Beet (5 page)

Still, the arthritic Beet alumni distributed over the country at the Beet Club of Cincinnati and the Beet Clubs of Bismarck, Kalamazoo, Walla Walla, and elsewhere, cocked their heads when they read the item on page 7 or page 8 below the fold. The news especially irked the oldest Beet families, whose New England names were on the dorms and whose frowsy scions dwelled in mansions with peeling paint near Brattle Street in Cambridge. They hobbled around unpolished floors on aluminum canes, wore cardigans with holes at the elbows, cooked popcorn on hot plates, and watched black-and-white TVs with rabbit ears that rested on piles of unopened bills. Their thermostats were kept at 60 degrees. At the Beet commencements, they hailed each other in loud patrician voices, usually in the middle of someone's speech.

But they were not to be trifled with. When they recalled the locations of their Remington typewriters, they fired off furious letters. They yelled in surround-sound. What the hell was going on? And who was this Bollovate anyway? A JEW? A WOP? A NEGRO?

Slowly the world of education was becoming riled as well. Beet College no more? Coca-Cola no more? The Ford Motor Company no more? Some institutions simply represent the breed. And Beet was one of these. When people wanted to indicate natural intelligence, they would say, “Well, I may not have gone to Beet, but…” Lesser institutions would identify themselves as “the Beet of the South” or “the West.” High schools judged it an official “reach” college. And those who did get in were hated for it all their lives.

Perhaps the surest indication of its catbird seat among American colleges was that Beet undergraduates never admitted they went there. Instead, when asked, they'd say they went “to school north of Boston” or (rarely) “to school southeast of Derry, New Hampshire.” Everyone knew what they meant thus, to avoid saying Beet outright was doubly irritating.

The disappearance of Beet was unthinkable except to those who thought about it. So the college turned to its head of public relations, Jerry Jejunum, who'd been picked for the job because he was born with an indentation in the parietal lobe that made him incapable of telling the truth. Jerry composed a form letter assuring all concerned not to be concerned; “Dear old Beet will soon be on its feet.” He hoped his mantra would catch on nationwide.

But Manning was right about the parents of Beet undergraduates, who, not so easily gulled, asked, “Why exactly am I paying forty thousand?”

November now lay upon the campus like a painter's drop cloth splotched with zinc grays and badger grays and destroyer grays. The month marked the onset of New England's murder/suicide season, in which Homer, tired of staring at the back of Jethro's head for the past thirty years, decides to blow it off, followed by his own. In this season, one recalls only one's mistakes and wrongdoings. Large quantities of sleeping pills change hands, as do copies of
Ethan Frome.
Phone calls are placed to high school sweethearts of years past. Viewers are glued to C-Span.

Driving back from Bollovate's, Peace figured he had seven weeks to fulfill the trustees' assignment—less than that, actually, since the Christmas holidays started on December 21, and final exams were the week before that. The board had asked for the report before the end of term. Counting backward, he calculated it had to be ready for the full faculty meeting scheduled for December 19, as Matha Polite had guessed, when it would be voted up or down. Yet in this case, down would not be acceptable. Down meant down for the ship. The new curriculum, whatever it might be, not only had to win the support of the Beet College faculty, but the support had to be all-out—a daunting task, since there were more political constituencies on the faculty than professors.

Parents Weekend was coming up, along with Veterans Day. Then, too, there was a whole set of new college holidays that would intervene between now and the end of term, and on which no committee work, or work of any kind, could be done.

Sensitivity Day, always scheduled for early November, was established to memorialize the community triumph in 1998, when especially sensitive college faculty, students, and Beet citizens (the number totaled eleven)—led by Professor Sensodyne—won their bitter fight against the town council to replace the Slow Children street signs with Please Be Careful As Younger People May Be Entering the Roadways signs. The group determined that the former signs conveyed a “hurtful insult” to mentally disadvantaged youngsters everywhere, and, after a five-year battle of attrition, prevailed. For the council there were two issues at stake. One was that the proposal was “horseshit,” and the other, that the extra words on the warnings would increase the size of the signs and the steel and paint used in their manufacture, and would cost the town an additional $28,000 a year. But the opposing group asked, “What price sensitivity?”

