A Drop of Cruelty
Robert Wexelblatt
. . . even
in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty. -Friedrich
Nietzsche
1.
It was only my friend Cavilcante’s retirement dinner yet the faculty dining room was thick with apprehension. Our department secretary, Lavinia Benedetto, hid herself in a corner deep behind a revetment of edgy graduate assistants. Sturmer and McComb, a brace of assistant professors, exerted themselves to laugh at the badinage of Thomas Linfield, exquisitely clad as always. “The greater part of my colleagues dress like longshoremen,” Linfield was famous for announcing on the first day of class each year, “while, as you can see, I am attired like a professor.” The Dean, only apparently at his ease, remained seated at his table, drawing the morals of his war stories. Three adjuncts had pulled their chairs near, but it was Caroline Warden-Blitzer, the Associate Provost, an unctuous woman with prematurely white hair and a vixen’s face, to whom he was addressing himself.
All the speeches had been delivered, every token bestowed, including the lack rocking chair with the University’s seal. The Dean had already solemnly announced the trustees’ routine decision to confer on the retiree the honorific title of emeritus. Wishes perfunctory and heartfelt for Cavilcante’s happy decrepitude had been expressed pretty much all around. In short, the evening had passed the moment when the passive voice takes over, when the forced mood decomposes and the fixed smiles disintegrate into dullness.
“Birds of a feather,” I observed, surveying the room.
Cavilcante reproached me. “No cliché is ever entirely true.”
Though I do not care for being feeling reproached, I was well beyond being offended by my old friend. He was right; I had been reduced to sociological small talk. I dislike academic parties; the next day I always feel like a vegetarian who’s scarfed down a whole rib roast.
The graduate assistants were making ironic faces at one another; a couple even shot aggrieved glances in the direction of the Dean, still tranquilly holding forth, though, if you looked closely, his left foot was twitching. Poor Lavinia twice put a restraining hand on her husband’s arm either to make him unclench his jaw or to prevent his running screaming from the room. CarolineWarden-Blitzer was growing visibly bored by the Dean’s necklace of tales, as if he himself were the irritant inside each pearl. In fact, everybody would have made a dash for the exits if they could, exploding with relief at getting away from the decorum, the ruins of a mediocre institutional meal, and the echoes of dreary toasts that seemed more to belittle than magnify the honor.
The young were at the furthest point from the brutal fact their elders could not avoid which was not retirement but mortality. The enchantment that held us in thrall was the Dean’s promise of a Very Distinguished Guest, regrettably delayed at the airport, one who must on no account be disappointed in finding a proper audience to greet him and to relish whatever he had to say. It was to be the high point of the evening, a wonderful surprise for Professor Cavilcante, and, above all, a jumbo honor for the University. In other words, he made it pretty clear that we were all to stay put until this mysterious celebrity put in his or her appearance. Resignation filled the room. People kept going into corners to phone their baby sitters.
The delay grew more and more awkward. Imagine that, having listened patiently to all the false endings of a turgid, uninspired Post-Romantic symphony, the final chord should be indefinitely deferred. The audience might turn into a mob and throttle the conductor.
At long last there was a commotion at the door. There appeared a University policeman and a young minion from the President’s Office, and, between the two, the guest—the real guest of honor. The Dean leapt to his feet and stretched out his arms like a polyp moved by a gust of current. Those standing nearby recognized the newcomer instantly, and word spread through the room that the person for whom we had been waiting was no less a personage than Norris Papanek.
Though it is unlikely that anyone reading this will require an introduction to Dr. Papanek, it is best to be precise. As everybody knows, Norris Papanek is the prodigious genius whose discoveries in medicine have revolutionized immunology and saved countless lives, whose theoretical work in large-scale astronomy has reconfigured the cosmos of space, time, and energy in which all educated people occasionally believe they are living. The only question is which Nobel Prize he will win. Papanek’s popular fame derives from the wellspring of all popular celebrity, television. Not only has he has appeared frequently as an expert commentator with the common touch but, of course, there is his award-laden, much re-run, thirty-episode series, The History of Science. A chess champion, government adviser, among the foremost of contemporary mathematicians, he is likewise the author of three books of poetry. The first, Prenatal Parental Paternal, includes a personal favorite of mine, “Refutation of the Law of Marginal Utility,” destined to appear in all future anthologies of American verse. Like the opening of Brahms’ Piano Trio in B-Major or Vermeer’s Girl Asleep, this poem never fails to move me, especially its conclusion, a mere three words in two lines: After everything/nothing.
Cavilcante, not a man one could call demonstrative, emitted a groan. If I had not been sitting beside him, I would not have heard it. This groan, so slight and involuntary, I found intriguing and, in its way, eloquent. It was shaped somewhat like a sine curve, beginning high then descending rapidly into silence, like the resigned complaint of a family dog left behind. For me, whatever courtesies would soon fill the air of the dining room would be conditioned by this groan; that is, by the certainty that Cavilcante was a good deal less than glad to see Norris Papanek, whose presence was meant to be the glorious climax of the evening dedicated to him.
Like the rest of those in attendance, save for the Dean and Associate Provost, whose inexplicable presence now made sense, I had no clear idea what Papanek was doing there. This made for invigorating suspense; it woke people up. They formed rapidly into the ranks of an audience, rearranging their chairs to face the little podium at one end of the room. Papanek, fawned over by the Dean and introduced by him to the star-struck Warden-Blitzer, glanced our way once with an expression that might possibly have been a smile but looked more like a smirk. Cavilcante stayed put in his seat, motionless as a pharaoh in bas-relief.
Perhaps Papanek would have liked to come directly over to Cavilcante. If so, he was prevented by the Dean who, hurrying to get things moving, directed him straight to a chair set up by the podium.
The Dean’s prologue was a specimen of the needs-no-introduction variety. He was enjoying himself as people do when they have successfully brought off a surprise. He looked at Cavilcante with an expression of benevolent triumph, as if he had vanquished him for his own good.
