Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson

The subtitle here is “The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion,” and it evidently won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1998.

Clarence Darrow

The book left only two impressions on me. The first was this sketch of Clarence Darrow, the celebrated attorney who chose to defend John Scopes.

By the twenties, Darrow unquestionably stood out as the most famous -- some would say infamous -- trial lawyer in America. Born into an educated, working-class family in rural Ohio, Darrow first gained public notice in the 1890s as a Chicago city attorney and popular speaker for liberal causes. He secured the Democratic nomination to Congress in 1896, but spent most of his time campaigning for the party ticket, headed by presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, and lost by about one hundred votes. Darrow took up the cause of labor about this time, beginning with the defense of the famed Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs against criminal charges growing out of the 1894 Pullman strike. “For the next fifteen years Clarence Darrow was the country’s outspoken defender of labor, at a time when labor was more militant and idealistic and employers more hardened and desperate than ever before or since,” the liberal Nation observed during the Scopes litigation. “The cases he was called upon to defend were almost invariably criminal prosecutions in bitterly hostile communities.” The final such case, a dramatic 1911 murder trial involving two union leaders accused of blowing up the Los Angeles Times building, tarnished Darrow’s reputation with labor when the defendants confessed their guilt after Darrow had professed their innocence.

Thereafter, Darrow gradually shifted his practice to criminal law, defending an odd mix of political radicals and wealthy murderers. Both types of cases kept Darrow’s name in the national headlines. The former type also connected the Chicago attorney with the New York-based ACLU: they joined forces to defend Benjamin Gitlow, for example. The latter type generated the most publicity, such as the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case, one of the most sensational trials in American history, in which Darrow used arguments of psychological determinism to save two wealthy and intelligent Chicago teenagers from execution for their cold-blooded murder of an unpopular former schoolmate, a crime that the defendants apparently committed for no other reason than to see if they could get away with it. Although Darrow’s defense outraged many Americans who believed in individual responsibility, it reflected his long-standing and oft-proclaimed repudiation of free will.

Darrow was not content with simply questioning popular notions of criminal responsibility, but delighted in challenging traditional concepts of morality and religion. One historian described Darrow as “the last of the ‘village atheists’ on a national scale,” and in this role he performed for America the same part that his father once played in his hometown. “He rebelled, just as his father had rebelled, against the narrow preachments of ‘do gooders,’” Darrow biographer Kevin Tierney concluded. “He regarded Christianity as a ‘slave religion,’ encouraging acquiescence in injustice, a willingness to make do with the mediocre, and complacency in the face of the intolerable.” In the courtroom, on the Chautauqua circuit, in public debates and lectures, and through dozens of popular books and articles, Darrow spent a lifetime ridiculing traditional Christian beliefs. He called himself an agnostic, but in fact he was effectively an atheist. In this he imitated his intellectual mentor, the nineteenth-century American social critic Robert G. Ingersoll, who wrote, “The Agnostic does not simply say, ‘I do not know [if God exists].’ He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. … He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact.”

Good intentions underlay Darrow’s efforts to undermine popular religious faith. He sincerely believed that the biblical concept of original sin for all and salvation for some through divine grace was, as he described it, “a very dangerous doctrine” -- “silly, impossible and wicked.” Darrow once told a group of convicts, “It is not the bad people I fear so much as the good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel -- he believes in punishment.” During a public debate on religion, he added, “The origin of what we call civilization is not due to religion but to skepticism. … The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.”

A quick Google search turned up the fact that Darrow wrote several books -- from An Eye for an Eye in 1905, a fictional work that tells the story of Jim Jackson who struggles with poverty and harsh circumstances before murdering his wife in a fit of rage, to The Myth of the Soul in 1929, a short treatise on if the belief in immortality is necessary or even desirable. Definitely a collection worth getting.

Academic Freedom

The other item worth noting is this summarized history of the development of public institutions of higher learning in the United States, and more specifically their establishment of the practice of academic freedom.

Attempts to propagandize public education did not begin in the twenties. In fact, Massachusetts Puritans founded America’s first public schools during the colonial era partly to promote their distinctive religious and political system. The common-school movement spread during the nineteenth century (at least in part) as a means to indoctrinate into American ways the large number of non-English immigrants entering the United States. Most public school curricula traditionally included American civics, Bible reading, and daily prayers. “Schools were not established to teach and encourage a pupil to think,” Clarence Darrow wrote of his own nineteenth-century education. “From the first grade to the end of the college course [students] were taught not to think, and the instructor who dared to utter anything in conflict with ordinary beliefs and customs was promptly dismissed, if not destroyed.”

This approach to education led to a de facto establishment of Christianity within American public schools. About the time of the Scopes trial, for example, the Georgia Supreme Court dismissed a Jewish taxpayer’s complaint against Christian religious exercises in public schools with the observation, “The Jew may complain to the court as a taxpayer just exactly when and only when a Christian may complain to the court as a taxpayer, i.e., when the Legislature authorizes such reading to the Bible or such instruction in the Christian religion in the public schools as give one Christian sect a preference over others.” The Tennessee legislature codified a similar practice in 1915 when it mandated the daily reading of ten Bible verses in public schools but prohibited any comment on the readings. This suggestion that constitutional limits on the establishment of religion simply forbad the government from giving preference to any one church denomination reflected a traditional view of religious freedom that dated at least as far back as the great federalist U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story. By the 1920s, however, an increasing number of liberally educated Americans, including leaders of the ACLU, rejected the idea that public education should promote any particular political, economic, or religious viewpoint -- even one broadly defined as democratic, capitalistic, or Christian.

The drive to free the American academy from outside political and religious influences began with higher education. Americans originally formed their colleges and universities on the English model, which did not incorporate modern concepts of tenure and academic freedom. At Oxford and Cambridge, for example, faculty members ultimately served under the authority of the Church of England and every college conducted daily Anglican chapel services for students. Similarly, in nineteenth-century America, professors at most public and private institutions of higher education served at the pleasure of the institution's president and trustees, many of whom were ordained ministers, and even Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia held student chapel services. This did not mean that conservative religious and political ideas held sway on all American campuses -- Harvard came under the influence of Unitarianism early in the century, while Oberlin later became famous for its radical egalitarianism and Bryn Mawr for its feminism -- but a party line tended to prevail within each institution. Late nineteenth-century populists, progressives, and radicals often accused college administrators of suppressing classroom teaching of alternative economic and political theories. A few highly publicized cases of alleged religious censorship also arose. Coincidentally, the most famous such case took place in Tennessee, where in 1878 the fledgling, southern Methodist-controlled Vanderbilt University terminated the part-time lecturing position of the famed geologist Alexander Winchell for suggesting that humans lived on earth before the biblical Adam. Winchell was an evolutionist, and his firing soon became a cause celebre in the perceived warfare between science and religion.

Like so much of American history -- when it comes to this “culture war” of what to teach and not teach in schools, it's the same as it ever was. But read on to see how academic freedom was established, in which institutions, and why.

The effort to maintain orthodoxy on American campuses encountered increasing resistance around the turn of the century. The historian George M. Marsden linked this development to the rise of pragmatism, flowing from the theories of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. “In Comte’s construction of history,” Marsden observed, “humans were rising from a religious stage in which questions were decided by authority, through a metaphysical stage in which philosophy ruled, to a positive stage in which empirical investigation would be accepted as the only reliable road to truth.” Empirical methods quickly came to dominate academic research in both the sciences and the humanities.

New principles of free academic inquiry and discussion logically followed from these new methods for acquiring knowledge. The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago were founded during the late nineteenth century on the model of German universities, which incorporated basic concepts of professional tenure and academic freedom. Several existing institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell, quickly adopted a similar model. By the 1896 edition of his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, the former Cornell University president Andrew Dickson White could write of the Winchell affair that Vanderbilt had “violated the fundamental principles on which any institution worthy of the name [university] must be based.” About this time, the national professional associations for economists, political scientists, and sociologists formed standing committees to investigate individual cases of alleged assaults on academic freedom.

These developments took a decisive turn in 1913, when Lafayette College dismissed the philosophy professor John Mecklin for teaching that social evolution, rather than revealed truth, shaped the development of religious ideas. The American Philosophical Association and American Psychological Association appointed a special committee, chaired by the Hopkins philosophy professor Arthur O. Lovejoy, to investigate the dismissal. Lafayette College defended its action on the grounds that as a denominational institution it could enforce orthodoxy within its curriculum. The committee grudgingly accepted this position, but maintained that “American colleges and universities fall into two classes”: either they guaranteed academic freedom or they served as “institutions of denominational or political propaganda,” with Lafayette placing itself into the latter class. To give substance to this distinction and thereby promote the rights of faculty members in the former class of institutions, Lovejoy immediately set about forming the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

With Lovejoy as its first secretary, the AAUP assumed the role of a national guild for university professors. Minutes of the association’s organizational meeting reported that members voted “to bring about a merging in a new committee of the committees already created by the economics, political science and sociology associations to deal with the subject of academic freedom.” Lovejoy served on this new committee on academic freedom, which presented its General Declaration of Principles at the AAUP’s first annual meeting in 1915. Endorsing the distinction emerging from the Lafayette College affair, this document recognized two types of institutions. “The simplest case is that of a proprietary school or college designed for the propagation of specific doctrines prescribed by those who have furnished its endowment,” the committee wrote. These institutions, which included many trade schools as well as such church colleges as Lafayette, need not offer academic freedom to their faculty. Institutions receiving support from the government or through appeals to the general public, however, fell into a different category. “Trustees of such institutions or colleges have no moral right to bind the reason or conscience of any professor,” the committee asserted, in defiance of traditional practices. To justify this new principle, the committee observed, “In the earlier stages of a nation’s intellectual development, the chief concern of educational institutions is to train the growing generation and to defuse the already accepted knowledge.” In twentieth-century America, however, “The modern university is becoming more and more the home for scientific research. There are three fields of human inquiry in which the race is only beginning: natural science, social science, and philosophy and religion.” In earlier times, the committee added, “the chief menace to academic freedom was ecclesiastical, and the disciplines chiefly affected were philosophy and the natural sciences. In more recent times the danger zone has been shifted to the political and social sciences -- though we still have sporadic examples of the former class of cases in some of our smaller institutions.” 

It seems like a reasonable distinction to me -- absolute free inquiry in public, research-based institutions that seek to serve and determine the common good, and a more limited approach in private, training-based institutions that seek to define and develop a certain doctrine or discipline. Even there, defined zones of free inquiry could certainly help advance and improve the translation and application of the discipline, but questions about the doctrine’s fundamental purpose could reasonably be restricted. It’s an interesting framework within which to analyze many of the current controversies about public education and the institutions that support it.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Part II

1

You know, I should probably just start telling you the story. I’ve jumped around so much, you probably think there isn’t a story here at all, that I’ve just come here to wring my hands and make fun of people. Well, that’s not the case. There really is a story here -- in many ways it’s the story of my own shortcomings -- and if I’m going to tell it properly I have to go back to just after I got that promotion to deputy account executive.  

I told you about the meeting Mary and I had attended, the one where she pretended to take me under her wing and re-introduce me to all the VIPs in the non-profit organization we served. Well, there was another meeting going on in another city at the same time, one I would have normally attended in my old role as a department head.

