by JJ Partridge
I declined the hostess’s offer of a seat at one of the common tables and she found me a place in an alcove off the main dining room. I glanced at the menu, ordered the quiche of the day, a garden salad, and hot tea, and laid out a pocket notebook to record some thoughts on the class action for a memo to Danby and the Provost. I began my scribbles, slowly becoming aware that at nearby table, two faculty members were commiserating. Their complaints, common faculty grievances about time-consuming research, writing commitments, and classroom overload, reminded me why Presidents rarely lunched here and why members of the College Hall cabinet purposefully did so once or twice a month. Fortunately, lunch arrived quickly—the quiche was hot, eggy, and filled with broccoli, onions, and pepper-jack cheese—and I dug in, trying to concentrate on my food and my notes.
The complainants eventually left but other, more rancorous voices were raised from a nearby common table. Two of the louder voices belonged to Ambrose Kyle, a professor of political science and rather famous campus blowhard, and Merton Aggassey, a chemistry professor; they had to know I was within earshot and they were trashing Danby.
“Overblown, if you ask me,” Kyle whined between noisy chomps. “An excuse for all the bleeding hearts around here to beat together. I tell you …”—he stopped to swallow—“… they take advantage and the administration lays down and plays dead ....”
Aggassey, whose squeaky voice and narrow views were offered freely on most campus topics, agreed. “Just listen to the names of these groups in this Coalition for Justice. …, GUTS ... Gays United To Survive, Black Nation, FEM ... Feminist Equality Movement ....”
“Where do they come from?” a table companion grumpily interrupted. Others made almost inaudible comments which probably were assents.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Kyle’s balding scalp, with its prominent liver spot, above the Crier. “Listen to this,” he snorted, and read off a list of demands: that classes be suspended, an ethnically balanced Security Office force be recruited, a quota system for minority faculty in each University department, the rooting out of any anti-feminist or homophobic faculty speech, and support for Jesse Kingdom’s causes. “How ’bout dem apples,” Kyle said triggering a general clacking by his tablemates about free speech, political correctness, and the expected wimpy College Hall reaction. “Maybe they could give The Stalker some sensitivity training while they’re at it!” Kyle said, and they all laughed.
“Danby’s playing into their hands if he gives them any credence at all,” Aggassey said plaintively, all the while chewing. “I know that it’s a serious matter,” he responded to a comment. “I understand the concern, believe me. It’s just that we can’t let the place go to hell ..., again. The cops should do their job, find this guy, and Danby shouldn’t let the loonies set his agenda.”
Why did I listen? Why did I let them get under my skin? They were just background noise, hollow, insecure men who relished having another victim in the President’s office. I closed my note book and left the table; as I passed by them, I directed appropriate recognitions to their raised eyes. I had almost escaped when Aggassey grabbed my jacket sleeve. His oddly prunish face made motions toward a smirk. “Algy, did you see these demands?” He took the Crier from Kyle and turned to his tablemates for support. “These people are trying to take advantage of the situation, to put the University on the defensive, and ...,” he continued, without the guts to say it to my face, “... what is the administration doing about it?”
I could have reminded the self-righteous boob that student demands popped up every year on a host of social issues—war, poverty, ROTC recruitment, needs-blind admissions, or the cause of the semester—even though I knew I was whistling in the dark about this year’s problem. I gently pulled my sleeve away from his fingers. “It’s hard to make too much fuss about rape and murder.”
Aggassey wouldn’t give it up. “This murder victim, I mean, she wasn’t even a student here, not anymore. Reading the Crier, you’d think it was the President’s wife, for God’s sake!”
I didn’t respond and his companions were silent. Holly Danby, the President’s wife, had been buried little more than three months ago. Aggassey’s face slowly registered his faux pas. “Well, you know what I mean,” he said into his napkin.
No rejoinder was necessary.
