Beet (4 page)

“We'll hear both plans,” said Peace.

“Me first,” said Kettlegorf.

“I don't have a plan,” said Booth. “Is that all right?”

“Of course,” said Peace.

Booth's face bore the austerity of a Viking king, though one on the verge of surrender. He camouflaged his smell of sweat with Rugby Players cologne, but only half successfully. “Will Mr. Bollovate know whose plan is adopted?” he said. He had not met Bollovate personally, but once sent him a complimentary note (as he did to everyone at Beet at one time or another), and he had long been of the opinion that when it came to self-advancement, one well-placed complimentary note was worth a thousand real accomplishments.

“I have a few thoughts as well,” said Smythe, who was everything Livi said he was. He was in his early sixties, and looked like an enlarged altar boy—not grown up, just bigger. His face was an aquarelle: sandy hair, mottled with faint grays and whites; pale aquamarine eyes; limpid skin around the cheekbones; and the broad expanse of forehead often indicative of candor and nobility, and sometimes not.

Of all the faculty at Beet, Smythe had most successfully mastered the art of academic acceptability. In the 1960s, he marched in every student protest, including one against his own department. In the early 1970s, he grew his hair long and wore a Nehru jacket to formal events. He also picked up the guitar, albeit a few
years late, so he put it down shortly thereafter. In the 1980s, he attached Save the Whales stickers to the fenders of his Volvo, which were replaced by Save the Seals in the 1990s and Save the Children in 2004, which he attached to his Prius. He knew all the right initials and said them frequently—TLS, PBS, NPR, SUV. He said poetic things about the Red Sox. Perhaps the surest sign of his social skills was that he showed just the right proportions in expressing contempt for his colleagues when they were in trouble—three parts sanctimony, one part understanding.

“I'm so very sorry about Margaret,” he'd told Manning weeks after her funeral.

“Don't make it worse,” Manning said.

Smythe's wife Ada was a Lacoste. Her fortune assured her husband, whose parents had run a poorhouse in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that he'd never set foot in one himself, along with a lifetime supply of shirts. Behind her back he remarked that Ada was so boring, even if she murdered him the police would not consider her “a person of interest.” Then he would laugh.

“I'm keen to hear your plan, Keelye, whatever it may be,” said Professor Lipman. She had a voice like desiccated fruit, and was said to be married to a submariner in New London who spent four-fifths of the year underwater and had reenlisted nine times. “Of course, I'm keen to hear all the plans.”

Lipman was uncomfortable in academic surroundings, and hoped the other committee members would recognize her as an intellectual as well as a journalist. Manning had once remarked to Peace that she had the mind of a Hallmark bereavement card, but less feeling.

“I would like to say, however,” she went on, “that whatever we propose, Communications Arts should stand at the center. Not only is it the most profitable of the concentrations”—Smythe eyed her enviously—“communication itself is so essential to the community these days. Without people communicating what they have to communicate, where would the community be?”

“Shall I proceed?” asked Kettlegorf. All nodded. “You know, students love to perform. Sing. Act in plays. Dance. I used to do that
as a girl. Dance and dance!” She sailed into a shrill rendition of “I Could Have Danced All Night,” whirling in her seat and heaving with jactitations, to which the others responded with dead stares. “Anyway, we could devise a curriculum in which all the disciplines are converted into performing arts. Instead of merely reading
Paradise Lost
, for instance, we could turn the poem into a mime show. Or an old Harlem tap-dance competition. Or a hippity-hop concert with El Al Cold Jay. Think of it! History as opera! Botany in folk songs! Why, I'm composing a country-and-western song about Gregor Mendel in my head right now!” She became a coliseum of exclamations. “And then…and then…as a sort of final project for the entire college, we present a mixed-media
mélange
performed on the lawn of the Old Pen, in which students dress up as disciplines and sing, and all the disciplines begin in a cacophony of self-assertions, as if competing for dominance, and then, merely by rearranging the clashing notes, suddenly explode in pure harmony. All of learning coming together in a better world! A brave new world! Parents in the audience, the trustees, the deans, our colleagues, on their feet and applauding a revolution of thought bursting into existence right before their eyes!” Her own were like a spooked horse's. “Why, it tires me out to think about it! I'm pooped!”