My job before the promotion was overseeing all the educational programming for my client organization, including a big national conference they conducted each year to keep their members up to date on the latest breakthroughs and developments in their field. This other meeting was a smaller workshop, and instead of me attending they sent my replacement, the new education department head, a freshly-hired woman named Susan Sanford. A couple of members of the education department staff went with her, and they really did most of the work at these kind of events. Susan’s role -- and mine before that -- was to act as a kind of figurehead, taking credit for everything that went right and assigning blame whenever something went wrong. Had it not been for the competing VIP meeting Mary wanted me to attend, I probably would have gone with Susan to introduce her around the way Mary introduced me, but in all the rush to get things done -- and remember, under Mary’s leadership there was always a rush to get things done -- it wasn’t considered essential and Susan was sent to make her own introductions.

Now, there are three pieces of background information you’re going to need to put what I’m about to tell you in perspective. The first is a little bit about Susan -- truly one of the nicest and most forthright people I’ve ever met. No, really. I’m not kidding. She was nice, and when I say nice, I primarily mean that she actually had empathy for others. She had worked directly for a number of nonprofits before joining the company, and had brought much of their compassionate perspective with her. She honestly cared about the people she worked with. She wanted what was best for them. As a supervisor, Susan sought to develop an open and personal relationship with each person that reported to her. She wanted to get to know the whole person -- not just an employee, but the real someone with a life and interests outside the office. She earnestly looked for ways to develop their personal strengths and leverage those traits for the good of the organization. She was conscientious, supportive, and caring.

She didn’t stand a chance.

Her meeting lasted a day longer than the one I attended, and the morning she returned she found me in my office. 

“Alan,” she said gravely, shutting the door behind her. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

She startled me. I was blowing the steam off my coffee and when she spoke I nearly spilled the whole cup in my lap. Being startled happened a lot to those of us whose positions in the company warranted private offices, because all of those offices were small -- so small that the only reasonable way to arrange the furniture was with the desk set facing against the back wall. If you tried turning it around so you could face the door while sitting at your desk -- and believe me, some of us had tried -- you were forced to literally climb over your desk in order to get behind it. 

I spun slowly around to face Susan. I had no idea what was coming next, but whatever it was, it was serious. I said she was nice, but I also said she was forthright, and when she walked into my office that morning I could tell she was ready to take the gloves off. Susan never messed around. If she had something to say, she’d tell it to you straight and not put any varnish on it. Normally, she had this kind of laid-back hippie sensibility about her. It was partly the way she dressed -- especially the fringe vest and distressed sandals she wore on casual Fridays -- and the way she wore her hair -- parted down the middle and hanging long around her face. But it also manifested itself in the way she approached life and human interactions. Like everything was cool in a metaphysical way except those things that were clearly not.

To Susan, certain things were Appropriate, and other things were Inappropriate. If it was Appropriate, then cool, man, let’s joke and laugh and have a good time because we’re all just monkeys trying to find something sweet on this big spinning planet of love. But if it was Inappropriate -- if you said something even the slightest bit off-color or risqué -- then Susan was liable to get up and walk out of the room on you. That’s just the way she was. The line between proper and improper was as clearly defined as that center part in her hair. I didn’t know what Susan needed to tell me, but something had clearly crossed that line.

“Have a seat,” I told her, indicating the only other piece of furniture in my tiny office, an old and misused conference room chair whose bolts needed tightening.

“I don’t want to have a seat,” she said hotly. “I’m too angry to sit down.”

She then began to tell me what happened at the meeting she had just attended with two members of her staff. And here’s the second piece of background you need. Both of these staff people were young women, one of them not over thirty and the other not older than twenty-five. I had just been their direct supervisor as the former education department head, and I knew that they and a number of other young women in the company had formed a pretty tight bond with one another. They worked long hours, were largely underpaid, and were occasionally ogled by the mostly older men who served on the volunteer committees of the non-profit organizations we served. They were, in fact, a clique. And Susan, try as she might, just wasn’t going to be accepted as part of their club. 

Susan explained that at their closing dinner -- another long and drawn-out affair in another anonymous hotel ballroom with yet another rambling after dinner speaker -- she and her staff people sat at one of the tables near the back of the room. That was typical. Staff almost always sat apart from the participants at events like this. It wasn’t until you reached my or Mary’s level in the company that you were expected to fraternize with the volunteers and pretend like you had something in common with them. What was not typical is that they were joined by one of the workshop participants -- a scheming and lecherous creep named Wes Howard.

He was a real piece of work. Pushing sixty, the most youthful thing about him was his full head of hair and the way he always tried to make himself the life of the party. He drank gin and had this down-home Texas drawl that you could feel crawling up your spine after he had one too many. I had even given Susan a warning about him before we had left for our respective meetings. If someone was going to get ogled at one of the events we planned, nine times out of ten it was Wes Howard who would be doing the ogling.

As usual, Susan didn’t mince any words. 

“That man is a predator, Alan. He acts like everything is innocent, but he preys on women, and he pushes things as far as they will go.”

“My god,” I said, fearing the worst. “What happened?”

Susan’s face flushed red, as if she was embarrassed by what she had to say, but her voice was strong and direct. “They all had too much to drink,” she said flatly. “He kept pouring the wine and they kept drinking it, and before long they were whispering things to each other, and Amy and Caroline were giggling and laughing like a pair of schoolgirls.”

Amy was the older of the two. She had been with the company for close to six years. Caroline was younger and had been there less than two. As far as I knew, the company was the first job after college for the both of them.

“And him!” Susan nearly shouted. “Him! Sitting there between them, egging them on with his devious smile and that sick twinkle in his eye. A dirty old man with a stray hand on each of their thighs. It was disgusting!”

“He was…touching them?” I asked. “What did you do?”

Susan shook her head. “Alan, I have never been more embarrassed in my life. They were talking about me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they would whisper to each other and then look over at me and laugh. Like I was some kind of joke to them. Like I was too stupid to understand any of their secret gags. I felt humiliated. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what he would do if I left. They were so loud. They’d had way too much to drink and the whole room heard them and saw the way they were acting.”

I began to feel sick inside as Susan was telling me this. In some ways it certainly sounded like Wes Howard’s modus operandi -- and that’s the third piece of background information you need. At events like this, good ol’ Wes had a habit of inviting himself along with a group of staff people at the end of a long day for drinks at the hotel bar. He’d done it dozens of times before. He’d wind up buying most of the drinks, cracking most of the jokes, and invariably sit himself next to the most attractive young woman in the group. Amy and Caroline had often been part of these groups, acting in ways that frankly stretched the boundaries of a strictly professional relationship. 

It was Inappropriate, sure, but they were young and trying to have fun, and as long as there was a supervisor or someone like that present, things never went too far over the line. Of course, it didn’t help that Wes was well respected in his profession and had some powerful connections in the organization. He’d been on the leadership track for years, and even though he’d not yet found his way onto the board of directors, everyone agreed it was just a matter of time. He probably should have been at the VIP meeting I was at -- I think he was actually on that invitation list -- but had evidently made a different decision about where he belonged. It’s true that in the company we had come to think of his affinity for the young women on our staff as something that needed to be managed rather than dealt with. But having said that, it’s also true that in my experience, I had never seen Wes, Amy, or Caroline act in the way Susan was describing.

“The whole room heard them?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly that,” Susan said. “The whole room heard them. They were laughing so loud the speaker could barely complete his talk. People at the other tables kept telling them to quiet down, and they’d stop for a little while, but soon they’d start whispering again, and before you knew it, Amy would burst out with that ear-splitting laugh she has. You know the one I mean?”

I certainly did. When Amy laughed it sounded like a howler monkey had gotten stuck in a trash compactor. I nodded my head.

“It was awful, Alan, unbelievably awful. When the speaker finished, everyone just got up and left. Everyone in the room was embarrassed by what had happened. There was no Q and A, no closing announcements -- everyone just got up and left. And the three of them just kept goofing around and laughing.”

The sick feeling in my stomach got worse. I looked uncomfortably around the room and felt distinctly like the walls were closing in on me. There were no windows in my office. For whatever reason, the space we occupied had been configured with all the offices lined up along one long wall. It was the one that backed up against the building’s parking structure and, as a result, none of the offices had any windows. That left me with four bare walls and a door. The walls were bare -- and painted a snow-blinding white -- because company policy said we couldn’t hang anything on them. No framed art, no tacked up posters, no bulletin boards -- not even an ass-kissing photo of our fearless leader or a plaque engraved with the company’s incomprehensible code of ethics. Don Bascom was known to say that the reason for the ban on wall hangings was that they didn’t want to be constantly patching holes in the walls as people moved in and out of the offices. He sometimes even said it with a straight face, not realizing what message it conveyed regarding his expectations for your tenure with the organization.

Now, I simply focused my attention back on Susan, doing my best to ignore my enveloping sense of claustrophobia. “What did you do?” I asked.

Susan looked at me resolutely, folding her arms across her chest. “I left, too. I’d had enough. I know what you told me about keeping an eye on him, Alan, but even I couldn’t take it anymore. I no longer cared what he might do to Amy or Caroline, I was so angry and humiliated. I just had to get out of there.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. Leaving Wes Howard alone with two young, attractive, and inebriated staff people was a mistake any way you looked at it. “Did you say anything to them?”

I know Susan could hear the unease in my voice, but she stood her ground. “I told them to act their age -- all three of them -- but they just laughed at me.”

Susan didn’t see them for the rest of the night, and the next morning she and Amy and Caroline all met each other at the airport for the flight home. Susan, being Susan, had by then recovered her natural empathy and wanted to know if they were both all right, if Wes had done anything Inappropriate after she had left.

“Amy told me to mind my own business,” Susan said. “She said they were both big girls and knew how to take care of themselves. But she was hiding something. Something they were both ashamed of. It seemed neither one of the them was standing as tall as they once had, and Caroline never said a word and never looked me in the eye.”

Susan paused, her eyes momentarily staring down at her feet, and her lips pressing together into a tight line. “I don’t know what that son of a bitch did,” she said direly as her venomous eyes popped back up, “but he took advantage of one or both of them, I’m sure of it.”

At this point my mind was racing, the claustrophobia growing and seeming to propel my thoughts forward. I was clearly looking for a way out, and I forced myself to take a step back. What exactly had Wes done? Susan was certain he had gone past impropriety and into some kind of assault, but she had no real proof, and neither one of the two possible witnesses had told her anything. For all we knew he had done nothing more than walk them back to their hotel rooms and kiss them on the foreheads. Neither Amy nor Caroline liked Susan, and they both had evidently had too much to drink the night before. Their reaction to Susan in the airport could have been nothing more than their contempt for her filtered through the head-pounding fuzz of their wine hangovers. 

“What are you going to do about this, Alan?” Susan’s hostile tone interrupted my train of thought. She was angry -- justifiably so -- and made it clear that she expected someone to read the riot act to Wes Howard. She expected someone to confront him and tell him to keep his sick old hands off the junior members of our staff. And she was looking squarely at me.

I had been deputy account executive and Susan’s supervisor for less than three months. I had sent her to this meeting, had cautioned her against Wes’s behavior, and had instructed her to keep an eye on him to prevent things from getting out of hand. It’s what we always did when we knew he was going to be at an event, but those strategies hadn’t prepared me to deal with anything like this.

