sixteen

I WAS MET at the La Salle Street Station by Lapchick and a studio press agent named Quincy. These two helped me down the train steps in the walking cast to which I must now become accustomed, and by which I had told my tormentors they might identify me.

Lapchick was a ruddy, bony-nosed man with cheeks that looked as though they had been scoured with a cleansing powder rather than washed with conventional bath soap. He wore a shirt with wide stripes and a white-on-white necktie secured with a gold clasp, and flourished a cigar in a hand on which gleamed a large signet ring, as though he, too, were engaged in the dangerous business of parody and must use a broad brush in order to leave no doubt that he was offering a popular caricature of his type. His speech, however, revealed no such special intention. He was manager of the studio’s Chicago office, as surmised. Quincy I liked on sight, though at the same time somehow doubting that he would wear well. There was a mirthless humor about him, that of someone basically wretched. Thirty, to all first appearances intelligent, he was very possibly the kind of public relations man President Bagley said the school needed—to avoid in the future such conjunctions as this.

I move in a fantasy through the station, like a prisoner between these men. Neither makes any secret of viewing this whole thing as a stunt, nor any bones about assuming I do too. Neither intrinsically good nor bad, just a stunt. If I encounter the same attitude in Miss Ravage, then I shall be so taken aback by prevailing cynicism that I shall be tempted to defend my letter on the subject of happiness as containing some sentiments that might be legitimately espoused. But I must be careful. I must not let people know that I am a square. At bottom. That is the secret I must carry to my grave. I once defended a line in a poem about “seeing rainbows in our tears” (the tears acting as a prism through which light is broken into its component parts) to my social detriment for that evening. I must try to let my sob ballads as a hobby smuggle sentimentalism over the borders of human relations humorously for me. I must conceal the fact that I am the End. With luck I may get through this life without its being discovered.

In the cab going toward the hotel where Miss Ravage awaits me, Quincy is openly bitter about his employment, on extremely short notice. He is a fleshmonger. Pure and simple. He would like to publicize something besides another Miss Twin Peaks. “Just once, somebody who can act.” Every time the West Coast sends him another picture to place in the Midwestern papers, he knows before he opens the envelope what it will be. “Another moocow.” Yet he is required to get the word around not only that the subject can act, but that she has a mind, and even a soul. She wants really to direct, she reads Camus, she is thinking of going into a monastery. Oops, convent. “But they can all only act with their neckline,” he says. “Wait till you see this one. A pail and a milking stool and you’re in business. I don’t know half the time whether I’m running an office or a dairy.”

“He wants to go out with them,” says Lapchick, with what seems like nothing more than good-natured banter, but which turns out to go directly to the heart of the matter. “Don’t pay any attention to him, Professor Waltz.” I sit between them, and as Lapchick turns to grin in my direction he releases a further cloud of the shaving cologne with which the cab is already permeated. Leaning forward, he says past me to Quincy, “You did take that one out who came through last week, didn’t you, Pete?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You cop her biscuits?”

“It’s a question of arranging interviews for them,” Quincy explains to me. “When an actress stops overnight on her way to or from the Coast it means she wants to be interviewed. You can fly through. So you have to rustle up the reporters and columnists.” He asks abruptly, proof again that people divine one another’s thoughts without dreaming it, “Do they ever use a press relations man at your college? What’s the name of it again?”

“Polycarp,” I say, having to think a moment myself. I am so far removed from my customary habitat that it seems like another time as well as another place.

“The way I hear it, anybody can cop her biscuits but you can’t get the silk down,” says the dreadful Lapchick. “A real teaserino.” I trust he is talking about the moocow who came through last week, not the one with whom I have an engagement, and toward whom, on this formal ground alone, chivalry forbids my brooking any such familiarity.

“It’s named after a second-century saint,” I say. “The college. Polycarp was Bishop of Smyrna and a Christian martyr. Very little is known of his life.”

“Right! Pete here will fix that.”

