by Smiley, Jane
Nor did it occur to any boy to empathize with the desire of any of the other boys. Dr. Gift said not to, said, in fact, that such empathy was impossible and even sympathy was an illusion. The only possible response to any other individual’s good or bad fortune, according to Dr. Gift, was indifference. To feel this indifference, or even to cultivate it as a way of avoiding illusions of sympathy or envy, was every individual’s duty toward the truth. And it was true that cultivating indifference was a reassuring discipline against the envy that seemed to the boys to have plagued them all their lives.
Just to show them who they were, early in every semester, Dr. Gift administered a test. He gave them all tokens worth $100 to an investing individual, but returning $220 when invested as a part of the group, though that larger sum had to be divided by all members of the group, with individuals who did not invest receiving as much as individuals who did. The investors could also choose to invest as individuals, in which case the return would be more modest—only $110 per $100—but the sum would not have to be shared out among the group (which would also include noninvestors). Dr. Gift made clear to all, even the most confused, that an individual’s greatest return would be on the group investment, IF the entire group chose to invest with the group. Then he polled them—how would they invest? Almost uniformly over the years, 20 percent of them chose to invest for the group, 80 percent chose to invest for themselves. When he announced the results of the tests, they looked around. It was pretty clear who was in the minority—students who weren’t doing very well in economics.
Dr. Gift, himself, had noticed the correlation between doing well in economics classes and choosing, even hypothetically, to maximize one’s own profits at the expense of the group. Just another piece of evidence, he thought, about the nature of success.
Keri knew she was one of those who fell into both undesirable categories—not doing well in economics and choosing to invest for the group. It had seemed so clear to her on the day of the test—if they all invested for the group, everyone’s return would be 120 percent greater. If even one more than half invested with the group, they’d get more than they would as individuals. The math seemed to be absolutely clear—she was convinced she had grasped something and the conviction bolstered her confidence. When Gift announced the results, smiling as always, the Bizarro Planet seemed to float completely out of her ken, and she was embarrassed, to boot. She had blushed. All the boys around her thought it was charming.
The midterm review was mostly of relevant mathematical models, which Keri understood fairly well. As with all mathematical models, the sides of the equations balanced each other, and therefore seemed pure and true, irrefutable. She wrote them down carefully.
Dr. Lionel Gift was well aware that he could teach this class, and even entertain and please the customers, with no thought whatsoever. What he was saying to them now was like a television program on another channel that he could switch to whenever he wanted, just to see that it was still on, just to see that he, the talking head, was still adhering to the script. Somewhat more often, he checked the audience. Heads down, pencils moving, the occasional nod, all the way back to the last rows. It touched him, it really did, the imparting of knowledge, the initiation of a whole new group of customers into the domain of truth.
The enlargement of his class in the spring by three times was satisfying for so many reasons. In the first place, market demand had been recognized, even by the bureaucrats in the administration. In the second place, the larger amount of tuition money soon to be flowing in his direction would be good grounds for a raise, no matter what the legislature decided to do for the faculty at large (as a matter of principle, Dr. Gift was indifferent to their concerns). And in the third place, there was this intangible. As little attention as he liked to pay to intangibles, this sense in the room of knowledge pouring out of his mouth and being soaked up by their eyes and ears and note-taking hands was intoxicating. How much more intoxicating, how loaves-and-fishes-like it would be when the same amount of knowledge poured out and was soaked up by three times as many customers! The thought brought him right back to that nagging question of the value of information. Once he had his report done about the Arlen Martin plan, he would get back to the joy of that sort of pure economics.
