The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels Page 8

  “I can only assume,” Tattersall began, “that if action was to be taken on my participation in the rally, it would consist either in a request for my resignation, or, if the milder line were adopted for which I would have to thank my good friend Edmonds, in some kind of statement of censure which would force me to tender it anyway.”

  “A distinct possibility,” the President said to his desk blotter.

  “In that case,” Tattersall said slowly, “there would be a student revolt.”

  “So that’s your little game, is it? Blackmail!”

  “No. Not in the least. The fact is that I have decided to tender my resignation anyway. Not over this, or as a member of the committee. As a teacher. I have another offer of employment open to me, in another profession, which I have decided to accept. That ought to cut this Gordian knot for us all.”

  There were murmurs of protestation and reassurance. “Quit teaching? Why would you want to do a thing like that?” the President said, scarcely able to conceal his joy.

  “I just think I’m ripe for a change, that’s all. Nothing more to it than that. Well, to get back to the business at hand. I thought one reason Hartack’s presence would be valuable is that he can hear for himself that my resignation is not being asked for, and so testify to the student body. That way there’ll be no misunderstanding, no needless hoopla over nothing Certainly no wasteful and destructive student revolt.” After they had all breathed a sigh of relief, Tattersall turned to Hartack. “Now let’s put a few questions to the prisoner while we have him here, shall we? Does anyone mind if I conduct the interrogation?”

  “Not at all,” said the President, only too tickled that this was to be Tattersall’s swan song.

  They were loosely ranged around the desk at which the President himself sat. Tattersall now twitched his chair about so as to be facing Hartack more squarely. Hartack, a stocky blond with a crew cut, did not look like a firebrand now that he was actually before the tribunal that would decide his fate. The sudden fear of expulsion, or even of a suspension that would in effect lose him a whole semester since they were within so few days of its end, brought beads of perspiration to his brow, and made him clear his throat nervously. He agreed to come clean when Tattersall warned him it would be wise to do so, and not deny facts of which he had the evidence—evidence, Tattersall added, that he had gone to the trouble of personally collecting.

  “The truth is that you were only caught in bed once with this girl, but that you have really been taking her into your room regularly. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hartack said, wetting his lips. “I guess that’s right.”

  “You guess. How many times would you say you violated the rule?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Because they were so many. It might be easier to state the period of time over which you have been doing so, rather than enumerate individual instances. How long would you say? All semester? All year?”

  “All year.”

  “Last year too?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the year before that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a silence in the room. It continued for some time. The committee members could all be heard breathing heavily. When they had drunk their fill of implication, Tattersall turned slowly from Hartack to them.

  “You’ve heard the whole story, gentlemen,” he said, “the full facts. And I wish to submit to you, gentlemen, that these are extenuating circumstances. This is obviously not a superficial relationship, but a deep and serious one. This girl is not a pickup, nor is this your short-order sex, a case of popping in and out of the sack such as we know to be going on everywhere, not only here but all around, anywhere you can name. These young people are going steady in the fullest sense of the term, not shacking up in the shabby and superficial one. This man has been pulling the wool over our eyes for four years. Clearer proof of his intentions could not be asked. In view of all this, gentlemen, I think it would be regrettable to make an example of someone who might more properly be held up as one.”

  “Hear, hear!” they said.

  That was how they voted too, not only clearing Hartack of the charge, by the simple device of dropping it, but shaking his hand by way of commending a meaningful bond such as could only refresh their faith in an age of promiscuity. “There are marriages that don’t last that long,” Edmonds said from within a dense cloud of smoke.

  Having excused Hartack, they settled down to the larger issue, that of overhauling the regulations in general. Tattersall again stressed the point that students on campus were being cracked down on for what those living off it got away with scot-free. The President protested fatigue with that argument. The obvious impracticability of policing the entire city didn’t absolve them from the responsibility of governing the part they could. “If a cop is giving you a ticket for speeding,” he said, “the fact that cars are whizzing by at eighty miles an hour while he is doing so is no ground for complaining that you’re being discriminated against. He can’t be everywhere at once. And if they’re having such meaningful relationships, let them prove it by contending with a few obstacles!”

  Then the Dean, having just murmured that there was something in what Tattersall said, now agreed with the President also, picking lint from his knee with his crapkicking smile. Then he made a joke. He remarked that infractions were hard to be sure about in any case, if you found two people in bed together, because nowadays you couldn’t tell the boys from the girls. Then Tattersall, who had made that observation himself years back when it wasn’t so common, said, “Maybe they like to resemble each other, the young people. Maybe that’s very loving and sexual, rather than hermaphroditic.” Then the Dean backed down a little and said, “There’s something in what you say.” Whereupon Tattersall had one of his twinges of remorse for jumping on him, and to make amends, cited a cartoon contradicting his own position and supporting the Dean’s. It showed just such an androgynous youth as they were talking about, with dungarees and long hair, standing at a mailbox reading a letter which began, “Dear sir or madam …” Then the Dean said, “I see what you mean,” lowering his eyes to the floor while Tattersall rolled his to the ceiling in an expression of absolutely giving up.

