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Longer Days, Smaller Prizes

How imperceptibly change the seasons of our lives! The pale, tentative chartreuse of May darkens into the firm Kelly green of June, the daylight hours lengthen, and the marigolds bloom. The rhubarb sprouts, the fruit trees blossom, strawberries come to market. One dry afternoon in July you notice a patch of khaki in the meadow, and thistle gone to seed. The days grow shorter, and one withered leaf becomes ten. Somewhere, you didn’t notice when, you crossed a divide, and suddenly the breath of autumn is upon the land. You look back and wonder. Sometimes, retrospectively, you identify a moment.

“For three days, Lily and I were husband and wife,” Jack told me shortly before his death. “That was the moment. Then she did what she did and got free.”

Lily’s social life had always posed a problem for the couple. An A+ mind in an A+ body, she was desired by every male on the campus. Since playing the nun might have raised questions about her relationship with Jack, both Charles and Lily thought it wise that she make a show of dating other men. Lily made the rounds, including one basketball player who later spent six years in the N. B. A. It was not uncommon for Lily and her date to cross paths with Jack, Rose Marié, Lou, Patricia, Linda, and me, at a Bucks game or at Smokey Joe’s, a jazz and blues joint down by the River. Jack never got used to it. As an evening wore on, I could see his stomach begin to churn. Increasingly he ignored the game or the music, which on other occasions absorbed him absolutely, to focus his covert attention on Lily Lee. If she and her date left before the rest of us, I could almost see the ulcers forming.

“They’re teenagers,” Lily told her lover. “Boys. In ten years, they may become men. I’m a woman now, and I need a real man now. And that’s where you come in.”

Even boys, Jack understood, posed the likelihood of sex, the possibility of love. But what were his options? He did his best to turn it off and accept reality. Lily Lee was no nun. Besides, he had a partner of his own. And children.

Jack even accepted Lily’s sustained relationship with J. J. “Big Jim” Oliver, starting forward for the Busiris Bucks. J. J. was handsome and popular, a respected student and certainly no dumb jock. If anything, other players found him a little too upper class for their crude lifestyles: his father was president of his own small business . . . in Wilmette, Illinois. He was exactly the Afro-American for which any corporation was desperate in 1976. Everyone knew he was going to make it: honorable mention all-conference and a legitimate degree in economics, not business, or sociology, or physical education. While no Oreo cookie, J. J. was no radical either. Jack, betting that the differences between Wilmette and East St. Louis would prove ultimately insurmountable, considered Jim a safe way to see Lily through her senior year. The campus generally considered Jim and Lily the perfect couple. During the 1975-76 basketball season Jack, Timm and Jenny could be seen sitting publicly with Lynette and Lily during home games, often joining Jim and other Bucks for post-game pizza.

“It was a great scheme,” Charles reflected; “Timm, Jenny, Lily and I all together, once a week, sometimes twice. A good six hours, including the JV games.

“Who would have thought she could accommodate herself to his North Shore life of body guards and silver canes? Not I. Not her. We talked about it all the time. I’d encourage her: ‘Yes, you could, yes you could’—the encouragement of reverse psychology. She’d be singing, ‘No I can’t, no I can’t.’ It was a gamble. I lost.”

As events generated their own momentum, Lily found herself skidding into a deep, deep ditch. In late January 1977, the couple announced their engagement. “I never expected to go through with it,” she told me. “I always figured something would break. But nothing broke.”

The wedding was set for June 1977, immediately after commencement. Lily Lee’s mother was ecstatic. The black community at Busiris was ecstatic. Jack was, as always, ecstatic with his kids, miserable with Rose Marié, and now miserable with Lily. Lily was miserable with her magazine husband-to-be, and desperately, possessively in love with Charles Creed.

For three years Lily had accepted Jack’s love for Timm and Jenny—she loved the kids too—but always there had been jealousy. Her engagement heightened the jealousy, and her desperation. “At least you’ll have your children and your book,” she lamented. “What have I got to look forward to?”

Jack offered no answer beyond a hug, a kiss and a declaration of love.

Inevitably, and to her subsequent disappointment in herself, she broached the idea she had promised herself their affair would never come to: Charles’ divorce and remarriage. Also to her later self-chastisement, she approached the subject with a complaint about the unsatisfactory nature of their relationship, which had always been satisfactory, and a question about Jack’s commitment, which had always been unquestioned.

“You love your wife more than you love me. How else am I supposed to see things?”

“I didn’t give a damn about Rose Marié,” Jack told her bluntly. “Probably I’ve never given a damn about her. And I’m not sure she gives a damn about what I really am. But I do love Timm and Jenny Lynn. I love them not more, but as much as I love you. Can you understand that? I live for three people: my son, my daughter, and you. All that I have, I would give for you to have been the mother of my children. But you are not their mother. As far as I can see, there is no way you can be.”

“There is a way, and you know it,” she told him tearfully.

“I don’t think so,” Jack answered. “There is a way you can bear me children, but I know Rose Marié and I know this town. There is no way you can ever become the mother of Timm and Jenny Lynn Creed. There is also no way you can ever be the wife of Charles Creed, Associate Professor of English at Busiris Technical University.”

“With your book, you can get another job at another university.”

“I can get another job,” he said quietly.

“My children won’t be good enough?”

“Your children—our children—would be spectacular. Our children would be every bit as fine as Timm and Jenny. But they would not be Timm and Jenny.”

“If you really loved me. . . .”

“If I split with Rose Marié, she will return to her mommy in a minute, back to New York, taking Timm and Jenny with her. I might see them two weeks in the summer and a few days at Christmas. I can’t do that to them or to me or to you. My grief would destroy our relationship. Then I’d have neither you nor them.”

Charles too was weeping.

“I love you so damned much,” Lily explained.

“Jim will stay in Riverton,” Jack told Lily. “His wife won’t need a law degree.”

“How about you, Jack? You hangin’ ‘round Busiris once that book comes out? I know how you feel about this place.”

“I’ll hang if you hang.”

“I don’t know where this is going. But I’ll always be on your side, Jack. Remember that. Don’t ever doubt I’m on your side.”

“We been through some shit together.”

“Finding love is so easy,” Lily thought aloud. “I didn’t know that before I met you. What to do with love when you find it? That’s the hard thing.”

“A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. By all means necessary.”

“By all means necessary. That’s what you taught me. By all means necessary.”

To her subsequent self-approval, Lily Lee made not the slightest mention of race or class. No “black girl: good enough to fuck, but not good enough to marry.” No “okay for a private fling, but never want to be seen with her in public.” Jack accused himself on this score, but Lily Lee Martin was no self-pitying, abused black female.

Nor did Lily threaten to go public about the relationship, to run to Rose Marié.

Instead, she threatened suicide.

Then she tried suicide. One evening in February Jack received a phone call from Lynette. In three and a half years, neither Lynette nor Lily had phoned Charles Creed at home. He knew something was up.

