May sunlight shone through the familiar, beloved ugliness of Memorial Hall’s stained glass windows. It stained the old floor, hollowed by footsteps, with the color of blood; and blood was in the air.
In the year since her eviction from Los Angeles, Wyn had been through enough Welfare Islands to know when someone was being stalked. The pack was gathering; the hunt was on; and she was their prey.
She shrugged one shoulder, adjusted the strap of the old-fashioned green book bag, and entered Sanders Theatre. Briefly, the smell of the ancient, polished wood overpowered the scent of blood. For more than a century, someone had taught the introduction to ancient literature here. She wondered how long it would take Harvard and the Department to name her successor—or if they would bother. Already, she had heard rumblings that the subject material was not just irrelevant to learning how to run a business or treat a cancer, but subversive.
Look what it did to Mad Wyn Baker.
This sort of thing happened in the best of families. They used to shut the strange ones up in attic rooms, or let them rove about the big old country houses. Now, of course, there were drugs and rest homes.
She wondered what excuse would be found when whatever was planned actually happened. Because no threats had been made, no protection orders could be issued. “They don’t mean squat!” one of the women in the Dorchester Project had assured her about such orders.
It had been a mistake to inquire about her students, now long vanished. She knew that her inquiry had been reported where it would do her the most harm, in those carefully, lavish offices where her brother and his aides compiled a dossier on Professor and Doctor Winthrop Baker and her troubled state of mind.
Did she seem…composed when she pressed her police call button? Did she perform her duties in a satisfactory manner upon her return? Would you call Professor Baker’s involvement in the Literacy Programs at the Welfare Islands characteristic behavior? Did you notice any…uh, behavioral quirks when she was arrested on charges of civil disobedience?
Even her housekeeper had been questioned:
Does Professor Baker appear cheerful? Does she keep irregular hours? Has she ever said…?
The poor woman had reported the questions and her answers to Wyn. When she realized how her answers might be used, she had broken down in tears, and Wyn had to dose her with her best brandy.
She suspected they would use her as another example of how professors shouldn’t interfere in business, much less politics. Probably the excuse would be the usual one for a woman and an intellectual. She was working too hard, poor thing. And then she started poking into business and wasn’t up to the stress. What could you expect?
Actually, she figured her brother would try to prove her incompetent. That meant a rest home—a country club with guards for wealthy, neurasthenic, or otherwise inconvenient people. She hoped the one they’d probably park her in would have a decent library. Maybe tranquilizers wouldn’t be too strong, or she could spit them out.
Well, the rest home could just wait. She had one last lecture to give.
Wyn climbed the platform, arranged notes she knew she would not use, and looked out at the students waiting for her to speak. Faces pink and assured, with the familiar chin or browlines of distant cousins, come to hear lecture or scandal as they absorbed the academic airs and graces suitable for the heirs of rulers.
There were ghosts in the room, too. Floating above empty seats at the back (which were the places they would probably have chosen) were other faces, the olive skin and dark eyes of the students who had vanished because they were Citizens, to be engulfed by BuReloc. What would they have made of Sanders Theatre and this university Wyn had called home for most of her life? Could they see it for the tainted thing it had become?
Her voice rang out over the room with its pine and sun scented echoes. Aristocrat speaking with aristocrats, she could invoke references and languages that would have lost and shamed her LAU students. “We have been reared,” she told them, “to admire
Realpolitik
. Consider, for example, the ways of Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan. But must life, as he formulated it, be ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ to be considered ’real’? I find it interesting….”
There, she had used first person; that ought to bring her students’ heads up. They must know: she would be detained today, taken away, whatever euphemisms they chose. No wonder Sanders had filled the way it did when elder professors were retiring.
“…that Hobbes chose to translate Thucydides’s
Peloponnesian War
, which contains Pericles’ funeral oration. That speech is perhaps one of the most moving formulations of belief in an ideal code that we have from the ancient world, and the Melian Dialogue…Book Five, which is a debate between such an ideal code and a rather cynical
realpolitik
.
