Poetic Justice (8 page)

“Which explains, I guess,” Kate said, “why you want someone in the English Department on your side at the meeting Monday. Let’s think about the English Department a moment, may we, if you can bear it?”

“That, Kate, is what I hoped you would say,” Frogmore said, leaning toward her. “McQuire here can probably handle the Economics Department, but they will only give a certain amount of trouble—economists today, except for Bill, aren’t really interested in undergraduate education—but if we can’t do a little something in your department, Kate, we might as well turn in our badges. What will you drink?”

“Beer,” Kate said. “It will remind me of how pleasant the park was this morning. O.K. We have Cartier committed to the University College, and also, if I may put order before modesty, you have me. Opposed to the University College you have Cudlipp, Clemance,
O’Toole. But O’Toole as Dean will be off the College faculty. It’s scarcely worth the price to us since he will be leading the fight in the main arena, but the odds on our side are small enough so that every advantage counts. From the rest of the Department we have the chairman, Michaels, who is, I would say, so fed up with Cudlipp and Clemance going over his head to the Acting President that he would probably welcome, in a properly decorous way, any plan which gave him some weight against those two. Everglade, the Secretary of the Department, is absolutely the sweetest guy in the world, but I don’t really know what corner he’ll be in. Probably ours. We have then Professor Peter Packer Pollinger, who is perfectly capable of voting on either side when it comes right down to it, depending on what he imagines Fiona Macleod would have done under similar circumstances, but as a matter of fact he dislikes Clemance so much for once having said that Fiona Macleod was a silly poetess whose rhymes were not improved by the fact that she was really a man that Professor Pollinger may vote with us if he remembers what it was Clemance said on the day he happens to vote.”

“Kate, dear,” McQuire interrupted, “I do hope you know what you’re talking about. Frogmore and I aren’t going to ask you to explain why a lady poet should be a man, but you might just assure us that you aren’t, shall we say, rambling?”

“I assure you. The one who rambles is Peter Packer Pollinger. All right, then we have Chaucer, Medieval English, Comparative Medieval, Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Shakespeare. I don’t know where any of them stands (I mention the fields
rather than the names for the moment to give you the scope of the problem) but the older the field, the more conservative the views, as a general rule. The only trouble with that is that I’m not certain what they’ll consider the conservative position in this case. Of the two people in the contemporary field, one is Plimsole, who is a College man and lost, I fear, to us, but he is so unbelievably longwinded that I can’t believe even the College will consider him altogether an asset, though he’s not a bad fellow if he could learn to stop talking when he gets to the end of what he wants to say. The other contemporary person is Emilia Airhart.”

“You must be putting us on. I never heard of her, I mean not as a member of the English Department. You aren’t suggesting she made it out of the Oriental waters only to pop up here in a new life.”

“I hadn’t realized, really, what an odd lot we were. Emilia’s little known because she never turns up anywhere except to see students, whom she likes, and to write plays, which keep getting put on off-Broadway, but they are so very with it that no one in the whole Department realized for years that Emilia was writing them. She never has anything to do with anything in the Department, never goes to parties or gives them; she
might
come down on our side on this issue—it’s not unlikely.”

“What does she look like?” Frogmore said. “I thought I knew all the tenured English faculty.”

“What she looks like is the whole point, as you’d realize the moment you clapped eyes on her. She’s a large woman with flat shoes, wide skirts, and glasses, who gives you the impression that she could actually
be a
jolie laide
if someone with the combined talents of Sophie Gimbel and Yves St. Laurent would only take her in hand. She’s got five children and a husband, and that’s almost all I know about her, although I know her better than most people, since we’re the only two women with tenure in the Department and we inevitably find ourselves together in the ladies’ room from time to time. Her specialty’s drama, and the only other thing I know about her is that when I once asked her what she thought of Clemance, she said that apart from the fact that he was pompous, a company man and a male chauvinist, she had nothing against him, which I suppose, is another good sign for us. All the rest of the Department don’t have votes on the Senior Faculty Committee, being non-tenure, and need not concern us, though of course they wield more influence than is often realized. I hope I have made it quite clear that this is going to be an uphill fight.”

