John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Ask it," he grumbled. "I won't stand for blackmail, but I'm obliged to You for letting sleeping dogs lie. What I mean, I'm not beholden, You understand, but when a fellow needs a hand, why, I'll give him the shirt off my back."

I thought of the hungry undergraduates upon whom he'd bestowed cufflinks and desk-barometers, but contented myself with inquiring whether Anastasia was my sister.

"Aha," he said, as if spying some ulterior motive in the question, and his expression turned fatuous again. "I'd heard you two were sweet on each other! Well, don't You worry, lad — Sir — - I don't believe Stoker's filthy talk about her and that George fellow. He says Pete Greene's lost his head over her too — fellow served under me in C.R. Two, heck of a fine Joe. But I'd never believe that flunking Stoker!"

Disturbing as was the suggestion that Anastasia was known to be "sweet on" Harold Bray, I merely demanded to know whether he meant then that she was not Virginia Hector's daughter. He sighed and rolled another cigarette, shaking his head.

"She only had the one, poor Ginny: just Yourself. Me and Ira stood by in the delivery-room, hoping You'd be stillborn. I figured You'd be some kind of monster, if Ginny hadn't been lying about the GILES-thing…"

Unaccountably my heart thrilled to the news that "My Ladyship" and I (so I began from that moment forth to regard her) were no kin. But I repeated Ira Hector's assertion that he'd helped deliver her himself.

"I wouldn't put it past him," Reginald chuckled. "That's Ira all over." But the truth, he declared, was that Ira regularly "helped out" at the Unwed Co-ed's Hospital simply to be helpful, and thus had taken part in a great many deliveries — it was, after all, his building. Anastasia's parentage, however, would never be known: "The hospital records are confidential anyhow, and when we decided Ira should adopt a girl we had her papers destroyed. Ginny's doctor was the only one who might have known, and he passed away twenty-some years ago." In other words, Anastasia was an orphan, born to some luckless co-ed, left for adoption at the New Tammany Lying-in. When my disappearance from the tape-lift, and G. Herrold's garbled talk of finding a baby in the Belly, had led Reginald Hector to fear that his plan had misfired, he'd judged the scandal of illicit pregnancy less dangerous than that of infanticide, actual or attempted. The fortunate coincidence of Dr. Mayo's death at about that same time had made it possible to enter on the records that Virginia Hector had borne a daughter, Anastasia — whom Ira raised when Virginia refused to. Scandal there'd been, when the news gradually became known, but on the whole it had not much damaged the public image of Reginald Hector; people pitied him and censured Virginia (a double injustice of which he seemed yet oblivious), whose subsequent deterioration they were pleased to regard as her due; Max was got rid of, the Cum Laude Project quietly scrapped, and Eblis Eierkopf demoted to less sensitive researches. Anastasia had proved a delightful grandchild, and but for an occasional nagging fear that the GILES had not really perished (if the baby had been the GILES), Reginald Hector had put the unpleasant episode out of mind — until yesterday, when it had suddenly come back to haunt him.

"But look here," he said at last, patting my shoulder, "if You really promise to let bygones be bygones, You can count on me to put in a good word for You with Stacey."

When I asked what exactly he meant, he winked. "She had no business marrying that dirty-minded draft-dodger in the first place! But Stacey listens to her Grandpa Reg, and if I was to tell her the G.T. loves her… Not that You haven't told her so already, eh?" He nudged me with his elbow.

"A Grand Tutor loves the whole student body," I told him coldly, adding that if he felt so beholden to me as to pimp for his married granddaughter, he was flunkèd indeed, and had better heed my counsel about herding goats. Not to lose my temper further at his pandering to the image of Harold Bray, I turned my back on his expostulations and left the office. At that very moment, as if to remind me of urgenter business, the crowd outside set up a shout. But another came from behind me, like an answer to the first: a woman's cry: "You're not my Giles!"

It was Mother, crazy-eyed and pointing from behind the ex-Chancellor. In vain the young receptionist tried to coax her back into the farther room; in vain Reginald Hector said, "Whoa down, Gin" — his own eyes still flashing wrath at me. She pushed past him with her claws out and would have attacked me if they'd not caught her arms.

"You're not my Billy!" she cried. I froze before the hatred in her face. More shouts came from outside, disorganized and fearsome. She struggled now not at me but towards the office window, shrieking, "They're killing him!"

"What's she talking about?" her father demanded. The receptionist, herself verging on hysteria, replied that it was that George-fellow, the so-called Goat-Boy, that the crowd had discovered somewhere and dragged to the front gate. "She says it's her son, sir! And I think — they're lynching him…"

I ran for the porch, flunking myself for not having put off all disguise long since. The doorguard snapped to attention, ignoring the horror at the gate. There on hands and knees in the torchlight some poor wretch was indeed not long for this campus: blows and kicks rained upon him; the host of his attackers snarled like Border Collies at a wolf; those not near enough to strike with briefcase, umbrella, or slide-rule shouted imprecations and threw weighty textbooks. Already a noose was being rigged from a lamp-post, and Telerama crews were exhorting the crowd not to block their cameras. The victim's tunic, though rent now and bloodied, I recognized as Bray's; but his hair was gold and curled, not black and straight — and the face he raised, when the mob hailed the sight of me, was my own!

"Stop!" I commanded. "Stop in the name of the GILES!" They did actually pause for a moment, weapons poised, and Reginald Hector (a more seasoned hand than I at giving orders) bellowed at them from the doorway to fall back before he horsewhipped the lot of them. "You heard your Grand Tutor: let the bastard go!"

"Billikins!" my mother screamed behind me, and had I not caught hold of her, would have run to the gore-smeared likeness of her son. "You're not the GILES!" she shrieked at me, and strove ferocious at my eyes. "Billy is!"

Did I see Bray smile through his mad disguise? A half-second I had to wonder what, if not an EATen mind, could have led him to so fatal a mask, and where anyhow he'd got it. In that same half-second, as the mob faltered, another woman squealed forth round a shrubberied corner of the mansion. I let go my mother in horror at sight of Anastasia herself, scarcely less abused than Bray: her sandals were gone; her hair was wild, her cheek bloody, her white uniform ripped down the front and everywhere grimed!

"What in thunder!" Reg Hector shouted. My mother, instead of assaulting me, ran weeping to embrace whom she thought her son. Like the crowd, I stood dumbfounded; Reginald Hector, half-mad with alarm, caught his granddaughter in his arms and shouted questions at her: What had happened? Who had attacked her? But she shook away and ran to me. Forgetting my mask I held out my arms — ah, Founder, she was worse mauled than on the night Croaker beached her! — but she halted just before me and screamed at me to "keep my promise." Men with microphones came running.

"You swore!" she cried. "You swore you'd pass Him if I slept with you!" Beside herself, she snatched a microphone and pointed to the man she thought was I, his wounds being kissed by my mother. "That man is a passèd Grand Tutor!" she shouted into it. "Don't dare kill your own Grand Tutor!" To me again then she cried, "I kept my promise! You keep yours!"