At first, Mr. and Mrs. Jrob were the center of much delighted attention. Mostly Mrs. Jrob, because she was home all day. For blocks around wives homed in on what came to be referred to as “the love nest.” Mrs. Jrob was given to understand that at Ivy Leave faculty wives were Broad-minded. Uninhibited. Not concerned with the unimportant Legal Technicalities of social existence. Godwin was mentioned frequently. Rousseau. Françoise Sagan.
But Mrs. Blake’s rumor, for which I am in no way responsible, soon bore bitter fruit. Creech, I should say.
It was William who, by pure chance, mentioned it. He’s giver to mentioning things when faced with a bowl of furz in the morning. Which is one good reason for serving furz.
“Too bad about Jrob,” he said.
“What’s too bad?”
“Nobody can take over his classes.”
“You mean they’re leaving?” I cried delightedly, wondering if the peonies would grow up again from the roots.
“May have to. It seems they’ve been living in sin.”
“Oh, but that’s just a rumor Mrs. Blake started. Anyway, so what? It’s perked up the whole neighborhood.”
“It perked up the board of administrators, too. It seems word got down to the undergraduate level. That’s why J’s classes were so large. He lectures like a billy goat. And one of those undergraduates is a pasty-faced little freshman who just happens to be old B.D.’s grandson. So word got back to B.D. and President Grayson said he had that expression on his face he gets when he’s decided to leave his money to Harvard.”
“Harvard! But all there is there is…”
“I know. But you know the tradition. Businessmen think there is an exclusive section of the Hereafter reserved for people who leave their money to Harvard.”
“Let’s not discuss B.D. Get back to Jrob. What did President Grayson tell him?”
“As I get the story, Jrob says to the Pres, ‘What do you mean, legally married?’ And it turns out he really is living in sin, only it isn’t a sin in the twenty-second century and furthermore he refuses to get married as he says that would make him lose face and ruin his social life when he goes back home on vacations.”
“So he’s going to be fired?”
“Asked to resign because of cultural lag.”
“My, but this is going to be fun!” I sighed happily. Because William knows all about Architecture from 1875 to 1890, but I know all about college professors. And I knew the upheaval to come would furnish conversational material for years.
The sociology department was up in arms immediately. It was the first Cause we’d had since Integration. Professor Insfree grew a beard and two female teaching fellows shaved their heads.
The psychology department followed. Musty old tomes, predating the Organization Man and the growth of suburban morality, were routed out of the basement in the library. The libido came into its own again.
“We’re lost. We’re all lost,” several members of the English Department were heard to remark with tragic joy. Fitzgerald and Hemingway enjoyed a brief revival.
The Jrob dilemma sifted down to the student level. A group of sophomores began to wear brown chitons and glare at everybody. Blast, the student organ of Ivy Leave, began to publish articles advocating free thought, though apparently the only thing students considered worth thinking about freely were other students of the opposite sex.
Above all, the roar “Academic Freedom!” echoed from one end of the campus to another.
There was even a pantie raid, interpreted, for some obscure reason, as a gesture for academic freedom.
Bulletins began to appear on the campus. As fast as the signs were torn down they came back up.
“All the world loves a lover except the Administration.”
“Were Pericles and Aspasia married?”
“Don’t let them make you do it, Professor Jrob!”
“Up with academic freedom.”
“Down with the administration.”
It was gratifying, I thought, the way faculty and students alike rallied around the injured Jrobs. I didn’t like them, but it occurred to me I could do a little rallying myself and I popped in to see Mrs. Jrob one morning to offer aid and encouragement.
“They won’t dare fire your… er… Mr. Jrob now,” I told her. “The entire faculty would resign in protest. They might even go back to Harvard.”
“Lord! I’ll be glad to get out of this hairy place,” was her only comment.
It was for the principle of the thing, not for Mrs. Jrob, that I marched through the History Building with the other wives, bearing my placard. “The Faculty Wives Accept Mrs. Jrob.”
