Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  He’d looked into Ford’s face on the table in the mortuary and Ford wasn’t there anymore. As he touched the cold blue lips, Theo heard Hamlet’s line, “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once.” And for hours, driving back to London, sitting in the hotel room, the line stuck fast in his mind, over and over: “And could sing once, and could sing once, and could sing once.”

  Bittermann, short and bald, red-eyed and still in the wrinkled suit he’d worn on the plane, stomped endlessly in methodical squares around the hotel sitting room, complaining about Ford’s having so stupidly killed himself. “I knew this would happen sooner or later, I knew it. I knew it. ‘You keep this up, Ford, and sooner or later, you’ll end up dead,’ I told him. ‘You’ll die, and you’ll leave a mess.’ How many times did I say that to him, Theo? A hundred, a thousand? Thirty-two years I said it to him.”

  “I know, Bernie. You tried your best.”

  “What best? He’s dead.” Bittermann began to cry.

  The tears ran from the accountant’s nose, not his eyes, and seeing that, the crack in Theo wrenched a little wider.

  Miss Ruth Rexford, small and thin, dressed in a cheap, unfashionable black suit, sat on the edge of the couch in the corner of the room, her purse in her lap. Timid and dislocated by all the unfamiliarity, she spoke willingly whenever addressed, did whatever Bittermann asked her to, and otherwise waited patiently until she could go back home to Bowie. She looked like what she was: a very old unmarried nurse from a rural Texas town.

  “Sure you don’t want anything to eat, Miss Ruth?” Theo kept asking her. “You sure about that tea? I remember when I visited you in Bowie, you made me such a nice meal and we had iced tea.”

  “I’m just fine, thank you, honey.” She folded her hands on the purse.

  “You were so helpful to me on that first trip, showing me where Ford had grown up and gone to school and all.”

  “Well, he called me up, and he said would I take you ’round, Theo. I recollect how he wanted you to see Mama’s grave, didn’t he?”

  “That’s right.” Theo sat down beside her. “He talked to me about how you’d raised him after your mother died. He talked about you a lot, you know, Miss Ruth.” (Theo wondered if she had any idea that Ford was still talking about her this very night at the National Theater where Her Pride of Place was playing.)

  She turned the old purse on her lap, crossing her hands over it. “Well, he was so skinny when he was little. ‘Honey, the wind’s gonna blow you away.’ That’s what I used to tell him.” Straight-backed, bony, old, Miss Rexford looked over at Theo, and he saw in her mouth the sweetness of Ford’s smile. “First time I tell him that, he says to me, ‘And I’ll fly and fly and fly! I’ll fly right up in them stars and eat ’em up.’ Ain’t that something? I still remember that.”

  Theo looked out the hotel window at the stars. “Maybe he did,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.” The crack in his breast broke apart then, and he believed that Ford was gone.

  Believing it, he could call Rhodora. He knew Bernie Bittermann had already reached her in New York, where she was filming her video, and had told her before she had had to hear it on the news. So she’d known. Still, the first thing Rhodora said to Theo was, “Okay, I guess it’s true, isn’t it? Goddamn bastard, breaking my heart all over again.”

  The next thing she said was, “Now you listen to me. I promised him he’d be buried in Bowie, Texas, with his mama’s family. I already told Bernie this, and he give me some shit about it wasn’t practical, about cremating him, and bringing the ashes to Bowie. I didn’t tell Ford I’d dump his damn ashes in Bowie, I told him I’d see to it he was buried there. I gave him my promise, hear? So all those artsy types can have their big memorial New York shindig for him whenever they want to. Ford won’t give a shit. What he wants is his body in the ground in Bowie, Texas. Now, can you handle this, Theo? Because if you can’t, I’m hanging up and calling the airport right this minute.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “You let Bernie Bittermann bring Ford home in some goddamn little screw-top urn, and I swear, the sight of me coming at you’s gonna be the last thing you see. You hear me?”

  “I hear you. I’ll talk to Ford’s sister. She’s right here in the next room. It’s her decision.”

  “Bernie’s dragged Ruth all the way over there? Jesus Christ, poor old thing. Where’s Pawnee?”

  “He wouldn’t come.”

