by Smiley, Jane
“A month, just a month, but delicious. How about you?”
“I did an NEH seminar at Princeton with Carol Gilligan.”
“I’m impressed. How was it?”
“I’m still suspicious, reluctant, full of doubts, but the seminar was great.”
“Ready?” orated Dr. Lionel Gift.
John Vernon Cates looked at him and wondered by what strange and tortured intellectual process economics had come to be known as a science.
Meanwhile, Dr. Gift had sized them up. Of the four, Garcia and Cates were the most likely to bring in a corporate grant large enough to dent the budgetary shortfall the provost had told him about. Cates’ lifetime figure was pretty impressive. More corporations were interested in atomic clusters than you might suspect. Garcia wasn’t far behind Cates, because he sometimes studied corporate life, and corporations loved to be found interesting and worthy of study. He glanced at Bell. An unknown quantity, and he was a little afraid of black women, anyway. So he said, “Helen? How about taking notes today.”
Professor Levy lifted toward him her coldest smile, and said, “Lionel, forget it.”
They stared at each other until Dr. Garcia, with a sigh of resignation, took out a pen and a yellow pad.
8
The First Memo
FOR MANY YEARS, the chairman of the horticulture department, known to himself as “Chairman X,” had lobbied to change the start date of the fall semester to September 10, the average first frost date for the university’s climatic region. Chairman X was an observant man, and he had noticed that one day every year, right around the first frost date, everyone on the campus woke up refreshed, the local news media referred to “good sleeping weather,” and the work of the semester moved into high gear. For the horticulture department, of course, this sense of new beginnings was mixed with the end of the growing season. The plant succession that had begun in March with snowdrops and early crocuses would soon flicker out in a blaze of orange chrysanthemums and show its last pinpoints of color in bittersweet and ash berries hanging like embers in the general misty brown of the world. That was the time to be sitting indoors and reading books, the time to be glancing out windows and reflecting, and even if the university population at large didn’t know that, their bodies felt it. Nevertheless, Chairman X had let his efforts in this direction slide. The task of putting thirty-two thousand people in touch with their senses was finally beyond him.
It was, in fact, September 10, always an important date to him, as was May 20, at the other end of the season, when he noticed that something was going on in Old Meats. There were, of course, no lighted windows, no vehicular activity. There was only the sight of a student entering the door beside the loading dock, using a key. When Chairman X tried the lock a few minutes later, the door did not budge. Chairman X resumed his inspection of the perennial border, which was still blooming vigorously because the first frost was later than average this year, but he did not move on to the experimental beds, instead returning to the beginning of the perennial border. His inspection had now become a pretense, and he self-consciously fingered leaves and stems and blossoms, looking for signs of parasites or disease. He had already decided, for example, that planting delphiniums annually was becoming too much trouble, and that perhaps delphiniums referred too cravenly to eastern and English gardens. Perhaps it was time to break away more decisively from that model. Taking up the delphiniums once and for all would constitute a statement about where this garden was, what that meant. He straightened up. A boy in a blue shirt, certainly the same student who had gone into Old Meats, was walking away from the building, already a good fifty paces off. Chairman X called, “Hey!” but the boy didn’t hear him, or at least didn’t stop, and Chairman X decided not to run after him, only to note him, and to resolve that he would get to the bottom of this mystery. Actually, Chairman X was surprised to discover in himself this sense of jealous proprietorship over Old Meats, but that’s the way it was, wasn’t it? Even the ugliest and most worthless pieces of property had the power to set your feet upon the capitalist road.
When most people thought of the campus, they thought of the buildings and their distinctive features—the bell tower of Lafayette Hall across the quad from the complementary dome of Columbus Hall, one housing higher administration, the other housing the school of agriculture. Other buildings ranged from these in two casual arms—Auburn Hall, Pullman Hall, Corvallis Hall, the Frankfort College of Engineering, Ithaca Hall, the Clemson School of Art and Design. Some of these buildings were notable for their architecture, others notable because they needed to be rebuilt and modernized, but as a group they made a harmonious backdrop, to Chairman X, for the many grand trees that had been planted among them, maples, oaks, Russian olives, redbuds, dogwoods, dark glades of Douglas fir. For a week in spring, pink and white crab apples planted everywhere made a fragrant heaven of the campus. The early tree man who had planned and planted all these trees had been an unsung genius. It had, in fact, taken Chairman X a whole semester, off and on, to find out his name, which was Michael Hailey. Shortly thereafter, the horticulture department had raised the funds for a granite bench to be placed in the fir glade, inscribed “to the shade of Michael Hailey, who gave us this shade.”