* * *
I threaded my way out of the dining room. Fifteen minutes of pool on the Club’s new Olhausen table upstairs might help my equilibrium but a glance at my watch nixed the idea and, instead, I entered the library, a room that whispered “hush” in its subdued décor of landscape paintings, grouped tables and Parsons chairs, and thick carpet. A copy of the Crier lay open on a tufted leather sofa where I sat and read the headline story on student demands. The President hadn’t bothered to mention it this morning; that’s how pressing he thought it was. I was about to put the tabloid down when I noticed Joe Bucas standing at the newspaper rack near the doorway, picking through various national and international dailies. I raised the Crier higher seeking to avoid a conversation not welcomed at any time and, at the moment, potentially compromising since Bucas was a party to speech code complaints due for a hearing within the month.
The incident was high profile and unusual since it arose in the context of the Permanent Curriculum Committee—the PCC—a cockpit of campus ideological wrangling. A majority of the PCC’s faculty component are liberal to radical activists who usually portray Carter’s undergraduate curriculum as a biased reflection of male-dominated Western cultural aggression; the rest are a few wobbly middle-of-the-roaders from the arts and science faculty who nominally favor a relevant curriculum, with Joe Bucas as the sole representative of the anti-correctness conservatives to whom “Third World” and “multi-cultural” mean “third class”. No, that’s not quite right because Joe Bucas, a gadfly reactionary nuisance, gives conservatives a bad name. Along with two administrators and three seniors, this ill-matched group had been for years an ineffective debating club but hadn’t caused too much harm until Danby’s predecessor saw its rancorous debates and procrastination as a way to avoid policy decisions: if it had to do with the curriculum, she decreed, it had to go through the PCC.
Like most speech code appeals, Bucas’s case began with an exchange that reeked of insensitivity and bad manners. At a PCC meeting a few weeks earlier, his views had been savaged by a Marcus somebody-or-other, described to me as an obnoxious, opinionated senior. Marcus characterized Bucas’s opposition to a new, non-Western culture element in the basic studies program as “fascist” and Bucas, who is Jewish, exploded, as Marcus probably intended. No admonishment to Marcus from the Dean of the College could calm Bucas; his fists pounded the table while he decried the student’s insensitivity to the Holocaust and railed at remedial courses for minorities, inflated grades, no grades, and ethnicity majors, much to the snorts and amusement of Marcus. Bucas brought up, for no apparent reason, the tumultuous faculty vote that had led to adoption of curriculum change years ago—and the rhetoric of a young assistant professor of history, Carl Reinman, which carried the faculty resolution and put Carter in the vanguard of curriculum change. “Reinman and his clique almost brought the University down,” Bucas thundered, according to the taped minutes, “and we’ve been wallowing in the muck ever since!” That broke up the party, with the students narrowly beating Bucas in the filing of harassment and hate speech charges.
Unfortunately, Bucas spotted me and plopped his large rump on the arm of the sofa. As usual, his brow was wet and his pudgy face had an unpleasant jaundiced tone. He wore a shapeless brown suit, grayish shirt under a tan V-neck sweater, and a mustard yellow tie. “So, Reinman didn’t make it,” he said without the pretense of concern.
“No, he didn’t,” I said, folding the newspaper and putting it on the seat, and started to get up. But Bucas wouldn’t let it go. He touched my arm and put his face close to mine, close enough for me to see the hairs that sprouted from his ears and red-veined nose and to get a whiff of c
heap cigar smoke.
“You know, Reinman and I almost came to blows once. On The Green, after one of the sit-ins ..., CIA recruitment or something. It was late in the day, almost dark, and he was walking across, coming towards me, with a couple of young girls hanging all over him like he was some sort of idol. For some reason, that moony adulation got me steamed. As they passed by me, he said something to the kids that made them laugh. I was sure it was directed at me. I lost it and grabbed him by the shoulder, ready to take a swing. Took him completely by surprise for a second, before he pulled loose. Laughed at me. The girls, they laughed at me, too.” Bucas shrugged and said, with a touch of genuineness, “I don’t know why I did it. He could have murdered me.”
“Forget it, Joe.”
“Always had the girls …,” Bucas said, obviously exasperated.
