Phineas Coomb

Phineas Coomb, usually called Finny, is a senior member of the English department whose authority rests on committee work, professional advocacy, and an ability to shape departmental proceedings. Yet his apparently controlled public life sits beside a remembered episode of severe instability after he stopped taking his medication. The contrast makes him both a participant in the department’s ordinary power struggles and a figure whose colleagues interpret through the afterimage of his past.

Departmental Position and Public Manner

At a personnel committee meeting, Finny is the committee’s chair and has selected a small, windowless seminar room for its six members. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. finds the meeting physically difficult: Finny and Gracie DuBois are heavily perfumed, and Devereaux repeatedly gets up to open a door that is already open. The detail places Finny’s authority in an ordinary institutional setting, while the discomfort and comedy are filtered through Devereaux’s account rather than presented as neutral observation.

Finny also presides over discussion of the search for a new department chair. When he asks for its status, Devereaux describes a process that has repeatedly stalled: authorization came in September, but funding was questioned in October; a shortlist and convention interviews were permitted in December, while campus visits were denied in January. By March, most applicants had withdrawn or accepted other positions, and by April only three of the original two hundred remained. Finny’s question makes him the visible chair of a committee caught in a search whose successive permissions and reversals have steadily narrowed its options.

His appearance is described as part of his familiar departmental presence. On the day of the search discussion he wears a white linen suit and pink tie, set off by a recently acquired Caribbean tan. Years earlier, he had grown his white hair bushy and hung a large portrait of Mark Twain in his office, where he liked to stand beside it. These details sketch a man who cultivates a recognizable professional presentation; the narrative supplies them through Devereaux’s sharply observant, comic viewpoint.

Breakdown and Return

Finny’s history of stopping medication is recalled in connection with the final days of the Vietnam War era. The account suggests that his departure from his marriage may have influenced his decision to stop taking medication, but presents that connection as an apparent explanation, not a confirmed motive. Initially, he became unusually garrulous and cheerful. As the medication left his system, he began wearing makeup and then appeared in feminine clothing, moving through the halls of the Modern Languages Building in a state of evident exhilaration.

Colleagues responded in markedly different ways. Teddy Barnes, then the department chair, shut himself in his office and would not come out. Paul Rourke threatened to remove Finny from his office if he did not leave, while June Barnes offered a pointed comment about when pearls were appropriate. Billy Quigley, who normally had little use for Finny, welcomed him and shared a drink. The range of responses makes the episode a measure of the department’s strained tolerance as well as a startling rupture in Finny’s usual role.

The episode did not last. By the time the last marine had been evacuated from the American embassy in Saigon, Finny’s soon-to-be ex-wife had arranged for him to be hospitalized and placed back on medication. After a month of convalescence, he returned to teaching in the Modern Languages Building. He brought with him several new exercises on the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. The narrative presents this return as a resumption of routine, though Devereaux pointedly suggests that Finny’s teaching remains tedious and his professional competence questionable.

Afterward, Finny maintains outward conventions associated with his return to medication and to the closet, often appearing at department functions with a female companion. Devereaux mentions rumors about Finny’s long lunches at the Railton Sheraton with favored male students, but explicitly expresses doubt about the rumor and about academic gossip generally. The distinction matters: the text establishes the rumor and the narrator’s skepticism, not the allegation as fact. Finny’s public appearances therefore register both as an effort at normality and as something colleagues continue to read against the department’s memory of his brief crisis.

Advocacy and Departmental Conflict

Finny’s professional judgments have also shaped the careers of colleagues. He was Campbell Wheemer’s most vocal advocate for hiring, having interpreted remarks in Wheemer’s interview as evidence that he was gay. That interpretation proved mistaken: Wheemer was expressing political and moral approval of gay people and other marginalized groups, not disclosing his own identity. Finny’s advocacy was thus sincere but based on a misreading, a small example of how assumptions travel through departmental hiring decisions.

When Wheemer argues that the department ought to have hired a woman instead, and even says that colleagues should vote against him when he comes up for tenure, Finny reminds him that this is not the procedure used when Wheemer himself was hired. His response invokes consistency and the precedent of the department’s own decision. It also exposes the limits of Wheemer’s moral performance: the dispute turns not only on his stated principle but on whether he is willing to apply it to the process that brought him into the department.

Later, Gracie DuBois tells Devereaux that Finny is sounding colleagues out about recalling him as chair and may introduce a motion at the next department meeting. She says that, given the circumstances, she expects she would have to vote for it. Separately, Billy Quigley tells Devereaux that Finny and a Jesuit are planning a recall and threatens to vote with them if Devereaux will not help him. Billy’s statement is presented as a lie about his willingness to abandon Devereaux, but it still points to the recall as a live departmental threat; Gracie’s report independently attributes organizing activity to Finny.

Character and Narrative Function

Finny is not defined by a single episode. He can chair a personnel committee, advocate energetically for a colleague, insist on procedural consistency, and reportedly sound out support for removing Devereaux. Alongside those roles stands the remembered account of his medication-related breakdown and return. The tension between these registers prevents the department’s settled routines from seeming entirely stable: the man now associated with meetings and professional maneuvering is also the one whose earlier public transformation colleagues have not forgotten.

The portrait remains bounded by Devereaux’s first-person recollections and judgments. His account is openly comic and often uncharitable, particularly about Finny’s teaching, so its evaluations are not an independent institutional record. At the same time, Devereaux distinguishes rumor from what he knows, and the scenes give Finny concrete actions rather than reducing him to office gossip: he asks about a search with only three candidates left from two hundred, recalls the department’s hiring precedent, and becomes a reported organizer of a recall. His significance lies in that combination of authority and vulnerability, and in the way a department’s present conflicts keep drawing on its shared, imperfect memory of him.