Hocus Pocus (11 page)

Dr. Blankenship had a niece in the graduating class. That was what brought him to Scipio. His niece was Hortense Mellon. I have no idea what became of Hortense. She could play the harp. I remember that, and her upper teeth were false. The real teeth were knocked out by a mugger as she left a friend’s coming-out party at the Waldorf-Astoria, which has since burned down. There is nothing but a vacant lot there now, which was bought by the Japanese.

I heard that her father, like so many other Tarkington parents, lost an awful lot of money in the biggest swindle in the history of Wall Street, stock in a company called Microsecond Arbitrage.

 

 

I HAD SPOTTED Kimberley as a snoop, all right, but not as a walking recording studio. All through the academic year now ending, our paths had crossed with puzzling frequency. Again and again I would be talking to somebody, almost anywhere on the campus, and realize that Kimberley was lurking close by. I assumed that she was slightly cracked, and was eavesdropping on everyone, avid for gossip. She wasn’t even taking a course of mine for credit, although she did audit both Physics for Non-scientists and Music Appreciation for Nonmusicians. So what could I possibly be to her or she to me? We had never had a conversation about anything.

One time, I remember, I was shooting pool in the new recreation center, the Pahlavi Pavilion, and she was so close that I was having trouble working my cuestick, and I said to her, “Do you like my perfume?”

“What?” she said.

“I find you so close to me so often,” I said, “I thought maybe you liked my perfume. I’m very flattered, if that’s the case, because that’s nothing but my natural body odor. I don’t use perfume.”

I can quote myself exactly, since those words were on one of the tapes the Trustees would play back for me.

She shrugged as though she didn’t know what I was talking about. She didn’t leave the Pavilion in great embarrassment. On the contrary! She gave me a little more room for my cuestick but was still practically on top of me.

I was playing 8-ball head to head with the novelist Paul Slazinger, that year’s Writer in Residence. He was dead broke and out of print, which is the only reason anybody ever became Writer in Residence at Tarkington. He was so old that he had actually been in World War II. He had won a Silver Star like me when I was only 3 years old!

He asked me who Kimberley was, and I said, and she got this on tape, too, “Pay no attention. She’s just another member of the Ruling Class.”

So the Board of Trustees would want to know what it was, exactly, that I had against the Ruling Class.

I didn’t say so back then, but I am perfectly happy to say now that the trouble with the Ruling Class was that too many of its members were nitwits like Kimberley.

 

 

ONE THEORY I had about her snooping was that she was titillated by my reputation as the campus John F. Kennedy as far as sex outside of marriage was concerned.

If President Kennedy up in Heaven ever made a list of all the women he had made love to, I am sure it would be 2 or 3 times as long as the one I am making down here in jail. Then again, he had the glamour of his office, and the full cooperation of the Secret Service and the White House Staff. None of the names on my list would mean anything to the general public, whereas many on his would belong to movie stars. He made love to Marilyn Monroe. I sure never did. She evidently expected to marry him and become First Lady, which was a joke to everybody but her.

She eventually committed suicide. She finally found life too embarrassing.

 

I STILL HARDLY knew Kimberley when she appeared in the bel tower on Graduation Day. But she was chatty, as though we were old, old pals. She was still recording me, although what she already had on tape was enough to do me in.

She asked me if I thought the speech Paul Slazinger, the Writer in Residence, gave in Chapel had been a good one. This was probably the most anti-American speech I had ever heard He gave it right before Christmas vacation, and was never agair seen in Scipio. He had just won a so-called Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation, $50,000 a year for 5 years. On the same night of his speech he bugged out for Key West, Florida

He predicted, I remember, that human slavery would come back, that it had in fact never gone away. He said that so man) people wanted to come here because it was so easy to rob the poor people, who got absolutely no protection from the Gov ernment. He talked about bridges falling down and water mains breaking because of no maintenance. He talked about oil spills and radioactive waste and poisoned aquifers and looted banks and liquidated corporations. “And nobody ever gets punishec for anything,” he said. “Being an American means never having to say you’re sorry.”

On and on he went. No matter what he said, he was stil going to get $50,000 a year for 5 years.

I said to Kimberley that I thought Slazinger had said some things which were worth considering, but that, on the whole he had made the country sound a lot worse than it really was and that ours was still far and away the best one on the planet

She could not have gotten much satisfaction from that reply

 

WHAT DO I myself make of that reply nowadays? It was an inane reply.

 

 

SHE ASKED ME about my own lecture in Chapel only a month earlier. She hadn’t attended and so hadn’t taped it. She was seeking confirmation of things other people had said I said. My lecture had been humorous recollections of my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Wills, the old-time Socialist.

She accused me of saying that all rich people were drunks and lunatics. This was a garbling of Grandfather’s saying that Capitalism was what the people with all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decided to do today. So I straightened that out, and explained that the opinion was my grandfather’s, not my own.

“I heard your speech was worse than Mr. Slazinger’s,” she said.

“I certainly hope not,” I said. “I was trying to show how outdated my grandfather’s opinions were. I wanted people to laugh. They did.”

“I heard you said Jesus Christ was un-American,” she said, her tape recorder running all the time.

So I unscrambled that one for her. The original had been another of Grandfather’s sayings. He repeated Karl Marx’s prescription for an ideal society, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” And then he asked me, meaning it to be a wry joke, “What could be more un-American, Gene, than sounding like the Sermon on the Mount?”

 

 

“WHAT ABOUT PUTTING all the Jews in a concentration camp in Idaho?” said Kimberley.

“What about what-what-what?” I asked in bewilderment. At last, at last, and too late, too late, I understood that this stupid girl was as dangerous as a cobra. It would be catastrophic if she spread the word that I was an anti-Semite, especially with so many Jews, having interbred with Gentiles, now sending their children to Tarkington.