Whether he is engaging again in idle irony or seriously accommodating the possibility of losing another employe in a field with an understandably rapid turnover is hard to say—and impossible at the moment to explore. We have stopped in front of my hotel, where Lapchick himself springs out to drop my Gladstone bag off for me, my condition being an added complication in a tight schedule allowing no time to “freshen up or anything.” I move over to the corner of the cab he’s been occupying and, in the few moments while we wait for his return, take Pete Quincy in a little more closely.

He has light red hair and the pale pink skin that often accompanies it. His features are neat and symmetrical, at present outlined in profile against a broth of neon light from State Street storefronts, but despite its regularity and the obscurity in which it is viewed his face clearly betrays the querulousness behind his humor. I guess him to be quite lonely. His mood, my predicament, and a kind of despair diffused by the anonymous swarms of pedestrians combine to infect the hour. How many of these people are hurrying to rendezvous of any intrinsic joy? Most of them may be no happier than Quincy. He wants to date this Twin Peaks while I wish I were flying through the Indiana dunes in Marion Wellington’s open car.

“Walk, moocow, walk. See the moocow walk. Tom watches the moocow walk,” Quincy mutters to himself. After a few sentences of this routine I gather that it is a way of declaring the plane on which he works to be that of a grade-school primer, and of implying that that is also the level on which my own evening will be pitched. Only a profound personal bitterness can account for such behavior on such short notice. He is biting down on an aching tooth. The pit into which I have let myself be drawn yawns at my feet. How did I ever get into such a muddle?

“The moocow turns. She sees Tom watch her walk. Watch her walk, Tom, see the moocow walk. Now the man with the camera takes the moocow’s picture. Does the moocow like to have her picture taken? Yes, she likes to have her picture taken.” It seems to me we have had enough of this—far too much in fact. A stop ought to be put to it, and that instantly. But Quincy continues. “The man now has enough pictures of the moocow, and he tells Tom to go over and stand with her. They stand together while the man takes their picture.”

“Do you mean,” I say, deciding to put an end to the performance, “that there will be photographers here tonight?”

“Yes,” Quincy answers, smiling for the first time. “They will be there. See the man with the box. The box is called a camera. Stand over there, moocow, stand with Tom. The moocow stands next to Tom. Tom stands next to the moocow. A light flashes. It flashes over and over. That is enough that way, moocow. Now dance with Tom, so the man can take some pictures that way too. Then we will have them to put in the papers tomorrow, and in the magazines. The kind that the moocow can read …”

His ragging must be borne as good-naturedly as possible. It is no good asking whether he has been hurt as a child. Some other method must be employed if the best is to be made of this, and further untoward results be kept to an absolute minimum. Perhaps some good may even come of it. After a moment of silent thought, I say:

“Look. I don’t know whether you were serious about what you said a minute ago, about a press relations man at the college. But I could arrange for an interview if you had any such thing actually in mind. You seem discontent with your present work. I can’t promise anything of course, but it’s the sort of thing schools often talk about the need for, and occasionally even get around to. I don’t know myself how good you are, but my own test for a press agent would be how well he can keep stuff out of the paper. Especially in a man’s home town. We could discuss it later. Here comes Lapchick. Shh.”

The instant Angela Ravage opens the door of her hotel suite to admit us I see what a misrepresentation Quincy’s account is, and that it must serve as some kind of protective mechanism. She dresses precisely so as not to dramatize the famous prow, in a soft green evening gown with a straight neckline that displays rather her white shoulders. Perhaps it is a stratagem, but it also reveals an instinctive good taste. Her hair is gathered in a cluster of curls at the nape of her neck. The petulant smile of the “hoyden” roles results mainly from a pinched, slightly tilted upper lip which in real life, especially in unguarded moments, gives her a somewhat vulnerable look. Since due to this faint malformation her lips are always slightly parted, there is a vaguely wondering air about her, as of the dew still on her. It is easy to see how much of her true spirit is vitiated by all the silly smoldering and emoting she is instructed to do before the cameras. Nor does it call for any speculative acumen to sense that Quincy is smitten, and requires the safeguard of his sour-grapes caricature. When she extends her hand I remember to press it with the warmth, and retain it for the interval, regarded by experts as signifying neither extreme of introvert nor extrovert, but a mature blend of both.

