Beet (19 page)

All this had happened and was happening as Peace descended the library steps and stood in the sights of the television cameras and crews collected in brightly colored knots on the lawn of the Old Pen. The college was starting to look grimly festive, like a
street fair in a seedy neighborhood, what with the fast-food joints in the visitors' parking lot and the whirligig of American media camped on the green. They had been sent to cover Beet's likely closing, but now they heard this thing some professor had said, which was so much “sexier.” The story could lead the news that evening. The professor who hated women chaired the committee charged with saving the college. So how about this? “Anti-Feminist Professor Brings Down College.” No, to be even-handed, let's phrase it as a question: “Can One Bigoted Professor Bring Down One of America's Premier Colleges?”

“Will you speak with us, Professor Pottersham?”

“Porterfield. Sure.”

“Did you say all women are hysterical?”

“No.”

“Did you say
some
women were hysterical?”

“No.”

“Do you think women are hysterical?”

“No.”

“Are women equal to men?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you say those inflammatory things in the student newspaper?”

“I didn't.”

They were getting nowhere with this guy. But there, coming out of College Hall, were President Huey and Chairman Bollovate.

“I must tell you. I'm shocked,” said Huey, who added a good deal more, but it all came down to his being shocked.

And Bollovate? “I'm very sorry to say this. But it looks like we picked the wrong man.”

“Will you have to close the college then, Mr. Bollovate?”

With a sigh and a shrug: “I hope not.”

Catching sight of the scrum of reporters, Ferritt Lawrence tried to join up with them. He introduced himself as the author of the Porterfield scoop, and was disappointed when the grown-up
journalists did not hoist him to their shoulders. He spied Peace disappearing from the Old Pen, and he ran to him.

“Professor Porterfield?” He was breathing hard. “Any comment on my story?”

Peace kept walking. “What story is that, Mr. Lawrence?” He could not resist.

“About what you called Matha Polite.”

“I never called her anything.”

“She says you did.” Now they were at the Accord. “Where are you going, Professor?”

“To change the oil.”

Classes were supposed to be going on, but students and faculty milled about the Pens. Chants erupted from time to time. “Down with Male Chauvinists!” “Down with Porterfield!” One young woman wearing a sign that read
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
was hissed till she fled. Another was more successful when she delivered an impromptu speech citing the plight of the American Indians, the plight of the Palestinians, the plight of the Tibetans, and the plight of HIV sufferers, but lost the crowd when she came to the plight of the Holocaust.

Some danced alone to music on their iPods. Some did not. Some sent text messages. Some did not. Some stood on their hands. Some thumb-wrestled. Some played Sudoku. Some did not. Some, including Dean Baedeker, positioned themselves to be interviewed by the TV people, and when that didn't happen, repositioned themselves. No one knew what to do or where to be, but this is what panic looked like in a college—an expressionistic play, and a bad one. It wasn't a mob scene. It wasn't a march. It was a swirl—without purpose or destination, scumbled over by a vague if anachronistic sense of decorum. This was a place of learning, after all. People came here for a gentler life.

Yet those amassed there were not harmless either, and like any crowd, no matter how privileged, this one could do damage, especially if led by someone who did have a purpose and a destination.

She looked down upon the spectacle from the steps of the
Temple. She had climbed the hill to survey the world she'd brought to life. And make no mistake: Matha had brought it to life. Years from now, when historians spoke of the last days of Beet College—the end of an institution older than the nation itself—her name would be linked to the monumental event. And who was this Matha Polite? Only a student. A student and a poet. And yet a student and poet with the heart of a lion. And where is she now, this Matha Polite? Why, all you need do is drive out to the East End of Long Island and behold the billboards every five miles: “Polite for the Elite, Realtors.” Did you know that her older sister, the needy one—Kathy or Connie or something—works in her office, too? Matha gave her a job. Just like her to do that.

Too bad that like all students and poets who are also charismatic political leaders, Matha had in her one super-duper lollapalooza of a blunder; she was still planning to take Bacon Library on December 18. Poised on the Temple steps, she hit upon a decorative way to do it. She could not help herself. She thought of it as a good thing.

Livi phoned as soon as she saw her husband's sweet stunned face on television. The Beet story did lead the evening news after all. She told him what she always told him about getting out of there, but this time with fear in her voice. Suddenly the idea that snakes could kill did not seem merely idiomatic. That was her husband—the best and most decent man in the world—they were talking about. People not fit to speak
to
him were talking
of
him. She would rend them with her teeth.

