Beet (9 page)

That was not an option for Peace, who now understood that what he'd heard earlier did not come out of his beleaguered mind. The lone faculty member on campus that night jumped up and jogged toward MacArthur. Still at the window, Matha called to the disheveled visitor.

“What's the matter, Professor Porterfield? Did your wife make you spend the night on the couch?”

“What are you doing, Matha?”

“What does it look like? We're taking over a building.”

“To accomplish what?”

“You heard our demands.”

“You can't be serious. The faculty is trying to save the college, and you people are occupying a building?”

“Matha,” Lattice whispered to her. “Maybe he's right. Maybe we should leave.” Bagtoothian asked if he could kill Lattice.

“Go away, Professor Porterfield. Go meet with your little committee. See where it gets you. Don't you know they're going to close the place anyway?”

She slammed the window shut. Peace went to phone Huey. Next he called Manning, whom he reached on his cell. This was a Tuesday, and Manning was paying his weekly visit to Margaret at the Beet village cemetery. It was approaching eight o'clock when he arrived and stood beside Peace. “Who's in there? The Junior League Madame Defarge?”

Peace looked over his shoulder and saw Huey and Bollovate descending the steps of College Hall and walking hurriedly into the New Pen toward the occupied building. Other faculty members trickled in—three, ten, fifty.

“Will they call the cops?” Lattice asked.

“If it were up to Bollovate,” said Matha, “they'd be loading the rubber bullets right now.”

Among the faculty members gathered, only Professor Lipman was noticeably upset. Her office was in MacArthur, and she blanched at the thought of the students riffling through her stash. Hidden away were secret memos from the
New York Times
, lists of favored and unfavored politicians, editors, artists, and so forth that would prove embarrassing if made public. Her treasury included two photos signed by
Times
critics concealed under stacks of manila envelopes in her bottom desk drawer. One was signed, “With luminous admiration, Chip.” The other: “All my brio, Ben.”

The rest of her colleagues stood dazed and perplexed, blowing smoke in the cold air. For some, the takeover was like a hookah dream. It had been many, many years since any of the professors saw an occupied building, and they were trying to recall how to react. After conferring with Joel Bollovate, President Huey did nothing. So did the dither of deans. The students, still sleep-headed, remained in their beds, though Akim tried once more to stand with his beloved Matha, and again was turned away.

“We have added one more demand!” yelled Matha over the bullhorn. “Amnesty for the occupiers!” The MacArthur Five cheered from inside.

That addendum jogged the professors' memories, and at last some of them recalled how to react to the takeover. They would join it. One by one in a growing line of ten, twelve, and more, they marched up to the door of MacArthur, knocked, and shouted, “Open up! We are with you!”

“Are you people nuts?” Manning called to them. He and Peace stood with several members of their own departments, who said nothing as others approached MacArthur House.

Now it was the MacArthur Five's turn to be uncertain as to how
to react. All they knew of student protests came from books and movies, none of which was clear on the matter of responding to sympathy. Bagtoothian said, “Let them in!” And so they did, with Professor Godwin leading the troupe and shouting, “Right on!” as he entered.

All of Peace's committee joined in except Smythe, who hung back to see which way the wind would blow. Professor Booth marched right behind Godwin. Professor Heilbrun repeated “Right on!” then Kramer. Heilbrun had on a Beckbury—navy herringbone jacket, plain waistcoat, and striped trousers. Kramer wished he'd worn his Continental Army uniform, with the musket and tricorne. Kettlegorf entered singing, “Let me in, I hear music.” On they came, their mood at once intense, festive, and bemused. Lipman rushed into her office, ascertained that nothing had been touched, and rejoined the others in the reception room, telling them that a protest like this was in the best tradition of the First Amendment.

By three to one, the professors in the building now outnumbered the students, whom they ignored. They stood in a huddle and high-fived and hugged one another as Matha took one look at them and frowned.

“We're with you!” shouted Professor Godwin. The professors began to sing “We Shall Overcome,” but faltered when they could not remember the lyrics beyond the first words.

“Right on!” said Professor Kramer again, growing bolder.

“We don't want you here,” said Matha.

“We don't?” asked Betsy Betsy.

“No, we don't,” said Matha. “Look at these people, will you? They're not with us. They're just putting on a show. They're on a nostalgia trip.” And before the accuracy of her assessment had begun to sink in for her comrades, she added, “I'm out of here.”

