“I’m not interested in it anymore. I’m a new man these days.”
“Can we please get going?”—Manning again.
Peace leaned forward and said, “Cool it. You’re turning them off.”
“Would that I could.”
Huey presided from a heavy, thronelike dark wood chair at the head of the room. To his right sat Joel Bollovate on an identical chair, his belly spilling over his tooled black leather belt, like lava over a cliff. Though it was unusual for a trustee to attend a faculty meeting (no one could recall it happening before), Huey had determined upon “conferring” with Bollovate that an exception to custom was in order. Why Bollovate had asked to attend, no one knew. He merely told Huey he wanted to see how the faculty would respond to the takeover. Matha Polite was there for much the same purpose. The way of her presence, also extraordinary, had been paved by Keelye Smythe, who had persuaded his colleagues (though not much persuasion had been required) that students should be allowed in “since their fate was at issue.” And Ferritt Lawrence was there too, as everyone agreed on his indispensability as a representative of the people’s right to know.
There being no old business, it was on to what Manning was calling for. The faculty was to decide whether or not the MacArthur Five should be punished, and if so, to what degree. Should they be admonished, placed on probation, expelled for a term or two, or tossed out forever, their names to be expunged from the Beet College records?
The threat of expunction had so shaken Jamie Lattice that he remained hidden in his room in Coldenham under his coverlet awaiting the meeting’s outcome. His tiny head was wedged into a history of Elaine’s Restaurant, complete with photos of the regulars in grim and belligerent poses indicating they were writers. Betsy Betsy went on a crying jag. Goldvasser called his dad in Nevada and asked if he were like expelled or something, would that like affect his admission to law school and stuff? Bagtoothian, with time on his hands, tortured a frog in the bio lab.
Manning rose again. “May I move that all five of the rebels without a cause be expelled for the spring term?”
“Are we taking motions yet?”—Huey to Bollovate. “I think we should have some discussion first.”
A series of speeches followed, each ten to twenty minutes long. In rows and rows sat the professors in tweeds—all one hundred forty-one of them—like woolen dolls, boneless and loose-headed. They flopped in their polished black Beet College chairs with “Deus Libri Porci” at their backs and stared ahead at Huey and Bollovate. The air smelled of flax and varnish, with a hint of pharmacy, and it glistened with dust gilded by window-sunshine and the off-white globes hanging from long wires on the ceiling. Were it not for the substance of the occasion, the scene might have been mistaken for a congregation of philosophers or theologians or friends, even, who had convened to show their mutual affection and respect. But this was a faculty meeting.
“I find Mr. Manning’s question to be very insensitive,” said Professor Godwin.
“And why is that?”—Manning.
“It fails to take in the fact that the students are alienated.”
“Pardon my negativity,” said Manning. He seemed to be searching the floor for a spittoon. “Don’t you also think they’ve been marginalized for their otherness?”
Among the lengthy speeches were several that compared both the administration and the student protestors to Nazis; two that compared Matha Polite to Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Marie de France; two that recalled the Army-McCarthy hearings; one more obscure speech that invoked the Claus von Bülow trial; an oral memoir of a summer spent picking grapes with César Chávez; and a parable involving a prince, a hare, and an apple, which seemed to favor the apple.
Professor Eli of Narratology—a one-person subspecialty of the English and American Literature Department—rose to speak. He said he judged the uproar “more a grapheme than a Grand Guignol. While I do not mean to get lost between the énoncé and the énonciation, or to apply a diegesis where the extra-diegetic is sufficient, the truth—or what we can determine of it, since none of us seeks to contaminate differénce with the hierarchical, or to substitute the phonocentric for the logocentric—is that it is what it is. I hope that by so saying, I have not undermined anyone’s radical skepticism.”
No one thought he had.
