Though mild clear weather
Smile again on the shire of your esteem
And its colors come back, the storm has changed you:
You will not forget, ever,
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale
Prophesying your downfall.
That classes at the University began, as they were scheduled to, on September 17, was a matter of considerable astonishment to everyone. There was not a great deal to be said for revolutions—not, at any rate, in Kate’s opinion—but they did accustom one to boredom in the face of extraordinary events, and a pleasant sense of breathless surprise at the calm occurrence of the expected. Kate said as much to Professor Castleman as they waited for the elevator in Lowell Hall.
“Well,” he answered, “I might have found myself even more overcome with amazement if they had not managed to put my course in historical methods, which never has less than a hundred and fifty students, into a classroom designed to hold ninety only if the students sit two in a chair, which, these days, they probably prefer to do. Though come to think of it,” he added as the elevator, empty, went heedlessly past, apparently on some mysterious mission of its own, “I don’t know why students should expect seats at lectures, since audiences can no longer expect them at the theater. We went to a play last night—I use the word ‘play,’ you understand, to describe what we expected to see, not what we saw—and not only were there no seats, the entertainment principally consisted of the members of the cast removing their clothes and urging, gently of course, that the audience do likewise. My wife and I, fully clothed, felt rather like missionaries to Africa insufficiently indoctrinated into the antics of the aborigines. Shall we walk down? One thing at least has not changed in this university: the elevators. They have never worked, they do not now work, and though an historian should never speak with assurance of the future, I am willing to wager that they never will. Where are you off to? Don’t tell me, I know. A meeting. What’s more, I can tell you what you are going to discuss: relevance.”
“That,” said Kate, “would be the expected. As a matter of fact, I have a doctoral examination: the poetry of W. H. Auden. He wrote a good bit of clever poetry to your muse.”
“Mine? Gracious, have I got a muse? Just what I’ve needed all these years. Do you think I could trade her in for a cleaning woman, three days a week with only occasional ironing? My wife would be prostrate with gratitude.”
“Trade Clio in? Impossible. It is she into whose eyes ‘we look for recognition after we have been found out.’ ”
“Did Auden write that? Obviously he’s never been married. That’s a description of any wife. I thought you were in the Victorian period.”
“I am, I am. Auden was born in 1907. He only missed Victoria by six years. And don’t be so frivolous about Clio. Auden called her ‘Madonna of silences, to whom we turn When we have lost control.’ ”
“Well, get hold of her,” Professor Castleman said. “I’m ready to turn.”
The dissertation examination was not, in fact, scheduled for another hour. Kate wandered back toward her office, not hurrying, because no sooner would she reach Baldwin Hall, in which building dwelt the Graduate English Department, than she would be immediately accosted, put on five more committees, asked to examine some aspect of the curriculum about which she knew nothing (like the language requirement for medieval studies) and to settle the problems of endlessly waiting students concerning, likely as not, questions not only of poetry and political polarization, but of pot and the pill as well. Kate strolled along in the sort of trance to which she had by now grown accustomed. It was the result of fatigue, mental indigestion, a sense of insecurity which resembled being tossed constantly in a blanket as much as it resembled anything, and, strangest of all, a love for the University which was as irrational as it was unrewarded.
She would have been hard put to say, she thought looking about her, what it was she loved. Certainly not the administration (had there been one, which, since they had resigned one by one like the ten little Indians, there wasn’t). Not the Board of Governors, a body of tired, ultraconservative businessmen who could not understand why a university should not be run like a business or a country club. The students, the faculty, the place? It was inexplicable. The love one shares with a city is often a secret love, Camus had said; the love for a university was apparently no less so.
“Kate Fansler!” a voice said. “How very, very nice. ‘I must telephone Kate,’ I have said to Winthrop again and again, ‘we must have lunch, we must have dinner, we must meet.’ And now, you see, we have.”
