“Yes, I see,” she said. She should introduce him to Arthur Gage, they’d get along fine. Arthur Gage with his suggestion that she work as a department secretary and Foster Burgess demanding a pledge about morals and traditions, a lovely tradition of white men bulwarking their campus and community against Northerners, agitators, noisy women, blacks... She heard herself talking as if she were interested in this school, these potential history department positions teaching middle-school girls, and she took the folder of materials that the secretary brought in for her as if she were pleased to have it. Foster Burgess stood, and she stood, and they shook hands as he walked her out of his office, and she smiled as Momma always had told her to do.
Back in Momma’s car, she set the school folder on the passenger seat. School leadership, the back of the folder announced. Board of Trustees. Archer Tazewell, president. Oh, yes, she saw. Archer, a helpful bulwark with his hideous pride in his all-white frat at Hampden-Sydney College, the best men around, he’d said. She’d start teaching here, only to leave the school after a year or two in exasperation, and then she’d have to find something else, some sad secretarial or bank teller work. She’d live in one of those flimsy new apartments out near the beach with Momma and Rebecca, who’d be flattened by her new school’s helpful bulwark and the moral culture, with men like Arch Tazewell and Foster Burgess in charge.
Once upon a time, Virginia had thought she could be something. She’d fallen in love with New England, and then with John Singleton Copley, and then with Oliver. Somehow she was going to put all those things together and be a new kind of woman. She hadn’t done that. Yet. But if she stayed here, she would turn into her mother, and not even a good version of her mother.
Chapter Eight
Friday afternoon, Sam and Jerry sat hunched at a terminal in the back of the math building, Jerry reading numbers from their cipher and Sam typing commands with the keyboard. Jerry continued to act like Sam was merely the sidekick, but it was pretty clear that Jerry had no idea how to run commands.
“Okay, so that’s—fuck, I did something wrong here.” Jerry peered at his notebook and scrawled an arrow at a row of numbers. “Can you back up to a couple lines before, or is that going to be a huge pain?”
“Sure, no problem.” It felt good to be the competent one. Sam deleted, backed up, waited. Watched the cursor glowing and blinking at them on the dark screen. It was quiet in here this afternoon, only that new math professor at a terminal by the window, and the faint hum from the big computer in the basement.
During one of Sam’s math classes last year, the group of them had gone downstairs to get a look at the new mainframe and talk to Professor Durer, who was in charge of it. It was cold in the basement, heavily air-conditioned to keep all the machinery cool. And spotless, shining clean. Dust was bad for the computer, they’d learned.
Professor Durer had talked to them about the complex equations that the computer could solve and the vast information storage that the computer allowed. The computer could store all the college’s records, all the information about the library’s books, and all the Westfield town records, possibly with room for more. “And before long our network will allow our students to communicate with each other, and possibly students at other colleges. Instantly.” On one of the panels nearby, reels that looked like audio recording equipment turned round and round, stopped, turned again.
“Does it ever sleep?” Smith, one of their classmates, asked.
Everyone laughed. “No need to sleep,” Professor Durer said. “Clearly a better worker than any of us.”
No need to sleep: the thought gave Sam the shivers. Computers working around the clock, whirring through the instructions they followed. Eventually these big computers would figure something out, start talking to one another. Rebel against their masters. Control all the humans from the cold basement of this unassuming, beat-up building.
“Are you with us, Sam?” his professor had asked.
He’d blinked, nodded. “Yes, sorry.”
Sam didn’t say anything to Jerry about that visit last year. It was way too wussy to admit to that shivery feeling about computers leaving the humans behind.
He and Jerry did a test run of what they had so far, and when they looked at the printout, it had done what they’d wanted it to do.
“Smoke break?” Jerry said, after Sam had typed in ten more lines of instructions.
“Sure.” Sam pushed back his chair. Once outside, he stretched in the cold. When Jerry offered him a cigarette, he took one, pretending to focus on the act of smoking—no point in trying to start a conversation. Jerry had made it clear that they weren’t going to be friends. But this afternoon Sam didn’t mind Jerry’s prickliness; Jerry was what he was.
