The War Between the Tates: A Novel (22 page)

First, she must give up the idea of taking Wendy’s child. Considering everything, especially considering Brian, there are too many problems. She would prefer not to consider Brian; she would rather not think of him at all, but that is impossible. He cannot stay in “Detroit” forever; he will have to come back home, and she will have to see him. At first, just as before, he will be solemn and contrite. He will accuse himself, and figuratively pour ashes upon his head, but in reality his hair will remain quite shiny and smooth, sideburns and all. Then he will begin to explain how the affair with Wendy meant nothing to him and was not important; how the child means nothing and is not important. Gradually his smooth, shiny air of self-esteem will reappear. He will begin to think that it is time for Erica to swallow his version of events, and to forgive and forget again. Presently, if she does not do so, he will begin to feel righteously aggrieved.

Erica rinses Danielle’s frying pan under hot water and sets it upside down on the drainboard. She turns off the tap and lifts the metal basket from the sink. There is a sound of choking from below, the dirty water, floating gray curds of detergent, quivers as it is sucked down into the drain, which swallows it finally to the dregs with a nauseous gulp.

Looking ahead, down into the long dirty dark drainpipe of the coming winter, Erica can imagine that she might one day be able to accept what has happened; that she might be able to forgive. But the person she will forgive is not her husband Brian Tate, but a weak, shallow-minded, self-justifying middle-aged man of the same name. Such men often become involved in messy, loveless adulteries; and they are forgiven, because nothing better can be hoped from them.

But Brian will not only expect to be forgiven, and to have his version of events listened to and believed. At some time during this process he will want to move back into the house on Jones Creek Road, and presently he will want to move back into the bedroom. He will expect Erica to make love to him; to love him, although it has been proved he does not love her, or anyone.

And this is impossible. Erica can never like, much less love the person her husband has turned into. The very most she will ever be able to do is pretend to tolerate him, to remain silent as he rehearses his excuses and false protestations of love, to wait and watch for the next sign of deception, to be still under him at night with her teeth together. Lies, more lies, years of lies.

It is so much easier for Danielle. She does not have to have Leonard in the house; she need only see him a few times a year. She can say what she thinks of him without risking criticism, because everyone knows now what he is really like. And it is easier for Leonard too: he need not be reminded every day of how shabbily he has behaved. Really it is more charitable to let a man like that live where his faults will not be so glaringly obvious: among other shallow, undependable people who will forgive
him
because they are no better themselves. Or perhaps among naïve people who still believe in him, who accept his pretensions, as Wendy does Brian’s—and thus possibly motivate him to live up to these pretensions.

Wendy still thinks Brian is a great man, a hero; she thinks that the book he is writing will be a great book. This need not be wholly naïveté: very likely, when Brian is with her he plays that part, or more than plays it—he really is serious, dignified, affectionate, etc. Brian always behaves best when people are watching him, especially people he does not know too well; and after all, it has taken Erica herself nearly twenty years to find him out. If Wendy were to know him as well—A faint idea, like the shadow of a small fast plane or a large bird flickering in weak sunlight high over a field, crosses Erica’s mind at this moment, and is gone. But Wendy will never see Brian as he really is now; she will go through life mourning him as a lost hero.

Whereas Erica, very soon, will have to see Brian again. If she puts it off much longer she will seem hysterical, unforgiving; everyone will blame her. Then she will have to let him move back into the house. And when she does so, it will become a sort of prison.

She remembers a conversation she had once with Sandy Finkelstein, coming home from
The Magic Flute
on the streetcar along Mass. Avenue. He had been reading Dante’s
Inferno,
and was saying how he didn’t think the sinners in the first circle, in the whirlwind, had it so bad, because they were with someone they loved passionately. The real hell, he said, would be to be with someone you couldn’t stand. “Or someone you once loved, but now you hate them,” Erica suggested. “Like my mother. That would be the worst.”

In that same conversation Sandy had said what really gave him the horrors was all those people drifting outside hell in that sort of dirty fog, the ones who did neither good nor evil, but were for themselves.

There must be some other solution for all of them, Erica thinks; some way out of that fog. A moment ago there was a sort of idea in her mind ...She looks out the kitchen window into the misty narrow backyard. The shadow of the idea is returning; nearer this time, darker, more distinct—Yes. Now she recognizes it.

