Giles Goat Boy (27 page)

Here I interrupted to protest that I didn’t understand what was being alluded to, and thus had no way of judging how it bore upon the question of her marriage. Anastasia looked at me curiously, and Max reminded her that I too had been raised in isolation from normal campus family life, if not exactly in the same ignorance of natural facts.

“But don’t tell us what’s none of our business,” he added; “it was just about you and Stoker we wondered.”

I was ready to protest that I regarded it as quite my business (without knowing exactly why) to right or avenge any wrongs done to those whom I—well,
esteemed—
as I esteemed Max himself, and had vowed to clear his name. But the protest was unnecessary; Anastasia declared she felt obliged to speak in more frank detail than normally one might: first, because we might else misjudge her Uncle Ira’s motives; second, because these incidents from her early youth were not unrelated to her subsequent marriage; and third, because if I was indeed a Grand Tutor, it was not hers to decide what ought to be told me and what ought not, but rather to open her heart trustingly and completely as she did in her nightly petitions to the Founder, without whose forgiving comfort and understanding she would long since have perished under the burden of misconstruction put upon her actions by her husband and others. The memory of these same misconstructions, presumably, brought tears to her eyes: I could not imagine a face more piteously appealing.

“I never
mean
to hurt anybody!” she said. “It says in the Scroll that Love is the Founder, and all I ever mean to do is
help
people, like in the Infirmary and the Psych Clinic. How can you help them except to find out what it is they need and then give it to them, if you have it? But it always seems to do damage somehow, when I do it!”

“Now
pfui
on that,” Max consoled her, and I too declared it unthinkable that so generous a heart could do other than good.

“Well, take that time in Uncle Ira’s study …” She was clearly encouraged by our words, though her expression remained doubting. “He said in a way he thought of me as his daughter and in a way he didn’t, and I naturally supposed he meant because he was really my great-uncle instead of my father. So when he started explaining what it was the boys wanted, there was no reason to think he wasn’t just trying to help me. I
still
think he was; I
know
he was, even later on! He’d been working on some accounts that night, as usual, and there were double-entry
ledger-sheets spread on his desk; when he drew some pictures on them for me, to show me what he was talking about, I was a little upset, but he had to do
something
like that because I was so stupid. But he couldn’t draw right, he said so himself: the people in the pictures had the funniest expressions on their faces! I told him if his drawing of the girl’s parts was right, then there must be something wrong with mine, the proportions were all different; but I said I was pretty sure
mine
must be okay because they were just like Miss Fine’s, my language-tutor’s, and when Miss Fine and I used to play with each other she always said mine were the nicest she’d ever seen.”

Though her tone remained glib as a child’s, Anastasia blushed furiously. Max also, but not I, though my blood pulsed.

“You see how
dumb
I was! I was going to show him then and there to make sure, in case Miss Fine had just been being polite, and I told him I couldn’t for the life of me see why he was so angry at her, when my other tutors and governesses and maids had all done and said the same kind of things. I said if he promised not to be angry with Miss Fine I’d teach him all the games I’d learned to play—I liked him better than Miss Fine anyway, because she would bite sometimes; what’s more he had whiskers, and I was sure they’d be fun—but I wasn’t certain about men, he’d have to show me … He couldn’t talk for a while: I thought he was shy, the way some of the maids were the first time I’d ask if I could play with them; I never dreamed what I was
doing
to the man. I even
touched
him …”

“Yi.”

“Well,”
Anastasia said, “to make a long story short, he gave me a good spanking, big as I was, and fired all the tutors and maids except an old cook and housekeeper who weren’t any fun to play with anyhow. After that he wouldn’t trust anybody to teach me unless he was in the room too, and every night he’d lecture to me in his study about how flunkèd my tutors and maids had been. I’d agree, and try hard to believe it, but I just couldn’t understand what was wrong with something so nice.”

“I know what you mean!” I exclaimed, thinking of my own difficulties with moral education. “I’m
still
not sure I understand!”

Her eyes were bright and yet wondering, as if she was pleased by my words but not certain she wasn’t being baited.

“After all,” she said, “it wasn’t from some
book
I learned to do what I’d been doing, but from my cats and dogs and my teachers, so that it not only seemed like the naturalest thing in the University for people to take their clothes off and have fun with each other, but the
passèdest
thing, too, especially if the other person was old or not pretty or needed something very badly, and you pleased them so much. The first teacher I ever had explained that to me, and I loved her such a lot I guess I never could get her idea out of my head. She was the sweetest lady!”

