Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “That would be you...” Ave surmised. “It sounds...you’ll forgive me...egotistical.”

  “Please,” I said. I waited before saying more. I was about to tell him what I hadn’t shared with anyone and my confessor was a classic C student, whose undergraduate memories were of copied papers, slept-through classes, doodled blue books. “Let me ask you something, and answer me immediately. No editing, no politeness. Alright?”

  He took a drink, walked over to the bar and poured a refill. He gestured to me.

  “No, I’m driving.”

  “Fair’s fair, Warren,” he says, handing me another gin and tonic. “I guess you can make it home.”

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “As I’ll ever be,” he said, raising his glass to his lips in a kind of salute.

  “Am I...” I leaned forward in my chair to study him closely, watching for a wince, a flush, anything to betray him. “Am I...an ASSHOLE?”

  “Jeez—” He bolted in his chair, choked on his drink, which had gone down his windpipe, ice and all, up his nose and out his mouth in a mix of gin and tonic and chopped ice which covered my face like a new aftershave. I pulled a lime wedge out of my pocket and held it towards him. He was laughing now, so was I.

  “Asshole? Warren? No, hell no. Listen, we have our bad days. And our off days. But no...So tell me. What is this all about?”

  Now I told him. It was easy. Martha Yeats’ library card in my bathroom and that first note. Act of faith, in lipstick, on my bathroom mirror. And, I pointed out, act of faith was no boilerplate phrase that I served up every year. It was part of my departure from prepared text. Someone—how could it not be the murderer?—had heard my speech, then written that hateful note on my bathroom mirror.

  “So...you’re the man,” Ave said when I had finished.

  “So I resign. What’s another year or two at this point, anyway? You can’t say people aren’t wondering about me. Is he what he was? Has he already made his contribution? Are his best years behind him? You can’t tell me there hasn’t been talk. Informed, tentative, off-the-record, et cetera, et cetera. Among the trustees. Not all of them. But some. Including...”

  “Me?”

  “Yes,” I said. Our trustees were...trusting. They liked getting respect in a respectable place. Mostly, they heeded what we told them, their assigned chores, their particular committees. In spite of that, I always knew that, at the end of the day, one of them would come to me. And it would be Averill Hayes.

  “Well, hell, Warren. What do you expect?”

  “You think I’m past it?”

  “It’s not fair, I admit. You forget something when you’re young, it’s because you’re distracted. Same thing happens in middle age, you’re overworked. Forget something at your age, you’re senile. But there’s something you’ve got to remember, Warren.”

  “What?”

  “Till now, you’ve been very well treated.”

  I couldn’t disagree with that. The worst turmoil of the sixties and early seventies was over when I arrived, and what’s more, by the time they got to Ohio, to our campus, they were road-weary and stale—the demonstrations, sit-ins, teach-ins and all. Times had been mostly good, the college had prospered. I’d made a difference in this place, I supposed. So they’d tell me on my way out. But it was no different from the difference a thousand other men might have made.

  “Anyway, you can’t resign,” Ave said. “Not now.”

  “Of course I can resign. I can resign anytime.”

  Ave took a deep breath and studied the lights of the college as though he couldn’t believe that command of such a ship had been entrusted to the likes of me. When he turned to face me, Hayes had a look I’d seen him aim at others—faculty members at their whiniest—but not at me.

  “These murders are the best thing that ever happened to you,” he said. “You want to stay a while longer—and you do, Warren, you do—these bodies are your tonic. Elixir. Fountain of Youth. Is there talk about retiring you? There was. Consultation? A certain concern? Yes. An inclination—no, an obligation—to picture this place without you? You bet. You’ve been here a long time. People take your strengths for granted. Your weaknesses stand out more. The mistakes you’ve made.”

  “What mistakes?” Again, I bristled. He held up his hand, like a school crossing guard holding up a pedestrian. Stop it, Warren. Don’t do something. Just stand there.

