Poetic Justice (11 page)

“Which will mean,” Polly went on, “actually
mean
that the Linguistics Department will have a specialist in Chinese and
not
in English—can you believe it?”

“Oddly enough, I can,” Kate said. “Who objects to the promotion from University College, have you heard?”

“Well, of course, I’m just a lowly teaching assistant, and none of my news can be called from the horse’s mouth, or even from his immediate neighborhood, but the
general
word is that the College objects, and especially
the new dean who looms on the horizon, though he is as yet nameless.”

“I believe,” Kate said, “I could put a name to him. Polly, you’ve actually come up with something lunch at the Cosmo wouldn’t cure. Give my love to Winthrop and I’ll give yours to Reed.”

“Who’s Reed?” Polly Spence called.

“My husband, more or less,” Kate called back, leaving Polly open-mouthed and speechless on the steps of Baldwin Hall.

T
HE
news that Kate was acquiring a husband became, as the fall semester got under way, the excuse for a bacchanal. Which is to say that the three secretaries in the English Department, certain that marriage is more important than revolution, planned a department party to celebrate. Kate and Reed were to be the honored guests, and everyone who was invited would contribute the necessary funds and come. One may insult one’s colleagues, the administration, or the Board of Governors, but one does not offend secretaries.

“You,” Kate said to Reed, “are my greatest accomplishment. I have achieved the apotheosis of womanhood. To have earned a Ph.D., taught reasonably well, written books, traveled, been a friend and lover—these are mere evasions of my appointed role in life: to lead a man to the altar. You are my sacrifice to the goddess of
middle-class morality, as Iphigenia was Agamemnon’s sacrifice to Artemis. Shall you mind the party frightfully?”

“I shall be giddily amused. Nor had I known the victim enjoyed the sacrifice. I can never remember having been so outrageously happy.”

“Which merely shows how even the sanest man can be the sport of the gods. There are times, Reed, when I wonder if you know what you’re taking on. But I suppose if one ever knew that, one would never do anything. May I urge you to back out, if you so choose, before the party? After it, you are more committed than if the banns had been read in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Secretaries may not be trifled with.”

“What I don’t understand,” Reed said, as they set out for the party, which was being held in the English Department Offices (thus making it semiofficial and obviating the necessity of asking wives), “is what Clemance wanted from you at your lunch
à deux.
”

“I expect he wanted reassurance,” Kate said.

“Clearly; but of what?”

“That he need not change his ways; that those who felt impelled to kill the University College need not be stopped by him.”

“But why should he have expected you to provide the reassurance?”

“That is the question, I know. I think it must have occurred to him that, suffering like him from heartache, I might be induced to back him up in his old-fashioned opinions, particularly since, as he suspected, I had an old-fashioned background whose beauty I was not prepared to deny. You see, his moral nature or his imagination or both caught him up. Of course, Emilia Airhart
thinks that he is a male chauvinist and a company man, and if she’s right, the University College may well be doomed, but I take his choosing to have lunch with me as a sign that she may be wrong.”

“My instincts tell me not to ask, but I will ignore them; who is Emilia Airhart?”

“You’ll meet her tonight—the only other lady member of the department, of tenure rank that is, and therefore on the secretaries’ most exclusive list. I think you’ll like her, if you don’t object to large, downright women on principle. She likes me because she thinks me willowy.”

“You are,” Reed said. “The willowiest of the willowy.”

It was with some trepidation that Kate agreed to take the elevator to the eighth floor. After her dramatic presentations about the wild eccentricities of University elevators, Reed was mildly disappointed to arrive at the English Department with no undue incident whatever. He was immediately taken in tow by the secretaries, provided with drink, and paraded round for introductions for all the world, Reed said later, as though he were some unique specimen miraculously caught in the nets of matrimony—which perhaps he was. Certainly the young ladies could not have been prouder of him if they were planning to marry him themselves. Kate, meanwhile, accepted a drink from Professor Goddard, the medievalist, who offered congratulations.

