The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (6 page)

This remark moved him to merriment. He laughed once again, but now genuinely, intellectually, till the tears rolled from his eyes. “Precisely,” he cried. “You have it. Proceed to the head of the class. A pity it is, indeed.” But as she commenced to laugh also, his mien immediately sobered. “Domna,” he confessed, “you won’t believe it, but I did try to get it on paper and at that moment my friendship with the Hoars evaporated. Overnight. From that moment, Maynard has hated me without respite.” He spoke with force and impressiveness, bringing his hand down on the chair-arm; yet he thought he saw an inner doubt or reservation shadow the girl’s brow. “Listen, Domna,” he said earnestly. “Forget whatever you may have picked up or whatever Maynard has told you and hear my version first. It does me no credit, I promise you, and you can judge for yourself how it leaves our friend, Maynard.” He began to pace the room. “Last spring, as the campus gossip may have told you, my status here was rather irregular. After the ruckus out West had made all the papers and figured in the
Nation
and the Witch Hunt book, as well as in a report of the A.A.U.P., several anonymous friends of the college got up a little purse and turned it over to Maynard, to use as he saw fit for victims of the purge in the universities. At that time, there was no vacancy in Literature and he used this grant to appoint me visiting lecturer in humanities—a special creation—with the understanding that I would be fitted into the Literature department at the first opportunity. However, as it happened, no vacancy did occur and I was unwilling to bring Cathy and the children on from her mother’s without some assurance of tenure; Stephen had just been born. Maynard was very good about this; I was allowed certain traveling expenses to commute back and forth every month and free quarters in Barracks C, since it would be an obvious hardship for me to keep up two establishments on my salary. Once or twice I used this expense account to bring Cathy on to Jocelyn for a week or so; another time, say two times at most, I met her in Pittsburgh for a long weekend. I had my schedule arranged, so as to be free Mondays and Fridays. Well, as could have been predicted, someone—they say a student—carried the tale to Hoar: I alone on the faculty was teaching a three-day week! Maynard had me on the carpet, very firm, and, to do him justice, sympathetic. He foresaw an opening in Literature, but if my appointment were to be put on a regular, permanent basis, a new living arrangement would have to be stipulated. As an official member of the department, I would be expected to conform to the Jocelyn principle of
communitas!
”

Domna nodded, warmly. “I too!” she exclaimed. “‘The fully resident faculty … we don’t punch a time-clock here, Miss Rejnev, but we must ask you, in all conscience, not to emulate Bard and Sarah Lawrence and treat us as though you were a commuter.’” The vagaries of the President’s diction seemed to evoke nostalgia from both of them, for a time when they had merely laughed over Maynard. Henry swiftly cut into this mood.

“Naturally, I insisted on a two-year contract to compensate me for the expenses of moving. Maynard perfectly saw my position, agreed with it, but unfortunately the policy of the trustees gave him no leeway. Contracts at the instructor level ran for the single year only. No exception to be made without establishing a precedent, and tradition only permitted three professorial salaries in the Division, one full professor in Languages, two associates in Literature. He could give me his word, of course, that the appointment would be continued, if I, on my side, would give evidence of my own commitment by bringing on Cathy and the children and taking a house in the neighborhood.” He came to an abrupt stop in his pacing, folded his arms, and stood looking down at her, measuringly, while he tilted the tip of his tongue against the sharp edges of his teeth. “At that point,” he said. “I did a very foolish thing.”

“You told Esther,” she suggested, in her low, consolatory voice. This divination of his conduct rather startled him; he had intended to take her by surprise. “About Cathy’s condition? Yes,” he acknowledged. “It was a question of paying the movers to get the furniture out of storage. My mother-in-law, who
could
pay, was understandably against the move. I didn’t know where else to turn. It appeared to me that Esther, if she knew how serious things were with Cathy, how necessary security was for her, might stir Maynard up to give me a letter, something on paper, you know, to show the old lady. In fact,” he admitted apologetically, “I’d already wired Cathy that such a letter was in existence.”