The answer turned out to be, “Higher than you think,” since the additional $28,000 had to come out of the fund for a special wing for the mentally disadvantaged at a nearby children's hospital.

“It's my favorite holiday,” Manning told Peace every year. “I celebrate by torturing small animals in front of toddlers, and vice versa.”

On Sensitivity Day some years back, Manning counted how many times Hitler's name had been invoked. He'd reckoned it was twice more than during the Third Reich.

There were panels on reparation payments proposed for any people ever harmed by the U.S. government. The list of injurees began with African-American descendents of slaves and was soon expanded to include Koreans, the Vietnamese, Granadans, Panamanians, Bosnians, Cubans, the French and Indians, the British, and as an afterthought, the Germans and Japanese. There were seminars on how to address older people, shorter people, taller people, and lately, poorly-thought-of people who heretofore had been overlooked, such as dentists, lawyers, airline employees, congressmen, senators, cable TV installers, building contractors, and insensitive people themselves. Journalists were on the list initially, but Professor Lipman persuaded the group that to call journalists not-well-thought-of would be “hurtful.”

On Sensitivity Day this year, Manning once again planned to press his motion to add white Protestants from New Canaan, Connecticut, to the poorly-thought-of list, which had been tabled last year for being “frivolous.” He was delighted to learn it was expected to pass with enthusiasm. And a protest was awaited from the Robert Bly Man's Manliness Society against the event itself, which the Bly group condemned as “sissyish.”

The day was known by its celebrants as “S Day,” and had its own hand signal, like the victory V. Since forming the S required the use of both hands touching at the thumbs (the left held below the right, so that the letter would be backward to the ones who made it yet correct for those facing it), one could not give the sign while holding packages, or holding anything. That sometimes made for physically awkward moments as books, groceries, and occasionally babies had to be laid on the ground before the signal could be given. But since fewer than a dozen faculty members, and no students, remembered either the S sign or how to make it, the inconvenience was deemed minor.

Also on the school calendar was How to Prepare for the Holidays Day—“my second favorite,” said Manning—always held the week before Thanksgiving, the components of which were so complicated and muzzy, the problem that once occupied a mere town meeting on Sensitivity Day now required a day of its own. The activities included formal debates regarding public displays of religious symbols such as “The Crèche: Pro or Con?” and “The Menorah: Yes or No?” along with panel discussions of “Atheist Rights,” which involved the suggestion that the baby Jesus be removed from the Nativity scene. The panel “Should We Place a Menorah in the Crèche?” was the most successful.

The highlight of every How to Prepare for the Holidays Day was a sermon in the Temple by Dr. Bucky Lookatme, the college chaplain (a full-blooded Cherokee who had been converted to Christianity by Billy Graham himself, when the evangelist's train had made a whistle stop at Lookatme's Arizona reservation), on the ever-popular topic “Godspeak.” Lookatme had tobacco-colored skin with a birthmark stain on his forehead in the shape of California. At the
pulpit, he appeared less pastor than apparatchik, and with the backing of Bollovate and Huey had taken to selling his Sunday sermons for fifteen dollars apiece, with a fifty-fifty split for the college. His best seller was “On the Highway to Heaven, What Are You Paying for Gas?” His perennial issue was nothing as simple as whether God should be addressed as He, She, or It, but rather, Should God be allotted divine superiority as compared to humans? Chaplain Lookatme had come up with this problem all by himself, but once he stated it, several of the faculty agreed it was crucial. The point was, said Lookatme, that God Him-, Her-, or Itself would not wish to be thought of as existing on a higher plane than mortals. He or She or It was more of a Friend.

Manning intended to participate in this discussion as well. He was going to propose abandoning such archaisms as the opening of the Lord's Prayer, and substituting “Our Buddy Which art in heaven.”

