Bobcat and Other Stories (11 page)

I had one quick detour before the meeting, as Teddy’s teacher had sent home a little note asking us to bring along a “healthy dessert” to World Party tonight. So Terrance accompanied me to Moon’s, a tiny cozy convenience store on the edge of campus, run by Mr. Moon and his wife Liliane. They had Fig Newtons, which I knew were not exactly healthy but they were faintly educational and maybe even sort of biblical. And anyway, I was in the habit of just setting the food down quickly and then disowning it entirely, even in my own mind. And since my ex-husband, Ted, and his wife, Elizabeth, and their two little children—a beautiful blond fairy family—would be there, it would be important not to place my package of cookies anywhere near Elizabeth’s offering, which would be something homey and exquisite, lemon squares or warm flaxen oatcakes.

We had about five minutes to get to the meeting after we exited Moon’s. As I was telling Terrance about my newest concerns about Teddy—he was refusing to dress up as a character from a book for the party tonight and instead wanted to dress up as death, or a disease, or a rat—I saw that across Great Lawn, the white clover flowers had sprung up everywhere, ten thousand of them. It was my favorite sight—the field suddenly white instead of green. “Well, he’s testing the hypothesis,” Terrance said. “Is it a World Party or not? Is everything really invited?”

“I guess,” I said. “Maybe. I just wish he wanted to be Willy Wonka or something.”

“Well, what is he going to be after all?”

“We compromised with a black hole. He’s going to be a black hole.”

Just the night before, the Nobel Prize had gone to the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti for his book
Crowds and Power,
which I happened to have read (crowds as wildfire, crowds as birds, crowds as a hillside of trees), but it was a lesser play of his—called
Their Days Are Numbered
—that I recall when I think back to that day, walking across the wildish, newly white field with Terrance. In the play, every person wears a medallion with the day, month, and year of their death on it, so that you know while talking to somebody when it is they will die. I don’t know what I would have done differently if I’d known how soon Terrance would die. I suppose clutch his arm, and stay close to him, try to see things a little longer his way, which was generous and serious, but I was already doing that, holding on to his muscley, tattooed arm.

As we were making our way up the stairs I saw Stewart Applebaum just standing there, waiting for his time to go in and appear before us. “Oh hey,” I said to him. “It’s you,” he said. Terrance smiled and opened the door for us both.

FOUR

Of all the college committees, this one—the Faculty Hearings Committee—was the greatest. If a faculty member did anything suspect—threatened the dean with a gun, gave their classes all A’s, denied the Holocaust—it was referred to us, the most unskilled tribunal ever assembled.

When Terrance and I arrived, Dana Fisher, our committee chair, who looked like maybe a handsome Ichabod Crane with a salt-and-pepper mustache, was already there seated at the table, behind which there was a big window letting on to an enormous, two-hundred-year-old oak tree. All of our deliberations over the past two years had taken place in the measured, gorgeous aura of this tree. It had turned in the last few days a bright and otherworldly bronze.

Dana, who was a nonvoting member of the committee, had laid out at each of our places a little packet of information about Applebaum including, strangely, a big glossy picture of him, as if we were considering him for a part in a movie. In the photo, Applebaum looked serious but kind, handsome in a dark, feathered-hair sort of way. His CV was there too: BA from Berkeley, MA from Wharton, PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

Within moments, our last member, Geraldine, arrived, bearing poppy seed muffins. Geraldine was a formidable woman—brave, ethereal, intelligent, tall, fragile, and frequently contemptuous of our committee. She was already in her sixties, and had been in that first wave of feminists who had to be absolute warriors.

Dana decided to invite Applebaum into the meeting right from the start, so he could help us understand the situation, before we began our deliberations. When Applebaum entered he apologized quickly to us all, for taking away our Friday afternoon.

Dana was a Quaker, so ran our meetings in an atmosphere of almost total silence, out of which speech was supposed to arise like a revelation of some sort. So we all sat quietly for a while, looking over the materials. Finally, Dana said, “We have a crisis. We have a young student in the hospital, after refusing to eat for three days, and we have two more following in his footsteps. They are members of this group, Harvest.”

