Poetic Justice

by Amanda Cross

  “I don’t know. It says in the front of the campus directory, but I’m afraid I never noticed.”

  “Who, alas, has? We shall have to dial the operator, and we all know where that leads.”

  “Do you think there is sufficient oxygen?”

  “For what? Compared to the air I’ve been breathing in most meetings lately, there is probably here a smaller proportion of carbon monoxide and irritating tars than in most otherwheres.”

  “May I help you?” a voice said over the telephone.

  “You certainly may,” Mark happily replied. “We are stuck in an elevator and …”

  “If you are on campus,” the voice continued, “you may dial directly the number you want. Is this an outside call?”

  “I can’t even get outside this elevator,” Mark said. “Help, help, help,” he mildly added.

  “I will connect you with maintenance,” the voice said. “If you are on campus, will you dial one-two, one-four? Are you on campus?”

  “Perhaps it’s a recording,” Kate said.

  Mark pressed down the telephone button until he heard a dial tone, then dialed 1214. There was a busy signal.

  “Try calling the English Office,” Kate said.

  “A brilliant suggestion which I am hideously certain will not work. Ah, well.” Mark dialed the English Office.

  “English,” the secretary’s voice brightly said, “will you hold on a minute?” There was a click as the secretary pushed the ‘hold’ button. Mark slammed the receiver down as violently as the small cupboard allowed. Kate put her purse and case down on the floor.

  “I am reminded,” she said, “of a story my father used to tell, repeatedly, in order to drive home a moral whose application has, until this moment, escaped me. He was a friend of the president of some railroad, the New York Central or something, and one day my father asked his secretary to find out when the next train left for Tuxedo, where he was planning to meet someone. The secretary returned to tell him that she could not get through to railroad information because the line was continually engaged. ‘Nonsense,’ my father called out. ‘Get me the president of the whatever railroad.’ The poor secretary couldn’t get the president, but she did get his private secretary, at which point my father grabbed the telephone from her. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Fansler,’ the president’s private secretary said, ‘but Mr. Whosis is out of town. Is there any way I can help you?’ ‘There certainly is,’ my father said; ‘when is the next train to Tuxedo?’ Well, she managed to find a timetable and tell him; and the moral of the story is: always go to the president.”

  “I trust,” Mark said, “that since we are without a President, the Acting President will do.”

  “Perfectly,” Kate said.

  “And do you happen to know his extension?”

  “Yes, I do. I was recently glancing through the new directory, as one does when it first comes out, and I noticed that his number is 1837. Shall we try it?”

  “How did you happen to decide to remember his number and not the emergency number? Your father’s advice?”

  “Naturally not. I have never given a thought to my father’s advice until this moment. Eighteen thirty-seven is the year of Queen Victoria’s ascension.”

  “Of course. Silly of me.” Mark picked up the receiver and dialed 1837.

  “President Matthewson’s office,” a voice cheerfully said. “Good afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon,” Mark said. “May I please speak to Mr. Matthewson? This is Mark Everglade of the English Department calling.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Everglade, but President Matthewson is at a meeting. May I take a message?”

  “You certainly may,” Mark said. “Tell him that Professor Fansler and I, both of the English Department, are stuck in an elevator in Baldwin Hall and are rapidly running out of oxygen. I might add, in case it will in any way goad you more rapidly to action, that Professor Fansler and I are not of the same sex. Good afternoon to you.” Marie hung up the phone. “I give her fifteen minutes,” Mark said, “to check on us and the elevator. Shall we go over the catalogue, since the opportunity presents itself?”

  “Mark, what do you think of Cudlipp?”

  “He does his job, which is to represent the College. I do mine, which is to represent the Graduate School. Michaels, as chairman of the whole Department, complains about Cudlipp from time to time, but after all, everybody’s got to do his thing, doesn’t he?”

  “I often ask myself,” Kate said, “—does he? Do you know anything about University College?”

  “Sure,” Mark surprisingly said. “I’ve been letting its students into my classes lately; they’re good.”

