Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  He’d also hired Jane Nash-Gantz’s husband, Victor Gantz, an amiable, hardworking Anglo-Saxonist who’d written a number of books but wasn’t famous, and therefore couldn’t be a Ludd Chair himself. But everyone liked Vic, for he taught lots of classes, served on lots of committees, and—from loneliness (his wife was in high demand on the international lecture circuit)—attended lots of parties where he came in handy as an extra male.

  Still, these visible-women coups had occurred more than two years ago. Since then, while the short list of distinguished candidates for the final Ludd Chair grew as long and convoluted as a metaphysical conceit, no consensus could be cajoled out of the rancorous crew with whom poor Dr. Bridges was obliged to row his academic ship of state. Everyone submitted plenty of Ludd-worthy names, names of scholars or “creative sorts” they considered distinguished (including their own and those of old friends), but everybody blackballed as totally undistinguished any names submitted by anyone else. Theo himself proposed bringing back from retirement, and over from England, Dame Winifred Throckmorton, the great Elizabethan drama specialist, angrily denying his colleagues’ claims that she was long dead, notoriously senile, too obvious, and too obscure. He got nowhere.

  Friday after Friday, semester after semester, allegations, innuendos, and reckless libel flew around the Dina Sue Ludd Lounge like bats in a burning barn: a Chaucerian was vetoed by the up-to-date set as “hopelessly concrete”; a popular culture theorist was poohpoohed by the old establishment as “a moronic boob-tuber” after publicly stating that MTV was the cutting edge of postmodernist narrative and that John Lennon was better than John Donne. An eighteenth-century critic was dismissed as a compulsive and clumsy plagiarist, and a novelist fell by the wayside after the public posting of an old, yellowed newspaper clipping in which he urged the nuclear bombing of Hanoi.

  Anonymous memos with exclamation points in red magic marker appeared in department mailboxes claiming that a renowned Melville man was trying to hush up six charges of sexual harassment and that a poet was a kleptomaniac. On her way home from the Asheville airport, Jane Nash-Gantz vetoed, via the cellular phone in her Mercedes, a foreign playwright who’d just been exposed at a conference in Budapest as a Nazi collaborator. John Hood, the department’s gentle Miltonist, left the room in tears on being informed by Marcus Thorney that his Renaissance candidate didn’t have a brain in her head, had lied about her salary, and was spreading herpes along the Northeast Corridor.

  Tempers flared. Only two months ago, Marcus Thorney had threatened to resign if his own candidate wasn’t offered the Ludd post. Steve Weiner had snapped, “So go!” and the two men had actually surged out of their chairs, with nostrils wide, until Jorvelle Wakefield had broken the tension by laughing despite noisy efforts to hold her breath. At that meeting, the department had formally split between factions of Weinereans and Thorneyites, but it was a loose and jagged division. Temporary coalitions formed only to break up other temporary coalitions, then turned on each other. At least the excitable Jonas Marsh was consistent: he voted “No” on everyone except Dame Winifred Throckmorton, including (as Thorney nastily reminded him) one scholar he himself had nominated the year before! Dr. Bridges was eating five or six Almond Joys a day from nervous tension, and could no longer get into his tuxedo for trustee banquets. He told his wife, Tara, that he had stopped believing in democracy—a horrible thing for a Walt Whitman scholar to say.

  Besides, as Theo pointed out to Steve, temperamentally, Norman Bridges was incapable of anything but democracy. Whatever the greatest number wanted at any given meeting (even if that number was only three on one side, two on another, and four against both), Bridges was constitutionally convinced that that majority had possession of the greatest good. He could not swim against the tide to save his life, and so in this whirlpool of random riptides he was constantly drowning. For most of his three terms as chair, he’d been trying to resign on the British precedent that he’d clearly failed to receive a vote of confidence. But if he’d thought he’d suffered migraines from trying to bring the department to agree on hiring an outsider, then what happened to his nervous system when he started asking them to choose one of themselves to replace him was, in his wife’s phrase, something you wouldn’t want sleeping in the same bed with you. She certainly didn’t, and ordered a set of twin maplewood four-posters.

