Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

Manton, who had recently read Irving Stone’s The Origin at George’s suggestion, piped up, “Oh, right—then she went and married some other dude while he was gone.”

  “Thanks, you guys,” said Mead. “You’re most helpful.”

  “But he did happily marry his other cousin, Emma Wedgwood, eventually.”

  “Super,” said Mead. “Only, all my cousins are already married.”

  Winchester grew serious. “By the way, James, I really do appreciate your attention to the colony this summer. As you know, those insects are valuable, and I need to trust that they’re in good hands in order to go away myself. You’ve come to be rather fond of them, haven’t you? I thought so—no more odor, eh? And have you managed to dispose of that surplus colony yet? What, three or four dozen, are they?”

  “About that many. No, not yet, but I will. Maybe one of the schools will take them . . .”

  “Yes. It would be a pity to kill them, or waste them. Fine animals indeed. Well, you do your best. I’m off home, gentlemen. A lift for anyone?”

  “I think I’ll troll the streets for a pizza and a pitcher,” said Mead.

  “Legend has it pizza was invented in New Haven—” began Winchester.

  “Hamburgers too, right?” asked Manton.

  “Actually, yes. You know ‘the place where Louie dwells’ in ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’?”

  “Whatever. Making me hungry. How about you, Jimbo?”

  “Never more. Let’s go.”

  Mead was hungry all right, and he wanted that beer in a bad way. But he was particularly ready to vent—and Manton was a good listener, especially when eating. In the end they walked all the way to the old Italian section of East Haven, which really was the putative birthplace of pizza. From a deep brick oven came a large prosciutto and tomato pie that the two of them would soon convert completely. By the third slice, Manton noticed that Mead was biting and chewing with a vengeance—just the right word, in the event. By the fourth, a plan began to form in the back of Mead’s reptile brain, and by the bottom of the pitcher of Schaefer it had reached the front.

  Manton noticed an actual smile creeping out of Mead’s glower. “So what’s up, Jimbo?”

  “How’d you like to skip that beer truck in Jersey City this summer, Steve?”

  16

  Richard Phelps and Frank Griffin paced down Prospect Street toward their weekly tea. Their assignation always began with noncommittal small talk: university gossip or reports of weekend forays to antique shops in the Berkshires or resorts in the Thousand Islands or some such family outing. But this time Griffin only grunted at Phelps’s pro forma entrée.

  “So we thought we’d visit Mystic Seaport at last,” Phelps was saying. “Elizabeth and the kids all like the seaside and sea lore, I’ve just reread Moby-Dick, and we’ve always meant to go there. It’s that restored whaling village, you know, near Groton, where the submarines live.”

  “Hmm,” muttered Griffin.

  “But on the way, Sam spotted a sign for a steam train running up the valley. He’s crazy about trains, and he couldn’t be persuaded that it would wait for another time. You know how obdurate a teenager can be, and we’re just thankful he’s willing to do anything at all with the family anymore.”

  “Uh, right.”

  “So we rode the train upriver and took the riverboat back down. It made for a very satisfactory outing, with a good lunch at the midpoint landing. And after the inevitable recriminations about missing out on Mystic yet again and how it’s been there since Ahab and will wait for us a little longer, there wasn’t a cross word! Even Sherrie enjoyed it, though I really think what saved her from a sulk was a rather overly interested conductor-cum-deckhand. Given his attentions, she wouldn’t have cared where she was. So a good time was had by all, as they say. We didn’t hear the dread word bor-ing once. Good value, too—ten bucks each, up and down. Has your family ever done it? Frank?”

  “Mm? Done what?” The upward lilt of his colleague’s voice alerted Griffin to the fact that he’d been asked something, but truly, he’d barely registered a word before “ever done it?”

  Dick’s monologue had taken them past the colonial cemetery, past Woolsey Hall, with its war memorials to glorious fallen Yalies, dead for all that, past Architecture, to the Berkeley quad and, opposite that, the white clapboard house called the Elizabethan Club. Phelps held open the oaken front door of the “Lizzie” for an exiting couple, then blocked Griffin. “Oh, never mind,” he said. “I was just blabbing on. But if you’re going to be so abstracted, we might as well call it off this time. I’ve plenty to do, and I don’t fancy conversation with a brick wall.”

