The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (31 page)

It had been Domna’s whim that they should ask him, a real feminine caprice. For, first of all, she had refused to believe that all three men—Furness, the President, and Bentkoop—had taken no stock in the wild story Hen had told her and that she and Alma and Aristide and Consy had accepted without question. “How could you ‘know,’ Dr. Hoar, that he was not a Party member? How can anyone ‘know’ such a thing?” “By instinct, simply,” said Furness. “We knew it in our bones,” he added, with a sour laugh of self-disparagement. “But weren’t you interested in pressing it further?” she persisted, with widened eyes, ignoring him, and keeping after Maynard. “If you thought Hen deliberately told such a lie, why didn’t you say so?” “My dear,” said Maynard simply, “it was a very hot potato. I am an administrator, Domna. You people were backing him—some of my best teachers. I had no belief, or wish to believe, that Hen was a Communist—I could hardly reinstate him on that basis; that’s not the kind of argument you use on the bursar or the trustees. I chose to ignore the question. What was relevant to my purpose was your feeling, yours and John’s and Kantorowitz’s and Aristide’s and Alma Fortune’s. If you backed him you left me no choice. I respected your opinion, but not enough, apparently.” He gave a sorrowful laugh. Yet Domna remained incredulous. “You too, John?” she murmured when John came in, as though accusing him of perfidy. What struck Furness, straight off, was that this strange tone of hers and soft, reproachful eyes seemed to betoken an intimacy that he himself had never enjoyed with her.

And then, almost at once, she and John had dropped into a low-voiced colloquy, from which Domna had emerged with one of her sudden, startling
volte-faces.
All at once, backed up by Bentkoop, she had taken the curious position that there must be some misunderstanding: Mulcahy could never have been a Communist Party member. She knew this, she declared—with her strange, positive logic—by the fact that she had found herself skeptical when the story of the recognition scene had been repeated to her, just now, by the President—she had been too far away to catch the exact words herself—which showed her, she said, that she had never really believed Mulcahy in the first place and had been merely overriding her doubts, in order, perhaps, to think ill of the President or perhaps for some more worthy motive. But she now was certain that she had been half-consciously gulling herself. Furthermore, and it was here that Bentkoop seconded her, there was something very implausible, she insisted, in their account of Vincent Keogh’s behavior. No anarchist who was a decent fellow, as Keogh appeared to be, would denounce a former comrade to the authorities, still less expose him, for no reason, in a public room, in the presence of his employer and his colleagues. “Anarchists are not informers,” she kept repeating, over Furness’ objections. This stubborn repetition and Bentkoop’s deep-voiced assents had the effect, not of convincing Furness and the President, who after all had heard the conversation with their own ears and were not simply reiterating a maddening abstraction, but of persuading them that further investigation would at any rate do no harm. It was agreed that Furness should bring Keogh to the President’s office at nine-thirty. As to what they could do next, if Keogh were to substantiate what he had implied the previous evening, none of them dared think. It was the President’s vague hope, apparently, that the truth could be somehow suppressed. Furness did not concur in this; he had no hope at all; but only a suicidal compulsion to
know
at all costs. As he drove along the black-top road, dipping and rising through the newly plowed farmland, he was a prey to the darkest jealousies, including a jealousy of political activism.

When Keogh, rumpled, badly shaven, his dark-blue eyes bloodshot, was ushered into the President’s wainscoted sanctum and saw there, waiting for him, the pretty Russian girl, a strange dark bony young man, and the President himself, he perceived immediately that this was a judicial occasion. Up to this moment, he had supposed that the President was going to offer him a job, which he was strengthening himself to refuse. Thinking over the previous evening, in the student social room, he could not imagine now what offense he had given, and a truculent heat rose in him, which he damped by reminding himself that these people were human beings. He concentrated his thoughts on the girl, who was wearing a handsome white wool dress, with a dark purple stripe down the center of it, which he mentally tagged as very expensive. Having been poor all his life and intending to remain so, he had a funny itch to know how much things cost, things, that is, that he would never have—yachts, custom cars, jewels—but this feeling was without rancor on the whole. Furness, whose wrist-watch and tie-pin he had already appraised, pulled up a chair next to him and sat down. The dark young man was sitting in the window-embrasure. To Keogh, it was like a scene from a movie, in the District Attorney’s office.

