I was sitting in the first floor entryway of Bryan Hall, next to the fluores-cent, plastic glow of the vending machines. Every other time I had been here to wait, I had planted myself on the tiled ground. On this Thursday afternoon, though, there was a chair wedged between the machines and the wall. It offered the perfect vantage point to the room across the hall.
The door was slightly ajar and the light was on. English Department Chair Michael Levenson, his back to the hallway, was showing Prof. Charles Vandersee's room to a woman with snow-white hair.
The rumble and hum of the vending machinery drowned out their dialogue. I could only see them standing there amid littered landscape of office clutter. Then one clear sentence cut through the snack food sound barrier:
"Well, this looks exactly how I imagined it," Barb Foster said, her head titled up as she scanned the room.
I smiled because she was smiling. It was my former advisor who had died over winter break, but it was her brother, and we could both smile at the same thing: the utter chaos of his office.
I could not have imagined the state of affairs in that small corner room had I not made biannual pilgrimages to see Vandersee. There I had stepped gingerly over bulging stacks of books, folders and papers, struggled to find a space to set my backpack down and eased myself into a wooden chair across from my gentle interrogator of an advisor.
I can't remember if I cried after my initial meeting with Vandersee because I cried a lot in those first homesick weeks at college. But I can say I was jarred, perhaps shocked, when he questioned the academic rigor of my course load. No one had ever second-guessed the motivation of this high school overachiever, and I left that cluttered office in an indignant tizzy. I wondered if I could switch advisors, unaware that I was dealing with an ally, not a foe. I certainly didn't know he was dean of the Echols program for 24 years or that he had taught the University since 1964 or that he might be the best person here to make me think hard about my academic path.
"He did give people a hard time -- including me," Foster told me in his office. "He wasn't afraid to express his opinions about other people's lives."
As much as I appreciated his advice, I'll especially remember the way he listened. At the beginning of my second year I was wandering through Bryan Hall stressed, anxious and confused about life. On a whim, I decided to visit Vandersee, who anyone will tell you kept the most extensive office hours -- he was there all the time.
Sure enough, he was free and as we talked I tried to hold back the tears that threatened to spill out along with my doubts and fears about, what else, my future.
Normally Vandersee absorbed what I told him with a wise, blue-eyed gaze, punctuated occasionally by one of his famous wry smiles. He would only look away to scribble a few notes on what I was saying. But he broke from our conversation and began rummaging in the abyss of a filing cabinet drawer.
Was he paying attention to me? I wasn't sure.
Then he looked up holding a box of Kleenex he had recovered.
"I knew I had these for a reason," he said with that smile, offering me a tissue.
I told this anecdote to Foster as I sat in the same old wooden chair in Room 120. She sat in her brother's desk chair, legs crossed and a folder of papers in her lap just as he used to. But this time, I was hearing about his life instead of talking about mine.
Behind Foster, her husband Larry looked through hillocks of papers.
All around us was the hard evidence for passions for poetry and prose. Five floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls, a small library of American literary history: Walt Whitman, Ralph Ellison, Sinclair Lewis, Emily Dickinson, Gore Vidal, Eugene O'Neill, Henry David Thoreau. On one shelf 29 dictionaries, cyclopedias, encyclopedias, almanacs and guidebooks promised answers to countless questions. On the floor, mounds of file folders, magazines, yellow legal pads and newspaper clippings raised countless others.
"This was the way his house was," Foster said.
"There's a telephone over here!" Larry interjected, excited at the find.
Vandersee saved everything, his sister said -- an observation that didn't surprise me. He hung onto papers from elementary school and floor plans for houses he designed in high school.
The two siblings grew up in the small town of Crown Point, Ind., an hour southeast of Chicago, where they attended a three-room grade school. As kids they played Monopoly and softball, listened to the radio and made up other games.
"We were poor and so had to use our imagination," Foster said. "I think, in some ways, that's why he saved things -- never knew when he might need it."
She also chalked up Vandersee's saving habits to his historical sensibilities. He picked up a history minor along with his English major at Valparaiso University in Indiana.
"He really had what I call the historical instinct of preservation," said Jacob C. Levenson, English professor emeritus and one of Vandersee's co-editors on the six-volume work "The Letters of Henry Adams."
During the decade that they worked on the project, culling letters from around the world and identifying all the people and events in Adams' life, Levenson said he never knew Vandersee to make a mistake in his scholarship.
Traveling, along with music, architecture and religion, was among Vandersee's multi-faceted interests. He sent his sister detailed postcards cataloguing the meals he savored and the buildings he visited during his road trips. He had been to Russia, China and the Czech Republic. On a pile next to my chair was a packet of photos from a trip to Spain. "He would love to get acquainted with cities, talk to people, look over the architecture," Foster said.
At 2:20 p.m. there was a knock on the door. Fourth-year College student Vivek Jain came in and introduced himself.
"This is for you," Jain said, handing Foster a tape. "It's incredibly moving."
The cassette Jain gave her was a recording of Vandersee reading 43 poems, including ones by Margaret Atwood, Robert Hayden and Yehudi Amichai. Jain, a bio-chemistry major, had taken English classes before, but never a poetry analysis class until Vandersee's "Studies in Poetry" last spring.
"He could read any poem and make you understand it," Jain said over the phone later. "Just from his reading he would make poems very accessible."
Knowing how much Jain admired Vandersee, Jain's friend Edmund Etheridge asked Vandersee last November to make the tape recording of Jain's favorite poets as a surprise. The night they heard of his death, Etheridge, who took a seminar with Vandersee in the fall, called Jain to come over to listen to the tape.
With snow falling outside, they listened in the dark to Vandersee's pitch-perfect voice bring the cadences of words on a page to life. "If you pay attention, you can really hear him inhale," Jain said.
Foster let out a quiet sigh as she and her husband, who live in Portland, talked about how they were going to pack up the office in a few weeks.
"With some attack plan in mind we could do this in a day," Larry said.
"Yeah," Barb replied softly.
I asked if we could look for my file. But after a few minutes of futile searching, it was obvious we weren't going to find it. It could have been anywhere.
He probably knew where it was, Foster said.
I had to agree. And seeing a box of tissues on top of the cabinet, I had to smile.
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