The Headmaster's Wife (60 page)

“Not much,” Beata said. “We can't sell those properties as long as the court forbids us to, and the court is forbidding us to. We're going to have to find some other way to solve the problem.”

“There is no other way to solve the problem. We have a banknote coming due in six weeks.”

“I know.”

“And if we don't pay it, there's going to be a first-rate dustup about this monastery's finances, and it's not going to be confined to the screaming fit the Cardinal is going to subject us to.”

“The Cardinal doesn't usually scream, does he?” Beata said. “I've always thought of him as a go-stone-cold-silent type.”

“The distinction is too fine to excite my interest.”

“Possibly. But Mother, seriously. It's time to tell the Cardinal, and let him straighten this out. Maybe he could talk to the mystery buyer, or the buyer's lawyers. Maybe he could advance us enough to make the payment or countersign to roll over the loan. The Archdiocese does that kind of thing all the time.”

“It used to.”

“Mother, it's going to be a lot more willing to do thatkind of thing than it will be to go on the legal defensive against Markey, who's going to be very easy to portray as a poor, downtrodden, unjustly harassed homeless person. It's going to be easy to do that even if it turns out Markey did sell Mr. Harrigan the drugs.”

“Procured them,” Constanzia said automatically. “Is he really homeless?”

“Not now. The Justice Project has him in a hotel. He was homeless when Mr. Harrigan says he was paying him to pick up the drugs for him.”  

“You've got to wonder how a person like that could keep himself together long enough to do all this nonsense he's supposed to have done to pick up the Oxycontin and whatever else there was supposed to be. You read all these things in the papers. Going to a different pharmacy every time. Going to different doctors' offices. It's like a spy film with James Bond.”

“The Justice Project doesn't think Markey did do any of that. They don't think he's capable. They think Mr. Harrigan is accusing him because he's handy.”

“Because Drew doesn't want to admit that he did it all himself?”

“Because Mr. Harrigan is shielding somebody else, somebody he has more—respect for. Somebody whose life he doesn't think is a waste.”

“I'd like to get my hands around Drew's throat and squeeze until he turned blue.”

“Well, you can't for the next forty days. He's in rehab. The enclosure there makes the enclosure here look like wide open access. Do you want me to try to get in touch with the Justice Project people?”

“Would it do any good?”

“Probably not but I wouldn't mind meeting Kate Daniel.”

“Then go do whatever it is you do at this time of night.”

“I take turns monitoring the bam.”

“I remember when we had sheep in that bam,” Constanzia said. “It's strange, really, the way things have changed since I've been in Carmel. I thought when I camehere that if things changed in the outside world, I wouldn't know about it. But I do.”

“I thought that if I came to Carmel, I'd find nuns who were all actively engaged in an ecstatic union with God. That was why I didn't want to make a solemn profession, did you know that? I'd read St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa, and I couldn't see myself in the throes of that kind of, that kind of—”

“Sexual hysteria?”

“We have to assume that that isn't what that was, don't we?”

“Get something to eat before you go out to the bam,” Constanzia said. “I have to think. And thank you for everything you did today.”

“There's nothing to thank me for. I'm a member of this community.”

“I know. Go now. You look exhausted.”

Beata hesitated for a moment, and then turned and left the office, back into the hallway, back down the hallway to the niche where the crucifix was. She genuflected again, absent-mindedly. Around her, the monastery was silent. Even the clocks didn't tick.

“Everybody who comes to Carmel has a different story,” Mother Constanzia had said, the day Beata had shown up at the monastery door, dressed in an Armani power suit and carrying a burgundy leather Soho briefcase from Coach.

She didn't miss the power suit, but she missed the sound of music, all kinds of music, even the bad kind. She kept listening to hear the voice of God.

