The Veritas Conflict (35 page)

Leyla Lemoine was standing with crossed arms, her foot tapping a double-time beat on the floor. “What is your name, young man?”

Brad looked her in the eye. “Brad. I’m a junior.”

“Well, young Brad, how is it that you have earned the right to criticize your instructors for intellectual dishonesty, to pretend to know more than a well–respected author like Stephen Gould?”

“As I said, Ms. Lemoine, I mean no disrespect to either of you. And I’m only a student; obviously I have many things to learn. Maybe I misunderstood you. But you were talking about something I strongly believe, and it
sounded
like you were teaching incorrect information as if it were true. I felt that I had to raise this point.”

“Ah.” The instructor’s smile was all teeth as she turned to the class. “We have an absolutist in our midst—a person who believes there is actually such a thing as absolute truth. Truth with a capital
T
. Most thinking people in this day and age acknowledge that truth is relative, that there
is
no such thing as ultimate, absolute truth.”

Brad raised his hand again. She called on him with an amused shake of her head.

“Ms. Lemoine, are you sure about that?”

“About what?”

“That there is no absolute truth?”

“Of course I’m sure.” Her congenial expression tightened. “Brad, I am growing tired of this petty—”

“I’m sorry to point this out,” Brad broke in, almost apologetically, “but you just contradicted yourself.”

Muffled giggles sounded throughout the classroom.

“If there is no absolute truth, you can never claim that something is absolutely true—such as saying that you’re completely sure of something.” He smiled politely. “Don’t you think so?”

Claire watched as the instructor struggled to keep her cool and to maintain control of the class. She looked over at Brad.
How does he do that?

A male student sitting near Claire raised his hand. He wore a thin multicolored friendship necklace. Claire knew him only as Jarvis, who came from somewhere in the Caribbean.

As soon as he was called on, he turned tentatively toward Brad. “I do not want to be offensive, but I do not understand how you come here and preach the fundamentalist beliefs with a clear conscience. You cannot impose your views on others who disagree with you.” His slight accent was thick with indignation. “I saw similar argument to yours in a talk show over summer. A television evangelist was guest on the show. He was causing the guilt, judging those who are different. And he also say there is absolute truth. But then talk show host point out that maybe there
is
real truth but since we can’t really know what it is or who has it, the important thing is that you follow your heart wherever it leads. And that will lead you to the real truth. Follow your desires—”

“Yes, yes.” Ms. Lemoine was nodding vigorously up front. “As I say in chapter 4 of my book
Shame No More
, if we can reach into the core of our being, touch and recognize our inmost desires—and act on them without fear, shame, or self-censorship—then that is our means to what is right for us.”

But what if those inmost desires are wrong?
Claire tapped her pencil eraser furiously against her desk. She saw the instructor’s eyes searching the seats for the next student comment and lowered her head.
No, no. No way
.

Ms. Lemoine was studiously ignoring the section of the room where Brad sat. Jo Markowitz slowly raised her hand, and Ms. Lemoine beamed at her. “Yes, Jo.”

“Ms. Lemoine, I loved your book—”

“Thank you.”

“—but actually I had a question about that very part of chapter 4.” Jo flipped through a hardcover book until she found the page she was looking for. “You talk about ‘chipping away at the morass of expectations, traditions, societal mores, and self-judgments until you come to the inner sculpture within the stone: the Desire.’ You say, ‘If we can learn ourselves the way a sculptor learns the silent block of marble, finding and following our most perfect desire, we will achieve our true personhood.’ We will, in other words, achieve what is highest and best for us.”

Jo looked up at the instructor. “But I don’t actually agree that you
have
one perfect inmost desire to follow. Don’t we all have many desires, and aren’t some of them contradictory? I
really want to
be a size eight, and I
really want
to eat all the ice cream in the cafeteria.”

Laughter broke out across the classroom. Jo shrugged, waiting for an explanation.

Claire’s eyes narrowed, her mind hardly registering Ms. Lemoine’s response.
How come I never think of things to say until ten minutes afterward?

