Hocus Pocus (14 page)

Cough, cough, cough.

 

IF THERE IS a Divine Providence, there is also a wicked one, provided you agree that making love to off-balance women you aren’t married to is wickedness. My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

 

 

JUST AS A hungry person knows that somewhere not far away somebody is preparing good things to eat, I knew that night that not far away was an older woman in despair. There had to be!

Zuzu Johnson was out of the question. Her husband was home, and she was hosting a dinner party for a couple of grateful parents who were giving the college a language laboratory. When it was finished, students would be able to sit in soundproof booths and listen to recordings of any one of more than 100 languages and dialects made by native speakers.

 

 

THE LIGHTS WERE on in the sculpture studio of Norman Rockwell Hall, the art building, the only structure on campus named after a historical figure rather than the donating family. It was another gift from the Moellenkamps, who may have felt that too much was named after them already.

There was a whirring and rumbling coming from inside the sculpture studio. Somebody was playing with the crane in there, making it run back and forth on its tracks overhead. Whoever it was had to be playing, since nobody ever made a piece of sculpture so big that it could be moved only by the mighty crane.

After the prison break, there was some talk on the part of the convicts of hanging somebody from it, and running him back and forth while he strangled. They had no particular candidate in mind. But then the Niagara Power and Light Company, which was owned by the Unification Church Korean Evangelical Association, shut off all our electricity.

 

 

OUTSIDE ROCKWELL HALL that night, I might have been back on a patrol in Vietnam. That is how keen my senses were. That was how quick my mind was to create a whole picture from the slightest clues.

I knew that the sculpture studio was locked up tight after 6:30 P.M., since I had tried the door many times, thinking that I might sometime bring a lover there. I had considered getting a key somehow at the start of the semester and learned from Buildings and Grounds that only they and that year’s Artist in Residence, the sculptress Pamela Ford Hall, were allowed to have keys. This was because of vandalism by either students or Townies in the studio the year before.

They knocked off the noses and fingers of replicas of Greek statues, and defecated in a bucket of wet clay. That sort of thing.

 

 

SO THAT HAD to be Pamela Ford Hall in there making the crane go back and forth. And the crane’s restless travels had to represent unhappiness, not any masterpiece she was creating. What use did she have for a crane, or even a wheelbarrow, since she worked exclusively in nearly weightless polyurethane. And she was a recent divorcee without children. And, because she knew my reputation, I’m sure, she had been avoiding me.

I climbed up on the studio’s loading dock. I thumped my fist on its enormous sliding door. The door was motor driven. She had only to press a button to let me in.

The crane stopped going back and forth. There was a hopeful sign!

She asked through the door what I wanted.

“I wanted to make sure you were OK in there,” I said.

“Who are you to care whether I’m OK or not in here?” she said.

“Gene Hartke,” I said.

She opened the door just a crack and stared out at me, but didn’t say anything. Then she opened the door wider, and I could see she was holding an uncorked bottle of what would turn out to be blackberry brandy.

“Hello, Soldier,” she said.

“Hi,” I said very carefully.

And then she said, “What took you so long?”

PAMELA SURE GOT me drunk that night, and we made love. And then I spilled my guts about the Vietnam War in front of a bunch of students at the Pahlavi Pavilion. And Kimberley Wilder recorded me.

 

 

I HAD NEVER tasted blackberry brandy before. I never want to taste it again. It did bad things to me. It made me a crybaby about the war. That is something I swore I would never be.

 

 

IF I COULD order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one.

That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me.

His name? Rob Roy.

After we made love, Pamela asked me the same question Harriet had asked me in Manila 15 years earlier. It was something they both had to know. They both asked me if I had killed anybody in the war.

I said to Pamela what I had said to Harriet: “If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.”

I should have gone straight home after saying that. But I went over to the Pavilion instead. I needed a bigger audience for that great line of mine.

So I barged into a group of students sitting in front of the great fireplace in the main lounge. After the prison break, that fireplace would be used for cooking horse meat and dogs. I got between the students and the fire, so there was no way they could ignore me, and I said to them, “If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.”

I went on from there.

 

 

I WAS SO full of self-pity! That was what I found unbearable when Jason Wilder played back my words to me. I was so drunk that I acted like a victim!

 

 

THE SCENES OF unspeakable cruelty and stupidity and waste I described that night were no more horrible than ultrarealistic shows about Vietnam, which had become staples of TV entertainment. When I told the students about the severed human head I saw nestled in the guts of a water buffalo, to them, I’m sure, the head might as well have been made of wax, and the guts those of some big animal which may or may not have belonged to a real water buffalo.

What difference could it make whether the head was or was not wax, or whether the guts were or were not those of a water buffalo?

No difference.

 

 

“PROFESSOR HARTKE,” JASON Wilder said to me gently, reasonably, when the tape had reached its end, “why on Earth would you want to tell such tales to young people who need to love their country?”

I wanted to keep my job so much, and the house which came with it, that my reply was asinine. “I was telling them history,” I said, “and I had had a little too much to drink. I don’t usually drink that much.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “I am told that you are a man with many problems, but that alcohol has not appeared among them with any consistency. So let us say that your performance in the Pavilion was a well-intended history lesson of which you accidentally lost control.”

“That’s what it was, sir,” I said.