Lily had gone into her room for a nap and shut the door. Around 7:00, Lynette took a phone call for her, knocked, heard no response. The door was locked. Lynette banged loudly on the door, and still heard no noise. She pried the door open with a lug wrench, and found Lily Lee on the bed asleep, empty container of sleeping pills in the trash can. Charles told Lynette to call an ambulance immediately, made a technically true excuse to Rose Marié about a student being in serious trouble, then met Lynette, Lily Lee, and the ambulance at the hospital. The medics who pumped her stomach said Lily was two, maybe three hours from gone.

For two days Lily lay in the hospital. She never explained to anyone why she tried to kill herself, and Lynette never explained to Jim why it was Charles, not Lily’s fiancé, who got called in a crisis. Jim never pressed the matter.

Out of this near disaster emerged a plan which, the pair thought, would permit Jack and Lily to remain lovers forever. Lily would forget law school and marry Oliver. She would encourage him to accept the very attractive offer he’d already been made by First National Bank, Riverton, which saw in J. J. a local sports hero and showcase Affirmative Action Black Man. Jack would remain married to Rose Marié and, he promised, to Busiris. Lily would enroll in the Busiris M. A. program, Jack her mentor and lover still. Once she completed her degree, she’d get hired as an adjunct teacher of composition or, ideally, as a full-time member of the Afro-American Studies faculty. Busiris could point to Lily Lee Oliver as a black woman by whom it had done right. If the financial pinch continued, Busiris would be happy to ease some expensive senior Ph. D. into early retirement in exchange for a young M. A. If Busiris enrollment stabilized, First National Bank trustees would see that their client institution hired permanently the wife of their very prominent black employee. Should Lily need a Ph. D., there were programs all over the state.

This plan carried Lily and Jack through March and April of 1977, as the lovers saw less and less of each other.

Through May, with Jack’s promotional tours for Age of Faith and Lily’s increasing absorption into graduation and wedding plans.

Through June, with Lily and Big Jim’s marriage at the Episcopal Cathedral.

Charles and Rose Marié attended the wedding, with most of Busiris and a third of Riverton.

“There is the most beautiful woman you will ever see in your life,” Jack said aloud of Lily Lee Martin in her wedding gown. I couldn’t disagree. Lily’s attendants, all cheerleaders and Bucks Belles, were one more gorgeous than the other. Lynette looked like the Playmate of the Year. But Lily was in a class by herself: magnificent, manic, possibly even happy. Her figure—toned by a month of diet and exercise—was spectacular, and her eyes deep as ever. She had added a confidence in her own ability to define herself, which made her almost inaccessible.

As the ceremony wore on, Lily’s elegance seemed to confuse Jack. And her distance. While his eyes sought hers throughout the ceremony, hers never met his. Not during the processional, as, strong and unaccompanied, she followed six attendants and Lynnette Taylor down the aisle to meet her future husband. Not during the string quartet solo which preceded the formal exchange of vows, when Daisy stared fixedly into the eyes of her Tom Buchanan. Not during the recessional, when she passed right by the four of us on the aisle end of the pew. Not during the photo session after the wedding, when Charles took a few photos of his own. Not in her last dash through a hail of rice to the safety of the enormous white stretch limo.

Throughout the entire ceremony Lily played her role perfectly.

Or nearly perfectly. As the great white whale of a limo pulled away from well-wishers, the sun roof opened and Lily herself emerged, veil blowing in the breeze, a bottle of Moët in her hand. Reeling unsteadily, she looked back at the crowd, her eyes searching, finally, for Jack. When they found him, she clutched the string of pearls around her neck, raised her bottle, and shouted something. And continued to shout and gesticulate as the distance increased between her and Jack. In the noise and distance, it was impossible to tell what she had said, what she meant.

Then the limo turned a corner, and Lily was gone.

Jack was pierced to the heart. “We’re going home,” he announced to his wife.

“What about the reception?”

“Go with Andy and Linda if you want. I can’t stand ten minutes more with these banker types. I’m going home to play with my kids. Tell them I got sick.”

Rose Marié fumed all through the five-course sit-down banquet. We left before the dancing began. Jack’s absence did not surprise Lily, nor did she inquire as to his whereabouts.

“A fucked life,” Jack lamented next Monday at the office. “Absolutely fucked. You should try it, Tucker, watching the woman you love play the field, find another man, go through the ritual of engagement and marriage, knowing it’s him she’s balling each night, knowing—she said it right up to the end—she’d a hundred times rather be fucking you. Knowing that’s the way it’s going to be, you in your bed with the wife you don’t love, she in her bed with the husband she doesn’t love . . . and not a damned thing you can do about it except not stand in the way.

“You want pain, I can tell you about pain.”

If Jack had been unhappy at the wedding, he was in absolute agony during June of 1977, which the couple spent on an extended honeymoon in the Bahamas, funded by First National, and in July, when he knew her to be back in the States and settling into married life. Only Age of Faith distracted him, and that only temporarily. In Busiris between book signings and radio talk shows, Jack would rush to the office to read her brief letters, written hurriedly and mailed surreptitiously. Invariably they left him less reassured than upset. He, of course, could not reach Lily. He hoped against all possibility that she would show up at Kroch’s to have a book signed or, less improbably, phone WFMT to talk with her former mentor live on the Studs Terkel Show. But she didn’t. Lily was gone.

Gradually Jack sensed that Lily Lee Martin-Oliver, although accepted to the Busiris graduate program and enrolled in his fall seminar, had left his sphere of influence and entered a world he neither respected nor understood, a world in which he had no currency, over which he exercised no control. A world which she might one day find, might even at that moment be finding, might (horror of horrors) even before the marriage have found, vaguely seductive.

In short, Jack understood he was losing Lily.

Inevitably, he cracked.

I arrived at Busiris Hall one day in the mid-summer to find him busily piling boxes and cartons—all the stuff he’d left stacked on his floor—onto his desk and the top of his shelves and cabinets.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He looked up at me quizzically. “Custodial staff is polishing floors this week,” he explained, “so I thought I’d help them a little. Get my shit out of their way. Those guys put in long hours for small wages.”

“Jack?”

“Those guys can use all the help we can give them. Show them we’re not so, you know, high and mighty.”

“Jack? You’re over the edge.”

“You might do something about all that crap on your floor too. And the other assholes around here. Solidarity of the working class, Tucker.”

“Jack?”

He caught himself. “Apologies. You’re right.”

He returned to his work.

“What are you doing in here, Jack, shuffling the past like a deck of cards, day by day, scene by scene?”

He pretended to busy himself with a box of old desk copies.

“The summer of my arrival on this campus, you left me a note,” I reminded him. “I offer you, sir, your own advice. Spend as much time as possible out of this campus and out of this town.”

“I do,” he said.

“That’s work. You hate those trips more than you hate being home.”

“They’re long journeys away from the people I love. It’s funny. Once I looked forward to this book being out, to the possibilities it offered for escape. Now . . . I’d as soon sit here in the office.”

“It’s been a long year. A long four years. You need a vacation.”

“Not until August.”

“You need the trip now, buddy. This office isn’t for you. Get out of here. Go visit the folks. Go bury yourself in your book.”

“The book is finished,” Jack said with his back turned. Then he turned to me with the most abject look of exhaustion I’ve ever seen on a man, and slumped into his chair.

“I thought there might be a letter,” he said quietly.

There had been no letter that day, or for several days previous.

