Giles Goat Boy (70 page)

“
Among the rash of modern researches into the political and economic life of the early West-Campus colleges one finds frequent mention of Milo and the heifer—for example, in E. J. B. Sandry’s scholarly analysis of the old enmity between the Divisions of Agriculture and Athletics in the Lykeionian Academy. Yet while one welcomes new light on studentdom’s history from whatever source, one cannot but regret the deprecatory tone of these investigators and the glib iconoclasm especially manifest in their handling of traditional anecdotes. Sandry’s suggestion, for example, that Xanthippides saw in ‘the Milo affair’ an opportunity to ‘… pull the collective beard of the Ag Hill Lobby
[
sic
]’
as a gesture of mollification to Coach Glaucon, who was miffed at the large appropriation for new mushroom-houses, is more exasperating by reason of its partial truth than are plainly lunatic hypotheses
(e.g.,
that the Chancellor’s hand was forced, there being no other way to unoak the cow; or that the whole incident was cynically pre-arranged by Milo and the Chancellor, or by the School of Athletics, or by some Lykeionian equivalent to the Office of Public Information, for publicity purposes
).”

Surely, I thought, that must end both gloss and gloss-gloss. But the indefatigable scholiast went on to recommend as perhaps the best general work on the whole matter a recently-taped study by one V. Shirodkar, called
There Is One Way:

“
As the title suggests, Shirodkar approaches ‘Khadrunianism’ and ‘Philoeastrianism’ (which
is to say, in a special sense, Entelechism and Scapulism
)
by way of the ambiguity of Xanthippides’s famous observation, and he attempts to combine, or at least subsume, the major traditions into what he calls Mystical Pragmatism. The result, alas, is more syncretion than synthesis, but Shirodkar’s historico-semantic
schema
belongs in every undergraduate notebook. Please Hold and Gloss
.”

Appalled, I did, and from a slot in the console issued, in the form of a printed diagram, this gloss upon the gloss upon the gloss upon Bray’s quotation from Enos Enoch’s allusion to Xanthippides’s remark upon Milo’s misdemeanor:

Even as I endeavored to make sense out of the diagram, the
Hold-
button popped out and the recentest speaker concluded primly:

“
Pragmatic Monism, for example, Shirodkar maintains, comes to quite the same thing as Equipollent Pluralism, and Valuational Monism to the same as Disquiparent Pluralism. That this correspondence
(
which may be merely verbal
)
is ground for synthesis seems doubtful: the position of the old Lykeionian Sub-Department of Dairy Husbandry may, it is true, be assigned with equal justice either to Negative Valuational Monism or to Negative-Superlative Disquiparent Pluralism; but what meeting of minds can be hoped for between Negative Valuational Monism and Positive Valuational Monism, or between Mystical Monism and any of the others? These secondary and tertiary glosses were prepared by your Sub-Department of Comparative Philosophical History
.”

I chewed nervously on Shirodkar’s historico-semantic
schema
, waiting to see what would happen next. The
Gloss
-button popped up and automatically redepressed itself, whereupon the voice of the earlier commentator, the Agricultural-History man, resumed his own conclusion—no advertisement after all:

“… Heifer House, which generations of exchange-students have been surprised to find is no stock-barn but the ancient headquarters of the Lykeionian Campus Patrol, stands where Sophie’s Oak reputedly stood. The exact site of the tree is marked by a bronze disc let into the floor of what was formerly an auxiliary detention-chamber. Thank you
.”

Up came
Gloss
and
Hold
simultaneously, down went
Lecture
, and at once into my headset Bray’s voice rang, more impassioned even than before:

“Learned Founder! Liberal Artist! Dean of deans and Coach of coaches, to whose memos we still turn in time of doubt: stand by us through these dark hours in Academe! Teach me, that am Thy least professor, to profess no thing but truth; that am Thy newest freshman advisor, not to misadvise those minds—so free of guile and information—Thou has committed to my trust. Help me to grasp Thy rules; make clear Thy curricular patterns as the day; Thy prerequisites unknot for me to broadcast with the chimes. Enlighten the stupid; fire with zeal the lowest percentile; have mercy on the recreant in Main Detention and the strayed in Remedial Wisdom; be as a beacon in the Senate, a gadfly in the dorms. Be keg and tap behind the bar of every order, that the brothers may chug-a-lug Thy lore, see Truth in the bottom of their steins, and find their heads a-crack with insight. Be with each co-ed at the evening’s close: paw her with facts, make vain her protests against learning’s advances; take her to
Thy mind’s backseat, strip off preconceptions, let down illusions, unharness her from error—that she may ere the curfew be infused with Knowledge. Above all, Sir, stand by me at my lectern; be chalk and notes to me; silence the mowers and stay the traffic that I may speak; awaken the drowsy, confound the heckler; bring him to naught who would digress when I would not, and would not when I would; take my words from his mouth who would take them from mine; save me from slip of tongue and lapse of memory, from twice-told joke and unzippered fly. Doctor of doctors, vouchsafe unto me examples of the Unexampled, words to speak the Wordless; be now and ever my visual aid, that upon the empty slate of these young minds I may inscribe, bold and squeaklessly, the Answers!”

I shucked the earphones and left the stall—moved to the pasterns by his rhetoric, dazed with envy at the force of his imposture. No one else seemed to be leaving: perhaps the orientation-lecture was not ended, or perhaps they had availed themselves of more glosses than had I. But I could hear no more; I left the hall despite my horn-rimmed helper’s information that one could select questions from a prepared list to ask the commentators by remote control. Aside from my distress, I saw no help for my Assignment in that learned chatter, and sad to relate, Bray not only had reminded me, with the Milo epigram, of my responsibility to Max, but had tutored me as well. More accurately, his description of class- and course-work as merely one among a number of possible means to Commencement (a sentiment so recognizably Affirmative-Eclectic-Disquiparent-Pluralistic that I never doubted he had lifted it from some old Hierarchical Adverbialist, probably without permission) gave a rationale to what had been my inclination since leaving the barn: to waste no further time on books and lectures. Matriculation yes, class-attendance no; I must wrest my Answers like swede-roots by main strength from their holes.

I flung away the
schema
, unpalatable even literally, and fetched a morning newspaper from a trashcan near the exit, thinking to tide myself over until lunch with its inklesser pages. But bannered across the top was the headline SPIELMAN CONFESSES, followed by two columns that confirmed what Stoker had told me: Max had surrendered himself to the Campus Patrol and declared himself guilty of the murder of Herman Hermann, substantiating the confession with exact details of the scene, time, and circumstances of the crime. He had been sitting by the roadside not far from Founder’s Hill, the news-report said, when he was accosted by a man in the uniform of a Powerhouse guard, astride a motorcycle, who offered him a ride. The two shortly afterwards fell to quarreling over political matters, and upon recognizing the guard as Herman Hermann,
the Bonifacist Moishiocaust, Max had been so overmastered with desire for revenge that he had shot the man with his own pistol. Nay, further: “according to the Grand Tutor,” who had interviewed him at some length in Main Detention, Max admitted to having harbored for years a secret yen not merely to settle a part of the Moishian score against the Bonifacists, but, for a change, to be the persecutor instead of the victim. Yet once he had arrogated this position (so Bray claimed) a wondrous change had come over my advisor’s heart.
“The fact that Dr. Spielman cannot, by his own admission, repent of the murder, has had a remarkable effect on his spirit,”
Bray was quoted as saying.
“The secular-studentism which he had always formerly espoused assumes that the heart is essentially educable and ultimately Passable; faced with the revelation of his own failing, however, Dr. Spielman now sees that the heart is flunkèd, desperately flunkèd; that what it needs is not instruction but Commencement; not a professor but a Grand Tutor, to Graduate it out of hand and with no Examination; otherwise all is lost, for however we may aspire to the state of Graduateship, we may never hope to deserve it
.” And Max himself had allegedly said to Bray, “By me the only way to pass is to pass away,” and had requested capital punishment “as a Make-Up for his failure.” Campus sentiment, I read, was even more sharply divided than before; the old issues of Max’s former leftish connections and his opposition to the “Malinoctis” program had been revived, though with far less virulence than when they had led to his dismissal. Liberal sentiment, as always pretty generally in his favor, was embarrassed by his confession of violence; right-wingers, on the other hand, while inclined to despise him on principle (and to view the murder as evidence of a Student-Unionist conspiracy to assassinate all ex-Bonifacists now doing important work for New Tammany), were much impressed by the humble tone of his confession, in which they seemed to hear a recantation not only of Student-Unionism in favor of Informationalism, but of Moishianism in favor of Enochism. “Go now, and flunk no more,” appeared to be their net reaction, whereas the liberals’ was just the contrary: that Max had formerly been among the persecuted Passed, but now had flunked himself. The argument had grown in tenser, I read, since early morning, when the prisoner had been Certified for Candidacy by the new Grand Tutor—who, however, emphasized to reporters that the Certification by no means implied that Max was innocent of the murder or deserving of mitigated punishment: “Passèd are the flunked,” Bray had quoted from the Founder’s Scroll, “who repent and suffer for their failings.”