“I cannot quote Hobbes to you at this point. The book is out of print and I”—Wyn paused to let the irony sink in—“lost my copy in California last year. It is strange, however, how one recalls phrases in and out of context. For me, the most chilling phrase from Book Five comes not from Hobbes but from another translation. For all I can recollect, it may have been one of my own, done many years ago. ‘For the strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must.’”
She could see the smiles, evoked by her mention of the California riot that had brought her back prematurely to the East Coast, altering to nods of approval. “We are used to agreeing wisely with such statements. To disagree, these days, marks us as naive, foolish, sentimental, especially those of us who plan to enter the more active fields of law and commerce. And yet, to have these words spoken by a people who had earlier declared that they honored the law and they honored the law that was above the law is to hear a chilling moral progression. Or, as I see it, a moral deterioration.
“As students, we are not just entitled to make such judgments.”
She paused.
“We are required.” Shock on those scrubbed, smug faces. Had she ever looked so sure, so jolted out of her composure? Memory shocked her: the day before the riot.
Disappointed at hearing ethics when they had hoped for scandal, her class was glazing out again. Perhaps only a riot outside the windows would convince them of what she had seen. But no such riot would taint the Yard if she could help it. More than enough blood had been shed on any campus.
“Why you goin’ back there if you knows they gonna take you?
’ Her brother had been very, very right. Social work, settlement house work hadn’t been the answer. But students in Harvard’s “adopted” schools in the Dorchester and Mattapan Welfare Projects had received her. Primarily, because they had no choice. No Citizens turned down help from a Baker from Harvard. Then once the newsgrids had shut up and the Welfare rumor mills had a chance to spread the word, they had bothered to listen. Warily at first: like all the people who came into the Projects when anyone in her right mind knew the only thing to do was get out as fast as you could, this professor had to be crazy. But maybe, just maybe, she was their kind of crazy.
And maybe, just maybe, she was theirs.
It had been strange at first to teach basic reading rather than Linear B or Homer. It had been stranger yet to make home visits to grandmothers younger than herself but pregnant once again. And strangest of all to find herself learning more from them than they could from her.
Abandoning generations of “keep it in the family” she had asked their advice; and they had warned her. “
They’d
never
do that!
” she had protested to faces, black, white, and brown, old and young, all wizened from the same street wisdom and the street fights that erupted when that wisdom failed.
Was she expecting trouble? What kind? Given tough licensing laws and the penalties for illegal weapons, she’d better not pack a weapon. So her book bag held books and papers, nothing more dangerous. A first-aid kit rode in one pocket. She had even sewn some simple jewelry and coins into the seams of her bag. With luck, the nurses in whatever rest home she was bound for could be bribed.
“You’re pushing it, Wyn. I’m warning you.” Sure enough, Wyn could hear the minatory singsong in her brothers’ voice. For years, it had been second nature in the family to yield to him when his face turned red, and he waved his finger at her as no teacher beyond the elementary grades had the ill grace to do.
She had held the statement out to him, the statement of her holdings and the records she had found. Saying nothing. Letting the record speak for itself.
“So, you’re blowing the whistle? Do you want to disgrace us all?”
“This illegality has done that already,” she had retorted. Tactical blunder. She should at least have looked as if she were ready to deal.
She had tried to hire a lawyer the next day—not a Family member. The lawyer had sweated, hedged, gabbled of consequences that made him sweat through his shirt until even the silk of his tie hung limp. Ultimately, however, Baker money—even after it was besmirched by old Put & Call—convinced him to accept a retainer. And her instructions. She wondered if he’d stand tough if…when…she disappeared.
Subpoenas were delivered; the newswires went ghoulish with “need to know” and the implication of famous prey. But “you haven’t heard the last “her brother had promised. The elaborate contra-dance of bail, hearings, and indictments began.