Domna turned white. “Oh, no, Henry!” she protested, as if to deter him from continuing with a tale that harrowed him too much. “Wait!” He raised a finger and moved a little nearer to her. He experienced a strange, confident exhilaration in forcing her to know him at his worst. “Exactly fourteen hours after I spoke to Esther, Maynard called me to his office.” He paused. Domna caught her breath. “To assure me that the ultimate decision rested with my own conscience. The college would exercise no pressure.” He spread his freckled hands expressively. “By that time, the van was crossing the Alleghenies.”

Domna’s whole body stiffened, while Henry watched her curiously. This, he was aware, was the real crisis in her loyalty; yet he felt no impulse to press her, but rather a pleasure in waiting while she worked out her own course. She was too intelligent not to see that Hoar had put himself in the clear, that there was not the shadow of a claim on him, technically speaking: his hands were as clean as Pilate’s, ceremonially laved on his balcony; his wife doubtless had had a dream and sent to him, saying, “Have nothing to do, Maynard, with this just man.” Yet did not this precisely make the point? Would Domna be wise enough to know that this very avoidance of a claim on him was in Maynard the measure of an atrocious guilt, a refusal of responsibility, of jointness in the Mystic Body (“We are members, one of another”)?

Domna’s rose-colored lips curled. “Monster,” she spat out calmly. “Monsters, both of them. Do they think then that
that
absolves them?” She made a rather theatrical gesture of drawing her skirt aside. Henry was filled with amazement. He felt himself catching fire, quite impersonally, from her, as if his own paler responses blushed beside this defiance. What marvelous contempt, he inwardly exclaimed, and puckered his own lip sourly in imitation of this sublime disdain. “Still, Domna,” he expostulated, in an aggrieved and somewhat whining tone. “Maynard can plausibly contend that he has no responsibility for Cathy, in fact that he tried to deter me from making an imprudent commitment. We mustn’t commit the error of putting Cathy’s health too much in the foreground of the case.” Domna, as he had feared, seemed to be genuinely astonished. “Why not?” she cried. “What else could be in the foreground?” Her dark brows arched in vivid semicircles as she swung around to face him. As always in moments of excitement, her accent became more marked. “What is complicated here?” she protested. “It is all very simple. One does not undertake actions that will lead to the death of other people, short of war at any rate. Does Maynard Hoar accept himself as a murderer? Will you accept him so?” Her strange, intent eyes were shining; she tossed her head angrily and the dark, clean hair bobbed; she clicked her pocket-lighter and drew in on a cigarette. “This cannot be permitted to happen,” she declared quickly, amid puffs of smoke. “One simply refuses it and tells Maynard Hoar so.” She jumped up, knocking a book off the desk, and seized her polo coat from the coatrack. “I shall do it myself at once to set an example.”

Henry moistened his lips, half tempted by this rashness. “You forget that it must be kept from Cathy,” he said peevishly. “If you go to Maynard in this mood, the whole campus will hear of it.” Domna stood holding her coat. “Come,” he said, “sit down. Do you think that you will convince Maynard by moral arguments when he has already come to this decision fully knowing of Cathy’s condition? Let me tell you something more. In the desk at home, there is a forged letter purporting to be from Maynard, promising me a permanent appointment. Cathy believes in that letter. Do you see now that we must be quiet?” Domna slowly put her coat back and leaned against the desk, lacing and unlacing her fingers. “What’s to be done then?” she asked in a toneless voice. “What’s to become of you, Henry?” Her eyes, wide and frightened, ransacked him as though seeking his destiny. He shrugged. This new admission, he saw with relief and a certain misanthropy, had put her altogether in his hands; his malfeasance would make her submit to his better judgment as to ways and means, as she would submit to the superior knowledge of a criminal whom she was concealing in her house. At bottom, he reminded himself, she was conventional, believing in a conventional moral order and shocked by deviations from it into a sense of helpless guilt toward the deviator. In other words, she was a true liberal, as he had always suspected, who could not tolerate in her well-modulated heart that others should be wickeder than she, any more than she could bear that she should be richer, better born, better looking than some statistical median.

