Hardscrabble Road (35 page)

Jig Tyler had stood up and taken her hand. He gave it a good quick shake and let go. “You’d better sit down and read that
letter. You’ll feel better or worse depending on whether you’ve heard the news.”

Alison picked the letter back up again and opened it. No matter how thrilled she was to meet Dr. Tyler, she really wanted
to know what was in this letter, and she wanted to know it now, not later. She sat down behind her desk and ripped it open.
Roger was pretentious, but not ridiculous. The letter started Alison, and she immediately relaxed.

I’m glad to be able to tell you that the committee has looked into the allegations of the student in question and found them
without foundation.

Alison wanted to fix the syntax—you didn’t use “found” and “foundation” in a single sentence with only two words separating
them—but instead she chucked the letter onto her desk and looked up at Dr. Tyler in his chair.

“Relieved?” Jig Tyler said.

“Very,” Alison said. “Did you know what it was about?”

“About an allegation that you systematically discriminate against students with conservative views, brought out by a few broadcasts
by Drew Harrigan. It’s all over campus that the department launched an inquiry and it’s been all over campus since this morning
that they were going to abandon it. I take it you’re relieved.”

“Very. I know you’ve been in trouble like that a dozen times, but I don’t have two Nobels to fall back on.”

“I take it you haven’t heard the news,” Jig Tyler said.

“If you mean the news that Harrigan is dead, yes, I’ve heard it,” Alison said. “It’s a terrible thing.”

“Boot up your computer and get online. You need to see something.”

Alison swiveled her chair to the side and tapped at the keyboard, sending the screen saver, a picture of the cathedral at
Rheims, shuddering. The desktop appeared and she clicked on the Internet connection, which came up immediately, since the
university was on a cable system and not on dial up anymore. She rather missed the sound of dial up, the way she rather missed
the sound printers used to make before they got the silent ones.

“Go to CNN,” Jig Tyler said. “That ought to work.”

Alison hesitated, and then went. The window came up with a picture of Drew Harrigan in the middle of it, and for just one
moment Alison thought it was nothing but another story about the murder. Then she saw the inset picture of a vapid-looking
blonde holding up what seemed to be a piece of legal-sized typing paper, and the words:
HARRIGAN WIDOW NAMES NAMES
.

“What’s this?” Alison said.

“That’s Mrs. Drew Harrigan, the fair Ellen,” Jig Tyler said. “Have you met her?”

“I’ve never even seen a picture of her before. Who’s she naming the names of?”

“Well, there’s you, for one. And me.”

Alison looked up. “Me? Why? I don’t even know her.”

“I do, although only in passing. Believe it or not, the Harrigans and I get invited to some of the same fund-raisers. You’d
be amazed at the people I’m willing to put up with for charity. The names she’s naming are the list of people she believes
had motive, opportunity, and blind unreasoning hatred to kill her husband.”

Alison blinked. “But that makes no sense,” she said. “Why would I want to kill her husband?”

Jig Tyler pointed to the envelope on the desk. “That. Drew Harrigan is dead and the inquiry is over.”

“But it doesn’t have anything to do with that,” Alison said. “It can’t have. I threatened to sue the department back to the
Stone Age. That’s what happened.”

“That’s not what it’s going to look like.”

“But this is ridiculous,” Alison said. “The police can’t be taking this seriously.”

“Well,” Jig Tyler said, “if my sources are to be believed, and they usually are, she took it to the police first. Actually
to Gregor Demarkian. Tracked him down at that convent where the body was found this morning and gave the list to him. Then
she seems not to have believed that he was taking it seriously, so she came back here and called a press conference. That
was at about ten thirty. It’s now just about noon, and that story is on every wire service on the planet. The police are going
to have to take it seriously.”

“Good God,” Alison said.

“Assuming God exists, I doubt if he’s good. But mostly I assume he doesn’t exist. Do you believe in God?”

“No, not really, I suppose. I don’t think about it much.”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think Drew Harrigan believed in God much, either. He just found God a convenient co-pilot for
the show. Have you listened to the show?”

