The Church of Dead Girls

by Stephen Dobyns

  Franklin said that Chihani spoke slowly but without pause or hesitation. He was not a man short of ideas. Nor did he blunt his message with diplomacy.

  Franklin said it was too bad that the position at the college should become available as the result of a tragedy.

  “It was not a tragedy,” said Chihani. “A shame, perhaps, even a great pity. But the accidental death of a human being engaged in his daily responsibilities is never tragic.”

  He left a wife and two small children, said Franklin.

  “Then it is an even greater pity, but it is not tragic.”

  Franklin asked what Chihani thought about his students at Aurelius.

  “Youth is expected to be ignorant. That is a definition of youth: it is unknowing. One assumes the young are capable of being taught. Here the students are not only ignorant, they are apathetic. However, in any situation one finds a few willing students, and that very willingness creates intelligence, or a readiness that passes for intelligence. And those few students can enlist others. Wherever there are a few ounces of chaff, one finds a few grains of wheat. Here there is much chaff.”

  And Mr. Chihani’s colleagues at Aurelius?

  “They are like the students in their ignorance, but their minds have calcified. At best they may impart information which conventional wisdom deems useful. The degree to which the students digest this wisdom depends on the degree to which it is made pleasurable. But true knowledge does not depend on charm. The reasoning faculties of the listener are all that are required to convince him of its truth.”

  And why did Houari Chihani teach?

  “I teach to help young people take responsibility for the world and responsibility for one another. There has to be a consequence for education. Mostly that consequence is seen as increased earning power. That is a chimera attached to another chimera: limitless growth. I feel the consequence of education must be responsibility and change.”

  By change did Chihani mean revolution?

  “That is a melodramatic word. I mean responsibility for the world. Historically, we see a fraction of the population taking advantage of the majority, making them ignorant consumers. They work hard at pointless jobs in order to buy the clothes, cars, and toys which they believe will make them happy. They fall into debt, become a version of wage slaves, and seek distraction in violence and sporting events. Education is minimized, the arts are discredited. The alternative is a society which values its members equally, a society which takes responsibility for its people and which acts out of that sense of responsibility, a society which works to decrease the greed, ignorance, and baser natures of its participants, instead of encouraging them.”

  Do you call that Marxism? asked Franklin.

  “One finds many of these ideas in Marx, but just as the theories of evolution have gone beyond Darwin, so have the theories of economics gone beyond Marx.”

  But don’t you teach Marx?

  “His ideas were a beginning. You can argue that these ideas also exist in the New Testament. Our job is to prepare young people for the twenty-first century—that is a more complicated task than simply teaching Marxism.”

  And what did Mr. Chihani think of the people of Aurelius?

  “They are asleep. This is the condition they prefer. They are afraid of the world and sleep is a way of dealing with their fear. Someday they will wake. Perhaps something frightful will happen. Indeed, there is no better invitation to the frightful than ignorance—that is, sleep.”

  Four

  Franklin’s interview with Chihani made no one happy. Roger Fielding and Priscilla Guerthen were seen as having made an error in hiring Chihani, which led people to recall errors they had made in the past. When the paper came out on Thursday, the third Thursday in February, the president of Aurelius College, Harvey Shavers, called Roger and Priscilla into his office and read them the interview out loud. People passing in the hall spoke of hearing Shavers’s voice. He was a big man and he had a big voice to go with it, a voice well-practiced in public speaking. Shavers was primarily a fund-raiser and he knew how difficult it would be to raise money within the community if someone at the college went on record to call members of that community stupid. For Shavers, what was important was the appearance of quality rather than quality itself. As he had discovered, the brilliant rarely conceal their gifts, meaning they talk too much and create unfortunate publicity. Far easier to have silent mediocrity posing as quality than to have the real thing.