Kate paused on the steps of Baldwin Hall and smiled at the sight of Polly Spence. Talk of the unexpected! Polly Spence belonged to the world of Kate’s family—she had actually been, years ago, a protégée of Kate’s mother’s—and there emanated from her the aura of St. Bernard’s—where her sons had gone to school—and Milton Academy, the Knickerbocker dancing classes and cotillions.
“I know,” Polly Spence said, “my instincts tell me that if I wait here patiently you will say something, perhaps even something profound, like ‘Hello.’ ”
“It’s good to see you, Polly,” Kate said. “I don’t know what’s become of me. I feel like the heroine of that Beckett play who is buried up to her neck and spends every waking moment rummaging around in a large, unorganized handbag. Come to see the action, as the young say?”
“Action? Profanity, more likely. Four-letter-word-bathroom, four-letter-word-sex, and really too tiresome, when I think that my own two poor lambs were positively glared at if they said ‘damn.’ It’s not an easy world to keep up with.”
“But if I know you, you’re keeping up all the same.”
“Of course I am. I’m taking a doctorate. In fact, I’ve almost got it. Now what do you think of that? I’m writing a dissertation for the Linguistics Department on the history of Verner’s Law. Please look impressed. The Linguistics Department is overjoyed, because the darlings didn’t know there was anything new to say about Verner’s Law until I told them, and they’ve been taking it like perfect angels.”
Kate smiled. “I always suspected an extraordinary brain operating behind all your committee-woman talents, but whatever made you decide to get a Ph.D.?”
“Grandchildren,” Polly said. “Three chuckling little boys, one gurgling little girl, all under three. It was either hours and hours of baby-sitting, to say nothing of having the little darlings cavalierly dumped upon us at the slightest excuse, or I had to get a job that would be absolutely respected. Winthrop has encouraged me. ‘Polly,’ he said, ‘if we are not to find ourselves changing diapers every blessed weekend, you had better find something demanding to say you’re doing.’ The children, of course, are furious, but I am now a teaching assistant, very, very busy, thank you, and only condescending to rally round at Christmas and Easter. Summers I dash off to do research and Winthrop joins me when he can. But you look tired, and here I am chatting away. Let’s have lunch one day at the Cosmopolitan Club.”
“I’m not a member.”
“Of course not, dear, though I never understood why. Why are you looking so tired?”
“Meetings. Meetings and meetings. We are all trying, as you must have heard, to restructure the University, another way of saying that we, like the chap in the animated cartoons, have looked down to discover we are not standing on anything. Then, of course, we fall.”
“But everybody’s resigned. The President. The Vice-President. We’ve got an Acting President, we’re getting a Faculty Senate, surely everything’s looking up.”
“Perhaps. But the English Department has discovered there is no real reason for most of the things they have been happily doing for years. And the teaching assistants—where, by the way, are you being a teaching assistant? Don’t tell me the College has reformed itself sufficiently to be hiring female, no-longer-young ladies, however talented . . .”
“Not them; not bloody likely. I’m at the University College. Very exciting. Really, Kate, you have no idea.”
Kate, looking blank, realized she hadn’t.
“Really,” Polly Spence said, “the snobbery of you people in the graduate school! We’re doing splendid work over there . . .”
“Didn’t the University College used to be the extension school? Odd courses for people at loose ends like members of labor unions who only work twenty hours a week and housewives whose children are . . . ?”
“That was a hundred years ago. There are no more courses in basket-weaving. We give a degree, we have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and our students are very intelligent people who simply don’t want to play football or have a posture picture taken.”
“Forgive me, Polly. As one always does when one speaks from ignorance and prejudice, I’m sounding a lousy snob.”
“Well, you’ll be hearing more from us, just you wait and see. Meanwhile, you must come and have dinner. When I tell Winthrop I’ve met you, he’ll insist. He always finds you so entertaining, like Restoration comedy.”
“And about as up-to-date. I’m faltering, Polly. If you want to know the truth, I’m thinking of taking up bridge, if not palmistry, astrology, and the finer points of ESP. One of my students has offered to introduce me to a medium with electronic thought waves.”
“There is no question about it,” Polly said. “We must have lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club. It reassures one.”
