Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  But, thought Iddy, knocking back a slug of codeine-laced cough syrup, things were actually going pretty well; compared, that is, to when the two leads had refused to speak to each other, or to him, during the last week of Damn Yankees, or when the cow had died onstage at the dress rehearsal for Fiddler. No, thought Iddy, things could be much worse. He had Thursday and Friday and even Saturday until the curtain went up left to rehearse in with full orchestra. And Saturday was sold out. As the lovers, Fletcher and Ryan weren’t bad at all. His lighting designer had quit a few minutes ago, but he always did about this time, and he always returned. Jenny Harte had failed to appear for rehearsal tonight when she was always so reliable, but she was only a chorus member, and there were too many of them anyhow. If Bill Robey could stop worrying about the “psychological subtext” behind his postponing for fourteen years his marriage to Miss Adelaide, he’d be (while no Sinatra) a respectable Nathan Detroit. Nobody would be looking at Robey anyhow, because (as Iddesleigh with great self-satisfaction told his wife every night) the real show-stealer was going to be Jorvelle Wakefield. “She’s a natural! She can sing, she can dance, she’s got incredible comic timing—”

  From under the pillow, Doris Iddesleigh had mumbled, “I don’t think black people like to be told they’re naturals anymore, Thayer. Please turn that video off and go to sleep. If I have to listen to Frank Sinatra sing ‘Sue Me’ one more time, that’s just what I’m going to do to you in a divorce court.”

  “Very funny, Doris, very funny.”

  On stage now, Iddy was watching the Hot Box girls’ number, “Take Back Your Mink.” (Still without minks, the girls were flinging in each other’s faces a colorful flurry of raincoats, parkas, and leather bomber jackets.) The director was trying to handle Tara Bridges’s sulky efforts to upstage Jorvelle (whom she hadn’t forgiven for getting to play Miss Adelaide), when the first sirens wailed by the Spitz Center.

  Of course, any world there may be outside the walls of a theater is not a world of interest to those inside it. Mrs. Fruchaff kept playing. Iddy kept darting in and out of the line of women, shouting, “Pick it up. Right, left, right, kick. Move your you-know-whats!” There was a rumbling of thunder, very faint in the soundproofed space. Ten minutes later, a second, louder, longer set of sirens flew wailing past. More heads turned, turned back. The show went on.

  From their seats in the orchestra where they were conferring about some new business they planned to add to her drunk scene, Maude Fletcher leaned over to whisper to Theo, the white silk of her blouse brushing his arm, “Is that a fire?”

  Theo listened. “I noticed a bunch of students massed around Coolidge when I drove by. Some of them did have torches. Maybe they set fire to the place.”

  “Are you serious!” Maude Fletcher leapt to her feet and ran up the aisle. “Something’s happened at Bleecker!” she shouted back at him. “Tell Iddy I had to go!”

  “Maude! Wait! You can’t leave rehearsal!” Was this what Ford had meant by her “radical activism”?

  “Quiet!” the director shouted from the stage. Then, “Where does she think she’s going?”

  “She’ll be right back,” Theo promised.

  But she wasn’t. And it wasn’t a fire. The Bleecker boycotters, learning this evening that Dean Tupper had not only denied them the right to hold their rally tomorrow but that he’d summarily fired ten of the cafeteria workers, had just stormed Coolidge Building, where the provost was apparently holed up in his offices. Steve Weiner burst into the Spitz Center to tell the cast the news. Drenched, he ran up onto the stage and over to Jorvelle by the piano. Mrs. Fruchaff’s hands lifted stoically from the keys.

  “They’re arresting students over at Coolidge!” he said. “They were burning Tupper in effigy, and he called the cops on them! A fight’s broken out!”

  Everyone stopped where they were—in midkick, midstitch, midstaple. They looked at each other and at Thayer Iddesleigh, who stared aghast at Steve Weiner (he recognized the short bearded man as the intruder who hung around Jorvelle Wakefield, who’d had the effrontery to claim to be her “voice coach”). Iddy hugged his black Cabaret sweatshirt and turned red in the face. Not from fury against the fascistic Dean Tupper, either. From rage that an outsider had disrupted his rehearsal for something less momentous than news that the Spitz Center itself was at that instant an inferno of raging conflagration.

