Hardscrabble Road (10 page)

“Apparently,” Alison said, “a feminist looks like a slattern having a bad hair day. What did you do to your hair?”

“It’s what I didn’t do to it. Brush it.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I only look this way around the house. I promise you if I wear it outside I’ll do it when I’m done up respectably.
I had a deadline to meet.”

“And that means you didn’t get dressed or brush your hair?”

“No time.”

“I had a friend in college who wanted to be a writer, and she made a point of always getting up and getting dressed just as
if she were going into any other kind of office.”

“Your friend was mentally ill. Or maybe it was just more of that crap with Wellesley. So what’s been so terrible about your
day?”

Alison moved into the apartment and sat down on the couch. It was a very nice couch, but the white of its upholstery was no
longer really white, and it was covered with copies of The Weekly World News.

“This what you were writing for today?”

“I couldn’t if I wanted to. I don’t have the imagination. What’s been so terrible about your day?”

“They scheduled the inquiry this morning.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, Carrie, of course I’m serious. And don’t tell me you don’t believe it, because I can’t believe it, either.”

“But I don’t get it,” Carrie said. “What are they going to inquire about? I mean, Drew Harrigan says this student came to
him and complained that you gave worse grades to conservatives and Christians than you gave to liberals, okay, he said that—”

“—About five hundred times over the course of three weeks.”

“Yes, I know, but still. He never gave the name of the student. There may not even be any student. He could have made the
whole thing up. How could anybody possibly know? What’s the university going to investigate?”

“They’re going to investigate me,” Alison said. “They’re going to make an inquiry into my classroom practices and my grading
practices. They’ve
asked for my grade books for the last five years, so they can go over them assignment by assignment, and they’ve put out a
call for testimony to the university community. They’ll mail notices to my former students through the alumni records. So
that my students and my former students can come in and testify to, you know, how I behave.”

“But that’s all right, isn’t it? You don’t really give poorer grades to conservative students because they’re conservatives,
do you?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Alison said. “I don’t even know what most of them are, politically. I mean, I don’t teach a political
subject. I teach medieval literature and medieval philosophy and that kind of thing. We talk about Thomas Aquinas and bringing
Aristotle back into the tradition of Western thought, and Chaucer and the rise of vernacular poetry. I suppose you could make
those things political. The Women’s Studies Department probably does make those things political. But I talk about poetic
forms and the enthronement of logical analysis in the medieval European university.”

“So,” Carrie said, coming over to the couch with a cup, a saucer, a bottle of Irish whiskey, and a big electric coffee percolator
with its cord hanging down behind like a bridal veil, “there’s nothing to worry about, is there? You’re not guilty.”

“I’m a professor at an Ivy League university. My students are the result of a long culling process that turns competition
into the be-all and end-all of life itself. You know and I know that there are people I’ve given grades to who weren’t very
happy with them, people who wanted A’s and didn’t get them, people who want to blame anybody but themselves for their own
records.”

“And these people will all be conservatives?”

“No,” Alison said. “These people will turn this inquiry into an auto-dafé. It’ll be a chance to get their own back, and they
will. There are times I want to slaughter every water buffalo on the planet.”

Carrie was putting together the Irish coffee. The cup was larger than an ordinary coffee cup, and the percentage of whiskey
to coffee was larger than in most Irish coffees. Alison reached forward and took a long swig. It was straight alcohol with
essence of coffee bean.

“Water buffalo,” Carrie said.

“Oh, it was something that happened a few years ago with the speech code. We’ve got a speech code. It’s completely asinine.
It’s the modern university’s equivalent of an old Catholic formulation on free speech—error has no rights. Whatever. There
was an incident where this kid who was brought up in Israel or somewhere shouted out his window at a bunch of girls whooping
it up in the quad and said they sounded like a bunch of water buffalo, which happens to be an exact English translation of
some common light insult in Hebrew, and they were black and took it as a racist remark, so the
university tried to prosecute him under the speech code, and he got outside lawyers and whatnot interested and it was a huge
scandal, mostly making the university look bad. Which it should have, because free speech isn’t about speech you like but
about speech you don’t. Anyway, that’s why they feel they have to investigate every time somebody like Drew Harrigan makes
accusations like this. Just in case. Because they don’t want this student to prove his case in an outside court of law and
make the university look bad again.”