“I cannot remember,” Kate said, “when I have had so overwhelmingly the sensation of having done something devastatingly clever. As though I had been saved after days in the bottom of a well or lost in the depths of
the forest. And yet you know,” she added, in a more confidential tone of voice, “Reed and I have known and cared for each other for a long time.”

“No matter,” Professor Goddard said. “A wedding is destiny, and hanging likewise.”

“Did
Piers Plowman
say that?” Kate asked. Kate’s total ignorance of
Piers Plowman
was one of her most guilty secrets.

“No. John Heywood; too late to be in my period. But I shall find you a properly dull tag from
Piers Plowman
and have it framed for you both as a wedding present. It may serve, in these days of frantic relevance, to remind you of the importance of the useless.”

“The useless is never important, it is only comforting,” Robert O’Toole said, coming up. “I’m glad you’re getting married,” he added. “All women should be married. An unmarried woman is an offense against nature.” He seemed to find this a marvelously witty remark, despite Kate’s look, which indicated clearly to Reed all the way across the room that Kate was finding Robert O’Toole an offense against nature. Kate, who, when she was really offended, had to think with both hands for a fortnight before becoming possessed of a satisfactory retort, was fortunately saved from beginning on this endeavor by the voice of Emilia Airhart, who had joined them. “What I can never understand about you, Mr. O’Toole,” she said, “is whether you think arrogant bad manners encourage the illusion of manliness, or whether you think that evident unmanliness is somehow obscured by arrogant bad manners.”

Professor Peter Packer Pollinger interrupted whatever response anyone could possibly have found to
make to this observation, which was delivered in the voice of one noticing, pleasantly, some mild natural phenomenon, by strolling up to Kate and handing her a book.

“Didn’t wrap it,” he said. “Many happy weddings.”

“Don’t you mean many happy returns?” one of the secretaries skittishly asked.

“Mean what I say. She’s beginning late, but she may take to it and keep at it, you never know. Here you are, anyway, regardless.” Kate was pleased to receive an old book from which all indication of title and author had long since been eradicated by use. She opened therefore to the title page.
The Mountain Lovers
, she read—Fiona Macleod. “Wasn’t an easy choice,” he said, “for your first wedding.
The Immoral Hour, The Divine Adventure
, or even, though I hope not,
The Dominion
, might have done equally well. Have you ever been lovers on a mountain?”

To this embarrassing question, which ought to have been answered in the affirmative for veracity’s sake, in the negative for the sake of everyone’s feelings, and for propriety’s sake by what her mother used to call a deprecating
moue
, Kate was fortunately saved from responding. (I might, she later observed to Reed, have tried a deprecating
moue
and failed; how awful a thought.) Jeremiah Cudlipp had entered the room, announcing that he had had a terrible day in such stentorian tones that every conversation stopped in deference to him. Kate managed only to take Professor Pollinger’s hand and thank him with the affection and gratitude she felt.

The room was now rather full, and almost all of Kate’s colleagues had found an opportunity to converse
with Reed. As an Assistant D.A. he had no doubt encountered worse ordeals, but this could scarcely be easy, and as Kate regarded the relaxed pose of his long, lanky form from across the room she was suddenly visited with an enormous affection. Odd that she should have to see him in a room full of academics before realizing wherein exactly his unique attraction lay: he was vital without being intense, confident without being assertive, assured without being pompous. She was certain he found this whole phenomenon amusing, and was particularly pleased to see him make his way over to Emilia Airhart—who, naturally, would not want to appear to be looking him over—and engage her in conversation. They appeared to like each other. Into this
tête-à-tête
plunged Jeremiah Cudlipp.

Before Kate could even consider the outcome of such a threesome, Cartier came up to her. He seemed to consider his presence sufficient comment on Kate’s marital state, and plunged immediately into questions about University matters, though it was a moment or two before this became wholly clear. “What do you think,” he asked, “are the chances for things turning out well? Do you feel doomed to frustration, or slightly optimistic?”

