Beet

by Roger Rosenblatt

  Bollovate reached into the large envelope and held the sacred document aloft. The crowd gasped. He chuckled. He was coddling idiots. “Why, I only took it for safekeeping,” he said. “When the college closes, you wouldn’t want this left lying around, would you? Who knows what sorts of people will invade the campus!”

  He stared at the throng for which he had more contempt than ever and made some rapid calculations. What could they say about him and Matha but that he fucked her? So what if he’d wanted Porterfield out? Who didn’t? He had a chance to emerge from this clean as a whistle if he acted with enough self-assurance. And he had stacks of that. It was time for his surprise announcement.

  “My friends,” he said. “I know how you feel. It’s a sad day for all of us, myself and the trustees especially, who have tried so hard to keep Beet College alive. But unlike Ms. Martha Stewart Polite, I have news that matters. The college is alive. We’re staying open!” No one knew what to make of that.

  “You see,” said Bollovate, “after observing that Professor Porterfield and his committee weren’t getting anywhere, and were not going to get anywhere—Dr. Huey and I came up with a plan. Join me up here, will you, Lewis?” Huey took the steps two at a time and stood panting beside his master. “I hadn’t anticipated telling you about this today. But now’s as good a time as any, eh, Lewis?” Huey nodded and grinned. “Well! Dr. Huey and I are going to make Beet College the first online institution of its kind in the country! Totally online. Other places have gone this route without success, because they did not have the stature, the traditions, of Beet College. But we’ll make it work, because we’re going to be practical and prepare people for the real world. What do you think of that!

  “And why waste four good years doing it? You can learn whatever trade you need to learn in six months! As for the liberal arts stuff, why make it part of a college education? Read Shakespeare on your own time! On your yacht! Meanwhile, go to college to earn the yacht!

  “That’s the future, boys and girls. Years from now, when Harvard and Yale have taken the same path and are online trade institutions too—for I promise you, the failing business of higher education will catch up with them all—they will look back and know that we at Beet were pioneers! Welcome to Beet College Online! You don’t have to be there to be there!”

  With each succeeding sentence he grew more exclamatory, but the crowd was sullen. Beet might be cold and sepulchral; what in New England was not? But at least it existed. It was real—real stones, real trees, real sterility, real gloom. Who wanted to spend six months parked before a laptop?

  Six months? College was supposed to be the best years of one’s life. Not only were they fun, and irresponsible, those years; they were joyously inner-directed. How could one possibly cram all that insistent self-indulgence into six short months?

  What’s more: the students kind of liked reading Shakespeare. A few even liked Plotinus.

  Bollovate examined the situation. Had he misjudged? Had he judged at all? The idea of an online Beet College trade school was such a sweet deal. Ah, well. He could always scrap it. Or better still, attract an entirely new clientele outside the college who wanted to brag of a Beet degree. He’d come up with something, one could bet on that. And Beet College as currently constituted was going down the tubes, down the fucking tubes, except for the land, of course, all that gorgeous acreage just waiting to be free of students, teachers, books, bullshit. And Joel Bollovate would soon be free as well—good riddance—of wife and bonged-out children. How did he feel? This is how.

  He had just caught the punt on the zero-yard line, and had tucked the pigskin (get it?) under his left arm, and with his right was stiff-arming the opposition, shoving the entire student body and administration and faculty of Beet College—including, oh dear, yes, the ever so high-and-mighty and preciously educated Professor Peace Porterfield—not merely onto the sidelines, but over the stands into the streets. And the green, beautifully green (get it?) field lay ahead of him like the stairway to heaven. And the crowd—millions of admirers—was chanting “Joel! Joel! Joel!” Oh, God! Was Joel Bollovate standing on the steps of Bacon Library, right there, in front of all those people…Was Joel Bollovate about to come? Oh, God!