“But there may be no student,” Carrie said.

“I know.”

“And you’ve got tenure.”

“I know.” Alison took another long swig of coffee. Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. Alcohol could be very good to you if you treated
it right. Unfortunately, the next morning it made you feel as if you’d been run through a food processor with a bunch of sand.
“Tenure doesn’t fix everything,” she said finally.

“And?”

Alison shrugged. “I don’t know. I keep telling myself I don’t need to worry, I haven’t done what Drew Harrigan’s been accusing
me of. They can’t find evidence of something that isn’t there. But I know university inquiries. You don’t have the same due
process protections you have in a court of law. I may end up having to sue the university to clear my record. I may end up
ostracized, although I admit that doesn’t seem to be happening at the moment. And all I can think about is the fact that if
Drew Harrigan would only spend an extra, oh, six months in rehab, this whole thing would probably die down. Because the administration
doesn’t want to pursue it any more than I want them to. They just want to cover their asses.”

“Maybe the cops will be waiting for him at the door of the clinic when he walks out, and he’ll be so wrapped up in legal troubles
he won’t have time to bother about you.”

“It’s a nice thought, but I talked to a guy over in the law school about that. Apparently, probably not. They’re going to
shift most of the blame onto this guy who was supposed to be supplying him with the pills.”

“The homeless guy?”

“Yeah. And then, you know, Drew Harrigan is a victim, and he gets ordered to therapy, and that’s that. My guy at the law school
said it was practically a done deal.”

“I think it’s disgusting the way celebrities get treated by the law.”

“I think everybody thinks it’s disgusting the way celebrities get treated by the law,” Alison said. “But they do, and here
we are. I just wish I knew what started all of this. It’s the one thing that makes me think there might really be a student
out there somewhere complaining that I gave him a bad grade because he’s a conservative. I mean, how else did Drew Harrigan
get
my name? I’m not an academic media star. I don’t teach in a sensitive department. This came out of nowhere, and I have no
idea why.”

“Get absolutely stinking drunk and sleep it off and then get up and go on with what you’ve got to do,” Carrie said. “That’s
how I handle it. It’s like a catharsis. Once I’m through it, I can do anything I have to do.”

“I keep thinking that maybe that homeless person will just disappear. Isn’t that awful? I just can’t help thinking that if
he wasn’t around to be the convenient scapegoat, Drew Harrigan would be in a lot more trouble than he’s in, and I’d be in
a lot less.”

“He’s filed a lawsuit, hasn’t he?” Carrie said. “Maybe he’ll win.”

“Maybe he will,” Alison said, but she didn’t believe that. In at least one case, the socialists weren’t entirely crazy. There
really were disparities of power in the world, and there was no disparity greater than the one between a homeless drunk and
a media powerhouse. This homeless person would take the fall for Drew Harrigan, and Drew Harrigan would go on giving lectures
about how all drug addicts should be locked away in penitentiaries for fifteen years every time they got caught with a half
ounce of marijuana in their pockets, and the university inquiry into the allegations of bias on the part of Professor Alison
Elizabeth Standish would proceed as planned, delivering ruin to somebody, because that was what it was designed to do.

Alison took another long swig of the Irish coffee, and decided that getting blind drunk was not that stupid an idea after
all.

