Giles Goat Boy (116 page)

“Go to him now,” I bade My Ladyship. I might have added certain further directions, thanking her too for having fetched me where I had to go; but she agreed this time so readily, and with so knowing a smile, I said no more. Triple-T, once out of the crowd, browsed placidly; I handed his leash to Anastasia and stepped past the guard.

“Achtung, Stinkkäfer!”
he cried. He referred of course to the goat-dip on me, mighty indeed the perfume whereof; but his epithet was so exactly inapposite, I laughed aloud. He swung his billy; I parried with my stick and hoofed him a clean one in the balls. Before he could let go of himself to shoot, a pair of white helmets came over from the dignitaries’ stand. One intervened in the names of the Chancellor and Harold Bray, both of whom he declared had authorized my admission—murmurs went through the near bystanders at this news, and the fallen guard put by his pistol with a curse.

“You call that Grand-Tutoring?” Stoker shouted. He had started for My Ladyship, but paused when T.’s T.’s Tom bucked at him. Anastasia too seemed shocked by my deed. “Violence!” Stoker appealed to the crowd. “No respect for law and order!” People stirred; even White-helmet, though he’d come between us in my behalf, bent to assist his sooted comrade and grumbled that the man had after all been simply doing his duty.

“Tomorrow the Revised New Syllabus,” I said to My Ladyship. “Today the stick.”

The other white helmet now escorted to me Hedwig Sear—at her request, it turned out, who had observed from the viewing-stand my entry. She was gowned in black, her face veiled; Anastasia hurried to her, and they wept together as Three-T grazed. The shock of Croaker’s assault, it seemed, had cleared Hedwig’s mind; she spoke lucidly and quietly, impeded only by her grief at the critical condition of her husband. Dr. Sear lay in the infirmary, she told me, at the point of death. Her one wish was to join him, but she’d come to Founder’s Hill at his request in order to honor Max and give me a message. The circumstances of her attack she recounted with extraordinary calm—despite the fact that Croaker, with Dr. Eierkopf aboard, was present in the visitors’ stand. She could even smile, mournfully enough, at the irony of her rape: that when she’d tried to provoke him to it once before, in the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, he had rejected her in favor of an automatic soft-drink dispenser. There had followed her return to childishness, of which I’d heard, and when Croaker’s path and hers had crossed again, following their separate releases in yesterday’s amnesty, she had fled him with the fright of a five-year-old girl.

“Which is just what turned him on,” she said ruefully. “He couldn’t help it; he was just being Croaker. But poor Kennard—” She chuckled and wept. “In the old days he’d have taken pictures, and I’d have been showing Croaker naughty tricks. But Kennard’s changed, too, since last spring—the different things you’ve told him, and his cancer and all …” She blew her nose. Perhaps it was no more than a metastasis of the cancer to his brain, she said; in any case, he’d been escorting her from the Asylum to Great Mall (so he told her afterwards) to get a taxi to the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, not this time to mount her in Position One as the consummate perversion, but to come to her in simple love, in hope (her voice grew awed even now at the notion; she doubted I would believe her) that he could leave a child behind him upon his death! The rest I had witnessed from my noose: how, seeing her attacked, Dr. Sear had
leaped—
spontaneously, instantly, one could only say heroically—to her defense, and been felled by Croaker with a backhand smite. The blow had struck his bandaged tumor; though entirely blind now and basically, mercifully unconscious, he still had moments of lucidity, during which, in the night just past, she’d told him of her own astonishing recovery, begged his forgiveness for her part in their sorry past, professed her devotion to him, and announced her intention to undergo surgical curettage, against the unlikely chance that Croaker had accomplished what her husband had aspired to.

“But Kennard said I mustn’t,” she declared. “He says we have to be
grateful
to Croaker for bringing us together after all these years, and that we ought to
hope
I’m pregnant! No matter what the baby looks like, he says, it’s our child—Kennard’s and mine—because of what Kennard did without stopping to think.”

“Oh,
Heddy!
” Anastasia wept with delight and embraced her again, clearly as convinced of the fact and nature of Mrs. Sear’s pregnancy as of her own—though neither was two dozen hours past! Time was getting on; I asked Mrs. Sear directly whether her husband was pleased to be dying.

She shook her head at once. “That’s what I’m supposed to tell you, George. He says he doesn’t regret for a minute doing what he did. He says that what he’d never seen till Croaker hit him, even though he thought he’d seen everything, was that a certain kind of
spiritedness
was absolutely good, no matter what a person’s other Answers are. It doesn’t have anything to do with education, he said to tell you, and it’s the most valuable thing in the University. Something about Dean Taliped’s energy, even at the end … He wants to know whether he’s right.”