Thus Mrs. Jrob managed to be a tremendous social success, though she refused to join the Garden Club or the Sewing Club and her only comment on the Wives Tea, which was compulsory, was “Hairy.”
Though all did not end well, because of certain unexpected events, President Grayson was shouted down and the Jrobs were asked to stay. President Grayson made one last stand. He came into his office one morning and through his window zinged a dagger with a note attached. It bit into the wall and quivered. President Grayson summoned the maintenance department without a moment’s hesitation and the note was removed. It read, “What does Ivy Leave stand for, anyway?”
For some reason this epistle enraged President Grayson beyond endurance. He called a meeting of the entire student body and faculty. The wives, janitors and assorted news reporters came too.
“This note!” he cried waving it in the air, “sent anonymously, reads, ‘What does Ivy Leave stand for, anyway?’ Well, I can tell you one thing it does not stand for. Free Love!”
“Boo. Hiss.”
President Grayson was not making the impression he intended. He couldn’t understand why the issue was not as clear to everyone else as it was to him.
“All right,” he said, several times because there was a group singing, for no apparent reason, “La Marseillaise.”
“All right. Even the freshmen here are not children. I’ll put it to you in its crudest terms. Do you want your University to stand for fornication?”
There was a shocked silence.
“Well, do you?”
The shouting began.
“Yes!” from the sophomores.
“No!” from the seniors.
“Define your terms!” from the faculty.
“Allons, enfants de la patrie…” from an assorted group.
In the end, of course, he lost. Well, not in the end.
It was at the Insfree’s cocktail party that the turning point came. We had a jolly time that fall, because of the prevalent notion that a party for the Jrobs was a declaration for academic freedom. The Jrobs, unfortunately, did not like to go out to parties because Mrs. Jrob felt other people’s houses weren’t properly filtered, and she had her lungs to consider.
They appeared, however, at the Insfrees. And to everyone’s consternation they were accompanied by a bald headed little boy of about ten. The little boy bore an evil grin and he kept glancing slyly at Mrs. Jrob. There was a heavy collar around his neck and Mrs. Jrob held the rope firmly, for he had a tendency to buck.
“Not broken in yet,” I heard her explain as she passed her hostess, taking the sanitary precaution of not shaking the extended hand.
Mrs. Blake was all shook up. “Mr. Jrob,” she said, or rather asked, “I didn’t know you had a child!”
“That’s not my child,” Mr. Jrob answered, as though the thought were, indeed, a hairy one. “I don’t even know his name.”
“Omicron,” Mrs. Jrob said. “I’ve told you a thousand times.”
“Poor, dear child,” Mrs. Blake murmured, stooping to commiserate with him.
“Watch out!” Mrs. Jrob shouted. Too late.
“He’s used to robots,” Mr. Jrob explained. “I suppose he doesn’t understand yet that it’s all right to bite robots but it’s not all right to bite people. Why I should be saddled with this child I don’t know.”
“It cer
tainly isn’t my fault,” Mrs. Jrob said petulantly, smoothing her blond fringe with a shapeless hand. “How he got out of the Personality Adjustment Center I don’t know. Much less how he got here. I’m going to sue them for negligence. I sent them the boy and they were supposed to return me the man. If this is the man—well, all I can say is, he takes after his daddy.”
“No wonder he bites,” said Professor Graham, of psychology. “All that pent up hostility. You mean you actually put him in an institution for the duration of the academic year?”
“No, indeed,” Mrs. Jrob replied. “He’s been in it since he was six. Before that he was in the Tot’s Pleasure Dome. I know my responsibilities. Ordinarily he’s perfectly happy there and I bore him to tears. I don’t know what got into him.”
“You mean he’s never known what a home is?”
“Not my home. What kind of a home do you think it would be with a child around? I take him out to the zoo on Sunday afternoons.”