Flashbulbs pop in our faces and continue to explode as we become acquainted. There are two photographers, who kneel on the floor and crouch on the furniture in the contortions common to their trade for the procurement of interesting angles. We are shot “getting to know one another”: leaning forward in earnest conversation, smoking cigarettes, drinking champagne. There is general laughter when the cork I pry from the bottle flies across the room, narrowly missing Lap-chick. It is then that I catch an accidental glimpse of Quincy, watching from the sidelines. He isn’t joining in the mirth, but taking Miss Ravage in with a tense, almost hopeless expression. He gives the impression that his eyeballs are sweating. I am glad to see the photographers assemble their gear at last preparatory to departure, but dismayed to hear that they will “see us down in the dining room,” as will Lapchick and Quincy.

Miss Ravage and I are left alone for a moment to finish our champagne cocktails. I have noticed a book lying on a table, Existentialism and the Theatre. “Are you interested in that?” I ask.

“Which? Existentialism or the theatre?”

“Either. It makes no difference.”

“Well, both. I’m an Existentialist, I think.” This kind of remark is either a silly affectation or the expression of an honestly thoughtful nature. It is a little disquieting to find it more the latter; the need for Quincy-like insulation becomes understandable. “Well so,” she says, composing herself with a smile. “I wish we weren’t stuck with the others, so we could really get acquainted. Sort of reminds me of Sartre’s definition of hell. You probably remember it.”

“No, I don’t believe I …”

“Hell is other people. One of the characters in No Exit says it.”

Talk, moocow, talk. Talk to Tom. Cite authors, make literary allusions. Show Tom that you know big words and the titles of plays. Tom listens. Tom sees that the moocow knows big words and the titles of plays. Make Tom see that you are not a sexpot, moocow, so that Tom will be twice as captivated by you.

Tom helps the moocow into her wrap and they go down the elevator. The elevator makes your stomach feel funny when it stops quickly. The others are waiting on the mezzanine and together we enter the dining room, where the head-waiter bows us to our tables. Miss Ravage and I share a choice one near the window, next to one from which our sponsors watch and supervise the proceedings. We are photographed making selections from menus the size of pup tents, then eating what we have ordered, roast duck and a vintage Burgundy. By the time we reach our baked Alaska the orchestra is in full swing, and couples are walking out onto the floor.

“Would you care to dance?” I ask with a laugh. “Dance with one of the others if you’d like, moo—I mean Miss Ravage. Dance with Quincy.”

“I don’t like him.”

“So dance with him. You believe in the Absurd. He’s unhappy. I know he’d love it.”

She acquiesces, and I crook a finger at Quincy over my shoulder. “Miss Ravage would like to dance and I can’t. Can we throw you into the breach?”

Lapchick frowns on this development. After consultation they have decided to omit my broken leg from the publicity releases and the pictures, but they do want one of us dancing. So I hobble out to the floor, where I hold Miss Ravage in my arms a moment, then clomp back to the table, leaving her to Quincy. His eyeballs are still sweating, and he seems to have difficulty swallowing. As I cross the room this time I stumble into a man who has as much trouble walking as I, though not with his leg. He holds a rubber cushion under one arm, and he brings up the rear of a party the captain is showing to a table while at the same time trying to ignore their existence. The captain manages to get them well out of sight, though one does catch a glimpse of the little old man placing the air pillow on his chair preparatory to sitting down on it. For some reason this pleases me enormously. I derive a certain perverse satisfaction from it, and only wish the man would at some point blow air into the valve before returning it to its place under him. That would make my evening complete, especially if it occurred in full view of the captain, perhaps even while he was pouring their wine. The cushion is circular with a hole in the middle, like a doughnut. Most refreshing.

“You dance divinely,” I tell Miss Ravage as Quincy wafts her past my table. She sticks her tongue out at me over Quincy’s shoulder. How well the evening is going. After dinner our supervisors want only a shot or two of us chatting between the acts at the theatre, before a last one saying good night at Miss Ravage’s hotel room door again.

