Testimony and Demeanor

by John D. Casey

  I thought Honorée was peering at me, and even seeing for the first time that I had a nervous flaw.

  But she said, “Oh. Don’t worry. You don’t have to give me a ride to get your kiss.”

  I was surprised by this now perfect misunderstanding. And now Honorée, having surprised herself, blushed up to her eyes. We looked at each other. She was stopped dead, no momentum of teasing to help her. More slowly than I would have ever imagined, she moved upstream against the current of my look. She was still nervous, but solemnly certain of giving pleasure. As she slid her feet forward, she took a shallow breath through her nose that made her head bob. We kissed, and then Honorée relaxed completely, as though her curiosity, her duty, her worry, her expectation, were all lifted up. She leaned on me happily for an instant, as though she was a castaway washed ashore on me by a long wave. It was really her pleasure and trust that touched me. For a short while I thought that was all there was to it, that all I had to be was the shore soothed by the wave.

  I slowly worked my way through my piles of blue books and final term papers. I also had to sit on a committee which reviewed a number of the examinations graded by teaching assistants.

  At the end of this miserable week I drove to the Cedar Rapids airport to pick up Elizabeth Mary Chetty. The department chairman seemed impressed that I knew her. I felt as though I’d won a prize when she moved in to share my office.

  She seemed glad to see me, and soon had me convinced that we were old chums. She was as argumentative as ever, but now that we were suddenly friends I found I even liked her retrospectively. I could now cluck amiably and familiarly at her brilliant wrong-headedness, rather than feel shriveled at the thought of her heresies being rewarded.

  Our basic disagreement was this: She regarded criticism as the highest form of creative amalgamation. She wished to swoop down on the wings of theory from her aerie on a timeless mountain and carry off her prey, whose most edible innards she called “structures.” She in her turn regarded me as a worm, writhing around forever in “the period,” munching my way through even the third- and fourth-rank writers, provided they smelled and tasted like “the period.”

  We insulted each other merrily. She would say, “Oh, Oliver—you are nothing but an encomiast. You are nothing but an aestheticizer. You wish to preserve the innocence of everything and everybody. If only you could insinuate yourself into the brain of some typical Elizabethan groundling actually seeing a Shakespeare play then and there, you would think you’d found the truth. That is how puny it is to be ‘true to the age.’ ”

  And I would say that she loved dangerous ideas just because they were dangerous and that her theories were nothing but jujitsu holds and that she was only happy when an author was at her feet.

  I confess that she was more consistent with her simple worm metaphor than I was with my eagle and jujitsu.

  She said, “There. Now we both have said the very worst. I feel good enough to go back to work. And please don’t tempt me into chatting when we are in our office together; there it must be work, work, work.”

  Within two days of her arrival she was swamped with applicants for her upper-level seminar. She ruthlessly chucked out all but the brightest. I was impressed with her quick scan of who they were. The next day she invited me along to lunch with two senior members of the department. She was brilliantly chatty. She alluded to their works shamelessly. She took the major theory in one senior colleague’s book and wiggled it like a loose tooth. The colleague whose tooth it was was seized with the sensation which he finally decided was pleasurable.

  The next day both senior members showed up for the first lecture of her survey course, giving it an air of grand occasion as they tried to make themselves unobtrusive, settling into the cushioned seats of the lecture hall, their scarves dangling around their necks like albs. The students beside them stuffed their own snow-sogged parkas and field jackets aside, away from the ranking overcoats. The senior presences made soothing gestures with their fingers, meaning don’t mind me, don’t bother, just dropping in.

  Several students handed out mimeographed sheets—the reading list, the next twenty lecture topics with keyed reading assignments, and a detailed outline of the day’s lecture.

