Restoration Court

By Denn William Quinn

Professor Sophia Stuart, smart, sexy, and sassy, finds herself in competition for a prestigious academic appointment with her closest friend, a prospective lover, a nasty colleague, and one very strange little man. Over the course of a sometimes whacky, sometimes heart-wrenching semester, as she campaigns for the honor that would be the crowning achievement of her professional career, Sophia becomes swept up in the private war of wills between two powerful personalities for whom the university is a battleground and whose clash of incompatible ideologies masks a struggle for nothing less than the soul of higher education itself. In negotiating this contested space, bestrewn with obstacles and challenges, the failure to overcome any one of which could frustrate her aspirations toward fulfillment, Sophia must learn how to reconcile her fragile sense of personal integrity with professional ambition. Somehow in this world circumscribed by philosophy and faction, Sophia, a quick study and shrewd, must craft the means to that reconciliation; and somewhere in the midst of this turbulent landscape she must locate a calm refuge for the preservation of the self, a place with room enough in which tender heart, tireless mind, and boundless soul can find adequate scope for enriched expression. Restoration Court, the inaugural novel in the Winston University Series, offers an irreverent glimpse into one of the most deliriously dysfunctional institutions of higher learning ever imagined. But for anyone who has worked in higher education, nothing of extreme shading and artful distortion of the novel can hide the underlying and disturbing realities present in the fictional representation, unquiet but for the modesty of its truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503584273

Denn William Quinn

Denn William Quinn is author of several novels and critical studies in literature. K is a novel in the serio-comic Winston University series, which also includes Restoration Court.

Book preview

Part One

I.

The Exception to the Rule

H alfway between Boston and New York, between Athens and Rome, stood the little city of W _______ , soberly industrious and morally plodding market town by day, and by night vibrantly cultural and liberally disposed metropolis. In this city—halfway between life-begrimed brick row houses and self-important Tudors with clean, antique brick façades; between a combat zone more suburban than urban in character whose front lines of soft immodesty were constantly shifting and a fixed commercial zone of fast franchises, family businesses, and proprietorships reliant on cliental loyalties of another sort to fulfill immoderate expectations; between furtive economy and an ostentatious one; between tattoo parlors looking unabashedly forward and museum proudly looking backward—could be found Winston University, occupying an enlightened, studious, and grave space, if sometimes one of benighted frivolity and vitality, a half-Apollonian half-Dionysian space between Ivy and ivy. And here, halfway between metonymy and synecdoche, halfway perhaps between facetious syntax and diction and structures of subtle and serious purpose, halfway between Locke’s Walk and the Philosophy Department and Descartes’ Detour—the students’ name, half-affectionate half-derisive, for the improvised pathway meandering toward eventual union with the Mathematics Building since the proper vector of approach had been under construction for some time and was still but half-complete—halfway between the imprecise and the precise in a recondite little corner of the campus given up to preciosity stood Restoration Court, the home of the Department of English subdivided into specialties in British, American, and Comparative Literature and in Rhet oric.

Except for the hoary-headed among the faculty whose institutional memory was legendary and had been accorded an authority disproportionate to its merit and whose knowledge of the matter compelled them to insist that the name designated only the courtyard fronting the building, everyone else blithely supposed the name applied to the building as well. In truth, if such there be, in leaner, former times when higher education had been valued as a privilege of the talented and not an entitlement of the mediocre, when some matriculated and most did not, the building had been a dormitory called eponymously Winston-Stanley Hall, in honor of the university’s first and still most munificent benefactor. Sadly for the little building covered by ivy, it had been rendered functionally obsolete by capital improvements over the years that witnessed in one creatively challenged and aridly efficient decade the urgent erection of towering hives of steel and glass. Another, later, more psychologically sensitive decade witnessed the formation of detached student housing, architecturally pleasing, unobtrusively two-storied structures clustered together in quaint little self-contained villages, scattered in idyllic quiet here and there up and down maple-shaded hillsides. As a concession to fiscal responsibility—called in some circles frugality, parsimony in others—the venerable old dormitory had been converted mainly into office space to accommodate faculty whose relative utility in a decidedly scitech age, as determined by certain sagacious powers, had not permitted their migration from inadequate offices to the ostentatiously ample suites that had awaited other of their colleagues upon the momentous completion of the university’s signature edifice, the Science and Technology Building, worthy of the praise, if not the name, over which latter point crucial debate still raged among those same aforementioned sage and powerful personalities.

The striking feature of the Court was its octagonal turret protruding from one side and referred to reverently, if inaccurately, as the Great Rotunda. In its first half-century, it had been a chapel, where groggy boys assembled for morning service and whose outer five sides were stained glass; in its next half-century, when stained glass had been secularized by clear panes, and unpadded wooden kneelers had been converted to cushioned window seats, it had been transformed into a reading and smoking parlor, where young men lazed about in study and heady discourse; it presently served as a conference room, conveniently adjacent as it was to the chair’s office. Its spacious, sunny, and airy dimensions had encouraged as well its modest utilization as a conservatory, festooned with the requisite plants, in which form, for small audiences privileged by specializations so narrow they were intellectually incestuous gatherings, it became the venue of choice for elegant and formal little talks. These were designated somewhat grandiloquently as the Winston-Stanley Conservatory Lectures, a title later by a hipper generation revised in deference to reality to the Occasional Winston-Stanley Lectures at the Conservatory. In neither incarnation were these receptions attended by students.

Alas for those students who once every semester, during advising week, did undertake the long and tortuous trek through an obstacle course of orange construction cones and yellow caution tape to reach Restoration Court! A warren of offices interspersed with small classrooms and lecture halls awaited their arrival, whose navigation required an instinctive application of such collegiate virtues as temerity and perseverance and a providentially acquired sense of direction in the event a GPS was unavailable. Indeed, if this were the Science and Technology Building, one might describe the offices of any given floor as so many needy electrons clustering around an anteroom or secretarial nucleus, a description in which nucleus and electron cluster clumping together with similar clumps from other floors, according to clearly discernible laws, might further be elaborated as forming some reasonably identifiable molecular model. But this was not the Science and Technology Building. Instead it was a building with nothing remotely reasonable about it, where offices were perversely arranged by association, theoretically meaningful only, adhering to a logic that defied the comprehension of the shrewdest of intellects. Fraught as it was with physical and spiritual perils, the journey was not without its satisfying rewards, for the intrepid and fortunate student with Ariadne’s thread to guide him or her inevitably came away from Restoration Court bearing a signed schedule authorizing advancement to the next stage of the registration process. Itself a drama or a little Passion, that process unfolded, unfortunately, on the other side of the campus in a place called Administration Land, necessitating another long and tortuous trek through an obstacle course marked by a tape of a different kind from that which cordoned off sections of the campus under repair, renewal, or renovation as the administratively sanctioned word of the day would have it.

