Beet Page 2

  “I don’t get you,” said Manning. “You sit there as though you had nothing on your mind but those papers.”

  “Because I can do something about them.”

  “Oh, yes. I forget. You’re the pure teacher. But it’s not natural. Where’s the gnashing of teeth, the cursing out of the pricks?”

  “You handle that.”

  From the year of its establishment, darkness seemed to have found a home in Beet College. Dark pink for the brick buildings, dark green for the doorjambs and the benches, dark iron for the hinges, dark stone for Nathaniel’s Tomb; darkness in the piceous roots of trees that broke through the earth like bones through skin. Darkness in the impermeable forest surrounding the college, and in the Atlantic, too, three miles to the southeast yet audible at night.

  Livi loved the sound of its churning. “Like traffic going somewhere else,” she sighed.

  Darkness even in the Temple, whence Bollovate made his slow descent and which, though composed of alabaster, seemed to absorb the light and turn it to the color of tarnished silver. High on the hill it squatted, with its frieze of piglets on the tympanum above the cornice, and its acroterion made up of a three-foot-high pig on its hind legs, the entire structure looking like a proud white pig itself, yet still emitting that haughty gloom the Puritans gathered up from the smoke-choked huts and cottages of the seventeenth-century English countryside and brought to the New World to guarantee its continuity.

  “I knew it, I knew it! They’re definitely closing us down,” said Manning, as he traced the trustee’s leaden steps. “If they had intended to keep us open, they would never tell the faculty first.”

  That was the general opinion of all who flattened their faces against the windows of Beet that morning, including the dither of deans (the collective noun was coined some years earlier by a professor of Romance languages named Wilcox, who ran off with a wild and brilliant sophomore named Maud). Many grew excited. Hungry for honors, no matter how dubious, they sought even this one—to receive the bad news personally and be the first of the last people standing.

  And yet, as usual, the Beet intelligentsia misjudged the situation. For if Bollovate planned to deliver the announcement of Beet’s closing, he never would have bothered to tell the faculty himself. He held an even lower opinion of Beet’s professoriate than he did of the administration. He held a very low opinion of Beet altogether. When President Huey appointed him to chair the board, he’d asked what exactly a college trustee was entrusted with. Was the board supposed to keep the college going no matter how much money it was spilling? Or was a trustee one entrusted to make the hard, unsentimental choice of getting off the pot when the pot was leaking shit? (The metaphor was his.) Actually, he asked those things as second thoughts. His first was, “What’s in it for me?” Huey had heard the question as rhetorical.

  “Governments are shaped by pretenses, my boy. Noble pretenses.” Now Manning leaned over Peace’s desk. “If you studied something practical, if you didn’t bury that fair-haired head of yours in the airy-fairy land of ‘literature’ [slowing up so as to pronounce every letter], you’d see what I mean. America announced ambitions like liberty, equality, all that glorious crap, so we could try to live up to them. But set the bottom line as the goal of the country, and what do we become? A nation of pork bellies.” He pointed to the window. “And there it is now, fat and sassy, rolling down the hill.”

  “You and Livi ought to get together. She hates the college as much as you do.”

  “In a heartbeat. Will you keep the kids?”

  By now Bollovate had directed his royal progress toward the Old Pen—professors in the New Pen moaned and sighed—and had limited his possibilities to three pathways, a choice of one of three departments at which to make his announcement.

  But just as History and Social Anthropology were working themselves into a tizzy, he swung the iron belly toward English and American Literature and entered. The department members coagulated about him like rock star groupies. He scanned his surroundings, as if calculating square footage.

  “Professor Porterfield?” he asked the crowd. They pointed to a closed door. He did not bother to knock. “Professor Porterfield?” Manning shook his head. “Professor Porterfield?”—addressing the right man at last.

  Peace stood. Manning edged toward escape.

