Starting Over Read Free Page B

she asked what had happened he explained, “I quit.”
    For a while she tried to reason with him, told him how that sort of thing happened all the time to everyone, tried to taunt him, appeal to his machismo, but finally she understood that something had clicked off, that indeed the big theatre dream was as busted inside him as a pricked balloon, and that nothing could patch it together and blow it up again; and when she was sure of that she set down her cup of Medaglia d’Oro and lit a Pall Mall, and after exhaling a long, thin stream of smoke, like a line drawn across the empty air, she said in a calm, thoughtful voice: “You’ll be drunk tonight. And puking in the morning. When you’re through, get your shit together and clear the fuck out.”
    Potter said nothing.
    Thinking back, he wished he’d had some kind of line of farewell. He at least could have done a quick buck-and-wing and said “Remember me to Herald Square.”
    The old saw that “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” was part of the vague prejudice Potter had carried with him against the academic life, but that seemed no more applicable now than many of the other set assumptions he had grown up with in the Fifties. Teaching had the potential for the sort of personal satisfaction that people seemed to value more now than old-fashioned success, and Potter was willing to give it a fling if any institution was bold enough to grant him the chance. Knowing the market was already glutted with Ph.D.s, he couldn’t imagine that his own academic background, which sported nothing gaudier than the now perfunctory B.A., would qualify him for anything. But Max Bertelsen, who knew what was happening, said that Potter’s practical experience might just be of interest to certain institutions whose programs were now in flux.
    Gilpen Junior College was in flux.
    It was one of the many brownstone schools of higher education on Beacon Street, former family houses converted into factories of learning, ranging from certified distinction of a minor sort to high-priced havens for middle-class kids who had nowhere else to go, were not yet ready or willing to marry or work, and whose parents could afford the luxury of a largish tuition in exchange for the solace of saying “My son/daughter is at Gilpen Junior—you know, in Boston.” This college, as well as many others scattered through the metropolitan area, had flourished for a while with fairly staple servings of a liberal arts stew, and a boast of being small, selective, and “giving special attention to the individual student.” But along with many other private colleges, Gilpen had felt the pinch caused by the end of the postwar baby boom, rising costs, the growth of state institutions with vastly lower tuitions, and had brought in a new dean who was a real live wire to revolutionize its program to meet current needs and trends.
    As Dean Guy M. Hardy, Jr., explained it, “The day of the Ivory Tower is past. In fact, ‘the past’ is past. What’s happening is Now, in education as in other fields.”
    Dean Hardy tamped his meerschaum and his brow furrowed in studied seriousness. His greying hair was styled in a brush-cut, and with his snapping little eyes and pudgy, lineless pale moon face, he reminded Potter of an apprentice FBI agent. Actually, he had “been in government” before going into higher education. From the way Hardy spoke of “being in government” it sounded as if he had probably held some sensitive post pretty high up in State, but Potter knew from Max Bertelsen that Guy Hardy had served in the nether regions of the USIA, editing a quarterly designed to capture the minds of the intellectuals in Central America and producing a series of Brief Lives of American Presidents for Radio Free Europe. He had also seen overseas duty, holding down the post of librarian at the American consulate in San Salvador