The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (17 page)

“Very well,” he acceded, with a sigh.

“In this instance,” his Diotima continued, “we
must
let Maynard know that he is living in the real world, that if he takes certain actions certain consequences will irreparably follow. If I make my resignation contingent on concessions from him, he will never be sure that I would have gone through with it, that he couldn’t have won me back in June or during the summer term. In fact, the whole tendency, Hen, of a conditional resignation would be to encourage Maynard to procrastinate, stave off any decision in the hope that I might exercise the proverbial woman’s privilege and change my mind. And, oh my dear, who knows? Perhaps I would,” she exclaimed on a more sprightly note. “We’re weak vessels, all of us, we thinking reeds. I hold it safer to burn my bridges.”

She snapped a rubber band around her notes and stood up, with a shake of her skirt. “I have a class,” she apologized and rapped him with her knuckles sympathetically on the arm. “Don’t worry. One resignation will be enough to give Maynard an idea of how the wind blows. He’ll be taking in sail soon. Wait and see if he doesn’t. You have other friends, you know. Even poor Howie is having some second thoughts. He’s afraid that Domna will be next, and you know his little
penchant
there.”

Henry made a sour face. “Domna will never resign,” he asserted, not knowing why he said this. Now that Alma was leaving him, he felt all at once abandoned, cheated, misused; he picked on Domna, partly to vent his mistrustfulness on a convenient target, and partly to detain Alma; yet the instant he had spoken he had a vicious certainty that he was right. “Domna is very young,” pensively observed Alma. “Moreover, she has a moral problem. We talked it over together last night.” Henry’s suspicions returned; he disliked the suggestion of “sharing” or “quiet time” that had come into Alma’s voice and felt like a carcass greedily picked between the two of them—what
were
their relations anyway? No wonder Domna had been too busy to telephone him with the news. “She isn’t altogether sure in her own mind,” said Alma thoughtfully, “whether she
wants
to stay at Jocelyn. If she’s going to resign in any case, she feels that it might be dishonest for her to let Maynard think, by resigning now, that she was doing it on your account. Or, conversely, if she resigns now, she feels that she might be under an obligation to stay if Maynard renews your contract.” Henry made a movement of impatience. “What infernal jesuitry!” he exclaimed. Alma shook her head at him, reproachfully. “No, my dear. You are quite wrong. Domna must know what she wants herself before she can rush into an action. There’s a side of her—she confessed it—that merely wants to emulate me. And another side, related to it, that would like to take credit for a principled action while suiting its own convenience. It was I, if you must know, Hen, who warned her against this possibility.”

“I see,” said Henry, slowly, with a polite show of being convinced; in one part of his intelligence, he was, if not convinced, then impressed by this exercise of feminine scruples; he stored the lesson away in his memory against the future. “But Alma,” he interposed, as she made again to leave, “I don’t precisely follow how this argument can apply to Domna and not to you. If Domna must withdraw her resignation when Maynard renews my contract, why not you? It would seem to me that the same principle holds.” Alma’s eyes crinkled with laughter. “That’s a man for you,” she cried. “It’s not the same at all. Domna, you see, would sacrifice herself by staying. My sacrifice is to go. It’s very important,” she continued, soberly, tapping him with a forefinger, “to play for real stakes in these cases. You are worth something to us, my dear friend, and we must show that we mean it. No flimflam or mere attitudinizing. Until Domna decides in her own mind whether she would stay on at Jocelyn if this unfortunate thing hadn’t happened, she has no way of knowing whether it would cost her anything to resign. And she must
not
resign until she knows.” In the peremptory underscorings of that voice he heard the echo of many a formidable tutorial; Alma had what he had characterized as a sentimental severity that scared the girls stiff and left the boys stolid: many a soft lower lip had been sharply caught back and bitten, as Mrs. Fortune, leaning forward across her desk, eyes glistening and chin propped on her knuckles, lovingly impaled a moral weakness and squeezed it, like a pimple. “I see,” he repeated.

