MONTHS BEFORE, IN October, Marya was walking on a downtown street with several of her colleagues when she happened to see Sylvester approaching: a tall big-bodied black man in checked trousers, a pinkish-orange shirt, a maroon cloth cap set atop his wiry hair. He was walking with a black woman of his own approximate age, lighter-skinned, chunky, with an attractive face that had gone puffy and sullen. Marya, caught up in an autumnal mood of gaiety and camaraderie, called out hello; but Sylvester, his chin uplifted, passed by without so much as glancing at her. (His companion, however, had stared at Marya. Who do you think you are, she seemed to be asking.)

Marya’s friends asked her who the black man was. Marya, flushed with embarrassment, said he was the janitor—the custodian—in their building; didn’t they recognize him? She was also rather angry at having been so resolutely and so publicly snubbed.

No, Marya’s friends said, they hadn’t recognized him, they didn’t know him, and, anyway, weren’t there several black custodians in the building?

Not long afterward the window in Marya’s office was left open at the top over a weekend; rain soaked into the carpet, damaged papers and books on Marya’s desk, gathered in a little puddle on the floor. Marya was puzzled at the time because she never opened the window from the top and found it highly difficult to manipulate the window at that angle at all. But it wasn’t until a while afterward—she was slow, very slow, in coming to certain conclusions—that she realized the janitor had done it. Even then it was a while before she realized he had done it deliberately, to punish her for calling out to him on the street, for making a pretense of their sociability.

After that the persecution became more evident. Though it was still sporadic and unpredictable. Though, with so many other urgent things to consider, she rarely had time to consider that. (Wasn’t it petty and demeaning, Marya asked herself. Purposeless. Childish. And here she was on the faculty of one of the most distinguished colleges in the Northeast, twenty-five years old, well respected by her students and colleagues, passionately caught up in teaching, teaching, teaching . . . which she wanted to make her life’s work.) Still, it was difficult to ignore Sylvester’s taunts when he made it a point of passing her in the corridor, on the stairs, dipping his head in her direction in a parody of gallantry, twisting his mouth around the word “Professor” until it had never sounded so forlornly pretentious. And then she discovered one afternoon (how long had it been there? had any of her students noticed?) a bloodstained sanitary napkin placed innocently on the bottommost shelf of one of the bookcases. The thing had dried and stiffened into a peculiar arched shape.