The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (3 page)

The girl looked at him curiously, waiting for him to go on. He felt a harsh desire to initiate that innocence, to ply it with brute facts, like drink. At the same time, he was aware that he ought to titillate her no longer. Her aroused curiosity was a temptation, which, having savored it, he must now in wisdom put aside. According to academic usage, the man must disappear into the pedagogue. He chose a book from her chair-arm.

“Sherwood Anderson,” he announced, reading from the spine. “And how did you like Windy MacPherson?” Yet even as he was speaking, he felt another, irresistible force take hold of him, not rudely but almost playfully, like a spring breeze. “Look, Sheila,” he murmured quickly, as if fearful of being overheard or interrupted. “Would you like me to tell you a secret?” The girl nodded, straining forward. He had consolatory visions of student petitions, torchlight parades, sit-down strikes in the classroom. He held her in suspense for a moment—like a conductor, he thought, with raised baton over the woodwinds of her feelings. “This morning, I was fired from Jocelyn.”

W
HAT THE STUDENT, SHEILA
McKay, replied to his confidence was: how terrible, Dr. Mulcahy; how awful to have to break such a piece of news to your wife. Among the still-filial section of the student-body, the Mulcahys were acclaimed as a very devoted couple, an ideal couple, the girls said; so wrapped up in each other. They were popular, especially, as chaperons at the regular Saturday night dances, with the fat girls, pale girls, pimpled boys, chinless boys who stiffly paired off in the drafty gymnasium decorated with bows of crepe paper, while the rougher element, scornful of the old self-play phonograph or cheap three-piece band, of the basketball nets and the Indian clubs, drove off in its convertible to Gus’s roadhouse or put on its pork-pie hat and buttoned its windbreaker and hitchhiked down the state highway to York or Lancaster or up to Harrisburg or chipped in on a gallon of red wine and made love on the couches of the darkened social rooms. In the brightly lit gymnasium, however, Catherine Mulcahy, née Riordan, led off with a boy-student, her pale-rimmed spectacles folded in their case for the night, her long heavy straight brown hair wound up high with a Spanish comb from which a white-lace mantilla descended. She wore her wedding-dress, a white satin and net concoction with a short train; crystal drops sparkled at her ears; lipstick outlined her thin lips; and the pale, somewhat watery blue of her eyes, the sharp cut of her nose, which ordinarily had a secretarial quiver, were lustered and softened with excitement and a heightened sexual aplomb. “Doesn’t Mrs. Mulcahy look
beautiful
?” the girls cried to their escorts, identifying Catherine’s triumph over four children, housekeeping, and poverty with their own trepidant emergence from the chrysalis of slacks and blue jeans, with the innocent magic of parties, rouge, low dresses, music, with everything silky, shining, glossy, transfigured, and yet everyday and serviceable, like a spool of mercerized cotton or a pair of transparent nylons reinforced at heel and toe.

And Dr. Mulcahy, by the serving-table, quaffing fruit-juice punch and crunching cookies, waving jubilantly to his wife, arguing the quantum theory with a physics or a pre-med student, impressed for the boys and girls the die of authority on the gala, as a more personable teacher could not have done. This ugly, a-social man, at home and suddenly garrulous in their midst, shedding his terrors for them as his wife shed her spectacles, imparted to each and every dancer a sense of privileged participation, of having been chosen and honored, as though their act of choice in inviting him set them under a new dispensation, eventfully apart from the rest. These were not the remarkable students but the diffident, unoffending minority who, anywhere else but Jocelyn, would have been on top of the heap; and the knowledge that here the prerogative of extending the invitation weekly, of securing a sitter for the children, fell to them, of all people, rather than to their elders and betters, made them feel almost apologetic; their undeserved good fortune, surely, was a reflection on the Jocelyn system of values.

In the eyes of such mild maiden freshmen as Sheila McKay and her two roommates, the dances came slowly to be conceived as an object-lesson to the college; this, declared the minority, timidly presenting its bill of particulars, is what we would like Jocelyn to be. To have a good attendance became urgent and exemplary, as winter closed in and beer-cans piled up in the leaf-choked rain-pipes of the boys’ dormitories and the poker-playing crowd kept the girls in the neighboring building awake all night Saturdays and swaggered in, unshaven, to Sunday breakfast in commons, boasting of no-hours sleep. Proselytization for the dances went on, concomitantly, at an intensified pace in the girls’ rooms—“
Don’t
go to Philadelphia
this
weekend; stay and go to the dance!” Having been taught by their mothers that the girl was always at fault if the boy drank or took liberties, the missioners applied this principle to the social situation at Jocelyn, and, perched on the foots of beds, in pajamas, with cold cream on their faces, in the bathroom with soap-dish and towel, argued earnestly against weekend absenteeism, indifferentism,
laisser aller,
capitulation to the status quo.

