Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “Not as yet,” I said.

  “Have they voted on it? Up or down?”

  “Not as yet.” I hated the way he made me sound, like a corrupt official on a witness stand. I decided to take control, if I could. “It’s sensitive,” I said. “The land wasn’t given to be developed. Harry Stribling loved this place—the woods, the fields, the rickety barns. The dirt roads, those especially, that he sped down on dark nights, driving out in the country in a state that was—what to call it—like a diver going deeper, rapture of the deep...the land drew him into it. Whatever else came and went, he wanted the land to stay. So, until now, there would have been resistance to any scheme that involved development. And lots of legal questions. But now that the college is in desperate shape—I endorse it.”

  “Okay, then, Mr. President,” Graves said, getting off the bench. “That’s all I want.” We walked together across the street, towards the post office. He put a hand on my shoulder as we stepped on the sidewalk. It felt companionable. For a moment I felt reconciled to his presence. I wanted him to appreciate life’s complexities.

  “I went to two funerals this week,” I said in my lonely-at-the-top tone of voice.

  “Oh, my,” he said, sounding sympathetic. “Don’t think of them as funerals.”

  “No?”

  “Think of them as groundbreakings.”

  Chapter X

  MARK MAY

  After Jarrett Stark’s funeral, Billy Hoover got into the habit of dropping by my office, just to “shoot the shit.” We both missed Jarrett. I’m safe in saying no one missed him more. We were his late night buddies. Now I was the one who went with Billy for chili. At first he was tongue-tied, talking to a professor. But after a while, he got comfortable. He talked about his father, whom he’d lost in an accident he thought might have been a suicide. The man drove his truck into a river. He talked about his farm, which he wanted back, and his ex-wife, whom he didn’t. He talked about Hiram Wright, a living legend, the smartest man for miles around. And he wondered about a famous student, the G-Man, whom he worried might have something to do with the murders, though Graves wasn’t buying it. Finally, he mentioned Graves. It took time for him to get around to it, though. He was tense, awkward, shifting in his chair, like a student begging to get into a closed class. Or out.

  “This is between us,” he finally said. “Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re the only one I’m telling. So if it...”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You’re the only one I can tell,” he added. Still, it took a moment before he could bring himself to speak. “Averill Hayes. That’s who Graves wants.”

  “He’s the killer?”

  “Not the killer,” Billy said. “The killer’s employer.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s who Graves wants it to be.”

  He said until lately he was out of the loop with Graves, kept busy with “window dressing and make work.” Graves had promised the press he was “looking everywhere, leaving nothing to chance.” Billy was there to make it look that way. But Hayes was who they wanted. It was hard to know what they had on him, Graves and Wesley, the way they whispered. Maybe if they said it out loud, if they shouted it, he still wouldn’t understand it. “The likes of me.” Income tax records, court proceedings, deeds of ownership, wills and trusts, they were going all through Hayes’ affairs. And they’d discovered his wealth was smoke and mirrors. He was leveraged to the hilt. He owed money.

  “So what?” I said. “He’s like half the rich people in America.”

  “Right,” Billy nodded. “But there are some bank withdrawals he made, right last August. Twenty thousand dollars in cash. Who was he paying?”

  “You think he’s guilty?”

  “Guilty as hell. Of being a president’s relative. Of having gone to this college that dumped Graves’ dad. Of being a trustee of that college. Of being the kind of guy Graves hates.”

  “Still,” I persisted. “You think he’s the wrong man.”

  “Hey—I’m not the boss.”

  “But you have some ideas of your own?”

  “That no one listens to. That I don’t want to listen to myself. That scare me shitless...”

  Billy sat there, wanting to say more and worrying that he’d said too much. I could see him decide he didn’t want to stay. He got up, opened the office door, stood there a moment.

  “I have my guy,” he said. “Graves has his. Who isn’t a suspect? Is there any end to it?”

