Beet (12 page)

Then one morning, Mrs. Whiting upped and quit. She walked away from a position she had held with quiet distinction for three decades, without a word to anyone but Professor Porterfield. To him she simply left a note of gratitude and wished him well.

The fourth extraordinary event involved Professor Porterfield himself who never lost his temper, but in this instance, did. In the
middle of a class, when Peace was working his way through
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,
Bollovate threw open the door and asked Professor Porterfield to see him, now. Peace told him he'd meet with the developer after the hour, but Bollovate said he was a very busy man. Peace did not wish to participate in a scene in front of the students. He excused himself and went to stand with his intruder in the hall, as students crowded round the closed door.

“Don't do that ever again, Mr. Bollovate,” he said as the two men faced each other.

“Time is money, Professor Porterfield. We are just about to hold a board meeting. The trustees need to know if you're getting this job done or not. There's talk that you're not.”

“They don't need to know right now”—looking down at the developer.

“Yes or no?”

“Yes,” said Peace. “The committee will provide the sort of plan the board is looking for. You have my word.” He did not know how this would happen, but he meant what he said. “Just don't interrupt a class of mine again.”

“You're an employee here,” said Bollovate, his nostrils dilating, his cheeks puffing to a purple soufflé, and one jagged tooth showing just above his lower lip, which (yes, it did) trembled.

“No, sir. The students and faculty are the college. You're the employee.” And he went back to teach.

In many ways, this exchange stood out as the most unusual incident among the unusual incidents, because it represented a first for both men. It was the first time Peace had felt the urge to pop anyone since his St. Paul's baseball coach called the opposing catcher a “dumb nigger,” and it was the first time Joel Bollovate had quivered with rage and humiliation since his high school's yearbook editors had voted him the man most likely to be fat.

Speaking of which: the three-foot-high alabaster pig that made up the acroterion above the cornice on the Temple? That was missing too.

Finally, there was an event that occurred outside the college
purview, involving the rest of America, and thus went unnoted at Beet. While the story of the imminent closing of the college had trotted along—prompting editorials saying on the one hand that it was unimaginable, and on the other, it was not—a poll was taken by ABC and the
Washington Post
. It simply asked a large sampling of citizens whether they would care if all the nation's four-year liberal arts colleges closed forever.

The answer was, 71 percent “could not give a rat's ass” if the institutions vanished from the face of the earth, just as Manning had thought. So while the results of the poll prompted editorials of their own—on the one hand, the American people didn't realize the consequences of what they were saying, and on the other, they did—the businessmen of America got interested.

“You know,” Bollovate told his fellow trustee developers at the board meeting following his contretemps with Peace, “this may be a sign of things to come. I mean, look, pro basketball players don't go to college anymore. The best prospects don't. Why should they? They become millionaires right out of high school. And the NBA nabs them while they're young, before they can be injured playing college ball. Major League baseball players don't go to college, most of them. It's only a matter of time till pro football catches on and gives in.” His fellow trustees were rapt, eyes googly. This was their kind of talk. “You see what I'm saying? There's nothing four years of liberal arts gives them but [chuckling] Plotinus!” The others chuckled too, without knowing why. “After four years of history and the Greeks, four years of Shakespeare, how can they possibly fit into the country? How can they help themselves? Help us?

“Tell me”—as he was unwittingly about to paraphrase Virginia Woolf—“would the world be any worse off if Shakespeare hadn't existed?”

“We could teach them all they need to know in six months,” said Giles Rogaine, a developer of tract houses outside Framing-ham.

“Six months!” said Bollovate. “Damn straight! Instead of paying tuition—for what?—they learn to earn! They
make
money. And
they make it sooner. Everybody wins.” He leaned forward. “Do you know what the average four-year college costs these days? The average? Thirty thousand bucks! That's what!”

“Your crapper costs more than that, Joel.” All laughed.

“And it's
worth
more,” said Bollovate. All laughed again.

Bollovate remembered the Department of Homeland Security. “That's the model,” he said. “Six months of courses like Homeland Security. Trade schools, boys! There's our future. Online trade schools. Am I right?”

