Free Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red by Harry Kemelman Page A

triumphantly. “I been sitting here only a couple of hours and already I got thirty signatures on your petition, and six of them signed the resolution.”
    Fine shook his head in exasperation. “Did it ever occur to you to ask me before you got up this petition? Did it ever occur to you that it might interfere with my own plans?”
    “Jeez. Roger, we thought you’d be pleased. Besides, if we didn’t do it, the SDS would, maybe even the Weathervane crazies. You’d rather have us doing it than them, wouldn’t you?”
    “Well, I don’t like it, Ekko. I want it stopped.”
    “OK, if that’s the way you want it. Excuse me a minute –” He grabbed a student who was with a girl. “Hey Bongo, come on sign a petition for Professor Fine!”
    Roger Fine hurried away.

Chapter Nine
    What have you got against John Hendryx. Dad?” asked Betty Macomber. It was Mrs. Childs’ night off, and Betty was clearing the dinner dishes while he glanced through the evening paper.
    “Hendryx? Oh, the new man in English?”
    “New! He’s been here two and a half years.”
    “Really. It just shows how time flies. Why; I have nothing against him.”
    “Then why hasn’t he been appointed chairman of the department? Why is he only acting chairman?”
    President Macomber put his paper aside and looked up at his daughter, she was tall and blonde; “my Viking princess” he had been fond of calling her when she was a little girl, although her face showed planes of maturity: it was unlined and still attractive. “It’s regulations,” he began. “A chairman of a department is required to have tenure, and that takes a minimum of three years, Hendrix hasn’t been with us that long. So naturally he can only be acting chairman.”
    “But in the past people have been made chairman of their departments without tenure,” she persisted. “You told me yourself that Professor Malkowitz was made chairman of the Math Department the day he was hired.”
    “Malkowitz was a special case, he wouldn’t have come to Windemere otherwise, and we were very anxious to get him, the trustees had to grant him tenure by special vote.”
    She put aside the bread tray and salad bowl she was carrying and sat on the hassock at his feet. “Well, why can’t you do the same thing for Professor Hendryx?”
    He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Professor Malkowitz has a national reputation, he’s an extremely capable man.”
    “And you have doubts about Professor Hendryx’s ability?”
    There was no doubt about the challenge in her voice, he tried to blunt it with a light answer. “Well, one thing I can say about him, he certainly knows how to enlist female support.” He smiled. “For months now Millicent Hanbury has been after me about him, and now you. I can understand her attitude, they’re old friends. I gather, or at least they both come from the same hometown. But you. I didn’t think you even knew him.”
    “I met him the day I got back, he was at the Sorensons’ party.”
    “Oh?”
    “And I’ve seen quite a bit of him since,” she added offhandedly.
    But he wasn’t fooled. “He complained about his treatment here?”
    “No, it wasn’t that,” she said. “But when I happened to refer to him as chairman of the English Department, he made a point of correcting me and explained he was only acting chairman.” She paused. “If you know anything against him. Father, I’d like to hear it.”
    Realizing that her interest was more than impersonal concern for a faculty member, he began cautiously. “He has a good degree. Harvard. I think, and I understand he’s published some. But when you’ve been at this game as long as I have, you get a kind of feeling about faculty people. In the last ten years, before coming here, he’s had three different jobs, and why would he come here at all? We’re a small college, not too well known, with that kind of background he should have been able to wangle a job at one of the prestige colleges by this