John Goldfarb, Please Come Home

by William Peter Blatty

  No-Neck had earned his keep immediately. Fifteen minutes prior to his first game against the Oregon State freshman squad, he darkly rumbled, “I hate beavers!” and then proceeded to flatten the opposition with such cruel and wanton abandon that Cal Tech physicist Meyer Mu Meson was moved to lead a crusade to ban him from the gridiron. The physicist organized picket lines and pounded a hundred lecterns, calling for an end to the “inhuman football race” and “crimes against bodies.” But as usual, no one listened except the American Civil Liberties Union, which defended Mu Meson when he was arrested for leading an anti-No-Neck demonstration in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. No-Neck was still around, and next year would be eligible for varsity play, where Overreach needed him. Would have been eligible … Something had to be done. From unthinking habit, Overreach depressed the flush button and strode briskly out of the pine-scented men’s room to the majestic rhythms of “God Save the Queen.”

  Outside the International House, sprawled in sunlight, a lean greyhound snapped gently at dust motes and mysterious visions.

  “Let’s go, Snipe.”

  The dog eyed Overreach, bared its fangs, and snarled wetly.

  “Come on, come on!”

  Overreach strode toward the campus administration building, which was fashioned after Hollywood’s old Garden of Allah and was named Geisler Hall. Snipe hoisted himself in slow, surly jerks and padded moodily behind his master, his yellow, hooded eyes darting from side to side with cocky malevolence.

  Overreach halted abruptly at the DeMille Memorial, sniffing the air with suspicion. Orange blossoms! He could still smell orange blossoms!

  The university had been erected only three years ago on the site of a cleared-out orange grove, and when the breeze was right, elements of the school’s inglorious origins rose up to rebuke its president’s nostrils. Overreach thirsted for reassurance, and his eye roved over the ultramodern physical plant: the all-glass buildings; the study trylons; the peri-sphere labs, interconnected by spiral ramps and walkthroughs; the Hollywood Freeway off-ramp that flowed directly into the football stadium’s parking area; and over all the stately, giant palm trees, swaying their heads in the smog. He imagined it all as it appeared at night, with fountains spurting in a bath of fluorescences: “King of Kings blue,” “Presley purple,” “Runaway green,” and “Sam Katzman brown.” Garish? Overreach didn’t think so. Movable Nu, chairman of Sub U.’s classics department, had assured him numerous times that if the Greeks had possessed neon, they would have used it in their temples. “In the age of Pericles, there was also Sam Goldwyn!” averred Nu, and had earlier approved a school seal designed for them by Saul Bass: an armless, naked coed rampant on a field of fraternity pins.

  Overreach sighed. Sub U. was to be a showcase of his talents, the proof positive of his vigor, advanced thinking, and fitness for the governorship. Here the most advanced dicta of the educationists would be put into practice and a daring, experimental end made to the teacher shortage. Teachers! Who needed them? A few personalities like Blaise Hus who could inspire thousands of students at a time via closed-circuit television—that was all; leave the rest to the amazing new teaching machines.

  Overreach returned the nod of a passing biochemist who had discovered a means of stimulating the “pleasure principle” in rats to such excruciating dimensions that their ecstasies overrode their survival instinct; he was now on the track of an application to humans, although the bulk of his research was devoted to uncovering new aids to feminine hygiene. Overreach wished him well. For his brag was that Sub U. disavowed the inculcation of “useless abstractions” and was here to provide “service to the community and the state.” Yet where were the funds to come for the new School of Real Estate? the Juvenile Delinquency Research Center? the Television Science Building? the programs in Unwed Motherhood, Automated Living, Skin-Diving, and What to Look for in a New Cult? And who was going to pay the repair bill on 16,000 teaching machines?

  A staff of forty professional fund raisers—a figure exceeding that of full-time “television professors”—toiled furiously over these problems in Geisler Hall, scratching for cash in a variety of places, such as the philanthropic Lord Foundation. Lord was sending a fact finder to Sub U. in the fall, and in anticipation of his arrival the fund raisers had already slain a fatted deception and stuffed it with several Eastern “egghead” professors who had been added to the faculty solely in order to confront Lord with a “scholarly image.” Moreover Cleavage Productions had loaned the school tons of artificial ivy left over from A Yank at Eton, and even now it was being draped over the university walls. Overreach hoped it would do.