  “But you can’t go now. The college would be defeated. Cowardly. Unconvinced of the importance of its mission. You’d be joining the twenty students who left. Not the hundreds and hundreds who’ve stayed.”

  “Yes, but if I left, they might be safer. If it’s about me, if I’m the asshole.”

  “You’re an asshole if you go. ‘College president offers self as a sacrificial figure. Message to murderer: kill me not my students! I’ll be waiting for you down at Hilton Head. Just aim for the little alligator on my golf shirt!’ Please.... Everybody is somebody’s asshole. But you’re the captain of this ship. Listen, Warren. This college has been here a long time and will be here even longer. It will outlive everyone who is here now, yourself included. It has more resources than you realize, more strength...”

  Ave paused a moment and studied me. More resources, he said, and now he waited, watching to see if I understood.

  “Oh, hell,” he resumed. “I shouldn’t have to tell you this. It’s not about you. Much as you might wish it were.”

  It felt like a reprimand. Suddenly Ave Hayes outranked me, Ave Hayes was stronger. Had he just grown or had I diminished? We stood facing each other as if we were both measuring something. Each other, I suppose.

  “We have business in front of us, Warren,” he said. “Decisions to make.” Then he walked me out to the car, clapped me on the shoulder. I nodded gratefully. I turned the key, switched on the headlights and heard the scrunching sound a rich man’s driveway makes, raked and even, no pings and pongs, every pebble in place. Behind me, he stood on the porch, watching me drive away. I admired his decisiveness. I’d been like that in my first years. But in recent years, I’d learned that in academe, nothing is ever decided. Every yes and no is provisional, a temporary adjustment, shifting weight on a see-saw.

  Driving home, I saw where the river lay just across some flood-plain cornfields, hidden in a line of trees. Harry Stribling had written stories about hobos camping out on the doorsteps of the college during the Depression, about a Kristallnacht-traumatized professor arriving by train in the middle of the night, wandering up the hill towards the shining lights, about a country girl—this was in something called “The Mixer”—invited to a fraternity party, plied with drink, attacked from behind while leaning out a window, vomiting. Stribling had his dark side. Dead fifteen years but still around, no doubt about it. He cast a shadow, still, a shadow over the land.

  I should have felt better, because of what Ave told me. He’d confirmed that trustees were watching me. But he’d also convinced me that, in this crisis, I was the necessary—or inevitable—president. Captain of the ship. But then, I wondered, was I the captain destined to pilot the college vessel through stormy seas or was I the captain tradition-bound to go down with the ship? “Oh captain, my captain, the fearful trip is done.” Whitman’s elegy for a dead president.

  I turned home at last, speeding up the hill and then my blood froze. I saw some flashing lights and heard a siren—all this a quarter mile from home, so close to being back in the castle that I debated slowly driving home so that the officer would know who I was and behave appropriately. But I pulled to the side. Some local deputies had an attitude towards the college and would cheerfully write me up for resisting arrest, along with speeding and, God forbid, driving under the influence. There might even be a photo: the president walking a chalked line. Further proof that it was all falling apart. I waited behind the wheel while someone stepped out and walked towards me. It was late and I might be lucky, no one coming up the hill at this hour. Everyone in town knew my car. The law walk
ed toward me slowly, while red and blue lights lashed across my face. He paused in back, walked around, shone a flashlight inside. As soon as the beam hit my face, it snapped off.

  “Mr. President? You okay? It’s Tom Hoover.”

  “Tom!” I said. “Thank God it’s you.”

  “I thought someone was joyriding in your car. I never figured it was you. Something wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, yes. It’s—you know how it’s been around here. The pressure. I had to get out tonight. So I just took off and drove like a teenager.”

  “I see you hit the back roads,” Tom said, running a finger over the door, covered with dust. “Blowing the carbon off the pistons, huh?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I can’t say I blame you. It’s a rough patch. We get three times the normal number of calls. Anybody steps on campus is a suspicious character. I hope it’s over soon.”