But not only did Chairman X rarely consider the buildings as an important factor on the campus, he never considered the campus as anything but an arbitrary thought, a passing microclimate. What he felt and saw were the larger, gently rolling sweep of the deep geosyncline far below (still, in fact, rising, though infinitesimally), the layers of rock and aquifer (Bozeman shales, Burlington limestones, with upthrusting Laramie sandstones) above that, the skin of subsoil and topsoil above that, then the whispering interface between earth and atmosphere, and the humid, thick air that was prey to every weather system sweeping from the west. And above that the jet stream, above that the sidereal realm of the astronomy department.
The mutable, almost fluid landscape where the campus sat like a stone in a stream rolled gently downward from the northwest to the southeast, a hospitable slope that ended in low bluffs overlooking the Orono River. All the ponds and creeks on the campus emptied into a tributary of the Orono, the Red Stick, which ended in a small man-made lake, Red Stick Lake. Most of the time, the Army Corps of Engineers allowed moderate flow from there into the Orono. To the west, low morainal hills rose in a semicircle, and Chairman X had found many rare plants in the thin hardwood forests that clad those slopes. The earliest white settlers in the region had known clearly enough that the hills were better for hunting than plowing, and for that Chairman X gave thanks.
The campus tempted most of its denizens to nest—to crawl into their books and projects and committee work and pull their self-absorption over their heads like bedcovers, but Chairman X never lost the sense of that slope, and the sweep of forces across it. Whatever was produced on the campus, from toxic waste to ideas, flowed uncontrollably into the world, and, frankly, it made him nervous. Even those whose lives consisted of giving advice to everyone from home orchardists to national governments around the world displayed this odd sleepiness, in the view of Chairman X, but of course his view, often expressed, was not a popular one. The Lady X, the woman he would have been married to by now if they had remembered to get married and found a convenient time (in a few years, when the children would be at summer camp?), told him that he was misinterpreting the mid western demeanor from the perspective of his own East Coast impatience, but as usual, he felt, she was too forgiving. She didn’t know Nils Harstad, after all, the dean of extension and everything Chairman X deplored.
Every day, Chairman X had to endure the pleasant, reasonable voice of Dean Harstad calming him down. “Say,” he would remark, “you’ve been spreading those radical ideas again. The books are there. The hort answer-line people just have to re-e-e-ad from the book. Don’t have to make it harder than it is. These folks who call in, they don’t like to go off on a tangent, you know. No time for that.” Dean Harstad had unbounded p
atience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon. At meetings, when Dean Harstad was delving deeply into his patience, he would close his eyes. It was a remarkably infuriating gesture, especially to Chairman X, who had probably never closed his eyes voluntarily in his whole life.
Chairman X had a private fantasy of killing Dean Harstad. While normally a believer in the larger forces of history, and ready at any time to discount a theory of history that privileged “great men,” Chairman X did feel that there were key individuals, uniquely destructive, who could not be replaced, after whose demise life on the planet would actually be better, and Dean Harstad was one of these. Hitler, Stalin, Nils Harstad. The urge to violence was what Chairman X, a flower-man, a believer in perennials, struggled against. Neither vegetarianism nor Buddhism, neither long study of Japanese gardening theory nor the example of the Lady X, a mild and generous woman, had quenched his desire to kill Dean Harstad, preferably with his bare hands, staring right into the eyes, forcing him, at the last moment, to recant, to regret, to know his life as worse than bankrupt.
Chairman X consciously released his grip on the shovel he was throttling, and hung it gently on its hook in the tool building, then washed his hands, and went up to his office to write a memo. It read,
From: Chairman of Horticulture Department
To: Provost’s Office
Subject: Morgantown Hall (“Old Meats”)
I have noticed activity around the loading dock entrance to Old Meats. It was my understanding that the building is abandoned and part of the structure is condemned until renovations have been approved. You might look into what’s going on over there, in case some students have gotten keys and are using the building for nonacademic activities.
Of course, this memo would never reach the provost, nor was it intended to. The Chairman stuck it into a campus envelope and addressed it to Mrs. Walker, provost’s office. That was how you got anything done on this campus.
