On the eastern face of the six-story Student Union Building, the architect had added a striking feature—the fire escape, instead of being clad in concrete, was enclosed in a glass shell, so that all twelve flights of delicate stairs, as though suspended in air, were visible from the courtyard below. The fire escape stairwell was thus transformed from a purely functional feature into what looked more like an Escher drawing that had somehow been straightened out. On a campus of drab buildings, the stairwell was an architectural gem.

It was precisely this aesthetic quality, this airy transparency, that caught the attention of Bernard W. Boggs, erstwhile graduate and successful entrepreneur, as he was escorted across the courtyard patio one sunny day in June. Boggs had been invited to campus for a special VIP Alumni Donor dinner at Eye in the Sky, the faculty restaurant on the sixth floor of the Student Union Building. The restaurant had the best food and catering on campus. Widely rumored in university fundraising circles to be preparing to make a major donation to the University Development Fund, Boggs was escorted by Ralph Pedersen, Chair of the Philosophy Department, a specialist in ethics and an expert on Kant. Pedersen had been carefully chosen for his diplomatic skills and his charm, as well as for his ‘administrative discretion’—he was the perfect man to chaperone Boggs.

As Pedersen and Boggs crossed the courtyard, however, the philosopher noticed Boggs looking up at the glass-encased stairway, and as they gazed upwards, an unusual event happened. For while the stairway was generally admired as elegant and pleasing to the eye, it was rarely used. The elevators in the building almost always worked and there was an inner stairwell also, which could be used if the elevators were too slow or if they malfunctioned. The exterior fire escape was therefore an unnecessary feature of the building, perhaps a purely aesthetic gesture on the architect’s part. Nobody used it.

But today, as the two men regarded the stairwell’s upper reaches, the push doors behind the uppermost flight of stairs opened, revealing a female student who—even at this distance—was very attractive. The girl was wearing a white T-shirt and a very short matching white skirt. Her blonde hair was drawn back in a ponytail, revealing chiseled and tanned features. On her feet she wore white pumps with short ankle socks. Her long slender tanned legs were finely displayed due to the shortness of her skirt. Thinking her own thoughts and not paying attention to the world outside the stairwell, she started to descend the stairs as Boggs and Pedersen, momentarily distracted, looked up in silence.

But they did not seem to see the same thing.

Boggs was looking up in shock. Moreover, as his dark eyes followed the descending student, she reached the bottom of the first flight of steps and, before she turned her back on her unseen male observers, her short skirt flicked up and a tiny triangle of her white panties became momentarily visible to them. She descended the next flight with her back to Boggs and Pedersen, disappearing incrementally down the new flight of stairs.

This gave her watchers a moment to reflect.

Boggs was looking at the stairwell, mouth slightly open in shock, licking his lips and shaking his head. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his monographed handkerchief, still shaking his head. Ever percipient, Pedersen registered the disapproval that Boggs’s body language and gestures conveyed. Instinctively, he tried to smooth over the uncomfortable fact of the girl’s provocative attire.

“She should, erm, probably be wearing a, a, a longer skirt….”

“Indeed she should!” Boggs agreed with a growl. He had managed to catch his breath and replace his spectacles. He continued to look up. The girl had reached the third flight and was now descending towards them again. Once again, the triangle of white panties became visible just before she turned, as the veil of her short skirt trembled aside.

Boggs looked around at the young men lounging around the courtyard space. Some stretched on patches of lawn, others sat on benches reading, a few stood about chatting and bobbing their heads. None of them had noticed the descending girl.

Pedersen was anxious to get things onto more comfortable conversational terrain. “It’s, ah, always been one of my favorite architectural features on campus—that fire escape. Those transparent walls. They are actually quite unusual. But I always admired that stylish architectural touch. It’s one of those throwaway elements, not strictly necessary, that sort of make the building!”

“I’m sure it does!” Boggs agreed with a tonal suggestion of disapproval. “I’m sure it does! Perhaps one needs to be a philosopher to see its value, but speaking strictly for myself, I have to say that I wonder what on earth the architect was thinking! Surely, he must have realized that in the event of females using that stairwell—as that, that young woman is—he has left them open to the possibility of a somewhat compromised modesty.”

Pedersen sensed danger.

It was rumored that Boggs, who was refinancing his estate now that he had retired, was preparing to donate as much as a million dollars to the university. The interest alone from such a donation—if placed in a scholarship or financial need fund—could generate handsome scholarships and grants for dozens of students, perhaps more if the donation was wisely invested. Pedersen did not want anything to rattle the old alumnus.

“That stairwell is actually very seldom used. I’ve been teaching here for twenty years, and that girl is the only person I have ever seen on those stairs. There are elevators inside and also an internal stairwell. That exterior fire escape is quite superfluous. It serves a basically ornamental function.”

“Indeed it does! I am sure the stairwell serves a rather different ‘ornamental function’ than the one the architect intended!”

Pedersen had said the wrong thing again and Boggs seemed to want to let him know this. He thought it best to let Boggs’s sarcastic comment fall without response.

