Helping Dolores Die
Claude Clayton Smith
What starts as a campus drama ends with much higher stakes than tenure or a paper in Acta Mathematica. We’re excited to welcome Claude Clayton Smith back to Works Progress—he’s always worth your time.
Happy February,
The Editors
Chance made us colleagues . . .
—Anonymous
I WOULDN’T HAVE had to help Dolores die if I hadn’t been faculty adviser to the university chess club. I’d been stuck with that chore during my first year on campus, after the Dean reminded us newbies that community service, which often entailed volunteering for unpopular duties, was a factor in awarding tenure. OK, I’d told myself, since I’d been in the chess club way back in middle school, I’d reacquaint myself with the game and get on with it. Being in the math department, I suppose I was a logical choice for the chess club, given the other Assistant Professors in my cohort that year. Dolores was in Sociology, a second woman in Modern Languages. They flipped a coin, Dolores lost, and so she was saddled with the Society for Creative Anachronism. I forget what the other woman had to take on. At any rate, it was after the meeting when extra-curricular duties were assigned that Dolores asked if I’d mind playing a game of chess with Spencer. Apparently, chess was his only interest. To which I replied, “Who’s Spencer?”
“He’s arriving next week. I’m his foster mom and I intend to adopt him.”
A snag in the paperwork had prevented Spencer—a pale, gangling fourteen-year-old with a mop of red hair—from accompanying Dolores to the university from Utah, an out-of-state move for both of them. There didn’t appear to be a man in Dolores’ life, nor did I ask, although my wife Eleanor was curious. In retrospect, I guess I considered that being a foster mother was somehow appropriate for a new Assistant Professor of Sociology. Dolores had done her doctoral dissertation on a comparison of recidivism in paroled prisoners with those who had been in foster homes before incarceration. I forget which group had fared better—all this by way of chatting before that meeting—so I said, “Be happy to.”
Incredibly, late one afternoon a few days after his arrival, the taciturn and pimply Spencer beat me handily at the tiny frame house Dolores had rented on the edge of campus. I had played hastily—Eleanor and I had dinner plans—and wasn’t really concentrating. Or so I told myself. Still, I was piqued to have been bested. When Dolores asked if Spencer might join the chess club on campus, I discouraged the notion, since he’d be starting ninth grade at the local K-12 school. Didn’t they have a chess club there? Dolores said she’d inquire.
A few weeks later, returning home from a dinner for new faculty members hosted by the Dean of Arts & Sciences—Dolores and I and the woman in Modern Languages were in the same college—Eleanor wondered aloud if Dolores might be a good match for my colleague Dave Schlossberg. Dave had recently divorced and seemed out of sorts. Eleanor had just made friends with his ex and felt sorry for him, so I said I’d mention it. Surprisingly, before the month was out, Dave invited Dolores for a beer at The Depot, the faculty watering hole, telling me, when I ran into him outside his office, that he’d found her at once “engaging” yet “distant.” They “dated,” if you could call it that, several times, then the relationship petered out.
Toward the end of the second semester that year I received a call from the secretary in the Sociology Department saying that an envelope addressed to me had found its way to her desk through campus mail. “It looks official,” she said. “You might want to fetch it rather than wait on it.” As everyone knew, the campus mail was notoriously slow, thanks to a new program that employed a number of work-study students, several of whom had been caught stealing checks from letters intended for their classmates, which they cashed on a lark at the bank on Main Street. When the scheme was discovered, the students were expelled, and the head of the mail room—a twenty-year employee of the university—was fired. His large family, already on food stamps, was then relegated to the county food pantry.
Indeed, the letter waiting for me across campus was important. Acta Mathematica, one of the most prestigious journals in my field, had expressed an interest in a paper I’d submitted on fractals—the focus of my doctoral dissertation—and wondered if I’d be open to revisions per their suggestions. Would I? I couldn’t wait to tell Eleanor, who’d borne the brunt of typing up my dissertation. I thanked the secretary for notifying me, and as I left her office, letter in hand, I noticed that the door to the office with Dolores’ nameplate on it stood ajar. So I nudged it open, intending to ask how she was getting on.
What I saw disturbed me greatly. Dolores wasn’t in, but Spencer, dressed all in black, was rifling through the top drawer of her desk so intently that he didn’t even look up. When he finally did, he said, hesitating just long enough so that I knew he was lying, “I’m locked out. Have you seen my mother?”
“No,” I said. “I—I was just going to ask her when we might play chess again. You owe me a rematch, you know. To even the score.” My voice rang hollow.