  Not even Edmonds could summarize, or “recap,” these bandied and qualification-tormented observations, or resolve their contradictions by pointing out with his pipestem the truth that lay somewhere in between. So they came to no decision about what to recommend, but tabled the matter till another meeting, which meant another term. Which was perhaps just as well. But in rolling his eyes to the ceiling, Tattersall had noted a wide and rapidly spreading wet spot in the plaster there. Thus a serious leak in the plumbing was detected, in time to save the school hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars in repair expense, and making them all feel that something worthwhile had been accomplished by this meeting.

  They adjourned on a generally happy, or at least hopeful, note. The President was so glad that Tattersall was leaving that he begged him to stay. But Tattersall was adamant. He needed a change. All he had to do now was reveal his decision to his wife, who was not surprised, and then set out in search of Wurlitzer to tell him he was accepting his offer of a job at the agency. He found him at the fountain, harmonizing with some of his cronies.

  Six

  Tattersall was about two months into his new career when, through the half-open door of his cubicle at Wurlitzer and Wise, he caught a glimpse of a long-legged girl who looked familiar. He saw her from the back just as she turned a corner of the corridor and disappeared in the direction of the wing in which the agency brass were quartered. She slipped along with a rapid gliding walk, as though about to break into a trot toward or away from something. She carried a leather shoulder bag, and her head was tilted to one side in a manner that rang a bell, even though the black hair remembered as hanging straight down was now done up in a large biscuit.

  Tattersall rolled aside the typewriter stand behind whi
ch he had been working and shot on tiptoe down the hallway to the corner where she had turned, and peered around it just in time to see her vanish again, this time into the complex of executive lairs which included Wurlitzer’s own. It was Mayo Stiles all right. Another leap brought him to a water cooler where, standing with his back to the closed double door, he could listen to what went on behind it with a paper cup in his hand. He heard the receptionist’s typewriter stop, and then Mayo’s voice asking to be announced to Wurlitzer. “He’s expecting me,” she said.

  Tattersall remained at the otherwise deserted water cooler a few minutes, reviewing the general situation and trying to sort out the possibilities inherent in it. The one that made most sense was that Mayo was seeing her uncle about a job herself. She had graduated and now wanted to write, with the problem of a livelihood classically embedded in that wish. The Satyr Press could not have advanced her much. He knocked back several paper cupfuls of water during this train of thought and bleated “Maaw,” a few times, although, truth to tell, he was as much excited as nonplussed by the speculation. A buzzer sounded behind him, and the receptionist told Mayo to go in. The typewriter there resumed its tattoo, and Tattersall returned to his, assuming the dramatic crouch he had come to develop here, like that of a hard-pressed jockey pressing on, in turn, his mount.

  Working with the door partway open enabled him both to see into the hall and be seen by anyone approaching down it, banging away at his copy or glaring at what he had written with that grim and bitter self-evaluation that went with creative standards. Orders were to regard Tattersall as offbeat, special, to give him his head and let him incubate his own ideas in his own good time. The previous resident sport, Gascoyne, with whom Wurlitzer had once mentioned his possibly collaborating, was no longer with the firm; regrettably, accordingly to Wurlitzer, who considered him “a real pro” despite his Off-Broadway copy. He was now working for another agency.

  Wurlitzer wanted a minimum of twenty “are you sick of’s” before he would even think of showing the series to the one client for whose blood Tattersall might not be too rich. He was too rich for the average sponsor’s blood, that they all knew. This one was a manufacturer of a line of soft drinks still lacking a “cola,” and who was about to launch one, to be called Kickola.

  “Are you sick of batteries that go dead when you need your car most?” he had been writing when he had glimpsed Mayo in the passage. This wouldn’t work, since failures of ignition were likely to be at their most vexing to commuters who had just inadequately breakfasted and must be off for their train, or in the dead of winter when the thing to hit the spot is a cup of hot coffee or cocoa, not a cold bottle of Kickola, even supposing one were available. Tattersall twisted the sheet of paper out of the roller, but instead of discarding it cross-filed it under headings such as Coffee, Cocoa, Gums, Mints and Antacid Lozenges, as well as other products conceivable as ameliorants in the crisis postulated. The complex variety of factors that had to be taken into account in this venture had by now been borne in on Tattersall. He had so far submitted a hundred and eleven “are you sick of’s” to the front office, where superiors of an almost Kafkaesque anonymity and elusiveness had accepted ten and rejected the other hundred and one. Moreover, they refused for obscure bureaucratic reasons to return the rejections. They considered them killed, unaware of the swelling limbo in which Tattersall was cross-filing carbons. If whatever plugs finally made the grade here met the same rate of extermination at the hands of sponsors to whom they were in turn submitted by the agency, Tattersall estimated, he would be several hundred years old before the show got on the road. Here they wanted the “are you” vignettes to be both dramatic and commonplace—something listeners could identify with. Thus one could not be fed up with oil furnaces exploding, since such things did not recur with a sufficient frequency in everyday life, nor with fabrics to which lint easily adhered, since such experiences lay at the other extremes, below the threshold of exasperation. Neither, in any case, called for a Kickola. But Tattersall knew one thing. Neither the strains of composition nor the obstacles flung up by the front office against the end product would make him ever compromise the original integrity of his conception. These plugs were going to express a dignified resignation to life.