“Few of you will know that Norris Papanek was once a student of Professor Cavilcante. This was over thirty years ago and, alas, at another institution. The fact was brought to my attention by Dr. Papanek himself when we met a couple years ago at a conference in Australia. We were introduced by the President’s science advisor. ‘I see you have Hermes Cavilcante on your faculty,’ he said. I expressed surprise that he knew our faculty so well, especially in philosophy, but Dr. Papanek told me that he had long kept track of Professor Cavilcante’s whereabouts. ‘You’re damned lucky to have him, but I’m sure you know that. I owe him a lot. In fact, you could say I owe my career to him.’ It was a memorable encounter of which I am ashamed to confess I neglected to tell Professor Cavilcante. However, when I was making the arrangements for tonight’s celebration I recalled that meeting and sent a complimentary invitation to Dr. Papanek. The Dean of our Medical School followed this up with an invitation to lecture his faculty, and the Board of Trustees conveyed their wish to award Dr. Papanek an honorary degree. A full-court press and so, well, here we are. Dr. Norris Papanek.” He turned toward the guest, gestured toward the podium, and sat down.
I looked over at Cavilcante, who was concentrating on Papanek, as if examining a bacillus through a microscope.
“Thank you,” Papanek began in that semi-refined Brooklyn accent with which the whole nation has become familiar. “It’s a treat for me to be here this evening; in fact, it’s pretty nice just to get out of the airport. Everything the Dean said about our meeting in Australia is quite true, except that it was New Zealand. Professor Cavilcante may not remember me, but I certainly remember him, and I’m going to prove it. Thirty-two years ago, section three of Philosophy 101 met at nine o’clock on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in a filthy old building the University called Ford Hall and the students called Tin Lizzie. The Professor’s method was Socratic, which is to say terrifying, but the results were psychedelic, in the non-chemical sense. His very first words to us were to cite that old canard about every man being either a philosopher or a fool by the age of forty. His twist was to add that the two conditions were not mutually exclusive. The next thing he did was to ask the class for arguments as to why cheating is wrong, each of which he demolished by pointing out that we had only argued out of cowardice or conformity. After that, we freshmen were off and running, mixing up foolishness and philosophy about as well as any forty-year-old. I’ve never forgotten Professor Cavilcante’s teachings and I can only say that while I regret he’ll no longer be professing to the young, I hope he’ll find in retirement all the pleasure and leisure possible to a philosopher.”
Everyone smiled throughout, chuckled at the right moments, applauded politely at the end. The speech was conventional enough; and, though it left my old friend in the third person, it was, of course, the fact of the speech rather than its content that constituted the signal honor. Nevertheless, though I had only his profile to judge from, it seemed to me that Cavilcante was not pleased, as if he had been expecting something more dramatic, maybe some kind of revelation.
Papanek left the dais while the applause still reverberated, marched over to us, picked up Cavilcante’s hand and shook it, but said nothing further. Led by Linfield, people gathered around the hero, eager to introduce themselves and assure him of their esteem. Not a single personal word had been exchanged between Papanek and Cavilcante.
By now it was almost ten-thirty and, after the Dean’s reminder that everyone should plan to attend the special Saturday convocation at which Norris Papanek would be honored and would in turn honor the University by accepting its degree, honoris causa, the party broke up like a dike too long under pressure. With the Associate Provost holding his arm in a proprietary fashion, Papanek himself was the first to leave the room.
“Well,” sighed Cavilcante striking both thighs, “so now it’s time for pleasure and leisure.” It was only then that the real significance of the evening struck me; that is, from my old colleague’s point of view. He was a widower. He had come alone to be kissed off and his evening had turned into Papanek’s night. He would leave alone and return alone to an empty apartment where, if he should contemplate travel or playing cards, it would have to be alone. Like the children of almost everyone I knew, his three offspring lived busy lives far away. Paternity would have devolved into vestigial forms as they awaited the crisis, the nursing home, the funeral. The children would urge him to establish new routines, find new interests. Perhaps he intended to do a little lonesome research that would come to nothing. He would read a good deal, but mostly fiction now, become either more finicky or more careless about housekeeping and hygiene, would come to see in each civic crisis and international contretemps the degeneration of the world. At that moment he looked abandoned, and so this is how I imagined his future, or possibly my own. Real compassion is never simply mental and never detached; empathy is of the gut. Whether to comfort him or myself, I could not let him go, not just yet.
“How long has it been?” I said as we fetched our coats.
“Since when?”
“Since you went to a bar.”
He laughed. “A bar? In geologic time, not all that long; by human reckoning, about a generation or two, I guess.”
“What do you say, then? Let me buy you a drink—no two. One for each generation.”
He accepted with alacrity. I had hit on just the right thing. “All right,” he said with a what-the-hell gesture of his hand. “Anyway, I’ve got a story to tell you.”
“About Norris Papanek?” I guessed.
“Yes, about Norris Papanek. And me.”
“Excellent. In vino veritas, then.”
“I’d prefer single malt. You see, even Latin clichés are never entirely on the money.”
2.
I had suggested we avoid the campus bars as unsuited to the occasion. Instead, we walked a couple blocks downtown from the flashy clubs that preyed on undergraduates with cash to match their lust and installed ourselves in the piano bar of a staid hotel. The place, a hangout of mine once upon a time, was not crowded; the customers were mature and well dressed, the service unobtrusive. We began with some haphazard reminiscing and listened to the decorous jazz. Cavilcante said he would like to wait for his first Laphroaig before beginning his story. Once the water of life touched his palate, though, he was quite galvanized and spoke with something like ardor.
“I would ask the kind of question you usually start off with, you know, the sort that generally gets you a sentence or two. Up shoots Papanek’s hand and, if I’m improvident enough to give him the floor, he goes on for twenty, thirty minutes, covering more than I had in mind for the entire hour. Never once blithered or stumbled or goofed. Even at eighteen, he was more lucid than Linfield on his best day. Of course he’d read more than the other kids, but that didn’t have all that much to do with it. The difference had ceased being merely quantitative long before he set foot in a college.”