  The provost had finally demanded that Bridges’s colleagues elect a new chairman by the end of April or he’d appoint one himself.

  That election was scheduled for next week. Meanwhile, until his successor arrived to relieve him, Dr. Bridges (believing that leadership had its duties as well as its—presumed—privileges) took a Valium every Thursday and carried on.

  “I tell you frankly, gentlemen—” Dr. Bridges caught sight of Theo pointing ostentatiously at Jorvelle Wakefield, the sole woman in the room (for Jane Nash-Gantz was away, as usual, lecturing in Europe). Dr. Bridges fussily puckered his lips as if to say, “I knew!” But then he only made matters worse (as his wife often remarked), by adding, “Gentlemen, and our one lovely lady, Jorvelle…”

  Jorvelle crossed her eyes flamboyantly at Theo. Dr. Bridges didn’t see her; he was dropping two thick packets onto the laps of the napping Romantic Poetry and Victorian Novels, small, elderly Southerners tenured before the days of publish-or-perish and entirely unpublished (indeed for all anyone knew for certain, entirely unread), dubbed “Dee and Dum” by Theo after the nasty, beanied schoolboys in Alice in Wonderland. They twitched with little exasperated jerks when the packets hit them, but immediately settled back down to their slumbers.

  Dr. Bridges tugged at his argyle sweater vest. “We have to come to a decision by next week. Here’s our final ranked list of candidates—”

  “Who ranked it?” growled Jonas Marsh, who always said aloud what everyone else was thinking—one of the warning signs of what everyone else called insanity.

  Bridges ignored this violation of Robert’s Rules of Order. “—with a little more material I’ve put together—” He ignored a sound suspiciously like a groan. “—about each person. We have to stop, well, this friendly fire…” He waited for a laugh but didn’t get it. “…and come together on this thing.” He sighed. “And make, I repeat, make an acceptable and advantageous appointment before the term is over. Or—” And for emphasis, he took off his glasses. “Or, and this, my friends, is the news.” Bridges started to pull at his hair, remembering only at the last second that it wasn’t his hair, but a toupee. “If we don’t, Dean Tupper has called me in, and told me flatly that he is going to take that third Ludd Chair and give it…” The chairman paused, sucked in his stomach and snarled, “to the French Department!”

  A pause. Followed by a loud slap from the end of the table. “Let the whoreson Tupper give it to the bloody Frogs then!”

  Everyone looked at Jonas Marsh. The Restoration man had blown again. He did so as regularly as a geyser. First, his foot-jiggling sped up until his handsewn slip-on was kicking the underside of the table, then his hands began to squeeze both lapels of his custommade jacket, then they started rubbing in a frenzy of zigzags across his handsome face as if it were crawling with flies.

  “Here we go again,” sneered Marcus Thorney, sotto voce to his current minion (Rice, Early American), and everyone went back to whatever they’d been doing for the past hour—chewing erasers, grading quizzes, counting venetian blind slats, doodling curtains.

  “Now, Jonas, you don’t mean that.” Bridges gave Marsh a placating smile. The chairman seemed determined to go on believing his colleague was joking, as opposed to confronting the fact that Marsh seemed to be under the impression that he lived in seventeenthcentury London, where men of letters were blunt, rather than in modern North Carolina, where they were considerably less so.

  “Outrageous!” Marsh snapped. “Tupper? That cretinous, syphilitic, backwater, swamp-bred fundie?”

  “Now, Jonas.”

  Marsh stood, his wide-cuffed Jermyn Street trousers falling in
exquisite lines. “Dean Buddy Tupper, Junior, threatens us? That poodle-fornicator?!”

  John Hood, the gentle Miltonist, gasped.

  Steve Weiner gawked at Theo and asked aloud, “Dean Tupper is a poodle-fornicator? I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes.” Marsh turned to him in a gleeful quiver. “Yes, yes, yes. What else do you call a whoreson panderer who spends his life trying to fleece old women out of their assets while their mongrels hump his shinbones?”

  “I don’t know,” Steve admitted.

  Marcus Thorney tapped his packet of folders with an angry forefinger. “Why is my candidate ranked fourth, may I ask?”

