v
Age of Faith
“The things that have given me most pleasure in my life,” Charles Creed told me shortly before he died, “are my children, good sex, and writing. Unfortunately, the best of all three came at the same time.”
The early to middle seventies, then, were the happiest years of Charles Creed’s life. This period was his great good place and time, the dream to which he turned repeatedly for a remembrance of where he’d begun, a vision of what might return. For all the pain he felt during these years (and it was considerable) over the continuing disintegration of his marriage, a country plunging into mediocrity and boredom, and his on-going crusade against Busiris administrators, he was more than compensated in Timm, Jenny Lynn, and Lily Lee. And by his work on Age of Faith. In the book Creed could move comfortably in his own selectively reconstructed Past (which was perhaps why it took so long to write). In Lily Lee he found all any man could desire of Passionate Woman Present. In the children, Jack enjoyed a Future by no means guaranteed in the relationship with Lily Lee.
Accordingly, he focused as much of his life as possible on Lily, Jenny, Timm and the book, and as little as possible on Rose Marié and Busiris.
In the middle seventies Jack arose each morning around 6:30, showered, then awakened the children. He dressed them and fed them breakfast. Just before leaving the house, they awakened Rose Marié, who was then in the habit of sleeping late. On his way to Busiris, Jack dropped Timm at Helping Hands Preschool, later at Herbert Hoover Elementary School. Around noon, Rose Marié walked with Jenny Lynn to reclaim Timm, unless the son was joining his dad for lunch at the Tech, which he did about twice a month. From 8:30 to 10:00, Jack held office hours and prepared for class. From 10:00 to noon he taught. He usually lunched off campus. Occasionally on a warm day in early summer or fall, Jack and Lily would take a picnic lunch to Burr Oak Park: Beaujolais wine, Colby cheese, cherries or apples. Eat, walk, talk, and, yes, and make love, on a blanket spread below an oak deep in the park’s remoteness, or in the back seat of a car parked in some secluded corner of the park.
Afternoons Jack researched and wrote, initially in McKinley Library, later in the apartment Lily Lee and Lynette Taylor rented on Harding Avenue.
At 5:15 each evening Charles Creed arrived at the home he had purchased in 1973, using the Age of Faith advance as a down payment, to enthusiastic greetings from Timm and Jenny Lynn. “Nothing in this world beats the cry of ‘Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!’ in the mouth of a three- or five-year-old kid,” he assured me more than once. “That is all life is about. Keep that photo locked in the shadows of your heart, and you can walk through hell. Or New York City.”
5:15 to 6:00 was spent reading mail, magazines, and the newspaper. Supper followed at 6:00, and then play until 7:30, when Jack retired to his basement den to read and grade papers. However, the heating duct which fed his den also fed the rec room, so one could easily call up, or down—general greeting like “Hey, dad, how’s the air down there?” or a specific inquiry like “Hey, dad, are you working on my dollie house?” or just a general directive to “play with me, play with me.” Jack rarely spent 7:30 to 9:30 entirely in scholarship or grading.
9:30 was bath time, and at 10:00 Jack read or told the children a bedtime story. 10:30 brought a choice: join Rose Marié in bed, or finish the evening’s work. By the mid-seventies Jack was opting increasingly, I think it is fair to say with some degree of relief, for work.
Among the younger faculty, Jack was regarded as a New Age Father before the term was properly invented, just as he had been—regarding racism and sexism—politically correct before that term was invented. Charles spent a great deal of time with his children. He was a lion in promoting minority causes. Certainly he considered himself a feminist, and by the definitions of his time he was. “Women need to be lovely, intelligent, and hard-working,” he would say, “just as men should be handsome, intelligent and energetic. One out of three, even two out of three, just doesn’t cut it.”
The children were raised to be lovely (which for Jack meant lean and athletic), intelligent, and hard-working. Both Timm and Jenny received art and music lessons. Both Timm and Jenny accompanied Jack to Busiris Buck baseball and basketball games. When father and children played football, son and daughter alternated at tight end. When Timm turned seven, his father bought him the best Spaulding glove on the market. Three years later, Jenny Lynn received an identical glove . . . brand new, despite the fact that her brother had since graduated to a larger model. “She is not to think of herself as a hand-me-down athlete,” he told me, offering Timm’s old glove for my own son.
Father, son and daughter fished together, spent whole weekends camping in state parks from Wisconsin to Kentucky. From their earliest years the children had notoriously late bedtimes—no bed times at all really: Jack used their presence as insulation between himself and his wife—and traveled everywhere with Jack and Rose Marié. The essence of Jack’s child-rearing philosophy was, “Never say no when you can say yes.”
Returning from a conference in Ann Arbor sometime around 1975, Jack told me, “I figured it out on the drive home, Tucker. I love to travel, but travel usually doesn’t pay. If I am away from home alone, on vacation or at a conference, that’s two pluses against three minuses: I’m away from Busiris and away from my wife; but I’m also away from my kids and from Lily Lee, and spending lots of money. I’ve lost ground. If I’m away from home with my wife and kids, I’m still down two pluses to three minuses: away from Busiris and with my kids, but with my wife, away from Lily, and spending money. Being on the road benefits me only if I travel with Lily or the kids alone. Otherwise, I might as well stay the fuck in Riverton.”
During this period, Jack preferred increasingly to stay the fuck in Riverton and work on his book.
Working on his book brought him to Lily Lee. Writing Age of Faith pleased Jack far more than its actual publication, largely, I suspect, because of the environment in which he wrote. While the whole campus understood that Professor Creed was “off writing” each afternoon, most people assumed he was deep in the recesses of McKinley Library. Only Lynette and I knew he was typing away in the Harding Avenue apartment, which Lily and Lynette generously vacated from 1:00 to 4:30 every weekday afternoon of their freshman, sophomore, and junior years. How they managed to keep both themselves and their friends away, how Jack managed to enter and exit unnoticed, and how Jack disciplined himself to writing in such proximity to the bed of the woman he loved, I cannot imagine.
Shortly after lunch Jack let himself into the flat and spread his work across the bed. He typed at her dresser on an electric Smith Corona portable he had purchased for her with money out of his advance. At 4:30 he packed his work into a cardboard box (later several), which he tucked under the bed. On the bureau he left the day’s pages and a single red rose, fresh, which he bought around the corner at Main Street Floral, adjacent to the laundromat. Three years of roses bought plenty of discretion from the proprietor, who, she admitted to me later, knew good and well who the recipient was.
Each evening Lily Lee read what he had written during afternoon. The detailed commentary written in pencil on early drafts of Age of Faith manuscript (Novum State University Library, Special Collections MS-CC17 through MS-CC32) was written by Lily Lee Martin. Because she read source material as well as Jack’s text, Lily contributed a great deal to the final manuscript, as careful examination of successive drafts reveals. One reason promotion of the published Age of Faith was such an agony for Jack was that in his mind the book was so fused with Lily that without her presence it ceased, literally, to have meaning.
Jack and Lily discussed his text and her notes when they met on campus the following day and on those occasions when Jack lingered beyond 4:30 in the apartment of his beloved.
Those occasions were rare. Jack and Lily Lee were determined to keep their relationship secret, as much to guard her reputation as to protect his marriage, and they considered the apartment not a safe place to be together. They also avoided his house and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center as too risky for serious sex. They did not avoid his office (which was probably not bugged at that time), locked bedrooms at some student parties (five minute quickies before somebody noticed they’d gone concurrently AWOL), the sheltering recesses of Burr Oak Park, and the front seat of his car in some rural Illinois cornfield. When Linda and I left town on long vacations I would give him the key to our place, asking him to water plants and vent windows. Lily once remarked on our squeaky brass bed.
One summer day they made love in a canoe on the Sangamon River.
