A Genius for Compromise


by George Slanger

(I wrote this story in about 1968 during my first teaching stint, at Columbia Basin College. It was published in the literary magazine at the University of Washington in 1969.)

 Henry Ramstad was often affected by the young girls who sat in his classes, but never in quite the same way as he was by Miss Carey. He felt her presence for the first time as she sat to his left  in a small undergraduate seminar in English History. Something made him stop as he called the names; something made his mind stumble, though he carefully controlled his voice and timing so it would not show.
  
 It was not that she was pretty. Her face was saved from homeliness only by an unusual response that controlled it.
She was dark with olive skin and a convex nose that would have dominated her face if her long hair hadn't drawn enough attention It could have been her pose, the way she sat, with her body sloped backward and her head pitched forward so she was always staring at the desk in front of her. Particularly, it may have been her hands which she kept clasped in front of her, just on back of a battered stub of a pencil which she would pick up to
take occasional notes.

After he had written his name on the chalkboard and called the names from the yellow cards in front of him, he began to talk nervously, as he always did at first. "This is a course in the history of handful of illiterate, savage warriors who landed on a hold and inhospitable bit of rocky land off the coast of France. For some reason, rather than dying or fading into obscurity as they should have done, these people grew into one of the strongest nations in the world. Assuming that history is rational--(Henry paused, wondering if history were rational, and wondering whether to bring it up. He compromised and continued)--an assumption we can question later, there must have been reasons for this event which on the surface seems so unlikely. The object of this course is to speculate about those reasons." He paused.
   
"Would anyone like to begin?" There was silence, of course, and shock, as there always was. He took the pack of yellow cards out of his coat pocket and called a name. "Mr. Brocklin." Mr. Brocklin stirred in his seat and muttered something unintelligible. "We'll come back to you, Mr. Brocklin," Henry said easily. He thumbed the deck to chose another name at random "Mr. Padley." Mr. Padley smiled
smoothly.
   
"Could you ask me that at the end of the term, sir?"

The students laughed uneasily and Henry laughed too. "I may do that." He unhooked himself from his chair and leaned against the wall near a map of Eastern Europe. "Does the map help?" he
asked. Miss Carey's hands unclasped and one bent upward from the wrist. Henry nodded.   
   
"England is an island," she said. She continued to stare at her hands which were now re clasped.
  
 It was the answer Henry intended to lead the students to, but he had intended to take about thirty minutes, and he smiled as he realized he was now stuck without material for the rest of the period. He shared his amusement with the class and went on to show how again and again the twenty miles of North Sea had controlled England's destiny--saving her from being absorbed by her friends or conquered by her enemies. He made an assignment
and the class filed out.

He watched Miss Carey, her eyes lowered, gather her books, jam the pencil stub into the pocket of a notebook, and walk out.

Her body seemed firm though not strikingly well-built, a young girl's figure which had gained weight without losing its awkward and slightly misplaced curves. Henry tried to identify his feeling. Lust, yes, but something more. Not love, though he longed to call it that. And not something in between either, but something new and disturbing. The feeling lingered in the air between them the first two weeks of class, pivoting slowly around those first disturbing sensations, but never shifting to something more conventional, something he could identify or classify or analogize as he usually could.

At the end of two weeks he gave an exam. It was a good exam with enough straight recall questions to weed out any non-participants, but with the major weight on an essay question designed to allow the students to be original within the limits of their material. He took a generalization about the English Genius for Compromise from a noted historian and asked the students to examine the materials they had studied in the light of
this generalization.
  
Some academic controversy had swirled around the issue, and the question was designed to catch the excitement of the issue but allow application of the specific information he had carefully fed them. Since it was an abstraction finally beyond the reach of supporting fact, it would be equally well supported or demolished. The question would both measure and stimulate. It was the perfect exam question, designed to produce the perfect response from the perfect student.

 he leafed through the exams that night, Henry was satisfied that he had measured so well, stimulated so well, but he was also a little awed that the answers were so good. Many of them had the kind of polished parallelism, exact distinctions, and careful documentation that mark the prose of the best journals.
   
