Sheila had invited the Skullthorps together with the entire crew, including Kit and Handy, to luncheon at her house. The women consulted each other about what they and the men should wear. You didn't get an invitation from "Lady" Sheila every day. She invited faculty, staff, students, parents and alumni to a lawn party every October on a weekend when the football game was "there." Otherwise, she admitted mostly upperclahsse to Saddle Junction, her father President (1937-1959) Wilcox's two-acre lawn and fifteen-room mansion. Hazlehurst, the official residence of the president, consisted of only one acre and ten rooms. Sheila gave Softack orders, he obeyed and his wife Imogen sizzled. Sheila once said, "My father earned his fortune," implying that "Ham," a nickname that made Imogen cringe, only knew how to beg. Yet Ham himself admired the grand old lady of ZU as much as everybody else and even Imogen had to admit that she had her virtues. One was remembering the names of everybody who had ever "done something for ZU," which excluded the ZU Press and the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics. If anybody mentioned one of Gettough's athletes or Spratly's authors, she snapped: "Who is that?" And should anybody try to explain, she changed the subject as if he had said an obscenity.

She had her own hierarchy, although she never mentioned it. Nobody ranked higher than her father. Kings, queens, popes, princes, princesses, presidents of countries, prime and other ministers, governors, US and Zenia cabinet officers, senators and supreme court justices, Nobel Prize recipients and Billy Graham ranked no higher than presidents of "real" universities, as opposed to "toe-tip colleges." She let them know by an overtone of irony in her voice, which, together with her age, usually smoothed the ruffles. A subtle modulation introduced a slight condescendence towards mere presidents of colleges, vice-presidents of all kinds, boardmembers, cardinals, bishops ("arch or otherwise"), US and Zenia representatives, "real" colonels and "ship" captains, pilots of all airplanes and helicopters, CEOs of non-polluting companies with more than ten employees and spouses of everybody on the highest level. A further modulation combined the same condescendence with sympathy, the degree of irony remaining constant. It included everybody else from deans to freshmen, from skyscraper cleaners to garbage collectors, from lieutenant colonels to privates, from the musicians in the orchestra to the ticket takers and ushers, all "honest" judges, lawyers, doctors, salespeople and professors, the dishonest ones being relegated to the same hell as 

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Gettough and Spratly. In addition to Ham, a few received special treatment within their category, such as Wilma Deah whom Sheila spoke to as if she were fifteen and still blushing when kissed. Part of the sympathy they had for each other stemmed from the facts that Wilma had no birthday and that Sheila, who never forgot anything, had forgotten hers, despite a trifling graduate student in history who found it in the Concordia archives and wondered why nobody paid any attention. Even Imogen thought "somewhere in the eighties" was accurate enough, although Murma and I, when we couldn't sleep, sometimes wondered if it wasn't ninety.

This time we lost our sleep worrying whether our advice about how to dress for Saddle Junction would turn the younger guys out well enough to meet Sheila's requirements. The only thing wrong with Lora's slinky black dress was its color. Sheila would approve of everything above and below because she thought attractive women had a duty to let men know it. As for herself, she admitted to having been more attractive by what she said than how she looked. Lora was wearing high heels and damned if she didn't know how to walk on them! Deanna was walking on hers like the hind legs of a horse. She wore a beige dress with little clusters of flowers here and there. She would have made a better impression if her mother had bought it for her after she had rounded out. Yet she was all the prettier because of the dapper young man at her side. Austin Reed had fitted Guy with a light brown suit, a light blue shirt and a large white tie. His snazzy shoes could only have come from Italy. Kit wore a fluffy baby blue dress and Handy, a baby pink zootsuit, both bought for a wedding. A fleeting smile between Murma and Emily conceded that the rustic couple had done their best. The other guys conformed with the faculty standard for cocktail parties and dinners, while Jake and Muriel had dressed as for church. Although Sheila had a butler, she preferred to meet her guests at the front door herself, so she could inspect them. She looked them deliberately up and down as if to decide whether she should send them home for improvements. Nobody could remember her doing that, but the fear that she might may have made it unnecessary. In any case, even Kit and Handy passed.

I owe the foregoing description more to the fluctuations in Sheila's face and the inflexions in her voice than my own observations. She assembled us for fruit or vegetable juice and unsalted, low-cholesterol crackers in her living 

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room with three floor-to-ceiling windows on one side and "The Battle of Saddle Junction (1863)" on the opposite wall. This painting had shaken as many heads in Concordia as the building in which it hung. Wasn't the living room wall in Hazlehurst large enough? Wasn't Hazlehurst spacious enough? Zebediah Wilcox replied that his successor wouldn't be able to replace the painting by something less appropriate. Less appropriate! The History Department deplored a battle that never should have been fought. Recently created by Wilcox himself, the School of Art objected that the money he had paid for this daub would have bought a Bosch. He retorted: "The troops that complain the loudest fight the hardest!" Hadn't he converted a backwater college into a major university?

When seen for the first time, the painting silenced the worst gossips. The only authentic detail was mutual slaughter by thousands of ferocious young men. Desperate to seize a railroad junction, the two armies had arrived at the same time and collided with each other. The lead troops couldn't fall fast enough to make room for the following ones and some soldiers were trampled to death. The well aligned ranks shooting at each other in the painting were a travesty. Likewise the clean, well fitting uniforms and the officers on rearing horses waving their swords. The blue on one side was authentic, but the gray on the other was ridiculous. Destroyed in a raid a few weeks before the battle, the station, which resembled a prop for a model railroad, reappeared in the painting with the sign "Saddle Junction" on the opposite side from the track. The north had won because it had more troops and the south had not lost because a local beauty had turned the general's head.

You are probably wondering how a bluestocking who liked poetry could have tolerated such an abomination in her living room. So did I until I witnessed an argument between her and Forthwright. Although Sheila loved to lecture university and state officials, none dared to argue with her except him. Arguments with her, he boasted, persuaded the bystanders to vote for him. He drew her attention to the painting by a gesture that Truman might have used on MacArthur: "What is that thing doing in your living room?"

"That thing happens to be President Wilcox's favorite painting." 

"It does for his house what 'Co-Ed Couple' does for his campus."

"Boss Forthwright!"

"You are the most impudent demagogue who has ever run for office in this state."

"And if we had Rodin's 'Lovers' instead of 'Co-Ed Couple'?"

"If my father had hung a Bosch on that wall, half my guests would turn around and leave as soon as they saw it."

"I don't invite people to amuse myself at their expense."