“In all my life, I never said anything like that,” I promised.

“Maybe it wasn’t Idaho,” she said.

“Wyoming?” I said.

“OK, Wyoming,” she said. “Lock ’em all up, right?”

“I only said ‘Wyoming’ because I was married in Wyoming,” I said. “I’ve never been to Idaho or even thought about Idaho. I’m just trying to figure out what you’ve got so all mixed up and upside down. It doesn’t sound even a little bit like me.”

“Jews,” she said.

“That was my grandfather again,” I said.

“He hated Jews, ri
^g
ht?” she said.

“No, no, no,” I said. “He admired a lot of them.”

“But he still wanted to put them in concentration camps,” she said. “Right?”

The origin of this most poisonous misunderstanding was in my account in Chapel of riding around with Grandfather in his car one Sunday morning in Midland City, Ohio, when I was a little boy. He, not I, was mocking all organized religions.

When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, “You think your dad’s a good chemist? They’re turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?”

When we passed a Pentecostal church, he said, “The mental giants in there believe that every word is true in a book put together by a bunch of preachers 300 years after the birth of Christ. I hope you won’t be that dumb about words set in type when you grow up.”

I would later hear, incidentally, that the woman my father got involved with when I was in high school, when he jumped out a window with his pants down and got bitten by a dog and tangled in a clothesline and so on, was a member of that Pentecostal church.

 

 

WHAT HE SAID about Jews that morning was actually another kidding of Christianity. He had to explain to me, as I would have to explain to Kimberley, that the Bible consisted of 2 separate works, the New Testament and the Old Testament. Religious Jews gave credence only to what was supposedly their own history, the Old Testament, whereas Christians took both works seriously.

“I pity the Jews,” said Grandfather, “trying to get through life with only half a Bible.”

And then he added, “That’s like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.”

 

 

I WAS ANGRY now. “Kimberley,” I asked, “did you by any chance tell the Board of Trustees that I said these things? Is that what they want to see me about?”

“Maybe,” she said. She was acting cute. I thought this was a dumb answer. It was in fact accurate. The Trustees had a lot more they wanted to discuss than misrepresentations of my Chapel lecture.

I found her both repulsive and pitiful. She thought she was such a heroine and I was such a viper! Now that I had caught on to what she had been up to, she was thrilled to show me that she was proud and unafraid. Little did she know that I had once thrown a man almost as big as she out of a helicopter. What was to prevent me from throwing her out a tower window? The thought of doing that to her crossed my mind. I was so insulted! That would teach her not to insult me!

The man I threw out of the helicopter had spit in my face and bitten my hand. I had taught him not to insult me.

 

 

SHE WAS PITIFUL because she was a dimwit from a brilliant family and believed that she at last had done something brilliant, too, in getting the goods on a person whose ideas were criminal. I didn’t know yet that her Rhodes Scholar father, a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, had put her up to this. I thought she had noted her father’s conviction, often expressed in his columns and on his TV show, and no doubt at home, that a few teachers who secretly hated their country were making young people lose faith in its future and leadership.

I thought that, just on her own, she had resolved to find such a villain and get him fired, proving that she wasn’t so dumb, after all, and that she was really Daddy’s little girl.

Wrong.

“Kimberley,” I said, as an alternative to throwing her out the window, “this is ridiculous.”

Wrong.

 

 

“ALL RIGHT,” I said, “we’re going to settle this in a hurry.”

Wrong.

I would stride into the Trustees’ meeting, I thought, shoulders squared, and radiant with righteous indignation, the most popular teacher on campus, and the only faculty member who had medals from the Vietnam War. When it comes right down to it, that is why they fired me, although I don’t believe they themselves realized that that was why they fired me: I had ugly, personal knowledge of the disgrace that was the Vietnam War.

None of the Trustees had been in that war, and neither had Kimberley’s father, and not one of them had allowed a son or a daughter to be sent over there. Across the lake in the prison, of course, and down in the town, there were plenty of somebody’s sons who had been sent over there.

I MET JUST 2 people when I crossed the Quadrangle to Samoza Hall. One was Professor Marilyn Shaw, head of the Department of Life Sciences. She was the only other faculty member who had served in Vietnam. She had been a nurse. The other was Norman Everett, an old campus gardener like my grandfather. He had a son who had been paralyzed from the waist down by a mine in Vietnam and was a permanent resident in a Veterans Administration hospital over in Schenectady.

The seniors and their families and the rest of the faculty were having lunch in the Pavilion. Everybody got a lobster which had been boiled alive.

 

 

I NEVER CONSIDERED making a pass at Marilyn, although she was reasonably attractive and unattached. I don’t know why that is. There may have been some sort of incest taboo operating, as though we were brother and sister, since we had both been in Vietnam.

She is dead now, buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down. She was evidently hit by a stray bullet. Who in his right mind would have taken dead aim at her?

Remembering her now, I wonder if I wasn’t in love with her, even though we avoided talking to each other as much as possible.

 

 

MAYBE I SHOULD put her on a very short list indeed: all the women I loved. That would be Marilyn, I think, and Margaret during the first 4 years or so of our marriage, before I came home with the clap. I was also very fond of Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent for
The Des Moines Register,
who, it turns out, bore me a son after our love affair in Manila. I think I felt what could be called love for Zuzu Johnson, whose husband was crucified. And I had a deep, thoroughly reciprocated, multidimensioned friendship with Muriel Peck, who was a bar-tender at the Black Cat Café the day I was fired, who later became a member of the English Department.

End of list.

Muriel, too, is buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.