Hocus Pocus

15

pamela sure got me drunk that night, and we made love. And then I spilled my guts about the Vietnam War in front of a bunch of students at the Pahlavi Pavilion. And Kimberley Wilder recorded me.

I had never tasted blackberry brandy before. I never want to taste it again. It did bad things to me. It made me a crybaby about the war. That is something I swore I would never be.

If I could order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one.

That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the airconditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me.

His name? Rob Roy.

After we made love, Pamela asked me the same question Harriet had asked me in Manila 15 years earlier. It was something they both had to know. They both asked me if I had killed anybody in the war.

I said to Pamela what I had said to Harriet: “If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.”

I should have gone straight home after saying that. But I went over to the Pavilion instead. I needed a bigger audience for that great line of mine.

So I barged into a group of students sitting in front of the great fireplace in the main lounge. After the prison break, that fireplace would be used for cooking horse meat and dogs. I got between the students and the fire, so there was no way they could ignore me, and I said to them, “If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.”

I went on from there.

I was so full of self-pity! That was what I found unbearable when Jason Wilder played back my words to me. I was so drunk that I acted like a victim!

The scenes of unspeakable cruelty and stupidity and waste I described that night were no more horrible than ultrarealistic shows about Vietnam, which had become staples of TV entertainment. When I told the students about the severed human head I saw nestled in the guts of a water buffalo, to them, I’m sure, the head might as well have been made of wax, and the guts those of some big animal which may or may not have belonged to a real water buffalo.

What difference could it make whether the head was or was not wax, or whether the guts were or were not those of a water buffalo?

No difference.

“Professor Hartke,” Jason Wilder said to me gently, reasonably, when the tape had reached its end, “why on Earth would you want to tell such tales to young people who need to love their country?”

I wanted to keep my job so much, and the house which came with it, that my reply was asinine. “I was telling them history,” I said, “and I had had a little too much to drink. I don’t usually drink that much.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “I am told that you are a man with many problems, but that alcohol has not appeared among them with any consistency. So let us say that your performance in the Pavilion was a well-intended history lesson of which you accidentally lost control.”

“That’s what it was, sir,” I said.

His balletic hands flitted in time to the logic of his thoughts before he spoke again. He was a fellow pianist. And then he said, “First of all, you were not hired to teach History. Second of all, the students who come to Tarkington need no further instructions in how it feels to be defeated. They would not be here if they themselves had not failed and failed. The Miracle on Lake Mohiga for more than a century now, as I see it, has been to make children who have failed and failed start thinking of victory, stop thinking about the hopelessness of it all.”

“There was just that one time,” I said, “and I’m sorry.”

Cough. One cough.

Wilder said he didn’t consider a teacher who was negative about everything a teacher. “I would call a person like that an ‘unteacher.’ He’s somebody who takes things out of young people’s heads instead of putting more things in.”

“I don’t know as I’m negative about everything,”

“What’s the first thing students see when they walk into the library?” he said.

“Books?” I said.

“All those perpetual-motion machines,” he said. “I saw that display, and I read the sign on the wall above it. I had no idea then that you were responsible for the sign.”

He was talking about the sign that said “THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.”

“All I knew was that I didn’t want my daughter or anybody’s child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,” he said. “And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.”

“What’s so negative about it?” I said.

“What could be a more negative word than ‘futility’?” he said.

‘Ignorance,’ “ I said.

“There you are,” he said. I had somehow won his argument for him.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Precisely,” he said. “You obviously do not understand how easily discouraged the typical Tarkington student is, how sensitive to suggestions that he or she should quit trying to be smart. That’s what the word ‘futile’ means: ‘Quit, quit, quit.’

“And what does ‘ignorance’ mean?” I said.

“If you put it up on the wall and give it the prominence you have,” he said, “it’s a nasty echo of what so many Tarkingtonians were hearing before they got here: ‘You’re dumb, you’re dumb, you’re dumb.’ And of course they aren’t dumb.”

“I never said they were,” I protested.

“You reinforce their low self-esteem without realizing what you are doing,” he said. “You also upset them with humor appropriate to a barracks, but certainly not to an institution of higher learning.”

