A Handful of Time (15 page)

“Fine! Fine!” Mr. Jrob said. He was never quite as offensive as his wife.

“What’s in a Suspicion?” she asked nervously. “I remember the time you came back from a field trip with a canteen full of kumiss. I’ve got my capillaries to think of, you know.”

“Dear, I got that from Marco Polo.”

“I don’t care if you got it from Willy Mays. It did something to my capillaries.”

“The Suspicion,” William said, “is pretty harmless. It’s straight French Vermouth with just a suspicion of gin in it and a clove of garlic. Some people put a sprinkling of nutmeg on the top, or a little…” He stopped, because of the expression on Mrs. Jrob’s face. “You don’t
have
to have the nutmeg.”

“Hideous,” Mrs. Jrob shuddered. “Absolutely hairy.”

“Beta!”

“Oh, all right. But just give me a plain Vermouth.”

William went back to make the drinks and left me unprotected.

“Have you found a place to live yet?” I asked Mrs. Jrob conversationally.

“We
brought
a place to live. Fortunately,” she added, looking around my living room which is really, quite nice.

“A bubble?”

“Of course not. Synthetic slabs supported by electronic beams. They wouldn’t let me bring my robot, of course, and there won’t be enough power for my matter converter, so there’ll be a lot of wastage. But I suppose you get used to primitive conditions after a while.”

“You’re so brave,” I murmured. “Where are you going to put your house?”

“Hasn’t your husband told you? He offered us your back yard. From his description it ought to just fit.”

“Just fit!” On my peonies.

I asked William to take a look at the soufflé. If I’d looked at it it would have fallen.

After dinner we played some primitive middle low American music on the tape recorder and I was just feeling vengeful enough to bring out my electric zither when the footbell tinkled.

Mrs. Blake fluttered in, wearing her second best grey voile peplum and a surprised smile.

“Oh, excuse me, my dear, I had no
idea
you had company. Dr. Blake has a class tonight, you know, and I just thought I’d pop over to tell you about Norma’s hys… oh, my, men present. My dear, they took everything out.
Everything.
Well, I’ll just run…”

“No, indeed,” I assured her. “Do sit down and talk. The men don’t pay any attention to us anyway.” I waved toward the company. “Meet Mr. and Mrs. Jrob from the twenty-second century.”

Mrs. Blake peered nearsightedly at Mr. Jrob,. donned her antique pince-nez, and took it off with a very disappointed expression.

“Tell me, Mr. Jrob, do you write poetry?”

I couldn’t help it I giggled.

“Poetry?”

“You know. The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung…’ That sort of thing.”

“I most certainly do
not.”

“What a hairy thought,” Mrs. Jrob sniffed. “
 
‘The aisles of grease.’ It reminds me of your faculty lunch room.”

“Well, I just thought, in the circumstances… I mean, from what William suggested… oh, well, everyone can’t write poetry,” Mrs. Blake explained lamely.

The men went back to their deep discussion of late twentieth-century advertising semantics, which left Mrs. Blake a clear field on Norma’s hysterectomy.

“Hairiest thing I ever heard of,” was Mrs. Jrob’s comment.

Mrs. Blake left early, apologizing herself out of the door. But she whispered in my ear before she left, “Manfred,
indeed!”

At first, Mr. and Mrs. Jrob were the center of much delighted attention. Mostly Mrs. Jrob, because she was home all day. For blocks around wives homed in on what came to be referred to as “the love nest.” Mrs. Jrob was given to understand that at Ivy Leave faculty wives were Broad-minded. Uninhibited. Not concerned with the unimportant Legal Technicalities of social existence. Godwin was mentioned frequently. Rousseau. Françoise Sagan.

But Mrs. Blake’s rumor, for which I am in no way responsible, soon bore bitter fruit. Creech, I should say.

It was William who, by pure chance, mentioned it. He’s giver to mentioning things when faced with a bowl of furz in the morning. Which is one good reason for serving furz.

“Too bad about Jrob,” he said.

“What’s too bad?”

“Nobody can take over his classes.”

“You mean they’re leaving?” I cried delightedly, wondering if the peonies would grow up again from the roots.

“May have to. It seems they’ve been living in sin.”

