Beet

by Roger Rosenblatt

  “I guess I should have realized,” said Godwin, turning on his heels. “They would have appointed a conservative.”

  Out of nowhere, Dean Wee Willy Baedeker rushed up and pressed a sheet of paper into Peace’s hand. Baedeker, whose life’s ambition was to appear on public television, was sort of a reverse centaur in miniature. He had the body of a small man and the head of a pony. “Read it,” he said. “Give me some feedback.” He trotted away.

  Peace read:

  MEMO FROM DEAN WILLIAM BAEDEKER TO PROFESSOR PEACE PORTERFIELD.

  Hey, Peace. What would you think of televising your committee meetings? We could make a PBS series around it, with me as host, or maybe Bill Moyers. Call it Curricular Reform. Bring intelligent seriousness back to public TV. What do you say?

  “Professor Porterfield?” Now it was Ferritt Lawrence, a reporter on the Pig’s Eye, the college (“Beet is Our Beat”) daily. Lawrence had a brilliantine head and a face on which curiosity battled with ignorance, and lost. He was majoring—or concentrating, as it was called at Beet—in communications arts, and was writing his senior honors thesis, “The Media: Has It Lost Its Credibility?” Naturally, he was pursuing the story of Peace’s committee. “Rumors were swirling,” he wrote in his notepad. “They are spreading like wildfire.”

  “What can you give me?” he asked. “I was hoping for a far-ranging interview.”

  “Nothing,” said Peace. “The committee is meeting for the first time this morning. Even so, it wouldn’t be a good idea to talk until we really have a plan”—with the smile he’d given Marigold Jefferson.

  “The people have a right to know, Professor.”

  Entering Bacon at last, Peace was tempted to cry “Sanctuary!” and had just tossed Baedeker’s memo when he noticed Akim Ben Laden seated at a carrel, his head in his hands. He’d had the boy in a seminar on Conrad the previous year, and though Akim was loony, he was also bright and sweet-natured. Besides, it came as something of a relief to encounter a nutcase who knew that he was one.

  “What’s the matter?” Peace asked, realizing the question might be too open-ended.

  “Homeland Security, Professor Porterfield.”

  “It’s interfering with your work as a terrorist?” He indicated he was kidding.

  “No. It’s the only concentration I could get into. And it’s awful. I can’t find a single professor to talk to because all the courses are online. Besides, I think there’s only one professor in the department.”

  “Why not switch out?” Peace had only just learned about the Homeland Security department. It was dreamed up by Bollovate and Huey over the previous summer, when no faculty were around to vote it up or down. The brochure (online) advertised Homeland Security as “the nation’s leading growth sector,” and said the concentration would lead to careers in law enforcement, public safety, SWAT team memberships, and hazmat expertise. Homeland Security required no classrooms, none of the paraphernalia of real courses, and only the one professor mentioned by Akim, an ex–New York cop named Billy Pinto, who was kicked off the force for firing his weapon at a slow-cooking steak on a grill during a police department barbecue in Ozone Park, Queens.

  “I can’t switch,” said Akim. “The other concentrations are all filled. I wanted Communications Arts, but I was rejected by Professor Lipman’s How to Write for the New York Times course—the prerequisite for the concentration.”

  “I thought you were a straight-A student.”

  “I am. Professor Lipman said the Times only wanted straight-A-minus students.”

  Peace gulped. Joan Lipman, a former editor of the recently instituted Times Young Gay and Straight Celebrity Styles section, was on his committee. He’d put her there because if he hadn’t included someone from the New Pen, he would have been accused of reactionary traditionalism. “Why is she looking for A-minuses?”

  “She said it’s the only acceptable standard for the paper. She said a record of straight A-minuses indicates a student will give back just what the teacher says but with some special words included in the pieces to add flair. The Times favors ‘brio’ and ‘luminous.’ I told her I wanted to write arts criticism. I mentioned Bernard Malamud. She said, ‘Who’s that?’ I said, ‘Who’s Bernard Malamud? Only one of the two or three greatest writers of the twentieth century.’ She said, ‘There you go, Akim’—assuring me that she had only the warmest feelings toward Muslims—‘everyone knows it’s Philip Roth who is one of the two or three greatest writers of the twentieth century. The Book Review said so.’ Then she said, ‘I’ve never heard of Mr. Malamute’!”

