“Does your motion imply full voting power for the student representatives?” Clarke asks.
“Of course. The right to hear and be heard is not enough. The right to vote is essential. Will somebody move an amendment to the motion — ‘Students to have full voting power with faculty.’ ”
One of the Pinsky people obliges. Several people now begin to talk rapidly at once.
“But Harry, the point is that if students are going to sit on our committees — Hiring and Tenure, for instance — they’ll have access to confidential files, and that raises the whole —”
“What about support people, then, like Sherri and Mrs. Barrow? They have as much right as —”
“The Students for a Democratic Society —”
“Look, that crowd is led by professional agitators up here from the States - sorry, Harry, but you know it’s true —”
“Order!” says Clarke, but Molly seizes the lull to say “It’s time we recognized the fact that students and faculty are equal. We’re partners in the learning process. We’ve got to be partners in administration too.” Her normally pale cheeks are flushed. Clarke stares at her. He looks both sad and angry.
“Partners my ass,” mutters Bill.
Clarke draws breath to say something, but is cut off by a sneeze so explosive it makes me flinch in my chair. Then once more there is that queer element of tension in the silence. I look from face to face with curiosity. Innis places his pen down with precision and turns to the head of the table. “Perhaps you’d read us the amended motion, Sherri? Then if there’s no more discussion —”
“Yes. Quite. I am still in the chair, Professor Innis,” says Clarke. He is unmistakably very angry and there is something formidable about him in spite of the sneeze-bleared eyes and the blue handkerchief into which he keeps plunging his large nose. He looks so fixedly at Innis and Molly that another uncomfortable silence falls.
“We all argued the matter pro and con for many hours last spring,” says Harry mildly. “I think I express the feeling of the meeting when I say we’re ready for the question now.” He glances briefly at the young people with Ruth, and they pipe up eagerly, “Hear, hear.”
At a surly nod from Clarke, Sherri reads the motion aloud.
“Is there any further discussion?” demands Clarke.
No one speaks.
“All those in favour, then.”
Molly’s hand is up with Harry’s, and the two jean-wearers at the foot of the table are each holding up an arm energetically.
“Those opposed.”
Bill, Emma, and Ruth (looking worried).
“And you are abstaining, Miss Doyle?” growls Clarke. He spears me with an eye no longer in the least flirtatious.
“Yes, sir … I wasn’t here for the discussion, so …”
He nods without comment, after a pause so fraught with his extreme disapproval that I feel a qualm of unease in the pit of my stomach.
“The motion is passed, then, by a vote of four to three, with one abstention. Now perhaps someone will move adjournment of this meeting.” He pushes out of the room in a hurry, though Molly calls after him, “Wait a second, Archie, please —”
Harry is beaming at the centre of an arguing, chattering group which, after a second’s hesitation, she joins.
“For heaven’s sake, why was that so uncomfortable?” I ask, hurrying down the hall after Bill. He frowns at me, an action that sours his good looks into petulance. “Not here,” he mutters. “It’s a long and complicated story.”
I tag after him down the stairs and linger at the open door of his office, a pleasant room with plants on the windowsill and a bright Lautrec poster on the wall. But he doesn’t ask me to come in.
“Does it matter all that much, student parity?” I can’t help persisting.
“Yes, it does. For various reasons. You’ll see why soon enough. Sorry I’ve got to rush off now — got a dentist’s appointment.”
“But why was Clarke so furious with me?”
“Well, don’t you see, if you’d voted no, there would have been a tie, and then Archie could have defeated the motion with his own vote. The chairman only votes in case of a tie. But as it was —”
“Lord, do you stick to parliamentary procedure as closely as that? Since when have college affairs been so political?”
“These days, ducky, education is politics. You’d better get your consciousness raised, Willy, that’s all I can say. Now I’ve got to go. See you.”
He hurries off, still looking ruffled. I drift homeward pensively through the rain, and reflect on my innocence, now forever lost, on the subject of department meetings.
