Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“Boiling,” Bill replied.

For a moment Brian allowed himself to enjoy a vision of Dibble in his office, opening a copy of this letter, reading it, boiling. “Ye-es,” he said, frowning so as not to smile. He turned back to the second page, to the demand for a public apology from Dibble plus equal class time for a speaker of their choice. If he wished Brian could advise granting this demand, causing Dibble to boil even harder. But, like Bill, he had to consider the public reputation of the department, to avoid uproar and scandal. It was time to return to the policy of containment.

He could of course, and perhaps should, recommend the usual delaying tactics: suggest that the matter be referred to a committee which would be unable to reach its decision until the term was over. But this would mean in effect a total victory for Dibble. It would be deeply discouraging to Wendy and pretty Jenny and all their friends. Moreover, they would see it as a failure not only of their cause but of Brian’s advice and political know-how.

For all these reasons, he had decided on a compromise. It was clear that the demand for an apology must be forgotten. (“Apologize!?” Bill reported Dibble as shouting. “Those spoiled brats ought to apologize to me.”) There should be no interference with lectures, but Dibble should be asked to announce optional class meetings during reading period (now only two weeks off) in which the feminist viewpoint would be presented. And as Bill nodded, smiled, expressing approval of this solution, Brian felt again the intoxication of political power. He thought that now he understood why someone might wish to become a double agent.

He was not surprised to discover that Bill Guildenstern had taken his advice. But he was rather startled yesterday when he heard that Dibble had refused even this favorable compromise. Wendy and her friends, quite naturally, were not only surprised but indignant. At about noon Sara and Jenny appeared in Brian’s office, one white with anger, the other almost weeping. He tried to calm them, to tell them that nothing much was lost—that they could still go ahead and hold meetings in reading period without Dibble’s permission. Jenny seemed partly convinced, but not Sara. “You know something?” she cried passionately, clinging to the back of a chair with her small white fists as if it were a podium, and looking more than ever like a young boy revolutionary. “If we were blacks, instead of women, they wouldn’t dare give us this kind of crap. Anyone, anyone has more status in this society than we do, more respect!”

“Blacks do not have more status,” Brian corrected her. “The establishment is just more scared of them. If you were black, they’d be afraid you’d bomb Burnham Hall, or hold Dibble hostage in his office.”

“Yes! That’s what we should do,” Sara said stubbornly. “Only we’ve got no guts. We’ve let ourselves be brainwashed too long.” She gave Brian an accusing, discouraged look, such as another woman might give an incompetent repairman, and turned back to Jenny. “Come on, let’s split. We’ve got to get that meeting organized.”

From the departmental point of view things have turned out for the best, but Brian regrets that the protest has ended in a rout. Sara had held her meeting last night, and Wendy dutifully attended the first two hours of it. (Brian, as usual, did not go; he would have been unwelcome, not as a professor, but as a man.) She reported that there was a lot of discussion still going on when she left, but no plan of action. Brian was not surprised; women alone can never really get a cause together. It is not only that they are too gentle, but also, as he has read recently, that they lack the male bonding instinct, the tradition of cooperation against a common enemy.

Wendy has poured him another cup of coffee, and is cooking herself a brownish mess of health-food cereal and nuts and raisins when the telephone rings. It is Linda, breathlessly asking to speak to her.

“For you.” Brian holds out the receiver.

“Hi ...What? ...Oh, wow! ...Fantastic ...No, we didn’t hear the radio. Gee, I don’t know. Wait a sec.” She turns around. “Linda says they’ve taken over Dibble’s office! She’s going over there now, and she wants me to come with her. Oh, hey, isn’t that far out?”

“Taken over his office?” Brian drops the Times, causing the Cosmopolitan Girl on the back page to become smeared with egg and marmalade, and stands up. He is torn between reluctance to speak with Linda and wish for information. But he recalls her habitual inaccuracy, and the first impulse wins. “Tell her you’ll call back. And turn on WCUR.”

“I’ll call you back ...As soon as I can ...She says she can’t wait,” Wendy reports, hanging up.

“... more bulletins as they are received,” the radio announces. “And now a message from Bud Wordsworth, president of the Savings Bank.” Brian turns down the sound, knowing from experience that this pompous commercial will last sixty seconds.

“They’ve taken over Dibble’s office,” he repeats. “How many of them?”

“About twelve or fifteen, Linda said. Nearly everybody who stayed at the meeting last night. She would’ve been with them, only she had to teach her eight o’clock class. Hey, isn’t it just fine, though?”

Brian does not reply, but checks his watch: it is a quarter after nine. “And what’s Dibble doing?” he asks.

“Nothing, I guess. He was talking on the phone for a while, but then they cut the wire.”

“You mean he’s in there with them?”

“Oh, yeh.” Wendy grins. “That’s the whole idea. Sara was talking about it last night, but I didn’t think she’d convince them. They’re holding him hostage, like you told them to.” She gazes at Brian proudly.

“Oh, Christ.” A vision comes to him of Donald Dibble at his desk, surrounded—indeed jostled, for the room is hardly ten feet square—by angry girl students. Again Brian has the sense of his own power to affect circumstances; but this time it is the uncontrolled, ignorant power of the sorcerer’s apprentice.

He turns the radio up again, hearing first that savings are grow-power for our community and then that everything Wendy has said is true. He learns that although campus patrolmen have been called to the scene, no action has yet been taken against the demonstrators; and that neither William Guildenstern, chairman of the political science department, or Ned Kane, dean of the Humanities, has made any statement.

An undertone of amusement in the voice of the campus reporter causes Brian to realize for the first time that there is a humorous, even farcical side to the situation. Whatever happens now, Dibble’s goose is cooked. For the rest of his life he will be known locally as that professor who was imprisoned by a gang of girls. People will make jokes about it, including people who know Dibble well enough to suspect that the worst thing he could imagine is to be locked in a room with fifteen women. For the first time since Linda’s call, Brian smiles, then laughs aloud.

But of course to Dibble it is no joke. Or to Bill Guildenstern. “I’d better get up there,” he says. “Come on. Leave the dishes, for God’s sake”

“You realize I don’t want you to go into the building,” he informs Wendy as they ride down in the elevator five minutes later.

“But I told Linda,” Wendy mews. She is now dressed for revolutionary action, in jeans and boots and an old fringed cowboy jacket with peace symbols blazed on the lapels. Her pale, fine yellow hair is loose, her eyes bright. “I promised her—”

“I don’t care what you promised Linda,” returns Brian, who has also changed his clothes, though in the other direction, replacing his cord pants and knit jersey with a suit, shirt and tie in anticipation of his interview with Bill and Ned Kane. “I don’t want you involved in this misguided affair.”