Hardscrabble Road(34)
All this year’s field of Democratic presidential candidates is pretty pathetic, but the winner of the National Loser Party Award for Biggest Loser in the Bunch has to be John Kerry. I mean, come on, people. It’s not enough that Democrats are traitors to America in fact, that any one of them would rather be living in Moscow, Russia, than Moscow, Idaho, they’re going to go for a guy who looks so French he could be Brigitte Bardot’s evil twin?
Gregor blinked. John Kerry looked French? John Kerry looked so New England, he could have been Cotton Mather’s evil twin. And wouldn’t somebody like Drew Harrigan think Brigitte Bardot, who was a big activist in the animal rights movement, evil enough on her own, so that if she had an evil twin, he’d have to be good?
His head was swimming. He’d left home this morning expecting to do nothing more than spend an hour with John Jackman and get a promise of another morgue check. He’d been muddled and depressed, thinking about Bennis, thinking about himself. He’d wanted something to take his mind off the narcissistic and uncontrollable.
He wasn’t sure he’d meant something like this.
SEVEN
1
Alison Standish felt that if the university was attempting to conduct its investigation into her teaching in a way that did not leave it open to charges of responding to Drew Harrigan’s programs, it was doing a very bad job. As a matter of fact, as of this morning, it was doing a very bad job of investigating, and as the days went by it only seemed to be getting worse. In the first place, there was the secrecy. The investigation was secret in a way that would make a grand jury fan salivate. Nobody involved in it was allowed to tell anybody else what they had told the committee, nor what anybody else had told the committee, not even a lawyer. Alison was sure that couldn’t be legal. For another thing, nobody was allowed to confront the witnesses, not even Alison herself. If a former student came forward to say that he had had to sit through a lecture praising Marxism in Alison’s class, Alison couldn’t ask him about it, and couldn’t even know who he was. It was like an interrogation from the Holy and Roman Inquisition—not the Spanish one, which came later, but the one the Vatican ran in Rome, which had called Thomas Aquinas down for questioning and forced him to take the long trip by horse that killed him. Alison didn’t expect to die. She didn’t even expect to have her classes suspended. She was beginning to think she needed to find somebody outside the situation to help her, and stop assuming that the university was the community of scholars it had been set up to be in the Middle Ages.
Hell, that one hadn’t even worked in the Middle Ages.
She sat at her desk and looked, without reading, at the document in front of her. She wasn’t reading it because she’d already read it, about four times, since she’d first picked it up in her mailbox an hour ago. These were supposed to be her office hours, but it didn’t matter. Students almost never came, and none had come today. She was free to obsess as long as she wanted to about this piece off… this piece of…She didn’t know what it was a piece of. She didn’t know how to respond to it. It didn’t matter that she knew it was untrue, and that Roger Hollman, the dean, must also know it was untrue. The idea was obviously to act as if it were true, and worse, to presume the truth of it unless the falsity was proved. Who was it who said you couldn’t prove a negative? Somebody from the Middle Ages, probably. Alison was having a hard time remembering the Middle Ages at the moment. What she was remembering, for no reason at all, was her marriage. That had all been so long ago it might as well have happened to somebody else, but there you were. She had been married, to a professor of history at Temple who had eventually moved on first to New York University and then to Tufts. She had had a child, named Simon, who had died at the age of seven after many long years with leukemia. There was a time there, just for a moment, when she might have been somebody else than who she was: David’s wife, Simon’s mother, a woman who “kept her hand in” by reading other people’s books on scholastic theology and the art of the icon but otherwise had nothing to do with this at all. She didn’t know if she would have been happier if her life had turned out that way. She did know she would have been happier if Simon had lived. It occurred to her that she had gone past the time when having another child was feasible, and maybe she shouldn’t have left it so late.
That’s ridiculous, she thought. She didn’t want another child. If she’d ever had one, she would have been scared to death of it. She would have examined it for symptoms of leukemia daily, and then examined it some more, home medical encyclopedia in hand, hoping to cover all the fatal illnesses possible in children, miserable because she’d know that she could never cover them all. It was odd the way people turned out. It was odder what they wanted in times of crisis.