To top it off, Frankfurter University had offered a taxonomic penthouse they would construct for his sole habitation. “Distinguished Professor,” the highest honor that was accorded a faculty member, was deemed incommensurate with Jonas Elijah Klapper’s stature. The title that was to be Jonas’s, and Jonas’s alone, in perpetuity, was Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values. If only that paragon of selfless maternality, who had been pitifully chained to the classification of an agu-nah, a deserted wife, had lived to see the change in academic nomenclature necessitated by her Jonas. And the signs and wonders had come pouring.
And now another.
The week after Roz’s emotional return from the Amazon, Cass went for his Tuesday meeting and found Marjorie Cutter sitting in the small office where Cass had expected to find the professor. Her face, normally stolid, was churned up with the agitated eagerness of a bystander at a fatal accident, and she placed her index finger vertically against her mouth, forming the crucifix of silence, and motioned for Cass to stay put. The door of the next office was closed, but Cass, following Marge’s urgent facial signals, listened, and an irate voice could be heard leaking through the wall.
Cass couldn’t share in Marge’s fevered excitement about a confrontation of soap-opera proportions happening in real life and within hearing. On the contrary, he felt his innards clenching. For a few minutes, while the voices remained muffled, it was conceivable that there was nobody but Jonas Elijah Klapper in the next office, either talking on the phone or having a psychotic breakdown, but the raised voices soon partitioned into two.
And suddenly there he was. He stood at the threshold, staring unseeingly, or so it seemed to Cass, his features distorted in that silent-film shriek of horror that recalled to Cass a moment he would just as soon have forgotten, when Klapper’s wrath over “Dover Beach” had nearly annihilated Cass. Professor Klapper pushed past Cass, who tried to retract himself, and elbowed Marge to reach for his briefcase on the floor near the desk. He said not a word and turned away to flee, but not before Cass had caught sight of the wild gleam of triumph snaking its way across his face.
While Cass and Marge remained frozen like hands on a clock in a blackout, another apparition materialized at the threshold.
The dean of the faculty, often accused of being a bloodless prig, was giving the lie to the accusation. Browning Crisp’s face was an apoplectic shade of red. He, too, stared unseeingly, or so it seemed to Cass, for several long moments.
“That is the most impossible man on the face of the earth!” he finally announced, which was as out of character as the pounding blood in his face, since Browning was the soul of decorum, and it was hardly decorous for someone at a certain rank, in this case a dean, to address those at a lower rank, in this case a secretary and a graduate student, regarding a personage above them, in this case a professor, not to speak of an Extreme Distinguished Professor.
“Professor Klapper?” ventured Marge in a small voice, hoping to push the dean to a few more indiscretions.
“Indeed!”
“You look like you’ve been given a terrible time,” Marge urged gently.
“Well,” Crisp said, collecting himself, “I daresay I’ll recover.”
The dean had gone to the Extreme Distinguished Professor to discuss his giving up some of his building space-he was using most of it for storage anyway-because it would be needed for the new brain and cognitive sciences center. Klapper had stared him down with the most intimidating of his glowers.
“I shall not relinquish a cubit!”
With his entreaty to Klapper’s sense of collegiality rebuffed, the dean reminded Jonas that the space belonged to the university. Brain science and cognitive science were dynamic and expanding fields. To stay in the first rank, Frankfurter had to allow them to grow. Harriet and Manny Katzenbaum had generously donated the funds for renovation if the university could come up with the available space. It was Browning’s responsibility as dean to allocate space according to the greater good of the university. Jonas’s underused offices were the logical option for the time being.
Perhaps it was the word “logical” that had touched off the ensuing tirade. Klapper had insulted Browning Crisp up and down the canon, accusing him of being an academic apparatchik of the noetic nomenklatura, a moral Quisling who was reneging on the covenant of trust and who would be reduced, if he were remembered at all, to an ignominious footnote in the history of Jonas Elijah Klapper.
At this point, Browning Crisp lost his own temper and wielded his decanal power. There was no more negotiation: some of Jonas’s space would be taken away. Klapper told him that in that case he would resign. It may have been said in the heat of the moment, but Browning Crisp was going to hold him to it.
Jonas had shown, under the circumstances, the restraint of a saint. The insult was historic. They were proposing not only to reduce his square footage but to bestow the stolen property on his sworn enemies. These were the illiterate mob intending to trample out intellectual and spiritual life as Jonas Elijah Klapper had known and shaped it, the light-spun span of all the faith, literature, and values of the ages. This brain and cognitive sciences center represented the worst of scientism, for it had set its sights on the study of Man. “Go, wond’rous creature! mount where Science guides, / Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; / Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, / Correct old time, and regulate the Sun”-but keep your filthy fingers off the study of Man! This was but a small share of his thoughts on the matter that he had seen fit to impart to the odious dean of faculty.
The ex-Extreme Distinguished Professor hadn’t gotten in touch with any of his graduate students, nor had anyone from the administration. At the designated time, the seven of them were assembled round the seminar table, awaiting the Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self.
Vague rumors had reached them, but they were uncertain of everything. It fell to Cass to tell them quietly of the scene that he had witnessed, and they received the news in wounded silence. The few desultory speculations concerned where he might go next, and they along with him.
“He could go anywhere.”
“Not Great Britain.”
“Well, of course, not there.”
“He could always go back to Columbia. I’m sure Columbia would be thrilled to have him back.”
“It would be good to go back to New York.”
“Who knows where it will be? We could end up almost anywhere in the world.”
“It’s kind of exciting. Disorienting but exciting.”
“You have to expect the unexpected with Jonas.”
They sat there for the full two and a half hours of the seminar, long after they had given up on Professor Klapper’s appearing, feeling that it would be disloyal to leave before the allotted time was over. When Cass left them, they were heading as one toward the View from Nowhere.
XXVI The Argument from Chosen Individuals
Cass had decided against informing Klapper of his change of plans. He would go and speak to the dean of graduate students. His hope was that some other Frankfurter department would accept him. He had some ideas about what he wanted to study. But Cass received word from Klapper himself, a scrawled note left in his box summoning him.