Moo (6 page)

One profitable practice, in Dr. Gift’s view, was meeting with the committee once or twice before any departmental materials were referred to it, and so he sent out a memo calling a meeting in the second week of classes, and so he reserved the economics seminar room, and so he sat at the head of the walnut seminar table and watched the other members file in.

Dr. Helen Levy, professor of foreign languages (French and Italian), set down her thermos of black coffee and nudged her briefcase under the table with her foot. She considered this meeting the real beginning of the school year because this committee, which she had sat on the previous year, had a way of burdening your life. She glanced around, smiling at each member as he or she came in. The group, for the first time ever, was a miracle of political correctness, an unstable compound that on this overwhelmingly white, male campus would mutate after this year to the more usual, and more comfortable, ratio of all white men except for one “designated minority.” This year, though! Helen smiled right at old Gift, the complacent fool. His habit of oily pontification, with which he had greased every conflict last year, greased it and greased it until out of misplaced deference or simple fatigue the committee had given in, that habit wouldn’t do him a bit of good this year. Helen had sat on other committees with all of these people, deplored all the time spent in meaningless argument, but this time, however fatuous in substance, the effects she foresaw in balking old Gift would be splendid indeed. She said, “Well, Lionel, have a pleasant vacation?”

“Vacation?”

“Summer recess.”

“Oh, yes. Well, the weather was pleasant, but of course my work proceeds seamlessly, year-around.”

“Getting and spending?” Helen smiled.

“More or less, yes. On many levels, yes. A cogent way of putting it.”

Dr. William Garcia, professor of psychology, could see them taking up their roles as soon as they walked into the meeting room. Father Lionel, humorless, even, you might say, witless, big with gravity though actually a rather small man. Mother Levy, full of a feminine power that was profound but essentially reactive, bringing sustenance in the form of coffee to the meeting, which she would certainly offer around at some point. Sister Bell, the youngest, perhaps the most brilliant, probably (and she hadn’t even opened her mouth, and Garcia had never actually met her before) the most recalcitrant (though she would experience her recalcitrance as authentic rebellion). Brother John Vernon Cates, a black man who had fled to science and would fruitlessly strive to bring “facts” to bear on every conflict between Mom and Dad. And finally himself, of course, a lifelong mediator—he could already feel the tension and it already hurt him. He was better in groups of boys, as he had been great, in his youth, on the playground, big enough, quick enough, good-looking enough, well-meaning enough, good at sports. Most men, in fact, were competent in groups that mimicked the playground, incompetent in groups that mimicked the family; that was why all-male committees ran the most smoothly. He had published a paper about it in the
Journal of Social Psychology
that had been cited in fourteen other papers. He was not sanguine about this year’s committee work, foresaw a tangle of controversies involving every member’s whole personality structure, with appeals to professionalism (which often worked in groups of men) ineffectual and resented. He said, “Professor Levy. Weren’t we on the parking committee together some years ago? I seem to remember that.”

“Oh! The parking committee! I thought the perk for that would be a special permit or something. Do you know I got ten tickets that year? Would you like a cup of coffee? There are some cups over there. This is a nice French roast.”

Garcia shook his head. “This late in the day, it disagrees with me.”

There, they had done it. She had made him her son, and he had
made her his mom, and made himself sickly, to boot. He could say almost anything for the rest of the semester, and she would probably agree with it. He looked at old Gift, who was grinning, as usual. Did they call economics the dismal science? They should have saved the term for psychology.