“Oh, but that’s just a rumor Mrs. Blake started. Anyway, so what? It’s perked up the whole neighborhood.”

“It perked up the board of administrators, too. It seems word got down to the undergraduate level. That’s why J’s classes were so large. He lectures like a billy goat. And one of those undergraduates is a pasty-faced little freshman who just happens to be old B.D.’s grandson. So word got back to B.D. and President Grayson said he had that expression on his face he gets when he’s decided to leave his money to Harvard.”

“Harvard! But all there is there is…”

“I know. But you know the tradition. Businessmen think there is an exclusive section of the Hereafter reserved for people who leave their money to Harvard.”

“Let’s not discuss B.D. Get back to Jrob. What did President Grayson tell him?”

“As I get the story, Jrob says to the Pres, ‘What do you mean,
legally
married?’ And it turns out he really is living in sin, only it isn’t a sin in the twenty-second century and furthermore he refuses to
get
married as he says that would make him lose face and ruin his social life when he goes back home on vacations.”

“So he’s going to be fired?”

“Asked to resign because of cultural lag.”

“My, but this is going to be fun!” I sighed happily. Because William knows all about Architecture from 1875 to 1890, but I know all about college professors. And I knew the upheaval to come would furnish conversational material for years.

The sociology department was up in arms immediately. It was the first Cause we’d had since Integration. Professor Insfree grew a beard and two female teaching fellows shaved their heads.

The psychology department followed. Musty old tomes, predating the Organization Man and the growth of suburban morality, were routed out of the basement in the library. The
libido
came into its own again.

“We’re lost. We’re all lost,” several members of the English Department were heard to remark with tragic joy. Fitzgerald and Hemingway enjoyed a brief revival.

The Jrob dilemma sifted down to the student level. A group of sophomores began to wear brown chitons and glare at everybody.
Blast,
the student organ of Ivy Leave, began to publish articles advocating free thought, though apparently the only thing students considered worth thinking about freely were other students of the opposite sex.

Above all, the roar “Academic Freedom!” echoed from one end of the campus to another.

There was even a pantie raid, interpreted, for some obscure reason, as a gesture for academic freedom.

Bulletins began to appear on the campus. As fast as the signs were torn down they came back up.

“All the world loves a lover except the Administration.”

“Were Pericles and Aspasia married?”

“Don’t let them make you do it, Professor Jrob!”

“Up with academic freedom.”

“Down with the administration.”

It was gratifying, I thought, the way faculty and students alike rallied around the injured Jrobs. I didn’t like them, but it occurred to me I could do a little rallying myself and I popped in to see Mrs. Jrob one morning to offer aid and encouragement.

“They won’t
dare
fire your… er… Mr. Jrob now,” I told her. “The entire faculty would resign in protest. They might even go back to Harvard.”

“Lord! I’ll be glad to get out of this hairy place,” was her only comment.

It was for the principle of the thing, not for Mrs. Jrob, that I marched through the History Building with the other wives, bearing my placard. “The Faculty Wives Accept Mrs. Jrob.”

Thus Mrs. Jrob managed to be a tremendous social success, though she refused to join the Garden Club or the Sewing Club and her only comment on the Wives Tea, which was compulsory, was “Hairy.”

Though all did not end well, because of certain unexpected events, President Grayson was shouted down and the Jrobs were asked to stay. President Grayson made one last stand. He came into his office one morning and through his window zinged a dagger with a note attached. It bit into the wall and quivered. President Grayson summoned the maintenance department without a moment’s hesitation and the note was removed. It read, “What does Ivy Leave stand for, anyway?”

For some reason this epistle enraged President Grayson beyond endurance. He called a meeting of the entire student body and faculty. The wives, janitors and assorted news reporters came too.

“This note!” he cried waving it in the air, “sent anonymously, reads, ‘What does Ivy Leave stand for, anyway?’ Well, I can tell you one thing it does
not
stand for. Free Love!”

“Boo. Hiss.”

President Grayson was not making the impression he intended. He couldn’t understand why the issue was not as clear to everyone else as it was to him.

“All right,” he said, several times because there was a group singing, for no apparent reason, “La Marseillaise.”

“All right. Even the freshmen here are not children. I’ll put it to you in its crudest terms. Do you want your University to stand for fornication?”

