Dominic Hallkyn played back the voicemail on his telephone while he took off his sport coat and hung it up to dry in the laundry room. The smell of rain on tweed was one that he knew some people might say was his smell, the smell of an English professor. The coats—tweed or finer-spun wool in the winter and seersucker or summer-weight fabrics in the late spring and early fall—were his work uniform, no different from a mechanic’s coveralls. He wore them to repel the skepticism of the young. The first couple of calls were routine: a girl in his undergraduate medieval lit course had been sick, so could she please hand her paper in tomorrow? Of course. He had plenty of others to deaden his soul until that one arrived. Meg Stanley, the Department Chair, wanted him to serve on a Ph.D. oral exam committee. Unfortunately, he would. Reading the frantically scribbled preliminary exam and then asking probing questions in the oral would be torment to him and the student, both of them joined in a ritual of distaste and humiliation, all of it designed to punish them both for their love of literature, but it was part of his job.