“I gambled,” he said finally, “and I lost. It’s my own fault. I tried for way more than the situation offered. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Hindsight is always 20-20.”

“A major league fuck up, and not a damned thing I can do. What a fucked up summer. I tried to get Rose Marié and the kids to go east early, June instead of our usual late summer visit, so that I’d be gone while Daisy was gone, and I’d be back here when she returned. Couldn’t tell them the real reason, of course, but made a pretty good case about being out east to push books, and being around to harvest some of our garden for a change. Had her sold on the idea. Then her folks lined up some place at the shore, for August first no less, and we’re back to late summer. What can I say? I offered to stay here, let her and the kids go east. ‘What about your folks?’ she wants to know. ‘We want to see grandpa and grandma Creed,’ Timm and Jenny say. Hell, I want them to see grandma and grandpa too. I got no argument.

“So Lily and Jim ball their way around the Bahamas, first class hotel and restaurant accommodations all the way, then return to Riverton in July. In July they’re busy settling into their comfy Trident Towers apartment, and my publisher’s got me in California, home of the fruits and nuts, and Big D. Dall-ass. I get maybe a phone call because Lily’s busy with decorators and social functions at First National. By the time I’m back from Texas and she’s settled in Trident, I’m off for the East Coast. ‘See you in September.’

“By September . . . who knows? I am mucked, ducked, plucked and fucked.”

Jack was in deeper trouble than he knew. During July he and Lily were in touch exactly twice—by phone. She wrote him four letters, all short, none of them answering, exactly, his letters to her. In August, I must have received a dozen calls from Jack out East, “checking the mail and message situation.” Rose Marié thought he was keeping abreast with Age of Faith promotions. I knew better.

Then, exactly two days after Jack returned in August to Riverton, with fall registration to begin in a week, First National announced the transfer of recent Busiris graduate J. J. Oliver to their Evanston office, not far from his boyhood home of Wilmette.

It was a very big time promotion unprecedented so early in a young man’s career. Vaults of money. Barrels of prestige. “Smooth Black Basketball Star With Economics Degree Rockets Into Upper Middle Class.” First National obviously had Oliver on a very high trajectory.

Lily Lee was weeping when she phoned Jack with the news, genuinely distraught. Most of her concern was for Jack, of course, but other things were involved as well, including the apartment, which she and J. J. had decorated at the expense of innumerable compromises borne of innumerable disagreements spoken and unspoken. Old animosities between St. Louis and Chicago came into play as well. She wept, too, for a lost Busiris, the scene of some pretty good times in both of their lives.

But the tears Lily shed over the phone were not the desperate tears of her attempted suicide, or even her final, desperate call from the white limo. Part of Lily Lee was ready to move. She had outgrown Busiris Tech, outgrown Riverton as well. Jack’s worst fears were being realized. Backed by First National, Jim Oliver could offer Lily Lee a world to which he could never, even as a celebrated scholar-writer, aspire. Whether it would suit her or not, he couldn’t guess and she didn’t know. It was, like any world, a world worth exploring.

Memories of the weekend at the Ritz-Carleton haunted Jack.

“I have not seen Lily Lee since her wedding,” he fumed, “And I saw her precious little in the weeks before that. One hundred, twenty-seven days it has been since last we made love, and nearly as long since we had a serious talk. I’m not that hard to find.”

“She wrote half a dozen letters,” I pointed out, “just counting the ones that I’ve seen you receive.”

“Travelogues.”

“Can I ask how they were signed?”

“She telephoned, Tucker, she telephoned. She fucking telephoned to say goodbye. A thousand times Lily Lee Martin has walked through this door, if she has walked through this door once. You would think one more time. . . . She owed me that at least, to walk one more time through this door.”

“ ‘You can’t repeat the past, old sport’.”

Jack’s eyes fell. “No. It turns out you can’t.”

A day after the phone call, Jack was invited, with a number of other Busiris faculty and administrators, to a reception co-hosted by Busiris and First National in J. J.’s honor. Charles, Rose Marié, Linda and I drove together downtown. Rose Marié wanted to save parking fees. I wanted to save Jack.

“If this reception is anything like the wedding, it’s going to be some posh night,” Rose Marié chirped from the back seat. “Your hours with these students sometimes really do pay off.”

“Good thing First National is footing the bill,” Linda offered wryly. “If it were Busiris, this would be hot dogs and ice cream.”

“Or bring-your-own cookies, we’ll provide the Kool Aid,” I added. “Like the Christmas party.”

Jack said nothing. Busiris and he were in the midst of political battles, his relationship with Rose Marié was dead as a brick, and he had hit the ultimate writer’s block. He felt, and looked, like a dead man.

“My friends at Helping Hands are all jealous,” Rose Marié said. “These bank receptions are apparently really big deals. I suppose the president will be there.”

“Of the University or the Bank?”

“Is there a difference?” Jack muttered.

“Of the University.”

“The president of Busiris Technical University is not that big of a deal,” Linda said.

“He signs my husband’s contracts,” Rose Marié said. “It never hurts to do a little politicking, you know.”

“We marched down this street in the fall of 1972,” Jack remembered as we neared the First National Bank parking lot. “Lily Lee and Jim were high school students. What a long, strange trip this has been.”

The reception was indeed a very big deal with sparkling wine, a string quartet, and an enormous seafood buffet, around which members of the Busiris faculty hovered, gobbling down one jumbo shrimp after another. Most did not even bother with an intervening plate. The First National big shots, to whom jumbo shrimp were passé, spent their time talking Busiris basketball with Big Jim and ogling Lily Lee.

We were introduced to First National President Andrew McDonald and to Busiris President Martin Stoddard. “Very pleased to meet you, President Stoddard,” said Rose Marié.

“So you’re Dr. Creed,” Stoddard said, surprised finally to put a face with a name. “I understand you have a new book out.”

“I do, sir,” Jack answered. “Good reviews, mostly, including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.”

“So I had heard. I haven’t found the time to read it.”

“Jack will send you a copy,” promised Rose Marié. “And the reviews, too.”

“Congratulations, Professor Creed,” Stoddard said lukewarmly. “We both know the University appreciates all the good publicity it gets. In its way, a good book benefits our reputation as much as a winning basketball team. Right, Bert?”

“John Bertholt Reich the Third,” said the man at Stoddard’s elbow in a thin Southern accent. “I’m the new Vice President for Academic Affairs. We must have a chat sometime soon, Professor Creed. Professor Jeremy Jones speaks highly of you.”

“I appreciate all the good publicity Professor Jones gives me.”

“I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of each other,” said Reich. “I believe that one of the problems at Busiris has, historically, been failed communications between administration and the younger faculty. I’m hoping that Professor Jones will be able to help us in that regard.”

“I’m sure Professor Jones will be serviceable in any regard.”

“And what a charming wife you have there, Creed,” Reich said, giving Rose Marié a pat on the shoulder and a light peck on the cheek. “Busiris seems full of charming ladies. Good luck, professor, with your book.”

“Since when did we have a new V. P. A. A.?” Jack wanted to know as we turned to our table.

“Since forty-eight hours ago,” Ted Jones informed him. “There are changes afoot in Old Main. I had no more warning than you. Neither, apparently, did Brad Beckstrom.”

