When the Bough Breaks (29 page)

21

A
THOUSAND YARDS
of rain forest shielded the Jedson campus from the coastal road. The forest yielded to twin stone columns engraved with Roman numerals that marked the origin of a cobbled drive running through the center of the college. The drive terminated in a circular turn-around punctuated by a pockmarked sundial under a towering pine.

At first glance, Jedson resembled one of those small colleges back East that specialize in looking like dwarf Harvards. The buildings were fashioned of weathered brick and embellished with stone and marble cornices, slate and copper roofing—designed in an era when labor was cheap and intricate moldings, expansive arches, gargoyles and goddesses the order of the day. Even the ivy looked authentic, tumbling from slate peaks, sucking the brick, trimmed topiary-fashion to bypass recessed, leaded windows.

The campus was small, perhaps half a square mile, and filled with tree-shaded knolls, imposing stands of oak, pine, willow, elm and paper birch, and clearings inlaid with marble and bordered by stone benches and bronze monuments. All very traditional until you looked to the west and saw manicured lawns dipping down to the dock and the private harbor beyond. The slips were occupied by streamlined, teak-decked cruisers, fifty-foot craft and larger, topped with sonar and radar screens and clutches of antennae: clearly twentieth-century, obviously West Coast.

The rain had lifted and a triangle of light peeked out from under the charcoal folds of the sky. A few knots out of the harbor an armada of sailboats sliced through water that looked like tin foil. The boats were rehearsing some type of ceremony, for they each rounded the same buoy marker and unfurled outrageously colored spinnakers—
oranges, purples, scarlets and greens, like the tailfeathers of a covey of tropical birds.

There was a lucite-encased map on a stand and I consulted it to locate Crespi Hall. The students passing by seemed a quiet lot. For the most part they were apple-cheeked and flaxen-haired, their eye color traversing the spectrum from light blue to dark blue. Their hairstyles were expensively executed but seemed to date from the Eisenhower age. Trousers were cuffed, pennies shined prettily from the tops of loafers and there were enough alligators on shirts to choke the Everglades. A eugenicist would have been proud to observe the straight backs, robust physiques and stiff-lipped self-assurance of those to the manor born. I felt as if I’d died and gone to Aryan Heaven.

Crespi was a three-story rhomboid fronted by Ionic columns of varicose-veined white marble. The public relations office was hidden behind a mahogany door labeled in gold stencil. When I opened it, the door creaked.

Margaret Dopplemeier was one of those tall, rawboned women predestined for spinsterhood. She’d tried to couch an ungainly body in a tentlike suit of brown tweed, but the angles and corners showed through. She had a big-jawed face, uncompromising lips, and reddish-brown hair cut in an incongruously girlish bob. Her office was hardly larger than the interior of my car—public relations was obviously not a prime concern for the elders of Jedson—and she had to squeeze between the edge of her desk and the wall to get up to greet me. It was a maneuver that would have looked clumsy performed by Pavlova and Margaret Dopplemeier turned it into a lurching stumble. I felt sorry for her but made sure not to show it: She was in her midthirties and by that age women like her have learned to cherish self-reliance. It’s as good a way as any of coping with solitude.

“Hello, you must be Alex.”

“I am. Pleased to meet you, Margaret.” Her hand was thick, hard and chafed—from too much wringing or too much washing, I couldn’t be sure.

“Please sit down.”

I took a slat-backed chair and sat in it uncomfortably.

“Coffee?”

“Please. With cream.”

There was a table with a hot plate in back of her desk. She poured coffee into a mug and gave it to me.

“Have you decided about lunch?”

The prospect of looking across the table at her for an extra hour didn’t thrill me. It wasn’t her plainness, nor her stern face. She looked ready to tell me her life story and I was in no mood to fill my head with extraneous material. I declined.

“How about a snack, then?”

She brought forth a tray of cheese and crackers, looking uncomfortable in the role of hostess. I wondered why she’d gravitated toward p.r. Library science would have seemed more fitting. Then the thought occurred to me that public relations at Jedson was probably akin to library work, a desk job involving lots of clipping and mailing and very little face-to-face contact.

