In our morale must lie our strength.
“All I ask, Kate, is that you listen. Give it a chance. Try to remember that these are people fighting for the life of a school they do not need. They all have tenure in other branches of the University. It’s a matter of believing in something.”
“Even Dean Frogmore?”
“Even he.” Bill McQuire and Kate were walking toward the Faculty Club next day to attend a luncheon with Dean Frogmore and some senior members of his faculty. Kate had had to cancel two appointments to come, and she did so, finally, only as a favor to McQuire. He had known, and Kate respected him for knowing, that she had learned to refuse any official request, but was still far from immune to personal ones. “Frogmore is offered a job every other day, as president of this college or that. Everyone’s looking for administrators; they’re almost as scarce as plumbers and doctors. Probably he’ll go off to some rural collegiate paradise before long, but I think his devotion to the University College is unquestionable. Everyone has underestimated Frogmore from the beginning, I among them. But let me tell you two things about him: he’s got guts you’ll admire, and an oily surface you’ll hate. For one thing, and I want to warn you about this in advance, knowing your prejudices, he calls everyone, everyone, by his first name the first moment they meet.”
“Cripes,” Kate said.
“I know; that’s why I mention it. You’re remarkably old-world in some ways, Kate.”
“Remarkably. I don’t mind going to bed at ten at night with a man I met at noon the same day, but I can’t bear being called by my first name until a relationship has had time to mature. Very old-world indeed.”
McQuire chuckled. “It’s a maddening habit—Frogmore’s, I mean. When I first met him he kept referring to Lou and Teddy, and the conversation had gone on for half an hour before I realized he was speaking of the President and Vice-President of the University. But don’t underestimate him, Kate. He really and truly wants to put the University College on the map, when the easiest thing for him to do would be to cop out.”
“It might be the easiest thing for all of us. Certainly for me. I can’t imagine, truthfully, why you think I . . .”
“Yes, you can. Be good now. I’ll give you a chance later to protest and thrash around, and I promise you, if your answer is really ‘No,’ I’ll back you up.”
“Which means if I act intelligently interested today, and ask leading questions, you won’t assume I’m committed.”
“Have I told you yet today,” Bill said, “that you’re beautiful?”
The luncheon party was held in one of the private rooms of the Faculty Club. The moment Kate and Bill McQuire entered, Frogmore leaped to his feet and rushed forward to greet them at the door. Somewhat overcome by his enthusiasm, the other gentlemen already seated around the table rose to their feet, awkwardly pushing back their chairs, dropping their napkins and brushing crumbs from their laps. (It was one of the unfailing characteristics of the Faculty Club that although service never began until the latest possible moment after one had sat down, there was always present, as part of the table setting, a large, exceedingly stale roll which one found oneself compelled, in time, to pulverize, showering oneself and the table top with crumbs.)
“Please,” Kate weakly said. The academic community had taken longer than most to shake off old habits of gallantry. When Kate had first joined the faculty she had had to become inured to roomfuls of men rising to their feet as she entered. Gradually, of course, the custom had died out. Only Frogmore, with his bouncy manner and boy-scout demeanor, had trapped them into old habits.
“So this is Kate,” Frogmore said. “Thank you. Bill, for bringing her.” Kate, regarding Frogmore with a lackluster eye, avoided glancing at McQuire. Clever he: the blow fell less painfully, being expected. “Let me introduce you pronto to the others before getting under way; we’ve got a long agenda. What will you drink, Kate? This is on me; the Dean’s slush fund.”
“A Bloody Mary please,” Kate demurely said. (Reed had often remarked that when Kate came all over demure, it meant that what she really wanted to do was put a pillow over some chap’s head and sit on it.) Kate did not like, in the ordinary way, to drink at lunch, a meal she avoided if she could, and certainly not when she was in danger of becoming involved in some internecine struggle. She had therefore hit upon the lovely stratagem of ordering a drink which was, at the Faculty Club, equal parts of Worcestershire sauce and watery tomato juice with as little vodka as made no difference to anyone not a teetotaler on principle.