My old friend paused for three sips of whiskey.
“The midterm covered the Greeks. Papanek’s was absolutely the best I ever saw. He not only answered my questions as if they were trifles, which to him they probably were; he wrote original commentary and made connections to things I wouldn’t have dared mention in class. Penetrating and comprehensive. The boy knew military history, Greek politics, Xenophon’s account of Socrates, Nietzsche too. Even then he knew immensely more than I did about the history of science. Anybody would have supposed he was showing off, and that’s what I thought at first; but it actually felt more as if he had been starved for a chance to use his brain, to open it up. Papanek at nineteen was all pent-up energy, indifferent to the cold shoulders of his classmates. They seemed hardly to exist for him. How can I put it? That midterm was like an ejaculation of intellectual joy. He came into the exam room hefting his ballpoint like a javelin. I was reminded of that line in the Bible about the strong man rejoicing to run a race.”
“Well,” I said, “then he hasn’t changed.”
Cavilcante, concentrating on his whiskey and his memory, ignored my comment.
“Terrific as his test was, the first essay he gave me outstripped the midterm. He wrote it in the form of a Platonic dialogue. I say form, but he captured more than just the superficial aspects of Socratic dialectic. It was uncanny. The thing read more like a lost dialogue of Plato. He had Socrates converse with Callicles and Thrasymachus about the nature of justice and believe me when I tell you that Plato wouldn’t have been embarrassed to put his name to it. But there was something odd about that paper too. Wish I’d thought to make a copy. What I remember best is how he caught Socrates’ irony. I mean he got it so well that it was nearly disturbing, as if Papanek’s Socrates were doing something subversive and nasty, deliberately undercutting his own arguments and somehow mocking virtue even while extolling it.”
“I’m surprised how well you remember all this. I mean, it’s been—what? more than thirty years? He must have been quite a showboat.”
“Of course he was showboating, but it was all for me, you see. And I was moved by it. Who wouldn’t be? How many students like Papanek do you get in a career? He ate up everything I said and made me feel it was really me he cared about, not just Plato or Epictetus. That’s seductive, isn’t it? Being the humble messenger who’s mistaken for the magnificent message? You’ve seen him on television, I suppose, that series of his? He didn’t tell about science, he incarnated it. He had the knack even then. He made me feel I had it, too. It made a sort of bond. I guess it was pretty much the way the Dean said tonight. Even as a kid, Papanek needed to know everything but he also needed an audience to know he was knowing. That was my job—to hand out the praise and A-pluses.”
“And did you?”
“What?”
“Hand out praise with the A’s?”
My friend reflected a moment. “Have you ever had a student whose work is so good that it’s hard to praise?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s how Papanek’s was for me. Praise seemed banal, inadequate. His excellence was too obvious. Praise would have implied a superiority I just couldn’t feel. Praise requires that there be some exertion that deserves the praise, a kind of effort that implies the possibility of failing. Anyway, there wasn’t much I could say to Papanek about his work. I don’t know. Maybe that had something to do with what happened.”
“What was that?”
“His second paper. It was supposed to be on an original topic, relating the modern philosophy we’d been studying to their lives or something they were learning in another course—that sort of thing. You can imagine how I was looking forward to seeing what Papanek would produce with a carte that blanche. In fact, it was with him in mind that I chose the theme.”
“Seldom a bad idea to be over directive, is it?”
“Normally, yes.”
“So, did you get your magnum opus?”
Cavilcante finished off the scotch and motioned for the waiter to bring him another.
“It’s absurd,” he said. “When I saw him walk in tonight I was actually hoping for an explanation.”
“An explanation? Yes, you looked expectant and then—you looked disappointed. Were you?”
“Disappointed? Oh, yes.”
The scotch arrived along with another vodka and tonic for me, though I hadn’t asked for one. Cavilcante put his elbows on the table, rested his head in his hands, and spoke as if he had fallen into a reverie. “You know those students who challenge you?”
“Sure.”
“I mean the ones who want something you can’t give and so they challenge you for it and then, because that doesn’t work either, they begin to despise you. You become the father on whose bones they want to cut their teeth. They glare at you in class, and every conference turns into a psychomachia.”
“That what happened with Papanek?”
Cavilcante sighed then straightened up, suddenly alert. “Teaching really is writing on water. . . . Frankly, I don’t understand what went on between Papanek and me. Never did. That’s why I was hoping for an explanation. And yet you didn’t see me asking for one, did you? I couldn’t do it, not after all this time. I don’t know. So despite tonight’s surprise appearance, I still don’t know and I almost suspect that may be the point, my not knowing, retiring in a blaze of insincere praise and on this point still in utter ignorance. Maybe the reason he came was to remind me, to rub it in as some weird sort of revenge; maybe he was there out of resentment.”
“Oh, come on. It doesn’t seem likely that’s why he came tonight. A lot of trouble to take. You think he flew across the country just to annoy his old prof?”
“Why do you think he flew across the country, then?”
I replied with more conviction that I felt. “I think he came to do you honor.”
“You’re so sure it was an honor? Not just a piece of neo-Socratic irony?” Cavilcante caught himself up. “No, no. Sorry. I’m not really thinking about tonight but about that second paper of his.”
“So, what about Papanek’s second paper?”
“It was plagiarized.”
The pianist wore a tuxedo and had thick glossy hair. He could play “Misty” like Erroll Garner, “Round Midnight” like Thelonius Monk, and, if you shut your eyes, it might have been George Shearing playing “Stella by Starlight.” Except for a young and rather rapturous couple, everybody ignored him.
