‘Erasmus was a scholar, an academic, an innovator with vision, sensitivity, and compassion.’
George would never have credited him with any of these qualities, and remembered how the man, in a misguided attempt to inject a social conscience into his comatose student body, had permitted an unknown activist theatre troupe to stage in the school auditorium a consciousness-raising skit about ‘shaken baby syndrome,’ in the wake of a series of well-publicized tragic infant deaths at the hands of their desperate, usually young parents. At the climactic moment in the bathetic drama, the ham-fisted actor playing the baby’s father, enraged by the baby’s persistent crying, his words often drowned out by an amplified recording of a real infant’s bawling, snatched a doll from the cradle and held it overhead with trembling hands, when a wit in the audience called out, ‘Shake that baby!’
A gale of explosive laughter convulsed his peers. ‘Silence!’ An outraged roar came from behind the curtain. Jinkinson strode out to centre stage, singled out an inoffensive red-haired youth in the front row, and sent him to the Vice-Principal’s office, while he directed his fury at the complicit student body, most of whom had been sitting respectfully quietly until that point. The red-headed student had been innocent of wrongdoing. No apology, private or public, was ever given for his humiliation, and the culprit was never caught.
Once George himself had been peremptorily summoned to Jinkinson’s office in the middle of a class to explain why he had written a letter to the superintendent. ‘All official correspondence between assistant teachers and supervisory officers at the Board,’ he intoned, ‘must go through me. I trust I make myself clear?’
‘In that case, then, please instruct the supervisory officer in question to submit requests for information from assistant teachers through your office in like manner,’ had been George’s uncharacteristically spirited response. ‘I was answering such a request from the superintendent, and sent you a copy of my letter as a courtesy. Perhaps I should not have troubled?’
A pause. Then, ‘You may go now.’ There was no apology.
The eulogy continued, the speaker enumerating Jinkinson’s pedagogical achievements with mind-numbing thoroughness. There was no reference to his personal life and nothing about his family. There were no heart-warming anecdotes about his hobbies, interests, travels, or likeable idiosyncrasies. Clearly, he had none.
’In his sophomore year at Taylor College, Erasmus was awarded the E. Cluett Peabody Prize for Public Speaking. The following year, his fraternity voted him Student Most Likely to Succeed…’
Succeed at what? It certainly wasn’t human relations. The memory of the day the Doc had enraged the staff by refusing to close the school during a blizzard, despite his having sent the students home ‘on account of the inclemency of the weather’ came to mind. He had assigned staff to patrol empty corridors and ‘volunteer’ to clear pathways of snow. In retaliation, some staff members had buried his car in snow, but this had only made him more intransigent, less accommodating, and infinitely more remote. At a school reunion, he had famously thrown a pencil at a parent volunteer who had misspelled his name. The parent declined to lodge a complaint. Royce’s leaden discourse continued. How much longer could it drag on? The first fifteen years of Jinkinson’s uninteresting career had already taken ten minutes to particularize, including a list of committees he had sat on, addresses he had given to service clubs, speeches delivered to community groups, and articles written for earnest educational journals, none of which had anything remotely to do with teaching young people. How long would the speaker bore his audience with the legacy of the next twenty years? Another twenty? Lord, have mercy…
