Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (10 page)

She stuffed her hanky back in her purse and reached out for his left hand, holding it tight in both of hers. “You’re right,
Michael, in everything you said. Damnit, I know why people get frustrated with you sometimes and are secretly afraid of you.
Your mind is like a rifle bullet when you decide to let it run full tilt, and that’s scary. Carolyn, the dean’s wife, said
that about you the first day I met you. She said, ‘Michael Tillman frightens the hell out of Arthur, and Arthur retaliates
in mean little ways.’ The dean was going to turn you down for full professor on those grounds alone, even though you’d done
twice as much work as it took to qualify. Carolyn told him, ‘Arthur, you pull that piece of crap on Michael and you’ll see
me waving from the first train out of Cedar Bend.’ “

Now they had Carolyn and Arthur into it. Jellie kept wandering away from the subject, but he understood why. There was a door
closing behind them, and she wanted to keep it open all the while she was pulling it shut.

“Jellie, let’s let it rest where it is. You know where to find me. Come by if you feel you can. Hell, I just like to be around
you, to look at you, to smell your perfume when I get close, which I haven’t done nearly enough.”

“I don’t think so. There’s something about being in each other’s presence that’s just too strong for me— for both of us. I
came off the plane clear-headed and ready to tell you exactly how I felt and what I was going to do, now here I am turning
into mud pie. I’ve got to get my life organized again. I’m going to take another class this fall, so I’ll be on campus three
days a week. If I feel okay about it, I’ll stop by to see you. If I don’t, and I probably won’t, it’s not because I’m not
thinking about you. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes. I understand, Jellie. I don’t like it, but I understand. And I’ll be thinking about you, too. That’s all I ever seem
to do anymore.”

As they left the Ramada bar, Jellie pulled a small package from her purse and handed it to him. “I forgot to give you this.”

He tore open the wrapping. Inside was a belt made of English bridle leather with
Orville
hand-tooled on the back.

Michael took the Shadow out of town and let it go all the way to Des Moines, where he turned around and came back into Cedar
Bend through one of those soft August twilights. Going home past the campus, he could hear the marching band practicing, getting
ready for the first football game. They were playing some old song from some old movie. Michael Till-man couldn’t remember
the name of either the song or the movie, because he was thinking about Jellie Braden and wondering how he was going to get
through the years ahead without her.

The lights in Bingley Hall flickered on, and the race to December got under way. Jimmy Braden came by Michael’s office for
new ideas, and the football team was doing well. On those Saturdays when the team was playing at home, the streets were packed
with Cadillacs and Lincolns, driven by overweight men who wrote out large checks to the athletic department and whose daughters
were in the best sororities.

Michael paced the classroom, tossing a piece of chalk up and down in his right hand. “Consider, for a moment, the nature of
systemic problems, the elements of a puzzling issue and the subtle, intricate relationships among those elements. What we
must do is learn how to overcome what I long ago began to call the Archimedean Dilemma.” He always hesitated at this point
and looked out at the class. “Who, by the way, was Archimedes?” They all focused on their notebooks, pretending to be doing
something.

He pushed and prodded, and finally a young man (bad complexion, front row) said hesitantly, “Wasn’t he some kind of scientist
or something?”

Michael gave them a two-minute capsule on the life and times of the Greek mathematician. After that, he picked up the thread
of the lecture again. “Archimedes said, ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.’ That’s what structural
modeling is all about, finding a lever, a place to stand, an angle of entry into complexity.” He paused, thinking of Jellie,
while the students wrote in their notebooks and wondered if he would ask about Archimedes on the first examination.