Kate, walking up the stairs of Baldwin, waved a dismissive hand.
“Kafka,” Mark Everglade said, meeting her in the hall outside her office, “where is thy sting?”
“I take it,” Kate said, “that is a perpetually appropriate remark these days.”
“Perpetually. Would you mind teaching a text course next year in the novels of Bulwer-Lytton?”
“You have to be joking. And what, while I’m doubled over with hilarity, is a text course?”
“One that uses books, of course. I know we’re all tired on the first day of the semester, Kate, but surely you could have seen that. You remember books? They’re what we used to read before we began discussing what we ought to read. The students have spent the entire summer reforming our course offerings, and it’s now to be text courses.”
“I have never read Bulwer-Lytton. I have never even discussed reading Bulwer-Lytton, except with some strange student who used to turn up every seven years with another thousand pages on the development of the historical novel. Ah, I see. The Last Days of Pompeii is now considered relevant. Perhaps it is, at that.”
“If only,” Mark Everglade said, “a volcano would come and cover us all with dust. We have done away, as you would have known if you had ever listened at all those meetings this last summer, with lectures and seminars. We now have text courses, preferably in texts nobody ever heard of before, like Bulwer-Lytton and the literature of the emerging African nations. While I think of it, we are in the market for someone who reads Swahili, if you should ever hear of such a person.”
“So mysterious,” Kate said. “No doubt there are scads of fascinating literary works in Swahili. But I spoke just the other night to someone returned from Africa. He said that in Ethiopia, for example, there are seventy-five different dialects, and that the tribes can only converse with each other in English. In Nigeria, I understand, there are two hundred and twenty-five languages, with English again the common tongue for conversation. Why don’t we train people to teach English in Swahili, instead of training people to teach Swahili in English, or is that a particularly reactionary observation?”
“Not only reactionary,” Mark said, “but probably in itself grounds for occupying this whole building. Now as to the catalogue . . .”
“Why are we discussing next year’s catalogue on this year’s first day of classes?”
“As you will see when you meet with the student-faculty committee for finalizing the revisions of the catalogue, everyone keeps changing his mind, so that we’ve got to get the damn catalogue for next year into print so that no one can change it and we can argue about the year after.”
“I am not on the student-faculty committee to finalize anything, and I will not serve on any committee with so barbaric a word as ‘finalize’ in its title, and that’s final,” Kate said.
“The title is open to discussion,” Mark said, “but I’m afraid you’ve absolutely got to be on the committee because you’ve been on it all summer and are the only one who knows what’s going on.”
“ ‘We have no means of learning what is really going on.’ Auden says.”
“I had no idea Auden was so relevant; the ultimate compliment.”
“Well, he may be,” Kate said, “but I’m not. Do you think that could be my whole problem?”
“It’s the problem all right. We are not only magnificently irrelevant, but are prevented, mysteriously, from enjoying the fruits of irrelevance, which are frivolity and leisure.”
“I wish I were an African nation,” Kate said. “It must be so comforting to think of oneself as emerging.”
Kate had time only to dive into her office, add the mail she had collected from her box downstairs to that already on her desk unopened, grab the dissertation on Auden, tell three students who appeared from nowhere that she was not having office hours or consultations of any sort, and listen, with perfect impassivity, to the ringing of her telephone. Kate did not claim to have learned much during the previous spring’s disruption or the summer’s hard committee work, but she had learned one thing: it is not necessary to answer one’s telephone. One can always suppose that one is not there. This vaguely existential decision meant, therefore, that Kate avoided for another two and one half hours what her governess used to call a rendezvous with destiny. A nice phrase. But Kate had early on discovered (though considerably after the reign of the governess) that one cannot ‘avoid’ a destined rendezvous. Rendezvous are either inevitable or impossible.