Every class period, Keri discovered that willpower was not enough to keep her attention fixed on the material Dr. Gift was delivering. Her own experience in economics, extensive and gained on her father’s farm through the farm crises of the eighties, did not, for example, teach her that the workings of the market unerringly produced the general good. When her uncle Jack, having done well in hogs, bought out her uncle Dwight at a farm auction when Keri was in sixth grade, and then farmed the land himself rather than giving it or renting it to Dwight (“He owes a lot on a new combine, he says,” said the relatives), forcing Dwight to commute to a chicken processing job two hundred miles away, Keri’s father, Sam, had been caught in the middle, as had her grandparents—her grandfather sided with Jack and admired his success, her grandmother sided with Dwight and said that it was just like Jack, always had been, he had no more family feeling than a cat. Jack and Dwight were certain never to speak until they died, every family holiday was wrecked, her cousins lived on hand-me-downs and envied everything Keri had or did, her father, once playful and fun, now hardly ever spoke at all, her mother said he was impossible to live with (and Keri knew what that could portend), the whole township knew their family business and had an opinion of it. She did not understand what general good Dr. Gift was smiling about.
Nor did her experience teach her to value consumer insatiability above all other virtues. She clearly remembered from her early childhood what life on the farm had been like when her grandfather and father and uncles were farming together on the original 400 acres. They farmed and fished and farmed and hunted and farmed and went to the state fair. Half her relatives sat on the PTA and were hand in glove with her teachers. Her father played Hank Williams songs on the guitar, and her mother sang, and her grandfather played the harmonica. Someone was always available to help with the 4-H projects—even the worthless pony and those crazy goats. Later, when her grandfather farmed the original 400 by himself, her father had 600 of his own, and Jack, the most insatiable member of the family, farmed his and Dwight’s 780, they were in the fields day and night, every planting season and harvest was a nightmare, the family debt load soared to astounding proportions, all the money from the farm went back into the farm, and her mother and grandmother had to get work in town to pay for food. Her grandmother would say, “If this is success, you can have it.”
It was true, as Dr. Gift said, that the land itself had no value except as a market commodity, but that fact did not cause Keri the mirth and good cheer that it seemed to cause her professor. The rocketing and plummeting of land prices that she had known as long as she had known her name had meant unexpected and mysterious indoor weather, unmanageable cycles of surprise and anxiety, constant repetition of one ritualistic phrase, “the bank, the bank, the bank,” year after year. Then there was the valueless land itself. Her father fretted about it as if it did have value, as if he cared whether he planted on steep slopes, as if corn after corn after corn in the same fields was actually bad, as if he cared about cutting down windbreaks and filling in stream courses, as if he didn’t know about land the very thing that so thrilled Dr. Gift—that land was inexhaustible, and fertility was, too.
And then there was that word, “market.” Dr. Gift intoned the word “market” the way her minister back home intoned the word “Creation.” All the goodness in the universe, Dr. Gift seemed to say, was contained in the market. Well, it was clear from one single detail of her childhood and adolescence that she would never pass economics, because she had learned early to leave the room when her father turned on the market reports. She hated that word “market,” whether attached to hogs, feeder cattle, corn, soybeans, or any other word. “Market” was synonymous with “impending doom.”
&n
bsp; Every class period, she ended up sitting transfixed, gazing wanly at the spectacle of Dr. Gift on the podium. He spoke emphatically, jestingly, seriously, informatively, for all she knew, well-meaningly. The boys around her were caught up, though surely some of them had backgrounds in practical economics similar to hers.
Dr. Gift LOVED them. You could tell that by the way he let them know every day in all sorts of little ways that in America, a boy, a girl even, could always succeed by hard work and a little knowledge of the market. Though world-famous, he let them know he was personal savior-consultant to each of them. All they had to do was pass the test, see the light, believe. But Keri simply had no capacity for faith, willing though she was, deeply though she felt that faith in economics, though it might not lead to good works, would surely lead to goods.
He wound up, startling her once again with how quickly the hour had passed and how depressed she felt as a result.
“Bring your own blue books,” he said. “Exams will be returned in exactly one week after the date of the midterm. I remind you that exams are graded on a strict statistical curve, so seven percent of you will get F’s, no matter what. You may not thank me for that now, but I hope you will later, when you have attained greater wisdom.” He smiled to show that this was meant as a joke. The customers laughed as they were intended to, and in the hubbub, the mysterious blond beauty vanished from the hall.