The name on the plastic nameplate screwed to the outside of the door was Richard Alden Tyler, but nobody in the world had ever called him anything but Jig. Even the King of Sweden, congratulating him on the first of two Nobel Prizes, raising his voice a little to be sure the right people couldhear, had called him “Jig”—or rather “Yig,” because of the problems Scandanavian pronunciation had with the letter “J,” and after that, for half a year, people had called out to him in bars and named him “Yig.” Whatever. It was a sign of just how bad off he was that he was thinking about bars and 1974, instead of the one hundred and forty things he had on his mind these days, instead of the problem with Drew Harrigan. If there was one thing Jig Tyler knew, it was that the problem with Drew Harrigan was not about to go away. This was the calm before the storm. This was every cliché that had ever been written in every third-rate novel about the McCarthy era. This was idiocy, because Drew Harrigan himself was idiocy. This was—

Delmore Krantz had opened the office door and switched on the lights and stepped back a little to let Jig pass first. It was the kind of thing graduate students did when they were in awe of their professors and had no hope in hell of ever equaling them. Delmore was the kind of graduate student Jig attracted these days, in droves. There was a time when students came to him for the science. That time was gone. It was odd the way things worked out. Two Nobel Prizes, one in mathematics, one in chemistry: that was science. Forty-two years of teaching in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania: that was science. Only the books that had landed him on
The New York Times
best-seller lists every couple of years for the last two decades or so were not science, and they were … they were …

With the light on in the office, it was obvious that he'd left his desk in a mess. He hadn't used to do that. He had this odd feeling, standing in the middle of the empty room, that he had turned into that character in
The Nightmare Before Christmas.
He was tall. He was thin. He was cadaverous. Delmore was central casting's idea of a sidekick. If he were any shorter or fatter, he'd be a mushroom.

“You left the tape machine playing,” Delmore said, sounding worried. Delmore always sounded worried, except when he sounded put-upon, which was any time anybody anywhere mentioned Israel. Delmore resented the fact thatother Jewish students on campus expected him to defend Israel. He also resented the fact that non-Jewish students on campus expected him to criticize it. Jig thought he could see Delmore's future as clearly as he could see anything at all. There would be a job in a fifth-rate department somewhere in the Midwest, a wife with a career as a dentist, a child named Zara or Joe Hill, and forty-two million letters to the editor of the local paper, upholding Socialism and the High Art Tradition in the face of midwestern anti-intellectual cant.

The voice on the tape machine was Drew Harrigan's. It would be, because that was what Jig had been listening to when he'd left to go to the department meeting. He hated department meetings. In the end they all came down to the same long whining complaint about parking.

“This man,” Drew Harrigan was saying, “this fool, who thinks he's smarter than everybody else in the universe because they gave him a couple of Nobel Prizes, who thinks he knows everything there is to know because he can move a few molecules around, who thinks you—I mean seriously, where do guys like this get off? What difference is there between what he's doing and flat-out treason? We're at war. We're in a big war. We—”

Jig reached up to the top shelf of the bookcase and turned the recorder off. How many hours of Drew Harrigan's voice had he taped?

“It doesn't matter,” Delmore said loyally. “Nobody pays attention to Drew Harrigan. He's a fascist attack dog.”

“He's the most popular radio talk show host in the country.”

“Well, okay,” Delmore said. “Those people pay attention to him. But nobody pays any attention to those people. Nobody here pays attention to them. This is a private university.”

Jig couldn't help himself. Sometimes he couldn't. Stupidity fascinated him.

“I thought you didn't approve of the fact that this was a private university,” he said. “I thought you said that Ivy

League universities like this one were bastions of capitalist reaction and ought to be abolished.”

“Yes, I did,” Delmore said, looking confused, but only for a moment. “But you have to work with reality. You have to play the game in real time. The fascists have control of the White House. They've got control of the state governments. You'd have a harder time right now in a public university.”

“Does it ever bother you that so many people vote for the, um, fascists?”

“They don't,” Delmore said. “Nearly half the people don't vote at all. They're discouraged. They think their voices don't count.”