"Well... It isn't the most important reason."

One of Sheila's servants came running with an ashtray on a stand and everybody roared with laughter. Second-level guests were allowed to smoke only with this show of disapproval.

"Did you get that from Gladstone or Disraeli?"

You are going to accuse me of getting off the subject too, but I couldn't resist. While I'm at it, though, let me explain that Sheila never served alcohol before five o'clock on the principle that it loosened minds as well as tongues. Juice and crackers in the living room had a specific purpose just like everything she did. She learned the names and families of all the youngers and in-betweeners, recognizing several of these and telling them 

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things they didn't know about their ancestors two or three generations back. Handy's great uncle Hade for Hadrian Bracewell, a legendary hayseed, had kept the campus laughing for four years. The campus needed it; the fourth year was 1941 and Hade fell at Anzio. Sheila went over to the painting and pointed with her cane at one of the officers in gray: "That's my great great uncle. He wasn't on his horse waving his sword like that, but he died right there."

She led us into the dining room and, standing behind the chair in the middle of the oval table on the other side, assigned everybody a seat. Cary and I sat at the ends; no woman was without a man on at least one side and no "young person" without an older one. Sheila impressed all of us by her ability not only to put everybody at ease but also to enter into the spirit of the submarine. She had decided that our project would be the subject of our conversation. Wasting little breath on our disaster, she took a keen interest in how we were overcoming it. The food was delicious, especially the ratatouille. Everybody knew Sheila served better food than any of the thirty-some restaurants in Concordia and it was healthy too. Her cook Sadie had kept her job by pleasing guests with little salt, sugar, spice and no garlic. After decaffeinated coffee, the only kind Sheila served, she took us to the Orangerie in back of the house on the other side from the swimming pool. There was a lot of space, despite the palm trees which, she said, would go back around the pool once the weather was warm enough. Enjoying our perplexity, she teased: "Maybe you will feel uncomfortable."

The luxury of working in the Orangerie enabled us to reach cruising speed again two weeks after the fire. We welcomed Sheila on board... or was she welcoming us? In any case, she made a valuable contribution adding a viewpoint misesteemed by academic critics and often inaccessible to them. Once the palm trees were back out around the pool, everybody had a standing invitation to take a dip whenever he liked, although few of us did before five. When we thought cooling off might reconcile opponents in an overheated argument, however, we sent them to the pool. Deanna arrived one morning with such an angry expression on her face that we burst out laughing. Cary, who mastered all ceremonies, solemnly condemned her to a dip with Guy as lifeguard. She dismissed this title with a toss of her head: evidently her lover was also the cause of her anger. We never learned what 

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he had said or done, but twenty minutes of splashing around restored her good humor to the point that we burst out laughing again and, this time, she was the one who blushed. The cramped interior of 327 had encouraged hand holding, furtive kisses, an arm sneaking around a shoulder and a head leaning on one, yet these habits continued in the less intimate space of the Orangerie and Sheila surprised the couple in a clinch worthy of Clark Gabel and Bette Davis. They sprang apart and, for once, Guy didn't blush alone. 

"What do you take me for?" Sheila protested, "an old maid or something!" Walking past them with her cane pounding on the floor: "Finish what you started! Humanity depends on it."

We were fitting the last pieces into our puzzle by the end of the semester when Sheila broke a silence at lunch one day: "Why don't we read the whole thing through aloud? Everyone could take a turn."

Cary: "Wonderful idea! We could catch mistakes, think of changes..."

Me: "Anticipate objections by Spratly and his readers."

Murma: "Including EH?"

Me: "We will probably have to fight, but not to the bitter end. Jake and Muriel made it clear that they will support us if we have to resort to another press. The fire changed her mind and Ombre's death changed his."

Me: "If we can convince the university that Spratly is letting EH dictate a revision that would ruin our edition, we will have a legitimate reason to submit to another press. Spratly will back down, especially if there were an initiative to reduce his subsidy. All academic presses have become subsidized businesses, but his is crass."

Murma: "Maybe you better ask everyone here not to repeat that." 

Solomon: "You are right, but so is he." 

Sheila: "I hope you won't have to force Spratly's hand."

Lora: "After all the work you have done, after everything you have been through..."

Lora: "Anyone could have done what the younger guys are doing."

Me: "The hell they could have!"

Emily: "I agree."

Deanna: "We need you!"

Me: "I hope you will wait longer than that. Murma is right: We are all in the same submarine. If anybody drops a wrench on the floor, depth charges will fall on us."

Since it was my turn to serve the daily surprise, I plotted with Sadie to make French coffee. After the first sip, the youngers made a face and added cream.

Murma: "If you do that in France, everyone will know where you came from."

Lora: "They must have stainless steel stomachs."

Deanna: "What's going to happen to the crew when we have finished?"

Guy: "Is everyone just going to go his own way?"

Emily: "At least two are going to go the same way."

Solomon: "I know of two others."

Edie: "He isn't a very galant player. All he wants to do is win."

Solomon: "I make up for it afterwards."

Edie: "Sol!"

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Solomon: "Everyone's invited."

Lora: "What are we invited to?"

Edie: "He wasn't very galant about that either: 'Heads for folklore, tails for magic.' He flipped his quarter heads!"

Lora: "On purpose?"

Edie: "Of course!"

Lora: "I might have guessed."

Solomon: "I didn't know I was that clever."

Guy: "Since you are so clever, we have to guess. You are going to get married in a synagogue and not in a catholic church: right?"

Solomon: "Hey! You are pretty clever too!"

Deanna: "We aren't going to get married yet."

Guy blushed.

Lora: "Yet?"

Deanna: "We might get bored."

Murma: "I have. It's when you give me your lecture."

Me: "I'm going to give it to you right now." I chased her around the table while the men cheered and the women jeered.

Sheila: "There are three kinds of couples: not ready, ready and already."

Deanna was going to comment, but Guy interrupted her: "Miss Wilcox is right."

"Sheila. We got off on a comedy with a happy ending. But what is going to happen to the crew?"

Emily: "Since both are in the fall, we could pick the more convenient date according to the university calendar."

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Me: "How about a learned society? We could call it the Jamma Skullthorp Submarine."

Murma: "Everyone here is a charter member. Jake, Muriel, Hardy and Kit too."

Me: "All charter members will take a turn serving one year as president, beginning with Sheila."

Sheila: "Provided Lora is my vice."

Lora: "Do I look like a vice?"

Me: "The dues will be absolutely ridiculous."

Solomon: "Like $2?"