“Me too,” said Smythe. Heilbrun smirked. Lipman looked around to see how to react.

“My plan involves the great battles of history,” said the military historian Kramer, taking advantage of the silence. His eyes were fogged goggles. “It's simple, really. We give lectures on the major clashes of a war, then the students go to the gym, where they divide into armies and move toy soldiers around the gym floor to simulate actual battles. And they could dress up as soldiers, too! Fusiliers could carry real fusils! Once the students really got into playing with toy soldiers, they would understand history with hands-on excitement.”

To demonstrate his idea, he'd brought along a shoe box full of toy doughboys and grenadiers, and was about to reenact the Battle of Verdun on the committee table when Heilbrun stayed his hand. “We get it,” he said.

“That's quite interesting, Molton,” said Booth. “But is it rigorous enough?”

At the mention of the word, everyone, save Peace, sat up straight.

“Rigor is so important,” said Kettlegorf.

“We must have rigor,” said Booth.

“You may be sure,” said the offended Kramer, “I never would propose anything lacking rigor.”

Smythe inhaled and looked at the ceiling. “I think I may have something of interest,” he said, as if he were at a poker game and was about to disclose a royal flush. “My proposal is called ‘Icons of Taste.' It would consist of a galaxy of courses affixed to several departments consisting of lectures on examples of music, art, architecture, literature, and other cultural areas a student needed to indicate that he or she was sophisticated.”

“Why would a student want to do that?” asked Booth.

“Perhaps sophistication is not a problem for chemists,” said Smythe. Lipman tittered.

“What's the subject matter?” asked Heilbrun. “Would it have rigor?”

“Of course it would have rigor. Yet it would also attract those additional students Bollovate is talking about.” Smythe inhaled again. “The material would be carefully selected,” he said. “One would need to pick out cultural icons the students were likely to bring up in conversations for the rest of their lives, so that when they spoke, others would recognize their taste as being exquisite yet eclectic and unpredictable.”

“You mean Rembrandt?” said Kramer.

Smythe smiled with weary contempt. “No, I do not mean Rembrandt. I don't mean Beethoven or Shakespeare either, unless something iconic has emerged about them to justify their more general appeal.”

“You mean, if they appeared on posters,” said Lipman.

“That's it precisely.”

Lipman blushed with pride.

“The subject matter would be fairly easy to amass,” Smythe said.
We could all make up a list off the top of our heads. Einstein—who does have a poster.” He nodded to the ecstatic Lipman. “Auden, for the same reason. Students would need to be able to quote “September 1939” or at least the last lines. And it would be good to teach “Musée des Beaux Arts” as well, which is off the beaten path, but not garishly. Mahler certainly. But Cole Porter too. And Sondheim, I think. Goya. Warhol, it goes without saying, Stephen Hawking, Kurosawa, Bergman, Bette Davis. They'd have to come up with some lines from
Dark Victory,
or better still,
Jezebel
.
La Dolce Vita. Casablanca. King of Hearts.
And Orson, naturally.
Citizen Kane,
I suppose, though personally I prefer
F for Fake
.”

“Judy!” cried Heilbrun.

“Yes, Judy too. But not ‘Over the Rainbow.' It would be more impressive for them to do ‘The Trolley Song,' don't you think?” Kettlegorf hummed the intro.

“Guernica
,” said Kramer. “Robert Capa.”

“Edward R. Murrow,” said Lipman.

“No! Don't be ridiculous!” said Smythe, ending Lipman's brief foray into the world of respectable thought.

“Marilyn Monroe!” said Kettlegorf.

“Absolutely!” said Smythe, clapping to indicate his approval.

“And the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Booth, catching on. “And the Chrysler Building.”

“Maybe,” said Smythe. “But I wonder if the Chrysler Building isn't becoming something of a cliché.”

Peace had had enough. “And you want students to nail this stuff so they'll do well at cocktail parties?”

Smythe sniffed criticism, always a tetchy moment for him. “You make it sound so superficial,” he said.

“Shall we move on?” said Peace.