Less volatile was Peace's own reaction. To all who called his home that night, and there were many, he repeated with patience that the quotation was false, the accusation absurd. No, he did not plan to step down from the CCR. Yes, he did think he could continue in the chair effectively—questions and replies looping ad infinitum, or pretty close. He heard them all out. He hung up on none of them. He did not raise his voice in anger or lower it in shame. Good old predictable Peace. What should one do with such a man?

Yet he was plain disgusted—with the others and with himself.
More with himself. Why was he at the mercy of people like this? He was trapped. He couldn't go anywhere in public because he'd be stared at. He couldn't go down to New York as planned because the reporters might follow him. He wasn't as worried for his family as for the journalists. If Livi got hold of them, murder would be added to the charges.

He went out for a midnight run, took a header, and lay on his belly with his forehead bleeding.

So the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend ended with the students and faculty in panic mode, and in gossip mode, and Livi and Manning in fury mode, and Matha in clover, and Peace on his face. Bollovate, who sent a congratulatory note to Matha, was never better; Huey, of course, the same. And six of the members of the CCR agreed to meet in secret in Keelye Smythe's house (Ada served souvlaki, which her husband called “boring”), and decided to follow Smythe's suggestion that they attend no more meetings with Professor Porterfield “until this whole unfortunate business can be resolved.” The TV crews waited and watched, expecting more trouble and loaded for bear. Ferritt handed each of them his card,
FERRITT LAWRENCE, JOURNALIST
. Jamie Lattice, feeling oh so much better, emailed the MacArthur Four that number five was back. Akim and Max continued to watch the letters and numbers dance on the screen.

In the quiet of the middle of the night, the college seemed to contravene the pathetic fallacy. Every pocket of darkness appeared shades darker—the buildings, the pathways, the trees, even the sky, which was never really dark at night, on this one seemed to have shut the hatch on itself. No moon or stars. No winking jetliner. No shopping mall searchlight projecting a hazy flare. It was as if Beet College were doing to itself what some others wanted to happen to it—die. And it was showing them and everyone else what it would look like dead.

Affrighted, interdicted, astonished, all bloody, all panting, Peace said to himself, “If this is the best…” One knows the rest.

BRICOLAGE—THAT'S ALL IT WAS. THE NEW CURRICULUM
Peace had devised was a construction achieved by using things already at hand. Bricolage, yet workable.

He walked from the parking lot toward his department to deliver the graded papers for his Modern Poetry class. It was Tuesday of finals week, December 17. Between the Monday after Thanksgiving and the present, he had become all that anyone was speaking of. L'Affaire Porterfield. That horrid Porterfield business. He did not mind his status as a pariah as much as simply being the center of attention.

Professor Jefferson opened the I Am Woman Center twenty-four hours a day to everyone except Professor Porterfield, and played a medley of Mariah Carey songs over the loudspeaker.

Professor Dalmatian announced that Bliss House was available for anyone who had difficulty with anything, except Professor Porterfield, who had “forfeited his right to bliss.”

Even the Robert Bly Man's Manliness Society condemned Peace on the grounds that insulting women wasn't manly.

And the CCR met daily, sans chair, mainly to discuss whether or not Professor Porterfield had been telling the truth, and whether or not they liked Professor Porterfield, and what was
Professor Porterfield doing at this moment, do you suppose? Professor Lipman wondered if she should go to him in private, since it was rumored his wife had left him—a rumor of which she was aware because she'd started it. The committee also spent half a day debating if they were in violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the student strike by holding their meetings indoors.

Oh, yes, the student strike. On account of Peace, a collegewide strike was called. It was Matha's idea. At least it was her idea to look back to the 1960s again, and use someone else's idea. In the spring of 1969, she learned, Harvard students went on strike, and the long-term results were so delicious—personal relationships ruined, managers replacing leaders, politicians in the trees, and so much more—the thought was irresistible.

The student strike had begun on December 7. Matha liked that date because she knew something important had happened on it, somewhere. The MacArthur Five had T-shirts made up showing a pink-and-white clenched fist thrusting into the air. They tried a computer-generated picture of Latin on strike, but the raised hoof looked awkward. They tried to take a real picture of Latin wearing the striped T-shirt, but what he raised wasn't a hoof.

Matha had become more than a leader now; she was a martyr-leader, the most attractive kind. The CCR was as good as dead. Curricular reform was as good as dead. “Strike for women! Strike for the women of Beet! Strike for women everywhere!” That's what she shouted in public, where she spent much of her time.

“But explain something to me,” said Betsy Betsy one night in Matha's room, which had become part headquarters, part shrine. “How can we go on strike? We're not workers. We don't belong to a union. What are we striking
for
—I mean, besides women everywhere?”