  “Funny, you never mentioned it,” Kate said.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not certain it’s kosher, so it seemed a case of least said soonest mended.”

  “Do you think Cudlipp would object if he knew?”

  “No doubt. But he can’t very well do anything about it, since the Graduate School doesn’t give credit, and what credit the University College gives is its decision. He makes damn sure no University College students take any College courses, or vice versa, and that’s exactly as far as he can go.”

  “Why is he so against the University College? I know all about the question of resources, but his passion has deeper roots than the University’s operating deficit.”

  “Mainly, I guess, he thinks the University College degree threatens the value of The College degree. He wants undergraduate education at the University to be absolutely elite, and all those adults returning with their tired brains to school threaten him.”

  “Do I,” Kate asked, “hear the calls of rescuers?”

  “Professor Everglade,” a voice called. “Switch the Emergency button to off, and push open the door.”

  Mark looked at Kate and shrugged. “Well,” he said, “here goes. Are you prepared to dive down the shaft?” He switched the button and pushed at the inner door which, rather to his astonishment, opened. Below them, the door on the third floor had been pushed back. “Have you a lady in there?” the voice called. “Professor Fansler is with me,” Mark said, winking at Kate, “if that answers your question. The point, I gather,” he said to Kate, “is to drop down into their arms on the third floor but not into the elevator shaft. Chivalry demands that you go first, so that I may hand you down into their waiting arms. And we never even looked at the damn catalogue.”

  It was typical of Kate’s postrevolutionary attitudes that being caught in an elevator, which might, at one time, have been an adventure, was now not even material for an anecdote. She rushed up the stairs from the third floor to her office on the eighth, apologized for her lateness, and plunged into interviews with four students from University College who hoped to register for her course in Victorian literature. She recognized John Peabody from the luncheon arranged by Bill McQuire. He introduced the others: Barbara Campbell, Greta Gabriel, and Randolph Selkirk. “No doubt,” Mr. Peabody said, “you want to know something about us, how we come to be at University College, why we want to take your course, stuff like that. It’s probably simplest if we just start in and tell you about ourselves.” To Kate, who had been uncertain what inquiries she might decently make, given, particularly, her profound disinclination to ask personal questions, this blunt prelude was a distinct relief.

  “We,” Mr. Peabody began, “have all returned to college after what is known as a voluntary interruption in our education—though the word ‘voluntary’ has to be pretty broadly defined. Anyway, we weren’t bounced out of college, we bounced ourselves. And when, in the fullness of time, we decided to return to college, the last thing we wanted was dormitory life, rah-rah games, anybody being in loco parentis or the company of eighteen-year-olds. To us, therefore, University College seemed a kind of miracle. There aren’t many adult schools in the whole country, not many even in New York—schools which give degrees, and aren’t just places to take courses and wile away the time. University College had
no athletic requirements, no organized social life, and some of us were a bit shaky at math at the time of our entrance examination. But we are all in college because we have decided to be; we are, as the saying goes, highly motivated; and most of us are even pretty bright. I might add, though Barbara can tell you more about this, that the women students are looking for a bachelor’s degree, not for a bachelor.”

  Barbara Campbell was stunning, beautifully dressed, and appeared to be in her early twenties. “I’m fairly typical, I guess,” she said with a smile which acknowledged that she certainly didn’t look typical. “I went to an excellent prep school where I was mainly interested in what our antediluvian headmistress used to call ‘the lads,’ and then to Bennington, where I spent three years—almost; I quit in the middle of my third year. I discovered at Bennington that I enjoyed thinking, and that if you work there are plenty of people who will encourage you. I worked like a demon for five days, when, since we were all girls, it wasn’t necessary to wash your hands or feet or even face if you didn’t feel like it, and every weekend I spent away from the campus with a man.