They’d gotten into a mild argument over T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” which Jack always admired and Lily always detested. “All that shit about ruined maidens,” Lily fumed. “Useless Brit. bitches. ‘Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’ You can’t do it in a canoe. What this jive-ass talking about?”
“You can do it in a canoe.”
“Shit, fool!”
“It could be done,” Jack insisted.
“You think so?” Lily challenged.
One hour later Jack and Lily were doing it in a canoe on some backwaters of the Sangamon. “It wasn’t too bad, either,” Jack insisted, “with the rocking of the water and all.”
“Yeah, until you got all excited and nearly drowned us,” Lily laughed.
Around Busiris, many suspected and some gossiped, but I think nobody, beyond Lynette, me, and the owner of Main Street Floral, knew absolutely and for certain that Lily and Jack were romantically involved. Those who disapproved did so for political reasons. Those who approved of the nearly inseparable couple considered them kindred spirits separated by age, gender, and race, a model black-white, student-teacher cooperation.
Which, in fact, they were. In addition to, but independent of, being lovers.
Who really cared? Jack and Lily Lee were not the first student-teacher lovers in Busiris’ history, nor were they the last. During the middle seventies, even a campus as conservative as Busiris Technical University, there were no anti-miscegenation laws, and no feminist confusions of sex and power. Any one of three dozen coeds, Lynette included, would have given her sorority pin to be in Lily’s position.
“Everybody should, once in their life, be crazy in love and young,” Jack told me a decade later. “Rose Marié and I were never crazy in love and young, and that was our problem. Victoria Nation, Lucy Kramer, the Dean of Women were never crazy, old or young, and that’s their real problem. I don’t want to be reductionist, you know, that old crap about ‘What they really need is a good fuck.’ But one time or another everyone has to cut the rope and be free. There’d be lots less war, lots less guilt, and lots fewer Puritans. I haven’t the slightest, singlest regret.”
The epigraph of Age of Faith Jack selected from Emerson: “Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.”
Jack and Lily were indeed extravagant and strange and indecorous, especially in 1973 and 1974. Streetwise and full of energy, Lily Lee Martin matched Jack vision for vision, scheme for scheme, prank for prank. Whereas Jack always tended to be disruptive in his pranks—late sixties surrealism with a comic edge, Lily was more in the earlier sixties tradition: political and didactic. She constructed. He deconstructed. You could laugh at Jack’s jokes. Lily’s had an edge.
Characteristic of Jack was the “Royal Nonesuch” memo. One morning after kissing Jenny Lynn goodbye and dropping Timm at Herbert Hoover, Jack hustled over to Busiris to type the “Royal Nonesuch” announcement from Twain’s Huck Finn onto a sheet of white paper. Across the top and bottom he pasted “PLEASE ANNOUNCE TO ALL CLASSES,” cut from one of a hundred such requests that had been jamming our mailboxes. The promotions of trivial meetings and self-help sessions had been driving us all nuts. This memo he had duplicated off campus, and by noon it had appeared in mail boxes all across campus. Most Busiris faculty had no idea what to make of it. Walking out the front door of Busiris Hall that afternoon, Lou and I overheard a couple of mathematicians puzzling over the strange document. “Well look here,” said one to the other, “it doesn’t give a date or a time.”
“And there’s no room location either,” the other pointed out.
“That’s the English Department for you,” the first said, triumphantly.
Lily got more than laughs for her pranks. She was especially clever in using the strategically placed phone call, letter, and even a bogus news story to further a good cause. Her main causes were the Black Students Alliance, over which she presided as president during her junior and senior years, and the Black Studies Program. With Jack, Lynette and a cadre of articulate black students she developed Afro-American Studies into a program offering a dozen different courses on an annual budget well into six figures . . . over and above faculty salaries (faculty were loaned to the program from other departments) and summer school expenses. She led the Alliance into a building of its own, the King Center, and to an annual budget of $25,000, most of it from student activity fees.
The base was a $10,000 allocation from B. T. U. Development Funds, which Lily Lee engineered in 1975, starting with two forged memos, one from the Dean of Liberal Arts to the Vice President for Academic Affairs, the other from the VPAA to the Dean. Each supported a program neither had proposed, each indicated a copy to B. S. A. President Lily Lee Martin. Lily took her “copies” to President Stoddard, who recognized a politically sensitive issue when he saw one. Stoddard gave his verbal blessings to the attractive young black woman and to what he assumed was the Dean’s or Vice President’s idea. The following day’s mail brought both Dean and VPAA copies of a phony written commitment from Stoddard. An article in the Thursday Sentinel announced the $10,000 allocation. Lily wrote profuse letters of thanks to Dean, VP, and Pres, none of whom apparently gave the subject further consideration.
A special account containing the not-at-all-bogus ten grand was set up by a slightly confused business office secretary, who had not heard of the allocation when Lily showed up requesting an account number. But who was she to quarrel with this Young Black Woman in Complete Control carrying a handful of memos from the Dean, the Vice President, and the President?
Lily was a prankster of no small capabilities.
The Development Funds allocation was renewed four years running . . . some of them years of serious economic hardship at Busiris.
As 1974 wore into 1975, and 1975 to 1976, Jack and Lily’s relationship mellowed, as relationships have a habit of doing. “Sex,” Jack always claimed, “is a necessary spark, but it will carry you only six months, a year at best. After sex comes love.” Intimacy is the word favored by people who usually prefer to skip the wild sex and go directly to caring. But as Jack also preached, intimacy follows after and develops from craziness. Men who are gentle, sensitive, and caring in their early twenties are dead in their thirties, and their women wonder if maybe they haven’t missed something.
Lily Lee missed nothing.
With intimacy, Lily and Jack achieved sophistication, elegance and even respectability. Lily’s miniskirts, hip-huggers, tank tops, cutoffs, and scuffed sneakers disappeared in 1974. Jack took to calling her “The Lady” and “Daisy” in reference to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In the spring of 1975 he joined the Faculty Club, which he had previously scorned, for the sole purpose of entertaining Lily Lee. At the Club, Jack and Lily Lee could look smart and talk Langston Hughes or Age of Faith over a gin and tonic.
By fall 1975, Jack and Lily were joining English Department colleagues and lower level Busiris administration types for Friday afternoon happy hour at the Heidelberger Lounge, Jack in pleated slacks and a Christopher Scott shirt, Lily Lee in an outfit from Carson Pirie Scott or Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Dressed to the nines, seated in one of those heavy carved oak chairs at the Heidelberger, margarita in one hand and a popped shrimp in the other, Lily Lee Martin was the Queen of Diamonds herself.
Friday afternoon happy hour at the Heidelberger is one reason Lily Lee was hired in 1980 as Busiris affirmative action officer, after some of those lower level administrative types had moved slightly up the Old Main ladder. On the other hand, one particular Friday afternoon is the reason that the mature Lily Lee—intelligent, black, M.A., from Northwestern, right there on the Busiris campus—never taught even an adjunct course in Victoria Nation’s Women’s Studies program.
Victoria, whatever her other deficiencies, had a natural instinct for political opportunity. She was a Heidelberger regular, even though she really didn’t like to drink, was not particularly adept at witty conversation, and was a natural target for practical jokes and put-downs. One thing about Victoria: she did what she had to do.
She sat, invariably, at a polar distance from Jack and Lily, at one end of the long oak trestle table, vying with them for control of the middle. In a direct contest, she was no match for either Jack or Lily, but she had the staying power of a Mike Tyson. They’d get in a few sharp jabs early, then lose interest, retreating into each other or Lou Feracca and me, leaving the field to Victoria, who forged ahead like a D-9 Cat. Occasionally Jack or Lily would toss a nonchalant barb, which bounced off Victoria like a BB off the battleship Missouri. Then they’d return to their private discussion and Victoria reclaimed the ears, if not the eyes, of faculty, grad students, and Old Main lower management.
