The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (11 page)

When the vegetable soup had been removed and the napkins still lay rolled in their napkin rings before the empty places, he slipped out into the hall to telephone, pausing to glance at himself in the men’s room mirror, where he saw only bright delft-blue eyes, flat, rather wooden features with a certain set of resolve to the jaw, and a Bermuda Christmas tan that gave a “finish” to the whole, like a wax stain on floorboards. This simulacrum reassured him; he caulked his face for the inquiry. “Give me the Co-op,” he murmured, legato, to Switchboard, with a sliding determination in his voice. The store phone was finally answered by Mrs. Tryk, the Co-op or soda-shop manageress, who shouted into it as usual in a surly, contumelious tone. “This is Mr. Furness,” he said lightly. “I had an appointment with Mrs. Fortune. I wondered if she could have mistaken it and be waiting for me in the store.” “Not here now,” called Mrs. Tryk. Howard sent his smile over the wire. “Would you mind looking around for me and seeing if any of the other people from my department are there? Or Mr. Bentkoop or Mrs. Legendre? They might be able to tell me where she is.” “Nobody here but Fraenkel of History and Mulcahy. Do you want to talk to them?” Having obtained this much information, Furness lifted an eyebrow—so Mulcahy, who regularly went home to lunch, was eating in the Co-op! But where, in that case, were the others? He felt this violation of the established pattern to be an offense first against himself and second against common decency. “Don’t trouble to get Dr. Mulcahy to the phone,” he said hastily. “Just ask him if he has seen Mrs. Fortune.” He added this latter merely for form’s sake; he felt a sudden unwillingness to know where any of them were.

“Hello, Howard.” Mulcahy’s rather ectoplasmic voice effused itself into Furness’ ear. Both men disliked each other intensely, under cover of departmental solidarity and a joint sponsorship of the same canon of authors. The Proust-Joyce-Mann course, in which they alternated from year to year, had been a buffer between them, Furness making it a point to stress Proust by innuendo over Joyce, for whom he felt no great sympathy, and Mulcahy vice versa. “Alma’s not here. Can I help you?” Furness, who combined crudeness with the sensitivity of the princess of the pea—in short, a raw man, well polished, a bright, country-green apple—distinctly heard an ooze of satisfaction percolate through the voice of his subordinate. Wherever she is, he knows, he said to himself with bitterness. The vindictive thought that this egregious fellow might at long last have been fired had more than once darted through his mind, yet the voice on the other end of the wire sounded more as if it had received a promotion. “No thanks, Hen,” he said shortly and moved to put up the receiver; the line, however, remained open—Henry was waiting, like an encouragement. “Are you through?” inquired the operator. “You haven’t seen Domna, have you, or Ivy?” Furness burst out, thickly, despite himself. His tone suddenly grew querulous, as when he had been drinking, and a wild feeling of loneliness drove him to abase himself. “Where is everybody, anyway? What’s up?” “Perhaps they’ve gone to Gus’s for a drink,” suggested Henry, too helpful. “Probably,” assented Furness, hanging up.

Mulcahy made his way back to his table, where the small scoop of chocolate ice-cream he had ordered was melting into the plastic and waxed paper chalice. He was, in fact, waiting for Domna, who had promised to fetch him for lunch some fifteen minutes ago and who had neither come nor telephoned. Yet he felt no particular apprehension; the fat was in the fire, and he had only to wait on the outcome; his fate and he had separated. Furness’ telephone call assured him, at any rate, that all was going according to schedule: six empty chairs in the faculty dining-room must be testifying, like a vacant jury-box, to a discussion of his peers still in progress. Here, in the near-empty shop, with Mrs. Tryk and her assistant engorging their noonday sandwiches at the table in the corner and Bill Fraenkel correcting some papers for an afternoon class, he had a sense of having crossed a Rubicon and of belonging no longer to himself but to history, a strange and yet restful experience, as though one part of him sat in a stage-box, watching with folded arms for the rise of the curtain, oblivious to the groundlings and their noise.

What interested him retrospectively, and just precisely, he thought, as an onlooker, was the question of how and when the risky inspiration had come to him. That Maynard considered him a Communist must have been a strong factor from the outset, yet as he had paused in the hall outside Domna’s door, listening thoughtfully to her and her student, he had not yet (he was certain) felt the metonymic urge that would prompt him, once in her office, to substitute the effect for the cause, the sign for the thing signified, the container for the thing contained. It was the artist in him, he presumed, that had taken control and fashioned from newspaper stories and the usual disjunct fragments of personal experience a persuasive whole which had a figurative truth more impressive than the data of reality, and hence, he thought, with satisfaction, truer in the final analysis, more universal in Aristotle’s sense. Evidently so, to judge by first results; there could be no doubt that Domna, just now, had experienced an instant
recognition
: of himself as the embodiment of a universal, the
eidos,
as it were, of the Communist, Lazarus to their Dives, the underground man appointed to rise from the mold and confront society in his cerements. That he had never, as it happened, chanced to join the Communist Party organizationally did not diminish the truth of this revelation.

