“It’s a white car,” she said, apparently to herself.

“Are you sure you’re feeling up to driving?” I asked, having merely voiced the question that would have been on anyone’s mind, watching her shift her weight unsteadily from spine-heeled shoe to shoe.

The guest lecturer stopped, paused, and turned around. A smile spread slowly across her wide mouth, to which new lipstick had been recently and inexpertly reapplied.

“No,” she said. “You’re right. Anyone can see I’m not up to it at all. Would you mind taking me to my hotel?”

4

We drove west, cutting through campus.

“Are those…” slurred my passenger, “those palm trees? The famous ones?”

It was a dark night, and a crescent moon was visible above the roof of Memorial Church. We turned right into the Arboretum, and I sensed the guest lecturer sitting up a little straighter in her seat.

“Is that,” she said, more distinctly, “where the dead son is buried?”

I looked over at her, startled, and then I saw that she was squinting through the dark at the white form of the mausoleum.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so, yes.”

“So sad,” said the guest lecturer in a mournful voice. “They told us all about it on the tour. The children of California shall be our children.”

She gave me a sideways look, as if this quotation from our university’s founder might have particularly impressed me.

“That’s right,” I said, and then we were spat out on the other side of campus at the base of the foothills heading north past the golf course.

“He died of typhus?”

“Typhoid, I think,” I replied.

What a strange thing she wanted to talk about, I thought. I had not anticipated discussing the century-old death of a boy from typhoid as if it were recent news, and to call it “so sad” did not seem quite appropriate, but it was often the case, I remembered, that tourists were most interested in this somewhat morbid aspect of our institution’s founding.

“I think I know where we are now,” said the guest lecturer, pulling herself upright with effort. The headlights swept along a vast expanse of yellowed grass. In the darkness it glowed pale and eerie against the black sky, as if we were crisscrossing the foothills of some other planet.

“Even this,” said the guest lecturer, indicating the land around us, “belongs to the university?”

I nodded.

“And can’t be sold.”

I looked at her again. I doubted that I had ever met anyone who’d shown such interest in the campus tour.

“Right again,” I said. “Only leased.”