  The shock paralyzed him a minute too long. Before he could move, his entire cast and crew, even his stage manager, even his four children, bolted. “Stop! Come back here!” he screamed to no avail. They scrambled off the stage, raced up the aisles, and poured out the exits. In seconds, the whole huge beautiful space was empty and silent.

  Silent, except for the mournful plink of notes on the piano as Mrs. Fruchaff slowly one-fingered “Take Back Your Mink.” The old secretary had seen them come and go, young protesters and irascible police; she’d heard the shouts and the sirens through decades of grievance. Over Sacco and Vanzetti, Guernica, the Rosenbergs, Birmingham, Nixon, Soweto. Over everything from nuclear waste to curfews on campus. “They’ll be back, Iddy,” she called to the forlorn little man slumped in his black Bob Fosse pants on the edge of his director’s stool.

  He nodded morosely. Hadn’t he just told himself things could get worse? He shouldn’t forget it. He should remember the opening night of Annie, when the singing orphans had lost control of F.D.R.’s wheelchair and plunged him into the orchestra pit.

  On the campus green, pelting rain and stabs of lightning shooting all over the sky had driven off most of the festive students who’d come to support the fired Bleecker workers less out of political fervor than a desire to be caught up in mass hysteria, whatever its nature. And the arrival of two squad cars and the Rome police van with helmeted, armed men jumping out of it had proved enough to scare off the sincere but timid. Still others had been persuaded to slip away by reports that the administration was taking names. That still left about sixty students, twenty cafeteria workers, and a dozen faculty members to taunt Dean Buddy Tupper Jr. as he stood on the Coolidge steps, rain pouring off his flattop, and glared down at them. The arrival of the police had caused a swell of obscene chants and boos, a rattling of placards, and a confused stampede during which two deputies had gotten whacked with soggy torches. They’d retaliated by conking whatever they could reach with their swat sticks; unfortunately, in the confusion, one stick connected with the head of a female undergraduate and knocked her unconscious. An ambulance was rushed to the scene to take her away. The police were now hauling the ringleaders up into the van by their hands and feet—all of them had dropped limply into the mud, just the way Professor Herbert Crawford was shouting at them to do.

  The ringleaders were Crawford, a Bleecker salad chef, three dishwashers, and the two students who had used their torches to ignite a kerosene-soaked, eight-foot cloth dummy with a gray flattop and tupper painted across its fat stomach. Hung from the limb of a giant oak near the steps, the effigy smoldered in the rain now, but the storm had arrived too late to stop it from blazing into a charred rag of disrespect.

  But Buddy Tupper was not about to be intimidated, as he’d explained emphatically through his megaphone two hours ago. He’d told them then to disperse and no hard feelings. He’d told them then there was a university rule on the books against assemblage of more than twenty-five students after dark without written permission from the provost’s office (his secretary had found this rule at 6:49 p.m.). He’d told them that if they attached that effigy to a university tree and lit it, they’d be subject to arrest as well as disciplinary action. He’d warned them. They didn’t know the Bone-Cruncher if they’d banked on his backing off. He hadn’t backed off when unions had tried to infiltrate the campus; he hadn’t backed off against Georgia Tech in much worse weather than this, with Cavendish down thirteen points in the fourth quarter and two of his fingers broken.

  While the camera of Channel 10 whirred
, the provost stood feet apart (like the opening of Patton, his favorite film next to Knute Rockne, All American) and stuck out his chin. He could see an indistinct huddle of half-dressed spectators watching him from the shelter of the nearby Forum café awning—among whom he thought he spotted Tara Bridges in pink tights. Well, they’d see a man against a mob! He hadn’t been happier since ’73, when he’d routed the students who’d stormed Coolidge over the bombing of Cambodia.

  Sure, he was a little surprised; these weren’t unwashed long-hairs, these were Reagan’s and Bush’s children, future commodities traders and corporate execs. But still, they’d staged that El Salvador demonstration, and then they’d tried to clutter the campus with that South African shantytown, and now here they were up to this malarky. That idiot Herbert Crawford must have brainwashed them with his MTV and his Commie films and his old sixties footage of hippies wild in the streets. Listen to the Limey now, squealing, “Thah ’ole world’s whatchin,’ yah bleedin’ bloody bastards!” You wish! Well, let’s see how ’Erbie likes a night in a Yank holding cell instead of a swim in his lap pool.

