“Because I don’t want you to. Dolly has a separate life of her own. You may not like it, but you have no right to jump in and wreck it for her. I’ll see you at the motel.”
He drove away rapidly and angrily, spinning the wheels of his car. Mrs. Bradshaw was back among her roses. I asked her very politely for permission to examine Dolly’s things. She said that would have to be up to Dolly.
Chapter 5
The campus was an oasis of vivid green under the brown September foothills. Most of the buildings were new and very modern, ornamented with pierced concrete screens and semi-tropical plantings. A barefoot boy sitting under a roadside palm took time out from his Salinger to show me where the Administration Building was.
I parked in the lot behind it, among a scattering of transportation clunks with faculty stickers. A new black Thunderbird stood out among them. It was late Friday afternoon by now, and the long collegiate weekend was setting in. The glass information booth opposite the entrance of the building was empty. The corridors were practically deserted.
I found the Dean’s office without much trouble. The paneled anteroom was furnished with convertible Danish pieces, and with a blonde secretary who sat at a typewriter guarding the closed inner door. She had a pale thin face, strained blue eyes that had worked too long under fluorescent light, and a suspicious voice:
“Can I help you, sir?”
“I’d like to see the Dean.”
“Dean Bradshaw is very busy, I’m afraid. Perhaps I can assist you?”
“Perhaps. I’m trying to get in touch with one of your girl students. Her name is Dolly McGee, or Dolly Kincaid.”
“Which?” she said with a little gasp of irritation.
“Her maiden name is McGee, her married name is Kincaid. I don’t know which she’s using.”
“Are you a parent?” she said delicately.
“No. I’m not her father. But I have good reason for wanting to see her.”
She looked at me as if I was a self-confessed kingpin in the white slave traffic. “We have a policy of not giving out information about students, except to parents.”
“What about husbands?”
“You’re her husband?”
“I represent her husband. I think you’d better let me talk to the Dean about her.”
“I can’t do that,” she said in a final tone. “Dean Bradshaw is in conference with the department heads. About what do you wish to see Miss McGee?”
“It’s a private matter.”
“I see.”
We had reached an impasse. I said in the hope of making her smile: “We have a policy of not giving out information.”
She looked insulted, and went back to her typewriter. I stood and waited. Voices rose and fell behind the door of the inner office. “Budget” was the word I caught most frequently. After a while the secretary said:
“I suppose you could try Dean Sutherland, if she’s in. Dean Sutherland is Dean of Women. Her office is just across the hail.”
Its door was standing open. The woman in it was the well-scrubbed ageless type who looks old in her twenties and young in her forties. She wore her brown hair rolled in a bun at the back of her neck. Her only concession to glamour was a thin pink line of lipstick accenting her straight mouth.
She was a good-looking woman in spite of this. Her face was finely chiseled. The front of her blouse curved out over her desk like a spinnaker going downwind.
“Come in,” she said with a severity that I was getting used to. “What are you waiting for?”
Her fine eyes had me hypnotized. Looking into them was like looking into the beautiful core of an iceberg, all green ice and cold blazing light.
“Sit down,” she said. “What is your problem?”
I told her who I was and why I was there.
“But we have no Dolly McGee or Dolly Kincaid on campus.”
“She must be using a third name, then. I know she’s a student here. She has a job driving for Dean Bradshaw’s mother.” I showed her my photograph.
“But this is Dorothy Smith. Why would she register with us under a false name?”
“That’s what her husband would like to know.”
“Is this her husband in the picture with her?”
“Yes.”
“He appears to be a nice enough boy.”
“Apparently she didn’t think so.”
“I wonder why.” Her eyes were looking past me, and I felt cheated. “As a matter of fact, I don’t see how she could register under a false name, unless she came to us with forged credentials.” She rose abruptly. “Excuse me for a minute, Mr. Archer.”
She went into the next room, where filing cabinets stood like upended metal coffins, and came back with a folder which she opened on her desk. There wasn’t much in it.
“I see,” she said more or less to herself. “She’s been admitted provisionally. There’s a note here to the effect that her transcript is on the way.”
“How long is provisional admission good for?”
“Until the end of September.” She consulted her desk calendar. “That gives her nine days to come up with a transcript. But she’ll have to come up with an explanation rather sooner. We don’t look with favor on this sort of deception. And I had the impression that she was a straightforward girl.” Her mouth turned down at the corners.
“You know her personally, Dean Sutherland?”
“I make a point of contacting all the new girls. I went out of my way to be useful to Miss or Mrs. Smith-Kincaid. In fact I helped to get her a part-time job in the library.”
“And the job with old Mrs. Bradshaw?”
She nodded. “She heard that there was an opening there, and I recommended her.” She looked at her watch. “She may be over there now.”
“She isn’t. I just came from Mrs. Bradshaw’s. Your Dean lives pretty high on the hog, by the way. I thought academic salaries were too low.”
“They are. Dean Bradshaw comes from a wealthy old family. What was his mother’s reaction to this?” She made an impatient gesture which somehow included me.
“She seemed to take it in stride. She’s a smart old woman.”
“I’m glad you found her so,” she said, as if she had had other kinds of experience with Mrs. Bradshaw. “Well, I suppose I’d better see if Mrs. Smith-Kincaid is in the library.”
“I could go over there and ask.”
“I think not. I had better talk to her first, and try to find out what’s going on in her little head.”
“I didn’t want to make trouble for her.”
“Of course not, and you didn’t. The trouble is and was there. You merely uncovered it. I’m grateful to you for that.”
“Could your gratitude,” I said carefully, “possibly take the form of letting me talk to her first?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“I’ve had a lot of experience getting the facts out of people.” It was the wrong thing to say. Her mouth turned down at the corners again. Her bosom changed from a promise to a threat.
“I’ve had experience, too, a good many years of it, and I am a trained counselor. If you’ll be good enough to wait outside, I’m going to try and phone her at the library.” She flung a last shaft as I went out: “And please don’t try to intercept her on the way here.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Miss Sutherland.”
“Dean Sutherland, if you please.”
I went and read the bulletin board beside the information booth. The jolly promises of student activities, dances and gettogethers and poetry clubs and breakfasts where French was spoken, only saddened me. It was partly because my own attempt at college hadn’t worked out, partly because I’d just put the kibosh on Dolly’s.
A girl wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and a big young fellow in a varsity sweater drifted in from outside and leaned against the wall. She was explaining something to him, something about Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles was chasing the tortoise, it seemed, but according to Zeno he would never catch it. The space between them was divisible into an infinite number of parts; therefore it would take Achilles an infinite period of time to traverse it. By that time the tortoise would be somewhere else.