Students are an observant lot. They need to be, at Marshall: good at synthesis, too, at self-directed research, and at asking acute and occasionally intelligent questions. Most of this is wasted on academic work. It certainly doesn't go towards their professors, who are hard enough to keep track of without adding gossip into the mix.
Still, it can't be denied that something doesn't quite fit about Dr. Henry Jones.
There is, for instance, the incident with the bust of Frederic Marshall. Everyone's a bit fuzzy about how it started, but maybe this Sigma Rho guy says something jokey to a scholarship kid, and the kid takes it wrong and comes back with a sharp return that echoes through the foyer, and pretty soon there's about fifty people shouting at each other all along the stairs. Janitor's in the middle looking like he wishes he wasn't, and a couple of professors from their offices are keeping everyone apart, all shouting as well except no-one can hear a single word. Pretty soon somebody's gonna start shoving.
And then there's a "Look out!" and a scream and a lot of people scrambling out of the way, and then, with the most godawful noise imaginable, the whole plinth and bust of Frederic Marshall, oldest and greatest patron of this college, crashes its full length onto the landing. One girl dives for the head, fumbles. Everyone else is too shocked to move, so Frederic goes down the stairs, bump, bump, bump, all the way to the bottom.
Dr. Jones looks at the plinth, kicks it as though it might not be quite dead. Opens his arms and drops them again. Looks at them from the top of the stairs.
What with how long it takes to heave the solid hardwood into place, and what with general embarrassment, the whole mess ends right there. After the official reprimand nobody wants to talk about the affair ever again, so not one person mentions these odd details: that the plinth stood flush against the wall, almost in a corner, and that all the fighting students were on the opposite side.
It's not the gun; plenty of men on the faculty fought in the Great War and kept their pistols, and he's got to be old enough. Some profs have theirs about the place, too; makes one think, to go and borrow a book from some withered philosopher's office and spot that killing thing being used for a paperweight. Jones's revolver is in his third drawer, under the pile of marked essays. Alfonso's seen it, and Louise, and the joke goes that whoever wants feedback has to beat the professor at Russian Roulette which is why Evie Latimer never came back after first semester. But a gun's just a gun.
No, it's only that one afternoon Alfonso comes thundering into his office late on a deadline, paper in one sweaty hand, and the light slams on and the chair topples and Dr. Jones is crouched on the floor in front of him, one arm buried in the third desk drawer.
There is the criminal element. Call it judging a book by its cover, but some people just don't look right. Some types should not be messed with, and it's so very wrong that they should be mixing with Dr. Jones.
Hard to define them, actually. Maybe it's the clothes, respectable but just this side of tatty or with one too many layers. Maybe it's the way they walk or the way they stand that's somehow different from a student. They wouldn't stick out if they would just keep off campus – but they don't. They sidle up to Dr. Jones as he's leaving a lecture so he's never in his office when you need him, hang around side doors, sit smoking on the main steps of the campus museum.
They'll walk into the Library like they own the damn place, drape a familiar arm over his shoulder and that's the end of it. Tomorrow may bring an apologetic "watch this space" from Dean Brody on the department noticeboard, but it's the last anyone sees of Dr. Jones for the next fortnight.
And then there's the sharp-dressed men. Men in suits and hats, though not in the sense of clothes: the hats exist in space, and the bodies beneath are merely incidental. The jackets and pants have that expensive crease of natural wool and are measured to perfection, not a fold or a seam out of place, but again with the feeling that the suit was made first and the man inside tailored to fit.
They can't be called a criminal element. The label feels right but peels off like those suits are woven oil. They are almost always in pairs, sometimes in threes, once or twice just one with a better suit and a newer hat and a handkerchief in the jacket breast pocket. They sit politely on benches or stand with hands clasped behind their backs. They very rarely smoke. But they never say anything, either, except to Dr. Jones, not so much as a joke or a tease or a good-morning, though they'll meet your eyes when you look at them. They've been shouted out of buildings by staff and left silently with no resistance but that flat animal stare.
The sharp-dressed men only show up every other month. You can tell when they're about because Dr. Jones starts leaving through fire exits and hiding behind the shelves in the library.
Anita Lin swears she saw him in a Chinatown street market in New York, one of those weeks he was supposed to be away doing fieldwork. "How can you be so sure it was him?" they ask, and she can't answer. But he had the hat and the voice and he was arguing with the tradesmen in very bad Cantonese.
There are thermos flasks of black tea which once spilled all over the Egyptology 301 test papers to give them an authentic period feel. In summer, when even professors leave the Meal Hall for the lawn outside, there are cold bean dishes in lurid colors and lunch boxes that stink of garlic.
There are telephone calls, sometimes, German, Urdu, Arabic, smooth Argentinian Spanish heard dimly from the far side of his frosted glass door. The charges must be spectacular because some of these calls last for minutes on end, Dr. Jones's silhouette sharpening and blurring as he walks to the glass and back, while the long queue of students wonders if he'll ever hang up.
He'll switch into a foreign language mid-lecture, maybe for a word he can't recall, and will struggle on in pidgin for a minute or two before someone begs him to come back to English.
Mostly, though, people remember the cursing, which is a muttered corner-of-the-mouth thing that is completely incomprehensible. Some of the more ambitious students have taken to the bench outside the Trustees Meeting Room in the hope of catching a Jones Day, but so far nobody has understood a syllable.
One time there's no annoyance but honest white-faced anger. Six months into the European war, well, people are bound to take sides, and a group of the guys are sitting around a radio and lauding the Reich's newest economic policy. It's a while before they see him. He stands and stares unblinking, lips twisted and arms loose at his sides, while the silence spreads around him.
There is the day Dr. Jones finally reappears after weeks of absence, and not only shows up on time for the first time anyone can remember but is already in his chair when the first student comes in. Dean Marcus Brody enters at the ten-minute mark and takes a seat in the back, and Dr. Jones talks quietly from the chair he has never sat in before, and doesn't rise when the bell rings the students out.
There's the weeks afterward when he lectures behind the desk, and then the last day on Inca Mathematics when he strolls in fifteen minutes late and sits on the desk instead.
Sometimes they visit the museum. The exhibits get neat little brass plaques, name, category, epoch, culture, location, and close on a hundred also the name "Jones" in very small letters on the bottom right corner. Jones is on crates in back rooms, too, on glass cabinets, safes, string-and-paper tags, hundreds and hundreds more: pottery, but also carved stone, and silver so bright it burns. Awe tempered by reason, because they are scientists, they acknowledge that the storeroom has almost as many Smiths, and American archaeology countless Joneses.
They take turns on the microscope, learn to tell period damage from the more recent wear and tear. In between demonstrations, as Dr. Jones unlocks each cabinet, there is a grin to outshine the sun.
A.N.:
With thanks to the good people at little-details on LJ, who helped feed my curiosity about Forn Food in 1930s USA. I am inordinately proud of myself for actually completing this - and it only took me five months, too. That's nearly 300 words/month! NaNoWriMo, here I come.
If you enjoyed this story, a review would light up my week/month/year/life. Feel free to point out typos, Britishisms and miscellaneous borking. (Gosh, that sounds dirty.)