Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red (9 page)

“I told you Roger asked us to lay off” said Ekko. “Screw Roger Fine.” said Allworth.

“Right.” Selzer agreed. “We aren’t doing this for Fine, he’s just an example, we’re interested in like a principle.”

“That’s right. Ekko.” said Judy. “If they’re going to drop any teacher that sides with us, where in hell we going to get faculty support?”

They argued back and forth, getting nowhere, until it was time to split. Ekko saw them out, but on the landing he took Selzer aside.

“I didn’t want to say it in front of the others, but Roger is pretty upset about the petition and even more about our meeting with Millie. You see, he’s already resigned.”

“Resigned? What the hell –”

“He had to.” said Ekko. “He says they had him over a barrel and made him write out a letter of resignation. Millie’s got it in her safe right this minute. I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody, but with the meeting today I figured we ought to go kind of easy – you know, keep it like general – so we shouldn’t end up with egg all over our face.”

“Yeah.” Already the wheels were spinning as Selzer began revising his strategy, then he shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe we ought to let her spring it on us, and then just tell her we know but feel he was forced into it.”

“I still think –”

Selzer felt his leadership questioned. “Look, you want to handle it, Ekko?”

“No, I just don’t want to see Rog get the short end of the stick.”

“Don’t worry, all along, the best I ever figured was a draw.”

“How do you mean?”

“We’d lose on Fine, but we’d get a promise on somebody else.”

“Yeah, Well, keep it in mind.” Ekko turned, then said: “Say; does anybody else know about this meeting?”

“I didn’t tell anybody. Why?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want any of those crazy Weathervanes to come pushing in, then the dean would use that as an excuse to lower the boom on Roger.”

“Who would tell them?”

“Well, Mike is always talking about how the Weathervanes would do this and the Weathervanes would do that, and I’ve seen him with that Aggie broad.”

Selzer considered and then shook his head. “Nah. Mike’s all right, he just talks. It makes up for the square clothes he has to wear at the bank.” He laughed and clumped down the stairs to catch up the others.

They separated at the Charles Street train station. Yance and Abner taking the stairs to the overhead while O’Brien continued into the city, after a block or so. Mike stopped at a drugstore pay phone and, carefully closing the door of the booth, dialed a number, the phone rang half a dozen times before it was answered. “Yeah?”

“Is Aggie there?” asked O’Brien.

“Aggie who?”

“Just Aggie. Just see if Aggie’s there.”

He waited and then another voice, a woman’s voice, said. “Hi, lover.”

Rabbi Small did not look forward to meeting his last class of the week, but each Friday he would hope that this time there would be a normal complement, and each time he would be disappointed.

He could not avoid the feeling of resentment, even though he knew it was irrational; and this Friday; the thirteenth, was no different: a dozen students were present and he was annoyed, he closed the door behind him, and without a word of greeting, mounted the platform.

Nodding briefly, he turned his back to write the assignment on the blackboard and when he turned around he received a profound shock: half the class was gone! Then he saw that they had not left the room but were sitting on the floor in the aisles.

He was not in the mood for joking; he never was on a Friday. “Will you please come to order,” he called.

There was no response. Those still in their chairs looked down at their open notebooks, reluctant to meet his eye.

“Please take your seats.” No movement.

“I cannot give my lecture while you are sitting on the floor.”

“Why not?” It was Harry Luftig, who asked from the floor, not impertinently – politely, in fact.

For a moment the rabbi was uncertain what to say, then he had an idea. “To sit on the floor is a sign of mourning with us Jews,” he said. “The devout sit on the floor during the seven-day mourning period, we also do it on the Ninth of Av, the day of the destruction of the temple. In the synagogues we sit on the floor or on low stools and recite from the Book of Lamentations. But now it is Friday afternoon and the Sabbath is approaching. Mourning is explicitly forbidden on the Sabbath.”

Of course Sabbath was still hours away, but he peered down at them through his thick glasses to see if they would accept his explanation as a face-saving way of giving up their little joke, he thought one of them was about to rise, but he only shifted position on the floor.

