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  We were both shocked. Mary was one of the best psychology students at Vassar.

  Mary thought that a private meeting in Washburn’s office might offer a better climate for persuasion, and I offered to tag along, waiting on a plump, tapestry-covered bench in the hall outside faculty offices. From my seat on the bench, I worked at deciphering a German publication of new lectures by Freud—Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse—missing every third or fourth word, and swung my shoes against the floor, softly tapping out the rhythm of a popular tune while I absentmindedly played with the charm bracelet on my left wrist. My mother had given me the bracelet, and Mary had given me my favorite charm, the little magnifying glass, symbolizing my love for science (evidently, no beaker- or brain-shaped charms were commonly available).

  As soon as I saw Mary emerge and walk right past me, I knew things had gone badly.

  “Don’t say it,” she said, intent on moving as quickly as possible away from the source of her humiliation, her pointed chin with its faint cleft just starting to tremble.

  “Oh, Mary,” I said, struggling to catch up. “You’ll be fine.”

  I took her arm so we could walk down the dark hall, past the sconce-lighted portraits and old windows. The wavy leaded glass of each window blurred the view of rust-colored trees outside. “You’re our best and brightest. You’ll be fine.”

  “How will I possibly be fine if I can’t even rise to the top within our own little college? Three years of paying my dues and I’m being excluded.”

  “There will be a portrait of you hanging in the labs someday. ‘Mary Cover,’ our next famous psychologist.”

  “I don’t want to be famous. That has nothing to do with it.” Mary hurried our pace. Joined at the elbow, we bobbed out of sync, heels clicking and squeaking against the scuffed wooden floors. “I want to contribute. I want to understand. I’d just like to work with humans—if that’s not so much to ask—instead of worms and rats and color-blind fish.”

  “It was just . . . rotten luck. You rubbed her the wrong way. Calling her one of Cattell’s ‘most important men,’ and all.”

  Mary snickered. “Your fault, for telling me about that.”

  I was the one who read every journal announcement, every newsletter, every history of the newer “scientific psychology,” from James and Hall to Titchener and Angell.

  “Yes, my fault,” I said, feeling the happiness well up inside me, glad that Mary wasn’t feeling demolished at that moment.

  “Self-righteous bat,” Mary said.

  How old was Washburn really? Early forties. She seemed ancient to us both.

  “Cave-dwelling crone.”

  “Half-blind hermaphrodite.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, buoyed by the snicker in Mary’s voice. “We’ll fix it.”

  “I admire your optimism, Rosalie,” Mary said with faux formality, giving my elbow a grateful squeeze. Then she dropped into a huskier whisper, the sound of so many afternoon library conversations, so many sleepy picnics in the shade of ancient campus trees. “But don’t hold your breath.”

  Mary was the type of woman Vassar was intended to produce, the type who wouldn’t just run off and get married but would actually do something. She was needed. Goodness, we were all needed—and more than that, committed to making the world a better place.

  In Europe, the Great War dragged on. Society, government, and even religion seemed to offer few solutions to problems of an incomprehensible scale. And yet, still, my fellow students and I retained our idealism, an unspoken sense that whatever was dismantled or destroyed, something else newer and better would rise up to take its place. Scientists urged us to believe that with the help of new education methods and a commitment to societal improvements, reforming man’s worst habits was more than possible, it was inevitable. Look how much our own suffragette mothers had done to reform the world ahead of us, as they liked to remind us when we showed any sign of forgetting their labors and sacrifices.

  Mary Cover’s mother was more committed than my own. I was glad that my mother didn’t distribute pins and handbills when she came to visit, but of course, we all wanted the same thing: equality of opportunity. And weren’t we practically there already? A few more states to be persuaded, a few more legal details to be pinned down, but the battle had been won. Hadn’t it?

  We were meant to exceed our mothers’ ambitions. We were meant to walk down that cleared path into a new American century of progress and enlightenment. Relying on experimental science, not phrenology or philosophy or voodoo, we would understand what made people tick. We would understand—in addition to how to mix a Manhattan and dance the fox-trot—how to make people healthier, happier, better in character and in conduct from the very start.

  The day after Mary’s snub by Miss Washburn, I walked past our teacher’s house on Professors’ Row. I had to circle back twice before mustering the courage to step up to the front door. I lifted and dropped the tarnished brass knocker: no reply.

  To one side, a single struggling rosebush hunched, defeated, against the wall, next to a window I could just see into, pricking my hip on the branches as I angled in closer for a better view. The curtains, faded from years of sunlight to the point of near transparency, had been left parted. Inside, I could make out a small wooden desk of Quaker-like simplicity with stacks of papers, a typewriter, and a plain chair, with a white sweater folded neatly over the back. Also on the desk: one small and spidery green plant doing only a little better than the rosebush, pushed into a drinking glass full of tangled roots and brown water. No rugs or tapestries, no framed photographs or paintings, no side tables with crystal decanters, no other decoration in this monastic cottage. An answer to my question: How does a single, educated woman live?