  But Tupper didn’t see his major prob as Crawford (now being whisked away in the van with his comrades). Nor did he give a thought to General Irwin Kaney, who, somehow escaping from the middle-aged daughter responsible for putting him to bed each night, had trotted across the lawn from the President’s House and pushed his way into the crowd. It had taken only minutes for Tupper’s secretary to capture the Mississippian general and relieve him of the umbrella with which he’d been poking at the protesters as he ordered them with yipped Rebel yells to, “Close up those lines! Remember why you’re here, boys! You’re here to liberate the people of South Vietnam from Northern Aggression! Go git ’em.”

  As ever, Tupper’s major prob was Dean Claudia Pratt. The small woman of fifty, now in a yellow slicker, kept grabbing at his trench coat sleeve and hissing at him that he was out of his mind, and that she was taking the whole affair to the trustees. Let her. The best defensive was forever a good offense. Yanking his arm free, Tupper raised the megaphone, spit out the water, and bellowed at the crowd, “Listen to me! Those people just taken off by the police, including those students, will all be charged with criminal offenses. Anyone who does not immediately clear this area will be arrested too. Any student who disobeys these instructions will also be expelled from this university. You have one minute to disperse!”

  Dean Pratt shook his arm. “Buddy, you’re going too far!”

  As if they’d heard her and agreed, the crowd yelled back, “fire tupper! fire tupper! fire tupper!”

  This wave of hate slapped at the provost’s thrust-out chest without budging him. He showed the crowd his watch. “The clock is running!” Thunder crackled in echo, and a bolt of lightning lit up the bronze statue of Amos Latchett. Half the students and all the untenured faculty broke rank, dispirited by the storm and the departure of their leader, Professor Crawford and began to shuffle aimlessly from cluster to cluster.

  Then, out of the crowd ran a tall young dark-haired woman in black slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse. She flew up the steps, right beside Tupper, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted, “strike! strike! now!”

  An instant of silence. And then the cafeteria workers started shouting it back at Reverend Maude Fletcher, “strike! strike! strike! strike!”

  And then the students joined in, stamping their feet, jabbing their placards in air. “strike! strike! strike! strike!”

  Maude Fletcher shouted, “the chapel! go to the chapel!” She rushed down the steps and ran, waving her arm, back into the night. The whole crowd stirred, turned, and fled away—either after her or back home—while the four remaining Rome policemen, frankly relieved, watched them go, and Channel 10 followed the action.

  “Was that that goddamn Fletcher woman?” bellowed Tupper at the dean, flabbergasted.

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” Dean Claudia Pratt snapped at him. “Yes, that was Reverend Fletcher. Our chaplain.”

  “Not for long,” Tupper growled. “That’s not what I call a minister of God. Not at Cavendish University!”

  “Buddy, remember Tyler Gym!”

  This was a below-the-belt reference to that damn Affirmative Action fracas when those damn lesbo feminist gym teachers had got the feds to cut off funding for the new phys-ed plant because the men had forty showers and they only had two.

  Tupper swelled over the small dean. “Yeah, Claudia, well, don’t talk to me about academic freedom. You’re the one who tried to muzzle Burke Spooner!” (This counterblow was a reference to the fracas Pratt had stirred up over Professor Spooner’s lecturing to Anthro 210 about the genetic inferiority of the Negro race.)

  Dean Pratt wiped rain from her face in wild exasperation. “I am not talking about academic freedom, Buddy! I am talking about all hell breaking loose here! One of our students was just taken to the hospital! I don’t know where in the world you think you are, but we are not behind the Iron Curtain in the nineteen fifties!”

  “And never will be,” vowed the provost, “if I have to arrest every man, woman, and child on this campus. You call this hell? This kind of gunfight doesn’t scare me one iota.”

  Dean Pratt, a sensible woman, calmed herself and retied her plastic rain hat. “I’m glad to hear it,” she predicted. “Because we’re about to get bombed good and heavy. See you in the bunker in the morning.”

