Rich Friends (10 page)

“Genebo!” Caroline cried, waving her clipboard energetically.

He saw her, smiled, and his tall, slender body wove around milling students to her.

She bobbed a curtsy. “Mr. Matheny.”

“Miss Wynan. Fancy meeting you here.”

“I've been patrolling the quad for
hours.
”

“How many did you get?”

“A huge, whopping, record-breaking—are you ready? Eleven!” She showed him her clipboard.

“Mmm, yes, I see.” He pronounced the last two names. “Euphemia Blittfsk. Conrad Papagadopolos.”

“An exceptionally alert couple.”

“If illegible.”

“Having already tried to sway three thousand and four others, luv, I neglected my routine literacy test.” She took back the board. “Everybody is totally disinterested.”

“Or terrified.”

“Or both,” she said.

“It so happens, Caroline, you can't be both.”

“It so happens I'm disinterested in and terrified of you. Both.” She tucked the clipboard under her arm. They stood holding hands while students milled around them.

“Forgeries,” she said. “Those last two.”

Gene's gray eyes blinked.

“I signed for Miss Blittfsk. I signed for Conrad Papagadopolos.”

Caroline often would lie—soon after, admitting the truth with a comfortable, lazy chuckle, as if her lies, pedigreed and wittily clever though they were, required too much effort to bring to parturition. Gene never quite got used to it.

He let go of her hand.

“Gene, if everybody's so damn apolitical and apathetic, who,
ex
actly, is about to check signatures?”

His gray eyes were—what was that expression in his thoughtful eyes?

“That's where telling the truth gets a girl!” she cried. “Now you don't love me anymore, do you, huhh, Clean Gene? Now you won't come up to Arrowhead with me, will you, huhh?”

No reply.

She swatted his arm with the clipboard. “You're refusing to answer on the grounds,” she cried. Another swat, this so vigorously executed that one of her books fell. “Now see what you've done!” She began laughing. Gene couldn't prevent a smile. He took the clipboard from her, using his teeth to unscrew his Parker 51, drawing thick lines through the two bottom names. “There,” he said.

“You're too honest. We'll never beat the fascists.”

“Then we won't. Come on, Caroline. The Duquesnes are waiting.” Caroline and Gene, Professor and Mrs. Duquesne were spending the weekend in the Wynans' cabin at Lake Arrowhead.

2

Gene idolized LeRoy Duquesne, PhD.

It was Gene's Achilles heel that his lifelong love affair with liberal causes wasn't built on the firm rocks of political belief, but on the misty quagmire of personality. He admired and sought the company of Progressives because they had read
Finnegans Wake
and Kierkegaard and mistrusted anything printed in
Time
, they were always on the side of justice, they dressed casually and enjoyed foreign food and foreign films. They were fanatically tolerant. It was this, their avowed willingness to accept everyone, that Gene cherished most about Progressives. In his deep, thoughtful mind, all men are brothers and basically the same: good.

The goodness of man was no easy belief to hold in the United States of 1950.

Paranoia gripped the country. The insanity had been brought about by the Russians having managed their own (primitive) A-bomb. And words became the symptom of our national madness. The red-baiting words of J. Parnell Thomas, words microfilmed and hidden in a pumpkin, words conjuring up subversive influences in the film industry, witch-hunting words of the House Un-American Activities Committee, words of the Far Right printed in the Hearst press. There were screenwriters who merely by exercising their constitutional rights according to the Fifth Amendment never sold another word, there were people who said the wrong word and went to jail.

The Board of Regents of the University of California voted it necessary for each employee to sign words of loyalty:
I am not a member of the Communist party, or under any oath, or party to any agreement, or under any commitment that is in conflict with this oath
. Near the close of the spring semester, 1949, the regents had made it known that taking this oath was a condition of employment. At the final faculty meeting of the scholastic year, opposition had been fierce, yet for obvious reasons, ambiguously worded. Most professors had refused to be quoted.

The following noon, at an All-U rally, LeRoy Duquesne, Gene's faculty adviser, had stood on Royce Hall steps, speaking loud and clear into a microphone, opposing any and every type of limitation on academic freedom, including the loyalty oath. An act, in Gene's mind, of supernatural courage.

