All this was of a piece with her formal adherence to Christianity, which in turn informed and even dictated the substance of her teaching. As we drove home we were soon again deep in one of those discussions of human fundamentals that occupied so many hours of our courtship. I sat in back again, my leg out on the seat.
“The emotions a given religion itself inspires are a yardstick of its worth, I think,” she said over the wheel, and again I had the feeling that I was being treated to a set of classroom notes. “Historically speaking, Christianity speaks for itself. It not only civilized the Western world, it gave rise to a wealth of art unparalleled in any other place and time. What I feel when I look at a painting by El Greco or listen to Bach’s Mass in B Minor or Handel’s Messiah makes it impossible for me not to believe what they say. El Greco doesn’t paint religious subjects, he paints religion. Bach and Handel don’t simply ‘take’ Christian themes, or embody them—they embody Christianity. When I listen to them, I believe the God they glorify. I have to.”
“By that logic, the emotion inspired by The Nibelungen Ring is reason to worship the Norse gods,” I said, “while the Rubáiyát proves that there are none at all, my dear Marion. I think you’d best take me home.”
fifteen
PEOPLE WHO FEAR ridicule seem most to attract it. Or perhaps this is nothing more than an illusory reversal of the truth that those who provoke it develop an understandable fear of it. I was back in harness again, settled down to normal after the first constraints and embarrassments attendant on my return had been survived, stomping busily from class to class between my crutches, when a fresh complication arose, of an emotional order that made it a sort of “relapse” in my fortunes.
I had completely forgotten the letter I had entered in the contest, on the theme of why the movie starlet Angela Ravage had failed to find happiness, until one afternoon in early March I received a telegram saying that I had won. It was signed by a studio representative named Lapchick, and assured me that Miss Ravage was on her way from the Coast for the date with me that was part of the first prize.
This was appalling. When I had written the letter, of course, I had supposed my days at Polycarp numbered, and had only been casting about for any extra money I could lay my hands on. A thousand dollars had seemed a fortune at the time. I had never really imagined I would win, proud as I was of the entry I had finally turned out (or ashamed, depending on how one looked at it). Now that I had regained what I had jeopardized by my first folly, and more, thanks to Norm Littlefield’s confused grasp of my heckle, it was twice as imperative that I nip this thing in the bud and not make a fool of myself on an even larger scale, at least without allowing a longer interval of time to elapse than this.
Lapchick was apparently head of the Chicago office. At any rate the wire had been sent from that branch. So I put in a telephone call to him there and told him that the award was quite out of the question, that I must decline the prize, and that he must consider my entry withdrawn from the contest as of now.
“It’s too late for that,” said a voice evoking a man sitting in a bowler hat with his feet on the desk.
“Now look, pal,” I said, in a tone that figuratively clutched him by the lapels and threatened to give him a couple across the chops, “this whole thing is a mistake. I want it to go no further, under pain of suit. I cannot afford it at this time for professional reasons. Am I making myself quite clear?”
“You’re a professor, ain’t you?”
“How did you find that out?”
“Then you should be proud to win a prize for writing a letter dat was well written. Like I say, it’s too late anyway. We released it for publication in all the papers—including the one in your home town there.”
“My letter? In the Blade?”
“Didn’t you see it?”
Physically ill, I rushed out and bought a newspaper. I opened and read it on the street. There was the whole hideous thing on page three. “Polycarp professor wins movie letter contest. Local educator defines happiness.” The story was run with a picture of the actress, a soft blonde girl with full lips and creamy shoulders. I had forgotten precisely what I had written, but its opening lines refreshed my memory: “A member of the Polycarp faculty has won first prize of a thousand dollars and an evening on the town with the actress Angela Ravage for a letter undertaking to explain why she, the actress, has been unable to find happiness. The author of the letter, a graduate of the college who at present teaches English there, defines happiness as ‘like a puppy dog. If we try to catch it, it will run away from us. But if we walk along paying no attention to it, it will follow us home …’”
I crushed the newspaper with a gasp of horror and thrust it deep into a convenient litter bin. I entered the nearest bar, where, nursing a whiskey, I tried alternately to recall the rest of what I had written and to keep it at mental arm’s length. Scalded by the memory of specific phrases, I would writhe on the stool and wonder how I had become caught in such a network of absurdity. I had again the tormenting round of imagined campus figures laughing in groups over what I had said and done. Without trying to explain the course of events to which I now fell victim, or pausing to elucidate them in any way, I will simply state in bald detail what happened, in the order in which it did.
A string of telephone messages awaited me at Mrs. Duncan’s. Things were humming there. My mother had called, obviously to congratulate me, and to add a word of regret that I had neglected to include religious faith as among the ingredients essential to human felicity. There were calls from Marion Wellington, the editors of both the town Blade and the Polycarper, as well as from Norm Littlefield and Dr. Bagley, the college president. That was marked “urgent,” as was another from the dreadful Lapchick, in Chicago. We had rung off with the understanding that he would get in touch with me later about the order of events from the studio point of view. In a burst of courage born of the adrenalin released by the very thought of Lapchick, I phoned President Bagley back and agreed to see him in his office immediately and “explain.”
