Poetic Justice (4 page)

“Eye-flies?”

“Well, something nasty. I was quoting Forster, who
happened to be writing about India at the time, so it was eye-flies.”

“Somebody said once—unlike you I never remember where I read things—that if a woman is not beautiful at twenty, it’s not her fault; if she’s not beautiful at forty, it is her fault. Have you ever thought of getting married?”

“Once or twice, lately. The ramifications of university upheavals are endless. Do you think marriage advisable? One has such lovely friendships with men whose wives were beautiful when they were twenty.”

“What a dreadfully cynical remark. Married women can have friends; the men feel, if anything, more comfortable.”

“Meaning you would feel more comfortable now if I were married.”

“Kate, don’t put words in my mouth. I was …”

“Answer me honestly, if you want me to help with your beastly crisis.”

“That’s not fair. People who demand to be answered honestly have already decided what the honest answer is. But you’d be wrong. I wouldn’t be more comfortable with you, but I think I would feel you were happier, particularly in these times of institutionalized uncertainty.”

“I’ll tell you one thing, Bill,” Kate said, recovering herself. “I have believed, in the words of a first-rate woman scholar who lived to be eighty and was always falling in love with someone, that marriage for a woman spoils the two things that make life glorious: learning and friendship. Somehow, that no longer seems so unquestionably true. Fill up your glass and tell me about Toadwell.”

“Frogmore. That you haven’t heard of him is absolutely symptomatic.”

“Oh, come on, Bill, how many deans have I heard of?”

“Can you name the Dean of Divinity? Law, Graduate Faculties, Public Administration, Business, Engineering?”

“Not Public Administration.”

“My point still holds.”

“I can only name most of the others because of the troubles last spring.”

“Fair enough. But you can’t name the Dean of the University College?”

“Frogmore?”

“Frogmore.”

“You know, Bill, it is absolutely coming over me in waves that I do not
want
to know the Dean of the University College, or University College, or …”

“Shall I tell you something? Last spring, when this place was blowing up, there was only one school in it that remained intact.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess.”

“The students of the University College occupied their own building and held it for themselves. They proved to be the only really loyal student body the whole blasted University possessed, and the University, with the gratitude and intelligence that has marked all its decisions, now wants to wash the University College down the drain.”

“Bill, I’m in Graduate Faculties. I’m planning next year’s curriculum there. I’m going to give a text course in the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, and maybe one in the literature of Emerging African Nations. I’m thinking of emigrating to an Emerging African Nation myself.

Do you really think you want to try to make this my problem?”

“Yes, lady, I do. And when your fortieth birthday comes, I shall buy you a specially lovely present for a beautiful and humane woman.”

“As Polly Spence would say—my God, Polly Spence—four-letter-word-bathroom. Bull’s, that is.”

“A
LL
I ask, Kate, is that you listen. Give it a chance. Try to remember that these are people fighting for the life of a school
they
do not need. They all have tenure in other branches of the University. It’s a matter of believing in something.”

“Even Dean Frogmore?”

“Even he.” Bill McQuire and Kate were walking toward the Faculty Club next day to attend a luncheon with Dean Frogmore and some senior members of his faculty. Kate had had to cancel two appointments to come, and she did so, finally, only as a favor to McQuire. He had known, and Kate respected him for knowing, that she had learned to refuse any official request, but was still far from immune to personal ones. “Frogmore is offered a job every other day, as president
of this college or that. Everyone’s looking for administrators; they’re almost as scarce as plumbers and doctors. Probably he’ll go off to some rural collegiate paradise before long, but I think his devotion to the University College is unquestionable. Everyone has underestimated Frogmore from the beginning, I among them. But let me tell you two things about him: he’s got guts you’ll admire, and an oily surface you’ll hate. For one thing, and I want to warn you about this in advance, knowing your prejudices, he calls everyone,
everyone
, by his first name the first moment they meet.”

“Cripes,” Kate said.

“I know; that’s why I mention it. You’re remarkably old-world in some ways, Kate.”

