Beet Read online

  He had hair the color of a Hershey bar, and wore round rimless eyeglasses and a thick mustache with a neatly trimmed beard—all of which could not disguise his boyish face or an expression that bore a rapturous love of learning. Max was from Lindaville, Alabama (pop. 4,600 where his father owned the feed store. Until he’d arrived at the Beet train station, he’d never taken a taxi before. Until he met Professor Porterfield, he’d wanted to take the taxi back. Max was encumbered with a tendency never to say a thing he didn’t mean, but was otherwise suited for college life. When he went to report his discovery to his favorite professor, he recalled the Wallace Stevens lines he’d learned in one of Peace’s classes, about the nothing that was not there and the nothing that is.

  “You’re kidding,” said Peace, who thanked the boy for the tip about the Moore and headed from the English Department to the New Pen to see the nothing for himself. How to explain it? The abduction might have been a Halloween prank from the previous night, though the prankster would have had to use a crane and two large flatbed trucks, one for each reclining half.

  Thinking he was the bearer of news, Peace strode toward College Hall and into the president’s office. The door read DR. LEWIS HUEY. The “Dr.” was honorary, awarded by Huey to Huey at his inauguration.

  “You won’t believe this,” Peace said to Huey, who did. The missing Moore did not at all come as a surprise to the president, who explained that upon conferring with Joel Bollovate (conferring being his word), he’d had the sculpture removed and taken to Rockport. Peace asked why.

  “To sell it,” said Huey, as blithely as if he’d been asked why beavers build dams.

  “Sell it? Sell a Henry Moore? How could you do that?” The question was not merely accusatory. Apart from the absurdity of selling an invaluable work of art, how, legally, could the college make a profit off what had been a munificent gift? The Moore had been donated in 1954 (when alumni were still making munificent gifts to Beet) by a local wealthy mortgage broker who never liked it, and quipped during the transfer that he’d just had the thing lying around. College officials chuckled politely and grabbed up the sculpture.

  “Oh, the legal stuff is taken care of,” said Huey, leaning back in his chair, his arms cradling his head like a pair of angel wings, and looking both in charge and scared witless. “Joel Bollovate explained it all to me. Actually, selling the Moore was Joel’s idea [as if Peace needed to be told that]. I think the college is going to realize $14 million, before Joel’s commission.”

  “He took a commission?”

  “Business is business.” Huey could rearrange his face, which had the folds of a shar-pei’s, to suit any situation. This one called for the look of an insider. “That’s what Joel said.”

  “Great,” said Peace, who saw nothing more could be accomplished by talking to Huey.

  The selling of the Henry Moore was but the latest in Beet’s commercial ventures since Bollovate had taken over as chairman of the board. Last fall, the college launched an effort to sell various parts of the campus—not to be removed, as was the Moore, but rather to display the names of the donors. Their efforts had been impeded by the first faint whispers about the college’s closing, suggesting that the trustees were advertising immortality but selling obsolescence.

  They began by offering whole structures that bore no names as yet, from the departmental offices to the indoor garage to the field house and the football field itself, where for one million dollars one could have one’s name carved permanently into the fifty-yard line. Since the teams, both home and visitors, rarely made it as far as the fifty, the donor’s name was likely to remain pristine.

  When there were no takers for the million-dollar names, the college offered individual slabs and bricks in the buildings for anything from $10,000 for a brick to $25,000 for a slab. But again, no buyer was interested. They tried to sell the paving stones on the pathways for $500 apiece, calling it a “Walk of Fame,” and were rejected even by Donald Trump, whom Bollovate called a “close personal friend.” (Bollovate was called the same thing by Mr. Trump.) Finally, they offered the parquet floor tiles in the vestibule of the student center for $5 a tile. Here they made a sale. Gregory, the security guard, bought one for four one-dollar bills, three quarters, two dimes, and two pennies (the college forgave the difference). After his name was inscribed he would sneak away from the front gate, stare at his purchase, and murmur, “Rhandor.”