Among those waiting to cluster about me on the steps of the Administration Building was a reporter from the Polycarper, pad in hand. “No comment,” I said tersely, toiling up the stairs between my crutches. He trailed me to the door, asking in a whining tone I remembered from a chapel speech he had made on the subject of school spirit, “Well, could you expand a little on the distinction you made between a lady and a woman? That the ideal female is half of each?”
Certainly I hadn’t said that! Was I to be spared nothing? “Read your Shakespeare,” I said, and vanished through the door.
President Bagley was in a state. Pacing behind his desk, he raked his gray hair with a thin hand. The public embarrassment I was causing the college certainly did not justify the degree of agitation he now displayed, it seemed to me. I learned later that it was merely the last of a train of unsettling incidents that had marked his day, but I had to cope with him as he was now, at the climax of the series.
“This will make us the laughingstock of the country,” he said. “Just when I’m about to set out on an important fund-raising swing. What shall I tell James Hill when he asks me if this is typical of the writing turned out by our English teachers? What shall I tell Josiah Bean, or Mr. Hodges!—a new prospect since we have had his son here in residence? I don’t understand you, Waltz. I really don’t. You sit with the students in chapel instead of with the faculty, horsing around with them and having to be called to order, just like one of them. You cause a public disturbance in general assembly, and now you enter a screen magazine publicity contest that should be beneath the dignity of a grade-school graduate, let alone a college instructor,” he said, flourishing a copy of the afternoon paper, “and then win the damned thing into the bargain with a sample of balderdash just about perfect for the mental level of the average moviegoer. It’s things like this, seemingly little things you know, that lose colleges their accreditation. Ours is in danger, did you know that? This could be o
ur finish.”
Norm Littlefield had slipped into the office just in time to hear this last, admitted so quietly by the secretary that I saw him before I heard him. He was as white as Bagley. Being my apparent sponsor, who had just recommended me for promotion, he naturally took this matter more to heart than the president even. I felt a little sorry for him.
“Yes, Tom,” he said, dropping into an armchair, Dr. Bagley having by now managed to compose himself enough to sit down. There was an unmistakable change in Littlefield’s attitude toward me since last seen. Instead of acknowledging me, even proclaiming me, as an ally in the faculty politics forever swirling about our heads, he now pointedly identified himself with the president’s disapproval, even the semi-disciplinary policy that seemed to be crystallizing here in dealing with me, at least tentatively. In the circumstances this was quite understandable, even justifiable; I could not reasonably blame them. “I must say this doesn’t set much of an example to our students. I’m really puzzled by your motive. Certainly it couldn’t be for the money. Why would you drag the principles for which we stand—culture, intelligence, a certain civilized taste perhaps hard to define but nonetheless there—through such a—such a travesty?”
In his charge I suddenly found my defense. I grasped at it eagerly.
“You mean, gentlemen,” I said, looking from one to the other with a tolerant but somewhat disappointed smile, and speaking in a low tone of general incredulity, “gentlemen, am I to understand it hasn’t occurred to anybody that that is why? That I was deliberately travestying the contest itself, indeed all such contests, and in so doing satirizing the publicity standards prevailing in this country?” I regarded them in absolute, if feigned, amazement. “Has my spoof misfired that badly?”
Their expressions of wistful surmise were a sight to behold. Norm Littlefield’s pasty face even took on a little color, and a sparkle of hope came into his eyes. “Is that what you were doing, Tom?”
“Of course. I mean it never occurred to me that anybody would fail to see I was aiming it over their heads, and in so doing striking a blow for literacy.”
“We must make an official announcement to that effect,” said the president, rising. “There must be an immediate statement.”
“Leave it to me. I’ll be glad to talk to the reporters,” I said, so relieved that I was apparently going to have another narrow squeak that I was eager to make concessions—even amends. “It’s a sad day when you have to explain you’re joking, but I won’t say that. It sets people’s backs up to be called idiots. And it’s the perpetrator’s fault, really, if a burlesque doesn’t come off. He should make it clear. I’ll say it was ill-advised and so on, and offer some kind of apology, as I do now to you gentlemen both. I hope that will show my true feelings for Polycarp,” I continued, in gratitude for Bagley’s visibly diminished hysteria. “I’m terribly sorry about the whole thing. Not just the letter, but being stuck with the continuing publicity, which I suppose I’ll just have to go through with. That bird-brained actress and all. So if there’s nothing more, I think I’d best get busy and straighten this muddle out.”
We left it that way. I hurried out to make my statement to reporters and now even photographers waiting in front of the Administration Building.
“You can say,” I began, hunched between my crutches as I weighed my words in the attempted balance between explanation and apology, “that my entering the contest was a jape aimed at seeing just how far you can go in satirizing such publicity devices, and I never doubted this would be obvious to any intelligent person. However, it backfired, for which I express keen regrets. I apologize to the college authorities for the risk I thus took with the school’s good name. It was ill-advised. I had no right to do it.”