  And in the faculty senate there was talk of demanding an explanation. Hadn’t the teachers’ credibility been disputed? Robinson Smart, chair of the English department, said he would have difficulty facing his students unless Chihani made a public apology to the entire college. These ideas were argued back and forth until it was decided it would be a mistake to give Chihani a soapbox from which to make additional remarks. Instead, the faculty senate agreed to vote on the possibility of censure should Chihani ever again insult their competence as teachers.

  The student senate went further and sent a delegation of three students to Chihani to demand an explanation.

  “Do you deny that you are ignorant?” asked Chihani.

  There followed a certain discussion of the word ignorance: how it cast no aspersion on ability, potential, or intelligence. For instance, Chihani confessed himself ignorant of Japanese.

  “You should welcome your ignorance,” said Chihani, “because it enables you to learn.”

  They were sitting in his office. That February was very snowy, with only two days entirely free of bad weather. More than three feet of snow covered the ground. It seemed that every time I glanced outside I saw snow blowing past the window.

  “What I object to,” said Sharon McGregor, who was vice president of the student body, “is that you think I need to know Russian history in order to be a veterinarian.”

  “Absolument pas,” said Chihani, “only to be a good veterinarian.”

  The reaction outside the college was not as strong but it was bitter. There has always been a division between the farming community—the cabbage growers and dairy farmers—and the town itself. The farmers tend to feel a certain scorn for the town and even more scorn for the college. That Chihani was making rude remarks only confirmed their beliefs. The college was made up of idiots and here was a specific idiot to prove the point. The fact that he was a foreigner, a non-Christian, and a Marxist made it worse. To those few farmers who cared, Chihani wasn’t quite human. His little red car, his beret, and his oaken skin were too eccentric. He was discussed briefly in the few bars where farmers assembled, then dismissed. Manure smelled, and Chihani had only shown proof of his smell.

  Among townspeople the reaction was fiercer. Many thought Aurelius a fine place and here was this Marxist claiming it was less cultured than the North Pole. In taverns the complaints against Chihani tended toward violence: somebody should kick his ass. In politer circles there was talk of Chihani’s ignorance of community values. The doctors, lawyers, and businessmen spoke of the warp and woof of friendships and relationships that kept any town running smoothly. Even at Albert Knox Consolidated School there was talk among the faculty of sending Chihani a letter of censure, though nothing was done about it.

  If Houari Chihani realized his unpopularity, he gave no sign of it. He taught as ever, arguing his positions in his dry, passionless voice. He was observed downtown and at the shopping mall. Chihani was one of those people who never seemed to take their eyes off their destination, who didn’t let their eyes wander curiously over other people or things. He stared straight ahead, as if surrounded by empty space. Often his red Citroën could be seen driving through the snow to his house, then back to campus, then around town on various errands: to Wegmans supermarket, the Trustworthy Hardware. It would have been better if he had driven a more conventional car because his little Citroën was like salt in civic wounds. And indeed, five days after the interview ap
peared in the Independent, Chihani emerged from Wegmans one afternoon to find his windshield smashed and a large stone sitting in the front seat. He put his shopping bags in the trunk, returned to the store, and telephoned the police. Chuck Hawley, a cousin of mine, responded to the call. There was no sign of the culprit and it was clear that Chihani had called the police only for insurance purposes.

  “He wasn’t even angry,” said Chuck. “Snow was blowing into the car but this guy didn’t even notice. He made his statement, signed the form, and that was it. I asked if he’d seen anyone or if he had enemies. I’d read the interview, of course. He said there was no reason for him to have any enemies. Then he got into his car and drove off with the snow blowing in his face. He must have been freezing.”

  The day after Chihani’s windshield was smashed, Franklin stopped by my house in the evening with Sadie, and I gave them each a cup of tea. On a bookshelf in the parlor I keep the books my mother read as a young girl, and Sadie settled down to read Understood Betsy. She sat with her feet tucked under her in the old wing chair. Her brown hair fell forward to frame her face. She was the image of her father, long and bony. I also set out a plate of sugar cookies. Sadie would take one and break off small pieces to put in her mouth. Other than saying hello, thank you, and good night, I don’t believe she spoke.