“What specifically are they protesting?” Terrance asked Applebaum.

“Well, we’ve discovered that one of our board members—Dean Forenter, in fact—is the head of a waste company that is currently violating state regulations and dumping waste every day in a waterway that feeds into the Atlantic. These boys cannot tolerate that.”

“Did you instruct them to strike?” Geraldine asked. I could tell she was angry.

“No. But we frequently talk about nonviolent means to protest.”

“But this is quite violent,” I said. “It’s a type of terrorism. It’s a method of force.”

“I suppose. But for me the question is always whether it matches the activity it is meant to address. We’ve been reading A. S. Mill,
The Uses of Obedience and Disobedience,
as well as some old Emerson essays. The students who are involved in this particular action are intelligent, free-thinking adults. I don’t tell them what to do. One of them—Griffith Tran—has been studying quite carefully the essays of—”

“Forgive me,” I said, “but you sound supportive of what they are doing.”

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “I will be happy if they stop, but I can’t help but be proud of them.”

“Hmmm,” Dana said. And we all fell silent again for awhile.

My mind was passing back and forth promiscuously between the matter at hand and a deep inner discussion on the difference in Applebaum’s age and mine. If you squinted we were almost the same age. We were of the same generation, at least. He was thirty-five to my forty-four, which I couldn’t decide if it was vast or negligible. We were on earth at the same time, and maybe that’s all that mattered. Still, how would it all go? I would be fifty when he was forty-one, which would be okay I guess, but then I would be sixty when he was fifty-one, when he could still conceivably date, for instance, a thirty-five-year-old, which would put me at sixty in competition with women in their thirties.
Forget it!
Dana was going over some by-laws, while I suffered through my breakup with Applebaum fifteen years hence.

Geraldine leaped in. “You keep referring to these students as ‘adults,’ ” which I think is your unconscious way of removing yourself from any responsibility. Anybody who has had a child of that age knows that they are hardly functioning with the same judgment they will hold in the future when they are thirty and forty.”

“Well,” Applebaum said, “they are more passionate, yes, and energetic. But I’ve found that people at that age can have a kind of intuitive sense of justice that disappears after people’s lives take on more responsibilities to their children and to their communities.”

“But the power differential seems to escape you,” Geraldine said. “You have power over them whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.”

It was three p.m. and the day was already getting darker. There was no rain but an intense afternoon darkness. The tree outside our window registered this by getting brighter, turning its inner light up, and its wet, golden leaves shook with delight at all this weather. My thoughts ran to Teddy and to World Party. I was not late yet, but darkness always signaled to me that I had to get to Teddy, wherever he was. He had a little tic that deepened as the day progressed, and if he got tired especially. Not that it seemed to bother him. We almost never spoke of it. I didn’t want to make him self-conscious. But then I worried that by not mentioning it, I was ignoring something that was distressing him, or just leaving him to manage something on his own when I should be accompanying him in some way.

When I was young, my family often spent weekends at our old family homestead up in Southern Saskatchewan. Every Sunday we went to a small, beautiful Lutheran church, whose pastor had a severe tic that ran all the way from his temple down across his left cheekbone, over his jaw, down his neck, affecting even his left shoulder. The tic occurred every thirty or so seconds, without fail. You could have timed the passage of the sun and moon with it. And to this day I can’t hear any of those old Bible stories—the exile from Eden, Noah’s flood, the binding of Isaac, Jesus on Calvary—without picturing and even feeling in my own face that great quake, that grave, magnificent revelation of fragility. His name was Glademacher, and he had a beautiful old man’s face, God and time and mortality working its way over it.

By the time we all stepped out, two hours later, we each—Terrance, Geraldine, and I—had a tiny slip of paper in our pockets, with yes and no written on it. We were to check the box beside yes or no, regarding whether we should allow Applebaum to continue to direct Harvest. A no vote meant that Harvest should be disbanded immediately. We had to return this to a little mailbox outside this building by 6:30 tonight. I was pretty sure Geraldine would check no, they shouldn’t be allowed to continue, and Terrance would check yes, they should of course be allowed to continue, to let everybody’s destinies play out as they will. So that left me.