“You're right, Joel.”

“Online trade schools. Great for youth. Great for business. Great for America.”

“Joel”—the consensus—“you're a genius!”

THAT YEAR, PARENTS WEEKEND WAS COINCIDENT WITH VETERANS
Day, November 11, which meant one less holiday for the college and less wasted time for the CCR. But considering the nonprogress the committee had made so far, the combining of events was of little help to Peace. And he'd lost November 8 to Sensitivity Day, when he'd decided to stay working in his office and be sensitive to his assignment. Sensitivity Day went without a hitch, save for an incident when a midlife-crisis motorist took so long to read the revised Slow Children sign, he wrapped his red Corvette around a mailbox. In an effort to get with the esprit of the college, Chuck E. Cheese's served a Sensitivity Meal, but they had difficulty coming up with components. Since no product involving a living thing could be included—eliminating burgers, salads, cheeses, and shakes—the Sensitivity Meal consisted of a Coke, a gift certificate for double burgers with fries, and a Chuck E. Cheese's bobble-head.

Parents Weekend and Veterans Day created two pockets of festivities at the college and in town, separated by the dark woods. That is how one would have viewed the scene from above, say from a helicopter—a typical New England landscape in which the tea-black darkness is occasionally relieved by small and desperate flickers of light.

In town, the event had all the fun of a Thanksgiving Day Parade, with people on television remarking on the fun. Beet had no living World War I veterans available to march, and only two from the Japanese theater of World War II (one of whom refused to admit the war was over, and yelled “Kraut” and “Gerry” at the plastic models of sashimi in the window of the Soo Piggy Soo Soo Sushi restaurant). The vets from Vietnam and Iraq numbered twenty-six, thirteen from each conflict. But the two groups hated each other so openly that one refused to march anywhere near the other, with the Iraq vets wearing combat fatigues, their faces painted green and yellow, and the boys from Vietnam dressed in sombreros, flak jackets, and fuchsia Speedos. Manning marched with his buddies from the Marines, who provided the parade with its only dignity. He had fought in no war, but took the day seriously, and never missed a year.

A couple of hundred Beet citizens lined Main Street, looking strikingly related to one another, and swaying more from the November wind than from their singing, which was made up of clashing patriotic anthems belted out simultaneously. The Beet High School marching band, the Porkers, tried to play “Hail to the Chief” for some reason, but wound up in an offbeat rendition of “Sentimental Me.” The children of Beet, standing at their parents' knees, gave miniature American flags a desultory wave, then grew tired and dropped them to the sidewalk. Beth Porterfield attempted to push her little brother in front of a slow-moving Army Jeep, but thanks to her mother's grip on the boy, as well as the pace of the Jeep, failed.

“Here's Professor Manning!” Livi shouted to the kids.

Marching in parade dress, Manning turned and winked.

Over at Beet College, the parents didn't know what to expect of the weekend. Of course, they'd kept up on the situation with the trustees and the CCR, which by now was reported regularly in cities like San Francisco, Miami, Houston, Chicago, New York, and, it goes without saying, Boston. The story was described as “a wakeup call” for colleges all over America. Dean Baedeker had offered himself to the PBS
NewsHour
to analyze the matter but was turned
down in favor of Professor Manning, who served the topic more ably, since he saw it as unrelated to his own career. Manning presented his bottom-line theory. He was opposed by Donald Trump himself, who had just come from another television appearance where he had forgiven Miss USA for partying and sullying her title. Trump asked the PBS audience, “What's wrong with making a buck?”

Manning countered, “Nothing. Unless that's all you make.”

By now, Beet had become a big national story, no doubt about it. With nothing to opine on but Iraq and gay marriage, columnists—some of them alumni—produced emotions recollected in tranquillity, lamenting the passage of
les neiges d'antan
. News stories focused on the finances, the keener reporters noticing how many colleges were closing because of money, how many administrators were caught with their hands in the till, how much plain mismanagement was hurling institutions into bankruptcy. That poll showing Americans willing to see four-year liberal arts colleges disappear was repeated, producing the same results.

