Chapter Eight

Sunday afternoon in her office up in St. Fiacre's was a moment back in the usual ritual.

Fundraising letters, student records, grading appeals, maintenance requests -- this was the best time to polish off all the detail work that never seemed to get finished through the week. Faculty and affiliate teachers, other office staff along with her one other administrative counterpart, the grandly named and hopelessly obtuse Chancellor, matters of protocol and timing for visiting scholars to the library, or the ever-elusive quest for some form of accreditation to the college, all caused regular interruptions through weekdays to the necessary operations of the day-to-day operations of the paired institutions.

Hazel was glad for a chance to sort and sift without a sound in the building other than her CD of Chopin nocturnes and the occasional creak of a window (does that need replacing?) or the groan of bit of subflooring (is it a structural matter?) as she walked back and forth from her desk to the long expanse of the conference room table where she could shuffle her piles and stacks of various "important" papers.

As she worked, she'd kept thinking about the last part of her conversation with Nicholas, about his daughters, and especially the youngest one. Apparently there had been some sort of concern over a social media issue, where some girls at school had put her picture, a shot of her face, up on a list of girls with some inappropriate language about them. He'd been awkwardly amusing about his inability to say what it was the internet pages had said about her. Apparently it was rude, but not profane.

He'd hoped Hazel had some advice for him about the subject, but her main reaction had been more along the lines of "seriously, that's all?" In the admissions conferences, and regarding disciplinary issues on campus, she'd become somewhat numb to the sheer willful stupidity of what young people posted about themselves, let alone about others. She knew Nicholas was hoping for some sort of feminine perspective on his parenting problem, but she'd not been a parent, and she wasn't even sure being feminine today was something a woman in her late thirties could even offer useful advice on.

Looking back out the north-facing windows of her office, it was a good view to reflect on these last couple days. The Lunchbox could be picked out as a lower roofline along Upper Sharon Road curving under the hill; the Memorial Church in white and gold just beyond; the mill where this latest chapter began in peeling green and rustic red obscured by brush and bushes along the creekbank, next to the steel frame bridge crossing Elliot's Run where it poured into Auter Creek, the road disappearing out of view to her right to where, a mile or so along, it met with Welsh Hills and Sharon Valley Road at the crossroads where the Salvage Yard sat.

Unaffected by these last few days were College Hall below, its central cupola four stories high yet still below her and to the left, and the rows of low-slung buildings, timber framed and cedar-shake roofed, plodding two by two from the historic brick hall to the west down The Range until its eastern end at the cast iron bridge across Auter Creek.

College Hall had roof problems, timber problems, and all around age problems. Hazel was not yet old enough to have them herself, but she was old enough to be thinking about them more than she had in her twenties. The years took their toll, and the hall had seen a century and a half of them.

Oddly enough, when Mrs. Woodhull Martin had left the endowment for St. Fiacre's, she had been very specific that it was for the library and the library's operations, and nothing else. Cyrus College had been left effectively nothing; Miss Zula Maud had left the college such nest egg as they'd ever had, but it hadn't been much, and their graduates had never been big on giving. Or maybe, Hazel reflected, Cyrus College had never been big on asking. The legend was that Mrs. Woodhull Martin had simply not acknowledged in her late 80s that she might be near to passing from the scene, and she had intended a generous endowment for the college, and just never got around to it before her not entirely unexpected death. Not unexpected, at least, to Zula Maud and the staff at Bredon's Norton, if a very real shock to Victoria herself.

She had made a special provision not long before her death, executed just after, which benefited not the bereft college, but a rather indifferent town. Just at the point where Upper Sharon Road branched beyond the steel frame bridge over Elliott's Run, where a small triangle of land had long stood, Zula Maud had executed a wish of her mother's. She had erected a life-size bronze statue of Mary Hartwell Catherwood, Ohio's first best selling novelist, one of the first bronze statues of a woman for any reason at all, honoring her life and work -- she was born more than a dozen miles south of Upper Sharon, but had set some of her writing back in the 1890s and early 1900s in this town, perhaps having taught here as she had in an assortment of small schools around the county thirty years previous.

There was no indication that Victoria Claflin Woodhull Martin had ever met Mary Hartwell Catherwood, but she obviously read her books, and that admiration had led to the prominent plinth and bronze sculpture at the entrance to the town.

At any rate, the statue had a maintenance endowment in the county bank (one of Hazel's multitudinous responsibilities to manage), but Cyrus College did not. Creating something of the sort out of nothing immediately at hand was one of the main reasons she'd been hired for the job. It was Hazel's opinion, at this point, that the trustees had made a definite mistake.