus over the weekend to ask the professors and students how they felt about the prospect of the college closing. “How do you feel?” they would ask them. And also, “How does it feel?”
And there were stories of other imminent college closings as well. The subject, originally addressed as an intellectual calamity, was increasingly discussed as an element of the marketplace. Those colleges with fat endowments, or those able to make money on their own, were the ones that swam. The others were bound to sink. So versed had the public become in these matters that the fates of the colleges were generally lumped under “business news,” though there also were references on Entertainment Tonight and similar programs, which featured prominent Beet graduates.
Among the college’s alumni were three U.S. senators, two congressmen, one cabinet member (Interior), one Supreme Court justice, the CEOs of six Fortune 500 companies, the CFOs of four, an Episcopal bishop, forty-eight writers for Comedy Central, and the booker on Ellen.
The story was featured on Dateline, Frontline, and Nightline, also on 60 Minutes and 48 Hours. All Things Considered considered it. In a caterwauling session on the Chris Matthews Show, a writer for the Wall Street Journal shrieked at a writer for the Nation that Beet College wouldn’t be in this fix if more criminals were given the chair and that the Rosenbergs got what they deserved.
If some were resigned to the prospect of a world without Beet, that was not true of the Massachusetts State legislature. The Commonwealth had a longstanding interest in Beet College. The Board of Education had been certifying it annually for over two centuries under the provisions of a charter dating back to 1755, when Beet was a quasi-public institution. The certification was a formality, but it linked the college to state government—a connection symbolized by the presence of the governor at commencements, where Huey marched at his side, asking what it was like to be governor. Then too, the state’s attorney general had jurisdiction over nonprofits. Why was the college closing? asked the legislators, who were so relieved to be focusing on something other than charges against themselves for bribery or indecent exposure, they asked the question louder and with greater frequency.
And what was all this about Beet selling off valuable property? More had disappeared besides the Henry Moore, the Calder, and the African art. A 1916 Steinway middle grand (one of only twenty of a discontinued model) was missing from the Music Department, as were several semiprecious stones from the Geology Department, as were two fourth-century amphora lifted from the Classics Department and said to be worth $300,000 apiece, and a twelfth-century hauberk and other knightly apparel worth God-knows-what, a jorum dating to King David, and assorted items such as an oxbow, a boot jack, and a watercolor of a collie that belonged to Teddy Roosevelt (the collie, not the painting). The librarian who had chastised Matha reported first editions missing, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Typee, Huckleberry Finn, and Leaves of Grass. She told Jacques La Cocque, who told her that Mr. Bollovate took the editions for appraisal by Bauman Rare Books in New York, and to mind her own business. “Taisez-vous or you’re fired,” he said.
Rumor had it, too, that pieces of furniture, including a George III armoire, were missing from the president’s house, and that Huey had tried to sell the house itself, until he was reminded he didn’t own it.
And where the hell was the pig on the temple?
Joel Bollovate’s influence in Springfield derived from property deals he had made for lawmakers over the years, and he had been able to keep political noses out of his transactions and out of Beet’s affairs—at least until recently. Akin to Daniel Webster only in this, Bollovate fended off the state as Webster had in 1819, when New Hampshire sought to take control of Dartmouth College. In his defense before the Supreme Court, Webster called the school “small, and yet there are those who love it.” Bollovate, employing his own brand of eloquence, informed the legislators of the multiple copies he kept of canceled checks made out to cash.
But then old-money Massachusetts got into the act—names like Cabot, Wigglesworth, and Lamont, which by their mere appearance petrified Massachusetts pols, whose grandparents had been employed by the old guard as chauffeurs, cooks, butlers, and maids whom they chased upstairs, and caught. When that breed did not go to Harvard, they went to Beet. Tradition meant something to such people, even if little else did.
Of course, the state of Beet’s fortunes meant most to the students and faculty. Over Thanksgiving break the faculty worked themselves into a stew. Or
dinarily their view of the world outside their province was like Jane Austen’s: it did not exist. The world was there to comment upon wryly—elections, taxes, upper-class murders, that sort of thing. It gained reality only in the light of faculty opinion. If there were ever the slightest doubt about this, there was television to back them up. For, when the outer world was heaving under the throes of this or that, who would it call upon to explain its travails? Why, professors, that’s who.