America speculated:

Can you imagine New England without colleges? Take colleges out of Massachusetts and what would be left? Chowder. That's what.

Hell, can you imagine the whole country without colleges? American culture would be cut in half. What would happen to plays and movies no longer able to include the drunk, stubble-chinned, chain-smoking, self-loathing, brutal but deep down kind and inspirational professor? Where would one behold the undergraduate who finds love, loses it, yet learns the lesson of a lifetime and faces the future with clear eyes?

What would become of the college essay, and those revelatory moments when one realizes that one's parents are people too, or that life consists of something bigger than oneself?

What would happen to phrases like “the press of work”? Who would “concur”? Who would “demur”? Who would “recuse” or “adumbrate” or find things “cathartic” or “emblematic”? What would happen to letters of recommendation and “without hesitation”?

What would happen to secondary education? Schools like Groton, Exeter, Andover, and Peace's own St. Paul's would be the first to bite the dust. Why go through all that fancy-schmancy preparation if one is merely aiming to work for Bollovate? On the other hand, public education might get a boost because without the brass ring of attending a top college, the private schools would be deprived of their competitive advantage. At long last, there would be an equal playing field in American education. Say! Did Bollovate have something after all?

“You see?” said Manning to Peace after returning to the campus. He was still in uniform. “Colleges are thought of as any old business, so they're available to the same standards. Thirty years ago, did you ever hear of anyone talking about colleges as moneymakers? You bet your ass you didn't. Look at these parents. Don't you think half of them are thinking about money right now? Is the school worth it? Are their kids better off working at IBM?”

Whatever their thoughts, most parents had come for the weekend simply to be with their kids. Matha Polite's mama and daddy drove the metallic bronze Range Rover up from Virginia in spite of their daughter's e-mailing them that Parents Weekend had been canceled due to a blizzard. All she needed was for one of them to call out her three names, with that slow southern emphasis. As it was, Luelle wondered why people kept referring to her daughter as Matha, but concluded it was a Yankee mispronunciation.

The weekend was kicked off by a welcome speech from President Huey in Lapham Auditorium. There sat the parents like obedient children, looking up at a man on whom most of them would have looked down in any situation other than a college—if they noticed him at all. Huey was in his glory. He had no significant talent, save a nose for his superiors, but he possessed an old-fashioned West Virginia senator's gift for speechifyin', and though his public talks contained no more wit or wisdom, or information for that matter, than his private ones, many were pleased to listen to them, the way people are pleased by the soothing repetitive rhythms of a train. Students, however, being less tolerant of their leader, greeted his appearance with a razzing parodic chorus of “I Did It Their Way.”

Huey stood at the podium, cleared his throat for effect, and told the convocation he knew these were “stormy days,” and the “winds of change” might be blowing “the great old ship” of Beet College “to and fro and hither and yon.” Yet he for one was convinced that “smooth seas lay ahead” and “the albatross or the sharks, whatever, would soon give way to the doldrums and the scallops.” He also asked the parents to donate what they could, each according to his ability. Ferritt Lawrence took down the speech word for word, noting that though Huey “sent shock waves through the community,” he was “no stranger to controversy.”

Outside Lapham after the talk, students and their families collected in huddles. Mothers and fathers of freshmen in particular confronted Huey, their noses inches from his, asking, What did he think the college was doing, admitting students to a school they planned to shut down?

“You'll pay us back every cent, you fraud,” shouted a DuPont executive from Delaware.

Huey, who was so adept at tergiversation one could barely recall the subjects he evaded, took the assault with a frozen smile. Showing the bouncy self-confidence of a fencing instructor and backpedaling toward his office, he told the man, “You know, I've always been interested in the DuPont Corporation.”

