In fact she had hardened her heart beforehand, that she might not succumb to the romance of this university—its fame, tradition, wealth—the singular beauty of its Gothic architecture—its atmosphere of privilege and academic rigor; she was an alien here, she felt her presence in a way subversive, a tactical error on the part of others. For this part of the world (its geographical as well as its intellectual location) was as different from the State University at Port Oriskany as Port Oriskany itself was as different from Innisfail. Yet it was romance, and she had partway succumbed; she simply could not resist. For this was an environment that sheltered persons like herself: brilliant, she might have boasted, and genderless: it was an environment in which genius and near-genius were honored. In such disciplines as mathematics, physics, and certain branches of philosophy, “genius” was unmistakable, and usually declared itself at a very early age (there was a world-famous logician in the Philosophy Department who had come to the university at the age of twenty-eight, given the highest rank and any number of academic privileges); in other disciplines—Comparative Literature and Languages, for instance, which Maximilian Fein taught—“genius” was rather more a matter of speculation, debate, prejudice. Fein’s many admirers took it for granted that he was a man of genius—consider, for instance, the quality of the offers he received from other universities in North America and abroad—but his detractors granted him only a flamboyant, rather precious sort of talent, a talent of style, awkwardly wedded to an obsessive scholarly methodology. Fein was inimitable, they claimed: so very sui generis, of what value was his work ultimately? At the age of twenty-five he had published a brilliant and controversial study of the “therapeutic” function of the perverse, in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Western Europe; at the age of fifty-five—for so Marya knew him to be, having looked up his birth date in a biographical encyclopedia—he was hardly less controversial, provocative.

It was known that Fein had been working on a definitive examination of the medieval mind for the past fifteen years, and, judging from a few chapters he had allowed to be published, his revisionist study would alter forever all scholarship in the field. Hence Fein’s circle at the university, and the various “circles” that had formed about him over the years—passionately faithful to their master, chronically ill at ease in his actual presence, hopeful of being included in however peripheral a way in what promised to be his grand sweeping conquest of his branch of the profession.

(Marya was grateful for the fact that Fein’s study, at the ground floor rear of the house, was kept locked; she didn’t want to be responsible in any way for that gathering of books, manuscripts, notes, drafts. It was even said that the study was off-limits to Else Fein herself; but Marya indulged herself in a fantasy, a harmless sort of schoolgirl fantasy, of being one day invited in. “Should you like to assist me . . .” Maximilian Fein would begin, fixing Marya with his impenetrable blue-tinted gaze—for he wore his tinted glasses at all times, even at night; “Should you feel you have the time to spare from your own work. . . .”)