One of Marya’s colleagues, a perpetually melancholy young man named Ernest who had been an assistant of Fein’s for several years, asked her pointedly one day what Fein was really like—the implication being, of course, that Marya was on some sort of intimate basis with him. She felt her face go hot; she chose her words carefully. “If I were in a position to know,” she said, “anything I said would be a betrayal. And I’m not that sort of person.”

SHE HAD’T INTENDED to fall in love with Fein, or even to fall under his spell, as so many people, male and female, evidently did. That wasn’t Marya Knauer’s style, that wasn’t quite the way she saw herself in this phase of her career. (Adulatory, calculating, subservient, “feminine.” She had learned to think of herself as genderless, just as knowledge itself was genderless; just as the scholarly life was genderless. In truth she had learned in graduate school to think of herself scarcely at all—she was too absorbed in her work.)

But of all her professors Fein was the one who most insisted upon a personal relationship. At their first meeting—when Marya sought him out to ask, to insist, that she be allowed into his seminar—he interrogated her for some minutes, keeping her standing awkwardly in a doorway; neglecting, or not wishing, to invite her inside to have a seat. He wanted to see how serious she was. How substantial her background was. Frankly (so he said, adjusting his blue-tinted glasses and regarding her critically)—frankly, he and her adviser didn’t get along very well; the man’s notions of the medieval period were asinine. His single published book in the field was a disaster of misguided energies. . . . Not knowing what she did, Marya found herself nodding, smiling vaguely, seeming to agree.

Fein stared at her. “But why are you agreeing?” he asked sharply. “Are you really in an intellectual position, Miss Knauer, to know enough to agree?”

So she was shamed, exposed. But she went away buoyant enough since Fein had—reluctantly, magnanimously—allowed her into his seminar.

SOME MONTHS AFTERWARD Marya was singled out for the awkward honor of looking after the Fein household for ten days while the Feins were in Europe. Maximilian was scheduled to speak at a medieval conference in Munich (his paper was on a newly discovered manuscript attributed to Agrippa von Nettesheim); following which the Feins were flying to Madrid to visit the Prado. (Every few years, Fein explained, the need came over him to see Bosch again, to stand in his extraordinary presence. It was more than need—it was hunger, sheer desire.)