  There even was talk of making Latin the Pig available for branding. The Bring Home the Bacon butchers offered $500 to have its name burned into Latin’s hide. But when the students got wind of it, they staged an “Ightnay orfay Atinlay in which the pig was paraded back and forth, albeit carefully, and was cheered lustily with “Avesay Our Igpay!” They took up a collection and raised $500 to keep Latin brand-free. The honoree spewed his gratitude all round.

  On the cost-cutting side of the ledger, Mrs. Whiting was told that her workweek in the English Department was to be limited to three days, and her salary reduced proportionately. When Peace learned of it, he offered to help her out with extra work. She declined with thanks and a what-can-you-do shrug.

  If there were a third side to the ledger, it would show that the college continued to accept applications for the following year—and more to the point, Bollovate’s point—application fees. Manning observed to Peace that while other colleges were competing for students by offering discounts, laptops, and other swag, Beet had its hands in their pockets.

  “And if we close shop,” said Manning, “there won’t be enough lawyers in Massachusetts to handle the lawsuits. Wait and see.”

  There was more: “Did you know Huey is requiring quarterly reports from the departments?” Manning asked Peace. “No, of course you didn’t. You live on a higher plane.”

  “Quarterly reports on what?”

  “Enrollment. Income from tuition. Price points. Yields. In short—” Peace started to make the time-out T. “Yes! The bottom line. I keep trying to explain this to you. It’s simple. Ask for an accounting every three months, and the employees—you and I—start to run scared. We have to meet expectations, like any Wall Street–driven company. We have to produce—in an institution where the product isn’t visible. The goal is money, man, and make it quick. So, what does one do to show a gain every quarter? Lower! Lower quality, lower standards. You think you’re going to draw new students without diluting what little we have left?”

  “I’m going to try,” said Peace.

  “Well, good luck, my boy. But the fact is, we’ve plunged straight to the bottom line and are headed down from there. Did I ever tell you my theory about that?”

  The way things were going, Peace was not very hopeful he would persuade Bollovate the sale of the Moore was ill-advised, as some of his colleagues might say, or as Livi might, crooked, stupid, and wrong. Nonetheless, Livi’s Candide decided to give it a shot and make the one-hour drive to Bollovate’s office in Cambridge, in one of the new high-rises near Harvard Square. After all, he reasoned, only two weeks earlier Bollovate had said the college could be saved by a new curriculum. Why sell off valuable property?

  But Bollovate had a previous appointment in Boston, and only a minute to spare. He was just finishing a large bowl of succotash, his favorite dish. On his desk lay antique paper pressed between glassine sheets.

  “Are those surveys?” Peace asked. “They look old. Colonial?”

  “Yeah. I’m interested in property lines.”

  “For developments?”

  “Yeah. For developments.”

  Peace scanned the office. The walls were covered with framed bank checks, the trophies of a lifetime of real estate deals. One dated back to a Lego set Bollovate had sold to a schoolmate at the age of nine. He’d cleared $4.25 on that one.

  On either side of Bollovate’s desk stood flags on poles. One was the American flag; the other, the standard of Bollocorps, which was bright green and showed a smiling house with a sign on the lawn reading sold! In a corner leaned a
gold-plated shovel bearing the legend “To J. B., Man of the Soil.”

  Bollovate scraped his bowl clean and stood to leave, saying merely that the sale of the Henry Moore was a sweetheart of a deal, that the buyer, whom he called a sucker, grossly overpaid, that Beet needed the dough, or hadn’t Peace noticed, and good-bye.

  “If I were you, Professor Porterfield”—leading Peace down the elevator and out the door—“I’d focus on curricular reform, and leave the fund-raising to the trustees, who know what they’re doing. Us bean counters—remember? Temporary fugit. Carpet diem. Time’s a-wastin’. Come to think of it, how’s your committee coming along?”

  “We’re getting there,” Peace lied. “But is losing a Henry Moore a smart way to raise funds?”

  Bollovate settled the iron belly into the black pleather of the back seat of his Cadillac Escalade and motioned his driver to move on. He waved to Peace like the Queen. The tinted window rose shut, leaving the professor standing on the sidewalk in front of the Harvard Coop confronting his own reflection in the dark glass, and looking like, well, a professor.

