Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “Tell me more,” Wright said.

  “She said it was over here. She’d had it with Warren. Then she came home and said there wasn’t going to be a college here anymore. She said this place was going to be a trivia question, a crossword puzzle clue: name of a dead college, six letters, begins with a K.”

  “Half the world would fill in Kansas,” Wright said. “Where is she now?”

  “Crane College, outside of San Diego.”

  “Provost?”

  “President.”

  “Were you included in her plans?”

  “Initially. Part of the package. A tenure track in the English Department, sight unseen. They were excited about meeting me, she said. What’s more, they’re a pioneer in study abroad—operations in Edinburgh, London, Copenhagen, Vienna, Florence.”

  “Daunting challenges, all of them.”

  “It gets better. We were invited to tour them. Before Caroline’s inauguration.”

  “And you said no?”

  “She couldn’t understand why. There were some students I knew who died here, I said. Wrong answer. She warned me. Even if this place has a future—which she doubted—I’d be a writer-in-residence. Out of place in the English Department, out of place in the college, out of place in Ohio. And the teaching! Three courses a semester. When would I write? What would I write? One haiku per weekend? A short story per summer? The place would destroy me, she said. Maybe it already had.”

  “Your wife,” Wright said, “has things in your dossier that should have resulted in your dismissal. I could accommodate you now. Accommodate your wife as well.”

  “I hope you don’t,” I said. “I’d like to stay. If there’s going to be a college here, I’d like to be part of it. And if it’s like the place you’re talking about...well...I’d like a shot.”

  “What kind of life do you picture yourself living here if you stay?” he asked. Again, I felt the oddness of it, talking about employment at a shut-down college.

  “Teaching,” I said. “And writing, of course.”

  “Which comes first?” he asked. “And please, spare me the dosey-do about how they go together like a horse and carriage. Horse and miscarriage is just as probable.”

  “What comes first,” I said, “is whatever I’m doing at the time.” He smiled at that. I’d dodged another bullet.

  “Well, if you’re here, you’ll be teaching most of the time. And most of the teaching you will do will be introductory and survey courses. Not more than one seminar. God knows what you’ll write. Or when.”

  “Summers,” I said. “Vacations. Sabbaticals. If it’s important to me, I’ll do it. You said as much yourself.”

  “I did? Where?”

  “Harry Stribling’s conditions of employment. Just give me the same deal he had. I won’t complain.”

  “Well,” he huffed. “I’m not so sure we can do that, right off.”

  “I was joking,” I said.

  “Oh. I see.”

  “But this part’s not a joke. The writing that I do here, I won’t be doing in order to leave. I’ll be doing it in order to stay. I want you to know that.”

  “Well then,” he said. He picked up that dossier he’d been studying, My Wife, My Provost’s collection of my abominations. He held it over the wastepaper basket. “Do you want your biographers to find this?” I shook my head. He dropped it into the wastepaper basket. “You can stay.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. Why? Is there a question?” There were a lot of questions. How many courses, how many years, visiting appointment or tenure track, full time or part time, what about medical and retirement coverage, when would I have to move out of the provost’s house? But those were for another college or another time. For this place there was just one question, for now.

  “Have we been playing a charade here, Mr. Wright?”

  “A charade? That’s what they’re saying?”

  “Will this place ever be a college again?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, which was disappointing. “It depends...” I’d expected something more ringing and well rounded. “We’ll see...”

  “Mark May!” Willard Thrush exclaimed. “The man, the legend.”

  I didn’t know why he’d called me in, a few days after I’d spoken to Hiram Wright. He wasn’t popular with the faculty, I knew that from Caroline. “What’s the difference between a dog and a faculty member? A dog stops whining when it gets what it wants.” Jokes like that were his style. He cast himself as a man of affairs, someone who dealt with real budgets and hard money. A lot of people thought he’d be out of here lickety split, once the college closed. But my wife won that race.

  “So...” he said. “What are you doing around here?”