  CHAPTER 20

  WOULDN’T IT BE SOMETHING IF THIS STORY ENDED HERE, with Bollovate in triumph, the students and faculty outfoxed, and Peace—exonerated of a crime no one believed him guilty of, or took seriously anyway—standing freezing and helpless with his freezing and helpless colleagues in the Old Pen, awaiting the certain collapse of their way of life? Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Bollovate—whom Livi and Manning had called “a man like that”—wound up on top because, not in spite of, the fact that he was a bean counter, goddamn it, and an all-pro among bean counters at that? And as for those who looked down, all the way down their noses, at bean counters? Well, they would seem to have proved themselves as unfit for the world as Bollovate had said they were. And they had lost the little world they cherished because they were unfit? Wouldn’t that take the cake?

  It would. Things didn’t turn out that way. But that was only because of two students who happened to count the beans, and their teacher, who learned that if one wants to make pigs fly in the real world, it helps to do the paperwork.

  “Mr. Bollovate. How much in the slush fund?”

  Recognizing Professor Porterfield, standing in his sweats, the crowd wondered if the strain on him over the past couple of weeks hadn’t taken its toll. But Peace repeated his question. “Mr. Bollovate. The Homeland Security slush fund. How much money is in it, do you suppose?” Livi tossed the trustee a dark little smile.

  “Oh! Professor Porterfield,” said his nemesis. “The famous, do-nothing Professor Porterfield. You have something to contribute for a change?” Bollovate chuckled, still riding high.

  “The Homeland Security slush fund, Mr. Bollovate.” Everyone continued to stare. Why was Porterfield asking this seemingly irrelevant question?

  “The Homeland Security slush fund?” Bollovate hacked a dry laugh. “How the hell should I know?”

  “Would you like me to tell you?”

  “You’re going to tell me about money, Professor?” He laughed out loud.

  “The amount in the Homeland Security Department slush fund is $265 million, Mr. Bollovate. Check the Web site budget. I’ll give you the code. A lot of slush, don’t you think? Two hundred and sixty-five million dollars. A sum familiar to everyone here. Precisely the number of dollars in the college endowment you and the trustees said was all gone.”

  It took a moment for the crowd to catch up with what Peace was saying, so he made it easy.

  “You stole the endowment, Mr. Bollovate. You and Huey most likely. Maybe the other trustees, too. You stole it, and you hid it. We were never broke. We never had to go through all this. The college was solvent. What did you plan to do with the money, Mr. Bollovate?”

  An old country adage: If you wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty, but the pig enjoys it. Which is to say, Bollovate was not at all shaken. He’d been in similar situations, loads of them, and he kept a portfolio of defenses in his pocket.

  “Nobody stole a red cent, Professor,” he said. “If the endowment wound up in Homeland Security, it was an accounting glitch. Happens all the time.” He took stock of the crowd. “But I think we owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Porterfield. Let bygones be bygones, that’s what I say. This means the college can go on as it always has!” He was banking on these sheep being as manipulable as ever. “A glitch,” he repeated, an animal’s wildness in his eyes. “I sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Peace addressed the people around him. “You should know it wasn’t I who discovered this crime. It was Arthur Horowitz, whom most of you know as Akim, and Max Byrd. They did it all. I’m merely speaking for them. We owe everything to these two young men.”

  The boys waved meekly. Livi clapped.

  So, what had Akim né Arthur seen on his screen when he’d erre
d in his hot-link entry for Billy Pinto? OPERATING BUDGET. Only that. And at first, like the rest of the information on the Homeland Security home page, the budget seemed innocuous. There were ordinary line items—PAYROLL (fac.), PAYROLL (admin.), MATERIALS (broken down into the big-ticket items like computers and the smaller necessities like lamps and office chairs). There was a line for TELEPHONE. There were lines for TRANSFERS in and TRANSFERS OUT, but they displayed no money because there was also a line for SLUSH FUND. The world of Joel Bollovate had opened like Kafka’s gate before the Law.

  “Holy shit!” Manning muttered to himself. He stood at the far end of the Pen, listening intently to Peace’s story. “I was right!”

  And why was the incriminating evidence out there for anyone to see? Because no one was supposed to see it, ever. Why go to a lot of trouble to conceal a slush fund if entry to the whole Web site required the breaking of hundreds of levels of codes? Bollovate was nothing if not secretive and careful when it came to money. How was he to guess his kingdom could be toppled by a temporarily crazy person, an “unsatisfied customer,” obsessed with hacking into Homeland Security, of all things?