  Yet Bollovate was right; time was a-wastin’. And after nine committee meetings so far, Peace was seeing a lot more waste in his future. For the hell of it, he’d again asked Manning to join the committee. Manning ducked as though a missile had been aimed at his head.

  “That’s what you do,” said Peace.

  “What’s that?”

  “Duck.”

  Manning shrugged.

  Faculty members not on the CCR were free to carp about it, which they had done for the past two weeks, and which they did about most things that did not require their direct participation. Their glee at what they supposed would be the committee’s destined failure was somewhat compromised by the fact that when it failed, they’d be out of work.

  Not that the pedagogical life at the college came to a stop during this time, or even a pause. Courses in the Old Pen limped on as ever. Students found them adequate (barely), yet the traditional courses seemed country cousins compared with the New Pen offerings. Tried-and-true concentrations like English, history, and government had perhaps grown too tried-and-true—not because of any overt failings so much as because professors had lost confidence in them. They were too aware of the hipper classes occurring on the other side of College Hall, even though the crowds of students were often attracted to the New Pen because the courses were both easier and loopy. To be fair, this was not true of them all, or of all the parts of any one. Still, professors in the New Pen smirked at those in the Old, who smirked back at them for opposite reasons. It all came out even. Students bored to tears with the traditional offerings produced tears of rage or derision at the new ones, as Akim Ben Laden did regarding Homeland Security. Until or unless an interesting curriculum might be devised (did anyone really think it would happen?), the status quo remained in less jeopardy than the college.

  Undergraduate organizations continued to solicit new members, though they had a hard time persuading their fellow students to join up when the college was about to buy the farm. Hardy nonetheless, they set up their booths in the Pens and waited—the Beet Buddhist and Karate Club, Bengalis Unite, Berliners for Rebuilding the Wall, WPIG, Jacobean Bloodletters, Brothers for Lynn Cheney, Baptists for Fornication, Equestrian Hillel, Christians for Jesus, Pre-Raphaelite Readers ( James Lattice, pres.), Haitian Ballroom Dancing, Fuck Foucault, Chicana Frisbee, and Up with Goats. Only a handful of students stopped by the booths, which sagged like a bazaar after a rainstorm. Even the usually oversubscribed Future Animated Sitcom Writers of America and Future Network Presidential Historians drew no one.

  In the wider world, news of Beet’s predicament was seeping into America without incurring too much agitation, at least initially, supporting Manning’s prediction about public opinion on American colleges. On October 20 the trustees had sent out a press release about the possible closing, and the proposed solution to the problem. But it was phrased so positively, the papers that picked it up featured the story as little more than a filler. Other American colleges were in similar fixes, even if the loss of a whole endowment was unusual, but who pays attention to the autarkies of nonprofits?

  Still, the arthritic Beet alumni distributed over the country at the Beet Club of Cincinnati and the Beet Clubs of Bismarck, Kalamazoo, Walla Walla, and elsewhere, cocked their heads when they read the item on page 7 or page 8 below the fold. The news especially irked the oldest Beet families, whose New England names were on the dorms and whose frowsy scions dwelled in mansions with peeling paint near Brattle Street in Cambridge. They hobbled around unpolished floors on aluminum canes, wore cardigans with holes at the elbows, cooked popcorn on hot plates, and watched black-and-white TVs with rabbit ears that rested on piles of unopened bills. Their thermostats were kept at 60 degrees. At the Beet commencements, they hailed each other in loud patrician voices, usually in the middle of someone’s speech.

  But they were not to be trifled with. When they recalled the locations of their Remington typewriters, they fired off furious letters. They yelled in surround-sound. What the hell was going on? And who was this Bollovate anyway? A JEW? A WOP? A NEGRO?

  Slowly the world of education was becoming riled as well. Beet College no more? Coca-Cola no more? The Ford Motor Company no more? Some institutions simply represent the breed. And Beet was one of these. When people wanted to indicate natural intelligence, they would say, “Well, I may not have gone to Beet, but…” Lesser institutions would identify themselves as “the Beet of the South” or “the West.” High schools judged it an official “reach” college. And those who did get in were hated for it all their lives.