  “Writing. Waiting to see what happens.”

  “California?”

  “Not in my plans,” I said. “Why are you staying?”

  “I like it here,” he said. “You spend twenty years learning about a place, honking people off, you can’t just walk away.” He stopped and studied me and for just a moment we connected. We were both here and I wondered if, years from now, those of us who stayed around, this skeleton crew, might not amount to a freemasonry. When we met, we’d know each other. It would be in our nods, in our conversation and in our silences, what we’d shared.

  “I was wondering, how did Duncan Kerstetter do in that course your wife cooked up?”

  “He did alright,” I said.

  “A pain in the ass, right?”

  “I got used to him.”

  “So the question...envelope, please...is, did you give him an A to make up for all the pain and suffering Harry Stribling inflicted on him?”

  “A student’s grade is confidential. I sent it to the registrar.”

  “Give me a break. There’s no one in the registrar’s office. I could walk over, unlock the door, and look it up myself.”

  “Okay. B plus.”

  “It was supposed to be an A.”

  “B plus. Lots of energy. Lots of attitude. He wrote pretty well and what he said was interesting.”

  “Sounds like an A to me,” Thrush said. “These days.”

  “But there was a tone of impatience in everything he did. An indifference to craft. An over-eagerness to get to the bottom line. Not ‘what does it mean,’ but ‘what does it mean to me.’ It all came down, way too quickly, to whether or not he liked something. So...B plus. I could show you his final paper. A comparison of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. Blatty holds his own, it turns out. But...in the end...B plus.”

  “Well,” Thrush said, tilting back in his chair, pulling out a lower desk drawer and stretching his legs across it. “The joke’s on us. Duncan Kerstetter calls the other day. ‘How much does it cost to endow a chair?’ he asks. ‘Three million,’ I say. Silence on the phone. Then, ‘Bullshit. A million and a half.’ ‘Duncan,’ I say, ‘that’s not a chair, it’s a stool. You want your new best friend sitting on a stool?’ That’s you he was talking about.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I should have given him the A. I’d be getting a chair.”

  “It’s alright. He came up with the three.”

  There was one condition, of course. The college would have to reopen. If that happened, there was a place for me here, a tenure track that led right to an endowed chair. No national search on this baby, this was home-cooking at its finest. Oh, they might have to go through the motions—applications and interviews and inviting two chanceless candidates for campus interviews. I’d worry about that, because you always worry about something, about Seamus Heaney walking into the room. But it was all there, all waiting for me. Which made me that much more certain that the college would never come back. And that maybe Duncan Kerstetter wasn’t being generous. Maybe he was being incredibly...even criminally...cruel. Maybe this endowed chair was a killer’s parting joke.

  Chapter XIV

  WARREN NILES

  Night Thoughts of a College Pres
ident

  “Don’t thank me,” Sheriff Lingenfelter said. “Tom didn’t disappear because we were looking into him, Mr. President. We started looking into him after he disappeared. And what we found was interesting.”

  How surprising, how banal, it all turned out to be, that the crimes against our college were committed by Tom Hoover, a local man, a low-level employee. And that the account of his disappearance should be rendered to me by a county sheriff whose voice and cadence and grammar made it sound like a garden-variety domestic quarrel or tavern punch-up and not an assault against a respected and beloved college. The stupidity of it all, the meanness of it contaminated us. It stank of anti-climax. But an anti-climax was better than no climax at all.

  Tom owned and was licensed to carry a Smith and Wesson handgun. That weapon had not been found but it matched the make and model employed in the killings. And, it turned out, Tom was bitter. The college had rejected his son’s application and the boy, his only child, had died in Vietnam. This was from Hiram Wright, confirmed by Billy Hoover, who added that Tom had made puzzling references to moving on but not before leaving something behind that would make him remembered.

