When the Bough Breaks (31 page)

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t say. It never would. Some transgression. With his family background it had to be something big. Something that made the school want to wash its hands of him.” She looked up at me. “This is getting interesting, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

She put the cards back in the envelope and locked it in her desk.

“I’ll take you to Van der Graaf now.”

22

A
GILDED CAGE
of an elevator took us to the fifth floor of a domed building on the west side of the campus. It relaxed its jaws and let us out into a silent rotunda, wainscoted in marble and veneered with dust. The ceiling was concave plaster upon which a now-faded mural of cherubs blowing bugles had been painted: we were inside the shell of the dome. The walls were stone and gave off an odor of rotting paper. A stationary diamond-paned window separated two oak doors. One was labeled MAP ROOM and looked as if it hadn’t been opened in generations. The other was blank.

Margaret knocked on the unadorned door and, when no answer was forthcoming, pushed it open. The room it revealed was high-ceilinged and spacious, with cathedral windows that afforded a view of the harbor. Every free inch of wall space was taken up by bookshelves crammed haphazardly with ragged volumes. Those books that hadn’t found a resting place in the shelves sat in precariously balanced stacks on the floor. In the center of the room was a trestle table piled high with manuscripts and still more books. A globe on a wheeled stand and an ancient claw-footed desk were pushed in the corner. A McDonald’s take-out box and a couple of crumpled, greasy napkins sat atop the desk.

“Professor?” said Margaret. To me: “I wonder where he’s gone.”

“Peek-a-boo!” The sound came from somewhere behind the trestle table.

Margaret jumped and her purse flew out of her hands. The contents spilled on the floor.

A gnarled head peeked around the curled edges of a pile of yellowed paper.

“Sorry to startle you, dear.” The head came into view, thrown back in silent laughter.

“Professor,” said Margaret, “shame on you.” She bent to retrieve the scattered debris.

He came out from behind the table looking sheepish. Until that point I’d thought he was sitting. But when the head didn’t rise in my sight I realized he’d been standing all along.

He was four feet and a few inches tall. His body was of conventional size but it was bent at the waist, the spine twisted in an S, the deformed back burdened with a hump the size of a tightly packed knapsack. His head seemed too large for his frame, a wrinkled egg topped by a fringe of wispy white hair. When he moved he resembled a drowsy scorpion.

He wore an expression of mock contrition but the twinkle in the rheumy blue eyes said far more than did the downturned, lipless mouth.

“Can I help you, dear?” His voice was dry and cultured.

Margaret gathered the last personal effects from the floor and put them in her purse.

“No, thank you, Professor. I’ve got it all.” She caught her breath and tried to look composed.

“Will you still come with me on our pizza picnic?”

“Only if you behave yourself.”

He put his hands together, as if in prayer.

“I promise, dear,” he said.

“All right. Professor, this is Bill Roberts, the journalist I spoke to you about. Bill, Professor Garth Van der Graaf.”

“Hello, Professor.”

He looked up at me from under sleepy lids.

“You don’t look like Clark Kent,” he said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Aren’t newspaper reporters supposed to look like Clark Kent?”

“I wasn’t aware of that specific union regulation.”

“I was interviewed by a reporter after the War—the big one. Number two—pardon the scatological entendre. He wanted to know what place the war would have in history.
He
looked like Clark Kent.” He ran one hand over his liver-spotted scalp. “Don’t you have a pair of glasses or something, young man?”

“I’m sorry, but my eyes are quite healthy.”

He turned his back to me and walked to one of the bookshelves. There was queer, reptilian grace to his movements, the stunted body seeming to travel sideways while actually moving forward. He climbed slowly up a footstool, reached up and grabbed a leatherbound volume, climbed down and returned.

“Look,” he said, opening the book which I now saw was a looseleaf binder containing a collection of comic books. “This is who I mean.”
A shaky finger pointed to a picture of the Daily Planet’s star reporter entering a phone booth. “Clark Kent.
That’s
a reporter.”

“I’m sure Mr. Roberts knows who Clark Kent is, Professor.”

“Then let him come back when he looks more like him and I’ll talk to him,” the old man snapped.