The girl had now reached the bottom of the stairwell, and, having pushed the ground floor fire door open, was walking towards the two men, who had halted during their colloquy. She approached them, oblivious to their scrutiny and commentary. Lost in her own thoughts, she breezed past them, her blonde ponytail dancing from side to side, the white of her attire a dazzling contrast to the bronze tan of her face and her exposed athletic limbs. As she drifted silently past them, Boggs caught a whiff of musky perfume. Pedersen looked away so that Boggs did not see that Pedersen had seen Boggs blush.

Boggs watched the girl recede in disbelief.

Pedersen tried to put the fundraising dinner back on the menu of their attentions.

“We’d better get to the lunch—if we’re not careful, we might miss the hors d’oevres!”

Boggs continued to watch the girl recede, then shook his head again and looked at the young men dotted around the courtyard. None of them had registered the presence of the girl, either on the stairwell or when she crossed the courtyard.

“I can honestly say,” Boggs said, his tone a slight breech of protocol, “that I am grateful that I was privileged to study here when young women still had a modicum of self-respect! How on earth young men like these are supposed to concentrate on their studies in an atmosphere of such utter decadence, I for one am sure I do not know!”

Pedersen muttered a noncommital agreement and escorted Boggs across the courtyard to the entrance of the building, over to the elevators, and then up to the Eye in the Sky. The dinner went well. The incident with the girl was not mentioned.

As it turned out, they had not, after all, missed the hors d’oevres.

A few old college songs were sung by all when the meal was over.

Nostalgic speeches were given. Old familiar paws were meaningfully shaken.

Boggs knew this would probably be his farewell tour of the campus.

After the meal and formalities, the pleasant socializing and reminiscences, he took advantage of the twilight to visit a few of the spots where he had first held hands with Linda, his sweetheart, whom he had married soon after graduation, and whose death from cervical cancer had prompted his retirement a few years earlier.

But when he had returned home to Dallas and began thinking about that donation he had been planning to make in his wife’s name, his mind kept flashing back to the stairwell outside the Student Union Building. Year after year, he reflected, the ornamental stairway continued to perform its insidious function of exposing its female patrons to the possibilities of voyeuristic observation. He thought of the young men who studied or relaxed or socialized in that courtyard, of how their thoughts might be shaped, over the generations, by apparitions like the one he had witnessed during his visit. The blonde student in her short white skirt, too, continued to trouble him: unwelcome flashbacks to the sight of those slender, tanned legs prancing down the alluring stairway, the momentary glimpses of underwear he had noted with such shock. Who was to say, he reasoned, what temptations and even iniquities might be activated or actualized, what unwholesome passions might be ignited by the very presence of this fire escape the ethical philosopher had admired for its aesthetic merit! A life, lives, whole sequences of lives could be destroyed by the oversight or the insidious intention or the clandestine perversion of the architect—whatever the reason, morality was being sacrificed on the altar of some inscrutable purpose or decadent idea.

After much thought and prayer, Boggs realized that it was his destiny to make a difference, to become the quiet and unrecognized hero who effected the implementation of a higher law. He called Winston Riley, a friend who had studied architecture and successfully built several prominent government buildings during his career. He asked Riley what it might cost to cover that glass stairwell with a granite cladding. Riley said he would look into it and get back to Boggs with an estimate. When Riley called Boggs two weeks later, he explained that the stairway could not be covered cheaply but he knew a contractor who could do it—materials and labor included—for just under a million.

Boggs drew up the papers and took them to his lawyer to ensure that his will in this matter would be carried out. He selected the granite himself. One of his objections to modern architecture was its criminal overreliance on glass.

A few months later, when the Alumni Donations Committee met to go over the annual gifts, eyebrows were raised as ‘the Boggs donation’ was reviewed. Pedersen shook his head and complained that the funds could have been much better employed to endow a scholarship fund and to assist students in financial need. He called Boggs to reason with him—for purely ethical reasons—and to persuade him to reconsider his donation’s strict stipulations. But Boggs was not about to be manipulated by some Kantian professor who failed to understand that buildings, like people, could be immoral. He would make his contribution to his alma mater, he explained, in his own way. He was adamant that his legacy would be both significant and lasting. The six-figure donation was to be used exclusively for the cladding of the glass fire escape in a handsome granite shell.

When the architectural modification had been made, Boggs was delighted to receive photographs of the newly refurbished Student Union Building. He was pleased, too, that this improvement in the ambience of the university had been made in his dearly departed wife’s name. A small plaque had been erected on the exterior wall of the stairwell at the courtyard level, naming the donation made in his wife’s name and rechristening the now nontransparent stairwell the Linda Boggs Fire Escape.

Boggs only wished his wife was still alive so that she could appreciate his acumen in ensuring that their legacy would not be carved in wood or written in sand.

He was extremely pleased, too, with his choice of granite. The grey and white slabs elegantly entombed the revealing glass that had rendered the fire escape a panopticon. Glass—he often told himself—was the enemy of eternity, the antithesis of permanence. But granite—well, there was a material that was made to last! It was all deeply satisfying to Boggs on a personal level.

Since he was a young man, he had always been strongly drawn to stone.

– Mark Crimmins