Where Drowned Things Live. Susan Thistlethwaite
On this floor of the Myerson Humanities building, we in Philosophy and Religion occupied one side and History had the other. A big staircase bisected the building in the front. There was one creaky old elevator somewhere. Not really ADA compliant and I’d never consider riding in it.
One side of our hallway had faculty offices arranged from smallest to largest, Henry’s and mine being the smallest. The Department Chair, Dr. Harold Grimes, of course, occupied the very largest. On the other side, the department secretary occupied an equally small office, the mirror of my shared office, and then there were two empty offices, now used for very small classes, and a large conference room at the end where the meeting was taking place. Grimes had the showcase office, a semi-circular room with stained glass at the top that was inside one of the four turrets that anchored the corners of the building.
I clunked along, thinking that if the university really did attack us with more drastic budget cuts we could always defend ourselves by shooting arrows out of the narrow slits in our turrets. With the water in the water cooler and the snack machines in the basement, we could hold out for weeks.
Even as slowly as I was walking, I finally reached the conference room. Though the meeting had started at 3:30 and it was now nearly 4, I could not bring myself to open the door right away. As I lingered in the hall, I could hear the raised voices inside probably making points that had been made several times before, and surely would be again.
This was another area where I had discovered to my dismay that being a cop and being an academic did not differ substantially. Squad meetings were also endlessly repetitious. Of course, at squad meetings we’d had donuts to keep us going. No donuts at faculty meetings, or none that I had ever seen.
I finally pushed the heavy oak door open and shards of afternoon light spilled through the mullioned windows that lined the conference room on the west wall. The light shot directly into my eyes and poked at the headache that had been building since I’d first met with Ah-seong. It had been a long afternoon and it was going to get a lot longer.
Seated around an oak table fully thirty feet in length were the remaining full-time members of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Many chairs lined the walls, but there were three empty chairs still at the table. One because I was not yet seated in it, and the two others for the two tenured positions we had lost in the last two years.
Yes, of course, those courses were still taught, but just by underpaid adjuncts, the fast-food workers of the university whose ranks of cheap labor were growing even as full-time positions were cut or moved to more lucrative departments. I thought it was rather like playing at the ghost in Hamlet to keep the empty chairs pulled up to the table. Were they meant to echo a mute cry for revenge from those whose jobs had been murdered?
The head of our department, Harold Grimes, was standing at the head of the table, the filtered light behind him glinting off of his full head of white hair. This was an effect intended by Harold, as was keeping his suspiciously tanned face out of direct light, the better to hide the network of wrinkles direct light would reveal. He thought he was handsome and affected the clichéd horn-rimmed glasses, tweed jacket, leather patch elbows, pipe in pocket look so beloved of his generation of academic men. He really didn’t look too bad. Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
Harold was tall, probably now just a little over six feet as age took its toll on his height and contributed to his increasing girth around the stomach. His veneer of absent-minded professor covered a power player of some skill. He had survived to his nearly sixty years of age having published very little, and none of it of note, in a university where that should have finished him long ago. That it had not, and that he was, in fact, a tenured senior professor, was strong testimony to his palpable personal charm and to his ability to know and be known in the labyrinthine ways of power in the university.
Harold’s field was Ethics, a fact I tried not to dwell on because I found it made me laugh. It’s not wise to find your boss too funny. Harold was not a person to underestimate. Yet, in a weird way I was glad he was our department head. If anybody could protect us from the accounting sharks that ruled academic budgets today, Harold could. That is, if it suited his own purposes. I glanced at the two empty chairs. He hadn’t been able to save the ghosts. And an untenured professor like my lowly self who has not completed her dissertation is very vulnerable at budget-cutting time.
“Ms. Ginelli, so glad you could join us,” said Grimes, pausing to underline my peon status by not even using the customary faculty honorific of “professor.” He then waited, underlining my tardy status, until I had crossed the large room to take my seat.
Well, given my height I am not able to insinuate myself into a room in any case. I paused behind my chair for a minute and looked at him. I’m about an inch taller than he is and he really didn’t like the fact that I could look down on him. He was used to looking down on women (literally and figuratively) and on most men for that matter.
“Take your seat,” he barked out, having been pushed too far.
I could feel my job sway under me and decided I’d really better sit down.
Henry, my office-mate, swiveled his pseudo-Tudor conference chair in my direction as I took my seat, and with his back to Grimes crossed his eyes at me. Wow, this meeting must be excruciating for Henry to mug in front of Grimes, even discretely. Henry desperately needed his job. This must really be bad.
Grimes seemed to decide he had punished me enough and began pacing at the head of the table.
“As I was saying, at the Department Chairs meeting, Dean Wooster emphasized that the self-study is a way for all departments to have access to the creation of a curricular structure that befits the intellectual demands this twenty-first century have laid upon us.”
He paused for emphasis, not for comment. At least not from me. Anything I could truthfully have said would have further imperiled my job.
Hercules Abraham, Professor of Judaism, the most senior member of the department and the kindest man I have ever met, nodded his small, neat, white head from his position directly to Grimes’ left. I wondered what he was doing here. At more than seventy years of age, he was semi-retired and only taught a few seminars and tutorials. He had no committee assignments and was not expected to have to attend faculty meetings. He must be here voluntarily. I was stunned. I would have used any excuse not to be here.
Hercules spoke, his still prominent French accent making the words seem to flow.
“This is necessary, I believe, for in these changing times we have to adjust ourselves.”
As he spoke, his blue eyes peeked out from his wrinkled face radiating good will. He leaned his thin frame back against the high-backed chair and smiled at all of us, confident that he, Hercules, had helped our leader make an important point.
It would probably never occur to Hercules that this was bureaucratic claptrap. To him, it would mean we would all pull together and in the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to learning make this university a new Garden of Eden.
Hercules combined the innocence of a child with the wisdom of Solomon. He had been a four-year-old Jew in France when the Vichy government, far from trying to hinder the Nazi round up of Jews to send to concentration camps, was being positively helpful to their occupiers. Hercules and his mother (his father had fought and died in the French Resistance) had been hidden in the French village of LeChambon, the tiny mountain town in France where literally hundreds of Jews were saved by French Protestant farmers who became expert forgers and smugglers to fool the French government officials and Nazis in order to save Jewish lives.
Maybe Hercules believed in goodness because he had seen it. He just made me feel like I wanted to protect him, but in many ways he was also like a tough little French rooster, too thin and wiry to be eaten. And sometimes there was a suspicion in my mind that Hercules saw right through Grimes, but felt that by not directly challenging him Grimes could be brought to see what was right. If you grew up hiding from Nazis, you probably had a good idea how to hide what you were thinking.
I was too new to this academic culture to read it accurately.
But before Grimes could get