Margaret and I exchanged helpless looks. She started to say something and Van der Graaf threw back his head and let out an arid cackle.

“April Fool!” He laughed lustily at his own wit, the merriment dissolving into a phlegmy fit of coughing.

“Oh, Professor!” Margaret scolded.

They went at each other again, verbally jousting. I began to suspect that their relationship was well-established. I stood on the sidelines feeling like an unwilling spectator at a freak show.

“Admit it, dear,” he was saying, “I had you fooled!” He stamped his foot with glee. “You thought I’d gone totally senile!”

“You’re no more senile than I,” she replied. “You’re simply a naughty boy!”

My hopes of getting reliable information from the shrunken hunchback were diminishing by the moment. I cleared my throat.

They stopped and stared at me. A bubble of saliva had collected in the corner of Van der Graaf’s puckered mouth. His hands vibrated with a faint palsy. Margaret towered over him, legs akimbo.

“Now I want you to cooperate with Mr. Roberts,” she said sternly.

Van der Graaf gave me a dirty look.

“Oh, all right,” he whined. “But only if you drive me around the lake in my Doosie.”

“I said I would.”

“I have a thirty-seven Duesenberg,” he explained to me. “Magnificent chariot. Four hundred snorting stallions under a gleaming ruby bonnet. Chromium pipes. Consumes petroleum with ravenous abandon. I can no longer drive it. Maggie, here, is a large wench. Under my tutelage she could handle it. But she refuses.”

“Professor Van der Graaf, there was a good reason why I turned you down. It was raining and I didn’t want to get behind the wheel of a car worth two hundred thousand dollars in hazardous weather.”

“Pshaw. I took that baby from here to Sonoma in forty-four. It thrives on meteorological adversity.”

“All right. I’ll drive you. Tomorrow, if I get a good report on your behavior from Mr. Roberts.”

“I’m the professor. I do the grading.”

She ignored him.

“I have to go to the library, Mr. Roberts. Can you find your way back to my office?”

“Certainly.”

“I’ll see you when you’re through, then. Good-bye, Professor.”

“Tomorrow at one. Rain or shine,” he called after her.

When the door had closed he invited me to sit.

“I’ll stand, myself. Can’t find a chair that fits me. When I was a boy Father called in carpenters and woodcarvers, trying to come up with some way to seat me comfortably. To no avail. They did produce some fascinating abstract sculpture, however.” He laughed, and held on to the trestle table for support. “I’ve stood most of my life. In the end it probably was beneficial. I’ve got legs like pig iron. My circulation’s as good as that of a man half my age.”

I sat in a leather armchair. We were at eye level.

“That Maggie,” he said. “Such a sad girl. I flirt with her, try to cheer her up. She seems so lonely most of the time.” He rummaged among the papers and pulled out a flask.

“Irish Whiskey. You’ll find two glasses in the top right drawer of the desk. Kindly retrieve them and give them to me.”

I found the glasses, which looked none too clean. Van der Graaf filled them each with an inch of whiskey, without spilling a drop.

“Here.”

I watched him sip his drink and followed suit.

“Do you think she could be a virgin? Is such a thing possible in this day and age?” He approached the question as if it were an epistemological puzzle.

“I really couldn’t say, Professor. I only just met her an hour ago.”

“I can’t conceive of it, virginity in a woman her age. Yet the notion of those milkmaid’s thighs wrapped around a pair of rutting buttocks is equally preposterous.” He drank more whiskey, contemplated Margaret Dopplemeier’s sex life in silence, and stared off into space.

Finally he said: “You’re a patient young man. A rare quality.”

I nodded.

“I figure you’ll come around when you’re ready, Professor.”

“Yes, I do confess to a fair amount of childish behavior. It’s a perquisite of my age and station. Do you know how long it’s been since I taught a class or wrote a scholarly paper?”

“Quite a while, I imagine.”

“Over two decades. Since then I’ve been up here engaged in long solitary stretches of allegedly deep thought—actually I loaf. And yet, I’m an honored Professor Emeritus. Don’t you think it’s an absurd system that tolerates such nonsense?”

“Perhaps there’s a feeling that you’ve earned the right to retirement with honor.”

