Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  •••

  Thayer Iddesleigh was a wreck. Even his wife (who’d been buffeted by so many years of Iddy’s theatrical tempests that she could sleep upon the raft of their bed through his most torrential gales) was worried about him. He sat with all the lights out in his den, in the director’s chair with his name on it, sat there limply, dialing the phone in his lap, hour after hour, without a word. She couldn’t goad him into a groan, much less a shriek. They’d canceled his play. His own cast and crew and orchestra had done it to him. They’d met this morning behind his back under the instigation of that female Judas, that Benedict Arnold to the theater, that witch Maude Fletcher, his leading lady (ha, ha, that would teach him to give outsiders a chance); and they had voted to “honor the strike” by refusing to perform on campus.

  The Spitz Center was dark. But not as dark as Iddy’s soul, from which all light had been snuffed, leaving him in black despair. And irony of ironies, who was the one person to stand up for the play’s-the-thing, for the Honor of the Glorious Tradition that the Show Must Go On? Theo Ryan, that’s who. Ha, ha. Fat lot of good it had done Ryan, of course, trying to convince those amateurs of their Duty to the Stage. Never again. Never again. He’d resign from C.F.D.C. as soon as that you-know-what Tupper answered his phone.

  Norman Bridges was a wreck. He’d passed the morning unable to decide whether to honor the strike by canceling Thursday’s regular senior faculty meeting (as seven members of the department insisted), or to disavow the strike by holding the meeting anyhow (as eight members demanded). Finally, Bridges put memos in everyone’s mailbox urging each to follow his or her individual conscience and attend or not attend a meeting that would be held, but not held in Ludd Lounge; it would be moved to the Bridgeses’ living room, off campus.

  This agonized attempt at compromise by the chairman was scorned by the few Luddites who bothered to check their mailboxes that afternoon. Jonas Marsh fired off a two-page fulmination, jammed it in Bridges’s mailbox, and went back to the library. Jorvelle Wakefield and Steve Weiner returned to the picket line outside Bleecker. Marcus Thorney and four of his followers joined the snoozing old Mortimer and Lovell in Ludd Lounge and waited there fuming for half an hour for an official announcement of the results of the vote for the new chairman. Finally, they gave up and left to get ready to drive to Mrs. Ludd’s estate in Asheville for the black-tie dinner party in honor of Thorney’s winning the Ludd Book Prize.

  Promptly at four, John Hood showed up at the Bridges home with a bottle of sherry and found Norman in the living room trying to talk his daughter into turning off her soap opera so he could introduce her to Vic Gantz. It was a meeting that only they and Theo Ryan attended, and at which Theo spent most of the time arguing with Tara and Vic in the kitchen about whether or not they should put on Guys and Dolls.

  “We don’t appear to have a quorum,” sighed Bridges, alternatively clutching his stomach and his head. “I guess we should cancel the meeting. What do you think, John?”

  “Dear me. I suppose we should,” said the gentle Miltonist.

  Bridges had only two solaces. One was that he didn’t have to announce that Dean Tupper appeared to have suddenly developed reservations about offering that last Ludd Chair to Scottie Smith, and might be secretly planning to give it to the French Department as he’d threatened to do. The other consolation was that he wouldn’t have to tell three men who disliked Marcus Thorney that it looked as if Marcus Thorney was going to be their new chairman. Well, at least, he sighed, after this interminable term was over, they wouldn’t have Dr. Bridges to kick around anymore. Maybe now Tupper would let him take early retirement. Maybe Tara and he could leave their daughter the house here, and move to Florida, and he could write that Whitman book, and Tara could…Norman Bridges pulled himself together, and offered his guests some chocolate eclairs.

  •••

  Theo Ryan was a wreck. Working on his play with Ford Rexford would have been by itself enough stimulation to last him a month. Then add the rehearsals. Add seeing Maude Fletcher rush up the Coolidge steps and start the strike. Add the all-night meeting in the chapel, the sign-painting, the telephoning. Then elation plummeting to gloom in the morning.