I should have left well enough alone but Bucas nettled me—can’t help it since he is so unlikable, and besides, I had some vague notion I should defend Reinman since I was to be his executor. “Joe,” I said, “lots of people were involved then. Principled people. He wasn’t much different, maybe more persuasive and aggressive, but not basically different. And he changed ....”
“Yeah, sounds silly now, doesn’t it? But,” he said, edging closer to me, “for me, he symbolized a lot of what was happening, all the sit-ins and disruption, turning the curriculum upside down, the pass-fail thing, every fad that dropped academic standards. I realized that the night of the faculty vote when Reinman and his hippies won.” He paused, then said, “I thought he was a phony even then. And that was before he turns into Reagan’s pet.”
I stood to leave, realizing that Bucas would relish the opportunity for piling on more scorn, but he was hard to escape. He grasped my forearm. “A few years ago, I had this kid for ... second semester creative writing. A cute little redhead, from some farm town in the Midwest.” His face hardened. “I think she slept with him. She wrote a short story about a professor and a sophomore and how the sophomore got picked up, seduced—and never told a soul. The professor she described, physically, and in attitude, was a dead ringer for Reinman. I asked her about the story and she said to me: ‘write from life,’ one of those aphorisms we tend to use. ‘Write from life,’ she repeated and then she spelled it out. ‘R-I-G-H-T from life.’ Had to be Reinman!”
It took a second for the spelling of the word to have significance. “You mean, he was dating students? Why didn’t this ever come up in some formal way, some student complaint or—”
“For what? To whom?” Bucas’ face displayed the meanness which often lurked in his voice. “College Hall put out any regulations yet on faculty-student romance, Algy? Not that you should have to, for God’s sakes. Or,” he added snidely, “is that sexual harassment? I get confused.” I let that pass: I wasn’t about to get into a discussion on student vulnerabilities or plain old, unacceptable behavior. “He would have been very discreet, with just the right kind of kid. I would have leaned on him if I had the proof. I think he thought he was just accepting their favors. I don’t even say he exploited them, but it’s so lousy to do it!” He took a deep breath. “So there it is. I don’t apologize for it.”
“I guess we ought to leave it at that.”
“You’re right,” he replied, his eyes holding mine for a second. “It’s all over with now. Maybe there is some justice after all.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Whatever happened to the ivory tower?” Marcie’s scribbled note was on a Post-It attached to the cover sheet of a quarter inch thick document on my desk. It was her draft of our annual, federally-mandated, Campus Crime Report.
I put down the Diet Sprite I’d brought up from the canteen, picked up the document, cleared a place on the sofa, and sat.
The Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act, now called the Jeanne Clery Act after a murdered freshman at Lehigh University, requires all colleges and universities to tabulate, summarize, and report all crimes occurring on or near their campuses. When it was first proposed, the academic community was split as to its need, with some schools asking why higher education had been singled out for intrusive self-reporting while others, with varied motives, sought to have the campus crime issue publicized. The legislation passed Congress in the aftermath of a couple of nasty street murders of students in Boston which provoked predictable reactions from Massachusetts’s powerful delegation. While Carter University had been ambivalent about enactment, its passage required Providence cops to provide the University with reliable data on what the feds refer to as off-campus “incidents,” something that the cops had long refused to share with the Security Office. Even with the federal mandate, it took years and Justice Department threats to begin the process and to this day, the cops had sand in their shorts about the extra work.
Marcie, diligent and persistent as always, with a personality that bridges a lot of institutional truculence, had collected data from the police and the Security Office, organized it into the prescribed format, and compared the results with those of each of the prior two years. Her suggested introduction tried to make sense of the pages of graphs, tables, and maps, especially in pointing out that not all the incidents were related to Carter University or its student population.
