LITMIR.BIZ

      SIX

      As he walked from Tigert Hall to the English building, Stall could not stop talking to Thomas Connor. He knew that he must look half-mad, muttering to a phantom listener. Students gave him a wide berth.

       My God, what do you expect me to do if I find out that some guy who teaches English also likes to . . . do what the ancient Greeks apparently did? Am I supposed to take him aside and tell him to cease and desist or he’ll end up like Jack Leaf—with flashbulbs in his face in a men’s room? Leaping from a third-floor window? Am I supposed to pass his name along to you who will give him his walking papers for the good of the university? It’s preposterous.

      As he walked, debating Connor, it occurred to Stall that, indeed, there were men in his department who were what was politely called “confirmed bachelors.” And maybe the study of English attracted such types, but to a man, as Stall knew them, these “types” were good, helpful, and honorable colleagues. He’d never heard an unkind word from any of them, though a few were known for rapier wit, and he’d enjoyed hours of searching and earnest conversation with many of them about mutual research interests. The best thing, the thing that held the potential to break a great many hearts, was that for now at least, Stall’s English Department, the one he hoped to chair someday, was a harmonious, happy collection of eccentrics whose greatest love was to read books and talk about them with young people. Of course, there were petty rivalries, and the placid surface was sometimes disturbed by academic politics, but this was a group that could gather for Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties and have itself a roaring good time. These were men, and now, with the advent of Sophie Green, a woman, who could get drunk as lords and end their evenings with their arms slung over one another’s shoulders in someone’s backyard singing “On Moonlight Bay.” Christ, it would kill Stall to see anything harm the beauty of his English Department.

      Stall imagined Connor on the phone with Harding, the president telling the chairman that Stall had not cooperated. At least not fully. Not in the way that a man with the university’s best interests at heart should cooperate. Stall would see Harding now—but what should he tell the old man about his talk with Connor? It occurred to Stall as he walked under the tall, turpentine-smelling pines in the midmorning sunshine, that it might serve both his and Connor’s purposes to keep their conversation secret from Harding, at least for the time being. If Connor planned to commission Stall as a secret agent, then it made good sense to tell no one about it.

      In Anderson Hall, Stall presented himself to Helen Markham, who stood guard over Harding’s inner office. Reading glasses precarious at the tip of her long, heavily powdered nose, she looked up at Stall from her memo pad as though this were any summer morning. As though neither a professor nor a governor had died in the last twenty-four hours. She lifted her cup of Earl Grey tea, sipped, and said, “Go on in. He’s had his Sanka.”

      Amos Harding was known for shunning humanity until he’d finished his first cup of instant coffee in the morning. He preferred instant, he said, for digestive reasons. No one asked him to elaborate. Stall thanked Helen Markham and walked on.

      Harding was standing at the tall window that looked out over the student ghetto that began abruptly a block beyond the row of restaurants and bars that lined University Avenue. He was a tall man who always wore black or dark-blue suits with narrow lapels and narrower ties. His face was pale, pocked, and gaunt. What hair he retained was white, combed straight back, and matted to his scalp with pomade. Department wits sometimes referred to him as Funus Director, the funeral director, and he did look a bit like a cartoon country mortician. Lost in the mists of history were the reasons that Harding had been made chairman.

      Stall cleared his throat and Harding turned from the window. “Well, Tom, how did it go with Himself?” Harding sometimes referred to the president this way so that all who heard would know he was on easy terms with the man who signed the checks.

      “Fine, sir.” Damn it, he asked you to call him Amos.

      Harding sat behind the big desk that Stall hoped someday would be his and motioned Stall to a chair. “It’s happening all over the state now, Tom.”

      What did Harding mean? People jumping out of windows? An epidemic of suicides?

      “Sorry, Amos. I’m not sure what you mean.”

      Harding reached out, lifted his empty coffee cup, looked into it, frowned. “This damned Committee. They’re going after Communists, the NAACP, homosexuals.” He spoke the words with obvious distaste. “Agitators, which I take to mean those shaggy kids out in front of the library.”

      Stall had stopped by these ragged gatherings a few times to watch the kids hand out leaflets about the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran or read aloud from Howl. The local free speech movement seemed to be headed by a grad student from Miami, Stephen Levy, who majored in political science. Mostly, students drifted past these self-styled provocateurs, paying no attention. Sleepy Gainesville was always slow to bend to the fashions from California and New York, whatever they were—clothing, politics, Hula-Hoops.

      Harding regarded Stall from across the Victorian desk with its matching period decorations, a bronze figure of a man in knee breeches pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with books, a bust of Tennyson. Harding waited.

      Stall said, “You think Jack’s death has something to do with this Committee?”

      “Yes, I do. I just don’t know what. Do you?”

      Stall decided to work from the premise that Connor had not told Harding about the photos of

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