Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [7]
So all the bells but 1 from a middle octave were slathered with grease to prevent their rusting and stored in 4 ranks in the estate’s great barn, 200 meters from the mansion. The 1 bell that was going to get to sing at once was installed in the cupola of the mansion, with its rope running all the way down to the first floor. It would call people to classes and, if need be, also serve as a fire alarm.
The rest of the bells, it turned out, would slumber in the loft for 30 years, until 1899, when they were hanged as a family, the 1 from the cupola included, on axles in the belfry of the tower of a splendid library given to the school by the Moellenkamp family of Cleveland.
The Moellenkamps were also Tarkingtons, since the founder of their fortune had married a daughter of the illiterate Aaron Tarkington. Eleven of them so far had been dyslexic, and they had all gone to college in Scipio, since no other institution of higher learning would take them in.
THE FIRST MOELLENKAMP to graduate from here was Henry, who enrolled in 1875, when he was 19, and when the school was only 6 years old. It was at that time that its name was changed to Tarkington College. I have found the crumbling minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting at which that name change was made. Three of the 6 trustees were men who had married daughters of Aaron Tarkington, 1 of them the grandfather of Henry Moellenkamp. The other 3 trustees were the Mayor of Scipio, and a lawyer who looked after the Tarkington daughters’ interests in the valley, and the area Congressman, who was surely the sisters’ faithful servant, too, since they were partners with the college in his district’s most important industries.
And according to the minutes, which fell apart in my hands as I read them, it was the grandfather of young Henry Moellenkamp who proposed the name change, saying that “The Mohiga Valley Free Institute” sounded too much like a poorhouse or a hospital. It is my guess that he would not have minded having the place sound like a catchment for the poor, if only he had not suffered the misfortune of having his own grandson go there.
IT WAS IN that same year, 1875, that work began across the lake from Scipio, on a hilltop above Athena, on a prison camp for young criminals from big-city slums. It was believed that fresh air and the wonders of Nature would improve their souls and bodies to the point that they would find it natural to be good citizens.
WHEN I CAME to work at Tarkington, there were only 30C students, a number that hadn’t changed for 50 years. But the rustic work-camp across the lake had become a brutal fortress of iron and masonry on a naked hilltop, the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at Athena, keeping 5,000 of the state’s worst criminals under lock and key.
Two years ago, Tarkington still had only 300 students, but the population of the prison, under hideously overcrowded conditions, had grown to 10,000. And then, 1 cold winter’s night, it became the scene of the biggest prison break in American history. Until then, nobody had ever escaped from Athena.
Suddenly, everybody was free to leave, and to take a weapon from the prison armory, too, if he had use for 1. The lake between the prison and the little college was frozen solid, as easily traversed as the parking lot of a great shopping mall.
What next?
YES, AND BY the time André Lutz’s bells were at last made to sing as a carillon, Tarkington College had not only a new library but luxurious dormitories, a science building, an art building, a chapel, a theater, a dining hall, an administration building, 2 new buildings of classrooms, and athletic facilities that were the envy of the institutions with which it had begun to compete in track and fencing and swimming and baseball, which were Hobart, the University of Rochester, Cornell, Union, Amherst, and Bucknell.
These structures bore the names of wealthy families as grateful as the Moellenkamps for all the college had managed to do for offspring of theirs whom conventional