That evening, when the usual group from their hallway trooped over to Annenberg for dinner, Claire fell in step with Sherry.

“I’m sorry about this afternoon. I probably came across as judgmental, and I really didn’t mean to.”

Sherry walked a few paces, then shrugged. “No big deal. We’re just different people, that’s all. So is your big meeting with Professor Mansfield tomorrow or another day?”

“Tomorrow.”

A few buildings passed as the two roommates walked side by side in silence.

“You know, I was talking to someone the other day about this great church that’s just one stop down on the T. There’s supposedly some Harvard and MIT students there. Should we try it on Sunday?”

Sherry shrugged again. “Okay.”

Sherry and Claire pulled even with two other students walking just in front of them. They were laughing and joking, and Sherry joined in without missing a beat. Claire watched the surface chatter, her hopes seizing on the new church possibility.
At least that’s something …

After a few moments, Sherry looked back over her shoulder to where Claire was walking alone a few paces behind. Claire watched her hesitate; then Sherry fell back in step with her roommate.

“Look.” She looped her arm through Claire’s. “I’m sorry to be irritable. It’s just the more you push, the more I want to get away. So I have an idea. On Fridays Stefan and his friends always go down to a restaurant in Boston. Why don’t you join us Friday night? We’ll probably leave—oh—eight o’clock, so you’ll have plenty of time to finish up with HCF before we go. What do you say?”

“Well …” Claire pursed her lips, then looked up with a short smile. “Okay. I don’t know any of Stefan’s friends, but I think it’d be good to meet them.”

“Great. Friday.”

“Thanks.”

Lord, if this is an opportunity, help me make the most of it
.

THIRTY-THREE

M
ANSFIELD HEARD A HESITANT KNOCK ON THE DOOR
and glanced at his watch. “It’s three o’clock already. That’ll be the new research assistant I was telling you about.” He jumped up and swung the door open. “Come in, come in. Claire, isn’t it?”

“Yes sir. Claire Rivers.” She haltingly stepped into the room, shaking Mansfield’s hand.

“Claire Rivers, this is Ian Burke, my TA.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Mansfield guided her toward a chair then returned to his seat and pulled out his notes from the Grindley meeting.

Ten minutes later Claire sat perfectly still, trying to digest what she had just heard. Hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of dollars in unused Christian grants and endowments!

“How can—” her voice was hoarse, and she cleared her throat. “How can Harvard
do
that? It sounds like … something weird is going on. It sounds like they’ve taken the money but never used it as the donors directed.”

“It sounds like that,” Mansfield said, “but we cannot jump to conclusions. Things are not always as they seem. Perhaps they took the money and did establish the requisite professorships or scholarships for many years, but something legitimate interfered. Maybe the family changed it’s mind but never recorded it. Or perhaps the university even returned the endowment funds for some reason and canceled the contract.”

“Or perhaps the university just decided it didn’t need to abide by an antiquated Christian contract anymore,” Ian’s smile was sardonic, “and decided to appropriate the funds for its own purposes, without telling anybody.”

“All right, all right.” Mansfield turned to Claire. “This, my dear, is why you’re here.” He chuckled at her startled expression. “I need a research assistant, just on a temporary basis. Ian is deeply involved in another project and cannot spend the time poring through records to investigate this further. But we absolutely need to know whether or not the Grindley endowments remain unused, as it appears, and whether or not other families did in fact provide grants and endowments with Christian stipulations.
If you’re interested, we’d like you to spend some rime researching these old grants and endowments for us.

“We believe that the Lord may use this to give us some leverage for a very important meeting in two weeks, so we need you to piece together as much as you can before the meeting. We’ll pay you the standard rate the department offers its research assistants if you’ll agree to make yourself available beyond the usual minimum ten hours per week. This may take a few more hours than that, since I’ll need your briefing one week from today.”

Claire’s skin tingled. What an amazing opportunity!
O God, don’t let me screw this up!

She looked up at the professor. He was regarding her soberly, his eyes searching hers. Suddenly, she was very aware of the gravity of this project, of the eternal importance it could carry. Her smile died, and she sat up straight, steadily returning the professor’s gaze.

