Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  I have built to a crescendo. Now I rest a bit. The founder president lasted less than two years here. He lost an argument with a faculty he couldn’t control, resigned in anger and rode off into exile, wintering in a relative’s cabin one county north of here. He never returned, died and was buried elsewhere.

  “My definition continues,” I resume. “It has to do with size. Though the college has grown, often against the odds, contending with a smallish endowment, limited resources, and a short list of graduates, however generous, our smallness—a choice enforced by circumstances—defines us.” Careful now, I remind myself. Watch your cadence, those balanced clauses, those cross cutting parenthetical asides. Elegant and intelligent, that’s what they say about me. Slicker than snot on a doorknob.

  “We believe in small classes. We believe that what happens in class is only part—although the most important part—of what occurs between a professor and a student at a residential college. We believe in chance meetings, sidewalk seminars, casual conversation, the shared experience of life in a small place. Our faculty hold office hours, answer their own telephones and—now hear this!—grade papers the old-fashioned way, by hand, one paper at a time. If that kind of scrutiny makes you nervous, I can tell you, you are not alone. And I can add that the admissions people assure me your high school records, your test scores, your application essays and on-campus interviews suggest that you are among the most talented and diverse incoming classes in college history. So they tell me...” I pause, just a beat “...every year.”

  Relaxed laughter ripples across the crowd. I’m on the home stretch now, I smell the finish line and so does the audience: everyone’s relieved. The shirt beneath my robe is soaked from the collar down and my belt will be sweat-swollen and sodden when I pull it out of my trousers, loop by reluctant loop, half an hour from now. The breeze feels cool on wet skin and how often, in his chosen line of work, does a college president pour sweat? I love the illusion of honest labor! I love it so much that on this, my next to last convocation, I take an out of character gamble. I depart from the text that the faculty behind me know by heart. I do this for my own sake, not for theirs, and for the sake of this very journal I am keeping.

  “I travel a lot on college business,” I say, dropping my voice to the level of a confession. “And I come back late to various hotel rooms, I come back from meetings with trustees, with graduates, with foundations of all kinds, potential donors and prospective students and fellow presidents. I come back exhausted. There are no words left in me. I’ve lost not only the ability to talk—no loss there, some of you might say—but the ability to listen and, very likely, to think. So, what does your president do at, say, the O’Hare Ramada Inn?”

  A dozen faculty suggestions float into the air, obscene soap bubbles blowing across the stage, like words over the heads of cartoon characters: pornography, prostitutes, masturbation, phone sex. I sense unusual interest. I’m providing new material.

  “I turn on the television. Obscure sports events, late night talk shows, colorized movie classics, cable shopping. And, recently, a certain ad. It’s an ad—you’ve all seen them—for DeVry Technical Institute. I believe that’s the correct name and I apologize if I have it wrong. The ad features a map of the U.S. that lights up, to show the institute’s many locations. That’s impressive: a school that moves and shifts and replicates. But what impresses me most is the parade of graduates who appear on the screen, looking up from microscopes, seated behind computers, carrying rolled up blueprints that look like diplomas. These are happy, hardworking people whose lives have all been made better by education at DeVry’s. DeVry’s helped them find jobs and earn money and make a mark. Their education has been a transaction from which both sides, buyer and seller, have profited. In short: a good deal.

  “I wish, oh how I wish, this college could offer the same straightforward assurances. But, truthfully, we cannot. What we attempt here is different, riskier, trickier. Success is harder to measure here. A lifetime can pass and all the returns aren’t in yet. We don’t teach marketable skills here, specific trades and vocations. Though many of our graduates prosper, we cannot guarantee the kind of immediate return on investment that some places promise. Your presence here is more than an investment. It is an act of faith. And the faith is that a deeper and human engagement with the liberal arts will serve you and enrich you in a way that goes far beyond the job that you get and the work that you do, in today’s marketplace and tomorrow’s. We’re interested not just in what you do, but in who you are. And that, ladies and gentlemen, defines us.”