“So what else do you do, Manhattan?” Jerry asked. “For fun, I mean.”
A surprise. “Uh, you know, the usual. Some music stuff. Student-faculty jazz band, Granitetones. Lambda Chi.” For most guys on campus, Sam knew which frat they’d joined, what sport they played and whether they had a girlfriend somewhere. But he didn’t know about Jerry. Jerry would take it the wrong way no matter what Sam asked, so what the hell. “Are you in a frat?”
Jerry gave one of his half-smirk smiles. “You know Topos?” Topos, the commune that some Clarendon dropouts had started a few years ago. Last year, after the Clarendon SDS guys took over the administration building to protest ROTC, and after the National Guard came in and put them all in jail, some of them ended up out at Topos.
Sam nodded. “Cool.” He wanted to ask what Topos was like, whether there were girls living there, as he’d heard.
“Yeah. It’s okay. Lotta work, splitting the wood, clearing the fields, mucking out chicken shit. But good conversations, you know? Sometimes this place, all these dumbasses on campus, it gets to me. No offense, Manhattan.”
“None taken,” Sam said. “It gets to me too sometimes. Not that I—I mean, I haven’t gone to—so what did you do over in ’Nam?”
“Don’t call it ‘’Nam,’ you sound like a jackass,” Jerry said. “Okay. In a nutshell, base ops, signal corps support, radio operator. A fucked-up place, a fucked-up war, and the other Clarendon vets started out here and can’t relate to me. And everybody else on campus hates us. Or else they’re sick of being reminded and wish we’d disappear. That’s why Topos.”
“Ah,” Sam said. “I don’t hate you.”
Jerry gave a quick grimace of a smile, but said nothing.
Back inside, they worked at the code with the computer, wrestled with the cipher’s fourth level, ordered a pizza. As Sam tore into his second slice, he thought of something for the fourth level—his mouth was full of pizza, so he typed into the monitor with his free hand, then gestured for Jerry to look at the screen.
Jerry shook his head in admiration. “You’re not so dumb, Manhattan. Good work.”
Sam leaned back, clasping his hands behind his head as if he did this kind of thing every day.
“Hey, you want to go over to Topos?” Jerry said. “Little gathering there tonight, a fundraiser, and I was supposed to tell people, but...” He shrugged.
“Sure,” Sam said. “I mean, Lambda Chi’s pretty dead tonight, so why not.”
* * *
Sam got into Jerry’s beat-up Dodge, and they pulled out onto College Street. Topos was a mile or so north of Clarendon; a couple of members hitchhiked to and from campus, and once in a while you’d see a guy getting out of a farmer’s pickup truck near the library. He wondered if they talked about farm stuff on the way into town, and whether the farmer would be happy to see a young person trying to work an old farm. Or would he laugh at the hippie and his foolish questions about the land? Jerry clicked the radio on. Graham Nash’s thready, high voice floated from the radio, the carousel song, and Sam sang along. He’d loved the Hollies as a kid, and he still liked to hear Nash’s vocals in Hollies songs, Nash before he was Nash.
>
Jerry drummed on the steering wheel along with the guitar. “Nice falsetto, Manhattan.”
“Sorry.” Sam knew this road, which led to the Ski Bowl. They passed white-clapboard houses, stone walls, fields where snow had drifted into waves and hillocks that remained, even in March. After another few minutes, Jerry turned right onto a dirt driveway bordered by massive maples with sap buckets hanging off them. “You guys make syrup?”
“Nah, we just let our neighbor tap the trees,” Jerry said. “He pays us in gallon jugs of syrup. Sweet, huh?”
The car’s headlights illuminated a series of buildings—first, a couple of sheds and an off-kilter barn. Then a rambling farmhouse, with a narrow gable-end front section, and a screened porch to one side. Getting out of the car, Sam smelled woodsmoke, and the familiar acrid-sweet scent of grass. Two guys sat on the porch smoking, despite the cold air. Sam nodded at them as he followed Jerry inside, and they nodded back.