T
EACHERS, ESPECIALLY UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS,
often have an elective affinity with their subjects. Whether through original tropism, conscious effort or merely long association, language instructors born in Missouri and Brooklyn look and act remarkably like Frenchmen and Italians, professors of economics resemble bankers, and musicologists are indistinguishable from musicians. The similarity is usually only one of style; indeed most professors, at least at Corinth, tend to regard with suspicion and hostility any colleague who leaves the academy to practice what they preach.

These affinities also profoundly influence the functioning of the various Corinth University departments. They determine, for instance, which academic issues will take the longest to resolve and arouse the strongest feelings. Members of the math department tend to quarrel over the figures in their annual report, and members of the English department over its wording. In Psychology, analysis of the personality traits of candidates for promotion sometimes ends in ego-dystonic shouting; and the controversy over the new men’s washroom in the Architecture Building (during which two professors who had not designed an actual building in twenty years came to blows) has already passed into university annals.

But it is among Brian Tate’s colleagues that the effect of the law of affinities is most strongly felt. Since every member of the political science department is in outward manner and inner fantasy an expert political strategist, every issue provokes public debate and private lobbying. Even when there is little at stake, eloquent speeches are made; wires are skillfully pulled and logs rolled out of simple enjoyment of the sport.

In the past Brian has played the game with as much zest as any of his colleagues. Today it seems petty and tiresome. The transactions of the Curriculum Committee, of which he is chairman, appear vain playacting, and the question it is discussing very trivial compared to that on his own agenda, viz.: How is he going to cope with his wife’s crazy demand that he divorce her and marry Wendy Gahaghan?

The issue which is now before the committee, and which has been before it for an hour already, plus nearly as long on Tuesday before the whole department, is known as the Pass-Fail Option. It first appeared last week in the shape of a petition signed by thirty-two undergraduate majors in Political Science, nineteen in other departments, four teaching fellows, and three persons giving the names of “Thomas Paine,” “F. Kafka” and “Janis Joplin.” These fifty-eight real and imaginary persons demand that students in political science courses be allowed to choose whether they shall receive a letter grade or merely an indication that they have or have not passed a course.

In practice it is likely that the Pass-Fail Option would have little effect. The experience of the history department last spring suggests that the only students who will opt for it are those who would prefer the euphemism Pass to the letter C. Nevertheless, the matter has provoked great controversy: Brian’s colleagues have made long and sometimes emotional speeches containing phrases like “freedom of conscience,” “academic integrity,” “evasion of responsibility” and “moral cowardice”—the last two of which he has heard in another context recently, in fact only a few hours ago, when they were used by his wife to describe his conduct towards Wendy.

Brian’s committee, which is supposed to study the petition and make recommendations to the department, is divided on the issue. Each of the four other members has, as usual, taken up a philosophical position which he is arguing in his characteristic style. For not only do professors resemble their subjects; these resemblances are subdivided within each department. Just as some instructors in art history take on what they imagine to be the appearance, manner and opinions of Renoir, and others what they imagine to be those of Jim Dine, so each of Brian’s colleagues imitates a school of political thought, if not a specific politician.

John Randall, the grand old man of the department, last survivor from the days when it was known as the Department of Government, appears to Brian in the role of Cordell Hull. He is a large stiff elderly man, somewhat pompous and slow on the uptake, but with remarkable staying power; a Hegelian who lectures on political philosophy, often quoting by memory from Plato. It is John Randall’s view that if they admit the Pass-Fail Option, they will be breaking their moral contract with the university and failing to recognize true excellence. Students at Corinth are created equal in opportunity to attend lectures in Government (as he still calls it), but not equal in ability to comprehend these lectures. The petition should therefore be rejected, politely but in a firm and dignified manner.

