The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (18 page)

“You’re right,” exclaimed Henry. “You’re right.” For the second time that morning his heart was swollen with gratitude; tears came to his eyes at being understood, finally, after years of what he now understood to have been a mere fancied neglect. The idea that he had been at fault toward his colleagues entered his mind and was welcomed. “You don’t know what it means to me to be set right when I need it. People seldom speak plainly to me; it must be my own fault. I repel it with my arrogance, I suppose. I’ll try to do what you say, John; keep out of it till it’s over. No more back-seat driving. And yet, truthfully, my nerves are so bad that I hardly know whether I’m up to it. What do you think I should do, John, go home and stay there for a day or so and let Domna run the show?” “How much can you keep from Cathy?” replied John, glancing at him sidelong, with a certain curiosity. “Very little, in the past,” admitted Henry. “It’s not as though I’d had side affairs and were a practiced deceiver. Sometimes I feel sure she’ll smell it on me, like liquor or another woman.” “Better not try to stay home then,” advised Bentkoop, with what sounded like a slight loss of interest. “Stick it out here as well as you can. Work, you know. The great anodyne.” He paused as they climbed the broad stone stairs and purposefully lowered his voice. “By the way, Hen, there’s some sort of rumor around that this thing has gotten to the students. They even say that there’s a petition circulating. Do you know anything about it?”

Henry held himself taut. Experience had taught him that surprise of all reactions was the most difficult to imitate, for one was always an instant too late. He therefore remained immobile, as though frozen to stone by what he had heard, while considering what to say.
“I don’t believe it,”
he finally said, in measured tones, biting off the words, one by one. John scratched his ear, which had a rather pendulous lobe from being pulled, thoughtfully, in many a long discussion. “So they say,” he repeated. The moment prolonged itself, awkwardly. “I heard it,” he added, as though apologizing, “from Bill Fraenkel, who had it from a student. There’s a girl, Lilia Something, a freshman, who’s supposed to be passing a petition.” Mulcahy laughed. “Why, I don’t even know her,” he cried with exuberance; for a reckless moment, he had been on the verge of an admission, which the slightest real encouragement from Bentkoop might have succeeded in wringing out of him. “It just goes to show how the smallest thing gets distorted and magnified. I never heard of the girl. Probably some student grievance petition that has nothing to do with me, and Bill Fraenkel gets wind of it and tries to make me responsible.” He stopped and gnawed his lip. “As a matter of fact, John,” he suggested, “Fraenkel was in the store yesterday when I was talking to Domna—” Bentkoop put an end to this speculation. “Let’s hope you’re right,” he cut in, on a note of weariness. “I’d hate to see the students get their teeth in this one. Bad business, Hen. Bodes no good for anybody, including you, you know. I’d like to see this thing settled quietly. Maynard’s amenable to reason if you don’t force him out on a limb. If you do, there’ll be a fight, I’m afraid, and somebody’s likely to get hurt.” He scratched his ear again. “Technically, I assume you know, Hen, Maynard’s well within his rights. Since you don’t have tenure, he’s not obliged to show cause.” He broke off and held open the storm door for Mulcahy, who preceded him into the vestibule. Despite this deference, natural and proper from a younger man to an older, Mulcahy felt suddenly uneasy, as though binoculars were trained on his back.

This religious young man, he suspected, had been giving him a series of tips, like one of God’s strong men or gangsters; there was an aura of pleasant-spoken omniscience about him that reeked of spiritual blackmail. Could he be seeking to convert him to Protestantism by establishing a ghostly commerce with his conscience? Bentkoop held open the inner door, and again Mulcahy passed through ahead of him but pulled up and waited while Bentkoop stamped nonexistent snow from his overshoes. How he dallied, observed Mulcahy; as though expecting a keyword to be passed, like a priest who sits secure in the confessional, confident from long experience of the sins that will come tumbling out! Nothing further, however, was said, beyond a short good-bye, as they discerned their tutees waiting outside their separate doors. The interview, thought Mulcahy, as he unlocked his office, had a curiously raw, unfinished, and provocative quality, as if, to state it flatly, Bentkoop knew something. He felt a sudden interest in discovering Bentkoop’s real motive for supporting him, for Domna’s explanation—that Bentkoop wished to see at least one theist in the Literature department—seemed to Mulcahy all at once terribly thin and unconvincing: if this was one’s motive, one would certainly not avow it at Jocelyn. Impatiently, he wrote off the human element: Bentkoop was too intelligent to be taken in as the others were. There was something else, he was certain, some inscrutable purpose, of which he himself was either the tool or the beneficiary.