“You know everybody, I’m sure,” Frogmore said. “Luther Hankster of Biology.” Kate, indeed, had stood side by side with Luther Hankster when the police had first and, as it turned out, abortively, been called to clear out the administration building. Playboy turned radical, Hankster kept more or less in the good graces of his colleagues by his unerring good manners and the careful use of a voice never, ever, raised. He was given to outrageously radical pronouncements which, had they been delivered in any but the voice of a man making secret love, would have instantly offended everyone.
“George Castleman, of course, is our guiding star.” Kate wanted to ask Castleman if he had been tempted lately to public disrobement, but contained herself; she wondered anew at the passion for clichés which seemed, in Frogmore’s case, almost to equal his passion for first names. Castleman, if not a guiding star, was certainly a power in the University, on all the vital committees and possessed of the kind of political acumen that was almost as rare in an academic community as inspired teaching.
“Herbert Klein, Political Science. Herbie, I believe you’re not as well known to Kate as the rest of us.”
“Herbie,” a man of enormous dignity and baleful looks, rose and shook Kate’s hand with a firmness clearly indicating his wish to dissociate both of them from Frogmore’s unearned intimacy. Kate wondered if anyone else had ever called him Herbie in his life. “We hope you will be able to help us, Professor Fansler,” he formally said. Kate suppressed a grin.
“And,” Frogmore went relentlessly on, “this is the other stranger to you, Kate: John Peabody, a student in the University College.”
“Hi,” said Peabody, to whom formality was unknown. Kate looked up in surprise. Although the principle of students serving on all the governing bodies of the University had by now been given token acceptance, in fact where there was a need for delicate decisions, students had so far not usually been present. Peabody, though, was older than any ordinary college man: he looked nearer thirty than twenty.
“And Tony Cartier is of course from your own department.” Kate could never resist smiling at the sight of Cartier: his ill-controlled restlessness made luncheon meetings a torture to him; he would glance wildly about as though at any moment someone might lock the doors and keep him prisoner here forever.
The aged waiter took the order for the drinks and scrutinized it with exaggerated care. All the waiters at the Faculty Club were old and slow, though those chosen for the private rooms were, if not fast, because that was clearly impossible, at least not deliberately slower than age and rheumatism determined. Finding, perhaps to his sorrow, no esoteric and therefore unavailable drinks on the list, the waiter departed.
Frogmore began to speak. He had not spoken long before Kate became aware that he was, for all his foolish ways, a genius at committee work. Kate, who thought herself remarkably inept on committees, recognized the talent instantly. Thank God, Kate thought; were Frogmore a humbler they would all be wasting their patience and their time.
“Now,” Frogmore said, “let us run over the major points in a swift recapitulation, mostly for your benefit, Kate, since the rest of us have been kicking this thing around for quite a while. I don’t want to be long-winded, so I’ll get down to the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts.” (Kate had, by the end of this sentence, ceased even to wince; she was taking her beating manfully. “There is one evil which . . . should never be passed over in silence but be continually publicly attacked, and that is corruption of the language . . .” Auden had written, but then Auden’s hours were not passed amidst deans and social scientists.)
“As you know, Kate,” Frogmore went blissfully on, “the University, which used to be a collection of baronies, has got to start operating as a whole if it’s not to be part of the state system in ten years. There are certain changes we all agree on: it would take three million dollars to make our Dental School adequate; ten million to make it outstanding. Do we really need a Dental School? No, we do not. But, you see, restructuring is a convenient excuse for carrying out long-planned hanky-panky. I take it you are familiar with Professor Jeremiah Cudlipp?” Kate, who knew a rhetorical question when she heard one, did not trouble either to nod or object. “He, of course, and his associate, Bob O’Toole, have decided that this time of restructuring is just the moment to bounce the University College off the campus altogether.”
“Bounce it?”
“Demolish it, phase it out, declare it null and void, give it the ax.”
“But Cudlipp is only Chairman of the College English Department,” Kate said.