It was by no means usual for the dissertation examination, the final examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, to be held on the first day of classes. In fact, like so much else now going on, it was hitherto unheard of. But the spring revolutions had meant the inevitable postponement of many doctoral dissertation examinations, partly because the Committee of Seven appointed by the Dean of the Graduate Faculties could rarely be collected (most of them were either wrestling with plainclothesmen at the time, examining identification at the University gates, or begging the mayor to intervene in the University’s problems). And even had it been possible to get all seven in one place, it was not possible to find the place. The head of the Graduate English Department, a man for whom, Kate had decided over the summer, the term ‘longsuffering’ was meiosis, had held several examinations in his living room (to the evident distress of his children, who had planned to watch television at the same time), but after a while all such efforts were given up. When it reached the point where one examination committee (which fortunately included no lady members) met in the men’s room of the Faculty Club, and two of those who had been asked at the last minute to serve had never, it soon became evident, heard of the subject under discussion, the office of the Dean of Graduate Faculties declared itself officially closed. For one thing, with all the student raids on the administration buildings, the secretarial staff became so unnerved at the necessity of shoving all records and dissertations into the safe at the threat of occupation that they flatly refused even to come to the office until things had “quieted down.”
Today four members of the examining committee had shown up, which was a quorum, and an enormous relief to Kate and the candidate, who had flown in from his teaching post in California especially for the examination. All is, thank God, minimally official, Kate thought, taking her place as chairman at the head of the table. To Kate’s right sat the other member of her department, Peter Packer Pollinger, the official sponsor of the dissertation. To her left sat the two necessary representatives of other departments. Professor Kruger from the German Department, and, next to him, Professor Chang from the Department of Asian Civilization. Professor Chang was present as the result of total desperation, but someone else outside the English Department was required, and, after all, Auden, together with Christopher Isherwood, had gone to China in 1938 and written a book about it. The Department of Asian Civilization had told Kate that Professor Chang had never been to China, but one couldn’t ask for everything in outside examiners.
All began properly enough. Kate asked Mr. Cornford to leave the room and told the committee what facts about Mr. Cornford, provided in a special folder by the office of the Dean of Graduate Faculties, seemed relevant: his education, present position, date and subject of his master’s essay. “Perhaps, then, we can ask the candidate in for the examination,” Kate hopefully said.
“Clarification, please,” said Professor Chang.
“I beg your pardon,” Kate said. “I didn’t mean to seem to be rushing. Is there a question about Mr. Cornford? About Auden?”
“Please. I have read dissertation with great interest and attention. But I would like to point out I am not from Department of Asian Civilization. I am from School of Engineering.”
“Engineering?” Kate said faintly. “I’m afraid there must be some confusion.”
“Mr. Auden is most interesting writer,” Professor Chang said, “but are there many limestone landscapes in China?”
“Limestone landscapes!” Professor Kruger said. “It is more a question of the Weimar Republic. Auden does not realize that the love of death and the rejection of authority . . .”
At this point Professor Peter Packer Pollinger began blowing through his mustache, always a sign, as Kate well knew, that he was about to burst into speech. Professor Pollinger had only three kinds of speeches. The first was about punctuation, particularly about the necessity of keeping all punctuation marks inside quotation marks. He had been known to go on about the unbelievable dangers involved in placing punctuation marks outside quotation marks for close on to two hours. His second speech had to do with Fiona Macleod, the alter ego and pseudonym of a turn-of-the-century Irish author named William Sharp. He had managed (William Sharp, not Professor Pollinger, although the confusion did appear to be in some mysterious way appropriate) to get himself so perfectly, so schizophrenically divided between himself and his pseudonymous alter ego (who was, of course, a lady) that he had been known to fall down in a fit if William Sharp and his wife were invited to a dinner party and Fiona Macleod overlooked. Professor Pollinger had for the last ten years devoted himself (he was now sixty-seven) to the collection of every possible datum about William Sharp, and he was delighted, not to say compelled, to transmit whatever he had most recently learned to anyone he encountered. Thus despite a good deal of dodging behind doorways, everyone in the English Department, but particularly the secretaries, who, being rooted behind their desks, were less able to disappear, became authorities on the life and times of William Sharp/Fiona Macleod.