One exchange, however, was neither ignored nor forgotten.
Daisy had been offering her critique of some young black writer (not Toni Morrison) who was receiving tremendous and, she thought, unwarranted media attention. “This chick hustles her way into a copy editor job for some New York house. Very clever, very bourgeois. Naturally she writes a book of her own, probably her intent all along, which her connections in publishing get published. The same connections provide blurbs and reviews, and suddenly she’s the new black voice speaking for her people. In reality, she’s still just mousy, middle-class Maud, who gets it all second-hand. Only to literary types, who take everything second hand, could she be anything but a complete rip-off. She’s entirely removed from the ordinary lives of ordinary Afro-Americans, and a paradigm for the co-option that’s going on in movement right now. Too many people who haven’t suffered are making too much capital off the misery of people who did suffer. They collect the goodies, while the oppressed are left behind in the dust, where they always were. Workers still stuck in the back of the bus do not give a rat’s ass whether the dude up front is white or a black. Today, working-class blacks got no hope at all, because whenever they complain, they hear, ‘Look at all this shit we’re doin’ for you people. Why Ms. Booshie Black’s new novel just won the National Book Award.’ ”
The black undergraduate’s tirade reduced the table of M. A.’s and Ph. D.’s to thoughtful silence. Embarrassed, Lily retreated slightly.
“Anyway, that’s just my opinion. My opinion is apparently way out of line, but it’s my opinion. So all right, then I’ll go to hell.”
Unexpectedly, Victoria took Lily’s side. “I think it’s commendable for a young female student to have opinions of her own,” she began. “Many times as a young woman struggling to find my identity in an established graduate program, I was forced to confront the white, Anglo-Saxon, male patriarchy, whose views I naturally wished to question. You could do a fine deconstruction of any text, Miss Martin, I am sure. You don’t really have to go to hell for your opinions.”
Lily blinked. “Have you read that book?”
“The novel you were describing?” Victoria asked her. “I’m afraid I’ve been reading mostly theory these days.”
“I meant The Adventures of Huck Finn.”
“The ‘going to hell’ reference was to Huck Finn,” Jack told Victoria. “It’s the climax of the novel. You got through an M.A. program without reading that book . . . ?”
“I’m also very active on campus committees,” Victoria continued as if neither Jack nor Lily had spoken a word. “As some people at this table are not.” This with a look at Jack and me.
“Go to, Victoria,” Jack cheered. “You’re well on your way to being an . . . administrator!”
“Committee work, Chas, is the ward politics of academia. With your purported proletarian proclivities, I should think you’d condescend to do more of it. I could use you, for example, on the academic affairs committee.”
“Let it be noted that Victoria wants to use Charles,” Lou Feracca said wryly.
“Victoria Nation is the woman to see for an academic affair,” quipped someone else.
“I am the Associate Chairperson of the Busiris Academic Affairs Committee.”
“The Associate Chair of the Academic Affairs Committee,” Jack echoed solemnly. “You’re one important son-of-a-bitch, Miss Vicki!”
Victoria flushed. “Professor Creed [Victoria always jumped to “Professor That” and “Doctor That” whenever she was about to assume the high moral ground], you really should guard your tongue. Especially around undergraduates. A number of your students have noticed your gutter talk, and are offended by it. It hurts them. Words can be as sharp as swords.”
“Sticks and stones will break my bones,” Lily Lee recited.
“You especially, Miss Martin, who have been doubly oppressed, as a Negro and again as a woman. . . .”
“Black women are the strongest force on earth, Professor Nation. Black women dominate all relationships, black or white, male or female. You watch those big black football players Saturday on television. Camera pans the bench. They all wave. ‘Hi, mom.’ ‘Hi, mom.’ Every one of them. You don’t hear any ‘Hi, dad.’ Black women are powerful people.”
“Who know the oppression of words.”
“Names don’t cut no shit with me, Professor Nation. I’ve been called so many fuckin’ names in my life. . . .”
“Every word the lash of a whip.”
“I been hit, and I been bad-mouthed. I’ll take the words any day.”
“Words don’t wound the way sticks and stones wound,” Jack asserted.
“Verbal wounds are more oppressive than physical wounds, Professor Creed. You are a literary man. You know the power of a verbal construct to imprison us in a false image of ourselves. It is words that define our race, our sexualities, and our class.”
“Talk is talk,” Jack insisted. “A word does not hurt like a rock hurts.”
Victoria persisted. “Verbal assaults injure just as severely as physical assaults.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“I certainly do.”
Jack considered his words. “I’ll make you a proposal,” he said. “You hit me with five verbal assaults. The worst things you can imagine. True or untrue, vulgar, sexist, demeaning, I don’t care. Five of them. Then I hit you five times on the head with a rock. Is that a deal?”
“I’m not a fool, Charles. No one agrees to be hit. No woman wants to be assaulted.”
“I agreed to five assaults from you. Why won’t you agree to five assaults from me?”
“That’s different.”
“That’s the point, Professor Nation,” Lou concluded.
“You don’t know anything about abuse, Professor Nation,” Lily Lee said. “You’re just another white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class Puritan from a cozy middle-class world looking to cop a free ride off black people’s misery. Tryin’ to save the world from post-Freudian literature. Have you actually read anything more recent than Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf?” she wanted to know.
“Perhaps we could begin with Barbara Moran’s Woman in a Sexist Society. I commend that book to you as a Negro and as a woman.”
“I skimmed that book once. Terrible. It has nothing to do with reality. Or men. It’s all useless theory.”
“Apparently your advisor is not advising you well, Miss Martin. Theory is the very point of a university education. We are intellectuals at this university. We enjoy ideas. Ideas and cultured discussion. People who do not appreciate ideas . . . perhaps they do not belong here.” This came with a long look at Lou.
“For every theory, there is an equal and opposite theory,” Jack said.
“I’ll take a good fuck over good ideas any day,” Lily told Vicky.
More than one male jaw dropped. “The rest of this table, not to mention the rest of America, agrees with me.”
“Loosen up, Vicky, and get laid,” Jack advised.
“Getting laid, as you so vulgarly put it, ignores women’s integrity and worth. That kind of sexual oppression does not build a society free from prejudice and bias.”
“Professor Nation,” Lily Lee said, “you’re an old maid at thirty. You were probably an old maid at eighteen. Until you get laid, you’re never going to figure it out. All the books and all the theory in the world won’t help you.
“I’m supposed to say I feel sorry for you, but I don’t. Instead of solving your problem, you go around making your problem everybody else’s problem. You’re a bad trip. If this drink were a bucket of water, I’d throw it on you and watch you melt.”
The rest of the table laughed aloud. Victoria did not. She pushed her seat back from the table and left the bar. She did not return to the Heidelberger for several weeks thereafter.
Nobody missed her, least of all Jack. He had Lily, and his children, and his work. He had, in short, everything.
Lily didn’t think much about Victoria Nation either, one way or the other. Not then. Nor did the rest of the campus. In the middle seventies, it was Charles Creed—and Lily Lee Martin—whom others regarded as representing the institution’s future. It was Charles Creed whose approval others sought, to whom they came when something needed to be done.
In all fairness, Charles Creed did Busiris a great deal of good, sometimes consciously, sometimes as an accident of promoting himself or just having fun. Charles Creed engineered the Field House Construction Compromise. Charles Creed fathered the Afro-American program and later, against his own will, the Women’s Studies program. Charles Creed was a Bucks Booster. Charles Creed’s reputation gave Busiris national prominence, and attracted both students and donations. Charles Creed is the only Pulitzer Prize winner Busiris ever had, or is likely to have.
Charles Creed brought to McKinley Library the core of its now nationally known Lincoln Collection.
