Poetic Justice

by Amanda Cross

  “What a tribute to have earned,” Clemance said to Kate, beneath the applause.

  In the question-and-answer period which followed, Kate found herself remembering, not Auden’s exact phrases, but their purport: no game can be played without rules. A secondary world must have its laws no less than a primary world. By “secondary world,” Auden meant a work of art, but it occurred to Kate, thinking of the present university situation of turmoil, to wonder whether the secondary worlds the revolutionaries were trying to create were not, so far, dangerously lawless. Or did the young not realize the necessity of law? “Absolute freedom is meaningless,” Auden said. One is free to decide what laws there shall be, but once imposed, they must be obeyed. A troubling thought applied to anything but art. And Kate remembered one other phrase of Auden’s she had wanted repeatedly to quote to the young, though he had intended it only for poets: Those who refuse all formal restrictions don’t know what fun they’re missing.

  Auden concluded by saying that the life of a poet is a balancing act between frivolity and earnestness. Without the frivolity he is a bore, without the earnestness, an aesthete.

  I must remember to tell that to Emilia Airhart, Kate thought; that, I shall say, is Auden’s greatness; he is the best balancer of all.

  “Will you come home for a drink?” Kate asked Clemance, when they again stood outside the auditorium. “I shall soon be leaving the apartment in which I have been very happy, and it seems to me that it would mark the formal closing of that happiness most fittingly if you would spend some time there.”

  “A most gracious invitation,” Clemance said. “How fortunate you are to go from remembered happiness to anticipated happiness. Is it agreeable to you if I accept the invitation?” he asked Reed.

  “Perfectly,” Reed said. “Let’s get a taxi.”

  Yet when they were all seated in Kate’s living room, all supplied with spiritous liquors, Clemance seemed strangely silent. Kate spoke of Auden, of her thoughts during Auden’s remarks on the need for law in secondary worlds.

  “My mind was working much the same way,” Clemance said. “I expect I was so drawn to literature from the beginning because it is the only way in which man can create worlds: his godlike faculty. The only mistake is not to understand the necessary distinction between the laws of the primary and secondary worlds—the primary world being, of course, the actual world we inhabit.”

  “Surely something of what we learn from literature can be used in life,” Kate said. “Our greater awareness, if nothing else.”

  Another silence. Then Clemance said: “It begins to look as though your University College is to get a new lease on life. I have no doubt it will be given a vote of confidence by the Administrative Council, perhaps as its last act before the Faculty Senate takes over. A most significant act, I dare say. You must be feeling glad of that.”

  “I am, of course,” Kate said. “But you do realize, don’t you, that until the beginning of this term, I had never given the University College a single, wandering thought? I can’t imagine how it became such a crusade with me, even if my help was sought out. I suspect I was outraged at those who didn’t want their status symbols interfered with. I mean, it was so clear the fight wasn’t over academic excellence, but over snobbery and a wicked kind of prejudice.”

  “I like the word ‘wicked,’ ” Clemance said. “No doubt you realize, at least, and I’m certain as can be that Reed Amhearst realizes, that I’ve come tonight to talk about Cudlipp, the College, the whole mess. You know, don’t you?” he said to Reed.

  “Yes,” Reed said. Kate stared at them.

  “How did you guess?” Clemance asked. “Idle curiosity on my part, since I intended to tell you anyway. A process of elimination?”

  “How could I have helped but guess?” Reed said. “Everything in your actions, afterward, made me certain. It was easy enough to guess you had done it, but how to know? Finally, it was a very slight thing that told me. That day we met you on the campus. I became so nervous when I knew I had the truth, I spoke to you idiotically about your daughter.”

  Clemance listened, with what those who do not understand like to call an academic interest.

  “Everyone else,” Reed went on, “in discussing the aspirin, spoke of them as being somehow put into the tube in which Cudlipp carried his British pills. Everyone assumed the substitution had been made in his supply. But you, in speaking to Kate and me, referred to the person who had ‘handed’ Cudlipp the aspirin. I knew, of course, that they had to have been handed to him; no other method would have worked. And you handed them to him, right in front of Kate’s eyes. I don’t think, even at the end, that Cudlipp suspected you. He, too, I’m certain, thought it was an accident; something that had gone wrong at the source.”

  “I never meant to kill him. Need I say that?”

  “I never for a moment thought you did,” Reed said.

  “We cannot guess the outcome of our actions—how often I have said that in discussions with students. Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies. Kant put it differently and better.”

  “It is most unusual for aspirin to kill that way. And then there was the complication of the elevator.”

  “Neither did I think,” Clemance went on, as though he had not heard, “that the crime would be laid at the feet, so to speak, of the University College. It’s strange, really, how that seemed so germane to it all, and yet had nothing to do with it.”

  “Not in your mind. But Cudlipp’s actions against the University College must have gone some way toward making you realize the strangeness of Cudlipp’s behavior. He was mad, wasn’t he, or near so?”

