When the Chancellor Announced Her resignation

When the Chancellor Announced Her Resignation


People remembered where they were, what particular slant of light threw their shadows on the frozen ground. Some were hurrying to their cars, burdened with a shade of a dread that they might have missed something significant. The dread did not stop them. It made them hurry, a little, so there would be no chance to change their minds. There were appointments to be met, slightly early lunches to be eaten. But when they heard it on the radio, or looked at it on the computer screen, it was already of the second water, as one who looked where everyone was pointing after the shadow of the great event had passed. They might have all the information. They might have avoided the first shock, the moment or two of panic, the disorientation. Their stride over the thin snow might never have been broken. Still, it was not the same.

*

“Well, it doesn’t matter unless her replacement is someone significantly different.”
The young man had not, perhaps, expected such a long view. The announcement has just been made. A senior professor was sharing this observation with him who had only met the Chancellor for a few moments when he was hired, and seen her at imperial distance in various meetings. He’d thought she was tall. He noted that her slight speech impediment had not impeded her professional life much. He didn’t really know to what the older gentleman referred, or in what way the new chancellor should be different from the old. But the grand old man’s glance was piercing, so he said, “Indeed.”
The old man seemed satisfied. He got that look in his eyes his colleagues had come to associate with thoughts of the Keats of the summer odes.

*

“I will miss,” said the Chancellor after the important announcement had been made, “the fireplaces. The fireplaces in this house are truly remarkable. “
Though she had designed the fireplaces herself, along with the whole enormous house, this was not strictly self-praise, for here she was acknowledging how good craftsmanship can see to its end even the most vaunting ambition. And they were, too. The fireplaces were remarkable. If you were Lord of the Shield Danes you could roast a whole pig in one. If you lived three hundred years hence you could lead tours in period costume and mention all the interesting things that used to go on in fireplaces. You could sit across the room from one and imagine for a moment that the whole edifice was afire, picturing the headlines blaring that you had barely escaped with your life, and that you had delayed until you were in real peril making sure everybody else was safe.
You never pass by one of the fireplaces without glancing.
You think of the holocaust of documents there could be in the dead of night, accompanied by urgent hammering on the bolted door.

*

Some would remember how she had her favorite poets. One of these was never oneself. One learned through time that there is an anthology of approved poems and poets for people in positions like that of the Chancellor. The poets are black and female. Or if not, then damaged in some publicly intimate way. They will be invariably mistaken in their zoology. You should be able to deliver the poem from your heart, as though you knew it before it was written.  You can bring it out at convocations and commencements and say it in such a way that it will take people half an hour to realize it had nothing to do with the matter at hand. The power of indirection is a mighty power. You escape while the curtain is still trembling.

*

When the great pink crabapple fell in the Quad it distributed its branches as a boy throws toy soldiers across the lawn. You could have a souvenir if you thought of it in time. Only a few noted the prophetic nature of the event. It was a several years back, but such resonance is not easily dissipated. The branch that bore the flowers is broken. The dome of shade is flown. Now students must huddle for shelter under the other tree exactly like it across the Quad–planted for symmetry those long seasons ago.
But the wild things do not forget. The jay husband and the jay wife, left homeless, skitter across the ground, shrill and indignant. The would come to the Chancellor’s window and she would not to them, and they would understand.

*

It was not easy to say why the elder professor had chosen him for a confidante, but he had, and the young academic made the best of it.
“The will put the same people on the search committee that made a hash of it last time.”
“Are they still alive?”
“That doesn’t entirely matter. Of those who are dead, simulacra can be made.”
“If it was such a disaster, why would they–“
"Nobody ever said 'disaster.'" The professor retorted briskly. But then he leaned in, scoping the room as if trying to locate secret listeners; he whispered,”Repetition is redemption.”
The young man thought about this for a while. When he came back out into the open, a pair of bluejays had planted themselves on a certain piece of ground. It had begun to snow, a slow, elegiac transfer of luminous gray from the sky to the earth. Steam came from the birds’ beaks when the screeched, and they were screeching repeatedly, insistently like a pair of Yeats’ prophetic purgatory birds. So the young man thought. He watched them. He realized that the point the jays had chosen was not just one in an infinite number of points available on the Quad, but the precious point from which something vital had passed from the living earth. Maybe it was that crabapple tree everybody talked about, which he had never seen but which he understood was exquisite. Maybe the old man had it wrong, and that the birds had heard the Chancellor’s announcement, crying out now, and crying out.

*
“I will miss,” said the Chancellor, “the most extraordinary things.”  They waited for her to enumerate them, but she was too wise for that, and always had been.