“But we can’t get cocky,” he said, taking Huey’s chair.
“That would be bad,” said Huey, taking the chair reserved for visitors.
“I can’t tell you how many sweetheart deals have fallen through at the last minute because of cockiness.”
“People get cocky.”
“That’s right. They take their eyes off the ball. They lose sight of details. It’s the end game, Lewis. The end game separates the sheep from the goats.”
“The sheep from the goats.” Huey squirmed because he was about to say something that came from his own brain. “Joel, I hope you won’t mind my bringing this up. But we’ve never really spoken about what I’ll be doing after.”
“You’ll be taken care of. You can bet on that.”
“Yes, but my job. What will it be? I mean, exactly. The title.”
Bollovate frowned philosophically, as if he really were considering the question. “How about president?” He beamed.
“Could I still be president?” Huey beamed more.
“Of course, Lewis. We’ll always need a president. No matter the situation people are in, everyone wants to know there’s a president.” He reached across the desk and patted Huey’s hands, which were folded and damp.
Huey was teary with gratitude. “That’s great, Joel. Wonderful to hear. I’m relieved, I don’t mind telling you. It would be hard to start over, at my age.”
“Well, you don’t need to worry about that…Mr. President.”
On that Tuesday morning too, three women pursued separate though related quests.
Sheila Bollovate was driving her maroon Lexus to her lawyer’s, where she would sign an intention to divorce in the presence of a notary. The document contained 108 pages of property listings. As she drove, she chewed on a Mallomar.
Kathy Polite was leaving her home on Long Island. She was on her way to pay a surprise call on her sister, about whom, frankly, she was worried. Martha had never been a charmer. But over Thanksgiving, she’d seemed less charming than usual, and definitely involved in something over her head. I don’t like her, thought Kathy. Who does? But blood is blood. And it was Christmas. Was it not? It was.
It was! With all else going on, it seemed hard to remember. But it was Christmastime. And Christmas in New England carries a greater burden than elsewhere because the region drops into its deepest emotional pit, requiring desperate measures of jubilation.
In the town of Beet, merchants hung large wreaths with red velvet bows on the lampposts. “Rockin’ Round the Christmas Tree” crackled over the defective PA system in the firehouse. The Pen and Oink displayed a 1951 copy of A Christmas Carol in the window. The Bring Home the Bacon grocers lathed red and green icing on the cupcakes. Marty’s Swine & Cheese set up a three-foot Santa made of cheddar, and a Stilton in the shape of a dreidel. In that spirit, the debate on whether or not to place an aluminum menorah in the crèche on the village green had settled on a separate-but-equal arrangement. The menorah was placed beside the crèche, and a sign in front covered in tinsel, read: HAPPY AND MERRY WHATEVER YOU CELEBRATE OR DO NOT IN YOUR OWN WAY.
The first big snowstorm was forecast. Everyone spoke of it and of other big snowstorms in years past, which were always worse than the modern snowstorms. Everyone spoke of hot chocolate. Gregory wished all who passed through the gates a “Mango Isthmas.”
Only the recently defunct This Little Piggy Muncheonette failed to rejoice in the season. It appeared in mourning, as did the great pink fiberglass pig on its roof.
But the third woman worth noting was suffused with Christmas cheer that morning. Her husband would be home with her soon and forever, she hoped. She strode along midtown Third Avenue, looking to buy him a present.
“What would you like?” She’d called him on her cell.
“Nothing. Just you.”
“Then that’s what you’ll get. Nothing and me.” She walked past the shops until she came to Victoria’s Secret.
“Children,” she told them at dinner. “Tomorrow I’m going up to be with your father.” She wasn’t on call for the following two days. Why not? “I’ll get a nice policeman to stay with you.”
To tell Peace her plan, or make it a surprise? That night she would pack. The next day, the eighteenth, she would drive to Beet after seeing her patients. She could be at the house when he was just about to go to bed. Bed. Looking in the mirror, she brushed her red hair and sang along with Norah Jones.
FOR HIS PART DURING THOSE TWO WEEKS, PEACE HAD SIMPLY continued to work. Now he proceeded to his office, his papers tucked under his arm. In the midst of all the collegiate mummery, he had in fact come up with something.
Bricolage. Peace’s idea did not entail an upheaval of the existing curriculum. All it involved was one course, the planning and implementation of a single course of study to be superimposed on the existis curriculum, and required of all entering students. It would be taught by professors in every department, either by team teaching—an English professor with a biologist, an economist with a member of the Art Department, like that—or by individual lectures combined with small discussion groups.
Yet it would be neither multicultural nor interdisciplinary. If one had to give it a label, it could be called extradisciplinary, since the professors would need to go outside their disciplines to see them from a new vantage point. The course would run the entire freshman year, and if upperclassmen desired, they could take it again as auditors to remind themselves of its applicability to whatever they concentrated in. A new way to see learning, that’s what Peace hoped it would be.
“Professor Porterfield?”
“Yes, Jenny?”—from his Modern Poetry class.
“May I speak with you?”
“Sure.”