Wes Howard was one of the favored few -- a VIP among VIPs -- and Mary would have never promoted me if she hadn’t thought I had learned the lesson that wherever the VIPs are concerned, you puckered up first and asked for forgiveness later. And yet here was Susan Sanford, a woman new to our organization, but one honest and true and with a moral sense as yet uncorrupted by the company’s twisted priorities and politics, making accusations against him that, if true, should not just keep him off the board of directors, but probably land him in jail. I didn’t know what to do. And while I struggled to come up with the solution on my own, those damn white office walls of mine seemed to keep pressing in on me from all sides.

“Let go talk to Mary,” I said.

2

We marched right over to Mary’s office. In a very real way, it was a relief just to be out of my little claustrophobic compartment. It’s probably not hard to believe that those of us who occupied those small windowless rooms for one-third of our lives naturally came to view them as a kind of cellblock. Working there, you’d hear a startling number of prison metaphors being used, like “Hey, what brings you out of your cage?” or “Gosh, I feel like I’m going stir crazy today,” or “Let’s bust out of here and go get some lunch.” For me, I always knew I had been cooped up too long when Ted the mailroom clerk would come by with his little cart of deliveries, and I would feel like I was in one of those old prison escape films, with Ted as the jailhouse librarian, peddling paperbacks and selling contraband cigarettes to the cons.

But private offices were the exception. As Susan and I made our way across the office floor, it was easy to see that most staff people were assigned to tiny, wedge-shaped workstations in one of a dozen or so large pods, each such workstation radiating out from a central hub, where all the electrical and Internet connections for the computers were made. Those wires came down from the tangled mangrove swamp that existed above the acoustical tile ceiling, and were enclosed in a cylindrical tube that came down in the very center of each pod’s circle. In these pods, none of the dividers between individuals were higher than your waist, and everyone sat facing inward in a concentric ring. They were so close to each other that, if they chose, they could all stand up, link hands, and dance around their electrical pole, hopping from desktop to desktop like happy woodland sprites.

Don was in charge of the custom build-out they performed, and he said these pods were the latest in ergonomic, team-focused design, but every time I walked by them, I thought they looked more like the decrepit tilt-a-whirls the carnies trucked in for the county fair. I always half expected them to start spinning around, and for each of the workstations to begin going up and down while its occupant surreally kept banging away on his or her keyboard. The only thing missing to complete the illusion was the wet plywood flooring and the smell of horseshit.

The other thing worth mentioning about Don’s Ergonomic Pods is that the people assigned to them were under the same set of restrictions that prevented those of us with offices from hanging anything on our white walls. The company enforced a complete and utter ban on personal effects in anyone’s office or workstation. Photos of loved ones, decorative paperweights, kitschy trinkets picked up at trade shows, even coffee mugs with cute or clever slogans printed on them -- they were all equally taboo. If you were caught with any of these items, Don Bascom himself would pay you a visit and swap the offending item for a printed copy of the company’s office décor and accessories policy. They said it was all part of their efforts to present a polished and professional image to the client VIPs who occasionally paid us a visit, but I think it was more about de-humanizing people so they could get you to do inhuman things. More on that later.

When we got to Mary’s office we found the door closed and Ruthie MacDonald sitting at her desk outside, wetting envelopes with one of those little sponges and sealing them with the heel of her hand. Ruthie was Mary’s executive assistant, and still is, as far as I know. Ruthie’s been with the company longer than just about anyone, and is likely never to leave it. I’m not sure she could make it anywhere else. It’s not that she’s incompetent -- far from it. It’s just that she’s never worked anywhere else. She had been Ryan’s assistant before he left the company, and was the assistant to the company’s founder for years before that. I think she started working there right out of high school. And now, she’s so much a fixture in what makes that company work, I don’t think either would survive if they were ever separated from one another.

Like a lot of other executive assistants in a lot of other companies, Ruthie could make people turn cartwheels through razor wire just by looking at them askance. People knew she had the inside track to the boss’s thinking and feelings on any particular subject, and they would do anything she suggested, or even hinted at, if they thought she was giving out clues that would help them stay a leg up on their competition.

At the core, Ruthie was basically manipulating people, but she wasn’t the type to take savage glee in pulling people’s strings. Rather, she had quite a business-like approach to the task, understanding how essential it was to her and to the company’s success. It didn’t say so on her job description, but Ruthie’s primary role in the organization was to keep the boss focused on the thing that mattered most. Mary herself, like a lot of bosses, didn’t always know what that thing was, but Ruthie did. Ruthie would do whatever she had to in order to keep that thing from getting sidetracked. Certain files would get placed on Mary’s desk -- others wouldn’t. Certain phone calls would be put right through -- others wouldn’t. And certain people would be admitted to the corner office even if the door was closed -- others wouldn’t. These were the weapons that Ruthie wielded in defense of her sacred mission, and she wielded them with tremendous skill, honed from long practice.

That morning, I could tell by the look on Ruthie’s face that we were in for a battle if we thought we were going to be admitted to Mary’s office. I surreptitiously advised Susan to keep quiet and to let me do the talking, and then closed the remaining distance to Ruthie’s desk.

“Morning, Ruthie,” I said, as pleasantly as I could. “Is that a new necklace you’re wearing?” When necessary, I believed in putting an adversary off her game from the word go, and complimenting Ruthie on her jewelry was always a good way to start.

“Why, yes it is, Alan,” Ruthie said, suddenly blushing in the overgrown schoolgirl way she had. She was middle-aged with two teenage boys at home, but was still long and lean and freckled exactly as she must have been in high school. “Desmond bought it for me on his last trip to Florida. Don’t you love it?”

Desmond was Ruthie’s husband, a small business owner who spent all his time selling custom-built parts for speed boat engines and all his money on presents for his blushing bride. Physically, they made an odd couple, with Ruthie’s tall gawkiness juxtaposed against Desmond’s dramatically shorter stature. I always thought Desmond looked a lot like Yoda, the muppet Jedi master from the Star Wars films. He wasn’t green, exactly, but he had the same nose, and his ears sort of came to a point with those long, wispy hairs clinging to them.

Ruthie leaned forward, obviously intending for me to take a closer look at her newest prize.

“It’s really nice,” I said, caressing the pendant between my thumb and forefinger. “Is it twenty-four carat?”

“Of course,” Ruthie said with some indignant dismay. “Desmond knows all the best places to shop. He has some very reliable connections on both coasts. He would never be taken in by one of those charlatans who pawn costume jewelry off on the tourists.”

I wasn’t so sure. The pendant was a little teddy bear, and looked distinctly like something you might see hanging off a twelve-year-old’s charm bracelet. But I kept this thought to myself, knowing I had to keep Ruthie in a good mood if we were going to get inside. 

“It’s stunning,” I said with as much sincerity as I could muster, and then adroitly shifted gears, pitching my voice much more quietly, as if we were sharing a secret. “Hey, what’s on Mary’s calendar today? You think you could find me a few minutes of her time?”

I watched as Ruthie’s green eyes hardened. They lost the soft glow associated with her fond feelings for her puckish husband and the gifts of tribute he constantly offered her, and gained the calculating shine associated with her realization that something was up. She looked briefly at Susan standing impatiently beside me, then once quickly around the office to see who might be within earshot, and then focused laser-like on me.

“What’s going on?” she said.

I knew there was no way we were going to get inside without telling Ruthie some piece of what we had come to say. Like that mythical ferryman over the river Styx, only Ruthie could take us where we wanted to go, but she wasn’t going to do it without a little something for her change purse. And Ruthie’s preferred form of currency in these situations was information -- inside information about what was really going on within the company. It’s what she hoarded and what gave her the ability to perform her job as well as she did. But I couldn’t come right out and tell her. That would be taking the risk that she wouldn’t deem it important enough to interrupt whatever Mary was doing on the other side of the door.

I aped Ruthie’s actions from a few moments before, looking furtively around at our surroundings. “I can’t tell you,” I said quietly, indicating with a tilt of my head that there were too many people walking by that could overhear us. “Not out here.”

I saw the sparkle in Ruthie’s eyes intensify, but she was a practiced master, and was frankly better at this game than I was. She turned those eyes down towards Mary’s calendar and slowly began shaking her head.

“I don’t know, Alan,” she said. “Mary’s got a pretty full schedule. I shouldn’t interrupt her unless it’s something that really needs to be dealt with today.”

And then she looked back up at me, her eyes still bright, but this time with the coy satisfaction of knowing that she was in control, and that I wasn’t getting inside unless I spilled the beans.

“Not just today, but right now,” Susan said suddenly, her voice not loud, but also clearly not pitched to avoid being overheard. “The company may be facing some serious liability for sexual harassment.”

Although I felt like strangling Susan for speaking out of turn, her words certainly caught Ruthie’s attention. Forget the twinkling eyes, if Ruthie had been a lioness I could now envision her licking her chops. But Ruthie was not someone to be trifled with, and that’s why I had cautioned Susan to let me do the talking. I had seen many other people in the company try to manipulate her -- giving Ruthie only tidbits of information that sometimes didn’t even lead to some bigger scandal -- in order to gain access to the boss’s circle of control. Without exception, they all came to regret their actions. The hapless ones found themselves merely boxed out of the influence they had envisioned for themselves. But the calculating ones -- those who had angered Ruthie by treating her cavalierly in their own quest for power -- one way or the other had a habit of finding themselves cashiered entirely out of the organization. Despite what Susan had reported -- even if it was one hundred percent true -- I wasn’t sure that Mary would see the same threat to the company that Susan did, and so I wasn’t planning on playing the sexual harassment card with Ruthie in order to get inside. If Mary didn’t see things Susan’s way, then Ruthie was liable to interpret such a ploy as a kind of bait and switch, and was likely to extract some form of punishment on us at a later date.

I watched as Ruthie slowly mastered her excitement and gave me a critical look -- obviously waiting for me as the supervisor to confirm or refute the accusation of my direct report.

I swallowed my anger. “It might rise to that level,” I said diplomatically, but then turned partway towards Susan and spoke a little more tersely. “We’d like to brief Mary on what happened and get her read on the situation before making a judgment.”

Ruthie considered it for a moment or two more, and then put her envelope sponge aside. “Wait here,” she said, as she got up and moved towards Mary’s closed office door, her long legs sashaying beneath an ankle-length skirt. She knocked three times in quick succession, but didn’t wait for a reply before opening the door and poking her head inside.

I took the moment to turn fully towards Susan and give her my angriest look, but she fearlessly glowered back at me, clearly satisfied with her impression that she had gotten us inside.

“Got a few minutes for Alan Larson,” Ruthie said, a question mark not in her tone nor on the end of her sentence.

“What?” I heard Mary’s voice say from inside the office. “Now?”

Ruthie nodded her head, and turned part way back toward me. “He’s here with Susan Sanford. They’ve got something important to tell you.”

“All right,” Mary sighed. “Show them in.”

I skipped forward immediately, motioning for Susan to follow. Ruthie took a step back to give us access to the doorway and ushered us smartly inside. She followed us in and closed the door behind her, pressing her back against its frosted glass. I didn’t say anything. I knew being a fly on the wall during the conversation that was to follow was her payment for letting us in the dragon’s lair.

3

Every time I entered Mary’s office, for as long as I’d worked there, I couldn’t help marveling at the way all the rules that bound the rest us -- silly rules like the office décor and accessories policy and the ban on hanging things on their virgin white walls -- were utterly and completely disregarded. Yeah, I know, she was the president of the company and she was entitled to a few more perks than the rest of us, but seriously, the contrast between her world and ours was so stark it was like she was trying to rub our noses in it. Walking into her office it was hard not to feel like Dorothy in that scene in The Wizard of Oz when she first steps out of her black and white reality of dustbowl farming and limited opportunities and into the rich and colorful wonderland of her dreams.

