Poetic Justice Read online

  “Going my way, lady?” a voice said. “Or, more exactly, may I be allowed to go yours?” With something of a flourish, a man who had clearly been waiting for her removed his beret and bowed. “Bill McQuire is the name,” he said. “Remember me? Department of Economics. Statistics is my specialty. I advised you once that some figures you wanted to juggle could not reveal anything meaningful, being self-selected.”

  “I’m going to get a taxi,” Kate said. “Can I drop you somewhere?”

  “I wanted to talk with you,” McQuire said, “on a quite impersonal matter. May I buy you a drink?”

  “Can it be as important as all that? I’ve had a day.”

  “Very important. Dean Frogmore has been trying to reach you all day, but your telephone never answers. I’ve been delegated to drop round and catch you after your examination. Successful candidate, I hope?”

  “Beyond my wildest expectations,” Kate answered. “What’s this all about?”

  “I realize,” McQuire said, “that I am perhaps not the ideal man to approach you. But when Frogmore asked, I had to say I was acquainted with you. Do you know of Boulding?”

  “He isn’t by any chance a character in a novel by Bulwer-Lytton or a citizen of an Emerging African Nation?”

  “He’s an economist, and he announced one of the great laws of modern times: if it exists, it must be possible. That’s what I want to see you about: something which exists, but which everyone is saying is impossible.”

  “I have always thought,” Kate said, “that you scientists and social scientists ought to emblazon on your walls a quotation from J. B. S. Haldane: ‘How do you know that the planet Mars isn’t carried around by an angel?’ Will it express my utter confidence in your knightly qualities if I ask you up for a drink?”

  “It will,” Bill McQuire said, hailing a taxi. “Same place?”

  “Same place,” Kate said. “And who in hell is Dean Frogmore?”

  Kate had consulted Bill McQuire some five years earlier, when the Admissions Office of the Graduate Faculties had co-opted her onto a committee to study the old patterns of admission and to evolve new ones. For the first time in her life Kate found herself confronted with statistics, with no knowledge what to do with them but a distinct sense that either the statistics before her or the conclusions to be drawn from them were faulty. Someone had suggested that she consult a statistician, and had suggested Bill McQuire. Professor McQuire had himself soon provided a new statistic in Kate’s life. He was the only man she had ever gone to bed with on the basis of a ten-hour acquaintance, liked moderately well, and never, to all intents and purposes, seen again.

  They had, of course, met from time to time on University occasions, in the Faculty Club, once on a dissertation committee when a student of Kate’s had written on some abstruse topic concerning economics and literature. They greeted each other on these occasions not only with the pleasant formality their surroundings required, but with the pleasant indifference they both genuinely felt.

  Now, when they had reached home, Kate left McQuire in the living room to fix himself a drink. It was, Kate thought, a room Auden would have approved of:

  Spotless rooms

  where nothing’s left lying about

  chill me, so do cups used for ashtrays or smeared

  with lipstick: the homes I warm to,

  though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling

  of bills being promptly settled

  with checks that don’t bounce.

  McQuire seemed to agree, for he was happily stretched out in her Knoll chair when she returned. “It is extraordinarily ungallant of me to say so,” he laughed, “but when I opened your liquor cabinet I had a most magnificent case of déjà vu. I remembered looking into it, years ago, whenever it was, and thinking: My God, Jack Daniel’s, and that’s exactly what I did tonight. What can I get you?”

  Kate asked for Scotch. She watched him as he fixed the drink. How old was he now, somewhere between forty-five and fifty? His curly hair was thinner, and gray; at least he doesn’t dye it, Kate thought, and was surprised to have thought it. Bill had always worn his curly hair longer than the prevailing style—he was a distinctly Byronic type—and now that fashions had overtaken him he looked oddly more out of style than he had previously done. His face was lined, with that special crinkled quality of the skin which marks those who have drunk heavily and long. Turning to her with the drink, he found himself held by her stare. “Portrait of an aging stag,” he said. “Dissipated but kindly. If you want to know the whole hideous truth, I like them younger and younger all the time, so that I am in danger of becoming a dirty old man. Humbert Humbert, I do pity thee. Well, no,” he added, seeing Kate’s eyes widen. “Eighteen is still my under limit. Cheers.”