“What’s happened to Beckstrom?” I asked Jones.

“Back to teaching speech, and not even the chair.”

“After how many years?” Charles wanted to know.

“Five or six.”

“He was a decent man,” Charles thought aloud. “Not a competent man, but a decent man. Insofar as any administrator can be a decent man.”

“This fall he’s teaching four classes, just like everyone else,” Jones said. “I think this fellow Reich will be to our benefit, Charles. Ph. D. in English from Texas Christian.

“A Texas Christian is usually a real Texasshole.”

“I think you will like him, Chas.”

“You have to admire his taste in women,” said Jack. “You and he have apparently talked?”

“He has some plans in which I might figure. So might you. For the moment, I say no more.” Jones crossed his lips with the open palm of his left hand, winked at Rose Marié, and was off.

“A serviceable villain,” said Jack quietly to Jones’ back, then continued to the rest of us: “Sit you down, people, rest you.”

In a room of silver-gray hair and pot-bellied stomachs, Lily Lee and J. J. made a striking couple, so glaringly young, so obviously animated. Big Jim, who stood a good four inches taller than anyone else in the room, carried himself with the nervous tautness of a prize fighter. He looked vaguely uncomfortable, as if his dark blue suit were a warm-up outfit which would soon be stripped to reveal a gray Busiris Athletic Department T-shirt and navy basketball shorts.

Lily Lee was a woman reclassed. Scarlet dress with black sash, diamond earrings, black heels, red fingernail polish. A diamond on her finger approximately the size of an ice cube. Same eyes. Nearly the same body, slightly more rounded, slightly softer. Jack sought that 19-year-old girl in cutoffs and tank top who had blown his nose before blowing his mind four years earlier. She was gone. He sought the 20-year-old girl who had written his exams in the morning and critiqued his manuscript at night. She was twice gone. He sought the 21-year-old woman who with forged memos had scammed $10,000 annually for the Afro-American Cultural Center. She was lost in the corridors of history, with the woman who had written “Jes’ Be Simple: The Man and the Message” her junior year, and published it her senior year in Studies in Afro-American Literature. In her stead, a woman of style and stature, smooth, smooth ultra-smooth, a woman constitutionally incapable of uttering anything so crude as “There ain’t no such thing as an intellectual fuck.”

To his credit, Jack yielded not an inch to the money managers around him (whom he ignored entirely), to the old President or to the new Vice President. Nor would he defer to the celebrated couple. It was J. J. he addressed first, a jocular remark about him collecting in some Chicago skyscraper a small portion of the millions he and his teammates had earned for corporate America on the hardwood floor as a Busiris Buck. The comment was admiring and probably sincere, but calculated also to assert Jack’s old status as teacher.

“The bank is doing well by us,” J. J. reported. “I guess we owe a lot to good teaching and good coaching.” His use of the first person plural, whether inadvertent or calculated, rocked Jack just slightly. Jack looked quickly over Jim’s shoulder, in the general direction a crystal chandelier. “Champagne, stuffed mushrooms, and all the shrimps you can eat. Better even than Friday afternoon at the Heidelberger.”

“It’s a thrill to see Charles’ students make good,” Rose Marié put in. “That’s what a teacher’s life is all about.”

“It’s a job like any other,” Jim assured her. “We are fortunate.”

“We’re all working on Maggie’s Farm,” Jack observed. “Better a job in the house than in the fields.”

Lily winced, but J. J. betrayed no sense of a slight. The remark addressed Rose Marié’s pretensions as much as Lily’s marriage or Jim’s employer.

“I was really looking forward to graduate school,” Lily said.

“Maybe it’s time to try something new?” Jack suggested.

“It’s hard.”

“If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back to Busiris.”

“I don’t never go back,” Lily reminded Jack.

“Not to East St. Louis?”

“Once I went back. It didn’t work out.”

“I don’t know what more we had to teach you,” Charles said defensively. “It’s not good to do your M. A. where you took your B. A. Same people, same library, same courses with an extra paper or two thrown in. University of Chicago and Northwestern are among the best ten schools in the country. Actually Illinois at Chicago-Circle has the best English faculty in the city. And a tremendous Afro-American program. I know a bunch of people there.”

Lily Lee looked to Big Jim, who smiled and shrugged his shoulders, and then back to Charles. “Promise not to tell anyone,” she asked us, “because we’re not sure yet. But graduate school may have to wait.”

Charles looked at her blankly.

“I think I may be pregnant.”

J. J. smiled again. “We’ve told nobody at work, Professor Creed, so please. . . .”

“Charles loves his children more than he does his students,” Rose Marié said to Lily Lee, “and probably more than he loves me.”

Charles nodded his head vaguely. His ears buzzed and his eyes blurred. He gazed again into the distance, beyond the chandelier, beyond the bank’s walls, beyond place and time to, perhaps, a picnic table in Burr Oak Park or a hospital room in February.

Then he looked deep into Lily Lee’s eyes. “I always favored my children,” he said softly. “I guess they were my choice. I hope your child brings you as much joy as mine have given me.”

Then, distractedly, almost in a whisper, “They cost you. They do cost you.”

“It’s funny how we change,” Lily meditated aloud. “Four years ago I came to Busiris intent on law school. A law degree wasn’t really possible. One year ago, I wanted a Ph. D and a teaching position so bad I could taste it. Maybe that too is something the situation doesn’t offer. It seems so far away. Like I was another person.”

Jim put his arm around her waist. “I remember when all I wanted was to make the team. I remember the first game I started as a Busiris Buck. I thought I was king of the world. I was just a little boy.”

“We’re all different people now,” Charles said. “The times are different as well. A time for to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.” He looked again at Lily Lee, who understood he was pointing, as he often did, at a line further in the song: “A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.”

Lily looked away.

“It’s all in my latest book, with which I am sure you are familiar,” Charles added, with a cocktail party laugh. The remark hurt Lily.

“I miss the person I was,” she said wistfully, “but I can’t find her anymore. She left here last early spring.”

“If you see her, say hello.”

“Perhaps one day she’ll look you up,” Lily Lee suggested, herself on the verge of tears.

“If she’s passing back this way.”

“Well,” said Jim, weary of a conversation grown nostalgic and cryptic. “Wish us the best in Big Windy, Professor Creed. And all the best to you and your wife. And to you too, Dr. Tucker.”

Charles shook his hand, and Lily Lee’s. “It’s been an honor to have known you both,” he said. And then, seeking as always the last word, “If you get close to her, . . .” He let the thought drop.

Jim, who had already turned his attention to one of his banker colleagues, did not hear him. His pregnant wife too had turned her head. Whether she heard Jack's parting words or not, she did not look back.

We ate and left early, before the scheduled dance, Charles the picture of defeat, Rose Marié angry at having paid a baby sitter in advance for six hours when they had been gone only two.

“My big night out,” she fumed.

“I was choking,” Charles argued. “Lily Lee, J. J.—they’re okay people, I could have talked to them all night. Not the rest of that crowd. Worse than a goddamn shopping mall.”