Now it is much too late for the theatre, and neither of us wants to go in any case, but a lobby shot is faked against a wall outside the mezzanine entrance of the restaurant. Lapchick holds Miss Ravage’s wrap while she stands, elbow in palm, a cigarette burning in her fingers, listening to an intelligent comment I am making on the play we are seeing. Then the good night, shaking hands at the door of her room while she thanks me for a wonderful evening—though in actual fact she has secretly asked me in for a nightcap. The others disappear into the elevator, Quincy throwing a last haunted glance over his shoulder while I close the door of the room.

“Thank God that’s over. Now can I give you a brandy, Professor Waltz? Hell, Tom. Order yourself a drink while I change into something comfortable. I think I’d like a beer.”

I telephone room service for two bottles of Löwenbräu and stand at the window looking out across the lake front, the lamps along the drive and the moving lights of cars against a dark backdrop of water offering their unfailing nocturnal magic. I cannot get the little man with the air cushion under his arm out of my mind. I want him to go from restaurant to restaurant of this rotten world, deflating them all with his pneumatic doughnut.

Miss Ravage emerges from the bedroom at last in red lounging pajamas made precisely for what she said—comfort. She curls up in bed against a wad of pillows and without either affectation or any particular egotism rambles on about herself.

“I can’t act. Not really. They spotted me for a gamin type—America’s answer to the European ones?—but it didn’t work, and the gamin vogue’s about over now anyway. This contest was a last gasp. I kicked at first, but then figured what have I got to lose. Same as you probably. Actually that guck you deliberately turned out has a truth you can give a respectable statement, like com usually can. Don’t you think? Fitzgerald says somewhere how we look back on periods when we thought we were only waiting for the pleasure, to find they were the pleasure itself. I’m sure you feel deeply about things. I think I do. But then who the hell doesn’t? We’re all a mess of quivering, fearing—I mean inside—pulp, which is why we need the protection reason tries to give. Philosophy. The enamel around the naked nerve. The heart is a muscle—my father just had a heart attack—and people say, ‘It’s just a torn muscle. It’ll heal.’ But I think it’s more like a tooth, with this nerve inside, ready to quiver any time a cavity shows up. That must be our beer.”

I pay for the beers and pour them. I sit on a chair beside her bed, like someone visiting a friend in a hospital. She resumes her jabbering.

“I tried mysticism once, but that’s no good. That’s just cotton batting stuffed into the cavity, with a little medication on it maybe. You’ve got to seal the cavity over with cement—the good hard cement of reason. Face facts. Life is neither good nor evil, it just is. It has no meaning, no point, so just forget about that. Religious faith—” She interrupts herself with a swallow of beer, still gesturing with the free hand. “I hear it means nothing to people on their deathbeds. A survey was made once.”

“You mean they actually interviewed dying people to ask whether their faith meant anything to them now?”

“Well, not that blunt. But something. I forget where I read it. But I asked a doctor that once too, and he confirmed it. Not that people reject it or anything—they just don’t think about it. He said. What’s of value I suppose is what it means to people in their lives. Mortality comes down in the end to just an organic matter. If you do believe in the fiction about God—” Here she smiles, and says, “You remember what Heine said about whether he thought God would forgive him.”

“At the moment I can’t seem to …”

“ ‘C’est son métier.’ That’s his trade.”

Quote for Tom, moocow, quote some more famous men. The moocow sits on the bed talking. Tom listens to the moocow. She tells him what the man Heine said, and then translates it for him too. She translates it into English so Tom will understand. They smile at each other. There is a silence, and they drink from their glasses at the same time.

“I’d like to go back to school.”

“You would?”

“I’m twenty-two. I only had two years of college when some character ‘discovered’ me in a play there. It was Skidmore. I wasn’t too happy there, or then. I’d like to try some place else. How’s Polycarp?”

“I don’t think it would be to your taste. The head of the philosophy department is a Platonist, an idealist. He’d be dishing out a point of view you wouldn’t care for.”

“All the same I’d like to take a look at the place, now that I’m this close. I’m staying in the Midwest for a few days. I’d like to go back with you.”

“There was a man in the restaurant, I don’t know whether you noticed, who took an air pillow in with him? The captain’s face was a sight to behold. Tickled me pink. I hate snobbishness, and I like to see it brought low.”

