Even those who liked Mann’s set of universal truths had a hard time spending time with him. His wet, rheumy eyes fixed on his listener and he had a habit of leaning forward so that his breath, full of Chivas, coffee, and pipe, would be warm on the face. His physical presence was as overbearing as his ideology and as difficult to overlook.

Many theories were offered as the fact and the manner of his death spread through campus. Secretaries laughed and even the occasional dean seemed relieved to be rid of the embarrassingly popular Mann. He was an anachronism, blight on the liberal facade of the grand old institution. He had been known to refer to Hillborne as Mann’s Men’s School when drinking down in Marble Grill, toasting the murals of naked native girls that lined those venerable walls. Maybe somebody cut into him just to show that it was true that Mann had no heart at all, laughed the workers at the word-processing center, all of whom were women. Their laughter rang through the granite walls of the building’s basement where they worked for minimum wage.

Mann had no children. His ex-wife had long since remarried and moved to Chicago. He had only one sibling, a sister who lived on Chestnut Street and taught at one of the few remaining finishing schools (not that it called itself a “finishing school” any longer) for girls of the New England ancestry, one that frowned with pursed lips upon admitting those remarkable students from Japan and Dubai and Colombia and Saudi Arabia whose parents seemed so eager for them to attend school in Boston. Constance Rosamund Mann-Blatt (she adored her long name and was apt to be known only by parts of it) was vacationing in London at the time of her brother’s death. She sent a telegram in reply to the rude telephone call placed by the college president, a call that awakened her from a dream during which she was about to take tea at St. James’s. Deaths should be announced by telegram. Everyone knew that. She remembered that the college president wasn’t exactly a native New Englander (referring to him in unprintable terms, to be honest) and she forgave him as far as she could. She was to inherit monies Mann did not bequest to the college and she knew that would be precious little. News of her brother’s death did not ruin — or make — Constance Rosamund’s day.

Mann, principle heir to his father’s cigar-manufacturing fortune, left more than $1,875,000 to be used by the college in establishing a scholarship in his name. The requirements set out by Mann for the winner of the scholarship were as particular as he could make them, knowing full well he could not officially indicate that the money had to go to a tall, white, male English major. The endowment would allow a student majoring in American Literature to devote his time to the study of Whitman, Emerson, or Melville free from worries about cash: He would win a handsome $35,000-a-year fellowship, renewable for up to two years. He had to remain a full-time, unmarried student whose grade-point average remained above 3.3 (Mann thought overly intellectual students a bore and himself never received above an A- on an undergraduate paper during his years at Hillborne after the war), and the student had to produce a publishable paper on one of the three authors, but which could also serve as his senior thesis. “America is a country of young men,” declared Mann in his will, quoting Emerson. “I hope that the college will remember this truth in the years to come.”

Was anyone unhappy that Mann was dead?

Apparently not.

Mann had no lovers, few friends, and his undergraduate admirers were already drinking heavily on the Friday afternoon after his death because it coincided with homecoming weekend. One could hardly expect them to mourn. The members of fraternity row, male and female alike, did however drink deeply and well to Mann’s memory and made many jokes concerning his name and speculated on other attributes.

His killer was not repentant. Not in the least bit. Not at all. The killer drank a silent toast to a deed well and truly done. Thinking of Emerson, in fact, the killer mused on one of the poet’s lines — that the reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.

And so, rewarding himself, Mann’s killer drank again.