Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  His black flannel shirt rolled to the elbows, hands in the pockets of Not So Old black trousers, he now leaned against the wall, listening as his friends went on with their increasingly flirtatious bickering. It had been two years since Steve’s wife had left him to work full time for the George Bush campaign with a corporate banker from Charlotte, whom she’d afterward married. Lately, thought Theo, Steve was acting besotted with the new Ludd Chair.

  jorvelle (lighting up): Steve, if you lose to Marcus Thorney, I’m gonna take the Yale offer.

  steve (lighting up too): You’re gonna leave a place that’s giving you twice what I make to deconstruct The Color Purple?

  jorvelle: I don’t do deconstruction, boy. I do demolition. Didn’t you read that in People magazine? I blow up canons. Meanwhile, I’d love for William Faulkner to hear what you’re doing to The Sound and the Fury.

  They puffed away at each other companionably, smiling through the stinky clouds. Then Jorvelle gave Theo a hug. “So long, dwems, I’ve got a radio interview.” (dwems were the Dead-White-European-Males who’d once been running the world, and telling everybody in it what books to read.)

  “Hey, who’s dead? I’m still a Weem,” Theo protested.

  “Today’s Weem, tomorrow’s Dweem,” Jorvelle cheerfully predicted. She waved on the run, broad hips swaying.

  Steve couldn’t let her go. “I’m a Dweamboat,” he shouted, and chased after her down the hall, not even pausing at the men’s room door to chat up the emerging Contemporary Poetry, a vote allegedly leaning his way.

  It must be spring, thought the unattached Theo Ryan with envy.

  mother courage: Get out of bed and look alive.

  {exit}

  Chapter 2

  A Cry Within

  There has been much throwing about of brains.

  —Hamlet

  In 1924, a Piedmont tobacco czar named Ubal Cavendish had built himself an isolated Christian college in which to pen his worthless sons. He’d built it far from home, in the western part of North Carolina, built it of Georgian brick and Gothic stone in a sylvan setting in a fundamentalist county, huddled by a lake, surrounded by wooded hillocks, and guarded by an impoverished faculty of fanatical evangelicals convinced that the game of football was God’s favorite pastime. In the beginning, the student body was male, rural, local, and as sophisticated as a bootlegger’s still hidden behind a patch of jimsonweed. Back then, students were required to pray, forbidden to dance, and encouraged to smoke. Now they were warned against smoking, but praying and dancing were optional. Back then, the school was as poor as the state. Now it was rich; so were most of the students, and the faculty was looking to catch up. Football was still sacred.

  Football was sacred despite the scandals of ’64, in which the alumni Goalpost Club had been exposed for buying the head coach a beach house and the star quarterback a Corvette; or the shock of ’75, in which the defensive line had been arrested for betting on games with professional bookies; or the upheaval of ’82, in which three faculty members had turned state’s evidence and confessed to handing out passing grades to scholarship players in courses that presupposed an ability to (A) do long division, (B) identify rocks, and (C) read newspapers in Spanish—none of which skills the players appeared, under the most generous interpretation, to possess in the slightest. It didn’t matter. In ’87, the Cavendish Cougars had been ranked sixth in the nation. In ’88, they’d won the Peach Bowl for the fifth time since the Buddy Tupper days. They’d beaten their great rival across the hills, Waldo College, forty-nine times in sixty-four years. The college stadium seated fifty thousand happy alumni. There were never any empty seats. This was still the South. Football was sacred.

  Over the years, the college had become a university called Cavendish after its founder; the town that grew up around it was called Rome after the empire. Across from the building that housed the English Department, now renamed Ludd in honor of the daughter of one of those original worthless Cavendish sons, was the Forum, an outdoor café set amidst fake broken-off Roman columns. There, Theo’s bedraggled chairman, Norman Bridges, was treating his protégé to coffee and himself to two cinnamon buns. The Forum bordered Vance Walk, a cobbled path that wound on a pretty diagonal across the pastoral campus. The scene was idyllic, every tree patiently and expensively raised to form a grove of academe. The town of Rome, such as it was, was there to serve the school; it never imposed except to deliver mail and pizzas. The campus offered Nature at its monied best, Architecture at its most serene; upon the green landscape, well-fed youthful bodies lay lusciously about the grass nearly naked, sharing knowledge, like a vision of the Golden Age.

