However, Ruth and Ike had work to do. Not work related to their professions, but tasks connected to their behaviorally rash evening in Nevada. They had to decide the means by which their hasty and irregular marriage should be announced to the public. For ordinary folk, the problem would not loom so large, but for a popular public servant and the respectable president of an emerging university, the situation had facets ordinary people could not appreciate. Or so they thought. Ike signed out early that afternoon at four. He could be reached at his A-frame, he’d announced, but short of a national emergency approaching Hurricane Sandy proportions, he would prefer to be left alone. Ruth managed to sneak out of the Administration Building at Callend University by a side door and thereby missed an unscheduled meeting with a very irate chairman of the Biology Department who’d just discovered an FTE had been cut from his budget. The fact that he hadn’t filled the slot in three years, and clearly did not need it whereas others did, meant nothing.
