Padgett Powell - Edisto

But the way the General most significantly ruined the school was by designating department heads from the outside, rather than by promoting from within. This not only leaves them all unpromoted but at one time eight department heads were from military colleges or West Point itself, and the faculty meetings "sounded like Yalta," somebody said. " Enfilades , for Christ’s sake. I need smaller sophomore sections and he says to me, in public, if I can’t run a full company, fall to the rear."

"Get off the pot," somebody seconds, the party beginning to roll. But they never get very far with the General, because the campaign he runs is successful. They just don’t like the language. And he’s so powerful that even their most inept colleagues are reprieved and warmly taken back, because their fragile roles in the total ruination of education are by comparison so minor and incidental.

But after a time gossip beats out professional problems, and all gossip is finally about sex and a lot of giggling gets going, with grown men putting their heads between their own knees and laughing at the floor about, say, a wager someone present has made that someone absent always takes a shower after "doing it." "Whenever she'll let him." "Whenever he’ll let her!" Red faces burled in the bouncing knees, people going to the sideboud end losing count-something they rarely do. Thess are drink accountants.

Well, it’s one of these when Taurus drops in and hurls the talk backward through sexual indiscretion and the faults of the president and the failure of mind in America to a real problem: How to accommodate a nonprofessional guest who is not a servant or a child or an old friend of the hostels? Play It by ear, play it by ear.

Well, he knows his moves,I see. Gees to the sideboard and’s got a decanter top off and decanter on tilt when he sees no glass, only the Doctor's metal Depression tumblers, which make stuff taste like water squeezed out of electrical cord. He turns and gives me a high sign (I’m in the kitchen see-through) to bring him a glass. I carry it out like I was just going that way anyway, and he pours into it, still in my hand, sets the decanter back, and turns and takes the drink after he’s surveyed the whole room. They are studying other things, in other directions than his, to a man. So I know and he knows, I see him smiling. It’s the first time since Theenie took off like all get-out that I’ve really considered the large public questions about him and the situation. Like who is he? What’s he doing here?

Before I even get out of the way, a woman of whom it’s rumored her husband was found in a motel room with another man on the faculty comes up and puts her hand on his arm and says, "We’ve heard quite a bit about you, young man.” That’s a title I get a lot during these parties, but tonight it’s his and it’s different. It sounds more suspicious on him because he is one. I guess about twenty-five. Maybe thirty.

"I’m Margaret Pinckney," she says to him, adjusting her arm on his. "I’d introduce you to my husband, Jim, but he’s not here.” Jim’s the one they said was in the motel. She’s dressed up more than any other woman there.

"Wel1, Mahhgret, I see you’ve met him." It’s the Bill they howled about in the president story, fluttering his eyelids and blushing — won’t look at either Margaret or Taurus, but holds out his hand, without saying his name, to Taurus, who shakes it. Then, I guess before they could regroup, Taurus cruises off toward the Doctor, who is entertaining.

"Bill, isn’t Jim enough?” says Margaret.

"Enough whaat, Mahhgret?"

"Enough you know what."

Bill blushed. "Mahhgret, you d0n’t understayan—"

"Yes, I do," she says, turning from the sideboard with a whole tumbler of bourbon. “I understand perfectly that you people can’t just be per ni cious. You’ve got to be pro mis cuous on top of that." I hide, more or less, under the sideboard.

"Mahhgret, now who is we? And anyway, we didn’t do anything to Jim, honey. Why that tendency’s been quite around, quite some—”

"Schmendency! It’s cannibalism, human larceny! And you’ve got to come over here just now when I’m talking to Dr. Manny’s new—"

"New what , Mahhgret?"

"Her new friend.”

"Free-yend. Look at that bohunk. I heard he’s her second thesis , honey."

This one confused me at the time, made me suddenly self-conscious, crouching like a halfback, in full view under the sideboard, so I trotted off to the kitchen, kind of burning somewhere, almost wishing I had for cover a broom horse between my legs. But I saw Margaret Pinckney leaving the area, too — at an angle, but holding her tall tumbler at plumb, letting it lead her. I think she took all the attention.

You can’t retreat to your room during one of these deals, because browsers stroll in and look at the book titles and try to talk to you, and the telescope trick I worked on the coroner won’t hold up all night — in fact, it will draw more of these professional people in. So I went down to Theenie’s to read W.P.A. stories.

For a long time I thought that the Negro who papered those walls just did it random from a pile of newspapers on his worktable in the center of the room, and there were so many W.P.A. stories in the papers of 1937 that he just slapped up story after story or page after page and they were all accidentally on the W.P.A. Right next to a full feature on the Fair Park they built in Dallas, with all that heavy extra stone, was an account of how many new ditches were dug in Montgomery, which was going to be bad news for mosquitoes, and next to that how many writers had been assigned to make new plays for the stone-heavy theater that was going up, etc. And one day it came to me: the paperhanger had to select the stories out. There had to be breadline stories before there were W.P.A. stories, and stock-market stories before that. So a Negro with scissors in that shack so new it had good fresh black tar paper on the outside goes through a ton of newspapers and pulls out the stories he likes, a man with no job clipping out all these manufactured jobs he couldn’t even get to or probably land if he did get to, with a bucket of Hour and water and a stick to stir with and his hand to wipe it on and lay in the wonderful stories. They were good enough stories on their own, but when I figured out this new aspect, they got better. Somehow, standing on Theenie’s bed or on a chair reading them, I was closer to what really happened, if not to how it was to hold a made — up job, then how it was to hold in reverence their making up. It was a swell, poor time, I know.

There was always a new story to read, it seems, or even if you thought you had read one before, a new way to imagine the Negro reading it first, and so it became a new kind of story. Or maybe he couldn’t even read. Maybe he could just detect W.P.A. and cut out the connected columns, knowing or trusting it was the good stuff. Maybe he was even not in gloried awe of the Project, didn’t even know what it was. He could have thought W.P.A. was for "White People’s Advantages" or something. Maybe he was bitter and political in that shack in 1937. Who knows?

But anyway, you could always read and reread, changing your opinion about the Negro and so changing the stories and their effect now. I read them that night until Taurus showed back up.

"Is it over?"

"Near enough."

"You want to do something tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Come get me — after cartoons."

Cartoons. Consummate comedian he was. I went back to the house and slipped in and it wasn’t over. It was blumberville. Infamous motel Jim Pinckney had just got there.

"Well, what’s this guy like?” he said.