  “I’m pleased to tell you,” said Bollovate, “that the trustees have decided not to close the college just yet. You know how much the place means to us all. [Manning coughed.] But given the empty state of the endowment, we cannot survive beyond the end of term unless we can turn things around in a hurry. So we voted to use the remaining weeks to ask the faculty to come up with a new curriculum. Something bold and different [two more coughs from Manning]. Attract more paying undergraduates, more grants, more alumni gifts. [He frowned as if sincerely.] Of course, it also has to be intellectually worthwhile [three of Manning’s loudest coughs]. If the faculty can produce a curriculum like that, we might stay open indefinitely.”

  “Aren’t we at capacity right now?” Peace asked.

  “Technically, yes,” said Bollovate. “Depends on how you define capacity. The board sees the college as a growth industry. We figure we can take four to five hundred more undergraduates without straining the system.”

  “How will you house and feed them?” Peace asked.

  “Leave those concerns to us bean counters,” Bollovate chortled. He reached up and clasped Peace by the shoulders. “Think big, Professor!”

  Peace said nothing but wondered if it were possible to raise the numbers and hold the standards. Yet the prospect of a new curriculum intrigued him.

  “We still have time to save our asses,” said Bollovate.

  “That’s great, Mr. Bollovate,” said Peace. “But what does this have to do with me?”

  “We want you to chair the new curriculum committee.”

  “Me?”—a squint mixing surprise with suspicion. “But there are so many better people. People who have more experience. Like Professor Manning here”—who suddenly was not here, but halfway out the door, smiling sadly with his back turned.

  “You’re the one the trustees want,” said Bollovate. “And you’re the right man for the job. Everyone says so. They say you have ideals. Do you have ideals, Professor?”

  “Oh, does he ever!” said Manning, walking away.

  “Ideals. They’re so important,” said Bollovate. “Don’t you think so?” He gave Peace his I’m-very-concerned look. “I’d like to say think it over, Professor. But there’s no time. Yes or no? In or out?”

  Afterward, Peace phoned Livi at the hospital.

  “So it wasn’t bad news. It was worse,” she said. “By the way, we’re having goose for dinner. How do you like it cooked?”

  CHAPTER 2

  “SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT!” SAID THE POET MATHA POLITE (pron. “Pole-eet”) when she learned of the trustees’ decision and of Professor Porterfield’s assignment to save Beet from extinction. This knowledge came to her approximately two minutes after it had come to Peace himself, since nothing moves faster than a rumor in a college, even when the rumor proves true and is not about sex.

  Matha first shouted her reaction to herself, then to the group of her fellow student radicals gathered in her dorm room in Chillingworth. (All the dorms had names that froze the blood—Chillingworth, Fordyce, Snowe, Coldenham, Sleeting, and Frost.) They lolled on the floor and on the bed, under posters of Che, Dr. Dre, Oprah, and Simon Cowell, and listened to their leader. “Shitshitshitshitshit!” she said again. This turn of affairs represented a catastrophe.

  “Okay.” She rubbed her hands together. “If they’re not going to close the college, then we’ll do it for them!”—met with murmurs of assent and one or two yeahs.

  If ambition had a face, it would be Matha’s. It was small and tight about the skull, masked by an expression blending mere competence with want. Her hair was the color of mixed nuts, worn short and close like a helmet. Her eyes were brown an
d burned like coals in ash, but without light until she had need of it. Her mouth looked poised and loaded like a crossbow; the whole head pushed forward as if about to fire. It was her stridency that accounted for her appeal, both sexual and political, and her gift of fury. In high school she tried out for Lady Macbeth but lost the role because she was too ruthless.

  “Matha! Did you hear? Profesor Porterfield is going to save the college”—a shout from outside the dorm, directly below her window.

  “Is that Akim?” asked Peter Bagtoothian, the one bona fide thug in Matha’s group. “May I go down and kill him?”

  “He’s just hot for me. We have more important business.”

