The President of the college, Tex Johnson, sitting two chairs away from me, hadnt let out a peep. He looked sick. I surmised mistakenly that he had been scolded for having let me stay on the faculty long enough to get tenure. He was sick about something more personal, which still had a lot to do with Professor Eugene Debs Hartke.
He had been brought in as President from Rollins College down in Winter Park, Florida, where he had been Provost, after Sam Wakefield did the big trick of suicide. Henry Tex¨ Johnson held a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration from Texas Tech in Lubbock, and claimed to be a descendant of a man who had died in the Alamo. Damon Stern, who was always turning up little-known facts of history, told me, incidentally, that the Battle of the Alamo was about slavery. The brave men who died there wanted to secede from Mexico because it was against the law to own slaves in Mexico. They were fighting for the right to own slaves.
Since Texs wife and I had been lovers, I knew that his ancestors werent Texans, but Lithuanians. His father, whose name certainly wasnt Johnson, was a Lithuanian second mate on a Russian freighter who jumped ship when it put in for emergency repairs at Corpus Christi. Zuzu told me that Texs father was not only an
illegal immigrant but the nephew of the former Communist boss of Lithuania.
So much for the Alamo.
I turned to him at the Board meeting, and I said, TexXfor pity sakes, say something! You know darn good and well Im the best teacher youve got! I dont say that. The students do! Is the whole faculty going to be brought before this Board, or am I the only one? Tex?¨
He stared straight ahead. He seemed to have turned to cement. Tex?¨ Some leadership!
I put the same question to the Chairman, who had been pauperized by Microsecond Arbitrage but didnt know it yet. BobX¨ I began.
He winced.
I began again, having gotten the message in spades that I was a servant and not a relative: Mr. Moellenkamp, sirX¨ I said, you know darn well, and so does everybody else here, that you can follow the most patriotic, deeply religious American who ever lived with a tape recorder for a year, and then prove that hes a worse traitor than Benedict Arnold, and a worshipper of the Devil. Who doesnt say things in a moment of passion or absentmindedness that he doesnt wish he could take back? So I ask again, am I the only one this was done to, and if so, why?¨
He froze.
Madelaine?¨ I said to Madelaine Astor, who would later write me such a dumb letter.
She said she did not like it that I had told students that a new Ice Age was on its way, even if I had read it in The New York Tunes. That was another thing Id said that Wilder had on tape. At least it had something to do
with science, and at least it wasnt something I had picked up from Slazinger or Grandfather Wills or Damon Stern. At least it was the real me.
The students here have enough to worry about,¨ she said. I know I did.¨
She went on to say that there had always been people who had tried to become famous by saying that the World was going to end, but the World hadnt ended.
There were nods of agreement all around the table. I dont think there was a soul there who knew anything about science.
When I was here you were predicting the end of the World,¨ she said, only it was atomic waste and acid rain that were going to kill us. But here we are. I feel fine. Doesnt everybody else feel fine? So pooh.¨
She shrugged. About the rest of it,¨ she said, Im sorry I heard about it. It made me sick. If we have to go over it again, I think Ill just leave the room.¨
Heavens to Betsy! What could she have meant by the rest of it¨? What could it be that they had gone over once, and were going to have to go over again with me there? Hadnt I already heard the worst?
No.
16
~ he rest of it¨ was in a manila folder in front of Jason Wilder. So there is Manila playing a big
part in my life again. No Sweet Rob Roys on the Rocks this time.
In the folder was a report by a private detective hired by Wilder to investigate my sex life. It covered only the second semester, and so missed the episode in the sculpture studio. The gumshoe recorded 3 of 7 subsequent trysts with the Artist in Residence, 2 with a woman from a jewelry company taking orders for class rings, and maybe 30 with Zuzu Johnson, the wife of the President. He didnt miss a thing Zuzu and I did during the second semester. There was only 1 misunderstood incident:
when I went up into the loft of the stable, where the Lutz Carillon had been stored before there was a tower and where Tex Johnson was crucified 2 years ago. I went up with the aunt of a student. She was an architect who wanted to see the pegged post-and-beam joinery up there. The operative assumed we made love up there. We hadnt.
We made love much later that afternoon, in a toolshed by the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
I wasnt to see the contents of Wilders folder for another 10 minutes or so. Wilder and a couple of others wanted to go on discussing what really bothered them about me, which was what I had been doing, supposedly, to the students minds. My sexual promiscuity among older women wasnt of much interest to them, the College President excepted, save as a handy something for which I could be fired without raising the gummy question of whether or not my rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution had been violated.
Adultery was the bullet they would put in my brain, so to speak, after I had been turned to Swiss cheese by the firing squad.
To Tex Johnson, the closet Lithuanian, the contents of the folder were more than a gadget for diddling me out of tenure. They were a worse humiliation for Tex than they were for me.
At least they said that my love affair with his wife was over.
He stood up. He asked to be excused. He said that he would just as soon not be present when the Trustees went over for the second time what Madelaine had called the rest of it.¨
He was excused, and was apparently about to leave without saying anything. But then, with one hand on the doorknob, he uttered two words chokingly, which were the title of a novel by Gustave Flaubert. It was about a wife who was bored with her husband, who had
an exceedingly silly love affair and then committed suicide.
Madame Bovary,¨ he said. And then he was gone.
He was a cuckold in the present, and crucifixion awaited him in the future. I wonder if his father would have jumped ship in Corpus Christi if he had known what an unhappy end his only son would come to under American Free Enterprise.
I had read Madame Bovary at West Point. All cadets in my day had to read it, so that we could demonstrate to cultivated people that we, too, were cultivated, should we ever face that challenge. Jack Patton and I read it at the same time for the same class. I asked him afterward what he thought of it. Predictably, he said he had to laugh like hell.
He said the same thing about Othello and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.
I confess that to this day I have come to no firm conclusions about how smart or dumb Jack Patton really was. This leaves me in doubt about the meaning of a birthday present he sent me in Vietnam shortly before the sniper killed him with a beautiful shot in Hue, pronounced whay.¨ It was a gift-wrapped copy of a stroke magazine called Black Garterbelt. But did he send it to me for its pictures of women naked except for black garterbelts, or for a remarkable science fiction story in there, The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore¨?
But more about that later.
I have no idea how many of the Trustees had read Madame Bovary. Two of them would have had to have
it read aloud to them. So I was not alone in wondering why Tex Johnson would have said, his hand on the doorknob, Madame Bovary.¨
If I had been Tex, I think I might have gotten off the campus as fast as possible, and maybe drowned my sorrows among the nonacademics at the Black Cat Caf?. That was where I was going to wind up that afternoon. It would have been funny in retrospect if we had wound up as a couple of sloshed buddies at the Black Cat Caf?.