by Amanda Cross
“Perhaps I don’t mean to talk about manners. Perhaps I mean to talk about excellence.”
“There I am with you. But Professor Clemance, academic excellence is not that easily measurable. More and more students are getting perfect scores on college entrance tests—my graduate student with the oracular grunts scored very high indeed—but excellence is otherwise measurable, provided one maintains a minimum admissions score. The graduates of University College go on to graduate school in large numbers, astonishingly large numbers if one remembers the average age of the students. I know that some of those older students, especially the older women students, bore the boys in your college if they turn up in the same classes but, to be frank, the boys in your college bore me. I have never found youthful male arrogance, even when combined with great talent, especially appealing, while you, of course, have. In that, I suspect, we don’t agree at all.”
“You are accusing me simply of prejudice.”
“Oh, yes, quite simply. And as to manners, your college boys have fewer of those. They were the original, urinating-on-the-President’s-rug revolutionaries who called policemen pigs and the administration a double-barreled epithet I will not embarrass either of us by repeating. What I find difficult to understand is what it is you fear so about the University College—all of you, I mean. Those who are not satisfied to hurl from prep school through college and graduate school into the family law firm or whatever seem to me intelligent; it is surely the better part of wisdom to take time to think, and a country like ours should have a college for those who have gained wisdom and decided on a later, different college, or on a chance for a second life.”
“Miss Fansler, could your University College have produced Auden?”
“No. And neither could your college, Professor Clemance.” (Kate, as an inheritance from days when children were “brought up,” found she could not bring herself to call Clemance “Frederick,” a difficulty which Reed, who had never had a governess, thought preposterous.) “Oxford didn’t produce Auden, even if it did allow him luncheon parties; neither did his doctor father, from whose books Auden used to learn the facts of life he diagrammed on the school-room blackboards, nor his mother, whom he loved and resembled. What produces an Auden? Having a friend like Isherwood when you are young?”
“Wouldn’t you like it if Auden were to dedicate one of his poems to you?”
“I’ve given up daydreaming. No, I should always be so hideously frightened, with Auden, of being a bore or a hideola. Imagine afterward; one would have to drown oneself to avoid the memories.”
“He’s not as forbidding as all that; he’s a superb teacher, you know.”
“All I know about his teaching is another peculiarity we have in common: we are the only two teachers of literature who have ever admitted in class that we have never read Don Quixote through to the end.”
“It is a good thing I didn’t know that before I voted for your tenure.”
“Professor Clemance, I have often wished for the opportunity to tell you that you taught me more—about literature, something I can only call morality, and about the honor of the profession of letters—than anyone else in the University. But you seemed to wish only for young male followers, and I did not wish to burden you with an older female disciple. Surely you must know, however, that no teacher knows where his influence reaches.”
“I remember that you did a paper on Portrait of a Lady. I have never especially cared for women students. I think perhaps I was wrong in that. Perhaps there are Isabel Archers at University College.”
Kate looked at him for a time. “Perhaps there are,” she said. “I hope there isn’t anything terribly wrong—with you, I mean?”
“But there is,” he said. “My heart is broken. I have a pain in it.” Kate remembered how he was always able to say dramatic things simply, as though emotion did not frighten him. “This student revolution hasn’t broken your heart, hasn’t affected your love for the University?”
“No,” Kate said. “Much as I loved the rose petals in the finger bowls, I know my brothers too well. I have never cared for playboys or reactionaries, and they were produced by the same process that produced the finger bowls. I love talent, but do not care for privilege which takes itself for granted. To put it another way, I do not care for a society which has a place for Oblonsky, but none for Anna and Vronsky.”
“What about Levin?”
“Levin without his estate and serfs would have been Anna. We are all Anna now.”
Clemance sat silent for a time. “There is a Departmental meeting on Monday,” he finally said. “No doubt the whole matter,” he waved his hand in a familiar gesture, “will come up.”
“No doubt.”
“Jeremiah Cudlipp and Robert O’Toole feel very strongly about it; very strongly.”
“So I have heard,” she said. “Professor Clemance, let me tell you some non-University news: I’m to be married.”
“Are you indeed? I am glad. It is good ‘to be reborn, reneighbored in the Country of Consideration.’ ”
“The Country of Consideration: what a lovely definition of marriage.”
“Yes,” Clemance said. “If one considers it in the middle years, the best definition I know.”
When Kate had parted from Clemance outside the Faculty Club, she walked for a time around the campus; the autumn was her favorite season, she was to have dinner with Reed, she was happy. The campus looked peaceful, benign, perhaps falsely so, but “when was peace or its concomitant smile the worse for being undeserved?” Perhaps, she thought, Reed will be ready early.
She was surprised, though only mildly so, to find McQuire waiting for her at the bus stop.
“More propositions?” Kate asked.
“I am Frogmore’s pander. I promised him I would try to bring you over to the Club for a conversation. We’ve heard the English Senior Faculty Committee meeting is Monday, and we’d like a word in your ear before then.”