30
A Celebration
ON THE OCCASION OF his engagement, Dr. Nils Harstad felt it appropriate to spread his benevolence as widely and deeply over the campus as he could. To this end, he invited everyone he had ever known to witness his happiness. On the one hand, he was a little disappointed that Marly invited only a few people from the church, plus her brother and sister from the north-side splinter. On the other hand, he liked the idea of her mysteriousness. He asked her to wear something long and dark, to put her hair up. She complied. He liked that, too.
In the month or so of their acquaintance, he had found no reason to regret his choice. She had confessed that she wasn’t quite as young as he thought, but he didn’t blame her for that. In all fairness, he was willing to admit that the misapprehension had been his, and the person who had disappointed him was himself, not her. If he thought of her slightly differently as a thirty-five-year-old than he had thought of her as a twenty-seven-year-old, well, it couldn’t be helped, and the blow to his vanity was probably deserved.
The father, too, had turned out somewhat differently than he had expected, not so wise and upright, a little more cantankerous and rigid, especially in regard to doctrine, frivolous amusements (like drinking—he had insisted that no liquor would be served at the engagement party and Nils had reluctantly agreed), and the respect due him by Nils himself. He did not seem at all impressed with Nils’ résumé or his position at the university, proclaiming all such things as vanity every time they happened to come up in conversation. It had become clear that the father would be living with them (something Nils hadn’t quite had the courage to tell Ivar yet) rather than staying harmlessly in his own bungalow on the south side of town, a convenient, in Nils’ opinion, 4.2 miles away.
However, Marly seemed at least receptive to his childbearing plans, and there Nils pinned his hopes. He could not feature either Father or Ivar comfortable in the same house with six children under, say, three years old. He was confident that they would move out.
He had not actually told Ivar the extent of these plans, all the better to leave him unprepared as well as to avoid arguments. Father undoubtedly had no idea of them at all.
Nils, himself, was surprised by the power of those six children (three boys, three girls). As he guided the caterers in their last-minute preparations for the party (250 guests, nine dollars per person for hors d’oeuvres and soft drinks, and no liquor or wine or beer), he could see them everywhere—a dark-haired boy under the table, a sweet girl reading in the window seat, two boys on the stairs, soberly chatting, two girls in the kitchen, helping, glad to help, and all of them looking up as he passed, with admiring and affectionate regard. Now every time he went to church, they marched in front of him, heads down, perfectly behaved, handsome and always dark, never pale, as he was. The girls would wear glasses and look studious. The boys would reveal a contained fire—boyish spirit reined in for the Lord’s sake.
Swedish meatballs in a chafing dish. He said, “Rather than having those on the dining table, let’s set them up with some napkins in the living room. I don’t like it when all the food is in the same place, don’t you think, dear?”
Marly nodded. This was her first cocktail party, and she had no actual opinions of her own.
Tiny sausages in barbecue sauce. Spinach puffs. Cheese toasts. Miniature quiches. Garlicky stuffed mushroom caps. Nils went around after the caterers, straightening things, spying his children everywhere. There was a creak on the stairs. Nils looked up to see Ivar surveying it all in a charcoal gray flannel suit with an expression of such obscurity that Nils, even after fifty-five years and more of life together, couldn’t begin to penetrate it. Ivar glanced toward Father, who was reading his Bible in the sunroom. Nils shifted uneasily from foot to foot, an old habit from the days when Ivar seemed to accrue some sort of authority from his extra six minutes in the world. Of course Nils felt nothing of that now, at his age.