Linda suggested a movie. We saw The Sting, which Universal Studios had recently re-released. After the film, Jack and Rose Marié returned to our house for drinks. The more he drank, the more he thought about Lily and Jim, and the more depressed he became.

“I felt embarrassed in her presence, Tucker,” Jack confessed in a private moment. “I felt completely embarrassed for myself. For my presumption. We were all completely, absolutely, totally out of our class.”

In September 1977, Charles Creed lost twenty pounds and smiled hardly at all. He absented himself from University politics and, except for classes and office hours, from the University itself. Mail, including what proved to be a long and admiring letter from Charles’ hero, Ken Kesey, went unanswered. Phone calls, including messages from his agent and invitations to speak, went unreturned. They were not the phone call, not the letter for which he waited.

Despite the continuing presence of his children and the Pulitzer Prize announcement, Lily Lee’s departure brought down on Jack’s head the accumulated disillusionments from which book, children, and Lady had previously distracted him. For the rest of us, the institution and the country had soured somewhere around 1973. Jack had failed to keep abreast of the times, and when he did finally notice the changing seasons, he simply refused to acknowledge the withering leaves. In one of his frequent moments of exasperation, Ted Jones once told Charles to his face, “Look, you are in complete charge. Charles Creed’s situation at Busiris depends entirely on the way Charles Creed handles things. You are the man.” But Jack never took charge. To a considerable degree, Jack’s subsequent problems with Busiris can be attributed to his own adamant refusal to accept a changing climate.

College campuses, contrary to popular belief, are not hotbeds of conservatism. Change, a fundamental law of nature, is accentuated in academia, where students come and go in four, maybe five years. The collective campus memory is probably less than four years since freshmen don’t know anything about anything, and seniors are usually looking ahead to marriage and their careers. A college effectively reconfigures itself every three or four years.

In the old days faculty, staff, administration, and tradition constituted a desirable ballast. The sixties, however, discarded tradition like last season’s Nike airs. The seventies brought a class of professional administrators whose loyalties are strictly to their own careers. Today faculty alone constitute the institutional ballast. And in colleges increasingly driven by Full-Time Equivalencies (the equivalent number of full-time students enrolled in a class or program), faculty do not create or control programs and trends. Trends determine faculty, and trends have short memories. Nobody with power—that is to say, administration or students—recalls or cares what Professor Jones or Professor Creed did for his institution or students four years ago. “What have you got to offer us today?” they ask. “How do you fit the program?”

So even useful faculty can easily prove expendable, venerable programs can quickly evaporate, and good times can sour overnight. Twenty years of post-war Busiris expansion guaranteed no more than twenty years of dedicated teaching.

The good times at Busiris during the 1950s and ‘60s were fueled by exploding enrollments. Underwritten first by the G. I. bill and then by baby boomers’ parents, Busiris managed a really significant up-grading of students, facilities and faculty. Significant graduate programs had begun in several disciplines, including a M. A. in English. By 1972 Busiris could boast three nationally recognized research scientists, a handful of nationally recognized educators, at least one writer of talent and future reputation. In 1972 we thought we were on the way, and we were having a ball.

Even as we frolicked, money was running short, a result of trustee improvidence or mismanagement or miscalculation. The problem, Jack was convinced and we all concurred, was not a faculty problem or even a student problem. But the faculty and the students, whose tuition soared, paid the price.

A private school, Busiris kept all budgets confidential, and all resource allocations discretionary: physical plant, program development, faculty salaries. Allocations were made, as in old East Bloc countries, by an administration representing a board of directors largely removed from the educational processes. They were made in the best interests not of students, really, and certainly not of faculty, but of the Institution . . . which was seen as a business whose product happened to be college degrees. As in any other American business, marketing was more important than producing a quality product. Even considerations like physical plant and customer satisfaction entered the picture only insofar as they bore on the cost-effective production of marketable degrees.

Like any other corporation, Busiris detested unfavorable publicity, was very adept at playing one group of workers against another, and protected a number of demonstrably incompetent good old boys. During the great expansion of the fifties and sixties, when managerial inefficiency was more than counterbalanced by the rising tide which lifted all vessels, Busiris flourished almost in spite of itself. Only when the baby boom tapered off and the flow of cash slowed did cracks begin to appear.

Jack had his ups and downs. He had been a popular hire, but the construction strikes had, despite (perhaps because of) his article in Studies in American Transcendentalism, nearly finished him off. Jones claimed to have “saved Jack’s skin” in 1971 only after a very long discussion among tenured members of the department, and by the narrowest of margins. He once hinted that Rose Marié—not Jack—had personally appealed to him, and perhaps she had.

The ruckus over Afro-American Literature was all but forgotten by spring 1972, when even the old guard were touting “this new course” as evidence of Busiris’ currency with the latest trend in academia. By the spring of 1973, two of the old ones had completed their deaths, Jack (or his son) had won the support of Lucy Kramer, and the Afro-American Studies Program was blossoming, with the aid of Jack, Lynette, and Lily. Age of Faith, Age of Folly was under contract. Jack was rehired, promoted, and tenured, by a vote of 9 to 3, despite some half-hearted lobbying from Old Main, where most of Jack’s remaining enemies concentrated themselves.

Lou Feracca and I too made steady progress toward permanence, despite our relative lack of publications and charisma. Although we were close to Jack, we were not regarded as “his men.” We had solid reputations among students and got along well enough with most of our colleagues. Despite our blissful innocent of the traps, the political alliances, the decades-old grudges, the petty animosities, the unspoken agreements, the trip-switches, the land mines, the potential landslides of Busiris politics, we survived, although not without a scare in my case. On the day and the hour I knew my tenure was being discussed, Ted Jones phoned me at home. “Did you once at a party somewhere,” he asked me in a distraught voice, “say something about ‘voting the old fogies out’?”

Others did not survive. In fact, the handwriting was on the wall, had anyone been wise enough to read it, when a couple of the new appointments didn’t even last their fall term. One woman was doing some kind of group therapy touchy-feely thing as a pre-writing exercise in composition class. She had her kids sitting in a circle in the dark—they all had their clothes on—when the vice president happened to walk by. She was gone within the week. I can’t even remember her name.

One of the males turned out to be flamboyantly gay. He lasted a semester. Ben Allan Browne fell to the drug bust. A couple of male M. A.’s returned, after a year at Busiris, to grad school for the doctorates they were coming to understand would be a precondition to permanent employment in the cotton fields of composition. In truth, people were dropping left and right. We considered them isolated cases, or temporary setbacks, a few chilly days in August, not the onset of fall. This was in 1973.

When B. T. U. enrollments dropped slightly in 1972-73, no one considered the decline a trend. In 1973-74 they dropped some more, and they dropped again the year following, despite the expanding Afro-American Studies Program. Administration blamed bad press from construction, civil rights, and anti-war demonstrations. Youngsters blamed the glacial pace of reform. “Look what’s going on in Normal,” they pointed out. “In Chicago and Macomb. In the junior college across the river. Busiris is a dinosaur.”

