As I ought to have foreseen from Drew’s absences, the ceremony was of course disrupted after all. Ambrose Mensch, our first honorary doctor of letters, had evidently conspired with Drew and a number of non-students, as well as the Marshyhope radicals, to stop the show. I don’t believe Germaine Pitt had anything to do with it: she seemed more alarmed than I was, and indignant to the point of tears (she’s been sacked anyhow). I myself was too “strung out,” as the students say, to realize at once what was taking place. His citation read and degree conferred, Mensch launched into an unscheduled, Kurt Schwitters-ish sort of nonsense harangue, not at all scandalous I thought: a rather appropriate sort of inappropriateness, a properly nostalgic impropriety, evocative (to me) of the Dadaists and others who didn’t wear Arrow shirts and sail elegant sailboats back in 1921. Even when Drew and the youngsters began Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minhing and spraying the air with spray guns (to suggest our herbicidal campaigns in Southeast Asia, I presume), I thought them part of the entertainment. Granted, my wits were not quite about me; even so I was surprised to see so lively and harmless a stunt stop the show — and thus, I suppose, deny Drew the best part of his triumph. He himself hardly got into the act; he was still a hundred feet from the microphone when the campus cops nailed him.
And nailed the kids. And Mensch. And even Lady Amherst, at John Schott’s insistence, though I was able to persuade them to let her go before they got hit with a false-arrest suit. I was not able to persuade Schott to resume the ceremonies: he was as certain the Commies had further tricks up their sleeves as I was that they hadn’t, and I suppose he understood (his sort would) that terminating the exercises would magnify the gravity of the disruption and thus justify whatever reprisals he chose to indulge in. I got myself together enough to hitch a ride back into town in a state police car (Patrolman Jimmy Harris, our friend from the New Bridge Incident, q.v., scolded Drew all the way to the courthouse: an educated fellow carrying on like a nutty kid!) to see that everybody got decent bail and that the sheriffs people didn’t rough them up. My excuse to Schott would be that mishandling the arrests or the arrested would blow the college’s prosecution.
Anyhow, the police had learned a few things since the civil-rights years: the shouted obscenities offended but didn’t anger them; they brought charges but cracked no heads. Drew said I looked awful and recommended a macrobiotic diet. Beyond that we had no conversation; he did not thank me for arranging bail (Mensch did, cheerily). I learned that one of the nonlocal demonstrators, by odd coincidence, was Jeannine’s ex-stepdaughter, her second husband’s child. I telephoned Schott’s office to urge him not to take action until we could confer; no one answered. I was too exhausted to trek back out to Redmans Neck. The kids all said thanks and ’bye.
The Message, so long and repeatedly telegraphed, was buzzing at my ears, but not yet intelligibly. I crossed the park to the hotel, thinking vaguely I’d catch another nap and see Jeannine that evening on the O.F.T. II. As it turned out, I slept from four in the afternoon till five the next morning.
For all that, I felt no younger on the Sunday, nor looked less wasted. I seem truly and irrevocably to have moved overnight from middle to old age. I got through to Schott: he’d terminated both Mensch and Pitt, and was determined to revoke Mensch’s doctorate. Three days earlier, I believe, I could have talked him out of those actions; clearly I’d lost authority! I telephoned my sympathy to Lady Amherst, who undeniably was on some wrong track with that Ambrose Mensch (why didn’t she dress her age?), but was surely blameless in this affair. Miserable, she nonetheless thanked me — and hoped I was feeling better! To my surprise, Drew stopped by the room to make sure I was all right; an extraordinary gesture on his part, which at any time in the past many years, until three days since, I’d have tried with my utmost tact and gratitude to make the most of. As it was, I could scarcely register his confession of disillusionment with petty disruption, his shaken but not yet shattered faith in the Second Revolution. The 1960’s were about done with; he himself would soon be 31. It was time, I believe he asserted, for the Movement to escalate from “trashing” to serious demolition; for himself to escalate his struggle against a real pull in him toward Centrism or worse, the gravitation of his age and ancestry. A surprising admission! At once embarrassed to have made it, Drew went on more surlily to predict that if he lived long enough he’d turn into me at best, his father at worst, and that he’d rather die.
Where in the world was I? At least, in my geriatric stupor, I didn’t turn him off with Judicious Sympathy. He fidgeted awhile — a large, handsome, ineluctably wealthy-looking young man no matter what he wore — and then courteously bid me good-bye. Buzz buzz went the Message, no more clear.
Though I daily expected they would, things did not get better. Everyone at the office was concerned; at their insistence, and because I truly was not clearheaded enough to work, I took a week’s leave, then another, thinking that perhaps a bit of a cruise on Osborn Jones would restore me to myself. But I was too dispirited to provision and cast off. What was the point of sailing, of anything, except in 1921, with a beige Arrow shirt and the girl in that middy blouse? I languished out at the cottage with gin, tonic, and aspirin. Jane did not inquire. Others did — even Drew and Yvonne again! — but I didn’t pick up on the opportunity to work something out, somehow, between us, after so many years. That tender, devastating Dark Night dream remained as fresh in my imagination as the morning I’d dreamed of; nothing interested me any longer.
Last Friday, July 4, I bestirred myself enough to drive into town. Jeannine had joined the list of Inquirers After My Welfare and invited me to view the evening’s fireworks from aboard the O.F.T. II, which Reg Prinz had chartered for some sort of combination cast party and filming session. I thought, vaguely, to sound her out on her mother’s proposal to settle the estate contest out of hand and out of court; and I felt more than ever — but vaguely, dully — on the verge of seeing belatedly something obvious to our Author but not to me.
It was a peculiar voyage — I’m not sure whether even my former self would’ve quite comprehended what Prinz and Mensch and Company were up to! — but not a voyage of discovery. I condoled Peter Mensch and wife (he’s bankrupt and unwell, and his mother’s dying, an old flirt I’ve known all my life and even courted briefly in the Nineteen-Teens, before she made a bad marriage to Hector Mensch). I chided his brother — mildly, as it was after all none of my business — for having so inconsiderately embarrassed his good friend Lady Amherst, whose reinstatement I was by no means confident I could effect. He told me, more or less, it was All Right, without telling me how so. I do not greatly like nor much comprehend that fellow! Germaine herself was not there — just as well for her self-respect, since Dr. Mensch seemed in ardent pursuit of Jeannine; whether in earnest or in connection with their experimental movie, I cannot say.
I did not see Jane, either. I apologized to Jeannine for having missed her opening two weeks earlier; she to me for having missed it too, that first night. She wondered politely if I was feeling better; said I looked as if I needed a vacation. There was no opportunity to bring up the will; anyhow it was hard to remain interested. Neither the literal fireworks from Long Wharf nor the figurative ones aboardship (too complicated and obscure a business for me to recount, Dad) illuminated the Message. It thrummed in my head again when Jeannine, at the party’s end — she appeared to be running off somewhere with Ambrose Mensch! — bid me good night in an odd tone that seemed to me to have nothing to do with her promiscuous behavior. But I didn’t quite catch it.