Beet (20 page)

It was! With all else going on, it seemed hard to remember. But it was Christmastime. And Christmas in New England carries a greater burden than elsewhere because the region drops into its deepest emotional pit, requiring desperate measures of jubilation.

In the town of Beet, merchants hung large wreaths with red velvet bows on the lampposts. “Rockin' Round the Christmas Tree” crackled over the defective PA system in the firehouse. The Pen and Oink displayed a 1951 copy of
A Christmas Carol
in the window. The Bring Home the Bacon grocers lathed red and green icing on the cupcakes. Marty's Swine & Cheese set up a three-foot Santa made of cheddar, and a Stilton in the shape of a dreidel. In that spirit, the debate on whether or not to place an aluminum menorah in the crèche on the village green had settled on a separate-but-equal arrangement. The menorah was placed beside the crèche, and a sign in front covered in tinsel, read:
HAPPY AND MERRY WHATEVER YOU CELEBRATE OR DO NOT IN YOUR OWN WAY
.

The first big snowstorm was forecast. Everyone spoke of it and of other big snowstorms in years past, which were always worse than the modern snowstorms. Everyone spoke of hot chocolate. Gregory wished all who passed through the gates a “Mango Isthmas.”

Only the recently defunct This Little Piggy Muncheonette failed to rejoice in the season. It appeared in mourning, as did the great pink fiberglass pig on its roof.

But the third woman worth noting was suffused with Christmas cheer that morning. Her husband would be home with her soon and forever, she hoped. She strode along midtown Third Avenue, looking to buy him a present.

“What would you like?” She'd called him on her cell.

“Nothing. Just you.”

“Then that's what you'll get. Nothing and me.” She walked past the shops until she came to Victoria's Secret.

“Children,” she told them at dinner. “Tomorrow I'm going up to be with your father.” She wasn't on call for the following two days. Why not? “I'll get a nice policeman to stay with you.”

To tell Peace her plan, or make it a surprise? That night she would pack. The next day, the eighteenth, she would drive to Beet after seeing her patients. She could be at the house when he was just about to go to bed. Bed. Looking in the mirror, she brushed her red hair and sang along with Norah Jones.

 

FOR HIS PART DURING THOSE TWO WEEKS, PEACE HAD SIMPLY
continued to work. Now he proceeded to his office, his papers tucked under his arm. In the midst of all the collegiate mummery, he had in fact come up with something.

Bricolage. Peace's idea did not entail an upheaval of the existing curriculum. All it involved was one course, the planning and implementation of a single course of study to be superimposed on the existis curriculum, and required of all entering students. It would be taught by professors in every department, either by team teaching—an English professor with a biologist, an economist with a member of the Art Department, like that—or by individual lectures combined with small discussion groups.

Yet it would be neither multicultural nor interdisciplinary. If one had to give it a label, it could be called extradisciplinary, since the professors would need to go outside their disciplines to see them from a new vantage point. The course would run the entire freshman year, and if upperclassmen desired, they could take it again as auditors to remind themselves of its applicability to whatever they concentrated in. A new way to see learning, that's what Peace hoped it would be.

“Professor Porterfield?”

“Yes, Jenny?”—from his Modern Poetry class.

“May I speak with you?”

“Sure.”

“I wanted to say I never believed any of that stuff about you. I don't know anyone who did.”

“Thanks, Jen. I appreciate your saying so.”

“Professor Porterfield? Will you be able to save the college?”

“I don't know. We'll try.”

All right. What was the course? Storytelling. It would be a course in storytelling. The idea had come to Peace little by little after his one-on-one with Manning—what his friend had said about finding a way to make educators interested in education again, and about finding a different way to see what the college already had, rather than trying to invent something out of whole cloth.

And there was Peace's recollection of the children in Sunset Park and of telling stories there—the kids gathered round him, as though he were a bonfire, rapt in the ceremony of listening. Why does a child say, “Tell me a story”? Because he expects it to be wonderful.

“Professor Porterfield?”

“Hi, Lucky.”

“I just want to say hey.”

“Hey, Lucky.”

As thoughts tend to build on themselves, this one grew for Peace. His mind was his house. First the front door flung open, then the back, then the windows one at a time, and a couple of things dropped through the chimney (bang!) into the fireplace, and more breezed in through the cracks in the walls. What do you know? The idea filled the house. It had size. Stories were everywhere: In the law, where a prosecutor tells one story and the defense tells another, and the jury decides which it prefers. In medicine, where a patient tells a doctor the story of his ailment, how he felt on this day or that, and the doctor tells the patient the story of the therapy, how he will feel this day and that, until, one hopes, the story will have a happy ending. Politics? He who tells the best story wins, be it Pol Pot or FDR. And the myths of businesses, the foundations of religions—the “greatest story ever told.”