  “I am trying to decide,” Kate said, “why it is that you are quite incapable of shocking me, even though I think your life reprehensible and I find promiscuity shocking, particularly in married men.”

  “I’m sure you do. In fact, I have often noticed that those most shocked by marital infidelity are usually themselves unmarried. Cecelia, as it happens, has settled quite nicely into life, though she is pleased to see that neither of our sons at all resembles a rampant stag—that is, me. You’ve worn well, Kate. I like you and the way you look, and you’re very decent to put up with me this afternoon.”

  “I haven’t worn all that well. Supposedly I shall always be tall and lean with a French twist and a face that shows all the worries in the world. Do you know what I like about you, Bill? It’s only just occurred to me, so let me say it and then we can get down to whatever you and Dean Toadwell have on your minds.”

  “His name is Frogmore. What do you like? My eternal evanescence?”

  “The fact that however much you stalk your prey, you do not class women with motor cars if they are attractive and with eye-flies if they are not.”

  “Eye-flies?”

  “Well, something nasty. I was quoting Forster, who happened to be writing about India at the time, so it was eye-flies.”

  “Somebody said once—unlike you I never remember where I read things—that if a woman is not beautiful at twenty, it’s not her fault; if she’s not beautiful at forty, it is her fault. Have you ever thought of getting married?”

  “Once or twice, lately. The ramifications of university upheavals are endless. Do you think marriage advisable? One has such lovely friendships with men whose wives were beautiful when they were twenty.”

  “What a dreadfully cynical remark. Married women can have friends; the men feel, if anything, more comfortable.”

  “Meaning you would feel more comfortable now if I were married.”

  “Kate, don’t put words in my mouth. I was …”

  “Answer me honestly, if you want me to help with your beastly crisis.”

  “That’s not fair. People who demand to be answered honestly have already decided what the honest answer is. But you’d be wrong. I wouldn’t be more comfortable with you, but I think I would feel you were happier, particularly in these times of institutionalized uncertainty.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Bill,” Kate said, recovering herself. “I have believed, in the words of a first-rate woman scholar who lived to be eighty and was always falling in love with someone, that marriage for a woman spoils the two things that make life glorious: learning and friendship. Somehow, that no longer seems so unquestionably true. Fill up your glass and tell me about Toadwell.”

  “Frogmore. That you haven’t heard of him is absolutely symptomatic.”

  “Oh, come on, Bill, how many deans have I heard of?”

  “Can you name the Dean of Divinity? Law, Graduate Faculties, Public Administration, Business, Engineering?”

  “Not Public Administration.”

  “My point still holds.”

  “I can only name most of the others because of the troubles last spring.”

  “Fair enough. But you can’t name the Dean of the University College?”

&nbs
p; “Frogmore?”

  “Frogmore.”

  “You know, Bill, it is absolutely coming over me in waves that I do not want to know the Dean of the University College, or University College, or …”

  “Shall I tell you something? Last spring, when this place was blowing up, there was only one school in it that remained intact.”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess.”

  “The students of the University College occupied their own building and held it for themselves. They proved to be the only really loyal student body the whole blasted University possessed, and the University, with the gratitude and intelligence that has marked all its decisions, now wants to wash the University College down the drain.”

  “Bill, I’m in Graduate Faculties. I’m planning next year’s curriculum there. I’m going to give a text course in the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, and maybe one in the literature of Emerging African Nations. I’m thinking of emigrating to an Emerging African Nation myself.

  Do you really think you want to try to make this my problem?”

  “Yes, lady, I do. And when your fortieth birthday comes, I shall buy you a specially lovely present for a beautiful and humane woman.”

  “As Polly Spence would say—my God, Polly Spence—four-letter-word-bathroom. Bull’s, that is.”

