Hocus Pocus (16 page)

Not only was Ed Bergeron my doomsday pal. He was also a veteran of several debates about environmentalism with Jason Wilder on Wilder’s TV show. I haven’t found a tape of any of those ding-dong head-to-heads in this library, but there used to be 1 at the prison. It would bob up about every 6 months on the TV sets there, which were running all the time.

In it, I remember, Wilder said that the trouble with conservationists was that they never considered the costs in terms of jobs and living standards of eliminating fossil fuels or doing something with garbage other than dumping it in the ocean, and so on.

Ed Bergeron said to him, “Good! Then I can write the epitaph for this once salubrious blue-green orb.” He meant the planet.

Wilder gave him his supercilious, vulpine, patronizing, silky debater’s grin. “A majority of the scientific community,” he said, “would say, if I’m not mistaken, that an epitaph would be premature by several thousand years.” That debate took place maybe 6 years before I was fired, which would be back in 1985, and I don’t know what scientific community he was talking about. Every kind of scientist, all the way down to chiropractors and podiatrists, was saying we were killing the planet fast.

“You want to hear the epitaph?” said Ed Bergeron.

“If we must,” said Wilder, and the grin went on and on. “I have to tell you, though, that you are not the first person to say the game was all over for the human race. I’m sure that even in Egypt before the first pyramid was constructed, there were men who attracted a following by saying, ‘It’s all over now.’ ”

“What is different about now as compared with Egypt before the first pyramid was built—” Ed began.

“And before the Chinese invented printing, and before Columbus discovered America,” Jason Wilder interjected.

“Exactly,” said Bergeron.

“The difference is that we have the misfortune of knowing what’s really going on,” said Bergeron, “which is no fun at all. And this has given rise to a whole new class of preening, narcissistic quacks like yourself who say in the service of rich and shameless polluters that the state of the atmosphere and the water and the topsoil on which all life depends is as debatable as how many angels can dance on the fuzz of a tennis ball.”

He was angry.

 

 

WHEN THIS OLD tape was played at Athena before the great escape, it kindled considerable interest. I watched it and listened with several students of mine. Afterward one of them said to me, “Who right, Professor—beard or mustache?” Wilder had a mustache. Bergeron had a beard.

“Beard,” I said.

That may have been almost the last word I said to a convict before the prison break, before my mother-in-law decided that it was at last time to talk about her big pickerel.

 

 

BERGERON’S EPITAPH FOR the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:

Only he didn’t say “doggone.”

 

 

BUT I WOULD never see or hear from Ed Bergeron again. He resigned from the Board soon after I was fired, and so would miss being taken hostage by the convicts. It would have been interesting to hear what he had to say to and about that particular kind of captor. One thing he used to say to me, and to a class of mine he spoke to one time, was that man was the weather now. Man was the tornadoes, man was the hailstones, man was the floods. So he might have said that Scipio was Pompeii, and the escapees were a lava flow.

He didn’t resign from the Board on account of my firing. He had at least two personal tragedies, one right on top of the other. A company he inherited made all sorts of products out of asbestos, whose dust proved to be as carcinogenic as any substance yet identified, with the exception of epoxy cement and some of the radioactive stuff accidentally turned loose in the air and aquifers around nuclear weapons factories and power plants. He felt terrible about this, he told me, although he had never laid eyes on any of the factories that made the stuff. He sold them for practically nothing, since the company in Singapore that bought them got all the lawsuits along with the machinery and buildings, and an inventory of finished materials which was huge and unsalable in this country. The people in Singapore did what Ed couldn’t bring himself to do, which was to sell all those floor tiles and roofing and so on to emerging nations in Africa.

And then his son Bruce, Tarkington Class of ’85, who was a homosexual, joined the Ice Capades as a chorus boy. That was all right with Ed, who understood that some people were born homosexual and that was that. And Bruce was so happy with the ice show. He was not only a good skater but maybe the best male or female dancer at Tarkington. Bruce used to come over to the house and dance with my mother-in-law sometimes, just for the sake of dancing. He said she was the best dance partner he had ever had, and she returned the compliment.

I didn’t tell her when, 4 years after he graduated, he was found strangled with his own belt, and with something like 100 stab wounds, in a motel outside of Dubuque. So there was Dubuque again.

SHAKESPEARE.

 

 

I THINK WILLIAM Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that’s not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don’t even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

If I say that the Trustees of Tarkington College were dummies, and that the people who got us involved in the Vietnam War were dummies, I hope it is understood that I consider myself the biggest dummy of all. Look at where I am now, and how hard I worked to get here and nowhere else. Bingo!

And if I feel that my father was a horse’s fundament and my mother was a horse’s fundament, what can I be but another horse’s fundament? Ask my kids, both legitimate and illegitimate. They know.

 

I DIDN’T HAVE a Chinaman’s chance with the Trustees, if I may be forgiven a racist cliche—not with the sex stuff Wilder had concealed in the folder. When I defended myself against him, I had no idea how well armed he was—a basic situation in the funniest slapstick comedies.

I argued that it was a teacher’s duty to speak frankly to students of college age about all sorts of concerns of humankind, not just the subject of a course as stated in the catalogue. “That’s how we gain their trust, and encourage them to speak up as well,” I said, “and realize that all subjects do not reside in neat little compartments, but are continuous and inseparable from the one big subject we have been put on Earth to study, which is life itself.”

I said that the doubts I might have raised in the students’ minds about the virtues of the Free Enterprise System, when telling them what my grandfather believed, could in the long run only strengthen their enthusiasm for that system. It made them think up reasons of their own for why Free Enterprise was the only system worth considering. “People are never stronger,” I said, “than when they have thought up their own arguments for believing what they believe. They stand on their own 2 feet that way.”

