Poetic Justice (9 page)

It was typical of Kate’s postrevolutionary attitudes that being caught in an elevator, which might, at one time, have been an adventure, was now not even material for an anecdote. She rushed up the stairs from the third floor to her office on the eighth, apologized for her lateness, and plunged into interviews with four students from University College who hoped to register for her course in Victorian literature. She recognized John Peabody from the luncheon arranged by Bill McQuire. He introduced the others: Barbara Campbell, Greta Gabriel, and Randolph Selkirk. “No doubt,” Mr. Peabody
said, “you want to know something about us, how we come to be at University College, why we want to take your course, stuff like that. It’s probably simplest if we just start in and tell you about ourselves.” To Kate, who had been uncertain what inquiries she might decently make, given, particularly, her profound disinclination to ask personal questions, this blunt prelude was a distinct relief.

“We,” Mr. Peabody began, “have all returned to college after what is known as a voluntary interruption in our education—though the word ‘voluntary’ has to be pretty broadly defined. Anyway, we weren’t bounced out of college, we bounced ourselves. And when, in the fullness of time, we decided to return to college, the last thing we wanted was dormitory life, rah-rah games, anybody being
in loco parentis
or the company of eighteen-year-olds. To us, therefore, University College seemed a kind of miracle. There aren’t many adult schools in the whole country, not many even in New York—schools which give degrees, and aren’t just places to take courses and wile away the time. University College had no athletic requirements, no organized social life, and some of us were a bit shaky at math at the time of our entrance examination. But we are all in college because we have decided to be; we are, as the saying goes, highly motivated; and most of us are even pretty bright. I might add, though Barbara can tell you more about this, that the women students are looking for a bachelor’s degree, not for a bachelor.”

Barbara Campbell was stunning, beautifully dressed, and appeared to be in her early twenties. “I’m fairly
typical, I guess,” she said with a smile which acknowledged that she certainly didn’t look typical. “I went to an excellent prep school where I was mainly interested in what our antediluvian headmistress used to call ‘the lads,’ and then to Bennington, where I spent three years—almost; I quit in the middle of my third year. I discovered at Bennington that I enjoyed thinking, and that if you work there are plenty of people who will encourage you. I worked like a demon for five days, when, since we were all girls, it wasn’t necessary to wash your hands or feet or even face if you didn’t feel like it, and every weekend I spent away from the campus with a man.

“Partly, I began to realize that I had been in an intellectual and emotional cocoon for years, and partly I just wanted to
bouleverse les parents
—at which I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. They objected to the fact that I was living with a guy, they even objected to the guy, which at least made some sense, and they said if I didn’t give him up they would stop paying for college or anything else. I didn’t and they did. After a time I got tired of the guy, and of working in the glamour trades, and I began to want to study again. I saved enough money and here I am. My parents have since come round, but I don’t take any money from them, though I have been known to accept an occasional lavish present. If I took their money they would assume, however tacitly, that I had accepted their values, and I haven’t. I want to take your course because I’ve heard you’re great, and tough, and it recently occurred to me how like a harem Bennington was. I don’t mean just that all the faculty was sleeping with the students,
I mean that all the faculty was male, and that the whole spirit behind the place was of girls sitting at the feet of men. I find the idea of a woman teacher invigorating. End of my speech—I’m to introduce Greta.”

Greta Gabriel was in her middle forties, Kate guessed. Her story resembled Polly Spence’s, though she had not yet reached the grandmother phase and was not from the upper reaches of New York society. She was a suburban housewife who had decided that her life of being maid, chauffeur, and emotional wastebasket was insufficiently inspiring. Everything about her new academic life was difficult, from the commuting to the pressures of her life’s multitudinous demands, but she felt alive for the first time in years, and indicated her gratitude for the uniqueness of University College, which allowed her really to work, not to dabble, and agreed to reward her work with a degree.