CHAPTER THREE
NEIGHBOURS
I am sitting up in bed reading Little Dorrit, which I’ve put on my course reading list, when I hear a scream. It is well after midnight, and the building has been quiet for some time. No party overhead; no shouted marital argument from the old couple next door — diversions that often in the small hours form a counterpoint to my reading. This scream has an edge to it that makes the book jerk in my hands. It is followed by a silence so complete that I think I must have dozed off and dreamed without realizing it. Then the scream rings out again, this time accompanied by a thump of running feet and a crash, as if someone has fallen. It all seems to be coming from the newly occupied apartment beside mine.
Considerably alarmed, I get out of bed and pull on a dressing-gown. This is a bad old city, as I’ve often been warned, and by now have had some chance to discover. Recently all the mailboxes in the lobby have been rifled. There is so much burglary inside the building that the management sends out a notice urging us all to keep our door on the chain. I admit no one before identifying every caller through the little peephole, a feature of high-rise life that would give grim satisfaction to Dickens himself.
The scream comes again, muffled this time, and therefore more frightening than ever. My hands turn cold. I go and stand beside the intercom phone in the hall, my heart running fast. I listen so hard my ears ring. There is complete silence now — except for (but it can’t possibly be) — a sort of sobbing laugh. Then nothing.
“Well, if it is a mugging, it’s over now,” I think. “Might as well go back to bed.” I find myself thirsty, so on the way back I go into the bathroom for a drink of water. But my hand has barely touched the tap when a voice cries out “No! No!” so close I give a little gasp of terror. It’s just on the other side of the wall. Now there is violent thumping; a struggle of some kind. Gasping. Another cry. A heavy gush of water — the shower? Moans. They take on a rhythmic sequence: “Ah. Ah. Ah.”
My God. That new young couple next door. In the bathroom, of all places. What next.
It’s funny; why can’t I laugh?
I go back to bed and pick up Little Dorrit again. My heart is still racing, faster than when I was afraid. And my thoughts, before so lucid on the subject of Arthur Clennam’s frustration, dart around at random like a pile of feathers in a gust of wind. I am still thirsty, having retreated from the bathroom in great haste. My skin feels hot and dry. I keep on listening, unwillingly, but not a sound from next door can now be heard.
Later I wonder whether I really heard that episode after all, or just imagined I did. Damn Freud. Damn everybody. Damn everything, including my own extensive reading in the medical section of a good university library. Damn most particularly my own flesh, with its ignorance, its curiosity, and its automatic, mindless appetite.
I cannot stay in bed. I pace to and fro. I make cocoa, prowl up and down, look out at the glimmering island city floating in the dark. When light finally comes I go out for a fast walk in the frosty air, and it’s like letting an animal off a chain.
On the day classes begin, I’m in my office at eight a.m., re-reading my notes on The Development of the Novel, and trying to overcome a tendency to swallow too often. I have not slept. The activity of my neighbours in the shower is varied by parties overhead as frequent and violent as wars, and I have not had
a quiet, full measure of sleep for many nights. Instead I lie hour after hour in my queen-size bed, devoured by melancholy thoughts. The general drift of these is that I am a nineteenth-century person who has strayed by some regrettable time lag into the wrong place and period. In fiction I would be that anomaly, a Victorian heroine absurdly planted in the twentieth century — a Lucy Snowe in modern Montreal. God knows, I’m glum enough to fit the part this brilliant chilly morning. I have in fact sat up through most of the small hours reading Charlotte Brontë, with particular attention to her advice for novice teachers. Walk in briskly, she advises, and close the classroom door with decision. I wonder how much help this will actually be. All my joints feel too tight in their sockets, and my toes itch.
Ruefully I think of the teachers I have had in my time, notably Miss Ferguson, the ridge of whose boned corset used to show under her clothes so that when she turned to write on the board we all writhed in giggles. Mrs. Bartholomew, who had tufts of hair growing out of her ears, also gave much joy. Then there was fifty-year-old Miss Donahue, her distraught face so often crimson with what we thought was rage. She eventually stepped out in front of a train, poor wretch. Now she has her revenge. I wish she would get the hell out of my mind.
“Hi,” says a voice at the door, and I jump half out of my clothes with fright.
