You were supposed to be a poor widow for the rest of your life, Anna had said when the Golem complained to her about it. Now they’re afraid you’ll pity them, the same way they pitied you.
The carriage pulled away into the tunnel, and she closed her eyes as the cool earth surrounded her. The Elevated would be quicker, but the subway never failed to soothe her nerves. She’d go to the library and finish her assigned readings, she decided, and then begin her essay on how best to instruct a classroom of mixed ages. The dean had at long last approved her accelerated schedule, so she could earn her degree in three years instead of four—but with a stern warning that he’d rescind his approval if her grades slipped. You’re a gifted student, Mrs. Levy, but you mustn’t take on more than you can handle.
It would be imprudent, she supposed, to tell him that she could “take on” twice again as much. She absorbed her lessons at a glance, grasped the underlying principles nearly as quickly. In the laboratory, she timed chemical reactions with precision, and grew multicolored molds in glass dishes. From textbooks and lectures she memorized the strange science of the human body, all of which was new to her: the digestive system and its extraction of nutrients, the roles of saliva and gastric fluids, the chemistries of blood and lymph. She could name each step in the pasteurization process and explain why it was necessary, could identify every cut of meat in a butcher’s window and knew which were best roasted and which braised. She gleaned knowledge like wheat from a field, and passed all her exams handily—though she was careful to make a mistake every once in a while, so as not to be too perfect for comfort.
Still, there were difficulties. The phrase a credit to her race seemed to chase her around campus like a whisper. Many of the professors expected less from her because of it—and then, when she eclipsed their own favorite students, they recast her shyness as self-satisfaction, her intelligence as cunning. As for her classmates, they had little idea of how to approach her. They knew she was a widow, which was an unfathomable prospect; many of them wondered how she was not constantly in tears. The other Jewish girls turned a pitying eye upon her frugal shirtwaists and unfashionable cloak, but were mainly glad that she wasn’t so provincial as to embarrass them. If she’d struggled in the classroom, they might’ve invited her to join their study groups and kaffeeklatschen, as an act of benevolence. As it was, they were terrified that she might offer to help them.
But the Golem had expected all of that, had prepared herself for it. Never had she considered that her own longtime neighbors might now think differently of her; and it was their new, unspoken distance that drove her uptown, where she might study in peace, instead of skulking about the Lower East Side.
One more year, she thought as her carriage raced through the thawing earth. You can manage one more year.
* * *
The Jinni sat on a bench at Pennsylvania Station, smoking a blissful cigarette.
He ought to have been at the shop, working on their newest orders. But Arbeely had developed a bad head-cold over the winter, and the resulting cough refused to go away. “It’s your cigarettes,” the man insisted. “They tickle my throat.”
“That’s ridiculous, I’ve smoked them for years,” the Jinni had replied. “Besides, how can they be bothering you when you’re over here”—he indicated Arbeely’s desk, upon which he was currently leaning—“And I’m all the way over there?” He pointed to the far corner of the workshop.
“It’s the air-currents. All of your smoke ends up at my desk.”
“Then move your desk,” he’d said, which had earned him a disgusted look; and the man had spent the next few hours coughing in so dramatic a fashion that the Jinni had at last decided to go somewhere he could smoke in peace.
It was as good an excuse as any to walk all the way to 31st Street in the middle of the day—for now that Pennsylvania Station was completed, he never passed up an opportunity to visit it. He always took care to approach the station in the same way, for the best effect: First, the Seventh Avenue entrance with its wide, many-columned facade. Then, the vestibule and the high, narrow barrel of the Arcade, the windowed arch at its end. Through the arch, and down the stairs—and the view opened into the soaring marble expanse of the Waiting Room, with its ornate mosaics and soaring columns, its electric candelabra that rose, treelike, from the floor. Across this shining plaza, and through another towering arch, to the Concourse: and now the ribs of the building changed from stone to steel, a framework of arches and vaults all set with glass panes like an enormous greenhouse. Even the floor was steel, and pierced like a screen so that one might gaze below one’s feet, to the waiting trains.
The Jinni had gone to the station at least a dozen times since its opening, yet he always found some new detail to admire. It reminded him of a caravanserai he’d seen once outside Isfahan, in the days before his capture. From the outside, the structure had seemed merely a high-walled, rectangular fortress. But inside, it had revealed itself as a paradise