“Thank you.” I was hungry and the cheese was good.

“Well.” She looked around her desk, found a pair of eyeglasses, and put them on. Behind the glass her eyes grew larger and somehow softer. “You want to get a feel for Jedson.”

“That’s right—the flavor of the place.”

“It’s quite a unique place. I’m from Wisconsin myself, went to school at Madison, with forty thousand students. There are only two thousand here. Everyone knows everyone else.”

“Kind of like one big family.” I took out a pen and notepad.

“Yes.” At the word family her mouth pursed. “You might say that.” She shuffled some papers and began reciting:

“Jedson College was founded by Josiah T. Jedson, a Scottish immigrant who made his fortune in mining and railroads in 1858. That’s three years before the University of Washington was founded, so we’re really the old school in town. Jedson’s intention was to endow an institution of higher learning where traditional values coexisted side by side with education in the basic arts and sciences. To this day, primary funding for the college comes from an annuity from the Jedson Foundation, although other sources of income are existant.”

“I’ve heard tuition is rather high.”

“Tuition,” she frowned, “is twelve thousand dollars a year, plus housing, registration and miscellaneous fees.”

I whistled.

“Do you give scholarships?”

“A small number of scholarships for deserving students are given each year, but there is no extensive program of financial aid.”

“Then there’s no interest in attracting students from a wide socioeconomic range.”

“Not particularly, no.”

She took off her glasses, put her prepared material aside and stared at me myopically.

“I would hope we don’t get into that particular line of questioning.”

“Why is that, Margaret?”

She moved her lips, trying on several unspoken words for size, rejecting them all. Finally she said: “I thought this was going to be an impression piece. Something positive.”

“It will be. I was simply curious.” I had touched a nerve—not that
it did me any good, for upsetting my source of information was the last thing I needed. But something about the upper-class smugness of the place was irritating me and bringing out the bad boy.

“I see.” She put her glasses back on and picked up her papers, scanned them and pursed her lips. “Alex,” she said, “can I speak to you off the record—one writer to another?”

“Sure.” I closed the notepad and put the pen in my jacket pocket.

“I don’t know how to put this.” She played with one tweed lapel, twisting the coarse cloth then smoothing it. “This story, your visit—neither are particularly welcomed by the administration. As you may be able to tell from the grandeur of our surroundings, public relations is not avidly sought by Jedson College. After I spoke to you yesterday I told my superiors about your coming, thinking they’d be more than pleased. In fact, just the opposite was true. I wasn’t exactly given a pat on the back.”

She pouted, as if recalling a particularly painful spanking.

“I didn’t intend to get you in trouble, Margaret.”

“There was no way to know. As I told you, I’m new here. They do things differently. It’s another way of life—quiet, conservative. There’s a timeless quality to the place.”

“How,” I asked, “does a college attract enrollment without attracting attention?”

She chewed her lip.

“I really don’t want to get into it.”

“Margaret, it’s off the record. Don’t stonewall me.”

“It’s not important,” she insisted, but her bosom heaved and conflict showed in the flat, magnified eyes. I played on that conflict.

“Then what’s the fuss? We writers need to be open with one another. There are enough censors out there.”

She thought about that for a long time. The tug-of-war was evident on her face and I couldn’t help but feel rotten.

“I don’t want to leave here,” she finally said. “I have a nice apartment with a view of the lake, my cats and my books. I don’t want to lose—everything. I don’t want to have to pack up and move back to the Midwest. To miles of flatland with no mountains, no way of establishing one’s perspective. Do you understand?”

Her manner and tone were brittle—I knew that manner, for I’d seen it in countless therapy patients, just before the defenses came tumbling down. She wanted to let go and I was going to help her, manipulative bastard that I was …

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” she was asking.

And I heard myself answer, so smooth, so sweet:

“Of course I do.”

“Anything I tell you has to be confidential. Not for print.”