He was uneasy that students had learned to play so complex a game so well. The answers seemed a little sterile. cut off from the mystery of the students' own personality. Yet when he tried to put his finger on the quality the papers lacked, he could not. He would no sooner state the missing quality precisely in his mind than he could glance at a paper and find it. He felt driven toward loose and un-scholarly terms, and so he gave up. Almost unconsciously he dug in the pile for Hiss Carey's paper. Her paper was written in pencil in an abbreviated, but legible hand. The answers to the recall section were concise an complete. But the essay was unusual. It did not answer the question but instead made a passionate attack on the question i itself. "I can't answer this question," it began. "And I doubt whether anyone can answer it. Genius for compromise' is a phrase I can understand, but it has no meaning. It is a phrase which conceals ignorance rather than revealing knowledge. (Henry remembered having used that phrase in class, having picked it up himself somewhere.) What we are supposed to do is obvious.
We are supposed to refer to Alfred's agreement with the Danes, the settlement of the War of the Roses, to King John and the    Magna Carta where somehow principle emerged out of a mess of politically expeditious maneuvering--but the same things could be found in the history of any country which has survived. Survival comes of compromise." There was more, tumbling out in a kind of formless, breathless rush, the antithesis of the structured essay he had taught them to write, yet so laced with insights, so obviously in touch with the material that his heart leaped with a kind of joy. Yet he was indignant at the arrogance of the answer, and at the fact that she had not "answered the question." In fact, she had insulted the question, and he had a sudden glimpse of horror as
he thought that perhaps a lack of some quality in the question might have bred the kind of brilliant anemia he felt in some of the answers.
   
There was a kind of confidence, knowledge, and wrongness about her answer that could only be called integrity. He wrote an A on the paper, and beside the grade a note: "I am bewildered by your answer, bit it feels so nice." Then he crossed it out because of its vague sexual implication. He felt ridiculous for worrying about such a remote possibility, but he couldn't help it. Then he realized the crossed out message could call attention to the very thing he objected to in it. So he took another pen and scribbled across the message until it was just a neat square of ball pen ink. He had moved from intrigue to error and back to intrigue and he knew it. There was nothing to be done and he tried another note: "I admire your integrity, thought you didn't answer the question. Why do you consider your- self above playing our little games." The note was both ambiguous and ironic, therefore doubly safe.
   
The next day, he handed back the exams, moving from student to student without calling the names, to prove he knew them. He watched Miss Carey as he handed back her exam, and he thought he
saw a flicker of a smile from the eyes which still stared at the clasped hands and the stub of battered pencil in front of them.
   
As the weeks went on, she still impressed him with her endless mastery of relevant facts, and with her stubborn refusal to speculate beyond her means, her refusal, in fact to be glib. Since glibness was the means of Henry's livelihood, and much of his identity, her refusal was a constant accusation. She maddened him, yet she was what he wished her were, what he felt he somehow could be, so he clung to her and to the feeling that hung in the air between the. And always there were the light polished cotton dresses she wore, the straightness and unseductive youth of her body that confused him and kept him from sorting out his
feelings.
   
It was time for conferences on the papers. Henry tried to be calm and carry out all the arrangements with absolute normality. But when he passed around the sign-up sheet, he shivered when he watched her writing her name with the bit of pencil stub.
   
When her turn came, he was sure he could act normally. He was so used to stretching his professional manner until the light of his personality just shone through that he was sure he could do it with her as well. But all morning on the day of her conference, he often drew his hand across the top of his head where his hair was thin. When she sat down beside him and spread the sheets of her rough draft on front of her, he strained to conceal his excitement, strained to identify his feelings, strained to determine if she felt any of the same concern he did.
   
"What are you writing about?"
   
"The Queen."

What Queen?"

The Queen," she said. "You said English only had two real queens, and we aren't up to Victoria yet."
  
 "Elizabeth then?"
   
"Yes." She was starting at the desk in front of her.

And what about Elizabeth?"
   
"I want to save her a little. I think people are too hard on her"
   
"In what respect?" Henry watched the profile of her face.

You said she used people."

I said she used her men."

But you said here were other interpretations."
   
"But I said they were wrong." He was bantering, wondering
whether she'd pick it up. She did.

The catalog said we're encouraged to think for ourselves in this course." Like a man teaching his wife to play tennis, Henry couldn't resist scoring the final point.

Catalogs are written by idealists," he said.
  
