snapped at people. Even Ezra irritated her, with his calm and his docility.
So she kept her distance, and after missing her family a while began to discard the very thought of them. She grew brisker, busier, more hurried. Ezra’s letters — as ponderous as his conversation, just this side of dull — would turn up on the edge of the bathroom sink or crumpled among the bedclothes, where Jenny had laid them aside in midsentence. Her mind just drifted, that was all. And twice, during her first two years in college, Cody stopped to see her while traveling through Pennsylvania on business, and both times she was happy at the prospect (he was so dashing and good-looking, she was proud to show him off), but she felt muffled, gradually, once he’d arrived. It wasn’t her fault; it was his. It seemed that everything she said carried, for him, the echo of their mother. She saw him stiffen. She knew exactly what he was thinking. “How are you fixed for money?” he would ask her. “You need a few new dresses?” She would say, “No, thanks, Cody, I’m fine”—really meaning it, needing nothing; but she saw, from his expression, what he had understood her to say: “No, no,” in Pearl’s thin voice, “never mind me …” She could not straighten his tie, or compliment his suit, or inquire about his present life without setting up that guarded look in his face. It made her feel unjustly accused. Did he really imagine she would be so domineering, or reproachful, or meddlesome? “Look,” she tried once. “Let’s start over. I didn’t intend what you think I intended.” But his wary, sidelong glance told her that he suspected even this. There was no way to cut themselves out of the tangle. She let him leave. Back in her dorm room she studied her reflection, her swing of dark hair and her narrow- waisted figure. Then she acted gayer than usual, for a while, and had a sense of having clapped her hands to free them of some thick and clinging dust.
Late in her senior year, she fell in love. She had been in love before, of course — once with an English major who’d grown too possessive, bit by bit; and once with a barrel-necked football star who seemed now, when she looked back, to be a symptom of some temporary insanity. But this was different. This was Harley Baines, a genius, a boy of such intelligence that even his smudged tortoiseshell glasses, pure white skin, and adenoidal voice struck awe in his classmates. He was not outside Jenny’s group so much as above it, beyond it — a group in himself. It was rumored that he could have had a Ph.D. at twelve but was kept from it by his parents, who wanted him to enjoy a normal childhood. Next year he’d be at Paulham University, outside Philadelphia, doing advanced research in the field of genetics. Jenny was going to Paulham too; she had just been accepted by its medical school. That was what made her notice Harley Baines. Secure in the center of her own noisy group (which would not be hers much longer, which would soon be scattered by graduation, leaving her defenseless), she looked across the campus and saw Harley Baines passing with his stork-like gait, wearing unstylish, pleated flannel trousers and a bulky pullover obviously knitted by his mother. His hair, which could have used a shampoo, was a particularly dense shade of black. She wondered if he knew she was entering Paulham. She wondered if he would care, if he found girls beneath his notice. Was he impervious? Unobtainable? Her friends had to call her name several times, laughing at her bemused expression.
It was the spring of 1957—an unusually late and gradual spring. Professors opened the classroom windows with long, hooked poles, and the smell of lilacs floated in. Jenny wore sleeveless blouses and full skirts and ballerina flats. Harley Baines laid aside his home-knit sweater. Bared, his arms were muscular, thick with black hair. Around his neck he wore a gold or brass disk of some kind. She was dying to know what it was. One day in German class, she asked. He said it was a medal he’d won in a high school science fair, for setting up an experiment on the metabolic rate of white rats. She thought it was a funny thing to go on wearing all this time, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she touched the medal lightly with her fingertips. It hung just inside his shirt, and it was almost hot.
She asked him at other times (catching up with him in a corridor, arranging to stand behind him in the cafeteria line) whether he was looking forward to Paulham University, and what sort of housing he would have there, and what he’d heard about Paulham’s public transportation system. Offering these questions in an even, noncommittal voice, she felt like one of those circus trainers who take care to present to an animal only the curled- in backs of their hands, showing they pose no threat. She didn’t want to alarm him. But Harley didn’t act alarmed at all, and answered her courteously, matter-of-factly. (Was that good or bad?) When exams began, she came to him with her genetics notes and asked if he could help her study. They sat outdoors in the grass, in front of the Student Union, on a blue chenille bedspread she’d brought from her room. Their classmates lounged on other bedspreads all around them — including some of Jenny’s friends, who cast her startled, doubtful looks and then glanced quickly past her. She’d been hoping they would stroll over, make Harley a part of the group. But on second thought, she could see that would never happen.
While she framed her queries (acting not so slow-witted as to put him off, but still in need of his assistance), Harley listened and stripped a grass blade. He wore heavy, dressy shoes that seemed out of place on the bedspread. In his probing hands, the grass blade took on the look of a scientific experiment. He answered her levelly, with no question marks after his sentences; he took it for granted that she would understand him. Which she did, in fact, and would have even if she hadn’t known her subject ahead of time. His logic proceeded steadily from A to B to C. In his slowness and his thoroughness, he reminded her of Ezra — though otherwise, how different they were! When he finished, he asked if everything was clear now. “Yes, thank you,” she said, and he nodded and rose to go. Was that
Jenny returned to her room and took a bath and changed to a ruffled dress. She leaned out her open window, humming. Harley didn’t come. Eventually she went to supper, but he wasn’t in the cafeteria, either. The next day, after her last exam, she phoned his dormitory. Some sleepy-sounding, gruff boy answered. “Baines has left for home,” he said.
“Home? But we haven’t had graduation yet.”
“He’s not planning to go through with that.”
“Oh,” said Jenny. She hadn’t thought of graduation as “going through” with anything, although it was true you could simply have your diploma mailed out. To people like Harley Baines, she supposed, a degree was unimportant. (While Jenny’s family was coming all the way to Summerfield for this event.) She said, “Well, thank you anyhow,” and hung up, hoping her voice didn’t sound as forlorn to Harley’s roommate as it did to her.
That summer, after graduation, she worked again at Molly’s Togs in the little town near the college. It had always seemed a pleasant job, but this year she was depressed by the studied casualness of married women’s clothes — their Bermuda shorts for golfing and their wide-hipped khaki skirts. She gazed away unhelpfully when her customers asked, “Does it suit me? Do you think it’s too youthful?” Next year at this time, she would be at Paulham. She wondered how soon she could start wearing a starched white coat.
In July, a letter arrived from Harley Baines, forwarded from home by her mother. When Jenny returned to her boardinghouse after work, she found it on the hall table. She stood looking at it a moment. Then she slipped it into her straw purse and climbed the stairs. She let herself into her room, threw her purse on the bed, and opened the window. She took a square tin from a drawer and fed the two goldfish in the bowl on the bureau. All before opening Harley’s letter.
Did she guess, ahead of time, what it would say?
Later, she imagined that she must have.
His handwriting was as small and separate as typing. She would have imagined something more headlong from a genius. He used a colon after the greeting, as if it were a business letter.