“I promise. I’m a feature writer. I have no aspirations of becoming Woodward or Bernstein.”

A faint smile appeared on the large, bland features.

“You don’t? I did, once upon a time. After four years on the Madison student paper I thought I was going to turn journalism on its ear. I went for one solid year with no writing job—I did waitressing. I hated it. Then I worked for a dog magazine, writing cutesy-poo press releases on poodles and schnauzers. They brought the little beasts into the office for photographs and they fouled the carpet. It stunk. When that folded I spent two years covering union meetings and polka parties in New Jersey and that finally squeezed all the illusions out of me. Now all I want is peace.”

Again the glasses came off. She closed her eyes and massaged her temples.

“When you get down to it, that’s what all of us want,” I said.

She opened her eyes and squinted in my direction. From the way she strained I must have been a blur. I tried to look like a trustworthy blur.

She popped two pieces of cheese into her mouth and ground them to dust with lantern jaws.

“I don’t know that any of it is relevant to your story,” she said. “Especially if it’s a puff piece you’re after.”

I forced a laugh.

“Now that you’ve got me interested, don’t leave me dangling.”

She smiled. “One writer to another?”

“One writer to another.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “I suppose it’s no biggie.”

“In the first place,” she told me, between mouthfuls of cheese, “no, Jedson College is not interested in attracting outsiders, period. It’s a college, but in name and formal status only. What Jedson College really is—functionally—is a
holding pen
. A place for the privileged class to stash their children for four years before the boys enter Daddy’s business and the girls marry the boys and turn into Suzy Homemaker and join the Junior League. The boys major in business or economics, the girls in art history and home economics. The gentleman’s C is the common goal. Being too smart is frowned upon. Some of the brighter ones do go on to law school or medical school. But when they finish their training they return to the fold.”

She sounded bitter, a wallflower describing last year’s prom.

“The average household income of the families that send their kids here is over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Think of that, Alex. Everyone is rich. Did you see the harbor?”

I nodded.

“Those floating toys belong to students.” She paused, as if she still
couldn’t believe it. “The parking lot looks like the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. These kids wear cashmere and suede for horsing around.”

One of her raw, coarse hands found the other and caressed it. She looked from wall to wall of the tiny room as if searching for hidden listening devices. I wondered what she was so nervous about. So Jedson was a school for rich kids. Stanford had started out that way too and might have ended up similarly stagnant if someone hadn’t figured out that not letting in smart Jews and Asians and other people with funny names and high IQ’s would lead to eventual academic entropy.

“There’s no crime in being rich,” I said.

“It’s not just that. It’s the utter mindlessness that goes along with it. I was at Madison during the sixties. There was a sense of social awareness. Activism. We were working to end the war. Now it’s the anti-nukes movement. The university can be a greenhouse for the conscience. Here, nothing grows.”

I envisioned her fifteen years back, dressed in khakis and sweatshirt, marching and mouthing slogans. Radicalism had fought a losing battle with survival, eroded by too much of nothing. But she could still take an occasional hit of nostalgia …

“It’s especially hard on the faculty,” she was saying. “Not the Old Guard. The Young Turks—they actually call themselves that. They come here because of the job crunch, with their typical academic idealism and liberal views and last two, maybe three years. It’s intellectually stultifying—not to mention the frustration of earning fifteen thousand dollars a year when the student’s wardrobes cost more than that.”

“You sound as if you have first-hand knowledge.”

“I do. There was—a man. A good friend of mine. He came here to teach philosophy. He was brilliant, a Princeton graduate, a genuine scholar. It ate him up. He talked to me about it, told me what it was like to stand up in front of a class and lecture on Kierkegaard and Sartre and see thirty pairs of vacant blue eyes staring back.
Ubermensch
U. he called it. He left last year.”

She looked pained. I changed the subject.

“You mentioned the Old Guard. Who are they?”

“Jedson graduates who actually develop an interest in something other than making money. They go on to earn advanced degrees in humanities—something totally useless like history or sociology or literature—and then come crawling back here to teach. Jedson takes care of its own.”