  Franklin was restless and didn’t care to sit. Though he felt guilty about having run the interview, his very guilt angered him, as if feeling guilty indicated that he wasn’t as good a newspaperman as he should be.

  “I neither changed what he said nor exaggerated,” he explained. “If anything, I played down what he told me. I didn’t want to make him seem like a fanatic.”

  Franklin wore an old sheepskin coat that reached his knees. Around his neck was one of those British university scarves, blue with two red stripes. He held an Irish fisherman’s hat in his hand and kept hitting it against his leg, knocking off drops of water. Franklin must have been hot but he gave no sign of it. He wore boots with Vibram soles and as he paced back and forth he deposited little wedge-shaped chunks of snow on my grandmother Francine’s Turkish carpet. I’m sure he wanted a cigarette, though I don’t let anyone smoke in my house. Now and then Sadie would smile at him fondly and go back to her book.

  “All kinds of people live in a town,” Franklin said. “If everyone acts the same, what’s the point in that? Just the fact this sort of debate exists shows the town isn’t sleepy.”

  But it seemed there wasn’t any debate, just anger and resentment. Most of the resentment was aimed at Chihani, but people also knew who had been the medium for Chihani’s views. If Franklin hadn’t conducted the interview, no one would have been any the wiser about this Marxist in our midst.

  Franklin flung his scarf on the couch. It seemed a considered gesture, not quite studied, not quite spontaneous—the gesture of a man who isn’t sure who he is and so assumes a borrowed gesture, one that he thinks correct for the occasion.

  “My job as a journalist is to make people think. I can write nice stuff they won’t pay attention to, but that means I won’t be doing my job.”

  I asked what he was going to do about the smashed windshield.

  “I’m going to write an editorial about it.”

  And that’s what Franklin did. When the paper came out on the first Thursday of March, it contained an editorial by Franklin attacking whoever had smashed Chihani’s windshield, as well as those people who felt that vandalism was deserved. “If we have any richness as a town,” he wrote, “it must be in our diversity. We are different from one another—not only is this our wealth, it should be our pride. . . . The person who smashed the windshield of Houari Chihani’s car was attacking that very wealth. . . . We must see Chihani’s presence as a virtue. He helps us see ourselves, and to see ourselves is to improve ourselves.”

  I doubt that editorial smoothed any wrinkled brows. As I heard one man say in the faculty room, “Franklin’s shaking his finger at us again.” It would have been better to drop the matter and let people forget Chihani, but Franklin took the opposite tack. Since he was afraid of being thought cowardly or, as he might have said, unprofessional, Franklin began to ask Chihani his opinion on various events both in town and in the world at large. He didn’t do this regularly, but every so often there would be an article that included an opinion of Chihani’s. Mostly these were innocent. For instance, during a debate about health-care reform, Chihani was quoted as saying that any country that pretended to be civilized had to care for its people. But in some cases, Chihani’s remarks were disturbing and eventually they became more disturbing than anything he had said in his original interview.

  —

  It would be incorrect to suggest that Chihani’s remarks were received with universal scorn. One tiny group applauded them. That was Chihani’s reading group. At that point, Inquiries into the Right had five members. Perhaps we can all recall such fringe groups in college. Seeing its members together, one would be aware more of psychology than of intellectual belief. The shy, the pimpled, the resentful—one felt they had joined in order to be against something rather than for something.