  Theo glanced with pleasure at the yellow stone of the huge library glowing mellow in the afternoon sun. Ivy twined ’round the casement windows of rose-bricked Ludd Hall. An Ionic frieze of tobacco sheaves and Indian maidens graced Calvin Coolidge, the administration building named by the tobacco czar for that pro-business president who’d helped him make his fortune in the twenties by staying out of his way. Daffodils and tulips patterned the lawn leading to the stately new Palladian temple of History designed by I.M. Pei and paid for by the Georgia insecticide king. The chime of bells (or at least a recording of the chime of bells) pealed sweetly from the white spire of the college chapel. And in the center of the quad, bushy red rhododendron flamed at the base of the statue of Reverend Amos Latchett, the college’s first president, as if he were a martyr being burned at the stake for his devotion to a higher and purer education.

  “I do love this place,” Dr. Bridges reminded himself as he morosely licked cinnamon sugar from his fingers. “So, Theo! What do you hear from your mother?”

  “She and Dad are doing The Pajama Game—I think it’s Pajama Game—somewhere, Connecticut, I guess.” On a napkin, Theo started doodling the original set for the American playwright Ford Rexford’s Desert Slow Dance, which he was teaching Monday in “Classics of the Stage: Sophocles to Rexford,” his spring term perennial. Ford Rexford was in a way a friend of his, and they were, in fact, supposed to have dinner together tomorrow evening.

  “Lorraine Page!” Bridges sighed. “My goodness. I can’t get over my saving that Bells Are Ringing playbill.”

  Theo nodded and scratched at his tawny mustache. They’d gone through this—how many times?

  Decades ago, Norman Bridges had seen his first Broadway musical on one of the nights when Theo’s mother had happened to go on in it as the understudy for Judy Holliday. Bridges, enthralled, hadn’t even known Lorraine Page wasn’t Judy Holliday until he’d asked for her autograph at the stage door. The chairman now shook his head fondly, and wandered back into the past. Waiting for him to return, Theo stared as six beautiful short-skirted young women lined up across the quad; suddenly, they leapt in unison off the ground, each forming the shape of a Saint Andrew’s cross.

  “Well, Theo. I’ve got some exciting news about the Ludd Chair…”

  Theo had known Bridges would be drawn back to “shop talk” like a moth to an electric zapper. Still watching the young women, he brushed a bee from his coffee. “Norman, you know—”

  The cheerleaders screamed; an enormous sweat-suited young man charged into their midst, and galloped away with a blonde slung over his shoulder like a Sabine captive.

  “My gosh! Wasn’t that Cathy Bannister, one of our honors majors?” asked Bridges, squinting through his glasses.

  “Yes. That’s Joe Botzchick making off with her.”

  “The quarterback?”

  “Half.” Theo was staring at a dark-haired girl in shorts, lying in a spring fever in the grass nearby, her knees bent, her arms outflung, fingers feeling through the green blades. He rubbed his eyes. “You already know my opinion. If no one will agree with me about offering Dame Winifred—”

  “I’m afraid no one will. Except Jonas.”

  “Then I say we should give John Hood his Renaissance ca
ndidate—”

  “Yes, but what about this herpes rumor?”

  Theo laughed. “Do we have to sleep with her to hire her? Besides, you don’t even know it’s true.”

  “She doesn’t have much visibility. At least, as a scholar.”

  “Oh, the star theory!” Theo made a disgusted face.

  “The consensus is we need a star. And that brings me to—”

  Theo interrupted. “Make Mortimer and Lovell retire. (These were the real names of the ancient Dee and Dum.) Replace them with Hood’s candidate. Hire some famous female novelist. We need more women.”

  “More women?”

  “Yes.”

  Theo needed one, at least. He had a feeling today, almost tingling, a stirring he hadn’t felt since the departure of the art historian. But maybe the feeling was only April in the mountains. A jumble of songs of the sort his father and mother were continually belting out in his childhood jingled through his head, as they’d had a strange habit of doing this spring. April in dada, chestnuts in dada…Why, it’s almost like being in—He pushed away lyrics about hearing music when there’s no one there, and drank his coffee.