But rather more of our story lies dangerously deep within the interior of Restoration Court, at a place where three corridors surprised themselves and met. In this sanctum sanctorum, as it were, could be found a tangle of offices whose affinity to one another rested on a thematically intricate principle that invited contiguity if the occupant could claim specialization in British Literature in general, provided it were Sixteenth-Century Poetry or Drama, but not Sixteenth-Century Prose; Seventeenth-Century Drama and Milton, but neither Jacobean nor Caroline Poetry and certainly not Prose unless it were from Milton’s left hand; and finally, Classical Mythology and Latin Literature, provided the latter comprised Virgilian and Ovidian Poetry, but not Neoteric and not Greek Literature, except that the latter concerned Mythology such as Greek Epic and Greek Tragedy, but neither Aristophanic nor Menandrine Comedy, and nothing of Philosophy, Aristotelian or Platonic, unless it were Neoplatonic, in which case, consanguineously aligned as it was with the Italian Renaissance in general and the Florentine Academy in particular, its occupant was vouchsafed an office at a thrice mysterious and arcane remove from the others.

Unless it was to attend a lecture, few students ventured so deep at any time whether it were advising week or not. Not a few urban legends arose among the more imaginatively gullible students that involved heroic quests of an academic nature into the heart of that strange interior from which the subject hero failed to return. Although later sightings of the hero sitting at bars or nightclubs or delivering pizza in and around the city challenged the authenticity of such creative accounts, the legends persisted nonetheless. Be that as it may, little could be said ever to have disturbed, or disturbed for any appreciable duration, the settled and otherworldly quiet of the place. This monodic calm, soft and accessible to the initiate whose studied ear was attuned to such measures of the spheres, was in large part produced by the harmonious synchronization among faculty of lecture and office hours that but for one or two times a semester enabled most everyone to miss most everyone else, and in one peculiar case allowed one individual to miss altogether every one and every thing every other day. This is not to say there was nothing discordant in the daily revolution of bodies around a center of convenience, called by some the insolence of rank. Every rule admits of exceptions, or, as might have been said by one denizen of this monastic realm—indeed, one, by name Launcelot de Boer, by rank full professor, who most assuredly would have said and, in fact, who one day had said—exception probat regulam de rebus non exceptis. An exception establishes the rule as to things not excepted.

The Exception in question manifested itself in the enthusiastic appropriation of space. Here happily meeting were a polyphonic spray of cheerful colors and an energizing, though dizzying, because busy, display of posters and photos and notices, the last of which actually bore some relevance to students.

The Exception, naturally possessed of an ebullient charm that belied the acquired and perfected reserve of others of the professoriate, actually liked students and genuinely encouraged and tenderly nurtured a relationship with them rather like mentoring that some might otherwise call—and did call in at least one instance of inexplicable pique—blatantly unprofessional fraternization. But a disapproving scowl here and a dramatically arched eyebrow there failed to dissuade the Exception from persisting in a course of behavior generally deemed unbecoming if not destructive in that it threatened to blur the imagined distinction in social rank, educational class, and undoubtedly even some species of sociopoliticopsychoreligious caste, a divide of neatly fostered perception dug first by the Middle Ages and that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment had deepened and deepened some more between the intellectually ascendant and the intellectually underprivileged, between—as one of the self-reverential body of academics, by name Launcelot de Boer, by rank full professor, might have said, and, in fact, was heard to have snidely offered between a sly wink and a meaningful nod to an expectedly appreciative audience of like-minded colleagues when once the subject of the Exception had arisen apropos of something sexual—between the scientes and the nescientes. Those, in modern parlance, who were knowledgeable and those who were, for want of a better word, clueless.

Fortunately our Exception took no exception to snide and demeaning opinion. As soon as any such was leaked out by suspiciously malicious design, it was as soon theatrically dismissed (though never retracted) with a congenial gesture of rehearsed magnanimity, for our Exception had years before been granted tenure with one vote only dissenting.

It is not that sniping did not hurt—for who that is human among us can say he is not a little discomposed when a viperous comment regrettably insinuates itself in our hearing? Rather, our Exception had long mastered the art of self-preservation and certain Machiavellian principles that rendered impervious to even the most genteel and well-intentioned criticism, called by some slander, any adept who possessed simple skill enough to prepare the sweet poison of Renaissance realpolitic and who possessed enough a lack of compunction to apply it in any modern day dynamic in order to neutralize, indeed, in order to make subservient to one’s stronger will, any and all manner of boorishness.

From this uneven dialectic of wills emerged a grudging respect for the Exception, motivated to no small degree by intimidation and the ignominy of administrative censure for comments unbecoming. Disapprobation was relegated forthwith to a furtive click of the tongue, or a surreptitious shake of the head, or a barely audible grumble in Latin. So it came to be that Boorishness—the attribute allegorized in the person of one, by name Launcelot de Boer, by rank full professor—withered unhappily, painfully cognizant of how adroitly and effectively it had been marginalized. It retreated toward retirement and finally with a reluctant display of grace ceremoniously entered the otiose world of the Emeriti where it could regale itself with its past cleverness and feed savagely upon its memories. It frustrated a planned festschrift in its honor by rather hastily dying and so avoided the humiliation of witnessing the intent of its colleagues dwindle into indifference and a sparsely attended memorial service at which a bronze plaque was dedicated and at which, rumor has it, the Exception could be heard to have softly uttered in pace requiescat through a winsome snarl. In this remarkable way all things exceptionable had come to be reconciled to all things exceptional in the character of Sophia Stuart, for so was named our Exception that proved the rule as concerns the grouping of offices in the recondite interior of Restoration Court.

II.