Matha said she'd slap Betsy's face if she ever asked such a dumb-shit question again, and Betsy wept. “We're not striking
for
anything, Miss Shitnose. We're striking
against
the college. We want to close it down, remember?”

Striking meant boycotting their classes. That left many hours of the day vacant, which were filled with talking about the strike.

“What about finals?” asked Lattice and Goldvasser.

“I don't know,” Matha said. “I guess taking finals would be okay. They don't come up till the last week of term. We can kill a lot of time until then.”

“Yet still get into law school?” said Goldvasser.

“And not get into too much trouble?” said Lattice.

Betsy Betsy was hoping she could do some media reporting on the college. She would ask the reporters what it felt like to be reporting.

Matha concentrated on her new and inspired and, if she said so herself, simply yummy plan for occupying the library. She had not let Bollovate in on her surprise—a happy one, she was certain, because over the course of their business conferences, he'd given every indication he wanted Beet shut down, no matter what he told others to the contrary. After his note to her on the Porterfield story, she'd written back, “When the college closes, what are you going to do with the property?” He did not reply.

Meanwhile, faculty members had watched from safe insessorial locations on the sidelines. Like Betsy, many were uncertain as to the common sense of students on strike, but they participated zealously nonetheless. Under strike rules, faculty could not hold classes whether or not students appeared. A few like Smythe came up with an alternative plan that would allow them to teach, and yet also to side with the students in their grievances. They would hold class, but not in the classrooms. They would teach out of doors, sitting on the ground. “Like the Greeks,” said Smythe, not accounting for the climatic difference between a New England and a Greek December.

Naturally Peace had continued to teach in his classroom. Most of his students showed up. Some stayed in their dorms because they really weren't sure about Professor Porterfield, though experience and their better judgment, combined with their knowledge of Matha, ought to have taught them to be on his side. More stayed away simply because they were too upset about the college and their futures to know what they should do or where they should be.

Only once did Peace allude to the goings-on, when he quoted Marianne Moore's “In Distrust of Merits”—“We devour ourselves.” But he did not look around to see if anyone caught its application to the current situation. The temper of the group was not such that they would be alert even to matters at hand. These days, they did not come to class to learn more about the modern poets so much as to feel safe. Whatever they thought of the college at the moment, it was a comforting place to be—a classroom.

In any event, the strike had lasted only three days, with students too concerned about their own fates to get worked up about condemning Professor Porterfield.

Otherwise, not much had happened during the two weeks of Peace's disgrace and ostracism. The TV crews came and went and came again. The faculty had gone beyond frazzled to a state of numbness undergirded by desperation. Hoping to appear attractive to other institutions, professors hurried to finish books they'd been working on for decades. Phyllis Loo completed her
Bowdler Bowdlerized
, the only known study of Dr. Thomas Bowdler's letters, in which Loo had expurgated references to indecent passages. Da-menial Krento, who called himself a dwarf but was two inches over the limit, polished off the footnotes for his
Brief History of the Epigram
. Professor Holton of the Film Department was a chapter shy of completing his definitive
Van Heflin: Brute in a Suit.
And the Benson brothers, both from Biology, put the final touches on their joint autobiography as the only tenured former Siamese twins in academia. They would have used the euphemism “conjoined,” but they happened to be born to missionaries in Thailand. Writing the book was easy for them because, as they boasted, they could complete each other's sentences. Unfortunately, the sentences, once complete, conveyed little.

Akim, actually, did accomplish something during this period. It started with his trying to discover if his Homeland Security courses were giving finals. They would be online too, he supposed. But the department answered all his many inquiries with
TRY AGAIN LATER
. When he informed them, whoever and wherever they were, that there was no later—either the department
gave finals during finals week or not at all—the reply he received was
THANK YOU
.

He was sure the administration of Homeland Security operated at the same level of intelligence as the courses. Pinto, the one department member, probably did not know if there were finals. He probably did not know there was such a thing as finals. Akim tried to imagine what a Homeland Security final exam would be like: “Is it safer to live in New York City or on Baffin Island? Discuss”; “True or false: The World Trade Center tragedy can happen again and we must be prepared.”

Since being befriended by Max Byrd, Akim had found himself thinking more and more like an ordinary student, and less like a suicide bomber. He'd discarded his kaffiyeh and robes and now wore the standard undergraduate mufti of jeans, running shoes, baseball hat worn backward, and a sweatshirt bearing the name of any college but one's own. He'd shaved.

