Hocus Pocus

11

At one time I fully expected to spend the rest of my life in this valley, but not in jail. I envisioned my mandatory retirement from Tarkington College in 2010. I would be modestly well-off with Social Security and a pension from the College. My mother-in-law would surely be dead by then, I thought, so I would have only Margaret to care for. I would rent a little house in the town below. There were plenty of empty ones.

But that dream would have been blasted even if there hadn’t been a prison break, even if the Social Security system hadn’t gone bust and the College Treasurer hadn’t run off with the pension funds and so on. For, as I’ve said before, in 1991 Tarkington College fired me.

There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do?

The man who got me fired was Jason Wilder, the celebrated Conservative newspaper columnist, lecturer, and television talk-show host. He saved my life by doing that. If it weren’t for him, I would have been on the Scipio side of the lake instead of the Athena side during the prison break.

I would have been facing all those convicts as they crossed the ice to Scipio in the moonlight, instead of watching them in mute wonderment from the rear, like Robert E. Lee during Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. They wouldn’t have known me, and I would still have seen only 3 Athena convicts in all my time.

I would have tried to fight in some way, although, unlike the College President, I would have had no guns. I would have been killed and buried along with the College President and his wife Zuzu, and Alton Darwin and all the rest of them. I would have been buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun went down.

The first time I saw Jason Wilder in person was at the Board meeting when they fired me. He was then only an outraged parent. He would later join the Board and become by far the most valuable of the convicts’ hostages after the prison break. Their threat to kill him immobilized units of the 82nd Airborne Division, which had been brought in by school bus from the South Bronx. The paratroops sealed off the valley at the head of the lake and occupied the shoreline across from Scipio and to the south of Scipio, and dug in on the western slope of Musket Mountain. But they dared not come any closer, for fear of causing the death of Jason Wilder.

There were other hostages, to be sure, including the rest of the Trustees, but he was the only famous one. I myself was not strictly a hostage, although I would probably have been killed if I had tried to leave. I was a sort of floating, noncombatant wise man, wandering wherever I pleased in Scipio under siege. As at Athena Prison, I tried to give the most honest answer I could to any question anyone might care to put to me. Otherwise I stayed silent. I volunteered no advice at Athena, and none in Scipio under siege. I simply described the truth of the inquirer’s situation in the context of the world outside as best I could. What he did next was up to him.

I call that being a teacher. I don’t call that being a mastermind of a treasonous enterprise. All I ever wanted to overthrow was ignorance and self-serving fantasies.

I was fired without warning on Graduation Day. I was playing the bells at high noon when a girl who had just completed her freshman year brought the news that the Board of Trustees, then meeting in Samoza Hall, the administration building, wanted to talk to me. She was Kimberley Wilder, Jason Wilder’s learning-disabled daughter. She was stupid. I thought it was odd but not menacing that the Trustees would have used her for a messenger. I couldn’t imagine what business she might have had that would bring her anywhere near their meeting. She had in fact been testifying before them about my supposed lack of patriotism, and had then asked for the honor of fetching me to my liquidation.

She was one of the few underclasspersons still on the campus. The rest had gone home, and relatives of those about to get their Associate in the Arts and Sciences certificates had taken over their suites. No relative of Kimberley’s was about to graduate. She had stayed around for the Trustees’ meeting. And her famous father had come by helicopter to back her up. The soccer field was being used as a heliport. It looked like a rookery for pterodactyls.

Others had arrived in conventional aircraft at Rochester, where they had been met by rented limousines provided by the college. One senior’s stepmother said, I remember, that she thought she had landed in Yokohama instead of Rochester because there were so many Japanese. The thing was that the changing of the guard at Athena had coincided with Graduation Day. New guards, mostly country boys from Hokkaido, who spoke no English and had never seen the United States, were flown directly to Rochester from Tokyo every 6 months, and taken to Athena by bus. And then those who had served 6 months at the gates, and on the walls and catwalks over the mess halls, and in the watchtowem, and so on, were flown straight home.

“How come you haven’t gone home, Kimberley?” I said.

She said that she and her father wanted to hear the graduation address, which was to be delivered by her father’s close friend and fellow Rhodes Scholar, Dr. Martin Peale Blankenship, the University of Chicago economist who would later become a quadriplegic as a result of a skiing accident in Switzerland.

Dr. Blankenship had a niece in the graduating class. That was what brought him to Scipio. His niece was Hortense Mellon. I have no idea what became of Hortense. She could play the harp. I remember that, and her upper teeth were false. The real teeth were knocked out by a mugger as she left a friend’s coming-out party at the Waldorf-Astoria, which has since burned down. There is nothing but a vacant lot there now, which was bought by the Japanese.

I heard that her father, like so many other Tarkington parents, lost an awful lot of money in the biggest swindle in the history of Wall Street, stock in a company called Microsecond Arbitrage.

I had spotted Kimberley as a snoop, all right, but not as a walking recording studio. All through the academic year now ending, our paths had crossed with puzzling frequency. Again and again I would be talking to somebody, almost anywhere on the campus, and realize that Kimberley was lurking close by. I assumed that she was slightly cracked, and was eavesdropping on everyone, avid for gossip. She wasn’t even taking a course of mine for credit, although she did audit both Physics for Non-scientists and Music Appreciation for Nonmusicians. So what could I possibly be to her or she to me? We had never had a conversation about anything.

