Giles Goat Boy (26 page)

“But it doesn’t matter!” Anastasia said. “I forgive you anyway. There’s no need to keep saying you’re not my father.”

“By me there’s need! I wish I was your poppa, such a girl! But I’m not, I swear it!”

“Then I believe you,” the girl said firmly. “Don’t go on like that, now.” As if he were the child and she the parent, she gathered Max’s old head to her breast, which lacking the hard-cupped harness I had noted on Chickie-in-the-buckwheat’s, yielded softly to his cheek—and I wished
I
had something to be forgiven for. The effect was admirable: Max soon recomposed himself and set to praising her virtues to me (who needed no persuasion) in a more controlled if no less enthusiastic spirit. He now believed her utterly, he said, and would add to the proofs of my untutored wisdom, and his own too-human fallibility, that I had been drawn strongly to her from the first, and had affirmed her goodness in the face of his skepticism.

“That was sweet of him,” she said, and smiled me such a warm smile of gratitude, I wished I truly
had
never doubted her, and been impelled from the first by the sight of her spiritual merits alone. “He tried his best to hold Croaker back, too, but it wasn’t any use.”

“An atrocity!” Max cried. “The brute ought to be caged up.”

But Anastasia protested once again that after all men were what they were, Founder pass them, and animals were what
they
were; Croaker couldn’t help himself any more than her husband could, who often did things to her and to others that were misinterpreted as proceeding from a
flunkèd nature simply because the deeds themselves were flunkèd. Besides, it pained her to see anything caged, no matter how wild or dangerous—an animal, a criminal, anything … Often in the past, she confessed, she had pitied “poor Croaker” for not having a mate equal to his passions—though to be sure she pitied even more their unequal victims: the co-eds, the policeman, the poodle, and the cute little monkeys whose expressions had looked so like wise old men’s. But only look at Croaker now, she bade us, how docile and content he was, like a great spoiled child that’s had his lollipop at last. How could she, she asked us almost light-heartedly, be aggrieved at her own mistreatment—which albeit hurtsome had not been fatal, after all—when in addition to sparing others the same or worse, it had so plainly done its doer a campus of good?

I was purely touched, and asked her how it came that so gentle a lady girl had wed Maurice Stoker, whom despite her excusing him I took to be a flunkèder brute than Croaker, because more conscious of his ways?

“That’s well asked, Georgie,” Max approved. “That’s asked like a Grand Tutor.” And to Anastasia, before she could reply, he professed frankly his belief that I might be no person else than a true Grand Tutor to the Western Campus, destined to rescue studentdom from the tyranny of its own invention. “Don’t mock,” he cautioned her; “myself I’m a skeptic; I wouldn’t say such a thing in a hundred years without plenty good reasons.”

But Anastasia was far from mocking; she looked up at me in wonder as Max spoke. “So
that’s
it!”

I assumed she meant that she understood now certain earlier remarks and attitudes of mine which must have struck her as mysterious at the time (such as my alarm at her mention that Chancellor Rexford was expecting a Grand Tutor’s arrival at any moment). But she drew from the pocket of her shift a small glass phial, which she said had been given her by one of The Living Sakhyan’s company as they left the beach, just a short time previously.

“It was the strangest thing,” she said to Max—as if scarcely presuming to address me directly. “Here I didn’t even think they could talk our
language
, and I swear they hadn’t said a word to one another the whole time they were sitting here; but suddenly The Living Sakhyan smiled at me and raised His hand—it was like He’d just come out of his trance—and it made me feel peculiar all over! Then one of His men led me up to the fire—this was while George had gone back to get you. And I felt so
funny
, because I didn’t know whether they were going to thank me for fixing their fire, or—or
do
something to me, or what. And it didn’t
seem to
matter
, if you know what I mean, Him being such a great man and all; you can almost
feel
how wise and Commenced He is, and whatever He wanted to do, I had this feeling it was all right, and I’d be flunkèd not to let Him do it …” She turned to me, her eyes full of reverence. “But then His helper took out this little bottle and gave it to me, and said it was for you from The Living Sakhyan. ‘From ours to yours,’ is what he said—and he didn’t even speak with an accent! I was so surprised I stood there like a dunce, and didn’t think to ask what it was until they’d picked up The Living Sakhyan and were almost gone. Then the man who gave it to me sort of frowned and closed his eyes, as if I was so stupid he couldn’t stand to look at me, and he said, ‘It’s the Disappearing Ink.’ I swear that’s what he said!”