Suddenly he was angry – and hurt, these were not children. Why should he have to put up with it? Without another word, he picked up his books and left the room.

He strode resolutely down the corridor, his footsteps echoing hollowly in the silent building. His face was grim as he came to his office and, unlocking the door, went in.

He was surprised, not too pleasantly; to find Professor Hendryx titled back in his swivel chair, talking on the phone.

He waved his free hand at the rabbi, said goodbye into the instrument, and jerked himself to a sitting position to set it on its cradle.

He glanced at his watch. “Quarter-past one. Don’t you have a class?”

The rabbi pulled up the visitor’s chair and sat down across the desk. “That’s right. I walked out on them.”

Hendryx grinned. “What happened? They try to give you the business?”

“I don’t know what they were trying.” said the rabbi, indignation creeping into his voice, “but whatever it was. I didn’t regard their behavior as conducive to teaching.”

“What did they do?”

The rabbi told him, concluding. “And once having gone out on a limb by giving it a certain religious significance. I had no other alternative.”

“But they didn’t buy it.”

“I’m afraid not. No one on the floor budged.”

“So you walked out.”

The rabbi nodded. “I couldn’t think what else to do.”

“You weren’t here vesterdav, were vou, Rabbi?” Hendryx asked with seeming irrelevance.

“No. I just come for my classes. What happened yesterday?”

Professor Hendryx drew his pipe from his pocket and filled it form a canister on the desk. “Well, it really began Wednesday.” He scratched a large wooden match into flame on the underside of the desk and held it to his pipe, he puffed on it gently, then went on. “On Wednesday the newspapers reported a visit made by the Citizens Committee on Penal Reform to Norfolk Reformatory for Boys, they found the usual deplorable conditions: overcrowding, broken windows, toilets that don’t flush, cockroaches in the kitchen, and they were given the usual excuses by the warden: lack of funds, lack of trained personnel, divided authority. But there was something new since their last visit, there were no chairs in the recreation room and the inmates had to sit on the floor, the warden explained that he had ordered the chairs removed because they had been used for rioting in the rec room the week before. Most of the committee refused to buy it, they pointed out that the floor was uncarpeted and was cold and drafty, that the health of the little bastards was being jeopardized, and all the rest. Didn’t you read about it?”

“Yes, but what’s it got to do with my class?”

“I’m coming to that.” He puffed on his pipe. “President Macomber is a member of that committee, and he was one of the few who not only did not protest but even supported the warden. So the next day – yesterday, this is – our students, the more involved among them at least, decided to sit out the week on the floor in all classes in protest against their president.”

“They did it in your classes? What did you do?”

“Oh, I paid no attention to them.” said Hendryx. “I just went right ahead with my lecture. Some of the instructors made some sarcastic remarks, but nothing much happened.” He laughed. “Ted Singer – you know, sociology – said that since it was a topsy-turvy world perhaps they ought to go all the way and stand on their heads, and one girl took him up on it for the rest of the period, a good ten minutes, he said, she’s into yoga. I suppose.” He smiled and showed a mouthful of even white teeth. “Her skirt flopped over, of course, but Singer reported that unfortunately she was wearing these pantyhose they wear nowadays so there was nothing to see.”

The rabbi suspected that the story had been colored to get a rise out of him. Because he was a rabbi, he supposed, his colleague frequently made suggestive remarks to see if he could shock him. “Are you sure it’s only for this week?”

“That’s my understanding. Why?”

“Because if it continues. I won’t stand for it.”

Hendryx looked at him in surprise. “Why not? Why should you care?”

“Well, I do.” Glancing at his watch, he said. “I better go see the dean.”

Hendryx stared. “Whatever for?”

“Well, I walked out on my class.”

“Look Rabbi, let me tell you the facts of academic life, the dean doesn’t give a damn if you walk out on a class occasionally, or even if you meet with them at all. What you do in your classroom is your business. Last year. Professor Tremayne announced a three-week reading period in the middle of February and took off for Florida. Of course. Tremavne is the kind of teacher who mav provide greater benefit to his students by his absence than his presence.”

