Eight

EIGHT

Sylvester was black. That was the first—but was it the most significant?—of the problems.

Heavyset middle-aged Sylvester with his bloodshot eyes and his plump pouting lips, the color of mashed grapes; Sylvester with his jaunty railroadman’s cap pulled low over his forehead, and a cigarette (the ash grown long, precarious) slanted in his mouth; Sylvester swinging past with his noisy wheeled contraption—pail, wringer, cloth mop—mumbling in a low graveled voice, “G’morning, Professor Knauer.” Though the man gave the impression of being harassed, overworked—he panted, sweated, his skin exuded a rich oily moisture even on cold mornings—he usually had time to contemplate Marya, to stare very hard at Marya, and to give the innocent words “Professor Knauer” an exquisite sort of spin.

She dreamed of him. Though she had never looked him fully in the face. Though she didn’t know him at all. . . . Yet her anxious dreaming mind picked up details that turned out to be authentic: a thin wavering scar on his left cheek, a gold filling in one of his canine teeth that gave him a rakish appearance. He limped just perceptibly. The muscles of his shoulders and arms had gone fatty. He wasn’t good-looking now but he had certainly been good-looking years ago, with that fussy little mustache riding his upper lip, those wide-set shrewd eyes. “G’morning, Professor Knauer,” he said, his gaze dropping to her feet and rising, slowly, defiantly, to her face. “G’afternoon, Professor,” he said, a little catch in his throat as if he could hardly keep from laughing, “real nice day ain’t it?”

In the beginning, at the high-flying euphoric start of the academic year, Marya had said hello to Sylvester frequently, and warmly. She had taken him at face value—noting no irony in his greeting, or mockery in his heavy-lidded gaze or in that twitch about the lips meant to signal a smile. Perhaps unconsciously she had assumed that irony was a prerogative of the learned segment of the white race. In any case, she was mistaken. It was a year, generally, of mistaken assumptions.

MARYA WAS NOW twenty-five years old. She had the rank of assistant professor of English in a prestigious but rather small old New Hampshire college that had never, in its two-hundred-thirty-year history, awarded any woman tenure or promoted her to a higher rank; until three or four years ago no woman had been hired at all. The implications of such facts had not exactly escaped Marya but she seemed to be, at this time, in one of her zealous optimistic phases. After Fein’s death she had completed her Ph.D. work with another scholar and in another field entirely; her five-hundred-page study of mid-nineteenth-century American prose was scheduled for publication at Yale; she had discovered in herself an almost too ecstatic passion for teaching; and, exhausted as she often was, she nonetheless felt, for the first time in her life, young . . . or at any rate youthful. Surely the world wished her well; how could it not?