Chalk Dust on the Sleeve of Her Soul

This essay is excerpted from a eulogy delivered in June at Trinity College Chapel, in Hartford, Conn.

This all started when the mathematics department voted unanimously to invite Marjorie Van Eenam Butcher to join the faculty of Trinity College in the mid-1950s. The department petitioned the dean. The dean discussed the radical request with the president. The president consulted with the trustees. After six months of deliberation, a decision came down from on high: She was to be appointed to the faculty — but, mind she, only on an adjunct basis. The first woman on the faculty of Trinity College!

She quickly earned a reputation on campus. She required access to her classroom an hour before each class. She would arrive, take her beautifully Palmer-scripted notes from her satchel, and carefully copy them onto the board. Students quickly learned to get to class as soon as possible, because once she started lecturing, from left to right on the blackboard, she spoke at warp speed. But her dedication to her students soon turned into legend.

After Saturday classes were abolished, she still went to campus each Saturday morning, her 1954 Chevrolet Deluxe parked always in the same spot, the door to her cluttered office always open, her students coming in for special help. She just as quickly earned a reputation for being a tough grader. Those students who might not have been appropriately diligent in their preparation for the Wednesday quizzes would call her the “Butcher of Mathematics,” behind her back, when she lowered the grade boom.

She awoke one Wednesday in 1978 at her home in West Hartford to find the old car buried in snow. The house was dark and cold, the electricity off. But it was Wednesday, and Wednesday was quiz day. Undaunted, she went next door and borrowed a pair of snowshoes. Slowly she made her way down eerily silent streets to campus, a mere 4.7 miles away. But Trinity was closed. In fact, the governor had closed the state because of the worst blizzard in 100 years. Perturbed to her core by the fact that the weather had interfered with her normal routine, Marjorie walked back home.

The author John Barth, noting how much of his life had been spent in classrooms, once wrote that “there is chalk dust on the sleeve of my soul.” Marjorie was, I think, born with chalk dust on the sleeve of her soul. She once told me that she had to have a closet full of white blouses to wear to class because anything darker would show smudges of chalk dust everywhere. John Barth would have recognized Marjorie in a flash.

It was at my first reunion weekend, in June 2005, that my most cherished memory of Marjorie became engraved on my heart. At the reunion service, as I slowly read each name of those members of the Trinity family who had died since the last reunion, with the great bourdon tolling from the bell tower, I could see Marjorie sitting in the front row with a pencil in her right hand. Every now and then, she would do something with her service leaflet.

When the service was over, I went back into the silent chapel to find Marjorie still sitting there alone. Beside many names on her service leaflet were little checkmarks. She pointed her pencil at one name and told me that the alumnus had been called Dave when he was a student. “He was not especially gifted in mathematics,” she said, “but was such a sweet boy with a kind smile.” He had graduated in 1964. Another name, another checkmark: “Now, this boy, Charles, was a wonderful student. He came from Everett, Massachusetts.” After graduating in 1967, Charles had been called up and sent to Vietnam. “He never was the same after Vietnam, although he did try to come to reunions from time to time.”

A woman’s name: “She was one of the first female students who majored in mathematics. She had four children whom she adored. She was an architect. I knew something was wrong when I did not receive a Christmas card from her, as I always did. So I called her home to find that she was dying of breast cancer.” Name after name, checkmark after checkmark.

A reporter once asked me the hardest question ever posed in the scores of interviews I have done. “How would you define a school?” The question took me aback. I fumbled around for a while and then responded that I thought a school, at the end of the day, was an assemblage not just of places but more essentially of voices.

In the middle of Raphael’s magisterial painting “The School of Athens,” which hangs in the Vatican, Aristotle and Plato are deep in conversation. That eternal conversation is at the heart of any school: the conversation between student and teacher — like all those thousands and thousands of conversations between Marjorie Butcher and “my children,” as she loved to say, her students.

Almost 10 years ago, at the conclusion of a meeting she had requested to review her wishes about her own memorial service, she folded up her notes and said, “Now I want to talk to you about my will. You know, I am a bit of a Scot, which I got from my mother’s side of the family. I do not spend money foolishly like so many others do.” I thought back to the 1954 Chevrolet Deluxe that gave up its last breath in the faculty parking lot, when the back axle fell off.

“I have made provisions in my will to leave several million dollars to Trinity to endow two distinguished professorships: the Robert and Marjorie Butcher Chair of Mathematics and the John Rose Chair of College Organist.” I was speechless. She would not let me announce her intentions until, as only Marjorie would have put it, “I am no longer at the college.”

How can we possibly thank her for more than 60 years of dedication to this place? Tomorrow, when the names of all the members of the Trinity family who have died in the past year are read this reunion weekend, I am glad that it will not fall to me to read the name Marjorie Butcher. But when her name is read, I can imagine the entire college community, past and present, putting a huge checkmark by her name, and on another shore and in another light, a voice will call out for us all, “Well done, thou good and faithful teacher.”

James F. Jones Jr. is a president emeritus of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and of Kalamazoo College.