She flung open the door of MacArthur and stomped off in a rage, to be followed closely by the others, Jamie Lattice toddling ducklinglike behind her. Now the only occupiers of the building were faculty members. When they saw that the students had exited, they looked to one another, and then they left too, thus
bringing to a close the shortest building takeover in the history of American education.

And that might have been that, except for the fact that Beet College property had been invaded and occupied, and a few laws broken. The majority of adults who had remained outside MacArthur as well as those who went in knew something had to be done. Bollovate and thus Huey did as well.

They all gave the matter some thought. And then they came to a decision. They would do what they always did when they did not know what to do. They would call a faculty meeting.

“THE MEETING WILL COME TO ORDER,” SAID HUEY. “WE
should proceed with a reading of the minutes.”

“Forget the minutes,” Manning called from his seat. “Let's deal with the so-called radicals.”

“Shouldn't we read the minutes?” Huey turned to Bollovate, who shook his head. “Well, then, we won't read the minutes. Should we call the roll?”

“I think we should have an invocation first,” said Chaplain Lookatme, who was standing by the door. “This is so important a meeting. Don't you think we need the presence of our Friend?”

“But we've never had an invocation before,” said Huey.

“Our Friend won't mind,” said Lookatme, with the coy, self-satisfied smile that came upon him when referring to his Friend.

“Should we have an invocation?” Huey asked Bollovate, who said nothing.

A debate ensued as to whether an invocation would be violating the separation of church and state. This gave rise to questioning whether a college was equivalent to the state, and did a chaplain represent a church? After half an hour, the faculty decided to send Lookatme packing. The man was crestfallen, but not so's anyone would notice.

“Our Friend will bless us anyway,” he said.

“What a Pal!” said Manning.

Peace sat behind Manning, and maintained a silence that was unusual for him. Not the fact of the silence itself; for four years he'd kept quiet at faculty meetings in the vain hope that they would get on with greater dispatch without a contribution from him. But the silence he kept on this day was more watchful, and in some ways a consequence of his assignment. If he were being asked to resuscitate the college, he had to think about the whole institution more analytically.

The meeting was held, as were they all, in the Faculty Room, an airplane-hangar-like building unto itself on the north side of the Old Pen, which managed to be both muggy and drafty no matter the weather outside. It was among the oldest structures at Beet, its shell dating back to the days of Nathaniel himself, and originally had served as the area for pig auctions—called the volutabrum, or pigsty. When it was converted in the 1830s, someone at the inaugural meeting moved that the name be retained.

Large gilt-framed oil portraits of former Beet presidents covered the four walls, surrounding the rows of chairs and looking down on the gathering like the elders of a church. Each was illuminated by picture lights mounted in shiny brass. There was James Janes (1711–1766), Beet's first president, a drunk and a womanizer who beat the students with the branches of a cherry tree and was known to French-kiss his dog, a beagle named Dr. Brewster. There was Duncan “The Sneaker” Raymond (1758–1820)—the soubriquet did not appear on the legend—whose cherubic grin and chubby red cheeks belied his arrest and conviction for embezzling college funds. A dandy, though a pudgy one, he'd posed wearing a red Glengarry and a Black Watch tartan kilt under which he reportedly had concealed the pilfered stash in Black Watch tartan garters. Directly beneath Raymond hung Nicholas McVitt (1781–1862), with the scrofulous face of one of the late stages of the picture of Dorian Gray, and who seemed to be looking up Raymond's kilt. He was the only known male nurse to serve
on both sides in the Civil War, and was tried for desertion by each.

And there were several more rimose faces peeking out from handlebar mustaches and Smith Brothers beards, including that of President Chauncy Dicey (1929–2004), Huey's immediate predecessor, a lepidopterist who committed suicide by shotgun in his office and whose likeness bore the look of someone who had just glanced out his penthouse window as King Kong was strolling by. Dicey had left no explanatory note, only a cassette on which he repeated the name Beet, with increasingly darker emphasis.

Huey had not sat for his own portrait yet, though it was suggested the college might save money if they hanged the subject instead.

“Is there old business?” said Huey.

“The Self-Reinvention Center,” said Professor Hoffmann of Public Speaking. He'd proposed this idea at the last faculty meeting. “But I want to withdraw my motion.”