“Oh — Molly — come on in.”
She edges in, deftly nudging the door shut with the side of her small foot as she sets down containers of steaming coffee on the desk. “Here — I thought maybe you’d like some of this to brace you. It’s awful stuff, but it helps before a nine o’clock. At least I think it does. Archie says hemlock wouldn’t taste any worse and would have a better effect; but you know him.”
“Oh thanks.” With trembling hands I lift my coffee. “I must say I am terrified. Never faced anything bigger than a graduate-school seminar. And they tell me sixty students have signed up for the novel course. Can that be true?”
“Sounds about right. We can’t all be lucky, or maybe just smart, like Emma. She makes her course in Chaucer so tough there are sometimes only five in the class.”
She drags up one of the clumsy wooden armchairs furnished by the college to discourage relaxation, and curls herself into it, folding her legs under her in one cat-like movement. Her pleated skirt at once obligingly drops into a pretty fan.
“Well, I’d be glad if this awful death-wish would go away.”
“Don’t worry, it will. You’ll be fine as soon as you actually get in there. I was so cool the morning I first began — terribly pleased how cool — then just before the bell I had to run to the John and whoops my breakfast.”
“Please don’t put ideas into my head.”
“No kidding, you’ll be fine. Hey, did I tell you I read your book on Mrs. Gaskell, and it’s really great. Nobody else in the department has written anything half that good, except Archie. Only his things on Shakespeare are so good nobody could possibly read them, if you see what I mean. Of course Harry’s doing a book on McLuhan that’ll be finished one of these years.… Your coffee okay? There’s extra sugar here.”
She reaches forward to drop a little packet near my cup, her torso twisting gracefully from the narrow waist. How pretty she is, although she looks a little tired this morning; there are faint blue marks under her eyes.
“Anyhow, the kids here are great; you’ll enjoy them. Specially the graduating class. It’s terrific to work with them — they’re so bright, so with it and active —”
“Politically active, you mean?”
She looks mildly surprised at the question. “Sure.”
The memory of that recent department meeting turns over in my mind like a restless sleeper.
“Well, I’m not sure I know just what turns them on, if that’s the expression.… Bill Trueblood says I need my political consciousness raised.”
“Billy Boy tell you that? Good for him.”
“He’s a nice man, isn’t he? I’m sure he’s popular with the kids.”
“Oh sure.” But her voice is colourless; she doesn’t seem at all interested. Suddenly I feel cheerful, even buoyant.
“With those good looks he must have to fight the girls off. But maybe his wife protects him.”
(There. That was pretty neat.)
“No, he’s not married — not our Billy. Hey, it’s nearly nine. — Watch that cup. Come on, I’ll walk you down the street. You taking all these books?”
She gathers up a pile of them, bristling with markers, and waits for me at the open door while I wrestle into a jacket that seems to have shrunk since I last took it off. Harry Innis pauses a second on a rapid course down the hall, long enough to say, “See you after the meeting, Moll.”
“There’s a meeting today?”
“Not for us. Harry’s Faculty Rep. on the Student Council. Actually he is a student — he’s doing a degree at the Université de Montréal.”
“Oh, is he?”
“Should finish next fall. Oh by the way, Willy, we’re giving a little bash tomorrow night, just to get the term started — you’ll come, won’t you? Bring a bottle of wine, if you like wine. Otherwise it’s good old Labatt’s. Villeneuve Street, 1472, Apartment 4 … I’ll stick a map in your box. Come about nine. Here’s your class: got everything? Good luck, now.”
(A party! Who does “we” mean; she and Harry? Bill is sure to be there, though. Oh, lovely. What a sweet girl this is.)
She leaves me outside open double doors through which I can see tiers of seats rising in a semicircle. What looks to my shrinking gaze like several thousand students flutter and climb like swarming bees on these tiers, and the air buzzes with their voices. I swallow. With icy hands I grasp my load of books.
I walk in briskly and close the doors with decision, using the side of my foot. There is immediate silence. Rows of faces, stricken immobile, present themselves in order. I send up silent thanks to Molly and Miss Brontë, and open my notes to begin.