  He was leaving the chapel with Steve and Jorvelle to go get breakfast when the black BMW sports car pulled up. It was Herbert Crawford in black leather who bounced out of the driver’s seat. “Steve-o!” he yelled, and they all turned. “Where’s Maude?” he called. But the tall, dark-haired woman was already rushing down the steps toward him. And—as Effie Fruchaff had predicted only yesterday—Maude Fletcher didn’t give Theo the time of day when she flew past and flung herself into the arms of the revolutionary leader who embraced her with obvious familiarity. “Maudie, girl, you did it! A bloody strike!” They spun each other in circles of delight, then sped away together in the convertible.

  “I tried to tell you,” Steve said.

  “No, you didn’t,” Theo snapped. “Tell me what?”

  “The Marxist and the minister,” Jorvelle said. “Maybe it’s just political,” she added with an attempt at a comforting smile.

  “Maybe it’s the lap pool,” Steve shrugged.

  “I never liked her for you anyhow,” Jorvelle said.

  “You sound like an oddsmaker at the track,” Steve told her. Theo strode off, ignoring them.

  At noon, when the brief Guys and Dolls meeting took place, Theo’s mind felt curiously cool and clear. And although he lost the argument not to cancel the play, he had at least stood up and argued, cheeks hot, heart thumping, even in the face of attacks on his politics, his character, and his intelligence. Even when Jorvelle herself had shouted at him, and Maude Fletcher had cut him off in mid-sentence to call for a vote, relentlessly he’d offered analogies, compromises, counterproposals. One of his ideas had been to put on the play for the benefit of the fired cafeteria workers. But some of the cast thought this too weak a statement of solidarity; others thought it too strong. In the end, the consensus of the group was to do what everybody else was doing. Shut down. Still, Theo told himself, he’d spoken out, although surprised to find his the voice of the opposition.

  On Thursday night, Theo suffered still more blows. Until then, he hadn’t been back to his house since he’d run out of it with Ford Rexford, late to his Wednesday rehearsal. When he finally did return home, he found the place the mess he’d left it. Ford had never come back. Worse, there’d obviously been a long power failure during the lightning storm the night before; the clocks were hours late, the refrigerator was smelly. Worse, Ford had clearly not bothered to shut off the computer before they’d rushed off; the hard drive had crashed, taking with it into oblivion the revised version of Theo’s play. Ford didn’t appear to have made any back-up copies, or at least Theo couldn’t find any. And, as it proved, worst of all, there was a note stuck in his screen door. It said:

  Call me. Rhodora.

  She answered on the first ring and didn’t waste words. “Where is he?” she said. “And don’t lie to me.”

  “Ford?”

  “I got home from Nashville last night, no note, no Ford. And I haven’t seen or heard squat since.” Rhodora’s voice sounded more angry than frightened.

  “Ford?” Theo pulled over a kitchen chair and sat down.

  “Shit, Theo! Yes, Ford!”

  Theo was very tired and not really worried. Rexford was, after all, notoriously erratic. “I don’t know, Rhodora. He dropped me off at rehearsal last night about eight. I thought he was coming back here. He’s been here helping me with my play.” Moving the phone to his other hand, he opened his refrigerator and began sniffing its contents. “Have you called—”

  Her voice sharpened. “Yes, dammit! Highway patrol, hospitals, Cherokee’s, T. W.’s. What’s been wrong with your damn machine all night!”

  “I’m sorry. The power was off and I was gone. We’ve been in the middle of a strike on campus. Yo
u try Bernie Bittermann?”

  “Yes. He said to try the morgue. No such luck. You sure you’re not coverin’ for Ford? Don’t put me through this.”

  “Rhodora, Jesus.” Theo turned to the sink and splashed water on his face. “I don’t know! He could be anywhere.” He glanced out at the dining room table where the corkboard still lay, pinned with scraps of paper. “He’s not dead, you’d have heard!”

  “He’s gonna wish he was.” Rhodora hung up.

  Pulling off his grubby shirt, Theo went to clear his head in the shower. Afterward, he called the local bars: nothing. Was it possible that Rexford had joined the riot? It was just the sort of thing he’d do. But the playwright hadn’t been arrested, and he hadn’t come with the crowd to the chapel. Theo gritted his teeth and called Maude at the chapel office; she said Rexford had skipped their last session, and had spent the one before that alternatively fighting about the existence of God and reciting Hank Williams songs. “Try the local bars,” she suggested.

  While his pasta boiled, he called Bernie Bittermann, who said, “What else is new?”

