The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (2 page)

Yet it was just this incoherence and illogic, he perceived, beginning to pace the floor again, that constituted the strength of his position. That clear sense of blame and wrong, of the unjustified and the unwarranted, that at the beginning of any dispute dominates the imagination and orders the facts of the case into an appearance of sequence became, as he knew, gradually blurred and was finally lost irrecapturably as the quarrel unfolded in all its organic complexity; he feared this development in the present case, this attrition of the issues, and saw that, in order to win, it would be necessary to shut his mind even to its own settled purpose, to be furious, voluble, contradictory, incapable of “listening to reason.” What was required, in a word, was just that obstinate feigned
madness
of Hamlet’s, the rejection of all outcomes and explanations, the determination to make trouble, to be inconvenient, obstructive to the general weal, like a sidewalk demonstrator who declines to “move on” when the word from above is given.

And for that matter, Mulcahy said to himself, dropping into his swivel chair and commencing to polish his glasses, who had the more to lose by publicity, he himself or the college? Was it not Maynard Hoar, precisely, who could not “afford” to have it known that he had got rid of an inconvenient critic—Maynard Hoar, author of a pamphlet, “The Witch Hunt in Our Universities” (off-printed from the
American Scholar
and mailed out gratis by the bushel to a legion of “prominent educators”); Maynard Hoar, the photogenic, curly-haired evangelist of the right to teach, leader of torch parades against the loyalty oath, vigorous foe of “thought control” on the Town Meeting of the Air? Especially when it so happened that the inconvenient critic had been under fire, not so long ago, by a state legislature for “Communistic, atheistic tendencies,” as evidenced by a few book reviews in the
Nation,
of all places, a single article in the old
Marxist Quarterly
(“James Joyce, Dialectical Materialist”), and a two-dollar contribution to the Wallace campaign. A faint speculative gleam appeared in Mulcahy’s eyes; he lodged a third peppermint in his cheek and tapped musingly with a pencil on his teeth, a quick rat-a-tat-tat of estimate and conjecture.

Confronted with a charge of bias, Hoar, of course, would forensically repudiate any political motive in the termination of the contract, but rumor, working in secret, might tell a different story…. Mulcahy’s pale eyebrows wryly lifted; he shrugged off a twinge of conscience: in the split modern world, he lightly posited, we are too often the dupes of appearance; let us look at the underlying reality. A year and a half ago (cf. the Convocation Address), Jocelyn had been officially enraptured to welcome Dr. Mulcahy to its staff, as an exemplar, a modern witness to the ordeal by slander, etc., etc.,
passim
(see also the New York
Times
magazine for the fearless administrator’s account of the factors that influenced his decision), but since then Dr. Fuchs had confessed; Mr. Hiss had been convicted; Mr. Greenglass and others (including a former Jocelyn physics student) had been tried for atomic spying; Senator McCarthy had appeared; at Jocelyn there had been a suicide among the former Students for Wallace, an attack from a Catholic pulpit, the withdrawal of a promised gift, a deepening of the budgetary crisis. And though the college still officially counted on “a swing of the pendulum back to the old native freedoms,” Hoar, only this winter—under pressure, it was said, from the Alumni Fund Chairman—had reluctantly removed his name from the Stockholm Peace Petition. Mulcahy laughed comfortably. To those familiar with Maynard Hoar’s history, he ventured to predict, the dismissal of an outspoken teacher, at this turning point in the college’s affairs, might seem a
leetle
too opportune, especially if it could be shown that the teacher in question had engaged in political activities of the type now considered suspect.

Mulcahy sprang blazing to his feet. Surely (he saw it all now) he had been observed at the meeting of the Partisans for Peace, which, it so happened, he had gone to, with no special enthusiasm, at the invitation of a former colleague and fellow-Joycean who was scheduled to speak on the program. He looked in now and then on such affairs out of contempt for mob opinion, as a sheer exercise of his individual liberties, but would Hoar dare deny that his instructor of literature’s presence there had been duly noted and reported on the campus by some vigilant F.B.I. agent?

