It Will Come to Me (4 page)

“Ah,” said Barbara, in her characteristic I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself tone. “Now that I don't believe. You are one person who is
always
up to something, at least up here.” She tapped her temple. “Weren't you telling us about some fascinating idea for a novel? About Alzheimer's?”

Ruth had been afraid she'd remember this. Six or eight months ago the Bachmans had hosted one of their entertainments, a blind wine-tasting followed by parlor games. At the end of the evening, when she and Ben were standing in the foyer in a crowd of guests attempting to get past Barbara and out the door, Barbara asked her what she was writing these days. Feeling exposed and embarrassed and suspecting that Barbara knew quite well she wasn't
writing anything, Ruth mumbled that she'd been working on a novel about Alzheimer's entitled
It Will Come to Me.

“What's that?” Barbara had asked, sharply enough to turn heads. “A novel about what?” “Alzheimer's,” said Ruth. Suddenly she was at the center of an urgent buzz of discussion. Everyone had something urgent to say. Stories about relatives who suffered from the condition. Reports of new research pointing to the benefits offish oil. Other reports implicating the heavy metals found in farm-raised fish. Millicent McCordle, an elderly classicist married to another elderly classicist, tugged at her sleeve and confided that she'd been worrying recently about forgetting names. “Oh, I'm no expert, Millicent,” said Ruth. It was another twenty minutes before they got out the door.

“I'm sorry, Barbara,” she said now. “That was a joke.” “Ah,” said Barbara. “I see. A joke.” A small puzzled smile played around her lips. “A joke. About Alzheimer's.” As she considered this she allowed her gaze to wander out over the twinkling night campus. “Oh yes,” she said, as if recalling herself from an absence. “I've been meaning to ask you. How's Isaac? Just the other day I saw a study …”

B
en's office was on the third floor of Horace Dees Hall, newly built in memory of Horace Deming Dees, former director of the board of trustees. Horace Dees was the great-nephew of Lola Dees, founder of the university which began ninety years ago as the Lola Dees Institute. To the world these days it was LDI; to residents of Spangler, Texas, it was Loladees, emphasis on the third syllable; to students and faculty it was Lola. As the LDI Raptors loped onto the football field the brass section of the marching band blared “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets.” And when, as sometimes happened, the Raptors scored a touchdown, the crowd rose to its feet and bellowed out a chorus of the old song by the Kinks:

Even if athletics was not its strong suit, Spangler was proud of Loladees. “The Harvard of the South,” they called it. The school was highly rated and hard to get into; the students were earnest and well behaved. If they were geeks, Spanglerites loved them all the more for it, as they would have loved an odd bright late-born child. They smiled indulgently at the tame university-sanctioned pranks that were part of orientation week every fall. They treated the faculty with a deference usually found in German university towns; Ben never tired of hearing himself addressed as
“Doctuh
Blau.” The university was strongest in the sciences, particularly in physics and engineering and microtechnology A few years earlier a study committee had been appointed to consider how better to balance the curriculum, and when it was decided to free up a portion of the university's considerable endowment to build Horace Dees Hall, it was also decided that the building would serve as the new home of the humanities departments.

The doors of the new building had opened a year ago, admitting a stream of historians and metaphysicians and Chaucer scholars. All of them had come from a diaspora of small dark offices in departmental rabbit warrens, where secretaries were wedged into spaces between filing cabinets, junior faculty banished to carrels in the basement of the library, graduate teaching assistants forced to conduct student conferences in the halls. The space and light and palatial proportions of the new building were almost too much for them. They wandered blinking into the great ground-floor lobby with its marble floors and mosaic murals and made their dazed way through wide, gracious hallways to their new
high-ceilinged offices, all of them carpeted in smart beige-and-black tweed and fitted with mahogany desks and commodious built-in bookshelves. Each had its own upholstered reading chair and Swedish-designed reading lamp. A few had fireplaces.

Even now, the building smelled faintly of new plaster and paint. As Ben walked along the hall from the elevator to his office he passed a display of photographs of the university's first four graduating classes, groups of seven and twenty and thirty-five and fifty, standing in black frock coats and ankle-length white dresses in front of the lone brick building that was the Lola Dees Institute in those days, surrounded on all sides by tuffed prairie. Peering into these pictures, examining the stern young faces preserved under glare-free glass, Ben found it impossible not to feel a little thrilled at how far the university had come, and how far he had come as well. He was probably a fathead, he admitted to himself, to feel this way; his colleagues would scoff if they knew. Their attitude toward the new home the university had provided them had advanced very quickly from gratitude to skepticism, and in some cases from skepticism to resentment. The grumbling in the halls had started before Thanksgiving: How was it that all the humanities departments—including political science and sociology and anthropology, which for reasons no one could remember had long been members of the division—were expected to occupy a single building when physics and chemistry and engineering each had their own? Hadn't they been relegated to a golden ghetto? Wasn't there a marginalizing impulse at work here, hiding behind the show of largesse? It was undeniable that the results of throwing them all in together had been mixed. Old enmities had been exacerbated by new proximities. Somebody was probably making notes for a study even now.

