• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I was surprised and not a little reassured to receive an e-mail expressing support from Harvey Deharo who, as Director of the Ponce, is a member of the Board of Governors. “Dear Norman,” he wrote. “A quick note to let you know I am behind you one hundred percent. I think the savaging you have gotten from the Bugle has been nothing less than scandalous, and I have written to the editor saying as much. Call me anytime and let me know anything else I can do to help you. Yours fondly, Harvey.”

Support of that kind is more than academic. I spoke to Robert Remick, Chairman of the Board and an old family friend. He has been unfailingly polite and sympathetic, but I can tell he is worried. Old Wainscott alumni have been calling him with all kinds of questions.

“I have polled the other members of the board and convinced them that you are innocent until proven guilty, Norman,” he said. “But one more embarrassing incident and we will have to consider placing you on administrative leave and appointing an acting director.”

Which would be the end. The jury of public opinion would see to it.

That same afternoon I received a squirrelly little note from the Wainscott President’s office saying that my participation in this year’s commencement exercises would not be welcome. Each year, for decades now, I have donned my particular plumage to join in the self-congratulatory mardi gras of the academy — what are honorary degrees, after all?

Strange how academics and their administrative keepers, for all their rhetoric about freedom and for all their freedom — the whole point of tenure, after all — can be so pusillanimous when it comes to respectability. But then so many of the faculty these days are the new Babbitts, such unapologetic careerists as to make corporate executives blush.

Of course, I see the machinations of Malachy Morin in all this. His problem will be how to get this news into the media without making Wainscott look as petty as it has become.

I stayed late at work. I took a stroll around the galleries after closing time. The unfailing aesthetic bliss rendered by these timeless objects is like oxygen to one’s soul. I stopped and meditated for a while in front of the seagoing canoe of Polynesian origin. Here, in one object, is distilled the spirit, courage, and intelligence of a remarkable people. In such contemplation, my horizons widened and time stretched so that I and my problems shrank to liberating insignificance.

I would have gone home, but I could not face the queasy peace of an improvised reconciliation. Instead, I decided to go to the Club, which has been my refuge through so many troubles.

Quelle difference! The headwaiter, a man with pomaded hair and a waxed mustache, a man with whom I have been generous in the past, studiously ignored me as I stood waiting for a table. When I finally protested, he showed me to a place in a corner near the kitchen entrance that felt like it had been reserved for pariahs. As he led me there, people I knew casually — faculty, staff, administrators — people who acknowledged my presence in the past with friendly enough hellos, pretended not to notice me.

Once seated, though the place was hardly busy, I was again ignored. I glanced around, trying to catch the eye of a waiter. But to no avail. I sat and fumed. I wrote letters in my head to the management, withdrawing the museum’s institutional membership and the hefty support that went with it. I scowled. I wanted to tip my table over with a crash and storm out of the place.

I suppressed an impulse to go to the headwaiter and tell him that he was a jerk of the first order and walk out with dignity. But I managed to calm down. I began to understand in some small measure what Jews, blacks, and other historically despised groups had suffered over the years. Not that it helped a whole lot to place my hands on the table before me, bow my head, and submit to this exercise in public shame.

It wasn’t humility that finally made me hold my head up and wait; it was pride. I knew who and what