The Right Reverend Stanley Patmore, known as "Pastor Stan," found the story below in the In-Box in the narthex. In the first months of this congregation (Pastor Stan's third), two or three messages were received each week. Now that the congregation has grown to 4,500 or so, only one or two messages are left each month.
1
The Executive Secretary and her boss met them all, took them all to dinner, the best and... well, the rest too.
Sallie was good at the intuitive part, the personality traits, values and attitudes, so while they waited for the waiter, or over their meals or coffee afterward, Sallie would be asking about hobbies, favorite vacations, maybe clothes or foods. Often the candidates would speak of their spouses or children or pets, of their age or even their health. The Dean focused on the professional side: why were they interested in moving? what was a typical work day? current scholarly interests? favorite class size and why?
And by the way, all of this was in the mode of pursuing the most important objective of the on-campus interview: to recruit the candidate. It's so much better for the university to be able to be making the choice, from among three or four good people, all of whom like the university!
Pastor Stan used to wonder why people turned in what they did. Did they think there was a possible sermon idea in there?
2
So after dinner with Teri Underwood, as usual, both Sallie and Dean D--- were right there on the same page. "Classy" was a word that each of them leapt to. Teri was tall with thick hair cut pretty short, like the twenties' "bobbed" style. Tweeds and plaids, very preppy. Professional, not formal. She moved gracefully and spoke well, looked you in the eye. A nice person to have dinner with, in fact.
The Director of the Speech Therapy program - the redoubtable Sophia - was a little cooler on Teri than I would have expected, given the one or two other candidates we had considered over the two years we'd already been looking. But she signed Teri up willingly enough. Sophia was a feet-on-the-ground, no-nonsense kind of a woman, more focused on results than on how she and her team appeared while getting the job done. D--- thought maybe that was why she was not as enthusiastic as Sallie and Dean D---. Teri might have been Sallie's cup of tea, but not Sophia's "cuppa joe."
Another picture began to emerge after a couple of semesters, however.
3
D--- had been asking the routine "How's Teri working out?" for six or eight months, with Sophia - in her regular meetings one-on-one with him - giving the obligatory, "Oh, fine."
At one point, though, a little comment began to follow the usual response, like "Well, she likes to do things her way..." But this wasn't presented as a real problem. Teri was teaching what she was supposed to teach. The students liked her. She was exploring the possibility of adding a certification we'd like to have, and she was continuing a community health project on her own time that she'd begun before coming on board.
No complaints.
And Pastor Stan wondered who had turned in what. He was never sure... and he never based a sermon on the In-Box.
4
In the mean time Sophia had been going through one test after another for a considerable period already, hoping to rule out cancer. But finally, everyone had to face the fact that she had it. D--- wasn't sure she took real time off, as her various therapies got started. She lost her hair, but got a great wig and kept on keeping on, slogging it out most of most days. She was the bravest person anybody ever saw, and - even more impressive - she was the most determined too. She just wouldn't give in.
The cancer was apparently in her blood, and she was taking lots of drugs, every day. She went about 100 miles to some specialist about once a month too.
And she kept the program rolling along just as it should, everybody pitching in. Most people at the college didn't even know about Sophia's cancer in the first years.
5
The Speech Therapy program had more bother than most departments do of extra work, keeping up with Health Department regulations and that sort of thing. In holiday periods and over summers, when faculty in other programs are busy on personal scholarly projects or working or re-working class plans, Speech faculty divided up various sections of self-study reports, gathered data, filled out forms and wrote up reports. Sophia mentioned early in Teri's second summer that she was hoping she didn't have to nag Teri so much as last year to get her share done. (It didn't need to be said that Sophia herself would be somewhat less available to step in and take over herself for anyone having trouble getting the job done.)
