Hocus Pocus

16

“The 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 didn’t 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 hadn’t.

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 wasn’t to see the contents of Wilder’s 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 wasn’t 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 Café. 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 Café.

Imagine my saying to him or his saying to me, both of us drunk as skunks, “I love you, you old son of a gun. Do you know that?”

One Trustee had it in for me on personal grounds. That was Sydney Stone, who was said to have amassed a fortune of more than $1,000,000,000 in 10 short years, mainly in commissions for arranging sales of American properties to foreigners. His masterpiece, maybe, was the transfer of ownership of my father’s former employer, E. I. Dii Pont de Nemours & Company, to I. G. Farben in Germany.

“There is much I could probably forgive, if somebody put a gun to my head, Professor Hartke,” he said, “but not what you did to my son.” He himself was no Tarkingtonian. He was a graduate of the Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics.

“Fred?” I said.

“In case you haven’t noticed,” he said, “I have only 1 son in Tarkington. I have only 1 son anywhere.” Presumably this I son, without having to lift a finger, would himself 1 day have $1,000,000,000.

“What did I do to Fred?” I said.

“You know what you did to Fred,” he said.

What I had done to Fred was catch him stealing a Tarkington beer mug from the college bookstore. What Fred Stone did was beyond mere stealing. He took the beer mug off the shelf, drank make-believe toasts to me and the cashier, who were the only other people there, and then walked out.

I had just come from a faculty meeting where the campus theft problem had been discussed for the umpteenth time. The manager of the bookstore told us that only one comparable institution had a higher percentage of its merchandise stolen than his, which was the Harvard Coop in Cambridge.

So I followed Fred Stone out to the Quadrangle. He was headed for his Kawasaki motorcycle in the student parking lot. I came up behind him and said quietly, with all possible politeness, “I think you should put that beer mug back where you got it, Fred. Either that or pay for it.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Is that what you think?” Then he smashed the mug to smithereens on the rim of the Vonnegut Memorial Fountain. “If that’s what you think,” he said, “then you’re the one who should put it back.”

I reported the incident to Tex Johnson, who told me to forget it.

But I was mad. So I wrote a letter about it to the boy’s father, but never got an answer until the Board meeting.

“I can never forgive you for accusing my son of theft,” the father said. He quoted Shakespeare on behalf of Fred. I was supposed to imagine Fred’s saying it tome. ~

“‘Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing,’ “he said.” ‘ ‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands,’ “ he went on, “‘but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that Which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed.’”

“If I was wrong, sir, I apologize,” I said.

“Too late,” he said.