  “I could take you in English,” Peace said.

  “No thanks, Professor Porterfield. The English have done too much harm to my fellow Arabs.” He glanced about. “You haven’t seen Matha Polite today, have you?” Peace shook his head. “You know, I’m deeply in love with her, but she told me that if I went near her, she’d mace my balls.”

  “Why don’t you find another girl?”

  “Better than Matha?”

  BY THE TIME PEACE CLIMBED THE SHORT FLIGHT OF STAIRS to the conference room, he’d hoped the mad dogs of the day were behind him. But when he opened the door, there was his committee. They were seated around the refectory table, each face turned toward him like a heliotropic plant. He surveyed them counterclockwise: there was Penny Kettlegorf from Fine Arts, Heine Heilbrun from the Theater Department, Molton Kramer from History, John Petersen Booth from Chemistry, Keelye Smythe, his English Department colleague, and Joan A-minus Lipman. At Peace’s appearance, all six broke into applause, and Kettlegorf, who tended to express her thoughts musically, sang “We’ve Only Just Begun to Live.”

  “Professor Porterfield,” said Kettlegorf, “I believe I’ve come up with a new curriculum that should solve all our problems!” She was a gangly brunette with a face full of aimless enthusiasms, a serrulate mouth, and hands like fronds, which she would flap rhythmically in states of excitement, which were frequent. Unmarried, she claimed to have given her heart to a ship’s captain who never returned from sea, and for whom she had pined as a younger woman and paced a widow’s walk wearing widow’s weeds. The story was undercut by the fact that she’d grown up in Lawrence, Kansas, but no one bothered to make much of it.

  “That’s great, Penny,” said Peace. “We’re eager to hear it.”

  “But Professor Kramer has a plan, too,” said Heilbrun. An epigraph without a text, Heilbrun, a bachelor, expressed himself in tones that yoked fear with stupefaction. His hands were hairless, and he was so devoid of definition that had he perished in a blaze, no one could have identified the teeth. Yet he dressed theatrically, usually in Edwardian outfits. Today he was wearing a Wedge-wood—navy tailcoat, plain blue waistcoat, and striped trousers.

  “I have a plan, too,” confirmed Kramer, whose wife kept a mother-of-pearl-plated revolver under her pillow. His echolalia was mitigated by his tendency to repeat himself.

  “We’ll hear both plans,” said Peace.

  “Me first,” said Kettlegorf.

  “I don’t have a plan,” said Booth. “Is that all right?”

  “Of course,” said Peace.

  Booth’s face bore the austerity of a Viking king, though one on the verge of surrender. He camouflaged his smell of sweat with Rugby Players cologne, but only half successfully. “Will Mr. Bollovate know whose plan is adopted?” he said. He had not met Bollovate personally, but once sent him a complimentary note (as he did to everyone at Beet at one time or another), and he had long been of the opinion that when it came to self-advancement, one well-placed complimentary note was worth a thousand real accomplishments.

  “I have a few thoughts as well,” said Smythe, who was everything Livi said he was. He was in his early sixties, and looked like an enlarged altar boy—not grown up, just bigger. His face was an aquarelle: sandy hair, mottled with faint grays and whites; pale aquamarine eyes; limpid skin around the cheekbones; and the broad expanse of forehead often indicative of candor and nobility, and sometim
es not.

  Of all the faculty at Beet, Smythe had most successfully mastered the art of academic acceptability. In the 1960s, he marched in every student protest, including one against his own department. In the early 1970s, he grew his hair long and wore a Nehru jacket to formal events. He also picked up the guitar, albeit a few years late, so he put it down shortly thereafter. In the 1980s, he attached Save the Whales stickers to the fenders of his Volvo, which were replaced by Save the Seals in the 1990s and Save the Children in 2004, which he attached to his Prius. He knew all the right initials and said them frequently—TLS, PBS, NPR, SUV. He said poetic things about the Red Sox. Perhaps the surest sign of his social skills was that he showed just the right proportions in expressing contempt for his colleagues when they were in trouble—three parts sanctimony, one part understanding.

