Читать книгу The Committee - Sterling Watson - Страница 12

SIX

As he walked from Tigert Hall to the English building, Stall could not stop talking to Thomas Connor. He knew that he must look half-mad, muttering to a phantom listener. Students gave him a wide berth.

My God, what do you expect me to do if I find out that some guy who teaches English also likes to . . . do what the ancient Greeks apparently did? Am I supposed to take him aside and tell him to cease and desist or he’ll end up like Jack Leaf—with flashbulbs in his face in a men’s room? Leaping from a third-floor window? Am I supposed to pass his name along to you who will give him his walking papers for the good of the university? It’s preposterous.

As he walked, debating Connor, it occurred to Stall that, indeed, there were men in his department who were what was politely called “confirmed bachelors.” And maybe the study of English attracted such types, but to a man, as Stall knew them, these “types” were good, helpful, and honorable colleagues. He’d never heard an unkind word from any of them, though a few were known for rapier wit, and he’d enjoyed hours of searching and earnest conversation with many of them about mutual research interests. The best thing, the thing that held the potential to break a great many hearts, was that for now at least, Stall’s English Department, the one he hoped to chair someday, was a harmonious, happy collection of eccentrics whose greatest love was to read books and talk about them with young people. Of course, there were petty rivalries, and the placid surface was sometimes disturbed by academic politics, but this was a group that could gather for Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties and have itself a roaring good time. These were men, and now, with the advent of Sophie Green, a woman, who could get drunk as lords and end their evenings with their arms slung over one another’s shoulders in someone’s backyard singing “On Moonlight Bay.” Christ, it would kill Stall to see anything harm the beauty of his English Department.

Stall imagined Connor on the phone with Harding, the president telling the chairman that Stall had not cooperated. At least not fully. Not in the way that a man with the university’s best interests at heart should cooperate. Stall would see Harding now—but what should he tell the old man about his talk with Connor? It occurred to Stall as he walked under the tall, turpentine-smelling pines in the midmorning sunshine, that it might serve both his and Connor’s purposes to keep their conversation secret from Harding, at least for the time being. If Connor planned to commission Stall as a secret agent, then it made good sense to tell no one about it.

In Anderson Hall, Stall presented himself to Helen Markham, who stood guard over Harding’s inner office. Reading glasses precarious at the tip of her long, heavily powdered nose, she looked up at Stall from her memo pad as though this were any summer morning. As though neither a professor nor a governor had died in the last twenty-four hours. She lifted her cup of Earl Grey tea, sipped, and said, “Go on in. He’s had his Sanka.”

Amos Harding was known for shunning humanity until he’d finished his first cup of instant coffee in the morning. He preferred instant, he said, for digestive reasons. No one asked him to elaborate. Stall thanked Helen Markham and walked on.

Harding was standing at the tall window that looked out over the student ghetto that began abruptly a block beyond the row of restaurants and bars that lined University Avenue. He was a tall man who always wore black or dark-blue suits with narrow lapels and narrower ties. His face was pale, pocked, and gaunt. What hair he retained was white, combed straight back, and matted to his scalp with pomade. Department wits sometimes referred to him as Funus Director, the funeral director, and he did look a bit like a cartoon country mortician. Lost in the mists of history were the reasons that Harding had been made chairman.

Stall cleared his throat and Harding turned from the window. “Well, Tom, how did it go with Himself?” Harding sometimes referred to the president this way so that all who heard would know he was on easy terms with the man who signed the checks.

“Fine, sir.” Damn it, he asked you to call him Amos.

Harding sat behind the big desk that Stall hoped someday would be his and motioned Stall to a chair. “It’s happening all over the state now, Tom.”

What did Harding mean? People jumping out of windows? An epidemic of suicides?

“Sorry, Amos. I’m not sure what you mean.”

Harding reached out, lifted his empty coffee cup, looked into it, frowned. “This damned Committee. They’re going after Communists, the NAACP, homosexuals.” He spoke the words with obvious distaste. “Agitators, which I take to mean those shaggy kids out in front of the library.”

Stall had stopped by these ragged gatherings a few times to watch the kids hand out leaflets about the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran or read aloud from Howl. The local free speech movement seemed to be headed by a grad student from Miami, Stephen Levy, who majored in political science. Mostly, students drifted past these self-styled provocateurs, paying no attention. Sleepy Gainesville was always slow to bend to the fashions from California and New York, whatever they were—clothing, politics, Hula-Hoops.

Harding regarded Stall from across the Victorian desk with its matching period decorations, a bronze figure of a man in knee breeches pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with books, a bust of Tennyson. Harding waited.

Stall said, “You think Jack’s death has something to do with this Committee?”

“Yes, I do. I just don’t know what. Do you?”

Stall decided to work from the premise that Connor had not told Harding about the photos of two men in a bathroom. “President Connor and I talked about Jack. I told him what I knew about his . . . death, which isn’t much, really.”

As far as Stall knew, there had been no official determination of a cause of death. He supposed it would be suicide or death by misadventure, which, in the novels he read, meant a polite refusal to decide what had happened (with a rather heavy suggestion that something was amiss).

Harding leaned forward, removed an antique scrivener’s pen from an empty crystal inkwell on his desk, examined it, put it back. “Did the president tell you anything we should know?”

We meant the English Department. So far, Stall had only told a lie of omission. He recalled Maureen’s insistence to Corey that leaving things out was only discretion.

