The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) by Mary McCarthy

Author:Mary McCarthy [McCarthy, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480438453
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII

The Deputation

DOMNA AND JOHN BENTKOOP sat side by side on a small horsehair-covered sofa in the anteroom of Maynard Hoar’s office. They both looked extremely nervous, like a young couple being detained in the waiting-room of a doctor’s suite or an employment or adoption agency. The role they were about to play in the history of academic causes was in the foreground of their thoughts, so that they glimpsed themselves from the outside and strove for a correct demeanor that would combine assurance with naturalness. But merely by keeping them waiting, Maynard Hoar had turned the tables on them, so that they came, they began to fear, not as advisers, amici curiae, but as petitioners, facing an interrogation. Conscious of Miss Crewes, the secretary, typing in the next room, they spoke in slightly raised voices of indifferent matters, meanwhile exchanging certain eye-signals commenting on the furniture, which reflected a recent visit to Wanamaker’s on the part of Mrs. Hoar. The room had been redone, to cite the Alumni Bulletin, “in the spirit of the old College,” with white walls, white straight linen curtains, and black Shaker reproduction chairs. On the walls were dark paintings of the first presidents, clergymen and theologians, a primitive engraving showing William Penn and the Indians, and a pastel portrait of the Founder done by a woman friend. On a table, beside the catalogue and a brown glass ash-tray, was a framed snapshot of Maynard, fishing in a local stream. Domna indicated this, and John gave a short laugh, which came out over-loud, like a bray. To cover himself, he got up and pretended to examine the picture. Domna became immersed in the catalogue.

Each in his own mind was sorting out the arguments at his disposal and setting them aside, provisionally, in hopes that the other would take the initiative. They did not know each other well, but the constraint of their detention was beginning to draw them together, like pupils called before the Principal, and to invoke in each a silent trust that the other was the bolder and stronger of the two. John’s wife had just had a baby, so that he did not go out much, and he met Domna now, as if for the first time, in the intricacies of the Mulcahy case, like a man meeting a girl in a grand right and left and finding that their steps agreed. Though an ocean and a gulf of class had separated their childhoods, their upbringing had much in common in strictness and isolation; both held the advanced ideas that had been current in the eighteen-sixties and that remained advanced in the present era, though with a certain pathos, like an old hat that has never been worn.

Ten days had passed since they had written to Maynard, asking for a date for an interview; he had answered, begging them to postpone it until the beginning of the field-period, when all concerned would be freer. This morning the college was deserted, save for

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