“Nevertheless, I think I’ll tell her about it anyway. Besides, I’ve got to turn in my mid-semester failure notices.”

Hendryx whistled. “You mean you’re really sending out flunk notices after all I told you?”

“But last week I received a notice that the lists were due Monday, the sixteenth.”

“Rabbi. Rabbi.” said Hendryx, “when was the last time you had any connection with a college?”

“I’ve lectured to Hillel groups.”

“No, I mean a real connection.”

“Not since I was a student. I suppose, fifteen or sixteen years ago. Why?”

“Because in the last sixteen years – hell, in the last six – things have changed. Where have you been? Don’t you read the papers?”

“But the students –”

“Students!” Hendryx said scornfully. “What in the world do you think college cares about students? The primary purpose of college nowadays is to support the faculty, presumably a society of learned men, in some degree of comfort and security. It’s society’s way of subsidizing such worthwhile pursuits as research and the growth of knowledge. Society has the uneasy feeling that it’s important for someone to care about such irrelevancies as the source of Shakespeare’s plots or whether the gentleman above me” – nodding to the bust of Homer on the shelf above his head – “was responsible for the Homeric poems or if he was just one of a committee, or the influence of the Flemish weavers on the economy of England during the Middle Ages, or the effect of gamma rays on the development of spyrogyra.

“We’re set apart in the grove of academe to fritter away our lives while the rest of the world goes about its proper business of making money or children or war or disease or pollution, or whatever the hell they’re into, as for the students, they can look over our shoulders if they like and learn something. Or they can pay their tuition fees which help support us and hang around here for four years having fun. Personally, I don’t give a damn which they do, as long as they don’t interfere with my quite comfortable life, thank you.”

He drew deeply on his pipe and, removing it from his mouth, blew the smoke in the rabbi’s direction.

“And you don’t feel you owe the students anything?” the rabbi asked quietly.

“Not a damn thing, they’re just one of the hazards of the game, like a sandtrap on a golf course, as a matter of fact, we do do something for them, after four years, they are given that degree you were talking about which entitles them to apply for certain jobs. Or to go on to a higher degree which they can cash into money by becoming doctors, lawyers, accountants. Not the fairest arrangement from the point of view of those who can’t afford college, but quite normal in this imperfect world, hell, is it any different in the tight trades where you have to serve a useless apprenticeship before you can join a union?” He shook his head, as if answering his own question. “The only trouble comes when the students catch on, as they have in recent years, and kick up a fuss or stage a demonstration as your class did today.”

“But if the college is for the faculty, and the student is here merely to mark time, why should you care what he does?”

Hendryx smiled. “Actually: I don’t. Not unless it kills the goose that laid the golden egg, and that what’s been happening the last few years, the student sensed he was being had. Of course he’d known all along that what he was getting here wasn’t worth what he was paying. I once figured out it costs him about ten dollars per lecture. God, my lectures aren’t worth that, are yours? How smart does a student have to be to figure it out for himself? Still, he went along because he had to have the degree to get any sort of a job or train for any sort of profession. But then they rang in the war on him, and it struck him as a bit much: this degree we were giving him turned out to be just a ticket, sometimes one way, to Vietnam. So he rebelled.”

“It also gave him a four-year moratorium from the war.” observed the rabbi.

“Yes, it did, but that’s human nature. Things have quieted down a lot in the last year or two, what with the change in the draft law and winding down the war, and the students have quieted down correspondingly. But they acquired the habit of protest, even violence, and that we can’t have, there was a bombing here, you know.”

“Yes. I read about it, of course, but that was last year.”

“You never know.” said Hendryx. “Take this very afternoon, the dean is seeing a committee on the Roger Fine business, maybe, probably, all they’ll do is talk.

Nevertheless, she thought it advisable to call me and tell me to stand by.”

“Because you’re head of the English Department?”

“I’m only acting head. No, she wants me around in case there’s trouble.”

“Trouble?” The rabbi considered. “I’ve seen their poster on the Marble, of course. Professor Fine must be popular with the students for them to get up a petition for him.”