Sheila: "How would you like a Jamma Skullthorp Fellowship? I was going to give ZU some fellowships anyway, but I'm not going to let them play the usual games. My lawyer is writing a proposal and I told him I wanted the Skullthorp Fellowship reserved for a second-year graduate student in the humanities who has demonstrated, during her first year at ZU, promise of literary, artistic or musical talent."

Edie: "Her?"

Everybody was enthusiastic.

Sheila: "The committee who will choose the best candidate or decide that no candidate is qualified will come from the crew."

On the night of the fire, somebody had said: "It's got to be rebuilt and restored, exactly as it was before." It must have been one of the crew, but nobody seems to remember which one. The insurance would pay most of the reconstruction and replacement costs. Sheila persuaded Softack to have the university buy the apartment as soon as it was rebuilt. Property Management negotiated the purchase with Joe Cather, who expected the library and museum to enhance the value of the Mews. Solomon undertook the restoration of Jamma's library and Edie, that of her record collection 

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and stereo equipment. Sheff Bogelheimer, who had been the director of Buildings and Grounds for thirty years, accepted the job of replacing her furniture, linen, kitchen, office equipment, etc. I had never paid much attention to the praise he received in university publications, so I had never noticed the irony between the lines. His zeal for providing ZU with the services he thought it needed equaled his contempt for everybody who disagreed with him on this subject. When a new vice president for finance cut his budget, Sheff waited until a blizzard blanketed the campus with seventeen inches of snow. Then he announced that the cuts had forced him to lay off employees and sell equipment, so that it would take him three days to clear paths, sidewalks, roads, parking lots, etc. That summer, the vice president returned to research and teaching, which had always been his fondest dream.

Sheff hired men and a few women who conformed to his standards, but only if he thought they would obey him. If they didn't, he fired them. He not only expected obedience on the job, but also at all other times. No smoking indoors or inside vehicles and, if you smoked outdoors, you had better not throw your stub on the ground. No drugs, including Marijuana, no drinking except for a few beers Friday and Saturday evenings, no fornication and, if you didn't get married and have children, you were in trouble. The feminists, the gays, the ethnics, etc. loved to hate him and, much to the delight of the press, he encouraged them every chance he got. He Infuriated the feminists by statements calculated to ridicule their ideology without giving them any legal opportunity to retaliate. Unable to stand it any longer, the Concerned Women's Action Committee accused him of hiring more men than women and paying them more than the women he did hire. To everybody's surprise, Sheff's female employees told CWAC to shut up, behave and mind their own business. To everybody's even greater surprise, CWAC did shut up and behave, and, while they hardly stopped minding in other peoples' business, they confined it for a while to muttering among themselves.

Emboldened by Sheff's apparent inability to use this tactic against them, the Gay Rights Action Bureau mounted a frontal assault on B&G. Assuming, after a few days, that they had silenced him, they began to crow, always a mistake. Two men and a woman from B&G appeared on "Doing Your 

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Thing" and confessed that they were gays, although they didn't want to shout it from the rooftops. Each had an interesting story to tell. A young man had indulged in homosexual promiscuity with other adolescents until his parents, his minister and Sheff had persuaded him to make his contribution to society by marrying a nice girl and having a family. A lonesome middleaged widower had taken a young lover in, treating him as generously as his wife. But this young man was just a parasite bent on appropriating his property and savings. Thus the widower followed the advice of his family, his minister and Sheff by telling the young man to leave, but he gave him some money and offered to help him find a job. Taking the money, the young man tried to blackmail him by threatening to divulge their relationship to Sheff. The woman had married a man who drank, took drugs, couldn't hold a job and took it out on her, beating her so badly that she scared her children until four operations had reconstructed her face. An unmarried woman she had known in school took her and her children in. They lived together for several years, but then this friend, their minister and Sheff helped her find a good husband and father for her children. All three witnesses had smiles on their faces that the militants of GRAB took for hypocrisy, insisting that none of them had had the courage to face the permanent reality of being a homosexual. Then GRAB, President Softack, Governor Downy, the Concordia Semaphore, the Student Advocate, WZTV and WZFM received xeroxes of a petition signed by Sheff and every one of his 74 employees affirming that they were and had always been gay. The militants of GRAB noticed that, while straights had been listening sympathically, they were fighting a smile now.

Insinuations by the ethnics provoked more subtle protests from an assortment of blacks, hispanics, two Palestinians, an Apache and a Polynesian that Sheff had hired for that very purpose. These are God's children too, he growled, and, if anybody forgot... God's special children surprised the ethnic groups by their eagerness to join and participate in their activities. Yet the new members introduced unwelcome opposition to exaggeration and excess, especially when B&G was concerned, thus internal dissension threatened these organizations. Such victories only incited the campus axe grinders to greater revenge for their humiliation by more determined attacks on B&G. On and on it went and the by-standing majority of the university assumed that Sheff enjoyed it. 

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When I spoke with him about Jamma, he took no interest in anything I said except the practical skills she had learned from her father. Her poetry meant nothing more to him than the other nonsense he saw in the preoccupations of humanities professors. Courses in literature and foreign languages wasted the taxpayers' money. He disapproved of Jamma Skullthorp because she never went to church, where she would have found a husband so she could make her contribution to society. All of Sheff's employees attended church and basketball games, voted for the candidates of his choice, deplored abortions tooth and nail, feared God and loved the land of the free. Gettough had been right to take his team off the floor when the Russians were ahead by thirty-three points, because the officials were favoring our communist enemies. If the School of Sciences and Humanities followed the example of B&G, we would graduate citizens who loved freedom, hated evil and beat ZTech. The foregoing summary may suggest that Sheff did a lot of talking; on the contrary, he mastered the economy of speech, choosing his words, modulating his voice and making his opinion clear without saying anything that the press could quote to confirm it. Reporters were afraid of him because he rephrased their questions in order to shift the subject of the interview to them.

Me: "Do you mind if I call you Sheff?"

He watched me with a wooden face.

"You want to talk me into something."

"I never do anything that I will regret."

"Her grave looks pretty nice."

"Why shouldn't that place look ever better?"

"Nicer, more comfortable... cost effective." 

"For once, money is not the problem."

Triumphant chuckle.

"What's the point in that?"

"So?"

"Do I have to go to museums to find that out?"

"I saw Lindberg's airplane and an Apollo vehicle. They looked like the pictures I had seen."

"No, but that's something I would like to see. Would I mind if they replaced it with a desk of glass and steel? I would, but Jamma Skullthorp didn't sign the Declaration of Independence."