“You mean about Yen and fellatio?” I said. “I would never have said it if I’d thought a student could hear me.”

“I am talking about the entrance hail of the library again,” he said.

“I can’t think of what else is in there that might have offended you,” I said.

“It wasn’t I who was offended,” he said. “It was my daughter.”

“I give up,” I said. I wasn’t being impudent. I was abject.

“On the same day Kimberley heard you talk about Yen and fellatio, before classes had even begun,” he said, “a senior led her and the other freshmen to the library and solemnly told them that the bell clappers on the wall were petrified penises. That was surely barracks humor the senior had picked up from you.”

For once I didn’t have to defend myself. Several of the Trustees assured Wilder that telling freshmen that the clappers were penises was a tradition that antedated my arrival on campus by at least 20 years.

But that was the only time they defended me, although I of them had been my student, Madelaine Astor, née Peabody, and 5 of them were parents of those I had taught. Madelaine dictated a letter to me afterward, explaining that Jason Wilder had promised to denounce the college in his column and on his TV show if the Trustees did not fire me.

So they dared not come to my assistance.

She said, too, that since she, like Wilder, was a Roman Catholic, she was shocked to hear me say on tape that Hitler was a Roman Catholic, and that the Nazis painted crosses on their tanks and airplanes be-cause they considered themselves a Christian army. Wilder had played that tape right after I had been cleared of all responsibility for freshmen’s being told that the clappers were penises.

Once again I was in deep trouble for merely repeating what somebody else had said. It wasn’t something my grandfather had said this time, or somebody else who couldn’t be hurt by the Trustees, like Paul Slazinger. It was something my best friend Damon Stern had said in a History class only a couple of months before.

If Jason Wilder thought I was an unteacher, he should have heard Damon Stern! Then again, Stern never told the awful truth about supposedly noble human actions in recent times. Everything he debunked had to have transpired before 1950, say.

So I happened to sit in on a class where he talked about Hitler’s being a devout Roman Catholic. He said something I hadn’t realized before, something I have since discovered most Christians don’t want to hear:

that the Nazi swastika was intended to be a version of a Christian cross, a cross made out of axes. Stern said that Christians had gone to a lot of trouble denying that the swastika was just another cross, saying it was a primitive symbol from the primordial ooze of the pagan past.

And the Nazis’ most valuable military decoration was the Iron Cross.

And the Nazis painted regular crosses on all their tanks and airplanes.

I came out of that class looking sort of dazed, I guess. Who should I run into but Kimberley Wilder?

“What did he say today?” she said.

“Hitler was a Christian,” I said. “The swastika was a Christian cross.”

She got it on tape.

I didn’t rat on Damon Stern to the Trustees. Tarkington wasn’t West Point, where it was an honor to squeal.

Madelaine agreed with Wilder, too, she said in her letter, that I should not have told my Physics students that the Russians, not the Americans, were the first to make a hydrogen bomb that was portable enough to be used as a weapon. “Even if it’s true,” she wrote, “which I don’t believe, you had no business teffing them that.”

She said, moreover, that perpetual motion was possible, if only scientists would work harder on it.

She had certainly backslid intellectually since passing her orals for her Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree.

I used to tell classes that anybody who believed in the possibility of perpetual motion should be boiled alive like a lobster.

I was also a stickler about the Metric System. I was famous for turning my back on students who mentioned feet or pounds or miles to me.

They hated that.

I didn’t dare teach like that in the prison across the lake, of course.

Then again, most of the convicts had been in the drug business, and were either Third World people or dealt with Third World people. So the Metric System was old stuff to them.

Rather than rat on Damon Stern about the Nazis’ being Christians, I told the Trustees that I had heard it on National Public Radio. I said I was very sorry about having passed it on to a student. “I feel like biting off my tongue,” I said.

“What does Hitler have to do with either Physics or Music Appreciation?” said Wilder.

I might have replied that Hitler probably didn’t know any more about physics than the Board of Trustees, but that he loved music. Every time a concert hail was bombed, I heard somewhere, he had it rebuilt immediately as a matter of top priority. I think I may actually have learned that from National Public Radio.

