She was one of the few underclasspersons still on the campus. The rest had gone home, and relatives of those
about to get their Associate in the Arts and Sciences certificates had taken over their suites. No relative of Kimberleys was about to graduate. She had stayed around for the Trustees meeting. And her famous father had come by helicopter to back her up. The soccer field was being used as a heliport. It looked like a rookery for pterodactyls.
Others had arrived in conventional aircraft at Rochester, where they had been met by rented limousines provided by the college. One seniors stepmother said, I remember, that she thought she had landed in Yokohama instead of Rochester because there were so many Japanese. The thing was that the changing of the guard at Athena had coincided with Graduation Day. New guards, mostly country boys from Hokkaido, who spoke no English and had never seen the United States, were flown directly to Rochester from Tokyo every 6 months, and taken to Athena by bus. And then those who had served 6 months at the gates, and on the walls and catwalks over the mess halls, and in the watchtowem, and so on, were flown straight home.
How come you havent gone home, Kimberley?¨ I said.
She said that she and her father wanted to hear the graduation address, which was to be delivered by her fathers close friend and fellow Rhodes Scholar, Dr. Martin Peale Blankenship, the University of Chicago economist who would later become a quadriplegic as a result of a skiing accident in Switzerland.
Dr. Blankenship had a niece in the graduating class. That was what brought him to Scipio. His niece was Hortense Mellon. I have no idea what became of Hortense. She could play the harp. I remember that, and her
upper teeth were false. The real teeth were knocked out by a mugger as she left a friends coming-out party at the Waldorf-Astoria, which has since burned down. There is nothing but a vacant lot there now, which was bought by the Japanese.
I heard that her father, like so many other Tarkington parents, lost an awful lot of money in the biggest swindle in the history of Wall Street, stock in a company called Microsecond Arbitrage.
I had spotted Kimberley as a snoop, all right, but not as a walking recording studio. All through the academic year now ending, our paths had crossed with puzzling frequency. Again and again I would be talking to somebody, almost anywhere on the campus, and realize that Kimberley was lurking close by. I assumed that she was slightly cracked, and was eavesdropping on everyone, avid for gossip. She wasnt even taking a course of mine for credit, although she did audit both Physics for Non-scientists and Music Appreciation for Nonmusicians. So what could I possibly be to her or she to me? We had never had a conversation about anything.
One time, I remember, I was shooting pool in the new recreation center, the Pahlavi Pavilion, and she was so close that I was having trouble working my cuestick, and I said to her, Do you like my perfume?¨
What?¨ she said.
I find you so close to me so often,¨ I said, I thought maybe you liked my perfume. Im very flattered, if thats the case, because thats nothing but my natural body odor. I dont use perfume.¨
I can quote myself exactly, since those words were on one of the tapes the Trustees would play back for me.
She shrugged as though she didnt know what I was
talking about. She didnt leave the Pavilion in great embarrassment. On the contrary! She gave me a little more room for my cuestick but was still practically on top of me.
I was playing 8-ball head to head with the novelist Paul Slazinger, that years Writer in Residence. He was dead broke and out of print, which is the only reason anybody ever became Writer in Residence at Tarkington. He was so old that he had actually been in World War II. He had won a Silver Star like me when I was only 3 years old!
He asked me who Kimberley was, and I said, and she got this on tape, too, Pay no attention. Shes just another member of the Ruling Class.¨
So the Board of Trustees would want to know what it was, exactly, that I had against the Ruling Class.
I didnt say so back then, but I am perfectly happy to say now that the trouble with the Ruling Class was that too many of its members were nitwits like Kimberley.
One theory I had about her snooping was that she was titillated by my reputation as the campus John F. Kennedy as far as sex outside of marriage was concerned.
If President Kennedy up in Heaven ever made a list of all the women he had made love to, lam sure it would be 2 or 3 times as long as the one I am making down here in jail. Then again, he had the glamour of his office, and the full cooperation of the Secret Service and the White House Staff. None of the names on my list would mean anything to the general public, whereas many on his would belong to movie stars. He made love to Marilyn Monroe. I sure never did. She evidently expected to
marry him and become First Lady, which was a joke to everybody but her.
She eventually committed suicide. She finally found life too embarrassing.
I still hardly knew Kimberley when she appeared in the bell tower on Graduation Day. But she was chatty, as though we were old, old pals. She was still recording me, although what she already had on tape was enough to do me in.
She asked me if I thought the speech Paul Slazinger, the Writer in Residence, gave in Chapel had been a good one. This was probably the most anti-American speech I had ever heard. He gave it right before Christmas vacation, and was never again seen in Scipio. He had just won a so-called Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation, $50,000 a year for 5 years. On the same night of his speech he bugged out for Key West, Florida.
He predicted, I remember, that human slavery would come back, that it had in fact never gone away. He said that so many people wanted to come here because it was so easy to rob the poor people, who got absolutely no protection from the Government. He talked about bridges falling down and water mains breaking because of no maintenance. He talked about oil spills and radioactive waste and poisoned aquifers and looted banks and liquidated corporations. And nobody ever gets punished for anything,¨ he said. Being an American means never having to say youre sorry.¨
On and on he went. No matter what he said, he was still going to get $50,000 a year for 5 years.
I said to Kimberley that I thought Slazinger had said some things which were worth considering, but that, on
the whole, he had made the country sound a lot worse than it really was, and that ours was still far and away the best one on the planet.
She could not have gotten much satisfaction from that reply.
What do I myself make of that reply nowadays? It was an inane reply.
She asked me about my own lecture in Chapel only a month earlier. She hadnt attended and so hadnt taped it. She was seeking confirmation of things other people had said I said. My lecture had been humorous recollections of my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Wills, the old-time Socialist.
She accused me of saying that all rich people were drunks and lunatics. This was a garbling of Grandfathers saying that Capitalism was what the people with all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decided to do today. So I straightened that out, and explained that the opinion was my grandfathers, not my own.
I heard your speech was worse than Mr. Slazingers,¨ she said.
I certainly hope not,¨ I said. I was trying to show how outdated my grandfathers opinions were. I wanted people to laugh. They did.¨
I heard you said Jesus Christ was un-American,¨ she said, her tape recorder running all the time.
So I unscrambled that one for her. The original had been another of Grandfathers sayings. He repeated Karl Marxs prescription for an ideal society, From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.¨ And then he asked me, meaning it to be a wry
joke, What could be more un-American, Gene, than sounding like the Sermon on the Mount?¨
What about putting all the Jews in a concentration camp in Idaho?¨ said Kimberley.
What about what-what-what?¨ I asked in bewilderment. At last, at last, and too late, too late, I understood that this stupid girl was as dangerous as a cobra. It would be catastrophic if she spread the word that I was an anti-Semite, especially with so many Jews, having interbred with Gentiles, now sending their children to Tarkington.