  “If he knew how much like his daddy he is, he’d plow his dumb-ass car into a bridge too. Put Ruth on the phone.”

  “Okay, let me get her. Look, are you going to go to Bowie, Rhodora?”

  “I said I would, didn’t I? Hell, if the asshole hadn’t dumped me, I’d of had to cart him to Bowie myself. I’ll see you there.”

  “Me? They don’t need me to come to Texas.”

  “Oh, sugar. You need you to come. Don’t you know that yet? He’s broken your goddamn heart, too.”

  It was true.

  part five

  {scene: Various Stages}

  Chapter 27

  Interlude

  Oh, you hard hearts. You cruel men of Rome. Knew you not Pompey?

  —Julius Caesar

  Meanwhile, back in Rome, high above his kingdom of Cavendish, the provost, Dean Buddy Tupper Jr., was sniffing the political atmosphere. He had his nose to the ground, he told himself, pressing that bulbous organ to the plate-glass window of his office suite. War was in his nostrils, and he opened them to suck it in. War between him and Dean Claudia Pratt. Ever since he’d lost yardage over the Bleecker strike, that bleeding-heart woman had been trying a quarterback sneak right up the middle into the end zone of his job. He knew that, for all her wishy-washy jabber about “cooperation” and “compromise.” He knew there were meetings going on that he wasn’t asked to, phone calls being made, a funny kind of coolness in the air on the top floors of Coolidge Building that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.

  Well, let Pratt go for it, thought Tupper, roughing his gray flattop. She’d never get past the Bone-Cruncher, that’s for damn sure. Let her sidle up to the trustees and take the other deans off to Asheville for rabbit-food lunches. Let her get down and suck the faculty’s whatevers, and fill them so full of themselves they figured they could walk all over the administration. Look at her, down there right now heading out of Bleecker Dining Hall with a bunch of hangers-on, including the “chairperson” of so-called Cultural Studies, probably down there planning some more of those courses about runaway slave journals and old TV sitcoms and “Powerful Genders,” or whatever the hell they called that one. Let her. She’d never budge Buddy Tupper. He still held the fort. He gave its wall a satisfactory pound with his big-knuckled fist.

  As a matter of fact, Dean Tupper admitted, he was having a pretty good week. Nobody had quit, died, sued, or asked for a raise. The students who’d tried to get back the land Cavendish sat on for the Cherokee Indians had just had their case thrown out of court. A childless textiles king (who’d already had an embolism removed from his leg, a tumor taken out of his colon, and pig valves sewn onto his heart) had just told Tupper that he was leaving his alma mater, Cavendish U, twenty-one million dollars, unrestricted.

  Yes, the Bone-Cruncher had lost a few, but he’d scored some big ones, too. Of course, it still rankled him that the damn Limey commie Crawford had outflanked him on the so-called Reverend Maude Fletcher business. The whole History Department had run in here squealing like cats with their balls in a mousetrap as soon as Crawford had pulled that “I’ll go to bloody Santa Cruz” crap on them. “Herb’s made us No. 5 in the nation! Number five in the nation!” the chairman kept shrieking at him. “Do something, Buddy!” Not that he had relished busting the chops of Religious Studies (two of whom were ordained ministers of God—not that that meant squat anymore; the Fletcher woman was an ordained minister herself!).

&nbs
p; But he’d had to do it. Let’s face it, Religious Studies wasn’t No. 5 in the nation, or even on the charts, and no insecticide king had ever given them anything near thirty-five million dollars either. They were as poor as the apostles, and a lot less interesting to other people. Naturally, they were pretty hot under the collar about renewing the Whore of Babylon’s contract after they’d fired her, but he’d thrown them a new tenure slot, a few teaching fellowships, and a couple of computers, and they’d gone for it, four to two. At least Religious Studies had the satisfaction of knowing they were trying to make Fletcher’s life in the department hell, even if they couldn’t manage to get her stripped of her collar, or whatever you call dishonorable discharge from the church. He’d heard rumors that Claudia Pratt even went to one of those big parties Crawford and Fletcher kept throwing (why not, with their salaries!) at his lakeside chalet. An engagement party! Little late to be talking about getting engaged, wasn’t it? He’d heard a lot of Cavendish faculty were at that party. Spineless suckbutts.