  Where the two boys’ fathers had been of help was in advising them to try to trace the accounts that went into the slush fund. Forty separate endowment accounts were involved, which is to say, forty funds earmarked by different donors for specific projects—tenured chairs, a new department, bricks and mortar. All were relocated into a lump sum called slush. It was hardly difficult for Bollovate to hide what he’d done during the transfers, along with hiding the fact that there were no receipts for expenditures. All he needed to find was a bribable auditor in Massachusetts.

  Call it a shell game, impure and simple, with the lives and livelihoods of thousands of people trapped under one of the shells and about to disappear. The cybertrail pursued by the two students led to the revelation that the college endowment remained intact, funds were illegally moved, and the books had been cooked. Now Bollovate ought to be cooked as well. What all that did not prove, however, provided him with one more gambit.

  He blurted out a belly laugh that produced a small cloud of cold air.

  “Oh, for chrissake, Porterfield. Who knows how that money wound up in the slush fund? It may have been a hoax. But if it was theft, the thief wasn’t me. Anybody could have transferred those funds. No one expects the chairman of the board to deal with the day-to-day operations of the college. I’ll check on it, that’s what I’ll do. And I’ll get to the bottom of this, you can count on it. If there’s a crook in our midst [a glance at the terrified Huey], he’s dead meat!”

  “That’s funny, Mr. Bollovate,” said Peace. “Because you’ve hit on an area of the investigation in which Max Byrd’s expertise particularly came in handy. Max can find where messages come from.” Peace held up a printout. “This is an e-mail to Dr. Huey from you, Mr. Bollovate, traced to your office in Cambridge. Shall I read it? ‘Go ahead and set it up. Let me know when the money’s there. Be sure the site’s secure.’”

  His hand played out, Bollovate said, “I’ll sue you for slander, you son of a bitch!” As soon as he said “slander,” one knew he was out of ploys.

  He looked about for Huey as he waddled as fast as possible to his car, though not before Professor Porterfield cut him off and took back the Mayflower Compact. Excited by the turmoil, Latin broke free again, ran to Bollovate, and gave him his traditional salute.

  Bollovate slapped the pig. The pig bit Bollovate, very hard, on the hand.

  “The one that feeds him,” said Manning.

  “I’m bleeding!” cried Bollovate. Latin, frightened by his victory, gallumphed off.

  Livi stood beside her husband, watched Bollovate writhe, and stalled. “Oh, what the hell,” she said finally. She went to him and examined the wound.

  Dog bites? Several. Cat bites? Plenty. But a pig bite? She’d never treated a pig bite before. She couldn’t tell if Latin had dug to tendon or bone. A student offered her a bottle of Evian, and Livi cleaned the wound as well as she could. Her patient squealed.

  “Get an X-ray and an antibiotic,” she told him. She yanked the shirt out of his pants, tore off the tail, and made a compressive bandage, giving the hand an unnecessary and painful squeeze.

  “I’ll kill that animal.”

  “Go home, Mr. Bollovate,” said Peace. And the trustee wisely took his advice.

  In the uproar and confusion, Huey had gone to stand with the group from NBC, having decided on a career in commercial television. That was not to be. But eventually he would prove invaluable to the college by spilling everything about the hidden endowment, which, even with the cybertrail exposed, would have been hard to nail down in court without a confession. A plea bargain won him twenty months in a minimum-security prison in Dexter, Nebraska, where he served the pastor as an assistant confessor. He hoped to take over the ministry when the pastor retired.

  Matha left the college, unsure what to do with her life. Kathy brought her back to live with her in the Hamptons. She felt her sister might fit in with the literary set, whose get-togethers always featured at least one very young person whose pretensions they could encourage for up to half an hour. Matha enjoyed the people at those events—once catching a glimpse of Martha Stewart herself, who flashed her a glance of empathy—but she liked the decorations more. Was it possible, she wondered, to forge a career combining radical poetry and party planning? Again she was torn. She spent a lot of time in Kathy’s kitchen, baking pies, peach in particular. Within a few weeks, Matha was her old self—much as Kathy tried.

