Read Online Impulse by Frederick Ramsay - Free Book Online Page B

over. Apparently electrical service only went to every other panel. You got position first, he thought,, the light went with location. He formed a question: What criteria determined location? Then the obvious struck him. His father had received the lamp only recently.
    “Yes, well, he’s highly thought of, did you know that?” Ms. Roulx looked nervous, like something, some task assigned to her wasn’t going very well and she needed to regain her position.
    “I didn’t know. When did he get his light?” he asked. Meanness did not play a significant part in Frank’s personality as a rule. His wife used to complain about that. She thought he rolled over too easily. But today he still smarted from his confrontation with Powers, and even his time with Rosemary had not completely erased that. And then, this morning’s session with his daughter had stirred it up all over again. Now, he smelled a rat and gave in to the opportunity to stick it to the school.
    “Pardon me?” Ms. Roulx had the decency to blush. Maybe he should be a bit easier on her.
    “The light over his portrait…it’s a terrible rendering, by the way…when did you all decide to light him up?”
    A tall, thin man wearing a carefully worn and patched Harris tweed coat sidled up to them. “Smith, isn’t it?” He stuck out his hand. “Paisley Rehnquist, here. I am, if it can be so stated, your late father’s successor.”
    Frank shook the slightly damp, limp hand of Paisley Rehnquist and surreptitiously wiped it on his trousers.
    “I think it’s a very decent likeness,” Rehnquist said, peering over his half-lens reading glasses. Rehnquist had body odor.
    “You never met him—how would you know?” Frank stepped back a foot or two.
    “Well, I…people who knew him said so.”
    “I see…and that is sufficient?”
    “Um, yes, certainly.”
    “Then you should know, as his successor, so to speak, that the artist painted that disgrace from a photograph. My father refused to sit. The only reason it’s there at all is that one of his former students paid for it and the school had to accept it as part of a sizable donation made by said student. This is the first time I’ve seen it and I assure you, it is perfectly dreadful. When did he get his light?”
    Elizabeth Roulx looked embarrassed, but Paisley Rehnquist charged ahead.
    “Really, well…times change. We don’t use the old methods anymore, you know. Your father taught the classic way. We are into the new.”
    Frank thought he said the new like he’d discovered an addition to the periodic table of the elements.
    “New? As in what, exactly?”
    “Ah, no more doting on dead white men, literary fossils. I’m sure you had that introduction to literature, and many did, but it’s over, passé. We are contemporaneous now.”
    “Which dead white men were you referring to?”
    “Oh, you know, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner—”
    “James Baldwin?”
    “Um…well, yes, if you wish.”
    “Paisley—may I call you Paisley? Here’s the problem—when I read Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Kerouac, and the aforementioned Baldwin, they weren’t dead, and Baldwin wasn’t white. They were…what was that word you used? Contemporaneous. If you wish to divorce yourself from your cultural heritage, that is your right, but I think it intellectually disingenuous to short-change your students as well.”
    Elizabeth Roulx glanced to her left at Brad Stark, apparently seeking some help. Frank could not be sure if Stark had been listening to their conversation or not. He guessed he had.
    Stark stepped forward and smoothly disengaged Rehnquist from the group and then led them to their places at the High Table. They sat. Frank picked at his salad. Perry Dining Hall presented as bleak a face on the inside as it did out. Portraits of faculty members, mostly long forgotten, hung on panels between sheets of plate glass. Some had lights attached to their frames; some did not. He wondered again what constituted