The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (7 page)

A low cry escaped her. “You!” she protested, and when he nodded gravely she burst out, all a-frenzied. “I can’t believe it. I shan’t believe it. I refuse. It’s not like you. You are not political. You are a-political, the last man I have known of whom this could be true.” Henry sat smiling through this tantrum. “You think, then, that Maynard is right to fire me?” he inquired in a satiny voice. Domna recovered herself. “No,” she said slowly, “no.” She straightened herself thoughtfully and brushed the lock of hair back from her eyes. “No,” she reiterated yet another time. “I will stand by what I have always said. No one should be fired for mere belief; indoctrination is another matter.” She had the air of reciting a lesson to firm it mechanically in her memory, and her gaze distantly rested on him as though to firm him in it too. “But I cannot feel the same to you,” she appended in a formal tone. “Am I another man, then, than I was five minutes ago?” “Yes,” she promptly answered. “You have lied to me and to everyone.” Henry tugged a little on the smock, as if to recall his need to her; her downrightness had impressed him very favorably. He coughed.

“Once again you are too hasty, my dear. I would not have confessed to you if I were not at this moment an archenemy of the Party, one of those unfortunate prisoners of the Party you have read about in your newspaper who lack the courage to break, who live in fear of denunciation by some comrade who suspects us of backsliding, who are forced to perjure themselves on the witness-stand or see their families starve. Fifteen years ago, in a momentary enthusiasm, I joined the Party and since then I’ve had no rest, no respite, no night’s unbroken sleep; I’ve been fired from five universities on various academic pretexts, never knowing who was responsible, the jealous head of the department, a student I’ve awarded an E to, or a comrade teacher to whom I’d spoken too frankly my real opinion of the Party.

“Looking back on it now, I see that I might have gotten out quietly during the Yalta period, as many others did, but I feared exposure too much, teaching in a conservative college with a Catholic president and dean. Had I broken at that time, I could not know that I would not be expelled and my name printed in the
Daily Worker;
this actually happened to many teachers in my unit. At any rate, I was afraid. Very possibly, I am a coward. In any event, once I had lied to my superiors as to my affiliations—under orders, of course, but also for my own skin—I was done for, the Party had me. I have been useful to them from time to time in various little undercover jobs, and they content themselves with merely terrorizing me in the interests of some future big job, if they are driven underground, say, and they need a respectable front or merely a letter-drop.” His lips tightened in a short, bitter smile. “So, Domnatchka, you see, I have taken refuge in my irony, in the peculiarity of my position, a Communist in name only, like a wife of the same brand, allowed to go my own way, so long as I keep up the observances and pay my protection-money to the Bridges Defense Committee, the Committee for the Hollywood Ten (there but for the grace of God), the Trenton Six, and so forth. A unique life in No Man’s Land, a target for both sides.” Domna impulsively took his hand. “But you are not a Communist,” she reassured him. “It is all very simple. You have only to get up and say so, here in a progressive college, and we will all protect you.”

Henry shook his head. “Too late,” he insisted. “Too late for anyone to break today who will not play the role of stool-pigeon or police-informer. You forget that I have perjured myself before my superiors and before a state legislature—an indictable offense. No one will protect us exes in America unless we also become antis, unless we are willing to wear the shoes of a Budenz or a Miss Bentley and denounce former comrades, many of whom, my dear, are very likely in my own position. No, thank you, Domna.” He rose from his chair and stretched himself.
“Ite missa est,
or in Church Slavonic,
get out, Mulcahy, you’re finished.”
Domna took a swift breath and put out a hand to detain him. “You feel certain that Maynard knows?” she said with a troubled face. “You feel sure that that is the reason?” “What else?” he remarked lightly. “As is common knowledge on the campus, two gentlemen from the F.B.I. paid a call to Jocelyn last week. A purely social visit, you think?” Wheeling suddenly, he approached the desk with a complete change of mien. “You see it all now, don’t you?” he demanded in a breathy, sibilant voice. “The heat is on Maynard to get rid of me. I have become a political liability, and he will use any pretext to get rid of me before my name appears in a congressional investigation. And I myself—what a superb irony—have furnished him with just the lever he needs to slide me out quietly, without controversy—Cathy’s heart condition. Very considerately, he notifies me well in advance of the termination of my contract, smoothly bypasses the department, and leaves it up to me to find other employment before I dare tell Cathy that we’re moving on to pastures new.” In the mounting excitement of the last words, he felt his head exultantly whirling; speed and the impediment of his lisp made him salivate copiously as he spoke. “What would you think now,” he brought out, “if I put it to you: ‘knowing of Cathy’s condition, Hoar has been tempted to do this’?” Domna slowly raised her eyes. “I would think as you do,” she acceded in a low, unwilling voice.

