Beet by Roger Rosenblatt

rapturous love of learning. Max was from Lindaville, Alabama (pop. 4,600 where his father owned the feed store. Until he’d arrived at the Beet train station, he’d never taken a taxi before. Until he met Professor Porterfield, he’d wanted to take the taxi back. Max was encumbered with a tendency never to say a thing he didn’t mean, but was otherwise suited for college life. When he went to report his discovery to his favorite professor, he recalled the Wallace Stevens lines he’d learned in one of Peace’s classes, about the nothing that was not there and the nothing that is.
    â€œYou’re kidding,” said Peace, who thanked the boy for the tip about the Moore and headed from the English Department to the New Pen to see the nothing for himself. How to explain it? The abduction might have been a Halloween prank from the previous night, though the prankster would have had to use a crane and two large flatbed trucks, one for each reclining half.
    Thinking he was the bearer of news, Peace strode toward College Hall and into the president’s office. The door read DR. LEWIS HUEY . The “Dr.” was honorary, awarded by Huey to Huey at his inauguration.
    â€œYou won’t believe this,” Peace said to Huey, who did. The missing Moore did not at all come as a surprise to the president, who explained that upon conferring with Joel Bollovate ( conferring being his word), he’d had the sculpture removed and taken to Rockport. Peace asked why.
    â€œTo sell it,” said Huey, as blithely as if he’d been asked why beavers build dams.
    â€œSell it? Sell a Henry Moore? How could you do that?” The question was not merely accusatory. Apart from the absurdity ofselling an invaluable work of art, how, legally, could the college make a profit off what had been a munificent gift? The Moore had been donated in 1954 (when alumni were still making munificent gifts to Beet) by a local wealthy mortgage broker who never liked it, and quipped during the transfer that he’d just had the thing lying around. College officials chuckled politely and grabbed up the sculpture.
    â€œOh, the legal stuff is taken care of,” said Huey, leaning back in his chair, his arms cradling his head like a pair of angel wings, and looking both in charge and scared witless. “Joel Bollovate explained it all to me. Actually, selling the Moore was Joel’s idea [as if Peace needed to be told that]. I think the college is going to realize $14 million, before Joel’s commission.”
    â€œHe took a commission?”
    â€œBusiness is business.” Huey could rearrange his face, which had the folds of a shar-pei’s, to suit any situation. This one called for the look of an insider. “That’s what Joel said.”
    â€œGreat,” said Peace, who saw nothing more could be accomplished by talking to Huey.
    The selling of the Henry Moore was but the latest in Beet’s commercial ventures since Bollovate had taken over as chairman of the board. Last fall, the college launched an effort to sell various parts of the campus—not to be removed, as was the Moore, but rather to display the names of the donors. Their efforts had been impeded by the first faint whispers about the college’s closing, suggesting that the trustees were advertising immortality but selling obsolescence.
    They began by offering whole structures that bore no names as yet, from the departmental offices to the indoor garage to the field house and the football field itself, where for one million dollars one could have one’s name carved permanently into the fifty-yard line. Since the teams, both home and visitors, rarely made it as far as the fifty, the donor’s name was likely to remain pristine.
    When there were no takers for the million-dollar names, the college offered individual slabs and bricks in the buildings for anything from $10,000 for a brick to $25,000 for a slab. But again,