“A poor student, a desperate student, a libertine in danger of failing and terrified of dad, a dunce in over his head, an unscrupulous wiseass—all right. Plagiarism’s a sin against the holy ghost. It makes me physically ill, but its meaning lies in the motive and the motive is usually self-evident. What does it mean when somebody like Papanek does it? That’s what I asked myself, that’s what I wanted to know. Every syllabus I ever put out blared the same warning in capital letters: ‘Five unattributed words will constitute plagiarism and result in failure.’ Papanek saw this and yet he plagiarized. He even did it clumsily, carelessly. He couldn’t have supposed I’d miss it; I was meant to see it. It was his way of expressing disdain. That’s the real reason plagiarism gets to us like nothing else, isn’t it? The personal affront, the betrayal. But then everything about Papanek’s performance was personalized.”
“The source was so obvious?”
“For God’s sake, the source was Nietzsche.”
“Really?”
“I could hardly believe it. In fact, I didn’t want to. For a moment I even considered whether by some astonishing coincidence Papanek had actually recomposed the passage on his own, like the fellow in that Borges story. It was a punch in the gut. I didn’t grade any other papers that night. I couldn’t. I was sick at heart. I got mad. He’s challenging you, I thought. But why? I couldn’t come up with a reason. Then the possibilities began to multiply.”
“Such as?”
“He did it to prove something to himself.”
“Prove what?”
“I should know? That he could do it at all. That he didn’t have to be perfect all the time, an automaton, a grind; that he could do something criminal, like Raskolnikov. Or maybe he was making fun of that first class of mine. You remember, he mentioned it tonight. Give me reasons why cheating is wrong?”
I shrugged.
“I refuted the shallow arguments against cheating. So maybe he was cheating on principle, because he’d decided the world’s a cheat and only fools and cowards are honest.”
“Oh?”
“I thought back to his first paper and the odd sense it gave me that he was mocking Plato’s idealism. But there was nothing I could put my finger on and I began to wonder if I was on the wrong track, that if he didn’t do it to prove something to himself he did it to prove something to somebody else—a girl he wanted to impress, a fraternity he wanted to join, the rest of the class, left so far in his dust that the price of belonging might have risen to cheating. I was looking for a way to exclude myself from the equation, you see. But that wouldn’t be Papanek. No. If he wanted to prove anything to anyone, it was to me.”
I took a cool drink and, concealing my amusement at my friend’s obsession, asked flatly, “What about the simplest explanation?”
“Of course I thought of that. But it just didn’t fit. I couldn’t see him being rushed and at the last minute just copying something out Nietzsche. Anybody else maybe, but not this whiz kid with the subtle mind who could have been a first-rate philosopher if he’d been at all inclined that way. I’ve told you what he was like, does it seem likely to you?”
“Well—”
“Well it didn’t to me. It was a piece of deliberate arrogance, not to see if he could get away with it, but if I’d let him get away with it.”
Cavilcante paused to catch his breath and perhaps to remind himself that over thirty years had gone by.
“It was a sort of coded message: nothing new under the sun, so it doesn’t matter what I write. Nietzsche proved philosophy’s a dead end and so here you are, Professor Cavilcante, a chunk of Nietzsche. Your discipline’s as dead as God.”
I tried for some levity. “For a deep student you needed a deep cause?”
“For Papanek? You bet. After all, he knew as well as I did that plagiarism on his part would be a significant act, while for a mediocre student it wouldn’t have any special meaning. And he used that to torture me. Maybe it was his way of forcing me to examine categories like A,B,C,D, good, bad, average--original. That was the high compliment I’d paid his first paper, that it was original. That probably made him laugh, that an imitation Plato would strike me as above all original. It must have made me seem like a fool to him, a fool with low standards. Maybe it was his way of mocking the whole academic world by violating its chief commandment, by doing it pointlessly. Maybe he was setting me up for an ethical test of his own. Hatred of fathers was in the air in those days, wasn’t it?”
“So you stayed up late speculating in this way?”
“I didn’t sleep that night. I remember poor Marcia coming down to ask if I were sick and ordering me up to bed. It upset her to see me so fretful and because the reason seemed ludicrous even to me I didn’t tell her.”
Cavilcante had so well summoned up the anguish of that long ago night that I couldn’t help but enter into it myself.
“Okay,” I asked, “so what happened when you confronted him?”
He shook his head slowly, smiled bitterly. “I never did.”
“What? Why on earth not?”
“It wasn’t for lack of trying. He just never showed up in class again. The papers were due the Monday of the last week and there were only a couple of classes left. He never came to pick up his paper. He wouldn’t answer his phone or the letter I sent to his dorm or the two I mailed to his home address. Tonight was the first chance I had to ask him and I didn’t do it.”
“So then, what did you do about the grade?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m guessing you let him off and the rest is history.”
“Is that what you’d have done?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
Cavilcante rubbed his bald head. “I flunked him. For the paper and for the course. Then I submitted a complaint of academic misconduct to the Dean. There was a hearing. He didn’t show up for that either and he was expelled. And then somehow he got into M.I.T. And now I’m retired and I still don’t understand it.”
I was indignant. “Christ, you should have asked him tonight. The two of you might have laughed about it.”
He looked at me ruefully. “You really think he’d have told me? That he’d have laughed with me about it? That I could laugh?”
I shrugged. “It’s been over thirty years,” I mumbled.
We fell silent. The tinkling pianistic mimicry had ceased. The bar was emptying out.
I had an idea. “You said it could have been a message of some kind.”
“It could have been.”
“Nietzsche. What from Nietzsche?”
“Something out of Beyond Good and Evil.”
“Well, I suppose that at least makes a kind of sense. Beyond evil or good?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, which is why his showing up tonight infuriated me.”
“You don’t still have the paper, do you?”
“I told you, he never picked it up. If I’d known he was coming tonight, I’d have pulled my old files apart and brought it along and thrown in his face.”
We left and walked back to our cars. It was raining. Cavilcante drove off into the first night of his retirement. As for me, I steeled myself to carry on through what remained of my own undistinguished career.