She rose from her desk summarily and tore a slip of paper from her memo pad, on which from time to time during the last five minutes she had been scribbling a list of some kind which his eyes had been mistrustfully glancing toward without being able to read. Now, with bated breath, he watched her take off the smock and put on her coat; she looked very smart, trim, and handsome, and he scarcely dared ask her what she was planning to do. “You’re going to see Maynard?” he finally ventured. Domna shook her head. “Too early for that. As you say, this is not a private matter. Maynard must be faced with it in the open, insofar as we can do that and protect you and Cathy at the same time. You don’t mind, do you, if I date your last active membership back a few years, say,
before
you were investigated by the legislature?” “Whatever you think best,” he acquiesced gratefully; their roles, he perceived, had changed again, and it was better so for the moment. “But what?” he nevertheless queried, in some real mystification. She flashed the list before his eyes, rather gaily, and he was able to read on it the names of six colleagues, with notes and questions opposite each, written in violet ink in her large European hand.

“Your sympathizers,” she tersely remarked.

J
OCELYN COLLEGE, ON THIS
mid-morning in January, as Henry Mulcahy trod softly through its corridors, had a faculty of forty-one persons and a student-body of two hundred and eighty-three—a ratio of one teacher to every 6.9 students, which made possible the practice of “individual instruction” as carried on at Bennington (6:1), Sarah Lawrence (6.4:1), Bard (6.9:1), and St. John’s (7.7:1). It had been founded in the late Thirties by an experimental educator and lecturer, backed by a group of society-women in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati who wished to strike a middle course between the existing extremes, between Aquinas and Dewey, the modern dance and the labor movement. Its students were neither to till the soil as at Antioch nor weave on looms as at Black Mountain; they were to be grounded neither in the grass-roots present as at Sarah Lawrence nor in the great-books past as at St. John’s or Chicago; they were to specialize neither in verse-writing, nor in the poetic theatre, nor in the techniques of co-operative living—they were simply to be free, spontaneous, and coeducational.

What the founder had had in mind was a Utopian experiment in so-called “scientific” education; by the use of aptitude tests, psychological questionnaires, even blood-sampling and cranial measurements, he hoped to discover a method of gauging student-potential and directing it into the proper channels for maximum self-realization—he saw himself as an engineer and the college as a reclamation project along the lines of the Grand Coulee or the TVA. The women behind him, however, regarded the matter more simply, in the usual fashion of trustees. What they wanted to introduce into their region was a center of “personalized” education, with courses tailored to the individual need, like their own foundation-garments, and a staff of experts and consultants, each with a little “name” in his field, like the Michels and Antoines of Fifth Avenue, to interpret the student’s personality. In the long run, these views, seemingly so harmonious, were found to be far apart. The founder had the sincere idea of running his college as a laboratory; failure in an individual case he found as interesting as success. Under his permissive system, the students were free to study or not as they chose; he believed that the healthy organism would elect, like an animal, what was best for it. If the student failed to go in the direction indicated by the results of his testing, or in any direction at all, this was noted down and in time communicated to his parents, merely as a matter of interest—to push him in any way would be a violation of the neutrality of the experiment. The high percentage of failure was taken to be significant of the failures of secondary education; any serious reform in methodology must reach down to the kindergarten and the nursery school, through the whole preparatory system, and it was noteworthy, in this connection, that the progressive schools were doing their job no better than the old-fashioned classical ones. Indeed, comparative studies showed the graduates of progressive schools to be
more
dependent on outside initiative, on an authoritarian leader-pattern, than any other group in the community.