He'd also moved back to his dorm and had nearly forgotten the two milk cartons of TATP that remained on a ledge in his cave. Blowing himself to pieces no longer seemed as appealing as it once did. He wondered how to dispose of his explosive soup.

And that's what was occupying his mind on the morning Peace walked across campus to hand in his papers. Akim's attention was diverted from his laptop, so initially he failed to notice that the numbers and letters on the alphanumeric generator had disappeared. Just like that. On the screen, pretty as you please, was
HOMELAND SECURITY HOME PAGE
, as if it had been there all along.

He was in. It had taken a random search of over seven weeks and sixteen million permutations to break what turned out to be three hundred levels of codes, but he was in. Akim almost had to remind himself what he'd been looking for in the first place. The department. That was it. And the faculty member, Professor Billy Pinto. Less prone to obsessiveness these days, he clicked on to the hot links as if he were absentmindedly fiddling with the mouse. And what he saw in front of him was so mundane, he regretted having devoted all that time and effort to the task.

It was a menu, like that of any department home page in the college. There were lists of courses, which Akim knew too well. There was a list of professors consisting of one, and his Web site. There was a brief explanation of the department and its aims—“To make America safer for you and me.” There was even a street address, which Akim did not recognize, and so assumed it was off campus. The menu consisted of all the information one would need in searching out any department. Why the ultrasecure password?

Well, in for a nickel, he told himself. He would try the hot link for Billy Pinto. What the hell. He stifled a yawn.

What the hell, indeed. He must have put the hot link in incorrectly, because information on Billy Pinto did not appear. What did appear upon his screen caused him to stare for a full minute without a blink, much as he might stare at his father entering his room, greeting him with open arms and swearing off chess forever. It was then, in this state of astonishment, that he phoned his friend Max.

“Get over here. Now!”

“Waddup?”

“Work for a computer geek.”

Bollovate and Huey did not know of Akim's existence, much less of his discovery. At the time Akim was calling Max, the two men had business in Huey's office before the trustees' meeting that afternoon. The sole purpose of the meeting was to dump Peace as chair of the CCR. They would have liked to revoke his tenure and kick him out of the college that very day. But Bollovate, no dope when it came to tactics, knew that would be pushing things. The faculty would stifle its ordinary tendencies toward treachery, and figure that if one professor were dumped, so could they all be; they would protect their own and turn on Joel Bollovate. Yet he had enough to say to the “college mushheads” to make Peace their outcast forever. He would draw up the charges himself. He thought it a nice touch. He could announce Professor Porterfield's ouster at the same time as his own little surprise about the college—known only to himself and Huey—at the faculty meeting day after tomorrow. His day. Joel's day. One would have had to search the campus,
indeed the universe, to find two happier fellows. Huey was happy when Bollovate was happy, and Bollovate was happy as a cake.

“But we can't get cocky,” he said, taking Huey's chair.

“That would be bad,” said Huey, taking the chair reserved for visitors.

“I can't tell you how many sweetheart deals have fallen through at the last minute because of cockiness.”

“People get cocky.”

“That's right. They take their eyes off the ball. They lose sight of details. It's the end game, Lewis. The end game separates the sheep from the goats.”

“The sheep from the goats.” Huey squirmed because he was about to say something that came from his own brain. “Joel, I hope you won't mind my bringing this up. But we've never really spoken about what I'll be doing after.”

“You'll be taken care of. You can bet on that.”

“Yes, but my job. What will it be? I mean, exactly. The title.”

Bollovate frowned philosophically, as if he really were considering the question. “How about president?” He beamed.

“Could I still be president?” Huey beamed more.

“Of course, Lewis. We'll always need a president. No matter the situation people are in, everyone wants to know there's a president.” He reached across the desk and patted Huey's hands, which were folded and damp.

Huey was teary with gratitude. “That's great, Joel. Wonderful to hear. I'm relieved, I don't mind telling you. It would be hard to start over, at my age.”

“Well, you don't need to worry about that…Mr. President.”

On that Tuesday morning too, three women pursued separate though related quests.

Sheila Bollovate was driving her maroon Lexus to her lawyer's, where she would sign an intention to divorce in the presence of a notary. The document contained 108 pages of property listings. As she drove, she chewed on a Mallomar.

Kathy Polite was leaving her home on Long Island. She was on her way to pay a surprise call on her sister, about whom, frankly,
she was worried. Martha had never been a charmer. But over Thanksgiving, she'd seemed less charming than usual, and definitely involved in something over her head. I don't like her, thought Kathy. Who does? But blood is blood. And it was Christmas. Was it not? It was.