“Never be early for a party,” my mother used to say, in her firm way. So I would sit wriggling in my white stockings and party frills through the eternity of half an hour, rebelliously wondering why? Even after I knew the answer, it was years before I accepted it. Why must you pretend to have many other interesting things to do? Why pretend not to be eager to go? It’s like the artifice of table manners, whose main point seems to be the pretence that you’re not really hungry. Mother was right, of course. On these little dishonesties civilization is built. Yes, she was always right, bless her; but what a job she had civilizing headstrong, impulsive, crazily honest me. I can still feel the tweaking pull of the satin ribbon tying back the wild hair she had so patiently brushed to a meek gloss.
“Call me when it’s time to come home. Don’t forget to say please and thank you. Don’t eat too much. Don’t tear your dress.” (Don’t really enjoy yourself? Why?) No; of course she was right. No one was ever more completely a lady than Mother. It will take me the rest of my life to be half the person she was.
At a quarter to ten, therefore, I find a parking space for the Porsche on Villeneuve, pleased to discover it’s the same attractive crescent of old houses I discovered on my first morning in Montreal. It looks even more pleasing now, with the old-fashioned street lamps on, and lights in the tall bay windows. On each side of Molly’s door stained-glass panels glow in a water-lily pattern. The night is dry, frosty, with a bright, white moon balanced in the thinning foliage of tall elms. A cold draught flies up my legs in the yard-wide trousers of my black satin pantsuit. I hurry inside.
Up a steep flight of stairs with brassbound treads. A door on the ground floor twitches open enough to reveal a woman with purple hair and small, fierce eyes, who watches me threateningly all the way up. The party is a cauldron of noise boiling behind a half-open door. I knock, but in the din no one hears. I try again. Nobody comes. There is a wave of laughing that escapes and boils around my knees. I am seized with an urge to turn away and simply go home. But the presence of the fierce-eyed
one below deters me. I remind myself of Stein’s advice, “In the destructive element immerse,” and step inside. I am promptly enveloped in heat, smoke, and partynoise, all as palpable as the smell of beer, cigarettes, and incense in the place. More than ever I want to go home.
The narrow hallway I stand in is crowded with people, not one of whom I recognize. Molly is nowhere to be seen. Nor is Harry. Bill is not in sight, either. Clutching my bottle of wine miserably, I wonder whether I could possibly be at the wrong party — it’s the kind of thing that could easily happen to me. Several young people are sitting on the floor arguing in French. Another group is discussing Hesse. One couple is unconcerned with any language at all; they stand so tightly intertwined against the wall they might be growing there like a vine. Near me a pair of girls hissingly denounce someone called Stephanie. At the end of the corridor a quieter group sits on steps leading to a bathroom, passing a cigarette from hand to hand. No one takes the smallest notice of me.
I make my way into a bedroom plastered with bullfight posters and add my coat to the heap on the bed. Two girls are combing and tossing back their long hair at the mirror, and one of them says Hi to me in a small, dead voice. They disappear, to be greeted with shrieks in the next room. I put on some white lipstick carefully. The black pantsuit is becoming; it pleases me because it’s so Vogue-ish with its deep neckline and flared trousers. I have even gone so far as to invest in a long, jade-type cigarette holder. Is the V neck too deep, I wonder? Certainly is lots of cleavage there. My breasts are so high, firm, and perfect that the irrelevant attention they attract has been an embarrassment to me since my twelfth year. But after all, times are different now.… I resist the temptation to close up a little of the V with a pin. Instead I put some more Shalimar on my wrists and load the cigarette holder. I then follow a new couple in jeans into the sitting-room.
Here I look again for Molly, peering about as best I can in the bitter smoke. How odd; there’s no sign of her here, either. Across the room I see Harry Innis arguing with somebody, red lips busy in his bearded face; but he doesn’t notice me. Bill doesn’t seem to be here. One or two of the younger people drinking who-knows-what out of mugs may be Pinsky’s assistants, but I can’t remember their names.
A Population of One Page 5