“How about this afternoon?”
“Shouldn’t you be at school?”
Spencer’s red hair was much longer now, pulled into a pony tail, and his Goth clothing seemed a cry for attention. When I telephoned Dolores later from my office, she said that Spencer was having a tough time at school, accepted neither by the town kids nor those of the university faculty. She didn’t seem concerned that he’d been going through her desk. “We keep a key hidden outside,” she said. “He was likely just looking for loose change. He’s smoking now. I found an empty pack in his room.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll be over for a game of chess later on. I just have to see if Eleanor has anything on the agenda.” Eleanor had found a part-time job at a library in the next town over, and I usually had dinner ready on the days when she worked. Our young son Oscar, in third grade that year, spent his afternoons playing Pee Wee baseball.
“They want me to consider modeling snowflakes rather than eroded coast lines,” I told Eleanor, showing her the letter from Acta Mathematica. They think it would be less esoteric and more familiar. I was thinking just the opposite, but hey—it’d be a big drop in the bucket towards tenure. We can’t take it for granted, you know.”
“Between that and the chess club,” Eleanor laughed, “how can you miss?”
“Speaking of which, I had a game with Spencer after my last class today.”
“Oscar’s seen him at school dressed like Dracula. He says the kids think he’s weird. They call him Carrot Top, like that comedian.”
“I thrashed him thoroughly. Checkmate in ten moves. Guess that didn’t help.”
When I told her about catching Spencer in Dolores’ office, Eleanor just shook her head. “Poor kid.”
* * *
At the start of the following year at the local school, Spencer got himself suspended for smoking violations, wasting those few days out of class walking back and forth along Main Street, or sitting against the brick wall of the bank, chain-smoking. Dolores was now officially his “mother” and took pride in referring to him as “my son.” Dave Schlossberg, seen often in those days in the company of the Assistant Professor of Modern Languages, had told me confidentially—which meant that his girlfriend and probably everyone else on campus knew—that he’d seen black and blue bruises on Dolores’ arm when she’d taken off her sweater during some committee meeting, only to realize her mistake and hastily put it back on.
Later that school year, following further suspensions for a variety of infractions, Spencer was finally expelled. Unable to find him a tutor, Dolores arranged to home-school him, though busy with her own courses on campus. Whether Spencer ever really graduated from high school—Dolores insisted he’d earned some sort of certificate, perhaps a high school equivalency diploma—remained a mystery. She then arranged for him to begin a course in automotive repair at the local community college. Colleagues learned never to ask how he was doing.
* * *
Several years later, as time for tenure evaluations neared, Dolores and I were selected by the Dean of Arts & Sciences to represent the University at a conference of affiliated institutions on the reconstruction of General Education requirements. Stated simply, the theme was: What to do about the plethora of new technologies? I hated committees of any sort, let alone professional conferences of “learned societies,” but since this one happened to be in Toronto—where I’d never been—I found myself looking forward to it. I was still smarting subconsciously from the fact that Acta Mathematica had held my revised paper for so long that I’d actually forgotten I’d submitted it, and when I did remember and sent them a “tickler,” they’d admitted, “with sincere apologies,” that it had “somehow been lost.” It finally appeared in Random Structures and Algorithms, a publication, to be sure, but hardly top-notch.
The upcoming Toronto conference brought to mind the Acta Mathematica mini-debacle of yesteryear, since the role of mathematical journals in General Education was the work group to which I’d been assigned. On the flight up, I suppose I projected my sour mood on Dolores, cynically imagining that she would advocate for the death penalty instead of life imprisonment in her assigned breakout group. Then I came to my senses, and as we talked, she proved keener than ever in her belief that the values of adoption should be entrenched in whatever Gen Ed courses could accommodate them, regardless of any technological “accessories.” It would lessen abortion, help childless couples, encourage men or women without partners, etc. In turn, recovering my equanimity, I resolved to recommend that the recent standards set forth in Educational Studies in Mathematics be adopted by my own group. They were quite rigorous. Mindful of tenure, I hoped my recommendation would impress the Dean.
Then we found ourselves in Toronto, skittering from the airport taxi into the lobby of an immense hotel, which we never once left over the course of the next three days. Meetings held at adjacent buildings were accessed by subterranean tunnels. It was December and it was freezing, so I was glad to stay inside. The temperature, however, was a bit tropical, and as Dolores and I entered the elevator, she removed her button-up sweater. That’s when I noticed what Dave Schlossberg had noticed years earlier—fresh purple bruises on her left upper arm. She got off at the fourth floor. I went on to the fifth.