9
A Party
DUBUQUE HOUSE HAD always been known, with a thrill among the customers and a shudder in the administration, for parties. For a few years in the mid-eighties, the resident assistants had, of their own accord, gone through the dorm and removed mirrors from the bathrooms. Even without shards of glass and sharp metal frames, even with bags checked at the door and paper cups for beer, it had been surprising what the drunken customers could transform into weapons, and every party had ended in a fight, and every fight had ended in one or two hospitalizations. In 1986, the administration had quietly decided to end coeducation in Dubuque House. With no male customers living there, plenty of security, and strict instructions to the female customers to lock their doors and keep them locked until they went to bed, THEN to lock themselves in, the rate of unfortunate incidents had dropped almost to zero, and the administration had turned its attention back to fraternity row. It was too bad, some thought, that you couldn’t bar male customers from the fraternities, too, or, even, from assembling in groups larger than three anywhere on the campus, but given the impossibility of that Utopia, the best you could hope for was keeping them confined to their own area. That was what fraternity row was for.
Dubuque House parties were still the best on campus. Actual bands, good ones, came from Chicago and Kansas City, and actual dancing took place far into the night. Without boys and boys’ rooms, there was less danger of rape, and the dorm was far enough from fraternity row, all the way across the campus, that a girl would have sobered up from the walk before she was halfway there. Those who passed out and were left by their dates under bushes and trees were picked up by campus security and efficiently taken home. There had never been a case of injury through exposure to the weather, though that was something Ivar Harstad and the student affairs office worried about every year.
Mary, Sherri, Keri, and Diane, all of whom were shocked by how poorly they were doing in their classes, but none of whom had confided this to the others, assuming that the others were doing well, were dressing with careful exhilaration for their first college bash.
It could not be said that they were getting along well as a general rule. The most they felt for each other was relief at the familiarity of someone and some place in the wilderness of people and ideas they had entered upon three weeks before. Even so, getting ready was fun. The possessiveness each had been feeling about her clothes and makeup, the fear each had had that something might be used or borrowed without permission, had fallen away the moment Sherri said to Diane, “I have the perfect belt for that dress!” and then pulled out the perfect belt—black patent leather with a silver buckle shaped like a morning glory—and handed it over. Soon after that, Keri was wearing Mary’s purple miniskirt instead of the tasteful flowered print dress she had planned on, and Mary was trying on one of Diane’s hats. She hardly ever wore hats, but she had to admit that if she crushed one side a little bit, and cocked it over her eye, it gave her a very interesting look. And she liked the parrots marching around the band. They matched the orange and yellow blouse she had been planning to wear for a week. Then Diane said to Keri, “Oh! You’ve got Red Door! I love that!” and they all had to put some on, and discuss how best to put it on—spray it onto a cotton ball, then touch your hot points, or, as Keri insisted, spray a little cloud, then walk through it, once. Sherri walked through it twice, now that she was a redhead.
Mary said to Keri, forgetting herself just a little, “Girl, you look sexy in that purple skirt!” and Keri’s face turned beet red, because looking sexy in that very purple skirt had been a fantasy of hers since the first day, when she watched carefully as Mary unpacked her clothes, and took note of every item. Her own clothes hung in a wan pastel lump in her side of the closet. When she got dressed in the morning, she didn’t even look at what she was putting on, knowing that it would look okay and much the same as yesterday. Instead, she looked at what Mary was putting on, which was an education. The thing about Mary, Keri thought, was that she was so effortlessly herself. She snatched things out of the closet and threw them on, making fashion decisions faster than a speeding bullet. Everything about Mary, Keri thought, was a positive contrast to herself, and while she was afraid to actively model herself on Mary, she thought by studying her, she might soak up something that would give her more energy, make being herself less of a labor.
Sherri said, “I heard at these parties you get two guys, or more, to every girl, and lots of different types of guys, not just fraternity guys. I heard even some foreign students come.”
“You mean, like, from New York City?” said Diane. “That would be foreign enough for me. Exactly.”
Sherri puckered her lips speculatively into the mirror, then said, “What I dread is if kids from my high school show up. I wish there was a big banner, ‘Fishburn High, this is not for you, stick with your own kind.’ ”
Keri said, “What kind is that?”
“The gawky kind. Besides, one of them is sure to tell my old boyfriend if they see me dancing with someone else, God forbid I should flirt or kiss or, as my mother would say, throw my body around in a suggestive manner.”
Mary said, “Didn’t you break up with him?”
“I did, but it takes two to break up.”
“That’s the truth.”
“Well, girls,” said Sherri, “how do we look?”
They stood up and gave each other the eyeball. Sherri tucked the label into the back of Diane’s blouse. “Fabulous,” said Diane. “Super fabulous,” said Sherri. Keri smiled and smoothed her purple miniskirt, Mary opened the door, then locked it behind them. They could hear the band rumbling from the dining room two floors below.