Sitting here in the soda-shop, licking his little wooden spoon, he tried deliberately to re-imagine himself as a Communist, as the man he had just described to Domna, and perceived that, just as he had thought, very little adaptation was required. To
them,
he opined, glancing at the manageress and her assistant, who were conversing
sotto voce
over their pot of tea, he was a Communist already or worse, just as to Maynard Hoar he was a Communist or worse, i.e., an honest doubter who went to what meetings he chose, irrespective of the Attorney General’s list and the hue and cry in the colleges. And if they in their own minds and deeds equated him with a Communist, what more had he done just now than appropriate the label they dared not attach to him in their public pronouncements? By a faultless instinct, it would seem, he had been led to obey the eternal law of the artist,
Objectify,
or as James had put it and he himself was always urging his students,
Dramatize, dramatize!
Contemplating what he had done he felt a justified workman’s pride, which became tinctured, as he waited, with a drop or two of bitterness: he could imagine the hostile critics, the derogators, and detractors, finding flaws, carping, correcting, and above all minimizing, cutting him down to scale. Easy enough, he assured them, by hindsight to demonstrate the logic of the process, which was that of a simple reversal or transfer; anybody, having been shown, could do it a second time; yet the fact remained that he was the first, the very first, so far as he knew, in all history to expose the existence of a frame-up by framing himself first.

Naturally, he acknowledged, shrugging, there were holes in the story. Maynard, he dared say, would pretend to have had no previous knowledge of this “alleged” membership; trust dear Maynard to feign bewilderment, innocence, injury. But in the adage of the martyred President, which he heartily recommended to Maynard, you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The gullible public, he promised Maynard, would find that denial a mite hard to swallow when it put it together with the F.B.I.’s visit, the swift, peremptory dismissal, the victim’s open confession….

A little, secure smile glinted from his eyes and faded as, inadvertently, he caught sight of the clock. Fear suddenly reduced him; they had had time, and more than time, to come to a decision. Supposing they were asking for some piece of tangible evidence? He had not thought of this. Was it likely, he swiftly countered, that he would have kept his Party card in his desk at home for a student-sitter to discover? Or in a bank vault rented for the purpose? Nonsense, he remarked, crisply, turning his impatience on himself. What was proof in these days that anybody dreamed of looking for it? Who asked Miss Bentley for proof in a far more weighty context? In these days, it would be a work of supererogation to show that one had been a Communist; the rub was to show one had not been.

The idea that a man in his right mind would run the risk of proclaiming himself a Communist when the facts were the other way would simply occur to no one.
That
he could safely vouch for; the ordinary liberal imagination, he affirmed with a side glance at young Fraenkel, busy as a bee with his papers, could not encompass such a possibility. And it
was
of course a fantastic hazard—to that extent one should not blame Fraenkel and the others—one that few men alive would take and that he himself would not have risked this morning at many colleges outside of Jocelyn. In the present state of public opinion, all his advisers would tell him, he was inviting an academic lynching bee by such a gratuitous admission; if news of it percolated out West, thanks to some indiscretion of Domna’s, he would be open to prosecution for perjury. But this prospect, he observed with interest, did not daunt him; the choice he had just made in accepting himself as a Communist was having, he discovered, an extraordinary effect on his prejudices, as of liberation, such as a man might have in accepting himself as a homosexual. In fact, he could trace in himself a certain detached interest in the experience of being imprisoned, so that he felt rather defrauded by a vague recollection of having heard somewhere that perjury was not an extraditable offense.