The President, whom Keogh cast as Robert Mitchum, came rapidly to the point. “Last night, Mr. Keogh, you spoke to one of our teachers, whom you remembered as a former comrade in the Party.” Keogh sat upright with a jerk. “Whoa!” he protested, but the President went smoothly on. “Don’t jump, please, to false conclusions, Mr. Keogh. We—all of us, my two young colleagues, Mr. Furness and myself—are asking you to tell us in strict confidence what you know about this. We have no idea of using this information in any way, shape, or form. We’re all liberals, believe me”—Keogh sat absolutely still—“and there’s not one of us who isn’t shocked and sickened by the reign of terror in our colleges.” He reached out and selected a pamphlet from one of the bookcases; the others appeared slightly embarrassed, and out of the corner of his eye Keogh saw Furness wink at the Russian girl. “You don’t have to take me on faith,” continued the President, extending the pamphlet to Keogh. “I refer you to my article in the New York
Times
magazine, which brought me”—he faintly smiled—“a good deal of obloquy from our academic witch-hunters.” Keogh obediently opened the text. “I deal there with my own problems as an administrator in handling an academic freedom case, the case of a man charged, unjustly, as I thought, with communistic tendencies by one of our over-zealous state legislatures.” He chose another pamphlet from the bookcase. “Here,” he said, proffering it, “I deal with the problem in a more theoretical way. Examine it at your leisure; I’d be glad of your opinion. Out where you come from, in California, you know a good deal more, I dare say, than we do about the loyalty issue.” Keogh nodded, rather confusedly, as the President went on to say, warmly. “You’ve probably been in the thick of the fight for academic liberties.” The President leaned dynamically across the desk. “But the man I describe there, the man I welcomed to Jocelyn over the dissent of all the nay-sayers among my trustees and my faculty, is none other than the man you recognized as a former comrade—Henry Mulcahy!” A prankish smile briefly rested on the President’s fine features. “You can see that your revelation has left me, as a liberal pundit, in a rather delicate, not to say embarrassing position. But that of course is not the point. The point is our colleague himself. It would seem now that he perjured himself in his testimony to the legislature—a very serious thing, as you know. I’m not sure myself, without taking legal advice, what the best course is for him now. But to help him—rest assured, we mean to help him, every one of us—we need to know the truth, for Mulcahy’s own protection. Look upon us, if you want, as his lawyers.” He gripped the edge of the desk and his dark eyes gazed warmly into Keogh’s. “Naturally,” he interpolated, “there’s no question of dismissal.” Furness made a wry face, but the President firmly continued. “I can assure you, Mr. Keogh, that your conscience will be absolutely clear on that score.”

Keogh twisted the President’s two pamphlets in his hands; after the first cursory glance, he made no attempt to examine them. “You don’t have to worry about my conscience, friend,” he said with an insouciant smile. “I don’t know what I’d tell you otherwise, but under the circumstances, I’ll sing, gladly.”
“Sing?”
wondered the President. “I’ll talk,” said Keogh, laughing. “This bird Mulcahy was never in the Party or near it.” The Russian girl made a joyful sound and clapped her hand to her lips. The men looked sharply at each other. “To me,” remarked Keogh, “that means nothing either way today. I don’t know how you feel. Some of you liberals look on an old Party card as a testimonial to the bearer’s manliness, like a first dose of the clap.” “No,” murmured Furness, smiling. “We are not so innocent. You bring us great relief, I must say. You come among us like a
deus ex machina.
” Keogh, who was perfectly literate, felt offended by something slurring in Furness’ tone and in the veering stare of his blue eye. “I’m not a worker-robot,” he retorted. “I look on myself as a free individual.” “Please go on, Mr. Keogh,” said the President. “Please,” said the Russian girl, giving Furness an angry look. “I don’t object,” said Keogh. “In the fraction, I was given the assignment of recruiting Mulcahy to the Party. He seemed to be close to us on some things, but when it came to an organizational question, there was absolutely no dice. If I may say so without damage to his present standing in this liberal company”—he bowed—“Hen was very cautious, very much the home-body. Has he still got that wife?” The Russian girl laughingly nodded. “She was there last night; she writes poetry.” “What about the John Reed Club?” said the dark young man. “He came to a meeting or two,” said Keogh. “Under my steering. He stood in the back of the hall, with arms folded, so.” Keogh folded his arms, high on his heavy chest, and looked around the room, sardonically, while the company chuckled. “He asked some satirical questions. Later, he informed me that these
lumpen
-intellectuals had nothing to say to him. He was one of those birds that are more Communist than the Communists in theory, but you’ll never meet them on the picket-line. A weird, isolated figure, with a talent for self-dramatization.” Everyone nodded, and he went on for some time, analyzing Mulcahy in terms of his class background, his two years at Oxford, his Jesuit schooling, when he recollected that he was talking to Mulcahy’s employer and pulled himself up short, with the sense that already he had perhaps said too much.