She held the phial out to me, rather diffidently. “He must have just said that to let me know it was none of my business. There doesn’t seem to be anything in it at all, that I can see …”

I held it up to the firelight, shook it at my ear. It did in fact appear to be empty.

“Do you think—” She touched her fingers to her cheek and smiled uncertainly at Max. “What I mean, could it have disappeared already?”

Max examined gravely the empty phial and returned it to me. East-Campus Graduates, he pointed out, famously spoke in riddles, and it was by no means unthinkable that The Living Sakhyan, or His disciple, had been making some obscure joke with Anastasia; but whatever the true nature and significance of the gift, he took its presentation as no joke at all, but one more proof of my authenticity.

I myself was not impressed. “Disappearing ink!” I flung the phial down, angered afresh at the revelation that the men in yellow had after all been aware of everything that had happened in the gorge: had understood G. Herrold’s plight and Anastasia’s, but had suffered the one to drown and the other to be raped without lifting a finger in either’s behalf. “Dunce take it!”

“Oh, don’t!” Anastasia snatched it up at once from the sand. “Really—excuse me, George, I’m sure you’re a
thousand
times brighter than I am, but I really don’t think …” She blushed. “Would it be all right if I kept it for you? In case you change your mind?”

“That might be smart, Georgie,” Max agreed. “These things mean more than they seem to, sometimes. I’d like to have time to think it over before you throw it away.”

I shrugged. “You’re the advisor.” Anastasia gratefully returned the phial to her pocket, as if it were a precious gem, and I pressed her again to
account for her marriage to the notorious Stoker, which it seemed to me she had been pleased to digress from explaining. My tone was even a bit peremptory, for I was on the one hand impressed by her clearly self-sacrificial behavior with Croaker, her husband, Max, The Living Sakhyan, and myself, and on the other hand vaguely uneasy about it: it disturbed me to see her equally submissive to everyone, the flunkèd as well as the not. Yet sincere as this concern of mine was (which it made me feel quite Grand-Tutorish to express), in the main I was simply flattered by the novelty of being stood in awe of, especially by that lovely creature—so ready to obey, one could not resist commanding her! Out of all these feelings I demanded to know whether she had wed of her free will or been abducted like the captive brides of old, in which latter case I intended by some means to slay her captor and set her at liberty.

“Oh, you couldn’t do
that!
” she said—amused, alarmed, and pleased at once, as it seemed to me. “I mean, I guess you
could
, if you’re a Grand Tutor, but—”

“It’s not your business to start slaying people,” Max told me; “what you want to do is keep them from slaying each other. Besides, you got no kind of weapons, thank the Founder, and Maurice Stoker’s got his own private Riot Squad.”

It occurred to me to point out to him that my stick had once been deadly tool enough, and to argue that it was not without good precedent I contemplated using it again: Enos Enoch Himself had flung the Business Administration concessionaires bodily from Founder’s Hall, and had declared to His protégés that He came to them not with diplomas but with a birch-rod, armed Tutors always prevailing where unarmed ones failed. But Anastasia forestalled me by protesting that while she had not exactly
volunteered
to marry Stoker, she had willingly assented to the match at the time of its arrangement by her guardian, Ira Hector, and further that she would not dream of deserting one who needed her so absolutely as did her husband—however violently he himself denied that need.

“I knew it!” Max cried out. “A pact between the meanest mind on campus and the flunkèdest!” Ira Hector, he reminded me, was the wealthy and infamously selfish older brother of the former chancellor of NTC; from humble beginnings as a used-book peddler he had risen to his present position as head of a vast informational empire, controlling the
manufacture
and distribution of virtually every reference-volume published in the West-Campus colleges. Ready to line his pockets at anyone’s expense, he was despised and catered to by liberals and conservatives alike
(though always closer in spirit to the latter); while he preached the virtues of free research, what he practiced was the stifling of competition, the freedom of the clever to oppress the ignorant and stupid. Yet so enormous was his wealth and so ubiquitous his influence, every New Tammany chancellor had to come to terms with him; and Max himself, how vehemently soever he had used to rail in the Senate against Ira Hector’s unprincipled monopolies and graft, was obliged to admit that they were perhaps the necessary evils of Bourgeois-Liberal Studentism, his own philosophy. As was the case with Maurice Stoker too, however, the fact that Ira Hector was indispensable made him in Max’s view no less a wretch; as he put it (reversing a much-quoted remark of Ira Hector’s own): one might have to lick his boots, but needn’t praise the flavor.

