The Matlock Paper Read Online Free PDF Page B

o’clock. It was neither necessary nor advisable that the dean be present during the detailing of the specifics. He was a liaison, not an activist. Kressel was not averse to the decision.
    Ralph Loring learned quickly that Matlock was a private man. His answers to innocuously phrased questions were brief, thrown-away replies constituting no more than self-denigrating explanations. After a while, Loring gave up. Matlock had agreed to do a job, not make public his thoughts or his motives. It wasn’t necessary; Loring understood the latter. That was all that mattered. He was just as happy not to know the man too well.
    Matlock, in turn—while memorizing the complicated information—was, on another level, reflecting on his own life, wondering in his own way why he’d been selected. He was intrigued by an evaluation thatcould describe him as being
mobile
; what an awful word to have applied!
    Yet he knew he was precisely what the term signified. He
was
mobile. The professional researchers, or psychologists, or whatever they were, were accurate. But he doubted they understood the reasons behind his … “mobility.”
    The academic world had been a refuge, a sanctuary. Not an objective of long-standing ambition. He had fled into it in order to buy time, to organize a life that was falling apart, to understand. To get his
head straight
, as the kids said these days.
    He had tried to explain it to his wife, his lovely, quick, bright, ultimately hollow wife, who thought he’d lost his senses. What was there to understand but an
awfully
good job, an
awfully
nice house, an
awfully
pleasant club, and a
good
life within an
awfully
rewarding social and financial world? For her, there
was
nothing more to understand. And he understood that.
    But for him that world had lost its meaning. He had begun to drift away from its core in his early twenties, during his last year at Amherst. The separation became complete with his army experience.
    It was no one single thing that had triggered his rejection. And the rejection itself was not a violent act, although violence played its role in the early days of the Saigon mess. It had begun at home, where most life-styles are accepted or rejected, during a series of disagreeable confrontations with his father. The old gentleman—too old, too gentlemanly—felt justified in demanding a better performance from his first son. A direction, a sense of purpose not at all in evidence. The senior Matlock belonged to another era—if notanother century—and believed the gap between father and son a desirable thing, the lower element being dismissible until it had proved itself in the marketplace. Dismissible but, of course, malleable. In ways, the father was like a benign ruler who, after generations of power, was loath to have the throne abandoned by his rightful issue. It was inconceivable to the elder Matlock that his son would not assume the leadership of the family business. Businesses.
    But for the younger Matlock, it was all
too
conceivable. And preferable. He was not only uncomfortable thinking about a future in his father’s
marketplace
, he was also afraid. For him there was no joy in the regimented pressures of the financial world; instead, there was an awesome fear of inadequacy, emphasized by his father’s strong—overpowering—competence. The closer he came to entering that world, the more pronounced was his fear. And it occurred to him that along with the delights of extravagant shelter and unnecessary creature comforts had to come the justification for doing what was expected in order to possess these things. He could not find that justification. Better the shelter should be less extravagant, the creature comforts somewhat limited, than face the prospects of continuing fear and discomfort.
    He had tried to explain
that
to his father. Whereas his wife had claimed he’d lost his senses, the old gentleman pronounced him a misfit.
    Which didn’t exactly refute the army’s judgment of