Even so, he had yet to tell Ivar about his one significant conversation with Father. Father had issued a number of instructions, to wit: He expected to have his breakfast served promptly at eight a. m., no matter what. He preferred to be the first one in the house to look at the mail, read the afternoon paper, and do the crossword puzzle. He watched “NBC Nightly News.” He did not eat pork and any sort of beans made him gassy. He would not sleep on the second floor. There would be no television watching or radio listening on Sunday, and only a cold dinner on Sunday and Wednesday. These were all, said Father to Nils, rules that he lived by and was too old to change. Furthermore, to be perfectly candid, he thought Marly and Nils were both too old to get married, and so he disapproved of their plans and, since he disapproved, he didn’t feel obliged to change his style of life to accommodate them. When Nils’ hopes had begun to rise just a degree at this last remark, Father had dashed them again at once: The one good thing about the whole deal was, in Father’s opinion, that he could sell his little house that he’d paid twelve thousand dollars for twenty-five years ago, and the realtor fellow said he might be able to get forty or even forty-five for it.
The doorbell rang. The old house looked terrific—festive with sunlight and an abundance of good food. What could go wrong, really?
Ivar mastered his impulse to answer the door, even though he was nearer to it than anyone. Nils practically leapt for it, but then one of the catering people smoothly intervened, and Nils stepped back, to the side of his fiancée. The door opened to reveal two agronomists and their wives, with a soil scientist and and a plant geneticist and his wife close behind them. More guests were coming up the walk. The catering woman stepped aside, and they came in with something of an avid look that Ivar saw was satisfied as soon as they laid eyes on Marly. There would be a big crowd, all of them curious. Ivar experienced a little moment of embarrassment, then mastered that, too. He had drawn the conclusion years before, almost in childhood, that though they looked uncannily alike, Nils’ orbit was to be far more unorthodox than his, and that to probe the sources of this would be both fruitless and frustrating. He knew that in some way he had early accepted the mystery at the heart of their twinship, far earlier than Nils had, and in accepting it he had smoothed their relationship and his own course through life. But then he looked again at Old Man Hellmich, and his lips tightened. No matter what they said, and they had said it each of them already about a hundred times, he did not intend to call the old bastard “Father.” The door opened, and Ivar smiled. It was Helen in her reddest suit, red like a California poppy, or an ash berry, vividly alive and full of promise. He stepped forward and took her elbow. Her squeeze o
f his hand was discreet. After five years, discretion was their habit, and a monumentally pleasant habit it was.
Chairman X could not figure out why he had been invited to celebrate Nils Harstad’s engagement. How much hostility did you have to display before even the most resolutely forgiving person got the point? For a week, since receipt of the invitation, he had been telling the Lady X that of course they wouldn’t think of going, so when she came into the bedroom and found him taking an ironed shirt and a sport jacket out of the closet to wear with his jeans, she seemed a little surprised. He said, “You don’t have to go.”
“You don’t, either.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
He looked at her. She had the baby on her hip and a banana in her hand. He said, “I don’t know. Because Communism is collapsing all over Europe and cocaine is the ultimate cash crop and I can’t figure out an alternative, and my whole life is a failure and I just want to SEE.”
“See what?”
“See THEM, the winners.”
The Lady X sighed and let Amy take a piece of the banana, which she did with delicate precision. She said, “Do you want me to go?”
Chairman X thought Cecelia would probably not be there. He said, “Yes, but only if you want to. Garcia might be there. He could restrain me.”
“More likely egg you on.”
Now they were inside the big brick house and the odor of professional courtesy wafted everywhere. The Lady X was issuing him instructions in a low voice—you do not have to defend the idea of communism, or insist that mistakes were made and that it could have succeeded if capitalism hadn’t destroyed it; you do not have to make audible comments about the meat dishes, you can just avoid personal intake of them; you do not have to lecture anyone about perennial polyculture; you do not have to talk about blood money at any time. Chairman X nodded and nodded. She was only reminding him of social niceties that he preferred to conform to. Keep smiling and don’t say much, she advised. Don’t let them draw you out, and be thankful they aren’t serving any booze. As an alternative to offending anyone, Chairman X took a large glass of mineral water and sat down beside an elderly man who seemed to be ignoring the party and reading. The man paid no attention to him, and Chairman X sipped his cooling drink. The Lady X, who was wearing a rather nice blue dress, had joined some friends. Garcia wasn’t there.