Some Came Running (78 page)

For a time, it looked as though Parkman College had reached the limit of its development, but then it got another dispensation. Another local man, who was also a politician, and who was also wealthy and who had also graduated from Parkman College, had a daughter whom he wanted to send to school there, but Parkman College was a men’s school. So, in 1907, two new buildings began to go up, one of them dedicated to the new School of Science, and Parkman College became coeducational. It was a good trade for the school because not only did this other local man secure them more state funds, but he also paid for a number of other things himself and in addition left the school a large personal bequest in his will.

After the 1907 enlargement, there remained only one more thing for Parkman College to acquire, and the influence of one more man for it to undergo, to become what it was to be now in 1948. The thing was academic stature, and the man whose influence brought it about was Robert Ball French.

And naturally, Gwen thought, since it was Bob French who brought it about, it did not happen in any conventional way.

To have, in 1920, a man who had taken his PhD at Harvard and studied in Heidelberg teaching English literature in the high school of a town which also contained a college was embarrassing enough. And it piqued the prides not only of the college administration but of the Board of Trustees as well. But then, on top of that, to see the same man slowly sifting himself up to national prominence as a poet—it was not only embarrassing, it was ridiculous. And all the ridicule, they felt, pointed at Parkman College. He could, they knew, probably have taught anywhere, at Harvard or any big university, except that he already had money. He had lived in Chicago with Sherwood Anderson’s group, and he had known Harriet Monroe and Carl Sandburg; he was a personal friend of Van Wyck Brooks and John Hall Wheelock.

And yet, in 1915 he had returned home from all this kind of life, and married, and immediately had a daughter, and then for four years done nothing—except write criticism and poetry. And the only statement he had ever been known to make about it was that writers and academics were like chess masters; they were too vain and jealous a crew to ever live close together. Why in the end he had gone to the school board and asked to teach English in the high school, nobody knew, either. He was known to have said to someone that he was a born actor and that was why he liked to teach. But he had not even approached the college about teaching; and in this connection he was known to have said to someone else, quite simply, that he did not like their policies.

There were several opinions among the college administration and the Board of Trustees why Old Bob French—he was already becoming known as that—had done what he had done, and the prevailing one was that he had done it to spite Parkman College. Well, they knew they weren’t very academic, and they wanted nothing to do with him, either. The trouble was, he had money. It allowed him to be eccentric. In all, they had held out for eight years. Watching him blithely go his way while his poetry became more and more known. Then a new chairman of the board asked if anyone had ever asked him to teach at the college? It turned out that no one had, so a small committee visited him.

Gwen remembered it well, she was about fourteen at the time. Bob had sat with them in the living room—and so had her mother, busting to talk, but knowing better than to. For years, her mother had been embarrassed and indignant because he taught in the high school. They had made their offer, asking him to take over the English Department of the college. Bob had sat and thought about it a while. “You’re sure you won’t care?” he asked the head of the English Department. No, no, said the department head, he was moving on to a better place in a bigger school anyway. “All right,” Bob had said. “Then I’ll take it. I’ve got some ideas I’d like to try out anyway.”

And so it was that, in 1928 (the very same year that Dave Hirsh had left high school, without graduating, Gwen thought, musing in her study), Robert Ball French had also left the high school and moved out to Parkman College as head of the English Department. He did not stop his periodic drinking and he carried with him his high school course in Shakespeare, transposed for college students, and still continued on occasion to act out the dueling scene from Hamlet. But what he did to the college excited other people.

Parkman College had always been adequate in its own way—
four years of Liberal Arts, Gwen thought sourly, fully accredited, vitally Christian
—and nobody ever pretended it was anything than just what it was—a small teachers’ college that was a teachers’ college in everything but name. But with Bob French all this changed—at least, on the level of the faculty where the students did not exist. Bob French revamped the entire English Department almost as soon as he was there, and by the end of the first year began getting rid of all his English teachers who wanted only to teach what they had been told to teach. He wanted teachers who had very definite ideas about what they taught and theories of their own and were willing to argue with him about them. He argued with all of them. And some he hired. It did not take long for the word to get around; and soon they began to come, a steady stream of them from all over: that strange, thin race of young academics, and some not so young, hopeful, some even wistful, but every one belligerent as hell and dogged as an infantryman when it came to his theories. And it did not just stay in the English Department. A thing like that can’t. Soon it had extended into the fields of history, and philosophy, and mathematics, and even somewhat to the physical sciences. And in his third year, Bob French founded the
Parkman Review Quarterly,
and right away its literary level went up and stayed there. Gradually, inconspicuously, they infiltrated, the young academics, coming from here and from there, and soon it began reaching the level of the department heads, and Parkman College had become a brilliant school. And the sharp vinegary smell of intellectual ferment was everywhere, like the smell of burning perique, and the sizzling sound of the frying brains.

(Gwen could no more help being violently enthusiastic when she thought about it than she could help breathing. It was her life. And always had been. And probably always would be.)

On the surface, the college hadn’t really changed much. It still remained denominationally Episcopalian, and the church still had some sayso about the running of it, and everyone gave it the necessary lip service. But underneath, of course, all that had changed; because underneath, naturally, all the young academics, and not so young academics, were would-be idolbreakers in their hearts—as was Bob French himself; and he encouraged them in it. Nothing must be too sacred to suffer close inspection. It was a basic principle with him.

Somewhere in there—in 1941—her mother died and caused a momentary pause, and she herself gave up her apartment in town and moved back out on the campus to take care of him.

