The Dean Is Dead

The first email raised no flags. Good morning, it began, crisp, fresh, businesslike. Dean Labriola has been hospitalized in Florida since Thursday night, March 5th. The diagnosis is acute pneumonia. Sad, but in character: who but Dean Labriola comes down with a chest cold in the warmest state in the union on the first day of Spring Break? Poor devil probably out tippling with his literary chums until the wee hours. He will be in the hospital until Wednesday, March 11th. He expects to gain clearance to fly home on Friday, March 13th and plans to be back in the office next Monday, March 16th. That's my dean, baby: I see him now, smiling his sly smile at Nurse Wackelsticks, pressing her pudgy hands as he blusters on about transmigration, no man an island, tolling bells, oh yes, but not for me. And with a yawn he looks at his watch, smiles again, schedule me for checkout Wednesday morning, that's my doll, and how about a little of that boef a la port reduction tonight...?

So the second email, when it arrived three days later, blew me out of the water: I regret to inform you that Dr. Al Labriola, Interim Dean of the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, has died. Has what? We are indebted to him for his leadership in the College and his dedication to our students.

Thus was the life of one Albert Labriola, scholar, teacher, administrator, and all around nutcase, summarized by President Dougherty. Has died. Not even a passed away, never mind winged his deanly way into the bosom of that good night. Labriola, for all his common sense and steelbelt pragmatism, would have been outraged.

This has been a bad year for literary deaths. First there was Foster Wallace, then Updike, now Labriola. There is a difference, of course, between the first two and the last one. The fiction writers were iconic figures, and their deaths hit me hard because they represented a material shift in something that I had implicitly begun to view as immutable: just as there are good writers and bad writers, so there are live writers and dead writers, and when I pick up a book, I like to know who is who. Like most dilettante gathers of loose ends, I use these facile taxonomies as a sort of crude topographical map of the World, and resist any bursting of categories with dutchboy ardor, eyes closed and thumb in the hole. Labriola's death, on the other hand, represented an assault on a taxonomic line drawn not just through life, but through my life: it was the barrier between people that were sick and people that were well, between people I knew and people who were dead, between people I had joked with last week and people I would never speak to again.

What can I say about Dean Labriola? He belonged to a category of one, had a touch of the old sui generisitis, he would say, his fleshy lips concealing a smile, crows feet forming at the corners of his eyes, his whole carriage an invitation to revel in the double meanings, ribald implications, and arcane references rife in his every utterance. He greeted me at the beginning of the semester, asked about my child, flashed me a smile. Three weeks ago he signed my reimbursement forms for expenses incurred in the line of departmental duties. And in a not unrelated matter, two weeks ago he interview my good friend D. about a faculty position with the math department, and gave her a glowing report, D. and K evince an infectious good energy, and would be valuable additions to the college; the other two candidates are acceptable. D. and I had a long good laugh about this man (is he unwell? she asked, he seemed a touch ashen. No, no, just a touch of prostate cancer, nothing to worry about. He's much too jovial to succumb.)

Really, what do I know about his guy? He wore elbow patches. He kept his meetings short. He dropped lines from Donne and Shakespeare, he touched his thumbs to his middle fingers when he spoke, and spoke very slowly, with perfect Oxfordian timing (though he would lose it upon occasion and start cackling like hyena when he found his wit too pregnant to bear.) He embodied the basic ridiculousness that is being an academic in a minor American university, and carried that charge with pride and dignity. He was ,in a way, our standard bearer, and we loved him because he reminded us that the line between being and play-acting is one of perspective. He was the most vital man in the college, 69 years old, sly and wiry and decadent and polished. He made me laugh. He was kind. I still haven't thanked him for remembering that we had a child.