“Oh, George!” Anastasia cried. “Pass him now, so Heddy can tell him!”

Stoker huffed. “He’s out of his head.”

I smiled at tearful Hedwig. “Please tell Dr. Sear that in my opinion his attitude is certainly sentimental, and that his cancer may very well have damaged his mind as well as his eyesight. But tell him also that he’s a Candidate for Graduation, and congratulate him for me on being a father.”

“Only a Candidate?” Stoker jeered.

I nodded. “Like yourself.”

This retort so infuriated Stoker that Anastasia, still holding Triple-T, was obliged to step between us and command him to behave himself. Taking Mrs. Sear’s arm I slipped away to the viewing stand, and added en route:
“Of course, some Candidates are much closer to Commencement than others. Give your husband my love, Mrs. Sear.”

“Goat-Boy!” It was Dr. Eierkopf calling, from the dignitaries’ bleachers. There also I saw Chancellor and Mrs. Rexford, holding hands; the brothers Hector, amply coated; and Leonid Alexandrov, fidgeting as usual and looking restlessly to westward (though he could not see), where the sun fast sank upon the distant reaches of East Campus. Peter Greene was on the right, similarly bandaged, and flanked, to my surprise, by Stoker’s secretary Georgina and a pretty young white girl whom I concluded must be Greene’s daughter. But she was the very image of Chickie, that co-ed girl I’d watched disporting years ago with the Beist-in-the-buckwheat! The same uncombèd locks; the taunty eyes! And if anything younger, though I her witness had aged seven years in body, thrice that in spirit, since the night I’d heard her beg to Be. She could not be the original Chickie, then; wry speculations came to mind once again about Miss Sally Ann—but I put them aside as immaterial to Greene’s Candidacy and Assignment; also to attend Dr. Eierkopf, who, despite the bandage around his forehead and his general want of robustness, was fairly bouncing on Croaker’s shoulders. Round about them, come to retrieve their errant colleague, sat the delegation of visiting scholars from Frumentius, in the colorful garb of their alma maters. Outfitted with cameras and clipboards, they appeared to be making a careful record of the proceedings.

“I’m
Übertrittig
, Goat-Boy!” he cried. “My eyes have been opened!” While Croaker croaked croaks of greeting and the Frumentian scholars sniffed my air, felt of my fleece, and made pictogrammatic notes, he reported shrilly that he was a skeptic no more in the matter of Grand-Tutoriality. For he had seen with his own two eyes (abetted, to be sure, by corrective lenses) wonders unexplainable by natural law and student reason: Harold Bray, not two hours past, had appeared on the Hill as it seemed from nowhere; he had changed color and physiognomy before their eyes, leaped over the reflecting pool—a distance of some dozen meters—in a single bound, walked up the vertical face of the Founder’s Shaft as if it were a sidewalk, to rig ropes and pulleys for the main event, and then vanished, declaring from nowhere over the loudspeakers that he’d reappear at sunset.

“
Wunderbar
, Goat-Boy!” he exclaimed. “No tricks! No mirrors! Excuse you: that Bray, He’s a real Grand Tutor!”

I smiled. “You believe you’ve seen a miracle, Dr. Eierkopf?”

“
Ja wohl
, boy! I believe
because
I saw one! Five-and-twenty, yet!”

From behind me, where I’d not observed his approach, Stoker scoffed.
“You haven’t seen anything, Doc. If it’s miracles you want, George here can do better.” He clapped my shoulder in feigned affection.

“Dean o’ Flunks!” cried Eierkopf. “Heraus!”

“He’s going to rescue Spielman off the tip of the Shaft at the crucial moment,” Stoker announced to the stand at large, pointing at me with his index finger. “That’ll prove he’s the real Grand Tutor! He might even save the whole University in one whiz-bang, and Pass us all! Why not?”

With the exception of some of my Tutees, whose admission Bray seemed to have arranged for reasons of his own, the privileged spectators in the stands were people of position and influence, many of whom had sniffed disapprovingly at my aroma when I came near; they made it plain now that Stoker’s rowdiness offended them on the sober occasion at hand, and called upon the Chancellor to have us both removed from the Hill. Rexford looked with some concern in our direction; his wife whispered something in his ear that made him frown. He let go her hand and consulted a forelock behind him, who glanced at us and nodded.