The meeting broke up, with the President’s cordial thanks, and Keogh, to his sorrow, was sent off to breakfast with Furness at a coffee-shop in the old red-brick town. The Russian girl, so she said, had an errand and went off with the dark young man, their heads bent in close conference as they crossed the campus. Furness looked at his wrist-watch with the woven gold strap and called after her, sharply, to be on hand at the close of the morning session. It was already eleven-thirty, and he seemed suddenly peevish and preoccupied. From the moment they sat down to breakfast and he called out, “Miss,” awkwardly, to the waitress, he rubbed Keogh the wrong way. The self-made intellectual dandy was a type Keogh disliked intensely, and he quickly saw that Furness was unsure with him, in some peculiar way, placatory, and at the same time eager to be off. He unfolded the Mulcahy case and Keogh was repelled, both by the story itself, and by the veneer of amused sympathy with which Furness coated it and that seemed to overlay, as in fancy furniture, what Keogh took to be a raw spite and envy. So far as Keogh could see, only the Russian girl and the woman named Alma and the fellow they had just seen called Bentkoop had behaved with a modicum of humanity, and he felt suspicious even of them, as Furness smilingly elaborated the later events of the narrative, like a salesman in a plush store demonstrating the fittings of a suitcase or swiftly knotting a four-in-hand in supple, hairless fingers. The more he considered it, studying the dapper Furness, who patently believed in nothing, not even in himself, nothing, that is, but the
amusing
warp-and-woof of events and persons, the more he began to feel that the meeting in the President’s office had not been all it seemed. In the light of what Furness was telling him, of feuds and fissions and reversals, their concern for Mulcahy seemed acted. He had a sudden inkling that they would have liked to get the goods on Mulcahy, that whatever he himself had told them they would have been pleased, pleased if Mulcahy were a Communist and pleased, even more, if he were not, since this made him out a liar, which was probably even worse, from a liberal-respectable point of view. “We had to
know,
don’t you see?” Furness kept drawling in his peculiar, half-cultivated voice, as if he were trying anxiously to drag Keogh in to some disagreeable dark corner of the soul. This insistence on their psychology seemed to Keogh quite spurious and unnecessary. Though the President had assured him that there was no question of a discharge, he wondered now that he had believed him so readily, or rather, not believed him, but dismissed the problem as irrelevant. It was possible, he saw, that he had been very cleverly taken in. The idea that he might have played just now the role of a stool-pigeon or an informer was offensive to his whole sense of himself. He stood up suddenly and asked to use the telephone. Furness, fitting a cigarette into his holder, looked up with a flitting uneasiness, as though he descried his intention; he did not, naturally, have the courage to challenge him. Keogh stepped into the booth, found the Mulcahy number in the telephone book, and got Cathy Mulcahy on the telephone. He asked her to tell her husband, if she could locate him, that he would like to have a word with him whenever it was convenient. Cathy Mulcahy’s voice showed prompt and business-like understanding. “Where are you?” she demanded, succinctly. When he told her, she was silent for a moment, and then her voice came rapidly over the wire. “Tell Furness you want to look up something in the Library. Hen will meet you there, in ten minutes if I can reach him. If not, wait there till somebody comes for you. I’ll try to send a student.” As he came out of the telephone booth, Furness was paying the check at the counter only a few feet off, just barely out of earshot.

Keogh’s suspicions were fortified, both by Mrs. Mulcahy’s response and by what he took to be an attempt at surveillance on Furness’ part. He held no special brief for Mulcahy, less, if anything, when he saw him again in the Library, but it seemed to him, nevertheless, that he owed Mulcahy this much: to let him know that the President and certain staff-members had been asking questions about him, which he himself had answered, he now thought, too freely. Mulcahy thanked him, pressed his hand effusively, and sped off. He showed no interest in renewing the acquaintance, which relieved Keogh, who watched the tall, pot-bellied figure bolt out the swinging doors with a slight new feeling of dubiety. Should he have kept his mouth shut? He paced up and down, staring into the glass cases, where the books of the poets, including all of his own, were displayed. The middle-aged librarian respectfully bustled up and offered to help him, and this kindness softened him to the college, which looked to him once again like a pretty decent place. He left the librarian and strolled out onto the library steps; across the evergreen-shaded campus, where boys and girls were walking arm in arm, he saw the Russian girl hurrying toward one of the buildings. He had a sudden impulse to call out to her. Did he owe it to her to tell her what he had just told this shit, Mulcahy, etc., etc.? But as the ridiculous question, like a repeating decimal, propounded itself to him, he struck his open left hand a blow with his right fist.
No,
he inwardly shouted to himself;
Keogh, keep out of this, or they will get you.
The chapel clock struck one. Within twenty hours, he perceived, they had succeeded in leading him up the garden path into one of their academic mazes, where a man could wander for eternity, meeting himself in mirrors.
No,
he repeated. Possibly they were all very nice, high-minded, scrupulous people with only an occupational tendency toward backbiting and a nervous habit of self-correction, always emending, penciling, erasing; but he did not care to catch the bug, which seemed to be endemic in these ivied haunts. He drew a draught of spring air, flexed his chest muscles, and signaled to a tall blond girl in a tight turtle-neck sweater, who rode up to him, questioningly, on a bicycle. He knew that he was supposed to be somewhere at this hour; they had given him several purple schedules which he had promptly thrown away, on principle, just as he had tossed the President’s two pamphlets into a large green can under an elm-tree.