It Will Come to Me (15 page)

B
en was third in line if you didn't count the motorized-cart brigade. Tara D'Alainville of French and Fred Barber of physics were first and second, respectively, and Liz Portnoy of chemistry, standing directly behind Ben, was fourth. He'd been up since five thirty this morning, trying to get in his three hours of writing, and counted himself lucky to be surrounded by introverts.

Marcy Bainbridge, who worked in the dean's office, had shepherded the faculty into a long snaking line in the provost's rotunda, which backed onto the platform where the new president's installation was about to held. She and her assistant had been trotting up and down, checking to see that everyone was appropriately rigged out and wearing their mortarboards at the right angle, and now Marcy had dashed over to the sound system and inserted
Twentieth-Century Organ Fireworks
into the CD player.
The line shuffled forward a few feet and bumbled to a stop because the third of the five motorized carts that led the procession had stalled. (This was the first time they'd been used: at commencement two years earlier an elderly participant had lost her balance and tumbled off the stage. The lawsuit was settled out of court, but over the last summer the university purchased a dozen of these carts and issued a directive requiring anyone over seventy-five to ride in them whenever a raised platform needed to be negotiated.)

“Give me a hand with this wheelchair,” Marcy Bainbridge called to her assistant. “It won't move.”

“It's not a wheelchair,” said the motorized cart's occupant. “It's a motorized cart.”

“Do you think you could get off for a second, sir? We may need to turn it over.”

The occupant, whom Ben recognized as C. Trevor Dixon, long retired after a distinguished career in mechanical engineering, climbed down ably, knelt on one knee, lifted the cart a little and peered at its undercarriage. “The emergency brake's engaged,” he said. “See the little green lever? That'll release it.”

Once again the procession began to move. Following his colleagues in their rustling gowns Ben felt a familiar prickling behind his eyes. It happened every time, a Pavlovian response to wearing the ancient robes of his profession and walking to the slow beat of solemn music and feeling himself the object of respectful attention from what the dean would have called the university community. Ruth had noticed his rapid blinking at more than one commencement, and mentioned it to him—quite tenderly, in truth—and he'd been acutely embarrassed.

The faculty was seated in a C-shaped formation surrounding
the speaker's podium. Ben found himself in the front row on the left side, with a comprehensive view of the audience and the speaker's platform. He needed only to turn his head unobtrusively to see which of his colleagues had obeyed the provost's summons. The administration had applied heavy pressure, going so far as to send out an e-mail “reminding” the faculty that a documented medical excuse would be expected from anyone not attending the installation. Apparently it had worked: all the chairs were full. Even Charles Johns and Ricia Spottiswoode were here, wearing bachelor's robes. Why? For them there was no penalty in skipping this event. Perhaps because Ricia knew how fetching her red curls would look spilling out from under a mortarboard.

It was a few minutes after ten and the temperature was already in the low nineties. The faculty was comfortable enough, kept cool by a forced-air system under the platform floorboards, but in the audience people were fanning themselves with programs and opening umbrellas against the sun. Howling babies were being removed to the shade of the library archway. Ben spotted Dolores, far in the back with her husband, and picked out a number of last year's students. There was the reference librarian he liked, the one with the limp, and the very tiny woman who worked in the back room in personnel. And there, in the third row, wearing sunglasses and an enormous black straw hat, was Ruth.