  Dr. Bridges looked at the young man with the paternal affection a chunky little spaniel might feel for an adopted baby Saint Bernard. He thought of Theo Ryan, whom he’d hired and had nudged through finishing his first book (on clowns in Shakespeare), as his academic son and heir. His successor, his success. “Theo, Theo. Why can’t the rest of the department be as reasonable as you! I’ve got a building full of Napoleons and no army. Did I tell you my internist thinks I’m developing an ulcer?”

  “You mentioned it.” Theo stretched his long legs out into the walkway. “When I think of Napoleon, I think of ending up on Elba.”

  “That’s your one problem. You’re not ambitious, Theo.” The chairman wagged his pudgy finger.

  “Not virtue?” Across the quad, approaching the Coolidge steps, Theo saw a small group of students dressed in black and carrying a big red banner. They appeared to be staging a grisly pantomime with some sort of human effigy. He thought he recognized his best graduate student, Jenny Harte, among them. It looked as if she was waving at him; she was very pretty. Theo reminded himself that he was Jenny’s faculty adviser; she was as morally off-limits as a cloistered nun. She was very pretty.

  Bridges was gulping down a large pill taken from the prescription bottle he kept in his vest pocket. “The way academia is today, Theo, only the very ambitious make it to the top. And the top is all there is now. Even for those who aren’t in it. In my time, you could live a happy, productive life in the middle. Now the middle is simply not the top. You could be the top, if you’d only try.”

  “Norman, you sound like a Cole Porter song. Besides, a minute ago you were wishing everyone else could be like me.”

  “Theoretically.” The chairman smothered a soft belch behind his hand. “Let Dr. Bridges be frank with a friend,” he murmured. “All right?”

  Theo nodded unhappily. The frankness of friendship had, since they’d met, flowed only in one direction. All right over the years for Dr. Bridges to tell him that if he didn’t “chat up” old Mortimer and Lovell at his visiting lecture and “talk some football” to Dean Tupper at his first interview, he wouldn’t get the job; that if he didn’t finish his “clown book” and have it accepted by a “major press,” he wouldn’t get tenure; that if he didn’t stir himself and get married soon, he wouldn’t have children. And that if he didn’t capitalize on the success of the clown book and on his “fantastic chance” to write the official biography of Ford Rexford, America’s greatest living playwright, he would not only not get promoted to “full,” he would sink from the limbo of the Middle into an abyss of anonymity on the Bottom. All that was friendly frankness.

  Whereas it was Theo’s strong impression that it would not be all right for him to remind Norman Bridges that he himself had been working on the same book for eighteen years. That if he didn’t stop overeating, he would go from looking like Porky Pig, who was at least cute, to resembling the latter-day Orson Welles, who was a mess. That if he didn’t gag most of his faculty, the lucky History Department (an oligarchy of catholic conformity) would never stop smirking out their I.M. Pei windows at the anarchy of radical Protestants squabbling in Ludd Hall.

  Not for Theo to point out that Bridges himself was married and had children. That his wife, Tara, a Virginia belle who was sorry she’d ever left Charlottesville, lost no public opportunity for sarcasm at his expense, and four years back, after too much punch, had thrown a mousse pâté in his face at the department Christmas party. That his Visigoth of a teenaged son had trashed downtown Rome one Saturday night in his pickup truck, and, skipping bail, had vanished in a trail of exorbitant Visa charges. That his daughter (who made her father look slim) had declined to attend Cavendish or any other college, or to move out of the house, where at thirty-two she still lived, passing her days watching the soaps and sullenly stuffing college-fund drive envelopes for $5.50 an hour. No, frankness was not called for on Theo’s part.

  “How’s the Rexford book coming?” Norman asked.

  “Coming,” said Theo.

  “You’re due for promotion in the fall, you know?”

  He knew.

  “It’s going to be a big book, Theo.”

  It certainly was.

  “How is Mr. Rexford?” asked the chairman shyly. “Feeling better?”