During the second week of school he was looking out the window while covering a fine point in Boolean algebra, looking at
nothing except the quaver of now turning leaves in the wind of September, and saw her. At first it didn’t register, since
he was working hard at getting the students to appreciate the intellectual leavings of one George Boole, the nineteenth-century
mathematician who took formal logic up about fifty notches. But the long-legged walk and tweed cap finally got his attention—Jellie.
He stopped talking, he wasn’t sure how long, and watched her wind along a sidewalk, knapsack over her shoulder. Jellie from
a distance, always from a distance. When she moved out of sight, he turned back to the class. They were all looking at him
in a strange kind of way. His face, maybe, or his body. They saw something, in his eyes or the momentary sag of his shoulders,
and they knew they hadn’t seen it before. Michael glanced at the wall clock. Five minutes to go. “That’ll be all for today,”
he said. As he scraped up lecture notes from the desk in front, they filed out, some of them giving him sidelong glances and
talking to one another. A young woman whispered, “Did you see how he looked? What happened to him all of a sudden?”

Michael hadn’t realized how much it showed. Jellie was right in believing they had to stay apart. Aside from protecting themselves
from each other, people would start to pick up on how they felt, even if they were merely in the same room together. He’d
been looking at advertisements for faculty positions in the
Chronicle,
but at his salary and rank it would be difficult to make a move. Besides, with his mother’s health declining, he felt a responsibility
to stay in the middle of the country and not be too far from her. Still there might be something somewhere that met his requirements
and took him away from the town where Jellie Braden lived.

It’s hard to say where all this might have gone if it hadn’t been for the ducks. Probably to the same place by a different
route. The history of the situation is this: University presidents relish new buildings, so do Boards of Education. Bingley
Hall was just fine—old, but with a patina of learning and struggle rubbed into its corridors and heavy in its air. Still,
the president decided one of his premier colleges needed a new building. Presidents don’t bequeath knowledge or grateful students
to the world, they leave behind bricks and mortar. Whether those bricks and mortar are actually necessary is irrelevant. The
important thing is to get money and build buildings carrying the names either of heavy donors to the university or members
of the administration who served the university loyally, though not necessarily brilliantly.
The Arthur J. Wilcox College of Business and Economics
—you could see the lettering in the dean’s rodentlike eyes as he scooted around Bingley Hall with rolled-up blueprints clutched
in his sweaty paws. Fat chance.

The money could have been used for faculty salaries or student financial aid, but that’s never in the cards. As the president
was fond of saying, privately, of course, “It’s much easier to get money for buildings than it is for faculty salaries.” But,
in spite of hard economic times in the state, the board floated a bond issue and ponied up $18 million for a new building.
That had occurred the previous winter, and final construction plans were now being drawn.

Arthur posted emerging versions of the plans in the coffee room for everyone to slobber over. Michael was standing there looking
at an updated set and noticed the location of the new building had been moved fifty yards from its original site. “They’re
going to put the sonuvabitch right over the duck pond,” he said to no one in particular. The other faculty members present
looked at him in a way that said, “So what?”

Michael went to see Arthur and explained to him the rather neat and profound role the pond played in the traditions of the
campus. It wasn’t much in terms of water area, elliptically shaped and maybe a hundred feet long by fifty feet wide. But it
was home for little geezers with orange legs who looked at Michael when he walked by and went “Quack” when he grinned and
said hello to them.

It was also a place for moonlight walks and tender thoughts, a place where ten thousand engagement rings had been slipped
over shaking fingers through the years, not to mention various other assignations getting a little more carnal late at night.
When Michael looked out his office window, he could see the ducks on their pond a block away, and often he had found solace
in that when dealing with education gone berserk.

But guys like Arthur J. Wilcox have no appreciation for tradition, it’s not tangible enough. Michael talked hard, but it didn’t
register. Arthur just kept saying, “But, Michael, we need a new building.”

“What about the ducks?” Michael was angry. “Where will they go? Are we going to build a new eighteen-million-dollar pond for
them, too?”

Arthur didn’t understand ducks, either. You could see it on his face. That and the plain wish Michael would just go away and
leave him alone with his blueprints.