  Here Claudia Pratt showed the foresight that was to make her president of Cavendish University when, three years after these events, General Kaney suddenly passed away—very suddenly, for possibly under the impression that he was back in a B-52 freeing some American puppet-state or another from Northern Aggression, he drove his golf cart over the hill at Hillcrest Country Club and into the Rome reservoir below.

  As Dean Pratt foresaw, on Thursday morning, the Cavendish administration suffered saturation bombing. The girl who’d been struck on the head was in intensive care with a serious concussion. The whole story was on the morning news. The whole campus went on strike.

  Chapter 14

  Storm Still

  O, I am fortune’s fool.

  —Romeo and Juliet

  The Bleecker strike (organized that night in Wilton Chapel) spread like fire across the mountains of the campus. All university activities came to a halt. Cooks stopped cooking, teachers stopped teaching, students stopped doing much of anything except camping out with pizzas and Sony Walkmans on the green in front of Coolidge, yelling “oink! oink!” or “sieg heil!” at the provost every time he stomped past them. On Thursday, his office resembled the U.S. Embassy in Saigon on that afternoon in ’75 when the light at the end of the tunnel finally went out. From the crack he opened in his door, Tupper couldn’t even see his secretary through the mayhem of students, parents of students, professors, clergymen, civic leaders, and television crew all crabbing at her to let them in. Most of these people thought, like Dean Claudia Pratt, that Buddy Tupper had gone too far.

  Well, he didn’t think so. Except for that girl who’d gotten herself knocked on the head (and that was a shame), he didn’t think he’d gone far enough. Naturally, the ringleaders had got out of jail by dawn. Due to a gutless judge, they were let off with miserable minor charges for inciting riots and singeing that magnificent oak tree branch, and Herbert Crawford would have no trouble hiring a fancy defense lawyer (considering the fortune Cavendish was paying him!) to get those piddling charges thrown out. Tupper couldn’t even fire Crawford due to his damn tenure.

  But he had fired the salad chef and dishwashers (on top of the ten workers he’d already dismissed), he had expelled the two students, and he had sworn publicly to expel every student and to fire every (untenured) teacher and every cafeteria worker who wasn’t back on the job by 9:00 a.m. on Friday—which gave them a whole day to come to their senses. Fair warning. And that Maude Fletcher (whose three-year contract, thank God for sma
ll favors, ran out in June)—that harpy was out of here!

  As for everyone’s boo-booing about the poor cafeteria workers and about how shocking it was to hear how little those workers earned—well, they’d been earning that little for a long time, during which none of these sob sisters had ever given them a minute’s thought. As for the sniveling parents, let them tell their brats to attend the classes they were paying all those thousands a year for and then they wouldn’t be expelled. As for the administrators whining about bad publicity, and the History Department whining about guest speakers refusing to cross picket lines to appear at their conference, and even as for the football coach moaning because his best halfback, Joe Botzchick, had been arrested and expelled; let them all bite the same bullet Tupper was staunchly grinding between his teeth. Nothing was going to push the Bone-Cruncher back from his position on the line of scrimmage. Losing yardage was not the way to stay number one.

  Remember Waldo College, that once worthy rival of Cavendish on the other side of the mountains? Waldo had gotten soft, voted unions in, put students on the board of trustees, dropped the core curriculum and grades, let women try out for baseball; in general, rushed off like lemmings over the cliff of knee-jerk liberal politics into a sea of sentimental slop, and where had it led them? They’d been bought by the Japanese, that’s where! Japan owned Waldo College, fifty miles away! And Claudia Pratt thought he’d gone too far! What did she want, what had happened at Stanford? The whole student body out screaming, “Hey hey ho ho! Western Culture’s got to go,” with Jesse Jackson leading the chorus? If Western Culture went, who the hell would pay people like her and Herbie Crawford big fat salaries to sit around griping about Western Culture?

  Red lights were flashing on the provost’s phone like flak over Hamburg. That little jerk Thayer Iddesleigh had been calling every hour. And Norman Bridges was back on line three. Tupper barked at his secretary to tell those two fairies either to take the goddamn heat or get out of the goddamn kitchen. She decided to paraphrase this message, explaining that Dean Tupper was still in a meeting and unable to come to the phone.