Fall Convocation

E very now and again, it seemed, when most she needed it, the little Christmas ornaments sparkled and cheered her in a sad sort of way. She had both of them hanging from her rearview mirror, where, if she were younger, a graduation tassel would have hung, and were she older—much much older, she decided—rosary beads might have hung. One was a little goose. The other, more elaborate, was a Victorian figurine, a little fellow right out of Dickens who once held a drum and whose tiny cheeks once were rosy. It was old now and the colors had faded or flaked off. It was multifaceted though, like so many things really, and when the sun struck it just right, it sparkled. It was sparkling right now, the first day of the seme ster.

In centuries past in England, the semester would have been known as the Michaelmas term, she reflected, after the Archangel Saint Michael, whose feast day was celebrated on September 29; but over the last several decades, the fall semester had watched its traditional starting date creep ever so steadily toward Labor Day, so that the opening of college became more closely aligned with the opening of the grammar and secondary schools. She supposed that the earlier start had something to do with scheduling final exams before the Christmas break rather than deferring them until afterward, as she herself remembered to have been the case when she was an undergraduate. For most, if not for all concerned, the change was for the better on the back end of the semester. She recalled what a pain it had been to spend the short Christmas break with exams hanging over her head like the sword of Damocles. The change may not have been as enthusiastically welcomed on the front end, however, for, whether one were working or not and most students had to, the summer break was perversely foreshortened in order to accommodate the revised schedule. She suspected that the change had probably resulted in part from a desire to conserve energy, a desire no doubt heightened by the 1973 Arab oil embargo, for a lengthened break between fall and spring semesters (or Michaelmas and Lenten terms) enabled facilities to lower heating costs. Such anyway seemed to be the case across the northern tier of the country. Sophia Stuart could not speak for universities located elsewhere though she knew that in general university schedules were all of a kind with perhaps a few regional variations here and there, probably, again, dictated by climate.

The fall semester at Winston University commenced with a convocation of faculty and administrative staff on the day before the official start of classes. In the morning the assembly featured a keynote address by the president—during the current administration always a lexical adventure—and the brief introduction of new faculty and staff to the college community; more or less importantly, depending on perspective, it provided senior administrators, vice-presidents, and deans a forum to talk up new college-wide goals and initiatives, an occasion to assess the progress of past initiatives, and an opportunity to bask in the glory of the university’s many achievements. Breakout sessions for select committees and individual department meetings filled out the afternoon’s agenda, following a splendid buffet in the dining commons generously underwritten by the administration. Although it was never expressly stated that attendance at morning and afternoon sessions of the convocation was mandatory for all faculty, faithful attendance had evolved over the years as a good faith display of camaraderie and loyalty to the institution.

Of course, there were always those faculty, like her good friend Madeleine Orsini Borgia Colonna Sforza della Rovere, who managed at this time every fall to still be in Europe or to be en route home, or those for whom the buffet was the sole focus of the day’s events, who otherwise did not involve themselves in the full life of the university nor bother themselves with whether life existed on the department level either, but they were dwindling in number. Fading away into retirement. Dying. Sophia herself knew of one or two old timers in other departments who would nod their silver heads politely when passing her in the corridors, but who, if put to it, might not even know her name. It was not that the departments were so very large—the English department, for example, consisted of twenty-one members, a secretary, and a revolving door of work-study students. It was that the silver heads were too self-absorbed to care about anyone other than themselves. Most likely they had not attended the convocation the year—ten years ago—when Sophia, then a fresh face on campus, was first introduced to the general faculty just after coffee and Danish, the portion of the morning session she still liked the best.

During that hour or so before the start of convocation, attending faculty drifted into the Stanley Conference Center and caught up with one another over coffee and Danish. Summer excursions abroad, ongoing writing and research projects, progress of grants, family adventures—all were subjects for conversation among the returning faculty. Some arrived early to lay claim to one of the tables in the rear of the conference room, exhibiting the same human preference for anonymity they deplored in their students; others arrived early, anxious to reserve a seat at one of the right tables among unobjectionable fellow faculty. As whole departments tended to congregate in the manner of like species, this latter behavior underscored the volatility of department chemistry no matter how stable the admixture of diverse personalities appeared to be to an outsider. Still, for the agility-challenged, drinking coffee and eating Danish while standing around awkwardly shifting the day’s program of activities from one already encumbered hand to the other was a difficulty best met by finding a table at which to park oneself, and this often required an early arrival in order that one of eight chairs around a white linen-bedecked table be available and not available near some unknown entity. If a department chair happened to arrive early, he or she might have a new professor under wing to guide the neophyte through the event, and to provide introduction to members of the department who had not served on the search committee the previous year that had landed the prized addition and who would not have known a new professor in English from one in physics without such assistance. Since the chair of the English department, Dr. Sonya Herzog, was good that way, she could be counted on to gather to her skirts like a hen with her chick the newest member of the department in order to mother him or her through the anxieties of the morning. Finally, there were those faculty who timed their appearance on the theory that arriving late left them standing room only and a good excuse for slipping out unnoticed and early.

The faculty lot was slowly filling when Sophia drove up to the gatehouse manned by Round Little Eugene, an attendant compensated for deficiency of understanding by a very large heart and whose fondness for a jelly doughnut was surpassed only by his preference for two. In the event a doughnut was unavailable, a candy bar sufficed. Of these he stored a quantity in the gatehouse, and no matter what the time of Sophia’s arrival or departure, she could be sure that he would offer her one. Only Lindt or Godiva, Eugene. Sorry! I’ve got to watch my figure, she would as often say by way of declining. Of course it made no sense, but it was something to say, and he would merely shrug as if he knew it too.