“I wanted to say I never believed any of that stuff about you. I don’t know anyone who did.”
“Thanks, Jen. I appreciate your saying so.”
“Professor Porterfield? Will you be able to save the college?”
“I don’t know. We’ll try.”
All right. What was the course? Storytelling. It would be a course in storytelling. The idea had come to Peace little by little after his one-on-one with Manning—what his friend had said about finding a way to make educators interested in education again, and about finding a different way to see what the college already had, rather than trying to invent something out of whole cloth.
And there was Peace’s recollection of the children in Sunset Park and of telling stories there—the kids gathered round him, as though he were a bonfire, rapt in the ceremony of listening. Why does a child say, “Tell me a story”? Because he expects it to be wonderful.
“Professor Porterfield?”
“Hi, Lucky.”
“I just want to say hey.”
“Hey, Lucky.”
As thoughts tend to build on themselves, this one grew for Peace. His mind was his house. First the front door flung open, then the back, then the windows one at a time, and a couple of things dropped through the chimney (bang!) into the fireplace, and more breezed in through the cracks in the walls. What do you know? The idea filled the house. It had size. Stories were everywhere: In the law, where a prosecutor tells one story and the defense tells another, and the jury decides which it prefers. In medicine, where a patient tells a doctor the story of his ailment, how he felt on this day or that, and the doctor tells the patient the story of the therapy, how he will feel this day and that, until, one hopes, the story will have a happy ending. Politics? He who tells the best story wins, be it Pol Pot or FDR. And the myths of businesses, the foundations of religions—the “greatest story ever told.”
Every intellectual discipline, every college department was a story in progress. All one needed was to see it that way. Look at his own discipline. Literature was a story. Fiction most obviously, but essays and poems, too. An essay was the story of an idea; a poem the story of a feeling.
The subject had heft and stamina. It could go the distance. It might not re
scue civilization, might not even rescue Beet College, but it had something. Peace was sure of that, as he was fairly sure his colleagues would take to it, because the stories of the disciplines always changed, and tellers of the stories changed. Teaching located them within their own stories. They could account for changes as sequels and new chapters. They could be responsible for them—storytellers at work. They might even enjoy them.
“Professor Porterfield?”
“Morning, Jim”—an instructor in History he had hardly ever spoken to.
“I hope you know a lot of us think you’re getting a raw deal.”
“Thank you.”
“We’re scared, scared for the place and for our own skins. That’s why we haven’t rallied behind you.”
“I’m scared too.”
“Well, I just had to tell you.”
“Take care, Jim.”
And it was readily understandable because it was basic to human nature, like fellow feeling, if they gave it a chance. Storytelling was almost a biological fact, an inborn insistence. The Jews in the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto: They knew what was going to happen to them, had seen their mothers and neighbors hauled off to the extermination camps, and were themselves dying of diphtheria and hunger. And yet—and yet!—they had the strength and the will to take scraps of paper on which they wrote poems, fragments of autobiography, political tracts, journal entries. And they rolled those scraps into small scrolls and slipped the scrolls into the crevices of the ghetto walls. Why? Why did they bother? With no news of the outer world available to them, they assumed the Master Race had inherited the earth. If their scraps of paper were discovered, the victors would laugh at them, read and laugh, and tear them up. So why expose their writing, their souls, to derision? Because they had to do it. They had a story to tell. They had to tell a story.
That man in France, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle who suffered so massive a stroke the only part of his body he could move was his left eyelid. Yet with that eyelid, he signaled the alphabet. And with that alphabet, he wrote an autobiography. He too had to do it. It was in him, in everyone.
We like to distinguish ourselves from other animals by saying we’re a rational species. Are you kidding? But a narrative species? That, Peace was convinced, one could prove.
Who knows? Such a course might eventually expel the nonsense courses in the New Pen, or at least distill the nonsense from them, and leave a residue of something sensible to study, divorced from the promotion of self-adulation. If everything were seen as a story with all the elements of a good story discerned, a Gresham’s law of narrative might take hold. Good stories would drive out bad. Faculty and students would start making discriminations. Wouldn’t that be something? And even if everything in the college remained exactly as it was—Homeland Security and Communications Arts untouched, God help us—people still would recognize that there are minor stories and major stories. And what do you think of that?
“Professor Porterfield?”
“Hi, Max.”
“There’s something strange happening at the college.”
“You’re telling me.”
“No, sir. I mean, stranger than you think. We may need your help.”
“We?”
“I’m on my way to see Akim. May I call you later?”
“Sure.”
The particulars of the course—the components and how they would work with one another—would need to be fleshed out. But even Peace’s cursory survey of materials suggested there was plenty to use and to build on. The neuroscience alone was fascinating—the brain’s neurons firing to instruct by storytelling, a billion stories in endless competition to deliver information. The psychology: Peace read that babies learn language to tell the stories already in them. The psychiatry: how schizophrenics have their stories broken. And language itself, its beauty, and its hilarity when someone misspeaks, tells the wrong story. To say nothing of the terror of silence when there is no story to tell. Maybe we Cro-Magnons knocked off the Neanderthals because we could not bear their silence.