But his committee looked deflated. They just sat mum and buried their heads.

“Okay,” Peace said. “Don't worry. It's only the first day. We'll get there.” And they adjourned.

On the way back to his office, he broke into a run.

SO IT WENT FOR THE FOLLOWING TWO WEEKS, WITH STUDENTS
and faculty growing more edgy, Peace more anxious, Manning more bitterly amused, Matha more strident, Ferritt Lawrence more journalistic, Akim Ben Laden more frustrated with the Homeland Security Department, and the CCR more feckless, meeting after fruitless meeting. Oddly, the one who seemed least agitated by the situation he'd set in motion was Joel Bollovate, and thus Lewis Huey was calm as well.

Livi was not calm. At night, after her husband's reports of another day of failure, she'd go upstairs and surf the Net for openings for hand surgeons, preferably in the Boston area, but not exclusively.

Then, on the day after Halloween, and just before two o'clock classes, a senior named Max Byrd noticed something unusual about the Henry Moore
Two Piece Reclining Man
that had commanded the lawn of the New Pen for five decades: It was gone. Where the two pieces had reclined lay depressions in the earth bearing their imprints—soft, damp, wormy, and vacant. It seemed very odd that no one had noticed the disappearance of the vast object earlier in the day, as the New Pen was heavily trafficked. But Max, a self-confessed computer geek—who attended Beet on a
Herb Sherman Scholarship awarded to an undergraduate deemed “nice, normal and bright” (and difficult to win because of the first two qualifications)—yet one of Professor Porterfield's sharper students, was an observant young man, able to see absent as well as present things.

He had hair the color of a Hershey bar, and wore round rimless eyeglasses and a thick mustache with a neatly trimmed beard—all of which could not disguise his boyish face or an expression that bore a rapturous love of learning. Max was from Lindaville, Alabama (pop. 4,600 where his father owned the feed store. Until he'd arrived at the Beet train station, he'd never taken a taxi before. Until he met Professor Porterfield, he'd wanted to take the taxi back. Max was encumbered with a tendency never to say a thing he didn't mean, but was otherwise suited for college life. When he went to report his discovery to his favorite professor, he recalled the Wallace Stevens lines he'd learned in one of Peace's classes, about the nothing that was not there and the nothing that is.

“You're kidding,” said Peace, who thanked the boy for the tip about the Moore and headed from the English Department to the New Pen to see the nothing for himself. How to explain it? The abduction might have been a Halloween prank from the previous night, though the prankster would have had to use a crane and two large flatbed trucks, one for each reclining half.

Thinking he was the bearer of news, Peace strode toward College Hall and into the president's office. The door read
DR. LEWIS HUEY
. The “Dr.” was honorary, awarded by Huey to Huey at his inauguration.

“You won't believe this,” Peace said to Huey, who did. The missing Moore did not at all come as a surprise to the president, who explained that upon conferring with Joel Bollovate (
conferring
being his word), he'd had the sculpture removed and taken to Rockport. Peace asked why.

“To sell it,” said Huey, as blithely as if he'd been asked why beavers build dams.

“Sell it? Sell a Henry Moore? How could you do that?” The question was not merely accusatory. Apart from the absurdity of
selling an invaluable work of art, how, legally, could the college make a profit off what had been a munificent gift? The Moore had been donated in 1954 (when alumni were still making munificent gifts to Beet) by a local wealthy mortgage broker who never liked it, and quipped during the transfer that he'd just had the thing lying around. College officials chuckled politely and grabbed up the sculpture.

“Oh, the legal stuff is taken care of,” said Huey, leaning back in his chair, his arms cradling his head like a pair of angel wings, and looking both in charge and scared witless. “Joel Bollovate explained it all to me. Actually, selling the Moore was Joel's idea [as if Peace needed to be told that]. I think the college is going to realize $14 million, before Joel's commission.”

“He took a commission?”

“Business is business.” Huey could rearrange his face, which had the folds of a shar-pei's, to suit any situation. This one called for the look of an insider. “That's what Joel said.”

“Great,” said Peace, who saw nothing more could be accomplished by talking to Huey.