In substance he was an essential contradiction: he was a boulder of dough. His voice—when he spoke and that was not often—was crunchy like iron wheels grating over loose rocks; yet one remembered it as gritty, as if sound had been pulverized out of its hard round shape into scarcely comprehensible utterances, sandy syllables caked together in a mealy clump. His meaning was as one chanced to take it: in this it was the perfect meeting place of announced and unannounced intention, a self-canceling expression that left room for interpretation. From head to toe he was as elemental as the earth, which, churning, had heaved him to its surface, the vaguely chiseled form of a man, coarse and largely unrefined, whose one job it was to monitor the movement of others so much more graceful and becoming than he. Without much having to stir his great bulk, finding purpose in virtual stasis, he either swiveled in his chair to the window on the east wall of the gatehouse to register arrivals, or to the sliding window in the west to acknowledge departures. At his post, at the gatehouse, which served in this way to define him, he was a blocky gargoyle occupying what would otherwise have been an empty space between entrance and exit. For a man who did not himself come and go but by way of the special van from the home that dropped him every morning at seven and picked him up every afternoon at five, the art of driving was a skill in others he seemed to revere like the art of living. Such as it was, his meditations on the subject, if not on other things, whittled away the many quiet minutes of his working hours, though one might never be able to tell to what degree the meditation transported him, for his face in general was a tablet of stone on which nothing was written. Only his eyes, limpid and light, communicated what the ponderous weight of all other features could not. Sophia was one of the few to read his eyes for feeling. Her driving, in fact, excited a rather lively response in just that feature at which she was an adept in interpretation. The pained expression that passed over his eyes whenever she slowed in approach or departure was not unlike that of a driving instructor frustrated by a vainly inept student. When her car lurched and squeaked or bucked and rattled past him, it was owing either to a befuddled brake foot alternately too light or too heavy, he said, or to a clutch foot equally without clue, which continued to miss the catch point by oh so much each time. In truth, he was sweet on her, as his friends at the home would tell him, teasing him mercilessly until he blushed, like a flush of pink in granite; and all Sophia had to do, as she did now, was to acknowledge his well-meaning advice with a wave and perhaps an excuse capitalizing on her femininity for him to forgive her. And so in this way, lurching and bucking, squeaking and rattling, and oblivious to all of it, sunroof open in her BMW, the BBC news on the radio, and cell phone cradled between her shoulder and neck, Sophia arrived forty-five minutes before convocation on a day whose bright, sunny start boded well for the upcoming semester.

Her daughter Meredith, just divorced and having descended on Sophia with her two girls aged ten and six, was rushing her kids off to school and had no time to talk even though Sophia only wanted to know what the girls might like for supper that night. An I don’t know. Surprise us. They want hot dogs on the grill preceded an even more frazzled Got to go, Mum. Love you and the click that left Sophia wrinkling her mouth in annoyance as she sat a moment in her idling car. Hot dogs, she muttered as she buttoned up the car and reached for her briefcase from which she extracted a poster advertising a program of Medieval and Renaissance graduate study at a competing institution. She had plenty of time to drop by the office and hang the poster before heading on to the conference center.

From the parking lot the cement walk wound its way up a grassy incline under shady trees and by empty benches to the orange cones, sawhorses, and yellow tape that identified the currently allowable approach to Restoration Court, the one only moderately under construction at the moment. The air was sweetened by the freshly mowed lawns, and in the distance, at the football field, a whistle could be heard punctuating practice.

Once inside the old building, she pretty much had the corridors to herself, as evidenced by the solitary click of her heels on the shiny floor recently waxed and buffed. No one was in the main office either, into which she peeked on her way by. Outside her own office she scrounged tacks from a barren cork bulletin board ready to receive a new year’s worth of notices like the one she pinned prominently in its center.

On her way to the conference center she caught sight of a colleague approaching from the faculty lot at a distinctively graceful gait that made it seem as if he were walking on air. She modified her pace to ensure that their paths would intersect.

At forty-two, five (nay, not so much; not four) years younger than Sophia, Dr. Tom McBride was, she decided, the nearest thing to dashing the department could offer. His boyish good looks smartened always by his impeccable taste in expensive suits and choice of the perfect tie, his rapier wit, and his indefatigable good humor made him one of the most popular professors on campus. The product of a military academy—Annapolis, West Point, Sandhurst, Saint-Cyr, she forgot, maybe all of them—he was erect in bearing, he had a happy-go-lucky way about him that brightened meetings, and like Richard Cory, for everyone—colleagues, secretaries, work-studies, grad assistants—he had nothing but pleasant words all day every day. Professor of Seventeenth-Century British Poetry and Prose, subject matter that usually confirmed all laws of student attraction and repulsion, Tom McBride could fill a class at registration faster than anyone in the department, regardless of content—he did it once with the Cambridge Platonists, for God’s sake. On Rate My Professor—not that Sophia checked the notorious web site all that often, she would be the first to tell you—he was Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, Robert Redford depending on the age of the woman (they were always women) posting. For Christ’s sake someone’s nana had even likened him to Clark Gable! Though she too was very popular, Sophia nonetheless, quietly and without malice, envied Tom’s—what should she call it?—sprezzatura, for now that she considered it, there could be no other word for the nearly indescribable mix of assurance, elegant bearing, prodigious talent, and personal appeal that Mephistopheles must have granted Tom in exchange for his immortal soul.

As ever, with the show of genuine pleasure that made one feel that there was nothing of the generic about it, Tom greeted Sophia, offering her a kiss on the cheek. It was a peck of affection allowable only to someone approvingly undisciplined as Tom in a world whose supersubtle atmosphere was charged, whether rightly or hysterically and insupportably, with acute sexual awareness that generated official attempts at impressing upon all concerned toleration for nothing but asexual professionalism. It was a campaign doomed to failure, Sophia thought, on a campus populated by young people with raging hormones and adults of various ages and deficiencies in propriety, disinclined by human nature and experience to regard fraternization as even remotely a form of harassment mandating an aseptic response. She and Tom had scarcely resumed their strides when three passing cheerleaders submitted their own evidence in confirmation of her last thought. The unmistakable trill of flirtation in one honeyed voice alone secured it for Sophia. It was Hello, Dr. McBride, with a studied flutter, a beaming face, teeth as white as paper and an unconscious outthrusting of the ample chest that arched Sophia’s eyebrows playfully. When the three young women were past, content with their fix of the amiable professor’s pleasant return, self-consciously but obviously self-satisfied a little too, Tom smiled at Sophia: What can I say?

Bemused, Sophia suppressed any comment with a look of sporting censure; but where there are cheerleaders, there are football players, and two sculpted specimens with shoulders and chests padded to Olympian proportion met Sophia with equally significant tones of voice on their way to the practice field. Sophia was beyond but not long beyond the perky and pretty little thing she had been in the words of a superannuated but venerable old member of her tenure committee, and not by far was she removed from exciting youthful imaginations to heroic reveries or eliciting from a colleague the covertly feudal fantasy that she most certainly had to have been, as a certain careless confederate had put it, in Latin, in a future less vivid construction, a feisty lay. And so, as Tom—his turn to be sportive—held the door for her, Sophia, wearing a smug little smile of her own, glided past him into the conference lobby with a vampish step that could have been taken on a runway in Milan so defined it was by her consciousness that she was candy enough for young eyes too.