  “Oh yes,” Clemance said. “At the end I think he was probably certifiably mad. But who was to certify him, or even, if it came to that, to notice, till the damage was done? A number of faculty actually cracked, you know, under the strain of last spring’s events; it took different people different ways. One extremely prominent member of the faculty, whom Kate probably heard, ranted on to his colleagues one night in a completely vile and incoherent way. It was assumed by most people that he was drunk. But he wasn’t drunk. He suffered, not from alcohol, but from fatigue and psychic strain.”

  Kate rose to fetch them all fresh drinks.

  “Cudlipp, alas,” Clemance went on, “had cracked up. This anti–University College mania—he actually organized some students to stop elevators—was only a minor symptom, really. He was becoming paranoiac and utterly power-mad. He persuaded Robert O’Toole to become Dean of the College. Oh, I know what you must think—that I was jealous that Robert transferred his devotion from me to Cudlipp—but if I was jealous, that was only a small part of it. Cudlipp was corrupting O’Toole, as he was corrupting others. Not that it will matter if O’Toole is Dean for a while now. I imagine he may even do some good.

  “What you must try to realize is the great affection I had for Cudlipp—years of affection and admiration before he went to pieces. It took me a good while to face up to the truth about him. And then I had to decide what to do. Some action was clearly necessary. He couldn’t be allowed to go on. He wouldn’t take a leave, take any time off. But I hoped, if he were ill and forced to take a leave of absence, he might reconsider, recover, return to his former self, or some newfound self. His marriage was wrecked, you know, along with everything else. I tried to talk to his wife, but she assured me that he was sick and past being reached by any means she knew of.

  “I had known for years about the aspirin. It was never suggested, by Cudlipp or anyone else, that aspirin could be fatal. Such a possibility never occurred to me. But we are not gods, and the laws of our primary world inevitably operate. I hoped Cudlipp would be immobilized for a time, given time to think, made ill, perhaps frightened into reconsidering. I don’t want to suggest I wasn’t aware of the seriousness of what I was doing, but I had to act. I waited until a day when he had a new supply of pills, so that there could be no question of suspecting anyone; s
o my essentially non-criminal mind worked. Funny, isn’t it?”

  “Do you mean,” Kate said, “that I watched you hand Cudlipp those aspirin?”

  “Yes, you did. Your party, as it turned out, provided the perfect chance which I had not found earlier that day. I am so terribly sorry that I did not properly think how I might affect …”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Kate said. “As you realized, that party was none of Reed’s or my doing, but rather an aboriginal celebration of a marriage rite. But I keep trying to think back to the moment when you brought the soda water …”

  “Yes. I had a bottle of soda water in one hand and a glass in the other. Cudlipp was holding his pills in one hand and the University College catalogue in the other. I put down the bottle of soda water and took the pills from him, handing him the glass instead. Then I filled the glass with soda water, and handed him back the pills as he put down the catalogue. It sounds complicated and intricate, like a ballet or conjuring trick, but it was ridiculously easy. Had it turned out not to be, I should simply not have gone ahead with the substitution. As it was, the pills I handed him were two ordinary aspirin. I knew they were dangerous for him; I never thought they could be lethal.”

  “Buffered aspirin, as it turned out,” Reed said. “So that he did not immediately taste the aspirin and spit them out.”

  “My God,” Clemance said. “I never thought of that. It does sound a diabolic scheme. They were simply the kind of aspirin I use. No doubt,” he added, “a good prosecuting lawyer could make much of that.”

  They were all silent for a moment.

  “I cannot see,” Reed said, “that there need be a prosecuting lawyer, or a trial. Had I thought the possibility of such a trial existed, I should not have allowed this conversation to take place. Perhaps,” Reed said, “this is the nearest I shall ever come to creating a secondary world.”

  “No doubt it will sound unbearably pompous and unsuitable coming from me, but I cannot add to murder the sin of allowing you to be party to a crime.”

  “What better way to celebrate my marriage to Nancy Drew and my probable departure from the D.A.’s Office?” Reed smiled. “No,” he said, “I would do neither of us any favor to cover any of this up. But we need not publicize it. I shall introduce into the file an account of how you must have given Cudlipp the aspirin; an accident will be assumed, and indeed, his death was an accident if I know the definition of the word.

  “You have nothing to fear from anyone but yourself. If I might presume to persuade you of anything, it is to try to find the courage to continue in your work. You are essential to your university, and your instincts about Cudlipp were all correct. I do admit, however, that I have used a certain amount of blackmail to establish the truth of Cudlipp’s tricks with the elevators, and to save students from such further nonsense.”

  “With O’Toole, I suppose?”

  “Yes. He will produce the students. And in his work as Dean, he will need your support and help.”

  “Did he guess?”

  “Yes. No doubt of it. I was certain as soon as I heard of his intention to call off his demands for forestalling the University College. He still admires you, you know, and I think, was not a little concerned about Cudlipp himself.”

  “If you want,” Kate said, “in the old moral way, to pay a price, remember that the University College is now almost certainly assured of continued existence and development. Perhaps that is not something you would have wished for.”

  “You wished for it,” Clemance said. “It will be my wedding present. I hope I find the courage to continue my work. As to the price I pay, you need never concern yourselves about the appropriate enormity of that.”