“Only that he’s sorry about Jack’s death and worried about the effect it might have on the morale of the university.” There, that was good. And it was true in a limited way. Jack Leaf’s death would have its effects, but Stall knew, and literature taught, that the living remembered the dead only a short time. Morale would rise again with the first football victory of the fall.

Then it occurred to Stall that maybe by taking his walk in the air, Jack Leaf had made a statement. He had responded to the men who had left Murphree Hall seconds before Jack Leaf had left this world. If Jack was the man in the photos, then he had known someone would use them against him. Perhaps he had known all of it, foreseen all that Stall and Connor and Harding could not yet see. For there would be, there must be, more.

Hearing his own words emerge freighted with a weariness that he knew the older man would recognize, Stall said, “I think we’re in good hands with Connor. He’s an advocate. He’ll fight Charley Johns and his lousy committee.”

“Yes,” said Harding, “I agree with you about that.”

Happy to change the subject, Stall told Harding about Sophie Green’s offer to teach American Romanticism. Harding considered it for only a few seconds. “I like it. I’ll take your word for her qualifications, and it’s good of her as a newcomer to do this for the department.”

Stall nodded, gave a deferential smile.

Harding returned the smile of the village elder, stood up, looked at the old railroad pocket watch he kept chained to his belt. “All right, Tom. Thank you. We have to go now. I’ve called a special meeting.”

* * *

The graduate English faculty held their infrequent meetings in a large classroom in Anderson Hall. Today the room was full to bursting. Even some professors emeriti had shown up. Some of them, the oldest and grayest of beards, were men Stall had never seen before.

Harding called the meeting to order and told the assembled faculty what they already knew: Jack Leaf was dead. “We are not entirely sure what happened. We know little of why it happened, but I’m sure we will know more as time passes. For now, we need to conduct business as usual, in so far as that is possible. Tom Stall, who took care of Professor Leaf, of our friend Jack, at that most terrible time, has agreed to finish out the summer term in Jack’s research methodologies, a course he has taught before, and Professor Green has proposed that she teach American Romanticism as an overload in the fall.”

“But she’s a medievalist,” called Fred Parsons from the back. Parsons was an aging scholar of American lit and the obvious choice to fall on his sword for Jack Leaf and the department.

Harding raised both hands to suppress the minor uproar that followed Parsons’s remark. “She’s more than qualified. I’m satisfied that she’ll do a fine job.”

That seemed to be it until Sophie Green stood up in the front row and looked back at Fred Parsons. Blushing and holding a delicate hand to the base of her throat, she said, “I didn’t mean to step on any toes. I’ll gladly withdraw if that’s the will of the Americanists of the faculty.”

She could not know how much her comment would displease Harding, who had said the matter was closed. Stall didn’t like it much either, since he had proposed the plan to Harding. Well, perhaps this was the way things were done at Columbia. (And who on God’s earth said Americanists?)

Harding cleared his throat. “Thank you, Professor Green. I think this is settled.” Then to the group, “I will entertain proposals from any who care to tender them for covering Jack’s other course. We are all very, very sorry this happened. My wife and I have helped Sarah Leaf as much as we can in this very difficult time, and I know that some of you have reached out to her. I hope others will as well.”

Harding waited while heads bowed or eyes looked off into the middle distance where mortality crouched in all its ugliness. No one spoke. Harding said, “If there is no further business, let’s go back to our preparations for what I hope will be another fine academic year.”

* * *

Sophie Green waited for Stall at the end of the third-floor hallway. Stall had figured she’d want to talk, and he did too. When she began to gush an apology, he raised a hand to stop her.

“It’s all right. No harm done. I promise.”

“But Professor Harding seemed so stern, so offended. All I did was speak.”

“You didn’t just speak. You challenged. Harding’s old school. He doesn’t see departmental meetings as conversations. He presides and he pronounces. When he wants discussion, he lets us know.”

She looked at him for a long moment with her head tilted slightly to the side in a way that was, well, cute. “When you’re chairman, will you pronounce?”

Stall felt the heat of a blush rising up the stalk of his neck. “Who said I’ll be chairman?”

“Rumor has it you’re gunning for it.”

“Gunning?” He chuckled in a way he hoped seemed urbane. “A long time since I’ve held a gun.”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“Of course. That’s our business.”

She furrowed her brow. Did she think he really wanted to discuss with her his prospects for the chairmanship? Metaphorically or otherwise?

“Well, look,” he said, “it’s been a long day. For all of us. Let me assure you again, you’re in no trouble with Harding. I think he likes you, actually. He’s old school, but in his way he’s glad we have you. Even he knows we’ve been slow to bring in . . .”

“Women?”

“Yes, sure, what did you think I meant?”

“What about Negroes? Or do we think down here all they should do is carry books up the stairs and refuse money from Yankees for their work?” She said it in a voice full of charm and with a smile on her face, but still the words cut Stall. He couldn’t tell if she thought he was on her side or somewhere else.

“We move as fast as we can, I guess.” He gave her a dip of his head (his father would have tipped a hat real or imaginary) and started for the fire door at the end of the hall. “When I’m chairman,” he said over his shoulder, “maybe we’ll move a little faster. Get us some more Yankee girls to teach us yokels how to be . . . Americanists.”

Opening the door, he heard her sharp little intake of breath.