That great adventure may have marked the high point of Jack and Lily’s relationship.
It began on September 21, 1976, when Jack received an interesting phone call from his friend Roger Holmes. Holmes had been selected as the new director of McKinley Library from a field of forty-nine applicants for the vacancy created when Basil Gilbert Wentworth completed his death in the spring. With only six years’ experience as a reference librarian at De Paul (degree from John Carroll, 1970), Holmes was a surprising choice. Jack, one of two faculty members on the hiring committee, had fought hard and cleverly for him. He had finagled Holmes into the final three on the argument that a young ringer would make the experienced, and older, and safer, and less qualified internal candidate appear seasoned and therefore the better choice. In his on-campus interview, however, Holmes came across as confident, intelligent, and—within the boundaries of Busiris prudence—imaginative. The internal candidate looked old and stale. On a split vote heralded by the younger faculty as one glimmer of hope in otherwise darkening times, the selection committee recommended Holmes. Administration hired Holmes as the cheaper alternative, despite some lobbying from Old Ones inside McKinley Library. By June of 1976, his rival had found a position elsewhere, further reducing the library payroll. Six months later, another of the disgruntled Old Ones left McKinley, saving Old Main even more bucks. Holmes was by far the cheaper choice.
And the better choice. Holmes could make bricks without straw. He was especially adept at getting more work out of fewer people, at squirreling away stashes of cash for under-the-table acquisitions and renovations, and at cajoling selected local citizens into financing appropriate small projects which, down the line and supported further by the same or donors, could be developed into much larger projects. During his tenure at Busiris, Holmes managed to extend library holdings and hours, develop an archival and rare books collection, and lay the groundwork for Busiris’ entry into technological informational systems. Unfortunately he never realized his two pet projects: a Regional Studies Collection of downstate literary and historical manuscripts, and a new building.
Holmes proposed the Regional Studies idea during his interview, but Old Main nixed it as expensive. Before Holmes could line up local donors, John Hallwas at Western Illinois had taken the initiative and begun the remarkable collection he has since built there. A new library, of course, came only after fire gutted the old one.
But Roger Holmes was never defeated. When one idea failed, he had two others to pursue. Of three schemes, two failed and one succeeded. Holmes’ imagination was fecund enough that even batting .333 he collected a lot of hits.
“Charles Creed, this is Roger Holmes in the Library,” said the voice on the telephone that September Tuesday. “I want to talk to you immediately.”
“Fire away.”
“Not on the phone.”
“Meet you in your office?”
“Not in the office.” Jack was intrigued.
“Then you tell me.”
“I’ll meet you in front of McKinley in five minutes. Then we’ll go for a walk.”
Jack indicated he was a little tied up. “A class at ten for which I’m not entirely prepared.”
“Forget the class,” Roger told him. “This is important.”
Five minutes later Creed joined Holmes at the main entrance to McKinley Library. The two exchanged greetings, and Jack moved in the direction of Busiris Quad.
“Not past Old Main,” Holmes commanded. “Off campus.”
“Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you,” Jack mused aloud. “Stoddard has resigned.”
“Hush, hush. Bigger than that.”
“Stoddard has been caught embezzling millions, resigned in disgrace, and named you the new president.”
“Almost as big as that. Be quiet and walk.”
For ten minutes Holmes and Creed admired the fall foliage. Holmes led them past Dorms East, towards the student apartments and vaguely in the direction of Lily and Lynette’s apartment. For a moment Jack’s pulse raced.
Finally Roger Holmes spoke.
“I think I know where we can get 800 to a thousand books published before 1850, all reportedly in good condition. And about 2,000 manuscript letters dating to the early 1800s, many of historical significance. Possibly this material includes some Lincoln items: books, letters, and even manuscripts.”
“Well holy shit.”
“Holy shit is right. Not a word of this to anyone.”
“Doublecross my heart. I am silent as a brick.”
“This conversation is not taking place.”
“A thousand old books, two thousand old letters, and legitimate Lincoln material. You know, or you think you know?”
“I’m 95% certain.”
“I’m listening.”
“You familiar with Jubilee College State Park, over near Peoria?”
“I’ve camped there with the kids.”
“You know much of the history?”
“I read a sign there once.”
“Interesting place. The founder, Philander Chase, was the guy who founded Kenyon.”
“In Gambier, Ohio.”
“The same. Good school, after a rocky start. Chase was the Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, and he set up Kenyon as a seminary for Episcopal priests ‘in the West.’ Seems he didn’t trust decadent Easterners to minister west of the mountains. This is back in 1824. In 1831 Chase got chased out of the school he himself had built, by the faculty he himself had hired. After a stint in Michigan, he got himself appointed Bishop of Illinois, and in 1839—at age sixty-four, incidentally—he began buying land, collecting donations, and raising funds for a second seminary.”
“That’s the College? Not quite Kenyon, as I recall.”
“Jubilee never made it. Chase kept the whole operation in his hip pocket. Land and buildings in his name. Donations made to Chase personally. Faculty appointed ‘for tenure of good behavior’ by Chase personally. Students admitted, and expelled, by Chase personally.”
“Is Stoddard at all related to this guy?”
“It worked until Chase died in 1852. Then came the troubles, including the Civil War. The operation folded in 1860. It reopened a couple of times after the War, but you’ve seen how it ended.”
“Not much there that I saw,” Jack observed.
“Not much at all. Where it all went is anyone’s guess. Chase was more prolific than even you. The library contained at least two thousand books. A dozen or so ended up at Seabury-Western, on the Northwestern campus in Evanston. I’ve seen them. They have Jubilee College Library book plates, a photocopy of which I will provide for you. Each plate carries a number. I saw book number 2251.
“Chase got Jubilee made a U.S. Post Office, and himself made postmaster. That position carried free franking privileges. He wrote everyone who was anyone, and they wrote him back. Chase also had a publishing operation, and mailed leaflets and booklets by the ton.
“He had connections everywhere: England, New England, Charleston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York. Dudley Chase was U.S. Senator from Vermont. Salmon Portland Chase—the abolitionist lawyer—was U.S. Senator from Ohio. He was also presidential nominee at the Republican convention of 1860. He was also Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln, whose candidacy he finally supported in 1860. Also Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the Reconstruction years. Also the nephew of Bishop Philander Chase, with whom he lived for a couple years in Ohio.
“So Philander Chase has a major Lincoln connection. Another Lincoln connection is Rev. Charles Dresser, member of the Jubilee faculty, who officiated at the marriage of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd, November 1842 . . . when Philander was very much alive, not a hundred miles up the road from Springfield. Lincoln was a circuit lawyer: definitely visited towns like Knox, Galesburg, Peoria, Pekin, and Eureka. Probably Jubilee too if he knew Dresser. Lincoln probably knew Philander Chase personally, as an older and very established power.”
“Which brings us to the books and the letters,” Jack surmised.
“Exactly. This is Philander Chase’s personal property we’re talking about, kept by his heirs. The letters definitely were Chase’s property. The books—who can say, really, to whom the books were donated? If they weren’t technically Chase’s property, he viewed them as his personal property.
“It’s been assumed that the library remained at Jubilee between Chase’s death in 1852 and the closing of the college in 1860, and even beyond 1860. Probably some of it did. That closing was viewed as temporary in 1860. But Chase’s death precipitated a lot of animosity between his heirs and the institutional Episcopal Church: who had owned what, who still owned what, who owed whom what for loans, mortgages, land, buildings. Chase and the hierarchy had always been at war, and Chase had made the Bishop of Illinois ex officio president of the college. That was fine while he was the Bishop, but after he died . . . the next Episcopal Bishop of Illinois never set foot in the state. I doubt that most of whatever Chase considered his personal belongings remained at the college much beyond 1853.