"Since her apartment was destroyed, the authentic conditions have disappeared. Since we can only replace them by something similar, why quibble over a greater or lesser degree of resemblance?"

I thought I had refuted all of Sheff's objections, but he clearly didn't and our conversation began to turn in circles like a boat with a stuck rudder. I asked Jake to call Sheff and, although they got on as well as I had imagined, 

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Sheff refused to budge. He did say that replacing Jamma's furniture and other goods by duplicates would require the services of one or several experts outside of B&G. His budget didn't cover such an expense and he didn't like to hire people over whom he had no permanent control. I asked Wilma to speak to him, but he reminded her that the Director of Buildings and Grounds was on the same level of the organization chart as the Dean of Sciences and Humanities. Replacing Jamma Skullthorp's furniture and other goods was his responsibility and not hers. How would she have liked it If he had suggested who should teach what in S&H? She had appealed to him in other matters, though seldom successfully, and he had never been that uncivil before. She didn't want to speak to Softack. After years of pressure from Sheff's enemies, he had intervened in support of the gays only to suffer the embarrassment of their discomfiture. How about Forthwright? Damon and Sheff had been trading favors for years, with Damon padding Sheff's budget and Sheff delivering votes to Damon. I asked Sheila to talk to Damon and, after teasing her, he agreed to persuade Sheff to cooperate and she, to find and pay the experts he needed. Henceforth, the haggling took place between Sheila and Sheff, who loved to haggle and especially with each other.

Amos Henderson, who had built Tree Shadow Mews, did the reconstruction of Jamma's apartment in four months. Since Sheila and Sheff had already begun to replace her furniture, kitchen and tableware, linen, appliances and office equipment, they finished the job a month later. Jake and Muriel came to help with the finishing touches and participate in the midsummer ceremony we had organized to commemorate the event. It began in the Mews Recreation Center with a reading of Jamma's poetry, in which every member of the crew recited or read his favorite poems. A discussion followed with questions and comments from the audience, some of whom had to stand or sit on the floor. Sheila had bullied Softack and Forthwright into attending without making a speech and Jake had persuaded Sheff to attend too. The women wore dresses; the men, coats and ties, and all of Sheff's keys hung from his belt. None of these notables were wasting their time since reporters from all of the local media noted their presence and their contribution to the project. Once the discussion had run its course, we led a procession to 327 where a granit slab had been laid in the corner between the sidewalk along the street and the one that led to the entrances. Sheila, who had ordered the stone, invited Muriel to pull the veil away and, 

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once she had done it, Guy read a copy of the inscription on it. It designated 327 as the Jamma Skullthorp Museum and Library, summarized her life and work, reported the fire, regretted the loss and Ombre's death, celebrated the restoration. Then Joe Cather handed the deed to the property over to President Softack and I invited the crowd to visit 327, in which the youngers took turns serving as hosts and hostesses. Sheff had lent us a portable staircase so that our visitors could leave by the balcony, from which Jake had temporarily removed a section of the hand rail.

Since everybody knew I hated ceremonies, everybody teased me about this one, admitting nonetheless that it had been successful. The Museum and Library attracted enough visitors to necessitate a temporary extension of opening days and times, but we expected that, once the novelty had worn off, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons would be enough. We could make special arrangements for students or scholars who needed to work in the library. Kit and Handy had moved back into their apartment downstairs, so I hired them as custodians of the property. They suggested that we appoint a cat in residence, an idea that met with the unanimous approval of the crew. Deanna persuaded us to stage a contest to find a kitten who resembled Ombre and we published a list of mental and physical criteria in the local media. Thus several dozen kittens arrived at the Recreation Center on the appointed Saturday morning. We eliminated about half of them because they didn't have short hair or emerald eyes, or weren't all gray, although we regretted a few who had a patch of white somewhere. The remaining half competed in ankle stroking, cord swatting and wrestling with a gloved hand; we chose the seven best performers. I had suggested that we observe the finalists' reaction to certain surprises, such as a perfume that I had given Murma and that she never used. Edie played a variety of sounds on a cassette recorder that she carried around each kitten, moving closer and further away. Solomon bounced ping pong balls around each one. Joe Cather confronted each with Aristopholes, his boxer, who scared a few people until they saw how friendly and tolerant he was. Handy gave each kitten a little milk to lap and a few cat biscuits to eat so we could judge their "table manners." Deanna simply picked each one up, stroked it in her arms and saw how it reacted. After much discussion, we narrowed the seven to two, of whom, as you have probably guessed, each had his partisans. Both had swatted the ping pong ball back to Solomon, one had pawed Aristopholes' snout and the other had exceeded 

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the field in impertinence. Neither, and in fact, none of the contestants tilted its head, a disappointment which nonetheless demonstrated how unique Ombre had been. The majority finally persuaded the minority to agree on the impertinent one, whom we named Ombre Bis with Bis for short.

What a happy crew we were then! Yet we would have been even happier if Jamma had been able to join us and if we hadn't seen an obstacle looming down the road. We knew we were producing an edition which, if published without destructive alterations, would raise public and critical enthusiasm. The introduction consisted of Jamma's biography, including the composition, revision and publication of her poems, and a thorough study of her poetry by Cary and Emily. The biography contained sections on the story of Cicada and Firefly by Murma, Jamma's reading interests by Solomon and her taste in music by Edie. Numbers, letters and asterisks in the text referred to three series of notes at the bottom of the page: 1. explaining biographical, literary, musical or historical allusions; 2. quoting variants and 3. noting linguistic peculiarities. With patience, readers could follow Jamma's revisions of her poems from version to version and consider the contemporary events in her life as well as the books she was reading and the music she was listening to. Much of Cicada's e-mail correspondence with Firefly appeared in an appendix. Three bibliographies presented 1. the studies cited in our edition, 2. the works in Jamma's library and those she had borrowed from other libraries, and 3. the records in her collection. An index referred readers to proper nouns and well-known general ideas. Among the illustrations were the photo of Muriel, Jake and Ombre in front of the house in East Dalrymple and an enlargement of Ombre. The only photo of Jamma that she hadn't destroyed, a portrait in her high school yearbook, served as the frontispiece. Other photos showed her office, living room, 327 after the fire and after the reconstruction. Some crayon drawings from preschool and the first grade suggested that she might have had a talent for painting. The title page read as follows: "Jamma Skullthorp, Poetic Works, edited by Cary O'Sullivan and Emily Chan, biography by Augustus South with the collaboration of Murma South, Solomon and Edith Grosser," along with the rest of the crew including Ombre. An acknowledgment on the next page named Wilma Furlock, Hamilton Softack, Damon Forthwright and Sheffield Bogelheimer. Murma wouldn't let me add Elston Howard. We dedicated the volume to Jake and Muriel Skullthorp. 