“Poor little thing.” Mrs. Blake was practically sobbing. “Why don’t you let me take him home with me. Just this evening. So he can get to bed at a reasonable hour. And find out what a real home is like.” Considering her mangled wrist, Mrs. Blake was the heroine of the evening.
Mrs. Jrob handed Mrs. Blake the end of the rope. “Go ahead. It’s your home.”
As Professor Graham remarked to me, despite his recent article, Libido Revisited, there’s something a little sordid about it. The libido is all very well, but not with a child around.
Dr. Blake was similarly incensed. “He doesn’t even write poetry. Now that I think about it, what excuse does he have?”
Professor Insfree retired to the back of the house and returned with his beard shaved off. It was a symbol to all of us.
Omicron was back in no time. He rushed in panting, his eyes wild, and handed the end of the rope to his mother. “Get me out of this hairy century,” he screamed.
“What happened?” Mrs. Jrob asked.
“She tried to poison me!” Omicron grabbed at his throat dramatically. “I can still taste it. The old hag shoved poison in my mouth.”
“Creech preserves,” I guessed brilliantly. “They’re perfectly harmless, Mrs. Jrob. They may taste a little odd to your son.” As a matter of fact, they taste a little odd to everyone.
“Mrs. Blake let you come back here alone? Nobody held your rope?”
“Held it? She tried to take my collar off.” Omicron shuddered. “Threatened my entire sense of security. And would the other kids get a laugh out of it if I showed up without my collar. What would I have to take off at graduation? I had to freeze her.”
Professor Blake fixed Omicron with a furious gaze. “What have you done to my wife, you unnatural child?”
“Give me that Freeze Gun,” Mrs. Jrob said with tight lips.
“Aw, Mama…”
“Give it to me or I’ll leave you here.”
“Aw…” He handed it over.
“The question is,” Professor Blake blazed, “what did he do to my wife?”
“Froze her.”
“Is she… is she… ?” He had a horrible thought.
“Not literally. You people are so hairy. She’ll be immobilized for twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll sue,” Professor Blake shouted as he stormed out.
“You needn’t bother. We won’t be here. I’m taking Omicron back.”
“Not a bad idea,” several people remarked. And so, in the end, Mr. Jrob resigned from the Future Chair because of cultural lag, and everybody was reasonably happy.
Except me. Because I found something out just as the Jrobs were leaving.
“Well, I guess I won’t be seeing you again,” I remarked happily as they stood on their pile of synthetic boards waiting for Translation.
“Not exactly,” Mrs. Jrob answered.
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“You died when I was a baby, Grandma.”
Which is why I am so interested in the electric zither.
CAR POOL
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY to you,” we all sang, except Gail, of course, who was still screaming, though not as loud.
“Well, now,” I said jovially, glancing nervously about at the other air traffic, “what else can we all sing?” The singing seemed to be working nicely. They had stopped swatting each other with their lunch boxes and my experienced ear told me Gail was by this time forcing herself to scream. This should be the prelude to giving up and enjoying herself.
“Boing down in Texas in eighteen-ninety,” Billy began, “Davy, Davy Eisenhower…”
“A-B-C-D-Er-” sang Jacob.
“Dere was a little ’elicopter red and blue,” Meli chirped, “flew along de airways—”
The rest came through unidentifiably.
“Ba-ba-ba,” said a faint voice. Gail had given up. I longed for ears in the back of my head because victory was mine and all I needed to do was reinforce it with a little friendly conversation…
“Yes, dear?” I asked her encouragingly.
“Ba-ba-ba,” was all I could make out.
“Yes, indeed. That Gail likes to go to Playplace.”
“Ba-ba-ba!” A little irritable. She was trying to say something important. “Ba-barba!”
I signaled for an emergency hover, turned around and presented my ear.
“Me eat de ems’ of de toas’,” Gail said. She beamed.
I beamed.
We managed to reach Playplace without incident, except for a man who called me an obscenity. The children and I however, called him a great, big alligator head and on the whole, I think, we won. After all, how can a man possibly be right when faced with a woman and eight tiny children?