  But Lord handouts alone would not do. Nor alumni giving, which was notoriously slack, largely because there were as yet no graduates. And those elderly and tax-wise benefactors who had quilled Sub U. into their wills were proving alarmingly healthy. Overreach tugged wistfully at his ski-sloping nose, yearning for bubonic plague to smite Pasadena.

  His one gleaming hope was the dole royal, a direct handout from the citrus kings and movie moguls who made up the Sub U. board of trustees. Board President Dichotomous Susskind need only wave a hand and the others would gush forth doubloons. But Susskind was both a football fanatic and a Los Angeles chauvinist and, like so many self-made men who have never tasted of the campus, he lusted for the name of some collegiate band of stalwarts that he might engrave upon the blank trophy of his pride. He had intimated to Overreach that the moneys for his ambitious enterprises were ineluctably linked to his ability to field a football team that would “beat the bejesus out of those snotty Easterners.” Hello, No-Neck.

  Snipe, having enjoyed a surfeit of inflicting karate wounds on hapless pigeons, gripped the cuff of his master’s trousers between clenched teeth and tugged impatiently in the direction of Geisler Hall.

  “All right, dammit, all right!” Overreach made a move toward the administration building and the dog released his snarling grip.

  At the steps of the building Overreach halted, whirling on the greyhound. “Sit!” he commanded.

  Snipe, grinning wickedly, took a bold, testing step toward Overreach’s office.

  “I said sit!”

  His tongue lolling insolently from the side of his mouth, the greyhound brazened another step forward. Overreach peered around furtively, saw no one watching, and slyly drew back his foot.…

  The yelp of anguish carried into Overreach’s reception room, where his new secretary, a Miss Haya Condios, made a quick notation in a small ledger open on her desk, and then tossed it briskly into a drawer as the Sub U. president entered. “Mr. Overreach.” She nodded coolly. He swept by her into his office, and she surreptitiously flicked her intercom to the “open” position.

  Facile Quint, Overreach’s press aide for the past several years, eyed his chief accusingly from a stuffed-leather chair. “Why don’t you lay off the mutt?” he uttered softly. “It’s piss-poor P.R.”

  “He’s a piss-poor dog!”

  “He won an election for you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” thundered Overreach, “and the son of a bitch knows it!”

  “But——”

  “No-Neck flunked!” Overreach dropped the words like grenades on a church floor.

  “I know,” purred Quint omnisciently. “Here’s his test paper.” He withdrew an elongated card from his inside jacket pocket and handed it to Overreach, who immediately threw it back in his face.

  “Give me the questions, dammit, not a Smedley IV punch card!”

  Quint calmly produced a mimeographed form and Overreach snatched it from his grasp. “Whose course?” he snapped.

  “Blaise Hus.”

  Overreach grunted, then studied the test paper. Under the heading of “Final Examination” were fifty multiple-choice questions and, skimming randomly, Overreach read:

  “… Who said, ‘Good night, sweet prince…’?

  A. Ophelia

  B. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

  C. Grace Kelly


  D. None of the above

  “… Hamlet wanted to kill the King because:

  A. There was bad blood between them

  B. The King must die

  C. He had accused Hamlet of perversion

  D. None of the above”

  Overreach crumpled the test paper in an angry fist. “Christ, I couldn’t pass this thing myself!”

  “I could.”

  “Oh! Could you now?!”

  “Easy.”

  It was the story of Overreach’s life. As a puny boy winning the gold watch for eighth-grade deportment, he had been set upon by resentful class ruffians who gleefully broke his nose and his watch and sent him sniveling into tall grasses to lick his wounds and dream that he was Superman with no religion. That incident had set the pattern for a career of lofty accomplishments meriting snotty insolences, like: a wife who called him “Pignose”; a dog who missed no opportunity to raise his leg on the hydrant of his ego; and a football coach who baited him in a men’s room. And now a lifetime of buffets and frustrations came to focus in the smug, placid face of his aide.

  “You really could!” sneered Overreach.

  “Uh-huh,” grunted Quint.