And now, lo and behold, she was proceeding to give him a perfect example of these mental processes, even when one would have thought that her eyes would have been opened to a darker truth about human nature than her philosophy admitted. “Henry,” she began, frowning, “is it possible, do you suppose that Cathy, unknown to you, has talked about this contract among the faculty wives?” “Cathy doesn’t see the faculty wives,” he answered with impatience. “In the nursery school? In the grocery store?” She pushed her feminine point home with typically feminine insistence. “Supposing she did mention it?” she persisted. “It would be a perfectly natural and harmless thing to do, if one were talking about next year or plans for the children. Yet mention of a two-year contract could give rise to all sorts of jealousies and resentments, even on the upper levels. Suppose then some husband carried the story to Maynard and demanded to know whether it was true or not? Can’t you then imagine Maynard’s getting very angry and giving you notice straight off, simply to show you who was master, who wrote the contracts at Jocelyn?” She had moved along the desk till she was close to him and could look up softly into his face, like a pleading sweetheart urging her boy to reform—with no idea that she had offended him and was offending him more with every irrelevant word she uttered. “I don’t mean to exculpate Maynard, but if this
should
be so, it at least makes him understandable. Perhaps, if I were to talk to him, he would tell me and I could explain it to him …?” She stole another glance into his face and broke off, suddenly irresolute.

Without answering, he strode over to the window and looked out at a truck which was unloading some crates onto the platform of the maintenance building on which Domna’s office faced. The blank brick walls of the maintenance building, the smoking chimneys of the incinerator, the heavy truck with its indubitably dubious cargo—how many crates short was this order, what was the kickback today?—all perfectly suited his humor. He and Domna were getting nowhere; she refused to see, as if it were deliberately, the real dynamite in the case.

“Domna,” he said wearily, turning around from the window. “Can’t you see that what you are suggesting means dismissal for cause, blacklisting? Have you ever read the morals clause in the code on faculty tenure? You mustn’t ever mention this letter or even think of it again, even if you should come to hate me like the others. As for Cathy, she has been told that the letter is not to be spoken of—for the very reasons you cite. Perhaps, even, she knows me well enough to have half guessed the truth behind it—and to keep her guess to herself, a lesson to all wives.” He paced in silence for a moment, with a musing, deliberative air. “What you’re after, of course, is motive. Hoar’s motive, naturally—how has he been tempted to do this, knowing Cathy’s condition? I can enlighten you if you want, at the cost of losing your sympathy.” He stood smiling down at the girl, who had dropped without a word into her swivel-chair; nothing moved in her but her eyes, which looked up at him, mesmerized with instinctive fear, like an animal’s. “But first let me hint this, Domna—you are somewhat too
bornée
in your thinking. There is something in you, perhaps an upper-class habit, that keeps you, with your excellent mind and remarkable analytic powers, from making what one might define as the necessary metaphysical leap, the two plus two making five that Dostoievsky speaks of.” The girl nodded, almost joyously; she understood what he meant. “For example,” he proceeded, in a style that was purposefully leisured, “your very search for motive lacks creative imagination. You are looking in private places, while the answer is staring you in the face, from the newspapers, the radio, the forum. Domna, we are at war, though apparently you only realize it when you are reading your morning newspaper. You imagine that the war is located in the dispatches of correspondents, but it is also here, on this campus.”

The girl’s eyes flew wide open; did she begin at last to see what he was driving at? How much, he asked himself, was it necessary to tell her to send the point home irrefutably? “But leave that for the moment. Let us return to your thinking. As an intellectual exercise, the broad jump we’ve been speaking of, try putting the question that is bothering you in the form of a declarative statement: ‘Knowing of Cathy’s condition, Hoar has been tempted to do this.’”

Domna caught her breath. He moved closer to her and slipped into the chair by her side, feeling a curious, reckless excitement as his full intention became clear to him. He picked up the hem of her smock and played with it in his fingers, rubbing the grain of the raw silk against the whorls of his flesh. Then he began to speak very rapidly. “There’s another aspect of the case that I ought to have told you about. Something you may have guessed or may not have. You may not want any part of me when you hear the truth.” He could see her pointed breasts rise and fall with her quickened breathing; she moved slightly away from him, but he maintained his hold on her smock. “Does your Russian second sight tell you?” he murmured. She shook her head stubbornly, and the dark, shining hair, as usual, fell into her eyes. “Well, then,” he declared, squaring his stooped shoulders, “I must tell you that I am and have been for ten years a member of the Communist Party.”