  “Hang in there,” I said, watching him walk down the steps, out across the frozen lawn. I would keep his secret. That, in itself, was a sad change. This used to be a town that gossiped. Secrets were told. Now we carried them around and kept our mouths shut. Everyone had someone they wondered about. Once the unthinkable had happened, we looked at each other in a new way. We knew that there was something we’d missed, in our colleagues and ourselves. Disappointment, anger, rage were suddenly in easy reach. No one was immune, me least of all. I had my own candidate for killer.

  “I’ve got a short shit list,” Duncan Kerstetter told me in our first conference. “My father. My first wife. A lawyer or two, naturally. A short list, really. But once you’re on it, you’re on it forever. And Harry Stribling leads the parade.”

  Our agreement was that he attend class—and he did so faithfully—and then drop by to chat with me, in a tutorial mode. I kept office hours twice a week, in three-hour segments, and Kerstetter never failed to show. He waited until near the end, so that other students wouldn’t have to sit out our conferences. The man loved to talk and, clearly, he wanted his money’s worth out of me.

  “Anybody would have to ask,” he said one night, “considering what we’ve been reading, do you guys ever come up with a book that shows people winning? That has a happy ending? It’s not just your course, professor. I read this so-called canon that people complain about—dead white males, establishment authors, you name it—and I’ve got to laugh. Poe?! Melville, Thoreau, Crane, Twain, Whitman, throw in dickless Dickinson and I ask you, is there one, just one of those characters that could qualify for a mortgage at any prudent bank? That you’d trust to house-sit your summer place? Hemingway, Faulkner, Baldwin, Wright, that whole crew of drunks and exiles and closet cases? Sinclair Lewis for Christ’s sake! And yeah, I can hear it coming, I can hear old Stribling now—trust the art and not the artist. Well, he’s half right. I don’t trust the artist because they’re not trustworthy, they build their own short, shitty lives on not being trustworthy, okay?” He stopped to catch his breath. How different from the students who scanned the course syllabus with a yeah-well, whatever. “And this is what they’re paying to study, a hundred K and more for four years. You’re not even teaching them to write, let’s face it. I’ve seen the papers you put out in the hall after you’ve graded them. You circle this and underline that, you sprinkle words like awkward and vague like so much pepperoni on a pizza. You comment on their writing but you don’t really teach them how to write...”

  “Sometimes, they improve,” I demurred, but only mildly because these things happened unpredictably, and, though you took credit, it was hard to know whether it was our doing or would have happened anyway. If the grimmest felon comes out of prison an exemplary human being, is it because prison was an enlightened correctional institution that put him on the right path? Or an appalling hell-hole he never wanted to see again?

  “Now, about your course,” Kerstetter continued. “You’re lively, you’re smart, you know a lot about a lot of different things. Trust me, if I were in the same town, I’d look you up once a week, dinner on me, so we could talk about books. But this course. One wrist slicer after another. Willie Stark to Bob Dubois to Gatsby, Bigger to Babbit to Rabbit. Can you mention one happy marriage in all we’ve read? One trip that isn’t a disaster, one business or investment that doesn’t bottom up? One trial that’s fair, can you give me that, one jury that brings in the right verdict for the right reaso
n? One politician who isn’t a whore? Tell me, does anybody have a night of wing-ding sex that does not lead to heartbreak and betrayal? And money, is it ever not ill-gotten, not pissed away? Does it ever fail to corrupt? Anybody ever buy anything that’s worth having, at a fair price, huh? Does a business ever just start and struggle and grow and not wind up in feuds and bankruptcy? It happens in life, now and then. But not in books. And another thing. This country I live in is full of monuments and parks and streets named after people who died for—and believed in—their country. Do they ever make it into your serious literature? Has there been just one war that was ever worth fighting, one sacrifice that wasn’t for nothing? God, Professor May...”

  “Okay, it’s a puzzle,” I said. “So let me ask you this, Mr. Kerstetter. You read. You read a lot. That’s clear.”

