The Committee. Sterling Watson

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      FIVE

      Stall burst through the door of the presidential suite where legendary Margaret Braithwaite, Typist Immaculata, sat doing what she did best. The entire university knew that Margaret Braithwaite ran a lucrative business out of the president’s office while also catering to the great man’s every need. It was remarkable, Stall thought, and a testament to the times that she could type whole dissertations for grad students and still manage the schedule of a university president. Either the president was not busy enough, or Margaret Braithwaite was the equal of any three mortal women. Stall halted on the carpet in front of her desk, pulling at the collar Maureen had ironed for him. It was drenched with the sweat of his walk from Anderson to Tigert Hall. Mrs. Braithwaite finished a paragraph, her Olivetti making a sound like the German machine gun so feared by the Allies—a ripping sound rather than that of individual explosions, however close together. The German gun had fired an unheard of 1,200 rounds per minute. Unfortunately, Stall had heard the sound.

      Compassionately, Mrs. Braithwaite charged for typing on a sliding scale. Grad students, the poorest of the poor, received her services for a mere fifty cents per page. It was said that she occasionally gave sage advice to the writers she typed. (“If I were you, I’d check that reference to Reinhold Niebuhr on page 213.”) The manila envelope passed into your sweating hands and a smile sent you out the door. And Stall had never heard anyone say that her interventions were unwelcome.

      He looked at his watch.

      Without looking up, Mrs. B. said, “He’s stuck in a meeting. He’ll be here soon.”

      Stall thought this probably meant that the president was unable to free himself from a grudge round of golf—which, come to think of it, could also be an important meeting with a regent. It was all of a piece, and in Gainesville, President Connor was almost as well respected as his secretary. Like most Southern university presidents, he was more man of action than scholar. His trajectory had been lawyer, soldier (the Great War), businessman, and university president. The soldier had earned the Croix de Guerre at Belleau Wood. The businessman had prospered with the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. But President Thomas Connor was known best by rank-and-file Floridians for having been an amateur boxer of some renown: he’d won a Golden Gloves title in the welterweight division. Gas station attendants and grove workers knew him as the young man who had passed the bar examination and lasted ten rounds with Benny Leonard in the same week. Connor had lost the exhibition match but had persisted. Neither fighter’s knee had touched the canvas. Inevitably, when the newspapers covered Connor’s frequent trips to Tallahassee to finagle dollars for the growing university, the headline was something like: “Connor Boxes Pols for Education Lucre.”

      Stall took the chair that Margaret Braithwaite offered with a nod of her head, listened uncomfortably to the burring sound of the typewriter as she pushed the machine to the limit of its ability to whack words onto paper while avoiding an apocalyptic snarl of steel and inky ribbon, and examined the framed pictures of James Connor on the walls: a young Connor kissing a boxing trophy, a mature Connor shaking hands with Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, the same grip with Senator Spessard Holland, Connor breaking ground for a new building with a golden shovel in his hand and a steel hard hat raked across his brow, and Connor standing beside a railroad track with his arm slung over the shoulder of Charley Johns, who had risen from railroad conductor on a stretch of track near Starke to president of the Florida Senate. It all fits, thought Stall, who was an English professor but no snob. Stall had fled from the House of War to the House of Examined Lives, but he knew that money flowed only in one direction. It was the way of the world, and better to embrace the world as it was than to worry too much about changing it. Stall was proud to have a man like Connor as his president, a man who had rolled up his sleeves and stalked into the arena, as Teddy Roosevelt had famously said, there to be bloodied but unbowed, his face marred by dust and sweat, and from thence to return to the groves of academe with cash in one fist and hard-won worldly knowledge in the other.

      While he waited, Stall opened the envelope Sophie Green had given him.

       Dear Professor Stall,

       I hope you won’t think me too forward if I offer to teach one of Professor Leaf’s courses in American literature. I wrote my master’s thesis on The Leatherstocking Tales, and, though I later moved on to specialize in Chaucer (a lot of distance between those two!), I remember a good bit about American Romanticism, and I will certainly bone up on it if you repose faith in me to take over the course. I’m new and untried, I know, but I want to be helpful if I can in this sad time.

       Sincerely,

       Sophie Green

      Stall watched Mrs. Flying Fingers exercise her calling and considered proposing to Amos Harding that Sophie Green take over Jack Leaf’s American Romanticism СКАЧАТЬ