Michael was pretty sure he wouldn’t have raised as much hell about the duck pond as he did if he hadn’t been half-crazed with
sorting out his feelings in those days, trying to push Jellie far back and out of his mind and failing in that attempt. He
worked his way up through the provost, who didn’t understand ducks any better than Arthur. Stomping past Clarice’s desk on
his way out of the provost’s office, he turned around, then talked with her for a moment.

Next he made an appointment to see the president. Michael laid out his case: Move the building, keep the duck pond. The prez
was smooth. Years of dealing with demented faculty and recalcitrant alumni who stapled their checkbooks shut when they saw
him coming had provided him with a sheen and style worthy of the very best (or worst, depending on your point of view) slithering
public relations man.

“Professor Tillman, I do understand your concerns. Tradition is important, I agree with you. But in evolving times we must
sometimes cast off our old traditions and establish new ones. I like ducks, too. In fact, I’m a member of Ducks Unlimited
and go duck hunting every fall.”

Michael was wondering if, in addition to professional incompetence and moral degradation, presidential dismemberment was sufficient
cause for loss of tenure.

One of the best students Michael ever had went on to law school and stayed in Cedar Bend after graduating. Michael called
him. “Gene, what can be done to prevent these clowns from pouring cement over ducks and tradition?”

Gene always had a soft spot for radical causes, so he looked into it. He called back in two days, flat out saying the building
couldn’t be halted by legal chicanery. Something to do with state law and a Board of Education master plan for masterful buildings
and a master race.

“Screw ’em, Gene. I’m going to plant myself right in the middle of that pond and make ’em drag me out with chains.”

“Michael, I’ll defend you free of charge if you do it. But you’re going to lose. You’ll be better off spending your time looking
for another home for the ducks.”

Knowing bureaucrats hate bad publicity more than anything else, Michael wrote a long article for the university newspaper,
making what he thought was a powerful and eloquent plea to save the duck pond. That started a fair amount of debate over the
whole affair, which drove Arthur dotty.

Arthur went completely out of his mind when the longhairs from the Student Socialist Brigade made up signs reading “Save the
Ducks” and began marching around Bingley Hall in their Birkenstocks. Recruiters from the Fortune 500 who were on campus interviewing
savvy students told Arthur they were looking for good corporate citizens, not radicals. He took them over to the faculty club
for cocktails and reassured them this was merely one of those periodic outbreaks coming down to us as a result of universities
being too lenient in the sixties and it would soon be over. Afterward he took the recruiters to his office, unrolled his blueprints,
and showed them all the wonderful space the new building would have for interview rooms. They liked that a lot better.

The university newspaper was flooded for a few days with letters pro and con. One of the bookstores printed up T-shirts with
the logo
Ducks, Not Cement
and sold them for twelve dollars each, proving once again capitalism can profit even from the concerns of its enemies. Michael
was surprised to see Jellie write a letter to the newspaper in support of his position. It was a nice letter. And he knew
it probably caused her trouble at home, since Jimmy had dropped by to talk with him about the issue and seemed utterly amazed,
or perhaps bewildered, that Michael could get so worked up over eight or ten ducks.

But nobody except Michael cared very much. The longhairs marched, Arthur fretted, and the earth-moving machinery was carted
into position on the back of big, muddy trucks. Gambling on having a mild winter, the contractors would begin digging on the
following Monday. Michael was sure the tame ducks wouldn’t know how to handle the filling of their pond and contacted the
Humane Society. He and the society put a notice in the paper saying anyone who wanted to help in getting the ducks moved should
show up early Saturday morning and be prepared to get wet.

Light frost lay upon the grass of autumn when Michael rode the Shadow through early light and parked it by the pond. While
he sat on the bike, taking one last look at tradition and little geezers who slap-slapped about on orange legs and flat feet,
he noticed someone walking down the road toward the pond. Jellie. Jellie in the morning, Jellie at the duck pond. She wore
old jeans and her hiking boots, a heavy sweater and a red stocking cap with
Grownup
printed on the front. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she was smiling as she walked toward him.