Moo

by Smiley, Jane

  “Very much within the bounds of acceptable exploitation, even positive, as sectors which have no value become valuable through use.”

  “But how much has been lost?”

  “Nothing has been lost, but a great deal has been gained. Let’s allow some of the others to speak, shall we. Back in the back there.”

  Allowing the others to speak was fine with Chairman X, who was choking with rage and seeing a reddish fog enclose him from both sides. He sat down and attempted to slow his breathing. This would, possibly, be the occasion of his first stroke. The Lady X had begged him not to come, to avoid, as she said, the occasion of sin, but he had to hear what they were saying, how they were presenting themselves. The red fog cleared. The lovely woman next to him said, “I thought that was a good question. Thank you for asking it,” and her voice soothed him. “My mother’s family is from Costa Rica.” He looked at her and she smiled ruefully. “I don’t think they’ve participated much in the general rise.”

  Across the room, Ivar Harstad tried to pick the back of Chairman X’s head out of the crowd. He seemed to be sitting beside that new woman in Foreign Languages. Ivar, too, had appreciated the question, and considered Gift’s reply evasive, probably owing to ignorance. Was there a grant in there somewhere? Ivar took out his notebook and wrote a tiny little note to himself to call the horticulture department in the morning.

  14

  The Provost Is Tempted

  ARLEN MARTIN WAS a little Texan with jug ears who was worth a billion dollars and it both surprised the provost that he had turned up and didn’t surprise him at all. It certainly did not surprise him that he had turned up in the company of Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, who probably didn’t know about the ten-year-old scandal, and might not have cared if she had known. Arlen Martin’s name was one the provost had not written down, nor even spoken aloud in his ruminations over corporate grantors, but it had been in his mind, and clearly that was enough.

  Elaine had a theatrical way about her. In her three years as associate vice-president for development, her wardrobe had grown progressively more flamboyant in color and cut, so that now she looked just like a TV anchorwoman. Each year she was thinner, too, magnifying the similarity. And each year she travelled farther afield, looking for funding. She knew exactly what she was doing, what those executives in Fayetteville and Tulsa would be impressed with.

  Arlen Martin, though, was a horse of a different color. He had risen through so many social classes, and travelled through so many latitudes and longitudes that he was comfortable with everyone. And he was so rich, anyway, that the duty of accommodation fell to others, not him. Ivar stood up and came around his desk, hand extended. Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek exclaimed, “Ivar, Arlen says no introductions needed!” Clearly, she viewed this as a compliment.

  “No,” said Ivar, “I remember Mr. Martin very well. How are you, sir?”

  “Now don’t ‘sir’ me, Dr. Harstad. I know perfectly well who here has a high school diploma and who here has a pee aitch dee!” Elaine laughed hysterically at this joke. Mrs. Walker’s face, where she stood beside the doorway, was impassive, her “Indian” face. Not many people knew that Mrs. Walker was half Menominee, but Ivar did. It was the half of her that he was most intimidated by. Mrs. Walker knew all about the scandal, probably more about it than Ivar did. Ivar said, nervously, “Well, sit down for a few minutes, Arlen. Elaine?”

  “Wait till you hear, Ivar. Something very exciting is about to happen.”

  Hmmph, said Mrs. Walker, or rather, without speaking, she launched this hmmph into the air of the room and allowed it to float there. Elaine’s womanly response was an even brighter smile. Like everyone else on the campus, Elaine didn’t dare underestimate Mrs. Walker. Arlen, however, did. He said, “Well, I could use a cup of coffee, Ivar. I’m dry as a bleached bone. How about having your girl bring some in.”

  Elaine coughed, then said, “Let me get it, Mrs. Walker.”

  “Nah,” said Arlen, “I need you here for support. Dr. Ivar Harstad, well—”

  “I’ll get it,” said Mrs. Walker in her most deadly voice.