“There is no ‘only’ about it, I’m afraid,” Castleman said. “For reasons we do not wholly understand, he is determined that the University College must go. It gives a bachelor’s degree that Cudlipp claims dilutes the prestige of the degree given by The College, as they so maddeningly call it. He has lots of other arguments. The point is, since he is in the English Department, we felt we needed someone in addition to Professor Cartier to help us in what is, I’m afraid, a fight for survival.”
“The College feels,” Luther Hankster whispered, “like someone with valuable suburban property whose neighbor threatens to sell to a black.”
“Does Bob O’Toole go along with this? I have always thought of him as a follower of Clemance.”
“So he is,” Castleman said. “But, as perhaps you have noticed, he possesses arrogance and ambition in about equally large proportions, which puts him squarely on Cudlipp’s side.”
“Where does Clemance stand?”
“Oh,” McQuire said, “he’s with the College; always has been. He suggests, in his marvelously reasonable way, that we are simply not ‘excellent’ enough. Which is nonsense; we are the most excellent college for adults in the country.”
“Have you had much to do with the College, Professor Fansler?” Herbert Klein asked.
“Enough to know they are in danger of giving arrogance a bad name,” Kate lightly said.
“Exactly,” Frogmore exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “Well put, Kate.”
“O.K.,” Kate said. “You want someone from the English Department—which you gather, correctly, is fed up with Cudlipp’s throwing all that weight around.” She hoped Frogmore would consider that well put too.
“And,” Castleman said, “we need general sort of help so that when the Administrative Council next meets they will confirm the future of the University College in no uncertain terms. Needless to say, Cudlipp will do all he can to prevent that.”
“Right,” Kate said. “I see, or think I do. But why me? I don’t even like teaching undergraduates.”
“You are more decorative than our other colleagues,” Cartier said.
“We did a lot of research, Kate,” Frogmore said, “and we ran into very little flak when it came to you.” (My God, Kate thought, he is smart; smart enough to know the we-chose-you-for-your-womanly-charms bit wouldn’t work; good for him.) “From all sides we heard of your sympathy with students—your willingness, long before the roof fell in, to give them time. We also heard that you are opposed to the publish-or-perish racket, and to professors who have no time for anything but their own professional careers.”
“All exaggerated, I assure you. I have no recent experience in undergraduate teaching and, to be brutally frank, not much desire for it. I like graduate students because they’re self-selected.” She winked at Bill McQuire.
“Why do you dislike teaching undergraduates?” Hankster asked. “Or did you just say that to startle us?”
“I said it because it’s true—and tact isn’t my most notable characteristic. Why is it true? Because of the age of undergraduates—delightful, no doubt, but not for me. As far as I’m concerned, youth is a condition which will pass, and which I prefer to have pass outside of my immediate field of vision. Of course, I have nothing against young people—apart from the fact that they are arrogant, spoiled, discourteous, incapable of compromise, and unaware of the price of everything they want to destroy. It’s not that I disagree with their beliefs, or mind if I do disagree. I just prefer those whom life has had time to season.
“What a long speech. I am certain I ought not to be so emphatic; for one thing, it’s unladylike and mysteriously unbecoming not to cherish the company of the young of one’s own species. Someone must have asked me a question, and now I’ve come all over nasty about children, and quite forgotten what it was.”
“We are answering the question of why you were chosen to join us,” Klein said. “We felt we could interest you in a college whose students are no longer in the throes of role-playing: older, experienced in the ways of the world, mellower on the whole, and totally motivated—self-selected was, I believe, your own phrase.”
“I see,” Kate said. “And am I to be persuaded to some special action, or only encouraged to cheer in a general sort of way?”
“Let some of our students into your courses,” Frogmore said. “Get to know them. Find out a bit about what we’re doing, and give us a chance to impress you. Carry our banner in the Graduate English Department any way you see fit, but fight our cause there.”
“I’ve certainly no objection to a few of your students in my courses, if I can interview them first. As to the fight in the Graduate English Department—you know, I don’t as a rule drink at lunch, but right at the moment I feel the need of what Auden calls an ‘analeptic swig.’ ”
“You’ve got to admit. Reed, it’s not madly me. I mean, can you imagine one getting involved in a university power-struggle?”