  “So?”

  “Why?”

  “Why do I read?” He repeated the question, the oldest trick in the book. When they repeat the question before answering, it means you have them. They’re stalling, but time won’t save them. There are no exceptions to this rule. “Well, there’s the language thing,” he said.

  “The language thing?” I returned. “Kerstetter, please, we’re grown ups here.”

  “Alright, already. I like the way they use words, when they really cook. I like the English they put on the ball, okay? The words, the rhythms, you know, because a new way of saying something is a new way of seeing something...”

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “No, that’s not it, you know it’s not. There’s places they take you, you can’t drive through without thinking of them. Every time I come in from Kennedy Airport, headed through the Bronx, well shit, it’s Bonfire of the Vanities. And I go down to Key West, it’s that sorry-assed Bob DuBois that guy Banks wrote about—you know, the New Hampshire furnace repairman who moves to Florida, talk about a shrewd career move, he could have stayed home and planted orange trees, it would have turned out the same. Continental Drift, right? They’re all sad. But yeah, what you read, it becomes part of your luggage, when you travel. Takes you places you’ll never get to, wouldn’t even want to go, takes you to other times too. Studs Lonigan, Absalom, Absalom, U.S.A.—Jesus, does that guy cover ground! The characters you forget but the writing...did that guy play a mighty Wurlitzer!”

  Kerstetter’s enthusiasm embarrassed him but he didn’t take it back. If Harry Stribling were still alive, he wouldn’t remember Duncan Kerstetter and—if memory were jogged—he’d summon up a game, sincere, inept kid, lost among the acolyte belletrists, the whole thing an awkward episode that should never have happened, like a foreign student drifting into a fraternity party. He’d be wrong though. A life-time reader was born in that seminar. Lively, excited conversations, passionate debates. Two people caring about books, he was a dream student. And a nightmare. Because he always came back to Stribling. That’s when he frightened me.

  “Know something?” he asked me. This was out of the blue. We’d been talking about A Fan’s Notes. More literature-about-losers, I warned. He ignored me. “When the old fart croaked, I felt worse than when my own mother died.” Then he fell silent, waiting for something to come. “You know what? I’ve never told anyone this.”

  “What?”

  “I wished he’d come into one of our shops in the end.”

  “Your shops?”

  “One of our plants. You know? Stribling. For processing.” He’d gotten carried away and he knew it. He pictured Harry Stribling on a table, the storyteller of the South, magnolia scented, transfused with embalming fluid, his brains on a scale, the unexercised body, the ironic pouting mouth. Now the college was on the mortuary table. Could you blame me for wondering if he’d put it there? He’d been on campus when Martha Yeats died, when my two students were killed. Was that a coincidence? That moment—that brief, almost accidental confession—was the beginning of my suspicion. If a crime contemplated is a crime committed, he was a killer.

  Often, after we finished talking, we’d head out across the campus together, the murder-shadowed campus, with its looming buildings and empty paths and here and there, the blue-lit phones that connected the caller to the security office, glowing now like prayer candles in an empty church. I never declined these walks with Kerstetter, but that didn’t stop me from wondering if I weren’t strolling with a killer. On one such walk—it might have been our last—I tried to test him.

  “I’ve been wondering,” I said, “whether the same impulse that draws you to books, ‘loser lit’ as you call it, is what drew you back to this college.”

  “Oh boy,” he responded. “This better be good.”

  “No, listen. After so many years, after lots of success in other places, marriage and kids...”

  “Marriages—plural—and kids, professor.”

  “After all that, you come back here, where you say you were hurt. You deny that nostalgia had anything to do with it. It’s the ghost of Harry Stribling. But I think it’s the opposite. Know what, Kerstetter? You’re a lover.”

  “Well, shit—”

  “Hold the applause. Just think about it.”

  He did just that, at least for a minute, until we reached the spot where Plimpton and Stark had died.