“Anyway, it has virtually disappeared. I saw a few books in Evanston. Kenyon College has a modest collection of Chase papers, but the heirs detested Kenyon even more than they detested Jubilee and the organized Episcopal Church. The story you most hear is that everything stayed stored at Jubilee, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, through a couple of abortive openings and closings, through World War I, and into the Depression. Then it became fuel for the fires around which indigents tried to keep themselves alive. It’s inconceivable that Chase’s heirs would have let valuable books and letters molder away in empty buildings. They were learned and proud people. And even today Jubilee is full of old furniture that would have made much warmer fires for Depression hoboes than books.”
“Makes sense,” Jack agreed.
“And god knows, enough intelligent people have visited that place. . . . You and I are not the first book people to scrounge around old Jubilee College. The Peoria Episcopal Cathedral has held services out there twice a year since the twenties. If there were stacks of books and letters piled around . . . the philatelic value alone would interest people.”
“So you believe it’s stashed?”
“I believe much of it was stashed. Yes. By whom, and where, I am not at liberty to tell you. I’m not even sure the present owner of the treasure knows. I’m not sure she’s aware of what she’s got. I don’t know what’s there myself. All I know is that I received a telephone call late yesterday afternoon from a certain woman in St. Louis whose mother had recently passed away. This woman is not a Chase, nor was her mother, but two generations up the family tree is one Anna Chase Chamberlain, Philander’s granddaughter. In the attic of her mother’s mansion, this woman gave me to understand, is a large collection of old books and letters, most of them dating back to before the Civil War. The books, she says, contain Jubilee College Library plates.”
“Too damned much.”
“I’m just guessing about the Lincoln material. Her description was only ‘books and old letters.’ ”
“So my assignment, should I accept it. . . .”
“Here’s the situation. I have a little money saved, and I might be able to find a source for some more. Not nearly enough to buy this stuff at its actual value, assuming she’s got what I think she’s got. In a bidding war, I will lose, even to a used book dealer, not to mention more generously endowed and forward looking colleges and universities. Or the State of Illinois. I need not tell you that many schools would love to get their paws on this stuff.”
“Especially that other basketball school over there in Peoria.”
“Especially that one. Also Western, Sangamon, Knox, Wesleyan, Kenyon, and Northwestern. And Washington U., literally in the woman’s back yard.
“There are, however, some strengths to our position. First, this woman’s naïveté plays into our hands. If I can convince her that what she has is valuable enough to interest us, but not valuable enough to interest anyone else, she stays away from outside appraisals, and I’m in the ball game.
“Second, Busiris has the inside track. She graduated from Busiris in the late fifties, and whatever the rest of us think about this place, she remembers her years here fondly. As a Bucks fan, she naturally detests the Badley Braves, which cuts out our number one contender.”
“From what I’ve heard,” Jack said, “they’ve got less money even than Busiris.”
“And less vision. Anyway, this stuff will not end up in Peoria. She is a little suspicious of the State of Illinois and State schools in general: too big. Washington U. and Northwestern both rejected her college application, and she carries a grudge. I think that’s the reason she didn’t call Washington U. in the first place. St. Louis U. is Catholic, and thus eliminated. While explaining Jubilee College, I made a point of mentioning the shameful treatment Chase received from the Episcopal Church and Kenyon College. Maybe we cut them out too.
“There is a third reason, the reason I phoned you. Somehow, somewhere—I do not know where—she has heard your name, and has formed the impression that you’re the second coming of Philander Chase. She has this idea that Professor Creed is a very learned man. If she donates this material to her alma mater, it will be put to good use by Professor Charles Creed.”
“This is a little out of my time frame,” Jack pointed out.
“You’ve published on Thoreau. Maybe after this book you’ve been writing, you can do something with it. This may be a remarkable scholarly opportunity. And this woman believes in you.”
“I have my supporters.”
“Not too many of them are wealthy, middle-aged Episcopalians.”
“Maybe she’s a closet liberal.”
“Maybe she’s just a not-too-bright alumna who has plenty of money, doesn’t read the Standard-Republican or the Sentinel, and got a notion in her head about you from a niece or nephew. That’s a safer assumption, and the assumption under which I want you to operate.”
“Should I accept this assignment.”
“McKinley Library was very generous in supporting your research. Especially in the early stages. You owe it something.”
“McKinley gave me no more than it owes any serious faculty member. If my work over-burdened its interlibrary loan staff, that’s the price it pays for decades of chintzy acquisitions budgets.”
Holmes retreated. “Okay. Agreed. No bullshit among friends, Chas. Would you buy the ‘we all live under the same roof’ argument? We’re all in this together. Your ass is tied up in this institution, like all of ours. Whether everyone at Busiris admits it or not, a good book from Charles Creed is good for the institution. A coup for McKinley Library archives is good for the institution.”
“You can’t handle this yourself, Roger?”
“You will impress her more. Besides, I am absolutely locked up. Last Saturday of the month is the Trustees’ Meeting. In four days I make my pitch for a new library. That takes precedence over absolutely everything. And while I don’t want to appear too eager, I don’t want to let things slide much beyond this weekend. I want to phone her back and say yes, I’m interested, and I’m sending your man Creed down to talk.”
“I’m pretty buried myself right now. Full teaching load plus page proofs and photo package on the book. Too bad this stuff is not in New York, next door to Magnum Photo.”
“This is important,” Holmes pleaded.
Still Jack hesitated.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Holmes said finally. “I will blow you to a weekend of class A proofreading in St. Louis. I’m talking absolutely first class. Not the Hilton, but the Ritz-Carleton. Luxury suite. You and Rose Marié make a weekend of it. Put your meals on the tab, too. Take in a show or a movie. That’s just for going down there and spending two hours with this woman. Charm the pants off her if you have to. I know you can do it, Chas. I have seen you do it.”
A plan was forming in the back of Jack’s mind.
“A weekend at the Ritz in return for two hours of tea and crumpets. Check the books, and check the letters. Be casual, be alert. Especially look for Lincoln stuff. In my office I have photocopies of Lincoln’s manuscript hand, along with a copy of the Jubilee College book plate.
“Now if we land this little treasure,” Holmes added, “before it is inventoried, I will slip you under the table two books out of the collection. The first is a book of your own choice. The collection’s Star of India if you want it. Second book is my choice, and I will not stiff you on that either. Plus five randomly selected manuscript letters from the Chase material.
Holmes saw his man nearly hooked.
“And if there is any Lincoln stuff,” he added triumphantly, “one manuscript of your own choice. If we land the donation. That’s my offer.”
“And a generous quid pro quo it is,” Jack said. “You are a deal-makin’ man, Holmes. Sure there’s not a little Yom Kippur in your blood?”
“Negotiations may, you understand, involve another visit or two to St. Louis.”
“One of my personal favorite cities.”
“And this is absolutely on the Q. T. The first anyone knows of it is an announcement in the newspaper. And I mean anyone.”
“Absolutely,” Jack agreed. “Which brings up a small point, friend Roger. Rose Marié is not exactly one to keep a secret. Why not let me go down there alone Friday, ‘to do touch-up research’ we’ll tell people. I’ll meet this woman and do my best for you. And you’ll pick up the tab, absolutely on the Q. T.?”
“Whatever you want,” Holmes promised Creed.
“Done deal,” Jack said. The two shook hands and, a block from Lily’s apartment, turned their steps back toward McKinley Library.
With his rose that afternoon Jack left Lily a note in a sealed envelope. “For a good time, see Jack of Hearts. B. H. 313 tomorrow. Very hush hush. Lots of love, and kisses where they do you the most good.”
At supper that evening Jack announced that he would be spending the weekend down in Southern Illinois. Timm and Jenny were disappointed. Rose Marié, accustomed to Jack’s research trips, was only mildly curious. She had, as the saying goes, spent a month in Carbondale one weekend, and had no desire ever to see the place again.
