That evening the chaplain of the university, the Reverend Wolmer, organized a candlelight pageant across the campus. When confronted by the news media, they stated for the record that God did not take sides. He was with the soldiers, and He was with the scholars in the library. They offered prayers for the peaceful resolution of the conflict and a big hello to Herb and Irma over at the bingo parlor. Wolmer and his vicars were winding around in a luminous little circle when a centrifugal wind came suddenly down from the sky, snuffing their candles, raising up their robes for the eyes of the television public, and nearly blowing them to the ground. The ROTC and the jocks dove for it. Everyone assumed that the Almighty was proving to be not quite so esoteric and impartial after all.
It was only President Kirk returning to campus by way of the university whirlybird. Kirk approached the cluster of microphones and television cameras. He had worked in the State Department during the Second World War and had been instrumental in the founding of the United Nations following the conflict. He had written widely on political science topics and he had studied the Eastern philosophers, and had answered them in print, query for query. Long ago, he had had to purchase a harpoon to ward off liberal politicos who were forever insisting that he run for public office. He assumed the presidency of the university when a fellow named Eisenhower had left for the less discombobulating task of running the country. All power, they say, is cursed, but none more so than academic power. Kirk’s position had not come without a price. While the innocent on the plaza that evening and those looking in over the airwaves had every expectation that the distinguished university president would speak the words that would begin the chain of mediation and resolution that would end the Columbia crisis, the wise knew better.
Kirk didn’t care one way or another about the new gymnasium, although the old amphitheater on the east walk had warped floors and was suffused with the inexpungible Roquefort smell of an old sweat sock. As for the war in Vietnam, he had counted himself among the opposition since the days of the French involvement, but he could not truthfully state, despite his pronouncements to the contrary in the past, that he was opposed to all armed conflict in general. Called to arms in ’41, he had traded in the pursuit of absolute knowledge for the wholly ambiguous proposition of liberty or death. To his astonishment, he found the extremity that he was searching for not at either nadir, but squarely in the ground between. Between liberty and death, he had found the extremity of enlightenment.
The United States of America, Kirk maintained, was an ongoing social experiment. Therefore, he had no doubt that it would continue to matriculate from its mistakes. North Vietnam was another matter entirely. Killing to the North Vietnamese had become an indubitable affair, as had dying. We were killing them and making killers of them wholesale. We were draining the capacity for self-analysis from their minds, and we were filching the poetry from their souls. We were slaying them in spirit before we did them in in the flesh. Kirk feared for their humanity. He even wondered if they would be left with sufficient magnanimity to accept our predestined unconditional surrender when the time came.
President Kirk wanted to make a point of congratulating the American youth for becoming the only semblance of a national conscience at hand. Still and all, it was only fair that they show themselves willing to relieve him of his headaches if they thought themselves big enough to wear his britches. Hsia Liu Ping, a Taiwanese financier and sometime chargé d’affaires, a thermoplastic-resin-sniffing degenerate, a great stranger to the shower stall, and an invaluable Columbia alumnus, was flying in tomorrow with something in the diplomatic pouch. Which of those presumptuous children up in the window there would be willing to escort Hsia to the Stork Club and introduce him to whatever half-ass starlet who might have just come into town and found herself hard up for a dinner date? And he wished to state for the record that he had pulled an entire subsection of strings to get the British Museum to indefinitely lend Columbia University the Pre-Raphaelite master Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s Myrrha. It was hanging captive over his desk as he spoke. If they harmed one impasto swirl on the painting, they were all going to Vietnam. No, he was not going to have them drafted into the American military. They were going to go to Vietnam because Captain Kirk’s channels tunneled even unto Hanoi. Father Ho, the greatest living Asian poet without a Western publisher and a onetime short-order cook in Harlem, happened to be an old friend of his. Kirk and Ho had vowed that one day they would once again kill a cup of saki together as the red sun set over the Mekong. Ho was currently looking for a few good men and looking forward, God knows, to a few good women. His operatives could train members of either gender to snorkel through the rice bogs and wake the enemy from their sleep to the gleam of the gates of paradise. Kirk dared the recreant students to call his bluff and force his hand.