“Not so young, I bet,” Max ventured, and Anastasia confirmed his suspicion with a merry smile, though her eyes still shone with the earlier tears.

“Well, right or wrong, I couldn’t feel ashamed of what I’d done, even though I was ashamed at having done something I
should
be ashamed of—you see the difference, don’t you, George?” I nodded, hoping I did. “But at least I saw how I’d upset Uncle Ira, so I pretended to feel the same as he did about it. I was only sixteen or so when this happened with Uncle Ira, but I guess I’d become sort of an expert at guessing what people needed, sometimes even before they guessed it themselves; and being brought up the way I was, I couldn’t help trying to please them, whether I understood what I was doing or not. If I’d been allowed to go out with any of those nice boys, I’d have seduced them before they ever got their nerve up to kiss me, and probably I’d’ve thought I was a real Graduate for doing it!”

This intuition, she went on, plainly showed her that while Ira Hector was honestly horrified by her behavior, he also relished chastizing her for it. In particular, she observed, it had done him a campus of good to administer that spanking: time and again he alluded to it; teased or threatened her, according to his mood, with the prospect of another, and never failed, when he kissed her good-night, to swat her playfully athwart the haunches “in case she thought he couldn’t do it again if he had to.” Finally one day when he was in a rage over political reverses (young Lucius Rexford, the chancellor-to-be, had just won his party’s nomination and had pledged to break up the reference-book monopoly if and when he defeated the incumbent Reginald Hector in the final elections), she had deliberately perched on his lap and asked permission to attend the next Freshman Cotillion, knowing clearly what his reaction would be: quite as she had foreseen, his wrath leaped its bounds; with an oath he turned her over his knee (a feat he never could have managed without her cooperation), snatched up a ruler from his desk, and bestowed on her backside a swingeing admonishment. Nay further, it being evening and she forewarned of his ill humor, she had donned for the occasion a summer night-dress which scarcely covered her at all, so that it was fetching flesh he smote, more often than not, until he was winded and could smite no more. Whereupon, marvelous to relate, he found his wrath
spent with his strength: he begged her pardon, wept for what must surely have been the first time in his life, and astonished her utterly by granting her request. Moreover, he was quoted next day in the NTC newspapers as believing Lucky Rexford to be “not near as close to Student-Unionism as most so-called liberals are.”

Needless to say, Anastasia thanked her guardian profusely for having chastised her, declaring that a good old-fashioned hiding was just what today’s adolescents required now and then to confirm in them the old-fashioned virtues; the two went hand-in-hand, as it were, and she dearly hoped that whenever her behavior displeased him he would once more put her straight. He did, once a week at least, for a year or so thereafter, nor ever remarked, so far as she could tell, that her willfulest days coincided with his most irascible. He became, in consequence, less fearsome than his oldest subordinate could recall having known him, and showered privileges upon his ward—the more readily as she feigned herself loath to accept them …

“The truth was,” she said with a sigh, “all I had to do, if a boy wanted to be alone with me after that, was ask Uncle Ira to please not leave us alone, and he’d say, ‘Nonsense, I trust you absolutely—any girl who’d ask to be spanked just for dreaming a naughty dream!’ (I used to do that.) So he’d leave us alone together, and of course I’d let the boy do whatever he pleased—it was just as nice as with girls, if not nicer, and the dear
things
were
so
surprised and grateful; it would almost make me cry to see how happy I could make them! Then afterwards Uncle Ira would want to know if anything had happened, and I’d blush and say that the boy had kissed me three times, or touched my breast when I wasn’t watching out. And if I saw he needed cheering up himself, I’d start to cry and say I had to admit it had been kind of exciting, after all, and did it flunk me forever to have such a feeling? And he’d say, ‘No, my dear, that’s perfectly natural, and the Founder doesn’t flunk you for feelings; it’s what you
do
that counts. But the danger,’ he’d say, ‘is that you won’t be able to keep your actions separate from your feelings.’ And I’d kiss him and say, ‘You’re right, Uncle Ira: I need discipline!’ Then out would come the ruler …”

“By George!” I cried. “Do you know what I think? I think he
enjoyed
spanking you!”

There was a pause; Max allowed dryly that there might well be something to what I said. Anastasia looked perplexed from me to him, and he explained to her in an earnest tone that an examination of the sayings of Grand Tutors would reveal the quality of their insights to be not so
much a complex subtlety as a profound and transcendently powerful
simplicity
, which the flunkèd sophistication of modern intelligences might confuse with naïveté.

