At the beginning of the school year the departmental secretary had apologized to Marya, for the fact that her office—along with the offices of several other new appointees—was in the old Humanities Building, and not in the new; and for the fact that it was rather old, shabby, ill-lit, furnished with odds and ends—that battered old desk, for instance, all scratches and stains and scorch marks, a half century old, with drawers that couldn’t be locked. Marya hadn’t at all minded, however—she would have been embarrassed to say how grateful she was for the office, for any office at all; for a place, a salary, a tangible slot in the world. She was vain enough to love it that her name, on a tiny white card, was affixed to the front of the door; she loved it that she had an entire office, and a rather spacious one, to herself; there was even a tiny lavatory at the rear. In the past the room had been used for seminar meetings: so it was furnished haphazardly with mismatched items of furniture—chairs in various derelict stages, a floor lamp with a dusty shade, a narrow table measuring some six feet in length. The ceiling of hammered tin must have been fifteen feet high, the window faced south, sunshine flooded the room on clear winter mornings. It warmed Marya’s back when she sat at the desk, it cheered her up when she needed cheering.

Marya had begun to fill in the office with things of her own. A Dürer woodcut, a framed lithograph by an artist friend who lived now in New York, a print of a Cézanne landscape that reminded her, obliquely, of the countryside near Shaheen Falls. (All three items had been moved at one time or another by Sylvester, presumably because he wanted to clean the cobwebs off the wall; but there were always cobwebs, unless Marya brushed them off herself. The Dürer in particular took his fancy, he was always making it crooked by an inch or two.) Marya had brought in a few plants from the five-and-dime, some ceramic mugs, a fair number of books. She wondered at the protocol of filling up those floor-to-ceiling bookcases when her appointment at the college wasn’t necessarily permanent. Did it bespeak simple optimism and enthusiasm, or presumption, defiance?