Pages 307–312
Saturday 7 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment — the day after the Port Washington meet and its bus ride home — last class period at E.T.A., roughly 1435h. Three strands braid: Schacht breezing through prorector Mary Esther Thode's crackpot psychopathology midterm; Jim Troeltsch's student "radio" sportscast piping yesterday's Port Washington rout into every classroom over the intercom; and Hal in the one genuinely hard prorector class, Québecois history, taught entirely in French by Thierry Poutrincourt. The scene jump-cuts between exam text, broadcast, and lecture — the interruptions are the form. Its last two pages are the book finally sitting down to explain Separatism.
Terms, in order of appearance
- quadrivial (p. 307) — from the quadrivium, medieval schooling's four core arts; roughly "counting toward requirements," which these classes don't.
- Harry Hopman (p. 307) — real legendary Australian coach; his Florida program set the tennis-drill-sergeant template.
- Virginia Slims / Family Circle (p. 307) — real sponsors of the women's professional tennis circuits.
- double-bind (p. 307) — psychiatry's term for paired compulsions, each forbidding the other; the midterm demonstrates rather than defines.
- felo de se (p. 308) — legal Latin: suicide (as on p. 286).
- SACPOP (p. 310) — Troeltsch-ese, unglossed; the 7–6, 6–1 score is all the help the scene gives.
- Cartier / Roberval / Champlain / Frontenac (p. 310) — real explorers and governors of French Canada; the syllabus's dry early weeks.
- Amherst's blankets (p. 310) — real atrocity: British commander Jeffrey Amherst's smallpox-blanket scheme against the Hurons' region, 1763.
- Lévesque / Parti and Bloc Québecois / F.L.N. (p. 310) — real separatist history, lightly renamed (René Lévesque; the Parti Québécois); endnote 109 sorts them.
- Anschluss (p. 311) — German, "annexation"; historically Hitler's 1938 absorption of Austria.
- Great Convexity (p. 311) — the Canadian name for what U.S. pages call the Great Concavity (both since pp. 55–60); depends which side you're on.
- whinge (p. 311) — British/Canadian: complain peevishly; endnote 111 — worth the flip.
After you read: three things
1. The mirror pages are the other half of p. 89. The book's first full terrorism set-piece: mirrors dragged across I-87 at night, so that U.S. drivers die brazening out their own high beams, until a suicidal Valium addict "saw the sudden impending headlights in her northbound lane as Grace and shut her eyes and floored it" (pp. 311–12). Endnote 112 names the then-unknown cell; flip for it, and set it beside endnote 39 from the mountainside scene (p. 89).
2. The scene twice tells you something is off about Hal and this material. The insurgency lectures give him "a soggier, more furtively nauseous kind of sense, as if someone had been reading mail of Hal's that he thought he'd thrown away" (p. 310), and Hal separately notes how strange it was that Orin — the pp. 242–58 phone call — suddenly wanted help with Separatism (p. 309). No explanation is offered; the queasiness is presented as data.
3. Schacht's answer is two words long. Thode's ITEM 1 — the pathological kleptomaniac who is also pathologically agoraphobic, "Thus, respond to the question of, what do you do?" (pp. 307–08) — gets solved while Schacht is "looping the d in mail fraud" (p. 308). The exam's whole double-bind dissolves the moment you notice what he's written; the scene never points at it.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.