  “I hope it’s over already,” I said, leaning forward to turn the key and make my escape, before someone drove by. But Tom Hoover was shrewd. He was doing me a favor, no doubt about it, but I owed him. I hadn’t been excused. He leaned down, resting his elbows against the roof, so that his stomach and face filled the space where I’d rolled down the window.

  “This Graves guy coming up with anything? My Billy won’t even tell me. Ever since Graves turned him into a junior crimestopper, he treats me like a stranger. Not a word about what they’re up to.”

  “I don’t know. They’re into all sorts of things. We’re cooperating but...I don’t know.”

  “What did we do to deserve a guy like Graves?”

  “That’s a fair question, I’d have to say. Just between us.”

  “Man takes his time, don’t he?”

  “He takes our time. It’s our time I’m worried about.”

  What had we done to deserve this? What had we done to deserve the murders? Publicly, I maintained that what had happened to us might have happened anywhere. That was what I wrote to graduates, what I said to reporters, every day. Much as we praised our uniqueness there were a dozen, a hundred colleges not so different from ours, equally virtuous, equally vulnerable. Yet at night, I wondered whether this was a fate reserved for us, something I should have seen coming. What did we do to deserve the likes of Sherwood Graves? “A guy like that.” Tom Hoover’s phrase recurred when Graves sat across from me this morning. I’d decided to call him in, invite an update or what I wishfully termed a “progress report.”

  “Mr. Graves,” I began. “This is a crime scene to you. That’s what it is, that’s all it is. To me, it’s a college. And I don’t want any more deaths here. This place has been profoundly wounded. Are you here to end its agony? Or study it? I don’t want any more deaths here. Should we cancel what’s left of this year? What, sir, is your professional opinion? Shall we empty the college?”

  “You want a clear conscience, Mr. President,” Graves replied, “go ahead and shut her down. Nobody to kill in a ghost town. Shut it down, though, you’ll have to shut it down for years. That’s like shutting it down forever. Is that what you have in mind?”

  “Is that what you’re hoping for?” I retorted. “I know you hate this place—and I know why.” Anger is a luxury I rarely allow myself. I’ve permitted myself to seem angry, sometimes, but those are displays, carefully calculated.

  “You want us to catch someone, Mr. President,” Graves said, “you stay open.”

  “And risk more funerals?”

  “We’re working on this every day.”

  “Is there anything I can do? Anything at all? Anything you can tell me?”

  He studied me, as if deciding whether he’d heard anything more than routine politeness. He decided he had.

  “Come take a walk, Mr. President,” he said. A moment later, we were sitting out on Middle Path. The trees were past peak by now and the leaves that covered the gravel, wet from a shower the night before, were smelling like mulch.

  “You’re not going to like this,” he warned me. “I’ve been looking into all sorts of things. Maybe you think I take pleasure in this.” Now he turned to face me. “Maybe I do. Private pleasure. But my pleasure doesn’t come into it, Mr. President. Or your displeasure. Shall I go on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then talk to me about Averill Hayes.”

  “Averill Hayes?” It took me a while to recover. There was only one reason Sherwood Graves would ask about Hayes. “Some of this you must know. Mediocre student. Distinguished graduate. Generous donor.”

  “Friend?”

  “Of the college? Of course.”

  “Of yours?”

  “I suppose so,” I said, hating myself for my lukewarm response.

  “Fine,” Graves said. “A generous donor. How generous?”

  “I don’t have those figures memorized.”

  “There were large donations in the sixties. About a million, altogether. Real dollars.”

  “In a time of real need.”

  “Probably his wife’s money. Still...”

  “At one point we needed a loan to meet our next payroll. Ave was there for us. He co-signed the note.”

  “Fine. But in recent years, things have tapered off. Lately, it’s been two hundred dollars a year.”

  “Well, he’s retired. Living off assets and pension, I assume.”

  “What assets? What pension?”