The lobby of the Stanley Conference Center, the signature project of the late Pearson Winston-Stanley III constructed in the early eighties, could easily be mistaken for the lobby of some fantastically-imagined resort hotel in some trendy location of the world. It was a spectacular piece of architecture, of course. Stunning vistas of the remaining forest and meadows and a pond of an old farm, all preserved in a pristine state, were picturesquely framed by walls of glass and enhanced by an interminable classical score that lent an air of leisurely elegance to the experience of passive enjoyment. Helical stairways of oak spiraled to mezzanines tastefully stacked in alternation at differing heights like the shelves of a multi-level dessert tower; or better yet, in the spirit of dialectical discourse itself that defined the nature of conference, an effect which ex post facto Pearson Winston-Stanley III, having inherited the family gene of sagacity, was reputed to have intended all along.

Quite unequivocally, the whole thing was overdone. With apologies to Matthew 7:6 and Tyndale after him, it was a little like throwing pearls before swine, as Sophia often grumbled to anyone, like Tom McBride, who might share one of her fondest criticisms of the university. On a campus overrun by hordes of the aesthetically indifferent, where the food court of the student union had become the haunt of choice in default of refined sensibility and where clouded windows, messy plastic tables, and the blare of rock ’n’ roll were de rigueur, the center, or the crystal cavern as she christened the lobby together with the Grand Ballroom attached to it, sounded a decidedly dissonant note.

The official explanation for the perceived discordance was that the conference center—which was, in fact, part hotel—had not been conceived with students in mind, that it was from the start envisioned as a venue, albeit a grandiose one, for academic forums and conferences on a national and on occasion international scale. Be that as it may, all that the ballroom was required to gather this day was a parochial community of disparate scholars and administrators, many of whom would undoubtedly have discovered themselves surprisingly in accord with the students in their inability to find comfort in a place in which they felt so exposed and vulnerable if not downright small and irrelevant.

It took time for new faculty to acquire a convincing sense of their own inconsequence. For now they were too busy acclimating themselves to the fact that they really were tenure-track assistant professors, a condition confirmed with a pinch. It was not just this sense of personal awe and the deer in the headlights look that gave them away. An unmistakable aura of tension, like a metallic casing, surrounded many of them. If they were lucky, the chair of their new department or the professor who had chaired their search committee would clang on the metal, oil the joints, and usher the robot around the established cliques. If they were unlucky, they might find themselves left to rust in one of these groupings. An unhappy few—fragile today, indestructible in the long run—were left to make their own way. These, Sophia charitably sought out, for they were kindred souls. She was looking for them now over the rim of the coffee Tom had chivalrously fixed for her. Tom, who knew so much about her, like the way she took her coffee (one sweetener, smidge of half-and-half), entirely misread this altruistic aspect of her personality, but she was reluctant to correct him.

He was therefore thinking much differently than she when he said: There. Four o’clock. Armani suit. Armani everything. Tall, dark, and mysterious. Made to your specs.

Sophia, following the beck of his chin, laughed once shortly. Mysterious nothing. He’s poly sci and insufferable.

Tom fell to nodding, mulling over the justice of her opinion.

Now playing along, Sophia directed his attention left: Eight o’clock, Tom. Pert little thing. Short blonde flip, nice legs. Strawberries and cream and cornflakes in the morning. Phys ed.

He disagreed. Early Childhood. Intolerable discussions of the existential angst of the Berenstein Bears. Definitely not kinky enough.

She put on a scandalized look. You want kinky now? Have you no sense of sport, Valmont?

Forgive me, madame. Over there. Two o’clock. A bit of a paunch maybe, but he’s neat. What hair! Could prove a bull.

It’s a rug. Communications. We’d have nothing to talk about.

Who says you have to talk?

Sophia scrunched her nose. I’m a screamer. Say. There we go. Now that is what the doctor—ahem—likes to order. My guess he’s Geo. A seasoned traveler. Nice tan. Nice muscle tone. Easy on the ocular nerve.

Tom was dismissive. He’s married. Three kids, maybe nine. Drives an SUV. Republican, I think. A professional suburbanite.

Suvurbanite?

"Something like that. Not for you. You would devour him, madame. But what have we here? Six o’clock. Six o’clock, Meuteuil. Pay attention."

Sophia located the blonde—Tom did like his blondes—and after critical consideration demurred.

What does ‘hmm’ mean? Tom feigned insult. She’s got the eyes. The complexion. Hair is cookie-cutter female politician perhaps, but she’s shapely. Sort of.

She’s a frump, Valmont. Prefers slacks. Trainer heels. Baggy sweats at home. Into asexual reproduction. A nurse, if I’m not mistaken. Obedient, yes, but singularly unimaginative. She’d bore you to death.

You think?

I do.

Madame la Marquise has nothing but my welfare in mind, I am sure.

I do.

How can I ever hope to adequately repay you?

Well … you know your course ‘Donne, Jonson, and Herbert’?

Nothing doing.

One leg up, bent back at the knee, she leaned into him, plucked imaginary lint from his suit, and cooed: Please?

Out of the question.

And fiddled with his tie. One semester?

No. Il n’y a rien plus pour dire.

She dropped her hands and leg and stamped her foot petulantly. Boor! Vous êtes impossible!

Stop pouting.

No.

But he fell out of character: Oh, oh.

And she too. What?

Bearing one-five-zero. Three knots.

Where?

"Look southeast. Southeast, Meuteuil! Just coming out of the ballroom. See him? The Gerbil."

Oh, Tom, do be nice. But it was Sophia who had given him that name a few years back. Wait! Where are you going?

I need more coffee.

And Sophia was left on her own to dispose of a trapped look as gracefully as possible.

Hello, Sophia. Did you have a nice summer?

I survived it, Stanley. How about you?

