The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [172]
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
And Sometimes They Were Very Sad
When Alton Hanna had become president of Baxter College in the mid-sixties, leaving his position as dean of faculty at Connecticut College to move to New Jersey, his daughters hadn’t come along willingly. On their maiden voyage to the Garden State, the girls had begun holding their noses and shrieking as soon as they saw the “Welcome to New Jersey” sign, long before the car passed any actual oil refineries. Once they were installed in Prettybrook, their homesickness increased. Alwyn complained about missing her old schoolmates. Madeleine found the new house creepy and underheated. She was scared to sleep in her big bedroom. Alton had moved his daughters to Prettybrook thinking they would enjoy the spacious house and the verdant backyard. The news that they preferred the family’s cramped town house in New London, a place that was basically all stairs, hadn’t been what he wanted to hear.
But there had been little nice to hear in that turbulent decade. Alton had come to Baxter at a time when the school’s endowment was shrinking and its student body in florid revolt. His first year in the job, student protesters had staged a sit-in of the administration building. Armed with a comprehensive list of demands—for the elimination of academic requirements, the establishment of a department of Afro-American Studies, the banning of ROTC recruiters on campus, and the divestment of endowment funds from corporations involved with military or oil production—they had camped out on the Oriental runners of Alton’s outer office. While Alton met with the student leader, Ira Carmichael, a clearly brilliant kid dressed in army fatigues with his fly ostentatiously open, fifty hirsute undergrads chanted slogans outside the door. Partly to send a signal that this kind of thing wouldn’t be tolerated on his watch, and partly because he was a Republican who supported the war in Vietnam, Alton finally had the borough police remove the students forcibly from the building. This had the predictable effect of further inflaming tensions. Soon an effigy of “Hiroshima Hanna” was burning on the college green, his bald head hideously enlarged into the shape of a mushroom cloud. Beneath Alton’s office window a swarm of protesters formed each day, baying for his blood. At six o’clock, when the students dispersed (their commitment to the cause didn’t extend to skipping dinner), Alton made his nightly escape. Crossing the green, where the charred remnants of his effigy still dangled from an elm, he hurried to his car in the administration parking lot and drove home to Prettybrook to find his daughters still loudly protesting the move to New Jersey.
With Alwyn and Madeleine, Alton was willing to negotiate. He bought Alwyn off with riding lessons at the Prettybrook Country Club. Soon she was sporting jodhpurs and a riding jacket, had formed a near-sexual attachment to a chestnut mare named Riviera Red, and never mentioned New London again. Madeleine was swayed by interior decorating. One weekend, Phyllida took Madeleine into New York. Arriving home on Sunday night, she told Madeleine there was a surprise for her in her room. Madeleine ran up the stairs to find the walls of her bedroom covered by reproductions from her favorite book in the world at the time, Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline. While she’d been in Manhattan, a wallpaper installer had steamed off the old design to replace it with this new one, which Phyllida had had custom-printed at a wallpaper manufacturer