What alarmed me, other than Max’s confession itself, was not that Bray
had Certified him—he seemed to be Certifying everyone—but that Max had evidently accepted the Certification, as if Bray were qualified to give it! And how had Bray found time to visit Main Detention in addition to the hundred other things he seemed to have got done since the previous evening? Pressing as was the deadline for my Assignment, I resolved to go to Main Detention at once and hear from Max’s lips that all these allegations were false. For that matter, he might advise me how to attack most efficiently my list of labors, as he had pre-counseled me so valuably through the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate.

How to get to Main Detention? My first impulse was to look up and down the mall for Peter Greene. Had I appreciated the size and populousness of New Tammany I’d never have bothered—but I did not, and espied him at once. Four elms up and one over, he was doing calisthenics on the grass, almost the only person in sight. A kind of stationary jog: I heard him panting “Right! Right! Right!” in rhythm with his step as I approached, not alone to mark the cadence, it turned out, but in some wise to reassure himself as well; it was in fact the motto he’d lent me at Turnstile-time, reaccented for its present use:

“I’mall
right!
I’mall
right!
I’mall
right!
”

It developed, however—when I saluted him and hove in range of his working eye—that he was not all right. From the Assembly-Before-the-Grate, where I’d last seen him, he had proceeded dutifully to a first-period lecture in a course very close to his concerns,
Problems of Modern Marriage
, hoping to learn something useful; for though he was still resolved to put by Miss Sally Ann and pay court to Anastasia, he was much afflicted with bad conscience and wanted to satisfy himself that his union really was unsalvageable—and that his wife was chiefly to blame for its disintegration. But he’d “plumb fergot,” he told me, how tiresome it was to be a schoolboy. As the lecturer (on closed-circuit Telerama) had droned on about such matters as “contemporary role-confusion and attendant anxieties,” he had first fallen asleep, then diverted himself by making spitballs and carving initials in his desktop, and finally left the building on the pretext of visiting the toilet.

“It’s over
my
head,” he complained to me. “Durn if it ain’t!” How ever he would pass without going to school, he confessed he had no idea, any more than he knew how he could live without the woman he loved but could not live with. “Weren’t for Bray’s diploma I’d swear I was flunked, interpersonal-relationwise,” he admitted. “Figured I’d come out and get me a breath of air, take a little pill, try ’er again.”

I could not discern whether by The Woman He Loved But
etc
. he meant
his wife or Anastasia; I did not inquire. Indeed, for all my good fortune at finding him so readily, it was with some misgiving that I asked him to transport me to Main Detention, for I feared he’d hold me to my promise of intercession with Anastasia’s mother. But though he was delighted by the errand and “the chance to get to know Stacey’s family better”—as if Maurice Stoker were her father!—he made no mention of that mad embassy; it did his spirits a campus of good, he declared, to learn that I too had cut my first class. Much of his eagerness to oblige me, I presently observed, stemmed from his pride in a new motorcycle he’d acquired just after registration, and had yet to try out on the open road. He showed me it, parked nearby: an astonishing contraption, all chromium plated, larger-engined than any of Stoker’s, and equipped with every manner of accessory: headlights, fog-lights, spotlights, signal-lights, Telerama, air-horns that blasted the opening phrase of
Alma Mater Dolorosa
, a liquor cabinet, three dozen dials and control-knobs, an air-conditioned sidecar, and upholstery of stripèd fur. It was so new he’d not had time even to remove the mirrors (of which there were half a dozen); they were merely turned away from him. He bobbed his head happily.