Hardscrabble Road (22 page)

All this year’s field of Democratic presidential candidates is pretty pathetic, but the winner of the National Loser Party
Award for Biggest Loser in the Bunch has to be John Kerry. I mean, come on, people. It’s not enough that Democrats are traitors
to America in fact, that any one of them would rather be living in Moscow, Russia, than Moscow, Idaho, they’re going to go
for a guy who looks so French he could be Brigitte Bardot’s evil twin?

Gregor blinked. John Kerry looked French? John Kerry looked so New England, he could have been Cotton Mather’s evil twin.
And wouldn’t somebody like Drew Harrigan think Brigitte Bardot, who was a big activist in the animal rights movement, evil
enough on her own, so that if she had an evil twin, he’d have to be good?

His head was swimming. He’d left home this morning expecting to do nothing more than spend an hour with John Jackman and get
a promise of another morgue check. He’d been muddled and depressed, thinking about Bennis, thinking about himself. He’d wanted
something to take his mind off the narcissistic and uncontrollable.

He wasn’t sure he’d meant something like this.

A
lison Standish felt that
if the university was attempting to conduct its investigation into her teaching in a way that did not leave it open to charges
of responding to Drew Harrigan’s programs, it was doing a very bad job. As a matter of fact, as of this morning, it was doing
a very bad job of investigating, and as the days went by it only seemed to be getting worse. In the first place, there was
the secrecy. The investigation was secret in a way that would make a grand jury fan salivate. Nobody involved in it was allowed
to tell anybody else what they had told the committee, nor what anybody else had told the committee, not even a lawyer. Alison
was sure that couldn’t be legal. For another thing, nobody was allowed to confront the witnesses, not even Alison herself.
If a former student came forward to say that he had had to sit through a lecture praising Marxism in Alison’s class, Alison
couldn’t ask him about it, and couldn’t even know who he was. It was like an interrogation from the Holy and Roman Inquisition—not
the Spanish one, which came later, but the one the Vatican ran in Rome, which had called Thomas Aquinas down for questioning
and forced him to take the long trip by horse that killed him. Alison didn’t expect to die. She didn’t even expect to have
her classes suspended. She was beginning to think she needed to find somebody outside the situation to help her, and stop
assuming that the university was the community of scholars it had been set up to be in the Middle Ages.

Hell, that one hadn’t even worked in the Middle Ages.

She sat at her desk and looked, without reading, at the document in front of her. She wasn’t reading it because she’d already
read it, about four times, since she’d first picked it up in her mailbox an hour ago. These were supposed to be her office
hours, but it didn’t matter. Students almost never came, and none had come today. She was free to obsess as long as she wanted
to about this piece off… this piece of…She didn’t know what it
was a piece of. She didn’t know how to respond to it. It didn’t matter that she knew it was untrue, and that Roger Hollman,
the dean, must also know it was untrue. The idea was obviously to act as if it were true, and worse, to presume the truth
of it unless the falsity was proved. Who was it who said you couldn’t prove a negative? Somebody from the Middle Ages, probably.
Alison was having a hard time remembering the Middle Ages at the moment. What she was remembering, for no reason at all, was
her marriage. That had all been so long ago it might as well have happened to somebody else, but there you were. She had been
married, to a professor of history at Temple who had eventually moved on first to New York University and then to Tufts. She
had had a child, named Simon, who had died at the age of seven after many long years with leukemia. There was a time there,
just for a moment, when she might have been somebody else than who she was: David’s wife, Simon’s mother, a woman who “kept
her hand in” by reading other people’s books on scholastic theology and the art of the icon but otherwise had nothing to do
with this at all. She didn’t know if she would have been happier if her life had turned out that way. She did know she would
have been happier if Simon had lived. It occurred to her that she had gone past the time when having another child was feasible,
and maybe she shouldn’t have left it so late.

That’s ridiculous, she thought. She didn’t want another child. If she’d ever had one, she would have been scared to death
of it. She would have examined it for symptoms of leukemia daily, and then examined it some more, home medical encyclopedia
in hand, hoping to cover all the fatal illnesses possible in children, miserable because she’d know that she could never cover
them all. It was odd the way people turned out. It was odder what they wanted in times of crisis.