Those who left were not replaced. We didn’t know it when Ben Allen Browne left, but there would be no new hires in the Busiris English department until 1983. Except for two new appointments tied specifically to the Afro-American Studies program, the department added not a single new face in over a decade! It shrunk from 36 to 34 to 30 to 24 to 15. The mail lady disappeared, and the student secretaries, and other faculty perks, including contracts for summer research. Course offerings were trimmed—during summer school and the regular year—and decline fed on decline.

The old ones had survived the fifties, when faculty taught five classes a term and scheduled office hours so that two and three could use the same desk. They had seen the bad times and the good times. Perspective gave them patience. The young ones, who came to Busiris at her finest moment, lacked both. Having arrived in Riverton expecting a gradually rising slope, they were confounded by the prospect of a protracted decline.

Perspective on the world outside Busiris would have helped as well. Every institution I know was in financial trouble during the seventies. Every school I have ever heard about cut faculty in the 1970s due to “decreased enrollments.” Jack claimed that administrators nationally had created the crisis, as the oil companies conspired the mid-seventies oil shortage, as an excuse to bump class size from fifteen students per class to twenty-five, thirty, forty, to those mega-sections of two, three hundred freshmen or sophomores. “The total number of Americans enrolled in post-secondary education dropped only one year in the 1970s and 1980s,” he pointed out, “and that drop was minuscule, a fraction of a percentage. The decline in students is a hoax perpetrated by administrators.”

The decline in Busiris enrollments was no hoax: a 33% reduction in less than a decade. Jack was right in one respect, however: the teaching faculty shrank more precipitously than the student population. Admissions, counseling, and student services staffs actually increased. While enrollments dropped from just over 7,000 in 1970 to slightly below 5,000 in 1977, full-time faculty positions dropped by 50% and support-administrative personnel actually increased by 27%. In 1977 Busiris needed half the faculty, but 27% more staff to care for 66% of its 1970 student population.

Initial reductions were achieved simply by ending part-time appointments, and leaving vacant the positions of those who left voluntarily. The Busiris faculty was always a faculty in flux, a jumble of in-coming M.A.’s and Ph. D.’s green from grad school, and out-going professionals of three or four years’ experience, their rough edges polished, their skills honed, headed for more prestigious appointments elsewhere. Administration left the “out” spigot open, and shut off the intake valve.

As appointments elsewhere became scarcer, the natural exodus from Busiris slowed. In the 1973 most non-tenured people were notified that their contracts would not be renewed for 1973-74, a counterproductive move, really, since some of our more popular faculty were younger and non-tenured. My Ph. D. exempted me, as Jack’s degree and publications exempted him. Not exempted was a young instructor named Sam Reese, an M. A. one year out of grad school, popular with students and a good teacher of grunt courses.

Jack was especially vocal in supporting Sam.

“He fills every section of every course he teaches, every semester, first day of registration,” Jack told then-acting chairman Jones. “You’ve got at least one older tenured person here, we both know of whom I speak, who doesn’t register more than ten kids per section. By the end of the term, she’s down to five or less. She teaches fewer people in her four sections than Samuel teaches in one section. If you fire Samuel and keep her, those kids are not going to go out of his class into hers. They’ll just go to other courses in other departments in the University. Or they’ll go to the junior college across the river, take classes there, and transfer credit back here, which is the cheaper and smarter thing to do anyway. Or they’ll leave Busiris entirely and enroll at De Paul, or I. S. U., or even that place in Peoria. In one year, English F. T. E. will be down by as many students as Samuel teaches, and you’ll have to cut another position. Cut Samuel this year, you’ll lose one good teacher, a bunch of students, and, next year, another faculty position. Do it my way, you lose one bad person this year. Her students might even squeeze into Samuel’s classes, have a good experience, and come back for more. My cut is a 100% smart cut.”

“She’s given so much to the University,” Jones argued. “And where would she find another job?” (“Did you hear Jones Bones arguing, in my hour, ‘Creed has given so much to this University?’ ” Jack would ask rhetorically when telling this story in later years.)

“She’s incompetent,” Jack countered. “She’s an insult to the profession. For bad teaching, she’s received good money. More good money each year she’s remained a bad teacher. By now she’s overpaid, as are most of the old-timers here. She’s a free-loader. Free-loading for twenty years is no reason to be allowed to freeload for another ten; it’s reason to be booted off the gravy train. If anything, she owes the University. Samuel, on the other hand, has put in a lot more than he’s taken out. The University owes him.”

Of course Sam Reese went. Probably he had the last laugh. After kicking around the States for a year, collecting unemployment from Busiris Tech, he found a job in Saudi Arabia, earning bazillions of bucks and a free airplane ticket outside the country each year. We wept for him at the time—Arabia was not a prestigious post—but Sam lived frugally, invested carefully, and well before Jack’s death had begun a comfortable semi-retirement as a gentleman teacher at a sequence of institutions in rather elegant Central European cities.

So Busiris cut the non-tenured M. A.’s, with the conspicuous exception of Victoria Nation, who in 1973 remained an unpublished M. A., although she was a dutiful committee woman, a politician’s politician, and close to everyone in Old Main.

By 1974 all that remained were the Ph. D.’s and the tenured M. A.’s.

Economic logic would have impelled Old Main to cut from the top, where salaries were fattest, but no convincing rationale for so doing presented itself. President Stoddard also feared lawsuits, and the Big Damned Mess which would attend any airing of dirty laundry by disgruntled former employees. Seniority, the criterion favored by most older faculty, would have cut the lowest paid faculty. Whatever administration thought of Charles Creed, Lou Feracca, and I, we were still cheaper by half than Percy Thompson, Lucy Kramer or Virgil Cutter.

Besides, cutting popular faculty could also result in a Big Damned Mess, as Stoddard had found out the year previous in the school of art. The situation was not precisely analogous: the man there was not tenured, but he was clearly the department’s best painter and clearly the students’ favorite. A showing of portraits caricaturing Busiris art department colleagues as barnyard animals brought a negative tenure recommendation from those same colleagues, which Stoddard was only too willing to accept (he had appeared as a Rhode Island Red). The painter (who also did nudes, including some of his students) had tremendous support (including some of the women he’d painted). The students organized a strike that did not end until the department had uncovered “new evidence” supporting the case for tenure, taken a second vote, and awarded the tenure—and promotion. So much for cutting by seniority.

Almost all faculty, young and old, opposed qualitative criteria.

Inevitably the ball was bounced to departments. “Take a vote,” Stoddard directed each department. “Rank order all full-time members of your department by value to your program, #1 being the most valuable. Vice President for Academic Affairs Beckstrom may take departmental suggestions into consideration in making personnel decisions.”

If you want division, ask the six men in an overburdened lifeboat to decide who should jump.

If you want an ulcer, try going to work each day knowing that the fellow greeting you so cheerfully from across the hall gets to vote on your job, and you on his. Somebody has to go, and that somebody may be you or him. Unless, of course, you and he reach a mutual nonaggression pact, and go after the guy around the corner. Unless that guy has already cut a deal with the guy down the hall against you. . . .

When Ted Jones presented this directive at a department meeting, Jack moved that the department tell Vice President Beckstrom to shove it. Nothing personal—Beckstrom was probably the one upper level administrator for whom Jack had any respect at all—but Jack wanted us literally to write “Stuff this” on the sheet of paper and return it to Beckstrom. He made a good speech that day, reasonable, without condescension or real profanity, and somewhat different from his previous positions.