Every intellectual discipline, every college department was a story in progress. All one needed was to see it that way. Look at his own discipline. Literature was a story. Fiction most obviously, but
essays and poems, too. An essay was the story of an idea; a poem the story of a feeling.

The subject had heft and stamina. It could go the distance. It might not rescue civilization, might not even rescue Beet College, but it had something. Peace was sure of that, as he was fairly sure his colleagues would take to it, because the stories of the disciplines always changed, and tellers of the stories changed. Teaching located them within their own stories. They could account for changes as sequels and new chapters. They could be responsible for them—storytellers at work. They might even enjoy them.

“Professor Porterfield?”

“Morning, Jim”—an instructor in History he had hardly ever spoken to.

“I hope you know a lot of us think you're getting a raw deal.”

“Thank you.”

“We're scared, scared for the place and for our own skins. That's why we haven't rallied behind you.”

“I'm scared too.”

“Well, I just had to tell you.”

“Take care, Jim.”

And it was readily understandable because it was basic to human nature, like fellow feeling, if they gave it a chance. Storytelling was almost a biological fact, an inborn insistence. The Jews in the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto: They knew what was going to happen to them, had seen their mothers and neighbors hauled off to the extermination camps, and were themselves dying of diphtheria and hunger. And yet—and yet!—they had the strength and the will to take scraps of paper on which they wrote poems, fragments of autobiography, political tracts, journal entries. And they rolled those scraps into small scrolls and slipped the scrolls into the crevices of the ghetto walls. Why? Why did they bother? With no news of the outer world available to them, they assumed the Master Race had inherited the earth. If their scraps of paper were discovered, the victors would laugh at them, read and laugh, and tear them up. So why expose their writing, their souls, to derision? Be
cause they had to do it. They had a story to tell. They had to tell a story.

That man in France, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of
Elle
who suffered so massive a stroke the only part of his body he could move was his left eyelid. Yet with that eyelid, he signaled the alphabet. And with that alphabet, he wrote an autobiography. He too had to do it. It was in him, in everyone.

We like to distinguish ourselves from other animals by saying we're a rational species. Are you kidding? But a narrative species? That, Peace was convinced, one could prove.

Who knows? Such a course might eventually expel the nonsense courses in the New Pen, or at least distill the nonsense from them, and leave a residue of something sensible to study, divorced from the promotion of self-adulation. If everything were seen as a story with all the elements of a good story discerned, a Gresham's law of narrative might take hold. Good stories would drive out bad. Faculty and students would start making discriminations. Wouldn't that be something? And even if everything in the college remained exactly as it was—Homeland Security and Communications Arts untouched, God help us—people still would recognize that there are minor stories and major stories. And what do you think of that?

“Professor Porterfield?”

“Hi, Max.”

“There's something strange happening at the college.”

“You're telling me.”

“No, sir. I mean, stranger than you think. We may need your help.”

“We?”

“I'm on my way to see Akim. May I call you later?”

“Sure.”

The particulars of the course—the components and how they would work with one another—would need to be fleshed out. But even Peace's cursory survey of materials suggested there was plenty to use and to build on. The neuroscience alone was fascinating—the brain's neurons firing to instruct by storytelling, a billion stories in endless competition to deliver information. The psychology:
Peace read that babies learn language to tell the stories already in them. The psychiatry: how schizophrenics have their stories broken. And language itself, its beauty, and its hilarity when someone misspeaks, tells the wrong story. To say nothing of the terror of silence when there is no story to tell. Maybe we Cro-Magnons knocked off the Neanderthals because we could not bear their silence.

If mystery could be taught, there was the mystery of the whole enterprise. Why is it no one ever tells a story the same way twice? Not even the uncle who has told one anecdote over and over at every family gathering for decades—not even he tells it the same way twice. Why is it that when you read a sentence you have written yourself, you still don't know where it's going? Because you want to pretend the adventure is new, even when it was you who created it.

Art as story. Philosophy as story. Linguistics. Math. Scientific research, with its bulky collaborations, as a story. Science itself—evolution originally referring to the unrolling of a scroll. And Darwin, whom Peace thought the most imaginative person in history, seeing the consequences of the leaps without seeing the leaps. The story of one's own life. Self-esteem? If you want self-esteem, Peace said to himself, think big. Our DNA indicates we are all stories waiting to be told. But what are the stories we were meant to tell?