  When the curtain shifted, I startled and nearly fell into the rosebush again, but it was only a long-haired Persian cat that had leaped onto the sill, eyeing me skeptically through the glass, as if sensing with feline intuition my presumptions about Miss Washburn’s choices and sacrifices. For why, at the age of nineteen, was I interested in practically any other person, except as an embodiment of who I should, or might, become?

  I hadn’t told Mary I planned to make any of these visits. Mary was pretending she’d forgotten about the matter. But I had my speech planned.

  The next day, when Miss Washburn opened her faculty office door, I blurted, “I would like you to consider admitting Mary Cover into your class.”

  “Come in, come in. I have considered. You presume I haven’t?”

  “And?”

  Miss Washburn invited me in and served us both Earl Grey tea on a small round table flanked by two peach-colored wing chairs. I took one sip of mine, but I made so much clatter setting the cup back on its saucer that I resolved not to sip again until the very end, and then to finish it off in one gulp. Miss Washburn took her time with her own cup, sipping and smiling, comfortable with the silence.

  This room, at least, had more to occupy my gaze than her house would have had—proof of which place she considered her true home. There, across from me on the wall, were single and group portraits of men—the first-generation psychologists, clutching their cigars. There was G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, presiding over a group that included prestigious visitors from Europe: Freud and Carl Jung. There, in a separate portrait—and was his influence already fading?—was the father of American psychology, William James. Below a set of dark and piercing eyes, the bottom of his face was entirely hidden under a bushy mustache and square-cut beard. He looked grumpy and unapproachable, but from my own readings I knew that he’d actually helped one of the very first non-degreed women psychologists by allowing her to sit in on his class at Harvard, even when the other men boycotted in response.

  That was the world from which Miss Washburn had herself emerged: victorious, fully degreed, recognized. Why was she making things so hard for another woman
student?

  “Rosalie,” Miss Washburn said at last, setting down her cup. “There’s no shortage of competent seniors eager to fill those seats. Mary wasn’t the only person who was told she’ll have to choose another psychology class. And I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m the only professor with whom she’d benefit.”

  Damn the clatter. I drained my cup of tea. “But she’s an excellent student. If Mary can’t be in the class,” I said, setting down my cup firmly, “then I withdraw.”

  Miss Washburn finally looked surprised, at least for a moment, until her startled expression softened into a rueful smile.

  “You plan to withdraw,” she said.

  “Yes.” I settled my hands atop the folds of my wool-skirted lap. “That’s correct.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “No,” she said again.

  She stood and went to the window, looked out—there it all was, the world that had been her refuge for years. The world that had also been mine—almost enough. But no: not enough. Not at all. I felt the scratchy tingle of it, like some rash or fever just coming on. As a wide-eyed freshman, I’d been excited just to board the train to New York City, followed by the Empire line farther north, to Poughkeepsie. Away from my parents: Could there have been any greater excitement than that? Only in my fourth year was I starting to feel in want of something more than collegial, single-sex refuge. Only now was I pining for the invigoration of other places, other people, and perhaps moments like this: an opportunity to take sides, to sometimes go too far.

  Miss Washburn returned to stand behind her chair. “Rosalie, you’re a careful student. I don’t mean timid. You’re thoughtful and objective. You’re deeply committed, with good habits and a solid work ethic, but you don’t overreach. We need that.”

  Careful. Thoughtful. Solid. Was that the only impression I made?

  She continued, “Psychology in our decade is like a three-year-old. It’s at the runabout stage. It’s growing by leaps and bounds, but it’s also making messes—or it will be. It’s separating itself from everything that came before, and it’s still deciding who its friends will be, just as you’re evidently deciding who your friends must be.” She smiled. How amusing I was to her, with my narrow loyalties and small concerns. “Does that make sense?”

  I nodded, but only to be polite. Never mind about friendship: evidently she knew nothing about that. Better to focus on academics. To her, the field of psychology might have seemed new and on shaky ground, but to me, it was old: thirty years, at least. James had called it not a science, “just a hope of a science,” but enough with caution and modesty. Why this constant fear of everything new when the very point of science was to invite the new into our lives: the bubbling-over of beakers, the occasional shattering of glass?

  “Do you get along with your parents?” Miss Washburn asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Any younger siblings?”

  “No,” I said, confused about what she was implying. I had an older sister, Evelyn. We were seven years apart and not close.

  “I see.”

  But that I see bothered me. I was surprised to hear that kind of fainting-couch questioning coming from her, a scientist dedicated to objective laboratory techniques.

  A secretary knocked and opened the door a crack. Miss Whitehall, a teacher of classics in her eighties, needed Miss Washburn to pop down the hall, just for a moment. She smiled apologetically. “Perhaps you could refill our tea.”