“This department had been through enough, and it has given enough. We’ve had differences in the past, and we’ll have them in the future. I’m not happy with the achievement of everyone in this room, and I know some of you are not pleased with the way I invest my life. But we are all we have, really. If faculty will not protect faculty, nobody will. Professionals do not turn on colleagues no matter what they think of them. Civilized people do not cannibalize each other, and if the study of literature has not civilized us, what has it done for us?

“While we’re being squeezed, administration is living very comfortably, including Brad Beckstrom. I’ve got friends in Old Main—secretaries and staff, the hard-working blue-collar types—who tell me almost to the dime how well administrators live. I say that administration is paid handsomely to make hard choices and to accept the consequences—moral and otherwise—of those choices. Especially the President is paid to make decisions. He should not be allowed to shirk his responsibility.”

Finally Jack reminded us of the World War II ghettos where victims selected other victims for relocation, and of East Bloc nations where colleagues reported on their friends and children spied on their parents. “They too rationalized,” he told us. “Although their rationalizations make them no less complicitous. And in the end, as we know, they all ended up in the same boxcar headed for the same death camps.”

Jack’s speech carried the day. Our vote was indeed to direct Ted Jones to return Beckstrom’s directive without a ranking, with “Stuff this” scrawled across the bottom.

I doubt that Jones ever did what we directed him to do.

I do know that we all finally joined in Beckstrom’s assessment process. We had no union and we had no real unity, so there was nothing else to do. Jones circulated a memo to the effect that “certain members of the department” had privately exercised their individual right to “advise the dean on personnel matters.” Abstaining just meant giving up one vote—perhaps a crucial vote—in favor of yourself.

I rationalized my way through it, as did everyone else.

Privately, behind closed office doors and in small knots in the Student Center, discussions took place. Victoria Nation proposed to me, Jack’s best friend, that we mutually agree to rank each other high and Jack low. “He’d find another job in a minute,” she told me. “Especially after that book comes out. Of course he’d be first on our rehire list.” It was Victoria who went around explaining how much Busiris had furthered the career of the gay Shakespearean trimmed in 1972, who ended up at Berkeley in 1974.

“Explain your proposal to Rose Marié, Timm and Jenny Lynn,” I suggested. “If they buy it, so will I.”

“Busiris did not force Jack to have a family.”

“Or me either. But we have families, and people need to eat. Our salaries feed four people. Your salary feeds only one. Maybe you should go.”

“The department should not cut a woman,” Victoria said firmly. “There are too many female students in English, and they have too many male professors. The women need a female role.”

“Lucy Kramer, Ph. D.”

“Not an adequate female role model, and we both know it.”

“If the female students need a female role model, that model should have a Ph. D.”

“Being sensitive to the needs of female undergraduates is more important than having a Ph. D.”

“A man can’t be sensitive?”

“Not the way a woman can.”

“Don’t you think that’s letting yourself off a bit easily, Victoria?”

“There are things important beyond degrees and publication.”

“A Ph. D. shows commitment. Are you seriously saying that people should get or keep a job just for being born a certain race or gender? What kind of message is that? Substandard people receiving good pay for substandard work is not a good role model for anyone.”

“Our women are not substandard.”

“You just said Lucy Kramer was not adequate. Maybe we should cut her.”

“I’m just saying that we should not cut a woman. And that Charles could absorb the hit more easily than anyone else.”

The department ended up canning the right guy to my way of thinking, a senior full professor who was not a particularly effective teacher and had published nothing in twenty years more significant that two poems in the campus literary magazine. That didn’t make the consequences any more bearable. Naturally he never found another teaching position. Naturally he never returned at Busiris, not even for adjunct work. He taught briefly part-time at the junior college he so disparaged when it had opened ten years before. Then they let him go. He got a job, finally, as a night watchman at the brewery . . . six months before it closed. Finally he blew his brains with a shotgun.

So the student secretaries went, and the conference money went, and colleagues went as well. A couple of years of 0% raises, were followed by two or three years of 2% or 3% raises. Annual inflation was running about 12-14%, and most younger faculty were adding a child to their family every second or third year. Meanwhile, administrative salaries and the basketball program grew exponentially.

The late seventies witnessed also another curious development in the Busiris Department of English. A decade of accumulated small changes in student body, faculty, and administration emerged a clear pattern which made Old Ones of Jack, Lou, Victoria and me.

Between 1972 and 1980 six senior faculty completed their deaths and dropped one after the other into retirement. Initially the retirements elicited optimism and some rejoicing among the reformers: one fewer vote for Them, one more vote for Us. But our battles inside the department had been fought (and largely won), back in the early years of the decade. By the late seventies, old and young alike were passengers in a sinking ship. Whatever we might have thought of them in 1972, these were people whose eccentricities, strengths, and even weaknesses we had come to know and understand. They were our colleagues. Whatever Jack might have thought of them in 1972, these people had come to know and accept his rough edges. The shared history of their turbulent relationship constituted a ballast which might have saved the ship in the 1980s. Virgil Cutter had seen Jack in battle. He understood his madness, the palpable and beneficent fruits of which he had seen in programs like the Stoddard Field House and the Afro-American Studies Program. Cutter could live with Creed. And Creed could live with Cutter.

But Jack awoke one morning to find the Old Ones gone. Percy Thompson with his precious quarto of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Lucy Kramer with her drawer of green lollies for her little friends Timm and Jenny Lynn. Virgil Cutter and the three unpublished manuscripts to which he had devoted twenty years of his life. Even old Basil Wentworth, with his endlessly revised plans for the new library that never got built.

Busiris administration changed as well. Vice President for Academic Affairs Bradley Beckstrom, Jack’s antagonist-collaborator in developing the Black Studies Program, was reassigned to teaching duties in 1977 and retired the year following. President Stoddard himself, the oldest of the old, departed in 1979. Although he made more than one half-hearted attempt, Jack never developed with the new people in Old Main the same kind of gentleman’s agreement to disagree, the same mutual respect between antagonists, the same shared history he felt for old ones.

Especially Jack disliked, almost from the start, Vice President Bertholt Reich and Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences Ernest Hauptmann. “Bert and Ernie” he liked to call them. He regarded them as members of a new breed of college administrator he especially detested: careerists with no experience in either research or teaching, whose understanding of the pedagogy was basically managerial, and who therefore could never really understand what teaching was about. They picked up a Ph. D. as a kind of vocational prerequisite, in soft or even correspondence programs like education, sociology, administration or counseling. They moved easily and with no commitment from one institution to another, from one low-level administrative position to the next not-quite-so low-level administrative position, building resumes, weaseling their way up a corporate-educational ladder. “They might as well work for General Motors.”

Especially he disliked Hauptmann, “one of those East Coast wash-outs who retreat (always, in their own minds, temporarily) to some American backwater West of Hudson, confess publicly the justice of their exile while nursing petty jealousies and closet exculpations, subscribe to the New Yorker, and never, as months lengthen to years and then to decades, forgive Kankakee, Illinois, for not being “The Big Apple.”