The selling of the Henry Moore was but the latest in Beet's commercial ventures since Bollovate had taken over as chairman of the board. Last fall, the college launched an effort to sell various parts of the campus—not to be removed, as was the Moore, but rather to display the names of the donors. Their efforts had been impeded by the first faint whispers about the college's closing, suggesting that the trustees were advertising immortality but selling obsolescence.

They began by offering whole structures that bore no names as yet, from the departmental offices to the indoor garage to the field house and the football field itself, where for one million dollars one could have one's name carved permanently into the fifty-yard line. Since the teams, both home and visitors, rarely made it as far as the fifty, the donor's name was likely to remain pristine.

When there were no takers for the million-dollar names, the college offered individual slabs and bricks in the buildings for anything from $10,000 for a brick to $25,000 for a slab. But again, no
buyer was interested. They tried to sell the paving stones on the pathways for $500 apiece, calling it a “Walk of Fame,” and were rejected even by Donald Trump, whom Bollovate called a “close personal friend.” (Bollovate was called the same thing by Mr. Trump.) Finally, they offered the parquet floor tiles in the vestibule of the student center for $5 a tile. Here they made a sale. Gregory, the security guard, bought one for four one-dollar bills, three quarters, two dimes, and two pennies (the college forgave the difference). After his name was inscribed he would sneak away from the front gate, stare at his purchase, and murmur, “Rhandor.”

There even was talk of making Latin the Pig available for branding. The Bring Home the Bacon butchers offered $500 to have its name burned into Latin's hide. But when the students got wind of it, they staged an “Ightnay orfay Atinlay in which the pig was paraded back and forth, albeit carefully, and was cheered lustily with “Avesay Our Igpay!” They took up a collection and raised $500 to keep Latin brand-free. The honoree spewed his gratitude all round.

On the cost-cutting side of the ledger, Mrs. Whiting was told that her workweek in the English Department was to be limited to three days, and her salary reduced proportionately. When Peace learned of it, he offered to help her out with extra work. She declined with thanks and a what-can-you-do shrug.

If there were a third side to the ledger, it would show that the college continued to accept applications for the following year—and more to the point, Bollovate's point—application fees. Manning observed to Peace that while other colleges were competing for students by offering discounts, laptops, and other swag, Beet had its hands in their pockets.

“And if we close shop,” said Manning, “there won't be enough lawyers in Massachusetts to handle the lawsuits. Wait and see.”

There was more: “Did you know Huey is requiring quarterly reports from the departments?” Manning asked Peace. “No, of course you didn't. You live on a higher plane.”

“Quarterly reports on what?”

“Enrollment. Income from tuition. Price points. Yields. In
short—” Peace started to make the time-out T. “Yes! The bottom line. I keep trying to explain this to you. It's simple. Ask for an accounting every three months, and the employees—you and I—start to run scared. We have to meet expectations, like any Wall Street–driven company. We have to
produce
—in an institution where the product isn't visible. The goal is money, man, and make it quick. So, what does one do to show a gain every quarter? Lower! Lower quality, lower standards. You think you're going to draw new students without diluting what little we have left?”

“I'm going to try,” said Peace.

“Well, good luck, my boy. But the fact is, we've plunged straight to the bottom line and are headed down from there. Did I ever tell you my theory about that?”

The way things were going, Peace was not very hopeful he would persuade Bollovate the sale of the Moore was ill-advised, as some of his colleagues might say, or as Livi might, crooked, stupid, and wrong. Nonetheless, Livi's Candide decided to give it a shot and make the one-hour drive to Bollovate's office in Cambridge, in one of the new high-rises near Harvard Square. After all, he reasoned, only two weeks earlier Bollovate had said the college could be saved by a new curriculum. Why sell off valuable property?

But Bollovate had a previous appointment in Boston, and only a minute to spare. He was just finishing a large bowl of succotash, his favorite dish. On his desk lay antique paper pressed between glassine sheets.

“Are those surveys?” Peace asked. “They look old. Colonial?”

“Yeah. I'm interested in property lines.”

“For developments?”

“Yeah. For developments.”