“And if you could get them to vote, they'd elect progressive politicians who would put an end to corporate hegemony, expand the welfare state, withdraw American troops from around the world, and institute social justice?”

“They'd
demand
that politicians do those things.”

Jig dropped into the chair behind his desk. “You're delusional,” he said. “The great American public is a mob of anti-intellectual celebrity worshipers. If they all started to vote at once, they'd install a monarchy in ten seconds flat. They'd probably give it to the Rockefellers. And do you know why?”

“No,” Delmore said, looking stiff.

“Because the Rockefellers are just as stupid as they are. So are the Vanderbilts. So are the Cabots and the Lodges and the Goulds. That's one thing I learned in prep school. There are two kinds of people at places like Taft—poor kids with brains, and rich kids who can't think their way out of paper bags.”

“Bill Gates,” Delmore said tentatively.

“If Bill Gates had had any talent, he would have stayed at Harvard and gone into physics. I'm going to have to do something about this. I'm going to have to do it soon.”

Delmore cleared his throat and sat down in the only other chair in the room besides the one Jig himself was sitting in. Jig liked students to stand when they came to see him. Lately, Jig preferred not to have students come to see him.

Delmore's bulk didn't quite fit between the chair's arms. It oozed out the open spaces at the sides.

“The thing I think you have to worry about,” he said carefully, “isn't the university, but the Department of Justice. The Patriot Act. They could be coming for you that way. They could charge you with anything they wanted to, and you couldn't really fight back. They could arrest you and not tell anybody where you were, or let you see a lawyer.”

“Do you really think they could do that?” Jig said. “I'm not exactly Joe Six-pack off the street. You don't think that would be
huge
news?”

“Well, um, yes, maybe, but the news organizations are in the hands of repressive capitalism. They support the Administration and its efforts to criminalize dissent. In the context of reactionary hegemonic discourse—”

“I've told you, Delmore, no hegemonic discourse.”

“It's the best available language to describe—”

“It's not the best available language for anything. It's window dressing meant to make banal ideas sound profound. The country is run by a horde of capitalist shits. Given the chance to get away with it, they behave as what they are. No hegemonic discourse required.”

“But they own the language. They make it impossible for us even to think of dissenting, because they control—”

“Have they made it impossible for you to even think of dissenting?”

“I was thinking of ordinary people. People who haven't been trained to deconstruct … to deconstruct …”

“What?”

“Reactionary hegemonic discourse,” Delmore said.

Jig sighed. “You'd depress me less if I thought you knew what it meant,” he said, “but that's impossible, because nobody really knows what it means any more. How any of you expect to have any effect at all on the general public is beyond me. You go into a bar in South Philly and start talking about reactionary hegemonic discourse, and you'll be lucky to get out to the street alive, assuming they pay any attention to you at all.”

“But that's just it,” Delmore said, sliding to the edge of his chair. “They've been brainwashed. They've been dumbed down by advertising and infotainment. They're addicted to media schlock. If we can pull them out of that, if we can break the spell and show them—”

“What? That NASCAR is for stupid people and they've really wanted to be listening to the London Philharmonic instead of Garth Brooks all along?”

“The high art tradition is a culture trap,” Delmore said. “It exists to make ordinary people feel bad about themselves. The first step progressives have to take if they're going to advance the cause of social justice is to validate the cultural instincts of working people.”

“Right. Give the Nobel in Literature to J. K. Rowling.”

“Magic is a culture trap, too,” Delmore said. “It—”

But Jig had turned away. He had had to turn away. He was about to burst out laughing. He looked out the window onto the small, cramped quad that looked as uninviting as the brutal weather that enveloped it. He was sixty-two years old. His best days of scientific work were behind him. Science was a young man's medium. Mathematicians were washed up by the time they were forty. Physicists rarely lasted past fifty. He was at that part of his life when he was supposed to do something else, and he was being stymied by a man who ran to fat and stale ideas like a racehorse running to a finish line. The only difference was that the racehorse would at least be beautiful, and Drew Harrigan was not.