Professor of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, Dr. Stanley Kosiewski—who to most colleagues could never be Stan or Stosh or Shef or Ski though to some he could be simply K—looked positively delighted that she had asked. When he smiled spontaneously, wrinkles spidered far and wide from the deep dimples at the corners of his closed mouth, and their general upward spread bumped up the thick black glasses riding on his doughy cheeks before the ripples, growing ever fainter, vanished in the nearly hairless dome of his head. Such a display of feeling did not often manifest itself without apology, for he was an intense and skittish little man who had much nervous agitation to overcome before anything resembling glee could assert itself. Rather more often did it happen, unconstrained by self-consciousness, in Sophia’s company than in that of anyone else. All in all, were he an animal, he would be adorable. His students genuinely liked him and petted him, and at the present, he might have been a chipmunk wearing glasses, jowls chubby with food. He might have been as well something else entirely. Were he clad in elf buskins and conical stocking cap with tassled point flopped to one side—and leave the glasses in place on his face by all means, she mused—he most certainly could have been a postmodernist gnome, if not just a funny looking little man having got by accident or mischief into a larger man’s clothes, so ill-fitting was his suit.

Unspecified throat surgery a number of years before—before even her own appointment—had deeply scratched and scarred his voice, one apparently legendary for its powerful roll, leaving it forever after a ratchety thing. He taught only survey courses now. But there was something else. The lengthy leave of absence following fast on the sabbatical that lay between the last course he taught in his specialty and those lesser courses he taught now, together accounted for too protracted a recovery from mere surgery. Concerning this, Sophia had heard part of a whisper here and another part there, but never enough together to enable her to learn the whole of the story. That the pales and forts of reason may at one time have been overrun, she suspected, but it had occurred before her time, and few people who were around then were still around now to speak of it.

All in all, she liked Stanley. Still, agitation and anxiety accompanied him wherever he walked, and often the briefest of visits with him were enough to send her reeling from the encounter and more than enough to leave her for unsettled hours afterward inexplicably shaken.

I found us a table. I’ve saved you and Thomas a seat.

That’s sweet of you, Stanley.

You got the e-mail, right?

What? About the table? What e-mail?

Sonya’s. About the photographs.

What photographs?

The president wants snapshots of each of us.

What on earth for?

Yearbook maybe.

Sophia, nodding that it sounded likely enough, was content to shrug off the topic with indifference; but she could tell by Stanley’s fidgeting that for him the topic had a ways to go yet. And so? she prompted.

Would you take my picture? he asked hesitantly. He looked terrified of the worst possible answer. It doesn’t have to be today. Or tomorrow even. But when you have the time?

She wanted to say, Use your cell phone. Take your own picture, but what she might be more than half-inclined to say to anyone else, especially on a bad day, without concern that the tone might wound, she would never have said to Stanley. She smiled affably. Of course, I will.

The relief in his look, the sudden relaxation of his features into a grin, so recently tight with anticipation and dread, almost made her break into a laugh.

Seconds passed when neither spoke, for she—in a way really unlike her—did not know what next to say; and he, wearing a fatuous grin of self-satisfaction after having licked the bowl quite clean and into a corner, was a long time enjoying his little achievement in securing the table and the even sweeter topping of relief over the photo. He began to bob his head up and down with a chortle he could but barely contain, a behavior his students fondly described as priming the pump, and Sophia, now shifting her weight in anticipation but also discomfort, listened for the soft effusion of delight, most often a really small squeal. When it arrived, it was rather more like a snort fastened against its will to a hiccup and she had to suppress a laugh. But they were not freed of the impasse, and more silent seconds passed.

Slowly.

And more slowly.

One could bring one’s lips to the rim of the cup only so many times.

Oh! Look! Sophia said at last. There’s Tom now. Why don’t you go tell him. I’ll round up a few others.

Right. See you inside. And Professor Kosiewski, now a man with a mission, struck off in the direction of an unsuspecting Tom McBride.

With one watchful eye on the determined little man and smug with her perverse mischief, Sophia slipped through an accommodating crease in the growing crowd. Safe amid the press of bodies, she meandered around loosely-defined clusters of colleagues, some cohering on the strength of department affiliation; others formed on the elective affinity of their members, too often only a vague sense of shared interest more or less academic, administrative, or personal; and still others, weakly constituted to begin with around an unarticulated center, facing imminent dispersal and the subsequent re-gathering of its liberated parts elsewhere into new groups whose homogeneity would be based on freshly-conceived terms of relationship. She exchanged a civil greeting here, a perfunctory one there, and swapped palaver, but only briefly, with this one and that all the while that she idled about indulging her curiosity.

Her powers of observation were finely evolved. She considered herself a shrewd judge of character. And although patiently over time as daughter, student, lover, wife, and mother, colleague, teacher, and friend—and, yes, grandmother, young grandmother, though it pained her to think the word even with qualification—she had acquired a skill in applying, with rigorous consistency, an objectivity that could transform surmise or conjecture into indisputable fact at the drop of a hat, she was not, as far as she knew, incapable of amiable revision of opinion in the occasional, if rare, case warranting a reconsideration of what was normally inarguable evidence. On the whole, she inclined to fair, though not always generous, assessments of all those who must in the course of things parade under her cool and discriminating review. No one escaped her discerning gaze or escaped for long, and no one stood aloof from the truth about himself as she saw it without making matters worse for himself in her eyes, for she was a practiced enabler of the folly of others and severe and unrelenting in presuming its existence.

But even she could not say what she might be on the lookout for this morning. She considered old and new faces alike with an uncharacteristic indifference the way, without intent to buy and with desultory fingers, she might sample the texture of several swatches of fabric in a store where she did not care to be, but in which she nonetheless found herself marking time for want of an alternative. She remained prepared, however, to turn to good account her restless need to remark anomalies in the settled order of things—a breach of etiquette, an embarrassing moment, a fashion blunder, an unexpected homicide, but not her own boredom, which, sad to say, escorted her into the Grand Ballroom itself when the time arrived to leave socializing, coffee, and Danish behind and to find a seat. She remembered having read in Schopenhauer somewhere that boredom was a necessary, if unfortunate, concomitant of great intelligence, but that did not make her feel any the less restive and disappointed with the way the morning was unfolding. She was on her way to a table—Stanley was up out of his chair and madly waving at her—around which were seated individuals equally blessed with intelligence, or cursed as the case might be, but none of them seemed adversely affected by the tedium that had descended like dampness so drearily over her; unless each, drawing on much the same determination that she now felt, was in his own way making the best of a desperate situation. What was one to do? One just turned up the collar, lit up the smile, and mainlined enough good cheer to last the morning so that one fairly chirped with enthusiasm.