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Cary and I delivered the printout and a disk recording to the ZU Press on a sweltering day and asked for a receipt. Then the waiting began. We saw less of each other as the members of the crew attended their own business. Emily was back in Ann Arbor, Solomon and Edie were back in their libraries, Cary was trying to return to the scholarly project he had left, Murma had enlisted me to help with cleaning that should have been done in spring, Lora had a job in the registrar's office that was boring her to tears. "Everybody seems so dumb!" she complained with a magnificent shrug of her magnificent shoulders. Murma and I couldn't stop laughing. Deanna and Guy were visiting her parents in Arizona or his in Alabama depending on which week was which. If you couldn't find Kit and Handy at 326, they were either in the woods or the mountains. Murma ran into Sheila in the library and dinner was late. Wilma had us to lunch at Fu Chen's and, while we had a wonderful time together, we hardly mentioned the edition. Meanwhile, we were phoning our anxiety back and forth on the excuse of keeping our morale up. Before inquiring about the status of the edition, Cary and I decided to wait the traditional three months so often assumed and so often ignored. Yet we were convinced that we would hear nothing from Marvin until we inquired and maybe we would have to inquire more than once. We assumed that EH would be the first reader and that he would demand extensive alterations based on his methodology. I kept arguing that we should submit our edition to another publisher at the same time, but Murma and Cary kept objecting that we would only make enemies at a time when we needed friends. Sheila and Wilma were opposed to solliciting any publisher except the ZU Press.

We had committed the error of concentrating on the most likely threat from resourceful and unscrupulous enemies who had many options, hence our surprise when Marvin called the week before the end of the three months and asked Cary and me to come and see him in his office. Since I avoided university functions, I had seen Marvin only once before at a colloquium on scholarly publishing in the humanities. He reminded me of tourists who frequent café's made famous by intellectuals who have left because of the tourists. He had a bush of gray hair in need of a cut and a comb, for lack of which he tossed it backwards with a shake of his head or a sweep of his hand. Since it immediately fell down over his eyes again, you saw as much of them as a sheep dog's. He wore thick, oversized glasses set in horn-rimmed frames and they magnified the gravity and profundity of his crow's 

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feet. His tweed coat and worsted trousers looked second hand and slept in. A tie representing a jagged black cliff in front of an orange sky hung loosely from the neck of his dark green shirt with the longer, narrow end on one side and the shorter, wide end on the other. He made dismissive gestures with his left hand while keeping his right index finger on his place in the paper he was giving. When he felt the need for emphasis, he tore his glasses off and shook them in the air as if to free them of dandruff. His voice lacked overtones and inflexion, his sentences labored under a load of adjectives and adverbs, his theme of dashing foolish hopes neither relented nor varied. His appearance and the impression he made seemed deliberate to me. Applause from bored listeners and gratitude from cheated authors had evidently gone to his head. 

My friends let me know it by telling me, more or less bluntly, to keep my mouth shut, but Si gave me that advice once to deceive me and another time, to provoke me. I made Marvin's blacklist after he had finished his paper by questioning him about a point he had shaken his horn rims over: "The authors I publish are my friends."

Quoting this sentence, I asked: "Do you mean that you befriend authors after you have accepted their manuscripts for publication?"

"Should an author you haven't published and who is consequently not your friend send his manuscript somewhere else?"

Angry looks from his friends in the audience including Si.

"And he has as good a chance of publishing with you as your friends?"

"No one would question the right of publishers to befriend the authors they have published, but don't they face a possible conflict of interest when they have to decide between manuscripts submitted by friends and others they don't know?"

Marvin had gained some weight. He had a big, austere office with open and closed manuscripts heaped on his desk and a long table on one side. He 

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invited us to sit down on the other side where we found two easy chairs and a sofa around a low table, on which our printout lay. "I know how long and hard you have worked on this project," he said, "and the results clearly reflect it. I have no quarrel with the quality of your edition. My readers found no errors in your reproduction of the poems and their variants. Everything is explained, everything is proved, everything is clear. The critical apparatus leaves little to be desired. It's a thorough job... maybe a little too thorough. The cost of printing and binding it would approach the price at which I might be able to sell a thousand copies, leaving little or no margin. If I didn't sell all of them, I would lose and I can't afford losses. The state subsidy merely keeps me afloat, it doesn't move the ship. Here's a statement exposing the economic realities of publishing this edition as it stands." He gave us each a xerox.

"$10,000. There's a breakdown at the bottom of the page."

Me: "$10,000!"

"Bull shit!"

Cary laughed: "Gus doesn't like the word unprofessional."

"I don't like the word helpers either."

It was all I could do to follow the advice Cary would have given me.

"What are all these other people doing? All you hear from Marvin is 'I' and 'me.'" 

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Consulting and considering resulted in a debate between Cary, who wanted to negotiate an acceptable compromise, and me, who wanted to apply to other publishers. Sheila, Murma and Edie supported Cary; Emily, Solomon and all of the youngers supported me. We also disagreed over the agreement between Jamma's parents and the university: did it imply, as Cary argued, that we had to negotiate with Marvin or, as I argued, that we could submit to other publishers? In Cary's opinion, Marvin had accepted our manuscript on the typical condition that we revise it; in mine, he had typically demanded revisions that he knew were unacceptable and which therefore amounted to a rejection. Cary thought that the agreement with the Skullthorps obligated us to publish with the ZU Press and I, that, since Jake and Muriel had changed their minds, the de facto rejection of our manuscript allowed us to submit it to other publishers. The debate remained friendly, although, at times, it became heated. We invited Wilma to participate and she joined Sheila in promoting the interests of ZU, despite their contempt for Marvin. Cary and his other supporters deviated from them in giving the quality of the edition a higher priority, while Guy spoke for everybody on my side by tactfully insisting that Jamma and her poetry should have the highest priority. I asked Wilma whether Softact or Forthwright might be willing to lean on Spratly: "No," she replied: "Marvin has political skills and he provides Damon with services he couldn't do without. Hamilton would never run the risk of alienating Marvin for this very reason. Although Marvin and Sheff despise each other, they enjoy the same protection and rule their fiefdoms as if the university were a medieval kingdom."

Me: "Like Gettough?"