But these days, thanks to the crunch created by the trustees, the faculty had become part of the outer world themselves. They were included in the macrocosm. And, as clearly as they could see little stories within Beet—which colleagues were nitwits and dolts, which departments were utterly worthless, which promotions were going to be denied, and so forth—they had trouble recognizing themselves as part of the bigger picture. Their powers of observations seemed diminished, their intelligence useless, and they’d lost corrosive wit—the surest mark of their superiority.
What was worse, they were made privy to what the rest of the world lived with day to day—a humiliating sense of insecurity born of being at the mercy of others. And the others were the bean counters, the easy targets of their contempt. Could it be that the bean counters were winning? Should they have learned to count beans too?
All the cockiness (subdued and refined so as to pass for manners) was knocked out of them like a kick to the breadbasket. Ooof! Where did that come from? The Great Houdini struts his belly to the crowd and a Yalie sucker-punches the wind out of him forever. So this was how the other 99 percent lived—awakening in dread, dining in anxiety, sleepless with terror. Why hadn’t someone given them a course in reality training, to prepare them for this experience? Their confidence, born of nothing more than circumstance, was slapped and mugged, dragged into dark alleys and beaten silly. What were they to do?
Students being students, they were the last to become agitated at the situation, but over the long weekend it was all their parents asked them about. It was all their friends from other colleges asked them about. It was all the people at the cleaners, the grocer’s, the butcher’s, the bars, and other hangouts asked them about. “Is Beet Beat?” asked the New York Post. And Time: “Does the Beet Go On?” and Newsweek: “Does the Beet Go On?” By the time the holidays were over their talk was perfervid, their nerves frayed, and even those born with heads on their shoulders were beginning to lose them.
That may have been why, on the Monday morning of their return to College, when they picked up their copies of the Pig’s Eye and read Ferritt Lawrence’s story, “A Hysterical Female, or An Hysterical Female—What Professor Porterfield Thinks of the Women of Beet”—they threw a fit.
Ordinarily they never would have reacted that way, and they didn’t sincerely feel the fit they threw. Most who knew Matha Polite kept their distance from her, the way one does with any dangerous relation with whom one still has to live. They didn’t like her poetry either. And they didn’t trust what she said, ever. And they didn’t believe Professor Porterfield said what she said he said. And they didn’t even care all that much about it, whether he said it or not. But such was their state of mind—what with the college’s closing imminent and final exams more imminent. And what would become of them? And where would they go? And when it came down to it, they were only kids, and all this was a shitload of trouble for kids to bear. They overreacted to the story, and though most of them acknowledged what they were doing, they did it anyway.
One may only imagine what the Monday morning meeting of the CCR was like. Before Peace had settled in his chair, Professor Kettlegorf, blushing and sputtering, asked him: “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You’ve set us back irreparably! Irreparably!” No song came to her mind. She was that exasperated.
Booth: “It’s a very serious matter. Very serious.”
Heilbrun: “A disgrace, sir. Nothing short of a disgrace.” For this grave occasion, he’d decided on a Newport—a black frock coat, plain gray waistcoat, gray striped trousers.
Lipman: “Frankly, I don’t know that I want to serve on a committee with anyone who holds such views!”
But a moment like this was Smythe’s meat. “Peace,” he said, his voice a bite of marzipan. “No one understands better than I how one can say some damaging, even reprehensible, things under pressure. And you certainly have been under a lot of pressure. Not one of us—not I certainly—would blame you if you cracked. Not one iota. So I understand perfectly how this debacle could have occurred.” He patted Peace’s arm. “But of course it can’t be tolerated. You simply must resign. I shall be happy, I should say unhappy, to serve in your stead…” He looked at the others for approval, which was proffered. “And the first thing I shall do as chairperson—you can count on this—will be to tell the entire faculty and administration what a splendid job you did. Truly splendid. But for the sake of our work, I really feel it would be best—”
“Don’t be stupid, Keelye,” said Peace. “I didn’t say those things. And I wouldn’t resign if I did.”