1.
It was only my friend Cavilcante’s retirement dinner yet the faculty dining room was thick with apprehension. Our department secretary, Lavinia Benedetto, hid herself in a corner deep behind a revetment of edgy graduate assistants. Sturmer and McComb, a brace of assistant professors, exerted themselves to laugh at the badinage of Thomas Linfield, exquisitely clad as always. “The greater part of my colleagues dress like longshoremen,” Linfield was famous for announcing on the first day of class each year, “while, as you can see, I am attired like a professor.” The Dean, only apparently at his ease, remained seated at his table, drawing the morals of his war stories. Three adjuncts had pulled their chairs near, but it was Caroline Warden-Blitzer, the Associate Provost, an unctuous woman with prematurely white hair and a vixen’s face, to whom he was addressing himself.
All the speeches had been delivered, every token bestowed, including the lack rocking chair with the University’s seal. The Dean had already solemnly announced the trustees’ routine decision to confer on the retiree the honorific title of emeritus. Wishes perfunctory and heartfelt for Cavilcante’s happy decrepitude had been expressed pretty much all around. In short, the evening had passed the moment when the passive voice takes over, when the forced mood decomposes and the fixed smiles disintegrate into dullness.
“Birds of a feather,” I observed, surveying the room.
Cavilcante reproached me. “No cliché is ever entirely true.”
Though I do not care for being feeling reproached, I was well beyond being offended by my old friend. He was right; I had been reduced to sociological small talk. I dislike academic parties; the next day I always feel like a vegetarian who’s scarfed down a whole rib roast.
The graduate assistants were making ironic faces at one another; a couple even shot aggrieved glances in the direction of the Dean, still tranquilly holding forth, though, if you looked closely, his left foot was twitching. Poor Lavinia twice put a restraining hand on her husband’s arm either to make him unclench his jaw or to prevent his running screaming from the room. CarolineWarden-Blitzer was growing visibly bored by the Dean’s necklace of tales, as if he himself were the irritant inside each pearl. In fact, everybody would have made a dash for the exits if they could, exploding with relief at getting away from the decorum, the ruins of a mediocre institutional meal, and the echoes of dreary toasts that seemed more to belittle than magnify the honor.
The young were at the furthest point from the brutal fact their elders could not avoid which was not retirement but mortality. The enchantment that held us in thrall was the Dean’s promise of a Very Distinguished Guest, regrettably delayed at the airport, one who must on no account be disappointed in finding a proper audience to greet him and to relish whatever he had to say. It was to be the high point of the evening, a wonderful surprise for Professor Cavilcante, and, above all, a jumbo honor for the University. In other words, he made it pretty clear that we were all to stay put until this mysterious celebrity put in his or her appearance. Resignation filled the room. People kept going into corners to phone their baby sitters.
The delay grew more and more awkward. Imagine that, having listened patiently to all the false endings of a turgid, uninspired Post-Romantic symphony, the final chord should be indefinitely deferred. The audience might turn into a mob and throttle the conductor.
At long last there was a commotion at the door. There appeared a University policeman and a young minion from the President’s Office, and, between the two, the guest—the real guest of honor. The Dean leapt to his feet and stretched out his arms like a polyp moved by a gust of current. Those standing nearby recognized the newcomer instantly, and word spread through the room that the person for whom we had been waiting was no less a personage than Norris Papanek.
Though it is unlikely that anyone reading this will require an introduction to Dr. Papanek, it is best to be precise. As everybody knows, Norris Papanek is the prodigious genius whose discoveries in medicine have revolutionized immunology and saved countless lives, whose theoretical work in large-scale astronomy has reconfigured the cosmos of space, time, and energy in which all educated people occasionally believe they are living. The only question is which Nobel Prize he will win. Papanek’s popular fame derives from the wellspring of all popular celebrity, television. Not only has he has appeared frequently as an expert commentator with the common touch but, of course, there is his award-laden, much re-run, thirty-episode series, The History of Science. A chess champion, government adviser, among the foremost of contemporary mathematicians, he is likewise the author of three books of poetry. The first, Prenatal Parental Paternal, includes a personal favorite of mine, “Refutation of the Law of Marginal Utility,” destined to appear in all future anthologies of American verse. Like the opening of Brahms’ Piano Trio in B-Major or Vermeer’s Girl Asleep, this poem never fails to move me, especially its conclusion, a mere three words in two lines: After everything/nothing.
Cavilcante, not a man one could call demonstrative, emitted a groan. If I had not been sitting beside him, I would not have heard it. This groan, so slight and involuntary, I found intriguing and, in its way, eloquent. It was shaped somewhat like a sine curve, beginning high then descending rapidly into silence, like the resigned complaint of a family dog left behind. For me, whatever courtesies would soon fill the air of the dining room would be conditioned by this groan; that is, by the certainty that Cavilcante was a good deal less than glad to see Norris Papanek, whose presence was meant to be the glorious climax of the evening dedicated to him.
Like the rest of those in attendance, save for the Dean and Associate Provost, whose inexplicable presence now made sense, I had no clear idea what Papanek was doing there. This made for invigorating suspense; it woke people up. They formed rapidly into the ranks of an audience, rearranging their chairs to face the little podium at one end of the room. Papanek, fawned over by the Dean and introduced by him to the star-struck Warden-Blitzer, glanced our way once with an expression that might possibly have been a smile but looked more like a smirk. Cavilcante stayed put in his seat, motionless as a pharaoh in bas-relief.
Perhaps Papanek would have liked to come directly over to Cavilcante. If so, he was prevented by the Dean who, hurrying to get things moving, directed him straight to a chair set up by the podium.
The Dean’s prologue was a specimen of the needs-no-introduction variety. He was enjoying himself as people do when they have successfully brought off a surprise. He looked at Cavilcante with an expression of benevolent triumph, as if he had vanquished him for his own good.