Randolph Selkirk was more unexpected. “I was at Yale,” he said, “getting A’s in everything and working all day six days a week to do it. I had a girl and one day she broke off with me, saying I wasn’t human enough for her. It took me several weeks to calm down and discover it was quite true—I wasn’t human enough for anyone. I stopped working so hard, and finally took a leave from Yale and went to work teaching in a slum school; then I married the girl, who had begun to find me more human. We had a baby, which seemed to us a proper affirmation of life, and after a time I wanted to return to school, and this was the only place that wasn’t an undergraduate society for boys or a series of money-making courses for bored adults. My wife is working to help me finish, and I can’t begin to understand why they
should want to get rid of this place—University College, I mean. Still, I’ve observed that the boys from the College are radical enough when it comes to occupying buildings, but not when it comes to supporting an institution which might challenge the status of their own degrees. I’ve noticed nobody minds being revolutionary when he doesn’t think he has anything to lose. Forgive the cynicism. If you want to know why I’d like to take this course, it’s because I’m particularly interested in the ideas of the Victorian period.”

Kate leaned back in her chair and regarded the four of them. It seemed to her, oddly, that life had walked into her academic world, impressing her as not even the police or occupying students had done. She understood why McQuire found impressive the fact that University College students had been the only ones to feel loyalty to their school. Of course, she had sensed it from the beginning—which was why she had let McQuire drag her to that lunch and entice her into conversations with Frogmore. “ ‘Your presence exactly,’ ” Kate thought, looking at them, “ ‘so once, so valuable, so very now.’ ”

“You are welcome to the course,” she simply said.

What with further student conferences, a delegation from the student-faculty committee on curriculum, a good many frantic telephone calls, and similar distractions, Kate was not able even to ascertain if there was a wind, let alone the direction in which it was blowing. At four o’clock, the hour of the Senior Faculty Committee meeting, she left her office and stopped off in the faculty ladies’ room where she found Emilia Airhart
looking at herself dubiously in a mirror. She turned, apparently with relief, to contemplate Kate. “How lucky you are!” she surprisingly said.

“I?” Kate asked. “I’m feeling lucky at the moment, for personal reasons. Does it show?”

Emilia Airhart laughed. “Probably,” she said, “but I don’t know you well enough to tell. Congratulations, whatever it is. The luck to which I referred had to do with your willowyness—I have always longed to be willowy; if only one could design oneself, instead of turning out to be some dreadful preordained shape. I would, like you, be tall and slim, with my hair gathered at the nape of my neck, attractive without being charming. You mustn’t be insulted by the last item, which is, from me, a compliment. I dislike charm, having accepted Camus’ definition of it: the ability to get the answer yes without having asked a question. I prefer people who have to form questions. Still, it is agonizing to have the soul of Greta Garbo in the body of Queen Victoria. Ergo, lucky you.”

Kate laughed. “You don’t look a bit like Queen Victoria,” she said.

“Of course I do, if you could picture Queen Victoria in panty hose with flat shoes and her skirts above her knees. I take it you are going to the Senior Faculty Committee meeting?”

“Yes,” Kate said. “And for once in my life I don’t wish I could think of an excuse not to. I go with a purpose: I’ve decided to do what I can for the University College. Do you know anything about it?”

“Haven’t a clue; ought I to have?”

“Probably,” Kate said. “But there isn’t time to go into
it now. The College is trying to kill it off, which is rather too bad, I think.”

“Nasty old Cudlipp, I suppose. Terrible man. If only he were more like Pnin.”

“Who?”

“You know, Pnin, the man in Nabokov’s novel. Cudlipp looks just like him, but, alas, couldn’t be more different. I hardly like to say that if Cudlipp and Clemance are for something, I’m against it—it sounds so unscholarly and prejudiced, which it is—but at least I’m leaning in your direction, if that’s any comfort.”

“It’s some,” Kate said. “By the way, as to my being lucky, I’m getting married. I haven’t told anyone in the Department yet, but I’ll have to soon. Perhaps it’s being unmarried that’s kept me thin.”

“Congratulations, or whatever the proper phrase is, though in a way I’m sorry.” Kate raised an interrogative eyebrow. “Don’t misunderstand me, but you’re the only woman I’ve ever known who seemed unmarried as a wonderful choice, the combined influence of Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athene all in one. Please don’t be offended.”

