The 45th, page 18
“That is a long question. You want to know what I believe. The short answer is that iI believe everyone is wrong. I am all in favor of a woman’s right to choose. The question is how many choices does she get. She gets to choose in the first place whether she is going to have sex, she gets to choose in the second place whom she is going to have sex with, and she gets to choose in the third place whether she is going to engage in unprotected sex. Three choices before we even get to the question of abortion. There is an exception to this, of course: when she does not have any of those three choices because someone forces her against her will. There has always, as far back as you want to trace it in history and law, at least English and American law, an exception to the law against abortion for rape and incest, and to protect the life of the mother. There is an argument that is now being made that because life is a gift from God, we have no right to end a life just because that life was conceived in an act of brutal violence. An argument like that is nothing short of sacrilege. If life is a gift of God, do these people really believe that God would bestow this gift through the awful violence of rape? Is a rapist now to be seen as a messenger of the Almighty? Do they believe this is the way God gives life? - By forcing it on those who would prefer that conception come through an act not of violence but of love? So, no, I don’t agree; there have to be exceptions. But that still doesn’t answer your question. You want my view on abortion, whether it should be legal or a crime. My own view is that it should not be an issue. I don’t think we should even talk about it. This, again, is a question that should be left private. It should not be made unlawful, the way a number of self-styled conservatives insist it should. But neither should it be treated as some kind of right, something without consequence. Leave the question to the woman who has to make that decision. There really is no reasonable alternative. But treat it with the solemn respect it deserves. The difference in all this is the question whether we think everyone has a right to everything they feel like doing, or whether we think there is something more important, something worth the kind of sacrifice and effort I talked about before. The question, really, is whether we are going to be a frivolous, or a serious, people.”
Chapter Thirteen
Rachel Good tried to learn everything she could about Julian Drake and his sudden rise to national prominence. She read everything she could find, all the coverage in the local papers when he first ran for Congress, the verbatim reports in the Congressional Record of the speeches he had given on the floor of the House, the interviews, the articles - whatever had been written about him while he served. Nothing she read told her what she wanted to know. There was something missing, something she did not understand, and so she flew out to Michigan, and in the small town a few miles out of Ann Arbor where Julian had grown up, talked to as many of his old friends as she could find. They all said pretty much the same thing. Julian was smart, well-liked, the quarterback on the high school football team, his only ambition, so far as any of them could remember, was to play football in college. She talked to his high school coach, Clarence Philips who had just that year retired.
“Julian is going to be president,” said Philips, as he offered Rachel a beer.
It was a hot, humid, August day. Rachel was glad to have something to drink. They sat under a shaded canopy on the back porch. The house, small and unpretentious, was on a well-tended half acre less than a mile from the football field where on Friday nights in the fall two or three thousand students and parents would come out to cheer on the local team, however many games they might lose.
“Julian president! I wish I could tell you I knew it would happen, that he would wind up doing something like this.” Tall, with long arms and long legs, a short crop of graying red hair, Philips sat with his knees spread apart, twisting back and forth the ice cold bottle he held in his large, arthritic hands, thinking back thirty years to when Julian Drake was a scrawny kid with hardly any athletic ability at all. “Damndest thing I ever saw,” he mused, and then, embarrassed, looked at the well-dressed reporter from the New York Times, wondering if he should apologize.
“Damndest thing you ever saw,” said Rachel, drawling out the phrase with a glancing smile of encouragement. “You were saying…?”
“Yeah, damndest thing. He couldn’t run - when he was a senior we let him run wind sprints with the tackles, fat kids, most of them, who couldn’t run much faster than he could. And he couldn’t really throw - short passes, twenty, thirty yards, but anything farther than that - he didn’t have the arm. Hell,” he laughed, warming to the subject, “he really couldn’t do anything. Except work at it more than any player I ever had. I mean, all the time, before practice, after practice, all year, summers, too. He was never going to be fast, he was never going to be strong, but within those limits, those physical limits, of what he could do, he was - if I can put it like this - damn near perfect. I said physical limits, because what that kid could do with his brain - I guess I shouldn’t call him a kid anymore, should I? He knew more about the game….I was the coach, but I used to ask his advice, what play he thought we should call, that kind of thing. But if you want to know how smart he was….” He noticed that Rachel, after taking the first drink, had not touched her beer. “Can I get you something else? Ice tea, something?”
“No, I’m fine,” replied Rachel, shaking her head as she glanced at her open notebook. “I’ve talked to some of his friends. They all said he wanted to play college ball, but he didn’t, did he?”
Philips knitted his brow. His shoulders, almost too wide for his body, heaved up as he sighed with nostalgia at what he now remembered. He looked at Rachel as if she were the one who should know the answers.