Peace scanned the office. The walls were covered with framed bank checks, the trophies of a lifetime of real estate deals. One dated back to a Lego set Bollovate had sold to a schoolmate at the age of nine. He'd cleared $4.25 on that one.

On either side of Bollovate's desk stood flags on poles. One was the American flag; the other, the standard of Bollocorps, which
was bright green and showed a smiling house with a sign on the lawn reading sold! In a corner leaned a gold-plated shovel bearing the legend “To J. B., Man of the Soil.”

Bollovate scraped his bowl clean and stood to leave, saying merely that the sale of the Henry Moore was a sweetheart of a deal, that the buyer, whom he called a sucker, grossly overpaid, that Beet needed the dough, or hadn't Peace noticed, and good-bye.

“If I were you, Professor Porterfield”—leading Peace down the elevator and out the door—“I'd focus on curricular reform, and leave the fund-raising to the trustees, who know what they're doing. Us bean counters—remember? Temporary fugit. Carpet diem. Time's a-wastin'. Come to think of it, how's your committee coming along?”

“We're getting there,” Peace lied. “But is losing a Henry Moore a smart way to raise funds?”

Bollovate settled the iron belly into the black pleather of the back seat of his Cadillac Escalade and motioned his driver to move on. He waved to Peace like the Queen. The tinted window rose shut, leaving the professor standing on the sidewalk in front of the Harvard Coop confronting his own reflection in the dark glass, and looking like, well, a professor.

Yet Bollovate was right; time was a-wastin'. And after nine committee meetings so far, Peace was seeing a lot more waste in his future. For the hell of it, he'd again asked Manning to join the committee. Manning ducked as though a missile had been aimed at his head.

“That's what you do,” said Peace.

“What's that?”

“Duck.”

Manning shrugged.

Faculty members not on the CCR were free to carp about it, which they had done for the past two weeks, and which they did about most things that did not require their direct participation. Their glee at what they supposed would be the committee's destined failure was somewhat compromised by the fact that when it failed, they'd be out of work.

Not that the pedagogical life at the college came to a stop during this time, or even a pause. Courses in the Old Pen limped on as ever. Students found them adequate (barely), yet the traditional courses seemed country cousins compared with the New Pen offerings. Tried-and-true concentrations like English, history, and government had perhaps grown too tried-and-true—not because of any overt failings so much as because professors had lost confidence in them. They were too aware of the hipper classes occurring on the other side of College Hall, even though the crowds of students were often attracted to the New Pen because the courses were both easier and loopy. To be fair, this was not true of them all, or of all the parts of any one. Still, professors in the New Pen smirked at those in the Old, who smirked back at them for opposite reasons. It all came out even. Students bored to tears with the traditional offerings produced tears of rage or derision at the new ones, as Akim Ben Laden did regarding Homeland Security. Until or unless an interesting curriculum might be devised (did anyone really think it would happen?), the status quo remained in less jeopardy than the college.

Undergraduate organizations continued to solicit new members, though they had a hard time persuading their fellow students to join up when the college was about to buy the farm. Hardy nonetheless, they set up their booths in the Pens and waited—the Beet Buddhist and Karate Club, Bengalis Unite, Berliners for Rebuilding the Wall, WPIG, Jacobean Bloodletters, Brothers for Lynn Cheney, Baptists for Fornication, Equestrian Hillel, Christians for Jesus, Pre-Raphaelite Readers ( James Lattice, pres.), Haitian Ballroom Dancing, Fuck Foucault, Chicana Frisbee, and Up with Goats. Only a handful of students stopped by the booths, which sagged like a bazaar after a rainstorm. Even the usually oversubscribed Future Animated Sitcom Writers of America and Future Network Presidential Historians drew no one.

In the wider world, news of Beet's predicament was seeping into America without incurring too much agitation, at least initially, supporting Manning's prediction about public opinion on American colleges. On October 20 the trustees had sent out a press release about the possible closing, and the proposed solution to the
problem. But it was phrased so positively, the papers that picked it up featured the story as little more than a filler. Other American colleges were in similar fixes, even if the loss of a whole endowment was unusual, but who pays attention to the autarkies of nonprofits?