While only one-sixteenth of the college and community observed either Sensitivity Day or How to Prepare for the Holidays Day, the events were fully incorporated into official college life, and foreshortened the term. Some hours were also eaten up by Matha's radicals, who continued to pace in the two Pens with placards reading “The CCR Will Not Go Far.” Goldvasser wore a sandwich sign that read, “Free the Des Moines 7,” but no one seemed sufficiently interested to point out his errors.

All this made a difficult schedule more so for Professor Porterfield, who, after the first weeks of meetings of the CCR, was beginning to wonder if any amount of time, extended or shrunk, would accomplish what everyone wanted. Ideally, when the new curriculum was presented, the faculty would rise to their feet, every man and woman, cheer, sing the college song (whatever its words might be) and weep openly that in its darkest hour in the darkest season, good old Beet had been rescued by its own resourcefulness and goodwill.

On the road leading to his house, he drove past other professors' houses, which looked much like his own. Past the cords of wood and the mounds of mulch and the separated garbage. Past
the swirls of smoke from the chimneys. Past the conversations in those houses, which, when they diverted from the threatened closing of the college, focused on an upcoming trip sponsored by the Boston Museum of Trips, or on the incomparable can-you-believe-it spaghetti squash at the Natural Nature Food Shop, or on the antique birdcage in the shape of a pagoda acquired at last Sunday's Isn't This Precious! Flea Market, or on the latest “fascinating if plodding” book they all were reading; or on one another.

Peace took a wrong turn, the first time that had ever happened.

“Sold the Moore?” Livi said at an early supper that evening. “Jesus! They really must be strapped. I must say, I really don't get it. I mean, it's okay by me if they close the joint tomorrow. But I don't see how a college can go out of business like a falafel stand.”

Whenever they looked forward to a rare night out, they pushed up the family dinner hour so they could dine with the children.

“I think it's losing too much,” said Peace, as he passed the brussels sprouts to Robert, who made the gag-me sign and passed them to Beth, who pretended to vomit.

“Eat right or die,” said their mother. The pair were now attempting to cause each other's water glasses to topple over by kicking the table legs.

The children were still fuming over the previous night's Halloween costume fiasco. Weeks earlier, they'd planned to go trick-or-treating as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Beth, the elder, naturally assumed she would be Sherlock; besides, she looked beyond cute in the deerstalker cap. But Robert too thought he would be going as Sherlock, precisely
because
Watson was the elder. In the end, after a shouting match that lasted an hour, they both went as Sherlock, each pointing out the other to their trick-or-treat patrons as an impostor.

At least Livi had not contended with the Concerned Parents of Beet, which annually published a list of unacceptable and inappropriate Halloween costumes. The offensive outfits were hobo, witch, gypsy, old man, old woman, devil, and Indian princess. Last Halloween Livi threatened to dress up herself as a half-Jewish princess, but Peace persuaded her to let it alone.

“Tell me something,” she said to her husband, attempting to ignore the brother-sister act at the table, which now consisted of each plunging a pencil into the other's mashed potatoes. “What difference does it make if the college carries a deficit?”

Peace admitted he did not understand the complexities of the matter, or very much at all about college finances. He had no knowledge of discounted tuitions, earmarked donations, or fund accounting, and until lately, had never supposed he needed any. All he knew was that Beet had an operating budget of around $60 million, which depended on sustaining an endowment of $265 million, which had held steady until Bollovate, Huey, and the new board came in. But now the trustees complained that more money than ever was going toward scholarships. Health care costs were up. Equipment—everything from computers to staplers—was way up.

“I guess it's easiest to think of the college as a mom-and-pop store,” he said, unhappy to make the analogy. “With zero in the endowment, there's nothing left to invest. All the profits, which pay the bills, come from tuition and gifts. We need more students and more gifts.”

“How do you lose $265 million in a couple of years?” Livi asked. “That's a hell of a lot of staplers. And what will the esteemed board of trustees do if it should turn out that Beet is sunk?”

“Sell the property, I guess.”

“To pay the bills?” Livi crossed her eyes. “And how could they sell something as old as Beet College? Who owns the land?”