Two of the presentations were so off the wall, they elicited responses of terrified silence. The first was delivered one-third in English, one-third in Spanish, one-third in German, by Hermann Lopez of the Film Department, who claimed to have grown up in La Paz, but whose nickname, “Triumph of the Will Lopez,” did not come from nowhere. The second was a rant against the obtuseness of the reading public by Jack Umass of Sociology, who hadn’t been himself lately. The author of The 100 Smartest and Most Intellectual People in America, Jack had fallen into a depression when his book sold only one hundred copies.
“Do you have any Advil?” Peace asked Manning.
“I just swallowed the bottle.”
Had one been awarded, the prize for the most discursive speech would have gone to Professor Fannie Quintana, of Women’s and Fashion Studies, who spoke in the voice of a sopranino (dogs swooned to it). She began with a recollection of the nuns who taught her in elementary school, then swung into the story of her bitter divorce, digressed to a condemnation of anyone who wore real fur, and wound up with an apostrophe to her mother that so choked her, she could not remember what she had been saying, much less where she was going, and collapsed in a heap of attractively layered clothing.
Upon Quintana’s disintegration, Manning stood once more, looked Bollovate in the eye, and said, “Mr. President, may I ask what Mr. Bollovate is doing at a meeting of the faculty?” He did not wish to appear rude, he said, but “trustees have no business being in on faculty deliberations.” He turned to Godwin. “Or am I being insensitive again?”
While many of the faculty were weighing whether or not to agree, or disagree, or partly agree and partly disagree, Jacques La Cocque, the college librarian, defended Bollovate’s presence. La Cocque wore tattersall vests, and his head appeared to have been sawed off at the back, so that his hair lay flat against it. He said he thought it would be “très utile to have Mr. Bollovate’s presence.” He looked to the trustee for approval of his approval.
Professor Ordas of the Tarzan Institute stood and asked, “Is it because Mr. Bollovate is a man that Professor Manning objects to his presence?” Then Professor Jefferson asked if Bollovate would have been allowed in had he been female.
“Man! I feel like a woman,” said Manning. He was about to respond that Bollovate should not be welcome if he were a cross-dresser, a mink, or a tree either, but he merely shrugged and tossed a wave of disgust at the front of the room.
As Professor Jefferson was thanking her colleagues for their too kind but much appreciated remarks on her remarks, Professor Gander of Professional Public Policy and Government Appointments Studies stood to deliver his specialty, the perfectly formed academic speech. Tall and slope-shouldered, he had the mind of a Polaroid snapshot; whenever it evidenced itself, one was at first excited, then depressed. His voice, a cello without music, had undoubtedly saved his life more than once, as anyone who listened attentively to what Gander was saying would be moved to gut him with a hunting knife. But the orator of the perfectly formed academic speech had practical experience to abet his natural gifts. He’d recently returned from a leave of absence as assistant White House press secretary, where for two years he’d explained America’s successes in Iraq. He was expert in lulling all within earshot to a demicoma, particularly when he mentioned “governance.”
“Now this is an issue that has come before us many times,” he began. Half the eyelids in the hall drooped at once. “And, I am certain, it will come before us again.” The other half followed. “What we must remember is that we are the faculty of Beet College, which gives us a great deal of power. But with power comes responsibility.”
Manning muttered, “Shit,�
� and slumped.
“It is not enough to have rights,” said Gander. “One must also do right. Shall we not do right? I do not think so.” Peace chuckled. “Mr. Bollovate is not one of us. Yes. But then again, he is. And so, the governance…”
Nothing more of his speech was heard until Gander thanked his college colleagues for their collegiality and their kind collegial attention. Then everyone clapped heartily and gratefully, except for Peace, Manning, a few others, and Bollovate himself, who throughout the to-do had sat motionless as a hippo in a swamp, his little round eyes unblinking.
Peace turned toward a high, wide Faculty Room window and saw Bacon Library through the ripples in the glass. The massive facade. The scrolls atop the pillars. Another story came to him—why was he thinking in these terms lately?—of John Grimes, the hero of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, at the age of eight or so, standing on Fifth Avenue across from the two stone lions at the New York Public Library. The boy wondered if the lions were there to protect him or keep him out.