Ushering the student in, he took stock of the boy, wondering whether this weedy sophomore could be trusted to carry a message to Sheila McKay without letting the whole campus in on it, yet scrupling as to whether to call off the petition—if indeed there was one in existence—merely on Bentkoop’s say-so. There were certain interests, he abruptly perceived, notably Mr. Maynard Hoar’s, that might be very well served by having a student movement nipped in the bud; and what could be cleverer than to persuade him, through the mediation of Mr. Bentkoop, their agent, to do the job himself. It went without saying that the Administration cabal would have a spy planted, yet who would have thought they could have acted so promptly and with such amazing foresight? And what a masterstroke, he breathed, to have their spy actually appointed to serve on the proposed deputation, with only Domna to ride herd on him, a shy, high-minded girl with no experience of academic politics. Yet still, in the back of his mind, Mulcahy seesawed, accepting a paper from the student and running his eyes absently over it, while his pencil jotted corrections of spelling and punctuation: was he not being too astute, he rebuked himself, and ascribing to them a cleverness which was an attribute of his own intelligence and quite out of keeping with their own clumsy maneuvers?

It was always possible that Bentkoop had spoken to him in all good faith and sincerity, to warn him of what might be a costly mistake in timing, in which case he would do well to heed the admonition and curb his impatient disciples before they could do him harm. And yet how had Bentkoop known to come directly to him? There were a thousand ways, he assured himself, in which the students could have got hold of the story without
his
intervention. Why behave as if
he
had set the damned petition afoot? A spasm of irritation shook him. He could not determine where
their
machinations ended and his own, over-active intelligence began the work of conjecture—it was the old philosophical stickler: how to distinguish the mind’s knowledge of its objects from its experience of its own processes? In short,
can we know anything,
he muttered under his breath and raised his eyes from the paper. “Before we get on to this, Jerry,” he commenced, “could you take a message for me to one of your fellow-tutees? Don’t give it to just anybody in the dormitory. See that you tell her personally. Sheila McKay. Tell her to come to see me directly after lunch; she forgot to take her assignment and I want to explain it to her.” The boy nodded. “Glad to, Dr. Mulcahy. Do you want me to go now?” The teacher smiled at this alacrity. “No,” he said, lightly, seeing with relief and a certain pale regret that the name, Sheila McKay, had no special meaning for Jerry, and that the petition, therefore, could not be making great headway, “afterwards will do very nicely.”

D
OMNA AND JOHN BENTKOOP
sat side by side on a small horsehair-covered sofa in the anteroom of Maynard Hoar’s office. They both looked extremely nervous, like a young couple being detained in the waiting-room of a doctor’s suite or an employment or adoption agency. The role they were about to play in the history of academic causes was in the foreground of their thoughts, so that they glimpsed themselves from the outside and strove for a correct demeanor that would combine assurance with naturalness. But merely by keeping them waiting, Maynard Hoar had turned the tables on them, so that they came, they began to fear, not as advisers,
amici curiae,
but as petitioners, facing an interrogation. Conscious of Miss Crewes, the secretary, typing in the next room, they spoke in slightly raised voices of indifferent matters, meanwhile exchanging certain eye-signals commenting on the furniture, which reflected a recent visit to Wanamaker’s on the part of Mrs. Hoar. The room had been redone, to cite the
Alumni Bulletin,
“in the spirit of the old College,” with white walls, white straight linen curtains, and black Shaker reproduction chairs. On the walls were dark paintings of the first presidents, clergymen and theologians, a primitive engraving showing William Penn and the Indians, and a pastel portrait of the Founder done by a woman friend. On a table, beside the catalogue and a brown glass ash-tray, was a framed snapshot of Maynard, fishing in a local stream. Domna indicated this, and John gave a short laugh, which came out over-loud, like a bray. To cover himself, he got up and pretended to examine the picture. Domna became immersed in the catalogue.

