by trustees. M.R. was not going to accumulate a small fortune through her University connections. M.R. would establish a scholarship financed—(secretly)—by her own salary….
It will be change—radical change!—that works through me.
Neukirchen will be but the agent. Invisible!
She did have radical ideas for the University. She did want to reform its “historic” (i.e., Caucasian-patriarchal/hierarchical) structure and she did want to hire more women and minority faculty, and above all, she wanted to implement a new tuition/scholarship policy that would transform the student body within a few years. At the present time an uncomfortably high percentage of undergraduates were the sons and daughters of the most wealthy economic class, as well as University “legacies”—(that is, the children of alumni); there were scholarships for “poor” students, that constituted a small percentage; but the children of middle-income parents constituted a precarious 5 percent of admissions … M.R. intended to increase these, considerably.
For M. R. Neukirchen was herself the daughter of “middle-income” parents, who could never have afforded to send her to this Ivy League university.
Of course, M. R. Neukirchen would not appear radical, but rather sensible, pragmatic and timely.
She’d assembled an excellent team of assistants and aides. And an excellent staff. Immediately when she’d been named president, she’d begun recruiting the very best people she could; she’d kept on only a few key individuals on Leander’s staff.
At all public occasions, in all her public pronouncements, M. R. Neukirchen stressed that the presidency of the University was a “team effort”—publicly she thanked her team, and she thanked individuals. She was the most generous of presidents—she would take blame for mistakes but share credit for successes. (Of course, no mistakes of any consequence had yet been made since M.R. had taken over the office.) To all whom she met in her official capacity she appealed in her eager earnest somewhat breathless manner that masked her intelligence—as it masked her willfulness; sometimes, in an excess of feeling, this new president of the University was known to clasp hands in hers, that were unusually large strong warm hands.
It was the influence of her mother Agatha. As Agatha had also influenced M.R. to keep a cheerful heart, and keep busy.
As both Agatha and Konrad were likely to say, as Quakers—I hope.
For it was Quaker custom to say, not I think or I know or This is the way it must be but more provisionally, and more tenderly—I hope.
“Yes. I hope.”
In the front seat the radio voice was loud enough to obscure whatever it was M.R. had said. And Carlos was just slightly hard of hearing.
“You can turn off the radio, please, Carlos. Thanks.”
Since the incident at the bridge there was a palpable stiffness between them. No one has more of a sense of propriety than an older staffer, or a servant—one who has been in the employ of a predecessor, and can’t help but compare his present employer with this predecessor. And M.R. was only just acquiring a way of talking to subordinates that wasn’t formal yet wasn’t inappropriately informal; a way of giving orders that didn’t sound aggressive, coercive. Even the word Please felt coercive to her. When you said Please to those who, like Carlos, had no option but to obey, what were you really saying?
And she wondered was the driver thinking now It isn’t the same, driving for a woman. Not this woman.
She wondered was he thinking She is alone too much. You begin to behave strangely when you are alone too much—your brain never clicks off.
The desk clerk frowned into the computer.
“‘M. R. Neukirchen’”—the name sounded, on his lips, faintly improbable, comical—“yesss—we have your reservation, Mz. Neukirchen—for two nights. But I’m afraid—the suite isn’t quite ready. The maid is just finishing up….”
Even after the unscheduled stop, she’d arrived early!
She hadn’t even instructed Carlos to drive past her old residence Balch Hall—for which she felt a stab of nostalgia.
Not for the naïve girl she’d been as an undergraduate, nor even for the several quite nice roommates she’d had—(like herself, scholarship girls)—but for the thrilling experience of discovering, for the first time, the livingness of the intellectual enterprise, that had been, to her, the daughter of bookish parents, previously confined to books.
M.R. told the desk clerk that that was fine. She could wait. Of course. There was no problem.
“… no more than ten or fifteen minutes, Mz. Neukirchen. You can check in now, and wait in our library-lounge, and I will call you.”
“Thank you! This is ideal.”
Smile! Win more flies with honey than with vinegar Agatha would advise though this was not why, in fact, Agatha smiled so frequently, and so genuinely. And there was Konrad’s dry rebuttal, with a wink of the eye for their young impressionable daughter.
Sure thing! If it’s flies you want.
The library-lounge was an attractive wood-paneled room where M.R. could spread her things out on an oak table and continue to work.
Always it is a good thing: to arrive early.
The impulsive stop in the nameless little town by the nameless little creek or river hadn’t been a blunder after all—only just a curious episode in M.R.’s (private) life, to be forgotten.
Arrive early. Bring work.
She’d begun to acquire a reputation for being the most astonishing zealot of work.
It was known, M.R. was very bright—very earnest, idealistic—but it had not been quite known, how hard M.R. was willing to work.
For this brief trip, she’d brought along enough work for several days. And, of course, she would be in constant communication with Salvager Hall—the president’s team of aides, assistants, secretarial staff. In a constant stream e-mail messages came to her as president of the University, and these she dealt with both expeditiously and with an air of schoolgirl pleasure so it was known, and it would become more widely known, that M.R. never failed to include personal queries and remarks in her e-mail messages, she was irrepressibly friendly.
For we love our work. No more potent narcotic than work!
And M.R.’s administrative work was very different from her work as a writer/philosopher—administration is the skillful organizing of others, its center of gravity is exterior; all that matters, all that is significant, urgent—profound—is exterior.
“I want to be ‘of service.’ I do not want to be ‘served.’”
This too was a legacy of the Neukirchens. For the Quaker, the commonweal outweighs the merely personal.
Critically now M.R. was re-examining her address—“The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism’”—even as she found herself distracted by a memory of the bridge and the sharp water-smells—the mysterious faded lettering on the dark-brick building on the farther bank.
In the lobby, uplifted voices.