Dinner that night was a revelation. The ballroom-size restaurant was crowded, and our table was at the far end. Directly above us was a bar on the second-floor mezzanine, where a number of participants—you could tell them by their blue and white nametags—had evidently arrived early and were carousing on their university nickels. Beer mugs were lined up along the railing.
“Isn’t this grand?” Dolores exclaimed.
I’d never considered Dolores a social being, but off campus, as we were now, she was uncharacteristically animated. As we’d entered the lobby upon arrival, she’d stopped for a long conversation with the bellhop who’d grabbed our bags from the trunk of the taxi. And then, learning that the manager behind the front desk had once been in the Peace Corps, she began to tell him about her older sister, now married with three kids, who’d once served in Africa—Burkina Faso, to be exact. The line of those waiting to check in, myself included, grew longer as the manager replied, “And you?”
“I’m in domestic service,” Dolores winked. “On the home front. I adopted a teenager and am adopting another.”
That’s how I learned about Cassandra—Cassie, as she preferred to be called—a fifteen-year-old “waif” (Dolores’ term) from South Carolina, who’d be moving in with Dolores and Spencer at that tiny frame house on the edge of campus. “Did you know,” Dolores said as we consulted our menus, “that sixty percent of American households have some form of personal experience with adoption?” I didn’t, but had no chance to reply. “And yet tens of millions know very little about it.”
“Interesting,” was all I could say, trying to imagine Spencer playing chess with his new “sister.” Spencer was supposedly commuting by bus to the local community college, a branch campus of the larger state university where—Dolores insisted—he would be eligible to complete a Bachelor’s degree after his program in auto mechanics. He’d wanted a car for the commute (“Ain’t I workin’ on cars, Mom?”), but to her credit Dolores vehemently denied him even a driver’s license. I had no idea how he was doing in his studies—no one did—and you couldn’t guess anything from Dolores. And now Cassandra was entering the picture, a dour, dumpy fifteen-year-old.
“My father was in the Peace Corps years ago,” Dolores went on, “one of the first to work in South America. My mother always got a kick out of that: ‘Your father joined the Peace Corps to teach the indigenous people of South America how to plant corn— when they practically invented it! We met at the American Embassy in D.C. when he was home on break, and he never went back.’ My father’s mantra was noblesse oblige. My older sister took it seriously. As a kid, I had no idea what it meant.”
And now you do? I wanted to say. I was stunned by all this information, unsure how to reply. So I just smiled and looked up, as if in search of an appropriate response, when something caught my eye. A half-empty beer mug, trailing droplets of beer like a comet, was descending as if in slow motion from the balcony railing above us. Landing smack in the middle of our table—Wham!—it launched a basket of dinner rolls skyward, splattering Delores and me with whatever was on tap at the second-floor mezzanine bar. The sound it made, akin to a gunshot, sent people scrambling under the tables nearest to ours, while diners at the far end of the room were scarcely aware that anything had transpired. It was a Friday evening, after all, with a TGIF in full swing overhead. What the hell—we were all out of town for a long weekend, ready to solve the problems of education in America by tweaking the requirements of university General Ed curricula with a dash of technology. And now Dolores and I were wet to the waist.
Dolores looked at me—she said later that the blood had drained from my face—and laughed hysterically. “Tonight,” she said finally, holding the offending beer mug on high while aping a popular TV beer commercial of that era, “let it be Lowenbrau!”
I insisted, of course, that we be given a free meal, but Dolores pooh-poohed that suggestion, in a gesture of solidarity with our happy colleagues above. The latter were hanging over the railing, mouths agape. Dolores exchanged waves with them, then we returned to our rooms to change clothes, and I didn’t see her again for the next three days. Except once. Late that night, getting off the elevator at the wrong floor after a Math Society cocktail party, I saw her ducking into her room down the hall in the company of another woman. Come to think of it, I also glimpsed them in the breakfast room early the next morning.
* * *
By the time Dolores and I were coming up for tenure, her “daughter” Cassie was pregnant, insisting that she wanted to keep the baby. This, of course, put Dolores in a difficult position. She was an advocate for adoption—no problem there—but there were limits to the definition of “community service” when it came to the university.