  Frank apologized, an event rare enough to raise Phelps’s eyebrows. “I’m sorry, Dick, I’ll get off it.” His slick dark hair, what there was of it, shone off his sweaty, bulbous brow as a grimace gave away his mood. “It’s just that I’ve recently entertained that poseur, Mead, and he’s tickled my hackles yet again.”

  “Ah,” said Phelps. “I think you mean ‘raised.’ I would say that you two are less than simpatico.”

  “That’s an understatement!”

  “But really, Frank, don’t you think you’re a bit hard on the lad? He tries to be civil, and you gun him down every time. And why do you call him a poseur? I find him bright, accomplished, and sincere—promising, too.” Phelps’s blue agate eyes fired a beam of some intensity at his partner, giving him notice that a thoughtful reply was expected. He’d been intending to quiz Griffin on the matter anyway, though hardly cherishing the prospect. He stood aside, and the two of them entered the hall and doffed their coats.

  The pair of professors, such a seeming mismatch—the one tweedy and giving off the essence of the typical untidy indoor forester, the other all business and white lab coat no matter what he wore; one trim, fit, and glowing from frequent field trips and squash matches, the other paunchy and pasty from a sedentary indoor existence; the first relaxed in his skin, the second carrying his as a hermit crab tugs at his shell to follow—stepped into the clubroom. Hardly boon companions at other times, they had scarcely missed a Tuesday tea in term time for years, not even when the rest of the campus was shut down by the student takeovers after Nixon and Kissinger’s Cambodian massacre.

  They took their seats—that is, as soon as a steward flushed out an unknowing young probationary member who had made the serious error of usurping one of their usual hardwood seats by a herringbone fireplace. Phelps, across a hammered copper table, awaited Griffin’s reply.

  “Tea!” Griffin ordered as the steward attended, “with milk. And lemon pound cake. Richard?” It was a formality. They always had the same thing. Griffin knew it, Phelps knew it, and the steward knew it too.

  Phelps thought the ritual a bit silly after all these years, but he played his part. “The same, thank you.” The aged steward turned away. “Now: Mead.”

  “Well, hell, Richard. The boy’s a true provincial. He’s got no sense of rigor, of real scholarship. He just wants to join our estimable colleague . . .”

  “Careful, Frank, you’re talking about my squash partner.”

  “. . . our estimable colleague out there at his dude ranch excuse for a laboratory, come back with a merit badge in nature study, and get a doctorate of philosophy for it. I’ll be double-damned if I’m going to grant my imprimatur, let alone departmental funds, for a Yale PhD based on a grammar school scam like that!”

  “Frank, Frank . . . you harbor entirely the wrong idea about Gothic, about Winchester, about field studies in general, and especially about young Mr. Mead.”

  “I doubt it,” grumbled Griffin. “You see, Dick, it’s not just that I’m on the boy’s back. Nor do I entirely disapprove of field studies . . . after all, we need to know something about our organisms in their brief state of life so that we might better comprehend their tissues, cells, and molecular constituents in the laboratory.”

  “I’d have thought it was the other way around,” Phelps interjec
ted.

  Griffin ignored him. “Also, I recognize George’s journeyman contribution to his little corner of biology, and to the institution . . .”

  “Well, don’t patronize him or anything, Frank. His ‘little corner of biology’ does happen to comprise the great majority of life on earth. You know very well that the collections he has so astutely assembled and curated are among the most respected anywhere.”

  “Fine, fine . . . I thought you wanted to talk about the Mead problem?”

  “Okay, if you must characterize him that way. So what’s the rub?” Phelps asked, taking his first sip of tea as he closed his assertive lips over the rim of the cup on rub.

  The young assistant professor who had been ejected from his seat glanced over and announced, “Hamlet, Act Three, scene one, the so-called nunnery scene: ‘Aye, there’s the rub.’ ”

  Griffin scowled at him and lowered his voice. “It’s just that I had to work hard in under-equipped, badly funded labs for my degree. And I work hard now, you know I do. Science is work. Yet these eco-freaky excuses for students today, in their waffle stompers and sandals (if not bare feet!), seem to think that science should be fun.” He spit out the word as if it were a bad grape. “Science is not supposed to be fun. Science is meant to serve! What’s the matter with them, or their teachers, that they don’t know that?”