Matha Polite was “pissed” to see her parents standing next to Akim's, making chitchat. For one day only the radical poet was distracted from her campus mischief, though the Bacon takeover remained on schedule five weeks hence. She wanted to get Daddy alone. Lately she had experienced an irresistible desire to learn all there was to know about real estate. And Akim had never known so strong a wish to be near his parents, to the point of broaching the subject of chess with the rabbi. (He'd decided not to tell them about the cave or the TATP.) Matha approached anyway, said a breezy “Hi” to Akim, which sent him reeling with puppy love, and collared her old man. She needed a spoon-fed lesson in his trade before her upcoming business conference with Joel Bollovate at Sow's Motel, down the road from the campus.

With Huey's remarks consigned to legend, the rest of Saturday
was to be spent by the students ushering their parents to activities meant to highlight the college. In the late afternoon there would be a football game on Beet Field with the cheerleaders jumping up and down, assembling into injury-threatening pyramids, shaking their pompoms, and yelling “Piggy Piggy Piggy Piggy, Oink Oink Oink!”—a traditional cheer that always deflated opposing teams, which had been preparing those very words as a taunt.

In the evening there would be concerts in the Old Pen by twenty-four of the college's a cappella groups (the other sixteen were on tour), each singing “Old Black Joe,” “Camptown Races,” and “Nobody Know Da Trouble I Seen.” This medley was followed by a lecture by Professor Godwin, “Who Speaks for the Halt?” The day would end as did most days at Beet and other colleges—after the parents had gone back to their hotels—with binge drinking and casual sex, and most of the students simply headed for sleep.

For now, they guided their parents to selected classes. Those who attended Professor Smythe's class, Analepses and Anaphora in the Oeuvre of Dan Brown, could barely make out a word he said, while those who went to Professor Kramer's class left frightened. Kramer decided to do a one-man reenactment of the Battle of Blenheim, striding up and down in front of the room in full battle dress and wielding a two-handed sword. And no one went to Booth's class because it was chemistry. The students in Peace's Modern Poetry class actually wanted to show off their teacher. But more than a few in other classes were visibly anxious about exposing their folks to what they had been paying for. When the eerily quiet visitors finally emerged from Professor Lipman's much-sought-after seminar, three parents vowed to cancel their subscriptions to the
New York Times,
and two inquired as to the procedures involved in withdrawing their children from the college immediately, with a refund or without.

After his show class, Peace headed home for a rare lunch when the whole family could be together. On the way out he saw Manning walking toward Lapham. “And how are you pleasing the parents today, Captain?” he asked the Marine.

“Believe it or not, I'm on a faculty panel about diversity.”

“They invited
you
?”

“I volunteered. I wanted to ask my fellow panelists if they thought that holding a different opinion constituted diversity.”

The town parade was long over (having taken but twenty minutes from start to finish), and Robert was sitting on the hall staircase when Peace came in. Head in hands, he was counting to one hundred, very softly and seriously.

“What are you doing, Bobby?” asked his father.

“I'm giving myself a time-out.”

“Why? Did you do something wrong?”

“No. But I'm going to.”

“And he means it,” said Livi, greeting her husband with a kiss and asking, “How goes it at the House of Wax?”

“Never better.”

She took his hand and led him into the kitchen. They sat together at the corner of the long pine table, where they could be close. Livi had laid out two chicken salad sandwiches.

“Well, I've got some news that will make you even happier.” Peace tried not to look apprehensive. “I've been offered a job in hand surgery.”

“Where?”

“In New York,” said Livi, with too broad a smile suggesting her own anxieties. “What do you think?”

“And you learned of this when?” His lips were tight.

“Of the opening? Ten days ago. They interviewed me in Boston. I should have told you, I know. But they just called with the offer today, when the children and I got home.” She looked him in the eye. “It really is a wonderful chance. What do you think?”

“What do you think I think? Why are you doing this?”

“Doing this? Oh, you mean my life. I didn't invent the job, Peace. But here it is.”

“But you timed the move deliberately, didn't you? To get me to quit
my
job?”

“Yes, I'll admit, it was in my mind. Not the first thing, but yes. Did you think I was kidding when I said the college isn't worthy of you?”

“That's for me to decide, Liv. Not you or anyone else. So now your solution to my problem is to break up our family.”