As soon as Cassie turned sixteen, Spencer married her at the county courthouse, driven there by Dolores. Taking my own car, I stood in as witness to the brief ceremony. Random Structures and Algorithms had just accepted another article of mine, regarding the statistical characteristics of crystal growth, and so I was feeling fairly confident about tenure. The chess club had done its part, winning an informal though unofficial collegiate tournament of area colleges it had organized at my suggestion. Given her record of “domestic service,” no one was giving Dolores any chance of tenure until she announced that Recidivism Revisited, a book she’d allegedly been pecking away at intermittently since coming to campus, had been accepted for publication by an obscure academic press in England. She included a contract among the documents in the portfolio she submitted for tenure, but the committee requested to see the manuscript itself. The book proved to be her doctoral dissertation, to which she’d added a hasty Preface about the “progress” of Spencer and Cassie, who’d set up shop as a married couple with their infant daughter in her tiny frame house on the edge of campus.
One Friday afternoon during the latter months of that academic year, I saw Dolores talking seriously in a corner booth at The Depot with an older, tenured woman from the Phys Ed department, who coached the field hockey team. Dave Schlossberg, who’d insisted I have a beer with him—it was his birthday—said he’d seen them there often. Catching my eye (Had I been staring at that booth?), Dolores waved briefly and smiled, as if we’d just returned from our Toronto junket. Then I excused myself, needing to get home to Oscar, as Eleanor was working overtime at the library.
Denied tenure, Dolores appealed to the university committee, citing her “work” with the Society of Creative Anachronism. As their adviser, taking her cue from my suggestion to the chess club, she’d encouraged the members to engage in competitive games with institutions around the state, with optional discussions and exhibits on pre-17th-century combat, arts, culture, history, whatever. But that initiative had fallen apart, and the group’s student president admitted that Dolores had hardly attended any meetings. In fact, some members had no idea she was their adviser.
Tenure decisions were made in one’s sixth year at the university. The seventh was intended as a year of grace, time to settle in with new projects and prospects for the future, or to prepare to move on. I was tenured and promoted to associate professor. But that summer, Dolores and her children and grandchild disappeared for good. Incredibly, Eleanor and I received a family photo in a Christmas card from her in December. Dolores was smiling, Spencer looked glum, Cassie looked haggard, and the baby was screaming. They were staying with Dolores’ married sister and her three children. It must have been quite a household, because her sister had just divorced. Further, according to the enclosed note, Dolores had taken a job as a social worker, checking on welfare cases to see that those receiving food stamps were actually looking for permanent work. She was also tracking down deadbeat dads, etc.
“What a thankless job,” I said.
“Somebody’s got to do it,” Eleanor said. Then she paused. “Poor kids.”
The following year Dolores’ Christmas card—there was no photo or note this time—came from a new address. Checking it out on Google Maps, I discovered that it was an apartment building in Anacostia, the worst section of Washington, DC, an area known for its high rate of violent crime.
Because of Dolores, I’d developed a relationship with the Phys Ed professor, who, as it turned out, had bought the tiny frame house that Dolores had been renting, to rent and manage it herself. You could tell she’d been attractive in her youth, but was graying now, with that short ducktail hair style that seemed characteristic of the female coaches on campus. Once, over beer with her at The Depot, she admitted that whenever she’d gone on dates in high school or college—whether it was bowling or just putt-putt golf—she had a habit of beating her male companions, which seemed to discourage them. Why she was telling me this, I couldn’t imagine—perhaps it was the beer—but when I mentioned that Eleanor and I had received a Christmas card from Dolores, she said that Dolores was staying in touch with her as well. In fact, she’d visited Dolores and her family in Anacostia during spring break, while in DC for a conference of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education.
Taking early retirement a few years later, the Phys Ed professor moved to The Villages in Florida, an increasingly popular and raucous place for retirees, and we received a Christmas card from her a few months later. There was no card from Dolores that year; nor ever again. But as we learned in a brief note from The Villages during the following Thanksgiving, Dolores had been found stabbed to death in the basement of her Anacostia apartment building.
I don’t think the university—ostensibly relieved that Dolores had left of her own accord—ever learned of this tragedy. Or if so, it was never announced. Despite my own quiet inquiries, I could find nothing about her murder in the newspapers or online. And when I wrote the Phys Ed professor in The Villages to ask if she had any details, my letter was returned as undeliverable.
-30-
Claude Clayton Smith, Professor Emeritus of English, Ohio Northern University, is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four. His own work has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese. The second edition of his book QUARTER-ACRE OF HEARTACHE was published in 2025. He holds a DA from Carnegie-Mellon, MFA in fiction from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, MAT from Yale, and BA from Wesleyan. For details on his writing and teaching career, visit his website: claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com.