Hardscrabble Road (2 page)

“She won’t mind if she does.”

“Maybe not,” Beata said. “But Reverend Mother, the issue here is procedural, really. It’s a matter of timing. Mr. Harrigan
deeded the Holland Street lots to the monastery two weeks ago Wednesday. That was after he’d been indicted for illegal possession
of prescription drugs, along with about two dozen other things, and after Sherman Markey filed suit against him for defamation
and false accusation. After. It’s the after that’s the problem.”

“Because it looks like Drew was trying to shield his property from the lawsuit.”

“Exactly.”

“Because it looks like an arrangement,” Mother Constanzia said. “It looks like the whole thing is fake. That Drew deeded us
the property so that Mr. Markey couldn’t get it in a court settlement, and then we’d give it back to him when Mr. Markey was
taken care of and had gone away.”

“That’s it, yes.”

“Does it matter that none of that is true?” Constanzia said. “Oh, I’m not saying Drew didn’t deed it to us out of spite against
Mr. Markey. Drew is Drew. But there isn’t any arrangement. The fact that we want to sell the properties ought to be proof
that there isn’t any arrangement.”

“We might want to sell them, keep the cash, and turn the cash over to Drew after his legal troubles were over.”

“Does the general public actually think that nuns are that Machiavellian?”

“It’s not the general public we have to convince. It’s one sitting judge, and he’s going to side with Markey. He has to, really.
The fact of the timing looks bad. The fact that the buyer insists on remaining anonymous looks bad. The fact that Mr. Harrigan
is your brother looks worse.”

“I ought to go in there and tell that idiot that Drew may be my brother, but I’ve been a registered Democrat all my life.”

“I think that would break enclosure.”

“I’d wear a veil. And it can’t break enclosure any worse to testify in a court than to vote, and we always vote.”

“I’m trying to get a handle on what it would look like on the news. You sitting on the witness stand with your face covered
by an exclaustration veil—”

“Be serious,” Constanzia said. “Where are we now? What can we do?”

“Not much,” Beata said. “We can’t sell those properties as long as the court forbids us to, and the court is forbidding us
to. We’re going to have to find some other way to solve the problem.”

“There is no other way to solve the problem. We have a bank note coming due in six weeks.”

“I know.”

“And if we don’t pay it, there’s going to be a first-rate dustup about this monastery’s finances, and it’s not going to be
confined to the screaming fit the Cardinal is going to subject us to.”

“The Cardinal doesn’t usually scream, does he?” Beata said. “I’ve always thought of him as a go-stone-cold-silent type.”

“The distinction is too fine to excite my interest.”

“Possibly. But Mother, seriously. It’s time to tell the Cardinal, and let him straighten this out. Maybe he could talk to
the mystery buyer, or the buyer’s lawyers. Maybe he could advance us enough to make the payment or countersign to roll over
the loan. The Archdiocese does that kind of thing all the time.”

“It used to.”

“Mother, it’s going to be a lot more willing to do that kind of thing than it will be to go on the legal defensive against
Markey, who’s going to be very easy to portray as a poor, downtrodden, unjustly harassed homeless person. It’s going to be
easy to do that even if it turns out Markey did sell Mr. Harrigan the drugs.”

“Procured them,” Constanzia said automatically. “Is he really homeless?”

“Not now. The Justice Project has him in a hotel. He was homeless when Mr. Harrigan says he was paying him to pick up the
drugs for him.”

“You’ve got to wonder how a person like that could keep himself together long enough to do all this nonsense he’s supposed
to have done to
pick up the OxyContin and whatever else there was supposed to be. You read all these things in the papers. Going to a different
pharmacy every time. Going to different doctors’ offices. It’s like a spy film with James Bond.”

“The Justice Project doesn’t think Markey did do any of that. They don’t think he’s capable. They think Mr. Harrigan is accusing
him because he’s handy.”

“Because Drew doesn’t want to admit that he did it all himself?”

“Because Mr. Harrigan is shielding somebody else, somebody he has more—respect for. Somebody whose life he doesn’t think is
a waste.”