On the other hand, he assured himself, the risk was not really so great as lesser minds would assume. He was gambling, as he had already pointed out to himself, on Maynard’s reputation as a liberal, which meant something to Maynard that the worldly would not understand, but, over and above this, on the element of fantasy in Jocelyn, which nobody would understand who had not witnessed the freakish character of its tides of opinion, the anomalies of its personnel, the madness of its methodology which had produced here a world like a child’s idea of China, with everything upside down. And as if to illustrate the point, the door now slowly opened to admit a blast of wind and Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones in galoshes and turban. “Good morning,” intoned Mr. Jones, inclining his long body from the hips, like an idol being bowed in a parade. “Are these ladies serving us, dear colleague?” he inquired in a deep, “cultured” voice, rhythmically unwrapping the turban, which proved to be an Argyle scarf. He made his way stiffly to the counter; the manageress paid him no heed. “May I implore a western sandwich?” he asked in a sonorous tone, addressing the room at large; his elongated, hanging-Christ profile was turned toward Mulcahy; one drooping brown eye slowly winked. “The kitchen’s closed,” shot out the manageress, addressing no one, in her turn, but stating this as a generalization. Henry bit his lips. “By whose authority?” he quietly challenged. Fraenkel’s Ever-sharp suddenly paused in its scribbling; there was a pregnant silence, till the manageress slammed down the teapot and pounded over to the counter. “I can give you ham-on-rye, Swiss-on-rye,” she cannonaded. “Swiss, if you please. A thousand thanks,” said Mr. Jones, bowing to Henry. “I was perishing for a bite to eat. May I join you?”

He took the plate which the manageress pushed toward him and balanced it on a cup of coffee. “This
is
a pleasure,” he announced, in that curious, careful voice that appeared to have an echo in it, like a
double entendre.
“May I tell you how much I enjoyed your performance at last Tuesday’s faculty meeting?” The notion that this Byzantine lay-figure was capable of factional feeling alerted Henry’s interest and made him conscious of a moral law behind the smallest actions, as though a stone had spoken up or a fish in a German fairy-tale. “What points especially struck you?” he queried, in a disengaged and considerate tone, which nevertheless had a little feeler behind it. “The scrambled eggs, my dear fellow. Delicious!” Jones uttered a two-note musical laugh. “I am very fond of a pun, though my friends tell me it is the lowest form of wit. Do you agree with that?” Henry was aware of a great disappointment. “Our two greatest writers, Shakespeare and Joyce, were accomplished punsters,” he said shortly. Mr. Jones took a bite of his sandwich. “Domestic, of course,” he sighed. “My wife tells me that our President would be more sympathetic with your protest if he were obliged to eat, like ourselves, from the commissary. My wife is a Corsican, you know; from Ajaccio.” He offered these credentials in a definitive tone, quite bewildering to Mulcahy, who did not understand what they were supposed to signify—that his wife was an expert on cookery or a woman of implacable passions? Nevertheless, Henry’s interest cautiously revived; strange bedfellows, he reflected; and yet an unexpected ally, discovered thus casually, deserved, he thought, generosity, like the prodigal son returning. “We are both under medical orders,” pursued Mr. Jones. “We neither smoke nor drink nor permit ourselves any gassy foods—hot breads, of course, foods fried in deep fat, fatty meats, commercial cakes made with baking powder…. Quite a hardship, we’ve found it, dining in commons. In our apartment, of course, there is a little hot plate, but my wife does not think it economical to purchase for two in your stores here. But if you will do us the honor …?” Henry’s pale eyes shifted; he felt his integrity compromised; yet he did not wish to offend. “My wife is not well,” he explained in a lowered voice. The idea of binding Mr. Jones to him privately, without yielding the social
quid pro quo
that Mr. Jones was angling for, gained a foothold in his mind, though experience bade him dislodge it: nothing in life was free, as he had learned to his bitter cost; the Joneses of this world, foiled of their pound of flesh, could become the most dangerous enemies. “It’s a heart and kidney condition brought about by the birth of our boy,” he quickly amplified, lest Jones begin to execute a withdrawal. “Nothing she won’t recover from, given complete rest. These extra-curricular activities required by the college have put too much of a strain on her; there’s low blood pressure too and a retroverted uterus. Our doctor privately tells me that those Saturday night dances might have killed her.” He was tempted now to go on, go the whole hog, but the door opened again, and it was Domna. He got up in haste from his chair and began to tie his muffler. “It’s been good to have this talk with you,” he murmured. “Let’s see each other again.” “By all means,” declared Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones, still seated. “I’ve been wanting such a time to ask you—do you know that delicious little thing of Maurice Baring’s …?” Domna was faintly smiling and dancing a little on her toes. “Ah, good morning, Miss Rejnev!” Mr. Jones began slowly to rise, like a fountain in the gardens of Allah. Henry turned up his overcoat collar and hurriedly took Domna’s arm; he had gone pale and his lips were bluish, as though he were already out of doors. “Another time,” he muttered. “An appointment….” His mittened hand agitated the door. “Your check, Mr. Mulcahy,” called the manageress, an accusing finger pointing to the table where the evidence, the ice-cream calyx, still remained. Trembling, he began to search his pockets; Domna paid, from her purse.