Had Peace been able to see farther, beyond the campus and onto the interstate, he would have caught sight of Livi in her Civic, looking like a million bucks in knockoff Prada sunglasses and a black turtleneck, driving south toward Boston. That morning on the spur of the moment, as her husband had headed off to the faculty meeting, she’d decided to attend the annual convention of the American Society of Surgeons of the Hand taking place at the Ritz. Two main activities occurred at such conventions: lectures and job interviews. Livi was not going for the lectures.
At last the professors took up the business of the student demonstrators. The faculty voted nearly unanimously for no punishment of any kind. Apart from the fact that so many of their own number had joined the occupiers—and they certainly were not going to be punished—many expressed the sentiment that the students had been in the right, though no one could say exactly what they had been right about. And they forgot entirely about the demands other than amnesty, but so had the students. Except for Manning, who wanted the one-term expulsion, and a biochemist named Watson, who hated everything about undergraduates no matter the circumstance, and who voiced his opinion that the MacArthur Five should be sent off in shackles to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, the rest of the Beet College faculty, save one other exception, voted to let them off scot-free.
Matha looked pleased by the decision; it taught her what she had wanted to learn. Bollovate, too, for the same reason. Huey, of course, looked pleased as well. Ferritt took notes on their reactions, writing on his little pad: “There was a firestorm of protest.”
The only moment worth noting was the point at which Professor Porterfield, that other exception, chose to speak—something he’d never done. That, he recognized, was his mistake when the Free Speech Zone vote came up; he should have expressed free speech. He would do so now. He raised his hand, stood just before the question was called, and said, in approximately twenty-three seconds (a record for faculty meeting speeches that stands to this day):
“Mr. President, I would like to raise two objections to letting the protesters off. One is sort of technical. But I always thought acts of civil disobedience were undertaken to incur punishment, not to avoid it. The second has to do with the message this decision would send. In other words, with teaching. In my judgment, we’re doing the students no favor by pretending crimes have no consequences.”
Then he sat again as quietly as he had risen, and calmly beheld Huey, who conferred with Bollovate while most other faculty members muttered and mumbled. Manning applauded and tried to whistle. Matha Polite stared at Professor Porterfield with renewed interest. All at once she realized something about this man that had a direct connection to her future. Bollovate realized the same thing about his own future regarding Peace, which meant Huey did too. Ferritt not only realized it, he was composing the “hed” on his piece for the Pig’s Eye: “Porterfield Betrays Students.” Peace’s colleagues may have realized it as well, though some were more dimly aware than others. Members of the CCR certainly realized it, and quickly looked to one another across the room for mutual confirmation.
It had not occurred to any of them before. Until that moment, it would have been as removed from anyone’s mind at Beet College as anything could be. Beyond remote. Impossible. As distant as the half-life of uranium. As far away as Nairobi. But now, for wholly different sets of reasons, it was there, as plain as the nose on everyone’s face: Peace Porterfield had to go.
And sure enough, for the first time in his life—in the misty rivers of the mind where momentous thoughts flash like a carp’s head, brown and white, just below the surface—Peace was beginning to realize the very same thing.
CHAPTER 9
THE BETTER TEACHERS AT ANY LEVEL POSSESS INVENTION AND imagination. These powers are not the same and are not equal. An imaginative teacher is always inventive, but an inventive teacher is not necessarily imaginative. Between the two, invention is a comparative cinch. It’s a three-eared camel or a farting Sri Lankan ambassador or a three-eared Sri Lankan camel schooled in international diplomacy who farts out of one of his three ears. That’s all it is.
But imagination? Ah. Imagination is enthralled only by the camel, the ordinary humpy, durable, malleable-mouthed, diva-eyed, superior camel. Wow. The imaginative teacher walks around the animal, dreams into it, worries about it aloud in front of a classroom. The students overhear him as he worries. What’s so fascinating, Professor? Professor? Can you hear us? Professor?