  Overreach hurriedly smoothed out the crumpled test paper and pounced on a question like Sohrab upon Rustum prior to his enlightenment. “Who,” he quoted maliciously, “is thought by many to have written the plays of Shakespeare?” Then he paused momentously.

  “What’s the choice?” asked Quint.

  “Never mind the choice, smartass—give me the answer!”

  “Bacon?” hazarded Quint, and “Wrong!” screeched Overreach; “Beowulf!” He breasted the test paper protectively.

  “Lemme see that test!” requested Quint, reaching out a hand for it, and “Forget the test!” bawled Overreach, shredding it into subatomic particles. “Now bring in the idiot who made it up!”

  “Hus?”

  “Of course, Hus! You just told me it was his course!”

  “Sure. But he doesn’t make up the exams.”

  “Eh?”

  “He’s too busy with his TV series. Remember? We’ve got a guy here makes up the exams special.”

  “Get them both in here!”

  Quint nodded sagely, rose like an Indian fakir’s rope, and oozed out of the office with infuriating slowness. Overreach thought toads and tarantulas at him, then strode to his window and breathed deeply and rhythmically, employing a trick of relaxation that his quack psychologist nanny had taught him: on the inhale he thought, “I am breathing in health, strength, and happiness,” and on the exhale he murmured, “I’d rather be me than a Sikh.”

  Suddenly his eye alit on a foreign body creeping painstakingly along an artificial ivy leaf, and he leaned over the sill for a closer look. His face contorted with horror: snails!

  Chapter Two

  QUINT FOUND Hus in the Communication Arts Building and assumed that he was taping “training aids” for the summer session. Cameramen peered through view finders, grips moved cables, and a make-up artist touched up the rouge on the great man’s cheeks. Quint folded his arms, deciding to watch for a while. He enjoyed watching Hus; he brought things to life, and his usual approach was to treat Shakespeare as “funzies.” Employing animated cartoons, he would talk all around the subject while subliminal messages, too quick for the eye to see, flashed across the screen, drilling data and the love of learning into the viewer’s subconscious. When “Uncle Blaise” was discussing Marlowe’s love life in terms calculated to captivate the fancy of even the most jaded frat-house libertine, subliminal messages like “SHAKESPEARE WROTE IN IAMBIC PENTAMETER,” “MARLOWE PIONEERED THE ‘MIGHTY LINE,’” “FAUST NEEDED MCA,” “HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BACONIAN SOCIETY,” or perhaps simply “TWELFTH NIGHT LIKES YOU, YOU LIKE IT” would be sliding into the students’ subconscious. It was a form of wide-awake sleep-teaching, and had been quickly grabbed up by several other departments on campus who hammered home their subliminal lessons under the guise of running old “Gunsmoke” episodes.

  Quint missed the familiar mock-up of the Globe Theater that Hus customarily employed. In fact the set was barren save for a desk and a telephone resting on it. He sidled up alongside the student director, who would probably submit this taping session as a term paper.

  “Where’s the Globe?”

  “Globe? No Globe.”

  “Isn’t this a training aid?”

  “Huh-uh. He’s trying out a new monologue one of his graduate students wr——” The director caught Hus staring at him. “It’s a monlogue he wrote for Newhart,” he amended. “Wants to see how it looks before he turns it in.”

  “Ready, Bruce?” singsonged Hus at the director, squinting past spotlights. His jowly face was florid, his nose malmseyed above the bobbing yellow-and-blue polka-dot bow tie.

  “Ready, Uncle Blaise!”

  With a pixieish flourish—he had saved this bit for the titillation of the crew—Uncle Blaise whipped a flowing red wig from out of his jacket and flopped it over his bald dome. And with a twinkle in his eyes, he picked up the prop phone. “Hello, Elsinore?” he began. “The queen, please; Lady Macbeth calling.”

  The crew giggled, and the director silenced them with a wave of the hand.