Then the president of all that you could see around you, arches and pilasters, manicured lawns, and the ascending seas of gleaming concrete stairways, stepped away from the microphones and crossed the green to his waiting limo amid blasé, faintly damning and damningly faint applause from the rebels, the onlookers, the grunt trainees, the academics, and the newsmen themselves who had all uniformly expected something other than what it was, whatever it was, that Grayson Kirk had just said. Academic historians still debate whether or not President Kirk was pulling on the leg of the world on that evening.
14.
Assia
It got later and later, and although she knew that he was lying when he said that he was driving up to Trinity College, she had expected him to hate himself for not telling her the truth. She thought that he would appear contritely sometime during the night. She would listen to his confession, sitting in the darkness in a position of leverage, having lent her auto, and having minded his children without a word of protest. If Ted’s confession were to involve another woman, and knowing him it probably would, then at least she could be sure that he retained that particular appetite. Voluntary deprivation, as Assia had reason to know, smacked of allegiance to the dead. In the Holy Land, she had lived through approximately fifteen months of hunger and sacrifice to those who had made the ultimate sacrifice for her sake, or so everyone was quick to tell her. She had arrived in Canada and had spent months draining the grave dirt from her pores. She never would have survived the war without the certainty that she would die, and the sureness had proved an arduous dream to awaken from. She still had to pinch herself sometimes.
She got up out of bed in the nursery and went up the stairs. The organ that had played all day in the furniture and in the air overhead now had mutated into a philharmonic helmet upon her head. It played its symphony through a protective tumulus of cotton. She went into the little upstairs room that Ted kept for a private study. The heraldic light from the hallway barely penetrated. She ran her hand along the shellac of the desktop. She fingered the Braille of the engraved and gilt-edged book spines above. She took the lambent clock into her hand and felt its syncopated alpha jerk in the bone of her wrist.
She would have to run. She would have to scoop up these children who were not even hers under her skirts and run. Wherever he was and whatever he had done, Ted would have to return to a house full of her refusal to play the wifely role to Sylvia’s extreme. Did he really think that he was going to get off scot-free, tracks swept and dirty laundry done, twice in a matter of a couple of days? The only place that she could think of to go was Court Green, Sylvia’s other domicile, but also the place where Assia and Ted had fallen in love. Abdiel lived nearby, and he owned a van. He did not like her, but she had observed that he was not very good at saying the word no and meaning it. She had wondered why he behaved so slavishly toward Ted until Ted troubled himself to show her some of his best friend’s verses. Judging from his poetry, his inner life was more of a burden than any yoke of friendship could ever be. She could just ring up and tell him that Ted had not come home and that she was beside herself. She could say that the phone was out in North Tawton, but that that was the only place sh
e could imagine Ted to be. Abdiel had hardly more than arrived home from one funeral. Under the circumstances, could he begrudge her a night ride into the country in order to avert a second? She did not much like Abdiel, either. That was just the point. She could eliminate him by going to bed with him and letting Ted find out about it. He would have no one to turn to except Assia. She could hurt and heal him back to life. Both his heart and its scar tissue would belong to her. She would play Sylvia’s role to a greater effect. The only real extreme that Sylvia had really gone to was to settle for too little.
15.
Robert
In the days to come, Grayson Kirk worked tirelessly behind the scenes to end the occupation. For instance, he contacted what countercultural role models he could find in town. He persuaded them to visit the library and to try to make the youths see reason. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, resplendent with his white beard and mane and coruscant smile, arrived with his coterie and a film crew. The Maharishi’s reputed lust for the sister of Mia Farrow had so alienated that paragon of conventional moral virtue John Lennon fourteen months earlier at the ashram in Rishikesh that John forsook the Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation in favor of primal scream therapy. John found the yowling remedy more to his liking in any case. It approximated his new wife Yoko Ono’s attempts at pop music. The rumor, untrue by the way, was that Prudence Farrow had rejected the holy satyr’s advances because she was a confirmed lesbian. Detractors among the soldiers and the jocks saw the Maharishi approaching Low Library with his trotting phalanx of followers. They serenaded him with a chorus of: “Maharishi, you’re not half the man you used to be/You broke your sacred vow of chastity/You did your Sundance on Butch Cassidy/ Oh, Maharishi.”