  “Good, good, good,” carolled Arlen, with just the cheery insouciance of a character in a horror movie who must die a horrible death within ten minutes. Mrs. Walker retreated and closed the door behind her.

  Ivar was resolved not to get involved with Arlen Martin under any circumstances. It was clear he was no longer in chickens, but he had been ten years before, and he had given a grant to the university for the purpose of investigating the health effects on chickens of a diet made up partially of dead chicken offal—ground-up bone meal, ground-up dried blood and innards, and feathers, etc. In his many chicken factories at the time, the chicken cutters sent the wings, breasts, thighs, and legs to the supermarket and everything else to the rendering facility, where it was ground, cooked, and mixed with grains and prophylactic drugs. It was a practice widespread in England, where Arlen also had chicken factories, but frowned upon by the USDA. A study showing wholesomeness was just the ticket, and a professor in Animal Science had signed on. When the study showed that both the eggs and the killed carcasses of the chickens on the Martin diet showed higher levels of salmonella contamination that could not be satisfactorily controlled by antibiotics also added to the feed, the first thing Ivar had done was to give up eating chicken.

  Arlen had assumed that the study would remain unpublished, and asserted himself to realize his assumption. Jolly to the end, he had attempted to destroy the reputation not only of the scientist who had received the grant, but also of the graduate student who had helped him and the journal who had published the results. An addition to the library he had planned to fund had disappeared from the drawing board. Had it been built, Ivar thought, it would have disappeared from the campus. The faculty at large had taken the moral high ground, one of their normal perks as a faculty, and strongly disapproved of Ivar’s every attempt to find a compromise. There had been a vote in the faculty senate, condemning him and calling for his ouster, which had not passed, but had hurt more than his reputation.

  The study had been published.

  Other studies discrediting that study had been published very quickly thereafter.

  The USDA had, albeit reluctantly, approved the Martin system of chicken feeding.

  A salmonella scandal had hit the British egg industry.

  Ivar had stopped eating eggs as well as chicken.

  Arlen Martin had risen above chickens, spent two years as the American ambassador to Switzerland, and returned to buy up some companies and double his net worth.

  You could not call them friends, but as Arlen himself had once said to Ivar, “You and I are closer than you think. Someday you’re going to look at me, and I will look just as familiar to you as your oldest pal, and you’ll kind of like me, after all. Just you wait and see.”

  And it was true. For all his resolve, Ivar felt no personal aversion to Arlen Martin.

  Martin said, “I hear you got a budget shortfall of seven million.”

  “We are laboring under some budgetary constraints, but there are no actual”—he cleared his throat—“cutbacks as yet.”

  “Mmmm hmm.”

  “I don’t think we have to take the unrealistically optimistic view with Mr. Martin, here, Ivar. He knows what there is to know.”

  “Well, Elaine,” said Ivar, “that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Waters’ son dates my daughter, you know,” said Arlen. “Met at college, out there. Princeton.”

  Waters was the vice-chairman of the state board of governors. Ivar nodded.

  “Now, the thing is, I know you guys skim a percentage right off the top, and I don’t mind that. I recognize that you can’t do good research if you don’t keep up the physical plant, and I know a lump sum over here bumps some general funds over to here, and so on. Accounting is accounting, and I define accounting as an art rather than a science.”

  Elaine laughed again.

  “You know, we’ve brough
t six companies under the TransNational wing in the last six years, some big, some not so big. That gives us control of eleven diverse companies in all, and, of course, a goodly debt. Not much left over for research and development, for, let’s say, the physical plant aspects, and the personnel. So I look around me, and I say, who’s got the physical plant and the personnel, and I don’t have to look far, do I?”

  Ivar, whose nodding agreement had become unpleasantly rhythmic, said, “No, probably not,” and consciously stilled his head.