  Clio,

  Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence

  Only the first step would count and that

  Would always be murder, whose kindness never

  Is taken in, forgive our noises

  And teach us our recollections.

  Twelve

  BY the middle of November, the evenings were drawing in. The campus was almost dark by the time the offices closed and the secretaries went home. Kate, walking in the dusk toward the subway, was again visited by this sense of—what did one call it, affection, love, devotion?—and again wondered: toward what do I feel this sense of loyalty, a quite out-of-date emotion? Kate, in a way, sympathized with the younger generation who considered loyalty a typical demand of the establishment. Loyalty, after all, like patriotism, is the last refuge of scoundrels. Yet how explain this love? Suffice it perhaps to say that here was an institution for which she would willingly work; the University was not, for her, simply a place wherein to pursue a career. I recognize the claim, she thought, even if I cannot recognize what it is that makes the claim.

  The University College had been affirmed in its existence. It had won the credit to be a full-fledged undergraduate college in a first-rate university, though certainly it had achieved this status by a strange route. “Dare sound authority confess,” Auden’s poem asked, “that one can err his way to riches, win glory by mistake?” Well, Clio had known.

  Meanwhile, academia ground on its way.

  Professor Peter Packer Pollinger, to the amazement and delight of everyone, brought out a book on Fiona Macleod with such insight into the odd dual nature of William Sharp that Professor Pollinger’s colleagues looked at him with new attention. But he continued to puff through his mustache and grew, if anything, more vague and petulant. He delighted Kate by informing her one day that he had been reading the poetry of Sara Teasdale and that it was perfectly obvious no such person had ever existed. She was the alter ego of Vachel Lindsay. He had made a profound study of their imagery and was prepared to defend his thesis.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, puffing, “that you know her poem about the daisies and the asters.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Kate smilingly said, “I do.”

  “Well, you see,” Professor Pollinger went on, “the secret’s there. Daisies and asters are both carduaceous plants, having, that is, discordant and radiate heads. But one appears to supply simple answers and the other shares its name with a biological phenomenon of achromatic substance found in cells which divide themselves by mitosis.”

  “They do?” Kate said. “I mean, it does?”

  “Naturally. The aster originated in China, that is to say the Orient, never hot for certitude but full of the rhythm of life. The daisy originated in Europe, with its chief religions of simple answers and the simplistic beauty of its natural world. Both sides of the same person.”

  “But,” Kate began, “there is a great deal of clear evidence that …”

  “Have you had your wedding yet?”

  “No,” Kate said. “Not yet.”

  Kate met Polly Spence for lunch at the Cosmo Club. “Buffet now, dear,” Polly had said, “so get there early or all those vigorous ladies will have grabbed the tables.”

  Kate entered the Club like a revenant returning to an earlier life. When she had been a girl and it had not occurred to her or any member of her generation to refuse to go to all the benefit dances arranged for boys and girls from the proper schools, she had come to the Cosmopolitan Club where, somehow, they were always held. She remembered the steps down, after one had entered, to the ladies’ room on the left where she and a couple of girls from Chapin and Sacred Heart had hidden out during almost all of one dance; she remembered the balconies, and the library where no one ever went.

  “The library’s changed, of course,” Polly Spence said, when Kate had mentioned this, “all the latest books circulating like mad. They put me on the library committee and I said, ‘Let’s keep it old and stuffy and the way it always has been, where superannuated students like me can come and have a peaceful hour,’ but activity is the order of the day, even here. Busy, busy. And what is your news, dear? When is the wedding to be? Why not have it here? Perfect.”

  “It’s to be on Thanksgiving, with no one but two witnesses and a j
udge friend of Reed’s.”

  Polly Spence sighed. “I remember your brothers’ weddings,” she said. “St. Thomas’s and everything just so.”

  “That was never my style, you know, even in those days.”

  “I dare say. But you have done well, I think. You must bring your Reed to dinner and he and Winthrop can talk about all those dreary things lawyers always do talk about, and I can tell you about my wonderful new job.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “I don’t dare, because it hasn’t absolutely come through yet. But I’m so pleased. Imagine starting to teach linguistics at my advanced age—I’m really considered a coming scholar, even if I’ll be gone before I’ve finally come. And I’m so excited about University College. We’re actually beginning to get tenure for people. Do you suppose this spring we’ll be at the barricades again, filthy language, long nights, and all the desperate excitement of revolution?”

  “My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that we won’t. Some other places may be, though. You know, the only thing I really remember about the Cosmopolitan Club, apart from the dances for the benefit of blue babies or whatever it was, are the macaroons. Do they still have those fantastically good macaroons?”

  “Certainly they do, my dear, though now, of course, one serves oneself. Winthrop says pretty soon they’ll be selling a mix for them, and they will begin to taste like the glue on postage stamps, but I tell him not to be such a confirmed pessimist. I really do think life is just too wonderfully exciting, especially now that I don’t have to look after grandchildren anymore. My children point out that I was able to hire governesses, and I point out that I never contradicted my mother, but after all, autre temps, autre moeurs, n’est-ce pas?”

  “And what do they say to that?” Kate asked, munching macaroons.