They knew that at bottom the inert majority felt as they did: the girls’ rooms they visited were decorated with the same rag-dolls and teddy-bears, pink kewpies won at shooting-ranges, poufs and taffeta comforters, Mickey Mouse lamps, pictures of Mummy and Daddy in silver frames; the boys still had their lariats and bridles, souvenirs of the rodeo, autographed baseballs, bird-books—often, on the athletic field, on a clear fall afternoon, a boy would be seen flying a pale-blue kite into the blue sky. And yet agreement, they sorrowfully learned to recognize, was not tantamount to active adherence. In principle, most would admit that what Jocelyn needed in its social life was a certain modicum of formality and supervision. In practice, few, it seemed, were convinced by the assertion that Dr. and Mrs. Mulcahy had put new life into the dances by taking their chaperonage
seriously.
The majority would not consent to try out, even once, in action what it gladly conceded in talk, and, tendering promises of “another time,” “ask me later,” “give me a rain-check” (male), would follow the crowd as usual down to Gus’s roadhouse or off and away altogether. What disturbed the advocates of the dances most profoundly was the discovery of a fathomless paradox at the bottom of their friends’ thinking: in following the crowd, against their own will and judgment, they were following themselves, i.e., nobody.

Moreover, the claim that the Mulcahys took their chaperonage seriously, queer as this sounded as an inducement to youth in a progressive college, actually touched on a vital issue. The tolerance of other chaperons
had
been the subject of much student dispute. Certain younger teachers had been courting popularity by winking at gross infringements of the rules, allowing the punch to be spiked, hip-flasks to be produced on the dance-floor, necking to go on unchecked; on one occasion, even, marijuana had been smoked on the steps of the gymnasium during intermissions, with the tacit, shrugging knowledge of the faculty-member present. More responsible teachers, asked to serve as chaperons, irritably refused to give their time. Others treated the affair condescendingly, as a lark, coming in late, wearing ski-clothes or rough tweeds patched at the elbows, dancing close with their favorites or with members of their own party—moist-eyed strangers out of the night, wrapped in bright scarves and smelling of liquor. To such teachers, who appeared to live for the pleasure-principle, chaperonage, plainly, was a vast jest or a tiresome imposition; progressive education was a jest, which you winked at and made your living off; the students were comic archetypes, fantastic humors, butts of an educational ideology or else simply fair game, trophies of an impersonal venery—every year there were rumors of seduction, homosexuality, abortion, lesbian attachments, and what shocked the students about these stories, some of them very circumstantial, was the fact that they appeared to take place in a moral vacuum, to leave no trace the morning after; the teacher was at his desk, unchanged, smiling, impassive, and the student’s grade, a C usually in these cases, showed no improvement for the encounter.

Dr. Mulcahy, of course, was not the only instructor whose domestic life was regular, but he was the only one of the modernists who had a real sympathy for youth. He respected it in its integrity, its conservatism, its quest for forms, laws, definitions, ruling principles. Over his charges on the dance-floor, he exercised a jealous surveillance; woe to those intruders, Baal-worshipers, who tried to spike the punch when he was present. He did not dance, but his eye noted any disorder among the dancers; his plump finger signed; his head beckoned, vigorously nodded with approval when a jitterbugging pair desisted. Jingling a coin in his pocket against his wife’s compact and lipstick, he tested the beat of the music, relayed requests to the band or to the boy in charge of the records.

To his wife, Catherine, he frequently called out, in his soft, caressive voice, which always sounded coaxing as if it were calling a kitten, to ask whether she were tired, whether he could get her something, obviously for the purpose of receiving her radiant negative, the shake of the white mantilla proclaiming to all present her unquenchable, dauntless vitality. A certain element of tender prearrangement seemed to enter into their public relation, as though she were a film-star and he her discreet devoted manager. The girls loved this, as a sort of testimonial or advertisement of the permanence of romance in marriage. They clustered about the coatroom early to get a glimpse of him on his knees, fumbling with the clasps of her overshoes, while she waited, complacent, tapping her free foot, brightly waving and signaling, powdering her pointed nose. She would kick the overshoes off one by one, with a deft arch of her satined foot and then, with an imperious gesture, slip her old black daytime coat with its fox collar from her strong, full, lotioned shoulders and toss it to him at the coatroom window, with a cry, “Catch, Hen,” clear, bell-like, commanding, and a flash of the even teeth. The conspicuous whiteness and evenness of those teeth gave her beauty an incisory quality.

