Tibor looked down at his papers again, then up and out the window again, and sighed. His door was open—he liked visitors—but it was four o’clock in the afternoon. There was nobody in the building but old Miss Maryanne Veer in the office, and Miss Veer wasn’t likely to leave her post beside the chairman’s desk just to have a talk with him. Tibor wondered if she would leave it once there was a chairman at the desk. The old chairman had been diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of cancer just before the start of the semester, and taken himself off to Houston. The program had been deadlocked over the choice of a new chairman ever since—but that was in the realm of what Tibor thought of as “academic politics,” and he preferred to keep out of politics of any kind. He’d had enough of that in his former life.
What he could never get enough of, maybe because it had been nonexistent, even unthinkable, in his early life, were pets. That was what he was really doing here, so very late in the afternoon, when he had a perfectly good suite with a fireplace in Constitution House. Independence College was full of pets, and not just the dogs that faculty kept for company or the cats students kept in their rooms. There was a chipmunk who lived near Minuteman Field and came out to eat from the hands of the students lunching there. There was a family of deer so tame they would allow anyone who offered them salt to pet them. Mostly, there was Lenore, a great black raven who had turned up out of nowhere two years before, checked them all out, and decided to move in. She would fly into open windows—or tap on ones that were closed, asking to be let in—and eat whatever you fed her.
Tibor and Lenore had an understanding, a bargain entered into on the second or third day Tibor had been in this office. Lenore showed up every day except Sunday at four o’clock, and Tibor fed her crumbs from the pastries he brought up from Philadelphia every week after he’d gone down to say the Liturgy in Holy Trinity Church. Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian—and all the other good ladies on Cavanaugh Street, grandmotherly or otherwise—were thoroughly convinced that, in spite of a full college dining program and a campus snack bar that operated twenty-four hours a day, he had to be starving.
Tibor didn’t wear a watch—every time he tried, the watch in question went missing—but he could see the clock face on Declaration Tower, and it said ten minutes after four. He rapped his fingers against his desk and strained to see as far across the field beyond his window as was possible. For some reason, Lenore wasn’t going to come to him today, and that was worrisome.
What was even more worrisome was the fact that he was sitting here, minute after minute, putting himself in danger of being burst in on by the one faculty member likely to turn up in this building at this time of day: the Great Doctor Donegal Steele. The Great Doctor Donegal Steele was the single fly in the otherwise perfect ointment of Tibor Kasparian’s happiness at Independence College.
Actually, the Great Doctor Donegal Steele was the major fly in the ointment of the happiness of everybody who had anything to do with Liberty Hall, but because that knowledge was part of what Tibor called “academic politics,” he didn’t know it.
He only knew that the Great Doctor Donegal Steele was an unalloyed, dyed-in-the-wool, world-class son of a bitch.
3
TO MISS MARYANNE VEER, Donegal Steele was not a son of a bitch—Miss Veer didn’t even think in words like that; they were vulgar and immodest, and never once in her sixty-three years had she ever been tempted to either sin—but a threat of apocalyptic importance, the trumpet blast of an approaching Armageddon. Miss Maryanne Veer had come to Independence College at the age of nineteen, fresh from a year at the Katherine Gibbs secretarial school in New York City. Except for the two-week educational walking tours of European cities she took every July with her friend Margaret Lorret, that year represented the only significant time Maryanne had ever spent outside this small Pennsylvania valley. First she had lived with her mother, then she had lived alone, then she had let Margaret join her in a small house she had bought at the edge of the campus with the money from her mother’s life insurance policy. None of these changes seemed to her to be of the least importance. Miss Veer’s life was a seamless garment. Houses came and went, friends and relatives came and went even faster, but The College went on forever. Ever since she had first wandered onto this campus at the age of six, a shy child with a ferocious passion for books being brought up among people who thought all reading was done by radicals and “queers,” Miss Veer had known she was going to find her home in it.