“I thought you were done writing,” she said.
“I thought I was too,” Jack answered. “Every time I think I’m done, the Scribner’s copy editor finds a dozen more loose ends.”
“I suppose that means I’m stuck with the kids.”
“This book will make us a bundle.”
“You keep telling me.”
“You gotta have faith and believe.”
“You keep telling me that too.”
There the matter rested.
“It was all I could do to keep from phoning,” Lily told him the next morning. “But I figured if it was so secret, you wouldn’t be able to talk on the phone.”
“It was all I could do to keep myself from hanging around the apartment to tell you,” Jack said. “But I didn’t know who might walk with you through the door. What I’d say if it wasn’t Lynette. Or, for that matter if it was Lynette.”
“So what’s the big deal?”
“I’m going to St. Louis this weekend and thought you might like to come along. Friday night, Saturday, back Sunday late.”
“We’re talkin’ west side of the Mississippi?”
“The original St. Louis. Accept no substitutes. Although you can visit your mom if you want.”
“This girl ain’t never goin’ back to East St. Lou. To that life that never happened. You know that, big boy. You sure this trip is cool?”
“I made an announcement last night. Rose Marié drew a couple of incorrect conclusions, and I did not straighten her out.”
Lily Lee thought for a moment. “You be workin’ on your book or what?”
“You got a better offer?” Jack asked, half afraid of the answer.
“A gal like me always got offers. You know that, honey. An’ you know a gal like me will trade them all for one weekend with her man. Even if it’s lying in some Howard Johnson motel room workin’ on a book and watchin’ football on TV.”
“I never said nothin’ ‘bout reading no book in no Ho Jo motel room. Except for two hours, I am absolutely free this weekend. Cards game, sight-seeing, fine dining. Maybe fuck our brains out. At the Ritz-Carlton, no less.”
“Say what?”
“Holmes in the library has an assignment for me. In payment, he’s offering a weekend at the Ritz, meals and entertainment included.”
“The Ritz? That place on Carondelet Plaza? Shit, fool. We walk in there together, they will send you off for the mandatory shot of penicillin, and send me downtown in a squad car.”
“Not a chance.”
“Now what they gonna be s’posin’, I come walkin’ in there with you? Those niggers at the front door? The desk clerk? The restaurant? They’ll be thinkin’ I’m some cheap hooker from across the river. That’s what.”
“Fuck ‘em. Let ‘em think what they want. The Cards are in town, playing the Pirates. Double-header on Friday, games on Saturday and Sunday. Bound to be plenty of tickets.”
“I ain’t doin’ it.”
“I’ll put a ring on your finger if it makes you feel more comfortable.”
“Don’t you be messin’ with my mind.”
“A big one. You flash a ring in their face, you’re Mrs. Charles Creed. They can think all the ugly thoughts about me they want.”
“Put your ring on Friday, take your ring off Sunday? That kind of a deal?”
Jack was hurt. “Daisy! I am no three-day deal, and you should know that by now. I’m always yours and you’re always mine, whatever I’m doing, wherever I’m traveling.”
“I know this dream, Jack. It’s never going to work. It’s crazy.”
“I’m just trying to blow us to a big weekend together. On Mother B.”
Lily Lee reflected a moment, then smiled. “Shake me, take me, baby. You tell me when, I’ll be ready.”
“Friday noon, after class?”
“Friday noon after class.”
Friday 1:45 p.m. found Jack and Lily buck naked in the front seat of a maroon 1971 Crown Victoria headed south on I-55 just past Springfield.
It was a scene right out of Kerouac. Illinois cornfields flew by on either side. KMOX boomed from the radio. Jack kept watching the rear mirror for overtaking trucks, the front windshield to avoid overtaking vehicles ahead, the speedometer to avoid getting pulled over by cops, and of course Lily Lee’s remarkable body, kissing her, feeling her, feeling her feeling him.
“Gimme a rest stop,” he begged aloud. “A weigh station. A broad shoulder with lots of tall grass.”
“You just drive your stick shift,” Lily commanded, “and I’ll drive mine.”
At the magical moment—Lily horizontal with her head in Jack’s lap, Jack’s right hand busy between her legs—the Crown Victoria got sandwiched between a slow-mover ahead and an eighteen-wheeler roaring up in the passing lane. Jack let the truck ease up to his left fender, then braked lightly, hoping the truck would shoot quickly by. The driver must have seen something, because he swerved, then hit his horn two long ones. Wooooo, wooooo!
“Nothing he hasn’t seen already,” Lily Lee said. “Eat your heart out, good buddy. Ten-four.” Then she went back to her work.
Twenty minutes later, spent but still naked, the couple approached the rest stop at Atwater-Raymond. Jack suggested they put their jeans back on, then use the facilities to dress for the Ritz. “We walk in the way we’re dressed right now, and they’ll put us both in a squad car.”
“And clean up this seat!” Lily ordered her husband for a weekend.
“I love you,” Jack told Lily.
“I love you too. You know that?”
“Well, I guess.”
“Well, I know. The Ritz. My mama would never believe it.”
Jack arrived at the Ritz in a dark blue suit and tie, Lily in a sleeveless white blouse, a pleated yellow skirt, high heels, and wide-brimmed hat. And a gold ring about two inches wide that Jack had picked up in a Riverton pawn shop. The young black car hop and the old black doorman gave the couple a long once-over. The white desk clerk did not. His expression suggested he considered Jack and Lily the most bourgeois Middle American couple in Riverton. Jack signed “Mr. and Mrs. John Charles Creed” and offered a driver’s license and Holmes’ university credit card.
Mr. and Mrs. Creed carried their own small suitcases upstairs. Around 4:20 p.m., early in the first game of the Cards’ twi-night doubleheader with the Pirates, Jack opened the door, caught Lily as she was about to enter the room, lifted her in his arms, and carried her across the threshold.
On the credenza beside the television set, a bouquet of one dozen red roses.
“Jack,” gasped Lily.
“Consider them another little gift from Roger Holmes,” Jack chuckled.
“One dozen exactly,” Lily finished counting. “We’ve got to get busy. . . .”
Mr. and Mrs. John Charles Creed did not emerge from behind closed doors until 9:30 p.m. Neither knew that St. Louis had bested Pittsburgh 10-6 in the opener, and neither knew that St. Louis was losing the night cap bigtime. Neither cared. They took their evening meal in the Ritz-Carlton: shrimp cocktails, fillet mignon, and, believe it, a bottle of Moët champagne. At 10:45 the couple returned to their room, hanging a “do not disturb” sign on the outside handle.
At 11:00 the next morning, Jack and Lily were awakened by the call they had ordered as a precaution against oversleeping. “Damn,” was all Jack said.
“I could get used to this,” Lily thought aloud. “I really could.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Jack muttered, assuming his Dean Moriarty persona. “Now darling, there is just one little thing today. I must, repeat I must fulfill my end of the agreement which I have been sent here to do, and that is at 2:00 this very afternoon in. Regrettably I must do this alone, honey lamb, being on my, ahem, very best behavior, preparing for my labors around 1:00 and returning from them, in great triumph we hope, around 5:00. The balance of the day I am devotionally and emotionally, as always, entirely and absolutely yours. The Botanical Gardens call. The Zoological Gardens call. The Gateway Arch, and the Anheuser Busch Brewery. This fair city’s second-to-last place baseball team, with Lou Brock and Gary Templeton. This lovely hotel, with its delights and distractions. Whatever you want, you name it.”
“I done had what I want,” Lily told Jack. “I’m satisfied. ‘Black girls just wanna get fucked all night’. . . .”