“Why's that?” asked Huey.

“I'm not interested in it anymore. I'm a new man these days.”

“Can we please get going?”—Manning again.

Peace leaned forward and said, “Cool it. You're turning them off.”

“Would that I could.”

Huey presided from a heavy, thronelike dark wood chair at the head of the room. To his right sat Joel Bollovate on an identical chair, his belly spilling over his tooled black leather belt, like lava over a cliff. Though it was unusual for a trustee to attend a faculty meeting (no one could recall it happening before), Huey had determined upon “conferring” with Bollovate that an exception to custom was in order. Why Bollovate had asked to attend, no one knew. He merely told Huey he wanted to see how the faculty would respond to the takeover. Matha Polite was there for much the same purpose. The way of her presence, also extraordinary, had been paved by Keelye Smythe, who had persuaded his colleagues (though not much persuasion had been required) that students
should be allowed in “since their fate was at issue.” And Ferritt Lawrence was there too, as everyone agreed on his indispensability as a representative of the people's right to know.

There being no old business, it was on to what Manning was calling for. The faculty was to decide whether or not the MacArthur Five should be punished, and if so, to what degree. Should they be admonished, placed on probation, expelled for a term or two, or tossed out forever, their names to be expunged from the Beet College records?

The threat of expunction had so shaken Jamie Lattice that he remained hidden in his room in Coldenham under his coverlet awaiting the meeting's outcome. His tiny head was wedged into a history of Elaine's Restaurant, complete with photos of the regulars in grim and belligerent poses indicating they were writers. Betsy Betsy went on a crying jag. Goldvasser called his dad in Nevada and asked if he were like expelled or something, would that like affect his admission to law school and stuff? Bagtoothian, with time on his hands, tortured a frog in the bio lab.

Manning rose again. “May I move that all five of the rebels without a cause be expelled for the spring term?”

“Are we taking motions yet?”—Huey to Bollovate. “I think we should have some discussion first.”

A series of speeches followed, each ten to twenty minutes long. In rows and rows sat the professors in tweeds—all one hundred forty-one of them—like woolen dolls, boneless and loose-headed. They flopped in their polished black Beet College chairs with “Deus Libri Porci” at their backs and stared ahead at Huey and Bollovate. The air smelled of flax and varnish, with a hint of pharmacy, and it glistened with dust gilded by window-sunshine and the off-white globes hanging from long wires on the ceiling. Were it not for the substance of the occasion, the scene might have been mistaken for a congregation of philosophers or theologians or friends, even, who had convened to show their mutual affection and respect. But this was a faculty meeting.

“I find Mr. Manning's question to be very insensitive,” said Professor Godwin.

“And why is that?”—Manning.

“It fails to take in the fact that the students are alienated.”

“Pardon my negativity,” said Manning. He seemed to be searching the floor for a spittoon. “Don't you also think they've been marginalized for their otherness?”

Among the lengthy speeches were several that compared both the administration and the student protestors to Nazis; two that compared Matha Polite to Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Marie de France; two that recalled the Army-McCarthy hearings; one more obscure speech that invoked the Claus von Bülow trial; an oral memoir of a summer spent picking grapes with César Chávez; and a parable involving a prince, a hare, and an apple, which seemed to favor the apple.

Professor Eli of Narratology—a one-person subspecialty of the English and American Literature Department—rose to speak. He said he judged the uproar “more a grapheme than a Grand Guignol. While I do not mean to get lost between the
énoncé
and the
énonciation
, or to apply a diegesis where the extra-diegetic is sufficient, the truth—or what we can determine of it, since none of us seeks to contaminate
differénce
with the hierarchical, or to substitute the phonocentric for the logocentric—is that it is what it is. I hope that by so saying, I have not undermined anyone's radical skepticism.”

No one thought he had.

Two of the presentations were so off the wall, they elicited responses of terrified silence. The first was delivered one-third in English, one-third in Spanish, one-third in German, by Hermann Lopez of the Film Department, who claimed to have grown up in La Paz, but whose nickname, “Triumph of the Will Lopez,” did not come from nowhere. The second was a rant against the obtuseness of the reading public by Jack Umass of Sociology, who hadn't been himself lately. The author of
The 100 Smartest and Most Intellectual People in America
, Jack had fallen into a depression when his book sold only one hundred copies.