What was she doing here? She hadn't mentioned any interest in the installation. Of course they hadn't spoken much since the night of the potluck. Probably she was hoping to encounter Ricia and Charles. Where had that hat come from? He'd never seen it, and it was too big to hide. It was the kind you put on the ground and danced around, not the kind you actually wore, especially if people were sitting behind you. Where, for that matter,
did she get all those long black shapeless bedouin dresses, those odd-smelling folkloric vests, those great cowbell necklaces that would have looked more plausible under glass in a museum display case than hanging from the neck of a living woman, those earlobe-stretching earrings that dangled to her collarbones. Actually he knew quite well where she got them: from expensive online import stores. He'd seen the credit card statements. The question was why? Why would Ruth want to look this way? There was something self-mummifying about this late-life taste for barbaric splendor. These days she was beginning to look—it pained him to admit—like photographs he'd seen of the sculptor Louise Nevelson, or even Isak Dinesen in her syphilitic later years, except that Dinesen looked grim and ill, while Ruth continued to look girlish and vulnerable, if only to him. When Isaac was small she'd worn jeans and T-shirts, like any other young mother. Her hair was reddish brown then, and he'd nagged her to grow it. Now it was gray and long—though she rarely wore it down—and he wished she'd cut it, or at least color it, as every other woman her age seemed to these days.

A lanky, broad-shouldered girl in stiletto heels and what Ben felt sure must be an inappropriately short white sequined dress came clattering up the plywood steps of the platform to the microphone, urged on by whoops and cheers from a claque of students in the audience. She ducked her head, flipped her blond hair out of her eyes, and proceeded to perform an a cappella rendering of “Amazing Grace” in a wobbling contralto. Two signers stood on either end of the stage, gesturing energetically. Ben checked his program to find the singer's name. She was Hannah Whatley, a sophomore from Greenwich, Connecticut. What would a girl from Greenwich, Connecticut, make of the idea of salvation by
grace? And how, for that matter, did American Sign Language designate the word “wretch”?

Hannah Whatley left the stage to enthusiastic applause. The provost came to the microphone. “Welcome ladies and gentlemen. Welcome, faculty. I want to thank each and every one of you for coming out on this very warm day to help us welcome Dr. Lee Wayne Dreddle.” He turned to nod to a giant young man seated in the inner ring of chairs arranged around the podium, not a person Ben would have taken for a college president.

The provost continued: “Dr. Dreddle comes to us from the State University of Wisconsin, where he served as provost. Prior to that he was dean of the Business School at Land O'Lakes University in Waldorf, Michigan, with a joint appointment in the Untapped Human Potential Faculty Working Group. Professor Dreddle's research and teaching interests include the application of behavioral psychology in the classroom and the boardroom, the management of change, and the development of motivational techniques in academic and corporate settings. He holds a BA with highest honors from the University of Pennsylvania, a doctorate from MIT, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Management. He is the author of six books and numerous articles …”

Lee Wayne Dreddle's spread knees pushed aside the folds of his academic gown; his too-small mortarboard sat precariously on his oversize head. Ben had noticed him on his way in and wondered idly if he was some kind of bouncer, hired by the provost to keep fractious faculty members in line. Over the years he'd come to accept the new breed of college president, chosen more for fund-raising prowess than for intellectual distinction. Lola's last one had been a red-faced, hail-fellow-well-met type who'd
presided over a radical expansion of the student body and the construction of a new gym and a new complex of science buildings. He was a vulgarian, but a plausible one, human-sized and appropriately middle-aged. What was Ben to make of this brute who sat flung back in his seat between the director of the board of trustees and the dean of the Medical School, looking like nothing so much as a ballplayer sprawled on the bullpen bench, waiting for the coach's signal?

Selecting a college president had been a long and difficult process, the provost was telling the audience. The effort had begun two years ago with the naming of the members of the search committee. That committee did their work almost too well. They searched high and low and in the end they managed to dig up a bumper crop of seventeen candidates. (The provost had a background in agricultural science.) Of those seventeen, eight were weeded out and nine were brought to campus for further interviews. The three finalists returned to campus twice again and talked to everybody from the board of trustees to the student oversight committee to the line cooks in the cafeteria. The final decision was an agonizing one, but the seed had been planted and he felt quite confident that in spite of the many impressive accomplishments of the two who in the end, and with some regrets, had been culled, they'd gotten the pick of the litter.

“And so,” concluded the provost, “all that remains is for all of us to give the biggest warmest welcome we can to Lee Wayne Dreddle, the fourteenth president of the Lola Dees Institute!” Lee Wayne Dreddle bounced lightly to his feet and jogged to the podium. Or moon-jogged, rather; the podium was only a few yards away.