“You don’t know how uphill,” McQuire said. “It’s on the question of promotions that I’ve had my troubles with the Economics Department. The point is, we want you to see that a couple of assistant professors who’ve been teaching at the University College get promoted.”

“You don’t want much, do you?” Kate asked.

“The thing about Frogmore,” McQuire said, “is that easy fights bore him.”

“Listen, Kate,” Frogmore said, “I don’t want to be Dean of University College if it gets a new image, a new lease on life, and a new destiny. I want to be president of a girls’ college somewhere very rural and genteel. But I want to see University College the model of the elite
adult education for the whole United States, and I want it so badly that I’m going to get it.”

“What odd reasoning,” Kate said.

“No, it’s not,” Frogmore said. “When you find a man who wants something very badly, and doesn’t want it for himself, watch out.”

Kate stared at Frogmore awhile. “Do you know, Vivian,” she said, “like the man, meaning McQuire here, said, you got guts.”

“What happens at that Senior Faculty Committee meeting on Monday is going to show us a lot,” Frogmore said.

“I can hardly wait,” Kate laughed.

Then she hurried home to Reed.

M
ONDAY
, Kate reached Baldwin at two, in time for her office hour. The Senior Faculty Committee meeting was scheduled for four that afternoon, and Kate hoped, without too much conviction, to pick up a few tips before the meeting on the way the wind was blowing. So political a thought had not previously occurred to her and marked, no doubt, her initiation into the world of history. Clio, she thought, stand me now and ever in good stead.

“We have found no one for Swahili,” a voice said. “How is Bulwer-Lytton doing? Look, the elevator is actually coming,” Mark Everglade added. “There must be something wrong with it.”

“I do think,” Kate said as they got in, pressed ‘8’ and watched the doors close, “that such consistent pessimism is surely the triumph of experience over hope,
not to mention reason. Even this University’s elevators must work occasionally. The law of averages …” Kate’s voice faded away as, between the third and fourth floors, the elevator came to a reluctant, but by no means uncertain, stop.

“There is a law of averages,” Everglade said. “There is also a law of falling bodies. We are about to prove Galileo’s theory that two bodies of different weights will, if dropped from a sufficient height, reach the ground at the same time and in the same state of dejectedness. You ring the alarm bell; I will telephone.”

Kate pressed the alarm bell in much the same spirit with which one accepts herbal tea from an ancient aunt: it probably won’t help, but it can’t hurt. Mark, meanwhile, addressed himself to a little cupboard which housed the University’s most recent attempt to grapple with the problem of its elevators: a telephone. “What do you dial for emergencies?” Mark asked Kate.

“I don’t know. It says in the front of the campus directory, but I’m afraid I never noticed.”

“Who, alas, has? We shall have to dial the operator, and we all know where that leads.”

“Do you think there is sufficient oxygen?”

“For what? Compared to the air I’ve been breathing in most meetings lately, there is probably here a smaller proportion of carbon monoxide and irritating tars than in most otherwheres.”

“May I help you?” a voice said over the telephone.

“You certainly may,” Mark happily replied. “We are stuck in an elevator and …”

“If you are on campus,” the voice continued, “you
may dial directly the number you want. Is this an outside call?”

“I can’t even get outside this elevator,” Mark said. “Help, help, help,” he mildly added.

“I will connect you with maintenance,” the voice said. “If you are on campus, will you dial one-two, one-four? Are you on campus?”

“Perhaps it’s a recording,” Kate said.

Mark pressed down the telephone button until he heard a dial tone, then dialed 1214. There was a busy signal.

“Try calling the English Office,” Kate said.

“A brilliant suggestion which I am hideously certain will not work. Ah, well.” Mark dialed the English Office.

“English,” the secretary’s voice brightly said, “will you hold on a minute?” There was a click as the secretary pushed the ‘hold’ button. Mark slammed the receiver down as violently as the small cupboard allowed. Kate put her purse and case down on the floor.