  “Partly, I began to realize that I had been in an intellectual and emotional cocoon for years, and partly I just wanted to bouleverse les parents—at which I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. They objected to the fact that I was living with a guy, they even objected to the guy, which at least made some sense, and they said if I didn’t give him up they would stop paying for college or anything else. I didn’t and they did. After a time I got tired of the guy, and of working in the glamour trades, and I began to want to study again. I saved enough money and here I am. My parents have since come round, but I don’t take any money from them, though I have been known to accept an occasional lavish present. If I took their money they would assume, however tacitly, that I had accepted their values, and I haven’t. I want to take your course because I’ve heard you’re great, and tough, and it recently occurred to me how like a harem Bennington was. I don’t mean just that all the faculty was sleeping with the students, I mean that all the faculty was male, and that the whole spirit behind the place was of girls sitting at the feet of men. I find the idea of a woman teacher invigorating. End of my speech—I’m to introduce Greta.”

  Greta Gabriel was in her middle forties, Kate guessed. Her story resembled Polly Spence’s, though she had not yet reached the grandmother phase and was not from the upper reaches of New York society. She was a suburban housewife who had decided that her life of being maid, chauffeur, and emotional wastebasket was insufficiently inspiring. Everything about her new academic life was difficult, from the commuting to the pressures of her life’s multitudinous demands, but she felt alive for the first time in years, and indicated her gratitude for the uniqueness of University College, which allowed her really to work, not to dabble, and agreed to reward her work with a degree.

  Randolph Selkirk was more unexpected. “I was at Yale,” he said, “getting A’s in everything and working all day six days a week to do it. I had a girl and one day she broke off with me, saying I wasn’t human enough for her. It took me several weeks to calm down and discover it was quite true—I wasn’t human enough for anyone. I stopped working so hard, and finally took a leave from Yale and went to work teaching in a slum school; then I married the girl, who had begun to find me more human. We had a baby, which seemed to us a proper affirmation of life, and after a time I wanted to return to school, and this was the only place that wasn’t an undergraduate society for boys or a series of money-making courses for bored adults. My wife is working to help me finish, and I can’t begin to understand why they should want to get rid of this place—University College, I mean. Still, I’ve observed that the boys from the College are radical enough when it comes to occupying buildings, but not when it comes to supporting an institution which might challenge the status of their own degrees. I’ve noticed nobody minds being revolutionary when he doesn’t think he has anything to lose. Forgive the cynicism. If you want to know why I’d like to take this course, it’s because I’m particularly interested in the ideas of the Victorian period.”

  Kate leaned back in her chair and regarded the four of them. It seemed to her, oddly, that life had walked into her academic world, impressing her as not even the police or occupying students had done. She understood why McQuire found impressive the fact that University College students had been the only ones to feel loyalty to their school. Of course, she had sensed it from the beginning—which was why she had let McQuire drag her to that lunch and entice her into conversations with Frogmore. “ ‘Your presence exactly,’ ” Kate thought, looking at them, “ ‘so once, so valuable, so very now.’ ”

  “You are welcome to the course,” she simply said.

  What with further student conferences, a delegation from the student-faculty committee on curriculum, a good many frantic telephone calls, and similar distractions, Kate was not able even to ascertain if there was a wind, let alone the direction in which it was blowing. At four o’clock, the hour of the Senior Faculty Committee meeting, she left her office and stopped off in the faculty ladies’ room where she found Emilia Airhart looking at herself dubiously in a mirror. She turned, apparently with relief, to contemplate Kate. “How lucky you are!” she surprisingly said.

  “I?” Kate asked. “I’m feeling lucky at the moment, for personal reasons. Does it show?”

  Emilia Airhart laughed. “Probably,” she said, “but I don’t know you well enough to tell. Congratulations, whatever it is. The luck to which I referred had to do with your willowyness—I have always longed to be willowy; if only one could design oneself, instead of turning out to be some dreadful preordained shape. I would, like you, be tall and slim, with my hair gathered at the nape of my neck, attractive without being charming. You mustn’t be insulted by the last item, which is, from me, a compliment. I dislike charm, having accepted Camus’ definition of it: the ability to get the answer yes without having asked a question. I prefer people who have to form questions. Still, it is agonizing to have the soul of Greta Garbo in the body of Queen Victoria. Ergo, lucky you.”