  Steve Weiner snorted loudly. “Marcus, he’s a moron—”

  “Now, Steve,” said Bridges.

  Thorney rose. “How dare you?”

  Jonas Marsh interrupted. “His last book is dull, derivative drivel.”

  “Now, Jonas,” said Bridges.

  “Marsh, you ought to be locked up!” Thorney shouted.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” whispered Hood, the gentle Miltonist.

  “Frankly,” Jorvelle Wakefield said, “I agree with Jonas.”

  “Marcus, I’m telling yah,” said Steve Weiner, “this guy said in public, on an S.A.M.L.A. panel, that the only black literature ever written worth reading was by Alexander Dumas! The only black literature worth reading!”

  “What does Dumas have to do with it?” wondered an Americanist.

  A languid stir from the couch and a yawning drawl from old Dee, “Mulatto. Mixed blood. Known fact. Dumas’ père had Negro blood in him.”

  “Oh, who doesn’t!” Steve snarled.

  The lounge erupted. Theo heard his stomach rumble, but knew there was little chance anyone else would.

  Bridges tried beating on the table with his copy of Leaves of Grass, gave up, and waited. When the shouts subsided, he coughed, held out his wrist to display his watchface, and sighed. “Next week we also need to vote on whether or not to drop the Spenser course from the undergraduate major requirements.”

  “Right! No one needs to read The Faerie Queene in the nineteen nineties!” shouted one of the younger professors.

  “Oh reason not the need,” sadly whispered the gentle Miltonist.

  “Drop the bloody Romantics. Throw Shelley out!” Marsh yelled.

  Bridges looked desperately around the beautiful room. Theo took the hint and raised his arm. “I move we adjourn.”

  From the mustard couch came another rustle, then from both the venerables a thin, sharp, synchronized rasp perfectly audible, “Ah second.”

  {Curtain}, thought Theo.

  Norman Bridges had hurried away to answer an emergency call from the provost. Out in the corridor waiting for him, Theo leaned against the wall, noting who walked out with whom, who clustered, who got snubbed. He himself got snubbed by Dum and Dee and by Thorney, but that was nothing new. The ancients disliked him only because they couldn’t cope with the way Cavendish had been invaded by more and more “Yankees.” But the lean medievalist and Theo disliked each other personally. In Theo’s view, Thorney had only two kinds of relationships: he attached himself to power, like a bird hitchhiking on the back of a rhino, or he played rhino to smaller birds. And Theo had been unwilling to play fowl for him. Rice, Thorney’s newest hitchhiker, had his beak deep in the man’s ego now, sucking away by making nasty cracks about the jet-setting Jane Nash-Gantz as they hurried down the hall past old Dum and Dee, who were toddling off, looking refreshed.

  Contemporary Poetry walked out, hoping, despite the last minute notice, that Vic Gantz could come to dinner. As always, Vic could. Modern British Novels walked out and brushed past Jonas Marsh, who was emerging blind from the lounge, talking to himself, though Hood the Miltonist kindly walked beside him so it wouldn’t look that way.

  JONAS : “Unconscionable! Excrescence!”

  HOOD: “Yessss. Umm. Hmmm.”

  When Theo’s best friends, Jorvelle Wakefield and Steve Weiner,

  jostled together through the lounge doors, Critical Theory from the junior faculty raced out of his office after them, again trying to wheedle information from Jorvelle about her salary, as he’d been doing since the university’s youngest full professor had first arrived there in a red turbo Saab convertible.

  CRITICAL THEORY (obsequious): “We’re all just curious, Jorvelle, I mean, the junior faculty. We share our salaries, I mean the information, we share the information—”

  THEO : “Oh, make him suffer, Jorvelle. Tell him.”

  JORVELLE(grinding her teeth cheerfully around an unlit cigarette): “I’ll tell you this. If I was a white man, I’d be ashamed to take all that money.”

  CRITICAL THEORY (nervous): “She’s joking.”

  STEVE(straightening the younger man’s bow tie): “Look, Jim, lobby for me for chairman, and I’ll make Jorvelle let you ride in her new helicopter, deal? Did she tell you they gave her a helicopter?”