“Professor Porterfield?”

“Yes?”

“I'm from Mr. Bollovate's office. He asked me to let you know there's an emergency meeting of the trustees in the Temple this afternoon. They would like you to be there.”

“Sorry. I'm busy.”

“Is that what you want me to tell them?”

“Tell them what you please.”

He took a breath before entering his department building. What was the story Peace was meant to tell? He'd always thought it was a teacher's story. Now he wasn't so sure. Funny. You go along doing what you do until one day you find yourself seeing your life through a stranger's eyes. And you are that stranger.

What Peace would be asking of his colleagues, he was doing
himself, introducing his mind to itself. Evolution? You could say that again. He was unrolling like a piece of writing. The ink was wet.

But the course was possible, he was certain, ready for teaching. All it needed was someone to pull it together, get the others to take part and figure out the stories they'd been telling all their lives. Bricolage. They would cobble together the subject as they cobbled together the curriculum, as they remade the college.

And it did not need to be airtight, this subject. God, who would want it airtight? Just make it interesting enough, imaginative enough to sustain itself and provocative enough to challenge itself. One person playing point, that's all it would take, Peace knew, just as he knew he would not be that person.

“Professor Porterfield?”

He looked around, but no one was there.

IF A DECEMBER DAWN IN NEW ENGLAND WERE DISTINGUISHABLE
from the dead of night, one would have said it was dawn that brought the flabbergasting sight greeting all who entered the Old Pen. “What
is
that? Can you make it out?” Partly obscured in mist and darkness on the green, it looked spectral, like a vague elephant, and painted with a mucid glaze. It glowed pink. Big and glowing and pink. Could anyone tell what it was yet? “Why, shit! It's the pig from the roof of the Muncheonette. Goddamn! It looks awesome!”

It was, and it did. The pig, restored to its former prominence, stood majestic as ever at the south end of the green, its curlicue tail aimed at Bacon Library. Students and professors circumnavigated the thing, walking clockwise and counterclockwise, noting its bright blue hooves tucked beneath its ample body, and its bright blue eyes. Such eyes! Such ears! Such a snout! When it had resided on the roof of the eatery, no one could properly appreciate what a work of art was this pig. But here where one could see it up close, its full magnitude declared it the mother of all pigs, more than a totem, a god.

“It's the Trojan Pig!” said Archie Acephalous of Archaeology, who boasted he knew more classics than the Classics Department. He had no idea how right he was.

Occupying the hollow of the great pink animal, the MacArthur Five—four of them present—sat in their prearranged positions. They had entered through the snout, which opened and closed on hinges. The reason only four of the students were inside had to do with weight capacity. Though it was impossible to detect from the outside, the pig rested on a platform atop a scissor-link vertical lift, which in turn rested on four trailer-size tires. The lift was folded flat, and it and the platform were concealed in the lower portion of the pig's belly. Only the wheels showed. The platform could hold a five-hundred-pound level load; that's what the man who rented the vehicle told the revolutionaries. Betsy Betsy weighed 110; Goldvasser and Lattice, 160 and 137; Matha 106. Bagtoothian weighed in at 214, so it was he who remained outside.

But he had a key assignment. When late night approached, someone had to pull the pig to the library, at which point its occupants would employ the hand pump of the hydraulic lift, the scissor would rise, and the happy elevated animal would deposit the little army of revolutionaries at the second-story window. Once in, they would go downstairs and admit Bagtoothian. The plan was a beauty, thought Matha the moment she'd conceived of it.

So far, so perfect. The four had brought pillows and blankets for comfort, and books and magazines to pass the time. They had to wait a whole day. If their presence were to go undetected, talking must be held to a minimum, which was harder on Betsy Betsy than the others. Air aplenty was provided by the pig's nostrils. And it was surprisingly warm in there, given that the pig was never intended to carry passengers. Jamie and Goldvasser peeked out of the nostrils from time to time, Betsy read, and Matha distributed some of the hundred or so oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies she'd baked the night before. She had also put together decorative picnic baskets for the group, festooned with pink excelsior and tied at the handles with white velour ribbons. The others wondered at the meticulous care she had taken with this domestic project, but were glad of it and made no comments other than those of appreciation.

“They're delicious!” said Jamie.

“And the baskets—so pretty!” said Betsy.

Matha smiled demurely before telling them to eat shit.

By late morning it could be said that every student and most of the faculty in Beet College had ogled and circled the pig at least once, making the appropriate remarks of amazement and inquiry—except for Max Byrd and Arthur Horowitz, who had more urgent things on their minds.