“You’ve got something in your craw. What is it?”

“May the Lord smite all those who put on airs, all those who upstage another. May he dash them to pieces with a rod of iron.”

“Waltz. What kind of a name is that anyway?”

“I have no idea.”

“You mean you don’t know what nationality you are?”

“We lived in a neighborhood where there’s a dense Polish population. At least they seem dense to me.” Father forgive! Mother forget! Heed not the crowing cock again!

“You say you teach Shakespeare. Do you take any position about all these theories? Who do you think wrote the plays?”

“I lean to the group theory. Anybody can write the stuff who puts his mind to it. You even get so you think that way. Even find yourself extemporizing it.”

“Extemporize some. Say something to me in Shakespeare.”

“To celebrate thee suitably a contradiction were, for best to do thee homage would be to show how thou hast stopped me dumb. For thou hast so infested my commuting blood, which to the suburbs of my feet doth flow and back again, that something something further heats my somethinged brain. Fevered brain. Till in mid-flight the pinions of articulation falter, and my tongue palsies at its sweetly hopeless task.”

She smiles watchfully at me across the top of her glass. I see that I am making far too much headway.

We drove down with Quincy in his car the next afternoon, as it turned out.

Since I expected to be fired anyway, I could see nothing to lose by showing Miss Ravage around the school. She would certainly make a hit with the students, especially the boys, and might just charm the faculty if generally put on view. Quincy’s motivation for the trip was twofold: continued closeness to Angela Ravage, and the interview for a possible job as press relations man for the college which I had promised him. He took a camera along, a device not far short of blackmail. There would be no more pictures in local newspapers provided I made good my promise. He insisted first that the interview be accompanied by my personal recommendation, but I convinced him that in the present pass this would be a liability rather than an asset. He packed in the camera just in case—and of course there remained the possibility of our getting a shot of Miss Ravage winning over the student body, or Miss Ravage thinking about enrolling at Polycarp: publicity of a kind that would make people forget all about my letter and might even prove advantageous to President Bagley on his fund-raising tour. I arranged by telephone for Marion Wellington to join us on a double date, a stratagem by which I hoped further to appease Quincy by throwing him Miss Ravage in the resulting foursome. Marion herself proved entirely sympathetic on the phone. “How can anyone go on making such a fool of himself?” she said.

All in all, I felt a good deal better about things as we left the main highway from Chicago, that afternoon, and turned into Slow Rapids, climbing the long street that mounted toward the college. My dismay at what awaited me, therefore, can be imagined. As we wound along the driveway leading into the campus proper, I saw that the flag above the Administration Building was flying at half mast. We had not heard the news in some hours, and wondered if a governmental official or other national figure had died. Quincy stopped the car, and I sprang out to make inquiries of several students who were walking by. It was then that I learned the news that Norm Littlefield had passed away.

A word of comment which anticipates the story somewhat is not, I think, amiss here. It will put certain facts otherwise open to misinterpretation, and even now still often garbled in the telling, into some kind of badly needed perspective.

Norm carried too much insurance. There was no doubt about that. And who knows how many a demise is not hastened by the burdens unwisely shouldered by being too heavily written up. The thing becomes a kind of vicious circle, a self-defeating paradox in which an outcome feared is brought on by the means intended to provide against it. Among people familiar with the facts of Norm’s private life, this was his besetting folly. The strain of meeting unrealistic premiums was only the last straw among other fiscal imprudences. Wisdom had dictated a life far more moderate than Norm actually lived, one free of the stress he so recklessly invited by the many administrative chores he also needlessly took on, not to mention the pace a socially ambitious wife led him. That the amount of coverage with which he humored her was outrageously more than he could afford was in due course reflected by the scale on which his widow was presently able to live—far more splendidly than she had on a poor professor’s pay! But I do not wish to indulge in personalities here, or criticize the woman unduly. Anybody’s life is his own to live as he wishes, or as he must, which was perhaps the case here. I am only revealing facts which came to light, and assurances with which people very kindly came forward.