One time, I remember, I was shooting pool in the new recreation center, the Pahlavi Pavilion, and she was so close that I was having trouble working my cuestick, and I said to her, “Do you like my perfume?”

“What?” she said.

“I find you so close to me so often,” I said, “I thought maybe you liked my perfume. I’m very flattered, if that’s the case, because that’s nothing but my natural body odor. I don’t use perfume.”

I can quote myself exactly, since those words were on one of the tapes the Trustees would play back for me.

She shrugged as though she didn’t know what I was talking about. She didn’t leave the Pavilion in great embarrassment. On the contrary! She gave me a little more room for my cuestick but was still practically on top of me.

I was playing 8-ball head to head with the novelist Paul Slazinger, that year’s Writer in Residence. He was dead broke and out of print, which is the only reason anybody ever became Writer in Residence at Tarkington. He was so old that he had actually been in World War II. He had won a Silver Star like me when I was only 3 years old!

He asked me who Kimberley was, and I said, and she got this on tape, too, “Pay no attention. She’s just another member of the Ruling Class.”

So the Board of Trustees would want to know what it was, exactly, that I had against the Ruling Class.

I didn’t say so back then, but I am perfectly happy to say now that the trouble with the Ruling Class was that too many of its members were nitwits like Kimberley.

One theory I had about her snooping was that she was titillated by my reputation as the campus John F. Kennedy as far as sex outside of marriage was concerned.

If President Kennedy up in Heaven ever made a list of all the women he had made love to, lam sure it would be 2 or 3 times as long as the one I am making down here in jail. Then again, he had the glamour of his office, and the full cooperation of the Secret Service and the White House Staff. None of the names on my list would mean anything to the general public, whereas many on his would belong to movie stars. He made love to Marilyn Monroe. I sure never did. She evidently expected to marry him and become First Lady, which was a joke to everybody but her.

She eventually committed suicide. She finally found life too embarrassing.

I still hardly knew Kimberley when she appeared in the bell tower on Graduation Day. But she was chatty, as though we were old, old pals. She was still recording me, although what she already had on tape was enough to do me in.

She asked me if I thought the speech Paul Slazinger, the Writer in Residence, gave in Chapel had been a good one. This was probably the most anti-American speech I had ever heard. He gave it right before Christmas vacation, and was never again seen in Scipio. He had just won a so-called Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation, $50,000 a year for 5 years. On the same night of his speech he bugged out for Key West, Florida.

He predicted, I remember, that human slavery would come back, that it had in fact never gone away. He said that so many people wanted to come here because it was so easy to rob the poor people, who got absolutely no protection from the Government. He talked about bridges falling down and water mains breaking because of no maintenance. He talked about oil spills and radioactive waste and poisoned aquifers and looted banks and liquidated corporations. “And nobody ever gets punished for anything,” he said. “Being an American means never having to say you’re sorry.”

On and on he went. No matter what he said, he was still going to get $50,000 a year for 5 years.

I said to Kimberley that I thought Slazinger had said some things which were worth considering, but that, on the whole, he had made the country sound a lot worse than it really was, and that ours was still far and away the best one on the planet.

She could not have gotten much satisfaction from that reply.

What do I myself make of that reply nowadays? It was an inane reply.

She asked me about my own lecture in Chapel only a month earlier. She hadn’t attended and so hadn’t taped it. She was seeking confirmation of things other people had said I said. My lecture had been humorous recollections of my maternal grandfather, Benjamin Wills, the old-time Socialist.

She accused me of saying that all rich people were drunks and lunatics. This was a garbling of Grandfather’s saying that Capitalism was what the people with all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decided to do today. So I straightened that out, and explained that the opinion was my grandfather’s, not my own.

“I heard your speech was worse than Mr. Slazinger’s,” she said.

“I certainly hope not,” I said. “I was trying to show how outdated my grandfather’s opinions were. I wanted people to laugh. They did.”

“I heard you said Jesus Christ was un-American,” she said, her tape recorder running all the time.

So I unscrambled that one for her. The original had been another of Grandfather’s sayings. He repeated Karl Marx’s prescription for an ideal society, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” And then he asked me, meaning it to be a wry joke, “What could be more un-American, Gene, than sounding like the Sermon on the Mount?”

“What about putting all the Jews in a concentration camp in Idaho?” said Kimberley.

“What about what-what-what?” I asked in bewilderment. At last, at last, and too late, too late, I understood that this stupid girl was as dangerous as a cobra. It would be catastrophic if she spread the word that I was an anti-Semite, especially with so many Jews, having interbred with Gentiles, now sending their children to Tarkington.

“In all my life, I never said anything like that,” I promised.

“Maybe it wasn’t Idaho,” she said.

“Wyoming?” I said.

“OK, Wyoming,” she said. “Lock ‘em all up, right?”

“I only said ‘Wyoming’ because I was married in Wyoming,” I said. “I’ve never been to Idaho or even thought about Idaho. I’m just trying to figure out what you’ve got so all mixed up and upside down. It doesn’t 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 dad’s a good chemist? They’re 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 won’t 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, “That’s 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 didn’t 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 father’s 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 wasn’t so dumb, after all, and that she was really Daddy’s little girl.

Wrong.

“Kimberley,” I said, as an alternative to throwing her out the window, “this is ridiculous.”

Wrong.

“All right,” I said, “we’re 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 don’t 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 Kiinberley’s 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 somebody’s Sons who had been sent over there.