  “He was on duty the night that Martha Yeats died,” the sheriff said. “Hell, he was right there for the next two. Those students, the girl and the guy...”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Wait.” I held up my hand, pleading for a time-out. I remembered the awkward funeral. Jarrett Stark’s. How I’d lauded a brave boy who’d heard a shot and rushed forward to be of help, only to be slain himself. Everyone seemed puzzled by the picture I’d given. No wonder. It was wrong. The boy had run towards a uniformed College Security officer, his executioner.

  “Alright,” I said to the sheriff. “Sorry. I just remembered something.”

  “Sure. Anyhow, that high school kid? Right outside the Security Office. Like Tom’s getting tired of walking. Another thing. We found his truck out at a restaurant on the interstate. That was this morning...”

  “You think you’ll find him?”

  “We’ll look. But Tom’s no fool.”

  “No,” I said. I remember our last conversation, when he stopped me speeding up the hill. Our talk about the college. I always liked it, when lower-salaried employees fretted on our behalf. It was good, they felt they were part of the college.

  “Do you think,” I asked, “that Tom was working with someone?”

  “With? You mean for? Well, we couldn’t find any money. Then, Tom only used banks for checking. Hundred dollar balance. I told you he was smart. Wherever he is, he’s probably kicking himself about that $100 he left behind.”

  “Still...”

  “He was smart enough to work alone, sir. He didn’t need supervision. That’s what I think. You want to look for a conspiracy, bring back Sherwood Graves.”

  Night Thoughts of a College President. For now, the bad times are over. The college has reopened, one third smaller than before. Our applications are higher than usual, despite the fact that our competitors made the most of our weakness. It’s hard to know, but the publicity that came to us in our distress may, in the end, outweigh the damage done by the murders. Next year’s freshman class may be among the best ever admitted. Really. Our time in hell was a little more than a semester, but it was bad enough and long enough to answer my years-long musing, whether time—longevity—is itself enough of a monument for a man like me, and a college like this. The answer is mostly yes and a little bit, no. Bear with me. On that gray morning when I walked across the campus to Ascension Hall, I felt a huge sense of impending loss. To think of this college’s dying was more than I could bear. It was an imperfect place, but mostly good. So, when our rescue finally came, when I summoned the Board of Trustees to our reopening, relief surged through me; not relief, but joy, sheer jumping joy. One more year seemed like a huge gift, just then.

  There was something else, though. I could sense it in the trustees, after the cheers and the heartfelt embraces—an unmistakable sense of let-down, knowing that our brief moment of national fame had passed and we were back to being a pretty good liberal arts college. Large issues of life and death receded and we were returned to a world of budgets and staffing, what to do about fraternities, minorities, student parking. Later, Willard Thrush confided that he regretted that the solution hadn’t come a few weeks later. “There’s no telling what might have become of us,” Thrush said.

  That sense of disappointment, of a sudden return to earth, is something I share. There was something not quite first rate in the way I accepted Tom Hoover’s guilt. I hate to admit it, I may be wrong reopening the college. We may have missed something. A larger truth. Maybe Tom was someone’s instrument. Someone might still be out there, brooding, plotting, planning to come back at us again. Could it be? Is there a more substantial antagonist than poor Tom? Someone who desires our death or designs our transfiguration? Classes meet, professors profess, our college lives again, yet sometimes I find myself wondering whether it is truly over. These intimations come to me at the oddest moments, not when I am worried but rather, when I am mostly relaxed, hosting a reception for parents, putting in an appearance at a poetry reading, sitting in the stands at a swim meet and it comes to me like that, while I am watching, the sense of someone watching me. “Asshole.” Could that have been Tom’s judgment, his alone? Could there have been a confederate, an associate, a boss? Was there so much hate in Tom, that produced so much harm? Unlikely, I tell myself. But not impossible. I must never underestimate the abilities of a common working man, I tell myself, hoping I’m not sounding like an asshole.