  So, okay, he’d lost that battle. But there were compensations. ’Erbie Crawford might be here, but he wouldn’t be in Santa Cruz. Look at Waldo College, Cavendish’s once proud rival; they’d not only been taken over by the Japanese, they’d just had their whole Economics Department bought out from under them by some evangelical university in the Midwest. Thinking of Waldo College was always a comfort to Dean Buddy Tupper Jr. After all, at least he still had a core curriculum and grades. He wasn’t losing celebrities. He didn’t have the Yellow Peril for a board of trustees.

  There were more immediate consolations, too. For the past five days, President Irwin Kaney hadn’t been doddering in and out of Tupper’s bathroom (where lately, he’d been not only been forgetting to flush the toilet, but forgetting to unzip his trousers before he used it). Thank the Lord, Kaney’s middle-aged daughter had taken the general off to West Point for a reunion of other old soldiers who’d mentally faded away. Good luck to her, growled the provost; I hope she packed her daddy a big supply of jumbo Pampers in the back of that Cadillac.

  Over in the loony bin of Romance Languages, Professors Tomes and Montemaggio had dropped their suits against each other once their respective eyeball and finger had healed; so, the public relations director wouldn’t have to deal with the embarrassment of a trial. According to Tupper’s sources, right in the middle of some poor soul’s Ph.D. orals, they’d decided to make up, and had started to cry and hug and even kiss. (Two grown men, but what can you expect with names like that?)

  Plus, some nutcase in the Physics Department had just found out he’d won the Nobel Prize, so if Physics was building a bomb over there, at least one of them probably knew how. The Nobel Prize meant outside grants. Tupper loved outside grants; the university could skim 55–60 percent off the top for what went down on the books as administrative costs. (Hell, he’d heard Yale skimmed 65 percent, but then they’d been at it longer.)

  Plus, that star anthropology professor that they’d found out was pulling down two full (very full) salaries, one from Cavendish and the other from a well-known Ivy League university? Well, Tupper’d had a satisfying talk with that Ivy League university, and an even more satisfying blowout with the career bigamist (who might in fact be a real bigamist, since he appeared to have a few Ivy League girlfriends that his Cavendish wife knew nothing about). That guy’s moonlight hayride was coming to an end.

  And that junior who’d said he was suing Cavendish because his faculty adviser had sexually harassed him? He’d settled out of court. Maybe he was sick of trying to explain how, against his will, a six-one, hundred-and-ninety-pound, twenty-year-old male on the varsity ski team had gotten himself tied to a bedpost, undressed, and spanked by a short, skinny, fifty-seven-year-old Classics professor. Yes, a pretty good week. The football coach had just told the provost there were two promising Peach Bowl prospects in the freshman class, and both of them already knew how to read.

  Besides, summers were always easier. Students were easier then. They were either under-the-gun undergraduates making up courses they’d farted around and flunked in the spring, or they were decent outsiders trying to get ahead in the world. Why, Tupper’s own wife, Rosemary, had taken summer school courses for twelve years running, just to get out of the house; and she knew more about Etruscan art and the anatomy of sea urchins than any woman needed to know. The faculty was easier in summer, too. Most of the tenured celebrities who gave Tupper so much trouble during the regular term shot out of Rome so fast in May it looked as if Hannibal’s elephants were chasing them down the streets. As soon as they got their spring grades from whoever had done the grading for them, they turned them in in exchange for their colossal checks and off they flew. The dean of the summer school always had to scramble to find graduate students who’d rather teach his courses for peanuts than go back home; Cavendish faculty stars sure couldn’t be bothered to show a little team spirit and play secondary by filling in with a section of Expos. or Western Civ. No, they’d rather hop a jet to some library in London, or conference in Paris (why did mathematicians need to go to Paris?), or seminar in Honolulu (what did Hawaii have to do with biochemistry?), and bill Tupper for their plane tickets. They never seemed to go places they could drive to, like Charlotte or Atlanta, either.

