The street you came to from the rear entrance of the office building was the thoroughfare that ran from town and on out past the residential neighborhoods where most faculty, staff, and other campus employees either owned or rented homes. So we had to stop for the fairly steady stream of traffic, and then we crossed over and came on along the hedge-lined walk to the wide quadrangle in which the gymnasium faced the open end and across which the library faced the Science Building.
As we passed the tall shrubbery framing the main entrance to the library we nudged each other without looking or saying anything. Then as we came on to the next open space, you could see the red clay tennis courts beyond the parking space reserved for the buses of visiting athletic teams. And up ahead near the side entrance to the gymnasium there was a traffic circle, beyond which were the ticket booth and entrance to the bowl down the steep hill directly behind the gymnasium.
We followed the curving walk on around past the box office and main entrance to the gymnasium that was not only the headquarters of the Department of Physical Education and the venue for the annual conference basketball tournament in those days, it was also where all of the big campus dances were held, weekly movies were shown, and where touring repertory theater companies and dance and musical groups performed in those days.
Off to our right as we came around the loop to the science building side of the quadrangle was the campus water tower, beyond which was the baseball field, which was up the steep wooded hill and on the other side of trees directly behind the covered student grandstand in the bowl.
When you reached the other end of the science building, you were back at the tree-lined throughway, and as we came on across to Campus Avenue, the dormitory on the right of the quadrangle you faced was the one that Atelier 359 overlooked, and suddenly I missed my old one and only and best of all possible roommates again. But as we came on back along the main stem past the dining hall, the bandstand and the clock tower again, all I said was “seven league boots, indeed.”
XXV
The Poindexters lived in the first block of the faculty and staff off-campus housing area that began outside of the Emancipation Memorial Pillars of the main entrance to Campus Avenue. So it was only about a two and a half block stroll from the guesthouse, which also meant that they lived only about seven blocks along the municipal thoroughfare from the academic quadrangle where the office of the English Language and Literature Department was in those days.
When we arrived for dinner, our on-campus apartment assignment, and preliminary registration orientation that first Wednesday night, they both greeted us in the living room and there was now a second child, a boy, born during the term following my graduation. The first was a daughter, whom I remembered as having been in elementary school during my senior year.
I knew that Mrs. Poindexter, whose first name was Estelle, and who was just about the same shade of teacake tan as Eunice, but with freckles that you didn’t see until you were close enough to shake hands, had been his hometown sweetheart when they were in high school in Washington and that they had married the year after he came back to Washington with his M.A. degree and then came down to central Alabama that following September. By the time I arrived on the campus he had not only been back to graduate school to finish his residence work toward his Ph.D., he had also become the chairman of the English Department, which always surprised visitors and new-comers to the campus because he could still be mistaken for an upperclassman.
The first time I had seen his wife was during the break between the winter and spring terms of my freshman year, when I was invited to come along to his residence with my roommate and several upperclassmen for an informal extracurricular discussion of current books, magazines, and quarterly literary reviews.
She didn’t come in to say hello that time until we were all in the study, which was on the left as you entered the living room. We were still standing and moving around looking at the bookshelves and the diplomas and citations and also at the paintings, sketches, and photographs. She had come in, and he presented each one of us by name in class, and she served us tea and cookies and excused herself to do what she had to do as a young mother.
This time she left us in the living room with her husband and went to turn the children over to a babysitter and finished what she had to do in the kitchen and dining room before calling us in to dinner. So we were led into the study for a glass of dry sherry, and that was when the orientation session began. And the first item on his briefing agenda turned out to be a matter that was more personal than official.
Incidentally, he said, you probably haven’t been back on campus long enough to have been cued in on one unmandated change in common student parlance since either one of you was last here. Your host this evening is no longer addressed or referred to by the official name you and