Buckminster Fuller suggested that the entire crisis could have been averted if the campus were encased in a light blue pod of vitreous silica. He would look into the feasibility and have a word with President Kirk about it. Dr. Benjamin Spock had just announced for the presidency of the United States. He made a pitch for volunteers, once the insurrectionists had made bail and rendered their public apologies, of course. The hard-line kids in opposition outside had heard his name announced and they had waited the day long for the appearance of a gilly green, black-haired mutant with a mallet for a forehead and long, pronged ears, wearing a tracksuit with a knitted V on the front.
We, the English lit/creative writing seniors, finishing up our theses at the lackadaisical pace of little Minister Privy Pens, squinted sideways at the moral issues raised by the Low Library occupation, even as the dire week wore on and it became painfully apparent that violence was to be, once more, the expedience and not, pray God, the solution. Most of us visited the front lines in the idyllic late night when the crowds had gone home and the strong-arm opposition slept, post-Dionysiac, heads resting upon capacious chests, two or three to a sleeping bag, on the lawn outside the library. We taunted their watchboys, telling them to hurry to ’Nam while it was still possible to get themselves blown up for their beliefs. We sallied away when the musclehead sentries took their baneful steps in our direction. We weren’t about to engage. We had grayer, statelier matters on our minds.
In the daylight, we split up into voluntary study groups, using our honor keys to get into Dodge Hall. Foibles were the dollar unit in our intellectual currency, and the more elaborate and Daedalean, the better. We wielded the foibles of our literary icons like ceremonial swords since we were, at twenty-one or twenty-two, unlike our idols morally irreprehensible in addition to being physically imperishable, and life was going to be so unprecedentedly kind to us. The establishment’s death throes were to be the comedy of manners that would give rise to the greatest literature of our age. Everything that had managed to grow in the maleficent shadow of the status quo for nearly two hundred years of erroneous, sanguine, and, despite everything, nonsensically idealistic American history was going to have to be torn down, or else—and luckily for us, for this was where we literary demolitionists would come into our own in the rose beds of our welling futures—everything that stood and that stood to fall was going to have to be deconstructed before it could be reconstructed.
The heroes of Dodge Hall, then, were the fatal ironists. Dylan Thomas in “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” gave unprecedented elucidation to the lemming instinct inherent in the creative impulse. Not that long afterward, he died of exactly what he had delineated. Smiling, I suspect. He had drunk eighteen straight whiskeys, one for each annum of his innocence. Raging with the DTs in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, he complained of visions of “abstractions, triangles, and squares,” as though Mondrian had arrived in the guise of the angel of death. Dylan’s antecedent in this cruelest of worlds, George Gordon Noel, Sixth Baron Byron, rushed to put across the entirety of his mental processes onto parchment before dissipation, his angel of annihilation, had a chance to overtake him. Byron lavished his noble seed on all takers, siring children on a number of pulchritudinous wantons, one of them being his own half sister Augusta. While in the final stages of a death by excess, he traveled to Missolonghi to establish his own militia, intending to free his beloved Greece—his beloved Greece that he knew only from his inherited library—from the infidel Turks. He died with his inlaid silver spurs on before the first cannon shot could be fired. Arthur Rimbaud pledged his life to “a long, prodigious, and irrational disordering of the senses” at age sixteen. At nineteen years of age, he had proven so successful in his undertaking that it was no longer necessary or possible for him to write poetry. Occupied with slave and gun running along the Red Sea, he lived to read of his own death in backdated French newspapers. Returning to France, fever-ridden with a mind made insolvent by drink and a leg that badly needed amputating, he seemed unfazed by the fact that the newspaper accounts had proved to be more or less correct after all.