Professor Pollinger also had a third speech, which was unassigned: variable, as the mathematicians say. This speech might happen to do with any experience Professor Pollinger had recently undergone which had sufficiently caught his attention to be memorable: how a snow drift into which he had absentmindedly walked had overwhelmed him; the way he had heard the sound of the Irish Sea quite clearly in his ears for a solid hour before his wife returned to discover that the tub in the adjoining bathroom had overflowed, leaving Professor Pollinger ankle-deep in water; or, very occasionally, when truly impelled by circumstances, Professor Pollinger would deliver himself of a pertinent fact, which was always, as it was now, alarmingly germane to the discussion.
“Auden was interested in engineering,” Professor Pollinger now announced, blowing through his mustache. “Wanted to be one. When the Oriental languages fellow dropped out, I suggested an engineer.” Professor Pollinger puffed for a moment or two. “Glad to discover they had a Chinese engineer,” he said. “That made it all right, I thought. Couldn’t find you,” he added, looking sulkily at Kate.
Kate coughed. “Then,” she said, turning to the gentleman from Engineering, “your name isn’t Professor Chang?”
“Is,” that gentleman insisted. “Contradiction, please. Is.”
“I see,” said Kate, who didn’t. “Well, then, perhaps we can begin. Will you, Professor Pollinger, ask the usual first question?”
“Certainly,” said Professor Pollinger, puffing through his mustache. “What made you choose this topic, Mr. Whateveryournameis?”
“Please, Professor Pollinger,” Kate said, “if you don’t mind, don’t ask the question until we get the candidate into the room.”
“Very well,” Professor Pollinger said crossly. “Very well.” Kate, going to the door to summon Mr. Cornford, gave Professor Pollinger a baleful look. She seriously suspected him of putting them all on. Due to retire at the end of this year, he found it suited his peculiar sense of humor to appear gaga, but Kate suspected that a delight in confusion allied with a general resentment of the modern world was chiefly responsible for his eccentric ways. He had, of course, not really directed this or any other dissertation, although he did read right through all of them searching for punctuation outside quotation marks.
“Please be seated, Mr. Cornford,” Kate said. The committee, as was customary, arose at the entrance of the candidate. “We will now begin. Professor Pollinger, will you please ask the first question?”
“Mr., er, Whateveryournameis,” puff-puff through the mustache, “do you happen to know if Auden ever read the poetic dramas of Fiona Macleod?”
“Perhaps,” Kate interjected, “Mr. Cornford could begin by telling us why he chose . . .”
“Tell me please,” Professor Chang said, turning courteously in his chair, “in China your Mr. Auden found limestone landscapes? And what, please, is dildo?”
How they got through the subsequent two hours—for Professor Kruger was very interested in Auden’s experiences in Germany, and Professor Chang in everything—Kate never properly knew. But such a good time was had by all that they quite happily voted Mr. Cornford a distinction (which he thoroughly deserved) and Kate was still congratulating him when the other three had bowed themselves from the room.
“My God,” Mr. Cornford said. “No one will ever believe it. Can it possibly be official? I shall go to my death, which I hope is far distant, telling the story of this examination, and no one, no one on God’s green earth will ever, ever believe it. And this is the world of scholarship I want to enter.”
Kate laughed. “Well, according to T. S. Eliot, Auden is no scholar, you know.”
“Eliot liked his poetry.”
“Of course he did. But he insisted Auden was no scholar all the same. Somebody asked why, and Eliot said: ‘I was reading an introduction by him to a selection of Tennyson’s poems, in which he said that Tennyson is the stupidest poet in the language. Now if Auden had been a scholar he would have been able to think of some stupider poets.’ And if you, Mr. Cornford, had been around this university as long as I, you would know that it is better that a farcical examination produce a first-rate piece of work like yours than that a brilliantly run examination produce, as I have often seen it do, a farce.”
“So Auden was right,” Mr. Cornford said. “ ‘Against odds, methods of dry farming may produce grain.’ But, oh my Lord. ‘Your Mr. Auden, he found limestone landscapes in China?’ ” he mimicked.