  “Our interests continue to coincide, Dr. Harstad. I got hybrid seeds, you got plant genetics. I got steel roller mills, you got materials science and industrial engineering. I got airplane engine parts, you got aerospace engineering. I got chickens, beef, and llamas, you got animal science. I got a chemical company that specializes in pesticides, you got entomology. I got a big accounting and PR firm, you got a business school. Are you catching my meaning, Dr. Harstad? Why should I hire R and D people just to read what your R and D people already know?”

  “Of course,” said Ivar.

  “Your own governor says that alliances between education and business are the wave of the future, Dr. Harstad.”

  “Technology transfer,” murmured Elaine.

  “You don’t have to convince me of general principles, Mr. Martin.”

  The door opened, and Mrs. Walker brought in a tray of coffee and cookies. She set it in front of Elaine. There was silence until she left the room.

  “Call me Arlen.”

  “Arlen.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Arlen, let me speak frankly. The principles you speak of are generally agreed upon, but your particular history with this university is a more significant factor in the equation. I don’t know that the faculty would allow such an association even now, given the heat of opinion ten years ago.”

  “It’s up to you to explain reality to them, then. Jobs. Cutbacks, that sort of thing. Besides, I can understand my own mistakes. I’ve made plenty of them. I’m not so hotheaded as I used to be. TransNational casts a wider and more diversified net than Martin’s Flavorbest did. I say, invest everything in chickens and pretty soon you’re thinking like a chicken. You know how chickens think? I do, because I raised chickens as a boy. Chickens are always looking for little bits of things in the dirt. They don’t conceptualize on a higher plane. You step back from chickens and you start conceptualizing on a higher plane. That’s my philosophy.”

  “Even so.”

  “We got a lot to offer one another.”

  Elaine nodded vigorously, then said, “Ivar, I don’t think you should overestimate the sort of punctilious view that the faculty is going to take. My own personal sense of things is that bygones CAN be bygones if your office and my office handle things properly. But Mr. Martin has too much to offer this university, ANY university. I’m sure he knows that any research funded by his group of companies must be done according to academic standards of disinterestedness. I’m sure we can rely on that.” She beamed. Her shining eyes caught the electric blue of her suit and promised the end to all difficulties. The President, a newcomer of some two years’ standing, she knew was on her side, even though at his last dinner party, he’d talked to Jack Parker for seventeen minutes and thirty-seven seconds, and to herself for only twelve minutes and three seconds.

  Ivar said, “Well, specific proposals carry the most weight.”

  Arlen said, “The whole faculty doesn’t know, as a rule, about any individual project or grant?”

  “No, they don’t,” said Elaine.

  “There you go,” said Arlen.

  Ivar’s heart sank. For a few minutes, the three of them sat thoughtfully, sipping coffee. Finally, Arlen stood up. Elaine immediately popped out of her chair. Arlen said, “We’ll talk again.”

  “Yes,” said Ivar. “Elaine, I need to speak to you for just a moment about another matter.”

  “I don’t think—” said Elaine.

  “Only a second.”

  “Go ahead,” said Arlen. “Don’t stand on ceremony with me.” He went out. In the office, Mrs. Walker was just beginning her mail routine for the morning. She was the last to glance up when he entered. She pointed to the hard wooden chair beside her desk, the chair where students with appeals, complaints, and problems always sat. She said, “You may sit there.”

  “That’s all right, ma’am, I’ll stand.”

  She said, “Sit.”

  He sat. He put his ankle up on his knee and jiggled his leg. She said, “Don’t do that.”

  He stopped.

  She read through her mail deliberately. Of course, she clearly remembered the TransNationalAmerica letter she had thrown away without opening, but she did not intend to waste her time in fruitless regret.

  He thought of offering her an extremely well-paid job, just on the basis of her authoritative manner.

  Elaine emerged, and said, “Oh! I’m sorry there isn’t a more comfortable chair for you, sir.”

  Mrs. Walker glanced at her.

  They left rather hurriedly.

  Mrs. Walker picked up her phone and buzzed Ivar, who was waiting to hear from her. She said, “I have three words for you, Ivar.”

