Hocus Pocus

13

The Chairman of the Board of Trustees that fired me 10 years ago was Robert W. Moellenkamp of West Palm Beach, himself a graduate of Tarkington and the father of 2 Tarkingtonians, 1 of whom had been my student. As it happened, he was on the verge of losing his fortune, which was nothing but paper, in Microsecond Arbitrage, Incorporated. That swindle claimed to be snapping up bargains in food and shelter and clothing and fuel and medicine and raw materials and machinery and so on before people who really needed them could learn of their existence. And then the company’s computers, supposedly, would get the people who really needed whatever it was to bid against each other, running profits right through the roof. It was able to do this with its clients’ money, supposedly, because its computers were linked by satellites to marketplaces in every corner of the world.

The computers, it would turn out, weren’t connected to anything but each other and their credulous clients like Tarkinglon’s Board Chairman. He was high as a kite on printouts describing brilliant trades he had made in places like Tierra del Fuego and Uganda and God knows where else, when he agreed with the Panjandrum of American Conservatism, Jason Wilder, that it was time to fire me. Microsecond Arbitrage was his angel dust, his LSD, his heroin, his jug of Thunderbird wine, his cocaine.

I myself have been addicted to older women and housekeeping, which my court-appointed lawyer tells me might be germs we could make grow into a credible plea of insanity. The most amazing thing to him was that I had never masturbated.

“Why not?” he said.

“My mother’s father made me promise never to do it, because it would make me lazy and crazy,” I said.

“And you believed him?” he said. He is only 23 years old, fresh out of Syracuse.

And I said, “Counselor, in these fast-moving times, with progress gone hog-wild, grandfathers are bound to be wrong about everything.”

Robert W. Moellenkamp hadn’t heard yet that he and his wife and kids were as broke as any convict in Athena. So when I came into the Board Room back in 1991, he addressed me in the statesmanlike tones of a prudent conservator of a noble legacy. He nodded in the direction of Jason Wilder, who was then simply a Tarkington parent, not a member of the Board. Wilder sat at the opposite end of the great oval table with a manila folder, a tape recorder and cassettes, and a Polaroid photograph deployed before him.

I knew who he was, of course, and something of how his mind worked, having read his newspaper column and watched his television show from time to time. But we had not met before. The Board members on either side of him had crowded into one another in order to give him plenty of room for some kind of performance.

He was the only celebrity there. He was probably the only true celebrity ever to set foot in that Board Room.

There was 1 other non-Trustee present. That was the College President, Henry “Tex” Johnson, whose wife Zuzu, as I’ve already said, I used to make love to when he was away from home any length of time. Zuzu and I had broken up for good about a month before, but we were still on speaking terms.

“Please take a seat, Gene,” said Moellenkamp. “Mr. Wilder, who I guess you know is Kimberley’s father, has a rather disturbing story he wants to tell to you.”

“I see,” I said, a good soldier doing as he was told. I wanted to keep my job. This was my home. When the time came, I wanted to retire here and then be buried here. That was before it was clear that glaciers were headed south again, and that anybody buried here, including the gang by the stable, along with Musket Mountain itself, would eventually wind up in Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Or Maryland.

Where else could I become a Full Professor or a college teacher of any rank, with nothing but a Bachelor of Science Degree from West Point? I couldn’t even teach high school or grade school, since I had never taken any of the required courses in education. At my age, which was then 51, who would hire me for anything, and especially with a demented wife and motherin-law in tow.

I said to the Trustees and Jason Wilder, “I believe I know most of what the story is, ladies and gentlemen.

I’ve just been with Kimberley, and she gave me a pretty good rehearsal for what I’d better say here.

“When listening to her charges against me, I can only hope you did not lose sight of what you yourselves have learned about me during my 15 years of faithful service to Tarkington. This Board itself, surely, can provide all the character witnesses I could ever need. If not, bring in parents and students. Choose them at random. You know and I know that they will all speak well of me.”

I nodded respectfully in Jason Wilder’s direction. “I am glad to meet you in person, sir. I read your columns and watch your TV show regularly. I find what you have to say invariably thought-provoking, and so do my wife and her mother, both of them invalids.” I wanted to get that in about my 2 sick dependents, in case Wilder and a couple of new Trustees hadn’t heard about them.