I kicked off my loafers and began to read her draft critically. It was not exactly heartening. The number of alcohol-related crimes, everything from binge drinking to mayhem, stayed about the same despite an increased University focus on the problem and more counselors, education, and stronger disciplinary actions. Both hard drugs and the recreational variety were still prevalent; the number of drug-related arrests and the mix of drugs confiscated hadn’t changed much from past years. Petty crimes, like audio equipment and cash purloined from dorm rooms and student apartments, however, were up by ten percent, and worse, serious crimes, including aggravated assault not involving sex, had bumped up by twelve percent, likely due to a rash of armed robberies around Thayer Street last April and May. Sex-related incidents were up, maybe due to Fingers, and either more complaints or better reporting, or both. There was a zero after “Homicides.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose when I considered how the report, due to be filed in less than ten days and made available to students in hard copy and online, would be played up by the media. The Globe always compares results for Boston area schools with Providence institutions, the Times, now into the Stalker crisis, would compare Carter to other Ivy League schools and their academic competitors, and neither the newspapers nor SecurityOnCampus.com would likely make the point that Carter students weren’t involved in most of the incidents or that an increase of only one or two could be misleading on a percentage basis. With The Stalker out there, the media would have a field day, despite the spin the Information Office’s press release might put on it, sort of like a tutu on a dancing male dog.
Marcie had left the concluding paragraphs for me to handle. What to say? Pat ourselves on the back or wring our hands over the numbers? Defend our programs or deplore the nation’s descent into crime? What was the right slant, since Carter does a decent job when it comes to campus security? Our Security Office has over eighty people, including forty campus police officers and twenty-five security guards. We’ve got over a hundred outside emergency phones, operate shuttle buses and escort services for both the on-campus and off-campus student populations, and all freshmen get lectures in personal safety and property security. Student Life runs a mandatory orientation about booze, drugs, and, of course, sex: safe sex, sexual effrontery, and sexual harassment. However, with all the other things happening in young lives, it has been an unachievable goal to get kids to focus on safety and security in a setting as comfortable, as seemingly secure, as Carter’s upper middle-class neighborhood.
I filled the rest of the afternoon with routine work, packed the draft report and my notes in my bag, and left around five o’clock, walking home under leaden clouds that reminded me of a thick, rumpled blanket. During the walk, I called McAllister. One effect of the murd
er, he said tersely, was a jump in the number of kids signing up for Jesse Kingdom’s demonstration at the federal courthouse and Public Safety Building tomorrow. Worse, dorm occupancy among women was down twenty-five to thirty percent.
“Any other good news?” There wasn’t and I called Tuttle who reported that his contacts within the Detective Division had largely discounted The Stalker as the murderer of Anne Sullivan, despite the machinations of Chief McCarthy, and the focus was now on Lavelle Williams, who—surprise, surprise—seemed to have disappeared. Tuttle reiterated that he’d get a lot more cops on patrol on Saturday night near the campus but, so far, nada for the Kingdom rally.
At a few minutes after five, I unlocked the front door to my house. I picked up the hall phone for messages—there were none—and left Nadie a voice mail invitation for dinner before I went upstairs. I left my briefcase on my work table and recognizing I was out of sorts, and had been all day, changed clothes for a workout.
Despite real effort, I couldn’t get into a rhythm on the Nordic Track. I stopped, stretched for a few minutes, picked a Monty Python episode from a stack of DVDs, and started again. Somewhere between the “Cheese Shop” and the “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketches, I had a good, sweaty, thirty-minute workout. After a shower, I changed into jeans and a heavy Pendleton shirt and poked around in the Sub-Zero for the makings of dinner. I was in the mood to cook and the latest issue of Gourmet gave me a menu that would soak up time and energy and be worth it: garlic soup, broiled chicken breasts with sun-dried tomatoes and onions, and a shredded radish, orange, and onion salad. With an apron decorated by a large Tabasco bottle covering my front, I flattened garlic cloves under a cleaver’s wide blade and kept on chopping, slicing, peeling, and pureeing until there was enough for two of everything. A bottle of Marchese Antinori Chianti Classico was withdrawn from the mini-wine cabinet in the basement; the chef enjoyed a large glass of the ruby colored wine after Nadie telephoned to accept my invitation. As the kitchen filled with the aroma of simmering soup and sautéing onions, I prepared the salad, had a second glass of wine, and set the table for two, positive that the dinner and company would be enjoyable.