This statement appeared on the front page of next day’s Blade side by side with Norm Littlefield’s statement: “He had every right to do it.” In our confusion, or rather our haste, we had got our stories mixed. The fool had come to the defense of behavior I had just admitted to be indefensible. He was now left holding the bag—or as they say with egg on his face—in a skimble-skamble making the college twice the laughingstock it had been before. What had begun as a comedy had degenerated into a farce, into which the school was now up to its neck. The president was apoplectic when next I heard his voice, on the telephone.
“I have never,” he said in a mounting squeal, as though unseen hands were closing round his throat and attempting to throttle him from behind, “in all my years as head of this institution seen or had to cope with anything so preposterous. Now we really are a joke. There was something about it on the AP.”
“I realize how you feel, Dr. Bagley,” I said. “I’m sorry now I apologized. That was hasty.”
“You’re sorry what?” he piped, as though gorging himself on the outrage of seeing just how finely calibrated the absurdity of which he was the victim could become.
“I’m sorry I apologized. That I shouldn’t have done. I see now I shouldn’t have gone quite that far. But how was I to know Norm, Dr. Littlefield, was going to—”
“How were you to know? Why, I presume by simply inquiring. By a moment of simple, elementary consultation. Is that too much to ask of my staff? The least you could do is get your stories straight before rushing out on another impulse as ill-advised as the first. Now I am beginning to doubt that your explanation was true. I’m not at all sure you entered this contest for the reason you gave. It strikes me that you’re a highly unstable character, Waltz.”
“Well, you see, I thought—”
“You couldn’t have thought anything, or we wouldn’t be in this muddle. What we apparently need is a press relations department here, to coordinate public statements, to establish some sort of liaison among departments here, so nobody will go off half-cocked. This is a long felt need in this school.” I had the image fatally evoked by this cliché of a need long and slender, made of felt, and had to cover the mouthpiece with my hand to keep my laugh from being heard at the other end. But the gravity of the president’s state continued to foster an alarm quickly stanching such threats of levity. “To make sure that things are checked, intradepartmentally as well as interdepartmentally, before somebody opens his … We need lots of things here. We need better screening of applicants. I now learn that you who assign atheistic reading to your courses, and are known personally to spout godless infidelity in class, are also seen in church lustily singing hymns and devoutly kneeling in prayer. Is all that true?”
“I would like to recall Emerson’s remark about consistency and the hobgoblin of little minds.”
“Well, we haven’t time for that now. We’ve got another hobgoblin on our hands, believe you me. I’m going to reorganize this college from stem to stern, I’m …”
I let him discharge what was an apparently dangerous head of steam before even attempting further to express my regrets at the pass things had come to, let alone submit my suggestions as to what course of action might be taken with a view to salvaging at least a little of the school’s self-respect. But when he had finished blowing his top, at least to all intents and appearances, I did suggest two or three alternatives that might be profitably pursued.
“I can withdraw my retraction, and say it was headstrong. I can accuse the press of garbling my statement. Or I can issue another statement saying that Dr. Littlefield was merely acting out of chivalry, perhaps misguided, but for which I am personally—”
“Oh, for the love of heaven! What will that do but worsen the mess. Let’s forget our public image for the moment and think of Dr. Littlefield. He’s taken to his bed with mortification. He refuses to talk on the telephone …” Here President Bagley’s voice became again an indistinct squeal, as though the assailant, momentarily fended off, was renewing the attempted strangulation. “I think that in the circumstances you should by all means try your luck at getting through to him. And tell him, if you do, for heaven’s sake not to issue any more public statements until we all get together and agree on what’
s to be said.”
“Right. And if I may sum up, sir, here’s the way matters seem to stand at this juncture. I saw a certain thing my way. Then I changed my mind and no longer did, being persuaded by cooler heads to see it their way. Meanwhile these cooler heads ceased to see it their way in the attempt to see it my—”
But he had hung up, with a last splutter of rage.
I had an appointment at the doctor’s to have my second cast removed and a walking cast, with a metal heel plate, put on, which enabled me to throw away my crutches. I did not immediately do so, however, deciding to retain as long as possible the sympathy that accrued from their use in a situation still highly critical to myself. I needed more than ever the immunity of the invalid. I winced frequently as I moved about in public, as though physical pain might have deranged my faculties and clouded my judgment in recent events.
The instant I left the doctor’s office I called Littlefield’s home from the nearest booth. He refused to come to the phone. He could not, his wife told me, on learning my identity. She was hostile, and there was an edge to her voice that left no doubt she considered me responsible for his “nervous collapse,” as she freely termed it. I thought this rather dramatic of her. Still, the fact remained that Norm had “taken to his bed,” as Dr. Bagley put it, a fact disquieting in itself, and unpredictable as to its duration or outcome, as resorts of that kind always are. Mrs. Littlefield’s attitude must meanwhile be taken as measure of its gravity. It was on my account, she said, that he had made a fool of himself publicly, and neither for this, nor for the betrayal of his faith in me as a responsible underling, could she forgive me.
These were hard words. But whether just or unjust, needing to be digested. All in all, it looked like a rough weekend, and I was glad to see five o’clock of the next day, Saturday, roll around: time to catch the evening train to Chicago for my date with Angela Ravage.
Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel Page 17