Beet (15 page)

“How would I know what Mr. Bollovate is thinking of anything?” she asked, her voice a block of ice.

“Oh,” said Ferritt in an awkward attempt to sound casual, “I happened to see Mr. Bollovate leave the motel shortly before you did. I thought perhaps you had run into him.”

Matha spoke ruminatively. “Of course, I could always phone all the local papers too. Maybe stories as big as the ones I'm contemplating should not be restricted to one news outlet. A college paper at that. Maybe it isn't fair.”

“I don't know a thing,” said Ferritt at once.

“See that you keep it that way.” But she did not trust him and vowed to screw him, figuratively, at the first opportunity. In his own preprofessional way, he made the same vow, and wondered if there were anything else Matha Polite had to hide.

Deposited at Chillingworth, she left him without a thanks or good-bye and climbed the stairs to her room to summon her Gang of Four. Ferritt remained in the taxi, reviewing the pictures he had taken with his cell phone. He also played his cassette recorder, whose reception was muffled and staticky. Still, he could make out much of the conversation, and the words “Oh! Mr. Bollovate!” came through loud and clear, which gave him hope of getting his story after all.

In fact, the day concluded with several of the principals more hopeful than they'd had when it started—making it an unusual day in New England. Bollovate, still smarting from his face-off with Peace outside the classroom, was hopeful that he'd engineered the professor's eventual dismissal for incompetence or neglect of duty. While it was unlikely that charges would ever become formal, the mere accusation might be sufficiently discomfiting to force Porterfield to quit. Even so, students would have to turn against him as well as the faculty and administration, a circumstance that seemed unlikely, but—given Bollovate's determi
nation and Matha's new assignment—not out of the question. If that should happen, Porterfield would feel as though he had let down the people he had been charged to help, and he'd walk.

So that was Bollovate's hope. And consequently it became President Huey's hope, and it was Matha's hope, and Ferritt Lawrence's. It was also the hope of Peace's fellow committee members. And, had he been in on any of the multiple schemes aborning, it would have been Akim Ben Laden's too (though he liked Professor Porterfield and felt he owed him his life for the incident with Latin the Pig), since the failure of the CCR would mean the destruction of the Satan college.

But these days Akim harbored other hopes, such as that the Homeland Security Department might disappear, but not before it appeared. The permutations for the codes had reached the high millions. It was near Thanksgiving. Would the search ever yield an answer?

And Akim held a more immediate hope. He had just emerged from the bathroom on the top floor of Fordyce, and he very much hoped that on the long walk back to his cave he would not drop the soup bowl he had just filled with his first batch of TATP.

DID PEACE HAVE FRIENDS OTHER THAN DEREK MANNING? HE
had a few from prep school, and a few more from college with whom he communicated episodically, in the way that most men prefer 161 to maintain their friendships. And he corresponded with some of the kids he'd taught in Sunset Park. With five or six faculty colleagues, too, he had cordial relationships if not full-blown friendships, marked by the occasional drinks or the occasional lunch, or the very occasional dinner party. Peace and Livi abhorred dinner parties, particularly faculty dinner parties, and they often said they produced Beth and Robert as excuses to decline invitations. In their four years at Beet they had thrown only one obligatory dinner party for the English and American Literature Department, at the end of which Livi had asked her husband if buying a flame thrower required a waiting period.

As it was, though, Manning constituted most of Peace's social life. And much of that occurred on the gym floor. In previous years, before the Day of the Bollovate, the two men had met twice a week for one-on-one basketball games, which they played to the death. Now, in late November, they were going at each other in their first game of the term.

It was the Monday before Thanksgiving. Peace had invited
Manning to play in part to work up a real sweat, as compared to the purposeless games of the CCR, and to spill his many woes to his friend.

“You know what's wrong with you,” said Manning, after listening to the litany. Peace had kept it short, his sentences fragmented, and he was so uncomfortable in talking about himself, much less his difficulties, that anyone other than Manning might have thought he was recounting a lucky streak. Manning, who had legs like pilings and a vertical leap of three feet, sailed over his taller opponent and slammed the ball down with a whoosh. “What's wrong with you is that you're not PC. You're not P, and you have no sense of C.”

“And you do?”

“I don't need to be PC. I'm Jewish.” They were playing losers-outs. “And that's a perfect example,” Manning said. “If you had an ounce of common sense, or a sense of self-preservation, you'd hang with black guys on the faculty, or Chinese guys, or gays in wheelchairs. But no. You hang with a Jew! So wrong, my friend. So yesterday.”