As I walked in that morning with Susan, I was again struck by just how large the room actually was. Mary’s office was so large that it couldn’t be brought together into a single, cohesive space, no matter how creative the interior decorator they hired. It felt less like an office and more like one of those upscale studio loft apartments only millionaires could afford. Front and center was Mary’s desk, a modern-styled behemoth with an executive credenza behind and two uncomfortable visitor chairs in front; and over there to the left was a conference table, a cut piece of beveled glass exactly fitting over the oval-shaped tabletop and a speaker phone crouching like a venomous spider in its very center; and on the opposite side was a kind of sitting area, two low, leather chairs and a matching loveseat trying to surround a glass-topped coffee table, a spread of business and news magazines pushed across it like a winning hand; and farther on was the library, two enormous bookshelves filled with books featured in the Harvard Business Review and not a one of them with a cracked spine or a dog-eared page. They were all in the same room, but they were also rooms in and of themselves, making up a kind of posh apartment in the sky with no walls necessary to mark the transitions between spaces. 

Mary was standing there behind her desk, her reading glasses held absently in one hand and her other hand planted impatiently on her hip. Ruthie hadn’t shared the details of Mary’s schedule that day, but I figured she must have had some kind of power lunch planned with clients or with local business leaders because she was wearing one of her best suits -- gray Italian wool over a red silk blouse. Mary dressed well, but whatever she wore in the office it always looked more like an affectation than something she was comfortable with -- almost like something she had rented for the occasion. And the designer reading glasses really struck me as out of place. I don’t know what she could have been reading with those glasses before we came in. There was not a scrap of paper anywhere to be found on her desk and her computer monitor obliquely but clearly showed us nothing but the company’s familiar sign-in screen.

“Alan, Susan,” Mary said quickly. She made eye contact with me and with Susan in turn. “What’s going on?”

I led Susan deeper into Mary’s office, coming to a position right behind one of her visitor chairs. Susan came up beside me, and made a move as if she intended to sit down, but checked herself when it became clear that I had no intention of doing so. I waited for Ruthie to shut the door completely behind us. Knowing that Ruthie would be hanging on every word I had to say, and still angry at Susan for revealing too much too soon, I decided to start slowly, and to hedge my own bets as best I could.

“Something happened at Susan’s meeting,” I said. “She just told me about it, and I think you’d better hear it directly.”

Mary turned her attention away from me. “Susan?”

I don’t know if Susan knew she was being maneuvered into doing all the talking, and therefore take all the risks, but she didn’t seem to mind. I think she might have even relished the opportunity, because she launched into it with Mary just as she’d launched into it with me fifteen minutes before. She told the whole story again from top to bottom, her anger and frustration overriding any sense of embarrassment she had felt over how Wes and her staff people had mocked and belittled her.

I intended to pay close attention to Mary’s reactions while Susan spoke, but first my eyes were irresistibly drawn over Mary’s shoulder and out into the city beyond. I was like that then, you see, often getting distracted at the most critical of moments, and Mary’s office had the greatest of all distractions. Unlike every other office in our space, Mary’s office had windows -- two entire walls of floor-to-ceiling windows -- accentuating not just the office’s position in the corner of our building, but also its commanding view of the city we all called home.

“He’s a predator, Mary. Wes Howard is a predator and the young women of this company are his prey.”

It was this dramatic and somewhat practiced opening salvo of Susan’s that pulled my eyes away from the intoxicating daylight and reminded me that I should be studying Mary. I forced myself to do exactly that, watching for signs of shock or concern as Susan went on with her story, piling on the details surrounding Amy and Caroline’s poor judgment and Wes’s boorishness. But throughout all I saw was the typical Mary Walton poker face -- a stoic and impenetrable expression I had seen her adopt in countless board meetings and negotiations. It was the face she showed the world and it was meant to mask her emotions and the wheels of number-crunching thought that were always spinning in her head. It was so effective that I’d heard people say they didn’t think Mary had any emotions or, worse yet, that she was incapable of higher thought -- but I knew better. I knew it was a mask because I had seen what Mary looked like underneath. Mary didn’t let the mask slip very often, but when she did it was something to see.

I saw Mary’s true face the day Ryan left the company, when I had gone looking for him in his old office and had found Mary and Don there, Mary looking for all the world like the basement walls had just caved in on her family. It was such an unbelievable and oddly captivating sight -- Mary Walton completely thrown off her game -- that there was always part of me that longed to see it again.

But this would not be one of those times. Even as Susan finished and started to make her demands, I could tell that Mary had a full grip on her faculties.

“Something needs to be done, Mary,” Susan said. “That man can’t be allowed to victimize members of our staff this way.”

Mary nodded her head as if she agreed with Susan. “Did you actually see Wes touching either one of them inappropriately?”

Susan seemed surprised by the directness of Mary’s question, and she stumbled on her response. “I was -- well, I was sitting right next to them.”

“Yes,” Mary said. “But did you see him actually touching them?”

Susan stood and looked dumbly at Mary for a moment. “Mary, it was pretty clear what was going on.”

“Is that a no, Susan?” Mary said sharply. “Did you or didn’t you--”

“Did I actually see his grimy hands on their thighs?” Susan said suddenly, her voice loud and hostile. “Is that what you want to know, Mary? No, I guess I didn’t, and I don’t have any photographic evidence, either, but his hands were under the table and they certainly weren’t in his own lap. What are you trying to do here?”

I was surprised by Susan’s outburst, knowing it was more impassioned than what was typically seen in the company, especially inside Mary’s office. Mary had this thing about women showing too much emotion in the workplace. She was from the school that taught women professionals had to be even more cutthroat than their male counterparts because of the widespread sexism that expected them to be more emotional and -- by Mary’s estimation -- less trustworthy. The surest way for a female staff person to get onto Mary’s blacklist was to be too emotional. And if she ever cried -- forget it. Her career was over. Susan wasn’t anywhere near tears, but she was upset, and I wasn’t the only one who thought she might be stepping over Mary’s line. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ruthie start moving forward, the riot police about to swoop in and arrest the perpetrators, but Mary held her at bay with a raised finger.

“Susan,” Mary said calmly, “the only thing I’m trying to do here is determine an appropriate course of action. In order to do that, I need to know the facts. Now, if you didn’t witness inappropriate contact between them, then I need to have either Amy or Caroline make a complaint against Wes. Would either one of them be willing to do that?”

Susan turned her eyes down towards the floor. “I don’t know,” she said bitterly. “I don’t think so. You’d have to ask them.”

While Susan’s eyes were averted, Mary turned and looked at me, asking me with just her expression what I thought about Amy or Caroline ratting out on Wes. I responded in equal silence, communicating with a shake of my head and a skeptical wrinkle in my cheek that I didn’t think so, either. Amy and Caroline didn’t like Susan -- none of her staff did -- and it sounded like they had had a rollicking good time making fun of her while someone with greater authority provided them cover. Unless Wes had done something actually abusive to one of them -- and I wasn’t convinced he had -- I couldn’t see either of them turning on Wes in a situation like this. Rather, they were likely looking forward to the next opportunity to get out of their little workstations and drink expensive wine at a fancy hotel while ridiculing their supervisor.

Mary nodded her head slightly, making it clear that she also agreed with this assessment. And that made sense. Mary, as much as anyone, understood the inequities of Amy and Caroline’s positions in the company, and how little people acted when they got a taste of the big time.

Susan looked up just as Mary turned away from me. “Mary,” she said plaintively. “Something needs to be done. I saw the look in Caroline’s eyes yesterday morning. He did something to hurt her. I don’t know what it--”

“Something will be done,” Mary said suddenly, her resolution interrupting Susan in mid-sentence. “You can be assured of that, Susan. Their conduct was extremely unprofessional. I’m especially troubled by the way they called attention to themselves. You said the entire room was aware of how much they were drinking?”

Susan looked at Mary blankly.    

“Yes, you did,” Mary said, not waiting for Susan to respond. “And they treated you with great disrespect. I know you’re new to the company, but you are their supervisor. They owe you a greater courtesy.”

I saw what was happening. At the time I probably couldn’t have predicted it, but looking back on it now, I see this is why I didn’t want to jump too quickly to the sexual harassment accusation the way Susan had. I had sensed from the very beginning that Mary was going to have a different perspective on the situation. Simply stated, if you were going to accuse someone like Wes Howard of sexual harassment, you had better make sure you had him dead to rights. Susan didn’t, and Mary wasn’t going to risk a move against him without something a lot more substantial. Susan was having a hard time processing the cold reality of it all, but it was clear to me. And I suddenly knew what was coming next. 

“Let’s go talk to Don,” Mary said.

4

Don was the hatchet man in the company. Everyone knew that. Almost from the first day you started working there, you learned through a combination of osmosis and observation that a visit from Don Bascom was something to be dreaded. Remember that he co-owned the company with Mary. He called himself the Chief Operating Officer while Mary called herself the President, but they were equal partners in managing the business and made all the big decisions together. Near as I could tell, Don’s sole day-to-day function was monitoring everyone’s behavior and addressing as needed any deviations from the company’s poorly communicated expectations.

The fact that Mary wanted to consult with Don after hearing Susan’s story told me she thought someone needed to be punished for what had happened. In the idiom of the company’s corporate-speak, that meant someone was to be “placed on a course of progressive discipline” -- a best practice strategy the company utilized to address violations of policy. In it, the offending employee was “placed on notice,” and faced a series of “elevating consequences” for continued misconduct, “up to and including termination.” It was all written up very clearly and with the appropriate legal flourishes in one of the policy binders Don kept on his bookshelf, but in practice it usually meant the employee was simply taken a short journey -- a journey very much like the one mobsters take stoolies on in the old film noir classics -- a journey, in other words, with a predetermined destination. First, Don gave them a tongue lashing; second, he wrote them up and put a black mark in their file; and third, he ended the whole affair by firing them and contesting their ability to collect unemployment insurance.

I’m sure we made an interesting sight, the three of us -- Mary, me, and Susan -- marching through the office in single file. But most people were smart enough not to look up until after we had passed by. Don lived with all of us office dwellers, his cell more like a cozy warren in the very center of that long windowless wall against the parking structure. His office had been specially configured with a footprint the size of three of our offices, and a door and outer wall made completely of glass. The better to see you with, my dear, was the running joke that explained Don’s Transparent Wall, and it was true. The wall gave Don a commanding view of all the worker bees as they did their little functions in their little workstations. But most of the time the wall wasn’t even necessary, because Don was typically not in his office. He much preferred standing in its door frame, one shoulder braced against one of the steel supports and an extra large cup of coffee in his hand, looking out self-assuredly on all the pod people and the special habitat he had created for them. That morning was no exception.

“We need to talk,” Mary said bluntly upon our arrival, and Don, giving Susan and me the barest of cursory glances, simply nodded his head and backed into his office to allow the three of us to enter. 

Don was a big man, thick more than fat, with a gigantic head and a prizefighter’s nose pushed flat and wide against his face. He wore his wide-collared dress shirts -- white, and sometimes blue -- with two open buttons at the neck, revealing more of his puffy, pink skin than anyone really wanted to see. There was always a wrinkled sport coat draped around the high-backed chair behind his desk as if it were his personal valet, but he never wore it, and his shirts were chronically untucking themselves as he went through the movements of his day. Indeed, as he moved towards the small conference table that was the centerpiece of his office, I saw that his shirttail had come loose again, a mottled love handle flashing its blotchy rosiness at me as he turned and heavily sat himself down.   