“Hey,” he said to the audience, “mind if I take this off?” He
removed his mortarboard, revealing a head of expertly barbered dark hair with a vivid splatter of white right above the fontanel. “That's better.” With these few words, several things about him fell into place. His high, husky voice would have a strong appeal to women, Ben felt sure. And his smile was dazzling, a big gleaming wraparound that instantly relaxed and stimulated the audience. Only a moment ago it had responded obligingly to the provost's prompting, but now spontaneous applause was breaking out. Students whistled and stomped; soon people were rising to their feet.

“Hey,” said Lee Wayne Dreddle, raising a constraining hand. “Hey. Hey. Hey.” The audience grew calm. “I'm going to make just a few remarks today,” he began. “I won't keep you long because I know it's hot.” He produced and put on a pair of reading glasses. (Ben revised his age upward, from thirty-eight to forty-two.) “I'll begin by sharing an insight from the sage Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself…’ “

Oh no, thought Ben. Not that.

“ ‘… then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?’ “

Ben had heard these words a hundred times at convocations and commencements, never without irritation. It wasn't Hillel's fault, of course. He couldn't have meant to endorse the contemporary pop-psychology notion that putting oneself first is always healthy and that self-love is required to be lovable, but no present-day listener could hear this quote differently. And if the first clause was taken this way, then the second could only be understood as a mild corrective to what otherwise would be an injunction to rampant selfishness. As for the puzzling addendum,
“And if not now, when?”: either that was a non sequitur or something was missing.

Having invoked Hillel, Dreddle launched into his address. It didn't take long for Ben to recognize it as a familiar amalgam of bottom-line crassness:

and communitarian pap:

These were the conceptual poles of the written part of Dreddle's speech, which he read aloud a little haltingly, stumbling over an occasional polysyllabic word like a mildly dyslexic teenager. After a few minutes he abandoned his prepared remarks and embarked on a series of anecdotes about his early experiences as a college football player and his later adventures as a fund-raiser.

What was Ruth making of Dreddle? Ben saw she'd taken off her sunglasses. She could never keep glasses on for long because her nasal bridge was low and they tended to slide down, especially when her face was sweaty as it was now, so sweaty that her chalky
foundation makeup had melted off, and her raccoon eyeliner too. She was looking up at Dreddle, who was telling a story about being so intimidated by a potential donor, a wealthy Nob Hill art collector, that in the end he forgot to make his pitch and left empty-handed. He was an engaging raconteur, adroit at balancing triumphalism with self-deprecation. No wonder the search committee had chosen him: he'd been born to schmooze, born to attend galas and cocktail parties, born to move in on some mark, to throw an arm around his shoulder and lead him off into the shadows, spinning a narrative web all the while. Ruth was listening with a small smile playing around the twitchy muscles of her mouth. Without the mask of makeup, her reactions were readable—amusement, skepticism, consternation, wary delight. Ben looked at Ruth every day, of course, but it had been a very long time since he'd watched her. How sad she is, he thought. Often unhappy, sometimes diverted from her unhappiness, always sad.

The audience was sitting in full sun now. The ambulance parked around the corner on the access road hadn't been called upon yet, but an elderly man had been escorted into the shade by two ushers. Dreddle put on his reading glasses again and returned to his text, leafing through it quickly. It was the peroration he was looking for, and when he found it he looked up and gave the audience another of his patented grins.

One thing he couldn't say, he read, was that he hoped to turn LDI into a world-class university, because it already was a world-class institution. His predecessors had seen to that. Instead, he wanted to ask everyone, faculty, staff, students, administration, to give more …

“… just a little more. To make the move from 100 percent
to 110 percent. To come up with innovative ways to identify and solve problems, to study harder, to learn more, to keep the physical plant of this great university in the best possible condition, to prepare and serve healthy food so that the students in our charge can give their best, every day …”