Tom McBride, prince of cats and undeceived, met Sophia’s dissembling peep with an arch of a brow. A sour smile that washed out on his lips in the act of forming seemed to say, I’m glad that works for you, but you’re no more a bird than I, and I’m dying over here; and, indeed, he seemed to be, immobilized as he was between a little girl who wanted to festoon his fur with ribbons and a bald-headed little boy who wanted to dip his whiskers in glue.

The little girl was Dr. Charlotte Pfühl, Victorian Literature, knowledge of which, it was rumored, she had acquired first hand. In truth, in ways still not entirely understood or legally permitted, she commuted emotionally between Mayfair, London and antebellum Savannah, Georgia, depending on the semester, for she alternated Victorian British Literature with what she insisted was its American counterpart. Every now and again, however, obedient to some uncanny imperative, she seemed to want to come from Dallas. At such times she would unearth herself, unstop her pheromones, bleach her hair, pile it differently, rouge her mysteriously fattened lips, squeeze into rhinestone-studded cowgirl booties, and by shifting its provenance some thousand miles west, exchange her nasally twang for a throaty drawl. The nymph thankfully was not at present in her Dallas phase. Wherever she lived when not in the classroom, she was there and everywhere else a superannuated Gibson Girl with a penchant for high collars and upswept and then flattened piles of usually bleached hair that could have concealed a radar dish for SETI. Nearing professional though not chronological retirement, whose margin faded forever and forever as she approached it, she had preceded Sonya Herzog as chairperson for an unusually short term. For three years she had presided over an adamantly dysfunctional department whose internal squabbles she resolved by elevating the expedient of avoidance to the level of policy. She had brought to the corner office, the space as metonym for power, an unequal mix of spitefulness and Southern grace and gentility—her family called Battery Row, Charleston, home—with the latter masking the former the way lilac might disguise belladonna. Early on she had laid proprietary claim to moral high ground, first advanced by her forebears, and she embodied something of Ulysses’ spirit to never yield it. With that indomitable soul she shared as well an inelastic aversion to the hoarding, sleeping, feeding race, otherwise known as students. Their academic concerns and troubles she met with all the empathy of a lace curtain rustling just barely in an imperceptible breeze, a grandmotherly silence buttressed by the not uncharming but totally irrelevant smile of everyone’s Aunt May, and a pile of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies held out in the fold of a blue and white checked apron.

The major declined on her watch. It was rescued by Sonya Herzog, a person for whom Charlotte felt no animosity but only the profoundest respect and who was at this very moment sitting across from her listening to her chatter with expressionless reserve, her eyes boring holes in Charlotte’s pinched face, which through no fault of anyone but Charlotte’s illustrious forebears was dominated by a nose curved like a swollen cashew. Its tip ponderously overhung her thin lips above which was cast a shadow rather like a faint moustache.

The two women hated one another.

Sophia, whose approbation and fealty each assiduously courted, concealed her dislike for both behind an irrepressible theatricality that both found indecipherable, but that each, albeit with caution, misread according as she wished. Stanley, who it must be said tried awfully hard to fill the table before either sniffed it out, found no inconsistency in agreeing readily with each of them in their differences of opinion; and Tom McBride played one off the other with some skill and absolutely no shame whatsoever; and so, yes, he just might allow Charlotte to tie ribbons in his fur because it would be impolitic of him to openly express, with, say, a sneer, his disdain for all things Charlotte, which he often privately voiced to Sophia. In his interactions with Sonya, however, Tom was guarded. That he didn’t like or trust her, Sophia knew well enough, but he was always the first at a meeting to second her motions.

Close on Sonya’s right—indecorously cheating left at least two inches, noted Sophia, for whom the morning suddenly brightened with the promise of something salaciously unbecoming—sat the new hire trying not to appear wholly irrelevant. She was a horsey blonde caparisoned in broad-checked shirt, Capri pants that exposed her knobby ankle bone, and penny loafers. Her name was Candace or Canacee or Canapé something or other and she appended Women’s Studies to her name so naturally that Sophia was a few moments recovering from her surprise.

I’m Sophia Stuart. The Study of Men.

The new hire lifted her chin slightly and Sophia detected a trace of confusion.

Dead men. Dead white men. British. Really dead.

A flat smile limped across the fleshless lips of the new hire before further introductions distracted her. She met Tom McBride’s unfeigned friendliness with the bit in her mouth, and she acknowledged Stanley with a supercilious reserve cued by Sonya’s indifferent inclusion of the little man in the formal round of greetings. Whether and to what extent Stanley felt the cut, he was too much the gentleman to bleed in company. He hurriedly diverted attention from himself to the arrangement of chocolates added to the centerpiece on the table.

How sweet, said the new hire, venturing to establish her sociability with a short and safe comment that demanded little more of her while it indicated how effortlessly she fit in.

Hmm, Sophia said, my favorite kind too. She was more impressed by the candy than by the new hire whom she preferred to think had inadvertently sounded a clever note.

Tom chimed in, We’ll have to make note of that!

The use of the plural could be so Tom McBride, Sophia thought, for it distanced him from personal involvement by offering him the safety of the crowd.

Someone with good taste, observed Sonya, but it was unclear whether she were referring to Sophia or to whoever had arranged the centerpiece. At any rate, the new hire thought the observation required a laugh. Sophia knew right then and there that she was not going to get along with her at all.

Afterward, except for a brief surreptitious glance at Sophia—as if she were trying to figure her out—the new hire made as if the morning’s program in front of her were compelling reading. Twice she looked up and smiled, once warmly when Sonya Herzog made one of her infrequent jokes for her benefit, and once more, less warmly, less broadly—she had fine, fine teeth, Sophia decided—when Tom McBride said something witty, again for her benefit; but most of the time she absorbed herself in the program, or at least page two at the bottom of the bag of oats, so to speak, where the new employees were listed alphabetically. She spent a lot of time chewing her own name, a long one truly, for Women’s Studies—as Sophia now dubbed her, determined to be unkind for some reason she herself chose not to fathom—must have a moniker of the hyphenated variety so common for a time among women. She would have delved more deeply into the nature of the woman’s interest in page two were her own attention not called to the podium set up at the head of the ballroom.