“Did you or did you not say that the United States was a crock of doo-doo?” said Wilder.

I had to think a minute. This wasn’t something Kimberley had gotten on tape. “What I may have said,” I replied, “is that all nations bigger than Denmark are crocks of doo-doo, but that was a joke, of course.”

 

I NOW STAND behind that statement 100 percent. All nations bigger than Denmark are crocks of doo-doo.

 

 

JASON WILDER HAD heard enough. He asked the Trustees to pass the folder from hand to hand down the table to me. He said, “Before you see what’s inside, you should know that this Board promised me that its contents would never be mentioned outside this room. It will remain in your sole possession, provided that you submit your resignation immediately.”

“My goodness—” I said, “what could be in here? And what made Tex Johnson run out of the room the way he did?”

“The bottommost document,” said Wilder, “was painful for him to read.”

“What can it be?” I said. I honestly couldn’t imagine how I might have caused Tex pain. When I made love to his wife, I only wanted to make the 2 of us happier. I didn’t think of her as somebody’s wife. When I make love to a woman, the farthest thing from my mind is whom she may be married to. I can’t speak for Zuzu, but I myself had no wish to cause Tex even a little pain. When Zuzu spoke contemptuously of him, I had to remember who he was, and then I stuck up for him.

 

 

MY FIRST IMPRESSION of the bottommost document in the folder is that it was a timetable of some sort, maybe for the bus from Scipio to Rochester, a not very subtle hint that I should get out of town as soon as possible. But then I realized that what was doing all the arriving and departing was me, and that the depot, so to speak, was the home of the College President.

The accuracy of the times and dates was attested to by Terrence W. Steel, Jr., whom I had known simply as Terry. I hadn’t known his full name, and believed him to be what he was said to be, a new gardener working for Buildings and Grounds. He was in fact the private detective Wilder hired to get the goods on me. What little he had told me about himself may have been invented by GRIOT™, or much of it could have been true. Who knows? Who cares?

He told me, I remember, that his wife had discovered she was a lesbian, and fell in love with a female junior high school dietitian. Then both women disappeared along with his 3 kids. GRIOT™ could have cooked that up.

 

 

THE TIMETABLE ABOUT me and Zuzu was signed by the detective and notarized. I knew the Notary. Everybody did. He was Lyle Hooper, the Fire Chief and owner of the Black Cat Café. He, too, would be killed soon after the prison break. That document with his seal was all I needed to see in order to understand that my tenure was down the toilet.

Wilder said that the rest of the papers in the folder were affidavits gathered by his detective. They attested to my having been a shameless adulterer from the moment I and my family hit Scipio. “I expect you to agree with me,” he said, “that your behavior in this valley would fall dead center into even the narrowest definition of moral turpitude.”

I put the folder flat on the table to indicate that I had no need to look inside. My gesture was like folding a poker hand. In so doing, I would lay it on top of the school’s annual Treasurer’s Report, one copy of which had been put at every seat before the meeting. I would inadvertently take the report with me when I left, learning later from it something I hadn’t known before. The college had sold all its property in the town below, including the ruins of the brewery and the wagon factory and the carpet mills and the land under the Black Cat Café, to the same Japanese corporation which owned the prison.

 

AND THEN THE Treasurer had put the proceeds of the sale, less real estate commissions and lawyers’ fees, into preferred stock in Microsecond Arbitrage.

 

 

“THIS IS NOT a happy moment in my life,” said Wilder.

“Nor mine,” I said.

“Unfortunately for all of us,” he said, “the moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.”

“You said a mouthful,” I said.

Now the Chairman of the Board, Robert Moellenkamp, spoke up. He was illiterate, but legendary among Tarkingtonians, and no doubt back home, too, for his phenomenal memory. Like the father of the founder of the college, his ancestor, he could learn by heart anything that was read out loud to him 3 times or so. I knew several convicts at Athena, also illiterate, who could do that, too.

He wanted to quote Shakespeare now. “I want it on the record,” he said, “that this has been an extremely painful episode for me as well.” And then he delivered this speech from Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet,
in which the dying Mercutio, Romeo’s gallant and witty best friend, describes the wound he received in a duel:

“No, ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve: ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague on both your houses!”

The two houses, of course, were the Montagues and the Capulets, the feuding families of Romeo and Juliet, whose nitwit hatred would indirectly cause Mercutio’s departure for Paradise.

I HAVE LIFTED this speech from Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations.
If more people would acknowledge that they got their pearls of wisdom from that book instead of the original, it might clear the air.

 

 

IF THERE REALLY had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness.

WHEN I HEARD a few months later, after I had gone to work at Athena, that Robert Moellenkamp had been wiped out and then some by Microsecond Arbitrage, and had had to sell his boats and his horses and his El Greco and all that, I assumed he quit the Board. Tarkington’s Trustees were expected to give a lot of money to the college every year. Otherwise why would Lowell Chung’s mother, who had to have everything that was said at meetings translated into Chinese, have been tolerated as a member of the Board?

Actually, I don’t think Mrs. Chung would have become a member if another Trustee, a Caucasian Tarkington classmate of Moellenkamp’s, John W. Fedders, Jr., hadn’t grown up in Hong Kong, and so could serve as her interpreter. His father was an importer of ivory and rhinoceros horns, which many Orientals believed to be aphrodisiacs. He also traded, it was suspected, in industrial quantities of opium. Fedders was perhaps the most conceited man I ever saw out of uniform. He thought his fluency in Chinese made him as brilliant as a nuclear physicist, as though 1,000,000,000 other people, including, no doubt, 1,000,000 morons, couldn’t speak Chinese.