Giles Goat Boy (43 page)

Then, sometime in his twenties, for reasons he could not well articulate, Greene’s opinion changed profoundly on the question of Answers and Graduation. Some said he was influenced by disillusioned veterans of the First Campus Riot; others, that this dillusionment in turn was but the popular dramatizing of a state of intellectual affairs that dated from the Rematriculation Period and had long prevailed “across the Pond” in the famous seats of West-Campus learning. Still others pointed out, quite correctly, that Greene was a rustic without classical education or much use for the departments of moral science and the fine arts; they were inclined to relate his new attitude to the loss of his eye or of his adolescent vigor, to the belated realization of character deficiencies, or to domestic and business difficulties.

“Which is putting the cart before the goshdarn horse, them last ones,” he said. “I figure I invented my Answers my own self, just like Sally Ann and me invented making love, no matter how many’d thought of it before.”

Whatever the causes, the effects were unmistakable: they moved from their rural estate to an urban quad; he made his wife a full-time equal partner in his business; they toured distant campuses, learned to smoke cigarettes, drink cocktails, dance to jazz-music, drive fast motorcycles, and practice contraception. Miss Sally Ann now freely admitted enjoying what theretofore she had seemed only to permit: husband and wife put by all inhibition and together tasted every sweet and salty dish in love’s cuisine, improvising some, discovering others accidentally, borrowing not a few from the high-spiced cookbooks of ancient Remus and Siddartha, which Greene no longer perused in secret but shared with his wife. Nay, further, emancipated alike from the stuffy prohibitions of old-fashioned lecturers and the economics of harder terms, they went from twin beds to separate vacations to separate residences and friends, and mortgaged all
their assets to extend by daring speculation their business interests and finance their costly extracurricular activities.

This continued to the end of that decade of their lives, and ended, alas, in general fiasco. One memorable night, happening to meet each other en route to their separate apartments from separate illegal taverns, but both drunk on the same distillation, Greene announced impulsively to his wife, whether as confession, boast, or wish, that O.B.G.’s daughter (no longer in prison) was threatening him with a paternity suit, or might one day so threaten for all he knew; and Mrs. Greene replied, between hiccoughs, that for all
she
knew she might one day threaten O.B.G.’s daughter’s husband with the same, if the trollop had one and he was properly manned. They went then their separate ways, but whether that encounter was the trigger, or certain ominous signs that his speculations were overextended and no longer basically sound, there ensued just prior to his thirtieth birthday a collapse of Peter Greene’s self-confidence and a lengthy spell of profound depression.

“Just seemed like it all went kerflooey at once,” he said. His research and production plants failed, one after another, or were shut down by organized mutinies among his staff, some of whom openly professed Student-Unionism. Greene’s own sympathies were split between affinity for any rebellious cause (a habit of mind carried over from his childhood) and his contempt for anything that smacked of the “welfare campus.” So at odds was he with himself, he would bribe the campus police to put down a demonstration, then find himself marching unrecognized among the demonstrators, in his old forester’s clothes, and take a beating he himself had paid for. Sexually he became subject to periods of impotence; socially he withdrew, lost interest in the few friends he had left, as in himself. Whether he appeared well or ill in the public eye and his own no longer concerned him; he could not even manage to despise himself much, so thoroughgoing was his sense of futility. Much of his time he spent rocking in a chair. To his surprise (for he was not given to speculation of the philosophic sort) he found not only that he no longer regarded himself as Graduated, but that he disbelieved in the reality of Graduation, the Founder, and Final Exams. Nothing in the University mattered in the long run, it seemed perfectly clear to him: one man studied and strove for the good of his classmates, another cheated, lied, and tattled: both soon passed away and were forgotten, with the rest of mortal studentdom, and the blind University went on, and too would vanish when its term expired. To rock the campus, to rock a chair—what did it matter? Mrs. Greene dropped by with the children to spend the weekend, bringing with her a supply of
the sleeping-capsules which both had come to depend on for rest; they quarreled, resolved to institute bankruptcy and divorce proceedings, drank a final drink together, and ended by dividing the capsules between them, each swallowing a number he judged most honestly to be on the threshold of lethality, perhaps beyond it.