And as he hurried off to telephone Cathy, he did indeed see, he believed, something which had not come under Alma’s notice: the older woman, surely, was devoured by pride and watchful envy of the younger and wanted to have all the honors of a disinterested action to herself. She it was of course—how crudely she had given herself away!—who had talked the stupid Domna carefully out of the limelight. The girl had been all set to resign yesterday afternoon—she had told him so herself—and had simply let herself be bamboozled out of double billing. Yet it was clever of Alma, he had to admit, to have fixed on the typically Russian preoccupation with motive to divert the girl from her own rightful claims on celebrity; nothing would have served so well. The conceit of the “noble” action, he said to himself, chuckling,
l’acte gratuit,
the selfless, improvident, senseless, luxurious, spendthrift action, this had touched the soft spot of the little iron maiden, so resolved to distinguish herself from the others, the mere
canaille
of the faculty whose ancestors had had to work for a living, by the implacable purity of her motives. He was in no mood now to carp at this jousting of the two ladies for favor, which had a certain charm as well as a higher utility; all honors to Alma for carrying off the first round of the tourney. Yet even as he fancied them caparisoned for battle, another idea genially obtruded itself, like the gloss of a Marxist critic; he smiled sardonically as he walked.

In Domna, he was ready to wager, there was a
fond
of shrewdness, a sharp mother-wit, as there had been in old Tolstoy, that knew which side its bread was buttered on. The silken shirt under the peasant blouse—he had heard Domna hotly deny this story related of the old sinner, and then, characteristically, defend it by paradox. After all, the Marxians were not so wrong to look for the economic base—with Alma out, Domna would be the reigning
précieuse
of the department, with a step up in rank, very likely, and a nice little salary hike. He would not be surprised, for that matter, if Alma herself did not have another appointment tucked up her sleeve. More power to her, he thought succinctly; so long as she kept it dark. And yet, along with his relief, if this should be so, he admitted to a certain wry disappointment which made him dismiss the suspicion as if it had come from someone else.

Having been persuaded,
faute de mieux,
to accept Alma’s resignation in its present and no doubt irrevocable form, he was free at last to take a satisfaction in it that had been coursing through him all along, like a subterranean rivulet which he had tried dutifully to hold within bounds but which now bubbled up in a freshet of joy and, yes, brotherhood. He longed to share with the incredulous, infidel world the glad news of what Alma had done for him, the splendid finality of the thing, a bursting of the bonds of materialism and selfishness that turned the wintry morning, as he sped along, chin burrowed in his coat-collar, into an Eastertide. And as he walked, he argued
sotto voce
with an imaginary opponent, a devil’s advocate who tried, of course, to strip the act of its significance, reduce it to the level of things seen every day. How many others, answered Henry, would have been equal to it; how many cases could you name in recent academic history where such solidarity has been manifested, straight off, the first crack out of the box, without anybody’s asking for it? He nodded to passing students, promising himself that in time these too would hear what Cathy’s condition unfortunately now interdicted, and yet at the some time he wondered whether everybody’s well-meant efforts at secrecy
could
keep the story, once it broke, from spreading like wildfire on the campus. Howard Furness would soon be talking and Miss Crewes, of course, Maynard’s secretary—how could you hope at Jocelyn to keep such a scandal under wraps?

“I told her,” he said breathlessly to John Bentkoop, whom he ran up against in the main building, in the milling, mid-morning crowd by the mail-safes, “I told her that there were things one couldn’t accept, that I was grateful to her for her warmheartedness, but that I couldn’t willingly see her expose herself to the proscriptions of our present era, which hasn’t been surpassed, I assure you, since the times of Sulla or Diocletian. After what I’ve been through myself, I couldn’t permit another human being….” He broke off as a few curious students began to collect at his elbow. Young John withdrew a long hand from his mail-safe, glanced through his mail leisuredly, and gripped Henry’s shoulder. “Easy,” he advised in his cavernous and yet fraternal American voice. “That’s Alma’s affair, Hen; you must let her take care of it.” Under his gaze, which warningly identified them, the students moved off. He was a follower of Niebuhr and Barth, a farm-boy of the region who had gone to Jocelyn on a scholarship, lost his faith and regained it through the medium of anthropology. Every word he uttered had a weight of great consideration, and his deep young voice creaked, like a pair of high shoes ascending a dark stairway with precaution. He had large, grave brown eyes, with a strange blackish glitter in their depths, a long face, lantern-jawed, but rather winsome, and a crew haircut. “The time may have come in Alma’s life,” he pontificated, “when a change may have great value. We don’t make such decisions until we’re inwardly prepared for them. You may have been merely the necessary stimulant for a fruition long overdue.” A dim smile, touching his cheekbones, like a ray of light falling from a clerestory, indicated that this remark was illuminated by the comic spirit.