“What do you want me to do?”

Mansfield pulled forward his pages of notes, tossed Claire a notebook and a pen, and started talking.

The headlights of Mansfield’s car created warm pools in the blackness as he turned right out of the Everett Street Garage and headed home. The street was deserted, the residential buildings of the Law School rising dark on his right as he passed.

He reached the end of Everett Street and turned right onto Oxford, the two-lane road that ran parallel to Massachusetts Avenue, the other natural border of the main campus. Mansfield peered down the dimly lit street ahead.

The road ended abruptly in front of him, his headlights shining on the open expanse in front of Memorial Hall. Mansfield braked heavily to take the difficult left-hand curve from Oxford Street onto Kirkland, careful not to slip on the slightly wet pavement.

He shook his head, annoyed, as the lights of campus receded in his rearview mirror. The reflector posts that were supposed to warn nighttime drivers of that ninety-degree curve kept getting taken out by inattentive drivers. People complained, but the reflectors rarely got replaced. Mansfield hoped it wouldn’t require a
student
getting taken out for the complaints to be taken seriously.

He slowed when he saw the flashing taillights of a car along the side of the road. The white Bonneville was listing to the right, the back tire flat. One woman was trying to jack up the car; another wielded a flashlight. Mansfield recognized one of them and pulled over.

When he approached, the woman at the jack looked up in relief, then her expression changed to annoyance.

“Oh. It’s you.”

“And hello to you too, Sharon.” Mansfield nodded pleasantly. “Can I do anything to help?”

“Yeah. Call a tow truck.” Sharon DeLay stood up and kicked the tire jack now lying on the ground. “Stupid thing is bent.”

The woman with the flashlight held out her hand. “I’m Leslie. Thanks for stopping;”

“Nice to meet you. Sharon has told me quite a bit about you.” He bent down and picked up the jack. “I know a trick with these things. Let me give it a try.” He knelt, sighing internally. His trousers had just been dry-cleaned. With a deft positioning of the jack, he began cranking up the car.

After a moment he looked back at Leslie. “You’re teaching at Berkeley, right?”

“That’s right. I’m up for tenure next year.”

“Congratulations. They must like you, to be up for tenure so soon.”

Leslie gave a self-deprecating shrug. “I hope so. I think they just needed another woman on tenure track, quite frankly. But I’ll take it however it comes.”

“I’m sure you deserve it. I read one of your articles in the
Journal of American Medicine
this past summer.” Mansfield ignored the look of astonishment that came over Sharon’s face. He left the jack and began removing the tire nuts. “It was quite good. You’re doing some groundbreaking work with genetics out there.”

“It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. The research areas here in New England decided not to pursue the next logical step in genetics research—too much furor over the reaction of the religious right or something. I don’t know what the big deal is.”

Mansfield just smiled as he got up and pulled the spare tire out of the Bonneville’s trunk.

Sharon squared off in front of Mansfield, crossing her arms. “Mansfield is a well-known evangelical conservative, Leslie. I’m sure he could tell you why he thinks it’s a big deal.”

“Really?” Leslie said. “I’ve never met an evangelical conservative intellectual before.”

“Really? Well, I’ve never helped a lesbian geneticist change a tire before.”

Leslie guffawed, slapping her hands together, but Sharon scowled. Mansfield smiled in her direction, his eyes twinkling with genuine warmth. “I’m just kidding!” He finished bolting the spare tire and cranked the car down.

Leslie squeezed Sharon’s shoulder. “Hey, lighten up, hon.” She looked back to where Mansfield was wiping his hands on a handkerchief. “Sharon’s a little testy these days. You’ll have to forgive her, she—”

“Hey!”

The three started and turned toward the road. Taylor Haller was leaning out of a
car’s passenger window. Mansfield could dimly see another man in the driver’s seat, looking over curiously.

“What’s up?” Sharon walked over and stuck her arm through the open window and shook the drivers hand. “Hey, Randy. How you doing?”

“Need any help?” Taylor asked.

“I think we’re set. Mansfield here rode in on his white horse just in time.”