“I am reminded,” she said, “of a story my father used to tell, repeatedly, in order to drive home a moral whose application has, until this moment, escaped me. He was a friend of the president of some railroad, the New York Central or something, and one day my father asked his secretary to find out when the next train left for Tuxedo, where he was planning to meet someone. The secretary returned to tell him that she could not get through to railroad information because the line was continually engaged. ‘Nonsense,’ my father called out. ‘Get me the president of the whatever railroad.’ The poor secretary couldn’t get the president, but she did get his private
secretary, at which point my father grabbed the telephone from her. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Fansler,’ the president’s private secretary said, ‘but Mr. Whosis is out of town. Is there any way I can help you?’ ‘There certainly is,’ my father said; ‘when is the next train to Tuxedo?’ Well, she managed to find a timetable and tell him; and the moral of the story is: always go to the president.”

“I trust,” Mark said, “that since we are without a President, the Acting President will do.”

“Perfectly,” Kate said.

“And do you happen to know his extension?”

“Yes, I do. I was recently glancing through the new directory, as one does when it first comes out, and I noticed that his number is 1837. Shall we try it?”

“How did you happen to decide to remember his number and not the emergency number? Your father’s advice?”

“Naturally not. I have never given a thought to my father’s advice until this moment. Eighteen thirty-seven is the year of Queen Victoria’s ascension.”

“Of course. Silly of me.” Mark picked up the receiver and dialed 1837.

“President Matthewson’s office,” a voice cheerfully said. “Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon,” Mark said. “May I please speak to Mr. Matthewson? This is Mark Everglade of the English Department calling.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Everglade, but President Matthewson is at a meeting. May I take a message?”

“You certainly may,” Mark said. “Tell him that Professor Fansler and I, both of the English Department,
are stuck in an elevator in Baldwin Hall and are rapidly running out of oxygen. I might add, in case it will in any way goad you more rapidly to action, that Professor Fansler and I are not of the same sex. Good afternoon to you.” Marie hung up the phone. “I give her fifteen minutes,” Mark said, “to check on us and the elevator. Shall we go over the catalogue, since the opportunity presents itself?”

“Mark, what do you think of Cudlipp?”

“He does his job, which is to represent the College. I do mine, which is to represent the Graduate School. Michaels, as chairman of the whole Department, complains about Cudlipp from time to time, but after all, everybody’s got to do his thing, doesn’t he?”

“I often ask myself,” Kate said, “—does he? Do you know anything about University College?”

“Sure,” Mark surprisingly said. “I’ve been letting its students into my classes lately; they’re good.”

“Funny, you never mentioned it,” Kate said.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not certain it’s kosher, so it seemed a case of least said soonest mended.”

“Do you think Cudlipp would object if he knew?”

“No doubt. But he can’t very well do anything about it, since the Graduate School doesn’t give credit, and what credit the University College gives is its decision. He makes damn sure no University College students take any College courses, or vice versa, and that’s exactly as far as he can go.”

“Why is he so against the University College? I know all about the question of resources, but his passion has deeper roots than the University’s operating deficit.”

“Mainly, I guess, he thinks the University College
degree threatens the value of
The
College degree. He wants undergraduate education at the University to be absolutely elite, and all those adults returning with their tired brains to school threaten him.”

“Do I,” Kate asked, “hear the calls of rescuers?”

“Professor Everglade,” a voice called. “Switch the Emergency button to
off
, and push open the door.”

Mark looked at Kate and shrugged. “Well,” he said, “here goes. Are you prepared to dive down the shaft?” He switched the button and pushed at the inner door which, rather to his astonishment, opened. Below them, the door on the third floor had been pushed back. “Have you a lady in there?” the voice called. “Professor Fansler is with me,” Mark said, winking at Kate, “if that answers your question. The point, I gather,” he said to Kate, “is to drop down into their arms on the third floor but
not
into the elevator shaft. Chivalry demands that you go first, so that I may hand you down into their waiting arms. And we never even looked at the damn catalogue.”