Inside the farmhouse, Sam smelled bread baking, more grass smoke, the wet-dog smell of old sweaters. They passed through a kitchen where a man and a woman, way older than college age, sat at the end of a long table, both of them drinking out of mugs, while a guy stood at an old-fashioned cookstove, checking something in a pot. Beyond, in the front room, there were maybe fifteen people, mostly guys but some girls too. People stood around in little clumps talking. Sam recognized the guy with pale wavy hair and frameless glasses who’d just fed logs into the woodstove. Hank something, one of the SDS guys who’d gone to jail after the admin takeover. Hank had been suspended rather than kicked out because he’d only been a sophomore at the time. Sam remembered standing on the green that day with a bunch of other freshmen, taking in the guy with a bullhorn leading chants from a second-floor window in the deans’ office. Sam and the other freshmen had kept their distance because state troopers had started to rope off the building. Soon after, a crew of National Guardsmen emerged from an army truck. They carried a log and positioned themselves in front of the admin building’s big front door. Jesus, it’s the battering ram, Sam’s friend Stephen had said. It was like watching a war movie.
Sam tried to be cool, to take in the Topos scene without gawking. Once in a while a rumor would start up about Topos: that a busload of hippies stopped at Topos last summer and camped out in the farm’s field, a big naked sex party; that there was some guy, like a crazy priest, who led group acid trips; that the members paid their rent by doing carpentry and odd jobs around Westfield; that Topos had a rich benefactor who’d helped them get off the ground.
“There’s a basket for contributions,” Jerry said, pointing at a side table. “Officially we don’t believe in money, but we gotta pay the bills.”
Sam went and put a dollar in the basket. On the wall above the table, a carved wooden sign read EU TOPOS, THE GOOD PLACE. Around the sign, letters and cards had been taped up as decorations: “Greetings from Erewhon, Keene, NH;” “Greetings from Pie in the Sky Commune! Vermont Forever!” And the famous Outposts of the Counter-Culture poster. Next to it another, homemade poster making fun of the famous counterculture poster. The homemade poster showed cartoonish people, the men skinny and bearded, the women plump and wearing headscarves, leaning on a counter, ordering sheep, chickens, shovels as if they were in a deli. Sam turned back to talk to Jerry, but Jerry was greeting a girl, so he stood nearby to wait for an introduction. His arms felt too long, his hands too big.
“Elodie!” Jerry had pulled the girl into a hug, holding on to her for longer than your usual hug. When Jerry and the girl separated, Sam recognized her; she’d been an exchange girl in the fall. Silvery-brown hair in a braid down her back, jeans and turtleneck.
“Yep, I’m back,” Elodie said, hands in her jean pockets.
“Still fighting the patriarchy?” Jerry said.
“You know it,” she said.
Sam cleared his throat, putting out his hand to shake. Elodie looked down at his hand, smiling, probably amused at his squareness, then took his hand in both of hers.
“Ah,” Jerry said. “Sam, Elodie. Elodie, Sam. Sam’s a math genius.”
“Hardly,” Sam said. Elodie’s eyes were greeny-gray and smiley, and she held his gaze, as if she wanted to get to know him. This was new. Usually when he talked to a girl at a party he could tell she was looking over his shoulder, trying to find a cooler guy. He felt a new stirring too, felt his mind going blank. He started to blurt out that she had beautiful eyes, but he caught himself—he’d only sound like some lame-ass trying out a line. “You were in American Diplomacy in the fall, weren’t you?” he said instead. “You’re friends with Cynthia?” He could picture Elodie sitting up front every class next to blonde Cynthia. The exchange girls; since last year, a small group of girls applied to spend a semester at Clarendon. They were of intense interest to every Clarendon guy, but in class all the guys pretended a cool nonchalance, as if they were indifferent to this new occasional presence of girls.
“I wouldn’t say we’re friends,” Elodie said. “Cynthia’s the girl my mother wanted me to be. But we both go, went, whatever, to Wellesley.”
“How long you here for?” Jerry asked.
She tilted her head one way, then the other. “Maybe a week.”
Jerry asked if they wanted some cider and went off to get it.