“I have only just been at the Club,” Kate said; “inferior lunch, superior quotations. I never even expected to be here Saturday when I took up this line of work.”
“Come back to the Club with me now. I faithfully promise this will be the last time I abduct you.”
“By the way,” Kate said, as they walked toward the Faculty Club, “what’s your great interest in the University College? Surely there aren’t enough beautiful young things to be worth all this bother.”
“Well—the University College these days is an extraordinarily vital place, while the College, let’s face it, is catering first to a lot of boys fed up with work in prep schools whose only ambition for their college years is to get confronted and laid, preferably on alternate days, and second to the college alumni who want Alma Mater to go on unchanged, supporting the same prejudices and enthusiasms they remember, or think they do, from their undergraduate days. As an economist, I’m interested in the economically viable, and in the long run I think that’s an adult undergraduate school. Certainly in New York City. I mean, it may be lovely to go and gambol by the Charles, but the river in this city is not a river but an estuary of the ocean, and it follows the tides of the ocean. I think we should stop trying to be Harvard or Yale and find our own pattern. I ought to add that St. Jude is my favorite saint: he of the lost causes—or has the Church demoted him along with the others?”
“All causes are lost causes, as e.e. cummings used to say; otherwise, they’re effects.”
Frogmore greeted Kate with all the exuberance of a hostess who had not really expected the guest of honor to appear. “Never mind how goody-good he comes on,” McQuire had said. “It’s no doubt due to an oppressive upbringing. I’ve actually heard him use four-letter words, when driven. I don’t know why University College should be a personal matter to him, but I think he would do almost anything for the sheer joy of seeing Cudlipp’s face when the Board of Governors announce that they have voted to let University College continue.” Today Frogmore (“Call me Vivian,” he said
to Kate, who was astonished; it seemed to her that any man named Vivian would stick to last names as a mere matter of survival) did not come on goody-good very long. “You’ll never guess what that son-of-a—I beg your pardon, Kate—has done,” he said. “Managed to get one of his pals in as Dean of the College.”
“From the English Department? Do I know him? Or is his name unmentionable?”
“His name’s O’Toole,” Frogmore said. “Robert J. O’Toole. Ring a bell?”
“I don’t believe it,” Kate said. “Why should Robert O’Toole take a job like that? He’s already a full professor and a leader of what I believe is known as the New York intellectual community, with influence even in certain parts of Connecticut and New Jersey. Why should he take …?”
“Cudlipp has managed it. Of course, O’Toole’s acceptable to the faculty because he’s a name, and has a lot of university and extra-university weight to throw around. The only members of the College faculty who might have objected are those who can’t stand O’Toole’s guts, or those who don’t think he’s quite as good as he thinks he is …”
“Which is impossible on the face of it, from all I hear,” McQuire interjected.
“And these, of course, were quietly persuaded by Cudlipp that it takes a …”
“Conceited, arrogant, insensitive bastard to win this fight,” McQuire happily concluded. “Forgive me finishing all your sentences, Frogmore, but they all have such provocative beginnings.”
“Which explains, I guess,” Kate said, “why you want someone in the English Department on your side at the meeting Monday. Let’s think about the English Department a moment, may we, if you can bear it?”
“That, Kate, is what I hoped you would say,” Frogmore said, leaning toward her. “McQuire here can probably handle the Economics Department, but they will only give a certain amount of trouble—economists today, except for Bill, aren’t really interested in undergraduate education—but if we can’t do a little something in your department, Kate, we might as well turn in our badges. What will you drink?”
“Beer,” Kate said. “It will remind me of how pleasant the park was this morning. O.K. We have Cartier committed to the University College, and also, if I may put order before modesty, you have me. Opposed to the University College you have Cudlipp, Clemance, O’Toole. But O’Toole as Dean will be off the College faculty. It’s scarcely worth the price to us since he will be leading the fight in the main arena, but the odds on our side are small enough so that every advantage counts. From the rest of the Department we have the chairman, Michaels, who is, I would say, so fed up with Cudlipp and Clemance going over his head to the Acting President that he would probably welcome, in a properly decorous way, any plan which gave him some weight against those two. Everglade, the Secretary of the Department, is absolutely the sweetest guy in the world, but I don’t really know what corner he’ll be in. Probably ours. We have then Professor Peter Packer Pollinger, who is perfectly capable of voting on either side when it comes right down to it, depending on what he imagines Fiona Macleod would have done under similar circumstances, but as a matter of fact he dislikes Clemance so much for once having said that Fiona Macleod was a silly poetess whose rhymes were not improved by the fact that she was really a man that Professor Pollinger may vote with us if he remembers what it was Clemance said on the day he happens to vote.”
“Kate, dear,” McQuire interrupted, “I do hope you know what you’re talking about. Frogmore and I aren’t going to ask you to explain why a lady poet should be a man, but you might just assure us that you aren’t, shall we say, rambling?”
