Modern Languages is more than the workplace of William Henry Devereaux, Jr.: its offices and hidden passages give physical form to the pressures of his life as an English Department chair. Within the building, routine calls and campus business lead to a departmental crisis; after a vote, Devereaux hides above his own office and escapes by the back stairs, emerging into the parking lot to encounter Russell. The building’s ordinary institutional spaces become, in turn, places of surveillance, concealment, and flight.

Setting and Internal Geography

Modern Languages is part of West Central Pennsylvania University and houses the English Department offices and conference room. Its layout gives Devereaux several routes through the day: he stops at the office on his way to class, takes an elevator down to a basement recreation room, and later uses the back stairs to avoid the department’s main circulation. The building’s geography is functional, but during the crisis it also determines who can see whom and who can get away unseen.

The basement offers a particularly secluded place to make a call. A line of soda and juice machines stands against the far wall, beside an old-fashioned telephone booth with a folding door. Devereaux enters the booth and calls Lily using a calling card. The cramped, unappealing setting contrasts with the intimacy of the conversation: inside an institutional basement, he hears the voice of the person with whom he shares his life and recognizes how much he has missed her. Modern Languages thus accommodates a private moment without ceasing to feel like a workplace, with class only minutes away.

Offices, Messages, and Campus Business

The English Department office is a hub of messages and observation. When Devereaux arrives, Rachel gives him a sheaf of pink slips: Lily has called, and half a dozen other people want to speak with him. Rachel also reports that Leo, a student barred from lingering in the office, has been outside again. Finny, the English Department Instructor, keeps returning to check whether Devereaux has come back. The office’s ordinary traffic makes its thresholds consequential: people gather outside, watch the staff, and seek access to the chair.

That visibility also has a comic edge. Rachel is unsettled by Leo’s persistent attention, and Devereaux responds with a joke before deciding to leave by another route. He frames the back stairs as a practical necessity of academic power: even those who possess some authority, he suggests, have to use them. The remark anticipates the later escape, when the building’s less public passages offer not merely a shortcut but a way to avoid colleagues searching his office.

The office is also where personal and institutional business overlap. As shadows move along the frosted glass toward the English Department conference room, Devereaux understands that colleagues are gathering to determine his immediate administrative future as interim chair. On his desk, the department’s operating paper lays out the rules governing his ouster. He folds a copy and puts it in his coat pocket, while admitting to his agent that he has no book in progress and directing her to contact Rachel instead. Modern Languages holds the tangible pressures of his job—a message, a document, a meeting—alongside the creative silence he has not overcome.

The Building During the Departmental Crisis

After the vote, the building changes character. Devereaux has spent roughly half an hour crawling through the ceiling space, moving on hands and knees through heat and darkness while looking for somewhere to come down. From above, he can hear distant voices and see shafts of light rising from below. The conference and office activity that would ordinarily define departmental life becomes muffled sound and scattered illumination: he is physically near his colleagues yet separated from their meeting by ceiling tiles and insulation.

The crawlspace forces a reckoning with the disparity between Devereaux’s professional position and his immediate circumstances. He is nearly fifty, a published author, and still—at least temporarily—the chair of a large academic department; nevertheless, he is trapped above the offices in urine-soaked trousers. The space is contaminated with asbestos, dust, grime, and mouse droppings. His usual authority cannot make it dignified or safe. Modern Languages, the setting of his office and institutional standing, also contains a concealed, degrading space into which he has fled.

When he can no longer return to his office without encountering colleagues checking whether he has come back, Devereaux climbs down into the women’s restroom and locks the door. In its long, brightly lit mirror, he sees the physical cost of the crawlspace: his clothes are grayed with muck, his face is smudged with sweat and grime, his hair is matted, and a candy wrapper is stuck to his elbow. The mirror does not restore the appearance of a chairperson; it makes his predicament impossible to dismiss as merely funny. When Gracie DuBois and Jacob Rose try the door, he considers letting them in, but decides against returning to the ceiling.

Exit and Narrative Significance

Once the corridor is quiet, Devereaux slips back into his office, collects his satchel and the stories prepared for his workshop, and takes the back stairs down. He leaves Modern Languages after dark, crosses the lawn, and heads toward the rear parking lot, where only a handful of cars remain. The route from the hidden ceiling to the office, stairs, lawn, and car park is a cautious withdrawal from the building’s public spaces, not a triumphant return to control.

The parking lot extends the scene beyond the building’s walls. Devereaux initially mistakes a neighboring car’s movement for a young couple, then recognizes Russell when a horn sounds and Russell’s head appears in the window. He unlocks the passenger door, and Russell gets in. The encounter gives the escape an unexpected human destination: after hours spent among messages, departmental maneuvering, and colleagues’ searches, Devereaux leaves the building with his son-in-law beside him.

Modern Languages therefore concentrates several kinds of exposure. In the office, Devereaux is watched and sought; in the ceiling, he can listen without being seen; in the restroom mirror, he is forced to see himself; outside, he must re-enter the world of other people. Its physical arrangement turns the department’s conflict into movement through thresholds and levels. The building is at once the site of Devereaux’s institutional vulnerability and the maze through which he finds a way out.