Jonathan Kellerman - When The Bough Breaks

Her manner and tone were brittle - I knew that manner, for I'd seen it in countless therapy patients, just before the defenses came tumbling down. She wanted to let go and I was going to help her, manipulative bastard that I was…

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" she was asking.

And I heard myself answer, so smooth, so sweet:

"Of course I do."

"Anything I tell you has to be confidential. Not for print."

"I promise. I'm a feature writer. I have no aspirations of becoming Woodward or Bernstein."

A faint smile appeared on the large, bland features.

"You don't? I did, once upon a time. After four years on the Madison student paper I thought I was going to turn journalism on its ear. I went for one solid year with no writing job - I did waitressing. I hated it. Then I worked for a dog magazine, writing cutesypoo press releases on poodles and schnauzers. They brought the little beasts into the office for photographs and they fouled the carpet. It stunk. When that folded I spent two years covering union meetings and polka parties in New Jersey and that finally squeezed all the illusion out of me. Now all I want is peace."

Again the glasses came off. She closed her eyes and massaged her temples.

"When you get down to it, that's what all of us want," I said.

She opened her eyes and squinted in my direction. From the way she strained I must have been a blur. I tried to look like a trustworthy blur.

She popped two pieces of cheese into her mouth and ground them to dust with lantern jaws.

"I don't know that any of it is relevant to your story," she said. "Especially if it's a puff piece you're after."

I forced a laugh.

"Now that you've got me interested, don't leave me dangling."

She smiled. "One writer to another?"

"One writer to another."

"Oh," she sighed, "I suppose it's no biggie."

"In the first place," she told me, between mouthfuls of cheese, "no, Jedson College is not interested in attracting outsiders, period. It's a college, but in name and formal status only. What Jedson College really is - functionally - is a holding pen. A place for the privileged class to stash their children for four years before the boys enter Daddy's business and the girls marry the boys and turn into Suzy Homemaker and join the Junior League. The boys major in business or economics, the girls in art history and home economics. The gentleman's C is the common goal. Being too smart is frowned upon. Some of the brighter ones do go on to law school or medical school. But when they finish their training they return to the fold."

She sounded bitter, a wallflower describing last year's prom.

"The average household income of the families that send their kids here is over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Think of that, Alex. Everyone is rich. Did you see the harbor?"

I nodded.

"Those floating toys belong to students." She paused, as if she still couldn't believe it. "The parking lot looks like the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. These kids wear cashmere and suede for horsing around."

One of her raw, coarse hands found the other and caressed it. She looked from wall to wall of the tiny room as if searching for hidden listening devices. I wondered what she was so nervous about. So Jedson was a school for rich kids. Stanford had started out that way too and might have ended up similarly stagnant if someone hadn't figured out that not letting in smart Jews and Asians and other people with funny names and high IQs would lead to eventual academic entropy.

"There's no crime in being rich," I said.

"It's not just that. It's the utter mindlessness that goes along with it. I was at Madison during the sixties. There was a sense of social awareness. Activism. We were working to end the war. Now it's the anti - nukes movement. The university can be a greenhouse for the conscience. Here, nothing grows."

I envisioned her fifteen years back, dressed in khakis and sweatshirt, marching and mouthing slogans. Radicalism had fought a losing battle with survival, eroded by too much of nothing. But she could still take an occasional hit of nostalgia… "It's especially hard on the faculty," she was saying. "Not the Old Guard. The Young Turks - they actually call themselves that. They come here because of the job crunch, with their typical academic idealism and liberal views and last two, maybe three years. It's intellectually stultifying - not to mention the frustration of earning fifteen thousand dollars a year when the students' wardrobes cost more than that."

"You sound as if you have firsthand knowledge." "I do. There was - a man. A good friend of mine. He came here to teach philosophy. He was brilliant, a Princeton graduate, a genuine scholar. It ate him up. He talked to me about it, told me what it was like to stand up in front of a class and lecture on Kierkegaard and Sartre and see thirty pairs of vacant blue eyes staring back. Ubermensch V. he called it. He left last year."

She looked pained. I changed the subject.

"You mentioned the Old Guard. Who are they?"

"Jedson graduates who actually develop an interest in something other than making money. They go on to earn advanced degrees in humanities - something totally useless like history or sociology or literature - and then come crawling back here to teach. Jedson takes care of its own."

"I'd imagine they find it easier to relate to the students, coming from the same background."

"They must. They stay on. Most of them are older - there haven't been too many returning scholars lately. The Old Guard may be shrinking. Some are quite decent, really. I get the feeling they were always outcasts - the misfits. Even the privileged castes have those, I suppose."

The look on her face bespoke firsthand experience with the pain of social rejection. She may have sensed she was in danger of crossing the boundary from social commentary to psychological striptease, for she drew back, put on her glasses and smiled sourly.

"How's that for public relations?"

"For someone new you're certainly got a handle on the place."

"Some of it I've seen for myself. Some I learned."

"From your friend the scholar?"

"Yes." She stopped and picked up an oversized imitation leather handbag. It didn't take her long to find what she was looking for.

"This is Lee," she said, and handed me a snapshot of herself and a man several inches shorter than she. The man was balding, with tufts of thick, dark, curling hair over each ear, a bushy dark mustache and rimless round spectacles. He wore a faded blue work shirt and jeans and high - laced hiking boots. Margaret Dopplemeier was dressed in a scrape that accentuated her size, baggy cords and flat sandals. She had her arm around him, and looked maternal and childishly dependent at the same time. "He's in New Mexico now, working on his book. In solitude, he says."

I gave her back the photo.

"Writers often need that."

"Yes. We've gone round and round about that." She put her keepsake back, made a move toward the cheese and then retracted her hand, as if she'd suddenly lost her appetite.

I let a silent moment pass, then performed a lateral arabesque away from her personal life.

"What you're saying is fascinating, Margaret. Jedson is set up with all the enrollment it needs - it's a self - perpetuating system."

The word "system" can be a psychological catalyst for anyone who's flirted with the Left. It got her going again.

"Absolutely. The percentage of students whose parents are also Jedson graduates is unbelievably high. I'll bet that the two thousand students come from no more than five to seven hundred families. The same surnames keep cropping up when I compile lists. That's why when you called it a family before I was taken aback. I wondered how much you knew."

"Nothing until I came here."