We had every reason to believe that Wilma's influence over Marvin and his administration of the ZU Press would continue until he had either published our edition or we had submitted it to another press. Our negotiations with him followed a repetitive pattern. We searched our souls to cut our 

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edition while Wilma labored to squeeze more subsidy out of Abe, then Cary and I haggled with Marvin. We never managed to pry any significant concessions out of him, but he always held one back for Wilma whom he knew would intervene afterwards. Again and again, we went back to the crew and tried again. One by one, we cut the extras that had cost us so much time and effort: the illustrations, the glossary, the appendix, the second and third series of notes, one fourth of the introduction, two of the three bibliographies and two thirds of the index. We conceded the relegation of the remaining series of notes to the end of the volume, but we refused to cut our collaborators' names and the acknowledgments despite Marvin's demands that we do so. The cuts and the negotiations distracted Cary and me from our other scholarly work which we had neglected for the edition. I kept telling Murma, Cary, Sheila and Wilma that Marvin was drawing the process out on purpose and taking hidden pleasure in our frustration. EH and Priss were certainly gloating from afar. I lost my temper several times, but everybody and even Marvin reassured me that we were close to an agreement, which he nonetheless postponed on one quibble or another. Two months had gone by and the fall semester had begun when he finally accepted what he called our "revised manuscript" and what I called our "basket case."

Four more went by before we received the proofs in which, to our dismay, we discovered maliciously altered passages and even omissions corresponding to one or more pages of the printout. These discrepancies were all the more shocking because the disk recording we had furnished should have allowed the printer to set his type automatically, thus avoiding all possible mistakes except those that had escaped our own proofreading. We expected, for instance, to find an occasionally missing vowel in a word where it occurs two or three times such as civilty, which we had overlooked. Most of the omitted pages occurred in the Introduction, where they exposed information that would ruin the pretentions of the grave robbers. The love affair between Cicada and Firefly, for instance, contradicted the sexual interpretations of Mumpet and Sinkovitch. The correspondence revealed Jamma's contempt for feminist, psychoanalytic and marxist criticism as well as critical theory. The missing pages included "My Senseless Passion," which clashed with the materialistic inclinations of EH and his coterie. The altered passages confirmed their intolerance of exposition tending to 

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question the critical trends espoused by them. Let me give you a few examples:

We had written: "The persistence of ironical remarks in the margins of Crossly Steeple's Flowering of Critical Theory reveals that Skullthorp not only understood the methods he recommended, but also saw serious flaws in them."

We now read: "The persistent scribblings in the margins of Crossly Steeple's Flowering of Critical Theory reveal that Skullthorp not only misunderstood the methods recommended by him, but also admitted her ignorance, e.g. 'What?'"

We now read: "Endowed with an extraordinary sexual appetite and faced with the practical impossibility of fulfilling it, Skullthorp sought escape in dreams, which, much to her surprise, enabled her to obtain a measure of substitution."

The proofs had arrived without advance notice in February when the temperature stuck below freezing, slivers of dirty ice frustrated removal and a breeze infiltrated clothing. Sheila invited us to do the proofreading at Saddle Junction, but the Orangerie was chilly and drafty, so she had picnic tables and chairs set up in her recreation room with a fire in the fireplace. Since Marvin had given us a typical ten days to do the job, we had to make do with a reduced crew. Emily couldn't arrange a trip to Concordia in time and Lora couldn't get the week off on such late notice, although she came on the weekend. Rotating library shifts enabled Solomon and Edie to help part of the time, while Cary and I had our courses to teach. Kit and Handy offered to pitch in when they were free, so we eagerly accepted, but we had only succeeded in leaving a message on Guy and Deanna's answering machine. All of the olders and in-betweeners except Emily were there on the first afternoon when Guy appeared alone. He looked so sad that we hesitated to ask about Deanna, until Murma, in a tone of voice she had never used except with me and our children, finally said: "Guy... is Deanna busy with her courses?" 

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He blushed: "No, M'am. She transferred to ZTech."

Edie gasped; everybody froze and stared.

"Yes, M'am. It wasn't the same any more... I shuffled a deck on my computer and we drew cards. I drew a six and she drew a jack."

A few days later, Murma arrived at Saddle Junction and discovered Sheila in a bad humor with her arm in a cast and a sling: "I went to get the paper and slipped up on the ice."

"Miss Sheila," scolded Sadie, "I told you to let me go."

The dialogue reoccurred with every new arrival. 

We divided the proofs between us and, as we encountered the omissions and altered passages, we began to suspect that one person was responsible for them and that he had made them blatant. Why? We guessed that he wanted to shift responsibility for corrupting the text from the publisher to the printer. If Marvin substituted uncorrected pages for most of the ones on which we had made corrections and sent this version of the proofs back to the printer, the latter would unknowingly print the corrupted text and Marvin could blame him. Cary and I knew that publishers were contracting with printers in poor countries who did good work at low rates. Although these printers had an interest in doing as good a job as possible, their countries often had a bad reputation in the US. We had never heard of a publisher receiving a shipment of books with a corrupted text, but, if it happened, he could try to persuade the printer to do the work over or, if the printer refused, try to sue him, but that would be expensive and risky. Since such disasters seldom happened, Marvin could expect sympathy if one happened to him and the subsidy he had wrested from the university would cushion his losses. He could further amortize them by selling the faulty edition at a discount on the secondhand market, which would discourage other publishers from accepting an accurate and complete version of our edition. We had no evidence that EH, Priss or one of their friends had corrupted the text before Marvin sent it to the printer, but we could imagine no other explanation. What would keep them from publishing a rival edition of Jamma's poetry? Polemic against us would 

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probably enhance sales. Cicada had always declined to follow Firefly's advice to copyright her poems, because she wanted everybody to have free access to them. Thus the definitive versions of all of them were available online at shshh to any editor who wanted to publish them.

Once we had completed our correction of the proofs, we called a meeting in Sheila's recreation room in the evening when everybody could attend, even Emily and Deanna by speaker phone. We had invited Wilma too. Everybody agreed on the danger, but Cary and I disagreed on the appropriate response. I thought we should demand the right to deal directly with the printer ourselves and, if Marvin refused to cooperate, withdraw our edition from the ZU Press and offer it to another publisher. Cary objected that Marvin would certainly refuse on the excuse that this demand "impugned his integrity:" everybody laughed. Cary also feared that Softack and the half of the university who had sympathized with us would disapprove. They were proud of Jamma because they considered her a product of ZU, despite the failure to discover her talent and encourage her. Thus Cary wanted to call a press conference, state the facts and voice our fears without saying or implying anything about Marvin. We should also lodge a confidential protest with Softack and ask him to make sure that Marvin forwarded all of our corrections to his printer. This time, all of the in-betweeners as well as the youngers supported me, but all of the olders continued to support Cary, while Wilma looked like a sphinx.

