remember and pinning them where he couldn't lose them—on his body. His odd appearance was as distracting as his questions about my shoe size.
"Come in then," he said. "I have to work, but you just do whatever it is you have to do." And with that he disappeared into his study. As he turned and walked away, the notes made a dry, rustling sound.
From the bits and pieces of information I gleaned from the nine housekeepers who had come before me, it seemed that the old woman in the main house was a widow, and that her husband had been the Professor's older brother. When their parents had died, his brother had taken over the family textile business, had enlarged it considerably, and willingly assumed the cost of educating a brother who was a dozen years younger. In this way, the Professor had been able to pursue his study of mathematics at Cambridge University. But soon after he had received his doctorate and had found a position at a research institute, his brother had died suddenly of acute hepatitis. The widow, who had no children, decided to close down the factory, put up an apartment building on the land, and live off the rents she collected.
In the years that followed, the Professor and his sister-in-law had settled peacefully into their respective lives—until the accident. A truck driver had dozed off and struck the Professor's car head-on. He had suffered irreversible brain damage and had eventually lost his position at the university. He was forty-seven at the time, and since then he'd had no income except the prize money he earned from solving contest problems in the mathematics journals. For seventeen years he had been completely dependent on the widow's charity.
"You have to feel sorry for the old woman," one of the former housekeepers had said. "Having that strange brother-in-law eat through what her husband left her like some parasite." She'd been sent packing after she complained about the Professor's incessant jabbering about numbers.
The inside of the cottage was as cold and uninviting as the outside. There were just two rooms, an eat-in kitchen and a study that doubled as the Professor's bedroom. It was small, and the wretched condition of the place was striking. The furniture was cheap, the wallpaper was discolored, and the floor in the hall creaked miserably. The doorbell wasn't the only thing that didn't work: just about everything in the house was either broken or on its last legs. The little window in the bathroom was cracked, the knob on the kitchen door was falling off, and the radio that sat on top of the dish cupboard made no sound when I tried to turn it on.
The first two weeks were exhausting, since I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. The work wasn't physically demanding, and yet at the end of each day my muscles were stiff and my whole body felt heavy. It was always a struggle at each new assignment until I adapted to the rhythm of the work, but the adjustment was especially difficult with the Professor. In most cases, I figured out what sort of person I was dealing with from the things they told me to do, or not to do. I determined where to focus my efforts, how to avoid getting into trouble—how to read the demands of the job. But the Professor never gave me instruction of any kind, as though he did not mind what I did.
On that first day, it occurred to me that I should simply follow what the old woman had said, and start by fixing the Professor's lunch. I checked the refrigerator and the kitchen cupboards, but I found nothing edible except for a box of damp oatmeal and some macaroni and cheese that was four years past its expiration date.
I knocked at the study door. There was no answer, so I knocked again. Still no answer. I knew I shouldn't, but I opened the door and spoke to the Professor's back as he sat at his desk.
"I'm sorry to disturb you," I said.
He gave no sign of having heard me. Perhaps he's hard of hearing, or wearing earplugs, I thought. "What would you like for lunch?" I continued. "Are there ... things you like or dislike? Do you have any food allergies?"
The study smelled of books. Half the windows were covered by bookshelves, and piles of books drifted up the walls. A bed with a worn-out mattress was pressed