Kate parted from Mr. Cornford at the door of the building; he was due to make a midnight plane. This, she thought, has been a day. But it has had its moments, she thought, chuckling to herself over Professor Chang, bless his heart.
“Going my way, lady?” a voice said. “Or, more exactly, may I be allowed to go yours?” With something of a flourish, a man who had clearly been waiting for her removed his beret and bowed. “Bill McQuire is the name,” he said. “Remember me? Department of Economics. Statistics is my specialty. I advised you once that some figures you wanted to juggle could not reveal anything meaningful, being self-selected.”
“I’m going to get a taxi,” Kate said. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
“I wanted to talk with you,” McQuire said, “on a quite impersonal matter. May I buy you a drink?”
“Can it be as important as all that? I’ve had a day.”
“Very important. Dean Frogmore has been trying to reach you all day, but your telephone never answers. I’ve been delegated to drop round and catch you after your examination. Successful candidate, I hope?”
“Beyond my wildest expectations,” Kate answered. “What’s this all about?”
“I realize,” McQuire said, “that I am perhaps not the ideal man to approach you. But when Frogmore asked, I had to say I was acquainted with you. Do you know of Boulding?”
“He isn’t by any chance a character in a novel by Bulwer-Lytton or a citizen of an Emerging African Nation?”
“He’s an economist, and he announced one of the great laws of modern times: if it exists, it must be possible. That’s what I want to see you about: something which exists, but which everyone is saying is impossible.”
“I have always thought,” Kate said, “that you scientists and social scientists ought to emblazon on your walls a quotation from J. B. S. Haldane: ‘How do you know that the planet Mars isn’t carried around by an angel?’ Will it express my utter confidence in your knightly qualities if I ask you up for a drink?”
“It will,” Bill McQuire said, hailing a taxi. “Same place?”
“Same place,” Kate said. “And who in hell is Dean Frogmore?”
Kate had consulted Bill McQuire some five years earlier, when the Admissions Office of the Graduate Faculties had co-opted her onto a committee to study the old patterns of admission and to evolve new ones. For the first time in her life Kate found herself confronted with statistics, with no knowledge what to do with them but a distinct sense that either the statistics before her or the conclusions to be drawn from them were faulty. Someone had suggested that she consult a statistician, and had suggested Bill McQuire. Professor McQuire had himself soon provided a new statistic in Kate’s life. He was the only man she had ever gone to bed with on the basis of a ten-hour acquaintance, liked moderately well, and never, to all intents and purposes, seen again.
They had, of course, met from time to time on University occasions, in the Faculty Club, once on a dissertation committee when a student of Kate’s had written on some abstruse topic concerning economics and literature. They greeted each other on these occasions not only with the pleasant formality their surroundings required, but with the pleasant indifference they both genuinely felt.
Now, when they had reached home, Kate left McQuire in the living room to fix himself a drink. It was, Kate thought, a room Auden would have approved of:
Spotless rooms
where nothing’s left lying about
chill me, so do cups used for ashtrays or smeared
with lipstick: the homes I warm to,
though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling
of hills being promptly settled
with checks that don’t bounce.
McQuire seemed to agree, for he was happily stretched out in her Knoll chair when she returned. “It is extraordinarily ungallant of me to say so,” he laughed, “but when I opened your liquor cabinet I had a most magnificent case of déja vû. I remembered looking into it, years ago, whenever it was, and thinking: My God, Jack Daniel’s, and that’s exactly what I did tonight. What can I get you?”
Kate asked for Scotch. She watched him as he fixed the drink. How old was he now, somewhere between forty-five and fifty? His curly hair was thinner, and gray; at least he doesn’t dye it, Kate thought, and was surprised to have thought it. Bill had always worn his curly hair longer than the prevailing style—he was a distinctly Byronic type—and now that fashions had overtaken him he looked oddly more out of style than he had previously done. His face was lined, with that special crinkled quality of the skin which marks those who have drunk heavily and long. Turning to her with the drink, he found himself held by her stare. “Portrait of an aging stag,” he said. “Dissipated but kindly. If you want to know the whole hideous truth, I like them younger and younger all the time, so that I am in danger of becoming a dirty old man. Humbert Humbert, I do pity thee. Well, no,” he added, seeing Kate’s eyes widen. “Eighteen is still my under limit. Cheers.”