FIVE

The Quaker Day School was so cozy, I just wanted to curl up in the reading corner, on its huge alphabet pillows, and read away into the night, the wind and rain swirling all around. Maybe
The Borrowers,
or some Beverly Cleary. Of all the books I’ve read since childhood, of all the civilizations risen and fallen, none of them described the futility and fun of life so accurately as
The Jumblies,
by the great epileptic and depressive Edward Lear, the twentieth child of his parents
.

They went to sea in a Sieve they did,

In a Sieve they went to sea:

In spite of all their friends could say,

On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,

In a Sieve they went to sea.

The parents, all of us soaking wet, battered, nearly ruined by our days, crowded around the outside of the room and watched the quiet processional of children to the banquet table, which was laid with quince, pomegranates, squash, lemonade. My Fig Newtons were actually turning out to be quite appropriate. The teacher, Dominique, had swiftly arranged them in a complicated circle/maze design around a huge platter. She was a magician, who took all of life into her and there transformed it into something that a seven-year-old would love.

The children were solemn at first—Mother Earth with her elaborate headdress, Daffy Duck, a Moon and a Star, a Lightbulb, and then Teddy, with his cape of nothing. Dominique had us all bow our heads and then she said this little Quaker nonprayer based on an Emily Dickinson poem: “Who comes to dine must bring his feast, or find the banquet mean. The banquet is not laid without till it is laid within.”

Ted was across the room from me, with Elizabeth and their two toddlers. Elizabeth waved. Ted didn’t
not
wave. It just didn’t occur to him that we should wave at each other. He had a little bit of Teddy’s efficiency with emotion, or maybe inability. It actually made me love Ted, too, a little. He had an animal’s straightforward relationship to life, though, as with Teddy, this was coupled with a genuine, very interesting, and companionable intelligence. Still, I worried, basically every second of every day, about Teddy, who seemed farther out on the limb than his father. For instance, the banquet table was kidney shaped, with a big bulge at one end, and then a slim curve, with a tiny bulge at the other end. Teddy was down there, alone. The other children were jostling with each other, laughing, smiling, arguing, and Teddy was sitting there by himself, thinking and eating. Nobody seemed to notice but me—it was just a natural configuration to them, like the inevitable placement of stars in the sky.

I knew for a fact that Teddy wasn’t thinking about it—he would be thinking about subtraction, or Fibonacci, or maybe about the Hilbert Hotel, which was a hotel with an infinite number of rooms to which an infinite amount of guests kept appearing and asking for rooms. This was a thought experiment that there were whole books written about, and whole careers devoted to.

Still, the sight of him—a black hole at the end of the table alone—made me almost unbearably sad. I went to crouch down in the crook of the table and talk to him. “How are you, Teddy?” I tried to close the distance between Teddy and the other kids, chatting with the little girl Betsy Charter, Mother Nature, about her feathers and the jewels in her headdress. I suppose I looked ludicrous, trying to horn in on the World Party. But I didn’t care. I’d sit there forever. In my mind I’d sit there all night, and into tomorrow and the weekend, trying to bridge the gap between Teddy and everybody else.

But it ended, thankfully, within the hour, and we were on our way. Back to campus, where I still needed to place my vote. Teddy and I walked across those same white fields of clover, and just the thought of Terrance even existing (he was out at a restaurant with his lawyer love right now), casting his generous eye on everything—
he’s testing the hypothesis—
made me happy to be alone with Teddy again, thinking about everything.

“So if the Hilbert Hotel can accommodate any subsets of infinity, like busfuls of new people, infinite busfuls of new people, then there are different types of infinity. There are subsets of infinity,” Teddy said.

“Yes. Apparently they finally proved that.”

“The Hilbert Hotel proves it.”

“Yes.”

I’d had this conversation with Teddy many times, and each time I found myself wondering if anybody except a mother would find his austere intelligence companionable. When I think back on my childhood and young adulthood it seems the whole enterprise was awash with attempting to understand other people and get them to understand you, loving them and getting them to love you. Teddy’s path would be so different from that: I couldn’t even quite imagine it. He just didn’t care about that. He was alone with the Alone.