The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) Read Online Free

over the woodwinds of her feelings. “This morning, I was fired from Jocelyn.”

Chapter II

Mulcahy Has an Idea
    W HAT THE STUDENT, SHEILA McKay, replied to his confidence was: how terrible, Dr. Mulcahy; how awful to have to break such a piece of news to your wife. Among the still-filial section of the student-body, the Mulcahys were acclaimed as a very devoted couple, an ideal couple, the girls said; so wrapped up in each other. They were popular, especially, as chaperons at the regular Saturday night dances, with the fat girls, pale girls, pimpled boys, chinless boys who stiffly paired off in the drafty gymnasium decorated with bows of crepe paper, while the rougher element, scornful of the old self-play phonograph or cheap three-piece band, of the basketball nets and the Indian clubs, drove off in its convertible to Gus’s roadhouse or put on its pork-pie hat and buttoned its windbreaker and hitchhiked down the state highway to York or Lancaster or up to Harrisburg or chipped in on a gallon of red wine and made love on the couches of the darkened social rooms. In the brightly lit gymnasium, however, Catherine Mulcahy, née Riordan, led off with a boy-student, her pale-rimmed spectacles folded in their case for the night, her long heavy straight brown hair wound up high with a Spanish comb from which a white-lace mantilla descended. She wore her wedding-dress, a white satin and net concoction with a short train; crystal drops sparkled at her ears; lipstick outlined her thin lips; and the pale, somewhat watery blue of her eyes, the sharp cut of her nose, which ordinarily had a secretarial quiver, were lustered and softened with excitement and a heightened sexual aplomb. “Doesn’t Mrs. Mulcahy look beautiful ?” the girls cried to their escorts, identifying Catherine’s triumph over four children, housekeeping, and poverty with their own trepidant emergence from the chrysalis of slacks and blue jeans, with the innocent magic of parties, rouge, low dresses, music, with everything silky, shining, glossy, transfigured, and yet everyday and serviceable, like a spool of mercerized cotton or a pair of transparent nylons reinforced at heel and toe.
    And Dr. Mulcahy, by the serving-table, quaffing fruit-juice punch and crunching cookies, waving jubilantly to his wife, arguing the quantum theory with a physics or a pre-med student, impressed for the boys and girls the die of authority on the gala, as a more personable teacher could not have done. This ugly, a-social man, at home and suddenly garrulous in their midst, shedding his terrors for them as his wife shed her spectacles, imparted to each and every dancer a sense of privileged participation, of having been chosen and honored, as though their act of choice in inviting him set them under a new dispensation, eventfully apart from the rest. These were not the remarkable students but the diffident, unoffending minority who, anywhere else but Jocelyn, would have been on top of the heap; and the knowledge that here the prerogative of extending the invitation weekly, of securing a sitter for the children, fell to them, of all people, rather than to their elders and betters, made them feel almost apologetic; their undeserved good fortune, surely, was a reflection on the Jocelyn system of values.
    In the eyes of such mild maiden freshmen as Sheila McKay and her two roommates, the dances came slowly to be conceived as an object-lesson to the college; this, declared the minority, timidly presenting its bill of particulars, is what we would like Jocelyn to be. To have a good attendance became urgent and exemplary, as winter closed in and beer-cans piled up in the leaf-choked rain-pipes of the boys’ dormitories and the poker-playing crowd kept the girls in the neighboring building awake all night Saturdays and swaggered in, unshaven, to Sunday breakfast in commons, boasting of no-hours sleep. Proselytization for the dances went on, concomitantly, at an intensified pace in the