Dr. Margaret Bell, a brand-new full professor of English at thirty-four years old, who had been the most heavily recruited faculty member in the history of the English department eight years before, thought that serving on committees with Cates the Chemist was the bane of her existence. Student Judicial Committee, Minority Student Affairs Steering Committee, Black Studies Hiring Committee, Dean Search Committee, Black Awareness Month Committee, Library Committee, Faculty Senate Salary Committee. She had served on eight university-wide or college-wide committees that took up an average of four hours per week. When she had called her dissertation advisor at Harvard and complained about this, she had been told, “You have two courses of action and you have to pursue them both. Draw the line at one committee per year, and work to hire more black faculty members so that you can spread the wealth around.” Well, she had gotten used to the committee work, and often used the time to think through knotty logical points in papers she was writing, but she hadn’t gotten used to Cates the Chemist, who had the least amount of personality she had ever encountered in a man, much less a black man. After years with him, listening to him talk, following the train of his thoughts, she had diagnosed his problem as some sort of brain damage that had left him without instincts. His entire response to every stimulus was cerebral and had to be thought through. Dr. Bell, who urged her students to call her “Margaret,” thought it one of the weirdest disabilities she had ever seen, and she might have regarded it with dispassionate interest except that he also considered it his responsibility to discount the instincts of others and draw the regard of the committee back to “facts.” He always did this in measured tones, usually after she had spoken, as if in reaction to some wild irrationality that she represented. In social situations, he was overly formal, as if all he had to offer was exceptional manners. His wife was from Ghana, a pleasant woman but hard to get to know, and amused at Margaret’s single status. Her usual greeting when they met was “And how old are you now, Miss Bell?” as if she had some sort of right, earned through marriage, to take an interest in Margaret’s personal life. Margaret knew she was from a village, one of the twenty-seven children
of a man with five wives, so she had decided this interest was kindly, but even Margaret’s mother had given up asking her about men, so where did Cates the Chemist’s Wife get off? Margaret pursed her lips and said to Helen Levy, “I heard you spent the summer in the French Alps?”

“A month, just a month, but delicious. How about you?”

“I did an NEH seminar at Princeton with Carol Gilligan.”

“I’m impressed. How was it?”

“I’m still suspicious, reluctant, full of doubts, but the seminar was great.”

“Ready?” orated Dr. Lionel Gift.

John Vernon Cates looked at him and wondered by what strange and tortured intellectual process economics had come to be known as a science.

Meanwhile, Dr. Gift had sized them up. Of the four, Garcia and Cates were the most likely to bring in a corporate grant large enough to dent the budgetary shortfall the provost had told him about. Cates’ lifetime figure was pretty impressive. More corporations were interested in atomic clusters than you might suspect. Garcia wasn’t far behind Cates, because he sometimes studied corporate life, and corporations loved to be found interesting and worthy of study. He glanced at Bell. An unknown quantity, and he was a little afraid of black women, anyway. So he said, “Helen? How about taking notes today.”

Professor Levy lifted toward him her coldest smile, and said, “Lionel, forget it.”

They stared at each other until Dr. Garcia, with a sigh of resignation, took out a pen and a yellow pad.

F
OR MANY YEARS
, the chairman of the horticulture department, known to himself as “Chairman X,” had lobbied to change the start date of the fall semester to September 10, the average first frost date for the university’s climatic region. Chairman X was an observant man, and he had noticed that one day every year, right around the first frost date, everyone on the campus woke up refreshed, the local news media referred to “good sleeping weather,” and the work of the semester moved into high gear. For the horticulture department, of course, this sense of new beginnings was mixed with the end of the growing season. The plant succession that had begun in March with snowdrops and early crocuses would soon flicker out in a blaze of orange chrysanthemums and show its last pinpoints of color in bittersweet and ash berries hanging like embers in the general misty brown of the world.
That
was the time to be sitting indoors and reading books, the time to be glancing out windows and reflecting, and even if the university population at large didn’t know that, their bodies felt it. Nevertheless, Chairman X had let his efforts in this direction slide. The task of putting thirty-two thousand people in touch with their senses was finally beyond him.