  “Well, I have fun out there,” said Phelps, “and I pity you if you never do.”

  “I’m not saying it’s never enjoyable. There are satisfactions. But these would-be Thoreaus and Lord Byrons have no more sense of service to society than they have work ethic or patriotism. Where will our institutions be after a generation or two of such so-called scholars?”

  “Or the tobacco companies,” Phelps said, tamping his pipe to make his point.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Phelps. “Just an aside on some of your colleagues’ sense of service to society. But do you really think things are as bad as all that?”

  “Well, they’re getting that way. Anyway,” Griffin went on, his volume rising, “when the fun and games are over, after the dancing and showers, when we get down to ground zero, who’s going to go into the lab prepared to crack the hard nuts of knowledge?”

  Derisive laughter rose around them, interrupting the tirade. More than a couple of members had been listening in. The English lecturer, a philologist of minor but growing repute, busily scribbled that last remark into a pocket notebook and loosed another ripple of chortles for his unsolicited response: “The hard nuts of knowledge—brilliant!”

  Griffin growled at the eavesdroppers, then continued just above a whisper. “What I mean to say is that this generation of postgraduates—especially after their treasonous behavior over the war—seems to think that their studies should be a lark and an unremitting pleasure. I don’t believe that the point of scholarly research is to enjoy oneself, though one sometimes might, when applied labor yields the desired results. But a place like this, this—what is it, Gothic, for God’s sake?—just encourages such a frivolous attitude.” As if it were the evil in question and he was rooting it out with his long, hard teeth, he attacked his lemon pound cake.

  “But have you ever been there, Frank? Or to any other field station? The work they do there is often rock-solid, even cutting-edge. For that matter, have you ever been in the field, period?”

  “Don’t like bugs,” Griffin muttered through his mouthful.

  “Because fieldwork is fun, or can be, though it has its tedious times as well. Besides, it’s essential if we’re going to have a chance at arresting the global ecological crisis. Can you blame vigorous young students for aiming to take a little delight in learning about the world around them while trying to do their bit to save it?”

  “And getting laid every ten minutes while they’re at it, I don’t doubt. And high. Global crisis, my white ass.” He took another vicious bite. “Even if there were such a thing, their motto would be ‘think globally, screw locally.’ ”

  “Come on, Frank, even Nixon seems to believe in conservation. But never mind that. I do believe you are jealous! Or just plain envious. Don’t you remember grad school? Who had time for hanky-panky every night? And you don’t get many good data when you’re stoned! You must not be getting enough at home, man. Is that it?”

  Griffin swallowed, sucked his tea leaves, and said, “Never worry. Margaret is good to me. But I don’t mind saying, I’d take graduate school again, at least that part. And speaking of vigorous young students doing their bit, haven’t you seen Mead going gaga over that little Oriental bit? I’ll bet he’s doing it, all right.”

  Phelps just shook his head and smiled. “I knew you were a xenophobe, Frank, but a sexist one too? That’s appalling language about a student.” He’d long since given up trying to reform his colleague, and he did his best to ignore his worst warts.

  “Hell, maybe you’re at least partly right, Dick. Perhaps I am a little envious of the students. Aren’t you, ever? No? Liar. Anyway, we shall be spared the resolution of all this, as Mead will not be going to Colorado—at least not this summer. Let him attempt to do some science, against all odds, in that wretched roach hole of Winchester’s. Might as well be something out of Poe.”

  “Poe never wrote about roaches,” said the philologist at the next table. “Cats, rats, and golden bugs, yes, but never cockroaches, I’m afraid. Maybe he should have . . .”

  “Oh, stuff it,” said Griffin. “We still have to vote on your membership, you know.” He shuddered and spilled milk from the pitcher in his hand. Then, turning back to Phelps, “Let’s change the subject before it puts me off my tea altogether.” Not yet put off, he garfed another big bite of pound cake.

