The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (12 page)

“It is all right,” she called to him, as they ran through the wind, arms interlocked, to her car, a blustering old Buick touring model, unpainted, without a muffler, and buttoned up now, with torn celluloid and canvas curtains in the old-fashioned style. She turned on the ignition, threw a robe over him, and began to work the choke. “It’s all right,” she reiterated, maternally, over the throbbing of the juggernaut. “They’ve voted to support you. You wish to go to Gus’s or to town?” “Town,” said Henry faintly. The car started off down the hill, with bravura; behind the curtains, in the deafening noise, he had a sense of being kidnapped; even the snowy landscape looked unfamiliar. This captive feeling was intensified by the fact that he could hear what she said only in snatches; she did not turn her head; the car roared; the wind whistled; he shivered, forlorn, in the rug. The names, Alma, John, Ivy, and so on, came to him from a distance, repeated in a tone of authority, as if, he glumly felt, they belonged to her; she knew them now better than he. Nevertheless, he endeavored to feel grateful for what she had apparently done for him; he gave her full credit in advance. A certain feeling of jealousy, brought about by the repetition of those names, made him prefer, for the moment, to depreciate the others and think of it all as
her
doing,
her
spontaneous mediation, as though she were a divine goddess; his eyes moistened obediently, as he choked out his formula of thanks; humility made gratitude more fulsome, as he had discovered in the past.

Yet she, on her side, seemed girlishly determined that he should appreciate them all. Alma, he heard, was “wonderful,” Milton Kantorowitz was “wonderful”; even Aristide was “wonderful, so unexpectedly staunch,” as though, Mulcahy thought, grimly, the simple performance of one’s duty deserved a medal for heroism. Van Tour was “absolutely amazing.” “Who would have thought,” she cried gaily, “that the young man had so much blood in him?” It was clear, reflected Henry, watching her assured profile, that a meeting of the mutual admiration society had just concluded its business. And he could not help being nettled by the knowledge that they were all exploiting him, making him a pretext for the discovery of each other’s virtues: in this business, he remarked to himself sourly,
he
seemed to be the forgotten man. Every one of them had his own ax to grind here, a thing Domna made abundantly clear, but joyously, as though self-interest were a newly discovered cardinal virtue. “It means that each one has a real stake in it,” she cried, like some Hobbesian Miranda. “Only a really
interested
act is worth anything.” “Your view has the merit of paradox, at any rate,” commented Henry, non-committal. And he was the more resentful of Domna’s shining eyes, wind-whipped bright cheeks, with their flags of pride and accomplishment, when he discovered, toward the end of the ride, that the glorious little group had decided nothing whatsoever, so far as he could see.

They had decided to use “the existing machinery”—the very phrase set his teeth on edge. “It’s Aristide’s counsel we’re following,” she elected to inform him, while backing into the parking-space before the red-brick restaurant. “Just look behind and see if I am too close,” she interposed, as he started to protest, a typically feminine maneuver, he thought bitterly, seeing that it was as he had thought, his instinct had not misled him: he
had
been taken for a ride. He obeyed, however, with a shrug—“All right here.” “Aristide thinks it best,” she calmly pursued, shifting into first and letting out the clutch, “that we leave the political thing dormant for the moment.” “Look out!” shouted Henry involuntarily, as she hit the bumper of the car ahead. “Oh, how stupid of me! He thinks it best that we handle it departmentally and simply, as I say, get the department to accord you a vote of confidence which he, as head of the division, will carry to Maynard as a protest. Would you pass me my pocketbook, please?” “Domna!” His cry finally arrested this “normative” flow of words. “You must be mad! Don’t you see that that means working through Furness?” He gripped her arm to restrain her, lest she evade the issue by getting out of the car. “My dear girl, this is serious business. Furness, as you ought to know, is the classic type of informer, an academic police-spy. He’s already got the wind up; he called up the store just now, spying out the land. I told him nothing, naturally, but he’s got the bee in his bonnet. We shall have to work fast to circumvent him.” Domna’s face wore an expression of childish, crestfallen disappointment; she looked ready to cry from sheer defeated altruism, the vanity of good intentions. “We thought …” she jerked out, “Aristide … Milton … we all thought….” Henry stretched his legs. “You thought,” he told her calmly, “of your own skins, procedural safeguards, and all the rest of it.” Domna’s lips quivered; tears stood on her thick lashes. “Not you, Domna,” he said, more kindly. “I exempt you from such intentions. At worst, you have been thoughtless. Didn’t it occur to you, after all we have said together about Furness, that you might, just possibly might, be endangering Cathy’s life if you followed the method you approve of? What a temptation to malice to let her know, by a slip of the tongue, what was happening to her husband!” She stiffened, as if in disagreement, and stole a look at her watch. “I must hurry,” she muttered. “I have a class.” “Or an anonymous denunciation, posted to the F.B.I.?” He smiled to see that she was shocked by these possibilities he was suggesting, shocked, of course, more by him than by Furness, and, truth to tell, he enjoyed shocking her: it reinstated him at the tiller of his fate.

