"They don't bother me somehow," Greene laughed. "Anyway, to wind up my story…" I was relieved to think him nearly done, as we had distance yet to travel.
He had not had opportunity, he said (returning to the subject of his post-capsular attitude), to see whether the strange new feeling would persist — an acceptance of himself, as I took it, and of the student condition, based on the refusal to concern himself further with their unacceptability — and whether unassisted it would have lifted him from his depression. For he was seized out of it shortly thereafter by irrelevant circumstance, in the form of Campus Riot II. The impending threat of it reunited him with his wife, ended all picketing, and kept every shop and laboratory open around the clock; the resultant prosperity, together with the climate of emergency, the exhausting pace, and his new indifference to the question of Final Examinations, did away with what limited appeal Student-Unionism briefly might have had for him. He enlisted in the ROTC and became something of a hero. Unfriendly rivals and vanquished adversaries might complain that it was his size and material advantage that accounted for his successes, rather than superior skill and character; he himself was too busy to care.
"I am okay," he formed the habit of repeating to himself when his motives or performance was criticized, "and what the heck anyhow." As an officer under Professor-General Reginald Hector, with unlimited supplies partly of his own manufacture, he led his men to victory and emerged from the riot well-known throughout the campus and generally well-liked, with a reputation for open-handedness, vulgarity, fair dealing, bad manners, good intentions, gullibility, straightforwardness, lack of culture, abundance of wealth, and sentimentality. The wealth was certainly a fact: the manufacture of riot-matèriel (directed in part by his wife) had made him immensely prosperous, and the great post-riot demand in NTC for building-material, paper, and plastics (a line he'd branched into during the hostilities, when metal was scarce) promised to make him more prosperous yet: Ira Hector alone exceeded him in wealth and unofficial influence in Tower Hall.
"But things went kerflooey all the same?" I asked. I was eager now to have done with the story, which however had certainly illumined me on the subject of human marriage. Greene shook his head no, but in a way that I presently understood to mean Yes, and I still don't understand it, or something similar. His speech grew no less at odds with itself from here until the end of his relation: an inharmonious amalgam of the several idioms I'd hear him employ thus far:
"Durn if I can figure what got to us, togethernesswise. We bought us a fine house in a suburban quad, with a pool and a color Telerama and all like that; the kiddies started music lessons; Sally Ann had her own wheels to get around with, and only worked when she felt like getting out of the house. She weren't tied down a speck, what with O.B.G.'s daughter to clean house and me helping with every meal. And like, I'm busy, sure, but George, it ain't as bad as the old days, no sirree Bob, when I was up with the chickens and worked till midnight." What was more, he said, they'd agreed to cleave exclusively each to the other, as in the early terms of their marriage, with the difference that now they were to be equal partners and faithful companions in every aspect of life, rather than master and mastered.
"It ain't that business is slow, you understand, despite the way taxes have gone up. I spend me a fortune every year around Tower Hall to get the College Senate to lower my taxes and stop buying cheap stuff from across the Pond, but it's no go, sir; and they keep taking more and more timberland for college parks and the like. I hired me a roomful of Ph.D's to find out how to do more business: after awhile I got so took with the idea I closed down half my mills and paperplants and went into the Marketing- and Packaging-Research Department my own self. Didn't need all them people working for me anyhow, with their durn committees: we got machines now that WESCAC operates, you stick a log of wood in one end and get newsprint out the other, with nobody touching it in between. WESCAC even tells us how many trees to cut down, and which men to lay off."
In consequence, I learned, though he was prospering as never before, he was virtually unemployed, WESCAC having taken over executive as well as labor operations. When O.B.G.'s daughter had turned up and publicly accused him of having exploited her immorally in his youth to further his own interests, and possibly even having fathered a child on her, he had offered to hire her as a housemaid despite his wife's old resentment of her. Miss Sally Ann herself he made financial director of his concerns. Their children were amply provided for: the girls twirled silver batons in one of the Sub-Junior Varsity Marching Bands, the boys were star performers on the Faculty Children's Athletic League Farm Teams; they were never spanked, received large allowances, played games and took vacations with their parents — whom they called by their first names — had Telerama receivers in their bedrooms and a private bowling alley in their recreation basement, and regularly attended their neighborhood Enochist Hall for tradition's sake, as did their parents, though it was made clear to them that the Enochist Answers were their own reward, there being no such places as Commencement Gate and the Nether Campus. On weekends they all played golf and went to parties at the houses of their friends.
But no one was happy. O.B.G.'s daughter refused on the one hand to be "degradated," as she put it, to the role of menial, and on the other to be "bought off" with a slightly higher income and the title of Assistant Homemaker. Neither would she take the position he offered her as Special Representative in his Promotion Department, though the job entailed nothing more strenuous than being photographed for advertisements in Frumentian publications: she insisted that he confess his past attraction to and maltreatment of her, that he pay her neither more nor less than he would pay a white male for the same work, and that to redeem his past abuses of her he educate her children along with his, in the same classrooms, summer camps, and Founder's Halls. His own children showed no such aggressiveness, excepting one son who stole motorbikes for sport and contracted gonorrhea at the sixth-grade prom: they were tall and handsome, their teeth uncarious, their underarms odorless; yet they seemed not interested in anything. As for Mrs. Greene, she had become a scold — perhaps because, though she was still youthful enough in appearance to be mistaken for her daughters, in fact she was approaching middle age. Her moods ran to sudden extremes, more often quarrelsome than otherwise; she complained of her responsibilities; neither she nor her spouse thought it possible to pursue a career, raise the children, and supervise the housework at the same time, yet they could not bear the foolish women who had nothing to do but drink coffee and talk to one another by telephone; they believed in an utterly single standard of behavior for men and women, but practiced chivalric deference in a host of minor matters. She did not think they went dancing often enough; he wished he had more time to play poker with his colleagues.
"I'd swear I wanted her to be her own woman, independencewise, but whenever she'd go to work I'd freeze up and wish she was just a plain wife. Then she'd wife it a while, fix fancy meals and sew drapes and all, and I'd wish she had something more interesting than that to talk about! We got to be so much alike and close together, we'd be bored fit to bust for something different — but go away one night on a business trip, we'd miss each other like to die. And me getting soft, and overweight, and tired all the time from nothing! And Sally Ann skipping periods, and starting to wear corsets! And both now and then half a-yearning to bust out and start over, but knowing we'd never do as well, compatibilitywise, and loving each other too much anyhow, despite all. Durn if it weren't a bind! I'd say to myself, I'm okay, and what the heck anyhow — but that didn't help none when she'd bust out crying and go back for another prescription. And them doctors, and them analysts, and them counselors! One'd tell her 'Stay home and be a woman.' Another'd say 'Go to work full-time, let it all go.' One'd say 'Get divorced any time you want, that's the kind of campus we live on nowadays'; another'd say 'Stay married no matter what, 'cause if the family don't hold fast there won't be no character left in the Present Modern College of Today.' Some told Sally Ann she should let me have my head but tread the straight and narrow her own self, like olden terms; others said to me what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, one way or the other. Take pills; don't take pills! Go back to Enochism; eat black-strap molasses; practice breath-control! One high-price fellow told Sally Ann she ought to sleep with him to cure herself, 'cause his own wife didn't understand him! I swear to Pete! I swear right to Pete!"