I said instead, “If I’d known I upset Kimberley as much as you say I did, I would certainly have apologized. I had no idea, sir. She gave no sign.”

What made me weak was the realization that I had been mistaken to think that I was with family there in the Board Room, that all Tarkingtonians and their parents and guardians had come to regard me as an uncle. My goodness—the family secrets I had learned over the years and kept to myself! My lips were sealed. What a faithful old retainer I was! But that was all I was to the Trustees, and probably to the students, too.

I wasn’t an uncle. I was a member of the Servant Class.

They were letting me go.

Soldiers are discharged. People in the workplace are fired. Servants are let go.

“Am I being fired?” I asked the Chairman of the Board incredulously.

“I’m sorry, Gene,” he said, “but we’re going to have to let you go.”

The President of the college, Tex Johnson, sitting two chairs away from me, hadn’t let out a peep. He looked sick. I surmised mistakenly that he had been scolded for having let me stay on the faculty long enough to get tenure. He was sick about something more personal, which still had a lot to do with Professor Eugene Debs Hartke.

He had been brought in as President from Rollins College down in Winter Park, Florida, where he had been Provost, after Sam Wakefield did the big trick of suicide. Henry “Tex” Johnson held a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Texas Tech in Lubbock, and claimed to be a descendant of a man who had died in the Alamo. Damon Stern, who was always turning up little-known facts of history, told me, incidentally, that the Battle of the Alamo was about slavery. The brave men who died there wanted to secede from Mexico because it was against the law to own slaves in Mexico. They were fighting for the right to own slaves.

Since Tex’s wife and I had been lovers, I knew that his ancestors weren’t Texans, but Lithuanians. His father, whose name certainly wasn’t Johnson, was a Lithuanian second mate on a Russian freighter who jumped ship when it put in for emergency repairs at Corpus Christi. Zuzu told me that Tex’s father was not only an illegal immigrant but the nephew of the former Communist boss of Lithuania.

So much for the Alamo.

I turned to him at the Board meeting, and I said, “Tex—for pity sakes, say something! You know darn good and well I’m the best teacher you’ve got! I don’t say that. The students do! Is the whole faculty going to be brought before this Board, or am I the only one? Tex?”

He stared straight ahead. He seemed to have turned to cement. “Tex?” Some leadership!

I put the same question to the Chairman, who had been pauperized by Microsecond Arbitrage but didn’t know it yet. “Bob—” I began.

He winced.

I began again, having gotten the message in spades that I was a servant and not a relative: “Mr. Moellenkamp, sir—” I said, “you know darn well, and so does everybody else here, that you can follow the most patriotic, deeply religious American who ever lived with a tape recorder for a year, and then prove that he’s a worse traitor than Benedict Arnold, and a worshipper of the Devil. Who doesn’t say things in a moment of passion or absentmindedness that he doesn’t wish he could take back? So I ask again, am I the only one this was done to, and if so, why?”

He froze.

“Madelaine?” I said to Madelaine Astor, who would later write me such a dumb letter.

She said she did not like it that I had told students that a new Ice Age was on its way, even if I had read it in The New York Tunes. That was another thing I’d said that Wilder had on tape. At least it had something to do with science, and at least it wasn’t something I had picked up from Slazinger or Grandfather Wills or Damon Stern. At least it was the real me.

“The students here have enough to worry about,” she said. “I know I did.”

She went on to say that there had always been people who had tried to become famous by saying that the World was going to end, but the World hadn’t ended.

There were nods of agreement all around the table. I don’t think there was a soul there who knew anything about science.

“When I was here you were predicting the end of the World,” she said, “only it was atomic waste and acid rain that were going to kill us. But here we are. I feel fine. Doesn’t everybody else feel fine? So pooh.”

She shrugged. “About the rest of it,” she said, “I’m sorry I heard about it. It made me sick. If we have to go over it again, I think I’ll just leave the room.”

Heavens to Betsy! What could she have meant by “the rest of it”? What could it be that they had gone over once, and were going to have to go over again with me there? Hadn’t I already heard the worst?

No.