  All these formal details, I saw with some envy, roused the students to a state of nervous attention. Elizabeth Mary didn’t let it lapse. I was surprised at her tone. She wasn’t at all playful now—in fact, she seemed not only totally serious but furious. So furious and concentrated did she seem that it took me a while to realize that she wasn’t going very fast. Quite right for a middle-level survey. This wasn’t a dissection of the nervous system of the work she was discussing—rather a carving of the several large muscles and bones. And she certainly had no trouble finding the joints.

  Several days later I suggested to her that she’d had no trouble finding the joints in the local corpus of authority either. She turned her elegant attention on me.

  “Shall I give you a piece of advice, Oliver? I am amusing myself here, and I shall soon be gone to fresh fields and pastures new. But I would like to help you. It is not enough for you to just work, work, work. It is not even enough for you to have an idea that bursts like a bombshell. What one in your case must do is this—one presents one’s ideas quite fiercely, aiming quite directly at the established positions of someone quite important. But then it is absolutely crucial that one has a good chat afterward with this important fellow. One does not back down—not at all. But one makes it clear that one sees his points and that one is given pause. Then, after several days during which one is visibly knitting one’s brows, one has another chat and one admits that certain restatements and even revisions are being considered most seriously. Either of two things may happen. One”—she held up one slender toasted finger—“one is seen as the harbinger of new ideas, but in the guise of loyal opposition, not as some rude radical. Or two”—she held up another finger—“one is seen as a possible convert well worth the converting. One is not listened to if one is only muttering one’s ideas to oneself and keeping out of sight. Even your own Bible tells you it is better to be the one lost sheep rather than the ninety-nine silly sheep who are staying quietly in the fold.”

  I said, “So that’s the secret.”

  Elizabeth held up her whole hand and said, “Are you being arch with me, Oliver? You can be very sweet or you can be a little bit sour. I am in perfectly good faith with you. This advice would not be of use unless one has done one’s work. It would be of no use at all if one were not serious.” She rose suddenly, took two steps, and stood over me. She patted the back of my hand sharply and then let her fingertips rest on it. “You have an interesting sensibility, Oliver, and I think it is going to blossom in a most intricate way.” I was deeply, deeply charmed.

  Honorée came by the next day to ask me to approve her application to “test out” of her second half of the required composition course. I said I would miss her in class.

  She said, “Well, don’t be sad. I’ll still drop by to say hi, for heaven sakes.”

  We discussed her courses. It turned out she was taking Elizabeth Mary’s survey course. I asked Honorée how she liked it.

  She said, “Miss Chetty’s just wonderful. That’s who I’d really like to be like. I’d carry a torch for her.”

  I said, “Carry a torch?”

  She said, “You know—lead a parade.”

  I explained to her what carrying a torch means.

  “Oh, dear,” Honorée said. “I thought it was like a torch in a ceremony, like the Olympic Games. Oh, dear.” She put her hand over her mouth and giggled through it. “I’m glad it was you I said it to. I might have said it in public.”

  I said, “So. Now that you’re an actress you care more for your public. Your movie part has gone to your head.”

  Honorée blushed. “Oh, that. But you know what I mean. I mean I don’t care your knowing some silly details about me because you know everything about the way I am really.”


  I was suddenly touched by her. I could feel her efforts to ascend, and there was a surge of sympathetic aspiration in me, a bright echo of her buoyancy. Her full face appeared inspired, her large eye sockets like great rose windows in a new church. She gave her nervous laugh, looked away, composed her face, and looked back at me, chewing her lower lip. My saying nothing made her more nervous than my schooling her.

  She said, “Well, I’ll see you in class.”

  I said, “Well, if you’re going to test out there’s not much point.”

  She said, “Well, if I don’t I don’t want to fall behind.”

  Our next class, it was Miss Quist’s turn to do “My Favorite Magazine.”