Actually, after his first revulsion, he was inclined to let them have their way, but not without unsettling them a little, for future policy’s sake. If he yielded now, as he proposed to do in a few moments, and Furness proved obdurate to their entreaties (as he almost certainly would), then the next step in the dance, he could promise himself, would be called by Henry Mulcahy. He himself, through a natural impatience, common in quick minds, tended to prefer the short cut, but he had sufficient experience with faculty parliamentarians to know that, in every instance, it was necessary to exhaust legal means first, “employ the existing machinery,” etcetera, before they could be brought to an action that common sense would have dictated in the first place.

“You misunderstand Furness, I think,” answered Domna in a low, serious voice. “He likes you but fears you don’t like him. He has a bad character and longs to be loved. As to whether he would tell Cathy”—she shrugged, rather dispiritedly—“what is the use of arguing? I think not, but how shall I prove it?” She shrugged again. “Naturally, if you don’t wish it, we won’t do it that way.” She spoke in a flat, stubborn voice, but her breast rose in a sigh, in memory of the work lost. “But I must tell you frankly,” she added, as if compelled by conscience, “that if you refuse to do it our way, you will probably be out on a limb. Many people who will support you humanly will not involve themselves gratuitously in a political mess.” “And if I do it your way?” he insinuated. Domna suddenly looked blank; she had not, plainly, thought ahead beyond her conviction of easy victory. “What do you people offer me in exchange for the risk I shall be running?” His tone was perfectly pleasant, but the question seemed to disturb her. “
Offer
you?” she repeated, vaguely knitting her brows. “What do you mean, Henry? That seems a most odd conception.” “What will you do,” he said, waspishly, “when Furness turns you down in the department? Does your solidarity regretfully stop there?”

Domna once again looked hurt. “Alma and I spoke of resigning,” she finally let out, in a whisper. “Wonderful,” he absently assented, but his mind was elsewhere immediately. That was the sad thing about a confederacy: nothing was ever enough. “Just you and Alma?” he queried in a wistful tone, for already he was thinking in terms of a whole department. Domna flushed, which recalled him to the present and to the gratitude he was supposed to be showing. “Overlook my behavior,” he begged her. “I’m half crazy. I hardly know what I’m saying. Anything you want to do, of course, will be right because
you
decide to do it. Forgive me for questioning you at all. The defendant or victim in such cases as mine ought to be held incommunicado till his well-wishers have concluded their efforts. To be a victim or a defendant is simply inhuman. It brings out all one’s paranoia. Do whatever you think best and ignore me.” He spoke swiftly, bobbing his head in contrition, and then scrambled out of the car and hurried around to the other side to help her alight. Howard Furness, who had stopped for gas down the street, watched, behind the pump, while Mulcahy guided her solicitously into the restaurant.

“L
OOK HERE, ALMA,” COUNTERED
Howard Furness, with a light rasp in his tenor voice, “how do we know any of this is true?” The teacup on his saucer lurched and slopped as he spoke; they were drinking tea in her apartment in Linden Hall; a meeting of the full department was scheduled to begin here in a few moments, and Howard had arrived first, by design. Already, he felt captious and stubborn. “You take too much for granted,” he decreed roughly, thrusting a cigarette into his holder; like everything he did when he was jarred, this ordinary action seemed brutal and personal, a violation of frontiers. In silence, Alma passed him a little box of Vulcan matches. She was a widow of forty, small, dark, wiry, energetic, with a passion for Jane Austen and Goethe, the poles of an unusual temperament, which was at once rough-hewn and fanciful, delicate and dynamic. Twenty years ago, she had been a New Woman, of the
femme savante
school, and she had not been altered either by marriage or by the death of her life-companion—it was as though she had lost a congenial sister or a woman colleague with whom she had shared a flat and a small collection of books, bibelots, and common habits; having lived together with Mr. Fortune by a continuous stipulation of mutual consent, she had allowed him his independence in departing. She dressed in jerseys and wool skirts and brogues, wore a boyish haircut and necklaces of turquoise or Mexican silver, was fond of tea, little Cuban cheroots, Players, English Ovals, candied ginger, and so on. In the spring, she picked the first violets; in the autumn, a bouquet of wild grasses, which stood all winter on her mantel in a brass container. She was both extremely outspoken and extremely reserved; her personality was posted with all sorts of No Trespassing signs and crisscrossed with electric fences, which repelled the intruder with a smart shock. To men, in particular, the protocol of her nature was bewildering, like court etiquette; like a queen, too, she had her favorites, who were permitted familiarities and indulgences not granted to their superiors in rank or outward attainments—at Jocelyn, this footstool position was occupied by Henry Mulcahy and his dependents.