“I’d like to get my hands around Drew’s throat and squeeze until he turned blue.”

“Well, you can’t for the next forty days. He’s in rehab. The enclosure there makes the enclosure here look like wide open
access. Do you want me to try to get in touch with the Justice Project people?”

“Would it do any good?”

“Probably not but I wouldn’t mind meeting Kate Daniel.”

“Then go do whatever it is you do at this time of night.”

“I go out to look at the barn.”

“I remember when we had sheep in that barn,” Constanzia said. “It’s strange, really, the way things have changed since I’ve
been in Carmel. I thought when I came here that if things changed in the outside world, I wouldn’t know about it. But I do.”

“I thought that if I came to Carmel, I’d find nuns who were all actively engaged in an ecstatic union with God. That was why
I didn’t want to make a solemn profession, did you know that? I’d read St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa, and I couldn’t
see myself in the throes of that kind of, that kind of—”

“—Sexual hysteria?”

“We have to assume that that isn’t what that was, don’t we?”

“Get something to eat before you go out to the barn,” Constanzia said. “I have to think. And thank you for everything you
did today.”

“There’s nothing to thank me for. I’m a member of this community.”

“I know. Go now. You look exhausted.”

Beata hesitated for a moment, and then turned and left the office, back into the hallway, back down the hallway to the niche
where the crucifix was. She genuflected again, absentmindedly. Around her, the monastery was silent. Even the clocks didn’t
tick.

“Everybody who comes to Carmel has a different story,” Mother Constanzia had said, the day Beata had shown up at the monastery
door, dressed in an Armani power suit and carrying a burgundy leather SoHo briefcase from Coach.

She didn’t miss the power suit, but she missed the sound of music, all kinds of music, even the bad kind. She kept listening
to hear the voice of God.

T
he name on the
plastic nameplate screwed to the outside of the door was Richard Alden Tyler, but nobody in the world had ever called him
anything but Jig. Even the king of Sweden, congratulating him on the first of two Nobel prizes, raising his voice a little
to be sure the right people could hear, had called him “Jig”—or rather “Yig,” because of the problems Scandinavian pronunciation
had with the letter “J,” and after that, for half a year, people had called out to him in bars and named him “Yig.” Whatever.
It was a sign of just how badly off he was that he was thinking about bars and 1974, instead of the 140 things he had on his
mind these days, instead of the problem with Drew Harrigan. If there was one thing Jig Tyler knew, it was that the problem
with Drew Harrigan was not about to go away. This was the calm before the storm. This was every cliché that had ever been
written in every third-rate novel about the McCarthy era. This was idiocy, because Drew Harrigan himself was idiocy. This
was—

Delmore Krantz had opened the office door and switched on the lights and stepped back a little to let Jig pass first. It was
the kind of thing graduate students did when they were in awe of their professors and had no hope in hell of ever equaling
them. Delmore was the kind of graduate student Jig attracted these days, in droves. There was a time when students came to
him for the science. That time was gone. It was odd the way things worked out. Two Nobel prizes, one in mathematics, one in
chemistry: that was science. Forty-two years of teaching in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania:
that was science. Only the books that had landed him on the New York Times bestseller lists every couple of years for the
last two decades or so were not science, and they were…they were…

With the light on in the office, it was obvious that he’d left his desk in a mess. He hadn’t used to do that. He had this
odd feeling, standing in the middle of the empty room, that he had turned into that character in The Nightmare Before Christmas.
He was tall. He was thin. He was cadaverous. Delmore was Central Casting’s idea of a sidekick. If he were any shorter or fatter,
he’d be a mushroom.

“You left the tape machine playing,” Delmore said, sounding worried. Delmore always sounded worried, except when he sounded
put-upon, which was anytime anybody anywhere mentioned Israel. Delmore resented the fact that other Jewish students on campus
expected him to defend Israel. He also resented the fact that non-Jewish students on campus expected
him to criticize it. Jig thought he could see Delmore’s future as clearly as he could see anything at all. There would be
a job in a fifth-rate department somewhere in the Midwest, a wife with a career as a dentist, a child named Zara or Joe Hill,
and forty-two million letters to the editor of the local paper, upholding Socialism and the High Art Tradition in the face
of Midwestern anti-intellectual cant.