“You wanted to
kill
yourselves?” It was an idea I could comprehend only faintly, by recollecting my state of mind on the day I had murdered Redfearn’s Tom. But what a difference in circumstance! I took a wondering swig from the catsup bottle. Greene sighed, and arched his orange eyebrows, and fiddled with the sugarbowl lid.

“Didn’t have the gumption to choose either way, sir. But I sure did wish I was dead.” I could not discern whether his respectful mode of addressing me was general habit or particular deference. “We figured if the pills did us in, okay; if they didn’t, what the flunk, we’d have to think where to go from there.”

As it happened, they’d misjudged not only the dosage but the drug itself, a mild soporific, the first of what was to be a series of ever-more-sophisticated prescriptions. It was an ignorance they could no more have been saved by in later years, when their knowledge of chemicals came to rival a pharmacist’s, than they could have attained sweet sleep by that old potion. Sleep they did—soundly, long—and Peter Greene dreamed of the great Spring Carnival. When the children woke him next morning his wife was sweetly sleeping still, and it was some moments before he remembered having taken the capsules. He felt utterly refreshed; it was a sunny Saturday, no haste to rise. Nothing had changed: there was still no Founder, nor sense in the University; he was still wretched Peter Greene, his manner graceless, his enterprises failing, his character deficient, his family unhappy; there was still no more reason, ultimately, to heed the summons of his bladder and children than not to. Yet all these truths had a different
feel
now: he kissed Mrs. Greene and left the bed, still utterly uncertain how his life was to be managed and heedless of its course, but with a new indifference to this indifference.

“Didn’t matter a durn to me any more that nothing mattered a durn,” was how he put it. “I knew I weren’t worth a doggone, and couldn’t of cared less.” For the first time in a long while he felt like working; instead he made love to Miss Sally Ann, also for the first time in some while, and something of his mood must have touched her, for they clung together ardently, swore their love, repented their abuses of it, mourned the past, vowed to do better. He listened to their words with tender unbelief. No matter. Even the question that had come to live with him some
months earlier—having visited his fancy on rare occasions over the years—now lost its urgency and seemed just interesting: the question of the broken glass.

“What it was,” he said, “I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror one afternoon, just when my big depression started. I’d been out all day with the stiffs on the picket-line, busting the windowlights out of one of my papermills, and I’d come home to get a shower before the cocktail party we were having that evening for some Tower Hall big-shots. I got to making ugly faces at myself and feeling terrible, and suddenly it struck me maybe that wasn’t no window at all I’d chunked that rock through, or any flunkèd Peeping Tom hollering at Miss Sally Ann; it could of been one of them mirrors that make you look queer! For all I know it could of been just a plain mirror; I couldn’t see clear enough to tell. There wasn’t any checking back, ’cause they take everything down after the Carnival, and I never could locate the fellow that had run the funhouse, to find out from him. I took to asking everybody I’d meet whether they’d been to the Carnival that year, and did they recollect what was on the wall next to the exit. Some swore it was a windowpane, some was sure it was a trick mirror or a regular one; some said there weren’t nothing there at all. Most didn’t remember.”

I agreed with him on the importance of the question, which had occurred to me some time earlier.

“Once I’d thought of it, I couldn’t think of nothing else,” Green said. He had spent hours then before his mirror, studying his face and what lay behind it, back to the beginning. At times, and in some aspects, what he saw now seemed possible to affirm—in more innocent years he’d taken his appearance for granted, assuming its unblemished handsomeness—but in the main it struck him as repellent, hopeless. Not even fascinatingly so: after an orgy of self-inspection he became so persuaded that it was some sort of mirror he’d smashed on the midway that he now smashed his own (by hurling it out the window), not to have to see himself any further. And though since the critical night of the sleeping-capsules the question had largely ceased to torment him, he still had, in his phrase, “a thing” about any sort of glass near his face: he shaved and tied his necktie by feel, and refused to wear lenses to correct his faulty vision.

“How about windows?” I wondered, for we had huge ones all about us.

“They don’t bother me somehow,” Greene laughed. “Anyway, to wind up my story …” I was relieved to think him nearly done, as we had distance yet to travel.

