The Lesson of Her Death

don’t remember the name. Is it important?”
    “No, I guess not. What clubs is he in?”
    “Science Club and Latin Club. He was in Photo Club for a while but he quit that to spend more time working out. Say, will he have a chance to look this over?”
    “Not really, no. We’re going to press tomorrow. But he wouldn’t want just a blank space under his picture, would he?”
    “I guess not.”
    “What’s his favorite music video?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “His favorite movie?”
    “I couldn’t say.”
    “How about his favorite groups?”
    “Groups?”
    “Music groups?”
    Diane was disturbed to find how little of this she knew. She said abruptly, “Can you wait a moment?” then set the phone down and fled into his room. She picked up several handfuls of tape cassettes and hurried back to the kitchen. She read the labels into the phone. “Tom Petty.… Uhm, Paul McCartney—well, I remember him of course.”
    “Ha.”
    “Then U2 and Metallica and Ice Cube and Run DMC, whatever that is. And he’s got three tapes of this group Geiger. I guess they’re from Germany.”
    “Everyone knows Geiger.”
    Well, excuse me
.…
    She continued, “I don’t know if those are his favorites. He’s got a lot of tapes.”
    “Could you make up a quote for him?”
    No way
. “I think that’ll have to be blank.”
    “I guess that’s okay. You’ve been a big help, Mrs. Corde.”
    “When is the yearbook coming out?”
    “Won’t be long. Maybe I’ll bring Jamie’s by myself.” The voice lowered a few tones. “I’d like to meet you.”
    Diane laughed but silently; she understood fragile adolescent pride. “Well, that would be very nice.”
    Hit on by a high schooler! Maybe you’ve got some of the old allure after all—even if it’s just in your voice
.
    When he got the note he’d been saying:
    “The phrase that some soldiers used was ‘horizontal refreshment.’ Medical records tell us that at the height of the war, nearly ten percent of Union troops suffered from some form of VD.…”
    Associate Dean Randolph Rutherford Sayles took the slip of paper from the teaching assistant. He recognized Dean Larraby’s elegant scrawl, as distinctive as her ubiquitously disquieting choice of words summoning him immediately to her office.
    Silence rose. He found he was looking past the paper, staring at the whorls and lines of the lectern, at an ink stain.
    “… In Washington, D.C., the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue contained dozens of houses of prostitution—a locale where I believe a number of lobbyists now maintain offices.…”
    Sayles was in his trademarked posture: standing, both hands on the lectern, hunched forward. Sayles nurtured a classic professorial vogue, unkempt and preoccupied and tweedy, flaunting this style in the face of Brooks Brothers chic (passé on Wall Street but au courant in Cambridge, Hyde Park and Ann Arbor). He had sandy hair that he kept unruly and would grin like the absentminded scholar he had never been when it flopped into his face.
    “… And more astonishing, there are hundreds of documented cases of women disguising themselves as soldiers and circulating among the men to provide sexualfavors for a profit. Perhaps this is where the phrase ‘military service’ arose.…”
    These tidbits sounded frivolous but the students, who had waited in line since six A.M. on registration day to sign up for The Civil War to the Centennial, loved them. Sayles had worked hard at perfecting his lecturing skills. Nothing was more important to him than bestowing knowledge. He was tenured at thirty, two years after his doctoral thesis was published and one year after his book,
The Economics of Freedom
, garnered a favorable
Times
review and started its record six-month run as number one on the National Association of Historians’ recommended list.
    “As the war, which both Yanks and Rebs truly believed would last no more than six months, stretched on and on, the moral thread of the resoundingly Protestant and predominantly evangelical armies frayed.…”
    More problematic was Sayles’s second job as an associate dean, which he did not enjoy at all. But he was sophisticated enough to know that he could not survive forever without the yoke of administrative duties and he had struggled to master the perversity of collegiate infighting. Besides, his bailiwick was the Civil War and what better metaphor could there be for a college campus? He was like Grant, marshaling forces and