The voice on the tape machine was Drew Harrigan’s. It would be, because that was what Jig had been listening to when he’d
left to go to the department meeting. He hated department meetings. In the end they all came down to the same long whining
complaint about parking.

“This man,” Drew Harrigan was saying, “this fool, who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else in the universe because they
gave him a couple of Nobel prizes, who thinks he knows everything there is to know because he can move a few molecules around,
who thinks you—I mean seriously, where do guys like this get off? What difference is there between what he’s doing and flat-out
treason? We’re at war. We’re in a big war. We—”

Jig reached up to the top shelf of the bookcase and turned the recorder off. How many hours of Drew Harrigan’s voice had he
taped?

“It doesn’t matter,” Delmore said loyally. “Nobody pays attention to Drew Harrigan. He’s a fascist attack dog.”

“He’s the most popular radio talk show host in the country.”

“Well, okay,” Delmore said. “Those people pay attention to him. But nobody pays any attention to those people. Nobody here
pays attention to them. This is a private university.”

Jig couldn’t help himself. Sometimes he couldn’t. Stupidity fascinated him. “I thought you didn’t approve of the fact that
this was a private university,” he said. “I thought you said that Ivy League universities like this one were bastions of capitalist
reaction and ought to be abolished.”

“Yes, I did,” Delmore said, looking confused, but only for a moment. “But you have to work with reality. You have to play
the game in real time. The fascists have control of the White House. They’ve got control of the state governments. You’d have
a harder time right now in a public university.”

“Does it ever bother you that so many people vote for the, um, fascists?”

“They don’t,” Delmore said. “Nearly half the people don’t vote at all. They’re discouraged. They think their voices don’t
count.”

“And if you could get them to vote, they’d elect progressive politicians who would put an end to corporate hegemony, expand
the welfare state, withdraw American troops from around the world, and institute social justice?”

“They’d demand that politicians do those things.”

Jig dropped into the chair behind his desk. “You’re delusional,” he said. “The great American public is a mob of anti-intellectual
celebrity
worshipers. If they all started to vote at once, they’d install a monarchy in ten seconds flat. They’d probably give it to
the Rockefellers. And do you know why?”

“No,” Delmore said, looking stiff.

“Because the Rockefellers are just as stupid as they are. So are the Vanderbilts. So are the Cabots and the Lodges and the
Goulds. That’s one thing I learned in prep school. There are two kinds of people at places like Taft— poor kids with brains,
and rich kids who can’t think their way out of paper bags.”

“Bill Gates,” Delmore said tentatively.

“If Bill Gates had had any talent, he would have stayed at Harvard and gone into physics. I’m going to have to do something
about this. I’m going to have to do it soon.”

Delmore cleared his throat and sat down in the only other chair in the room besides the one Jig himself was sitting in. Jig
liked students to stand when they came to see him. Lately, Jig preferred not to have students come to see him. Delmore’s bulk
didn’t quite fit between the chair’s arms. It oozed out the open spaces at the sides.

“The thing I think you have to worry about,” he said carefully, “isn’t the university, but the Department of Justice. The
Patriot Act. They could be coming for you that way. They could charge you with anything they wanted to, and you couldn’t really
fight back. They could arrest you and not tell anybody where you were, or let you see a lawyer.”

“Do you really think they could do that?” Jig said. “I’m not exactly Joe Six-pack off the street. You don’t think that would
be huge news?”

“Well, um, yes, maybe, but the news organizations are in the hands of repressive capitalism. They support the administration
and its efforts to criminalize dissent. In the context of reactionary hegemonic discourse—”

“I’ve told you, Delmore, no hegemonic discourse.”

“It’s the best available language to describe—”

”—It’s not the best available language for anything. It’s window dressing meant to make banal ideas sound profound. The country
is run by a horde of capitalist shits. Given the chance to get away with it, they behave as what they are. No hegemonic discourse
required.”

“But they own the language. They make it impossible for us even to think of dissenting, because they control—”