  “Oh, hel-lo, Gert,” continued Hus, “didn’t recognize your voice. Listen, we’re throwing a little dinner party Thursday night and I wondered if you and—— Oh, no! Oh, how terrible! Gert, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know! I mean, calling you about a dinner party when——! Gert, how awful! How did it happen?… He was sleeping in the garden and—and he just ‘popped off’? Just like that?… Well, didn’t the coroner—?… Oh. Cremated right away.… He told Claude that’s the way he wanted it. Were—were you there at the end? I mean, did he say anything before he—?… He said just one word before he died—‘wormwood.’ Now what in the world do you suppose he—? You don’t know what he meant.… But you think it’s the name of some sort of sled.… Uh-huh. Well, if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times: there are more things in heaven and earth than—— Knock it off, I sound like Polonius?… No, no, it’s quite all right. I know you’re on edge, dear. How’s Junior taking it?… You’re kidding—you’re kidding!… Well, you’d better pick a top man, believe me; some of these Freudian shrinkers are—— What?… Now there, that’s exactly what I mean! This ‘father image’ cant is getting about as pat as aspirin, and if you want my op——Oh. Junior’s not looking for a father image, he—he’s seeing one?!… On the battlements?! Gert—Gert, honey; I know he’s an only child but—— Oh. You’ve tried it already.… The doctor won’t sign the commitment papers. Who’s the doctor; what’s his name?… Horatio who?… Sounds like a quack, all right. Now look, sweets, Mac has some influence with the medical board and—well, you know the game, dearie: you sharpen my dagger, I’ll sharpen yours. Speaking of daggers, guess who’s got the DTs!… What?… Gert, believe me, it’ll do the kid worlds of good.… Well, they’ll have him doing fingerpainting and puzzles and stuff.… Now stop fretting, Gert. Look—if you don’t mind my saying so, Junior always was a moody little snot, spoiled rotten by his father, God rest his soul; and it’s either——Now you’re not sore because I said that, are you?… You’re not.… The kid’s been bugging you, too.… But you love him.… You really love him.… Careful, honey!”

  Hus tossed his red curls effeminately and drew another laugh from the crew. The director mutely pleaded for silence.

  “So how’s Claude?” continued Hus. “Inscrutable.… How does he like the job?… What do you mean, how do I expect him to like it? Listen, uneasy lies the head and all that. One man’s meat is another man’s poison.… Bartlett’s—no, I didn’t just make it up. Thanks anyway.… Yes, I know, hon. You keep wondering what else can go wrong. First Duncan, then—— Well, you know what they say about bad luck coming in threes. By the way, how’s Ophelia?… Wringing wet.… Look, Gert, I hate to be a bore, but don’t you think it’s time Polonius got her off that nude-bathing ki
ck?… Well, we’ve all got our poblems, I guess.… Oh, Mac just loves being King. But you know how long that will last. It took him just two weeks to get bored stiff being Thane of Cawdor, and before that—— Yes, I understand, I’ve got to run, too. Now look, you get a sitter for Junior and—— Well, heck, we’ll send over one of ours; we’ve got three of them.… Sure, for Malcolm and Donalbain.… Why three sitters? Well, I don’t know, actually; it was Mac’s idea.… You can’t make it anyway? Oh, what a shame; it means we’ll have an unlucky thirteen for dinner.… Well the Macduffs have left the country and Banquo’s on some health-food kick.… No, I don’t think he’ll even make an appearance.… Have I tried who?… What young ensign?… Iago somebody.… Good party man, is he?… I mean, he can keep up his end of a conversation, right?… Give me the number—MAndragora 2-6000. Pretty classy number—oh, that’s the answering service.… Oh, not much. I’m in the middle of redecorating Dunc’s old room, trying to brighten it up a bit for Mac.… Yes, I’m doing it myself, help is just impossible these days. It’s all you can do to get that drunken porter to answer the door.… I don’t understand you, Gert.… Well, I’d like you to clarify that last remark. What do you mean, ‘he must know where the bodies are buried’?… Well, it’s not funny, sweets.… Never mind, let’s change the subject.… Oh, you got that brand name for me! Swell, I’ll jot it down.… L-A-V-A.… You’re sure that will do it, huh?… Well, that won’t bother me at all. I mean, there are lots worse things than dishpan hands, hon.… Well, it’s a long story, I’d rather not go into it. Look, you’re sure you can’t make the dinner party?… Well, if you can’t put it off.… Oh—he wrote part of it himself?… A dozen or sixteen lines?… Should be a circus.… All right, Gert, we’ll miss you all. Have fun at the play.… ’Bye.”