  “How would I know? The point is...there’s more than money involved here.” Beat by beat, Graves was undercutting a man who was at the heart of our college and our community. His agenda was becoming more clear. Red Rudolph’s son, the scourge of the college, pointing a finger at a president’s—a U.S. president’s—descendant. And the maddening part of it was that whatever he found—insider trading, unreported income, unexpected debts—would have nothing to do with three homicides. It was something for Sherwood Graves to do, while the college perished. It was a puzzle he worked on while he sat, dry-eyed, at our deathbed.

  “Mr. Graves, I’m going to take a chance on you that you wouldn’t take on me. I’m going to confide in you. I’ll let you in on a secret. That place of Ave’s...and it’s quite a place...is ours when he dies. In fact, it’s already ours.”

  “So he takes the tax benefits when he’s alive.”

  “You could look at it that way, I suppose, if you’re determined to take the lowest possible view of human motives. I don’t.”

  “Okay, Mr. President,” Graves said. “Calm down, just calm down,” Graves repeated, sounding like a hypnotist.

  “And answer this,” Graves said. “Averill Hayes is interested in land around here...”

  “If you say so...”

  “If you say so. Please, Mr. President. He’s been sniffing around for years. More talk than action. He hasn’t got the money. He has some options to buy, that’s all, options that are running out on him. But he’s a dabbler. He doesn’t have the money. Or the land. He wants the Stribling Tract. He wants the college to develop the land. Am I right?”

  “In a sense...”

  “You’re measuring your words, Mr. President. Senior Years, Mr. President, the magic word is Senior Years. Want to elaborate?”

  So that was it! Senior Years. He’d found out about it and now I had no choice but to describe it. A few years ago, I told him, Ave Hayes took me for a drive. So far as the roads allowed, we drove in circles around the college, a one-mile circle, a five-mile circle, a ten. Ave did most of the talking. The college founder, he said, had purchased eight thousand acres, some to develop, some to sell. These days, we owned fewer than 1,000. But there was a lesson in what the founder had done. And in what Stribling had added. Look around, Ave said, and you saw farms abandoned, brambly untilled fields, falling-down barns, rusted plows, not a mile of road without a for-sale sign. That was the past. And the future? Look again. Trailers and mobile homes, tract subdivisions, horse farms, mini-ranchettes, golf courses. We could be on the side of the losers—those forlorn farms—or the winners. Why leave development to ou
tside investors, why let them take advantage of our presence—“quaint college town, lively cultural life”—while contributing nothing to our survival? Thus: Senior Years. Use the Stribling Tract to build a housing development aimed at the kind of people who loved association with colleges like ours—all the games, concerts, lectures, all our traditions and ceremonies. And the best of it was that these people would be retired. “The Elderhostel Crowd.” We could count on them to live graciously, die gratefully and be replaced by more of the same. Senior Years could be a gift that kept on giving, if we could get it past the Trustees.

  “Does Mr. Hayes have a financial interest in Senior Years?”

  “You mean, has he invested anything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only hundreds of hours of unpaid labor.”

  “I see. That’s your way of saying he hasn’t put any money into the project?”

  “One dollar.”

  “What did a dollar buy him?”

  “A participation,” I said. “You’ll have to ask Willard Thrush. He’s on top of the fine points.” Just then, I sensed that Graves had already been to Thrush, already knew that Ave’s cut would be one-third, which seemed high to Willard and fair to me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I continued. “Don’t you see? Everything that Ave has is ours. It’s in his will. The college receives the residue of his estate. In a way, he’s not selling Senior Years. He’s donating it.”

  “A proxy for the college. A cut-out,” Graves said. “Or is the college a cut-out for him?”

  “As you like,” I said, shrugging. “We thought it would be better if he approached landowners. Farmers and such. If word got out the college was aggressively buying land, the market might go up.”

  “So Ave buys some land. And opens up the Stribling Tract too. Piggybacks what he’s bought and optioned and folds it into the Stribling Tract.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “In the interests of the College.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have the trustees approved all this?”