“What’s going on?” Don asked.

Mary was taking her seat beside Don. I stepped aside and gave Susan access to a third chair and turned to close Don’s door. Through its glass I saw that all activity had stopped in Don’s amusement park outside. All of the pod people were silently watching us -- some simply turned towards us in their chairs, but others stood clustered together in the spaces between the pods -- as if we were about to discuss all of their fates.

“It’s Amy and Caroline,” I heard Mary say. “They’ve really stepped over the line this time.”

Resisting the distraction, I forced myself to turn away from all those blank and frozen faces. Don, Mary, and Susan were huddled around Don’s circular conference table, a fourth chair waiting for me to claim it. 

“Who?” Don asked.

“Amy Crawford and Caroline…uh, Caroline…” Mary looked to Susan for help.

“…Abernathy. Car—” 

“Caroline Abernathy,” Mary added quickly. “They’re in the Education Department.”

Don seemed to think for a moment, his breath moving loudly in and out of his flat nose, and then perked up as if someone had stuck him with a pin. “Amy Crawford! Goddammit! What’s she done this time? I’ve about had it with her.”

“It’s not Amy—”

“She got drunk at a client meeting,” Mary said quickly, interrupting Susan again. “And she embarrassed the company in front of a hundred VIPs.”

“She did what!?” Don said, almost spilling his coffee as his big hands shot out in surprise. He wore one of those enormous class rings on his finger, and it clanged tellingly on the tabletop. “That’s the last straw! She’s already got the black mark in her file. Let’s fire her.”

Mary looked ready to pounce but this time Susan spoke first and wouldn’t be interrupted.

“Now just a minute, please,” she said. “There’s much more to the story than that. What about Wes Howard and his role in all of this?”

“What?” Don said, blinking his puffy eyes at Susan as if she had just materialized before him. “Who?”

Susan opened her mouth but Mary stopped her with a restraining grip on her wrist. “Wes Howard,” she said purposefully, as if regaining total control of the situation. “One of the VIPs. You remember, Don. You met him at the strategic planning retreat last year. Eleanor thinks we should be considering him for board service.”

“Oh, yeah,” Don said, thoughtfully. “Wes Howard. Nice guy. What’s he got to do with this?”

“Not much that I can see,” Mary said.

“Not much!” Susan suddenly exploded, yanking her arm out of Mary’s grasp and rising reflexively to her feet. Susan had a frenetic energy that could often not be contained, especially when she was worked up about something she felt was Inappropriate. “What are you talking about? He’s responsible for their behavior. They wouldn’t have done it without him providing them cover and egging them on!”

“Susan, please,” Mary said slyly, her voice like a snake moving through the long grass. “Sit down. We need to discuss this rationally.”

Susan turned deliberately towards Mary, her shoulders scrunching up and her elbows drawing back aggressively. I couldn’t see the expression on Susan’s face from my position near the door, but I saw Don’s reaction to it. His thoughts were plainly written on his jowly face and, like me, the split second impression that Susan was going to haul off and hit Mary flashed through his mind. Mary, still not shaken, looked up at Susan passively, like an ancient sea creature waiting for its smaller and swifter prey to swim within reach.

“Rationally?” Susan said bitterly. “How can we discuss this rationally when we’re not even willing to put the blame where it actually belongs?”

“Susan, please,” Mary said again, unperturbed by Susan’s icy tone. “Sit down. We can talk about an appropriate response for everyone involved in this incident. But we must be calm and rational about it. You’re still new to the company, but I know you’ve reviewed the personnel files of all the staff you inherited. This is not the first time Amy has acted inappropriately at a client meeting.”

Susan did not sit down. Instead, she literally threw her hands up and let out a loud harrumph. She turned to look at me with her arms folded tightly across her chest. Her eyes contained a simmering fire, but they also seemed to plead with me. Alan. Please. Do something!

I have to admit, I was torn. I had gotten as far as I had in the company by keeping my nose clean, by not crossing swords unnecessarily with Mary, but this time it did seem like our President was rushing to judgment. But more than that, as Susan stood there glaring at me I couldn’t help but think about the kind of person she was and the way she tried to deal with her staff. Although they had rebuffed her at just about every turn, Susan nobly continued to be their advocate, their champion, their supporter. Even now, knowing full well that Amy Crawford despised her, and had deliberately mocked and embarrassed her in front of a room full of people, Susan was trying to keep her from getting fired. It’s not just that Susan thought Wes was the real culprit to be dealt with. Susan defended Amy because Amy was one of her people, and that’s what a supervisor was supposed to do with the people she managed -- at least with the ones she thought were worth keeping in the organization. I knew Susan well enough to know that this was where she was coming from. And by the look in her eyes, I could tell that she expected no less from me. It guilted me into action.

“Mary’s right, Susan,” I said, stepping forward, touching her gently on the elbow and encouraging her to sit back down as I finally took my own seat at the table. “This isn’t the first time Amy has acted inappropriately.” I looked sympathetically into Susan’s angry eyes as she hesitantly reseated herself. “But, Mary,” I said, turning to face her, “Susan’s right, too. Amy isn’t the only one who acted inappropriately here.”

“I know,” Mary said. “We’ll have to discuss an appropriate action against Caroline as well. She’s less experienced, but she should know better.”

“Caroline!” Susan shouted before I could placate her, her thoughts beginning to sputter out of her in incomplete sentences. “Caroline’s the one… She doesn’t deserve… If you had seen her eyes…”

“Mary,” I said as calmly as I could. “Don’t you think that someone should at least have a talk with Wes?”

“About what?”

There was no mistaking Mary’s tone. It was crisp, dismissive, and, worst of all, honest. In three cold syllables, Mary had effectively communicated that there would be no more discussion on this issue. She had taken in all the information Susan had given her, had made the necessary calculations befitting her role as company President, and had decided on a course of action. Case closed. And it wasn’t Amy or Caroline that Mary was worried about. Mary was looking out for her company, and her inexorable logic told her that punishing a couple members of the junior staff for acting inappropriately was by far safer than confronting a well-connected VIP on the circumstantial evidence she had been given.

Susan also heard the finality in Mary’s voice. This time she did not jump up, but rose deliberately from her chair. She turned and gave me a venomous look and then, without a word, unclipped her ID badge from her blouse, tossed it cavalierly on the table, and strode resolutely from the room, leaving the office door hanging open behind her.

Don blinked his eyes. “Did she just quit?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, in shock over what had just happened, my head turned towards the open door, and staring at the wild eyes on all the stunned faces of the pod people as they wordlessly tracked Susan’s progress as she moved away from Don’s office. “But, I think I should go find out.” 

Without waiting for permission to leave, I got up and hurried after her.

5

It was quite a day, even for a company as dysfunctional as that one. Amy Crawford got fired. Caroline Abernathy got both a tongue lashing and a write up. And Susan Sanford resigned in protest. With the benefit of hindsight, I would say it was clearly the beginning of the end.

I was in all three meetings, although my final encounter with Susan could be better termed a brush-off than a meeting. By the time I caught up with her she was already in her office, taking some books off her shelf and putting them in an old copy paper box.

“Susan, wait a minute,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I quit, Alan,” she said plainly, her tone incredulous, probably at the idea that I may not be smart enough to have figured that out. “I’ve never left a job so quickly before, but I’ve had it. This place and I do not share the same values. The sooner I’m gone the better.” She stooped to pull her purse out of her bottom desk drawer and she dropped it into the box next to her books. 

“Susan, please,” I said. “I’ll talk to Mary. We’ll address the situation with Wes.”

Susan gave me a skeptical look, and then moved around me to remove her coat from the hanger on the back of her door.

“You may talk to her, Alan,” she said as she shrugged into her coat, “but she’s not going to listen. She’s made her decision. She’d rather defend the abuser than protect the abused -- and I won’t be a part of that.”

She walked past me again and retrieved her box from her desk. I felt a little like a turnstile at the entrance to the subway, constantly spinning in place while the people who mattered buzzed by and on to better things. With her box tucked under one arm and her coat already buttoned, she turned smartly back towards me and extended a hand. Not knowing what else to do, I shook it.

“Good luck, Alan,” she said. “I should be mad at you for the way you set me up in there, but I think you might’ve actually done me a favor. If you do decide to go up against her, watch your back. Mary strikes me as the kind who poisons her prey before eating it.”

And with that she was past me again, leaving her office behind and striding victoriously down towards the elevator. Moving out to her doorway, I watched with the rest of the office as she calmly waited for the car to arrive, then entered and vanished with the pneumatic hiss of the closing doors. In our last image of her, she was holding her head high, gazing out over the heads of those of us who remained.

The meetings with Amy and Caroline quickly followed. Susan’s dramatic exit had caught everyone’s fascination, but as soon as she was gone, Don popped out of his office and began weaving his way between the pods, telling everyone to get back to work.

When he got to the pod where Amy, Caroline, and the rest of the Education staff sat, he told Amy to report to his office and Caroline to stay at her workstation until she was called. I watched as Amy seemed to quietly collect herself, absently arrange a few files in her workspace, and then rise and begin making her way towards Don’s office. Once she was moving, Don’s eyes came up and found me standing in Susan’s office door. His face was expressionless, and he pointed at me and then hooked his finger down towards his office.

A minute later we were all gathered around Don’s conference table, Amy sitting where Susan had most recently sat, the rest of us in our same positions. Amy looked nervous but a little resigned to her fate. She was a young woman with long, flowing hair -- the kind you might see in a shampoo commercial -- but she had been with the company for a while and surely knew what was coming next.

An odd quiet settled over the room as we all waited for Don to begin, but Don’s eyes were downcast, his fingers busy fiddling with his class ring, and stopping every once and awhile to crack one of his thick knuckles. Mary sat looking directly at me, her stare at once dispassionate and unsettling, and I found myself wondering what she was thinking. Influenced by the rumors usually spread about her, I considered the possibility that she might not be thinking at all -- at least not at that precise moment. Like Don seemed to be, I thought perhaps she was just passing the time until the meeting could officially begin and they could move forward with the task they had set before themselves. Until then, there was simply nothing to think or do. There was only waiting. Waiting for the moment when they would terminate one of their employees; waiting exactly like they would in line at a busy restaurant to use the restroom. In such circumstances, at such moments of empty time and inactivity, Don’s habit was evidently to crack his knuckles and play with his class ring -- and it made some sense to me that Mary’s habit would be to study the people around her for weaknesses.

In a few moments Peggy Wilcox appeared on the other side of Don’s door. She was the Director of Human Resources, but in that company that meant little more than being Don’s executive assistant. Don didn’t formally have one -- no such position existed on the company’s perplexing organizational chart. Like his humble office, Don liked to pretend he was a man of the people who eschewed the trappings of power, but everyone knew Peggy was at his beck and call and handled all of his formal correspondence. She was a kind-hearted person, but had kept her position in the company through a combination of quiet competence and abiding loyalty that both Don and Mary appreciated. She stepped into the room without knocking, handed Don a slim file, and took up a position beside his closed door. She stood at attention, her chin quivering slightly before her clenched teeth forced it to be still.

The meeting did not last long. Once Don began speaking it was over in less than two minutes. It was a testament to the company’s brutal efficiency that such an action could be so well coordinated in such a short period of time -- every legal requirement fulfilled and a practiced script used to keep any tinge of human emotion from soiling the cold proceedings.