  I nod towards the crowd and linger at the podium while the applause builds. It always half-surprises me, though it’s never failed. Snake oil salesman! Flack! Flim-flam man! Shill! Charlatan! Those are shouts I hear in my head. And when I look at the applauding students and their parents, I half expect to see someone raising a hand to ask me the name of that institute I mentioned, could I please spell it for them?

  At the post-convocation reception, I position myself on the front lawn, mingling with parents, greeting them genially, introducing them to appropriate professors. Attendance is decent but the party doesn’t last long. It’s mid-afternoon and, unless they go soon, the parents will have to stay the night and that would feel wrong because the whole point of the day is about saying goodbye. I can read these parents’ eyes, see them wondering if there’s anything more they can do, some little thing, a conversation with me that might help down the road, the personal touch we advertise: “The president told us that early grades are low; he told us himself, his first paper in college came back with an F.” And, behind it all, deep in their eyes, the sense of departure, minutes away. Act of faith.

  When the guests are gone and only caterers remain, empty trays, empty glasses on empty tables, I step inside, into the living room we added a few years ago. Living room is a phrase I ordinarily resist. But in this house, the word applies. The other rooms are public spaces, designed for entertaining, where selected strangers stand and drink, sit and eat, hang their coats, relieve themselves, dry their hands on college towels, check their faces in college mirrors. Only the living room is mine. It has a television and a soft chair with a good reading lamp, a pile of magazines and books on the floor. Alumni like to send me books they think I should read. Most come from old timers who contribute volumes on the politicization and dumbing down of higher education. Just what I need at the end of the day. Titles like “Poison Ivy” and “The Tenure Trap,” published by institutes with furniture store names: Republican Heritage, American Traditions.

  I stretch out in my chair, settle into the afternoon itself. When late sunlight slants across the campus, every window frames a painting, a late summer/early autumn mix of green and gold. Stone walls, oaks and hemlock, grass and a few fallen leaves. The sun gets richer by the moment, even as it declines towards the hills on the other side of the river. Late afternoon. If my career were one day, it would be around this time now. Autumn of the President. A hundred yards away is the college cemetery, where three college presidents repose. It’s not so many, three out of eighteen, but some stormed away and others were forced out. What’s more, there’s an unwritten law about college presidents: once you resign, you leave. Hilton Head and Scottsdale beckon. Sometimes I picture a retirement community that’s just for former college presidents, poolside drinks at happy hour, merry old duffers swapping their favorite tenure-denial stories.

  As usual at college functions, I’ve eaten just enough to ruin my appetite. Everything is thrown off. At dusk, it is too late to nap, too early to sleep. My wife, if she were here, would urge me to walk the dog around campus. In her absence, and the dog’s, this stroll is something I cannot undertake. I head upstairs. I take off my shoes and stretch out on the bed. The day went well, I suppose. The only hiccup was mine: that angst about DeVry’s. I came out of it strongly, though. Act of faith. DeVry’s positions its graduates in the market place. At our school, we study history, we consider eternity. So: act of fai
th. I roll over. Lying on my back is like lying in state. I glance towards the bathroom. I must have left the door open, the light on, though that isn’t like me. And it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me at all. I see ACT OF FAITH written on the mirror in a pinkish-red lipstick my wife favors. Her lipstick but not her handwriting. Someone else’s. ACT OF FAITH and, just below it, YOU ASSHOLE!