Dressed in their “date-dresses” or “semi-formals,” jeweled barrettes in their new-washed hair, the girls gazed at the pair with nudging, sympathetic smiles, like grandmothers watching babies in a play-pen, while the boys, garroted in neckties, their oiled hair striated with comb-marks, stood by with board-like faces, declining to see the meaning the girls squeezed out of this byplay; a few of the taller ones exchanged shrugs of irony that remarked on the married condition and on how the mighty had fallen.

And yet to the Jocelyn boy who suffered himself to attend these dances the Mulcahys were both “regular” guys. These youths, for the most part, were still squirming in the straitjacket of puberty; their hands trembled when they lit a cigarette; their wrists protruded from their coat-sleeves; they lived in an existential extremity; every instant of communication was anguish. Besides the beer-and-convertible crowd—the ex-bootleggers’ and racketeers’ sons, movie-agents’ sons, the heavy-walleted incorrigible sons of advertising geniuses who had been advised to try Jocelyn as a last resort—the male part of the college included an unusual number of child prodigies, mathematical wizards of fourteen, as well as some spastics and paraplegics, cripples of various sorts, boys with tics, polio victims. There were a deaf boy, a dumb boy, boys with several kinds of speech-defects; there were two boys who had fits, boys with unusual skin diseases, with ordinary acne, with glasses, with poor teeth, a boy with a religious complex, boys who had grown too fast, with long, chickeny necks and quivering Adam’s apples. The girls, by comparison, were blooming, healthy, often pretty specimens, with the usual desires and values, daughters of commercial artists, commercial writers, radio-singers, insurance-salesmen, dermatologists, girls who had failed to get into Smith or nearby Swarthmore, girls from the surrounding region, narcissistic, indolent girls wanting a good time and not choosey, girls who sculpted or did ceramics of animals or fashion-drawing, hard-driving, liverish girls, older than the rest, on scholarships.

This disparity between boys and girls created an awkwardness at the dances that made them seem like children’s parties, an enforced or legislated pleasure—the girls consciously exercised charity; the boys yielded to coercion. Under the Mulcahys’ auspices, however, all this took on a positive character. Those who were recruited came back again with a growing confidence that such wholesome pastimes were licit, superior, in fact, to the brute pastimes of the majority. The division of labor between husband and wife provided reassurance both to the boys who danced badly and the girls whose feet they stepped on; it gave an authoritative precedent for the differences between the sexes. With Dr. Mulcahy as a model, appearances lost their terrors. A stammer, a cast in the eye invested a cheese-faced boy with clerkly functions—he squinted on his partner from a knot-hole of male assurance.

Catherine Mulcahy, moreover, had a womanly, Irish way with her that put the boys at their ease. She was only thirty-one and light on her feet; she had a low, warm encouraging laugh; she remembered first names and nicknames, parents’ occupations, where one had gone to school, what one thought of it, where one went for the summer; she was the sort of person who was interested in your birthday, and who could tell you what sign you were born under, your birthstone, and the patron saint of the day. Like the hefty, bantering nurses who helped you undress in the family doctor’s office and knew your weight and how much you had grown in a year and your favorite movie-star, she had a sort of
expertise
in the gross data of your history that both made you uncomfortable and vaguely stimulated you, as though a cool hand, plumping your biography, patted the secret tissue of your being.

Henry Mulcahy, on the contrary, had no humor or small talk. He impressed the group of boys present with his indefatigable seriousness. Standing by the buffet, he allowed himself to be bombarded with questions, like a pitcher emerging from a ball-park or a great man arriving on the
Queen Mary
: “Dr. Mulcahy, what do you think of Whitehead? Do you accept Vico’s cyclical theory? Do you follow Freud or Jung? How do you stand on the veto?” He dispatched each query in turn, coolly, methodologically, meting out his thought in measured lengths, his reddish head bent attentively sideward to his questioner, as though to catch the precise phrasing of the order. Only the athletic coach, speaking of batting averages, winning infield combinations, end-runs, had an exactitude as tireless and considered as Dr. Mulcahy’s, a willingness to be tapped by all comers, as he sat crouched in the shed in his windbreaker. Like the coach, Dr. Mulcahy was sometimes tetchy, irritable with flimflam and trifling; his mind was on twenty-four-hour patrol against incursions of the vague and the unformulated—women’s talk. In this touch of paranoia, the boys recognized themselves: the masculine principle. Here, while the music played, drifts of boys surrounded him; partners edged off the dance-floor—“Come on, I want to hear this”—listened, and danced again. A senior girl’s voice, plaintive, “Dr. Mulcahy, really, do we have to believe in orgones?” A racketeer’s son, guffawing, pulling his girl forward, “
This,
I gotta know.” But such questions and such auditors displeased him. He drew himself up; his fists clenched; his moon-pale face darkened; in or out of the classroom, he declined to discuss sex with adolescents. “Take your bull-session to the social room; I refuse to be baited and you know it.”