“Few of you will know that Norris Papanek was once a student of Professor Cavilcante. This was over thirty years ago and, alas, at another institution. The fact was brought to my attention by Dr. Papanek himself when we met a couple years ago at a conference in Australia. We were introduced by the President’s science advisor. ‘I see you have Hermes Cavilcante on your faculty,’ he said. I expressed surprise that he knew our faculty so well, especially in philosophy, but Dr. Papanek told me that he had long kept track of Professor Cavilcante’s whereabouts. ‘You’re damned lucky to have him, but I’m sure you know that. I owe him a lot. In fact, you could say I owe my career to him.’ It was a memorable encounter of which I am ashamed to confess I neglected to tell Professor Cavilcante. However, when I was making the arrangements for tonight’s celebration I recalled that meeting and sent a complimentary invitation to Dr. Papanek. The Dean of our Medical School followed this up with an invitation to lecture his faculty, and the Board of Trustees conveyed their wish to award Dr. Papanek an honorary degree. A full-court press and so, well, here we are. Dr. Norris Papanek.” He turned toward the guest, gestured toward the podium, and sat down.
I looked over at Cavilcante, who was concentrating on Papanek, as if examining a bacillus through a microscope.
“Thank you,” Papanek began in that semi-refined Brooklyn accent with which the whole nation has become familiar. “It’s a treat for me to be here this evening; in fact, it’s pretty nice just to get out of the airport. Everything the Dean said about our meeting in Australia is quite true, except that it was New Zealand. Professor Cavilcante may not remember me, but I certainly remember him, and I’m going to prove it. Thirty-two years ago, section three of Philosophy 101 met at nine o’clock on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in a filthy old building the University called Ford Hall and the students called Tin Lizzie. The Professor’s method was Socratic, which is to say terrifying, but the results were psychedelic, in the non-chemical sense. His very first words to us were to cite that old canard about every man being either a philosopher or a fool by the age of forty. His twist was to add that the two conditions were not mutually exclusive. The next thing he did was to ask the class for arguments as to why cheating is wrong, each of which he demolished by pointing out that we had only argued out of cowardice or conformity. After that, we freshmen were off and running, mixing up foolishness and philosophy about as well as any forty-year-old. I’ve never forgotten Professor Cavilcante’s teachings and I can only say that while I regret he’ll no longer be professing to the young, I hope he’ll find in retirement all the pleasure and leisure possible to a philosopher.”
Everyone smiled throughout, chuckled at the right moments, applauded politely at the end. The speech was conventional enough; and, though it left my old friend in the third person, it was, of course, the fact of the speech rather than its content that constituted the signal honor. Nevertheless, though I had only his profile to judge from, it seemed to me that Cavilcante was not pleased, as if he had been expecting something more dramatic, maybe some kind of revelation.
Papanek left the dais while the applause still reverberated, marched over to us, picked up Cavilcante’s hand and shook it, but said nothing further. Led by Linfield, people gathered around the hero, eager to introduce themselves and assure him of their esteem. Not a single personal word had been exchanged between Papanek and Cavilcante.
By now it was almost ten-thirty and, after the Dean’s reminder that everyone should plan to attend the special Saturday convocation at which Norris Papanek would be honored and would in turn honor the University by accepting its degree, honoris causa, the party broke up like a dike too long under pressure. With the Associate Provost holding his arm in a proprietary fashion, Papanek himself was the first to leave the room.
“Well,” sighed Cavilcante striking both thighs, “so now it’s time for pleasure and leisure.” It was only then that the real significance of the evening struck me; that is, from my old colleague’s point of view. He was a widower. He had come alone to be kissed off and his evening had turned into Papanek’s night. He would leave alone and return alone to an empty apartment where, if he should contemplate travel or playing cards, it would have to be alone. Like the children of almost everyone I knew, his three offspring lived busy lives far away. Paternity would have devolved into vestigial forms as they awaited the crisis, the nursing home, the funeral. The children would urge him to establish new routines, find new interests. Perhaps he intended to do a little lonesome research that would come to nothing. He would read a good deal, but mostly fiction now, become either more finicky or more careless about housekeeping and hygiene, would come to see in each civic crisis and international contretemps the degeneration of the world. At that moment he looked abandoned, and so this is how I imagined his future, or possibly my own. Real compassion is never simply mental and never detached; empathy is of the gut. Whether to comfort him or myself, I could not let him go, not just yet.
“How long has it been?” I said as we fetched our coats.
“Since when?”
“Since you went to a bar.”
He laughed. “A bar? In geologic time, not all that long; by human reckoning, about a generation or two, I guess.”
“What do you say, then? Let me buy you a drink—no two. One for each generation.”
He accepted with alacrity. I had hit on just the right thing. “All right,” he said with a what-the-hell gesture of his hand. “Anyway, I’ve got a story to tell you.”
“About Norris Papanek?” I guessed.
“Yes, about Norris Papanek. And me.”
“Excellent. In vino veritas, then.”
“I’d prefer single malt. You see, even Latin clichés are never entirely on the money.”
2.
I had suggested we avoid the campus bars as unsuited to the occasion. Instead, we walked a couple blocks downtown from the flashy clubs that preyed on undergraduates with cash to match their lust and installed ourselves in the piano bar of a staid hotel. The place, a hangout of mine once upon a time, was not crowded; the customers were mature and well dressed, the service unobtrusive. We began with some haphazard reminiscing and listened to the decorous jazz. Cavilcante said he would like to wait for his first Laphroaig before beginning his story. Once the water of life touched his palate, though, he was quite galvanized and spoke with something like ardor.
“I would ask the kind of question you usually start off with, you know, the sort that generally gets you a sentence or two. Up shoots Papanek’s hand and, if I’m improvident enough to give him the floor, he goes on for twenty, thirty minutes, covering more than I had in mind for the entire hour. Never once blithered or stumbled or goofed. Even at eighteen, he was more lucid than Linfield on his best day. Of course he’d read more than the other kids, but that didn’t have all that much to do with it. The difference had ceased being merely quantitative long before he set foot in a college.”