“I assure you. The one who rambles is Peter Packer Pollinger. All right, then we have Chaucer, Medieval English, Comparative Medieval, Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Shakespeare. I don’t know where any of them stands (I mention the fields rather than the names for the moment to give you the scope of the problem) but the older the field, the more conservative the views, as a general rule. The only trouble with that is that I’m not certain what they’ll consider the conservative position in this case. Of the two people in the contemporary field, one is Plimsole, who is a College man and lost, I fear, to us, but he is so unbelievably longwinded that I can’t believe even the College will consider him altogether an asset, though he’s not a bad fellow if he could learn to stop talking when he gets to the end of what he wants to say. The other contemporary person is Emilia Airhart.”
“You must be putting us on. I never heard of her, I mean not as a member of the English Department. You aren’t suggesting she made it out of the Oriental waters only to pop up here in a new life.”
“I hadn’t realized, really, what an odd lot we were. Emilia’s little known because she never turns up anywhere except to see students, whom she likes, and to write plays, which keep getting put on off-Broadway, but they are so very with it that no one in the whole Department realized for years that Emilia was writing them. She never has anything to do with anything in the Department, never goes to parties or gives them; she might come down on our side on this issue—it’s not unlikely.”
“What does she look like?” Frogmore said. “I thought I knew all the tenured English faculty.”
“What she looks like is the whole point, as you’d realize the moment you clapped eyes on her. She’s a large woman with flat shoes, wide skirts, and glasses, who gives you the impression that she could actually be a jolie laide if someone with the combined talents of Sophie Gimbel and Yves St. Laurent would only take her in hand. She’s got five children and a husband, and that’s almost all I know about her, although I know her better than most people, since we’re the only two women with tenure in the Department and we inevitably find ourselves together in the ladies’ room from time to time. Her specialty’s drama, and the only other thing I know about her is that when I once asked her what she thought of Clemance, she said that apart from the fact that he was pompous, a company man and a male chauvinist, she had nothing against him, which I suppose, is another good sign for us. All the rest of the Department don’t have votes on the Senior Faculty Committee, being non-tenure, and need not concern us, though of course they wield more influence than is often realized. I hope I have made it quite clear that this is going to be an uphill fight.”
“You don’t know how uphill,” McQuire said. “It’s on the question of promotions that I’ve had my troubles with the Economics Department. The point is, we want you to see that a couple of assistant professors who’ve been teaching at the University College get promoted.”
“You don’t want much, do you?” Kate asked.
“The thing about Frogmore,” McQuire said, “is that easy fights bore him.”
“Listen, Kate,” Frogmore said, “I don’t want to be Dean of University College if it gets a new image, a new lease on life, and a new destiny. I want to be president of a girls’ college somewhere very rural and genteel. But I want to see University College the model of the elite adult education for the whole United States, and I want it so badly that I’m going to get it.”
“What odd reasoning,” Kate said.
“No, it’s not,” Frogmore said. “When you find a man who wants something very badly, and doesn’t want it for himself, watch out.”
Kate stared at Frogmore awhile. “Do you know, Vivian,” she said, “like the man, meaning McQuire here, said, you got guts.”
“What happens at that Senior Faculty Committee meeting on Monday is going to show us a lot,” Frogmore said.
“I can hardly wait,” Kate laughed.
Then she hurried home to Reed.
There will be no peace,
Fight back, then, with such courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,
Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now;
They hate for hate’s sake.
Five
MONDAY, Kate reached Baldwin at two, in time for her office hour. The Sen
ior Faculty Committee meeting was scheduled for four that afternoon, and Kate hoped, without too much conviction, to pick up a few tips before the meeting on the way the wind was blowing. So political a thought had not previously occurred to her and marked, no doubt, her initiation into the world of history. Clio, she thought, stand me now and ever in good stead.
“We have found no one for Swahili,” a voice said. “How is Bulwer-Lytton doing? Look, the elevator is actually coming,” Mark Everglade added. “There must be something wrong with it.”
“I do think,” Kate said as they got in, pressed ‘8’ and watched the doors close, “that such consistent pessimism is surely the triumph of experience over hope, not to mention reason. Even this University’s elevators must work occasionally. The law of averages …” Kate’s voice faded away as, between the third and fourth floors, the elevator came to a reluctant, but by no means uncertain, stop.
“There is a law of averages,” Everglade said. “There is also a law of falling bodies. We are about to prove Galileo’s theory that two bodies of different weights will, if dropped from a sufficient height, reach the ground at the same time and in the same state of dejectedness. You ring the alarm bell; I will telephone.”
Kate pressed the alarm bell in much the same spirit with which one accepts herbal tea from an ancient aunt: it probably won’t help, but it can’t hurt. Mark, meanwhile, addressed himself to a little cupboard which housed the University’s most recent attempt to grapple with the problem of its elevators: a telephone. “What do you dial for emergencies?” Mark asked Kate.