The trouble for Lucinda had begun when Shimmy Baumzer, the president of Frankfurter, wanting to restore the university to those refulgent days when it had been able to boast on its faculty such international figures as Jonas Elijah Klapper, had used that article in Newsweek as a strategic plan. He made fabulous offers to each and every one of those Thirty-Five Scientists under Thirty-Five Who Are Remaking Their Fields, from Aashi Alswaan, computer scientist, to Simon Zee, cosmologist.
Lucinda had only intended to use the generous terms-not only a whopping salary but a minimal teaching load-to improve her situation at Princeton, playing one institution off against another. This was standard academic strategy. Instead, it was Lucinda who had been played, and she couldn’t believe that her being a woman wasn’t relevant.
David Prentiss Cuthbert, who was the chairman of the Princeton Psychology Department, had frankly had enough of Lucinda Mandelbaum, whose aggressive intellectual style had always been off-putting to him, and most especially after the Newsweek article had appeared. Lucinda hadn’t even tried to pretend to be embarrassed by the hype. If she could have had that damn article shrunk down and laminated to wear around her tyrannical throat, then she would have. So, while Cuthbert had encouraged her to press her demands and to threaten to leave if Princeton failed to match Frankfurter’s offer, he had also gone to the dean and told him that, “between the two of us, Bill, I wouldn’t be sorry to see her go. Her demands are infinite. I spend more time trying to keep her happy than I do the rest of my department put together. If I’m going to run this department, I have to assume that no one is indispensable.”
The Goddess of Game Theory had been knocked off her game, and it had been a chastening experience. She had spent the summer doing what someone like Cass might have called searching her soul. The depth of the animosity against her-she had learned of Cuthbert’s treachery- astounded and wounded her. He apparently resented her so much that he was willing to act against the interests of his department just to damage her, for surely it couldn’t be good for Princeton to lose her to Frankfurter.
She had only tried to game the system, and now here she was, within retching distance of the stink of failure, packing up her office in Green Hall and nobody stopping by to help her or offer her even a token word of insincere regret. She didn’t doubt for a moment why this punishment was being inflicted on her. It was the combination of her mother’s beauty with her father’s brains, which he had used to become an extremely successful doctor-lawyer specializing in malpractice. Caught in the summer’s swampy misery, she almost felt aggrieved with her parents for bequeathing her the singular genetic sum.
