The old man’s eyes drifted up from his hospital bed. The young woman lookeddown upon his dying body.
He coughed. “You’re really going to Ipswich?”
“Yeah grandpa, I’m really going. I start in two weeks.”
“That’s my alma mater you know?” He coughed again- productively.
She smiled. “I know grandpa, you’ve told me all about it.”
He nodded, as if remembering he should have remembered. He reached a knotted hand, well ravaged by time, to her wrist and clasped it.
She winced, but so he wouldn’t notice.
“I haven’t told you everything about it.”
She was confused. The dying man’s eyes were grave, and she sensed he was finally going to reveal a story never told to her before. It was a painful story. The sort of tale that would be torture to tell and hard to hear.
“You know Ipswich College was already a hundred years old when I attended. I was barely eighteen, all of seventy years ago?”
She was disappointed. A fresh story, however morose, was preferable to any story she listened to her entire nineteen years of life. Her great-grandfather would not survive the semester, and she prepared to tolerate anything. A hole near the hearth grew cold even now, waiting for the Christmas abandonment.
“The school has changed these seven decades, and so it’s hard to direct you properly. In my day there was only one dormitory. It was such a small school, and only provided to the minds of us young men. No women were allowed beyond its pompous gates. Not even to cook our food. Sexism was a divine right, even in the swelling of the Second World War.”
“Try your best, grandpa.”
“Oh, I was getting to the bench. I had a roommate; a squirrely nervous boy by the name of Chester Pickering. Chester was a second year, and I was green as the ornamental lawn that escorts the main drive to the campus proper. He told me, that first week, the school often suffered bouts of the swamp fog. On nights like that, he said, it was best not to wander the campus. I should take special caution of the bench between the history building and the chemistry building, when the fog came with the night.
“Of course, I sought out these benches. A cobblestone path led through the narrows between the two buildings. Then they were called Rupert Hall and the Boyle Building. Not sure how they’re named today, although I haven’t heard they’ve been brought down.
“I thought nothing of his comments for some days, busying myself with the frantic school schedule and the weight of work emphasized by the bulk of our books. We didn’t have computers you know?” He looked up toward her and flashed a smile. He still had most of his teeth.
“I know grandpa.” She decided to sit for this one.
“Yes, well into my second week of classes, I was up late studying for my first exam of the semester. A dreadful man by the name of Dr. McClintock brutalized us with Shakespeare’s Othello from the first day, and now we prepared to hurl it out on paper for him. The thee’s and thou’s spun on the page in the dim candle light. The college was skimping on electricity due to the war effort. I decided to go for a walk.
“The night wrapped around me like a warm damp blanket, and the fog was so thick I thought I might never see my way to the dorm again. The candle lamps flickered like glowing phantoms in the mist. I was so weary from my studies I forgot Chester’s omen, and delighted in the strange soft echo of my hard soles against those cobblestones. That’s when I saw him, sitting on the bench.
“I hopped with such ferocity my flat cap flopped from my head. I retrieved the cap and set it on my wavy brown hair. I had hair then,” he laughed. “The man, I took for a professor, smiled at me and simply sat. He nervously clutched his satchel.”
She leaned in close. This was a story she never heard him tell before.
“He said hello and I said hello. He smiled again, and asked my name. I told him and he gave me his. He said his name was Dr. Herbert Wallace. I asked what he taught, and he told me law. I didn’t know we had law at Ipswich, and I was sore confused. He asked me about my classes, and I said I was struggling with my literature regimen. He laughed and said that old Dr. Clifford was a rusty tough nail. I corrected him, and said that my professor was Dr. McClintock. He furrowed his face, and said he didn’t know of such a man. As I said before it was a small school then, and not attended on by many professors. All students studied the same subject with the same man, so this disparity was strange. I was unnerved.
“I was feeling an ill pill settling on my stomach, and retired for the evening. We said our goodbyes, and I returned to my bed. It was nearly another month before I saw Dr. Wallace again. On this particular evening the autumnal colors were gone, and the trees were bare. It was a cold night, and the fog ate through my clothes like a dunking in the lake. I was buried in books for midterm exams, and needed to stretch my legs and wake myself from a studious stupor.
“I clacked over the stones, and found Dr. Wallace sitting as he had before, still clutching that satchel. It seemed time worn, and so did he. Wrinkles besmirched his clean skin, and his hair reflected the stress reflected in his eyes.
“Hello I said and he returned with his hello. How did you do on the test, he asked. I asked which test he meant, as I was in the bad habit of taking tests this far along into the season. He reminded me the last time we spoke I was edgy about an essay of my Shakespearian acumen. I replied that I received in the upper half of the eighties on that particular exam. We moved on to Hamlet in the meanwhile, and the midterm would track my progress there.
“He understood, and I studied his features. I was not mistaken about it; he seemed to have aged years in the simple weeks since our last encounter. The effect of this aging, and the swirling fog shifting between us, caused me disconcertion, and I called it quits. I pledged to discover this man’s private office to pay him a visit in more human conditions.
“I forgot about that though, as midterms swept me away in their rapids, and before long snow coated the cobblestones and cluttered among the branches of the trees. Christmas break was rapidly chasing us down, and final exams were nigh upon us. I needed to study all to be had of King Leer, seven sonnets, and brush up on the first two plays of the former half of the semester. With aching eyes and throbbing temples, I sought respite in the chill of the ebbing autumn air, with all the crisp pollution of wintry weather laced with wood fire cheer. The fog glittered in the dance of the lanterns, and the sky hanging over the cloud glowed with the reflection of the city lights far below.
“I strolled through that fog, my long coat snuggled tight against my frame and my ears burned cold. My flat cap wasn’t up to the task of warming them. Dr. Wallace sat there, clutching the satchel, now fissured and sun bleached. His hair was stricken with white, and at first glimpse I took it to be buried in the snow! I was off. His hair in the space of a mere four months lost all of its color. His face was weather beaten like the satchel, and his eyes no less tired and sagging than the eyes you see on my face now. It took me to the inside of ninety-years for these marks of honor. It took him a single semester! I was nonplussed.
“He merely looked at me, and a tear dripped from the left of those faded eyes. I asked him what was the matter, cautious to keep my feet and did not sit. He looked at me perilously and informed me his wife died from typhus and he was retiring. I expressed my condolences and he accepted. He then looked upon me with his skull cocked, and said that Dr. Clifford retired last term and he was astonished that the replacement was a young man named Dr. McClintock. I thought this odd, as a full term had not commenced since our first meeting, not by half. This information he provided should have been known to him on that first encounter where we took equal surprise at our incongruence.”
He reached out to the young woman and took her hand. “I tell you this, dear, to stay away from that bench in the fog. And do not speak with Dr. Wallace. It is not fit for us mere mortals to stretch across the reach. In all my years teaching English I never mentioned this story, nor wrote of it. I tell you now, for it is the sort of story that lays on the soul like a blister that never heals.”
“Who was he, grandpa?”
“Who was he? He was a professor who died about twelve years before I set foot on campus. The studies on law retired with him, some years before his death. I was quite shocked when I visited the classroom where he taught for the whole of his professional life, and saw his painting on the wall behind the professor’s chair. I examined it, and saw the name with the dates he taught in the room he forever presided over. My dear, do stay away. I received a douse of goose pimples that never entirely disappeared.”
He closed his eyes, and she rubbed his hand. He breathed deeply and exhaled. He never drew replacement air. The young woman wept, and pledged to never seek out that bench when the fog fell upon the campus.
She almost kept her word.
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