Page 5 of The Headmaster’s Binding

The first was a single card, and I knew its weight before I turned it over, because I have turned one over every quarter for nine years. The quarterly acknowledgment. Seven words, typed, no signature: Received. Noted. The tithe stands as assessed.

It did not say that. I am recording what it usually says.

What it said was: Received. Noted. The assessment is declined. Resubmit.

I sat with that card for some minutes. There is an arithmetic that goes with it, and the arithmetic wanted doing, and I declined to do it, the way you decline to count a flight of stairs you have fallen down. Declined is a word with a bottom in it. An assessment is declined the way a payment is declined. What is being said, in the vocabulary I take apart sideways, is: what you sent down was not enough, and the shortfall is now yours to find.

Third decline since Easter.

I fed the card to the study fire, which is the filing system for that correspondence, and I stood at the window with my hands behind my back until my hands agreed to stay there. On the east side of the quad the fog was up early, lying along the lawns at its level, patient, the height it prefers. Nine years I have logged that height weekly. Four inches higher than any September in the log, and there is no field on the form for what that means, and I have stopped pretending I do not know what it means.

It is hungry. Everything below this college is hungry, and the office that meters the feeding has just written to say the pantry is short.

The second item was a letter, and the seal on it was not the office's.

I want to be precise about this, because precision is what I have instead of nerves. I know four seals. I can draw them from memory. This was a fifth: older work, deep-struck, a design I had seen exactly once before, on a document I signed at twenty-four and have not seen since. My thumb recognized the seal's deep ridges before my mind supplied the memory. The letter inside ran three sentences.

In consequence of the spring matter, a review of the Ashgrave station has been found warranted. An inspector will attend within the fortnight, in an academic character. Extend every courtesy.

The spring incident was Micah Vane's disappearance. His green drop-handle bicycle stood chained outside Whitlock, the graduate hall, through June, July, and August, until I had Croft move it into the store, where I would not see it, which worked in the sense that anything works.

I burned the letter too. The fire took it the way fire takes anything, which I note because there are papers it will not take, and this was not one of them, and I was glad, and gladness of that particular kind is a thing I no longer examine.

Then I sat down and did the arithmetic I had declined at four o'clock, all of it, in ink, in the notation nobody but I will ever read, and at the bottom of the page the sum said what I already knew.

The interval is shortening. The tithe is failing. And the office is sending someone to find out why my station, the cleanest station on the seaboard for nine years, has begun, very quietly, to run short.

I could have told them by return of post. The foundation is taking more than it is given. But you do not write that down, because the last man who wrote that down received, in reply, an expansion of eligibility, and I have spent nine years making certain that no such reply is ever provoked by anything with my signature under it.

I locked the study. I dressed for dinner. In the glass I looked like the Headmaster of Ashgrave College, which is the desired result, and takes eleven minutes, and is the only piece of magic I perform daily that costs nothing at all.

* * *

The welcome dinner is one hundred and ten minutes of being charming, and I have a system, because a system is how you make one hundred and ten minutes cost eleven.

Seven new appointments. I take them right to left, three minutes each, so that the last is the one I have judged most likely to say a sentence worth keeping. The room believes I circulate fairly. In fact I ration myself precisely, and spend my only unguarded quarter-hour exactly where I have decided in advance to spend it.

I had read all seven files in August. Two were appointments the search committees will discover to be mistakes by March and blame on me. Three were competent. One was a coup and knew it.

The seventh was Mercer, T. Literature and philosophy, thirty-two, to the graduate faculty in the School of Letters. Four years at a state college that let him go in the way institutions let a man go when the difficulty is not his work: a hearing with no verdict published, a department chair who retained his title, a letter of reference written in the dialect of lawyers. I have read perhaps three hundred personnel files closely enough to hear what they are not saying. His was not saying it loudly. I heard it anyway. And stapled behind all of it, a committee report that used, of his monograph, a phrase committee reports do not use. Unusually alive.

I had, in August, read the monograph. I had told myself it was diligence. It was August; there was time; the term had not started; a Headmaster reads his hires. I annotated four chapters. The annotations are in the Lodge study, in a drawer, and diligence does not keep its notes in the drawer with the lamp that is never lit.

He was at the window when I reached him, last, on schedule. Holding a glass of the college sherry he had been too polite to abandon and too honest to drink. Ink on two fingers. A jaw shaved badly on the left, in the manner of a man who shaves with his mind on a page. He had put his gown on backward at convocation, I had been told, and had turned it around where he sat, elbows out, laughing, rather than retreat one step to the vestibule. I had filed that under settles in quickly, that afternoon, in the drawer.

"Dr. Mercer. Adrian Thorne. Welcome to Ashgrave."

His hand was warm and his grip was brief and his eyes went over my face the way a reader's eyes go over a difficult page, which is to say: looking for the argument, assuming there is one.

Then he asked permission to be impertinent, and led with a fact about the building's geometry.

I have stood in the long room on that evening for nine Septembers. I have been led with the weather, the wine, the drive up, the portraits, my own reputation, and, once, memorably, the parking. No one has ever led with the fact that the east range stands two degrees off true. Most of the room has never noticed. Those who have noticed have not mentioned it, because mentioning it invites the question of why a college would build one range out of alignment with its own quad, and the answer is not in any history of the college, and the people who do not know that somehow know not to ask.

He noticed on the walk in. It had been irritating him all afternoon. He said so, cheerfully, to the man whose signature renews his contract, holding a sherry he hated, in his first week.

I gave him the committees. He gave me back people who couldn't agree on north, which happens to be the truth, though not in the sense he meant it, and I heard myself say that it was a fair summary of the institution, and his head went back.

The laugh requires its own entry.