Malcolm has an intuitive sense of his emotional parameters, his range and repertoire. It’s an unwavering internal mechanism of measurement that gives the impression of confidence. Some perceive it as arrogance. It’s not. Rather, it’s a trick of the genes he was born with, a small gift, like absolute pitch and eidetic memory.
Not that he knows himself, of course. Who can purport to possess that gift? Still, Malcolm McCarty exercises a consistent ability to articulate and prioritize the morphology of his sensibility. In a millennium of inchoate folly, even rudimentary self-awareness is considered impressive.
There’s ice on the road from a recent snowstorm, and with characteristic lethargy, the town of Allegheny Hills has not sent out plows. If he was the sort of man who shrugged, and he isn’t, he might be tempted to do so now, to convey his indifference to the condition of Maple Ridge Road. As a man of implacable aplomb, insignificant external details do not affect his fundamental purpose.
Professor McCarty is completely disinterested in the exchange of verbal banalities and displays of conventional gestures. That’s the sort of behavior junior faculty refer to as body language. Body language, he thinks derisively during faculty meetings, wondering if any of the new boys have read a Shakespearean sonnet. Or more accurately, any sonnet.
He remains calm. He conceals his contempt for the assistant professors from California and eastern seaboard cities. It’s the principles of the institution he’s devoted to, not the transitory personalities. Let them come and go. Milton and Chaucer are permanent like the universal law of gravity, the force fields and the speed of light.
Malcolm McCarty believes universities are akin to the monasteries of Europe’s Dark Age, the last repository of illumination in a barbarous era that lasted a thousand years. During particularly offensive curriculum discussions, where the canon is autopsied and body parts assigned to what is indisputably the province of women’s studies, ethnic sociology, film appreciation and abnormal psychology, Professor McCarty maintains his restraint. He has an appreciation for grace and the discipline of modulation.
In the third decade of his academic service, Malcolm recognizes that bureaucracy eventually reduces and degrades. He’s become strategic. Junior faculty present passionate justifications for Hip Hop: The Poetry of the Present. They’re not arguments, but clearly rehearsed theater pieces. It’s a charade with syllables intended for another format entirely. Twitter? YouTube?
Given these rules of engagement, a monosyllable is appropriate. A simple no. He has a reputation as the man of the no. He’s their anchor, their barricade, their unrelenting referee. He instinctively recognizes where the borders of civilization are and when there’s an incursion. His sense of violation is absolute. He’s been department chair for two decades.
Invariably these boys and, increasingly girls, move away. On, they call it, as if Boston and Los Angeles automatically conferred clarity and vision. He can define them with the elegance of a simple equation. Movie theaters with ornate facades + plazas selling the paraphernalia of diversity + concoctions with curry from Cambodian villages = an unassailably better destiny.
During their last faculty meeting, he glanced across the Formica table in the conference room. Their oak table disappeared one weekend and the replacement appears to have come from the student cafeteria. It’s leached beige plastic, no doubt assembled by teenagers in Malaysia or the Philippines who have no concept of what a conference table looks like or what its purpose might be. They don’t know much about the Imperial Examinations, either.
Malcolm McCarty was looking for Bob Lieberman, his staunchest ally. They came to the College of Northern Pennsylvania at precisely the same time. It was spring and nearly thirty years ago in the placid era before the vulgarization of culture. There was a before, when the knowledge of literature was a necessary attribute of the intelligentsia. Books were discussed at dinner parties where wit and controversy engendered a verbal choreography similar to performance art.
Malcolm McCarty wasn’t alone. Bob Lieberman can bear witness. They saw the delegitimizing of the experimentalists and the subsequent round-up of the stylists, the stilt dancers who parachuted for locomotion. When asked for proof of authenticity, the stylist held out his palms and smiled. There it was, stigmata on demand. Then the critical apparatus, the intellectual’s compass, collapsed.
This was before the college was called CON PA. Or as the students say now, without irony, the Con.
An excessively thin, completely bald man is occupying Bob Lieberman’s regular chair, the one with wheels and torn leather upholstery decorated with masking tape like bandages. The stranger is picking his nails with a Swiss army knife. Malcolm will have him removed by security. He reaches for the department phone and simultaneously realizes that it is, in fact, Bob Lieberman. It’s a maliciously vandalized rendition. The sixty-six-year-old version of his former colleague and confidante is unrecognizable. He’s progressing through his collection of miniature instruments with intense concentration. He’s a slow moving chameleon extracting a filing tool.
Their recent conversation was disappointing. Bob Lieberman had taken to staking out his office and ambushing him. He’d suddenly spring from a nook in the corridor as Malcolm walked toward his office.
“You can have the 49ers on Sunday. Give me eight points,” Bob proposed.
Was this an attempt at appeasement? The official line was ten. Malcolm was suspicious.
“Why this generous offer?” Malcolm asked. “What do you want?”
“The spring grad seminar,” Bob admitted.
“Have a topic?” Malcolm didn’t want to know.
“The genius of Bob Dylan.” Bob Lieberman offered a partial smile so small, it seemed purely conceptual. He looked feral and wizened and his skin was dull gray.
“Take it to the curriculum committee,” Malcolm said. He reached his office and pulled the key from his pocket.
“You are the curriculum committee,” Bob pointed out, following him.
“What did I say last time?” Malcolm was annoyed.
“I believe you said not in this life time or any other,” Bob recalled.
“Correct,” Malcolm replied, his key in the slot; he opened his office door. Bob Lieberman was still there. Then Malcolm shut and locked the door.
Bob Lieberman succumbed to a student, an older student, a returnee as they currently phrase it. He was exculpated by technicality. Malcolm considers Bob’s behavior an ethical violation. His fall from grace occurred in broad daylight and slow motion. Bob Lieberman defiled his principles and vows. He ignored logic and loyalty and, in his defining moment, he didn’t go down with his ship.
Bob divorced his wife, the daughter of a celebrated Israeli cellist for Christ’s sake, and married a woman with a spawn of grandchildren from various sons and daughters, half-children, stepchildren and assorted offspring from implausible liaisons with adoption complications. Some children kept returning to the screened porch at sundown like hungry dogs, and after a year they were considered found.
Bob Lieberman stopped writing. He said he didn’t feel the urge anymore. He was making furniture with his soon to be bride. He’d bought a pick-up to transport his pine benches and square squat tables to craft shows.
“I have no regrets. Make a novel. Make a bench.” Bob shrugged.
His new wife draped herself in floral housedresses resembling tents. Her grandsons in the army had phrases from Corinthians tattooed to their arms. The granddaughters were in jail or missing. She had given them the names of gems and intoxicants, as if intentionally scarring them from birth. Amethyst, Jade and Crystal. DUIs, possession with intent, and burglary were considered routine events. Then the multiplicity of in-laws with tawdry soap opera lives, passing around photographs of a half-child’s grandson from three liaisons past. Hadn’t Patricia in one of her Women’s Club scholarship activities sponsored that returnee?