The thing was, even though the proceedings were secret, the testimony was only secret up to a point. She didn’t receive names,
or dates, or the time periods when a student may have been in her classes, but she did receive the accusations themselves.
Up to now, most of them had been trivial and embarrassing. Someone had complained that she showed far too much approval of
feudalism, because it implied that she opposed “the legitimate aspirations of poor people and people of color.” Someone had
complained that she called on men with their hands raised more often than she called on women—who could possibly know if that
was true or not? Had there been a student in one of her classes counting the other students who were called on to speak and
writing it all down in a notebook in preparation for a time like now? That wasn’t the kind of thing the university would take
seriously, and it wasn’t the kind of thing Drew Harrigan had been complaining of. This, however, was:

The entire thrust of Professor Standish’s course in Church and State in the Europe of the High Middle Ages was to insult Christian
students and call them evil and stupid. She spent some time in almost every class talking about how the Middle Ages proved
that Christians should not be in charge of governments and Christianity would also produce tyranny and torture if it got any
power. She compared the situation in the Middle Ages to the political work of the Religious Right now, saying that the Religious
Right was the same as the witchburners and Inquisitionists who had killed hundreds of people for their beliefs in the twelfth
century. She referred to the President of the United States as somebody who thought he was on a Crusade. When students protested
her bias, she told them they either agreed with her or were too stupid to see the parallels.

There was more, but the more there was, the more ridiculous it got. At one point, the writer complained that Alison did not
“respect” his belief that witches were real and consorted with Satan, but tried to push her “secular humanism” on him and
every other student in the class. As if she were supposed to just nod and make encouraging noises when students claimed to
see ghosts or experience levitation. Maybe she was. Maybe that was what the New University was all about. Hammered by the
left and the right, they weren’t supposed to teach any longer, and they surely weren’t supposed to uphold the traditions of
high literacy and the Western Enlightenment. Civilization as they knew it was over. Everything really was political now.

I’m going insane,
Alison told herself. Then she picked up the two-page “testimony,” held it carefully with the thumb and index finger of her
right hand, as if it were contaminated, and got up to go down the hall to the chairman’s office. Alison knew better than
to start with Roger Hollman. He had a secretary who could keep her out. She’d start with Chris McCall, and he could deal with
it.

Chris’s office was an office like any other. The door was open when he was willing to see students, but Alison knew he was
there even when the door was shut, working away on his latest paper on Icons of Individualism in Twentieth-Century American
Popular Culture. The door was shut. She turned the knob and walked right in.

“What the hell?” Chris said.

Alison closed the door behind her. “I would have knocked, but you’d have pretended you weren’t here. We have to talk.”

Chris was an athletic, middle-aged man with a ponytail, an atavism, really, a throwback to the days when middle-aged men actually
believed they
looked younger if they never saw a barber. Alison threw the “testimony” down on his desk and sat down herself.

“Look at that.”

Chris didn’t. He just looked uncomfortable. “I have looked at it. They sent me a copy.”

“Well?”

“How do I know?” Chris said. “It’s important to give the students a safe place to express their opinions. That’s what the
investigating committee is doing. It’s important to hear them out and respect—”

“—Respect what, Chris? Whoever this is thinks witches are real. Not Wiccan-practicing modern witches, but the kind that ride
on broomsticks and have sex with Satan.”

“Yes, well. Evangelical students, the ones who take the Bible literally.”

“What, Chris? They’re supposed to come here and never get that idea challenged? Should we shut down the entire Religious Studies
Department? We might as well shut down History, Archeology, Geology, and Biology while we’re at it.”

“That’s not the point,” Chris said. “The point is whether you called this student stupid for being a Christian believer. I
mean, for God’s sake, Alison. You know what it’s been like around here since the water buffalo mess. We can barely breathe
in the direction of conservative students without the administration having a complete fit.”

