Chapter XIII: Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow

When Morgenthau closed for good, Grover was one of the students who stayed in protest, living in complete darkness in the cavernous Main Residence Hall. Having nowhere else to go, Morgenthau’s decrepit squalor seemed to be a better, more honest existence than begging his parents to take him back.

Morgenthau effectively closed after its final class graduated in May. However, some faculty and a hundred students lived on campus full-time had lease agreements that lasted through the entire summer until early September when the new semester would have begun. With all summer classes cancelled, this lame duck period was allotted to allow most of the full-time residents to find new places to live. The Grassos wanted the faculty out quicker than that.

On a sunny June morning, the professors that still lived on campus were served with eviction notices. Their homes on Regents Row—a line of old townhouses that housed a dozen professors, the deans and a few staff members—had been slated to be demolished. They would be relocated from the plush splendor of Regents Row to the sweaty confines of the student dormitories over by the library and the quadrangle. The Grassos meant business. They wanted everybody out, and fast.

The Professor and his colleagues would not take it lying down. They intended to stick out the remainder of their leases and then some. They joined forces with dozens of students in the dorms to form an alliance that would stick it out through the summer and into the troublesome winter that was sure to follow. For a few days, there was a realistic belief among the residents that they could actually convince the public to lobby the state to save the college. But soon, anxiety and doubt began to fill the ranks. More than half of the protestors jumped ship the day before the lease expired.

Grover was one of the students who had remained in the dorms to protest the Grassos. He made it as far as the middle of November before he decided to leave the college when the dank building became infested with a flu epidemic, one that Grover knew could possibly kill him if he wasn’t careful enough to avoid it. The winter was coming quickly, and it was in his best interest not to endure the bone-chilling temperatures on a limited amount of T-cells.

He packed up his nicest clothes and walked into the Tri-Towns to stay at one of the men’s shelters along the famed “desolation row.” Grover could stay at the shelter, but only from dusk until a little after dawn. During the day, he found himself walking the streets of the Tri-Towns, getting solicited by hustlers and dealers, getting scoffed at by yuppie mothers and business suits. He sat alone in the waiting rooms of the commuter railroads and got used to getting kicked out by the police, by transit workers and by other homeless wanderers.

One night, he wore his blue shirt, the only one that was still somewhat clean, to the Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow soup kitchen on a tip that they served delicious soup. Inside, the small cafeteria was hot, sweaty and smelly. The soup didn’t seem the least bit appetizing when juxtaposed with the aroma of a dozen streetwalkers who had ten times more dirt and grime than Grover.

Grover waited to stand on line, but a church worker came behind him and slapped him on the back. “Timothy, you’re late!” said the deacon of the local parish. “Get back there and put an apron on.” Grover, not ready to begin explaining himself, did as he was told and stepped behind the counter and began to serve soup to the dozens of homeless men that streamed through the door. He desperately wanted to have some of the soup that he scooped out from giant pots, but he did not want to blow his cover.

The deacon had no idea that this Timothy character was actually Grover Ellis. Timothy was an ex-con who had been placed in the halfway program run by the local parish. The deacon was his sponsor. He had arranged for the convict to take this position at the soup kitchen, but Timothy had taken off for Mexico.

Following meals, Grover was sent to the back of the kitchen to clean the dishes. As soon as he was back behind closed doors, Grover gorged himself on the soup, sucking it down like it was water after a marathon. After swallowing as much lukewarm soup as his hungry stomach could handle, he carefully wiped his lips clean and began to clean the pots, pans, ladles and bowls. As he dutifully cleaned the kitchen, he noticed giant, tins of pre-packaged soup on the shelves in the kitchen. The tins contained army surplus soup that was simply reheated and served to the homeless. The parish ran these shelters with funds from the city and state. Because they didn’t pay their volunteers and bought low-grade soup, the parish pocketed a pretty penny for their charitable service.

Before he left, Grover asked the deacon if he could come back and work again.

“You don’t have to come back and work at the kitchen again,” said the deacon, “You only had to come and help us this once as part of your community outreach.”

“But sir,” said Grover, “I really enjoy helping people. I really felt a great sense of purpose, even if it was just serving those men soup and washing the dishes. Please, sir. When can I come back and help again?”

“Well,” said the deacon, curiously, “I suppose you could come back this Sunday and again on Tuesday. Our kitchen is open Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.”

With that, Grover shook the deacon’s hand and began walking back to the men’s shelter.

“See you at church on Sunday, Timothy.”

“Please, my friends call me Grover.”

Grover needed a sense of purpose in his life, and he found it at the soup kitchen. He continued to go there long after Timothy’s parole officers required him to be. He had become such a fixture there that everyone knew him as Grover. After that first winter, he moved permanently back to Morgenthau and reoccupied his former room on the second floor, right underneath The Professor.

In time, Grover began stealing some of the giant, army-sized jugs of soup and carrying them back to the university where he would heat them up over an open flame and serve it to whoever was hungriest. It was during these meals that he got to know a lot of the people who lived at the University.

His soup nights became a social event for the small pocket of residents who had banded together, first out of hunger, then for a small sense of togetherness. He already knew The Professor, but over soup, the old man discussed his upbringing at the Dean’s residence on East Campus. When Winston appeared the following fall, Winston talked about his painting career and about the ghosts that lived in the library. Eventually Grover entertained numerous other guests, including Alistair, who helped him build a makeshift stove in the second floor common room that allowed Grover to cook indoors. When I first came to Morgenthau, I was invited to one of these dinners and got to know my neighbors. Through Grover, I learned the back-stories to my new friends, most of whom would open up only to Grover because he was one of the few people a Morgenthau resident could trust.