Standing there looking out over a sea of heads mounted on upper torsos was a man of slight stature, nattily attired in a gray business suit that complemented his thinning gray hair. Everything about Dr. Karamchand Bahadur exuded impeccable taste. Were he never to open his mouth, Sophia thought, he could not but impress everyone with his dignified bearing. With the mien of a Brahmin, the Boston kind, nonetheless lordly if honorary, although something of the Hindu might be inferred from the otherworldly calm and intolerance for nonsense with which he met the mundane challenges of his place as president of the university, he presented a brow made formidably noble and wise and shiny by a receding hairline. A few deep lines etched in his forehead were like steps leading to a temple set on a hilltop cleared of jungle and glistening in light. Ah, but then he spoke, and Sophia cringed, for all at once, squalling and chattering in a high-pitch, monkeys came clamoring out of the silver underbrush and ran amok over the temple.

He managed in under a few hundred words, only forty percent of them rendered intelligible by his sing-song lilt, to extend his opening greeting to all who were peasant, welcoming with great infection old anew to the begging of what, he must bleed, would be a year of wordy accomplices, marked by tumescence of co-legality, sinifying the pristine horror and gory of an inverse city celibated for its vacation from learning. With great acerbity he could quarantine a following year for onan’s faction, and on this tickled Cajun he alleged ever unto the dead in cases of his hair delinquent farts to improve vice or incinerable talents for ever unbenefit.

And so, in collusion, he concluded, when opportunity has knockers, let us grab the cow by the horns and take advantage of it.

As occurred every year to the visible gratification of the speaker, everyone rose in applause, and as occurred every year, Sophia, with a roll of her eyes, forced herself to stand with Sonya Herzog, who had so promptly left her seat that the new hire was left fumbling out of her chair in loyal imitation. In a sidelong glance, Sophia noted the bored look on Tom’s face turn mischievous as with hyperbole of feeling he added volume to his ovation.

A moo-ving speech, Sophia, yes? he winked.

Sophia could not help herself: Udderly magnificent.

He’s a breed apart, is he not?

Brahman, I was thinking.

So I heard.

Still, it’s the same bull as last year.

A new low in introductory remarks.

Do you veal so?

Veritable tripe, if we must cattle log his faults.

Yes, he was all dung before he started.

Jersey the smug look on his face?

I thought it more a look of Angus.

I think I’ll steer clear of that one, Meuteuil.

What, you don’t like my cowment?

You’re milking this one dry, Sophia.

I’ve only grazed the surface, Tom.

Just your inimitable brand of brilliance?

How kine of you to say so.

I can’t hide my admiration for you.

You are nothing if not impecunious in your praise, Thomas.

Oh good one. Did you ruminate on that one a while?

I’m a little ahead of you, yes. It’s like calving a dictionary.

Truly your wit knows no range. Mine withers in comparison. Wattle you come up with next?

Ouch. It’s cuds I practice.

And here I’m thinking it was ox-idental. You sure had me buffaloed.

Did I heifer!

As close to aghast as she could be, Sonya Herzog sputtered: Inappropriate. Adolescent. Not in his hearing. Humiliating. For rarely when she was nervous or excited did Sonya speak in a sentence containing a verb, and though the imperative mood, it might be imagined, was her favorite, she conveyed it largely through implication.

If he has a beef with us. … Tom struck a belligerent pose and Sophia muttered Bossy, with public enough volume, but when Stanley shook his head in amused admiration and said, Oh, you’re quite the hams, you two, both burst into laughter and they let the whole thing drop before people did indeed turn to see what the flap was all about.

III.

In Sophia Stuart’s Office

W ith the exception of those hidden in the remote recesses of Restoration Court, faculty offices at Winston University were uniformly sedate enclosures proudly conscious of the studied air of respectability, the academic reserve, and the great weight of prestige that defined in general the character of their denizens, an otherwise eminent and worthy class despite the practical penury to which they had been reduced by a life dedicated to unremunerative intellectual pursuits. The offices were centered each on the intersection of the imaginary axes, Functionality and Sufficiency—the former, a word crassly and carelessly conceived by Philistines buzzing about in Information circles; the latter, a stubbornly incomprehensible one. Along those axes, each office could be visually graphed with mathematical precision revealing a readily graspable matrix of values, certainties, and attitudes—socially and politically of a kind, if religiously and psychologically at variance. The occupants could claim more or less a shared set of assumptions: no one attends school for between twenty-two and twenty-four years, earns a doctorate, and acquires a preternatural expertise in his or her field however narrowly defined without somehow deserving the conferment of aristocratic status and entitlement in the world at large. However, rarely was such merit financially supported, even if psychologically it was the irrevocable bequest of a wistfully imagined order in which human intelligence was accorded its properly honored and privileged place among the many lesser traits that comprised the human ge nome.

The physical spaces varied but little from one another and that mainly in the arrangement of bookcases, double drawer file cabinets, and L-shaped desks. In all matters, strict observation of fire code dictated the nature of the surface: all furniture was fabricated from metal, the ceiling panels were fire retardant, the walls were cleanly painted block, and the carpeting equally resistant to flame and spill alike. In short, the offices were spaces ill-equipped to fire the imagination, but paradoxically conducive to burnout. What was worse, the windows did not open, thereby perversely frustrating wishful defenestration of either mind or body should the desire to part with one or the other arise on those too human occasions when those gifted with introspection plumbed with mounting horror and sinking despair the depths of their own sterility. Or functionality. Or sufficiency.

Not so Sophia Stuart’s office or any of its relations in Restoration Court, which like things inalterable and essential had always managed to withstand renewal and change. Unresolved tensions that in effect made of it a Mannerist composition lay beneath its Baroque surface, which insinuated with counterfeit assurance that it had struck a happy accommodation of opposing forces—something the trained and observant eye would surely question after touring the room, which Sophia had taken great pains to disguise as a refuge where academic and private lives engaged in self-conscious displays of mutual deference.

If indeed the office were a canvas, that same discerning eye might recognize the agitation latent in a clever appropriation of space. Wherever there was not a bookcase or file cabinet to