I
t was just turning
midnight, and Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation thought she could not read another page of Ascent of Mount Carmel without
going completely, utterly, and irrevocably insane. Beata had come to Carmel because she loved and admired Carmelite spirituality,
by which she meant the works of St. Teresa of Avila and St. Edith Stein. She’d never read anything by St. John of the Cross
before entering the novitiate, and she had only grazed that silly book by St. Thérèse of Lisieux, The Journey of a Soul. It
hadn’t occurred to her that there might be good reason why Thérèse’s book had sold more than any other work of Catholic piety
in hundreds of years, and why a modern Carmel might want to build on that popularity to keep its sisters dedicated to the
contemplative life. Quite frankly, if Beata had to read much more of this overwrought mysticism and sexually charged ecstatic
transportation into the presence of God, she thought she might quit Carmel for a life with the Dominicans as a mistress of
the Inquisition.

Except, of course, there was no Inquisition anymore, not in fact or in name. There was the Congregation of the Doctrine of
the Faith, which used
to be called the Holy Office, which used to be called the Holy and Roman Inquisition, but that was the wrong Inquisition for
her purposes, not the one in Spain but the one in Rome. Of course, she didn’t really know what her purposes were. She had
come to Carmel wanting only to find silence, and she had found that, even though the silence wasn’t silent enough.

At the moment, the silence was being broken by the sound of the monastery bell ringing the hour. It was the ordinary bell
marking ordinary time, not the one that rang for prayer. She was tired. She should lie down on the cot for a rest, as she
was supposed to do, but it had been a restless day. The one time she’d tried, she’d ended by staring up into the dark that
obscured the high ceiling. It had seemed a better idea to get up and read. That way, when it came to tomorrow night, when
she was not on duty, she would lie down at nine when the lights went off and have no trouble at all dropping off.

It was hardly possible that she had lived in this monastery for years, and her body still hadn’t adjusted to the schedule.
But it hadn’t.

There was a knock on the door. For a second, Beata thought it was nothing. There was a lot of wind out there. Maybe a branch
had been knocked against the side of the building. Then the sound came again, and she got up to look through the eyehole at
who was standing on the front steps.

She’d had a roommate in college once who’d called those eyeholes Judas holes. She had no idea what had made her think of that.
One of the homeless men was standing on the doorstep, his arms wrapped around him, without a hat. She was not supposed to
let anyone in when she was here alone at night, but she couldn’t imagine keeping this man waiting outside like that, in that
weather. She pulled the door back and pulled him in.

“You’re going to freeze to death,” she said. “You shouldn’t be out in the wind without a hat.”

“They stole his hat,” the man said.

“Whose hat?”

“They stole his hat,” the man said again. He smelled of beer and vomit. They all smelled of vomit. It permeated their clothes,
even when the clothes were newly washed. “The dead man. They stole his hat.”

Beata tried to process this. “There’s somebody dead,” she said. “Out in the barn.”

“They stole his hat.”

“Yes, I see. They stole his hat. And he’s dead. Are you sure he’s dead? Are you sure he isn’t just passed out?”

“He’s not breathing,” the man said. “And they stole his hat. I didn’t think that was right. Even if he’s dead. It was a good
hat. Red.”

Beata paused. She remembered the man in the red hat, waiting to get into the barn, when she was coming back tonight to tell
Reverend Mother
about the property. She shut the door to keep the wind out and tried to think.

“Let me get a sister,” she said, “and we’ll go see. Then we’ll know if we should call the ambulance.”

“I can tell you who stole the hat,” the man said. “I saw them do it. I tried to stop them. But nobody listens to me.”

“It’s all right about the hat,” Beata said. “Let me get a sister, and let’s see what we’ve got to do now. Is he just lying
out there, in the barn?”

“He’s on the floor,” the man said. “He had a cot, but when they took his hat they rolled him off on the floor, and they’ve
got the cot now. It wasn’t right about the hat.”

“No,” Beata said. “No, of course it wasn’t.”

She looked hard into the face of this man, but it just blurred. As soon as she blinked, she could no longer remember what
he looked like. She thought of the man in the red hat, and decided she had never really known what he looked like, beyond
noticing that his clothes were cleaner than the clothes of the other men in line. If civilization was the process of learning
to see our fellow human beings clearly and plainly, in their blood and skin and bone and brain, as vitally a part of us—Beata
didn’t think she was yet very civilized.