  “I can see we’ll get nowhere with it anyway,” Phelps conceded. “But I predict you’ll be surprised by the quality of Mead’s work. I think you simply hold a grudge against GW and the whole ecological establishment, not to mention against youth in general, and most of the country, and you’re taking it out on James. If you can’t show a little fairness, Frank, someone’s going to cry foul and remove you from his committee.”

  “His loss, Dick, I assure you. I’d be delighted to get shed of it. Except that I feel a certain responsibility—onus, even—to drum a little rigor into these prima donna Brownies and Cub Scouts we get these days. Anyway, Mr. Mead will, with any luck, get fed up with those horrid vermin in the heat of August, and he’ll retreat to his cow college. That would be a favor to everyone involved.” Emphatically, the last morsel went down.

  “Nasty, Frank. I don’t believe you mean it. At any rate, the roaches aren’t so bad. Of course they aren’t birds, but they’re not bad. You should ask George or James to introduce you to them personally, show you their ins and outs. I tell you, those viviparous hissing roaches feel crazy when you let them walk all over your palm!”

  At that, Griffin choked on his lemon pound cake, coughing so violently that Phelps rose and positioned himself behind his stricken, doubled-up colleague, ready to administer the Heimlich maneuver. Everyone else in the Lizzie, especially the probationary member, looked on expectantly. But Griffin recovered, expelling the soggy crumbs into the hearth. Crisis averted, the onlookers resumed their leather seats, crumpets, chess, and conversation, clearly disappointed by the anticlimactic outcome.

  “And as for harboring a grudge,” Griffin hacked when he was able, “you’re wrong about that, though well I might. I should have been elected, you know. Disappointment never tastes good. Is it my fault I’m not the biggest fan of the Osborn contingent?”

  Phelps struggled to think of an honest reply that would not ruin the afternoon. Before he found one, Griffin said, “Now, Richard, prepare to defend yourself, or else to wallow in your own growing grudge over your seemingly interminable losing streak.”

  “Why, you self-righteous, gloating, sad specimen of a biochemist—you should have choked! Just watch out, because one of these days you’re going to lose
, and lose bad—on or off the board.”

  Phelps opened the game board and placed the plastic pieces on the table before them. And as the firelight gleamed off the patina of First Folio Shakespeares in the burnished bookcase on their right, as discourse on all manner of recondite subjects hummed low around them, the two resumed the joint enterprise that had drawn them together against anyone’s comprehension for some 403 Tuesday afternoons in term: Tiddlywinks.

  17

  The old panel truck made a noise like a louder version of its own heater as it lumbered up the high incline. Seated within, two cowled figures, one in green and one in brown, clung to their robes and their thoughts, receiving no warmth from the heater or from each other. At last the driver, the one in green, spoke up.

  “Come on, Attalus. It was worth the attempt. We might have found recruits, and at least the lodging and food were good. Free, too. I admit it was a waste of time otherwise—except, never quite time wasted to be anywhere in these mountains.”

  “Oberon, Oberon . . . you’ve no judgment! I advised against this goose chase. How could such a place—a resort, mercantile philistinism run wild—bring anything of value to our order?”

  “I said I agree. But I remembered Dillon before the dam, before the reservoir covered the old town, a fine little mountain village. When I saw that the request for our visit came from there, I never pictured the crap new town that’s popped up in its place. Wildernest Road, Idlewylde Lane—you’re right, Attalus, about the philistines. The barbarians aren’t at the gates of the Rockies, they’re well inside.”

  “All pretense and money and noise and smoke—of various kinds. And our so-called host, that plastic pantheist Holcomb, ensconced in his ersatz Rocky Mountain High of designer jeans, sequined women, liquor, and cocaine. He actually offered me a snort! Claimed it was a natural botanical, so why not? What in the world made you think anything could come of it?”

  “Okay, Attalus. Lay off, already. I thought Holcomb’s letter, asking guidance, sounded earnest. The guy is well intentioned, just has no idea of what the mountains really mean. In his own way, I think, he’s looking for a way out of the modern mess he’s gotten himself into. And, the gods know, we could use a chunk of his bankroll. Maybe if we’d stayed a little longer . . .”