“Well …”

“The meeting of the English Department seemed to offer far more hope than I had thought possible; at the same time …”

“O’Toole being chosen as Dean is not a hopeful sign,” Kate said, pulling herself together.

“Most depressing,” Cartier said. “Well, cheers,” he inconsequentially added, and disappeared as Mark Everglade approached.

“I like your Reed Amhearst,” he said. “I thought it only fair to admit that you and I had been stuck in an elevator together in the recent past, and he complimented me on such good company under the circumstances. He’s the first lawyer I’ve ever really cared for, if you want to know. I wonder what the position of the Law School will be on the future of University College.”

“I can answer that, I think,” Kate said. “They will be for it, partly because they resent The College, which acts as though
it
were the University, but mainly because their secretaries take jobs in order to attend University College free; no University College, no secretaries. The same may be said of the School of Public Administration and probably of several others.”

“It really is extraordinary,” Everglade said, “the way one works one’s ass off for important ideas and principles, only to find that decisions are made in the end for reasons of petty convenience by people who have no more stake in the quality or general movement of education than I have in the changing rate of arbitrage. I don’t believe the Trojan War took place over Helen or anyone else. No doubt it began and ended because Hector needed a secretary and Thetis had some sort of working arrangement with Hephaestus about new shields.”

“Homer told that story,” Kate said. “But if, as Auden has pointed out, Hector or Achilles had written the
Iliad
in the first person, we should have had a comedy, as we have here. Besides, Clio did not love the commanders, the big swaggering figures of history, but those who
bred them better horses, found answers to their questions, made their things. If Clio honors anyone, it’s us, I think—not mere commanders.”

“And Cudlipp is a mere commander?”

“Indubitably. Like boys in pimple-time, like girls at awkward ages, what does he do but wish?”

Everglade smiled. “What do
we
do but wish?” he asked.

The room by now was full to overflowing. Reed and Kate were tall, and their eyes met. Plimsole had caught Michaels in a corner and was making a speech of great length. But for Reed, everyone in the room was tired, wearied with meetings, the extra, unthought-of burdens revolution brings, the sense of impermanence which is perhaps the most wearying of all. For none of them had, previously, questioned the University’s power to endure. Certainly one heard of financial crises, community troubles, but for the first time all of them at the University realized that the entire institution might come to grief. Yet, Kate thought, most of the faculty want only to get back to their work—many of them are probably considering offers elsewhere—more money, less turbulence, fewer students. Glancing at Cudlipp, who was now walking toward her, Kate thought of Auden’s question: “And how is—what was easy in the past, A democratic villain to be cast?” Stage front and center, Kate thought.

“May I have a word with you, Professor Fansler?” Cudlipp said in his loud, deep voice. Characteristically, he did not wait for an answer. Why are his questions more insulting than other men’s assumptions? Kate wondered. “I have had a short talk with Frederick Clemance
tonight; he tells me that you two have discussed the future of University College, about which he appears to think there may be some question. He thinks we might at any rate consider the promotion of the two assistant professors we discussed at the recent meeting. I have never heretofore disagreed with Clemance, and I am sorry to do so now. But since you seem to be representing the fight for University College here in the English Department, I thought it only fair to tell you my views. The University College has to go; Bob O’Toole and I have …”

“Come now, Jerry,” Clemance said. “This is a party for Kate and her charming lawyer, not for the thrashing out of departmental affairs.” He placed a hand on Cudlipp’s arm.

“I’ve got a frightful headache,” Cudlipp said, acknowledging nothing. He reached into his pocket for a tube of pills, and shook two of them out into his hand.

“I’ll get you some club soda to take them with,” Clemance said. “You’ve really got to take it a bit easy, you know.” But Cudlipp was gathering his forces. “Look at this catalogue,” he began, haranguing Kate as Clemance came up carrying a glass and a bottle of club soda.