  In our morale must lie our strength.

  Two

  “ALL I ask, Kate, is that you listen. Give it a chance. Try to remember that these are people fighting for the life of a school they do not need. They all have tenure in other branches of the University. It’s a matter of believing in something.”

  “Even Dean Frogmore?”

  “Even he.” Bill McQuire and Kate were walking toward the Faculty Club next day to attend a luncheon with Dean Frogmore and some senior members of his faculty. Kate had had to cancel two appointments to come, and she did so, finally, only as a favor to McQuire. He had known, and Kate respected him for knowing, that she had learned to refuse any official request, but was still far from immune to personal ones. “Frogmore is offered a job every other day, as president of this college or that. Everyone’s looking for administrators; they’re almost as scarce as plumbers and doctors. Probably he’ll go off to some rural collegiate paradise before long, but I think his devotion to the University College is unquestionable. Everyone has underestimated Frogmore from the beginning, I among them. But let me tell you two things about him: he’s got guts you’ll admire, and an oily surface you’ll hate. For one thing, and I want to warn you about this in advance, knowing your prejudices, he calls everyone, everyone, by his first name the first moment they meet.”

  “Cripes,” Kate said.

  “I know; that’s why I mention it. You’re remarkably old-world in some ways, Kate.”

  “Remarkably. I don’t mind going to bed at ten at night with a man I met at noon the same day, but I can’t bear being called by my first name until a relationship has had time to mature. Very old-world indeed.”

  McQuire chuckled. “It’s a maddening habit—Frogmore’s, I mean. When I first met him he kept referring to Lou and Teddy, and the conversation had gone on for half an hour before I realized he was speaking of the President and Vice-President of the University. But don’t underestimate him, Kate. He really and truly wants to put the University College on the map, when the easiest thing for him to do would be to cop out.”

  “It might be the easiest thing for all of us. Certainly for me. I can’t imagine, truthfully, why you think I …”

  “Yes, you can. Be good now. I’ll give you a chance later to protest and thrash around, and I promise you, if your answer is really ‘No,’ I’ll back you up.”

  “Which means if I act intelligently interested today, and ask leading questions, you won’t assume I’m committed.”

  “Have I told you yet today,” Bill said, “that you’re beautiful?”

  The luncheon party was held in one of the private rooms of the Faculty Club. The moment Kate and Bill McQuire entered, Frogmore leaped to his feet and rushed forward to greet them at the door. Somewhat overcome by his enthusiasm, the other gentlemen already seated around the table rose to their feet, awkwardly pushing back their chairs, dropping their napkins and brushing crumbs from their laps. (It was one of the unfailing characteristics of the Faculty Club that although service never began until the latest possible moment after one had sat down, there was always present, as part of the table setting, a large, exceedingly stale roll which one found oneself compelled, in time, to pulverize, showering oneself and the table top with crumbs.)

  “Please,” Kate weakly said. The academic community had taken longer than most to shake off old habits of gallantry. When Kate had first joined the faculty she had had to become inured to roomfuls of men rising to their feet as she entered. Gradually, of course, the custom had died out. Only Frogmore, with his bouncy manner and boy-scout demeanor, had trapped them into old habits.

  “So this is Kate,” Frogmore said. “Thank you, Bill, for bringing her.” Kate, regarding Frogmore with a lackluster eye, avoided glancing at McQuire. Clever he: the blow fell less painfully, being expected. “Let me introduce you pronto to the others before getting under way; we’ve got a long agenda. What will you drink, Kate? This is on me; the Dean’s slush fund.”

  “A Bloody Mary please,” Kate demurely said. (Reed had often remarked that when Kate came all over demure, it meant that what she really wanted to do was put a pillow over some chap’s head and sit on it.) Kate did not like, in the ordinary way, to drink at lunch, a meal she avoided if she could, and certainly not when she was in danger of becoming involved in some internecine struggle. She had therefore hit upon the lovely stratagem of ordering a drink which was, at the Faculty Club, equal parts of Worcestershire sauce and watery tomato juice with as little vodka as made no difference to anyone not a teetotaler on principle.