  “My Favorite Magazine,” Miss Quist said. “My favorite magazine is College Girl. I’ve tried Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and Glamour and Mademoiselle, and let’s face it—College Girl gets right to work for us girls from the Midwest. Girls in other parts of the country don’t have the problems we do. Southern belles have something going for them—all those books and movies. And everyone thinks California girls are tan all over. [Laughter from the class] So let’s say you’re a nice girl from a small town in the Midwest and you want to get in on the fun. Well, there’s this one column in College Girl that gives you game plans. Just about everyone in my dorm has picked up a move or two from this column.

  “Here’s a summary of one article I know has been helpful for a certain kind of girl.

  “Let’s say you’re not getting a rush from the college boys. Let’s say your first year in college is as dull as your last year in high school. What does college have that high school doesn’t? A lot more men, that’s what! So what if you can’t get in with the kids who go out for pizza and beer after the football game. There are lots of men at a college who have other interests—from astronomy to zoology. A lot of these guys are perfectly nice and there’s nothing wrong with them just because they’re a little bit older. So what if they’ve spent the last five years reading Latin and Greek. Someone’s going to wake them up sometime and it might as well be you.

  “So how do you start? You ask him for help. You say, I’m sorry, but you seem to have the only copy of Dante’s Inferno in Italian. Then you say, ‘No, I don’t speak Italian. I just wanted to see what it looked like.’ Then you say, ‘Oh, you do! Would you read some to me?’ And then you close your eyes.

  “Tell him it was deeply moving, but be sure you go away soon. Just a spoonful of this stuff at a time. It’s awful rich and you don’t want to upset him.

  “If you drop by his office or library cubbyhole to ask him to recommend some reading, remember, don’t ever stay too long: always have somewheres else to go. Cinderella didn’t get the prince to come looking for her by being the last to leave the party.

  “And then when you get him to explain such and such a part of his recommended reading, you might argue just a teensy bit, but in the end you say, ‘Oh! Oh, I see!’

  “Now, these grad students and instructors are a little different from your normal Joe College in some little ways. Here’s a little hint that should suggest the kind of delicate treatment you should use. Let’s say you’ve got to the point where you’ve got to leave a note on his door, or under his door, or with the department secretary. Don’t—do not!—put it in a pink envelope with big girlish handwriting. Typed address on a plain envelope, puh-leez. This subspecies of male doesn’t go for holding hands in public either. He may not even want to appear in public with you. He’s not ashamed of you—he’s just shy. Intellectually he may be a graybeard, but emotionally he may be younger than you are.

  “Take some walks. Get him outdoors and tell him how much better he looks with color in his cheeks. He’ll begin to think you’re what’s good for his health.”

  It was not until this point that I realized what Miss Quist was up to. If I hadn’t overheard her talking to Miss O’Rourke, I might not have understood. I had moved to the back row for Miss Quist’s speech. Honorée was sitting in the front row but I could see that her neck and arms were tense.

  Miss Quist moved on in her march to the sea. She said, “This particular article of this particular column for this kind of girl even gave some more tips. It said that you couldn’t just stick to academic topics, but you could always count on holding a man’s interest by getting him to tell stories about how he got started in his interests and how he had a hard time because the other kids thought he was a bookworm.

  “Well, you can certainly see how helpful this sort of advice could be in building up confidence for a particular sort of reader. I’m not going to tell you what article it was in this column that gave me some of my ideas, but it was helpful to me too along those different lines that might interest me. So that’s why College Girl is my favorite magazine. Thank you.”

  I would like to be able to say that I crushed Miss Quist. That I said, “It is clear that you were speaking of Miss Hogentogler and me, but you fell short, as envy and malice will always fall short. As envy and malice will always be too small to know the truth.” And so forth.

  I have even imagined that I should have said, “Miss Hogentogler, will you be my wife?” and that that perfect gesture would have filled us both with such sympathy that each of us would have understood the other’s life in such a way that we could have lived it.

  I realize that by having this extravagant fantasy of impossible rightness, I am only trying to avoid facing the smaller possibilities that existed then to have done something good. As it was, I let the moment pass in a muddle. I think I was even frightened by the glitter of Miss Quist’s wicked nerve.