“How do you do that?” asked Peace as his opponent again drifted over him and stuffed the ball in the basket, this time double-handed.

“Jewish legs,” said Manning. He stole the ball off Peace's dribble. “Are you going to play, by the way, or bellyache?”

“Bellyache,” said Peace. The ball echoed in the empty gym, the late autumn light streaming through the wire mesh on the high windows and making whorly patterns on the court. Manning knew not to pick up on the subject of Livi and the children going to New York. That was too raw. So he pretended the most important thing was how to devise a curriculum that would save the college, rid Peace of the sight of Bollovate, and set him free of his dreadful committee. As a government professor he fancied his lot superior to the English professor's, but he was experienced enough to recognize that a committee made up of his own types would have behaved no better, only with fewer verbal flourishes.

“That's why you'll never find me on a committee, unless it's to write obits for the faculty meeting. I like doing that.”

“Thanks for your help,” said Peace, as he stood flat-footed and watched his friend nail a long jumper. “You've been practicing.”

“For
you
?” Manning smiled.

“Okay. No more Mr. Nice Guy.” Peace took the ball. “Let's change to winners-outs.” He hit seven straight shots from all over the court, and “Game.” Manning took it as well as could be expected. They sat side by side with their knees up and their backs to the wall, like two kids on a playground in summer.

“Are you asking me something or just venting?” said Manning.

“Here's my problem. I mean, apart from figuring out how to have a family life without a family.” He stared briefly at the floor. “We're up against it. We have to produce something. If I make up a plan on my own, I don't think I'll have trouble selling it to the rest of the group. They really aren't as foolish as they've been acting.”

“And Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds,” said Manning. “Or did Twain say that?”

“But when they hear something that works, they'll know it and jump aboard, I'm fairly sure, if I can come up with a decent idea.”

“If you do,” said Manning, “you'll be doing everyone a service way beyond bringing dollars into the college. Nobody knows what to do with higher education these days. There's so much horseshit in the curriculum as it is.”

“Between deadheaded tradition and the current nonsense,” said Peace, “there has to be a clean, clear education designed to help young people find useful lives, to help them live in the world. I mean, that's it, isn't it? To learn how to live in the world? And you know, Derek, no matter how much they mess up, I believe most of the faculty believes that too.”

“And I believe that deep down, Miss Frank, everyone is good. Why don't you seek help in Bliss House?”

“No, I mean it.”

“I know you do. And in my happier moments, all three of them, I see it your way. A hundred forty-one overeducated people can't be wrong all the time. But the kind of curriculum you're suggesting would be hard enough to put in place in a matter of years, much less
weeks. You're talking about a reeducation of the educators. I think the trustees snookered you.”

“Not if I do what they asked.”

“You want to know the trouble with this place—fundamentally, I mean?”

“I do,” said Peace. “But no bottom-line lectures.”

“It's a different bottom line. Our colleagues are lazy, morally and intellectually lazy. Nobody cares about the students these days—a fact I find grimly hilarious because that's all anyone claims to care about. They spend so much time and energy trying to come up with what they think the students want. But our colleagues are gutless, because rather than concentrating on difficult, complicated material, and teaching that—worthwhile material that, by the way, they perfectly well know and were taught themselves—they offer pap. Instead of playing offense, they are always backing up the way we play D on the court here, countermoving according to the moves of people barely out of childhood. The joke is, nobody is on offense but them. The faculty is playing against themselves and getting creamed. What the students want, what they crave, is inequality. They want to rely on people who know more than they do, and they want to come out of Beet College a little smarter than when they went in.

“And you think the kids don't know what's going on? They go through the motions of sitting in classes they laugh at—Native American Crafts and Casino Studies?—and spend half their time partying, out of boredom, and the other half in a stupor, dreaming about becoming The Donald's latest apprentice or the next American Idol. This is what popular culture hath wrought. Have I not seen the best minds of their generation competing to be on
Survivor
? They dream the big preposterous dreams because they don't want to earn the small ones. And that's because we so-called teachers don't give them the small dreams anymore. No wonder Ms. Polite and the Four Stooges want to close the place down. The college has become a Green Room—without a show to go with it.”

“You're saying it's attitude more than substance?”