Jack smiled. “I just don’t have that much jazz,” he told her, completing the Rolling Stones line.
“Girl, don’t you know that all these rich ole white men got monkey glands and billy goat balls?” Lily announced, quoting Ellison this time. In ten minutes she was riding him once more.
“Damn,” Jack said after half an hour. “I could get used to this. I really could.”
“Rock me, lock me, baby. You’re the one.”
Over a fashionably late breakfast, the two planned what remained of the day. While Jack was off pursuing his own mysterious mission, Lily would tend to a little business of her own. The two would rendezvous at 5:00 at Laclede’s Landing, hit the ball park, and do the town brown.
“You need the car?” Jack offered.
“You take the car.”
“If you’re visiting your mom, you need the car.”
“I’m not visiting my mom.”
“Do I get a second guess?”
“Classified mission,” Lily told him. “Like yours. You’ll know in good time.”
“No monkey business,” Jack warned.
“No monkey business yourself.”
“You’re the one I’m livin’ for,” Jack informed Lily seriously. With a laugh he added, “Besides, what I got, you already took.”
“You’re loaded,” Lily told him, and, below the table cloth, ran a hand up the inside of his leg. Jack stiffened.
“Damn,” was Lily’s only comment. “You want to pass me a little more of that there dressing?”
When Jack met Lily Lee at 5:00, the rear axle of his Crown Victoria was riding on the axle. The back seat was packed so high with books and papers Jack could not see out of the rearview mirror. The front passenger seat was also nearly filled. Lily could barely find room for herself and the package she was holding.
“Where’s you get this nigger car?” she demanded as soon as the door was closed. “What is all this shit?”
“About a million bucks,” Jack told her excitedly as he maneuvered back into the flow of traffic. “Man, have I got the story for you. But first we got to get this machine back to protected parking at the Ritz. If I can see to drive it there.”
Jack’s mission to Mrs. Kathleen Morrison had succeeded beyond Roger Holmes’ wildest imaginings. For almost an hour in the parlor of the mansion of her deceased mother Mrs. Morrison had fenced adroitly with the handsome young Professor of English from her alma mater, about whom she had heard so many nice things from the daughter of a very close personal friend. They spoke of Transcendentalist writers and Bucks basketball, the future of higher education and the St. Louis Cardinals’ pitching staff. Of Jack’s youth on Long Island and her own youth in this home. Of Jack’s book, a copy of which she hoped he would send her the moment it appeared.
“Monday I will send a special letter to Scribner’s, and tell them to bill my royalty account,” Jack promised. “Cross my heart.”
“I would so hope it comes autographed,” Morrison protested.
“Autographed it will be,” Jack promised again.
“And what are your research plans after this book is published?” Morrison wanted to know.
Jack was not sure. “Probably something in 19th century America,” he ventured.
After an hour, something inside Morrison broke. “The woman made up her mind,” Jack told Lily. “I could see it in her eyes. I don’t know what I said or did. The process was entirely sub-rational. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lingering smell of our love this morning had as much to do with her decision as anything else. At one point she just decided I was a person she liked and could trust, and she wanted me to have her books. She’s not so much donating them to Busiris, as she’s donating them to me. And it’s a donation. Free. Holmes will be ecstatic. Not like she needs the money, mind you. Holmes will get her a tremendous write-off against inheritance taxes, and that’s apparently all she wants. I promised we’d name a room in the library for her mother. He and she can work that out.”
“Did she come on to you?” Lily was jealous.
“Probably she did, in her middle-aged, middle-class, Episcopalian way. She came on with tea and cakes and witty conversation. And the contents of her mother’s attic. We hadn’t even got to the attic, and she’d made up her mind.
“Once she made up her mind, her purpose was fixed. She wanted everything out of her grandmother’s attic and on the way to Busiris immediately. ‘You will take these things with you today, Professor Creed,’ she told me.
“ ‘My car is too small,’
“ ‘I want them out of my house by sundown.’
“ ‘It’s raining.’
“ ‘I don’t care.’
“In the back of my head I hear my uncle Lou’s voice: ‘Get the money up front, kid.’ I haven’t even seen the stuff. All this is going on in her parlor. I figure Roger will shoot me if I blow the deal, and what the hell, for this price he can toss what he doesn’t want. I tell her ‘sure thing.’
“So we start loading. I start loading. One box at a time, from the attic. I no more know what’s in those boxes than I know what’s in your package. From the looks of what’s on top, I think we’re into something big time. Anyway, I must have gone up and down those stairs twenty times. Each time, toss a jacket over the top of whatever I’m carrying to keep it dry, open the car door, set the stuff in, close the door.
“She’s right alongside of me every trip, holding an umbrella. On her way through the first-floor library, she pulls an old edition of Tom Sawyer off the bookshelf. ‘Here’s something your library might be interested in,’ she says and tosses it into a box of old letters. Next trip it’s a Noah Webster dictionary, I don’t know what edition, very old. I think she tossed in a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. Old Bibles in English and German.
“The back seat is full. I load the trunk. It’s full. My exhaust pipe is practically scraping the road. ‘Don’t you think you should put some boxes in the front seat, Professor Creed?” she suggests. “To balance the load?” What am I going to tell her? ‘I have to keep that open for my girlfriend, whom I spent the night balling but would not bring with me to meet you’? ‘Sure thing,’ I agree.
“The last trip past the bookshelves, she picks up this enormous 500-page folio and offers it to me. ‘Your library might want this too,’ she says. It’s an Audubon Birds of North America, and it’s definitely nineteenth century.”
Even Lily Lee recognized Audubon. “Must be worth a mint.”
“Depending on the publication date. Roger will know.
“That’s what I have in the car,” Jack was telling Lily Lee as the valet approached Crown Victoria in front of the Ritz. “Now what do we do with this shit until tomorrow?”
“We could take it to the room,” Lily said dubiously. “Or have it taken there.”
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
“We can’t drive all over St. Louis with this stuff, or park it outside the ball park.”
The valet waited. Jack muddled.
“Sooner or later you have to sort through it,” Lily pointed out.
“I’m not going to spend a Saturday night in St. Louis with my woman rummaging through some old books. They’ve waited a century and a half. They can wait another day or two.”
The valet also waited.
“Where we’re going, we don’t want this car anyway,” Lily told Jack.
“Is the parking secure?” she asked the valet.
“Yes, ma’am,” he told her.
“I want you to go with my husband, and park this car in a special place,” she told him, stepping with her package out of her side of the Crown Victoria. “My husband will lock the car himself and keep the keys. Is that clear?” She handed the boy a five dollar bill.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Bring the Audubon,” Lily told Jack, and entered the Ritz.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack said, and drove off with the valet in his passenger’s seat.
When Jack met Lily, she was wearing jeans and a cotton blouse. “Change your clothes,” she told him. “We’re late.”
“No shrimp and filet mignon,” Jack asked, “in this elegant establishment?”
“I decided maybe I can’t get used to this place. All this ‘yes, ma’am’ jive. Shit. Tonight we doin’ things my way. We goin’ to the ball yard, and then we goin’ cross the river to where I once begun. To the Cosmo Club.”
“Lily Lee’s East St. Lou,” Jack said, awe-struck. “Reach me, teach me, baby.”
“And we’re taking cabs everywhere, because that Crown V of yours wouldn’t last five minutes outside the Cosmo. You’d find it up on bricks or gone, gone, gone. Find your books in a heap by the tracks along Missouri Avenue, I expect.”
“I ain’t never goin’ back to East St. Lou,” Jack reminded Lily.
“Git into your jeans before I jump your bones again.”