  I remember thinking that I had seen a flash of envy that lighted up something I hadn’t ever quite understood—that is, Iago. I made a note of this small perception.

  Honorée left a note in my mailbox saying she’d successfully “tested out.”

  For a day or so I was too ashamed to call her. I finally did phone her at her new boardinghouse. She wasn’t in and the rather unpleasant landlady said she wouldn’t take a message. She said, “They’re supposed to get their own phones in their own rooms. I can’t go keeping track of all their boyfriends.” She added, “This is an approved university rooming house,” and hung up.

  The next week I was buried under work again, and Elizabeth Mary told me that she’d read what I’d done on my dissertation and wished to discuss it. That discussion and its aftermath took all my concentration. Elizabeth Mary thought it was pretty good, but wanted a larger sense of context in the introduction and something more vital by way of conclusion. She pointed out that it wasn’t too late to go shopping for a better job if I got it done right away.

  So it wasn’t until a month had passed that I really missed Honorée’s visits. And then I was reminded not by Honorée but by Miss Quist’s dropping by during my evening office hours.

  She was dressed in a business suit with a ruffled blouse and would have looked quite prim had she not been wearing shiny raspberry lipstick and matching nail polish. She’d been in class regularly but we hadn’t spoken since her speech.

  I asked her to sit down. She sat in silence for a moment. She looked forlorn, but I didn’t trust her.

  She said, “Is your officemate going to come in?”

  I said she wasn’t.

  Miss Quist said, “I asked that because this is going to be really hard to say. I want to say I’m really sorry, I really didn’t mean any harm, I just meant to tease Honorée a little and I didn’t think anyone would get it except her because she’d talked about how much she liked you but just to me and I didn’t think anyone else knew. I mean, it could have been some of the other girls. A lot of the girls think you’re really neat. Kathy O’Rourke said she thought it might be her. You can ask her.”

  I had a clear memory of Miss Quist’s and Miss O’Rourke’s conversation by Pioneer Woman.

  I said, “I’m sure Miss O’Rourke would back you up.”

  “Well, anyway, I just wanted to say that I’m really, really sorry. It was really dumb of m
e to fool around like that with Honorée’s feelings. I know I was just trying to be funny, but I guess I’m just not any good at that kind of humor. So I’m going to apologize to Honorée and I just felt I should apologize to you too.”

  Miss Quist stood up. I stood up. She took my hand and shook it, saying, “There, I’m sorry.” She put her left hand on top of our joined hands for emphasis.

  I was surprised when she sat back down. She said, “Now, this part is just as hard. I’ll tell you—my dad always told me never to ask for anything I hadn’t earned by working for it. I really believe that. So here’s what’s bothering me a little. My sorority is going to put me up for homecoming queen next fall. Now, I probably won’t make queen, but I might just make one of the princesses of the court. But the deal is this. I have to have a three point for the sorority to do it so that people don’t think the homecoming queen election is just a beauty contest. So I was doing fine, I had a three point one for the fall, but now I may not. My big paper for your course only got a two five. So I thought maybe it was because you were upset over what we were just talking about—about Honorée and all.”

  I started to speak, but Miss Quist went on.

  “I know you’re fair and everything. And I wouldn’t blame you for anything. I just wanted you to feel how important this is to me. I mean, I’ll do it over, or I can do extra work, or anything you say.”

  I said, “I’ll get another opinion. But I must warn you, if the grade comes back lower—”

  “Oh, Mr. Hendricks—oh, that wouldn’t work. It’s your opinion. I’m not just asking you about the paper—it’s all the work. I know I made a mistake and you have every right not to forgive me if that’s the way you feel.” She leaned forward in her chair, wringing her hands. I felt uncomfortable, but I knew I could resist her. I believed she was capable of the ridiculous cliche of offering her favors, in which case I thought I would ask her if that was what her dad had in mind when he’d told her to ask only for her due. I was prepared to be brutal.