Hart Crane wrote sublimely of the coiling transcendence of the Brooklyn Bridge. Within one year of publishing those verses, he stepped onto the yawing platform of eternity while aboard a pleasure craft in the channel of New York Harbor. “Goodbye, everybody!” he called, canting his straw hat as he looped his leg over the guardrail. In exile in Switzerland and already suffering from the then untreatable disease of leukemia, Rainer Maria Rilke pricked his finger upon the thorn of a red rose and died from the resulting infection. Years earlier, he had famously written, “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” Randall Jarrell died bodysurfing the oncoming traffic on a highway in Chapel Hill. One of his collections was titled Blood for a Stranger. Sylvia Plath died whistling in the new morning light after abjuring daughterhood, motherhood, and spousehood upon the oath of Ariel. Her death seemed a formality, tragically and implicitly required by the terms of her permanence.
The deliberation of poetics was my sui generis cordon sanitaire. It kept me above the fray of the riots, although it was probably also why I, unlike most of my friends, visited the scene daily. I knew that the war was wrong, but the magnitude of the wrong was going to take my meticulous litterateur’s lifetime to put into proportion. In the meantime, I took photographs with Sabbath’s Nikon.
Then I saw her. I saw Sabbath coming across Low Memorial Plaza, as ethereal as I always imagined the mad, meandering Ophelia to be. She walked with her head down and appeared to be regarding the buds of her pink salmon toes, exposed as they were in her sandals, as though she had never noticed them before. She wore a plain linen shift that she might have sewn herself. Needlework was still a part of the Barnard curriculum in ’68. In my fantasy, she validated the Gandhian self-reliance of the spinning wheel at a time when other young ladies were insisting that sewing was to the female what cotton picking was to the Negro. The radical alpha males up in the Low window took notice of her. Idle with hundreds of thousands of volumes of the select literature of the ages on hand, they called out, “Hey, baby!” or “Hey, chickie!” or something equally as civilized. The cave boys in the grass took up the chant as well. I called out to her, climbing with the Nikon aloft to t
he top of the steps of Dodge Hall. “Hey,” I probably yelled, “I’ve got your camera!” When she didn’t turn, I snapped her picture. I got her with her head down and her back turned. She kept walking until she exited onto 116th Street. She never looked up.
In the middle of the sixth night of the occupation, the Reverend Wolmer came through the window of the office of the president, caped-crusader-like in full ecclesiastical regalia, having shinnied up a pilaster. He had come in an unofficial capacity, he told the drowsy students. The Tactical Unit of the New York City Police Department was outside and it wanted to know if the students would be content to come out of the library now, hands up and hopes quashed. It mattered little to them, one way or the other. The reverend had an idea, though. The kids would exit the building with him, each of them holding a fistful of his robes. He would shepherd them in the inviolability of his shadow across yon square and unto the sanctuary of Saint Paul’s Chapel, where they would remain under his supervision until the tempers of the police and the provosts had had time to cool.
The occupiers thanked him, kissed his ring, and then broke his heart by turning him down. They, the kids said, would never find a more opportune moment to die. Chaplain Wolmer rolled his eyes, wiped his ring, and took out several sheaths of printed forms from beneath his robes. The forms turned out to be the reverend’s own particular curriculum vitae for the conferment of sainthood, although in his capacity as college chaplain he had absolutely no dominion whatsoever over who would or would not be fitted for wings during the emotionally fallow period following the bloodshed. Just the same, the cleric brooked no opposition from the students. He insisted that they each fill out the applications. He was the one who was going to be put into the position of having to approach their grieving parents, and he desperately needed to be able to offer them some semblance of consolation. It’s hell, Wolmer insisted, to have a martyr in the family.
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