  Trembling, stunned, I walk slowly towards the bathroom. I am an actor in a cheap scene, not of my devising, seeing what someone has wanted me to discover, walking forward as someone has meant for me to do, just like this, afraid, just as it was meant I should be afraid, wondering if someone might be waiting for me in the bathroom, behind the door or the shower curtain. I pause, I hesitate. “Don’t go in there,” I can hear an audience shouting. I nonetheless proceed. The room is empty. ACT OF FAITH. YOU ASSHOLE! I wet a washrag and wipe the mirror. ACT OF FAITH goes first. Then I am looking at myself in the mirror. YOU ASSHOLE! remains, like a caption below a photograph. A few more wipes delete it. The room is as before yet everything feels different. Who would consider me an asshole? I wring out the washrag under the faucet, turn to towel off my hand and see something on the top of the toilet. A library card, a firm plastic card with the sort of bar code that gets passed over supermarket scanners. And a name: Martha Yeats. What an anticlimax! A history professor, outspoken and cause-oriented, the loosest cannon on campus, the kind of tenured radical conservative critics denounce.

  I take the card into the bedroom, placing it next to the bedside phone. Another Martha stunt. I’m expected to react, to come down hard. That would make me a male authoritarian. Not to react would make me soft and gutless, another “suit.” A lose-lose situation. I decide to wait. This is a company town, a residential college, I remind myself, and Martha is tenured. She isn’t the kind of problem you solve. With Martha, you live and manage. “Hi Martha,” I will say, tomorrow or the next day. “It’s Warren Niles. I found your library card.”

  Chapter II

  BILLY HOOVER

  We found the first body near the mud wrestling pit, out behind the Psi U Lodge...

  That’s how I’d begin all this. But I guess I should set it up some, I should say what was going on in my mind and how I felt that night and how those feelings changed—before, during and after. That’s what writers do, I hear. Tell a story and pretend like you’re telling it to someone who’s never heard of you or this place. Tell it to a total stranger so what happened to you, happens to them. Back years ago, they paid writers by the word or by the line. My deal is better: I get paid by the hour, and I can take all the time I want. No rush, no outside work, no heavy lifting: a desk in the back office at College Security, the same office that was crowded with cops back when we were trying to understand what was happening to us. Now it’s just me filling up the lines of a spiral notebook while other guys worry about locked-out professors and false fire alarms and illegal beer kegs, all the things I used to do, knowing it was bullshit and I was bullshit, a campus cop is a Keystone Kop only not so funny, but now I miss that whole normal world and I wish I could shag a call or two, a noise complaint at night, a turd in the library stacks, an undergraduate ankle snapped in beer slides, but I’ve got this story to tell that I’m telling by the hour and it takes more hours than you might think to get past that first sentence. We found the first body near the mud wrestling pit, out behind the Psi U lodge. Lots of hours going into just that line. But who’s complaining? I’m just a campus cop and my time comes cheap.

  So okay, there’s this small expensive college on an Ohio hilltop that it shares with a small village and when people see it for the first time, especially in springtime, all three days of it, and autumn, which can stretch out for months, like a long, lazy yawn, they walk around with this goofy tourist grin on their faces, like they’ve walked into a Universal Studios set called “College Life,” where violets dot the grass in springtime, maple leaves cover the lawns in fall, dormitories look something like castles, dining halls are lined with paintings of rich and famous men. A mile-long gravel path runs through the college and the village, which is just a one-block collection of grocery, bookstore, bank, post office and restaurant. It’s a college that’s like a summer camp or a country club, some folks say, but to me, it’s beautiful. It’s hard not to drive up the hill and think that you’ve come to a place that’s good.

  Anyway, it’s late August and I’m on duty, I’m cruising Kokosing Drive and there’s a dog off the leash in the middle of the road—or to get it right—a dog trailing a leash, one of those fishing rod type leashes that reels in and out, as if the owner went surf casting in a pet shop. But the owner isn’t around and the dog is running around in circles, yelping. The first time I see him I drive right on by. This college town loves dogs. There’s lots of professors’ pets wandering freely and shitting at will, with no guff about pooper scoopers. And, when school’s in session, dogs migrate here from the surrounding country, begging for scraps outside dining commons, foraging in dormitory dumpsters—rough dogs, part-time coon hunters, part-time college students. So I drive past the dog, ten miles an hour, the first of four patrols between ten p.m. and dawn. After the fraternity lodges, the street is all residential, 1950s split-level stuff. Ten p.m. and not a light in any of the windows. That’s the way it is around here: dishes dried and put away by seven. People leave their garage doors open all night long, and keys in the ignitions of their sensible shit-box cars.

