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?

“G’morning, Professor Knauer,” the black custodian said as they passed in the corridor of the Humanities Building. “G’day, Professor,” he might say, bunching one plump cheek as he smiled with half his face, the jeering inflection in his voice so very subtle Marya hadn’t picked it up for weeks, months. Later she heard it all the time. But by then Sylvester had begun other strategies of harassment as well, none quite so subtle.

SHE FINALLY SOUGHT him out one morning in late January.