Me: "This must be the first time in history that the Dean of S&H has no opinion."

Wilma: "This must be the first time in history that the Dean of S&H has the honor of an invitation to a meeting like this."

"Well... You have probably guessed that I prefer Cary's opinion, but I sympathize with Gus and share all of his fears. I would distinguish between what you can say publicly and what everyone should understand. Call your press conference and state the facts; expose your fears too, but express them in a way that neither Marvin nor anyone else could possibly interpret as an attack."

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"I didn't know they called it that, but it's exactly what I mean. Let everyone who cares understand the threat you face without naming or implicating any individual. Now: Do not repeat what I am going to say... I will ask President Softack and Representative Forthwright to talk to Marvin Spratly, who may find himself facing a decision between forwarding all of your corrections to his printer or losing his job without a hope of finding another one like it. There! If any of you quote any part of what I just said, you will cause the disaster you want to avoid."

"On the contrary, it would increase the pressure on both gentlemen to do something they would rather avoid. But, please, no one else."

"May I say something before we hang up?"

Murma: "Of course!"

Sighing: "I hate ZTech!"

Emily: "What's so funny?"

Edie: "Guy blushed."

Everything seemed to go according to Wilma's plan. Cary and I organized the press conference, but I suggested that he, Edie and Guy sit at the table in front of the room. Wilma and all the rest of the crew except Emily and Deanna sat on the front row. Lora had permission to attend too. Since the journalists young and old knew who to suspect, loaded questions collided thick and fast with noncommital answers. Yet the unaccustomed role amused first Cary, then Guy and finally Edie, so that they were taking pleasure in what amounted to a game. The merriment spread to our public and the press took our side despite routine disclaimers and professions of disinterest. Guy and Edie even put icing on the cake towards the end, when he testified that he had learned more from the Skullthorp project than all the 

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rest of his education so far and she, that it had changed the course of her life. Mystified, the reporters pressed her for clarification, which embarrassed her without loosening her tongue. Finally, Solomon stood up, turned around and said: "I think she's talking about our engagement." The mood became so joyful that the pretty host of "Doing Your Thing" asked Sheila to recite a few of Jamma's poems, which she did to everybody's satisfaction. The Advocate and the Semaphore covered the conference favorably and ran favorable editorials, while WZTV and WZFM gave us enthusastic support and the Mapleton press echoed the publicity. Cary and I had a field day on "Doing Your Thing" where the inevitable question of whether we suspected professors Howard and Charitzky of involvement gave us an opportunity to exaggerate our ignorance and remind the public that they had moved on to "greener pastures," an irony that had the hosting couple in stitches. The laughter on the air spread to telespectors as phone calls, e-mail and a few letters demonstrated. Wilma and Sheila told us that Softack and Forthwright had exceeded our expectations in holding Marvin responsible for the fate of our edition. When Cary and I delivered the corrected proofs to the ZU Press, Marvin invited us into his office and apoligized for the corrupted text, which he blamed on his Lebanese printer who had never given him any trouble before. A Lebanese would have been a particularly convenient scapegoat, Cary and I later agreed.

A thought occurred to me a few nights later: What if Marvin found a more lucrative job as the academic editor of a commercial press? Under his management, the ZU Press had made a lot of money and he had received a lot of acclaim for it. Hadn't he succeeded in identifying himself with the press in the perception of the public? Indeed, he had subordinated the efforts of his employees to his authority so thoroughly that the slightest mention of the ZU Press conjured up a vision of Marvin Spratly playing the intellectual with his long hair, his glassy stare and his dismissive left hand. He had distinguished himself among the other members of his trade by his productivity, his profitibility and especially his skill in attracting manuscripts that, under the cover of scholarly trappings, flattered vulgar preoccupations. The examples I happen to remember are Sho Zhu Kee's Frontier Philosophy, Seldon Pithry's Authenticity of the American Dream, Katy Carmichael's Christianity of the Founding Fathers, Ramòn Sanchez' The Catharsis of Public Tears, Janet Smith-Jones' Keeping our Boys out of Harm's Way, Tolda Clostonides' Sociology of Talk and Sowdy Kemper's 

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Values and Role Models. If there had been an annual contest for the academic bestseller, each of these books would have won it for the year Marvin published it. "The man is a genius!" I heard someone exclaim at the colloquium.
 

Murma: "Why don't you just lie flat on your back, close your eyes and count the tiles on the bathroom floor?"

"There are 173 of them."

"Every time you shadow box."

"Ask me tommorrow morning after my first cup of coffee."

Five minutes later: "OK, dammit! what if?"

"How? A leak?"

"Some would disapprove..."

"And if he denied it?"

"You would lose another night's sleep trying to outguess him."

Wilma didn't have to wink. A disgruntled employee of the ZU Press blew the whistle on Marvin, revealing that he had accepted an offer from Sea Eagle Publishing Inc., which, having bought two other publishers, both of them more valuable, economically and intellectually, than Sea Eagle itself, 

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was in turn swallowed up and gulped down by a broadcasting network, and the whole again by a telephone and internet conglomerate, and the whole again by a tobacco company. The stock market rejoiced, the government swore that this concentration would increase competition and a few critics regretted the trashing of the two reputable publishers who had refrained from Sea Eagle's policy of assigning its own ghostwriters to the celebrities it published. The firm had made recent headlines by withdrawing from the competition to publish a retired black general because of his determination to write his own book. Marvin could look forward to a brillant career. Judging by the serenity with which he acknowledged his new position, he had already taken all the precautions he deemed necessary.