  Here was a stack of Ludd Hall receipts from old Fruchaff right now, thick enough to choke a goat. (Smelled like she’d spilled an ashtray and a bottle of Cherry Herring on them, too.) Jane Nash-Gantz: helicopter from Nice to Monte Carlo. “Plenary Speaker—Ovidian Joyce: Hermaphroditic Transformations.” What in God’s blue heaven did that have to do with what she’d been hired for? Hadn’t her vita said her training was in American poetry? Well, pardon Dr. Tupper for asking, but as far as he knew, James Joyce wasn’t an American or a hermaphrodite, either. And Jorvelle Wakefield: round-trip coach to Amsterdam. After what she’d gotten out of Cavendish with that Yale bluff of hers, why didn’t she buy her own damn plane? What’d she need to research seventeenth-century Dutch West Indies shipping records for? Hadn’t Norman said that woman taught novels?

  And, Crap Above, Dina Sue was going to have a shit fit if these rumors about Wakefield were true. He’d already had to pour a slug of Jack Daniels down her throat over Gash-Nantz’s, or whatever her name was, lecturing on Emily Dickinson’s clitty. But if his cousin found out that her other Ludd Chair was planning to marry a white man over Thanksgiving break, he’d have to put the fat old bag on lithium. Dina Sue was definitely for separate-but-equal, no getting around it. Poor old Norman had practically had to lick her toes for a month to get her to go for Wakefield in the first place. Well, the provost sighed, he’d calm her down somehow. He had to. His cousin’s money was one of his aces in his showdown poker game with Claudia Pratt. That, and the fact that Mrs. Ludd was Ubal Cavendish’s granddaughter, and the fact that she couldn’t stand Claudia. Dina Sue didn’t like liberals any more than she liked mixed marriages.

  Now, the truth was (despite the assumptions of people like Jonas Marsh), it didn’t really matter to Dean Buddy Tupper whether Jorvelle Wakefield married Steve Weiner or not. The provost was a sexist and a nationalist, an antimodernist, antisocialist, and an antipacifist. But he had nothing against blacks per se; they were good athletes, and that made them all right with the Bone-Cruncher. His brand of racism had more to do with geography than color. In general, foreigners rubbed him the wrong way. So if anything, Tupper’s question was why would a North Carolina girl like Jorvelle Wakefield want to marry a New York Jew? Actually, he’d liked Jorvelle; he’d liked going head to head in their scrimmages over salary. At least, he’d liked her until he’d seen her out there on that Bleecker picket line in May; Weiner’d probably recruited her for that socialist malarky anyhow—the way they do. Well, there’d be snow on the hills of hell before that smart-ass Weiner ever got to be chairman of the English Department. That was one blessing.

  Tupper sat down behind his gargantuan desk to count his others. Things were s
haping up pretty nicely over in Ludd Hall. Marcus Thorney wasn’t going to give him a lick of trouble; he had the man’s pecker in his pocket, and they both were real comfortable with that. Thorney was a different kind of gutless from Norman; he wasn’t going to fret and nag and appease and backtrack and flip-flop. Thorney didn’t care, and that was going to make things a whole lot easier. He was going to let Tupper do all the hardball playing, and then he’d carry all the hard news back to Ludd Hall, saying, sorry, there was nothing he could do about the raise or the promotion or the tenure or whatever. Fine. The provost loved hardball. He pulled a No. 1 pencil out of a trophy cup and made some notes.

  1: No promotion for John Hood—if the Miltonist was going to wimp out of going to London just because his mother had lung cancer, then he could wait for that full professorship ’til he was ready to give Cavendish 100 percent.

  2: Only the minimum raise for the maniac Jonas Marsh—maybe he’d take the hint and leave. Meanwhile, a few more letters like that last one to the Chronicle of Higher Education about their South African stocks, and Marsh would be over there in London trying to make ends meet on half pay.

  3: No tenure for this young Critical Theory guy—there was too much theory in that department as it was. Tupper didn’t mind a little flimflam; look, people had to earn a living somehow, and this kind of gobbledygook was harmless. But the English Department was getting out of hand. What about this hotshot visitor they’d brought in to teach a Milton course, and all the kids had done was spend the entire term with their individual letter presses, every one of them typesetting their own printing of Paradise Lost, letter by letter. “I bet they know it,” was this celebrity nut’s comment when interviewed by the Cougar Gazette.