  Well, pain in the ass. The dog’s still there at the edge of the road when I drive back and now I better get out and see who it belongs to. The yelping starts as soon as I step out, a shrill high sound, like a spoiled kid. “Hey you,” I say, hunkering down a few feet away, not wanting to alarm the animal. “What’s your story?” The dog quiets down some, perks up its ears, studies me. It’s a small kind of a dog, a terrier, a schnauzer. Soon as I move closer the yelping starts again. I reach out, hoping to grab the leash, but the dog takes right off, dodging onto the Psi U lawn where it sits, waiting for me to follow. Are we having fun yet? My next approach sends the dog back into the road. Now anything that happens, it’s my fault if this little puppy never knows the taste of Cycle Four. And just then, I see some headlights passing the Delt lodge, heading my way—make that our way, moving fast. “Shit, shit, shit,” I say.

  I rush into my Cherokee, turn on the roof lights, the parking lights, like I’m setting the stage for an accident that hasn’t happened yet. I grab a flashlight and point it down the road, into the windshield of a jeep with Connecticut plates.

  “How you doing, officer?” comes the familiar upper-class voice. I spot a t-shirt, a baseball hat turned backward, a girl in the passenger seat, three others in back. Those open cans of Old Milwaukee twinkle in my flashlight beam.

  “What might this be about?” I realize it’s been months since I’ve heard that insincere politeness.

  “Might be about speeding,” I reply. “Might be about open containers.”

  “Is this a multiple choice?” someone else asks. A round of laughs from passengers in back. The customer is always right and around here, the students are the customers. $100,000 for four years and going up all the time. I’m not a cop. Cops enforce law. I mind manners. Sometimes theirs, mostly my own.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I say. “You turn around and park in the student lot. I’ll come by and check, maybe ten minutes from now. Your vehicle isn’t there, I file a report. It’s there, no problem.”

  “Oooh...he’ll file a...report.” That voice again. This time my flashlight finds her, a woman, caught like a deer in the headlights. Same baseball cap, same t-shirt as the boys. A minute away from saying “boy does this suck.” I turn back to the driver. “Well?”

  “You’re on,” he says. The jeep turns towards campus. He leans out the window. “Officer?”

  “Yes?” Whenever they say officer, you know that something smart-ass is on the way.

  “There’s a dog in the road.”

  “I know.” The dog sits calmly, on
its best behavior.

  “It could get hit, officer.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Good. I’m sure you can handle it.” Long pause. “Officer.” Then they drive off, speeding up as soon as they turn the curve. I can hear them laughing, replaying the clever things they said. I stand there, wondering if there’s any way a guy like me can win, talking to the likes of them. I wonder about this all the time. I keep the student directory at home by the toilet and...add it all up...I spend hours just flipping through, seeing where they come from, towns like Shaker Heights and Lake Forest, Darien and Wilmette, all those Allisons and Megans and Ryans and Joshes who live on lanes and courts and drives, which are nothing like the roads I know. I study that directory like it’s a textbook in a course I’m close to flunking. I know that flunking feeling. I was a student here myself once, a scholarship student sort of. That’s only because college employees get a huge discount on tuition and since my father worked here, they cut me a deal. My going to college was a dream come true; my father’s dream that he never lived to see. It’s just as well. I lasted a few weeks into the last semester and then it was done. I went to class pretty regularly, at least at the start, and did my work on time. I got encouraged and counseled plenty but, though the college was a mile from my farm, I never felt like I belonged. I felt slow and tongue-tied and second rate and after a while I slipped away so quietly that nobody missed me, not then, not ever. Now I’m back, another dumb goober playing cop and nobody knows I was a student here. That’s okay. I take enough shit as it is.