It was early that summer that Sophia took off her first substantial block of time yet. She went up to the City for bone marrow transplant therapy, which was then still in the experimental phase; she had been lucky to have Health department colleagues who got her into the trial. It was going to be a grim experience, Sallie learned from the senior faculty member in the department, but Sophia expected to be running things at the college from her hospital bed, using her laptop and telephone.
And she did. As usual Sophia planned carefully, monitored closely, and things got done... even though there were always unexpected and unwelcome surprises along the way.
As for colleagues, Sallie co-ordinated an eager group's individual cards, letters, flowers or fruit-baskets, and the like, so that Sophia knew we were thinking about her (and her husband, who had taken the whole time off too, to be at her bedside), thinking of her routinely and not just in the first day or so. Sallie ran the little plan as efficiently as Sophia might have done herself...
More than anything, Pastor Stan asked himself, every time: "What's the point?"
6
When D--- (and Sallie) next saw Sophia she had lost some weight, and her color was a little odd. Skin-tone maybe a little gray, or green? Or maybe it was just the absence of a little of the usual rosy vigor. Anyway, you couldn't say Sophia looked her usual self, but she was certainly behaving normally. Showing up for routine one-on-one's as usual, never presenting a problem without a proposed solution, or sometimes two. And so on.
She was a brick. Come to think of it, she was built a little that way too, solid, stocky, muscular. As her hair began to grow back in a little, the wig was sometimes a little askew but Sophia was still keeping on.
This experimental therapy and drug regimen worked too. Her blood count improved, as her husband quietly mentioned in the margins of some formal event, and she got back up to speed and her customary robust demeanor. The possibility of the cancer's return was an anytime thing...
7
The third year of a faculty member's appointment at the college is an important time. Colleagues, the program director, and the Dean all have to go on record saying whether or not the individual is making satisfactory progress toward tenure. In positions that are hard to fill, to be honest, one is inclined to give the individual second or third chances that might be denied someone in a more crowded field (like History or English or one of the fine arts). But Teri didn't seem all that close to the knife edge of a year's notice. She was not very accessible to her students, who did not seek her support as their academic or professional advisor either. She was doing the minimal - or less than the minimal - scholarly work, was not much involved in faculty committee work or that kind of college service, and although Sophia did not mention it particularly, when D--- as Dean asked if Teri was pulling her full share of the unusual paperwork load the preprofessional program faculty had to produce, Sophia was noncommittal.
Still, Sophia's recommendation was unenthusiastic, and the Dean's concluded with the line intended to rattle the cage: "If the decision were to be made today, it would not be for tenure." Teri asked to speak with me privately about my evaluation, but she just listened politely to my re-hash of the written review. She talked about some professional goals, which - as D--- told her - were perfectly appropriate, but that she would have to make demonstrable progress toward one or more of them in the next two years in order to succeed.
Our personal bond renewed, she left graciously enough, head held high.
Just catching Sallie's eye as Teri let the outer office, D--- knew she was again thinking "classy." And I was too. I was relieved there didn't seem to be real ill-will on either side of whatever little division there was between her and Sophia.
Pastor Stan was now moving into fast-scanning mode, always seeking "What's the point?"
8
From the memorial service for her four or five years later, D--- learned that Sophia was not only respected, admired, sometimes feared a little... She was also loved. Yes. Even though that term seems totally out of keeping with her personality, looks, and character. You knew she was someone you did not want to get crossways with, a person whose judgments were not lightly taken or easily challenged, who seemed to operate using reason and practicality more naturally than idealism or emotion. A classic professional. Competent. Efficient.
But many of her colleagues did not know of the students to whom she had given a ride when they couldn't wait for a bus and couldn't afford a taxi, whom she'd treated to a pizza or a burger when it was particularly hard to make ends meet, whose tuition she had silently subsidized with private scholarship deals she'd quietly arranged through the college's Financial Aid staff. And that kind of thing.
9
It had seemed entirely out of character, and out of keeping for our their working relationships, one day when Sophia was telling the Dean in June that she didn't know whether she could carry her normal load and fulfill her usual duties the following September.