“One drives the other.” Manning thought about it. “You know,
you might not be talking about new courses as much as a new way to see the array of courses we have. Maybe you could trick our colleagues into taking an interest in what they teach, make them good students again by coming up with something they want to learn. Between you and me, I think most of the race and gender stuff is bunk, and you know what I think of the professors of newspapers. But even with those folks, it's the way they see things, not the material itself, that sinks them, the dumbass idea that the purpose of education is to make people proud of who they are instead of what they might become.

“Oops! I better keep my mouth shut. I'm not standing in the Free Speech Zone.”

He turned to Peace. “You know, pal, all this
tsuris
might not be bad for you. You've led a pretty charmed life. You've earned it insofar as anyone can. But life ain't charmed. So this may be your initiation into the club. Welcome. I wish the club didn't exist.” A sigh and a quick recovery. “But don't despair. We're coming up on How to Prepare for the Holidays Day! I'm thinking strychnine. How about you?”

They went quiet. “Livi said I was happiest in Sunset Park.”

“That's the kind of neighborhood I grew up in. I don't recall too many ecstatic moments.”

“She didn't mean that. She meant the quality of the kids. They were raw and rough, but—I don't know—they had a lovely sort of innocence. When I read them stories or told them stories. Anything, really. Stories from Shakespeare, or stories of ballplayers, it made no difference. You could see their faces unfrown, open up.”

“They were off-guard.”

“In a way. At any rate, they were transported out of Sunset Park for a while.”

Manning studied him. “You're an aristocrat,” he said.

“Hardly.”

“I'm talking about E. M. Forster's definition of an aristocrat. A good, decent person who does the right thing and doesn't show off about it. No wonder you're unfit for human company.”

“Got one more game in you?” Peace stood and flipped Manning
the ball. They went at it again. “Where do you think you fit in all this, Derek?”

“Meaning?”

“Well”—hitting a long jumper from the corner—“you've been here a fair number of years. Why don't you do something about it?”

“'Cause I think it's hopeless, if you must know”—missing a chippie. Peace took back the ball.

“So if it's hopeless, what do you do with the rest of your life? You've got twenty years before retirement, whether it's here or somewhere else.” Peace spun around him and floated it in for a basket.

“I can look after myself.” Manning gave Peace a what-are-you-getting-at squint, and missed another easy shot. “I'll leave the rescue of civilization to you.”

“That's just another wisecrack.”

“Are you baiting me?”

“If you had the guts you find missing in our colleagues, you'd help fix this mess yourself.” Peace was ahead six to nothing. Manning was missing by more with each shot. His hair stood straight as quills.

“You're trying to tick me off, aren't you?”

“Maybe.” Now it was seven-zip, eight, nine.

“It's been a while since I've been called gutless.”

“It's been a while since Margaret died.”

Pop! Manning shot a left so fast, Peace was on his ass in half a second. He reached up to his nose and examined the blood in his hand. Manning knelt next to him and wiped away more blood with his own hand.

“Hey! Peace!”—tears in his eyes.

“I went over the line. I was trying to get your goat.”

“It worked.” He took off his T-shirt and gave it to Peace, to stanch the bleeding, and helped him to his feet. “Is it broken?”

“Nope.” He slapped Manning's shoulder. “Not enough behind it.”

Manning was holding the ball on his hip. “You think I crawled into a shell after Margaret, don't you?”

“I wouldn't blame you if you had. But I don't think you're the man you're becoming. A good-hearted wiseass who lives on the sidelines.” Peace held up his fists, pretending to fend off another punch.

“Say, wasn't this conversation supposed to be about you?” Manning said. “Between your troubles and mine, I like it better when it's yours. You can keep the shirt.”

“Derek? My remark about Margaret? It wasn't aristocratic.”

“I don't know. Maybe it was.” Manning noted the clock on the scoreboard. “Gotta go.”

“Derek…?”

“Not another word. We're square.”

“Shalom?” said Peace.

“Peace,” said Manning.

That night after supper, as Livi sat reading in the one soft living room chair, Peace took the kids on the couch with him to tell them a story. He had not done that for a while. They sat on either side of him as he told them about the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County, and Rip van Winkle, and a story of Chekhov's that he made clear and simple. He found they were happier when he cast the old stories in his own way, rather than reading from books where he had to explain some of the words. It was the story they wanted, none so much as a story from Peace's own life. So, when he was done with the masters, he dredged up—he did not know why—a story told him by his father, whose father had told it to him, about a boy in a boat sailing down the path of the moon. As he finished the two children fell asleep, leaning against him like books on a shelf.