In all my life, I never said anything like that,¨ I promised.
Maybe it wasnt Idaho,¨ she said.
Wyoming?¨ I said.
OK, Wyoming,¨ she said. Lock Ľem all up, right?¨
I only said ĽWyoming because I was married in Wyoming,¨ I said. Ive never been to Idaho or even thought about Idaho. Im just trying to figure out what youve got so all mixed up and upside down. It doesnt sound even a little bit like me.¨
Jews,¨ she said.
That was my grandfather again,¨ I said.
He hated Jews, right?¨ she said.
No, no, no,¨ I said. He admired a lot of them.¨
But he still wanted to put them in concentration camps,¨ she said. Right?¨
The origin of this most poisonous misunderstanding was in my account in Chapel of riding around with Grandfather in his car one Sunday morning in Midland City, Ohio, when I was a little boy. He, not I, was mocking all organized religions.
When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he
said, You think your dads a good chemist? Theyre turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?¨
When we passed a Pentecostal church, he said, The mental giants in there believe that every word is true in a book put together by a bunch of preachers 300 years after the birth of Christ. I hope you wont be that dumb about words set in type when you grow up.¨
I would later hear, incidentally, that the woman my father got involved with when I was in high school, when he jumped out a window with his pants down and got bitten by a dog and tangled in a clothesline and so on, was a member of that Pentecostal church.
What he said about Jews that morning was actually another kidding of Christianity. He had to explain to me, as I would have to explain to Kimberley, that the Bible consisted of 2 separate works, the New Testament and the Old Testament. Religious Jews gave credence only to what was supposedly their own history, the Old Testament, whereas Christians took both works seriously.
I pity the Jews,¨ said Grandfather, trying to get through life with only half a Bible.¨
And then he added, Thats like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.¨
I was angry now. Kimberley,¨ I asked, did you by any chance tell the Board of Trustees that I said these things? Is that what they want to see me about?¨
Maybe,¨ she said. She was acting cute. I thought this was a dumb answer. It was in fact accurate. The
Trustees had a lot more they wanted to discuss than misrepresentations of my Chapel lecture.
I found her both repulsive and pitiful. She thought she was such a heroine and I was such a viper! Now that I had caught on to what she had been up to, she was thrilled to show me that she was proud and unafraid. Little did she know that I had once thrown a man almost as big as she out of a helicopter. What was to prevent me from throwing her out a tower window? The thought of doing that to her crossed my mind. I was so insulted! That would teach her not to insult me!
The man I threw out of the helicopter had spit in my face and bitten my hand. I had taught him not to insult me.
She was pitiful because she was a dimwit from a brilliant family and believed that she at last had done something brilliant, too, in getting the goods on a person whose ideas were criminal. I didnt know yet that her Rhodes Scholar father, a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, had put her up to this. I thought she had noted her fathers conviction, often expressed in his columns and on his TV show, and no doubt at home, that a few teachers who secretly hated their country were making young people lose faith in its future and leadership.
I thought that, just on her own, she had resolved to find such a villain and get him fired, proving that she wasnt so dumb, after all, and that she was really Daddys little girl.
Wrong.
Kimberley,¨ I said, as an alternative to throwing her out the window, this is ridiculous.¨
Wrong.
All right,¨ I said, were going to settle this in a hurry.¨
Wrong.
I would stride into the Trustees meeting, I thought, shoulders squared, and radiant with righteous indignation, the most popular teacher on campus, and the only faculty member who had medals from the Vietnam War. When it comes right down to it, that is why they fired me, although I dont believe they themselves realized that that was why they fired me: I had ugly, personal knowledge of the disgrace that was the Vietnam War.
None of the Trustees had been in that war, and neither had Kiinberleys father, and not one of them had allowed a son or a daughter to be sent over there. Across the lake in the prison, of course, and down in the town, there were plenty of somebodys Sons who had been sent over there.
12
I
met just 2 people when I crossed the Quadrangle to Samoza Hall. One was Professor Marilyn Shaw, head
of the Department of Life Sciences. She was the only other faculty member who had served in Vietnam. She had been a nurse. The other was Norman Everett, an old campus gardener like my grandfather. He had a son who had been paralyzed from the waist down by a mine in Vietnam and was a permanent resident in a Veterans Administration hospital over in Schenectady.
The seniors and their families and the rest of the faculty were having lunch in the Pavilion. Everybody got a lobster which had been boiled alive.
I never considered making a pass at Marilyn, although she was reasonably attractive and unattached. I dont know why that is. There may have been some sort of incest taboo operating, as though we were brother and sister, since we had both been in Vietnam.
She is dead now, buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
She was evidently hit by a stray bullet. Who in his right mind would have taken dead aim at her?
Remembering her now, I wonder if I wasnt in love with her, even though we avoided talking to each other as much as possible.
Maybe I should put her on a very short list indeed: all the women I loved. That would be Marilyn, I think, and Margar?t during the first 4 years or so of our marriage, before I came home with the clap. I was also very fond of Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent for The Des Moines Register, who, it turns out, bore me a son after our love affair in Manila. I think I felt what could be called love for Zuzu Johnson, whose husband was crucified. And I had a deep, thoroughly reciprocated, multidimensioned friendship with Muriel Peck, who was a bartender at the Black Cat Caf? the day I was fired, who later became a member of the English Department.
End of list.
Muriel, too, is buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
Harriet Gummer is also dead, but out in Iowa.
Hey, girls, wait for me, wait for me.
I dont expect to break a worlds record with the number of women I made love to, whether I loved them or not. As far as I am concerned, the record set by Georges Simenon, the French mystery writer, can stand for all time. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he copulated with 3 different women a day for years and years.
Marilyn Shaw and I hadnt known each other in Vietnam, but we had a friend in common there, Sam Wakefield. Afterward, he had hired both of us for Tarkington, and then committed suicide for reasons unclear even to himself, judging from the plagiarized note he left on his bedside table.
He and his wife, who would become Tarkingtons Dean of Women, were sleeping in separate rooms by then.
Sam Wakefield, in my opinion, saved Marilyns and my lives before he gave up on his own. If he hadnt hired both of us for Tarkington, where we both became very good teachers of the learning-disabled, I dont know what would have become of either of us. When we passed yet again like ships in the night on the Quadrangle, with me on my way to get fired, I was, incredibly, a tenured Full Professor of Physics and she was a tenured Full Professor of Life Sciences!
When I was still a teacher here, I asked GRIOTTU, the most popular computer game at the Pahlavi Pavilion, what might have become of me after the war instead of what really happened. The way you play GRIOTTh, of course, is to tell the computer the age and race and degree of education and present situation and drug use, if any, and so on of a person. The person doesnt have to be real. The computer doesnt ask if the person is real or not. It doesnt care about anything. It especially doesnt care about hurting peoples feelings. You load it up with details about a life, real or imagined, and then it spits out a story about what was likely to happen to him or her. This story is based on what has happened to real persons with the same general specifications.