“Then don’t,” Reed said. “What I can’t imagine is why you don’t just say no, but then I, like all outsiders, am having a certain amount of trouble understanding what in the world is going on in that university of yours. Surely you can send this Frogmore chap a firm but gracious note telling him you don’t want anything to do with his silly college.”
“But am I certain I don’t want anything to do with it? It is, after all, awfully soul-satisfying of them to want me.”
“And a very clever bunch they are, I must say. Though it is certainly by no means clear to me why the proposition of any old college gets the most careful consideration, while my . . .”
“I have yet to refuse one of your propositions, Reed, admit it.”
“Kate, whenever you start talking like a bad imitation of Nancy Mitford I know that you are not only plastered but worried.”
“Sweet, perceptive you. Though I must say, I really can’t believe that Auden drank a whole bottle of Cherry Heering.” They were in Kate’s living room late that night and Kate, as she carefully explained, while she had long since admitted she couldn’t write poetry like Auden’s, wanted to discover if she had at least his capacity for alcohol. “You see,” she had told Reed, “Auden went to spend the evening with the Stravinskys and Robert Craft, and he managed to drink a pitcher of martinis before dinner, a bottle of champagne during, and a bottle of Cherry Heering after. Craft thinks he thought the Cherry Heering was Chianti—I rather wish it were, actually. All that affected his labials only slightly and his wit not at all. It had no effect either, apparently, on his stomach, his liver, or his plumbing—not one visit to the loo. Well, I have failed the test—that is, my stomach is all right; I have, thank God, no way of knowing how my liver is; I’m far too comfortable to go to the loo; but I am not going to make it through this bottle of Cherry Heering. To join the fight or not to join the fight, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to defeat Jeremiah Cudlipp, which would be so pleasant in the gut, to say nothing of the good one could do, or . . .”
“Kate,” Reed said, “what has happened to you this fall? Last spring, at least before all those students decided to occupy all those buildings, you seemed to . . .”
“Sara Teasdale.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“In the spring I asked the daisies
If his words were true,
And the clever little daisies
Always knew.
Now the fields are brown and barren,
Bitter autumn blows,
And of all the stupid asters
Not one knows.”
“I am certain,” Reed said, “that Auden does not quote Sara Teasdale even after three bottles of Cherry Heering. What are you worried about, this University College?”
“There is my motto.”
“Oh, my God, which motto is that? If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly?”
“Not that one. The British Navy one: never ask for a job, never refuse one.”
“I wonder if I, too, am not an honorary member of the British Navy: I’m thinking of leaving the D.A.’s Office.”
“Reed Amhearst! Why? Surely you haven’t tired of fighting crime?”
“I’ve been offered a job—actually a partnership—in a Wall Street law firm. Great rise in salary, among other things. A man might even consider supporting a wife and a small canary.”
“Do you mean you would help people merge companies and diddle with their stocks and bonds?”
“No. That’s what everyone else in the firm does. I would be expected to rally round when their clients take time off and start diddling with things other than stocks and bonds. I am distressed, Kate, that the more certain I become of what I want, the more uncertain you become. I do realize that the University has got to go through a time of reorganization and re-examination, but—well, you seem positively driven . . .”
“To get plastered.”
“Yes, but I was going to say—to examine every alternative as though you had somehow forfeited the right to say a simple ‘no’ to anything.”
“But I have, you know. In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt. The generation gap appeared somewhere between me and my brothers. They deny that they are guilty of anything but an excess of generosity, and I deny that I am innocent in anything except bumbling good intentions. Excuse me a minute, I think I’m going to throw up.”
Reed, watching her more or less dignified exit, decided this was hyperbole. She returned, indeed, in a cheerful mood.
“I have thought it all out,” Kate said. “Ready? The University College is a damn good idea, and there is nothing against it except the insufferable snobbery of the College. The fact is, now that I come to think of it, I know plenty of people of my generation of all sexes to whom an adult college of excellence would be the chance for a new life or a second life, which is becoming more and more necessary in the United States but which present institutions make impossible. Hooray, I’m going to make a speech. Ladies and gentlemen . . .”
