Clio,
Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence
Only the first step would count and that
Would always be murder, whose kindness never
Is taken in, forgive our noises
And teach us our recollections.
By the middle of November, the evenings were drawing in. The campus was almost dark by the time the offices closed and the secretaries went home. Kate, walking in the dusk toward the subway, was again visited by this sense of—what did one call it, affection, love, devotion?—and again wondered: toward what do I feel this sense of loyalty, a quite out-of-date emotion? Kate, in a way, sympathized with the younger generation who considered loyalty a typical demand of the establishment. Loyalty, after all, like patriotism, is the last refuge of scoundrels. Yet how explain this love? Suffice it perhaps to say that here was an institution for which she would willingly work; the University was not, for her, simply a place wherein to pursue a career. I recognize the claim, she thought, even if I cannot recognize what it is that makes the claim.
The University College had been affirmed in its existence. It had won the credit to be a full-fledged undergraduate college in a first-rate university, though certainly it had achieved this status by a strange route. “Dare sound authority confess,” Auden’s poem asked, “that one can err his way to riches, win glory by mistake?” Well, Clio had known.
Meanwhile, academia ground on its way.
Professor Peter Packer Pollinger, to the amazement and delight of everyone, brought out a book on Fiona Macleod with such insight into the odd dual nature of William Sharp that Professor, Pollinger’s colleagues looked at him with new attention. But he continued to puff through his mustache and grew, if anything, more vague and petulant. He delighted Kate by informing her one day that he had been reading the poetry of Sara Teasdale and that it was perfectly obvious no such person had ever existed. She was the alter ego of Vachel Lindsay. He had made a profound study of their imagery and was prepared to defend his thesis.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, puffing, “that you know her poem about the daisies and the asters.”
“As a matter of fact,” Kate smilingly said, “I do.”
“Well, you see,” Professor Pollinger went on,” the secret’s there. Daisies and asters are both carduaceous plants, having, that is, discordant and radiate heads. But one appears to supply simple answers and the other shares its name with a biological phenomenon of achromatic substance found in cells which divide themselves by mitosis.”
“They do?” Kate said. “I mean, it does?”
“Naturally. The aster originated in China, that is to say the Orient, never hot for certitude but full of the rhythm of life. The daisy originated in Europe, with its chief religions of simple answers and the simplistic beauty of its natural world. Both sides of the same person.”
“But,” Kate began, “there is a great deal of clear evidence that . . .”
“Have you had your wedding yet?”
“No,” Kate said. “Not yet.”
Kate met Polly Spence for lunch at the Cosmo Club. “Buffet now, dear,” Polly had said, “so get there early or all those vigorous ladies will have grabbed the tables.”
Kate entered the Club like a revenant returning to an earlier life. When she had been a girl and it had not occurred to her or any member of her generation to refuse to go to all the benefit dances arranged for boys and girls from the proper schools, she had come to the Cosmopolitan Club where, somehow, they were always held. She remembered the steps down, after one had entered, to the ladies’ room on the left where she and a couple of girls from Chapin and Sacred Heart had hidden out during almost all of one dance; she remembered the balconies, and the library where no one ever went.
“The library’s changed, of course,” Polly Spence said, when Kate had mentioned this, “all the latest books circulating like mad. They put me on the library committee and I said, ‘Let’s keep it old and stuffy and the way it always has been, where superannuated students like me can come and have a peaceful hour,’ but activity is the order of the day, even here. Busy, busy. And what is your news, dear? When is the wedding to be? Why not have it here? Perfect.”
“It’s to be on Thanksgiving, with no one but two witnesses and a judge friend of Reed’s.”
Polly Spence sighed. “I remember your brothers’ weddings,” she said. “St. Thomas’s and everything just so.”
“That was never my style, you know, even in those days.”
“I dare say. But you have done well, I think. You must bring your Reed to dinner and he and Winthrop can talk about all those dreary things lawyers always do talk about, and I can tell you about my wonderful new job.”
“Tell me now.”
“I don’t dare, because it hasn’t absolutely come through yet. But I’m so pleased. Imagine starting to teach linguistics at my advanced age—I’m really considered a coming scholar, even if I’ll be gone before I’ve finally come. And I’m so excited about University College. We’re actually beginning to get tenure for people. Do you suppose this spring we’ll be at the barricades again, filthy language, long nights, and all the desperate excitement of revolution?”