“Come on!” Stoker taunted me at the top of his voice. “Do some tricks! Show us you’re the real G.T.!”

“Down in front!” someone called. At the same moment drums rolled, and I saw that the sun’s lower limb had touched the horizon. A marching-band struck up a grave processional; way was made at the barricades for a vee of three black motorcycles, behind the foremost of which walked Max. Bent under the weight of a block-and-tackle rig, he moved with difficulty, but his face was alight. A gasp came from the stands: not at that pitiful spectacle, but at a sudden apparition at the base of the Shaft. One would have sworn its marble lines had been unbroken except for ominous ropes and pulleys; there were certainly no doors or other apertures in the masonry, or hiding-places on the little ledge around its base, and the whole monument was ringed by a moat or reflecting-pool said to be a meter deep and twelve wide—yet in an instant on that empty ledge stood Harold Bray, black-cloaked, his arms held out to the approaching victim!

“How does he do it, Goat-Boy? Show us the trick!” Stoker’s tone was half jeer and half dare, but perhaps there was something else in his eyes. I turned my back on him and the others who now looked to see my reaction; bidding Anastasia to remain where she was with T.’s T.’s T., I made my way around to the opposite viewing-stand. Though not inconspicuously attired and scented, I was able to move without attracting great notice, owing to the crowd’s preoccupation. As the guards led Max forth, Bray’s cloak changed color with each rich chord the trumpets
sounded: black to brown, brown to iridescent green, green to a white so like the Shaft’s that the cloak seemed transparent, if not vanished—even the mortar-lines were replicated on it! Next he stepped from the ledge onto the surface of the pool and with a kind of sliding gait, as if the water were frozen, walked across to meet my keeper. The guards, no less amazed than the spectators, dismounted and examined the pool, even poked it with their billies to prove that there was no walkway just under the surface.

“Ja ja!”
I heard Dr. Eierkopf cry, and his applause was taken up by the others. Even the Chancellor shook his head, much impressed; the professor-generals behind him elbowed each other excitedly; Telerama-men chattered wide-eyed into their microphones. Max looked about under his burden, perhaps for me, as the guards placed a portable walkway over the moat. Catching his eye or nose, I waved a discreet bye-bye and held up the shophar to reassure him that his last request would be honored. He nodded, but some dismay at Bray’s performance still wrinkled his brow. Bray saw me then, if he had not before, and as if to taunt me with his prowess, uttered a sound not unlike choiring brass. The musicians put by their instruments, dumbfounded; everyone murmured astonishment except Anastasia and myself, who exchanged calm glances across the space between us, and Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom, browsing contentedly among discarded candy wrappers and cola cups.

Max was now strapped by his escorts into a kind of canvas diaper or bosun’s-breeches on the ledge, his tackle-ropes rigged to those that ran up the face of the Shaft to its flaming tip. His seat-belt was secured, the gangplank removed; the crowd grew still. Again drums rolled; the Chancellor gave a reluctant signal; and as two of the guards hauled upon the halyards to the stroke-call of the third, Max slowly rose. Even the professor-generals most pleased to see him go, like my grandfather, were hushed by the sight.

Bray then glided, as it seemed, to the central space between the stands, turned to face the Shaft, and raised his arms. Though the light was failing fast (shadow, in fact, went up the column as the sun went down, and determined the rate of Max’s ascent), he began another series of metamorphoses more remarkable even than the earlier: not only did the color and apparent cut of his vestments change at each halyard-heave, but his face and form as well.
Stroke:
he was Max himself!
Stroke:
pretty Anastasia!
Stroke:
the late G. Herrold! At every transformation the crowd roared
Hurrah
(sometimes
Olé
), the band saluted, and Max went up another measure on the Shaft, blowing kisses and pulling his beard. Now Bray was The Living Sakhyan, now great black Croaker, and then in rhythmic
series Maurice Stoker, Kennard Sear, Eblis Eierkopf, Lucius Rexford, the brothers Hector (both at once), hat-faced Classmate X, Leonid Alexandrov, and my passèd lady mother! Last of all he assumed the semblance of myself, complete with stick and shophar—and in this guise, as Max neared the blazing tip, proclaimed: “Dear Founder, pass our classmate Maximilian Spielman, who has finished his course in faith and would rest from his labors.” Though no public-address system was in sight, his voice carried as if amplified. “A-plus,” he said at the end, resoundingly, and from somewhere Mother’s voice gave back the echo:
“A-plus!”