  Nothing but good fortune followed the remaining MacArthur Four. Betsy Betsy won her “dream job” as a media reporter on a big-city paper, and there was no one who knew more about newsstand sales, to say nothing of what she understood of the ratio of ads to copy. After working the rooms at “more book parties than I can count,” Jamie Lattice was finally named a Literary Lion, largely on the basis of his “irresistible” Authors Who Have Talked to Me. Goldvasser did get into law school, and he also got out. He teaches civil liberties procedures at the University of the Caicos. Bagtoothian invented the nuclear cluster bomb. He is reputed to be the wealthiest man in Montana, including part-time residents. All four retained youthful appearances, and anyone who had known them at Beet remarked that the years hadn’t changed them a bit.

  Ferritt Lawrence repairs air conditioners in Buffalo.

  Max went on to graduate school, eventually to become a professor of English as well as the country’s leading mystery writer. His detective hero, Arthur, specializes in uncovering industrial espionage. The real Arthur never did make the How to Write for the New York Times course, but became the country’s most respected theater critic anyway. Both young men remained close friends, graduating with highest honors—Max in English, Arthur in History, to which he’d transferred after Homeland Security. It happened that everyone transferred out of Homeland Security, because no department member could ever be found, including Billy Pinto. And the location indicated on the home page turned out to be a guns and ammo shop run by a taxidermist named Tod.

  As for the college property, the Mayflower Compact and the pilfered first editions were returned to their proper places in the library, where—one is pleased to say—the librarian who had confronted Matha was appointed chief. To the relief of everyone, she knew not a word of French. (La Cocque, found not quite guilty of his part in the Mayflower not-quite theft, retired to Alsace.) The Calder and the pieces of African art were gone forever, as were the furniture in Huey’s house and the medieval knickknacks Bollovate had peddled (buyers would not be budged by sentiment). Gone, too, was the Steinway, which students were sure they saw in a bar in Revere, where they also could swear they saw Enron’s Kenneth Lay, alive and drunk, playing stride piano, and crooning “Proud to Be an American.”

  The Moore Two Piece Reclining Man was returned; the man in Rockport who’d shelled out the $14 million found the sculpture made him drowsy. He wrote off what he’d record
ed as his $16 million gift, and was content. The three-foot pig from the Temple was never recovered; Bollovate hadn’t touched it, he swore on his mother’s grave.

  Sheila did not remarry, though several suitors proposed. “Joel broke my heart. That’s it for me,” she would tell them, giggling only occasionally.

  And good old Ada Smythe, while her husband was looking around, had been doing the same thing. She’d wanted to stay with Keelye, but—and this was hard—she had to confess she found him boring.

  Among inanimate objects, the happiest fate befell the Muncheonette fiberglass pig. Students wheeled it to the middle of the Old Pen green, where it provided the one literal bright spot on campus. When it was clear that Beet would survive, the students hung a sign on the pig’s snout, reading: “That’s Not All, Folks!”

  But most of these events occurred after the Day of the Bollovate Part Deux (as the students called it thereafter) had come to an end. For the moment, on that night, one had the sight of some two thousand students, faculty, and staff—nearly the entire college—standing in the Old Pen, surrounded by the old trees and the old departments and Bacon Library. All were wildly grateful to two students and to Professor Porterfield, who, of course, would not hear of their apologetic embarrassment, and told them not to give it a second thought, though that might not have been a bad idea.

  “Oh, no!” said Manning.

  Chaplain Lookatme emerged from the crowd to a general moaning, even from the religious freaks. Was the night going to be crowned with another sermon?

  Lookatme faced his unwilling congregation and lifted his arms skyward. “Our Friend,” he said, “we have gone through a trying time and now we are free. Have You been watching over us? We know You have, just as we watch over You. We watch over each other. Dear Friend, if You are with us at this turbulent hour, could You let us know? Could You give us a sign? Could You?”