  CRITICAL THEORY: “Is that true?” THEO : “Is it because you theorists think language is meaningless that you’ll believe anything?”

  Critical Theory thought this over, biting at his fingernails, then wandered away to the library, where foreign exchange students and the untenured faculty carried on till late hours the life of the mind.

  Though Jorvelle was fleshy and Steve was thin, they were the same height, had the same close-cropped black curly hair, and wore the same clothes—baggy shirts in natural fibers, earth-colored, pleated, baggy trousers with thin belts, and shoes like bedroom slippers. Theo, on the other hand, was no clotheshorse, and was unaware that the undergraduates had voted him the best-looking and the worst-dressed professor on campus. In fact, two female Ph.D. candidates in film studies had commented, after watching Meet John Doe together, that Theo Ryan looked like the young Gary Cooper; but then Cooper hadn’t been much of a clotheshorse either. At home, Theo wore jeans and sweatshirts; his teaching wardrobe consisted of three corduroy suits—Old, Not So Old, and Pretty New—though Jonas Marsh had told him that one corduroy suit was one too damnable many. Steve had often offered to drive him to a “great discount mall” only fifty miles away, but Theo wasn’t interested.

  His black flannel shirt rolled to the elbows, hands in the pockets of Not So Old black trousers, he now leaned against the wall, listening as his friends went on with their increasingly flirtatious bickering. It had been years since Steve’s wife had left him to work full time for the George Bush campaign with a corporate banker from Charlotte, whom she’d afterwards married. Lately, thought Theo, Steve was acting besotted with the new Ludd Chair.

  JORVELLE: [lighting up]: “Steve, if you lose to Marcus Thorney, I’m gonna take the Yale offer.”

  STEVE: [lighting up too]: “You’re gonna leave a place that’s giving you six figures a year to deconstruct The Color Purple?”

  JORVELLE: “I don’t do deconstruction, boy. I do demolition. Didn’t you read that in People magazine? I blow up canons. Meanwhile, I’d love for William Faulkner to hear what you’re doing to The Sound and the Fury.”

  They puffed away at each other companionably, smiling through the stinky clouds. Then Jorvelle gave Theo a hug. “So long, DWEMs, I’ve got a radio interview.” (DWEMs were the DeadWhite-European-Males who’d once been running the world and telling everybody in it what books to read.)

  “Hey, who’s dead? I’m still a Weem,” Theo protested.

  “Today’s Weem, tomorrow’s Dweem,” Jorvelle cheerfully predicted. She waved, on the run, hips swaying parodically.

  Steve couldn’t let her go. “I’m a Dreamboat,” he shouted, and chased after her down the hall, not even pausing at the men’s room door to chat up the emerging Contemporary Poetry, a vote allegedly leaning his way.

  It must be spring, thought the unattached Theo Ryan with envy.

  MOTHER COURAGE:

  Get out of bed and look alive. {Exit}

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Malone is the author of nine novels and two works of nonfiction. Ed
ucated at Carolina and at Harvard, he has taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife, Maureen Quilligan, chair of the English department at Duke University.

  On the Ides of March, our hero, Raleigh Whittier Hayes (forgetful husband, baffled father, prosperous insurance agent and leading citizen of Thermopylae, North Carolina), learns that his father has discharged himself from the hospital, taken all his money out of the bank and, with a young black female mental patient, vanished in a yellow Cadillac convertible. Left behind is a mysterious list of seven outrageous tasks that Raleigh must perform in order to rescue his father and his inheritance.

  And so Raleigh and fat Mingo Sheffield (his irrepressibly loyal friend) set off on an uproarious contemporary treasure hunt through a landscape of unforgettable characters, falling into adventures worthy of Tom Jones and Huck Finn. A moving parable of human love and redemption, Handling Sin is Michael Malone’s comic masterpiece.

  Praise for HANDLING SIN

  “A joy from start to finish!” —Boston Herald “Terribly funny, emotionally engaging, and almost impossible to set aside…a heartwarming tour de force.” —Newsweek