Actually, I was laying it on pretty thick. Although Margaret and her mother read to each other a lot, taking turns, and usually by flashlight in a tent they’d made inside the house out of bedspreads and chairs or whatever, they never read a newspaper. They didn’t like television, either, except for Sesame Street, which was supposedly for children. The only time they saw Jason Wilder on the little screen as far as I can remember, my mother-in-law started dancing to him as though he were modern music.

When one of his guests on the show said something, she froze. Only when Wilder spoke did she start to dance again.

I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that.

“I want to say first,” said Wilder, “that I am in nothing less than awe, Professor Hartke, of your magnificent record in the Vietnam War. If the American people had not lost their courage and ceased to support you, we would be living in a very different and much better world, and especially in Asia. I know, too, of your kindness and understanding toward your wife and her mother, to which I am glad to apply the same encomium your behavior earned in Vietnam, ‘beyond the call of duty.’ So I am sorry to have to warn you that the story I am about to tell you may not be nearly as simple or easy to refute as my daughter may have led you to expect.”

“Whatever it is, sir,” I said, “let’s hear it. Shoot.”

So he did. He said that several of his friends had attended Tarkington or sent their children here, so that he was favorably impressed with the institution’s successes with the learning-disabled long before he entrusted his own daughter to us. An usher and a bridesmaid at his wedding, he said, had earned Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degrees in Scipio. The usher had gone on to be Ambassador to Iceland. The bridesmaid was on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

He felt that Tarkington’s highly unconventional techniques would be useful if applied to the country’s notoriously beleaguered inner-city schools, and he planned to say so after he had learned more about them. The ratio of teachers to students at Tarkington, incidentally, was then I to 6. In inner-city schools, that ratio was then 1 to 65.

There was a big campaign back then, I remember, to get the Japanese to buy up inner-city public schools the way they were buying up prisons and hospitals. But they were too smart. They wouldn’t touch schools for unwelcome children of unwelcome parents with a 10-foot pole.

He said he hoped to write a book about Tarkington called “Little Miracle on Lake Mohiga” or “Teaching the Unteachable.” So he wired his daughter for sound and told her to follow the best teachers in order to record what they said and how they said it. “I wanted to learn what it was that made them good, Professor Hartke, without their knowing they were being studied,” he said. “I wanted them to go on being whatever they were, warts and all, without any self-consciousness.”

This was the first I heard of the tapes. That chilling news explained Kimberley’s lurking, lurking, lurking all the time. Wilder spared me the suspense, at least, of wondering what all of Kimberley’s apparatus might have overheard. He punched the playback button on the recorder before him, and I heard myself telling Paul Slazinger, privately, I’d thought, that the two principal currencies of the planet were the Yen and fellatio. This was so early in the academic year that classes hadn’t begun yet! This was during Freshman Orientation Week, and I had just told the incoming Class of 1994 that merchants and tradespeople in the town below preferred to be paid in Japanese Yen rather than dollars, so that the freshmen might want their parents to give them their allowances in Yen.

I had told them, too, that they were never to go into the Black Cat Café, which the townspeople considered their private club. It was one place they could go and not be reminded of how dependent they were on the rich kids on the hill, but I didn’t say that. Neither did I say that free-lance prostitutes were sometimes found there,

and in the past had been the cause of outbreaks of venereal disease on campus.

I had kept it simple for the freshmen: “Tarkingtonians are more than welcome anywhere in town but the Black Cat Café.”

If Kimberley recorded that good advice, her father did not play it back for me. He didn’t even play back what Slazinger had said to me, and it was during a coffee break, that stimulated me to name the planet’s two most acceptable currencies. He was the agent provocateur.

What he said, as I recall, was, “They want to get paid in Yen?” He was as new to Scipio as any freshman, and we had just met. I hadn’t read any of his books, and so far as I knew, neither had anybody else on the faculty. He was a last-minute choice for Writer in Residence, and had come to orientation because he was lonesome and had nothing else to do. He wasn’t supposed to be there, and he was so old, so old! He had been sitting among all those teenagers as though he werejust another rich kid who had bottomed out on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, and he was old enough to be their grandfather!

He had fought in World War II! That’s how old he was.

So I said to him, “They’ll take dollars if they have to, but you’d better have a wheelbarrow.”

And he wanted to know if the merchants and tradespeople would also accept fellatio. He used a vernacular word for fellatio in the plural.

But the tape began right after that, with my saying, as though out of the blue, and as a joke, of course, only it didn’t sound like a joke during the playback, that, in effect, the whole World was for sale to anyone who had Yen or was willing to perform fellatio.