His balletic hands flitted in time to the logic of his thoughts before he spoke again. He was a fellow pianist. And then he said, “First of all, you were not hired to teach History. Second of all, the students who come to Tarkington need no further instructions in how it feels to be defeated. They would not be here if they themselves had not failed and failed. The Miracle on Lake Mohiga for more than a century now, as I see it, has been to make children who have failed and failed start thinking of victory, stop thinking about the hopelessness of it all.”

“There was just that one time,” I said, “and I’m sorry.”

 

COUGH. ONE COUGH.

 

 

WILDER SAID HE didn’t consider a teacher who was negative about everything a teacher. “I would call a person like that an ‘unteacher.’ He’s somebody who takes things out of young people’s heads instead of putting more things in.”

“I don’t know as I’m negative about everything,” I said.

“What’s the first thing students see when they walk into the library?” he said.

“Books?” I said.

“All those perpetual-motion machines,” he said. “I saw that display, and I read the sign on the wall above it. I had no idea then that you were responsible for the sign.”

He was talking about the sign that said “THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.”

“All I knew was that I didn’t want my daughter or anybody’s child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,” he said. “And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.”

“What’s so negative about it?” I said.

“What could be a more negative word than ‘futility’?” he said.

“ ‘Ignorance,’ ” I said.

“There you are,” he said. I had somehow won his argument for him.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Precisely,” he said. “You obviously do not understand how easily discouraged the typical Tarkington student is, how sensitive to suggestions that he or she should quit trying to be smart. That’s what the word ‘futile’ means: ‘Quit, quit, quit.’ ”

“And what does ‘ignorance’ mean?” I said.

“If you put it up on the wall and give it the prominence you have,” he said, “it’s a nasty echo of what so many Tarkingtonians were hearing before they got here: ‘You’re dumb, you’re dumb, you’re dumb.’ And of course they aren’t dumb.”

“I never said they were,” I protested.

“You reinforce their low self-esteem without realizing what you are doing,” he said. “You also upset them with humor appropriate to a barracks, but certainly not to an institution of higher learning.”

“You mean about Yen and fellatio?” I said. “I would never have said it if I’d thought a student could hear me.”

“I am talking about the entrance hall of the library again,” he said.

“I can’t think of what else is in there that might have offended you,” I said.

“It wasn’t I who was offended,” he said. “It was my daughter.”

“I give up,” I said. I wasn’t being impudent. I was abject.

“On the same day Kimberley heard you talk about Yen and fellatio, before classes had even begun,” he said, “a senior led her and the other freshmen to the library and solemnly told them that the bell clappers on the wall were petrified penises. That was surely barracks humor the senior had picked up from you.”

For once I didn’t have to defend myself. Several of the Trustees assured Wilder that telling freshmen that the clappers were penises was a tradition that antedated my arrival on campus by at least 20 years.

But that was the only time they defended me, although 1 of them had been my student, Madelaine Astor, nee Peabody, and 5 of them were parents of those I had taught. Madelaine dictated a letter to me afterward, explaining that Jason Wilder had promised to denounce the college in his column and on his TV show if the Trustees did not fire me.

So they dared not come to my assistance.

 

 

SHE SAID, TOO, that since she, like Wilder, was a Roman Catholic, she was shocked to hear me say on tape that Hitler was a Roman Catholic, and that the Nazis painted crosses on their tanks and airplanes because they considered themselves a Christian army. Wilder had played that tape right after I had been cleared of all responsibility for freshmen’s being told that the clappers were penises.

Once again I was in deep trouble for merely repeating what somebody else had said. It wasn’t something my grandfather had said this time, or somebody else who couldn’t be hurt by the Trustees, like Paul Slazinger. It was something my best friend Damon Stern had said in a History class only a couple of months before.

If Jason Wilder thought I was an unteacher, he should have heard Damon Stern! Then again, Stern never told the awful truth about supposedly noble human actions in recent times. Everything he debunked had to have transpired before 1950, say.

So I happened to sit in on a class where he talked about Hitler’s being a devout Roman Catholic. He said something I hadn’t realized before, something I have since discovered most Christians don’t want to hear: that the Nazi swastika was intended to be a version of a Christian cross, a cross made out of axes. Stern said that Christians had gone to a lot of trouble denying that the swastika was just another cross, saying it was a primitive symbol from the primordial ooze of the pagan past.

And the Nazis’ most valuable military decoration was the Iron Cross.

And the Nazis painted regular crosses on all their tanks and airplanes.

I came out of that class looking sort of dazed, I guess. Who should I run into but Kimberley Wilder?

“What did he say today?” she said.

“Hitler was a Christian,” I said. “The swastika was a Christian cross.”

She got it on tape.

 

 

I DIDN’T RAT on Damon Stern to the Trustees. Tarkington wasn’t West Point, where it was an honor to squeal.

 

 

MADELAINE AGREED WITH Wilder, too, she said in her letter, that I should not have told my Physics students that the Russians, not the Americans, were the first to make a hydrogen bomb that was portable enough to be used as a weapon. “Even if it’s true,” she wrote, “which I don’t believe, you had no business telling them that.”

She said, moreover, that perpetual motion was possible, if only scientists would work harder on it.

She had certainly backslid intellectually since passing her orals for her Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree.

 

 

I USED TO tell classes that anybody who believed in the possibility of perpetual motion should be boiled alive like a lobster.