Don told Amy they were letting her go -- that was the phrase he used, letting her go, as if charitably releasing her from some terrible burden. He opened Peggy’s file and slid a piece of paper across the table at Amy. It floated over the veneer surface like an air hockey puck and fell practically in her lap. It was a release form, Don said, freeing the company from any liability. If she signed it, they would treat her departure like a resignation. They wouldn’t contest her unemployment insurance and would give her the standard reference should anyone call during her quest for a new position.

Amy held the document up and I watched her eyes dance across it for a few seconds. When they flashed back up there was a shine of defiance in them. “What if I don’t sign it?” she asked.

“Then you’ll be terminated for cause,” Don said simply, as if he really didn’t care what Amy decided to do. “No unemployment insurance and no good reference.”

“For what cause?” Amy persisted. “Susan just walked out of here with a box under her arm. And I’m guessing she didn’t take the time to write anything in my file before she left.”

I looked at Mary, surprised that Amy was playing this as coolly as she was. Although no one had mentioned it explicitly, it was obvious that she knew her conduct with Wes at the recent client meeting was the reason she was being let go. But Mary didn’t seem surprised. She didn’t even turn away to meet my stare, her cold and calculating gaze focused squarely on Amy.

Weaknesses, I thought again. She’s looking for weaknesses.

“There’s already enough information in your file to warrant your dismissal,” Don said easily. “You have a well-documented history of inappropriate conduct. You were issued a written warning just two months ago for a similar incident.”

Amy looked down at the document again. She seemed to consider her options for a moment or two, and then set the release form back down.

“Does Wes know you’re doing this?”

To me, it was as if Amy had turned over a box of scorpions on the table. I couldn’t believe she would be so brazen. It seemed little more than a flat-out confession that there was something inappropriate going on between her and Wes Howard. Mary might have taken it that way, too, but she seemed to view it more as an opportunity than as a threat. Rather than recoil from its implications, she leaned forward, apparently willing to let the scorpions sting her.

But it was Don who spoke next, and Don was all business. “You don’t have to sign it now,” he said, ignoring Amy’s comment and bringing our attention back to the release form. “In fact, I would prefer that you didn’t. The offer it contains is good for the next seven days. You can sign and return it any time before then and we’ll honor our end of the deal. I would encourage you to take a few of those days to consider your situation, and even speak with your own legal counsel if you prefer. We’re striving for an amicable separation, and believe our offer will best help facilitate that. But ultimately, it will be your decision that determines what happens next.”

I watched as Amy looked at Don coldly, her mascaraed eyelashes blinking slowly. Don had stuck to his script, had refused to take Amy’s bait and, as a result, had extinguished the fire in her eyes. In that moment Amy looked slow-witted, like a kind of cold-blooded lizard just coming back to action after a long desert night. 

Don let the silence build in the room for three seconds and then called an end to the meeting. He announced it like it had been within his ability to do so at any moment. He said that Peggy would walk Amy back to her workstation, let her collect her things, and escort her from the building.

And that’s exactly what happened next. At first, I didn’t think it would. I didn’t think that Amy would get up and leave without saying another word, but the defiance that had flashed in her eyes was no longer there. There was nothing she could do at that moment that was going to change the situation, and she probably realized that whatever cards she still held were probably better played at another place and time. Peggy’s presence undoubtedly helped. As soon as Don finished talking, Peggy attentively positioned herself at Amy’s side. She scooped the release form off the table, helped Amy push her chair away, and then guided her out of the office with an expert hand.   

Things did not go quite so cleanly with Caroline. Peggy returned a few minutes later with Caroline in tow, and even before she sat down the tears were flowing. I remember thinking, no, NO, Caroline. Don’t cry. She’ll destroy you if you cry.

Don and Mary and I had passed the few uncomfortable minutes between Amy’s departure and Caroline’s arrival in almost complete silence -- Don again playing with his class ring, Mary studying me with her clinical detachment, and me trying to figure out some way to ask about what had just happened with Amy. I wanted to know what they thought about Amy’s reference to Wes, if they thought it revealed what I thought it did, but I had a difficult time finding the right words to break the odd silence they both seemed so intent on keeping. As my mind searched for the solution, my eyes strayed between Don and Mary and fuzzily focused on Don’s solitary bookshelf. As typical for Don’s office, it was crammed with all manner of materials -- his books maltreated with broken spines and tattered covers, and even his precious policy binders bulging with their contents, less than half of the documents actually secured in the rings.

“What do you think she meant by bringing up Wes?” I finally managed to croak.

Don and Mary exchanged glances, a little surprised, I think, that I had spoken up at all. Don seemed to defer to Mary with an obsequious nod of his head, and Mary turned to me, her eyes bright and penetrating.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said abruptly. “I called Wes while you were off following Susan. He’s not going to cause any trouble.”

I wanted to ask more questions, but Mary’s terse tone chased them out of my mind, and in a moment the tear-streaked face of Caroline Abernathy appeared on the other side of Don’s door. Peggy escorted her inside and directed her to sit in the chair Amy had just vacated. Caroline was only a year or two out of college and usually looked like she was still pulling all-nighters at the student union. She had a couple of balled-up Kleenexes tucked in the cuff of her wrinkled cardigan, and now she pulled one out and used it to dab at the tears as they fell out of her eyes.

Don showed her no mercy, berating her savagely as she wilted and withered under the strain. The most sympathetic thing he said to her were the first four words out of his mouth -- What were you thinking? He sounded initially like an angry father who had caught his teenage daughter trying to sneak into the house a few minutes before dawn after being gone all night, but he transitioned quickly into the strident taskmaster he was, simply outraged by the negligence of others.

“You obviously weren’t thinking, were you? I don’t see how you could have been, at least not thinking about your responsibilities to this organization. Traveling to client meetings is a privilege, Miss Abernathy, not a perk, and company policy clearly states that you are to conduct yourself professionally from the moment you leave the office to the moment you return. You are a representative of this company for that entire time, and your conduct must reflect the high ethical standards upon which our business model is based. By acting the way you have, you have jeopardized the reputation of this organization and may have damaged the relationship we enjoy with one of our longest-standing clients. Those are actionable offenses, and we have terminated employees in situations far less severe than this.”

It’s hard for me to recall those words and not now think about how full of corporate gobbledygook they are. In many ways, I believe, they are actually nonsense words, like something out of a Dr. Seuss story. But I watched them destroy Caroline, shriveling her up in her chair like a dying flower, and I listened as Don shouted them at her in full knowledge of the power they had -- a power not unlike the one that good Doctor Seuss has warned generations of children about. The best kind of Sneetches, after all, are the ones with stars on their bellies, and Sneetches like Amy Crawford and Caroline Abernathy -- well, they didn’t have any stars on thars.

It was a difficult scene to witness, and in my discomfort I averted my eyes, first seeing Mary’s vindictive sneer, and then Peggy’s look of anguished commiseration. If Don was the father punishing his daughter for some violation of the family’s moral code, then Peggy was the mother who knew the penalty was necessary but hated to see it delivered, and Mary was the jealous sister who had ratted out the daughter in the first place.

Don went on for a good ten minutes, basically repeating the same two minutes worth of material in ever louder and more incredulous performances. By the time he was finished he had half risen out of his chair, his large knobby fingers splayed wide on the table for balance and the veins in his temples pulsing with a life all their own. Spent, he collapsed heavily in his chair, tipping it momentarily back onto its rear legs and straining its loose bolts to their limits. He looked at Caroline in silence, his head shaking in disappointed frustration and his eyes staring vacantly into the space between them, as Caroline blubbered and sobbed, her face practically hidden in her hands. Eventually, he stood up, retrieved a box of tissues from on top of his bookshelf and slid them across the table to Caroline.

“Come on, now,” Don said with some small tinge of discomfort in his voice. “Get a hold of yourself.”

Caroline looked up, a pair of red and puffy eyes rising out of her hands. The tissues she had brought with her had long since disintegrated, and she pulled three fresh ones out of the box in quick succession. While wiping her eyes, her cheeks, her nose; her voice came forth, hitching with her spastic breath, hopeless and submissive. “Are you going to fire me?” 

It was Mary who answered -- Mary, who had not said a single word during the entire meeting with Amy, and had so far not spoken during this one.

“That depends on you, Caroline,” she said regally, not a drop of human compassion in her voice. “I am not making the decision to fire you today, but this incident will be written up and placed in your personnel file. You will receive a copy of this document later today, and it will serve as your official warning against this sort of behavior. If you demonstrate any kind of unprofessional conduct in the future, either here in the office or while traveling on business, you will be terminated immediately. Is that understood?”

Caroline did not speak, but she nodded her head.

“I’m giving you one more chance,” Mary said, sounding like the decision served Mary’s interests much more than Caroline’s “Do not disappoint me.”

6

Looking back on those meetings with Amy and Caroline, I sometimes still ask myself why I was even there. Personnel matters like that were almost always handled by Don and Mary exclusively, who held the power to hire and fire in that company very close to their vests. They had fired people before, even people who reported directly to me, and I had never been asked to sit in on a termination meeting. In some cases, I hadn’t even been informed beforehand. In the course of the meetings that day, I was not asked to say anything, I was not asked to do anything, I was not even acknowledged as being present.

I felt a little like the subject of some kind of psychological experiment -- you know, like the kind you hear about, where the researchers trick a bunch of self-absorbed college kids into thinking they’re helping with some vital research project, but in fact it’s the students and their reactions that are the focus of the study.

I read about one once where the college kids were instructed to administer electrical shocks to a supposed test taker hooked up to electrodes in another room -- one shock of increasing intensity for every question they got wrong. It was all fake. No one was really getting shocked in the other room, but they wanted to see how far tomorrow’s leaders would go before speaking up and bucking the authority embodied in the researchers that had recruited them. You might’ve heard about this one, too. As long as there was some asshole with a lab coat and a clipboard standing over them, the cream of the next intellectual generation just kept doing what they were told and shocking the idiot test taker in the other room, even after the co-conspirator pretending to be shocked started crying and begging them to stop.

There were times when working at that company felt like you were participating in one of those dishonest research studies, and this was clearly one of those times. It bothered me, and I needed some time to think about it. So I decided to stay in my office as much as I could for the rest of the day, even eating my lunch at my desk. But people kept finding me -- supervisors and junior staffers, some of whom were my direct reports but many of whom weren’t. They all came slinking in quietly, as if not wanting to disturb me, but wanting to know what had happened, and more insistently, what was going to happen next.

I didn’t have any concrete answers for them, and since then I’ve learned that when people are let go, that’s what everyone who stays behind needs. They need to be reassured that the bleeding has stopped and that no more cuts are going to be made. Those staffers came to me because I had been in the meetings, and because I was far more approachable than either Mary or Don would have been, and they all had the same look on their faces and the same tone in their voices.

Ha, ha, they would seem to giggle nervously, tough luck for poor Amy Crawford getting tossed out on her ass, eh, but -- but I’m okay, right?

I didn’t know what to tell them. I didn’t think there was going to be any more fallout from the situation with Wes, but I felt turned around and wasn’t completely sure, and worse yet, I was uncertain how much of what had happened I should share with them. There are always legal implications in these situations -- things you’re allowed to say and things you’d better keep to yourself. And neither Mary nor Don had given me any indication of where those lines were to be drawn. So I shrugged my shoulders a lot, and responded with a bunch of empty platitudes, and at the end of a frustrating and wholly unproductive day, I decided to go and see Mary.