LeRoy Duquesne, at forty-one, was thin-chested and too slight of body for his impressive head, a full professor with a reputation of consequence for his book on Pound. LeRoy Duquesne, therefore, was everything that Gene hoped to become. And it goes without saying that the man scared the pants off Gene. After the speech ended, Gene gathered all his courage, pushing through the crowd of students around LeRoy Duquesne. He could scarcely believe it when his faculty adviser gripped his hand, saying, “Gene, old son, tonight Hilda's having the faculty wives. Let us imbibe brew at The Glen.”

There, surrounded by students braying out college songs, they fulminated against the Oath, then Gene, burping tap beer, warmed by the glow of proximity to this admirably committed man, heard himself admit his cliché English Department dream. “Write,” he confessed slowly. “I did a series of columns on the UN for
The Bruin
. Undergrad stuff. But I want to do the real thing.”

“Journalism?”

“No. Creative writing.”

“Poetry?” There was a warning growl to this question. In LeRoy Duquesne's office, next to his
Ezra Pound: A Critique
, was a stack of different quarterlies, each indexing a poem (#1, #2, and so on, up to #17) by L. Fitzgerald Duquesne.

“Poetry's beyond me.” Gene shook his head mournfully. “Just fiction. About the ordinary people, little people.” He gave an embarrassed smile. “My Norman Corwin syndrome.”

LeRoy Duquesne, his territory intact, rubbed the bowl of his Dunhill against his Roman nose, inquiring, “What length work do you have in mind?”

“A novel.”

“Why not start with a smaller canvas?” asked LeRoy Duquesne with a hint of his lectern irony.

“A novella?”

“A short story. A time-honored form, Gene, the short story.”

It was well after two when Gene was back under his parents' commodious roof, yet he sat at his desk, two-finger pecking on his Remington:

Troopship

A Short Story

by

Eugene Matheny

And working through the night, he rough drafted a story of a young Pfc. shipping overseas. Like Gene, the young man had turned down, on principle, a chance at officers' training. Through that foggy May, Gene rewrote and polished “Troopship.” He did another story. And another. Seven in all. He showed each in turn to Caroline. She thought them splendid. He discounted her opinion. She's my girl, his sense of uncertainty averred, what else could she think?

He did not show his work to LeRoy Duquesne. The professor's good opinion was too important to risk.

For by now the two men were friends.

That summer and fall, with Mrs. Duquesne (“Call me Hilda”), a quiet, exophthalmic little woman, and Caroline, they passed compatible evenings discussing literature and civil liberties.

“You're
not
his friend,” Caroline said once. “You're his echo.”

“We agree. We're on the same side.”

“He uses you to pump his ego.”

“He doesn't need me for that.”

“Genebo, there's such a thing as having
too
much humility.” And Caroline said no more.

Late in June, the oaths were mailed to university employees, faculty included, with a covering letter asking for a signature. Many didn't sign. A substantial number of nonsigning researchers, TAs, junior faculty—in other words those without tenure—were denied reappointment.

And in the fall of the same year, 1949, the regents issued an ultimatum. Even those professors with tenure would not receive their paychecks if they had not signed their loyalty by February 24, 1950. Or as Caroline quoted the punchline of an old joke, “No tickee, no washee.”

A special faculty meeting was held in the recently constructed Shoenberg Hall. Before, everyone had been inoculated by fear. Now they were frozen by fear. In the well-lit new auditorium, speakers used two languages. Liberal for image. Nonsubversive (apolitical) for the finks surely present. Gene, who had a mathematical turn of mind, kept track of the number of times the matter of withholding paychecks came up. One hundred and eighty-seven times. Nobody, speakers kept reiterating, wanted to back down on so vital an issue as the Academic Senate's Constitution-given freedom to hire and fire. But, they said obliquely. But.

After the meeting, LeRoy Duquesne and Gene crossed the bleak, autumnal campus.

Gene sighed. “Take the oath or be canned—even with Governor Warren on our side, there aren't enough regents to stop it. God, Germany all over again.”

“I have finally conceded,” said LeRoy Duquesne, “that it is well within the realm of possibility that there won't be a single holdout.”