Ben's office—a chair's office—was half again the size of his colleagues’ and equipped with a mini-fridge stocked with bottles of mineral water and a modular leather couch and a Brobdingnagian glass coffee table mounted on a pitted concrete pillar. One wall was all but taken up with a multipaned, floor-to-ceiling window looking down over a park of live oaks run through with brick walkways. Ben tended to keep his distance from the window: its size and clarity frightened him. He never felt quite comfortable in the office, never quite unobserved. He'd found that he was unable to do his own writing in this bright room; since the move to the humanities building he'd been working on his altruism manuscript at home in the mornings and coming into the office in the afternoons. He found it difficult to read here as well. The light was excellent and the armchair quite comfortable, but for some reason he couldn't bring himself to fling his leg over its armrest. He felt obliged to sit stiffly upright.

This morning, the first day of classes, he was sitting in that armchair inching his way through an article entitled “Hard and Soft Duties” in
Acta Ethica Scandinaviensis.
After twenty minutes he flung the journal aside and moved to his desk to sort through the conference fliers and lecture announcements and publishers’ catalogs he'd found in his mailbox. Checking his e-mail, he found a communication from his editor at Priggers Learning, reminding him that the third edition of
Social Ethics: Problems, Principles, and Prospects
, Blau and Federman, editors, was due to go into production in less than a month. Bruce Federman was one of those academics who spends most semesters on leave in pleasant places like Florence or Geneva. At the moment, he was in Majorca, having left all the work of putting together the third edition to Ben.

Next came four requests for letters of recommendation. Two of these had come from graduate students for whom he had letters on file that would take only a few minutes to adapt. The third was from an undergraduate major who'd gone on to do graduate work at NYU and was now on the job market. He remembered her as a capable but odd girl whose affect was so disturbingly flat that encounters with her left him feeling as if he'd just stepped out of a high-speed elevator. She suffered from chronic postnasal drip; her classmates complained about her disruptive snorts and swallowings. Hard to imagine what kind of teacher she'd make, but he'd learned how to leave a soft spot here and there on the otherwise tautly inflated surfaces of these recommendations to convey reservations he couldn't make explicit. The last was from a student he'd apparently taught eleven years ago, of whom he had no memory. There were no computer records from that era and the physical files had long since been moved from academic offices to a morgue in the basement of the administration building. The days when he could have wandered down there and looked through the files himself were over; he'd have to go through an elaborate procedure to initiate a search for this student's transcript. Or Dolores would, if he could bring himself to delegate such a small task, or perhaps the work-study student.

Finally, there was a memo from Roberta Mitten-Kurz, the humanities dean. “Dear Colleague” it began:

SCAC was the acronym for Southern Collegiate Assessment Commission, an initiative aimed at enforcing accreditation standards according to a purportedly objective set of criteria. Grades, he understood, wouldn't do—too subjective—and neither would student transcripts. Instead, the dean's office barraged department chairs with forms and questionnaires and charts and long explanatory memos, all of which Ben had been ignoring for months. There had been some mention of keeping writing samples for entering freshmen on file and comparing them to writing samples produced at graduation, but that seemed so manifestly unfeasible that he'd forgotten it instantly.

Ben's style as chair had always been minimalist and laissez-faire. He had no particular interest in special programs or cross-disciplinary dialogue, only in maintaining the department's day-to-day functioning and, when necessary, making sound hiring decisions. His colleagues didn't seem to mind. He'd heard a rumble or two about administrative dissatisfaction but that hadn't bothered him. Fine, he thought. Let them find another chair. Muriel Draybrooke, for example, who wore the same egg-yolk-encrusted seersucker jacket day in and day out, or Stuart Dilbert, who raised pointless objections in faculty meetings and whose toneless bray put everyone's back up. Ben had no great investment in the job. He was doing it, in fact, for the fairly unselfish reason that he was the only member of the department both capable and willing. He'd seen no reason to pay the SCAC business much attention. He'd understood it as yet another ambitious bureaucratic
scheme, the kind that blew in and out of Lola with the regularity of storms from the Gulf

But the mention of a “next step” in the process alarmed him. What had the previous one or ones been, and how had it or they escaped him? And when had he been “cautioned”? He didn't recall being cautioned. The memo continued:

“Inappropriate affect … long-term adverse consequences”? Ben was staring at these words when Dolores leaned into the room. “Excuse me,” she said. “We've got a little problem. Maintenance can't go into Irv's office.” Ben raised a temporizing finger. He wanted a moment to absorb the import of this memo and think through its implications, and he wanted to do that without consulting Dolores—though he knew quite well that eventually he'd cave and ask her for help.

Dolores was a Jeeves of a secretary, calm and methodical, able, if necessary, to run the department with very little assistance from Ben. Without her he would never have been able to keep the banker's hours that made it possible for him to prepare for his classes and make any kind of steady progress on
The Necessity of Altruism.
Inside her small neat head was a history of the university going back to the late sixties, a map of its labyrinthine bureaucracy, a glossary of acronyms in current use, a file of medical
and marital case histories. She could be trusted to keep these last to herself, except when some grave faux pas was about to be committed. Nobody was better at placating students with grievances, discouraging persistent textbook salesmen, showing the door to the Sephardic nut who cruised the hallways looking for Ashkenazim to berate. She was the envy of all the other humanities chairs, many of whom were saddled with snippy timeservers who could never be fired. On the occasion of her twenty-fifth year of service to the university, the dean gave a reception in her honor. Five of her seven children and a dozen of her grandchildren attended. Her husband, a retired AT&T lineman, held her purse as she accepted flowers and praise and a commemorative plaque.