He clapped his hand to his head.
“Dummkopf!”
he cried.
“Dummkopf!”
—awestruck at his own blindness. The clue had been in his hands as long ago as the Christmas reception. Hoar had tipped him off, but he, of course, had been too witless to heed it. He began to laugh intemperately, till the tears dampened his eyes, recalling the holiday scene in the President’s living room, the damnable Swedish
glögg
and
pfeffernuesse,
candles, yule log, holly, students dressed as waits singing outside the window, and within, on an oak bench, Maynard Hoar, in heavy ribbed sweater, genially asserting that he could as soon,
in these times,
as president of a small, struggling college, appear at a “peace” rally as be found playing strip poker on Sunday in a whorehouse (laughter). How he, Henry Mulcahy, could have heard these words and failed to apply them to himself passed human understanding; disgust, he supposed, with the falsity of the tone, with the specious air of rueful openness, must have palsied his own powers of inference. Or possibly, he appended, his inner censor had simply declined to pass such rubbish as affecting himself in any fashion. What retort had Hoar expected from him anyway—explanations, promises of amendment, apologies?

Yet the joke was on Mulcahy this time, he had to admit, chuckling. Here he had been scrupling about ascribing bias to the President when the President had not scrupled to put that bias on record. There could be no doubt, certainly, he interjected, sobering, that he had been warned by Hoar, in public, before witnesses, and that he had seemed deliberately to ignore that warning; worse still, to repulse it. For some flippant demon had led him, of all people present, to frame an answer to Hoar. He had wondered aloud idly: Was Christianity compromised by the Magdalen? To which Hoar had replied, in a voice of cogent rebuke, “I’m unable, Hen, to identify myself with Jesus.
I don’t know about you.
”

Nor, prompted memory, a precisian, was that all. Had not Hoar—yes, on that identical occasion—gone on to lay down the principle that the president of a college dedicated to free teaching methods had a duty, in times such as these, not to engage irresponsibly in political activities that could imperil the whole academic structure and in which (school principal’s keen, probing gaze; measured pause for emphasis) he had
no deep belief.
Seeing how everything fitted together (whom else could this homily have been meant for?), Mulcahy fetched a sigh. The picture of the liberal educator in action was more damning than even he had supposed. It was a case, plainly, for the A.A.U.P. Grievance Committee, a clear instance of political pressure, complete with dates and witnesses. The evidence had been there all along, but he himself, in some recalcitrant part of his moral fiber, had been unwilling to see it. Preferable for humanity’s sake, he thought, frowning, to believe that a teacher was being fired because of a personal vendetta than to know that a public man like Hoar was a lie, from springing curly hair to the soles of his moccasin shoes!

Mulcahy made a grimace of disgust, conscious suddenly of a moral distaste not only for this nasty specimen of the genus careerist impaled on the pin of discovery but for the task of exposing it to the public eye. And also, for the first time, strangely enough, he felt a certain chill objective sympathy or commiseration for a man who could sink so low, as for an inching worm on which the heel is descending. The certainty that Hoar was deliberately using him as a scapegoat to satisfy the reactionary trustees and fund-raisers afforded him no joy, but, rather, sorrow for the race of men in general and for this particular example of the human kind. And the fact that he, Henry Mulcahy, had it within his power to ruin the man forever, at least in liberal circles (
make no mistake,
he said to himself bitterly, factual proof is unnecessary; the charge, the mere charge, will be sufficient), inclined him to fellow-feeling. He had seen, he thought, too much of venality in the course of his academic experience to regard Jocelyn’s president as exceptional or exceptionally deserving of punishment. Not being an idealist, he was indifferent to the law of the talion; regrettably, perhaps, but indubitably, he lacked the taste for blood.

And the
threat
of exposure in such cases, as one scarcely needed to remind oneself—a pinched, wintry smile sharpened his diffuse features—was generally more effective than the act. Seated at his desk, he tilted his fingertips together in a contemplative triangle, and leisuredly allowed his passion to cool—a favorite amusement of his spare moments and an intellectual tonic.
Live and let live,
he finally opined, was the most politic motto for the occasion. Maynard Hoar confronted with charges in a faculty meeting or before the A.A.U.P. would have no recourse but to fight, but Maynard Hoar in his office, respectfully urged to “reconsider” by a little ad-hoc committee (“Think, President Hoar, is this the best moment, in the very thick of the battle for academic liberties, to let out a dissident teacher, the father of four children? Is there not, in these times, an obligation to avoid even the appearance of yielding to popular pressures?”) was still, one would guess, open to persuasion…. Mulcahy sighed, forgoing the satisfaction of a joined battle; he was conscious of submitting to practicality as to an austere virtue.

