"Chin up, kid," said Leyden, patting her shoulder; but the more pragmatic Vance retrieved two sheets of paper from the wastebasket, and on the blank side he lettered in black charcoaclass="underline" ART DEPT. BUSINESS ONLY – NO RUBBER-NECKERS. Sandy provided thumbtacks, and he fastened a sign on each of the hall doors. Since those doors were always propped open during the day, closing them created an air of siege-an Us-against-Them feeling.
They had almost forgotten Nauman when from the inner office came another roar.
"Damn his pimpled soul to purple hell! Can't they see he's crazy? Never mind trying to explain. I'll do it myself!"
They heard the phone crash down; drawers banged open and shut while Nauman rummaged for something; then he erupted into the outer office. "Where the hell's a City University directory?" he asked Sandy impatiently.
"Would you like me to get someone on the line for you?" she asked placatingly.
"Something wrong?" Leyden inquired.
"Those damn copying machines! Invented by fools for the use of cretins!" Nauman's white hair was standing in angry tufts, and he'd bitten the stem of his favorite pipe hard enough to crack it. "If he'd had to copy that letter by hand, he might have come to his senses by the fifth copy. Damn copiers! One for every dean, board member and trustee in the whole bloody city."
He glared at Leyden. "If you ever try to sneak another goddamned primitive into the graduate program-" he swore.
"I have the chancellor's office on the line," said Sandy.
Nauman glared at Piers Leyden again, then slammed his office door shut. Sandy waited a moment till he'd picked up his phone, then hung up her receiver.
"I take it Harley Harris has surfaced?" asked Leyden.
"I don't know about Harley in the flesh," said Sandy, "but evidently he wrote a letter yesterday accusing the department and especially Professor Nauman of all kinds of improper things, beginning with something like 'the frivolous granting and withholding of graduate degrees.' He must have gone over to the library and run off a couple of dozen, which he hand delivered all over the city. Practically every dean on campus has already called. And as you just heard, even the chancellor and the board of trustees must have got copies."
She looked at Vance disapprovingly. The burly printmaker was choking with silent laughter. "I really don't think Professor Nauman considers it funny, Lem."
"He will!" Vance promised gleefully, and a smile spread over Piers Leyden's face, too, as they topped each other in imagining what the frustrated Harley Harris might have written.
They knew that Nauman felt the department's greatest strength lay in avoiding Administration's notice. As long as Art didn't make annoying demands of the paper pushers and didn't actively embarrass the image polishers, Nauman expected them to leave Art alone and let him get on with the business of imparting knowledge to students as he and his colleagues saw fit.
Quinn's death was bad enough; but
Harley Harris's barrage of letters could draw the fire of every nit-picking bureaucrat at Vanderlyn College and could open up an internal investigation that would last longer than any police department's.
15
SIGRID and Tillie had listened to Harley Harris's shame-faced account of his copied letters in astonishment.
When he'd finished, Tillie broke the news of Riley Quinn's death, something neither seemed to have been aware of before. Mr. Harris was instantly and indignantly on his guard when he realized that they were interested in his young son not because of his letters full of wild accusations but because they suspected him of murder.
"Okay, so he sent those dumb letters," he told Sigrid. "Dumb! Dumb! DUMB! he reminded Harley, who flinched beneath his father's verbal blows. "But," he said, swinging back to Sigrid, "just because he's dumb doesn't mean he's stupid."
"He uttered a threat in the presence of witnesses," Sigrid said mildly.
"But I didn't mean it!" wailed Harley.
"Shut up!" said his father. "Don't say another word. I'm calling our lawyer."
"If you wish," Sigrid said, pushing the telephone toward him, "but really at this point we're only interested in getting a descriptive statement from your son. The same sort of statement that everyone else who was there yesterday has given us quite freely. Of course, you know best for Harley, and if you feel you want a lawyer present, that's certainly your right."
Again she gestured toward the telephone, and this seemed to mollify the elder Harris. "Tell the lieutenant what she wants to know," he directed the boy.
Point by point Sigrid and Tillie took him through a recital of the previous morning's events.
No, he hadn't touched the cups, and he couldn't tell you what Nauman or Quinn or any of that bunch drank while they were wasting time up there. He was always too busy working down in his studio-"I'm a painter, not a coffee guzzler"-to hang out with those loudmouthed bull tossers. He wouldn't even have been up there yesterday, except that he'd had an appointment with Nauman. An appointment they had broken, he might add. Afraid to face him with the real reasons why he wasn't getting an M.F.A. degree. If his work wasn't any good, they should have warned him back in December. Oh, yes, Professor Leyden was his advisor, and yes, he'd told Harley the rest of the department didn't like primitives-not that he really was, you understand, but-
"Keep to the point," growled his father.
Okay. Yeah, he remembered seeing the tray on the bookcase. Two white foam cups from the cafeteria with writing on the lids. No, nobody'd touched them while he was in the office until Quinn came in. "At least, I don't think anybody did," he qualified nervously. His father snorted derisively. "Okay! Nobody!" he cried.
Tillie brought out the tray and handed Harley the two snap-on lids. "Could you arrange these lids the way the cups were sitting yesterday morning?"
The boy gnawed his thin lips apprehensively. "They were just there, side by side. I don't remember anything special about whether one was in front or anything like that."
"Christ!" said Mr. Harris. "Call yourself an artist, and you don't notice details? I can tell you every shoe in Foot Fair's windows for the last three years."
«r «i
"I'm not a window designer," whined Harley.
"Oh, yes, you are!" his father said meaningfully.
Pressed hard, Harley admitted remembering that Quinn had reached behind him to take a cup before closeting himself in the inner office.
'The one nearest you?" asked Tillie.
'I guess." Quinn had been on his high horse, he told them; and Nauman was just as rude, acting like he had nothing to do with getting him canned out of the graduate program.
"Jeez! Two years just down the drain, and what I'm going to do now-"
"You'll come into the business with your brother and me as you should've done six years ago," said Mr. Harris.
"But my art-"
"You can paint at night if you want. Or on Sundays. Look at Churchill. Look at Ike. Both of 'em decent painters, but did it stop 'em from winning the war or from running their countries and earning a good living?"
"They were hacks."
"And you're Michelangelo?"
It was evidently an old battle, and Sigrid stepped into it long enough to extract Harley's promise that he'd let them know if he remembered anything else.
When the Harrises, père et fils, departed, they were separated by more than a foot of open air; yet Sigrid was left with the distinct impression that Mr. Harris was pulling his son along by the ear.