It was, in fact, September 10, always an important date to him, as was May 20, at the other end of the season, when he noticed that something was going on in Old Meats. There were, of course, no lighted windows, no vehicular activity. There was only the sight of a student entering the door beside the loading dock, using a key. When Chairman X tried the lock a few minutes later, the door did not budge. Chairman X resumed his inspection of the perennial border, which was still blooming vigorously because the first frost was later than average this year, but he did not move on to the experimental beds, instead returning to the beginning of the perennial border. His inspection had now become a pretense, and he self-consciously fingered leaves and stems and blossoms, looking for signs of parasites or disease. He had already decided, for example, that planting delphiniums
annually was becoming too much trouble, and that perhaps delphiniums referred too cravenly to eastern and English gardens. Perhaps it was time to break away more decisively from that model. Taking up the delphiniums once and for all would constitute a statement about where this garden was, what that meant. He straightened up. A boy in a blue shirt, certainly the same student who had gone into Old Meats, was walking away from the building, already a good fifty paces off. Chairman X called, “Hey!” but the boy didn’t hear him, or at least didn’t stop, and Chairman X decided not to run after him, only to note him, and to resolve that he would get to the bottom of this mystery. Actually, Chairman X was surprised to discover in himself this sense of jealous proprietorship over Old Meats, but that’s the way it was, wasn’t it? Even the ugliest and most worthless pieces of property had the power to set your feet upon the capitalist road.

When most people thought of the campus, they thought of the buildings and their distinctive features—the bell tower of Lafayette Hall across the quad from the complementary dome of Columbus Hall, one housing higher administration, the other housing the school of agriculture. Other buildings ranged from these in two casual arms—Auburn Hall, Pullman Hall, Corvallis Hall, the Frankfort College of Engineering, Ithaca Hall, the Clemson School of Art and Design. Some of these buildings were notable for their architecture, others notable because they needed to be rebuilt and modernized, but as a group they made a harmonious backdrop, to Chairman X, for the many grand trees that had been planted among them, maples, oaks, Russian olives, redbuds, dogwoods, dark glades of Douglas fir. For a week in spring, pink and white crab apples planted everywhere made a fragrant heaven of the campus. The early tree man who had planned and planted all these trees had been an unsung genius. It had, in fact, taken Chairman X a whole semester, off and on, to find out his name, which was Michael Hailey. Shortly thereafter, the horticulture department had raised the funds for a granite bench to be placed in the fir glade, inscribed “to the shade of Michael Hailey, who gave us this shade.”

But not only did Chairman X rarely consider the buildings as an important factor on the campus, he never considered the campus as anything but an arbitrary thought, a passing microclimate. What he felt and saw were the larger, gently rolling sweep of the deep geosyncline far below (still, in fact, rising, though infinitesimally), the layers of rock and aquifer (Bozeman shales, Burlington limestones, with
upthrusting Laramie sandstones) above that, the skin of subsoil and topsoil above that, then the whispering interface between earth and atmosphere, and the humid, thick air that was prey to every weather system sweeping from the west. And above that the jet stream, above that the sidereal realm of the astronomy department.

The mutable, almost fluid landscape where the campus sat like a stone in a stream rolled gently downward from the northwest to the southeast, a hospitable slope that ended in low bluffs overlooking the Orono River. All the ponds and creeks on the campus emptied into a tributary of the Orono, the Red Stick, which ended in a small man-made lake, Red Stick Lake. Most of the time, the Army Corps of Engineers allowed moderate flow from there into the Orono. To the west, low morainal hills rose in a semicircle, and Chairman X had found many rare plants in the thin hardwood forests that clad those slopes. The earliest white settlers in the region had known clearly enough that the hills were better for hunting than plowing, and for that Chairman X gave thanks.

The campus tempted most of its denizens to nest—to crawl into their books and projects and committee work and pull their self-absorption over their heads like bedcovers, but Chairman X never lost the sense of that slope, and the sweep of forces across it. Whatever was produced on the campus, from toxic waste to ideas, flowed uncontrollably into the world, and, frankly, it made him nervous. Even those whose lives consisted of giving advice to everyone from home orchardists to national governments around the world displayed this odd sleepiness, in the view of Chairman X, but of course his view, often expressed, was not a popular one. The Lady X, the woman he would have been married to by now if they had remembered to get married and found a convenient time (in a few years, when the children would be at summer camp?), told him that he was misinterpreting the mid western demeanor from the perspective of his own East Coast impatience, but as usual, he felt, she was too forgiving. She didn’t know Nils Harstad, after all, the dean of extension and everything Chairman X deplored.