“A few. Us in English. Dr. Caughey in History. LeRoy, think one more petition'll accomplish anything?”

“Maybe.”

Gene gnawed a hangnail. “My feelings about the Oath never've been sound like yours. I mean, I've always nursed a sort of feeling that if we are making this much effort, why not use it to hire colored and Mexican faculty. But you, you've always seen it as a threat to academic freedom. You've fought the regents on their own ground. That takes tremendous courage.” LeRoy Duquesne kept his eyes on his feet, which were crunching through dry, wind-blown leaves. Gene went on, carefully. “That's what I don't understand. Today, when they were all backing down, I had this tremendous urge to fight. Me. A TA with no tenure, no nothing. I mean, why should I do battle when everybody's dropping off the bandwagon?”

LeRoy Duquesne had no answer.

“Why should I put everything on the line now, when nobody cares anymore? And when I never cared—for the right reasons, anyway?”

“You're a born champion of lost causes,” said LeRoy Duquesne, his tone implying there could be no more noble occupation. As he bent his impressive head against the wind, he gave Gene an encouraging smile.

Both men understood that without this approval, which meant so much to Gene, Gene would not have gone to his battered desk upstairs in Royce Hall, and in less than an hour composed his
WHEREAS
es. He and Caroline had circulated the petition, he with thoughtful sincerity, Caroline with highhanded, confident smiles. Both approaches had gotten terrifyingly small results.

3

Arrowhead is a mountain lake resort about eighty miles northeast of Los Angeles. On steep, hairpin curves Gene's '38 DeSoto boiled over twice. It was dark when Caroline, laughing and gasping into icy air, unlocked her parents' cabin. The men accomplished a small fire. Mrs. Duquesne heated her curry, and Caroline produced two raffia-wrapped bottles of Dago red, which for love of Gene she called sour red. After dinner the two women went downstairs to use the chemical toilet.

Their footsteps descending the narrow stairwell, Gene reached for his calf briefcase. “I've got some material,” he said. He released worn leather. The pain in his stomach was sharp. Sudden.

“Material? On what?” LeRoy Duquesne set down maroon wine.

“I took your advice.”

“About what?”

“The short-story form,” Gene said, pulling out three immaculate sheaves of Eaton's Corrasible bond.

“Three?”

Those that Gene considered his best work. Or rather, his least bad work. “Each more rotten than the next.”

LeRoy held out his hand.

Gene did not relinquish paper.

“Don't you want a reading?”

“They need more polishing,” Gene muttered.

“I'll tell you about that.”

“They're nothing special.”

“Gene, give me some credit.” LeRoy Duquesne waggled his fingers. Commanding.

Gene, placing his stories in the hairless hand, experienced a sense of release. Sure, he still feared losing LeRoy Duquesne's respect. But he trusted the man. It was the kind of trust rarely bestowed on one human being by another, and then only by a completely decent person like Gene Matheny.

The following morning Gene rose at the first thin light. Caroline slept, the top of her dark head tousling above the quilt. Worry about his literary lacks had given Gene a wakeful night.

Upstairs in the living room, LeRoy Duquesne was already waiting, a terry-cloth robe wrapping his insufficient body.

“Have you sent these out?” he demanded.

“I thought maybe
The New Yorker.
” As Gene spoke, he realized that his dream of selling to
The New Yorker
was one more English Department cliché.

“But they haven't gone?”

“Not yet.”

“Good.”

“Then they are rotten?”

“We'll work them into shape, old son, you and me together.” LeRoy Duquesne rubbed his hands together. “Let's start with ‘Troopship.'”

LeRoy Duquesne's talents lay in critical analysis: he could stretch a paragraph on the blackboard and let it twitch, neither dead nor quite living, while he pointed his ferule at character, style, realization of theme, figures of speech. He performed the best damn autopsy in the English Department. Shuffling pages of “Troopship,” his voice ringing with passion, he covered the manuscript with his minuscule, spiky notes. Gene's eyes occasionally would shift from paper to the sculptured features of LeRoy Duquesne, poet, critic, mentor, Progressive, and friend. He would agree, “That's right.” “Uh-huh.” “Yes, the crap game should be deepened into symbolism.” “Yes, sure, I get it.”