Each in his own mind was sorting out the arguments at his disposal and setting them aside, provisionally, in hopes that the other would take the initiative. They did not know each other well, but the constraint of their detention was beginning to draw them together, like pupils called before the Principal, and to invoke in each a silent trust that the other was the bolder and stronger of the two. John’s wife had just had a baby, so that he did not go out much, and he met Domna now, as if for the first time, in the intricacies of the Mulcahy case, like a man meeting a girl in a grand right and left and finding that their steps agreed. Though an ocean and a gulf of class had separated their childhoods, their upbringing had much in common in strictness and isolation; both held the advanced ideas that had been current in the eighteen-sixties and that remained advanced in the present era, though with a certain pathos, like an old hat that has never been worn.

Ten days had passed since they had written to Maynard, asking for a date for an interview; he had answered, begging them to postpone it until the beginning of the field-period, when all concerned would be freer. This morning the college was deserted, save for the Administration Building, the Library, and one wing of a dormitory kept open for the five or six students who remained. Thanks to this postponement, Mulcahy’s supporters were already scattered: Ivy Legendre had taken a train to Florida; Aristide, with a group of French majors, was en route to Quebec with his ice-skates; Alma had gone to New York. This left no one for the deputation to report to but Van Tour and Kantorowitz and, of course, Mulcahy himself, who justifiably felt that he had been let down, despite the fact that before leaving, Ivy and Aristide had penned hasty notes to the President, questioning the termination of the appointment. Mulcahy prophesied to Domna, whom he came to see every night, that the whole movement would evaporate during the four weeks’ hiatus; he was in a baleful mood, privately ruing the day when he had let himself be tricked into squelching the student petition, and vowing vengeance on Bentkoop, whom he only spared temporarily, till the conclusion of this morning’s interview. Domna, though she did not say so, feared that he might be right, in the main—she was ignorant of his sentiments toward Bentkoop and did not know how to interpret certain darkenings of the visage when the young man’s name was spoken. She too felt that those others, if they were serious, might have sacrificed a day or two of pleasure to stand by in the crisis. Even the writing of those notes, as she murmured to Bentkoop, had become suddenly a concession bestowed on her like a papal indulgence. Like most people intent on selfish ends—she swiftly continued, looking sidewise at him, through lowered eyelashes—they had an air of strained concentration, as though on a higher duty, as though the obligation to catch a train were a species of martyrdom, exacted from them by the schedule, by nameless people who were waiting for them, i.e., hotel-keepers and the like. John nodded.

“‘You and John will handle it; everything will be all right; don’t worry,’” she quoted the guilty ones, broodily. “And such an outing suit, I assure you! Such veils and toques!” John’s noiseless laugh was tolerant; he perceived that she needed to work herself up by gloomy prognostication, and this inspired in him a protective feeling both toward her and the others. “It’s not going to be so easy!” she threw out with a foreboding look at the closed oak door into Maynard’s sanctum. The truth was, she felt abandoned by her colleagues and had begun to have doubts, not only of the outcome but of the justice of the cause, which she turned into blame of the deserters. What she longed to confide in John and dared not was that Mulcahy had been acting most strangely, coming to her house late at night, letting his satirical laugh ring out over the snowy fields till the neighbors wondered, talking excitedly over the phone in a crazy code-language, which must surely be audible to Cathy, making friends with Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones and demanding that he be added to the deputation, confabbing with Herbert Ellison, whom he named his “new disciple.” Like most Russian women of her class, she had a horror of the bizarre that could only be tamed by mirth and she feared to laugh at Henry. She had the feeling that he was slipping away from under her influence and wondered even whether she really knew him as well as she asserted to herself. The idea that she was in too deep to get out was becoming her sole reassurance, embodying all her fatalism. At the same time, of course, she reproached herself for disloyalty: these doubts, she crisply declared, were marshaled in her by selfishness and a social dread of identification with another person’s conduct.