Akim's reversion was now complete. He was astonished how smoothly it had happened, as well as how eager he was to cast off the terrorist paraphernalia along with his nom de guerre. He'd even phoned his father—in part to initiate a rapprochement, which the repentant rabbi welcomed, saying, “You made me a better Jew by becoming an Arab than I would have been if I were an Arab and you were a Jew,” or something like that. Arthur also needed to ask him about what he'd discovered on his computer screen.

That was the previous evening. Max had been with him, and he too called his dad. Both young men knew they'd stumbled upon an area of knowledge and activity way beyond their experience. They'd stay up all night because of what was on that screen. Max's dad's information abetted the rabbi's, and both combined with Max's own “cyberfreak” expertise. His ability to see the nothing that was not there had proved indispensable. It was then, that morning, the boys decided to consult the professor they most trusted.

Peace phoned Livi at her Manhattan office. “I'm not sure what to do,” he said.

“You're sure, all right. But you don't know when.”

“The faculty meeting, I guess. But it seems a little cheap to air all that in public.”

“Only you would worry about the niceties, sweetheart. If you don't do it in front of the others, you'll lose the advantage. You don't want to give a man like that an inch.”

“Are you amazed by all this, or what?”

“I am.”

“Do I love you?”

“You do.”

“Will I see you soon?”

“You have no idea.”

As anyone could guess, the day would turn out to be quite busy for the crowd at Beet, what with finals nearly over and Christmas around the corner. Life was especially frantic for members of the CCR. Professor Kramer took this opportunity to apply to Gonzaga University, the last on his list of possibilities, for an assistant professorship, or if not that an instructorship. It seemed his attempts—and Heilbrun's and Booth's as well—to make lateral moves and win tenure at other institutions of higher learning had been unsuccessful, so now they were willing to take anything. Kettlegorf had no luck either, and neither did Lipman. Lipman had tried so hard to become a recognizable professor. She'd jarred jams, cross-country skied, and bought a chocolate Lab that she named Pinch. Nothing worked. So, rather than apply to colleges, she wrote her old boss at the
New York Times
, noting that there was no job too trivial for her, including writing the column on arts news. Her former employer replied that she should remain in academia, where she would do the paper more good by continuing to spread word of its excellence.

His future protected by Ada's Lacoste money, Keelye Smythe did not apply for a new position elsewhere. He was getting on, after all, and he wondered if this weren't a good time to try something new that would suit his social gifts and talents. Foundation work might do. Or the presidency of the College Board. Or an institute of some sort. Perhaps the government. Any place where he could deny people what they wanted and deserved, but with sincere regret. No rush. He'd look around.

None of them informed the others of their efforts. It might appear to show a lack of faith in their ability to save Beet College. But they were bundles—bales—of nerves. What would happen tomorrow at the faculty meeting, when they were called upon to present the new curriculum? Kettlegorf could not help but think they might have been a bit hasty when they refused to let Professor Porterfield continue as their leader. But when she gave it some thought, perhaps it was more gratifying to attempt to discomfit a colleague than to allow him the chance to save their necks.

Content as he was otherwise, Bollovate, too, had spent a nervous Tuesday night. Sheila had kicked him out of the Louisburg Square house, and got an injunction forbidding him entrance to the Wellfleet house, the Newport house, the East Hampton house, and even the 25,000-square-foot log cabin on the Snake River in Jackson Hole. The settlement demanded in Sheila's divorce papers had so upset him, he wondered if he were suffering congestive heart failure instead of his chronic acid reflux. He had tried to get hold of Matha for a business conference in the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, where he wound up spending the night. But Matha was unreachable, even to him. So he turned on the TV, searched the movie menu, and selected
Dripping Wet Asians
and
Young Thai Pie
.

Come Wednesday he felt chipper again, and in the evening, after checking on a number of hidden bank accounts to ascertain that they remained hidden from Sheila, and checking in on the Potemkin real estate company he'd set up on Long Island, he drove toward Beet College. He would arrive by eleven, just about the time the MacArthur Five would enter the library and Livi Porterfield would get home to surprise her husband. One important errand lay ahead for him, and one more at tomorrow's faculty meeting, and he would be king of the hill. As he steered the Escalade onto the Mass Pike and hooked north, never dimming his brights, he contemplated life without Sheila and the children. The dead trees stood at attention.