My old friend paused for three sips of whiskey.
“The midterm covered the Greeks. Papanek’s was absolutely the best I ever saw. He not only answered my questions as if they were trifles, which to him they probably were; he wrote original commentary and made connections to things I wouldn’t have dared mention in class. Penetrating and comprehensive. The boy knew military history, Greek politics, Xenophon’s account of Socrates, Nietzsche too. Even then he knew immensely more than I did about the history of science. Anybody would have supposed he was showing off, and that’s what I thought at first; but it actually felt more as if he had been starved for a chance to use his brain, to open it up. Papanek at nineteen was all pent-up energy, indifferent to the cold shoulders of his classmates. They seemed hardly to exist for him. How can I put it? That midterm was like an ejaculation of intellectual joy. He came into the exam room hefting his ballpoint like a javelin. I was reminded of that line in the Bible about the strong man rejoicing to run a race.”
“Well,” I said, “then he hasn’t changed.”
Cavilcante, concentrating on his whiskey and his memory, ignored my comment.
“Terrific as his test was, the first essay he gave me outstripped the midterm. He wrote it in the form of a Platonic dialogue. I say form, but he captured more than just the superficial aspects of Socratic dialectic. It was uncanny. The thing read more like a lost dialogue of Plato. He had Socrates converse with Callicles and Thrasymachus about the nature of justice and believe me when I tell you that Plato wouldn’t have been embarrassed to put his name to it. But there was something odd about that paper too. Wish I’d thought to make a copy. What I remember best is how he caught Socrates’ irony. I mean he got it so well that it was nearly disturbing, as if Papanek’s Socrates were doing something subversive and nasty, deliberately undercutting his own arguments and somehow mocking virtue even while extolling it.”
“I’m surprised how well you remember all this. I mean, it’s been—what? more than thirty years? He must have been quite a showboat.”
“Of course he was showboating, but it was all for me, you see. And I was moved by it. Who wouldn’t be? How many students like Papanek do you get in a career? He ate up everything I said and made me feel it was really me he cared about, not just Plato or Epictetus. That’s seductive, isn’t it? Being the humble messenger who’s mistaken for the magnificent message? You’ve seen him on television, I suppose, that series of his? He didn’t tell about science, he incarnated it. He had the knack even then. He made me feel I had it, too. It made a sort of bond. I guess it was pretty much the way the Dean said tonight. Even as a kid, Papanek needed to know everything but he also needed an audience to know he was knowing. That was my job—to hand out the praise and A-pluses.”
“And did you?”
“What?”
“Hand out praise with the A’s?”
My friend reflected a moment. “Have you ever had a student whose work is so good that it’s hard to praise?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s how Papanek’s was for me. Praise seemed banal, inadequate. His excellence was too obvious. Praise would have implied a superiority I just couldn’t feel. Praise requires that there be some exertion that deserves the praise, a kind of effort that implies the possibility of failing. Anyway, there wasn’t much I could say to Papanek about his work. I don’t know. Maybe that had something to do with what happened.”
“What was that?”
“His second paper. It was supposed to be on an original topic, relating the modern philosophy we’d been studying to their lives or something they were learning in another course—that sort of thing. You can imagine how I was looking forward to seeing what Papanek would produce with a carte that blanche. In fact, it was with him in mind that I chose the theme.”
“Seldom a bad idea to be over directive, is it?”
“Normally, yes.”
“So, did you get your magnum opus?”
Cavilcante finished off the scotch and motioned for the waiter to bring him another.
“It’s absurd,” he said. “When I saw him walk in tonight I was actually hoping for an explanation.”
“An explanation? Yes, you looked expectant and then—you looked disappointed. Were you?”
“Disappointed? Oh, yes.”
The scotch arrived along with another vodka and tonic for me, though I hadn’t asked for one. Cavilcante put his elbows on the table, rested his head in his hands, and spoke as if he had fallen into a reverie. “You know those students who challenge you?”
“Sure.”
“I mean the ones who want something you can’t give and so they challenge you for it and then, because that doesn’t work either, they begin to despise you. You become the father on whose bones they want to cut their teeth. They glare at you in class, and every conference turns into a psychomachia.”
“That what happened with Papanek?”
Cavilcante sighed then straightened up, suddenly alert. “Teaching really is writing on water. . . . Frankly, I don’t understand what went on between Papanek and me. Never did. That’s why I was hoping for an explanation. And yet you didn’t see me asking for one, did you? I couldn’t do it, not after all this time. I don’t know. So despite tonight’s surprise appearance, I still don’t know and I almost suspect that may be the point, my not knowing, retiring in a blaze of insincere praise and on this point still in utter ignorance. Maybe the reason he came was to remind me, to rub it in as some weird sort of revenge; maybe he was there out of resentment.”
“Oh, come on. It doesn’t seem likely that’s why he came tonight. A lot of trouble to take. You think he flew across the country just to annoy his old prof?”
“Why do you think he flew across the country, then?”
I replied with more conviction that I felt. “I think he came to do you honor.”
“You’re so sure it was an honor? Not just a piece of neo-Socratic irony?” Cavilcante caught himself up. “No, no. Sorry. I’m not really thinking about tonight but about that second paper of his.”
“So, what about Papanek’s second paper?”
“It was plagiarized.”
The pianist wore a tuxedo and had thick glossy hair. He could play “Misty” like Erroll Garner, “Round Midnight” like Thelonius Monk, and, if you shut your eyes, it might have been George Shearing playing “Stella by Starlight.” Except for a young and rather rapturous couple, everybody ignored him.