“My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that we won’t. Some other places may be, though. You know, the only thing I really remember about the Cosmopolitan Club, apart from the dances for the benefit of blue babies or whatever it was, are the macaroons. Do they still have those fantastically good macaroons?”
“Certainly they do, my dear, though now, of course, one serves oneself. Winthrop says pretty soon they’ll be selling a mix for them, and they will begin to taste like the glue on postage stamps, but I tell him not to be such a confirmed pessimist. I really do think life is just too wonderfully exciting, especially now that I don’t have to look after grandchildren anymore. My children point out that I was able to hire governesses, and I point out that I never contradicted my mother, but after all, autre temps, autre moeurs, n’est-ce-pas?”
“And what do they say to that?” Kate asked, munching maca-roons.
“They don’t say much, dear, but they glare, and I know what they’re thinking: four-letter-word-sex you, meaning me, of course. Tant pis.”
For Clemance, Kate felt an aching need to offer comfort and knew no comfort existed on earth.
“There is,” he told her, “a terrible need to demand punishment—to punish oneself. Resign, retire, go quietly and miserably mad in a richly deserved and dreary solitude. We never know, these psychological days, when we are fooling ourselves, but it seems to me that since I destroyed Cudlipp for the sake of the young men in the College, I ought to stay to serve those same young men—those, at least, who care for what I say. Yet, you know, it seems to me there is never a half hour together when I do not re-live that moment of handing him the aspirin.”
“And how,” Professor Castleman said as he and Kate waited for the elevator in Lowell Hall, “is the pro-claimer?”
“The who?” Kate asked.
“Clio, your muse of history. Kleio in Greek is the Pro-claimer.”
“You don’t say. I never thought of her as proclaiming, I suppose because Auden never mentioned it.”
The elevator, going down, passed them without stopping.
“If your Clio is going to proclaim any change,” Castleman said as they started down the stairs, “I wish she would begin. The elevators do not stop, and the room I’m in now, while larger, is still not large enough.”
“Standing-room-only is a compliment,” Kate said.
“Which reminds me. We went to the theater again. Dionysian rites, as I live and breathe. Nude young women pretending to tear nude young men to pieces. Oceans of blood.”
“Did they try to persuade you to take part?”
“Alas, no. Not, that is, that I actually want to tear anyone apart—not even my students, bless them, who refuse to believe one can learn from history. Do you suppose,” he went on, “if we were all to enter the classroom nude—and Lord knows, it’s overheated enough for that—the younger generation might be willing to pay their tribute to Clio?”
Kate met Emilia Airhart in the ladies’ room, where she was regarding herself miserably in the mirror.
“My plan,” she said, “was always to avoid mirrors, the sight was so demoralizing. Do you know, I had actually learned to put on lipstick and comb my hair without looking at myself? But I will escape no longer. I am going to look and look and perhaps the continual shock will actually force me to diet. I will never be willowy, but at least I can be slightly angular.”
Kate smiled. “You are probably no one’s idea of either Aphrodite or Artemis, but you are wonderfully you and I doubt, really, that you ought to consider changing. The trouble with Queen Victoria was not her figure but her opinions. Are you writing a new play?”
“I am, actually. It’s a comedy with supernatural bits. A community of middle-aged parents and teen-aged children, and they change places—keeping, of course, their original ideas. The result is that the colleges and prep schools become frightfully proper and comme-il-faut, but the banks and brokerage houses keep having disruptions, and the different partners keep occupying their Wall Street law firms. Meanwhile, on the floor of the exchange, the radical brokers take over the ticker tape and demand open admission for all seats on the exchange. Of course, the college students insist that any broker who interferes with the workings of the market will lose his right to a capital gains . . .”
Cartier would not stop long enough to talk. “Have you heard,” Kate asked him, “that they have found the students who caused the elevator trouble?”
“I did hear something,” Cartier said, fairly dancing to be gone. “Sorry, but I must prepare a class.” He rushed off and then, to Kate’s astonishment, allowed the strings of restlessness to twitch him back.
“Hope you will sit on my lap one day,” he said, and then was gone.