The imaginative teacher is thought itself. And to come upon one such person in a lifetime is to find, well, gold.
Peace Porterfield was an imaginative teacher. As a boy, he would dream into a painting in his parents’ house—a nineteenth-century English landscape his father had picked up in a junk shop to cover a wall over a mantelpiece. In the center of a green valley stood a whitish castle that included several towers, and another freestanding tower, gray and shadowed off to the side. Behind the castle stood a spread of vague blue-gray hills and a sky of lighter blue-gray in which puffy white clouds swung upward in a fuzzy comma. The day looked bright and yet also about to rain. To the left and right of the castle were trees full of leaves of resplendent greens, which grew more distinct the closer one came. Several trees tilted to the right as if pushed by a wind. Three black sheep occupied the middle distance, one grazing, two lying on the sward. And a boy and a girl walked on a path that seemed made of marl or some crumbly material, and ended halfway up a hill. He wore a straw hat and a blue shirt. She wore a red shirt and a white skirt shaped like an inverted egg cup. In the foreground were the brambles of a hedge, over which young Peace would climb while calling out to the boy and girl and telling them to wait up because he had questions to ask them.
That’s what he would do as a teacher when looking into a poem or a novel or a story. He would translate himself into the object of his interest, using an instinct that was a boon to his students and a saving grace to himself, especially when he was down or disgruntled or feeling out of place—a time like the present.
It was seven days into November. He had left the faculty meeting on the day of the MacArthur Five decision two days earlier without speaking to his colleagues, who, though they had voted against him, would have spent another hour privately congratulating him on his moral courage. He had gone to be with Livi and the children. And in the days following—whenever he could wrest himself from the interminable and ineffectual CCR meetings, which had grown testier by the day, and bright with savage hauteur—he devoted himself to family and to the classroom.
“May I ask you a sophomore bull session question?” Livi said to him one evening when they stood together scraping the dishes. “What are you looking for in your life, Peace? What do you want—I mean, besides us?”
“To be useful”—without hesitation.
“Useful to whom?”
“To my students, so they’ll be able to live in the world more alertly, or interestingly, I guess. I’m not crazy
about big lofty pronouncements.”
“I know. But the way everything is going, I thought it was a question you might ask yourself.” She kissed his cheek. “Just trying to be useful.”
In any given year he would teach a wide range of courses in subjects that simply interested him, and because they did, interested his students as well. Max Byrd had followed Peace from course to course, from a lecture course in the Metaphysicals, to seminars in Dr. Johnson, Conrad, and African-American novelists, to a conference group on the Irish Renaissance—a crazy salad, except that these various subjects came alive in the hands of a teacher of the first rank who gave Max and all serious students the goods. This fall, Peace was teaching but one course, since he’d taught three courses last spring, hoping to free time for writing. But the trustees’ assignment intervened. His one course—Modern Poetry—had become almost excessively important to him, like a safe house.
A bleak and dank Tuesday began with a lacerating phone call from Bollovate, pushing him about the CCR’s progress; a shouting complaint from the curator of the college museum that several pieces of African art were missing, and did Peace know anything about it and what was he going to do about it (as CCR chairperson, Peace had somehow become the catch-all for every college gripe and tantrum); a reading of his notes on yesterday’s meeting of the CCR (in which Lipman proposed that the new curriculum be built around “The Great Gray Lady: How the New York Times Gives Us the World”), and another corrosive call from Bollovate.
Before heading off to the college, he noticed an old textbook of Livi’s lying open on the kitchen table. The page was dog-eared and underlined at a description of a proximal row carpectomy, a procedure to remove three of the eight bones in the wrist, to relieve pain. A so-called salvage procedure, it is usually done to correct a botched surgery. The underlined portions detailed the procedure step by step. He took note of the book and the page as one does of something unusual that may be of importance later, but then slips one’s mind. Unconsciously he frowned.
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