“A poor student, a desperate student, a libertine in danger of failing and terrified of dad, a dunce in over his head, an unscrupulous wiseass—all right. Plagiarism’s a sin against the holy ghost. It makes me physically ill, but its meaning lies in the motive and the motive is usually self-evident. What does it mean when somebody like Papanek does it? That’s what I asked myself, that’s what I wanted to know. Every syllabus I ever put out blared the same warning in capital letters: ‘Five unattributed words will constitute plagiarism and result in failure.’ Papanek saw this and yet he plagiarized. He even did it clumsily, carelessly. He couldn’t have supposed I’d miss it; I was meant to see it. It was his way of expressing disdain. That’s the real reason plagiarism gets to us like nothing else, isn’t it? The personal affront, the betrayal. But then everything about Papanek’s performance was personalized.”
“The source was so obvious?”
“For God’s sake, the source was Nietzsche.”
“Really?”
“I could hardly believe it. In fact, I didn’t want to. For a moment I even considered whether by some astonishing coincidence Papanek had actually recomposed the passage on his own, like the fellow in that Borges story. It was a punch in the gut. I didn’t grade any other papers that night. I couldn’t. I was sick at heart. I got mad. He’s challenging you, I thought. But why? I couldn’t come up with a reason. Then the possibilities began to multiply.”
“Such as?”
“He did it to prove something to himself.”
“Prove what?”
“I should know? That he could do it at all. That he didn’t have to be perfect all the time, an automaton, a grind; that he could do something criminal, like Raskolnikov. Or maybe he was making fun of that first class of mine. You remember, he mentioned it tonight. Give me reasons why cheating is wrong?”
I shrugged.
“I refuted the shallow arguments against cheating. So maybe he was cheating on principle, because he’d decided the world’s a cheat and only fools and cowards are honest.”
“Oh?”
“I thought back to his first paper and the odd sense it gave me that he was mocking Plato’s idealism. But there was nothing I could put my finger on and I began to wonder if I was on the wrong track, that if he didn’t do it to prove something to himself he did it to prove something to somebody else—a girl he wanted to impress, a fraternity he wanted to join, the rest of the class, left so far in his dust that the price of belonging might have risen to cheating. I was looking for a way to exclude myself from the equation, you see. But that wouldn’t be Papanek. No. If he wanted to prove anything to anyone, it was to me.”
I took a cool drink and, concealing my amusement at my friend’s obsession, asked flatly, “What about the simplest explanation?”
“Of course I thought of that. But it just didn’t fit. I couldn’t see him being rushed and at the last minute just copying something out Nietzsche. Anybody else maybe, but not this whiz kid with the subtle mind who could have been a first-rate philosopher if he’d been at all inclined that way. I’ve told you what he was like, does it seem likely to you?”
“Well—”
“Well it didn’t to me. It was a piece of deliberate arrogance, not to see if he could get away with it, but if I’d let him get away with it.”
Cavilcante paused to catch his breath and perhaps to remind himself that over thirty years had gone by.
“It was a sort of coded message: nothing new under the sun, so it doesn’t matter what I write. Nietzsche proved philosophy’s a dead end and so here you are, Professor Cavilcante, a chunk of Nietzsche. Your discipline’s as dead as God.”
I tried for some levity. “For a deep student you needed a deep cause?”
“For Papanek? You bet. After all, he knew as well as I did that plagiarism on his part would be a significant act, while for a mediocre student it wouldn’t have any special meaning. And he used that to torture me. Maybe it was his way of forcing me to examine categories like A,B,C,D, good, bad, average--original. That was the high compliment I’d paid his first paper, that it was original. That probably made him laugh, that an imitation Plato would strike me as above all original. It must have made me seem like a fool to him, a fool with low standards. Maybe it was his way of mocking the whole academic world by violating its chief commandment, by doing it pointlessly. Maybe he was setting me up for an ethical test of his own. Hatred of fathers was in the air in those days, wasn’t it?”
“So you stayed up late speculating in this way?”
“I didn’t sleep that night. I remember poor Marcia coming down to ask if I were sick and ordering me up to bed. It upset her to see me so fretful and because the reason seemed ludicrous even to me I didn’t tell her.”
Cavilcante had so well summoned up the anguish of that long ago night that I couldn’t help but enter into it myself.
“Okay,” I asked, “so what happened when you confronted him?”
He shook his head slowly, smiled bitterly. “I never did.”
“What? Why on earth not?”
“It wasn’t for lack of trying. He just never showed up in class again. The papers were due the Monday of the last week and there were only a couple of classes left. He never came to pick up his paper. He wouldn’t answer his phone or the letter I sent to his dorm or the two I mailed to his home address. Tonight was the first chance I had to ask him and I didn’t do it.”
“So then, what did you do about the grade?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m guessing you let him off and the rest is history.”
“Is that what you’d have done?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
Cavilcante rubbed his bald head. “I flunked him. For the paper and for the course. Then I submitted a complaint of academic misconduct to the Dean. There was a hearing. He didn’t show up for that either and he was expelled. And then somehow he got into M.I.T. And now I’m retired and I still don’t understand it.”
I was indignant. “Christ, you should have asked him tonight. The two of you might have laughed about it.”
He looked at me ruefully. “You really think he’d have told me? That he’d have laughed with me about it? That I could laugh?”
I shrugged. “It’s been over thirty years,” I mumbled.
We fell silent. The tinkling pianistic mimicry had ceased. The bar was emptying out.
I had an idea. “You said it could have been a message of some kind.”
“It could have been.”
“Nietzsche. What from Nietzsche?”
“Something out of Beyond Good and Evil.”
“Well, I suppose that at least makes a kind of sense. Beyond evil or good?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, which is why his showing up tonight infuriated me.”
“You don’t still have the paper, do you?”
“I told you, he never picked it up. If I’d known he was coming tonight, I’d have pulled my old files apart and brought it along and thrown in his face.”
We left and walked back to our cars. It was raining. Cavilcante drove off into the first night of his retirement. As for me, I steeled myself to carry on through what remained of my own undistinguished career.
