And then his son Bruce, Tarkington Class of Ľ85, who was a homosexual, joined the Ice Capades as a chorus boy. That was all right with Ed, who understood that some people were born homosexual and that was that.
And Bruce was so happy with the ice show. He was not only a good skater but maybe the best male or female dancer at Tarkington. Bruce used to come over to the house and dance with my motherin-law sometimes, just for the sake of dancing. He said she was the best dance partner he had ever had, and she returned the compliment.
I didnt tell her when, 4 years after he graduated, he was found strangled with his own belt, and with something like 100 stab wounds, in a motel outside of Dubuque. So there was Dubuque again.
18
Shake~a1~
I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, thats not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You dont even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.
If I say that the Trustees of Tarkington College were dummies, and that the people who got us involved in the Vietnam War were dummies, I hope it is understood that I consider myself the biggest dummy of all. Look at where I am now, and how hard I worked to get here and nowhere else. Bingo!
And if! feel that my father was a horses fundament and my mother was a horses fundament, what can I be but another horses fundament? Ask my kids, both legitimate and illegitimate. They know.
I didnt have a Chinamans chance with the Trustees, if I may be forgiven a racist clich?Xnot with the sex stuff Wilder had concealed in the folder. When I defended myself against him, I had no idea how well armed he was-a basic situation in the funniest slapstick comedies.
I argued that it was a teachers duty to speak frankly to students of college age about all sorts of concerns of humankind, not just the subject of a course as stated in the catalogue. Thats how we gain their trust, and encourage them to speak up as well,¨ I said, and realize that all subjects do not reside in neat little compartments, but are continuous and inseparable from the one big subject we have been put on Earth to study, which is life itself.¨
I said that the doubts I might have raised in the students minds about the virtues of the Free Enterprise System, when telling them what my grandfather believed, could in the long run only strengthen their enthusiasm for that system. It made them think up reasons of their own for why Free Enterprise was the only system worth considering. People are never stronger,¨ I said, than when they have thought up their own arguments for believing what they believe. They stand on their own 2 feet that way.¨
Did you or did you not say that the United States was a crock of doo-doo?¨ said Wilder.
I had to think a minute. This wasnt something Kimberley had gotten on tape. What I may have said,¨ I replied, is that all nations bigger than Denmark are crocks of doo-doo, but that was a joke, of course.¨
I now stand behind that statement 100 percent. All nations bigger than Denmark are crocks of doo-doo.
Jason Wilder had heard enough. He asked the Trustees to pass the folder from hand to hand down the table to me. He said, Before you see whats inside, you should know that this Board promised me that its contents would never be mentioned outside this room. It will remain in your sole possession, provided that you submit your resignation immediately.¨
My goodnessX¨ I said, what could be in here? And what made Tex Johnson run out of the room the way he did?¨
The bottommost document,¨ said Wilder, was~ painful for him to read.¨
What can it be?¨ I said. I honestly couldnt imagine how I might have caused Tex pain. When I made love to his wife, I only wanted to make the 2 of us happier. I didnt think of her as somebodys wife. When I make love to a woman, the farthest thing from my mind is whom she may be married to. I cant speak for Zuzu, but I myself had no wish to cause Tex even a little pain. When Zuzu spoke contemptuously of him, I had to remember who he was, and then I stuck up for him.
My first impression of the bottommost document in the folder is that it was a timetable of some sort, maybe for the bus from Scipio to Rochester, a not very subtle hint that I should get out of town as soon as possible. But then I realized that what was doing all the arriving and departing was me, and that the depot, so to speak, was the home of the College President.
The accuracy of the times and dates was attested to by Terrence W. Steel, Jr., whom I had known simply as Terry. I hadnt known his full name, and believed him to be what he was said to be, a new gardener working
for Buildings and Grounds. He was in fact the private detective Wilder hired to get the goods on me. What little he had told me about himself may have been invented by GRIOT~, or much of it could have been true. Who knows? Who cares?
He told me, I remember, that his wife had discovered she was a lesbian, and fell in love with a female junior high school dietitian. Then both women disappeared along with his 3 kids. GRIOT~ could have cooked that up.
The timetable about me and Zuzu was signed by the detective and notarized. I knew the Notary. Everybody did. He was Lyle Hooper, the Fire Chief and owner of the Black Cat Caf?. He, too, would be killed soon after the prison break. That document with his seal was all I needed to see in order to understand that my tenure was down the toilet.
Wilder said that the rest of the papers in the folder were affidavits gathered by his detective. They attested to my having been a shameless adulterer from the moment I and my family hit Scipio. I expect you to agree with me,¨ he said, that your behavior in this valley would fall dead center into even the narrowest definition of moral turpitude.¨
I put the folder flat on the table to indicate that I had no need to look inside. My gesture was like folding a poker hand. In so doing, I would lay it on top of the schools annual Treasurers Report, one copy of which had been put at every seat before the meeting. I would inadvertently take the report with me when I left, learning later from it something I hadnt known before. The college had sold all its property in the town below, including the ruins of the brewery and the wagon fac
tory and the carpet mills and the land under the Black Cat Caf?, to the same Japanese corporation which owned the prison.
And then the Treasurer had put the proceeds of the sale, less real estate commissions and lawyers fees, into preferred stock in Microsecond Arbitrage.
This is not a happy moment in my life,¨ said Wilder.
Nor mine,¨ I said.
Unfortunately for all of us,¨ he said, the moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.¨
You said a mouthful,¨ I said.
Now the Chairman of the Board, Robert Moellenkamp, spoke up. He was illiterate, but legendary among Tarkingtonians, and no doubt back home, too, for his phenomenal memory. Like the father of the founder of the college, his ancestor, he could learn by heart anything that was read out loud to him 3 times or so. I knew several convicts at Athena, also illiterate, who could do that, too.
He wanted to quote Shakespeare now. I want it on the record,¨ he said, that this has been an extremely painful episode for me as well.¨ And then he delivered this speech from Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, in which the dying Mercutio, Romeos gallant and witty best friend, describes the wound he received in a duel:
No, Ľtis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but Ľtis enough, Ľtwill serve: ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague on both your houses!¨
The two houses, of course, were the Montagues and the Capulets, the feuding families of Romeo and Juliet,
whose nitwit hatred would indirectly cause Mercutios departure for Paradise.
I have lifted this speech from Bartletts Familiar Quotations. If more people would acknowledge that they got their pearls of wisdom from that book instead of the original, it might clear the air.