  Coming to the end of my night thoughts, seeing that this manuscript has not amounted to what I had hoped it would be, I remember a conversation with Harry Stribling. The first years of my presidency were the last years of his life. Even had his health been good, we would never have been close. He was a shy man, a tired man, and if he confided in anyone it would not have been me. Hiram Wright, perhaps, but not me. Yet I remember meeting him one summer day, when the absence of students encouraged us to chat. I had read a novel that fell apart after a promising start, ending in unbelievable contrivances.

  “Closure,” Stribling said, “is hard.” He was talking about literature. Or life. His own was ending, that was clear. He’d gained unhealthy weight and his skin had a yellow cast. “You want endings,” he continued, “happy endings preferably, meanings made clear, questions answered. But when you get them, you resist them. It’s a problem.” He glanced up at me, as if only just realizing he was talking to an unworthy audience in an unguarded moment. He started to leave, to shuffle forward down the path and, at the last moment, he said something over his shoulder that returns to me, as I prepare to shuffle off as well. “Things don’t end the way they should, Mr. President, and neither do we. Still, we end.” And so we do.

  Chapter XV

  BILLY HOOVER

  Spooked and dodgy, like deer at the end of hunting season, the students returned to campus. They came back jittery, those that came back, to a school year that would end in August. They flinched, kind of, when they walked through the college gates. They still put candles and notes where Amy Plimpton died. Not so much where Jarrett Stark had fallen: that was lawn which needed liming and cutting, once spring rolled in. If anybody showed up on campus that the students didn’t know, they called Security. They called about a BancOne interviewer smoking a cigarette outside the dining hall, a visiting speaker—a poet—who didn’t look like “our type.”

  You couldn’t blame them. Tom Hoover was still out there. He could be anywhere. Some cocky kids put his picture on a t-shirt they had made, a picture of Tom at a fraternity party, standing at a keg, guys around him on his left and right, raising beers in the direction of the camera and Tom pretending to be shocked. That was the Tom that everybody used to know, the sunny-dispositioned, easy-going good old boy. He’s a legend now, a bogey-man, and the t-shirts are just the start. There’ll be Tom clubs and parties, Sons of Tom, down the road. Our Freddy Krue
ger. You never know, he might be back. I like the feel of that. The feel of his gun, when I take it out of hiding sometimes, when I hold it, my fingerprints on his.

  They picture Tom in Manila or Mexico or Guam, when they talk about him, someplace where lots of people speak English, nobody asks questions and money talks. He’s gone far from here by now, they say. Or, he’s right in the neighborhood, that’s the other theory, hunkered down and hiding out in some shack along the river, in somebody’s trailer, on an abandoned farm. There’s lots of places to hide around here, don’t kid yourself, and Tom had lots of friends. So people spot him at Kroger’s supermarket or down on River Road or—this had to happen—driving an Amish wagon with a hat and a long beard. Tom lives.

  At the start we were like someone who’d been real sick, cancer or something, but we kept going for tests, which were all negative, everything free and clear, no bumps or spots of any kind, but old fears continued. The whole place reminded me of one of those ex-patients who says, I’m just taking my life one day at a time. Which isn’t a bad way to live, because nothing is for sure. If I’ve learned anything this last year, that’s it. I learned it from Tom and from G-Man and even from old Sherwood Graves, from all the phone calls we made, the stories we got told. It’s no more than what the college teaches and says it believes, about the importance of the past. There’s this line that Hiram Wright kept quoting, said it was from a William Faulkner novel, that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past. Everything that happened seemed to show that, one way or another, but the real clincher was when Mark May took me out for breakfast. We’d gotten to be friends. He was living in the provost’s house until the end of the year—Hiram Wright wasn’t going to bother moving in—and sometimes Mark cooked a meal for me. I returned the favor, which was breakfast out in some little town with a farmers café: trucks in the parking lot, these heavy lumbering guys making a cup of coffee last an hour. We always wondered where their wives were. Did these guys run away from them? Or were they run off? Then we talked just like they did about sports and real estate. But not this morning.