The President (it was always well to remember) had the legal power not to reappoint anyone short of the professorial rank, and though a legal power was scarcely a moral imperative, how many ardent defenders (were the case to be argued in public) of the President’s inalienable right to fire whom he pleased—for the color of his hair or his hatband—would not throng eagerly forward to speak against Mulcahy in the name of lily-white principle, and in the front ranks of the defenders of principle would he not find friends, who had dined with him, who had played with the children, who would be delighted now to lend him money, to write to a friend, the head of an adult-education project and fix him up with a splendid job, teaching nights to illiterates?

A terse laugh broke from him, and at almost the same moment, the two timid knocks he had been expecting sounded on the door. A young girl’s face appeared, looking frightened. “Dr. Mulcahy?” “Come in, Sheila,” he instructed kindly, taking pains as usual to speak in a soft, solicitous voice. Folding her heavy coat over the back of the side chair, the girl sat down, put her books on the arm, and crossed her thin hands tensely in her lap. She was pale, round-shouldered, reticent, a freshman, the daughter of a commercial artist, whom she reverently invoked as “Daddy.” Her trial-project was American naturalism. Mulcahy’s spectacled eyes assessed her, half pitying: a typical Jocelyn student of the paying sort that had been admitted in the fall by an over-lenient registrar. The thin, blond hair, he observed with interest, was done in a new fashion, braided around her head in two petering-out pigtails—the style of the President’s wife.

He raised his eyebrows a trifle. This visible sign of the Presidential influence affected him very unpleasantly; he took it as a bad omen for himself and his cause. At the same time, he felt quite detached and made note of it merely as a symptom, a corroboratory straw in the wind. “So that is how the land lies,” he thought, giving an inward whistle. He felt decision form in him, like a clot. While the girl watched him, rabbit-scared, he refolded the President’s letter, creased it incisively with his thumbnail, and dropped it into his file. He performed this action very slowly and deliberately, conscious that the girl would be thinking that the document he was suppressing must have something to do with her grades. “Now Sheila,” he said to her, smiling, idly prolonging her mystification, “I see you are fixing your hair differently.”

The girl’s face brightened with a start; she glanced at the file somewhat doubtfully, as if seeking a connection. Then she looked up at him and blushed. “Do you like it?” she shyly asked. “Very much, Sheila,” he replied in a grave tone. “It reminds me of my three little girls, with their pigtails. Do you know them, Sheila?” The girl nodded several times and spoke breathlessly. “I’ve seen them with you in the Co-op, Dr. Mulcahy. They’re
darling.
”

Mulcahy leaned forward, spontaneously moved. “You must come some time and see the baby boy, Sheila. You’ll like him.” “I’d love to,” breathed the girl. “I love babies.” “He’s sick this morning, though, Sheila,” he confided. “His mother is sick too.” Impulse had been propelling him, almost against his will. He felt himself gliding, by rhythmic easy stages, into the girl’s confidence; the knowledge that there, in the file, lay that which would disrupt her faith in officialdom gave him a sense of power over her and all her virgin classmates, and the fact that he had no intention of letting her in on that knowledge allowed him, he calculated, to carry her to the very verge of discovery with perfect safety to himself. Yet now a slight shifting of the girl’s weight in her chair made him imagine that he had lost his hold on her. Conscious that his delivery had become somewhat false and saccharine, he darted a mistrustful glance into her eyes; what, he thought angrily, did the young care for sickness and sorrow? Very likely, thanks to the Sitters’ Bureau, she had already had an earful of his domestic cares. Her eyes, however, were starry with sympathy and a sort of joyous gratitude; two anxious furrows had appeared between her fuzzy brows.

“How awful, Dr. Mulcahy,” she whispered. “I know just how you must feel.”

A smile touched his lips, a trifle coldly. “I doubt whether you do, my dear,” he retorted, stung to shortness by her innocence, her protected life, her “Daddy.” He regarded her, narrowing his eyes, feeling pity for her inexperience, her weak, soft, waxy soul, plastic to all impressions, to himself, to the Hoars. “I doubt whether you do,” he lightly repeated.