  “I’m so very sorry about Margaret,” he’d told Manning weeks after her funeral.

  “Don’t make it worse,” Manning said.

  Smythe’s wife Ada was a Lacoste. Her fortune assured her husband, whose parents had run a poorhouse in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that he’d never set foot in one himself, along with a lifetime supply of shirts. Behind her back he remarked that Ada was so boring, even if she murdered him the police would not consider her “a person of interest.” Then he would laugh.

  “I’m keen to hear your plan, Keelye, whatever it may be,” said Professor Lipman. She had a voice like desiccated fruit, and was said to be married to a submariner in New London who spent four-fifths of the year underwater and had reenlisted nine times. “Of course, I’m keen to hear all the plans.”

  Lipman was uncomfortable in academic surroundings, and hoped the other committee members would recognize her as an intellectual as well as a journalist. Manning had once remarked to Peace that she had the mind of a Hallmark bereavement card, but less feeling.

  “I would like to say, however,” she went on, “that whatever we propose, Communications Arts should stand at the center. Not only is it the most profitable of the concentrations”—Smythe eyed her enviously—“communication itself is so essential to the community these days. Without people communicating what they have to communicate, where would the community be?”

  “Shall I proceed?” asked Kettlegorf. All nodded. “You know, students love to perform. Sing. Act in plays. Dance. I used to do that as a girl. Dance and dance!” She sailed into a shrill rendition of “I Could Have Danced All Night,” whirling in her seat and heaving with jactitations, to which the others responded with dead stares. “Anyway, we could devise a curriculum in which all the disciplines are converted into performing arts. Instead of merely reading Paradise Lost, for instance, we could turn the poem into a mime show. Or an old Harlem tap-dance competition. Or a hippity-hop concert with El Al Cold Jay. Think of it! History as opera! Botany in folk songs! Why, I’m composing a country-and-western song about Gregor Mendel in my head right now!” She became a coliseum of exclamations. “And then…and then…as a sort of final project for the entire college, we present a mixed-media mélange performed on the lawn of the Old Pen, in which students dress up as disciplines and sing, and all the disciplines begin in a cacophony of self-assertions, as if competing for dominance, and then, merely by rearranging the clashing notes, suddenly explode in pure harmony. All of learning coming together in a better world! A brave new world! Parents in the audience, the trustees, the deans, our colleagues, on their feet and applauding a revolution of thought bursting into existence right before their eyes!” Her own were like a spooked horse’s. “Why, it tires me out to think about it! I’m pooped!”

  “Me too,” said Smythe. Heilbrun smirked. Lipman looked around to see how to react.

  “My plan involves the great battles of history,” said the military historian Kramer, taking advantage of the silence. His eyes were fogged goggles. “It’s simple, really. We give lectures on the major clashes of a war, then the students go to the gym, where they divide into armies and move toy soldiers around the gym floor to simulate actual battles. And they could dress up as soldiers, too! Fusiliers could carry real fusils! Once the students really got into playing with toy soldiers, they would understand history with hands-on excitement.”

  To demonstrate his idea, he’d brought along a shoe box full of toy doughboys and grenadiers, and was about to reenact the Battle of Verdun on the committee table when Heilbrun stayed his hand. “We get it,” he said.

  “That’s quite interesting, Molton,” said Booth. “But is it rigorous enough?”

  At the mention of the word, everyone, save Peace, sat up straight.

  “Rigor is so important,” said Kettlegorf.

  “We must have rigor,” said Booth.

  “You may be sure,” said the offended Kramer, “I never would propose anything lacking rigor.”

  Smythe inhaled and looked at the ceiling. “I think I may have something of interest,” he said, as if he were at a poker game and was about to disclose a royal flush. “My proposal is called ‘Icons of Taste.’ It would consist of a galaxy of courses affixed to several departments consisting of lectures on examples of music, art, architecture, literature, and other cultural areas a student needed to indicate that he or she was sophisticated.”

  “Why would a student want to do that?” asked Booth.

  “Perhaps sophistication is not a problem for chemists,” said Smythe. Lipman tittered.