  “You know everybody, I’m sure,” Frogmore said. “Luther Hankster of Biology.” Kate, indeed, had stood side by side with Luther Hankster when the police had first and, as it turned out, abortively, been called to clear out the administration building. Playboy turned radical, Hankster kept more or less in the good graces of his colleagues by his unerring good manners and the careful use of a voice never, ever, raised. He was given to outrageously radical pronouncements which, had they been delivered in any but the voice of a man making secret love, would have instantly offended everyone.

  “George Castleman, of course, is our guiding star.” Kate wanted to ask Castleman if he had been tempted lately to public disrobement, but contained herself; she wondered anew at the passion for clichés which seemed, in Frogmore’s case, almost to equal his passion for first names. Castleman, if not a guiding star, was certainly a power in the University, on all the vital committees and possessed of the kind of political acumen that was almost as rare in an academic community as inspired teaching.

  “Herbert Klein, Political Science. Herbie, I believe you’re not as well known to Kate as the rest of us.” “Herbie,” a man of enormous dignity and baleful looks, rose and shook Kate’s hand with a firmness clearly indicating his wish to dissociate both of them from Frogmore’s unearned intimacy. Kate wondered if anyone else had ever called him Herbie in his life. “We hope you will be able to help us, Professor Fansler,” he formally said. Kate suppressed a grin.

  “And,” Frogmore went relentlessly on, “this is the other stranger to you, Kate: John Peabody, a student in the University College.”

  “Hi,” said Peabody, to whom formality was unknown. Kate looked up in surprise. Although the principle of students serving on all the governing bodies of the University had by now been given token acceptance, in fact where there was a need for delicate decisions, students had so far not usually been present. Peabody, though, was older than any ordinary college man: he looked nearer thirty than twenty.

  “And Tony Cartier is of course from your own department.” Kate could never resist smiling at the sight of Cartier: his ill-controlled restlessness made lun
cheon meetings a torture to him; he would glance wildly about as though at any moment someone might lock the doors and keep him prisoner here forever.

  The aged waiter took the order for the drinks and scrutinized it with exaggerated care. All the waiters at the Faculty Club were old and slow, though those chosen for the private rooms were, if not fast, because that was clearly impossible, at least not deliberately slower than age and rheumatism determined. Finding, perhaps to his sorrow, no esoteric and therefore unavailable drinks on the list, the waiter departed.

  Frogmore began to speak. He had not spoken long before Kate became aware that he was, for all his foolish ways, a genius at committee work. Kate, who thought herself remarkably inept on committees, recognized the talent instantly. Thank God, Kate thought; were Frogmore a bumbler they would all be wasting their patience and their time.

  “Now,” Frogmore said, “let us run over the major points in a swift recapitulation, mostly for your benefit, Kate, since the rest of us have been kicking this thing around for quite a while. I don’t want to be long-winded, so I’ll get down to the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts.” (Kate had, by the end of this sentence, ceased even to wince; she was taking her beating manfully. “There is one evil which … should never be passed over in silence but be continually publicly attacked, and that is corruption of the language …” Auden had written, but then Auden’s hours were not passed amidst deans and social scientists.)

  “As you know, Kate,” Frogmore went blissfully on, “the University, which used to be a collection of baronies, has got to start operating as a whole if it’s not to be part of the state system in ten years. There are certain changes we all agree on: it would take three million dollars to make our Dental School adequate; ten million to make it outstanding. Do we really need a Dental School? No, we do not. But, you see, restructuring is a convenient excuse for carrying out long-planned hanky-panky. I take it you are familiar with Professor Jeremiah Cudlipp?” Kate, who knew a rhetorical question when she heard one, did not trouble either to nod or object. “He, of course, and his associate, Bob O’Toole, have decided that this time of restructuring is just the moment to bounce the University College off the campus altogether.”