Howard Furness was a friend of Alma’s, but she pricked him continually, like a nettle. Her black, wizened, peppercorn eyes regarded him with a permanent twinkle which anticipated his weakness and shriveled his independence; she would seldom speak to him seriously, except on department business, called him “Howie,” or “little Howie,” though he stood five feet nine, or even, when specially humoring him, her “little manikin-minikin,” which suggested, and not only to Howard’s mind, a dressed department-store dummy or a ventriloquist’s puppet. In moments of peace, he endured this, but in moments of crisis, like the present one, he was driven to take up with her a peculiarly sidling and derogatory tone, full of insinuation, as though he coarsely “saw through” her, like that of a boy to his sister. And at bottom, he did murkily consider all attainment, idealism, and so forth, to be a sort of speciousness; the upper world, for him, was divided into admitted frauds, hypocritical frauds, unconscious frauds: this fraudulence, in fact, to his glazed-pottery-blue eye, constituted the human, and below it was only animal activity, which was of no interest or amusement to the observer. Every relationship, therefore, propelled itself for him toward confession and mutual self-exposure; the slurrings and elisions of his voice conspired to this end; even in his ingratiating mood, his talk had a sidelong motion, suggestive of complicity. At the same time, he had a firm sense of what was reasonable and proper, of the Palladian façade of appearances and observances, a sense which was at present aggrieved by the farrago of incoherent accusation which was being offered him in all earnestness by a woman of supposedly critical temper; his jealousy of Mulcahy was sharpened by creative envy—to what lengths would sheer audacity carry the man?

Yet his natural envy, as of a fellow safe-cracker, together with a respect for the laws of slander, imposed on him a code, if not of silence, at any rate of restraint. He would do no more than restively hint his belief that Hen was lying, and this made him irritable, since nobody, he knew, would credit him with a voluntary act of abstention, but, on the contrary, everyone would gladly misjudge him and suppose that careerist motives kept him from supporting a colleague whom actually he distrusted for impersonal reasons and in the end from a sense of proportion. He made a deft little grimace and pushed his cup aside. “Let’s try to keep our heads,” he advised, with a worldly flourish of the cigarette-holder. “We’re all sorry for Cathy, but that’s the risk Hen has run. Frankly,” he shrugged, “the human angle leaves me rather cold. We all have our hard-luck stories, and Cathy was Hen’s lookout.” A peculiar, provocative smile had become affixed to his features, and his voice had a ring of defiance; in this atmosphere of coddling, he felt it his duty to vaunt himself as a particularly hard-boiled egg, but he found a cool pleasure in the role that outstripped his corrective intention; the desire to be original passed, through justification, into a positive wish to offend.

“In Maynard’s place,” he rather airily announced, “I should have acted sooner. For six months, at least, our friend Hen has been asking to be fired, and today he finally got what he was looking for. I’m not interested in his Party membership, or the meetings he went to; the more fool he, if he didn’t break with the Party when the breaking was good.” His voice had begun to rise, despite himself; Alma’s assessing silence worked on him like a reproach. “What you fine people choose to ignore,” he said, curbing himself, “is the academic record. In the two years he’s been here, how many times has he turned in his achievement sheets on schedule? Or reported class absences? Or filled in the field-period reports? How many conferences has Hen missed? Have you any idea?” In reply, Alma slightly lifted her shoulders, as though to deprecate all this as immaterial. There was a knock on the door, and Aristide softly entered; with an air of great precaution, like a late theatre-goer who fears to interrupt the performance, he tiptoed across the room and lowered himself onto the Empire sofa. As Howard’s indictment continued, his mild, smooth, benign face, like a Swiss weather-clock, registered a variety of alarmed expressions, from administrative pain to total mystification; this recital of quotidian misdemeanors affected him like a traveler’s tale, an account of strange customs prevailing among unfathomable peoples. “Last summer,” Howard concluded, with a sweep of the white cuff, “seven of Hen’s students wrote me, wanting their projects back. The others apparently didn’t care.” He gave a little laugh, in tribute to his normal skepticism. “We have
some
duty to the students, I assume. Little Elmendorf, let me remind you, nearly didn’t graduate last year when Hen mislaid her thesis and insisted, in the department, that it had never been turned in.” He quirked an eyebrow. “We know enough elementary Freud by this time to see the psychopathology of that. Little Elmendorf’s father, as we have cause to remember, was a trustee.”