  At his counter eating the spaghetti, Theo called the Rome police and described the gold Lincoln. Nothing. After two more talks with Rhodora, he even called Ford’s son Pawnee in Taos, who said sarcastically, “Ford who?” and added, “I don’t want him buried next to my mother if he is dead.”

  Steve Weiner and Vic Gantz were no help; neither of them had seen the playwright since he’d been with them that night at the Bomb Shelter.

  Who else had been with them that night at the Bomb Shelter?

  Jenny Harte. She seemed to know Ford. Where was she? She’d missed the rehearsal Wednesday, hadn’t she? And the meeting about whether to strike, she’d missed that too, hadn’t she? When Theo got no answer at her apartment, he started phoning anyone he could think of who might know her, troubled to realize he knew so little about Jenny’s life when he was, after all, supposed to be her “adviser.” His stomach had begun souring. Finally, he reached Cathy Bannister. Cathy was too worried about her fiancé Joe Botzchick (who’d been not only arrested, but expelled—which meant the end of his football scholarship, his pro career, and all their plans) to get upset about Jenny Harte. She didn’t even know her all that well. But she was pretty sure she had seen Jenny yesterday…at the Bomb Shelter…early on in the afternoon.

  With somebody?

  Yes, she thought so. “Mr. Rexford was with her.”

  Color sank out of Theo’s face. “Ford Rexford?”

  “Remember, Dr. Ryan, you had him talk to our class last year?” She thought a bit, then added, “Somebody else, seems like, said Jenny’d gone out with him a couple of times lately.” Cathy tried to be helpful. “Is it important for you to get in touch with her? You could try her folks in Charlotte.”

  By morning, Jenny Harte’s parents also wanted to know where she was. But no one appeared to be able to tell them.

  As fate—always promiscuous and wasteful—would have it, on Friday, Theo’s opposition to the play’s cancellation became moot. Dean Pratt had her way. In an emergency session that morning, members of the board of trustees of Cavendish University (as many of them as could get there) met first alone, then with the top-level administrators, then by courtesy with President Kaney, who from time to time advised them strenuously to, “Fall back and take cover!”

  They did just that. They sat the administration down with a group of cafeteria workers, a group of faculty members (chaired by Herbert Crawford and Maude Fletcher), and a group of students. They interviewed privately the police chief and the football coach and Dean Pratt. And then they called in Buddy Tupper, and in his phrase, the whole bunch went offsides, grabbed him by the short hairs, and busted his chops. Although long after Tupper had retired with his trophies to Pineshurst, he would deny that he’d ever surrendered, he did something that could be paraphrased as that. His other option was to resign, and he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. At 3:30, the white flag flew from the suite atop Coolidge Building.

  The fired Bleecker workers were reinstated. The salaries of all cafeteria workers were raised by 6.5 percent. (Tupper’s only comfort was that it was still not enough to live on.) Classes resumed. (At least the goldbricking faculty would have to show up to teach them.) Lines formed at Bleecker Dining Hall. (At least the students would have to eat the junk served there.) The expulsion of the two students was reduced to a week’s suspension, and Buddy Tupper signed a personal letter of regret to the parents of the girl in the hospital with the concussion. The strike was over.

  But at least some of the administrators and some of the faculty (including Marcus Thorney) had sent the provost messages that they’d been wholeheartedly on his side. And the same Rome clergyman who’d called Maude Fletcher, “a modern Joan of Arc,” took it back when he heard she was reputed to be having an affair with Herbert Crawford, a British Marxist separated from his wife. These were the small comforts that kept Tupper company in his lonely bunker as he looked down Friday afternoon at shirtless boys and barefoot girls climbing all over the statue of poor Amos Latchett, who had a sombrero on his head and a beer bottle in his hand.

  And so Friday evening, Doris Iddesleigh had the odd experience of feeling delight when her husband emerged from their bedroom in his black Bob Fosse pants and T-shirt, when he lowered his whistle around his neck, and marched once more into the breach of Show Biz. His cast, crew, and orchestra returned; all was, if not forgiven, forgotten in the mayhem as rehearsals at the Spitz Center frantically resumed where they’d left off in the middle of “Take Back Your Mink,” and went on all night long.

