“Application to this institute,” said the secretary scathingly. “The cheek of these American girls. I shall ring for help at once, Dr. Grant.” She lifted the receiver of a dusty black telephone box.
But Dr. Grant held up his hand. He looked at Violet, really looked, and his eyes were so genuinely and intensely blue that Violet felt a leap of childlike hope inside her ribs.
“What is your name, madame?” he asked.
“Violet Schuyler, sir. I have recently graduated with highest honors from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts, with bachelor of science degrees conferred in both mathematics and chemistry. My marks are impeccable, I have letters of recommendation from—”
“When did you first make your application to the institute?”
“In March, sir. It was returned in April. I presumed there had been some misdirection, so I sent it again, and—”
He turned to the secretary. “Why have I not seen Miss Schuyler’s application?”
The secretary knit her fingers together on the desk and creased her narrow eyes at Violet. “I assumed, sir, that—”
“That I would not consider an application from a female student?”
“Dr. Grant, the institute … that is, there is not a single scientist who … It’s impossible, sir. Of course it is. Your laboratory is no place …”
Dr. Grant turned back to Violet with eyes now livid. “I apologize, Miss Schuyler. Your application should have been received with exactly the same attention as any other. If you will please do me the honor of attending me in my office, I shall read it now, with the utmost regard for your tenacity in delivering it against all obstacles.” He stood back and motioned with his arm.
And so it began, the awakening of Violet’s gratitude, in that instant of triumph over the pinched and gray-suited secretary. She swept into Dr. Grant’s office and heard the firm click of the door as he closed it behind them, the decisive shutting-out of disapproving secretaries and rigid parents from the territory around them.
“Sit, I beg you,” he said, proffering a venerable old leather chair, and Violet sat. He pulled out his pair of rectangular reading glasses and settled into his own chair, behind the desk, while the clock drummed away in the corner and a robin sang from the tree outside the open window. As he read, he remained absolutely still, as if absorbed whole into the papers before him. Violet clenched her fingers around her knee and observed his purposeful energy, the fighting trim of his whip-thin body. Dr. Grant was three years older than her own father, and yet every detail of him belonged so clearly to a newer age, the modern age. Even his graying hair, the color of burnished steel.
How on earth did she get here, in this English building, filled with a race of people to whom she did not belong? Why had she fled her family, her life, her country, her comfortable future? What was she doing?
You’re greedy, her mother had said to her quietly, that last night in New York, as she had packed her things. Greedy and selfish. It’s not the knowledge you want, you can have that from your journals. You want to be in the newspapers, you want to be Marie Curie, you want to think you’re different from all of us. That all other women are silly and complacent and conventional, except you, brilliant you.
Isn’t that right, Violet?
“I beg your pardon,” Dr. Grant said, raising his head a quarter hour later to part the curtain of silence between them. “I believe a mistake has been made. You are quite the most qualified applicant to this institute in four years.”
Despite his heroic vanquishing of the secretary, Violet had somehow been expecting resistance. Resistance was all she knew: from her parents, filling the musty Fifth Avenue air with argument and expostulation; from her brothers, jeering over the silver and crystal. The opposition of the entire world against one embattled island of Violet.
She opened her mouth to return this volley that did not arrive. Instead, on the end of a wary breath, she offered: “I was informed at the outset that it’s too late to enter the university for the current term.”
He waved that aside in a flash of starched white cuff. “I shall see to it personally. You will have to join one of the women’s colleges, of course. Somerville, I think, will be best. I know the principal well; there should be no trouble at all. Have you lodgings?”
“I am at the Crown,” she said numbly.
He made a small black note on the paper before him. “I will see to it at once. A quiet, discreet pair of rooms. You have no companion, I take it?”
“No. I am independent.”
“Very good.”
Very good. Violet absorbed the note of rich satisfaction in his voice, above the glacial white of his collar, the symmetrical dark knot of his necktie. He was wearing a tweed jacket and matching waistcoat, and when he rose to bid her a tidy good afternoon, he unfastened the top button in an absent gesture to let the sides fall apart across his flat stomach.
Violet looked directly into his eyes, at that unsettlingly clear blue in his polished face, but her attention remained at his periphery, at that unfastened horn button, from which the tiny end of a thread dangled perhaps a quarter inch.
Now, as she pauses once more outside her husband’s office door, she remembers longing, quite irrationally and against her finest principles, to mend it for him.
By the time we reached Twenty-first Street, we were holding hands. I know, I know. I don’t consider myself the hand-holding kind of girl, either, but Doctor Paul reached for me when a checker cab screamed illegally around the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twentieth, against the light, and what would you have me do? Shrug the sweet man off?
So I let it stay.
Doctor Paul had suggested walking instead of the subway, once he emerged from the hospital locker room, shiny and soapy and shaven, hair damp, body encased in a light suit of sober gray wool with a dark blue sweater-vest underneath. I would have said yes to anything at that particular instant, so here we were, trudging up Fifth Avenue, linked hands swinging between us, sun fighting to emerge above our heads.
“You’re unexpectedly quiet,” he said.
“Just taking it all in. I suppose you’re used to bringing home blondes from the post office, but I’m all thumbs.”
He laughed. “I’ve never brought home a blonde from the post office, and I never will.”
“Promises, promises.”
“I happen to prefer brunettes.”
“Since when?”
“Since noon today.”
“And what did you prefer before that?”
“Hmm. The details are strangely hazy now.”
I gave his hand a thankful squeeze. “Stunned you with my cosmic ray gun, did I?”
He peered up at the sun. “I said to myself, Paul Salisbury, any girl who can say Holy Dick in the middle of a crowded post office in Greenwich Village, that girl is for keeps.”
“Nothing to do with my irresistible face, then? My tempting figure?”
“The thought never crossed my mind.”
I couldn’t see for the galloping unicorns. The Empire State Building lay somewhere ahead, over the rainbow.