Composing a Life

system that I knew was flawed, but I did not work warily enough. Ambiguity is perhaps easier to endure when you are a visitor, an outsider who has her own place to return to. One of the costs of living abroad, for me, was that I remained unduly hopeful about my own society, expecting to feel at home, but Amherst was still caught in the set of inherited attitudes that defined any woman as an outsider. My optimism, which survived the Iranian revolution, was shattered by my experiences there, but today I find myself believing once again that it is worthwhile to try to work gradually within an imperfect system, to look for ways in which values already embedded in it, however ambiguously, can find fuller expression.
    I experienced Amherst at its worst, partly by accident and partly because the ordinary and partial decencies of the system failed to function for a woman. My initial honeymoon on that gracious campus had been followed by a dip and a reappraisal. I had overcome the initial obstacles and felt happy and confident, with a sufficient mix of criticism and hope. I had a wealth of growing friendships and a sense, after two and a half years with only minor crises, of broad faculty respect and support. Then in January 1983, I rolled my car on an icy road in New Hampshire. I was not significantly injured, but within the same twenty-four hours Julian Gibbs, the Amherst president, died suddenly, and my entire experience was turned around.
    There were certain things that were crystal clear to me immediately—too clear, for one of the effects of shock is a certain spurious simplification. The immediate formal responsibility for the college in the president’s absence lies with the dean of the faculty; the college had, in fact, always tended to function more smoothly when he was away. I decided that I would not want to be a candidate for the Amherst presidency when a new search was mounted. I would conceal my accident and devote myself to ensuring calm and continuity, with the illusory clarity that comes from having laid self-interest aside. I ignored my bruises and the steady ache in my neck and worked around the clock, exactly as I would have concealed a headache if Vanni had come to me in some distress.
    The chairman of the board arrived in a near panic and pressed me to agree to accept the acting presidency during the interim. Worried about precedents in which women are said to have declined responsibility, I reluctantly said that I would do it. Then in a flurry of conflicting advice, I gradually became intrigued by the possibility of doing well, on a temporary basis, the tasks I had seen done badly. Under the pressure of emergency arrangements, I didn’t really grieve for Julian until the college memorial service, but when the chaplain reached the phrase, “and light perpetual shine upon them,” I suddenly saw Julian’s face turned up to the sun, boyish and free as it must have been on his sailboat, away from the administrative tasks he hated, and started sobbing helplessly. The portrait that hangs now in Johnson Chapel, with the array of other men who have been presidents of Amherst, captures exactly that look and makes me want to weep for this sweet willful man who was such a poor president and was so easy to mother.
    The six-person executive committee of the faculty normally meets with the president as chairperson and the dean as recording secretary. Because I felt that I had a conflict of interest, I suggested that the group meet without me, before meeting with the board. I was probablv more trusting than normal because I was grieving and in shock, a state in which one hopes for friendship and reaches out for shared values and commitments. Then too, if you work all day in your garden, you can forget that your neighbor may covet it as real estate. In the event, a majority of the Committee of Six advised the board of trustees against making me acting president. Several of their own number, they noted, would be “more reassuring” to the faculty in that role. It was only weeks later that I began, like a good detective, to ask, not
cherchez la femme
, but
cui bono
, who benefits?
    In any long-term community, there is a certain check on the crudest forms of self-interest because the wise know that everyone benefits from continuity and cooperation. But there is always a tendency to grab when a chance comes along—perhaps as a result of an emergency—to divide up the pie. Some people rescue survivors after a