  I took our cups over and, alone in the room, found my eye wandering again, from the photos on the wall to the papers on the desk—was there something there about Mary, or anything that could help my cause?—and then to a piece of pale lavender stationery next to the typewriter, the letter half written. It was addressed to a female friend (fine, so she had one) in New York State. They were corresponding, evidently, about Emerson. Miss Washburn was saying that she could take a little Emerson—as medicine, but not as regular food—and about introspection in general, and about life. The great thing is to look out for opportunities to help in little ways, and let the rest go. And further down the page: I am a very ordinary individual. There was a time when I feebly attempted to be other than ordinary, but I missed so much of wholesome fun and good fellowship that I was glad to give up the attempt.

  Resigned to being “ordinary.” Well, that was another mark against her.

  I refilled the cups hurriedly, hearing footsteps coming back down the hall.

  “It was only about her cat,” Miss Washburn said as she entered, smiling. “I’m watching Felix for her this weekend.”

  Turning serious, she continued. “Rosalie, you’re worried about a friend. But I’m worrying about something larger: a set of ideas that will greatly influence society. The young women who graduate from Vassar and go on to advanced degrees will soon enough become my own colleagues. Someday, they’ll be the women who challenge my own work. That’s as it should be.”

  So she was open to change, but only change so slow we might not see it or feel it, or arrive at a new shore anytime soon. Change at the regal pace of an ocean liner. I’d made a trip, with my mother, in an ocean liner once. Three weeks of boredom and nausea, sitting on deck chairs, playing whist.

  There was a knock at the door—another student, with an appointment.

  “I’ll see you in class,” Miss Washburn said, reaching out to shake my hand, soft fingers—loose skin over bone—gently enclosing mine. I did not wish to be so gentle in return.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said. “Yes, I’ll see you in Abnormal.”

  She cocked her head. “But you were signed up for Special Topics as well. You’re doubling up this semester. I thought we’d understood each other.”

  “I’m off to see the registrar next,” I said, pulling away. “It’s so hard to fit everything in. I do the same thing at Thanksgiving dinners, loading up my plate with more than I can possibly digest. That’s childish, don’t you think? Better to make firm choices. But thank you for the tea.”

  Chapter 2

  Of course, I rushed directly to the dorms, cheeks flushed with adventure, as if I’d just turned down a date with the most sought-after boy at a school dance. I couldn’t wait to tell Mary. By dropping Special Topics, I’d be sacrificing the chance to be one of the seniors with whom Washburn co-wrote and published scientific papers—the real things, in actual journals. And if Washburn turned me away from Abnormal Psych because I’d withdrawn from Special Topics? She wouldn’t, as it turned out. But at the time, I was willing to accept that additional consequence.

  Yet when I arrived in the corner suite Mary shared with four girls, Mary was in the middle of entertaining some other friends: Cynthia and Strikey, the three of them sprawled out on the oriental carpet, with a phonograph warbling. In more than three years at Vassar, I’d heard a rude remark about my heritage only once, from Strikey’s mouth. Regarding how to handle those sorts of comments, my father and my uncle, the senator, preferred optimistic stoicism. Only my mother seemed to think a biting response was appropriate. But then again, she would have been the first to call me home from Vassar if I’d been having any real trouble getting along, so I had to make sure never to let on that it was a challenge breaking into some social circles, even more so when you were darkly complected, quiet by default, a touch too book-smart, and young.

  The phonograph was playing dance songs and the girls had pinned up their hair in back, to make it look bobbed from the front, and had rolled their skirts at the waist to pull the hems up to their knees.

  “Mary,” I shouted. “Something happened. Stop the music.”

  She wagged a finger at me and stood up to dance, and her two friends laughed all that much louder, jumping up to join her, grasping their knees and knocking them together in time with the song. Strikey had a charm bracelet much like my own, and as she danced
, it jangled at her wrist.

  Their giggles gave them away. I picked up Mary’s teacup. Only a half inch of clear liquid remained, but it was potent.

  “Tea time,” Mary crooned. “Have some!” Her glasses slid crookedly across her pert nose.

  I always maintained that, despite her own protestations, Mary was pretty, but there were certain facts that couldn’t be denied. Her eyeglasses were big and black-rimmed. Her hair tended to spread out into a brittle, electrified mass, creating a second, round frame for her otherwise small features. Late at night, in her humorously droning voice, she had praised my blue eyes, my silky (as she called it) dark hair, and my narrow ankles. I had always told her that none of it mattered. Neither of us wore makeup—not even powder. Neither of us cared, in fact, about whatever traits supposedly made a woman more attractive to the opposite sex.

  But she had an indefinable charisma. She was revealing it now, dancing and slurring her speech, more glamorous and exotic in her honest, frizzy-haired dishevelment than some girls would be in perfect dresses, with fox stoles around their necks. She knew what she wanted and said what she thought, at the very least.

  “What’s in the cups?” I shouted over the phonograph. “British or American?”

  British was our code name for gin. American was our name for rum. I didn’t particularly enjoy drinking—yet—and the penalty for being discovered was steep, but we never let that worry us.