“I tried once. I couldn’t get through it.”

“It’s frightening how many stupid people there are in the world,” Jig said. “And the most frightening thing of all is that
they know they’re stupid. They feel it. That’s why they get so hysterical about ‘pointy-headed intellectuals’ who ‘look down
on them.’ It’s projection. They look down on them selves.
And it’s not just the ones who vote Republican. If you ask me, the Democrats are worse. The liberals are the worst of all.
It’s a shill. They make people believe things can get better if they just fool around with the system a little, instead of
getting rid of the whole thing at once.”

“You think that’s wrong? That things can never get better by fooling around with the system a little?”

“They can get superficially better,” Jig Tyler said. “You can buy people off with a house and a car and enough money for a
vacation every summer. They don’t notice that the house is a crackerbox in a soulless housing development where all the neighbors’
houses are the same, or the car breaks down in five years, or the summer vacation means trekking out to a godforsaken little
patch of sand with five thousand other people crowded onto it and staying in the kind of motel that advertises rooms for twenty
dollars a night, no cable. They don’t notice that the people who are robbing them blind have their own islands in the Caribbean
and their own planes with full bedroom and bath facilities and never get crowded anywhere.”

“I read one of your books once,” Alison said. “The One Party System, that one.”

“So I’m repeating myself,” Jig Tyler said. “I’m sorry. I just get so carried away. It seems so obvious to me. There are many
more of us than there are of them. They can’t continue to rule unless we allow them to continue to rule. For decades, every
time another election came around, I’d expect to see an insurgency. I almost thought I had one in the sixties. The sixties
were a sham, and since then we’ve had nothing but corporate party politics. It’s like toothpaste that comes in three different
colors. They’re all the same. The differences between them are superficial.”

“I used to go on those sorts of vacations when I was little,” Alison said. “We had a trailer, though. We didn’t go to motels.
We’d drive down to Cape Hatteras and hook up and spend the week there, and then we’d drive home. It really wasn’t awful, you
know. I found it very enjoyable. I know my parents did, too.”

“They wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much if they’d realized what they didn’t have. Do you know how I spent my vacations when
I was little?”

“No.”

“At my father’s house in Rome. The first time I had dinner with the Pope, I was six years old.”

“I don’t think I’d have much liked having dinner with the Pope when I was six,” Alison said, “and it has nothing to do with
the fact that I wasn’t Catholic.”

“We weren’t Catholic, either. My father was in the diplomatic corps. Which means I grew up around very rich people without
being a very rich
person myself. They are what they are, you know. They’re not stupid. They know they have to pay off at least a little if they
want to stay in power, or in business. So they pay off, just a little. But never more than just a little. And they present
the suckers with two options: a Democratic Party that’s working for them and pretending to be trying to take care of the people
they hurt, and a Republican Party that’s working for them and pretending to care about people with ‘traditional values.’ They
distract Democratic voters with puny-assed programs that won’t even begin to address the problems created by global capitalism,
never mind the yawning chasm of inequality it creates. They distract the Republican voters with God, guns, and gays. They
despise everybody who doesn’t have a bank account the size of Wisconsin and they always win. And the suckers get themselves
all worked up about Roe v. Wade or immigration law, and never even see it happening.”

“And you go on CNN and say all these things, do you?”

“Yes, well,” Jig Tyler said. “It’s good for their image to present at least some opposing views. That way, they can’t be accused
of censorship. And they always get somebody like me to present them. I’m the sort of person people who aren’t rich think of
as rich. I’ve got a cushy job. I’m an Ivy League intellectual. I can be presented as completely out of touch, and nobody they’d
really want to listen to, so mostly they don’t listen.”

“But you do the shows anyway.”

“I do, yes,” Jig Tyler said. “There’s always the chance that there are one or two people ready to hear. They’d think you were
rich, too. Do you know that?”

“Yes,” Alison said, “I do. My family does, even now. They refer to my time in college as when I went off to that rich kids’
school.”