  He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his hands folded under his chin, scrutinizing what was in his typewriter, when he became aware of two people coming down the corridor. Without raising his eyes he knew them to be Wurlitzer and Mayo. He was hammering away again when they stopped in his doorway.

  “Hank?”

  It was not till he paused once more in his fusillade that he looked up, with a start of interrupted concentration.

  “Oh, hello, Harry, I’m sorry I—Mayo! What a pleasant surprise. What brings you here?” He wheeled the typewriter aside again and scrambled around it to greet her. “You’re looking fine.”

  It fell out that she was going to get married. Her young man was a medical student whose remaining few years of study and internship necessitated her working for a while to help make both ends meet. Her novel would be published some time next year, but would not be expected to bring in any money to speak of. She was taking a job here at Double W, as the agency was called, in the copy department. So they would be seeing a lot of one another again.

  “I was surprised to hear you quit teaching,” Mayo whispered. “Whatever made you do that?”

  “Oh, I wanted a change. The real world, you know. I found myself beginning to think about tenure, that old placenta.” Shifting his weight to another foot, he adjusted this esoteric metaphor downward to Wurlitzer’s level. “That old cocoon. And that’s a danger signal. When things get too safe and snug, flee for your life.”

  “I think Hank felt the academic world was too secloistered for a man of his restless nature.” Had Wurlitzer really said that? Secloistered. Tattersall hoped he had heard right. A glance at Mayo revealed nothing to indicate that she had caught any such malapropism.

  “You can say that again,” Tattersall said.

  “He’s turning out to be a real pro, anyway,” Wurlitzer said. Tattersall would have found the testimonial more bracing had he not heard it in frequent requiems for the departed Gascoyne. Still, it was a term of praise Wurlitzer used for everybody. He would have called a prostitute a real pro.

  “Care to join us for lunch?” Wurlitzer said.

  Tattersall had more sense than to accept such an invitation. He declined it by pleading something in the pressure cooker, glancing at the typewriter as he responded with this bit of agency slang.

  He told Sherry the day’s news when he got home, not neglecting the malapropism his ear had chosen to pick up whether it had been uttered or not. He was determined that Wurlitzer had said it. “A regular Joyce. Secloistered. A great composite word for secluded, cloistered and sequestered,” he said as he shook up the cocktail with which to unwind. He admired the cotton print in which she sat, neat and fresh, waiting for her drink. “You might go all the way and make it seclustered. To mean all those clammy little cliques you get into on campus, you know, and that you’re damn well out of!” He was not sure he should have left.

  It was an odd aspect of academic life for a loner like Hank Tattersall to express no regrets about, Sherry thought, humid fraternization being among the tendencies to which he was least prone. She wished again that he erred in the direction about which other wives could by contrast complain; that he bowled, golfed, played poker or even drank with cronies. She thought about that again after dinner as, drawing on her gloves, she prepared to go out for an evening of committee work for some charitable organization. He was playing the piano, with the same rapt expression he wore sitting at the mangle. His fingers picked out a popular song, into the words of which he then flung himself. He had a really good amateur tenor, with a certain rough sweetness to it. If he would only join a singing group somewhere. She could see him in a glee club, standing tall and straight in a grove of shirtfronts, singing Brown October Ale and
Shipmates o’ Mine and Where My Caravan Has Rested. But he couldn’t see himself that way. He had joined in the singing around the fountain where he had found Harry Wurlitzer the night he hit him for the job, but only for diplomatic reasons, and it had gone against his grain. He preferred belting a song out on his own. She could hear him as she entered the elevator (they had moved into a city apartment of course) and knew that was how he would spend the evening. When he had the house to himself he would let go for hours at a time, either accompanying himself at the piano or singing along with phonograph records. In that case he would harmonize with other soloists, or with quartets or other vocal groups of some distinction, without having to go out through the wet and the drear to attend rehearsals.

  When she got back about a quarter to eleven, he was sitting in his armchair smoking a cigar, surrounded by sheet music and unreplaced record albums. She brewed them some tea, and as they sipped it he talked again about Mayo, wondering what her young man was like, and how soon they were going to get married. Sherry went to bed, but after a sleepless hour came in again to find him still sitting where she’d left him, staring into space and wreathed in the smoke of still another cigar.

  “Would you like to get married again?” she said.

  “Well, we are two different people. This is a new life. Up to now I’ve been a teacher, you a faculty wife. Now I’m an organization man and you’re a company wife. We might make a better go of such a marriage.”

  “I’m not going to make a big production of it. Another license and all that red tape.”

  “Don’t you think it’s worth it?”

  “Yes, but we’ve got a file of marriage licenses by this time—all probably illegal. And bothering ministers and getting justices of the peace out of bed and all. I just feel guilty. Why can’t we just slip into an empty chapel somewhere and exchange the vows by ourselves. Pretend there’s someone officiating. It comes to the same thing. God, I know the ceremony by heart by this time.”