“Those fuckers make bundles of money while we do all the work,” Jack would rage. “They’re assholes and thieves, without competence or consciences.”

Jack’s response, in the first year of 0% raises, was a letter explaining that if Busiris couldn’t increase his pay, all he could do was work less. Starting in 1974 he began inserting “Stop Days” in his syllabus.

“What does this mean, ‘Stop Day’?” students would ask.

“It means we stop.”

“Do we have class?”

“You can have class if you want, but I won’t be here.” Then Jack would explain 0% raises in a year of 15% inflation.

“This is a movement, Tucker,” he would tell me. “The Jack Creed’s Underground Hit the Bastards Where It Hurts Them Most Restaurant Movement. Today me, tomorrow us, the day after that the department. Before you know it, the whole university.”

Most stop days Jack spent in the office as usual, during the morning at least, tutoring whatever students happened by.

Although Jack continued his practice of Stop Days throughout the seventies, extending them finally to a Stop Week at the beginning, and then another at the end of each semester, the Jack Creed Stop Day Movement never spread to two, let alone the department. Busiris faculty were, as he never wearied of pointing out, short on balls. Administration fired—faculty left silently.

And with each faculty loss, Bert and Ernie grew stronger. And more hated.

I remember crossing the quadrangle with Jack one gray afternoon, probably in 1981, and seeing the Dean and the Vice President headed toward us. Sensing trouble, I looked for a way to avoid confrontation, but Jack seemed as determined on our course as they were on theirs. We were engaged in our private world, and they in theirs. He seemed to take as little notice of them as they did of him.

At the point of our crossing, however, he suddenly changed the subject and, still speaking to me, observed in a voice just loud enough to be heard, “You know, Tucker, if the sun were shining, or if you had a mirror, I could show you something very interesting about Herr Hauptmann.” Neither of us turned to look for a reaction, and our conversation resumed its previous subject and tone of voice.

Jack’s steam valve (and mine) during the later seventies was Tookey’s Tap, a blue collar alternative to the Heidelberger Lounge, not too far from the red light district, really, at the foot of Fourth Street down by the brewery. Only workers hung out in Tookey’s: no administrators, and no Busiris faculty except for Jack, myself and Lou Feracca. Almost no women. Lily Lee Martin never once set foot in Tookey’s Tap. Mostly Tookey’s was male bonding, trashing Busiris and what it was becoming, trashing America and what it was becoming. Bitching a lot about inflation and salaries, about the new breed of Busiris student and the new breed of big-buck Busiris administrators. We did a lot of reminiscing about the personal and collective sixties, and a lot of scheming for escape. Jack was going to write a series of academic detective novels. Lou was going to open the first McDonald’s in Dublin, and “tell this fucking place to kiss my fucking ass.” He had recently visited Ireland seeking roots on his wife’s side, and found “not a hamburger stand in the whole goddam country. It’s wide open. A gold mine.”

I fancied myself pulling down $25,000 a year working full time at the U. S. D. A. Research Lab, where I’d been doing some consulting on business communications.

Or we’d concocted some multi-year grant-funded project wheels inside of wheels, the three of us as executive directors.

Thompson’s junket to Madrid triggered one of Jack’s finest fantasy scams: the International Friends of Literature Association, headquartered in Milan, where he had shirt-tail relatives. Membership would be $50, stiff in those days. Except for executive chairs, who would collect the $50 memberships. In return for their $50, members of the International Friends of Literature Association would be guaranteed invitations to present a paper at the annual conference. Which, this being the International Friends of Literature Association, would be held each year in a different European city: Paris, London, Rome.

Using these invitations, members could leverage from their institutions an all-expenses paid one-week holiday in Europe—not a bad deal for $50. Then, Jack figured, all papers would be read at the same hour of the same day of the conference, in one huge auditorium, a vast Babel of readings. “Three, two, one, READ. Last one on his feet and still reading collects a $100 prize.” The other six days of conferencing would be devoted to sightseeing, drinking, wenching, and dinner meetings of the executive committee. Down the road Jack and I figured on hitting up participants for another $50 to underwrite publication of their papers. We’d work from their own camera-ready typescripts, and print the books somewhere in Poland or Bulgaria. Members, we figured, would more make up that $50 in promotions and raises attendant on being published. The plan never got off the ground, of course, but there are enough American schools like Busiris that we’d have had plenty of takers. Certainly old B. T. U. would have been none the wiser.

One scheme was more unlikely than the last, spun from the near edge of possibility to the most improbable reaches of desperate hope. The empty bottles on the table were bottles of desperation. Lou and I especially were approaching a point when our careers should have been turning out, only they didn’t seem to be quite turning out. At least not the way we’d dreamed. Bluebeard at the end of that movie, buried to his neck in the sand, with the tide of inflation coming in. Water swirling around his neck, his chin, his mouth, struggling to raise his nose just a little higher, each year a smaller raise, each year more expenses, the job market gone to hell with the economy.

Every Thursday afternoon around 5:00, a gimpy-legged guy came through Tookey’s selling sausage and hamburger. Brought it into the bar from his truck, wrapped in white butcher’s paper, five-pound packages, I forget the price. Just some guy trying to beat inflation and the conspiracy of chain groceries. Ray Kessler in Jack’s story “Ray’s Family Foods” is based on this guy. I always bought five pounds of sausage and five pounds of hamburger: it helped both of us beat inflation. Linda, who disliked sausage and thought the hamburger too fatty, always complained, but she always found a use for the meat. Jack bought some as an act of solidarity with the vendor, but Rose Marié would just tuck it away in the back of the freezer. When it got freezer burn, she’d throw it out, with some acid remark about “wasting money on that stuff when we’ve already got six packages in the downstairs freezer.” Eventually Jack quit buying.

More than once Rose Marié got caught in mild raves over one of Linda’s casseroles made from Tookey’s Tap sausage. She never inspired her to use our own, however.

By the end of the seventies, Jack Creed, Lou Feracca, and I were spending a lot of time at Tookey’s Tap. Even Jack recognized slow times when he saw them.

One or two beers were an upper for Jack. After three beers he leveled off. With his fourth drink, he’d turn morose and start replaying the past.

“It’s been downhill, Tucker, from June of 1977,” he would say. “Straight fucking downhill. I had my moment, and it came early. It goes like that sometimes. We’re all on a merry-go-round, and when your pony is in the right spot, you got a chance to reach for the brass ring. If you’re lucky and skillful, and whatever, maybe you get it. Then the thing spins around, and you find yourself moving further and further away from the ring. It’s completely out of reach. Before you know it, soon you’re on the far side, and no matter how long your arm is, you’re just not gonna reach that ring. If I live long enough, maybe the wheel of fortune completes its circle and I’ll have another shot. Maybe I’ll be too old to lift an arm. Maybe I won’t. Who the fuck knows? All I know for sure is that right now I’m fucked. For sure.”

“Your Pulitzer came in 1978,” Lou would remind him.

“I wrote the book in 1975,” Jack would point out. “Recognition is always after the fact. Bet the mortgage to your house, I could not have written Age of Faith in 1978. Or any time thereafter. For one thing, the faith is gone. For another thing, the Lady is gone. My life is over.

“It went by pretty damned fast.”