2. Adrian
Adrian
Two letters came to my desk on the day of the welcome dinner, under seals that do not exist. I burned both before dinner.
They were still only the second and third most dangerous things to arrive at my college that week.
This college keeps two sets of books. I am the man who keeps the second.
Rosalind brought the intake folders at noon, with a pot of tea and the observation that I had not eaten.
"There's soup."
"There is always soup."
"There's soup today," she said, and set the tray on the one place on my desk where a tray does not interfere with the blotter.
It took her three weeks to learn that in her first term.
She has not missed since, and I have never told her I noticed, and that arrangement is the closest thing to friendship I permit myself with a woman I would trust with my life.
Intake review is sixteen hours of work in two days.
The folders come in three colors. Blue is academic and goes back down to the deans.
Green is medical and does not open on my desk; it goes to the health center under my initials.
The third color has no name in any handbook this college prints.
Rosalind calls them the mustard ones. She has called them that for nine years and has never once asked why they come to me instead of to anyone else, which is either discretion or wisdom, and in my experience the two are the same thing worn at different angles.
There were four mustard folders. Three were continuations, routine, the paperwork of holding steady.
The fourth had a name typed on the tab in the registrar's old machine face: MARSH, CALEB J.
Graduate, second year, twenty-five. A town forty miles east with one road in it.
Flagged twice in the same fortnight, once by a residence advisor, once by the chaplain, and the pattern matters more than the words, because one report is a bad week and two is a bad week that other people can see.
Under the standard sheet there is a second sheet.
It uses a vocabulary that appears on no other paper this college produces, and I have been reading that vocabulary since I was twenty-two, and I have a way of reading it that keeps me from absorbing their full meaning all at once.
You look at the shape of the term and take the meaning out of it sideways, the way a splinter comes out sideways.
It is not a skill I am proud of. It is a skill.
Level three. Interval holding. Maintained since March.
Hands flat on his knees, I thought, for no reason I permitted to become a reason.
I wrote Thursday next, 4 p.m. on the cover in pencil, and set the pencil down parallel with the drawer runner, and closed the drawer on the whole question.
Eight days. A boy who has held since March will hold eight more days, and the first week of term is a poor week in which to take a student out of circulation.
The soup was leek. It had gone cold. I ate it anyway, because Rosalind counts the bowls.
* * *
The second post came at four, which is when the second post comes, except that what was in it had not come through any post.
Two items, both under the sort of seal that does not exist.
The first was a single card, and I knew its weight before I turned it over, because I have turned one over every quarter for nine years. The quarterly acknowledgment. Seven words, typed, no signature: Received. Noted. The tithe stands as assessed.
It did not say that. I am recording what it usually says.
What it said was: Received. Noted. The assessment is declined. Resubmit.
I sat with that card for some minutes. There is an arithmetic that goes with it, and the arithmetic wanted doing, and I declined to do it, the way you decline to count a flight of stairs you have fallen down.
Declined is a word with a bottom in it. An assessment is declined the way a payment is declined.
What is being said, in the vocabulary I take apart sideways, is: what you sent down was not enough, and the shortfall is now yours to find.
Third decline since Easter.
I fed the card to the study fire, which is the filing system for that correspondence, and I stood at the window with my hands behind my back until my hands agreed to stay there.
On the east side of the quad the fog was up early, lying along the lawns at its level, patient, the height it prefers.
Nine years I have logged that height weekly.
Four inches higher than any September in the log, and there is no field on the form for what that means, and I have stopped pretending I do not know what it means.
It is hungry. Everything below this college is hungry, and the office that meters the feeding has just written to say the pantry is short.
The second item was a letter, and the seal on it was not the office's.
I want to be precise about this, because precision is what I have instead of nerves.
I know four seals. I can draw them from memory.
This was a fifth: older work, deep-struck, a design I had seen exactly once before, on a document I signed at twenty-four and have not seen since.
My thumb recognized the seal's deep ridges before my mind supplied the memory. The letter inside ran three sentences.
In consequence of the spring matter, a review of the Ashgrave station has been found warranted. An inspector will attend within the fortnight, in an academic character. Extend every courtesy.
The spring incident was Micah Vane's disappearance. His green drop-handle bicycle stood chained outside Whitlock, the graduate hall, through June, July, and August, until I had Croft move it into the store, where I would not see it, which worked in the sense that anything works.
I burned the letter too. The fire took it the way fire takes anything, which I note because there are papers it will not take, and this was not one of them, and I was glad, and gladness of that particular kind is a thing I no longer examine.
Then I sat down and did the arithmetic I had declined at four o'clock, all of it, in ink, in the notation nobody but I will ever read, and at the bottom of the page the sum said what I already knew.
The interval is shortening. The tithe is failing. And the office is sending someone to find out why my station, the cleanest station on the seaboard for nine years, has begun, very quietly, to run short.
I could have told them by return of post. The foundation is taking more than it is given.
But you do not write that down, because the last man who wrote that down received, in reply, an expansion of eligibility, and I have spent nine years making certain that no such reply is ever provoked by anything with my signature under it.
I locked the study. I dressed for dinner. In the glass I looked like the Headmaster of Ashgrave College, which is the desired result, and takes eleven minutes, and is the only piece of magic I perform daily that costs nothing at all.
* * *
The welcome dinner is one hundred and ten minutes of being charming, and I have a system, because a system is how you make one hundred and ten minutes cost eleven.
Seven new appointments. I take them right to left, three minutes each, so that the last is the one I have judged most likely to say a sentence worth keeping.
The room believes I circulate fairly. In fact I ration myself precisely, and spend my only unguarded quarter-hour exactly where I have decided in advance to spend it.
I had read all seven files in August. Two were appointments the search committees will discover to be mistakes by March and blame on me. Three were competent. One was a coup and knew it.
The seventh was Mercer, T. Literature and philosophy, thirty-two, to the graduate faculty in the School of Letters.
Four years at a state college that let him go in the way institutions let a man go when the difficulty is not his work: a hearing with no verdict published, a department chair who retained his title, a letter of reference written in the dialect of lawyers.
I have read perhaps three hundred personnel files closely enough to hear what they are not saying.
His was not saying it loudly. I heard it anyway.
And stapled behind all of it, a committee report that used, of his monograph, a phrase committee reports do not use. Unusually alive.
I had, in August, read the monograph. I had told myself it was diligence.
It was August; there was time; the term had not started; a Headmaster reads his hires.
I annotated four chapters. The annotations are in the Lodge study, in a drawer, and diligence does not keep its notes in the drawer with the lamp that is never lit.
He was at the window when I reached him, last, on schedule.
Holding a glass of the college sherry he had been too polite to abandon and too honest to drink.
Ink on two fingers. A jaw shaved badly on the left, in the manner of a man who shaves with his mind on a page.
He had put his gown on backward at convocation, I had been told, and had turned it around where he sat, elbows out, laughing, rather than retreat one step to the vestibule.
I had filed that under settles in quickly, that afternoon, in the drawer.
"Dr. Mercer. Adrian Thorne. Welcome to Ashgrave."
His hand was warm and his grip was brief and his eyes went over my face the way a reader's eyes go over a difficult page, which is to say: looking for the argument, assuming there is one.
Then he asked permission to be impertinent, and led with a fact about the building's geometry.