“Now, you’re too hard on Uncle Ira,” Anastasia chided. “You must try to understand him.”

Max sniffed, but it was remarkable how the girl calmed his indignation with a pat on the knee. “So he’s got a heart of gold,” he complained with a smile. “Like Dean Midas he has!”

“He’s more generous than you think,” Anastasia said. “But he’s so afraid somebody will make fun of it, or take advantage of him, he wouldn’t admit it for the campus.”

“He don’t have to,” said Max. “He owns the campus already.”

But she pointed out with spirit that her own rearing in the rich man’s house was proof enough that his selfishness was not complete. “He didn’t
have
to take me in. Grandpa Reg said Mother was so upset when I was born, she wasn’t able to take care of me, and he sent me to the Lying-In Hospital for Unwed Co-eds—which by the way Uncle Ira built with his own money …”

Max asked indignantly why Chancellor Hector had not staffed his own house with nurses, which he could easily have afforded to do, and thus spared both Virginia Hector and Anastasia a disgraceful connection with the New Tammany Lying-In.

“He wanted to,” she replied. “But Mother wasn’t herself, you know … I guess I reminded her of so many unhappy things, she couldn’t bear to have me in the house, and of course she knew they’d take care of me in the hospital. I don’t hold it against her that she felt that way: it must have been a bad time for her, having been Miss University and all and then being jilted and left pregnant … Oh dear: I didn’t mean it
that
way!”

Max closed his eyes, shook his head, and waved away her apology.

“Anyhow it was only for a few weeks,” Anastasia went on. “Then
Uncle Ira (actually he’s
Mother’s
uncle) had a nursery fixed up in his house, and that’s where I was raised. It was a wonderful childhood, and I was terribly grateful to him when I was old enough to understand all he’d done for me. And Mother, you know, she wasn’t
always
upset: lots of times she’d come to visit, or take me out somewhere. Even when she’d have her spells where she’d say I was no daughter of hers, we were still friends.”

Seeing the pain in Max’s countenance, she changed the subject brightly: “As for Uncle Ira, he was sweet as could be! Not a
bit
like you think! I didn’t see him very much, he’s so busy all the time, and he pretends to be such an old bear: but I’d slip into his study and climb up on his lap and kiss him, or hold my hands over his eyes—even when I was big I used to do it—and he’d have to laugh and kiss me before I’d go away. And every night he’d come up to make sure I got my bath, and tuck in my covers—he never would let the nurse do it. And talk about
careful
, when I was old enough to go out with boys! He was an orphan himself, you know, and grew up practically on the streets; he told me his mother was taken advantage of by a bad man who talked her into leaving Grandpa Reg and him when they were kids, and he had to take care of Grandpa Reg when he was just a little boy himself, selling old books off a pushcart on the Mall. I guess he’d seen so many bad things in his life, especially young girls being taken advantage of—anyhow he wouldn’t let me go out with boys at all. It wasn’t he didn’t trust
me
; it was the boys he didn’t trust, even the nice ones. He said he knew what it was they were after, whether
they
knew it or not, and even if they’d never
thought
of trying to take advantage of me, they’d think of it soon enough when I was alone with them. Stupid me, I hardly knew what a boy
was
, much less what Uncle Ira was talking about; I used to come in and perch on his lap and pester the poor man to
death
, to tell me what was so awful that the boys would do. He’d try to put me off, and tell me I was getting too big to sit on his lap like that; but I wouldn’t take no for an answer …”

“I hate this,” Max said.

“I know what you’re thinking; just what Maurice says. But you’ve got to remember he was a lonely old man, and worried to
death
that the same thing would happen to me that had happened to his mother and his niece and all those girls in his hospital. And even if it
wasn’t
completely innocent, I’m sure
he
thought it was; he was probably fooling himself the way he said those nice boys were, that he drove away from the house when they tried to make dates with me. If I’d had a
grain
of sense
I’d have thought of some better way to handle him, without hurting his feelings; but I was so dumb, and
naturally
I was curious, too, when he tried to show me what was what.”