This finding convinced the trustees, who included the heads of two progressive schools, that the founder was ahead of his time, a stimulating man in the tradition of Pasteur and the early vivisectionists, whom history would give his due. He left the college the legacy of a strong scientific bent and a reputation for enthusiasm and crankishness that reflected itself in budgetary difficulties and in the prevalence of an “undesirable” type of student. Despite a high tuition and other screening devices (a geographical quota, interviews with the applicant and with the applicant’s parents, submission of a photograph when this was not practicable, solicitation of private schools), despite a picturesque campus—a group of long, thick-walled, mansarded, white-shuttered stone dwellings arranged around a cupolaed chapel with a planting of hemlocks, the remains of a small, old German Reformed denominational college that had imparted to the secluded ridge a Calvinistic sweetness of worship and election—something, perhaps the coeducational factor, perhaps the once-advertised freedom, had worked to give the college a peculiarly plebeian and subversive tone, like that of a big-city high-school.

It was the mixture of the sexes, some thought, that had introduced a crude and predatory bravado into the campus life; the glamour was rubbed off sex by the daily jostle in soda-shop and barroom and the nightly necking in the social rooms, and this, in its turn, had its effect on all ideals and absolutes. Differences were leveled; courses were regarded with a cynical, practical eye; students of both sexes had the wary disillusionment and aimlessness of battle-hardened Marines. After six months at Jocelyn, they felt that they had “seen through” life, through all attempts to educate and improve them, through love, poetry, philosophy, fame, and were here, it would seem, through some sort of coercion, like a drafted army. Thronging into store or classroom, in jeans, old sweaters, caps, visors, strewing cigarette-butts and candy-wrappers, they gave a mass impression that transcended their individual personalities, which were often soft, perturbed, uncertain, innocent; yet the very sight of an individual face, plunged deep in its own introspection, as in a blanket, heightened the crowd-sense they communicated, like soldiers in a truck, subway riders on their straps, serried but isolated, each in his stubborn dream, resistant to waking fully—at whatever time of day, the Jocelyn students were always sleepy, yawning, and rather gummy-eyed, as though it were seven in the morning and they unwillingly on the street.

Yet this very rawness and formlessness in the students made them interesting to teach. Badly prepared, sleepy, and evasive, they
could
nevertheless be stirred to wonder and pent admiration at the discovery of form and pattern in history or a work of art or a laboratory experiment, though ceding this admiration grudgingly and by degrees, like primitive peoples who must see an act performed over and over again before they can be convinced that some magic is not behind it, that they are not the dupes of an illusionist. To teachers with some experience of the ordinary class-bound private college student, of the quiet lecture-hall with the fair duteous heads bent over the notebooks, Jocelyn’s hard-eyed watchers signified the real. Seeing them come year after year, the stiff-spined, angry only children with inhibitions about the opposite sex, being entrained here remedially by their parents, as they had been routed to the dentist for braces, the wild-haired progressive-school rejects, offspring of broken homes, the sexually adventurous youths looking to meet their opposite numbers in the women’s dormitories, without the social complications of fraternities and sororities or the restraints of grades, examinations, compulsory athletics, R.O.T.C., the single well-dressed Adonis from Sewickley with a private plane and a neurosis, the fourteen-year-old mathematical Russian Jewish boys on scholarships, with their violin cases and timorous, old-country parents, hovering humbly outside the Registrar’s door as at a consular office, the cold peroxided beauties who had once done modeling for Powers and were here while waiting for a screen-test, the girls from Honolulu or Taos who could “sit on” their hair and wore it down their backs, Godiva-style, and were named Rina or Blanca or Snow-White, the conventional Allysons and Pattys whose favorite book was
Winnie-the-Pooh
—seeing them, the old-timers shook their heads and marveled at how the college could continue but in the same style that they marveled at the survival of the race itself. Among these students, they knew, there would be a large percentage of trouble-makers and a handful of gifted creatures who would redeem the whole; four out of five of these would be, predictably, the scholarship students, and the fifth a riddle and an anomaly, coming forward at the last moment, from the ranks of Allysons or Blancas, like the tortoise in the fable, or the sleeper in the horse-race, a term which at Jocelyn had a peculiar nicety of meaning.