The Administration Building was open, though it was Sunday, and I suspected President Bagley was in his office seeing to “arrangements” and attending to other matters relating to the misfortune. As I stood uncertainly in the driveway, his secretary appeared in the doorway and urgently beckoned me over. “President Bagley has been trying to get you,” she said. “I think you’d better go and see him now.”

I dismissed my frieinds, giving them directions to a tavern where they might get a drink and possibly stay on for dinner, as well as await word from me, though there was little likelihood that I would join them. I explained to Quincy that an interview with the president was now out of the question, as was showing Miss Ravage around the campus. They drove off as I made my reluctant way once again into the president’s office.

“Well, you’ve killed the head of the English Department.”

This was what I had been hoping he would say. I wanted him to blurt out an excess from which he would in all conscience have to retreat, owing me an apology. The result was that the grievance rather dramatically changed hands.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s quite all right. We all say things we don’t mean in circumstances like these when everyone’s upset. The thing to do is pull ourselves together and decide what is best.”

The best thing to do when someone dies is bury him—that was the thought brought readily to mind by this way of putting things. But President Bagley knew I was thinking beyond the immediate tragedy to the larger aspects of the problem from the school’s point of view. Making a visible effort to control himself, he said:

“Unfortunately we can’t always have what is best. The blow of Norm Littlefield’s loss turns out to be all the more bitter because neither Blodgett nor McGeese plans to return next year. Both have just told me they have taken jobs at other colleges. It’s as though everyone is running out on me. This is very serious as far as I’m concerned.”

“I too. They’re both bangup men, and I’m sorry to hear they’re leaving.”

“Yes. That means that neither of the two men logically next in line, both in terms of seniority and general merit, can be counted on to step into Norm Littlefield’s shoes. Everything seems to be unraveling here like an old sock. Jowett is a brilliant but erratic young man. His reviews have won him a following and given the faculty a dash of the avant garde that’s all to the good, but he wouldn’t set well with our more conservative supporters.” He paused and, darting a quick glance at me before rearranging the blotter pad on his desk, said, “We shall have to make you acting head of the English Department.”

Needless to say I was stunned by this announcement. I had not expected anything of the sort. I recovered myself long enough to reply, very nearly choking up, “Dr. Bagley, it is unnecessary for me to say that I hardly consider myself worthy of this honor, this trust—”

“At least we are in agreement on that point.”

“—but I shall do my best—my absolute dedicated best—for Polycarp.”

“It’s only temporary of course, until we find someone who …” He tried by a vague gesture to indicate the general concept of adequacy lacking in the present patchwork. “We’re in correspondence now with a couple of people. This is an emergency measure, and I emphasize that you’re acting head. Seeing to it purely that administrative processes go on. Nothing more. In fact, one of your first duties will be to help us find somebody better—as well as replacements for Blodgett and McGeese.”

He pushed across the desk to me a sheet of paper on which were the names of three or four possibilities for the post in question, all teachers at Midwestern colleges and universities, only one of whom I recognized, as the author of some treatise Norm Littlefield had made me read. Teachers must keep up with their homework as well as students. This was followed by the files on these prospects, including correspondence and notes, as well as folders on possible new English teachers as such, irrespective of their likelihood as executive timber. The president must have extracted some of the latter material from Littlefield’s desk.

“I’d like you to take it home with you and study it. Especially the dossiers, which aren’t by any means complete. Do what you can about filling them out and keeping them up to date. Find out what you can about everybody. Read what they’ve written. That’s important.”

“I’ll drop everything but my classes for it. My own research certainly.”

“What’s that?”

“‘The Clowns in Shakespeare.’ It was a field Norm wanted me to devote myself to.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. Well, do your best for everyone’s sake. Pitch in. Now I’ve got to get busy over the arrangements. There’ll be a service in the Episcopal Church, in which the school will participate. I’ll deliver a brief eulogy myself. So if you’ll excuse me. God bless you.”

“God bless you, sir.”

As I shuffled humbly out the door and down the front steps, clutching the folders, my eyes to the ground, I felt that my pants were baggy, my shoes several sizes too large, and the tears were coursing down either side of a huge putty nose.