“The kid in the water buffalo case wasn’t a conservative student,” Alison said, “and the trouble we had over it was over the
secrecy of the proceedings, which is what is going on here. This is like a Star Chamber, Chris. It’s absurd. At the very least,
I have the right to due process, to be able to confront the witnesses against me, to advice of counsel—”

“—Due process doesn’t apply to university committees,” Chris said quickly. “They aren’t adversary proceedings. You don’t have
enemies you have to protect yourself against.”

“No? Did what’s his name in the water buffalo incident have enemies he had to protect himself against?”

“That went wrong,” Chris said. “It got out of hand.”

“This is about to.”

Chris licked his lips. Alison didn’t think she’d ever realized, before, how soft and weak and self-protective he was, and
yet she should have. She’d known him for years. She had a sudden vision of that alternative lifetime again—Simon alive, herself
as a housewife in suburban Boston—and then snapped herself back to the present. She was angry. She had been afraid, but now
she was angry.

“Let’s not go into how I feel about being investigated because an idiot like Drew Harrigan made charges against me on a radio
program targeted to the kind of illiterate asshole who never made it past high school, if that,” she said. “Let’s just go
with what we’ve got. I came to you instead of Roger because you were easier to get to. You’d better go tell Roger if you know
what’s good for you.”

“Roger isn’t going to just drop the investigation,” Chris said. “He couldn’t. He’s got a responsibility—”

“When I leave this office, I’m going to hire a lawyer,” Alison said. “There’s a woman in town I went to college with. She’s
an attorney who works on high-profile media cases. She’ll know one locally who’ll suit my purposes. I’m going to hire a lawyer,
and I’m going to give a press conference. And I swear to God, I’ll make the water buffalo case look like a day at the beach
in comparison.”

“If you go to an outside source, the committee can suspend you from teaching.”

“Let them try it.” Alison leaned forward and took the two-page “testimony” off Chris’s desk. “The first thing we’re going
to look into is this. Because you know what, Chris?”

“You can’t blame a student for having an opinion.”

“No, I can’t. But I can blame a nonstudent for claiming he was a student. Or she. Because my classes are small. The one mentioned,
Church and State in the Europe of the High Middle Ages, never has more than ten people in it. Don’t you think I would have
noticed if a student in my class believed in the devil or any of the rest of this nonsense?”

“If you really were that dismissive, the student may not have felt it was safe to speak up. He might have kept it all inside.”

“Bullshit,” Alison said. “Go talk to Roger, Chris. I’ve had enough.”

It was one of those times when what Alison really wanted was to see Chris’s face after she’d left the room, but even the medieval
necromancers had never figured out how to manage that one.

It was too bad.

K
ate Daniel couldn’t decide
how she felt about the call she’d just had from Alison Standish. She would have liked to say bemused, but she’d never been
sure what the word “bemused” meant. It was a little like finding out that her ex-husband was representing Drew Harrigan in
a case in which they might have to have something to do with each other. It wasn’t
that she minded hearing from people in her past, exactly. It was that she didn’t know how to respond to them. She had the
feeling they all remembered the Kate Daniel who had always been called Katherine. She thought they’d expect to see her in
A-line skirts from Villager and matching crew-necked sweaters and a circle pin. She couldn’t really remember what she’d worn
in college, or as Neil Elliot Savage’s wife. What she remembered most of the time was being afraid. She was afraid of the
girls she went to school with. She was afraid of Neil. She was afraid of herself. God only knew how she’d gotten the guts
to get herself to law school, or out of her marriage, but here she was, and she didn’t want to go back.

To be fair, nobody seemed to be interested in seeing her go back. Surely Alison hadn’t. Kate was a little sorry that she couldn’t
help Alison herself, because the case sounded absolutely perfect, right down to the false accusations from a conservative
source, but there it was. Alison wasn’t homeless. She had good degrees and a tenured faculty position. Sherman Markey was
homeless, or dead, and he had nothing at all. It was, Kate thought, time for her to find somebody to sleep with. She wasn’t
looking for a relationship with depth. She was looking for sex. Sex cleared her head.