  Matha was a transfer student from Magnolia Blossom College in Balloo, Virginia, her hometown, and reigned as Queen of the May Flowers, the highest honor Magnolia Blossom bestowed. At her coronation she’d worn a pale blue antebellum ball gown with yellow rosettes at the breasts and spread her hoop skirts on the college green like Arabian tents, as ladies-in-waiting dried the beads of perspiration on her brow, waving wide white pleated fans. In those days, she was a different Matha Polite. She kept horses, owned an impressive collection of expensive pearls given her by various beaus of excellent if profligate local breeding, was elected social chairperson of her sorority, and looked forward to a life in a big white pillared Georgian house in Balloo similar to that of her mama and daddy, where she would decorate dinner party invitations with floret embossments, prance to church on the arm of her handsome chosen husband-to-be, Dawb Dubelle, and primp her daughters for their comings-out at the Balloo Cotton Cotillion, where she too came out, as had her older sister Kathy, her mama Luelle, and her grandmamma Bluelle before her.

  At the time, she also spoke with a thick-as-custard southern alto, with which, it was said, she could coax the male birds from their nests, and often did. “A girl like you could sell a man anything, honey,” her father, Beaulieu Polite, the most successful real estate broker in Virginia, told her more than once. “I’d hate to think where I’d be if you were my competition, girl!”

  “Oh, Daddy!” Matha would trill and laugh and stand on her tippy toes to give her father a kiss on the cheek. “I leave all that to yourself, and of course to dear Kathy. No one could ever compete with you. And besides, what would a teeny little thing like me know about the man’s world of big business. Real estate! I swan!”

  “Matha!”

  “Akim!” She opened the window. “Shut the fuck up”—and slammed it down.

  Her suitor stood his ground and pined.

  Akim Ben Laden was the official campus nutcase. Born Arthur Horowitz, he’d changed his name and other things in rebellion against his father, a conservative rabbi from Scarsdale who had beaten his son in chess relentlessly ever since he taught him the game at the age of two, with nary a smile, either sympathetic or gloating. He also insisted they play every night after supper, sitting across from each other at the dining room table cleared of kosher plates, where Akim would grow grimmer and grimmer year after year, and his father would sit statue-still wearing a green eyeshade beneath his black yarmulke. In the last game they were ever to play, so intent on his winning streak was the humorless if focused rabbi, he’d failed to notice that his son was wearing a white kaffiyeh, a blue terrycloth bathrobe, and green talaria sandals with little leather wings at the ankles, which became his signature outfit.

  Shortly afterward, Akim founded the Arab League at Scarsdale High School, along with the Loyal Sons of Mohammed and the OPEC Social Club. Of all these extracurricular groups, he was the only member, as even the Muslim students at Scarsdale were leery of him, especially after he called himself a half-Sunni and half-Shia Iraqi, and was given to kicking in the door of his own locker. He was also tossed out of several mosques because he’d never figured out the correct way to face Mecca. At graduation, he received a sound beating at the hands of a bunch of Arab and Jewish boys, the only such cooperative venture in local memory.

  “Matha! My love!”

  “I’m not kidding, Akim!”—opening and slamming the window again.

  Matha hated her sister Kathy, the most aggressive real estate agent on Long Island’s East End, which was saying something. But in her hidden heart she envied her sister’s success in business and hoped to eclipse her. She was nineteen years younger than Kathy. Beaulieu and Luelle, once they’d observed the development of their firstborn child, had been reluctant to create another. Their second daughter was named in the hospital, when Luelle was watching the Today show. She was suffering from postpartum depression, which accounted for her emotional reaction to the appearance of the up-and-coming Martha Stewart. Luelle was overcome with admiration for the pies Ms. Stewart was effortlessly baking, particularly the peach, and she hoped that if she named her baby Martha, the girl would grow up to be someone of equal stature and importance.

  “We’ll close down this place tighter ’n shit!” said Matha, who never uttered what Daddy called cuss words back home but, liberated at Beet, cursed a blue streak. Only sometimes she would get overexcited, and the words were misapplied. “Tighter ’n shit!”

  So, she’d transferred in her junior year, shortly after the unfortunate business with Professor Portebelloe of Magnolia Blossom’s Comparative Literature Department (the scandal drove Dawb into solitary despair in an A-frame in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he carved pickaninny dolls from balsa wood and beheaded them). Portebelloe was kicked out, but Matha got a note from her doctor, her uncle Delray, explaining she was afflicted with gerontophilia, and was not accountable for her actions.