He could have been, she knew, president of the college, if he had wanted. When the last president had moved on up to better things, it had been offered to him in so many words. But he had turned it down, and so Dr Clarence Brock Pirtle had been imported. And Bob French, a man of nearly seventy with the vitality of a man of fifty, had announced his retirement and bought the house on the river and moved there. “It bores me, dear Gwen,” he told her. “It’s all vanity. Talk and theorize and speculate—all in the hope of someday becoming known as the discoverer of one new thing, you know. I’m tired of it. It isn’t living. It’s more living than most. Because it’s keener. But it’s still not keen enough. At least, not for me. No, I’m afraid my acting days are over,” he had smiled. “Anyway,” he added, “I think the level is beginning to go down. It always does, you know. Too many cooks may not always spoil the broth, dear Gwen, but they almost certainly will always dilute it. Then there will be
nothing
left but the vanity, you know. I’m a poet. That’s where my keener living lies.”

In her study, Gwen sat up suddenly before the desk, staring straight ahead at the multicolored book spines above it. What in God’s name had got her started off on all that old stuff? Oh. Yes. It had been the old oak paneling, hadn’t it.

She lit herself another cigarette and turned back to her work.

Her own position with the college had been, of course—and still was—profoundly affected by what her father had been to Parkman College. She had been watched closely—and still was being—to see if she was going to take advantage of her father. Every young academic on the campus watched her constantly, just waiting for that one opportunity to be able to say there! you see! living off her old man’s reputation!

She stubbed out her cigarette, and laid aside the back issue periodical which contained a poem of Kenneth McKeean’s, Dave Hirsh’s buddy from Los Angeles, that she had been reading. A man she’d never even seen, or spoken to, who had lived out his agonizing life out there, and now she was studying him. The poem itself was an excellent free-verse love poem. She pushed the periodical further away from her across the desk, and lit another cigarette.

Bob himself had started a new, long poem recently, and she was getting excited about it. She did not know if he had yet written any of it down, but he had told her something about it. Bob worked in a funny way and had ever since she could remember. He would get an idea from something or other, and then he would mull over it, developing it, sometimes for months even, before he ever began to write a line. And then, he would write it in his head, carry it around in his head, until—if it were a fairly short poem—he had the whole thing entire, finished, all in his head, and then he would just sit down and write it off all at once, from memory. If it was a long poem, he would sometimes do it by sections, all in his head, until he had one section done so that it satisfied him; then he would write that one down on paper and go on to the next.

He had been doing an enormous amount of reading in connection with the new poem, all of it on chess. And on the history of chess. When he had exhausted their own meager supply of books on chess, Gwen had brought him home everything the college library had on it, which was pitifully little; and then still later had had the librarian write the state library and take out everything they had on it, which was not much more.

For Gwen, the whole thing was a sort of exciting intellectual adventure. Just as if one had gone off somewhere, to the South Seas or to Asia, on a hunt for physical adventure. She knew better than to ask him what it was all about; she would only have gotten a shy smile and a wrinkled up forehead and a mumble of something incomprehensible; and he would continue to do that until he had worked something out for himself in his mind, and then he would finally tell about it.

What he finally told her was that the poem was going to be about chess (she had rather guessed that), and that it would use the metaphorical symbol of a chess game in analyzing and expressing chess as a reflection of the relationships between humans, and the title of it would be “The King Is Helpless.” Basically, of course, he smiled, it was really about the relationships between men and women—what was not?

He had got the original idea one day last winter when he was sitting by the chess table there, and it had struck him with one of those strange, sudden, insights looking at the board and men, that while the queen was the strongest piece on the board, the king was also the weakest. And yet the object of the game was not to protect the queen, the strongest, but to protect the king, the weakest. Why had it been done that way? Had a woman invented the game?

Certainly, it was no new idea especially; but it was new to him. The title had come to him almost immediately: The King Is Helpless. He had begun to look into it. Especially about this thing of the strong queen and weak king. Had it always been part of the game? If so, was this a basic attribute of men and women? something in the race itself? And if not, just when
had
the strong queen come into the game, and
why?

It would make a magnificent theme for a poem, wouldn’t it? He wouldn’t try to use a play by play analogy, he said, but the history of the game itself and the growth of the power of the female piece and of modern woman. Today they dominated by using the same trick they had learned to use then—sexual morality plus its opposite attribute, physical attractiveness. A direct contradiction! Thus they made the men desire them, while also making them feel guilty for doing so; result: Love! And, also, the power to have their way—whatever it was they wanted. Because they held this power—this
moral
right to give, or to withhold, love. In a word: domination! The King Is Helpless.

Gwen’s very first thought—when he explained it all out to her—had been one of guilt. And she had immediately thought that he had not, as he said, taken his theme from the chessboard itself first, but from watching her and Dave Hirsh here (perhaps he had been sitting there in the big chair by the chess table watching them, in that absentminded way of his; and had made the correlation then). Of course, other past observations, and his own experiences, came into it, too. He was really a very wise man, at seventy-two.

Once again, she stubbed out her cigarette and pulled to her the stack of periodicals containing Kenny McKeean’s work. My God! How much time! She looked at her watch. An hour?

And just what the hell did he mean, if he
was
taking it from her and Dave? That she was dominating Dave? She wasn’t. That she was using love on him? To get work out of him? She wasn’t doing that, either. Any more than she had with Wally Dennis, or even Mac Price. It wasn’t she who kept bringing the damned sex into it. It was them! Like Wally, a year ago, a kid of twenty, asking her if she wouldn’t sleep with him! Damn them all. They were all alike. Who the hell was Bob French to say that it was
women
who used love on
men!
Gwen wondered, again, as she often had, if Bob had any inkling that she was still a virgin and not the woman of the world she claimed to be, as she opened the magazine with Kenny McKeean’s love poem in it.