I remember approaching Ruthie cautiously, not sure how she was going to react to my request.

“Hey, Alan,” she said with what seemed like genuine concern in her voice. “How are you holding up?”

“Okay,” I said stupidly. “Is Mary around?”

“She’s in a meeting with Don, but should be back soon. Do you need to talk with her?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking around as if expecting to see a waiting room chair to sit in.

“Why don’t you go on in?” Ruthie offered. “I’ll walk down and let her know you’re here.”

“What? Really?”

Ruthie stood up. “Sure,” she said. “You could probably use a few minutes of reflection time. Nobody’s going to bother you in there.”

Ruthie was right, as Ruthie usually was. I was surprised that there was no bluster in her voice, no calculation or intrigue, but I took her at her word. Whatever she thought about how Susan and I had approached her that morning, she wasn’t holding any grudge, and she was offering me a small measure of comfort after a dark and trying day.

Upon walking into Mary’s office I was again struck by how large it was, but also by how neat and immaculate she kept it. Right inside her door was a kind of exhibit case -- a glass-enclosed bookshelf on which dozens of plaques and awards were displayed. Mary was especially proud of these honors, but only a handful were ones she had earned herself. Most were accolades given to the non-profit organizations we managed, and which Mary had simply accepted on their behalf. That always felt a bit like cheating to me -- displaying awards recognizing the work of others -- but Mary seemed to revel in their acquisition. I saw the one the Communications Department had won for the redesign of one of our newsletters, and it reminded me how Mary, in congratulating the team on a job well done, had commented that she already had a space picked out for it in her display case, and about how much she was looking forward to showing to Eleanor the next time she visited our offices.

I knew the after-hours cleaning people had explicit instructions to keep Mary’s trinkets dust-free and sparkling, and as I stood there looking at them in all their dazzling brilliance, I suddenly realized what Mary’s office was for, and why it was so different from the rest of our space.

I turned around and let my eyes sweep over the whole of the room. The window walls and the city beyond provided an upscale architectural backdrop for the scattered groupings of modern furniture. I looked at the original artwork hanging on the walls, knowing they weren’t anything Mary had had a hand in. Trust me. I’ve been to Mary’s house, where Thomas Kinkade is clearly revered as the pinnacle of artistic achievement. The artwork in her office was daring, as far as corporate art went, but it wasn’t Mary’s style at all. Nothing in the office really was. She looked out of place in her office, just like she looked out of place in her rented business suits, because nothing in the office was for her. It wasn’t a place where she was expected to get any work done and it wasn’t a place where she could feel at home.

Funny thing about Mary’s office. When Mary was around people tended to avoid it as much as they could, but when Mary was on the road you’d find them inventing excuses to walk by and try to get a peek inside. At these times Ruthie usually kept jealous guard over the space, keeping its lights dimmed and preventing anyone from intruding, treating it like that room in your grandparents’s house that was used only rarely for entertaining guests from outside the family. And that’s what Mary’s office was. The out-of-town guests were the VIPs from the client organizations, who would come by several times a year for closed door meetings with Mary to talk strategy and plot intrigue. The apartment in the sky with its original artwork and its shining treasures was meant to impress them -- not us, and not even her. By comparison, Mary and all of us who worked for her were just the unruly children who could not be trusted to keep our feet off the furniture.

With these thoughts in my head I walked over and stood in the very corner of Mary’s two window walls, planting my fists on my hips and reveling in the fantasy that I was king of all I surveyed. Although I had never really been afforded such an opportunity before, I found the sights of the city from Mary’s office achingly familiar. The park across the way where street musicians performed and business people sat at picnic tables to eat their lunches and play hooky. The ancient cathedral with its imposing clock tower and patina-ridden cross, dozens of pigeons nesting in its crevices and nodding their heads like penitent sinners as they walked the length of the roofline. The cluster of blocky bank buildings that seemed to creep closer each year, offering an increasingly voyeuristic view of the small and silent figures that moved about within. And the shimmering water on the lake and the slowly moving sailboats that went in and out of the harbor as if time itself had ceased. I had seen all of these things before, but from Mary’s office they seemed to take on a different meaning. Gazing out on all that activity I saw for just a moment or two that there actually was more to life than what was waiting for me in my windowless cell.

“Hello, Alan.”

It was Mary. She had entered the office and by the time I turned around she was already halfway to her desk and moving quickly.

“Ruthie said you wanted to see me. You’ll have to make it quick. I don’t have much time.”

I pulled myself away from the window and came over to stand behind one of her visitor chairs. Without looking at me, Mary dropped her leather-bound organizer on her desk and sat down in her chair. She pulled open one of the desk drawers and took out a small stack of business cards. Combining them with a few stray ones tucked into the front pocket of her planner, she began counting them out onto the desk, dealing them down one by one like she meant to play a game of Solitaire. I kept silent, letting her finish, knowing that she would not want to be interrupted while counting. When she was done, she looked up at me impatiently.

I thought I was ready. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened today.”

“Lots of things happened today,” Mary said quickly. “Which ones are you referring to?”

“Amy getting fired,” I said bluntly. “And Susan resigning.”

“Uh huh,” Mary said, her eyes falling back down to her planner, while her hands stuffed the little pile of counted cards into the front pocket and placed the remainder back into the drawer. “What about them?”

“Well,” I said evasively, realizing that I wasn’t ready for this at all. “How do you feel about them no longer being here?”

It was a dumb question, and Mary didn’t need more than a second to compose her response. “I feel fine,” she said, swinging around in her chair to face the monitor on her desk’s return and reaching for her mouse. “Amy’s days have been numbered for a while and, all things considered, it’s probably better for everyone that Susan decided to leave.”

I watched her as she started clicking away with her mouse, her eyes quickly passing over a day’s worth of collected email, deleting roughly every third one with a practiced eye.

“Why?” she said somewhat absently. “How do you feel about it?”

I held my breath. “I feel bad. Especially about Susan. I think she could have made some significant contributions around here.”

Mary deliberately set her mouse aside and turned to face me. “Alan, sit down.”

I did as instructed, sinking into the uncomfortable chair Mary had provided for all visitors.

“What’s this all about?” she asked.

I decided to go for broke. “I don’t know, Mary. It just feels wrong. I thought Susan was the kind of person we wanted to have in this organization. And it feels like she was pushed out.”

Mary shook her head. “I wouldn’t say that we pushed Susan out, but she clearly didn’t mesh with our culture.”

“Then how’d she get hired in the first place?”

“What?”

The question just sort of popped out of my mouth, but Mary’s reaction told me I was on to something, that I might have just stumbled onto the thing that could make some headway. “Then how’d she get hired?” I rambled on. “I mean, don’t take it the wrong way, but don’t we screen candidates for cultural fit before bringing them into the organization?”

It was too much. I could tell by the fire in Mary’s eyes. The only thing that saved me was that I had used ‘we’ instead of ‘you.’ If I’d had the audacity to say Don’t you screen candidates? Mary would have almost certainly seen it as a criticism, as an attack, as a threat to her authority.

“I mean,” I said, desperately trying to keep myself in the frying pan, “if we don’t have something like it already, maybe we need some kind of process to help identify individuals with the traits that will best translate into success in our environment. Something that could identify people with the wrong traits and ferret them out of our hiring process.”

It was glib. Almost too glib. I was just thinking on my feet, really just stringing together a bunch of buzzwords into something that sounded halfway rational, but Mary seemed to consider it for a moment.

“Good idea,” she said finally. “You’re in charge. Pull the department heads together and come up with a draft for my review.”

Mary turned back to her computer and resumed the destruction of her email. I didn’t get up to leave right away, at once relieved that I had lived to fight another day, but apprehensive of this new and unknown challenge that had just been put in my path. My eyes wandered to the credenza behind Mary’s desk, and to the framed photo of her and her family that sat there for all us visitors to see. One would think that of all the prizes to be found in her office, this simple portrait would be the one item that was uniquely Mary, that was closest to her true but unfathomable heart. It was a tight shot of four blonde-haired people, all of them with the same pained smiles on their pinched faces, looking for all the world like a group of magnets held artificially together and ready to fly apart as soon as the camera flashed and their natural law of repulsion could again take hold. Even it looked staged to me, almost like one of those paper photos that come with the tasteful frames you buy in the executive section of the office supply store.

“Was there something else?” Mary asked, her finger still clicking away on her mouse.

“No,” I said, rising to my feet and almost rushing from the room.

7

That night over dinner I told Jenny about what had happened in the office. Her reaction surprised me.

“You should start looking for a new job.”

“What?” I asked. We were sitting across from each other at the dining room table, Jacob long since excused and playing up in his room, and the dirty plates from a hastily-devoured meal scattered about.

“You don’t have to quit tomorrow or anything,” Jenny said, pushed back from the table and swirling the last sip of milk around in her glass. She was about five months pregnant with our second child then, and we had long since switched to drinking milk out of our wine glasses. “But that place is poison. You should start looking for something new.”

It took my mind a moment to process what she was saying. I had been at the company for twelve years, hired right out of college. I had been promoted several times, most recently to Deputy Account Executive for the company’s largest client. In their way, they had been good to me, and raises had come each year and with each promotion.

“Do you really think it’s time for that?” I asked.

Jenny nodded. “I do. Look at what they did today. This isn’t the first time they’ve put the needs of the company ahead of those of their people.”

“But I don’t feel threatened at all. And with this new position it’s almost as if I’ve entered a kind of inner circle. I think this new assignment Mary’s given me is a really big deal. She’s put me in charge of redesigning the hiring process for the entire company.”

Jenny had been emptying her glass and now she hastily swallowed so she could interject. “Alan, don’t get me started on Mary Walton,” she said, her voice husky from the milk still coating her throat. “You know how I feel about her.”

I certainly did. Jenny and Mary only saw each other twice a year -- at the company’s summer picnic and again at its Christmas party -- but in the last couple of years the tension between them seemed almost palpable. It started immediately following Jacob’s birth when Mary had asked Jenny when she was planning on going back to work. Jenny had always been very career-focused, so it was a question she was hearing a lot in those days. But when she told Mary with her usual aplomb that we had decided to give it a go with Jenny staying at home with the baby, Mary had given Jenny such a sour look, I thought someone had slipped a cockroach into her holiday punch.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” I remember Mary saying in her uniquely condescending way.

And I remember Jenny looking back at her blankly, surprised, I know, at the idea that someone would think she would make such a decision without being sure it was the right thing to do. Jenny was sure about everything she did -- that’s one of the things that made her Jenny -- and she had a hard time keeping the disdain out of her voice when someone questioned her. “Of course,” she had said assuredly. “Alan and I think it’s what’s best for Jacob, and we’re comfortable enough right now that we can make ends meet without my salary.”

If anything, Mary’s look had turned even more sour upon receiving this information. Both of Mary’s kids had gone straight into daycare after they had been born -- by scheduled c-section, if you were to believe the office rumors; scheduled, of course, to avoid any conflicts with client meetings -- and it was a well known fact that women professionals who decided to stay home after the birth of a child were something less than human in Mary’s eyes. It happened time and again. Whoever it was, no matter how high in esteem Mary might have previously held them, once they made that one unforgivable decision, Mary started giving off this vibe that they were no longer to be spoken of in her presence. And if you ever forced Mary to mention them, she would always be sure to make a snide remark about how incompetent they had been and about how the company was much better off without them.