“On the contrary,” Kate said. “I’m honored.” Emilia gave a pleased grin and preceded Kate out the door. But Kate stopped a moment in the hall. “You know,” she said, “Forster says in one of his novels that the abandonment of personality can be a prelude to love; for most women I think it certainly is. You’ve made me see that, for me, it hasn’t been.”

“Do you like Forster?” Emilia Airhart asked. “I see you do; he’s too effete for me. But he did say once that life is a performance on a violin which one has to learn
to play as he goes along. A remarkable description of our times.”

“Gentle, perhaps,” Kate said, “not effete.”

The Senior Faculty Committee of the English Department, which comprised all tenured members of the Department, used, in pre-revolutionary days, to meet several times a semester for the purpose of discussing promotions and additions to the faculty. While these meetings were grim enough, in all conscience, a certain degree of cordiality prevailed, so that, as Kate used to say, though it might be clear that one professor thought another a tiresome, pontificating, and deluded bore, he did not openly indicate this opinion. Since last spring, however, fatigue and the plethora of meetings which the process of restructuring inevitably entailed had taken their hostages, which were, as always, good will, courtesy, and graciousness. The professors were exhausted, and exhausted people are easily made first angry and then rude.

To make matters worse, exhaustion bred not only bad temper but long-windedness. The inability of certain men, once they got to their feet, to finish a statement and sit down, amounted, in Kate’s view, to a disease as incurable as satyriasis and far more socially dangerous. She knew, as she seated herself in the room, that scarcely would Michaels, the chairman, have rustled his papers and made the few desperate grunts, punctuated by giggles, which constituted his reaction to exhaustion, than Plimsole would be on his feet and away. In fact, he was.

Plimsole was concerned, as he had been for months,
as to whether teaching assistants should be considered primarily as students, which they were, or as teachers, which they were also. The question was certainly of importance and was one, moreover, on which the radical faculty felt a consuming passion the conservative faculty was not prepared to match. This, perhaps more than anything else, annoyed Professor Plimsole. Kate could well infer from the looks on the faces of those about her that had the senior faculty had an opportunity to hear Mr. Plimsole before his promotion, that event might well have never taken place. It was, Kate thought, a mark of the need for this revolution that the faculty of departments like this never met, and the senior members never really heard the junior members at all. But, since last spring, all the meetings except those of the Senior Faculty Committees had been open to junior faculty and the long-winded Mr. Plimsoles might in the future be more successfully nipped in the bud.

“I really do feel,” Mr. Plimsole began, “that this body must come to a decision about the professional autonomy of teaching assistants. It is not that I anticipate another series of events like those which rocked this institution last spring; indeed, I would hate my colleagues to think I spoke in anticipation or even expectation of any such event, but I also do feel that we cannot allow our teaching assistants to remain in doubt as to their actual professional standing, and they are professionals, we must face that, for certainly the teaching assistants come into direct contact with students, both in actual teaching duties and in the correction of papers, and it is surely insufferable and insulting that they should be loaded with the responsibilities of teaching and then be
treated as students if they are found, for example, occupying a building, though as I have indicated I do not bring this subject up because I think buildings are likely to be occupied in the near future. But once we have co-opted them into our profession they must be treated professionally and not summarily dismissed as teachers because as students they have acted against what they consider inequitable policies on the part of the administration, whether or not those of us here consider the policies of the recent administration to have been inequitable or not …”

“His hat!” Emilia Airhart, who had risen, shouted. “His hat!” For a moment there was stunned silence as everyone tried to absorb the evident fact that Professor Airhart had flipped; Mr. Plimsole was certainly not wearing a hat, discourtesy having failed, as yet, to extend that far. Professor Airhart, having delivered her interruption, sat down again. Mr. Plimsole, as though he were an old mechanical Victrola, could be seen, metaphorically speaking, to be winding himself up again. But Professor Cartier, whose succinctness no revolution could undermine, bounced up just in time.