So Jack and Lily Creed joined 7,856 other Cardinals fans to watch McGlothen and the Cards whitewash the Pirates 3-0 in a non-televised game. Gary Templeton went one for three with a run scored, a stolen base, and one run batted in. It was chilly and damp. The couple sat right behind first base and loved it. After the game Jack and Lily hung around the club house door long enough for Lou Brock to autograph a program “to Jack and Lily, King and Queen of Hearts.”
Then a taxi took black Lily and white Jack to the corner of 17th and Bond Street in East St. Louis, a renovated supermarket called the Cosmopolitan Club, where Chuck Berry had started back in the early fifties. Surrounded by photos of Berry, Ike Turner, Muddy Waters and a hundred other blues players, half of whom Jack did not recognize, Lily and Jack lost themselves in music and alcohol and the moment. In the smoke and dim lights, Jack forgot all about Philander Chase, John James Audubon, and Busiris Technical University. For a moment, he forgot all about Jenny and Timm and Rose Marié.
“It was a moment out of time, out of place,” he recalled later. “Of all the places I went with Lily, the Cosmo Club was where I felt most comfortable in our relationship. Jive-ass white liberals can smile all they want, but they are finally hostile. The East St. Louis clubs were inter-racial way back in the fifties. Bottom line there is the music. As long as you can play, or come to dig the music, people there just don’t care.”
Lily’s reaction was more complex. The ghost of her childhood had hung like a mist over the entire weekend, including tales of black whores gone to work the other side of the River, including the Ritz. “On the west side of the Mississippi, I could keep all that shit behind me,” she told me, “But it was always out there calling me. Accusing me. Threatening me, in a way. Obviously I was pretending to be somebody I wasn’t. I had this notion that some witness would come bursting into the hotel to announce to the world I was just this ho from East St. Lou. I’d sink like Eurydice back into the Hades east of the river, my arms stretching for Jack and light. I figured the only way around something was through it. That’s why I took Jack to the Cosmo, even though I’d never been there before in my life.
“I don’t think Jack sensed my nervousness, but I was one uptight bitch for an hour or so. We kind of hid in the back, as far as possible from the lights. I knew the Cosmo was cool, but I watched the clientele more than the musicians.
“Then I saw one of my younger brother’s friends. A kid I’d grown up with, must have been around our place seven nights a week in high school. And did he have the hots for me? Baby! I was two years ahead of him and wouldn’t give him the time of day, but he was hustlin’ me like I was the only babe on the block.
“I thought, ‘I am one cooked nigger-girl.’ Just kept smiling at Jack and hoping this guy’s going to split or at least be cool. Then this kid looks right at me, and it’s like he doesn’t even see me. No recognition. Zero. Not accusation: ‘Lily gone booshie whore.’ Not acceptance: ‘Hey, a gal’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.’ No recognition at all. I was a complete stranger to him: up state, out of state, out of class, out of mind.
“I’ve never forgotten that moment. Maybe I wasn’t exactly Ritz Carleton, the wife of Jack Creed, Professor of English, but I was on my way. I had left myself behind and could be whatever I wanted to be. It was a very liberating moment. I suppose I owe Jack, for the trip and the transformation. From there on out, I was completely relaxed. Dug the music, dug the drinks. Dug the Ritz, too, when it was all over.”
Jack and Lily closed the Cosmo down, then took a cab back across the river, where they settled into an all-night bar, and drank until the sun rose.
“So what’s in your package?” Jack asked when he and Lily rolled apart somewhere in the third inning of the Sunday afternoon ball game. “Now that we’ve settled important matters.”
“I thought you’d never ask, white boy. I was beginning to think all you wanted was my sweet black tail.”
“And the soulful sounds in the night. Incidentally, I love you.”
“Nothing much compared to your haul. Just a bunch of posters is all. Incidentally, I love you too.”
While Jack has been schmoozing Kathleen Morrison, Lily Lee had arranged the design and printing of 300 11 x 14 posters announcing a meeting “of all Busiris faculty interested in forming a faculty union” to be held 7:30 p.m. in Busiris Auditorium, October 6, 1976. The unnamed organizers of this non-meeting promised representatives from the National Federation of Teachers and from the Teamsters Union, which was then attempting to organize white collar workers.
“It’s something I always wanted to do,” she reminded Jack. “I thought the best thing would be to post these while you’re known to be off campus, preferably on University business. Like now. Since last night, I was thinking that you could contact Holmes and tell him that you can’t go into details, but if he gives you Monday here, you can bring the stuff with you. He’ll buy that. Ask him to phone Vi and tell her to cancel your classes, and your wife to say you need another day. That brings him in to corroborate your story, if she has any doubts, and he’s the one to be saying ‘You will be so happy when this book comes out.’ You take another day at the hotel, which shows up on Holmes’ card, so the University knows you’re in St. Lou.
“From there we have two options. One is for me to take the 5:45 bus to Riverton, leaving you all alone in this big enormous bed until tomorrow afternoon. The other is for me to stay with you in this big enormous bed in this ritzy hotel in this splendid city, until midnight or so. It’s Sunday, but I think I can find ways of entertaining you. Around midnight, we slip a ten spot to the valet, who springs your car and turns in your key tomorrow around noon. By 3:30 in the morning we’re in Riverton taping these posters all over Busiris. By the time the campus wakes up, we’re at my place. I pull my car out of the garage, you put yours in and close the door. We tuck ourselves into my smaller but cozy bed, where you sleep your little head off all day, because you’re out of town. I make my 9:00 class as usual. Vi cancels your 10:00 and 11:00 and everyone knows you’re out of town and I’m in town. If you wake up early enough, maybe you finally find out what’s in your boxes. Maybe I rush home for a little afternoon delight. You shower up and drive over to McKinley, like you just got in from Old St. Lou. I won’t even pout too much if you take your wife and kids out for a big damn dinner.”
“You are one smart cookie, Lily.”
“And don’t you forget it. Incidentally, I love you, Jack. Don’t you forget that either.”
So Jack and Lily extended their marriage a little longer, not as long as Roger Holmes thought, but Lily did not take the bus back to Busiris. The rest of us arrived Monday morning to a campus plastered with posters announcing a union organizational meeting—walls, trees, rest rooms, hallways. At considerable personal risk, Lily had even spent 8:00 to 9:00 hitting the interior of academic buildings which had been locked earlier. Of course Administration had removed most of the posters by noon, but the campus buzzed with talk for a week.
President Stoddard circulated two separate memos “to dispel certain rumors circulating on campus,” noting that Busiris Auditorium had not been reserved by any campus group or individual for the night of October 6, and reminding all University employees that Busiris facilities must be scheduled, for authorized uses only, through the University scheduling office. Unauthorized use of University facilities, the President noted, was a violation of the contracts. The evening of October 6 brought three squad cars of Riverton police to the front entrance of Busiris Auditorium. Jack and Lily laughed themselves silly.
Jack, meanwhile, had waited in Lily’s bedroom until Lynette left. Ten minutes thereafter, in Lily’s garage space, he unpacked the car and made a quick inventory of what Morrison had given him. Over 800 books. Over 2,000 manuscript letters to or from Philander Chase, all dated before 1853. Several boxes of manuscript material unrelated to Chase, most of it from 1840-1880, including letters to and from Salmon P. Chase. He pocketed one letter, dated October 1842, from an A. Lincoln to a Rev. Charles Dresser, regarding the marriage ceremony of this Mr. A. Lincoln to a Mary Todd. Everything else, including the Audubon folio (which he later claimed as his finder’s fee), Jack delivered to Roger Holmes at 4:45 that afternoon.
“We’ll talk more tomorrow,” Jack told Roger as the two finished piling boxes in Roger’s office. “Right now you can inventory. I have to take my wife and kids out for a well-earned dinner.”
“Put that on the tab as well,” Roger offered.
A thick band of gold jingled against the office keys in his pocket as Jack Creed, with mixed emotions, left McKinley Library.