Brian’s principal enemy in the department, C. Donald Dibble, also opposes the petition, but more violently; just as he has for years opposed every proposal and blocked every suggestion for curriculum change made by Brian. It is largely due to him that the committee has accomplished almost nothing since September. A tense, talkative, rather paranoid bachelor, Don Dibble designates himself in interviews, of which he gives many on varied topics, as a “radical conservative.” Brian has privately designated him as Metternich. Dibble is a political philosopher of a more recent school than Randall’s, but he also quotes Plato frequently—and in Brian’s view deceptively. He has been trained at the University of Chicago to hunt out the basic political principles which are hidden in the undergrowth of even apparently obscure events. Occasionally he fails to flush any significant issues from the shrubbery, and refrains from involvement in the ensuing discussion; but not today. Hidden in the Pass-Fail Option, Dibble has discovered a wedge-shaped animal something like an elephant. If his colleagues let it into the department, he insists, they will be abdicating the responsibilities of power and yielding to mob pressure. Presently larger and larger elephants will enter behind it, and trample them all to death, which will be no more than they deserve.

Chuck Markowitz, the youngest member of the committee, appears in the role of Castro. He is an awkward, engaging young radical who is also extremely well read. Normally Brian feels rather fond of Chuck, but today he is impatient with him. For one thing, Chuck is not only in favor of granting the demands of the petition; he is probably responsible, at least in part, for its having been written in the first place, and thus for the special departmental meeting on Tuesday which prevented Brian from having lunch with Wendy, and all the trouble which has followed from that. It is his fault that the five of them are sitting in this room now instead of attending to their personal or academic business. More generally, Brian holds it against Chuck that though over thirty he affects the costume of a radical undergraduate, and has allowed his hair to grow out until it resembles a small dirty black poodle dog sitting on top of his head.

Chuck’s remarks in favor of the Pass-Fail Option are extensive and predictable. He dwells upon the stupidities and inequalities of the present grading system, with illustrative anecdotes; he extolls the superiority of independent study, and the success of free universities. “After all,” he concludes, grinning engagingly, “how can we really know what some kid has learned in our course? How do we have any right to grade him?” The faces of the other committee members harden at these words, and they silently give Chuck’s speech the grade of B-minus.

Last to speak, as usual, is Hank Andrews, a skinny pale clever man who is Brian’s best friend in the department. Andrews has long ago adopted for himself the role of Machiavelli. In meetings he plays the part of the detached scientist, observing and occasionally manipulating political forces out of pure intellectual curiosity. It is impossible to guess what side Andrews will take on any question, since he is as likely to be motivated by cynical amusement as by either interest or principle. Today, after appearing to hesitate for some time, he has finally come out in favor of the Pass-Fail Option—largely, Brian suspects, in order to cause trouble. Andrews declines to consider any of the larger issues involved. He merely points out in his dry way that the Option has been allowed by several other departments with apparently little effect, and that the petition has been signed by over half their own majors. If its demands are not met, considerable ill feeling will be felt. There will be mutterings about monolithic bureaucracy; snide or angry letters and editorials will appear in the student newspaper.

When Andrews ceases speaking there is a clamor of exclamation, among which the words “truckling” and “expediency” can be heard. The other three professors begin to repeat the arguments they have already put forth, and to make the points they have made half an hour ago or on Tuesday. Brian does not listen to them; he hears other voices arguing, demanding.

He should have suspected trouble from the way his wife sounded on the phone this morning—from the tension in her voice, the unnatural pauses. But he was unprepared for the assault which began when he opened the front door of his house an hour later and they met face to face—Erica’s white as if lit from within by fever, with wide ignited eyes. Her Jeanne d’Arc face, he had called it once: the face of a woman fighting, as she believes, for unselfish ends, fanatically certain she is in the right. When Erica herself is injured she merely becomes cross and depressed; but she can rise to flaming indignation over any injury, or possible injury, to a child. The younger the child, the hotter the flames. He has not seen them blaze this high since just before Matilda was born, when she battled two doctors and the management of a large hospital for the right to have the baby stay with her after birth instead of in the hospital nursery. “Do you know what the babies do up there in that place?” he remembers her demanding in a raised voice as they stood in the admitting office with her pains coming every eight minutes. “Each one is isolated from all human contact in a kind of horrible plastic cage. The lights are always on, glaring down into their eyes twenty-four hours a day, like some North Korean military interrogation, and they
cry,
that’s what they do, twenty-four hours a day, except when they’re too exhausted even to cry, for five days and nights. That’s their introduction to this world.”