Florence Gordon by Brian Morton

Author:Brian Morton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

54

Florence was planning to go to a meeting at NYU, not far from the library. She asked Emily to find her there that day and give her the next packet of research.

“Faculty meetings in the summer?” Emily said.

“It isn’t a faculty meeting,” Florence said. “It’s a protest.”

She put her fist in the air, signifying protest.

“What are you protesting?”

“A group of teachers and students want to keep the bloodmobile off the campus, and I want to put my two cents in.”

“What’ve they got against the bloodmobile?”

“The blood-donation laws discriminate against gay men. If you’re a man who’s had sex with another man, you’re not allowed to donate.”

“That’s crazy,” Emily said.

“It’s not so much crazy as cowardly. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, they didn’t know how to test for HIV in the blood supply. So a law like that, as repulsive as it was—well, maybe it was the best they could do. But now? Now they can do the test, but they still haven’t lifted the ban. They’re cowards, they’re homophobes, they’re ignorant, or they’re some combination of the above.”

When the day came, Emily found Florence without any difficulty, but instead of just handing her the packet and leaving, she stuck around. She was curious about observing Florence in her natural habitat, the protest meeting.

The meeting, held in an auditorium in a building on Washington Square, was much more crowded than Emily would have expected.

When Emily got there, the meeting hadn’t yet started, but already there was an atmosphere of anger in the room. Emily felt both innocent and ignorant—a shameful combination. She felt innocent because she didn’t think she’d been in a room with quite the same feeling in it before. She felt ignorant because she had nothing to compare it to. She ran her mind through the novels she loved, trying to remember whether any of them had featured big meetings. There were parts of Anna Karenina where Levin was engaging in all these arguments about land reform, but she couldn’t remember them that well. She’d sort of skimmed those parts.

When the discussion got started, the issues seemed simple. A few people wanted the bloodmobile to continue to pay its monthly visits, because blood donation was important. Most of the speakers wanted to ban it, because the laws restricting blood donations were intolerable.

As she listened to the arguments, she didn’t know how she felt. On the one hand . . . But on the other hand . . .

When some of the speakers were making their points, other people were snapping their fingers. At first it struck Emily as inexplicable, but then she realized it must be some political-meeting version of applause. The finger snappers looked serenely approving of what was being said.

She wondered how this custom had come to be. What was wrong with clapping? The finger snapping made it seem as if a group of beatniks had beamed in from a 1950s jazz club.

After many people had spoken—students, teachers, other people who worked for the university—Florence walked slowly to the microphone.

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