She talked stoically enough, as always, and detailed how she would decide, and when, and how. Her tone of voice was flat, businesslike as usual. She was sitting bolt upright in the chair across from me, and her wig was just a little askew: all the typical Sophia.
But it astonished D--- to realize inside that when they stood at their meeting's conclusion, he was going to give her a hug. That was just going to be the right thing to do. This, you know, was not what one normally did with Sophia.
But D--- stepped toward her with his right arm a little out to the side, and she walked into the hug. It was just three or four seconds, but it was a real hug. They smiled a little as they separated; she turned on her heel and opened the inner office door. She waved as usual at Sallie as she turned down the hallway and plodded out.
10
When Teri's tenure swam into sight, even rather far out there on the horizon, it was real clear she couldn't make it. The fact is, she hadn't met even one of the standards we had reviewed that last time the two of us had met. It didn't look as though she had made any attempt to do so.
Sophia had even quit covering for Teri's refusing to do the extras required by the professional standards self-study reports. Only once, but once, she had admitted that the other faculty in the program were pretty disgusted with the extra effort Teri's laxities required from them.
In short, it looked as though Teri had surveyed the situation and had made the decision that, if we were serious about all we said we expected of her, this wasn't the right place for her. But she was going to make us be the ones to take the responsibility to say so. Okay, fine, D--- thought. I can handle that.
11
As the next academic year drew to a close, Teri called Sallie to ask for an appointment to see the Dean and Sophia together for an exit interview. That was unusual but not a bad thing in itself, and besides the non-reappointment process the year before had gone smoothly and Teri's terminal year had been problem-free too... So, why not?
Sophia was already with D--- in the inner office, having arrived precisely five minutes early, when Teri herself strode through the hallway door. Sallie ushered her in, and they all took a seat.
"We want to thank you, Teri," Dean D--- started, "for having completed your contract this year coolly and professionally," adding "That's an anxiety I as the dean have in such situations, and - like most folks, I have to say - you did well."
"Do you have your future plans all laid out?" Sophia asked, keeping up the conversational tone.
Teri did not seem her usual serene, above-the-usual hullabaloo self, despite her normal preppy suit and slacks and just-so hair style. "I know what I'll be doing," she said, then with a harder edge looking at Sophia: "no thanks to you."
"Well, that's fine then," I tried to get us back in the chit-chat mode.
But Teri wasn't having any part of it. She had come with a mission, and she was going to get right to it. "You're a miserable tyrant," she said to Sophia who looked back at her calmly. And before the Dean could wedge in a cautionary word, she went on. (Maybe it was a set speech she'd been rehearsing.)
"You know everything. It's always what you say that matters. You don't care about others, who have real lives and families and community obligations."
D--- was stirring but Teri just raised her voice so he couldn't intervene. "You don't even like yourself! So you're sick? You deserve it. You deserve to die. You - deserve - to - die!"
Dean D--- had stood up. Teri had, too. "That's what I have to say, and I've done it," she turned on her heel, pulled open the door to Sallie's office and stomped away out the door. Sophia was standing now, next to D---, side-by-side,
12
D--- asked Sallie to close the hallway door and come into his office to join him and Sophia.
"Sallie," the Dean said, "I have just witnessed the most despicable human behavior of my lifetime."
Sophia was sitting quietly again, looking impassively at the two of us.
"Oh gosh!" Sallie exclaimed. "I'm so sorry, Sophia." Then to D---, in a sort of stage-whisper: "At first, I kind of liked that girl."
D--- couldn't keep from laughing. Sophia sort of chuckled too.
"At first," Sophia said, "she seemed perfect."
*
Midway through his scan, Pastor Stan had stopped wondering who had been in attendance Sunday morning who might have written this thing. He didn't know of anyone who worked at the university...
It didn't matter, though; it was destined for his trash can. Would it be recyclable?
***