  For instance, there were two brothers, Jesse and Shannon Levine, a sophomore and a junior respectively, skateboard nihilists whose boom boxes broadcast a music in which static played an integral part. They had blond goatees and were as skinny as whippets, which made their knees and elbows look huge. And they had homemade jail tattoos on their hands and arms: small messages of love and hate, anarchy and discontent. Invariably they wore jeans, T-shirts, and large basketball shoes with the laces undone. Their father taught psychology at the state university in Cortland. Before taking a class with Chihani, they had been on academic probation. Chihani focused them sufficiently to allow them to achieve a C average. He also focused their resentment. Instead of just feeling angry, they now had an intellectual argument to validate their feelings. This made their rebellion a rational act, a sensible course to follow.

  I would see Jesse and Shannon downtown. Their new beliefs gave them a cloak that freed them from their defensiveness and let them assume a sort of superiority. They developed Chihani’s manner of keeping their eyes trained straight ahead, of looking as if they were always alone. They put aside their skateboards for the books Chihani explained to them. They saw the rest of us as deluded, culpable, greedy. Their language came to display a jargon that formed a barrier between them and the unenlightened. They believed Chihani’s interview to be an attack against the complacent and they looked forward to future battles. They saw themselves as soldiers and began to dress in dark jeans and jerseys that had a vaguely paramilitary air. They even tied their shoes.

  Another member of the IIR was Leon Stahl, an overweight young man who slept during the day and read and argued all night. He seemed never without a family-size bottle of Coca-Cola. He had a round pimply face and a little black moustache. He wore white shirts, gray around the collar, with discolored splotches on the back where pimples had burst. He celebrated his ugliness as a blow against convention, though if he had lost a hundred pounds he would have been handsome enough. Leon panted dreadfully and had a key for the elevators that were reserved for faculty and the handicapped. Before he met Chihani, his favorite book had been The Golden Bough. Now he read Chihani’s books and articles and could quote whole passages. He was a passionate arguer and known for never giving up. Once he engaged two other students in an argument on the evils of private property that lasted twenty-six hours. As a freshman he had joined the debating club, as a sophomore he had been elected president, and as a junior he was barred from membership. He wore thick glasses in flesh-colored frames and the lenses always had large, fat thumbmarks across their surfaces. He came from Dunkirk, south of Buffalo, where his parents were high school teachers.

  A fourth member was Jason Irving, a tall, thin young man who I had assumed was gay, but later he claimed to have no sex at all. He chain-smoked and drank endless cu
ps of coffee. He played chess with a clock. Jason was vain about his long hair and combed it constantly. He liked to sit in McDonald’s and read Das Kapital. He was exceedingly polite with his pleases and thank yous, but beyond that he never seemed to talk. He wore inexpensive rings on all his fingers, even his thumbs. Jason was a good student and wanted to go to graduate school in history. Before joining the IIR he had memorized the sentence “The small black rabbit has stolen the fat hunchback’s yellow bicycle” in twenty-six languages, including Farsi. That had been the extent of an intellectual ambition that he later exchanged for Marxism.

  The fifth member was a young woman, Harriet Malcomb. She was a junior from Binghamton with long dark hair that hung loose, and she was considered quite beautiful. She was thin to the point of seeming anorexic and she never smiled. Her face had a pallor accentuated by chalky makeup so she resembled a character from the Addams Family. People said she had been sexually abused by a cousin as a young child. When I asked how they knew such a thing, I was told that Harriet herself told the story. Although a radical feminist, she dressed revealingly, showing off her legs and breasts. She often flirted with young men and then, when they responded, she would find fault with them. Perhaps flirt is too strong a word. She would appear available, and when the young man tried to approach her, she would show herself unavailable. And she would criticize the young man for approaching her, as if it indicated his sexism, even his bestiality. One had the sense that not only did she think badly of men but she manipulated events to make them seem worse. She was close friends with Jason Irving and they often wore the same clothes, red silk shirts and baggy khakis. Leon Stahl believed that he loved her, and he would follow her around, panting. She would be kind to him, more often than not, and send him on endless errands to buy cigarettes and chewing gum, which was probably the only exercise the poor fellow got. The two brothers, Jesse and Shannon, seemed immune to her charms.