So did the careful, cautious “it’s for her own good” of her brother’s people’s investigation.
Carry money and small valuables.
Wyn’s Welfare Project friends warned her.
Don’t stick to fixed habits. Watch yourself.
But what about her life?
“Lucky if you keep it.”
She had herself seen the boy who had been set on fire when he refused to run
borloi
; the woman whose boyfriend had slashed her face; the ex-gang member whose brothers stayed with him, as if on guard—and those were the lucky ones, who got to go on living.
“You stay here. We hide you.”
She assured them she was protected, that she played a game circumscribed by law.
“You step on his turf he get you. You stay here.”
She hadn’t listened. And she hadn’t run. She had no great faith in her ability to hide, in any case. And some bravura notion of being arrested at her work, taken from her classroom had pushed her back from the Welfare Projects to Cambridge and this final lecture.
After all, it was her students in California who had vanished quite literally off the face of the Earth, bound—as she knew now—for interstellar Devil’s Islands like Tanith or Haven. They couldn’t afford the luxury of grandstanding: she could.
He sayin’ you crazy
, her friends from Welfare, her students there, had told her. Gonna put you away. Even after two girls had dressed up like cleaning crew and raided the dumpster behind her brother’s lawyers’ office for shredded transcripts, Wyn had found it hard to believe that he would turn on her.
You turn on him!
She never had persuaded them of the difference between crime and revenge, had she? But, assuming he said she was crazy and tried to have her committed, she was hardly the first over-privileged woman to be that way for the crime of disagreeing with her family. How bad could a rest home be, after all? She had meant to ask her aunt Dorothea, who had spent twenty years of her life in and out of them. Old now, and lucid on the days she bothered to stop drinking and dress to come downstairs; Dorothea had watched her as ironically as the women in Mattapan.
No point in thinking of that now.
What’s done is done.
Where was she in her lecture?
That was right. Shake them up a bit with their own weakness. They only think they’re safe, prosperous: what if someone stronger comes along and decides to take what they have?
“…It is a sign of our own deterioration that we need to ask ‘who are the weak?’ Are they, those who live in Welfare Islands, those who have turned their back upon our nation and our world for the dubious loyalties of the CoDominium? Or are they, those who do not ask? The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not living. And we have failed to examine our own lives.
“It is thus we who are the weak…” Wyn let the statement drop gently into the sunny, civilized theatre.
“…For we have forgotten. And we have forgotten to ask.”
She
had not forgotten, she protested as she moved into the final section of the class. A century or so ago, there had been a great classicist, a Jew, who had fled Germany. He came to a checkpoint and was stopped by a young soldier who searched his baggage. With the instincts of the hunted, the scholar
knew
that the soldier recognized him, knew him for a Jew and a fugitive. He waited for the man to lay his hand upon his arm and shout the words that would herald the start of his arrest and death. The soldier indeed spoke. “
You have a copy of Horace in your bags Herr Professor.”
And so the professor had spoken of Horace, had lectured, risen on the wings of fear and eloquence till he taught as he had never taught before. And when his mouth dried, his voice broke, and his throat almost closed with weariness, the soldier again.
“Danke schon, Herr Professor,”
he said. And stamped his papers and sent him on his way to freedom and to life.
Heads turned to stare out the blurred glass of the theater’s windows. Wyn’s head went up. Again, the copper spoor of blood dimmed the air.
“Prowl car,” muttered one student to his seatmate. His ruddy face paling. “It’s white.”
Psycops? No security but Harvard’s own has ever set foot in the yard. Were they going to make her out to be a dangerous lunatic?
Wyn’s belly chilled, and her mouth dried. Her voice went hoarse, but she forced breath up from her diaphragm, and her voice rang out with a strength that surprised her.
Could she turn back?
she wondered. Even at the last, Antigone had been offered a choice: recant, retreat. She had not—and she had died. Too rigid, people called Antigone these days.