“Remarkably. I don’t mind going to bed at ten at night with a man I met at noon the same day, but I can’t bear being called by my first name until a relationship has had time to mature. Very old-world indeed.”

McQuire chuckled. “It’s a maddening habit—Frogmore’s, I mean. When I first met him he kept referring to Lou and Teddy, and the conversation had gone on for half an hour before I realized he was speaking of the President and Vice-President of the University. But don’t underestimate him, Kate. He really and truly wants to put the University College on the map, when the easiest thing for him to do would be to cop out.”

“It might be the easiest thing for all of us. Certainly for me. I can’t imagine, truthfully, why you think I …”

“Yes, you can. Be good now. I’ll give you a chance later to protest and thrash around, and I promise you, if your answer is really ‘No,’ I’ll back you up.”

“Which means if I act intelligently interested today,
and ask leading questions, you won’t assume I’m committed.”

“Have I told you yet today,” Bill said, “that you’re beautiful?”

The luncheon party was held in one of the private rooms of the Faculty Club. The moment Kate and Bill McQuire entered, Frogmore leaped to his feet and rushed forward to greet them at the door. Somewhat overcome by his enthusiasm, the other gentlemen already seated around the table rose to their feet, awkwardly pushing back their chairs, dropping their napkins and brushing crumbs from their laps. (It was one of the unfailing characteristics of the Faculty Club that although service never began until the latest possible moment after one had sat down, there was always present, as part of the table setting, a large, exceedingly stale roll which one found oneself compelled, in time, to pulverize, showering oneself and the table top with crumbs.)

“Please,” Kate weakly said. The academic community had taken longer than most to shake off old habits of gallantry. When Kate had first joined the faculty she had had to become inured to roomfuls of men rising to their feet as she entered. Gradually, of course, the custom had died out. Only Frogmore, with his bouncy manner and boy-scout demeanor, had trapped them into old habits.

“So this is Kate,” Frogmore said. “Thank you, Bill, for bringing her.” Kate, regarding Frogmore with a lackluster eye, avoided glancing at McQuire. Clever he: the blow fell less painfully, being expected. “Let me introduce you pronto to the others before getting under
way; we’ve got a long agenda. What will you drink, Kate? This is on me; the Dean’s slush fund.”

“A Bloody Mary please,” Kate demurely said. (Reed had often remarked that when Kate came all over demure, it meant that what she really wanted to do was put a pillow over some chap’s head and sit on it.) Kate did not like, in the ordinary way, to drink at lunch, a meal she avoided if she could, and certainly not when she was in danger of becoming involved in some internecine struggle. She had therefore hit upon the lovely stratagem of ordering a drink which was, at the Faculty Club, equal parts of Worcestershire sauce and watery tomato juice with as little vodka as made no difference to anyone not a teetotaler on principle.

“You know everybody, I’m sure,” Frogmore said. “Luther Hankster of Biology.” Kate, indeed, had stood side by side with Luther Hankster when the police had first and, as it turned out, abortively, been called to clear out the administration building. Playboy turned radical, Hankster kept more or less in the good graces of his colleagues by his unerring good manners and the careful use of a voice never, ever, raised. He was given to outrageously radical pronouncements which, had they been delivered in any but the voice of a man making secret love, would have instantly offended everyone.

“George Castleman, of course, is our guiding star.” Kate wanted to ask Castleman if he had been tempted lately to public disrobement, but contained herself; she wondered anew at the passion for clichés which seemed, in Frogmore’s case, almost to equal his passion for first names. Castleman, if not a guiding star, was certainly a power in the University, on all the vital committees and
possessed of the kind of political acumen that was almost as rare in an academic community as inspired teaching.

“Herbert Klein, Political Science. Herbie, I believe you’re not as well known to Kate as the rest of us.” “Herbie,” a man of enormous dignity and baleful looks, rose and shook Kate’s hand with a firmness clearly indicating his wish to dissociate both of them from Frogmore’s unearned intimacy. Kate wondered if anyone else had ever called him Herbie in his life. “We hope you will be able to help us, Professor Fansler,” he formally said. Kate suppressed a grin.