There was a shocked silence.

“Well, do you?”

The shouting began.

“Yes!” from the sophomores.

“No!” from the seniors.

“Define your terms!” from the faculty.

“Allons, enfants de la patrie…” from an assorted group.

In the end, of course, he lost. Well, not in the 
end.

It was at the Insfree’s cocktail party that the turning point came. We had a jolly time that fall, because of the prevalent notion that a party for the Jrobs was a declaration for academic freedom. The Jrobs, unfortunately, did not like to go out to parties because Mrs. Jrob felt other people’s houses weren’t properly filtered, and she had her lungs to consider.

They appeared, however, at the Insfrees. And to everyone’s consternation they were accompanied by a bald headed little boy of about ten. The little boy bore an evil grin and he kept glancing slyly at Mrs. Jrob. There was a heavy collar around his neck and Mrs. Jrob held the rope firmly, for he had a tendency to buck.

“Not broken in yet,” I heard her explain as she passed her hostess, taking the sanitary precaution of not shaking the extended hand.

Mrs. Blake was all shook up. “Mr. Jrob,” she said, or rather asked, “I didn’t know you had a child!”

“That’s not my child,” Mr. Jrob answered, as though the thought were, indeed, a hairy one. “I don’t even know his name.”

“Omicron,” Mrs. Jrob said. “I’ve told you a thousand times.”

“Poor, dear child,” Mrs. Blake murmured, stooping to commiserate with him.

“Watch out!” Mrs. Jrob shouted. Too late.

“He’s used to robots,” Mr. Jrob explained. “I suppose he doesn’t understand yet that it’s all right to bite robots but it’s not all right to bite people. Why
I
should be saddled with this child I don’t know.”

“It certainly isn’t
my
fault,” Mrs. Jrob said petulantly, smoothing her blond fringe with a shapeless hand. “How he got out of the Personality Adjustment Center I don’t know. Much less how he got here. I’m going to sue them for negligence. I sent them the boy and they were supposed to return me the man. If
this
is the man‌—‌well, all I can say is, he takes after his daddy.”

“No wonder he bites,” said Professor Graham, of psychology. “All that pent up hostility. You mean you actually put him in an institution for the duration of the academic year?”

“No, indeed,” Mrs. Jrob replied. “He’s been in it since he was six. Before that he was in the Tot’s Pleasure Dome. I know my responsibilities. Ordinarily he’s perfectly happy there and I bore him to tears. I don’t know what got into him.”

“You mean he’s never known what a home is?”

“Not my home. What kind of a home do you think it would be with a child around? I take him out to the zoo on Sunday afternoons.”

“Poor little thing.” Mrs. Blake was practically sobbing. “Why don’t you let me take him home with me. Just this evening. So he can get to bed at a reasonable hour. And find out what a
real
home is like.” Considering her mangled wrist, Mrs. Blake was the heroine of the evening.

Mrs. Jrob handed Mrs. Blake the end of the rope. “Go ahead. It’s
your
home.”

As Professor Graham remarked to me, despite his recent article,
Libido Revisited,
there’s something a little sordid about it. The libido is all very well, but not with a
child
around.

Dr. Blake was similarly incensed. “He doesn’t even write poetry. Now that I think about it, what excuse
does
he have?”

Professor Insfree retired to the back of the house and returned with his beard shaved off. It was a symbol to all of us.

Omicron was back in no time. He rushed in panting, his eyes wild, and handed the end of the rope to his mother. “Get me out of this hairy century,” he screamed.

“What happened?” Mrs. Jrob asked.

“She tried to poison me!” Omicron grabbed at his throat dramatically. “I can still taste it. The old hag shoved poison in my mouth.”

“Creech preserves,” I guessed brilliantly. “They’re perfectly harmless, Mrs. Jrob. They may taste a little odd to your son.” As a matter of fact, they taste a little odd to everyone.

“Mrs. Blake let you come back here alone? Nobody held your rope?”

“Held
it? She tried to take my collar off.” Omicron shuddered. “Threatened my entire sense of security. And would the other kids get a laugh out of it if I showed up without my collar. What would I have to take off at graduation? I had to freeze her.”

Professor Blake fixed Omicron with a furious gaze. “What have you done to my wife, you unnatural child?”