The Retirement of Professor John Underhill

John Underhill drove slowly along the winding cemetery road because it was narrow and uphill and because, consciously or not, he always did what seemed the proper thing to do. The young man next to him, whom the Superintendent of Lakeview Cemetery had assigned the job of satisfying Professor Underhill’s needs and desires insofar as it was within their power to do so, sat quietly. Professor Underhill noted the lines of cypress trees on either side of the road. The young man had said some of the newer cemeteries not only had no cypress trees but prohibited both mausoleums and grave stones; there were no mounds either; all that marked the final resting place was a name on a small piece of metal. The young man implied that Lakeview Cemetery believed one deserved more than this; however old-fashioned mounds and stones might seem to some, they bespoke a sense of the individuality and personal dignity of the departed. Professor Underhill had no opinion in the matter, and he had not replied.

Professor Underhill stopped the car in front of the Superintendent’s building. In getting out, the young man said he knew that Professor Underhill would be satisfied. Each thanked the other, said goodbye, the door was closed, and Professor Underhill drove the last hundred yards to the stone-arched entrance, and turned right into Lake Street, heading back to the campus. Ordinarily he would have avoided Lake Street. Traffic on it was heavy, and the innumerable used car lots depressed him, but today he did not think of these things. How many years had it been since he had visited the cemetery? He could not say with any certainty, but probably it was twenty or twenty-five years ago. The University was retiring him this spring. Only the month of May left and a few days in June, then he was finished. If anyone asked him how it felt to be sixty-seven he would not be able to answer simply. Sometimes he seemed to be dreaming a dream that had just begun, and in the morning he would get up, a young man, with a young man’s mixed feelings of anxieties and hope. At other times, he knew he had lived many long years, that his own history and all history were a part of eternity. The headstone on his wife’s grave had startled him a little. Margaret Leech Underhill, 1890-1913. Standing there, he had not thought of her as his dead wife or even as a person, he had been struck by the fancy that one dead at twenty-three would be young forever. A good poet might make something of the notion, and he had shrugged a little, as he often did when he thought of something that someone with a more orderly mind and more imagination might do something with.