  Perhaps the surest indication of its catbird seat among American colleges was that Beet undergraduates never admitted they went there. Instead, when asked, they’d say they went “to school north of Boston” or (rarely) “to school southeast of Derry, New Hampshire.” Everyone knew what they meant thus, to avoid saying Beet outright was doubly irritating.

  The disappearance of Beet was unthinkable except to those who thought about it. So the college turned to its head of public relations, Jerry Jejunum, who’d been picked for the job because he was born with an indentation in the parietal lobe that made him incapable of telling the truth. Jerry composed a form letter assuring all concerned not to be concerned; “Dear old Beet will soon be on its feet.” He hoped his mantra would catch on nationwide.

  But Manning was right about the parents of Beet undergraduates, who, not so easily gulled, asked, “Why exactly am I paying forty thousand?”

  November now lay upon the campus like a painter’s drop cloth splotched with zinc grays and badger grays and destroyer grays. The month marked the onset of New England’s murder/suicide season, in which Homer, tired of staring at the back of Jethro’s head for the past thirty years, decides to blow it off, followed by his own. In this season, one recalls only one’s mistakes and wrongdoings. Large quantities of sleeping pills change hands, as do copies of Ethan Frome. Phone calls are placed to high school sweethearts of years past. Viewers are glued to C-Span.

  Driving back from Bollovate’s, Peace figured he had seven weeks to fulfill the trustees’ assignment—less than that, actually, since the Christmas holidays started on December 21, and final exams were the week before that. The board had asked for the report before the end of term. Counting backward, he calculated it had to be ready for the full faculty meeting scheduled for December 19, as Matha Polite had guessed, when it would be voted up or down. Yet in this case, down would not be acceptable. Down meant down for the ship. The new curriculum, whatever it might be, not only had to win the support of the Beet College faculty, but the support had to be all-out—a daunting task, since there were more political constituencies on the faculty than professors.

  Parents Weekend was coming up, along with Veterans Day. Then, too, there was a whole set of new college holidays that would intervene between now and the end of term, and on which no committee work, or work of any kind, cou
ld be done.

  Sensitivity Day, always scheduled for early November, was established to memorialize the community triumph in 1998, when especially sensitive college faculty, students, and Beet citizens (the number totaled eleven)—led by Professor Sensodyne—won their bitter fight against the town council to replace the Slow Children street signs with Please Be Careful As Younger People May Be Entering the Roadways signs. The group determined that the former signs conveyed a “hurtful insult” to mentally disadvantaged youngsters everywhere, and, after a five-year battle of attrition, prevailed. For the council there were two issues at stake. One was that the proposal was “horseshit,” and the other, that the extra words on the warnings would increase the size of the signs and the steel and paint used in their manufacture, and would cost the town an additional $28,000 a year. But the opposing group asked, “What price sensitivity?”

  The answer turned out to be, “Higher than you think,” since the additional $28,000 had to come out of the fund for a special wing for the mentally disadvantaged at a nearby children’s hospital.

  “It’s my favorite holiday,” Manning told Peace every year. “I celebrate by torturing small animals in front of toddlers, and vice versa.”

  On Sensitivity Day some years back, Manning counted how many times Hitler’s name had been invoked. He’d reckoned it was twice more than during the Third Reich.

  There were panels on reparation payments proposed for any people ever harmed by the U.S. government. The list of injurees began with African-American descendents of slaves and was soon expanded to include Koreans, the Vietnamese, Granadans, Panamanians, Bosnians, Cubans, the French and Indians, the British, and as an afterthought, the Germans and Japanese. There were seminars on how to address older people, shorter people, taller people, and lately, poorly-thought-of people who heretofore had been overlooked, such as dentists, lawyers, airline employees, congressmen, senators, cable TV installers, building contractors, and insensitive people themselves. Journalists were on the list initially, but Professor Lipman persuaded the group that to call journalists not-well-thought-of would be “hurtful.”