That offered the group an opportunity for one of their tizzies. If their chairperson did not call Matha Polite “a” or “an” hysterical female, the point was moot. But if he could have said such a thing, what then? And if it were possible that he could say such a thing, yet still not step down, well, would it make a difference if he had said it or not? It was too much to deal with.
Having nearly been called “stupid,” Keelye mounted his highest horse. “Well, naturally, we’ll take your word you didn’t say it. But why didn’t you deny it for the reporter?”
“Yes. Why?” from Heilbrun, and, of course, Kramer.
“Because he never asked me,” said Peace.
“The paper says you were unavailable for comment,” said Lipman. “In journalism, that means you refused to speak to the press because you had something to hide.” The others were glad to receive the insider’s skinny.
“I wasn’t available because he never tried to reach me,” said Peace, still not grasping how this nonstory was about to, as Lipman would say, develop. “Now, shall we get down to the business of discussing the curriculum?” But the others were too shaken to go on. “All right. Tomorrow then. But let’s come prepared. Okay? I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, we have twelve days to come up with something and less than a week after that to persuade our colleagues to approve it. At the faculty meeting on the nineteenth, it’s do or die.”
The others crept away burdened not by their inability to complete their assignment, but rather by the saddening probability that Professor Porterfield had done nothing wrong.
Was Peace what Livi had called him—a babe in the woods? Or what? The poor fellow walked out of the committee meeting actually thinking that his colleagues would straighten themselves out, the matter would blow over in half a day, if it had not already done so, and now, with a free couple of hours at his disposal, he could get an oil change for the Accord for his trip to New York, Livi, and the children on Friday.
But one hardly needs to be told that by the time Peace descended the steps of Bacon, the story of—what was it exactly? His insult to women? His contempt for students? His rape and disembowelment of Matha Polite?—was spreading like a fast-moving cancer. And the trouble with a fast-moving cancer is that it grows like an embryo—two cells, four, eight, sixteen, and oh my! You’re as good as dead before you know it. So was Peace. Any professor would have been, because trouble for a professor grows faster than a fast-moving cancer, doubling and redoubling, often because the professor himself makes matters worse by speaking up, or (rarely) by attacking the idiocy of the accusation, which Peace was considering.
And Peace Porterfield was not just any professor. He was virtuous in general and blameless in this instance. Who would not wish him every calamity? His colleagues in the English Department were so excited at the prospect of verbally tearing him limb from limb, they sputtered and stammered. The department members, the students, the dither of deans—they must condemn him.
Shun him. Destroy him. What choice did they have?
Max Byrd did not join in the romp, needless to say. Neither did his new friend Akim. Gregory waved to Peace and shouted, “Phyppo,” as a salute of support. And that was about it, save for some few of the 141 faculty members who, while clucking isn’t it awful and isn’t it sad, knew the scandal was ridiculous, but said nothing to dispel it.
Chief among the few was Derek Manning, who decided to make real use of the Free Speech Zone. He stood an hour in the cold and spoke of Professor Porterfield as the finest man he knew. He said that this Matha Polite business was the stupidest moment in the college’s history—“in some stiff competition.” He was so hoarse by the end of it, no one could hear him promise to resign if anything were done to Professor Porterfield—“the best goddamn teacher in this goddamn place.”
All this had happened and was happening as Peace descended the library steps and stood in the sights of the television cameras and crews collected in brightly colored knots on the lawn of the Old Pen. The college was starting to look grimly festive, like a street fair in a seedy neighborhood, what with the fast-food joints in the visitors’ parking lot and the whirligig of American media camped on the green. They had been sent to cover Beet’s likely closing, but now they heard this thing some professor had said, which was so much “sexier.” The story could lead the news that evening. The professor who hated women chaired the committee charged with saving the college. So how about this? “Anti-Feminist Professor Brings Down College.” No, to be even-handed, let’s phrase it as a question: “Can One Bigoted Professor Bring Down One of America’s Premier Colleges?”
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