If mystery could be taught, there was the mystery of the whole enterprise. Why is it no one ever tells a story the same way twice? Not even the uncle who has told one anecdote over and over at every family gathering for decades—not even he tells it the same way twice. Why is it that when you read a sentence you have written yourself, you still don’t know where it’s going? Because you want to pretend the adventure is new, even when it was you who created it.
Art as story. Philosophy as story. Linguistics. Math. Scientific research, with its bulky collaborations, as a story. Science itself—evolution originally referring to the unrolling of a scroll. And Darwin, whom Peace thought the most imaginative person in history, seeing the consequences of the leaps without seeing the leaps. The story of one’s own life. Self-esteem? If you want self-esteem, Peace said to himself, think big. Our DNA indicates we are all stories waiting to be told. But what are the stories we were meant to tell?
“Professor Porterfield?”
“Yes?”
“I’m from Mr. Bollovate’s office. He asked me to let you know there’s an emergency meeting of the trustees in the Temple this afternoon. They would like you to be there.”
“Sorry. I’m busy.”
“Is that what you want me to tell them?”
“Tell them what you please.”
He took a breath before entering his department building. What was the story Peace was meant to tell? He’d always thought it was a teacher’s story. Now he wasn’t so sure. Funny. You go along doing what you do until one day you find yourself seeing your life through a stranger’s eyes. And you are that stranger.
What Peace would be asking of his colleagues, he was doing himself, introducing his mind to itself. Evolution? You could say that again. He was unrolling like a piece of writing. The ink was wet.
But the course was possible, he was certain, ready for teaching. All it needed was someone to pull it together, get the others to take part and figure out the stories they’d been telling all their lives. Bricolage. They would cobble together the subject as they cobbled together the curriculum, as they remade the college.
And it did not need to be airtight, this subject. God, who would want it airtight? Just make it interesting enough, imaginative enough to sustain itself and provocative enough to challenge itself. One person playing point, that’s all it would take, Peace knew, just as he knew he would not be that person.
“Professor Porterfield?”
He looked around, but no one was there.
CHAPTER 19
IF A DECEMBER DAWN IN NEW ENGLAND WERE DISTINGUISHABLE from the dead of night, one would have said it was dawn that brought the flabbergasting sight greeting all who entered the Old Pen. “What is that? Can you make it out?” Partly obscured in mist and darkness on the green, it looked spectral, like a vague elephant, and painted with a mucid glaze. It glowed pink. Big and glowing and pink. Could anyone tell what it was yet? “Why, shit! It’s the pig from the roof of the Muncheonette. Goddamn! It looks awesome!”
It was, and it did. The pig, restored to its former prominence, stood majestic as ever at the south end of the green, its curlicue tail aimed at Bacon Library. Students and professors circumnavigated the thing, walking clockwise and counterclockwise, noting its bright blue hooves tucked beneath its ample body, and its bright blue eyes. Such eyes! Such ears! Such a snout! When it had resided on the roof of the eatery, no one could properly appreciate what a work of art was this pig. But here where one could see it up close, its full magnitude declared it the mother of all pigs, more than a totem, a god.
“It’s the Trojan Pig!” said Archie Acephalous of Archaeology, who boasted he knew more classics than the Classics Department. He had no idea how right he was.
Occupying the hollow of the great pink animal, the MacArthur Five—four of them present—sat in their prearranged positions. They had entered through the snout, which opened and closed on hinges. The reason only fou
r of the students were inside had to do with weight capacity. Though it was impossible to detect from the outside, the pig rested on a platform atop a scissor-link vertical lift, which in turn rested on four trailer-size tires. The lift was folded flat, and it and the platform were concealed in the lower portion of the pig’s belly. Only the wheels showed. The platform could hold a five-hundred-pound level load; that’s what the man who rented the vehicle told the revolutionaries. Betsy Betsy weighed 110; Goldvasser and Lattice, 160 and 137; Matha 106. Bagtoothian weighed in at 214, so it was he who remained outside.
But he had a key assignment. When late night approached, someone had to pull the pig to the library, at which point its occupants would employ the hand pump of the hydraulic lift, the scissor would rise, and the happy elevated animal would deposit the little army of revolutionaries at the second-story window. Once in, they would go downstairs and admit Bagtoothian. The plan was a beauty, thought Matha the moment she’d conceived of it.
So far, so perfect. The four had brought pillows and blankets for comfort, and books and magazines to pass the time. They had to wait a whole day. If their presence were to go undetected, talking must be held to a minimum, which was harder on Betsy Betsy than the others. Air aplenty was provided by the pig’s nostrils. And it was surprisingly warm in there, given that the pig was never intended to carry passengers. Jamie and Goldvasser peeked out of the nostrils from time to time, Betsy read, and Matha distributed some of the hundred or so oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies she’d baked the night before. She had also put together decorative picnic baskets for the group, festooned with pink excelsior and tied at the handles with white velour ribbons. The others wondered at the meticulous care she had taken with this domestic project, but were glad of it and made no comments other than those of appreciation.
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