  “Much.”

  “Did he really fall off his balcony, or was he, well, drinking again?”

  “Both.”

  “Ah, ha.”

  Although not a vulgar man, Norman Bridges was a stargazer. His attraction to Theo Ryan, as Theo knew, had followed close on his spotting two comets that had trailed the tall young man into Rome. First of all, there were Theo’s parents, Benny and Lorraine. While by no means ever the greatest celebrities, and by now (to their chagrin) entirely unknown to the general public, the two had enjoyed their glittering moments up there in the same sky with brighter stars. Everybody in America who’d watched Luster Playhouse on Friday nights had watched Lorraine Page lather up her strawberry-blonde curls at 8:14 p.m. and comb them out at 8:27. Norman Bridges had been one of those millions of Americans. Plus, while an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky, he had attempted (along with everyone else in the country under twenty) to “Do the Duck” with Benny Ryan, although he had never mastered the backslide.

  Even more important among Theo’s assets was the playwright Ford Rexford. For Theo was not merely Rexford’s official biographer, he was likely to be his literary executor, with final say on the resting place of all the Rexford papers—papers that Harvard, UCLA, and Carnegie Mellon had already tried in vain to persuade the writer to leave to them. It was thrilling to Bridges that the best-known publisher in New York had flown down to Rome (well, to Asheville, and then rented a car) to meet with Theo and Rexford. Theo S. Ryan might not yet dazzle, himself—although those who loved him, and Bridges did, believed there was, well, sparkle in him—but life had already dusted him with the glitter of others; he might not be a star, but he certainly hung out with them.

  Theo knew this: that behind the chairman’s incessant promotion of his candidacy for the directorship of Cavendish’s new Spitz Center was the hope of getting Rexford’s papers. In fact, Theo was waiting for Bridges to say something more about that Spitz job right now. Seated in the sunset at the Forum, watching the bronze head of Reverend Latchett blaze with indignation at the disrespectful young protestors on Coolidge steps, Theo was absolutely certain he knew what was coming. The chairman was leading straight to that “word” he’d said earlier he wanted to have with his protégé. He would once again begin pleading with Theo to agree to run the Spitz Center.

  In this assumption, Theo was absolutely and horrendously wrong.

  The plump chairman wiped his glasses with his napkin. (A mistake, as
the napkin was covered with sticky sugar.) He said, “Damn.” Then he cleared his throat nervously. “Theo. I’ll make the announcement tomorrow, but I wanted you to hear it personally. You know that Dr. Bridges has always been your strongest supporter.”

  Theo smiled patiently.

  “But, well, I’ve had to face the fact—and there was no way to convince Buddy Tupper you were exactly eager, when you weren’t…”

  Theo stopped doodling and stared at Bridges, who looked as if he were having gas pains, which was possible. “Is this about the Spitz Center?”

  The plump man patted his heart or intestines. “Well, yes. Remember that multimedia thing they offered Herbie Crawford’s wife? I have to hand it to Buddy on this one. He’s pulled off quite a coup.”

  “She’s coming?”

  “No, thank God. We would have never heard the end of History’s hideous gloating.” Bridges swiveled to shake his pudgy fist at the I.M. Pei building. “No, but Buddy put a multimedia package together with Mr. Spitz, you know, the theater donor, and the upshot is we’re going to get something really major here. Theater, film studies, television studio, an annual festival! Bigger than—”

  “Sounds fantastic, Norman, but I keep telling you, it’s just not my—”

  Bridges rushed ahead, hands dancing. “To run it, Spitz wanted, and Buddy and Mrs. Ludd wanted, somebody, well, a star. Now, the amazing thing is—”

  Theo began to suspect. “A star?”

  “The amazing thing is, they put out some feelers, made the approach…and, I’ve got to hand it to them, they think they’ve got him!”

  “Him?” It’s a sad fact of human nature that we don’t care to be rejected even by that which we are quite prepared to reject. Theo’s first sensation was a spasm of hurt, a jab of envy. But all that might have been recovered from by bedtime, all that was nothing compared to the jolt that shook him at the two words he now heard like a hiss from the suddenly serpentine tongue of his old advocate.