Giles Goat Boy (21 page)

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 of 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 tapelift, 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?”

I kissed Max’s own long hair at this fresh testimony of his goodness, and he mine; yet even as I chid him, most gently, for so long keeping from me his hypothesis of my parentage—which seemed a quite probable one, everything considered—and assured him that I was far more touched by his generous adoption of me than disturbed by the likelihood of having been sired by the hateful Eierkopf—even as I spoke, it occurred to me that the story had not after all been to the point. Just the contrary! Had he not set out by means of it to explain an actual suspicion on his part that I might be of uncommon parentage? That my brash claim to herohood might be not without some foundation? But if I was in truth the child of Dr. Eierkopf and Virginia Hector, my getting was by no means extraordinary; it was merely irregular.

Some minutes were required to make my point clear, for Max had quite forgotten, as unhappily he came frequently to do in this period of his life, what he’d set out to demonstrate, and then only with difficulty understood that he had not demonstrated it.

“
Ja
, so, what I mean,” he said then, “that’s what I thought when G. Herrold brought you here, you were Virginia’s kid by Eblis; what I guess, that’s what I wanted you to be. And sometimes yet it slips me now and again you aren’t, I have trouble remembering. But the fact is, she never had a son: she had a daughter, that she left to her uncle Ira Hector to raise. I heard that somewhere a long time ago, I forget where. It was a daughter she had.”

I closed my eyes and tried to assimilate this new disclosure. “Well, then—we’re back where we started! The gate’s still open!”

“No.” Max shook his head firmly. “No, it’s not open, either. No.” He seemed now to have his mind once more in order. “It was that GILES business made me wonder, once I knew you weren’t Virginia’s and Eblis’s kid, and when you started this Hero nonsense. An old man’s foolishness, Georgie, is all! You see yourself now you’re not any Grand Tutor, but just a good boy with a regular life’s work to do. You got a little badness in you and a little dumbness, pass your heart, like we all got.”

With considerable effort (for he was fatigued by so much recollection, and regarded his point as now quite established) I wrung this final information from him: Among the bizarre features of the Cum Laude Project in the month just prior to its abandonment was the preparation by WESCAC, under Eierkopf’s supervision, of a highly secret something known as “the GILES”—Max could or would not go farther than to explain that the word was an acronym for
Grand-tutorial Ideal, Laboratory Eugenical Specimen
. What that phrase meant (it had as well been in sheep-language
for all it conveyed to me), and whether the attempt to prepare this same GILES was successful, and what in that event its purpose was—these things I was not to learn until later. But I gathered there was an uncertain connection between this mystery and my pretension to the office of Hero.

“I don’t say more than this,” Max said: “there’s things about the early days of Heroes and Grand Tutors. And when you took it in your silly head you were one yourself, I remembered these things and some others, that a person could stretch them and say they fit. So I thought up a couple experiments to prove what was what, I’ll tell you about later. But they’ve proved, George—they’ve
proved
—what you know your own self now: that you’re a good boy, and a human student, and that’s all.”

I supposed he was referring to the occasions when I had behaved stupidly or displayed a capacity, however slight, for actual flunkèdness, as in the matter of Redfearn’s Tommy and of Becky’s Pride Sue. It did not anger me to imagine, in the light of his confession, that Max may actually have encouraged such behavior, may even have arranged the circumstances of my temptation, perhaps in collusion with G. Herrold and (who knew?) with Lady Creamhair. That possibility was clearly beside the point; whatever experiments he had performed were for my own enlightenment and benefit, and had achieved their purpose. A Grand Tutor was very wise; a Grand Tutor was very good. Whatever the mysteries and portents of my birth, whatever formal prerequisites to Herohood I might coincidentally have met, I could not call myself very wise nor very good. Chastened, I took the conclusion to my heart, merely asking leave from the day’s instruction to get used to the feel of it there.

What remained of the morning I spent introspecting about the pasture, deaf to G. Herrold’s plea to wrestle in the cool March sun; after lunch I retired to the hemlocks with pencil and paper, thinking to map out as it were the road before me by noting down the few clear signposts I had passed. Perched on a high stump I began with
NEITHER WISE NOR GOOD
, which I printed out in fair block capitals at the page-top. But when I considered inscribing beneath it
PASS ALL FAIL ALL
and the Maxim
SELF-KNOWLEDGE IS ALWAYS BAD NEWS
, I could not at once decide which merited second place, and, unable to care intensely, I fell soon into reverie. My fingers toyed with the paper; I had seen human visitors nibble, in my kidship, colored ices from paper cones, and had been wont to fashion any sheet I found into that form before I ate it. Such a cone I fashioned now, scarcely aware; but I had not the appetite of childhood
days. Instead of eating it, therefore, idly I set it atop my head, and brooded the afternoon away thus perched and capped.

That night I dreamed the strangest dream of all. In our old meeting-place Lady Creamhair sat on the ground. It was dark night, not picnic time; yet the famous basket rested in her lap, and I squatted at her feet as in terms gone by. But we did not eat. As a child makes a comic mouth, she hooked her forefingers into the basket-lids and spread them wide. She bade me look, and I beheld in that dark chamber no peanut-butter sandwich, but a strange, a baleful host, I saw a man with wings and one with tail. An ancient leaned upon his crook. A lady girl did nothing. I saw a body with two heads, one atop the other. I saw a single head with two bodies, winking and blinking. Still other eyes I saw, seeing me: a bodiless pair that neither blinked nor moved nor changed their cast. A man was there who vanished when I looked, yet whom I saw when I looked away. And others, a multitude of shadows, men and women, sheep and goats—they hushed about, melting and shifting. They beckoned to me, all, inviting, threatening—except the lady girl forlorn and patient. I yearned to her. How was it I had not till then suspected what the basket held? I would go to that folk, not meant for eating. No matter the peril, I would press into their country, whence whooped to me a most clear call now.
Tekiah!
The goats swarmed over all.
Tekiah!