“Maybe that’s why he is going to be president: he didn’t know how to do anything except aim high. He could have played in college; some small college where football isn’t the most important thing. He might even have made it at a place like Eastern Michigan, or Central Michigan, second level programs but good enough to play some of the majors. One of them - I’ve forgotten which - offered him a scholarship. He did not have any great natural ability, but he could do enough, and he ran an offense like nothing you have ever seen - but he wasn’t interested. He wanted to play at Michigan State. I think he had dreams of being the starting quarterback, taking Michigan State to the Rose Bowl.” He searched the curious eyes of Rachel Good. “You’re trying to understand what he was like, how he turned out the way he did. All I can tell you is that from the time he was a kid the only thing he knew to go after was the highest thing there was. He went to Michigan State on his own, tried to make it as a walk-on. And this is the interesting part: when he discovered that he wasn’t good enough, that he couldn’t make the team, he didn’t leave, try with some other school. He stayed at Michigan State, forgot about football, became a student and a pretty damn good one from what I was told. But if you want to know what kind of student he was when he was in high school talk to Fred Chaplin. He was the principal back then. He lives out on the lake, the other side of town. I’ll call him if you like, tell him you’re coming.”
Chaplin was waiting in the driveway when Rachel arrived. He seemed nervous; his small hooded eyes looked away each time she opened her mouth to speak.
“I don’t get many visitors anymore,” he said in a quiet, self-conscious voice. In his late seventies, he seemed a shell of a man, shuffling along with the help of a cane, the tired, haggard look on his pale face proof of constant, debilitating pain. Rachel felt a twinge of discomfort , sympathy, for the effort with which he lowered himself into a threadbare easy chair that through years of use had lost most of its original shape.
“Philips said you wanted to talk to me about Julian Drake.”
The use of the coach’s last name, the way Chaplin still thought like a school principal, struck Rachel as a little depressing. Were we all prisoners of the categories in which we found ourselves? She did not like to think so.
“Yes, Mr. Philips said you would know more than anyone what Julian Drake had been like when he was a student in your school.”
“Julian Drake,” said Frederick Chaplin, speaking slowly and with great precision, “was the biggest disappointment I ever had in all my years of teaching.”
He looked at Rachel with new found confidence. He had surprised her, just as he had hoped. Something close to pleasure quivered at the corners of his thin, frail mouth.
“The biggest disappointment?” Quite on purpose Rachel tried to look even more surprised than she was. “Why? What do you mean?”
The old man tapped the fingers of his right hand on the scratched wooden arm of his chair, the same way he must have done a thousand times before, years earlier, when he was calling some wayward delinquent to account.
“What would you call it when a student with the highest I.Q. you ever tested is perfectly content to get by with what wasn’t much better than a B average?”
Out through a dusty sliding glass door, beyond a paint chipped wooden railing on the deck and a broken plank walkway to a small tattered sailboat tethered to the dock, across a small wind whipped lake, Rachel watched a young family sitting on a dock of their own begin their evening meal against the glowing background of a blood red sun, and for a brief moment wondered what it would have been like to have had children of her own.
“You think he should have done better,” she asked, vaguely, her eyes still on what was taking place the other side of the lake.
“Of course he should have done better,” replied Chaplin with such sudden force Rachel immediately looked back, worried for half an instant that she might be reprimanded for failing to pay attention. “The highest I.Q. we had ever recorded, one of the highest I.Q.s ever recorded anywhere in the state, if I am any judge of it. Off the charts! That good, and he does B level work!:
“Because he was lazy, or because he was bored?”
“Neither. He was not lazy; he did everything he was asked to do. Bored? No, not in the usual sense,” replied Chaplin, more forthcoming, more interested, as it were, than he had appeared to be before. “It’s what all these psychologists with all their testing never understand. Julian was too intelligent. That is the key: too intelligent. What makes perfect sense to you and me, what comes easy to the normal student, I think sometimes was just the opposite for him. English, for example.” Using both hands, Chaplin pulled himself up until he was sitting on the very edge of the chair. He leaned forward on his cane. “I read the papers; I watch some of the news. I saw the speech he gave; I watched that press conference. Everyone says he’s the greatest speaker they have ever heard. They’re right; he is. But he didn’t know anything about English grammar. And if that was all that was taught in high school English he might have failed the class. The way it was taught then - even in grade school - diagramming sentences, identifying parts of speech, classifying everything as a noun, a verb, an adverb, an adjective, putting everything in the right category. He could not do it. I asked him - had him in my office - asked him why he couldn’t. He said it was like looking at a solid white sheet, that when he was supposed to diagram a sentence his mind went blank. That is what I mean. He could not do the normal things; but he could do what no one else could do, he could write. He did not write by what he saw, he wrote by what he heard - the sounds, the voices, in his head. His English teacher asked me if Julian was religious. She wanted to know because she had read one of his papers - something about some work of literature he had been asked to read - she said it was one of the most searching, deepest, things she had read. You wanted to know what kind of student Julian was? Not a bad student, but - and there is no question about this - the only real genius I ever met. But you wouldn’t have known it from his grades,” he added with a sly grin, laughing at the world and all its misconceptions.
