Read Online Beet by Roger Rosenblatt - Free Book Online

Club, Bengalis Unite, Berliners for Rebuilding the Wall, WPIG, Jacobean Bloodletters, Brothers for Lynn Cheney, Baptists for Fornication, Equestrian Hillel, Christians for Jesus, Pre-Raphaelite Readers ( James Lattice, pres.), Haitian Ballroom Dancing, Fuck Foucault, Chicana Frisbee, and Up with Goats. Only a handful of students stopped by the booths, which sagged like a bazaar after a rainstorm. Even the usually oversubscribed Future Animated Sitcom Writers of America and Future Network Presidential Historians drew no one.
    In the wider world, news of Beet’s predicament was seeping into America without incurring too much agitation, at least initially, supporting Manning’s prediction about public opinion on American colleges. On October 20 the trustees had sent out a press release about the possible closing, and the proposed solution to theproblem. But it was phrased so positively, the papers that picked it up featured the story as little more than a filler. Other American colleges were in similar fixes, even if the loss of a whole endowment was unusual, but who pays attention to the autarkies of nonprofits?
    Still, the arthritic Beet alumni distributed over the country at the Beet Club of Cincinnati and the Beet Clubs of Bismarck, Kalamazoo, Walla Walla, and elsewhere, cocked their heads when they read the item on page 7 or page 8 below the fold. The news especially irked the oldest Beet families, whose New England names were on the dorms and whose frowsy scions dwelled in mansions with peeling paint near Brattle Street in Cambridge. They hobbled around unpolished floors on aluminum canes, wore cardigans with holes at the elbows, cooked popcorn on hot plates, and watched black-and-white TVs with rabbit ears that rested on piles of unopened bills. Their thermostats were kept at 60 degrees. At the Beet commencements, they hailed each other in loud patrician voices, usually in the middle of someone’s speech.
    But they were not to be trifled with. When they recalled the locations of their Remington typewriters, they fired off furious letters. They yelled in surround-sound. What the hell was going on? And who was this Bollovate anyway? A JEW? A WOP? A NEGRO?
    Slowly the world of education was becoming riled as well. Beet College no more? Coca-Cola no more? The Ford Motor Company no more? Some institutions simply represent the breed. And Beet was one of these. When people wanted to indicate natural intelligence, they would say, “Well, I may not have gone to Beet, but…” Lesser institutions would identify themselves as “the Beet of the South” or “the West.” High schools judged it an official “reach” college. And those who did get in were hated for it all their lives.
    Perhaps the surest indication of its catbird seat among American colleges was that Beet undergraduates never admitted they went there. Instead, when asked, they’d say they went “to school north of Boston” or (rarely) “to school southeast of Derry, New Hampshire.” Everyone knew what they meant thus, to avoid saying Beet outright was doubly irritating.
    The disappearance of Beet was unthinkable except to those who thought about it. So the college turned to its head of public relations, Jerry Jejunum, who’d been picked for the job because he was born with an indentation in the parietal lobe that made him incapable of telling the truth. Jerry composed a form letter assuring all concerned not to be concerned; “Dear old Beet will soon be on its feet.” He hoped his mantra would catch on nationwide.
    But Manning was right about the parents of Beet undergraduates, who, not so easily gulled, asked, “Why exactly am I paying forty thousand?”
    November now lay upon the campus like a painter’s drop cloth splotched with zinc grays and badger grays and destroyer grays. The month marked the onset of New England’s murder/suicide season, in which Homer, tired of staring