 "You're not an idealist?" she asked.
   
Suddenly Henry realized he didn't know whether he was an idealist or not. He had the feeling that he once had known but had since forgotten. He might have it written somewhere in his files, but he didn't know where.
   
"Don't ask embarrassing questions of the professor, Miss Carey," he said. "Tell me about your paper."
   
"I don't think she used Leicester."

Why not?"
    "Because the things she made him do weren't to her advantage." Henry grasped the point and saw its possibilities. He was caught between fascination for her ideas and her person: the odd curves in her smooth, flowered dress; the brown bare arm; the taut nylon over her barely visible knees; the way her hair parted
and fell forward, exposing her neck.
   
"What about the first expedition to the Low Countries?" he asked. But he already knew the answer, and he barely listened as she made the point. He made some suggestions about organization and recommended a source, more from obligations than necessity. He knew the conference was nearly over, and he felt her slipping away.
   
"Do you think that pencil will finish the job?" he said, pointing to the inevitable stub of pencil she held in her fingers. She flushed, her composure broken, and Henry was both sorry
 or her and glad that he had affected her.
   
"I always use pencils like that," she stammered.

"The school would loan you a new pencil just to see an original idea like yours get developed."
  
 "I'll remember that." She gathered up her papers and was gone. Henry was horrified, afraid on one level that his action could be interpreted as a sign of attraction, afraid on a deeper level that it could be interpreted otherwise.
   
When the papers came in, he rifled through the pile for hers as he habitually did now. He recognized some of the phrases and structure he had suggested, and he wondered if she had taken his suggestions out of respect or out of some other feeling he didn't dare specify. But it pleased him to think that she had taken them.
   
He went through the paper writing marginal notes and was nearly done when he realized she had avoided one of the central issues: Leicester's physical relation to Elizabeth. That they were lovers was possible, though not provable; the debatable point was relevant in her discussion. He went back, and at the logical point wrote, "The nature of their relationship is crucial here. If it were sexual, her motivation would be much simpler than what you state here." He put an A on the paper and set it aside. Then he though about what he had written, and rapid succession winced, cursed himself for wincing, and cursed himself for cursing himself. He tried to go on to another paper, but the words blurred and he could not concentrate.
   
He picked up her paper again. What he had just written was perfectly innocent he knew, but in view of the tension which seemed to flow between them, he felt it might be taken as an innuendo, a challenge to her innocence, the distasteful gesture of a lonely middle-aged man. He crossed out "If their relationship were sexual," and wrote, "If they were lovers." Then he realized how absurd the crossed-out lines looked. He nearly tore the paper in anger as he realized he had been caught in the trap of his own introspection, exactly as he had been when he wrote the first comment on her first exam. His habit of endless analysis, which served him so well in his studies, had become a curse, a kind of devil that prodded him and then jerked him back every time he jumped. He wanted for once to think a thought or feel a feeling that would be stable, something that would be simple and obvious enough to stand still a moment, free from the pressure of analysis that always came yapping after his perceptions, like dogs after a
weary fox. Especially he wanted that with Miss Carey who herself
 seemed so stable and complete, though so remote.
   
There was no question now of crossing out the words as he had before. That would be too absurd. Yet he had to give the paper back. In a kind of agony, he realized what had to do--remove the page. Then, if she missed it would say it was lost. He despised his actions, but he could not do otherwise. He had only two choices: He could take the page out and know himself to be ridiculous, or leave it in and risk having her think him ridiculous. As remote as that risk was, he could not take it.
   
The next day he gave the paper back. If she noticed the missing page, she never said anything. And her own feelings remained a mystery, until about a week later, It happened as he was walking back toward his office. Miss Carey was approaching, her books held in her crooked arm in front of her. Henry steadied himself and resisted the impulse to stare at the sidewalk.
   
"Hi," she said, and moved on. The greeting was not unfriendly, but it was so flat, so matter-of-fact that he know nothing lay behind it. She didn't care. The force of that fact opened chasms in the ground around him. All his tortured self-examinations and all the cross-examinations of his motives, all the tortured readings of her
gestures and his had been for nothing. At last, a clear and stable feeling swept over him, free of irony and ambiguity, impervious to analysis,
   
He felt a chill at the back of his head where his hair no longer protected him.