me from across the table. I waited for him to say the essay was a disaster, the product of an ignorant mind, that it had overreached, drawn too many conclusions from too little material.
“I have been teaching in Cambridge for thirty years,” he said. “And this is one of the best essays I’ve read.”
I was prepared for insults but not for this.
Professor Steinberg must have said more about the essay but I heard nothing. My mind was consumed with a wrenching need to get out of that room. In that moment I was no longer in a clock tower in Cambridge. I was seventeen, in a red jeep, and a boy I loved had just touched my hand. I bolted.
I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it. I wanted the professor to shout at me, wanted it so deeply I felt dizzy from the deprivation. The ugliness of me had to be given expression. If it was not expressed in his voice, I would need to express it in mine.
I don’t remember leaving the clock tower, or how I passed the afternoon. That evening there was a black-tie dinner. The hall was lit by candlelight, which was beautiful, but it cheered me for another reason: I wasn’t wearing formal clothing, just a black shirt and black pants, and I thought people might not notice in the dim lighting. My friend Laura arrived late. She explained that her parents had visited and taken her to France. She had only just returned. She was wearing a dress of rich purple with crisp pleats in the skirt. The hemline bounced several inches above her knee, and for a moment I thought the dress was whorish, until she said her father had bought it for her in Paris. A gift from one’s father could not be whorish. A gift from one’s father seemed to me the definitive signal that a woman was not a whore. I struggled with this dissonance—a whorish dress, gifted to a loved daughter—until the meal had been finished and the plates cleared away.
At my next supervision, Professor Steinberg said that when I applied for graduate school, he would make sure I was accepted to whatever institution I chose. “Have you visited Harvard?” he said. “Or perhaps you prefer Cambridge?”
I imagined myself in Cambridge, a graduate student wearing a long black robe that swished as I strode through ancient corridors. Then I was hunching in a bathroom, my arm behind my back, my head in the toilet. I tried to focus on the student but I couldn’t. I couldn’t picture the girl in the whirling black gown without seeing that other girl. Scholar or whore, both couldn’t be true. One was a lie.
“I can’t go,” I said. “I can’t pay the fees.”
“Let me worry about the fees,” Professor Steinberg said.
* * *
—
IN LATE AUGUST, on our last night in Cambridge, there was a final dinner in the great hall. The tables were set with more knives, forks and goblets than I’d ever seen; the paintings on the wall seemed ghostly in the candlelight. I felt exposed by the elegance and yet somehow made invisible by it. I stared at the other students as they passed, taking in every silk dress, every heavily lined eye. I obsessed over the beauty of them.
At dinner I listened to the cheerful chatter of my friends while longing for the isolation of my room. Professor Steinberg was seated at the high table. Each time I glanced at him, I felt that old instinct at work in me, tensing my muscles, preparing me to take flight.
I left the hall the moment dessert was served. It was a relief to escape all that refinement and beauty—to be allowed to be unlovely and not a point of contrast. Dr. Kerry saw me leave and followed.
It was dark. The lawn was black, the sky blacker. Pillars of chalky light reached up from the ground and illuminated the chapel, which glowed, moonlike, against the night sky.
“You’ve made an impression on Professor Steinberg,” Dr. Kerry said, falling into step beside me. “I only hope he has made some impression on you.”
I didn’t understand.
“Come this way,” he said, turning toward the chapel. “I have something to say to you.”
I walked behind him, noticing the silence of my own footfalls, aware that my Keds didn’t click elegantly on stone the way the heels worn by other girls did.