It did not take much to figure out what he'd had in mind when he engineered the closing of the college. Oh, he'd engineered it, all right. He'd appointed Porterfield because the young professor was wet behind the ears and likely to fail. He reveled in Professor Porterfield's humiliation, especially after Porterfield had faced him down. But it would have made no difference to Bollovate or his fellow developers on the board if Peace and the CCR had come up with the most dazzling curriculum ever devised. He and his cronies were bound to close the place under any circumstance because the land was a hell of a lot more valuable (“Are you kidding?”) with the deep thinkers off it. It didn't take much to figure that out either.
And it might have taken a little more, but not so very much, to figure out that the trustee developers were going to wind up owning the property, which is why they were happy as little overfed pigs themselves at their momentous meeting in the Temple two months earlier when good old Joel came up with his new curriculum scam, which was merely a stalling tactic, until the purchase could be arranged. Now, thanks to the hapless Francis April's need for ready cash (Bollovate wound up paying him $60 thousand plus the promise of a personal introduction to Joe Namath), the deal was as good as done. All that remained to play out were the coup de grâce on Professor Porterfield's disgrace; the anger-cum-melancholy of the milquetoast faculty; the brief if noisy outcry of the parents, and of the old-money alumni; and that would be that. Massachusetts State officials? Don't make Joel Bollovate laugh. The dummy corporation, which had so intrigued Matha Polite and concerned her sister, would front the money, and the man with the iron belly would add to his infinitely expanding territory two hundred and ten acres of prime real estate “in the heart of American history.”

All this chicanery had been in plain view from the start, had anyone wanted to take a look. But Beet being a college, populated by people who populated colleges, it occurred to no one to notice anything other than themselves. And so what was not difficult to figure out was left unfigured out.

Yet there were two additional items of pettifoggery known only to Bollovate and Lewis Huey. Not even the other trustees were in on them. And no one would have figured out the far worse of these two things had not Akim Ben Laden, as then he was known, been dissatisfied with his concentration. That the concentration was Homeland Security, as one would soon see, presented a minor irony of its own.

“Laissez les bon temps rouler!” cried Matha exactly at eleven, an hour after Bacon had closed for the night. No one remained in the Old Pen, the novelty of the Trojan Pig having eroded, leaving the campus to darkness and to the MacArthur Five. Bagtoothian was responsible for making les bon temps rouler. He looked around
furtively, hand shading eyes like a comic book spy, reached beneath the pig's pink fiberglass tail, disengaged the pole, and pulled.

Matha felt the pig roll and come to a stop. “Are we here?” she shouted a whisper to Bagtoothian.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Where are we, exactly? And call me sir again, and you're toast.”

“Under the second floor, like you said. What do I do now?”

“Kill yourself.”

The rental man had shown Matha what button to push to raise the vertical lift. Two chrome-plated cylinders moved upward away from the tractor chassis, and the pig rose a few inches at a time, the scissor link unfolding into three steel diamonds one atop the other and finally reaching its lift capacity of twenty-six feet. It stopped parallel to the library's second-story window, and about four feet away to allow room to open the snout-door. Bagtoothian pushed the structure forward, bringing the elevated pig flush with the building. Matha reached out, raised the window, and crawled through with the others behind her.

“Go let in brains-for-shit,” she told Lattice, who trotted downstairs.

The students took their stations and waited, looking about the great domed room, casting shadows in the dark and against the walls of books. Matha congratulated them on their achievement. They were about to desecrate the warehouse of learning they'd targeted on the Day of the Bollovate, two months earlier. And if their occupation of the building would not effect the great work stoppage of the mind they'd envisioned, at least they could serve their community as they always had—as giant pains in the ass. Here they stood, with all that was best thought and felt surrounding them. And it was theirs to abuse. Compared to this, thought Matha, MacArthur House was a piece of cake, which reminded her: “Did you bring in the baskets of cookies?” she asked Betsy, who, lucky for her, had.

“Do you think we can eat all these cookies?” Bagtoothian asked.

“They're not for us, they're for the crowd. It's cold out there. They'll enjoy a snack.” Matha was talking strangely, but the others were too afraid of her to point it out.

Since he'd been following Matha, as was his practice, Ferritt Lawrence had seen everything—from the previous night's gentle lowering of the pink pig from the roof of the Muncheonette to its placement on the platform and the wheels. On his mountain bike he'd trailed the pig on its long nocturnal journey, as the MacArthur Five had rolled it into the Old Pen just before dawn. He'd watched it all day, and into the night, when its occupants vacated it for the library. He noted all that, just as he noted that Matha had promised she would let him know when she would pull off the next big radical event. And he noted that once again she'd failed to keep her word. So he stood out of sight and watched some more, knowing exactly what he'd do when Matha emerged from the building.