  “What’s the subject matter?” asked Heilbrun. “Would it have rigor?”

  “Of course it would have rigor. Yet it would also attract those additional students Bollovate is talking about.” Smythe inhaled again. “The material would be carefully selected,” he said. “One would need to pick out cultural icons the students were likely to bring up in conversations for the rest of their lives, so that when they spoke, others would recognize their taste as being exquisite yet eclectic and unpredictable.”

  “You mean Rembrandt?” said Kramer.

  Smythe smiled with weary contempt. “No, I do not mean Rembrandt. I don’t mean Beethoven or Shakespeare either, unless something iconic has emerged about them to justify their more general appeal.”

  “You mean, if they appeared on posters,” said Lipman.

  “That’s it precisely.”

  Lipman blushed with pride.

  “The subject matter would be fairly easy to amass,” Smythe said. We could all make up a list off the top of our heads. Einstein—who does have a poster.” He nodded to the ecstatic Lipman. “Auden, for the same reason. Students would need to be able to quote “September 1939” or at least the last lines. And it would be good to teach “Musée des Beaux Arts” as well, which is off the beaten path, but not garishly. Mahler certainly. But Cole Porter too. And Sondheim, I think. Goya. Warhol, it goes without saying, Stephen Hawking, Kurosawa, Bergman, Bette Davis. They’d have to come up with some lines from Dark Victory, or better still, Jezebel. La Dolce Vita. Casablanca. King of Hearts. And Orson, naturally. Citizen Kane, I suppose, though personally I prefer F for Fake.”

  “Judy!” cried Heilbrun.

  “Yes, Judy too. But not ‘Over the Rainbow.’ It would be more impressive for them to do ‘The Trolley Song,’ don’t you think?” Kettlegorf hummed the intro.

  “Guernica,” said Kramer. “Robert Capa.”

  “Edward R. Murrow,” said Lipman.

  “No! Don’t be ridiculous!” said Smythe, ending Lipman’s brief foray into the world of respectable thought.

  “Marilyn Monroe!” said Kettlegorf.

  “Absolutely!” said Smythe, clapping to indicate his approval.

  “And the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Booth, catching on. “And the Chrysler Building.”

  “Maybe,” said Smythe. “But I wonder if the Chrysler Building isn’t becoming something of a cliché.”

  Peace had had enough. “And you want students to nail this stuff so they’ll do well at cocktail parties?”

  Smythe sniffed criticism, always a tetchy moment for him. “You make it sound so superficial,” he said
.

  “Shall we move on?” said Peace.

  But his committee looked deflated. They just sat mum and buried their heads.

  “Okay,” Peace said. “Don’t worry. It’s only the first day. We’ll get there.” And they adjourned.

  On the way back to his office, he broke into a run.

  CHAPTER 4

  SO IT WENT FOR THE FOLLOWING TWO WEEKS, WITH STUDENTS and faculty growing more edgy, Peace more anxious, Manning more bitterly amused, Matha more strident, Ferritt Lawrence more journalistic, Akim Ben Laden more frustrated with the Homeland Security Department, and the CCR more feckless, meeting after fruitless meeting. Oddly, the one who seemed least agitated by the situation he’d set in motion was Joel Bollovate, and thus Lewis Huey was calm as well.

  Livi was not calm. At night, after her husband’s reports of another day of failure, she’d go upstairs and surf the Net for openings for hand surgeons, preferably in the Boston area, but not exclusively.

  Then, on the day after Halloween, and just before two o’clock classes, a senior named Max Byrd noticed something unusual about the Henry Moore Two Piece Reclining Man that had commanded the lawn of the New Pen for five decades: It was gone. Where the two pieces had reclined lay depressions in the earth bearing their imprints—soft, damp, wormy, and vacant. It seemed very odd that no one had noticed the disappearance of the vast object earlier in the day, as the New Pen was heavily trafficked. But Max, a self-confessed computer geek—who attended Beet on a Herb Sherman Scholarship awarded to an undergraduate deemed “nice, normal and bright” (and difficult to win because of the first two qualifications)—yet one of Professor Porterfield’s sharper students, was an observant young man, able to see absent as well as present things.