It was, it seemed to Rachel Good as she drove along the road toward East Lansing, the story of a misguided adolescent, the beginning of a life full of uncertainty and doubt, searching for something that would remain, at least for a while, always elusive. She was not surprised to learn that he had changed his major in college at least four times.
Albert Walsh propped his feet up on the corner of his scuffed and decrepit wooden desk in his small office on the third floor of the red brick building where the faculty of the philosophy department had been quartered as long as anyone could remember. The bookcases on the wall behind him were stuffed with the works of Kant and Hegel, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes, Locke and Rousseau. Several of them, Rachel Good noted, were in German or French; others, a few, in bilingual editions which furnished the careful reader with an English translation along with the original Greek or Latin text. It was late morning, almost noon, but it was still summer and there were no classes to teach.
Walsh was now in his early sixties, but from the look of what he was wearing, a sports jacket with the elbows worn away, a button down white shirt frayed at the collar, and a green and blue tartan tie, pulled loose from the unbuttoned top of his shirt, he must have looked much the same way a quarter century earlier when the young Julian Drake was a student in his class. It was not just that his clothing had not changed, except for the lines that dug deep at the corners of his eyes he did not look much over forty. Painfully thin, his cheeks were drawn so tight over his cheekbones he would have looked like a living cadaver had it not been for the almost unearthly brightness in his large, deep set brown eyes. Rachel had never seen anything quite like them, the way they seemed to burn with some inner fire of their own. He was all angles and sharp corners, elbows and knees, and the long fingers of a practiced pianist. Even when he was sitting still, he seemed in constant motion. Rachel liked him enormously. Everyone did. He was known, as she later learned, by every student who had ever been in one of his classes or even, just once, listened to one of his lectures, as simply ‘The Great Walsh.’
“When you called, you said you were doing a story on Julian. How well do you know him?” he asked with such intense interest that before she knew what she was doing she was answering his questions as if he had come to interview her.
“I first knew him when he came to Congress, almost twenty years ago. Not very well, of course; I was a reporter, he was a freshman Congressman. But even then there was something about him.”
“Something about him; you knew right away that he was different, that he wasn’t driven by the same kind of ambition, that he wasn’t one of that breed that thinks only about the next election. You knew he had a future, and, reporter or not, you hoped he would have the chance. True?” he asked, his arms flailing in the air like some demented conductor who doesn’t realize the orchestra has left.
“Yes,” replied Rachel, laughing at the way this antic creature held her with his eyes. “You’re right; he had that effect. You knew right away you were in the presence of someone different. But what it was, I’m not sure even now I understand.”
“Easy!” exclaimed The Great Walsh, slapping the palms of his hands on top of his desk. “His mind was completely empty, the only thing in it ignorance - but ignorance of a very high order!” he proclaimed in a voice crackling with an electricity that made every word seem to have a life of its own. “Ignorance, profound ignorance, is the only guarantee of wisdom.” He waved his hand in the air like someone batting flies. “You don’t have to know Plato, you don’t have to have read Rousseau, just look around at what goes on all the time, the stupid things people do and say. Well, it helps if you know Plato, if you know Rousseau. Then at least you have read the line, a line you find in both of them, that it isn’t ignorance but error that causes all our problems. That’s what I meant. Julian never came to anything with preconceptions of his own. He was never the prisoner of all the things we get taught, all the things, if I can put it like this, everyone else believes. Do you know what this is all about?” he asked, suddenly gesturing toward the contents of his small, cramped office. “What higher education was supposed to do ? It doesn’t do it anymore, but that is another story. It was supposed to repair all the damage done by lower education, to liberate the mind, as we used to say, from all the nonsense we think it necessary to teach children - children of all ages, I might add. That was what made Julian different: he had somehow liberated himself. Or maybe he was just born that way. All I know is that from the first time he walked into one of my classes, the first time….”
Walsh twisted around in his chair and then lowered his head and for just an instant looked at Rachel with the calm despondency of a man who wishes he could live all over again something he has just remembered.
“It was winter quarter. I was teaching Philosophy of the Law. Most of those who took the class were the pre-law types who thought the course might give them some advantage when they got to law school. You can imagine their surprise when I spent most of the time lecturing on Plato’s Laws and Hobbes’ Leviathan. It was winter quarter, the class met one night a week, three hours, seven to ten. It was the first night, early January, bitter cold, must have been ten below, and a snowstorm. Class was over. I had on my parka, heading out the door. Everyone else had gone, but Julian had stayed to ask a question. I started to answer, but the question went right to the heart of what I had spent three hours trying to say. Suddenly I saw things I had not seen before. We stood outside under a street lamp, the snow coming down; stood there for - I don’t know - thirty, forty minutes. That is what he could do: listen with a completely open mind, listen to the way things were seen twenty-five hundred years ago, seen in ways so different as to be almost unintelligible to anyone who believes in the things we believe today, listen as if there was nothing unusual, nothing even difficult to grasp about it, and then ask a question that went to the very heart of it. You came here to ask me what he was like as a student. I wouldn’t know. Julian wasn’t my student; it was the other way round.”