  Yet sadly, Theo Ryan could not enjoy his inadvertent victory over the those who’d cried cancel. Too much else had happened. He could not retrieve his play from the computer, he could not stop wishing Herbie Crawford would drop dead, he could not find Ford Rexford or Jenny Harte. Of course, Ford might have flown to Key West to go fishing or to Las Vegas to lose his shirt. Jenny Harte might gone to the Library of Congress to work on her dissertation. Herbie Crawford might in fact drop dead. But Theo didn’t really believe in any of these possibilities. On Saturday night, the show went on without Jenny as by that miracle of communal will the show always does go on, and Theo Ryan, the trouper his parents had trained him to be, went on with it, playing the role of the lucky Sky Masterson.

  Everyone said Guys and Dolls was a triumph; even Iddy admitted that nothing really too noticeable had gone wrong. True, John Montemaggio had a fever of 100° from the infection in the twenty-two stitches on his finger, but it gave his portrayal of Big Julie a nasty heated quality that fit the part. True, little Nash Gantz had refused to be parted from his father, Harry the Horse, and had clung to him onstage through the whole show, but apparently everyone thought it a nice modern touch to make one of the gamblers a single parent. True, the Havana nightclub had toppled over during the fight scene, but in an expressionistic way that might have looked planned. As expected, Nathan Detroit had forgotten the words to “Sue Me,” but no one had much noticed, for as Iddy had predicted, the audience went so wild for Miss Adelaide they gave her a standing ovation.

  But if Jorvelle Wakefield stole the show, Theo Ryan had never performed so well before in his life. He was performing in the most absolute sense, of acting what he did not feel, was sure he would never feel again, even if the Rome Gazette had described his performance as “the magnetic and charming birth of a new Spitz star.” By Saturday night, he did not feel like singing and dancing and falling in love. He felt like crawling in a hole.

  By Saturday afternoon, Jenny Harte’s parents knew where their daughter was. And they telephoned Theo Ryan, who had to tell Rhodora Potts, who accused him, unjustly, of having known all along. After all, he was the girl’s faculty adviser; not that Jenny Harte was a girl (in fact, she was a year older than Rhodora); and not that she’d come to him for advice, or to anyone else apparently. Jenny had already made her decisio
n when she phoned her parents from London and told them she’d flown to England with a man, but that they shouldn’t worry about her. She planned to work there on her dissertation (on endings—suitably enough).

  She told her parents she thought this man and she might go to Cornwall on the southwest coast of England, which—as she had always loved the Arthurian legends—she had always dreamed of seeing.

  So Ford Rexford had flown her there. He had a way of making people’s dreams come true.

  part three

  {scene: An Island}

  Chapter 15

  Enter Time, a Chorus

  Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.

  —As You Like It

  May was in the mountains, profligate with beauty. On the Cavendish campus, rose vines climbed the walls; students collected like tulips on the green, their faces lifted to the sun. Classes had ended; exams were brief distractions; young bodies were restive for summer.

  But all was suddenly Russian winter in the eyes of Theo Ryan. In every direction, the sky darkened with no dawns in sight. In the fall, Marcus Thorney would be chairman. Dean Tupper had made the announcement “with pleasure.” Tupper’s pleasure was no doubt sincere, since Thorney had stood by him (at least in his heart) during the Bleecker strike; since certain things (both political and personal) had been heard about Steve Weiner and Jorvelle Wakefield; since Thorney was Mrs. Ludd’s choice; and since (which was helpful) Thorney was apparently also the will of the department—by a two-vote majority.

  It was ironic to Theo that the only blue speck in his sky was that Tupper had dumped Scottie Smith before finding out that, (1) Theo had also been one of those all-nighters at Wilton Chapel, and that, (2) Theo had spoken too soon when he’d claimed he could guarantee Ford Rexford’s premiering a play at the Spitz Center. Imagine telling the provost that Ford Rexford would commit himself to anything an hour from now, much less a year. Stupid. As stupid as (yes, Effie Fruchaff was right) not seeing that Maude Fletcher and Crawford were obviously the talk of the campus. Where were his eyes? He was too dumb to have deserved tenure. Except what was tenure but the misery of being stuck at Cavendish until he was lowered into his reserved gravesite? Stuck at Cavendish forever, and alone. Or so he said to Steve and Jorvelle as the three sat morosely in a dark booth of the Bomb Shelter, pouring beer after beer on their wounds.