“Bah!” He waved his hand. “That sounds too much like death. Retirement with honor and maggots gnawing at one’s toes. I’ll confess to you, young man, that I never earned anything. I wrote sixty-seven
papers in learned journals, all but five utter garbage. I coedited three books that no one ever read, and, in general, pursued a life of a spoiled wastrel. It’s been wonderful.”

He finished his whiskey and put the glass down on the table with a thump.

“They keep me around here because I’ve got millions of dollars in a tax-free trust fund set up for me by Father and they hope I’ll bequeath it all to them.” He smiled crookedly. “I may or may not. Perhaps I should will it all to some Negro organization, or something equally outrageous. A group fighting for the rights of lesbians, perhaps. Is there such a cabal?”

“I’m sure there must be.”

“Yes. In California, no doubt. Speaking of which, you want to know about Willie Towle from Los Angeles, do you?”

I repeated the story about
Medical World News
.

“All right,” he sighed, “if you insist, I’ll try to help you. God knows why anyone would be interested in Willie Towle, for a duller boy never set foot on this campus. When I found out he became a physician, I was amazed. I never thought him intellectually capable of anything quite that advanced. Of course the family is firmly rooted in medicine—one of the Towles was Grant’s personal surgeon during the Civil War—there’s a morsel for your article—and I imagine getting Willie admitted to medical school was no particular challenge.”

“He’s turned out to be quite a successful doctor.”

“That
doesn’t
surprise me. There are different types of success. One requires a combination of personality traits that Willie did indeed possess: perseverance, lack of imagination, innate conservatism. Of course, a good, straight body and a conventionally attractive face don’t hurt, either. I’ll wager he hasn’t climbed the ranks by virtue of being a profound scientific thinker or innovative researcher. His strengths are of a more mundane nature, are they not?”

“He has a reputation as a fine doctor,” I insisted. “His patients have only good things to say about him.”

“Tells them exactly what they want to hear, no doubt. Willie was always good at that. Very popular, president of this and that. He was my student in a course on European civilization, and he was a charmer. Yes, Professor, no, Professor. Always there to hold out my chair for me—Lord, how I detested that. Not to mention the fact that I rarely sat.” He grimaced at the recollection. “Yes, there was a certain banal charm there. People like that in their doctors. I believe it’s called bedside manner. Of course his essay exams were most telling, revealing his true substance. Predictable, accurate but not illuminating, grammatical without being literate.” He paused. “This isn’t the kind of information you were expecting, is it?”

I smiled. “Not exactly.”

“You can’t print this, can you?” He seemed disappointed.

“No. I’m afraid the article is meant to be laudatory.”

“Hale and hearty blah-blah stuff—in the vernacular, bullshit, eh? How boring. Doesn’t it bore you to have to write such drivel?”

“At times. It pays the bills.”

“Yes. How arrogant of me not to take that into consideration. I’ve never had to pay bills. My bankers do that for me. I’ve always had far more money than I know what to do with. It leads one to incredible ignorance. It’s a common fault of the indolent rich. We’re unbelievably ignorant. And inbred. It brings about psychological as well as physical aberrations.” He smiled, reached around with one arm, and tapped his hunch. “This entire campus is a haven for the offspring of the indolent, ignorant, inbred rich. Including your Doctor Willie Towle. He descends from one of the most rarefied environments you will ever find. Did you know that?”

“Being a doctor’s son?”

“No, no.” He dismissed me as if I were an especially stupid pupil. “He’s one of the Two Hundred—you haven’t heard of them?”

“No.”

“Go into the bottom drawer of my desk and pull out the old map of Seattle.”

I did what I was told. The map was folded under several back issues of
Playboy
.

“Give it to me,” he said impatiently. He opened it and spread it on the table. “Look here.”

I stood over him. His finger pointed to a spot at the north end of the Sound. To a tiny island shaped like a diamond.

“Brindamoor Island. Three square miles of innately unappealing terrain upon which are situated two hundred mansions and estates to rival any found in the United States. Josiah Jedson built his first home there—a Gothic monstrosity, it was—and others of his ilk mimicked him. I have cousins who reside there—most of us are related in one way or the other—though Father built
our
home on the mainland, in Windermere.”