Elodie introduced him to another girl who passed by, and Sam’s heart leaped up at Elodie’s friendliness. “Your name, it sounds like—” he said, but she interrupted.
“Ugh, I get that all the time,” she said. “It gets a little old.”
“Wait, what do you get all the time?”
“I introduce myself and someone says, ‘Melody? Your name is Melody? Like a song?’ And I say ‘No, Elodie,’ and even after I say ‘Elodie,’ still they go and make some dumb joke about my name and songs, like which song would I be, and do I have a good voice, and do I like to sing, because—”
“I wasn’t going to say any of that,” Sam said. “I only meant that Elodie sounds different, like it’s French or something.”
“It is. French, I mean.” She smiled. “Sorry, I’m a little touchy about it. I’m named for a great-aunt on my dad’s side. I honestly don’t know how that happened, since my grandmother is such a battle-ax and most of the women in my family are named Martha, Anna or Louisa. Especially Louisa. Everyone wants to claim a little bit of Louisa May Alcott. Our ancestor. Not directly, because she never had any kids, but you know what I mean.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s cool. Louisa May Alcott. I was named for a great-uncle.” He didn’t say. S for Great-uncle Sol, who did well in the undergarments business.
“Well, that’s a lot simpler.”
“So what are you working on in the movement?” Sam asked.
She tilted her head and looked at him, eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure how trustworthy you are, I mean you look okay, but you’re probably in a frat, or something—” She said the word frat like it was a curse word. He’d had to defend himself plenty of times for belonging to a crappy fraternity like Lambda Chi, but never for just being in a frat.
“You think I’m an establishment guy, huh,” he said.
“And you’re going to tell me otherwise, I take it.” She smiled, eyebrows raised, waiting.
He shrugged. “I’m in Lambda Chi. But it’s not like KA or Deke.”
“It could be worse, you mean.”
“It could be worse,” he said. “A ringing endorsement. But this is Clarendon we’re talking about, not Berkeley.” It occurred to him that Elodie must have liked Clarendon enough to come here as an exchange student. But he didn’t want to annoy her; he wanted her to keep talking to him. But she’d looked over his shoulder and spotted someone coming down the stairs—Hank the senior, he thought it was—and she excused herself to go talk to him. He watched her go, barely noticing when Jerry handed him a glass of brownish cider.
“Martha and Cyri
l—” Jerry didn’t say who Martha and Cyril were, only set two bottles on the table next to them “—have been trying out different methods. To bottle and sell it, bring in some income.”
Sam downed the fizzy-sharp cider in a few gulps. “So, Elodie, is she—” What could he ask: Was she going out with anyone? Was she a radical?
“I don’t want to hear it tonight,” Jerry said. Sam followed Jerry’s gaze across the room, where a group of guys and girls were talking loudly about the wrongheaded Cambodian bombing campaign, the lies coming out of Washington and Saigon. “Sometimes all the talk about the war, the chatter around here gets a little old, man. Nobody has any fucking idea what they’re talking about, not the government, not my old man. Not these guys. Nobody.”
“For sure.” Sam poured more cider. “But it would be good to get some real information. Not what they want us to hear.” Now they were sitting on a lumpy couch like old friends, and he scanned the room for Elodie.
“My old man’s been sending me stuff about POWs, his Legion post has gotten involved...”
“POWs, man, that’s brutal,” Sam said. “At least your old man cares, that’s something.”
“He cares about whatever his Legion buddies care about. Otherwise, he sits in his chair drinking his Rheingold and yelling at Cronkite and my mom.”
“My dad has a new wife and she’s going to have a baby any minute,” Sam said, surprising himself.
“That’s a drag,” Jerry said. “So you’ve got to deal with stepparents, not just parents.”
“And my mom is dying to get remarried. I’m sure it will be to some jerk.”
“Heh. It bugs my old man that my mom works and he doesn’t,” Jerry said. “She does time cards at Con Ed, and he can’t stand it that she goes off into Manhattan every morning. But they need her salary.”
The Wrong Kind of Woman Page 9