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Beet

Chapter One

"Don't bother to come home if you still have a job," Livi Porterfield called to her husband as he hustled their two groggy children into the 243,000-miles-and-still-rattling Accord, to drive them to school. He blew her a kiss.

The job she referred to was on the faculty of Beet College, forty miles north of Boston, where eighteen hundred handpicked, neurotically competitive undergraduates were joined with one hundred and forty-one handpicked, neurotically competitive professors to instruct them. Beet was a typical small New England college, fortified with brick and self-regard—the sort of place people call charming when they mean sterile.

There Peace Porterfield, the youngest full professor in the school's history, taught English and American literature—which is ordinarily enough to mark a person for disaster. If that didn't do the trick, he also believed in what he did, being committed to an academic discipline said to have exhausted both its material and its usefulness, and patronized by institutions of higher learning like a doddering tenant no longer able to come up with the rent. And if those things didn't do him in, he believed in the value of a liberal arts education, and in colleges in general, from whose sacred waters, he further believed, civilization flowed. Need one glaze the duck? He believed in civilization.

The same may not be said of the redhead knockout Olivia Weissman-Kelleher Porterfield, M.D., Peace's wife of thirteen years and mother of Beth and Robert, their bellicose progeny of nine and seven. Livi had the face and temperament of a despotic ingénue. While she gave anoccasional nod to civilization, she thought of colleges and universities as—how did she put it?—fucked up beyond belief.

She waved good-bye and wished him "Bad luck, Candide!"—what she called him when she was especially exasperated by his even temper. He needled her by adopting the nickname.

Voltaire probably pictured someone like Peace. Eyes as blue as daylight, hair the color of damp sand that flapped over his forehead. Six foot one, give or take. An athlete's careful lope. And a stoic expression, created and often tested by the name his 1960s generation parents had burdened him with. His less respectful sister Love, a parole officer in Newark, legally changed her name to Athena. Peace was more naturally serene, which came in handy at times as tense as these.

And why were these times tense? Because the board of trustees of Beet College was threatening to shut the place down. Since eight o'clock that morning, they had been meeting in the Temple, the imitation Parthenon atop College Hill, under the leadership of Joel Bollovate (known as "the man in the iron belly" to his colleagues, competitors, and to his family as well), chairman of the board and CEO of Bollocorps, the largest developer in five of the six New England states. And why close the college? Because Chairman Bollovate reported that Beet's $265 million endowment had been reduced to nothing, and the school was going broke.

"Jesus, Mary, and Moses!" Livi would say as often as she could. "A two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old American institution down the toilet in three short years. The Bollovate legacy."

Livi lacked what is known as the patience of a saint. When the Porterfields had first arrived at Beet, she could find no openings nearby in her specialty in hand surgery, and was forced to cool her heels working in the ER at Boston North. That diversion, she hoped, would be as short-lived as her husband's employment. She looked for any opportunity to free her family from what she called "the graves of academe."

But she was right about Beet's distinguished place in American history. Given every advantage at its birth in 1755, the college profited from the shortcomings of institutions of higher learning that had preceded it. Harvard College was founded in 1636, but in 1718, at the urging of Cotton Mather (whose urgings were rarely ignored), a group of New England conservatives who felt Harvard's standards were slipping decided to found Yale. A few years later another group, who felt Yale's standards were slipping, decided to found Princeton (1746). Not long after that yet another group, detecting more slippage still, created the University of Pennsylvania (1749), then Columbia (1754), until the groups of roving college founders felt standards had slipped so much and so rapidly, they could no longer find them. It was around that time Beet came into being.

That was thanks to a gift of Nathaniel Beet (1660-1732), an American divine and the wealthiest pig farmer in the New England colonies. Beet bequeathed his library of one hundred books (half on religion, half on animal husbandry) and his pigs, which were of much greater dollar value, to establish a "Collegium for Young Men in the Service of Almighty God and Livestock"—thus the college motto, "Deus Libri Porci."

Beet was to be God's beachhead on a pagan continent, created to produce the sort of young man that England and her motley intermarrying kings and queens had failed to produce since 1066—a learned, ruthless Christian who knew the value of a penny. Small wonder Beet was where the term "capitalist pig" originated, though not as a pejorative.

"Love ya, Dad!" Beth and Robert shouted as Peace dropped them off, just before they shoved each other in the small of the back when Dad drove away. Then he too headed off to school, as he had done his whole life, from the age of three to thirty-six—St. Paul's, Harvard A.B., B.Litt (Oxon.), Harvard A.M., Ph.D.; a year teaching poor and neglected kids in Sunset Park, Brooklyn (where he and Livi met); his first job, at Yale: school, school, and more school.

He drove down the dirt road, which became the macadam road, which became Main Street of the town of Beet, and he winced. If the college closed, so would the town. Everything in it—the This Little Piggy Muncheonette with its . . .

Beet. Copyright © by Roger Rosenblatt. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.