John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Max pronounced the word as though it tasted foul. He himself, he went on to say, though still nominally Eierkopf's superior, was by that time already out of favor with Chancellor Hector, and found himself denied full access to the Cum Laude planning. But he undertook a private research into the fields of eugenics and comparative mythology in hopes of anticipating Eierkopf's maneuvers, and at the same time (as I gathered) courted Miss Hector's society. His avowed motive was to protect her from his colleague's designs; unfriendly gossip had it he was out to improve his position with the father through the daughter; in any case, from what Max said I understood that Miss Hector came to reciprocate his own esteem for her — indeed, that it was Max's reluctance more than hers that kept their relation merely Scapular, as it were: "A fifty-years-old Moishian radical and a twenty-five-years-old Shiksa reactionary, that used to be the Spring-Queen of New Tammany College! Some heroes our kids would've been!"

What exactly passed between them he would not say, but it appeared there was an argument following which, perhaps to spite him, Miss Hector began spending much time with Dr. Eierkopf. She even exchanged her post as tape-librarian to work as some sort of technician on the Cum Laude Project, for which she professed great admiration now that (as she implied to Max) she was privy to its secret details. All Max ever saw her do was steer his colleague's wheelchair along the corridors and campus paths; despite his own frailness, he declared to me, and his contempt for the Siegfrieder ideal for blue-eyed athleticism, the contrast between Virginia Hector's proud form and the feeble bloat of Eierkopf sickened his spirit.

"A pretty Moishian girl, you know, Georgie, you think of a dark hall and heavy wine, and myrrh and frankincense; but this Shiksa, she reminded you of bright day-times — almost you could smell sunshine on her! I didn't want her for myself, not even if I wasn't old and bony; I wanted she should marry some buck of a northern forester, you know? Or a strapping young iceberg-research man with gold hair on his chest yet. It wasn't she was a goy ; it was she was so pretty in the goy way, instead of some other way."

This new feature of my keeper's life interested me considerably. I asked him whether the woman had married Eblis Eierkopf then. Max's face darkened; he shook his head. "You heard the reasons why I was fired from New Tammany — all but this one, that happened at the end. One day just after I made my last speech in the Senate, comes a message from Chancellor Hector himself, he wants to see me right away. The Security people take me up in a private elevator to his offices, and next thing before I can tell him hello, this Virginia runs in, all crying tears, and throws her arms around me; and she says, 'It don't matter! It don't matter!' So I ask her daddy, that's biting on his cigar by the window, 'What don't matter?' And he spits the end out and never once looks at me. But 'All right, Spielman,' he says: 'I know when I been out-generaled.' He was the big general in the Second Riot, you know, before he ran for Chancellor."

The occasion of the summons, it developed, was that Miss Hector had found herself with child and declared Max responsible! Even there in the barn, almost two decades later, my keeper's voice grew incredulous as he spoke of it: horror enough that she had submitted to the repulsive, to the despicable Eierkopf (by what clever means the cripple had managed seduction and mating, Max shuddered to wonder) — more bitter yet to hang her shame on the man who'd tried in vain to shield her! Heartsick, he challenged her to confess that Eierkopf, not himself, had been her undoer — or else some third party with whom she had secretly consorted. Miss Hector, never once looking him in the eye, only repeated her accusation; it was true, she said, that Professor Eierkopf's passion for his work had led him past propriety's bounds to the suggestion that she put by modesty for science's sake and lend herself to certain experimental possibilities of the Cum Laude Project ("I knew! I knew!" Max had shouted at the Chancellor. "Oh boy, won't I wring his pig's neck once!"); but she had never acquiesced. As for intimacies with the crippled scientist himself, she was prepared to swear on a stack of Old Syllabi that there had been none, nor had any been proposed; she professed to be nauseated at the thought. Max then had declared, almost a-swoon, it was not the thought she paled at but recollection of the deed, and appall at what thing it had got in her.

"Why did she blame you?" I asked him — and was told that in human studentdom such false charges on the part of desperate women were not uncommon.

"She'd… been with Eblis Eierkopf, you know — " He said the word with difficulty, and his use of it, clearly in the Chickian sense, compounded a certain perplexity of mine: I had come to think that Lady Creamhair, on the occasion of that fiasco in the hemlocks, had not understood my honest intention to be (an activity for which G. Herrold had a host of other names); but if the term was after all common parlance, as Max's use of it suggested, then her initial encouragement and subsequent wild rebuff of my advances were not yet clear. The memory made me sweat; another time I should have asked Max to gloss his term, but he'd gone on with the story. "- she must have been with him: you don't get pregnant filing tape-reels! Then he wouldn't do the right thing by her, and she thought to herself, 'That old Spielman, I'll say it was his fault, he'll be glad enough to marry me no matter what, and once the baby's born I can do what I please.' You haven't read much but the old epics yet, Georgie, or you'd know how it is with old men and young women."

I ventured to say I understood what the situation was, if not why it should be so. Nothing in my kidship equipped me to appreciate the reasons for human jealousy, so alien to the goats; yet my own heart was alas no stranger to that unnatural sentiment, which had been the death of Redfearn's Tom. But discreetly as I could I asked Max how it was that he, the soul of gentleness and reason, had been angered by the woman's expedient, born as it plainly was of desperation and ill usage.

"Yes. Well." He sniffed and frowned at me curiously over his eyeglasses. "That's a hard question, George! Aren't you a keen one, asking me that!" He said this not at all critically, but as if surprised and pleased. "A boy that asks that question is wise enough to raise his eyebrow at the answer. I hope he's wise enough to know how the truth can sound sometimes like a lie."

The truth came to this, he asserted: he could forgive, in the woman he'd felt such regard for, any infidelity; he did not count himself deserving of her love (or Eblis Eierkopf either, but that was her affair); the most he'd ever dreamed of winning was her respect and perhaps a daughterly affection, nothing more, in return for which he'd gladly have married her though she were pregnant by a different lover every year. But disregard for official morality and even for his feelings was one thing; disregard for Truth another. Let her confess frankly that the child was not his: he would wed her and give it gratefully, prayerfully, his name; but he could not allow a lie to be his marriage-portion, whose life's enterprise had been the research after truth. In short, neither the Chancellor's threats nor Miss Hector's tears could induce him to wed his heart's desire unless she openly admitted that Eierkopf had deflowered and impregnated her, and this admission she would not make.

"So that was that," Max concluded. "Her poppa hollered how he'd like to whip me with his two hands, and if it wasn't for his daughter's reputation he'd have me to court. Miss Virginia hit my face once and ran away, which I haven't seen her since, and just the next week was when I was sacked, like you know already. Why should it matter then, I should argue my case? So I came here to the goat-barn, and half a year later G. Herrold brings me this cripple-child out of the tape-lift, he's been sacked his own self for fetching you out…" He rubbed his left cheek, as if Miss Hector's smite still tingled there. "What am I supposed to think, Georgie? What am I supposed to do, but kiss your poor legs and your goy blond hair, that no Moishian like me was ever the poppa of?"