  “Love makes the world go ‘round, that it?” he asked. “Love keeps colleges going. You really believe that?”

  “I was talking about you.”

  “You think love’s enough? I don’t. Could be a coral polyp loves a reef. Could be a dog loves its master, though I’ve got my doubts. Not people.”

  He glanced at Amy’s bench, at wilted flowers and melted down candles.

  “You knew them both, I heard,” he said.

  “Yeah. She was in our class. You must have noticed her.”

  “Can’t say I did.”

  “You like it? Like watching the college squirm?”

  “It’s funny,” Kerstetter said. “I looked back on it, the whole place seemed unreal—a liberal arts college, for Christ’s sake—hard to believe it was still around. Hey, do they still have spelling bees? Fuller brush men? County fairs?”

  “When you decided to come back, when you approached the college to set this up...”

  “They didn’t play so hard to get, I’ll tell you that much. That Thrush guy had been in touch for years. My new best friend.”

  “But did you know that the place was in trouble? I just want to get the timing straight. Did you contact the college before Professor Yeats was killed? Or after?”

  “What are you? A detective?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Before. The murders were an extra.” He gave me an odd parting look, as though something had come to mind, an idea he didn’t want to share. “Thanks for your time, Professor.”

  Part Three

  Fall Break

  Chapter XI

  WARREN NILES

  Night Thoughts of a College President

  “There was a time when I thought I might move on to another presidency,” I confided to Caroline Ives. “There were conversations, after I’d been here a while, conversations with Brown and Princeton. Did you know?”

  I must have sounded like an old man owning up to a youthful affair—poet laureate Wordsworth recalling a long-ago love child in France. How like me, Caroline must have thought, to refer to a job application, a failed job application that everybody in town knew about, as a “conversation.” A conversation was what we were supposed to be having now, the kind of “periodic mentoring” I’d promised her from the beginning, though it felt odd, under the current circumstances. And yet one look told me that she’d learned all she was going to learn from me. At least she thought she had. She sat in front of me with a blank yellow legal pad in one hand, a motionless pencil in the other, like a student in a gone-dead lecture.

  “And I’ll tell you,” I continued, “even then, with my eye on larger places, I thought, well, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to remain here.”

  “Maybe not,” sh
e granted.

  “You run a capital funds campaign every ten years,” I droned on, “and it’s brutal. You’re doing it to stay in step with all the other colleges, to stay with the pack. You appeal, promise, placate, wheedle money. And you get it, eventually. Then it’s time to leave. That’s when you feel the tug. Move on, move up. But then you wonder—at least I wondered—wouldn’t I be running another campaign, asking for more money from bigger donors? Is that a promotion? I’d still be pumping gas, more of it, into a bigger tank. But wouldn’t it be nice to drive the tanked-up car for a while? Make those shaping decisions that...”

  “Oh my God!” The shout came from the outer office, through the door. In burst my secretary, Cindy. “They found another one!”

  “What?”

  “Right in the village. In the alley, right by Security.”

  “Dead?” I asked.

  Cindy nodded yes. “I park right near there,” she sobbed.

  I leaned forward in my chair, head down just above my knees, hands on my ears, roughly the position stewardesses tell you to assume in a crash landing. I stayed that way for a while. I heard the secretary crying, I sensed Caroline watching me.

  “Faculty or student?” I asked. I wondered if I had a preference.

  “A prospective student.”

  “It couldn’t be worse,” I said. There was no doubt about it. Martha Yeats’ murder was a shocker. The loss of two students was appalling. But a prospective student, a high school kid touring the college! A dead prospective! This was a torpedo below the water line.

  “I’m going home,” Cindy announced. “In the daylight.”

  “It’s 8:30 in the morning,” I reminded her. “You just arrived.”

  “I’ve got to go,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not safe here.” She grabbed her purse and ran out the door, leaving us sitting there. I pictured offices emptying out all over campus and, as it turned out, I wasn’t wrong.