The Lesson of Her Death

attorney up in Higgins indicts me.”
    “Oh, come on, Walt, it’s not like you’re buying yourself a Porsche. They’re not going to arrest you for loaning money to a university.”
    The banker looked at Sayles and seemed to be taking his pulse. Sayles thought:
I’m just like the farmers he
disbursed loans to, loans written on the strength of bad collateral and their desperation facing the loss of two hundred years’ worth of family land
. Randy Sayles, associate dean of financial aid, knew that you never saw a person as clearly as when you hand him a large check.
    The professor said, “What if we gave you a piece of the new dorm? It cost twenty-three million.”
    “Cost ain’t worth. And if we foreclosed it’d be because the school went under. And what good’s a dorm without a school to go with it?”
    “Land alone’d be worth three million.”
    “Not with an empty dorm sitting on it.”
    “You got the parking lot right on the highway.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    These two words lanced Sayles’s heart. He stood up and said with a despair that made both men extremely uncomfortable, “You were my last chance.” Neither said a word for a moment. Sayles picked up his financials and put them into his battered briefcase.
    He started out the door.
    “Hold up, Professor.…”
    Sayles turned and saw in the man’s face a debate. The banker arrived at a disagreeable conclusion. Writing a name and number on a piece of paper, he said, “I’m not doing this. You didn’t get this from me. You don’t know me.”
    Sayles looked at the scrawl.
Fred Barrett
. Next to the name was a phone number. Area code 312. Chicago.
    “Who is he?”
    After a pause the banker said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    He found it completely by accident.
    Because Brian Okun had made up the rumor that Jennie Gebben and Leon Gilchrist were lovers, he had not bothered to do what he had promised the dean—look through the professor’s office for evidence. Hewould have been content to tell her that he had made a futile search and let it go at that. Then when Gilchrist turned in Okun’s scathing evaluation Okun would claim that Gilchrist was seeking retribution for his espionage.
    A delightful symmetry to the whole matter.
    The whole
affair,
you might say
.
    This was a good plan but he thought of a much better one when, placing a sheet of student grades on Gilchrist’s desk, he noticed an envelope addressed in flowery script to the professor. The writer was a young woman student. Okun lifted the crinkly envelope and found to his huge amusement the paper was perfumed. Gilchrist, finally back from San Francisco, was at the moment lecturing his class, and the graduate assistant immediately sat down in the professor’s chair and opened the unsealed envelope.
    The poem scanned very badly, thought Okun the critic.
    When the memory of you/swallows me the way I took/your lovely cock into my mouth
…
    He decided he would have given it a D for form and a C minus for content (“Your thinking is unoriginal, your meter too unvaried and honey is a hopelessly trite metaphor for semen”). This didn’t matter however because he believed the poem would have at least one ardent reader.
    Okun now sat in Dean Larraby’s office, watching her flick the poem with a tough, wrinkled index finger. “You didn’t …” She hesitated. “You didn’t get it out of his mailbox?”
    It wasn’t stamped or postmarked, you stupid fool, how could it have been mailed?
Okun said mildly, “I’d never do anything illegal. It was lying out on his desk.”
    “Who’s the girl? Doris Cutting?”
    “Student of his. I don’t know anything about her.”
    “Do you know if he took her to San Francisco with him?”
    I just said I don’t know her. Senile already?
Okun frowned. “I wonder.”
    “This is enough for me.”
    “It’s hard for me to speak against him,” Okun said. “He’s taught me so much. But to sleep with a student.… It’s a very vulnerable time for young people. I used to respect him.” His mouth tightened into a little bundle of disappointment.
    “We’ll fire him. We have no choice. It’s got to be done. We’ll wait till the semester’s over. His last lecture’s when?”
    “Two days.”
    “I’ll tell him afterward, after the students have gone. We’ll want to minimize publicity. You’ll keep this quiet until then?”
    He nodded gravely. “Whatever you’d like, Dean.” Okun stood and started for the