“Right,” Reed said. “Then drop Frogmore a short, gracious note saying let’s fight together shoulder to shoulder for good old University College, sincerely yours, Kate Fansler.”
“Just Kate. He never uses last names.”
“Good. Then you join the fight for University, and I’ll join my law firm. Why not?”
“Frederick Clemance.”
“Our hero.”
“You need not be vulgar. When you speak with admiration of all those musty forensic types, I do not sneer.”
“I’m not sneering, simply surprised to have his name introduced into the discussion. What’s he got to do with University College?”
“He’s against it. Lock, stock, and barrel—or do I mean hook, line, and sinker? Anyway, he hates it, he wants to crush it under foot, he has joined with Jeremiah Cudlipp to defeat it, and do I want to go into battle with those two?”
“Why not? Growing up consists in fighting our former heroes.”
“Maybe. I’m not that grown up. I don’t want to get close enough to Clemance to discover he’s not as great as I prefer to suppose he is.”
“I don’t know about the labials but the sibilants are doing fine. If I remember correctly Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats, which isn’t all that difficult since you cannot have read it to me fewer than eighteen times, Auden found no difficulty in recognizing that Yeats was magnificent and silly at the same time. Something about time forgiving those who wrote well. Clemance, if I am to believe you, wrote well. Let time forgive him, and get on with your college.”
“But Clemance isn’t silly; he’s always been large of soul when all about him were nit-picking. Anyway, I’ve been hero-worshipping him since before I got into his special seminar as a student, and that, God help me, was nearly twenty years ago.”
“If Clemance is as large-souled as all that, why does he associate himself with Jeremiah Cudlipp?”
“I don’t know. Love for the College, maybe.”
“Maybe.”
Kate got to her feet and wandered over to the bookcase. Clemance’s books were there, ranged together, biographies, essays, plays, poems—all together, a rare tribute in itself, since Kate divided her library ruthlessly into categories: poetry, fiction, drama, biography, criticism, cultural history, and books-not-worth-keeping-with-which-I-cannot-bear-to-part. “And if this were a movie,” Reed said, “we would flash back to eager young Kate, eyes shining, hair streaming down her back, listening to Clemance in the glory of his prime, explaining us to ourselves.”
“My hair never streamed down my back, surely it’s the prime of his glory, and I wish they still made movies like that.”
“He must be almost as old as Auden.”
“We’re all almost as old as Auden, ‘in middle-age hoping to twig from/What we are not what we might be next.’ ”
“I’ll tell you what you and Clemance are going to be next.”
“What?”
“On opposite sides. Do you think I could be present at the opening fusilades of what promises to be a most interesting skirmish?”
“You can if you want to join us tomorrow. Frederick Clemance, though you may not believe it, has invited me to lunch. Why should you want to support a small canary?”
“Why should I want to support a wife? The only woman I think of marrying has long supported herself, with the aid of a meager salary and a large private income, and is presently concerned with founding a new college.”
“I’m not founding a college, I’m allocating resources—that is, if you’re describing me. Are you thinking of marrying me for my money?”
“Odd you should mention that,” Reed said. “It’s the only reason for marrying you I hadn’t thought of. Now, when it comes to the reasons for not marrying you, there isn’t an argument I’ve missed. But I’m like the Jew in Boccaccio who was converted to Catholicism on the sensible grounds that if the Church has succeeded despite all the corruption he found in Rome, it must have God behind it.”
“The world is full of beautiful young women aching for a handsome man like you, all graying sideburns and youthful demeanor. I am aging, cantankerous, given to illogical skirmishes and the drinking of too much wine. There must be at least fifty young women waiting for you, Reed.”
Reed walked then, in his turn, to the bookcase (poetry), extracted a volume and read from it: “ ‘One deed ascribed to Hercules was “making love” with fifty virgins in the course of a single night: one might on that account say that Hercules was beloved of Aphrodite, but one would not call him a lover.’ Nor is that all,” Reed said, turning the pages. “We have all agreed we live in uncertain times. Indeed, says Auden:
‘How much half-witted horseplay and sheer bloody misrule
It took to bring you two together both on schedule?’ ”