“Do you have any Advil?” Peace asked Manning.

“I just swallowed the bottle.”

Had one been awarded, the prize for the most discursive speech would have gone to Professor Fannie Quintana, of Women's and Fashion Studies, who spoke in the voice of a sopranino (dogs swooned to it). She began with a recollection of the nuns who taught her in elementary school, then swung into the story of her bitter divorce, digressed to a condemnation of anyone who wore real fur, and wound up with an apostrophe to her mother that so choked her, she could not remember what she had been saying, much less where she was going, and collapsed in a heap of attractively layered clothing.

Upon Quintana's disintegration, Manning stood once more, looked Bollovate in the eye, and said, “Mr. President, may I ask what Mr. Bollovate is doing at a meeting of the faculty?” He did not wish to appear rude, he said, but “trustees have no business being in on faculty deliberations.” He turned to Godwin. “Or am I being insensitive again?”

While many of the faculty were weighing whether or not to agree, or disagree, or partly agree and partly disagree, Jacques La Cocque, the college librarian, defended Bollovate's presence. La Cocque wore tattersall vests, and his head appeared to have been sawed off at the back, so that his hair lay flat against it. He said he thought it would be “
très utile
to have Mr. Bollovate's presence.” He looked to the trustee for approval of his approval.

Professor Ordas of the Tarzan Institute stood and asked, “Is it because Mr. Bollovate is a man that Professor Manning objects to his presence?” Then Professor Jefferson asked if Bollovate would have been allowed in had he been female.

“Man! I feel like a woman,” said Manning. He was about to respond that Bollovate should not be welcome if he were a cross-dresser, a mink, or a tree either, but he merely shrugged and tossed a wave of disgust at the front of the room.

As Professor Jefferson was thanking her colleagues for their too kind but much appreciated remarks on her remarks, Professor Gander of Professional Public Policy and Government Appointments Studies stood to deliver his specialty, the perfectly formed academic speech. Tall and slope-shouldered, he had the mind of
a Polaroid snapshot; whenever it evidenced itself, one was at first excited, then depressed. His voice, a cello without music, had undoubtedly saved his life more than once, as anyone who listened attentively to what Gander was saying would be moved to gut him with a hunting knife. But the orator of the perfectly formed academic speech had practical experience to abet his natural gifts. He'd recently returned from a leave of absence as assistant White House press secretary, where for two years he'd explained America's successes in Iraq. He was expert in lulling all within earshot to a demicoma, particularly when he mentioned “governance.”

“Now this is an issue that has come before us many times,” he began. Half the eyelids in the hall drooped at once. “And, I am certain, it will come before us again.” The other half followed. “What we must remember is that we are the faculty of Beet College, which gives us a great deal of power. But with power comes responsibility.”

Manning muttered, “Shit,” and slumped.

“It is not enough to have rights,” said Gander. “One must also do right. Shall we not do right? I do not think so.” Peace chuckled. “Mr. Bollovate is not one of us. Yes. But then again, he is. And so, the governance…”

Nothing more of his speech was heard until Gander thanked his college colleagues for their collegiality and their kind collegial attention. Then everyone clapped heartily and gratefully, except for Peace, Manning, a few others, and Bollovate himself, who throughout the to-do had sat motionless as a hippo in a swamp, his little round eyes unblinking.

Peace turned toward a high, wide Faculty Room window and saw Bacon Library through the ripples in the glass. The massive facade. The scrolls atop the pillars. Another story came to him—why was he thinking in these terms lately?—of John Grimes, the hero of James Baldwin's
Go Tell It on the Mountain
, at the age of eight or so, standing on Fifth Avenue across from the two stone lions at the New York Public Library. The boy wondered if the lions were there to protect him or keep him out.

Had Peace been able to see farther, beyond the campus and
onto the interstate, he would have caught sight of Livi in her Civic, looking like a million bucks in knockoff Prada sunglasses and a black turtleneck, driving south toward Boston. That morning on the spur of the moment, as her husband had headed off to the faculty meeting, she'd decided to attend the annual convention of the American Society of Surgeons of the Hand taking place at the Ritz. Two main activities occurred at such conventions: lectures and job interviews. Livi was not going for the lectures.