Mulcahy recognized, with discomfort, that he had begun on a false note. Nevertheless, he persisted. “No, John,” he said apologetically, “you’re all wrong. There’s no need to pretend that everything is for the best in the best of all Leibnitzian worlds. This is going to be an awful wrench for Alma. Her whole life and her memories are here. She’s made an extraordinary sacrifice. She doesn’t pretend otherwise, and I’m grateful to her for not pretending. She said in so many words that she wished me to know what I was worth to her, what my continuance here was worth to her and to all my friends.” Bentkoop’s jaws flexed, but he said nothing. Mulcahy saw in a disillusioning flash that none of these “friends” cared to hear of Alma’s sacrifice, lest it be construed as a demand on themselves, like those oral pledges made at charitable meetings. “Naturally,” he went on, with a short laugh, “I don’t expect
everybody
to commit suttee for me. Though just between ourselves, I have a suspicion that Domna and Alma are vying for the honors of the widow’s pyre. I really shouldn’t say that,” he added, seeing a shade of interest cross the young man’s face. “It’s all Alma’s show and more credit to her. Amazing woman, don’t you think?” In his refusal to be dislodged from his topic, he found himself beginning to babble. “But I must tell you, she had a wonderful formulation, quite in character for her, straight out of the feminist movement, with the sound of the doors slamming in the Doll’s House. She said ‘there’s no other way for a man or an institution to learn that one is serious than to learn it too late.’” He looked at Bentkoop expectantly; Bentkoop gravely nodded. “I have a tutee coming; how about you, Hen?” he interposed, with just a hint of admonishment. Mulcahy had the unpleasant feeling that all through this conversation there had been pity for himself in the atmosphere. He had already missed an appointment this morning and wondered if Bentkoop knew it. Bentkoop had the office just across the hall and often left his door open, as though to spy on his comings and goings. “Very likely,” he said shortly. “They keep changing their hours.
I
can’t keep track of them. Half the time I wait there and they don’t show up. Then they have the hypocrisy to go and complain to the registrar.”

“Come on, boy,” said Bentkoop equably, with again that nuance of understanding in his manner, as though, thought Mulcahy spitefully, he were guiding a drunkard past a beckoning saloon door. They walked back across the campus together.

“I imagine Maynard is on the hot seat this morning,” confidently remarked Mulcahy, as they came abreast the Administration Building; he could not resist a final allusion to Alma’s
coup de foudre.
“Poor fellow,” observed John, unexpectedly. Mulcahy’s eyes dilated. “What do you mean,
poor fellow
?” he scornfully cried. “I should think I was more to be pitied. Or Alma.” Bentkoop gripped his arm again; he wore a long dark back-belted coat of a cheap shaggy material much affected by priests and young existentialists. “Don’t harrow yourself so, Hen,” he murmured, with a moved note in his deep voice that touched and surprised Mulcahy. “Don’t deliberately try to think we’re all against you. I’m on your side, boy. Surely Domna told you. What I meant was simply that I shouldn’t like to be in Maynard’s shoes. A man who does a foolish thing is more to be pitied than his victim, provided the victim has recourses. How would you like to be opening Alma’s letter, receiving petitions, listening to deputations …?” Henry’s heart gave a surge of happiness. “Deputations?” he ventured.

John kicked away a clinker on the walk. “So I understand,” he said. “But who?” marveled Henry. “When?” “Domna and myself, I believe,” answered John casually. “It’s not been decided for certain yet. There’s to be another meeting, I’m told, at lunch-time. You know, Hen, if I were you, I’d try to stay out of this thing as much as is humanly possible. Everything’s being done that can be done, as they tell the patient’s relatives. This is an operation; anesthetize yourself till it’s over any way you know how. You’ll only alienate sympathy if you don’t keep your hand out of it. You have more at stake than we have, which makes you more eager, more fearful that we’re not doing the right thing by you.
You
can’t help it, but the public doesn’t like it. That’s the terrible thing about victims,” he added thoughtfully. “In fact, you could define a victim as one who must be more concerned about himself than anybody else is for him. Even Christ on the cross had such a moment: ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’”