I herded the children through the Germ Detection Booth and Gail was returned to me with an incipient streptococcus infection.
“Couldn’t you give her the shot here?” I asked. “I’ve just got her in a good mood, and if I have to turn around and take her back home… and besides, her mother works. There won’t be anyone there.”
“Verne, dear, we can’t risk giving the shot until the child is perfectly adjusted to Playplace. You see, she’d connect the pain of the shot with coming to school and then she might never adjust.” Mrs. Baden managed to give me her entire attention and hold a two-and-a-half-year-old child on one shoulder and greet each entering child and break up a fight between two ill-matched four-year-olds, all at the same time.
“Me stay at school,” Gail said resolutely.
There was a scream from the other side of the booth. That was Billy’s best friend. I waited for the other scream. That was Billy.
“Normal aggression,” Mrs. Baden said with a smile.
I picked up Gail. Act first, talk later.
“Oh, there she is,” Mrs. Baden said, taking my elbow with what could only be a third hand.
Having heard we’d have a Hiserean child in Billy’s group, I managed not to look surprised.
“Mrs. His-tara, this is Verne Barrat. Her Billy will be in Hi-nin’s group.”
I was immediately frozen with indecision. Should I shake hands? Merely smile? Nod? Her hands looked wavery and boneless. I might injure them inadvertently.
I settled on a really good smile, all the way back to my bridge. “I am so delighted to meet you,” I said. I felt as though the good will of the entire World Conference rested on my shoulders.
Her face lighted up with the most sincere look of pleasure I’ve ever seen. “I am glad to furnish you this delight,” she said, with a good deal of lisping over the dentals, because Hisereans have fore-shortened teeth. She embraced me wholeheartedly and gave me a scaly kiss on the cheek.
My first thought was that I was a success and my second thought was, Oh, God, what’ll happen when Billy gets hold of little Hi-nin? Hisereans, as I understood it, simply didn’t have this “normal aggression.” Indeed, I sometimes have trouble believing it’s really normal.
“I was thinking,” Mrs. Baden said, putting down t
he two-and-a-half-year-old and plucking a venturesome little girl in Human Fly Shoes from the side of the building, “that you all might enjoy having Hi-nin in your car pool.”
“Oh, we’d love to,” I said eagerly. “We’ve got five mamas and eight children already, of course, but I’m sure everyone—”
“It would trouble you!” Mrs. His-tara exclaimed. Her eye stalks retracted and tears poured down her cheeks. “I do not want to be of difficulty,” she said.
Since she had no apparent handkerchief and wore some sort of permanent-looking native dress, I tore a square out of my paper morning dress for her.
“You are too good!” she sobbed, fresh tears pouring out.
“No, no. I already tore out two for the children. I always get my skirts longer in cold weather because children are so careless about carrying—”
“Then we’ll consider the car pool settled?” Mrs. Baden asked, coming in tactfully.
“Naturally,” I said, mentally shredding my previous sentence. “We would feel so honored to have Hi-nin—”
“Do not think of putting yourself out. We do not have a helicopter, of course, but Hi-nin and I can so easily walk.”
I was rapidly becoming unable to think of anything at all because Gail was trying to use me for a merry-go-round and I kept switching her from hand to hand and I could hear her beginning to build up the ba-bas.
“My car pool,” I said, “would be terribly sad to think of Hi-nin walking.”
“You would?”
“Terribly.”
“In such a case—if it will give you pleasure for me to accept?”
“It would,” I said fervently, holding Gail under one arm as she was beginning to kick.
And on the way home all the second thoughts began.
I would be glad to have Hi-nin in the car pool. Four of the other mamas were like me, amazed that anyone was willing to put up with her child all the way to and from Playplace. I could count on them to cooperate. But Gail’s mama… I’d gone to Western State Preparation for Living with Regina Raymond, Crowley.
I landed on the Crowley home and tooted for five minutes before I remembered that Regina was at work.
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