  Kate laughed. “You don’t look a bit like Queen Victoria,” she said.

  “Of course I do, if you could picture Queen Victoria in panty hose with flat shoes and her skirts above her knees. I take it you are going to the Senior Faculty Committee meeting?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “And for once in my life I don’t wish I could think of an excuse not to. I go with a purpose: I’ve decided to do what I can for the University College. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Haven’t a clue; ought I to have?”

  “Probably,” Kate said. “But there isn’t time to go into it now. The College is trying to kill it off, which is rather too bad, I think.”

  “Nasty old Cudlipp, I suppose. Terrible man. If only he were more like Pnin.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, Pnin, the man in Nabokov’s novel. Cudlipp looks just like him, but, alas, couldn’t be more different. I hardly like to say that if Cudlipp and Clemance are for something, I’m against it—it sounds so unscholarly and prejudiced, which it is—but at least I’m leaning in your direction, if that’s any comfort.”

  “It’s some,” Kate said. “By the way, as to my being lucky, I’m getting married. I haven’t told anyone in the Department yet, but I’ll have to soon. Perhaps it’s being unmarried that’s kept me thin.”

  “Congratulations, or whatever the proper phrase is, though in a way I’m sorry.” Kate raised an interrogative eyebrow. “Don’t misunderstand me, but you’re the only woman I’ve ever known who seemed unmarried as a wonderful choice, the combined influence of Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athene all in one. Please don’t be offended.”

  “On the contrary,” Kate said. “I’m honored.” Emilia gave a pleased grin and preceded Kate out the door. But Kate stopped a moment in the hall. “You know,” she said, “Forster says in one of his novels that the abandonment of personality can be a prelude to love; for m
ost women I think it certainly is. You’ve made me see that, for me, it hasn’t been.”

  “Do you like Forster?” Emilia Airhart asked. “I see you do; he’s too effete for me. But he did say once that life is a performance on a violin which one has to learn to play as he goes along. A remarkable description of our times.”

  “Gentle, perhaps,” Kate said, “not effete.”

  The Senior Faculty Committee of the English Department, which comprised all tenured members of the Department, used, in pre-revolutionary days, to meet several times a semester for the purpose of discussing promotions and additions to the faculty. While these meetings were grim enough, in all conscience, a certain degree of cordiality prevailed, so that, as Kate used to say, though it might be clear that one professor thought another a tiresome, pontificating, and deluded bore, he did not openly indicate this opinion. Since last spring, however, fatigue and the plethora of meetings which the process of restructuring inevitably entailed had taken their hostages, which were, as always, good will, courtesy, and graciousness. The professors were exhausted, and exhausted people are easily made first angry and then rude.

  To make matters worse, exhaustion bred not only bad temper but long-windedness. The inability of certain men, once they got to their feet, to finish a statement and sit down, amounted, in Kate’s view, to a disease as incurable as satyriasis and far more socially dangerous. She knew, as she seated herself in the room, that scarcely would Michaels, the chairman, have rustled his papers and made the few desperate grunts, punctuated by giggles, which constituted his reaction to exhaustion, than Plimsole would be on his feet and away. In fact, he was.

  Plimsole was concerned, as he had been for months, as to whether teaching assistants should be considered primarily as students, which they were, or as teachers, which they were also. The question was certainly of importance and was one, moreover, on which the radical faculty felt a consuming passion the conservative faculty was not prepared to match. This, perhaps more than anything else, annoyed Professor Plimsole. Kate could well infer from the looks on the faces of those about her that had the senior faculty had an opportunity to hear Mr. Plimsole before his promotion, that event might well have never taken place. It was, Kate thought, a mark of the need for this revolution that the faculty of departments like this never met, and the senior members never really heard the junior members at all. But, since last spring, all the meetings except those of the Senior Faculty Committees had been open to junior faculty and the long-winded Mr. Plimsoles might in the future be more successfully nipped in the bud.