Jig Tyler stood up. “I’m sorry to have barged in on you. I just thought you’d better be forewarned. It’s going to get fairly
nuts before it quiets down. I thought you might not be used to that.”

“I’m not.”

“If I were you, I’d be careful not to make any statements to the press,” Jig said. “Oh, I’m going to, and probably most of
the people on that list are going to, but you’ve never done it before. You’ve got no idea how to handle reporters’ questions.
You don’t want to say anything that will land you in court on a murder charge when all you’ve done wrong is mistake the press
for people who are willing to listen.”

He stood up and looked around, at her bookshelves, at her filing cabinet, at the books stacked on the floor. Alison didn’t
think she’d ever realized how truly tall and thin he was, cadaverous, like a skeleton in clothes.

“You’ve got interesting books,” he said.

Then he ambled out of the room, as inexplicably, Alison thought, as he’d
wandered in. She watched him for as long as she could see him, then turned back to CNN and the story about Ellen Harrigan
and her list. She had the kind of uneasy feeling she got when she ate too much dairy at dinner. She wasn’t allergic to dairy,
exactly, but beyond a certain point it made her queasy and restless. She had the kind of thought she hadn’t had in many years,
the kind that used to drive her crazy when her parents had it, the kind that had made her early life a long wasteland of waiting
to get out of where she was and into a place where people understood books and ideas and everything that went with them.

She wondered what Jig Tyler did for entertainment.

She immediately felt stupid, and awkward, and uneducated. She went back to CNN, and to wondering if Roger had let her off
the hook on purpose, because he would have known it would make her look bad.

E
llen Harrigan had been
in the office since fifteen minutes to ten this morning, and now, when it should have been time for lunch, she was still
there, and still shrieking. Neil Savage was beginning to think that Ellen Harrigan couldn’t do anything but shriek, the way
her husband had been unable to say anything about anything except in that jokey I’m-really-smarter-than-you-no-matter-how-stupid-I-sound
tone that all the dim-witted talk jockeys like to affect for use on the radio as well as off. Neil Savage was beginning to
lose it, and he knew it. His level of anger was now so high that he couldn’t even begin to think about lunch, never mind about
getting Ellen out of there, which was what most of his partners wanted him to do. Usually, it was the secretaries who got
the hysterics out of the office, but Ellen Harrigan was shrewder than that. She might have the IQ of shredded wheat, but she’d
learned not to be fobbed off on secretaries and assistants. She was just going to stand there and have a fit until…well, maybe
until forever, since at this point nobody knew what she wanted, or what they were supposed to do. Neil thought he did know
what she wanted, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to give it to her. She wanted to be taken seriously by serious people. She
wanted the respect he would have given a Leonard Bernstein or a Saul Bellow without having to do one damned thing to earn
it, without having to have even the basic equipment that would have made it possible for her to even attempt to earn it. Neil
knew a lot of people like that. They existed especially in business, and among those tacky people who decked themselves out
in tatty little bracelets that said,
WHAT WOULD JESUS DO
? Neil sometimes thought he knew exactly what Jesus would do if he ever met up with them. He’d rip the bracelets off their
arms and the
MY BOSS IS A JEWISH
CARPENTER
pins off their shirts and make them all sit down and listen to the entire four hours of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

Ellen Harrigan was still shrieking, and he was still in this mood, when one of the secretaries came in to tell him Kate was
here. It took him a few moments to remember that he was supposed to be expecting her. She’d called first thing this morning
and asked to come in to see him. He should have arranged to take her out for lunch—but, of course, there was no need to go
out for lunch. The firm had a partners’ dining room. Only the associates and the help went out for lunch. He didn’t dare take
Kate down to the dining room now, though. Ellen might show up there, still shrieking, and demand his attention.

The secretary brought Kate in to him just as Ellen Harrigan was getting off another string of curse words, her voice stabbing
down the corridor like lightning caught in a box. “Goddamn it you goddamned motherfucking son of a bitch cocksucker—”