“
I
would’ve,” she admitted. “That shows how naïve
I
am.”

She went on with her story: “It was about this time that Maurice Stoker began coming to the house to see Uncle Ira—it was during the election campaign and just after, when Grandpa Reg had been defeated, and everybody was wondering what would happen to Uncle Ira’s business. I thought Maurice was the most
interesting
man I’d ever seen: I liked the strong way he laughed, and I used to find excuses for coming into the study while they were talking, so I could see his black beard and those eyes of his, and I told Uncle Ira I thought Mr. Stoker must have the whitest teeth in the University. You know how young people are: when Uncle Ira said Maurice was a very flunkèd man who did naughty things to co-eds, and I mustn’t even come out of my room while he was in the house or I’d get a spanking, I was scared to death and more curious than ever. So I used to wave to him from my window when he’d drive up on his big black motorcycle, and he never waved back, but just stood in the driveway with his hands on his hips, and smiled at me.”

“I hate what’s coming,” Max groaned. “I hate this whole part.”

Anastasia went on to say that she had wondered in addition whether her Uncle’s threat was not in fact a kind of invitation to further spankings, though it
did
seem to her that he was more concerned about Stoker than about the procession of undergraduate young men—of whom, in these months, she made a very large number “so happy, pass their poor hearts,” virtually under his nose, he being preoccupied with the threat to his reference-book monopoly. It came to pass that quite often Stoker himself was in a position to afford transportation to and from the house to these visitors of hers, so frequent were his business-calls there, and thus he’d soon possessed himself of the details of her peculiar philanthropy. (“Can you
imagine?
” Anastasia asked us, as incredulously as if the event had only just occurred. “He thought I was letting them make love to me because I liked it! I mean just for my own sake! He actually thought I was
promiscuous—
he still pretends to think so!” I shook my head at this presumption, and Max covered his eyes.) Not long afterwards, eavesdropping at the study door, she’d learned something of the nature of what business was between her guardian and the visitor with the curly beard: the new chancellor, it seemed, had been elected by a narrow margin, and so was particularly interested in a
rapprochement
with Reginald Hector
(who whatever his limitations as a political administrator, was still revered in New Tammany College for his role in Campus Riot II); he could not of course expect his beaten opponent to accept a post in the new administration, but it was an open secret that he sought the ex-chancellor’s support for certain controversial measures of policy with regard to WESCAC and the Quiet Riot. On the other hand, though Lucky Rexford was himself a wealthy man and a staunch supporter of the private-research economy, he felt obliged both by promise and by principle to make some gesture towards dissolving such monopolies as Ira Hector’s, which had flourished under the former regime. Now it was known that however sincerely he deplored Maurice Stoker’s activities, the Chancellor was bound to his alleged half-brother by Stoker’s firm hold on the Power Plant and Main Detention. What Ira Hector proposed (for it was he, not Stoker, who had initiated the interviews), was to establish Reginald Hector as the figurehead president of his reference-book firm—in fact his brother badly needed some such employment, not having an iota of Ira’s business-sense—in the hope that some
quid pro quo
could then be diplomatically arranged: he, Ira, would guarantee his brother’s support for Chancellor Rexford’s varsity policies; the Chancellor in turn could not only find grounds to spare the business headed by the lovable old professor-general, but might in addition see to it that Ira’s counterparts in the textbook field were
not
spared. The scheme seemed a likely one, but as a cautious entrepreneur Ira was suspicious of the new chancellor’s youth and the fact that Rexford’s own fortune had been inherited, rather than earned in the rough-and-tumble of competitive research—both which factors might lead him to put principle above interest, as it were, and proceed the more vigorously against any organization which attempted to negotiate with him. To minimize that risk, it were preferable that the overtures to negotiation be made by the Chancellor himself, who however must needs be assured by some close and disinterested advisor that they would not be rebuffed. The man for that work was Maurice Stoker: Anastasia heard her guardian offer him a sizable inducement to attempt it. But Stoker, while admitting with a laugh that the plot’s nefariousness appealed to him, and expressing his confidence that he could manage it with little difficulty, seemed not especially interested in the reward. This was the matter of their frequent meetings, which had reached an impasse: Stoker claimed frankly that he had wealth enough already, and desired only powers and pleasures, neither of which Ira Hector was able to offer him; Ira seemed unable to comprehend this attitude, or unwilling to believe in its sincerity, and so kept raising the amount of his bribe to no avail.