  “And they are?”

  “Bovine Spungiform Encephalopathy.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Let’s say that my sheep has a brain disease called scrapie, and that I send my sheep to a rendering plant where his or her remains are rendered into cattle feed, and then my cow begins to stagger around and fall down, and when I autopsy my cow I discover holes in her brain like the holes in a sponge—”

  “Spungiform?”

  “Exactly. I have not been careful in my feeding practices. I have encouraged a strange and terrifying disease to cross species boundaries. I am continuing to sell my beef and milk, though.”

  “Where am I doing this?”

  “England, my old stamping ground.”

  He said, “The source of your information, Mrs. Walker?”

  “My friend Mrs. Lake subscribes to the Sunday Times of London. Just by chance.”

  “No. You’re right. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She hung up her phone and picked up her campus mail.

  15

  A Proposal Made

  ONE OF THE Christian acts Marly Hellmich had set herself was to behave in a kindly fashion toward all members of the church, and so, for five years, she had behaved in a kindly fashion toward Nils Harstad, and he had received her kindness more or less as she expected—he was polite in return and he got along well with her and the others. This strategy of low voices and turning aside from anger had worked well for ten years to prevent the sort of acrimonious split that had divided the congregation at the end of the seventies, resulting in the establishment of a splinter church on the north side of town that still harbored fifty or sixty misguided souls, including Marly’s own brother and sister, though her father, uncle, two aunts, and all the cousins had stayed on this side of town. The rift ran so deep that there were plenty on both sides of town that were still not speaking to one another. She had heard that the north-siders continued to cherish contentiousness in their hearts, which proved that they always had done so, but the south-siders were as smooth and easy among themselves as passionate believers could be; their strategy had served them well. All you had to do whenever it became too strenuous was offer the effort up to the Lord, and that seemed to work well enough.

  It ran through her mind that something had changed with Nils Harstad, but what with preparing for the service, then serving the church supper afterward (a Wednesday night tradition), and cleaning up from that, and listening to Marge Overbeck’s story of her kidney stone, she didn’t think much else about it until she was leaving and Nils Harstad asked if he could walk her home.

  “Well, Nils, I have my car, but if you need a ride, I can easily give you one.”

  “No. I have my car.”

  “Oh, well, then—”
She was confused, unsuspecting.

  “How about a stroll around the block?”

  The most she thought, the absolute most, was that he might ask her out to a movie, but actually, he was too old for her. He would be in his fifties, and she was only thirty-five. She preferred men, when she got the chance (which wasn’t often with her job and Father to take care of), younger, darker, and from out of town. Certainly from beyond the surveillance of the church. She said, “I’m a little late tonight—”

  And he said, no kidding, “How about getting married?”

  Marly had to admit that this made her mad. She had not pegged Nils Harstad as a ridiculer of women, but she had been wrong before. Looking at him, she felt a powerful annoyance overcome her, but she spoke softly and turned away from anger. “Don’t you think this is sudden, Nils? Our friendship in the church isn’t accompanied by any special friendship just between us, do you think?” She had found with her father that asking questions was much more productive than making statements.

  Nils cleared his throat. “Many cultures find that a preexisting friendship between the parties to an engagement isn’t necessary to marital concord.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’ve seen you. I’ve watched you. I think the Lord has made his wishes known to me.”

  Well, if he put it that way. That way of putting it gave Marly pause. She said, “I need to pray over this and think about it. I need to listen to what the Lord says to me.”

  “I certainly honor that.”

  “Fine, then.”

  He took the casserole dish that she was carrying out of her hands and accompanied her to her car. By this time, his car was the only other vehicle in the parking lot. It was a Lincoln, about a year old. She got into her own eight-year-old Dodge Omni with a new self-consciousness, especially when he opened the door for her and said, “I don’t do things lightly, Marly. I know my own wishes.”