“I am trying to decide,” Kate said, “why it is that you are quite incapable of shocking me, even though I think your life reprehensible and I find promiscuity shocking, particularly in married men.”
“I’m sure you do. In fact, I have often noticed that those most shocked by marital infidelity are usually themselves unmarried. Cecelia, as it happens, has settled quite nicely into life, though she is pleased to see that neither of our sons at all resembles a rampant stag—that is, me. You’ve worn well, Kate. I like you and the way you look, and you’re very decent to put up with me this afternoon.”
“I haven’t worn all that well. Supposedly I shall always be tall and lean with a French twist and a face that shows all the worries in the world. Do you know what I like about you, Bill? It’s only just occurred to me, so let me say it and then we can get down to whatever you and Dean Toadwell have on your minds.”
“His name is Frogmore. What do you like? My eternal evanescence?”
“The fact that however much you stalk your prey, you do not class women with motor cars if they are attractive and with eye-flies if they are not.”
“Eye-flies?”
“Well, something nasty. I was quoting Forster, who happened to be writing about India at the time, so it was eye-flies.”
“Somebody said once—unlike you I never remember where I read things—that if a woman is not beautiful at twenty, it’s not her fault; if she’s not beautiful at forty, it is her fault. Have you ever thought of getting married?”
“Once or twice, lately. The ramifications of university upheavals are endless. Do you think marriage advisable? One has such lovely friendships with men whose wives were beautiful when they were twenty.”
“What a dreadfully cynical remark. Married women can have friends; the men feel, if anything, more comfortable.”
“Meaning you would feel more comfortable now if I were married.”
“Kate, don’t put words in my mouth. I was . . .”
“Answer me honestly, if you want me to help with your beastly crisis.”
“That’s not fair. People who demand to be answered honestly have already decided what the honest answer is. But you’d be wrong. I wouldn’t be more comfortable with you, but I think I would feel you were happier, particularly in these times of institutionalized uncertainty.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, Bill,” Kate said, recovering herself. “I have believed, in the words of a first-rate woman scholar who lived to be eighty and was always falling in love with someone, that marriage for a woman spoils the two things that make life glorious: learning and friendship. Somehow, that no longer seems so unquestionably true. Fill up your glass and tell me about Toad-well.”
“Frogmore. That you haven’t heard of him is absolutely symptomatic.”
“Oh, come on, Bill, how many deans have I heard of?”
“Can you name the Dean of Divinity? Law, Graduate Faculties, Public Administration, Business, Engineering?”
“Not Public Administration.”
“My point still holds.”
“I can only name most of the others because of the troubles last spring.”
“Fair enough. But you can’t name the Dean of the University College?”
“Frogmore?”
“Frogmore.”
“You know, Bill, it is absolutely coming over me in waves that I do not want to know the Dean of the University College, or University College, or . . .”
“Shall I tell you something? Last spring, when this place was blowing up, there was only one school in it that remained intact.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess.”
“The students of the University College occupied their own building and held it for themselves. They proved to be the only really loyal student body the whole blasted University possessed, and the University, with the gratitude and intelligence that has marked all its decisions, now wants to wash the University College down the drain.”
“Bill, I’m in Graduate Faculties. I’m planning next year’s curriculum there. I’m going to give a text course in the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, and maybe one in the literature of Emerging African Nations. I’m thinking of emigrating to an Emerging African Nation myself. Do you really think you want to try to make this my problem?”
“Yes, lady, I do. And when your fortieth birthday comes, I shall buy you a specially lovely present for a beautiful and humane woman.”
“As Polly Spence would say—my God, Polly Spence—four-letter-word-bathroom. Bull’s, that is.”