He had not had opportunity, he said (returning to the subject of his
post-capsular attitude), to see whether the strange new feeling would persist—an acceptance of himself, as I took it, and of the student condition, based on the refusal to concern himself further with their unacceptability—and whether unassisted it would have lifted him from his depression. For he was seized out of it shortly thereafter by irrelevant circumstance, in the form of Campus Riot II. The impending threat of it reunited him with his wife, ended all picketing, and kept every shop and laboratory open around the clock; the resultant prosperity, together with the climate of emergency, the exhausting pace, and his new indifference to the question of Final Examinations, did away with what limited appeal Student-Unionism briefly might have had for him. He enlished in the ROTC and became something of a hero. Unfriendly rivals and vanquished adversaries might complain that it was his size and material advantage that accounted for his successes, rather than superior skill and character; he himself was too busy to care.

“I am okay,”
he formed the habit of repeating to himself when his motives or performance was criticized,
“and what the heck anyhow.”
As an officer under Professor-General Reginald Hector, with unlimited supplies partly of his own manufacture, he led his men to victory and emerged from the riot well-known throughout the campus and generally well-liked, with a reputation for open-handedness, vulgarity, fair dealing, bad manners, good intentions, gullibility, straightforwardness, lack of culture, abundance of wealth, and sentimentality. The wealth was certainly a fact: the manufacture of riot-matériel (directed in part by his wife) had made him immensely prosperous, and the great post-riot demand in NTC for building-material, paper, and plastics (a line he’d branched into during the hostilities, when metal was scarce) promised to make him more prosperous yet: Ira Hector alone exceeded him in wealth and unofficial influence in Tower Hall.

“But things went kerflooey all the same?” I asked. I was eager now to have done with the story, which however had certainly illumined me on the subject of human marriage. Greene shook his head no, but in a way that I presently understood to mean
Yes, and I still don’t understand it
, or something similar. His speech grew no less at odds with itself from here until the end of his relation: an inharmonious amalgam of the several idioms I’d hear him employ thus far:

“Durn if I can figure what got to us, togethernesswise. We bought us a fine house in a suburban quad, with a pool and a color Telerama and all like that; the kiddies started music lessons; Sally Ann had her own wheels to get around with, and only worked when she felt like getting out of the
house. She weren’t tied down a speck, what with O.B.G.’s daughter to clean house and me helping with every meal. And like, I’m busy, sure, but George, it ain’t as bad as the old days, no sirree Bob, when I was up with the chickens and worked till midnight.” What was more, he said, they’d agreed to cleave exclusively each to the other, as in the early terms of their marriage, with the difference that now they were to be equal partners and faithful companions in every aspect of life, rather than master and mastered.

“It ain’t that business is slow, you understand, despite the way taxes have gone up. I spend me a fortune every year around Tower Hall to get the College Senate to lower my taxes and stop buying cheap stuff from across the Pond, but it’s no go, sir; and they keep taking more and more timberland for college parks and the like. I hired me a roomful of Ph.D’s to find out how to do more business: after awhile I got so took with the idea I closed down half my mills and paperplants and went into the Marketing- and Packaging-Research Department my own self. Didn’t need all them people working for me anyhow, with their durn committees: we got machines now that WESCAC operates, you stick a log of wood in one end and get newsprint out the other, with nobody touching it in between. WESCAC even tells us how many trees to cut down, and which men to lay off.”

In consequence, I learned, though he was prospering as never before, he was virtually unemployed, WESCAC having taken over executive as well as labor operations. When O.B.G.’s daughter had turned up and publicly accused him of having exploited her immorally in his youth to further his own interests, and possibly even having fathered a child on her, he had offered to hire her as a housemaid despite his wife’s old resentment of her. Miss Sally Ann herself he made financial director of his concerns. Their children were amply provided for: the girls twirled silver batons in one of the Sub-Junior Varsity Marching Bands, the boys were star performers on the Faculty Children’s Athletic League Farm Teams; they were never spanked, received large allowances, played games and took vacations with their parents—whom they called by their first names—had Telerama receivers in their bedrooms and a private bowling alley in their recreation basement, and regularly attended their neighborhood Enochist Hall for tradition’s sake, as did their parents, though it was made clear to them that the Enochist Answers were their own reward, there being no such places as Commencement Gate and the Nether Campus. On weekends they all played golf and went to parties at the houses of their friends.