“And,” Frogmore went relentlessly on, “this is the other stranger to you, Kate: John Peabody, a student in the University College.”

“Hi,” said Peabody, to whom formality was unknown. Kate looked up in surprise. Although the principle of students serving on all the governing bodies of the University had by now been given token acceptance, in fact where there was a need for delicate decisions, students had so far not usually been present. Peabody, though, was older than any ordinary college man: he looked nearer thirty than twenty.

“And Tony Cartier is of course from your own department.” Kate could never resist smiling at the sight of Cartier: his ill-controlled restlessness made luncheon meetings a torture to him; he would glance wildly about as though at any moment someone might lock the doors and keep him prisoner here forever.

The aged waiter took the order for the drinks and scrutinized it with exaggerated care. All the waiters at the Faculty Club were old and slow, though those
chosen for the private rooms were, if not fast, because that was clearly impossible, at least not deliberately slower than age and rheumatism determined. Finding, perhaps to his sorrow, no esoteric and therefore unavailable drinks on the list, the waiter departed.

Frogmore began to speak. He had not spoken long before Kate became aware that he was, for all his foolish ways, a genius at committee work. Kate, who thought herself remarkably inept on committees, recognized the talent instantly. Thank God, Kate thought; were Frogmore a bumbler they would all be wasting their patience and their time.

“Now,” Frogmore said, “let us run over the major points in a swift recapitulation, mostly for your benefit, Kate, since the rest of us have been kicking this thing around for quite a while. I don’t want to be long-winded, so I’ll get down to the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts.” (Kate had, by the end of this sentence, ceased even to wince; she was taking her beating manfully. “There is one evil which … should never be passed over in silence but be continually publicly attacked, and that is corruption of the language …” Auden had written, but then Auden’s hours were not passed amidst deans and social scientists.)

“As you know, Kate,” Frogmore went blissfully on, “the University, which used to be a collection of baronies, has got to start operating as a whole if it’s not to be part of the state system in ten years. There are certain changes we all agree on: it would take three million dollars to make our Dental School adequate; ten million to make it outstanding. Do we really need a Dental School? No, we do not. But, you see, restructuring is a
convenient excuse for carrying out long-planned hanky-panky. I take it you are familiar with Professor Jeremiah Cudlipp?” Kate, who knew a rhetorical question when she heard one, did not trouble either to nod or object. “He, of course, and his associate, Bob O’Toole, have decided that this time of restructuring is just the moment to bounce the University College off the campus altogether.”

“Bounce it?”

“Demolish it, phase it out, declare it null and void, give it the ax.”

“But Cudlipp is only Chairman of the College English Department,” Kate said.

“There is no ‘only’ about it, I’m afraid,” Castleman said. “For reasons we do not wholly understand, he is determined that the University College must go. It gives a bachelor’s degree that Cudlipp claims dilutes the prestige of the degree given by
The
College, as they so maddeningly call it. He has lots of other arguments. The point is, since he is in the English Department, we felt we needed someone in addition to Professor Cartier to help us in what is, I’m afraid, a fight for survival.”

“The College feels,” Luther Hankster whispered, “like someone with valuable suburban property whose neighbor threatens to sell to a black.”

“Does Bob O’Toole go along with this? I have always thought of him as a follower of Clemance.”

“So he is,” Castleman said. “But, as perhaps you have noticed, he possesses arrogance and ambition in about equally large proportions, which puts him squarely on Cudlipp’s side.”

“Where does Clemance stand?”

“Oh,” McQuire said, “he’s with the College; always has been. He suggests, in his marvelously reasonable way, that we are simply not ‘excellent’ enough. Which is nonsense; we are the most excellent college for adults in the country.”

“Have you had much to do with the College, Professor Fansler?” Herbert Klein asked.

“Enough to know they are in danger of giving arrogance a bad name,” Kate lightly said.

“Exactly,” Frogmore exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “Well put, Kate.”

“O.K.,” Kate said. “You want someone from the English Department—which you gather, correctly, is fed up with Cudlipp’s throwing all that weight around.” She hoped Frogmore would consider that well put too.