Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Chuck Markowitz, the youngest member of the committee, appears in the role of Castro. He is an awkward, engaging young radical who is also extremely well read. Normally Brian feels rather fond of Chuck, but today he is impatient with him. For one thing, Chuck is not only in favor of granting the demands of the petition; he is probably responsible, at least in part, for its having been written in the first place, and thus for the special departmental meeting on Tuesday which prevented Brian from having lunch with Wendy, and all the trouble which has followed from that. It is his fault that the five of them are sitting in this room now instead of attending to their personal or academic business. More generally, Brian holds it against Chuck that though over thirty he affects the costume of a radical undergraduate, and has allowed his hair to grow out until it resembles a small dirty black poodle dog sitting on top of his head.

Chuck’s remarks in favor of the Pass-Fail Option are extensive and predictable. He dwells upon the stupidities and inequalities of the present grading system, with illustrative anecdotes; he extolls the superiority of independent study, and the success of free universities. “After all,” he concludes, grinning engagingly, “how can we really know what some kid has learned in our course? How do we have any right to grade him?” The faces of the other committee members harden at these words, and they silently give Chuck’s speech the grade of B-minus.

Last to speak, as usual, is Hank Andrews, a skinny pale clever man who is Brian’s best friend in the department. Andrews has long ago adopted for himself the role of Machiavelli. In meetings he plays the part of the detached scientist, observing and occasionally manipulating political forces out of pure intellectual curiosity. It is impossible to guess what side Andrews will take on any question, since he is as likely to be motivated by cynical amusement as by either interest or principle. Today, after appearing to hesitate for some time, he has finally come out in favor of the Pass-Fail Option—largely, Brian suspects, in order to cause trouble. Andrews declines to consider any of the larger issues involved. He merely points out in his dry way that the Option has been allowed by several other departments with apparently little effect, and that the petition has been signed by over half their own majors. If its demands are not met, considerable ill feeling will be felt. There will be mutterings about monolithic bureaucracy; snide or angry letters and editorials will appear in the student newspaper.

When Andrews ceases speaking there is a clamor of exclamation, among which the words “truckling” and “expediency” can be heard. The other three professors begin to repeat the arguments they have already put forth, and to make the points they have made half an hour ago or on Tuesday. Brian does not listen to them; he hears other voices arguing, demanding.

He should have suspected trouble from the way his wife sounded on the phone this morning—from the tension in her voice, the unnatural pauses. But he was unprepared for the assault which began when he opened the front door of his house an hour later and they met face to face—Erica’s white as if lit from within by fever, with wide ignited eyes. Her Jeanne d’Arc face, he had called it once: the face of a woman fighting, as she believes, for unselfish ends, fanatically certain she is in the right. When Erica herself is injured she merely becomes cross and depressed; but she can rise to flaming indignation over any injury, or possible injury, to a child. The younger the child, the hotter the flames. He has not seen them blaze this high since just before Matilda was born, when she battled two doctors and the management of a large hospital for the right to have the baby stay with her after birth instead of in the hospital nursery. “Do you know what the babies do up there in that place?” he remembers her demanding in a raised voice as they stood in the admitting office with her pains coming every eight minutes. “Each one is isolated from all human contact in a kind of horrible plastic cage. The lights are always on, glaring down into their eyes twenty-four hours a day, like some North Korean military interrogation, and they cry, that’s what they do, twenty-four hours a day, except when they’re too exhausted even to cry, for five days and nights. That’s their introduction to this world.”

Today there was the same high fervor in her voice as she told him he had to marry Wendy—not so much for Wendy’s sake as for the sake of the almost nonexistent infant. And also, according to her, for his own. “You see, Wendy believes in you,” Erica explained, walking rapidly up and down the sitting-room carpet. “She thinks—no, it’s more than that, she knows you are a great man and that you are writing a great book. And I don’t know that, not any more. But I do know it’s wrong to hold on to a man you don’t believe in, when there is someone else who does.”

Brian had tried to argue calmly with her, to explain that she mustn’t involve herself in his mistakes; but he couldn’t get her to listen, or even stand still. “I don’t agree that it’s not my concern,” she insisted passionately while he followed her up and down the long room. “That’s what the ‘Good Germans’ said. After all, Wendy came to me; I have to help her. I don’t want to be like those people in Dante who did neither good nor evil, but were always just for themselves.”

After this interview there followed another just as bad, or worse, with Wendy at the Zimmerns’—where it turns out she has been staying ever since she disappeared—and in the oppressive presence of Danielle Zimmern. Danielle as well as Erica has known all along that Wendy never left Corinth, but she has concealed this from him. In the same way, she and Erica have concealed from Wendy that he has been anxiously and continually seeking her. For Erica, in her present emotional state, there is perhaps some excuse. For Danielle, none.

Considering Danielle, Brian grimaces so that Chuck Markowitz, at whom he happens to be gazing, stumbles over a sentence. He thinks that he has never really liked Danielle; he has suspected that she does not like him, and now he is sure of it, Very likely she is behind the whole thing. She has somehow convinced Erica that the Jeanne d’Arc thing to do is to give him up, or in less noble language throw him out. She wants him out of the way so that she, Danielle, need not see him any more, and so that Erica also will be a divorced woman. Misery loves company, especially ideological misery—and for some time Danielle has sounded more and more like an ideologue. Since Leonard left she has nursed a grudge against men, which she has recently attempted to generalize and dignify as radical feminism. If he didn’t know what he knows about her promiscuity at the time of the separation, he might wonder if she were a lesbian. And after all, promiscuity proves nothing; it might even suggest that Danielle cannot really love any man. No doubt she is attractive in a way—but isn’t there something heavy, something bovine (or “oxlike” might be a better word) about her good looks? He remembers that when he danced with her at parties it sometimes seemed as if she were trying to lead, and he was always uncomfortably aware that she must weigh nearly as much as he.

For months Brian has hardly spoken to Danielle, but now she has somehow forced herself into his private affairs and is standing over them like a policewoman, so that he hardly dared touch Wendy when they met today, and did not dare kiss her. Yes, a policewoman; or an MP guarding prisoners of war—for, seen together, she and Wendy might have come from different countries, even different races. He recalls with a pang how small, soft and young Wendy looked, hunched on the Zimmerns’ grotesque Victorian sofa with her bare feet up and her pink freckled arms wrapped protectively around her knees. She seemed reduced in size—not only in relation to the oxlike Danielle, but in contrast to Erica, whom he had just left. On one of her plump feet there was the angry, scraped mark of some recent injury. Her eyelids drooped, and her face was the weary, flattened face of child refugees in news photographs.