  A fistful of pebbles rattled the window. Bagtoothian was startled. “Couldn’t I kill him?” he asked Matha. “It’d only take a minute.”

  Until her arrival at Beet she had never set foot north of Port Deposit, Maryland, and yet it took her no more than two weeks to shed—or, as it turned out, to temporarily place in storage—her southern accent, replace it with a shrill and clipped Yankee voice, start writing poetry, and most important to her, call herself Matha, a name of her invention that seemed both hard and precise and feminine too—the female Math, a bouquet made of numbers. Not only was the name exotic, it was worlds removed from the name she was born with. (What would those sophisticated northern intellectuals make of Martha Stewart Polite?) She insinuated herself into Beet’s student radical movement, which she could tell required leadership. It had appealed to her at once, since she could see that underneath their scowls, the students were not all that different from the ones she’d left behind at Magnolia Blossom.

  The Beet radicals of today, a much smaller group than the radical students of the 1960s, had no Vietnam to march against. They were uninterested in Iraq because they could not be drafted to fight there. They had no minorities to defend, because they didn’t want to.

  From time to time the radicals would amuse themselves by testing the sympathy limits of the faculty or simply stirring the pot. They’d tell the people at the Robert Bly Man’s Manliness Society that Marigold Jefferson of the I Am Woman Center was entertaining its members by screening Deliverance. They compared everyone they disagreed with to Hitler. It was Matha’s group that agitated for the latest entry in the course catalog—Nippocano Studies: Where Tokyo Meets Tijuana. They’d meant it as a gag, but once established, it was oversubscribed.

  Their favorite faculty sympathizer was Tufts Godwin, who headed the Sensitivity and Diversity Council and who was known as Professor Sensodyne behind his back. They would come to him with some concocted grievance against another professor, any other professor, whose tongue slipped, causing him to say Miss rather than Ms., or who referred to a woman as beautiful. They would get Professor Sensodyne to insist that the insulting party make a public apology on the lawn of the Old Pen or take a course in sensitivity training. They would show Godwin their appreciation, but with niggardly zeal. Last spring, BWAP (Beet Women Against Pigs) voted him the “Professor Most Sensitive to Women’s Issues.” But when he showed up to accept the trophy—a plaster-of-par
is bust of Rosie O’Donnell inscribed “Noli me tangere”—the women refused to allow him into the meeting because he was a man. Professor Sensodyne said he understood perfectly.

  “He’s such a shithole!” said Matha.

  Then there was the matter of “niggardly zeal” itself, which phrase had been used in a lecture by a careless astronomy professor a couple of years back, and which almost got him fired for his vocabulary. Like all such incidents, this one flared from dustup to furor in less than a day, mainly because rather than letting bad enough alone, the accused made the grave error of trying to explain himself by calling a public meeting to which he brought Webster’s Dictionary to supply the correct definition of niggardly. The black students at Beet, all eighty-seven, weren’t bothered by the professor’s usage, and had not raised an eyebrow, much less a voice, against the man. But the Beet radicals, all white, and all five of them, arrived at the meeting in blackface, called for the professor’s head, and nearly got it, showing niggardly zeal.

  “Matha! Come down! Live with me. I’m moving to a cave! We can be happy in a cave!”

  None of these issues was sincerely meant because the students’ passions went elsewhere.

  What the new radicals at Beet wanted to do was nothing—not to attach themselves to any existing political movement or party, not to do public service and read Harry Potter to blind kids, or teach “The Wheels on the Bus” to old people with spittle on their faces, not to put up a Habitat for Humanity house for “some dimwit in New Orleans who couldn’t understand a weather report,” not to go help some struggling mosquito-ridden country in Africa, or some bird-flu-infected country in Asia, not to build new democratic institutions or to infiltrate existing institutions or companies and radicalize them from the inside or to take the antipodal direction and live on communes, make babies named for vegetables, and smoke dope. Their aims were at once minimal and anarchic. Since in their estimation there was no cause worth marching for and no America waiting to welcome them to its employ, they figured why not simply stop—quit classes, quit college, and if possible go home and live with one’s folks? That vision plus the pleasant prospect of doing nothing with one’s life is what the students were willing to fight for.