From that day forward, Mary started treating Jenny exactly the same way. At each Christmas party she would mostly avoid Jenny, looking contemptuously at her from across the room, and at each summer picnic, when it was harder to surround herself exclusively with co-conspirators and sycophants, any words she happened to offer would be as cold as the tubs of catered potato salad.

I looked down at Jenny’s belly, just beginning to peep out between the bottom of her shirt and the top of her pants. “Okay, forget Mary Walton. What about the new baby?”

Jenny instinctively put a protective hand on her stomach as she placed the wineglass back on the table. “What about her?”

“Well, don’t I need this job to support you and the two kids? We decided you should stay home with Jacob because we didn’t think it made sense for you to keep working just so we could pay for daycare. Doesn’t that same logic hold true for Crazy Horse?”

It was the joke name we were using to refer to the baby until we settled on a real name.

“I said you didn’t have to quit your job tomorrow. We do need your income, but you can start keeping your eyes open, can’t you? Apply only when it seems like a good opportunity. Let them know your current employer doesn’t know you’re looking. They’ll keep it confidential. Come on, Alan. People do this kind of thing every day.”

Jenny was right, I knew she was -- both about how people found new positions and about how it was time for me to at least start looking. But something in me still rebelled against the idea. I shook my head. 

“I don’t know, honey. With Susan gone things are going to get a lot busier for me. Until we hire her replacement I’m going to have to pick up her workload in addition to mine.”

Jenny looked at me skeptically. “Until who hires her replacement?”

“We,” I said, not sure what Jenny was driving at. “Until we hire her replacement.”

“We as in you and Mary?” Jenny asked. “Do you honestly think that woman is going to involve you in the process this time? You weren’t consulted at all when she hired Susan -- even though you had spent three years in the position she was hiring for and would be supervising whoever she brought in to fill your shoes. What’s going to make this time any different?”

“The new project,” I said, somewhat defensively. “I’m going to revise the way the company screens and interviews applicants.”

“And Mary is going to wait until you have that finished before she begins interviewing candidates for Susan’s position?”

It was a good question. Reflecting back on my conversation with Mary, I realized I didn’t have a clear answer to it. But evidently Jenny did.

“No, wait,” Jenny laughed, waving her hands in the air. “That makes even more sense. That’s exactly what she’s going to do. Look at what she’s done. As long as you’re working on this project, she has a reason for not moving forward in hiring a replacement for Susan. And all that time you’ll be doing both your job and Susan’s job for her. Same amount of work getting done, one less set of salary and benefits to pay for. What a bitch.”

I looked at Jenny suspiciously, not wanting to accept her interpretation, but knowing that it at least fit within Mary’s pattern of behavior.

“You’re definitely going to start looking for a new job. I’ll help if I have to, but you’ve got to start thinking about getting out of there.”

I smiled at her. We had been married long enough for me to know that when she spoke with that kind of finality there wasn’t much else I could do. She certainly wasn’t going to change her mind.

“Yes, mum,” I said with mock servility. “Would you like me to do the dishes before drawing m’lady’s bath?”

“Very funny,” Jenny said with a smirk. “No, I’ll clean up here. Go spend some time with your son.”

It was Jenny’s way of letting me know she needed some “away” time. Seeing to Jacob’s needs all day had proven more demanding than either of us had thought. But she wasn’t being selfish. She knew I wanted to spend as much time as I could with Jacob. Too often, it seemed, I would be working late or stuck on the road, and days would go by before he and I had any meaningful contact.

I went upstairs and found him in his room playing with his trains. While Jenny and I had talked he had set up an elaborate track all over his floor. The wooden pieces were normally kept in an enormous plastic tote in the corner of his room, but he had fished most of them out and had assembled them into a maze of switches, bridges, and crossings. Part of it even extended under his bed, the trains coming out from under the drape of his bedspread like they were going through a tunnel. I stood in the doorway for a few moments, watching him push long trains of magnetically-connected cars around, and marveling at the exactness that my four-year-old son could sometimes display.

“Hi, buddy,” I said eventually.

“Hi, Daddy,” he replied, not taking his eyes off his work. “Do you want to play trains with me?”

“Okay,” I said, and I got down on the floor with him. “Who’s this?” I asked, pointing to a green-painted engine off on a siding with three cars behind it.

“That’s Percy,” Jacob said.

“Can I be Percy?” I asked.

“Okay. But you have to go through the trainwash first.”

“The what?”

“The trainwash,” Jacob said patiently, pointing to a wooden structure with two blue rubber rollers on either side of the track and a gray-painted wooden cylinder labeled “WATER” on the very top. “All the engines have to be clean before they leave the station.”

Of course they did. It was one of the life lessons they tried to teach the kids on the television show the train engines lived on. A smart engine keeps himself clean, boys and girls. I had watched some of the shows with Jacob, and they were always trying to impart some kind of do-gooder morality -- you know, be nice to others, take care of the planet, don’t ask too many questions. It was thinly-veiled indoctrination for pre-schoolers, and its icons were reinforced with every trip down a toy aisle or through a grocery store. These train engines, each with a cheeky human face stuck on its front end, showed up on everything a child may come into contact with -- from tennis shoes and underpants to juice boxes and toaster waffles. They were everywhere, and in their insidious ubiquity they tried to convince their acolytes the world was a place where every problem could be solved by just trying a little harder and working together as a team.

“Who do you have over there?” I asked, beginning to push Percy through the rollers in the trainwash.

“I’m Gordon,” Jacob said proudly. “He’s the biggest and strongest engine there is.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Is he fast?”

“He’s superfast!”

“Is he faster than Percy?”

“He’s faster than everyone, Daddy.”

“Should we have a race?”

Jacob looked at me excitedly. “A race?”

“Sure,” I said, confidently. “We can build a pair of tracks that the engines can race down. We’ll start them at the top and see which one goes the farthest.”

My suggestion had lit a fire in Jacob’s eyes. “Can we race Thomas, too?”

“Of course,” I said. “Bring them out. We’ll race them all.”

I spent the next twenty minutes trying to construct a race track that would serve our purposes, eventually deciding I had to roll up Jacob’s area rug and build directly on the hardwood floor so the wooden blocks and pieces would be stable enough to create the effect we wanted. At one point Jenny stuck her head in the room -- evidently finished with the dishes -- and asked what we were doing.

“We’re building a race track, Mommy!” Jacob said, jumping up and down with excitement. “Daddy and me are going to race my engines!”

Jenny looked skeptical. “All right. Just be sure to clean up when you’re done, okay? And put the rug back.”

“Yes, Mommy,” I said.

When we had the track built the races began. Jacob had eight engines, so I put them in qualifying heats and then I sketched a kind of NCAA bracket tournament on the inside cover of one of his coloring books. Jacob was unbelievably excited with every race, jumping for joy and cheering for his favorite engine in each pairing. I quickly learned all of their names and which ones had a special place in his heart. One, in fact, was not an engine at all, but an old-fashioned double-decker bus named Bertie. Jacob thought it was hysterical every time Bertie raced.

“Bertie can’t win!” he would laugh. “He’s not an engine!”

In the end, the championship was between Jacob’s beloved Thomas, and a sneering black engine named Diesel. Superfast Gordon had fallen in the first round.

“Are you ready, Jacob?” I said, trying to build as much drama as I could. “Are you ready for the final race in the ultimate Jacob Larson Train Engine Championship?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“On the right track,” I said, cupping my hand over my mouth to imitate the sound of an announcement coming over a loudspeaker, “painted blue and red and puffing white smoke, the number one really useful engine…Thomas!”

“Yaaaaay!” Jacob shouted, jumping up and down and flapping his hands like a flightless bird. “Yaay, Thomas!”

“And on the left track,” I continued, “painted black and red and reeking of oily fumes, the engine everyone loves to hate…it’s Diesel!”

“Boooo!” cried Jacob. “Not Diesel! Thomas! Go Thomas!”

Diesel, I remembered, was the engine always causing trouble on the TV show, the one the other engines had to clean up after, or help each other out of the messes he created. But the little wooden and plastic toy that bore his likeness had legitimately earned its way into the championship race. He and Thomas both had consistently sailed down the sloping tracks I had built, and had rolled farther across the floor than anyone else. It was truly a battle of titans and I didn’t know who was going to win.

I let the two engines go and they flew down the track, leaping off the end at precisely the same time, and then rolling neck and neck across the floor. Jacob was screaming with excitement, hooting and hollering at Thomas to go, Go, GO! 

“And the winner…” I crowed, feeling invincible at having concocted such a captivating activity for Jacob and watching as the two engines came to a stop, one just half a length ahead of the other, “…is Diesel!” I started making sounds like those of a roaring crowd.

“Noooo!” Jacob groaned, all the fun of the past half hour suddenly evaporating in the heat of his burned expectations. “No, Daddy!” he complained petulantly. “Not Diesel! Thomas! Thomas is the winner!”

“No he’s not, buddy,” I said with a smile, noticing how red his face was and surprised at his angry tone. “Take a look. Diesel went farther. He’s the winner.”

“NOOOO!” Jacob shrieked, the high pitch of his voice piercing painfully into my ears, and then he frantically rushed forward in an attempt to kick the engines, as if needing to destroy the evidence of Thomas’s ignoble defeat. In his mad rush he stumbled over the rolled-up area rug and he fell into the wooden ramps, knocking them over in a clatter of falling blocks and pieces of track, and thumping his forehead hard on the exposed floor. Seeing him go down I lurched forward to try and break his fall but was only able to bring him into my lap after the damage had been done. The caterwauling cries that followed brought Jenny quickly to the door.

“What happened?!” she demanded.

I was focused on Jacob, trying to console him as best I could, but as soon as he saw Jenny he began to fight against me, squirming down halfway onto the floor again, his shirt bunching up near his red face and exposing his belly. 

“Alan, what happened?!” Jenny said again, her voice loud and powerful.

“He fell!” I shouted at her, trying to make myself heard over Jacob’s cries.

“Fell?” she said. “Fell how?”

I couldn’t make any sense out of her question. Not with a bellowing and writhing four-year old in my lap busily coating my shirt sleeves with tears and snot. “What do you mean, fell how? He fell! He tripped over the damn rug!”

Jenny gave me an exasperated look and then rushed forward to take Jacob away. He went gratefully into her arms and she stood there rocking with him, his growing toddler legs dangling awkwardly down as she both shushed him and tried to get a better look at his face.

“He’s bruised!” she gasped upon seeing the red splotch on his forehead. “Did he hit his head?”

I was still sitting on the floor amidst all the rubble of scattered train tracks, trying to wrap my brain around what had just happened. We had been having so much fun, my son and I, and then, it seemed, a tornado had come out of nowhere and torn the roof off our house. Was there anything I could have done to prevent it? At the time I didn’t think so, and it’s only with the benefit of hindsight that I’ve come to realize that I could have pretended Thomas had won.

“Alan!” she shouted at me. “Did Jacob hit his head?”

“I don’t fucking know!” I shouted back. “I think so.”

It was the worst thing I could have said. Head injuries were serious business in Jenny’s mother book. And I had seen Jacob bang his forehead against the hardwood floor with my own eyes, but in my distracted state I had said I didn’t know, and that was tantamount to admitting I had been an inattentive father. Jenny looked at me with a kind of horror and then took our son from the room, Jacob wailing and crying the entire time.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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