He met countless others who remembered him from the soup kitchen and were shocked to find that such a well-mannered man lived in such a horrible place like Morgenthau. But once the class of no tomorrow began their stay at the abandoned campus, they slowly felt no use for pity. There was an attitude that circulated among the residents that they were not entitled to any handouts or special treatment. They would not beg, they would not ask for mercy. In crossing the stone wall and the iron gates, they had accepted a fate that damned them to the university forever. This was to be the place that we were going to die, and to a certain degree we all knew it.

The Professor knew it most of all. He had accepted his fate long before the University closed and forced its students and faculty to find new jobs and schools. The Professor, more than anybody else, was capable of leaving the awful ruins of Morgenthau whenever he wanted, but the decision was his alone. The curse was his alone.

Roughly once a year, The Professor would walk off campus, ignoring the attempts by the addicts to scare him, and headed out into the Tri-Towns to meet with an old colleague of his. These meetings never went well, for The Professor insisted on paying for his half of dinner and refused his former colleague’s offers to give him shelter, a new job or some new clothes. One of these nights, the colleague dragged him across town to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, where Grover happened to be working his shift. Because the residents did not believe in charity, Grover was surprised to see someone from the campus enter the soup kitchen, let alone a curmudgeon like The Professor. His gloomy disposition suddenly brightened upon seeing the old man, especially since Grover had become very close with him over the years. In fact, the only reason that The Professor had decided to go over to the soup kitchen was because he had developed a fancy for the soup that Grover brought back from the mission, and he didn’t see the harm in getting some more.

Grover’s sunny demeanor only lasted for about five seconds before Grover noticed that the man accompanying The Professor was the man who had ruined his life with one tiny sentence. Behind The Professor, wearing his trademark blue overcoat and his black, Irish tweed cap, walked in Dr. Roland Salisbury, who was on the board of regents at Morgenthau before the school closed. Compared to the disheveled horde that dined at Grover’s soup kitchen, Salisbury looked distinguished in dapper slacks and a bright red scarf with white tapers that looped around his neck. He took off his leather gloves as he entered and tried to coax The Professor forward so that he could see what a nice establishment the church was running.

Grover had frozen at his post at the sight of Salisbury. His customers began to get frustrated at his lapse in service and he was brought back to reality when an old man with a rugged beard slammed his fist on the steel countertop. Grover resumed his service and tried to think of what to say to The Professor or to his former advisor, who had kicked him out of med school, outed him to his parents and requested that the dean of students to remove him from campus as a matter of public safety.

For all Salisbury knew, Grover was dead. He was more concerned with his old friend, who he believed was suffering from a mental illness that had made him an incredibly stubborn hermit. The Professor was crazy, but he certainly wasn’t mentally ill. He had not enjoyed his annual meeting with Salisbury and he just wanted to go back to Morgenthau and have the same soup that he was being prodded to eat now.

The two men walked up to the counter where Grover was standing in his typical white apron and black mesh hairnet. Grover made it a point to always remain clean-shaven, a vanity shared by few other men at Morgenthau. He had always been thin and pale, and he figured that he probably looked similar to the student that Salisbury had once taught in college.

“One soup please,” asked Salisbury with a sense of righteousness.

“Stop it!” shot back The Professor, “You think I don’t know how to order my own food?” The Professor looked up at Grover and rolled his eyes while nodding towards Salisbury. “What’s good here Grover?” asked The Professor.

Salisbury had been looking around the room thinking about making a charitable donation to the kitchen in his attempt to be a hero to the downtrodden, and after he heard The Professor speak, he looked over at the man behind the counter, and stared for five seconds before his jaw began to sag with shock and a deep, invisible embarrassment.

“Grover?” asked Salisbury. Grover did not acknowledge his former advisor, he just continued pouring soup into the warm, freshly cleaned bowls that continually came back from the kitchen.

Salisbury persisted, “Grover Ellis?” he asked again. With his full name uttered, Grover shot a quick menacing stare at Salisbury. This man had ruined his life and now he was here to pretend that he gave a shit about homeless people, when it had only been so long before when he railroaded him out of town.

Grover took a big swath of soup from the simmering cauldron and splashed it wildly into a bowl in front of Salisbury. The soup ricocheted off the sweaty porcelain and splashed all over Salisbury’s Madison Avenue overcoat, scolding hands as he attempted to defend himself from a steamy mist of broccoli cheddar soup.

Salisbury, in a defensive move, lurched back where he collided with a mob of hungry street dwellers that had been held up while Salisbury and The Professor gallivanted through the kitchen. Salisbury, who moments ago acted like Mother Theresa in the presence of the poor, suddenly recoiled upon coming into physical contact with these hobos, and pushed them away, spurting out ill-advised comments such as “Get your filthy hands off me!”

Suddenly, an ill mood developed among the soup queue, as the kitchen’s rightful customers, already fed up with Salisbury’s high and mighty act, turned against him. As he attempted to walk back to The Professor and Grover, a number of men stepped in front of him and prevented his movement any further. Grover later said he didn’t know who started it, but somebody threw a piece of stale break that struck Salisbury flush in the temple and within moments, the well-to-do doctor was being bombarded with everything from bread, to bowls of soup and other nefarious items smuggled into the kitchen by the Tri-Towns’ finest homeless men and women.

Salisbury exited swiftly without saying a word to The Professor or Grover. The Professor, as he was known to do from time to time after tense moments, let out a raucous chuckle and slammed his fist on the counter while Grover cleanly pored him a new bowl of soup.

With no open seats left in the kitchen, The Professor stumbled around the mess hall for a few moments before tired legs forced him to take the first open seat. Across from the table sat a hopelessly sad woman who couldn’t muster a smile despite the ruckus at the expense of Dr. Salisbury. That was the night changed the lives of The Professor and everybody at Morgenthau. It was the night he met Kendra Keane.