What happened then was worse than all we had dreaded. Only after Marvin had left did we learn that our printed edition had arrived with most of the altered passages still altered and the missing pages still missing. In addition, the names of all the editors and collaborators had disappeared from the title page and the acknowledgement, from the following page. In fact, "Zenia University Press" appeared nowhere. Tex Bodo, the new director of the press, who had received little cooperation from Marvin, discovered that his predecessor had sold the edition on the secondhand market, apparently with the help of an undisgruntled employee for whom he had secured a more lucrative job with Sea Eagle. Four months later, Sea Eagle published an edition of Jamma Skullthorp's poetry edited by Priscilla Charitzky and Thomas Sprinkle with the collaboration of Delphine Cooper and a foreword by Elston Howard. The latter triumphed over the sinking of the submarine with an irony so fine that the uninitiated would detect no more than an acknowledgement of contributions to the edition by certain ZU professors whose names appeared in the notes, such as Harry Sinkovitch, Jerry Mumpet and even Simon Goldstein. The notes and the introduction took every opportunity to punch another hole in the submarine and yet without appearing to do so. For instance, one note belittled the restoration of 327 Tree Shadow Mews by slight praise of our anonymous efforts to find "similar" books, furniture, etc. It would discourage anyone unaware of the obstacles we had overcome from visiting the museum. Yet Priss and her friends blew their bugles so loudly that uncommitted readers soon tired of it, jumping from their introduction to Jamma's poems and ignoring all but the earliest of their notes. Our consolation was slight. 

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Despite our disaster, the family we had created remained intact. Although Cary, Wilma and Sheila blamed themselves for our failure, I and the others insisted that only our enemies could do that. You moderates, I told them, had advocated a reasonable policy in good faith and we hardliners were suffering the misfortune of being right. We had many opportunities to see each other and took full advantage of them: the affairs of the Museum and Library; the first meeting of the Jamma Skullthorp Submarine; a concert of the poetess' favorite music organized by Edie; Solomon and Edie's wedding; parties thrown by Wilma, Sheila, us, etc.; visits by Jake and Muriel. When Cary decided to retire, I joined him and everybody showed up at the reception for retiring professors and the subsequent buffet that Sheila and Wilma organized for us. They had invited Forthwright and Softack, who regretted letting Spratly deceive them and get away Scot free.

For three years, Jamma was the darling of the special interests in the humanities. What do I mean by that? I will be frank with you. I mean those mediocrities who divide themselves into categories and demand protection by dedicated legislation. Unable to compete on the open market of academic competition, they organize monopolies by limiting participation to women, gays, blacks... or fat women. No, I'm not kidding. A militant minority of feminists founded the Society for the Study of Overweight Women Writers. Since Jamma Skullthorp had inspired them, they chose her as their patron saint, yet they avoided this term out of respect for her modesty. Needless to say, she was tossing and turning in her grave. Those of us who had known her in the flesh protested, but, the more we raised our voices, the greater the SSOWW's contempt for our incompetence. They busied themselves with articles, lectures, workshops and even a book published by Sea Eagle that Delly Cooper derived from the dissertation she had written for Tom Sprinkle: The Poetic Calvary of Jamma Skullthorp. This time, Priss Charitzky wrote the preface. Soon the SSOWW was organizing their own colloquiums and quarreling with skinny feminists over the appropriate interpretation of such and such a text written by a women either known to be overweight or not known not to be. A violent battle erupted over Louise Labbé's alleged obesity, but the two armies kept forgetting this objective in perpheral engagements and the generals on either side were busy rallying their troops. At least the armies that clashed at Saddle Junction remembered why they were killing each other, Sheila chortled. 

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Meg and Murma hadn't noticed any difference since Cary and I had retired, except that we didn't rush off to teach a course any more. No, nothing much had changed. A majority of the faculty continued to tolerate the minority who exploited the university's resources to their own advantage. Now that the Skullthorp project was no longer an issue, Wilma and the rest of the administration cooperated with this minority as they had always done. Yet her friendship with us prospered because retirement had removed us from the tension between the administration and the faculty. Though blessed with friends and privileged by the facilities of the university, I began to feel restless: Was I going to spend the rest of my life coasting on my career like most of my fellow emeriti or start a new one somewhere else, striking out in a different, more challenging direction? On one hand, I didn't relish the prospect of shaking my head and wringing my hands over the machinations and corruption that had always cursed the university. On the other, I yearned to cleanse my mind of the people and the place as when Murma and I had spent summers and sabbaticals in France. We could buy one of those picturesque houses that had been restored and equipped for modern living in Provence or Poitou villages. How often had we admired them and dreamt of dwelling in one of our own? Wouldn't the internet, satellite television, the telephone and the airlines enable us to stay in contact with our family, our friends and our... yes, our university?

1:33 AM.

Murma sighed and turned over on the other side.

"You are asking me?"

"I wasn't turning away from you, I was just turning over on the other side."

"All right, what is this business of yours that you were minding so quietly?"

"If it weren't 1:34 PM, I might think it was funny too." 

"I was just thinking..."

"You know, Gus, sometimes I wish you would stop thinking and get some sleep. Thinking is not good for your health."

"I know, how many times have you told me? You can't just turn it off like a spigot or something."

"You sound like an election official."

The tension between the enchanting dream and the comfortable reality tormented her as much as me. I admitted that my failures had something to do with it, but I denied that they were my only reason. Heated discussion erupted in two tantrums, after which I typically conceded everything I had demanded, and we finally decided on a compromise. We moved to Mapleton, which was only an hour from Concordia and only two days from southern France, where we could afford to spend a month or two from year to year. Among the events that brought us back to Concordia was the marriage of Guy and Deanna in Whitefield Chapel. He had just graduated from ZU with a major in English and she, from ZTech with one in computer science. Tex Bodo had hired them together to develop online publishing for the ZU Press, beginning with the our complete edition of Jamma's poetry. Solomon retrieved the printout and disk recording from Room 27 and, a month later, the Poetic Works were on sale for downloading at skullthorp@zup.zu.edu. Sales were brisk. Reviews, e-mail, letters, telephone and ordinary conversation soon revealed that, while the number of Jamma's readers and admirers had grown exponentially, so had outrage over the Charitzky-Sprinkle edition, Cooper's Poetic Calvary and the involvement of Howard and Spratly, although few of their allies deserted them. The Museum and Library prospered under Solomon and Edie's ____________________________________________________________ 

direction and likewise the Submarine under Sheila's presidency during the first year and Lora's during the second. Lora, whom the Registrar had promoted to a supervisory position, proved so capable, energetic and charming that the membership doubled. In spring, Sheila invited us to the Orangerie to decide which if any of the applicants for the Jamma Skullthorp Fellowship would receive it. What a festive reunion it was for the first two years! but then, a few days after we had received our invitation for the third year, Sheila died in her sleep. We held a reading of Jamma's poetry, as stipulated by her will, in the old university graveyard, where so many people came that Sheff fretted about the grass. We heard Sheila herself recite "My Volatile Self" which a student had recorded at Jamma's funeral. It was raining and everybody shared umbrellas.