Out of the fog the outline of Cambridge emerged, the new concrete dome of the technology institute rolling into view first. Sibyl’s hands knitted together in her lap. The call had come late, well after her father retired for the night. She herself was only half-awake, already undressed and settled in bed with a book when Mrs. Doherty scratched at her door. The housekeeper appeared, lamp in hand, dressing gown knotted tight, hair in a long braid over her shoulder, grouchy with sleep.
“Telephone. A Mister Derby. I told him ’twas well too late to be rousing the household, but he was most insistent,” Mrs. Doherty informed her, in a tone that suggested Sibyl might think twice about accepting such an impertinent overture.
“Benton Derby? Are you quite sure?” Sibyl asked, perplexed, propping herself up on one elbow.
“I’ve left the handset for you, ma’am,” Mrs. Doherty said, and then withdrew, light from her lamp trailing behind her as she made her way to the service stair.
Sibyl rose, pulling a filmy lace dressing gown over her shoulders and taking up her own lamp. Her bare toes gripping the velvet carpet runner reminded her of the nighttime excursions to the drawing room when she was a girl. In the entry hall, tucked behind the stairwell, she found the telephone in its dedicated niche, a technological toadstool, earpiece waiting on the table. In the background loomed the La Farge. Sibyl hesitated, discovering herself to be nervous, even excited, before pressing the receiver to her ear and moving her lips close to the mouthpiece.
“Ben?” she whispered. A loud cough burst through the receiver, and Sibyl held it away from her ear with a grimace.
“Hi, Sibyl? That you? Sibyl? Hello?” boomed a male voice on the other end of the line, then speaking above the mouthpiece said, How can you be sure if this damn thing is working? What? Well, it would seem to—no, I see. Wait here, would you?
“Ben? Hello? Can you hear me?” she said, more loudly, feeling conspicuous speaking at full volume in the sleeping house. Her left hand clutched together the edges of her dressing gown at her chest, a gesture toward modesty that she knew to be ridiculous but was powerless to stop.
“Sibyl! There you are.” Then, to the unheard other person, No, it’s quite all right, I have it now. Thank you.
“Ben, what a pleasure,” Sibyl began. “Though, I must admit—”
Before she could continue Benton interrupted, “I’m so sorry to be calling so late, and so unexpectedly. You know I’d never wish to trouble you, but—”
“No, no,” Sibyl interrupted.
“Sorry? What?” Benton said.
Sibyl smiled, and paused. Her caller paused as well. She took a breath. “Never mind the hour. I was up. Do go ahead.”
“Look, it’s late, and you can’t go around having strange men calling in the dead of night. It’s just I wonder if you might have the time to come by my office some afternoon.”
“Oh!” Sibyl paused, confused. A strange request, given how much time had passed. What could he want? Sibyl wasn’t even sure what business Benton was in. He’d worked with her father for a time, but that was years ago. And she hadn’t spoken with him, alone, since just before he was set to sail for Italy. With his new wife. A tiny slip of a thing, with delicate skin and a persistent cough, Lydia’s health was too fragile for the New England winter. They’d been sitting together in the bay window when he told her, the cheerful new snow on the windowsill insulting Sibyl with its innocence and freshness. They’d promised to be in touch again upon the Derbys’ return from abroad.
They weren’t.
Her eyes darkened at the memory, and all the dashed hopes leading up to it, but she pushed her thoughts aside with resolve. That part of her life was over. No point thinking on it now. She recalled that Harley once mentioned that he spotted Benton from time to time, at the club, or around campus. He even remarked with resentful sarcasm that Benton had accepted a position at Westmorly Hall, though in typical fashion Harley failed to supply any illuminating details. Perhaps Harley’s indifference was pretense, and he was shielding her from the fact of Benton’s return. But perhaps not—her brother took it awfully hard, too, when Benton married Lydia Pusey instead.
“Why,” Sibyl said slowly. “I can find a free afternoon, I should think. Any excuse to get out of a committee meeting. But whatever could you need from me?”
“Well, I’m phoning from St. Swithin’s.” He hesitated.
At once Sibyl understood. She felt her stomach tighten, and she wished she had eaten less at supper. He’d crossed paths with Harlan. That’s where her brother had gone when he ran out on supper. Her brother must have embarrassed himself in some way. It would be up to Sibyl to smooth over the ruffled feathers. Benton was only calling as a courtesy.
“Tomorrow,” she suggested. “If you’ll just remind me where . . . ?”
He laughed, and said aside of the mouthpiece, In a minute, in a minute! To Sibyl, he said, “Of course, I’m sorry. I’ve been teaching in Cambridge, actually.”
“Have you!” Sibyl exclaimed with not a little dismay. All that time, and no word from him. Harlan must be in some trouble indeed.
“I have,” he said, and she could hear the modest grin in his voice.
“Imagine that. Benton Derby, the professor.”
“It is, I wager, even stranger for me to contemplate than for you. Let’s say two-thirty. I should be done with actual flesh-and-blood students by then, and on to the paper-marking portion of the afternoon. I’ll welcome the interruption. Be desperate for it, in fact.”
Despite wishing to seem cool and elusive in her first real conversation with Benton, Sibyl couldn’t help but laugh. “And which department? Where shall I find you?”
“Department of Social Ethics. Look for the office with the insufficient light.”
The cab rolled to a halt on a comfortable brick lane, and Sibyl rooted in her pocketbook for change to pay the fare. She stepped down from the cab, which rocked on its springs with her weight, feeling annoyed by the tangle of skirts around her ankles. She’d have to hem this skirt up, no one was wearing floor-length skirts anymore. Sibyl felt foolish and spinsterly, her embarrassment heightened by a gang of underclassmen passing on the sidewalk, completely indifferent to her. The cab shook to life and pulled away.
Sibyl lifted her chin, setting her jaw in a way that made her look fleetingly like Helen. She straightened her hat and crossed under a wrought iron gate onto the campus.
The Yard was dotted with knots of boys in various stages of study and leisure, though rather more leisure than study. Here a gang of them wrestled over a football. There a few stretched in the grass, ties loosened. Chipper music from a Victrola played through an open window, which also contained a pair of socked feet. An older boy coasted by on a safety bicycle, serious under his hat. Sibyl was surprised to see how different the Yard looked, with the new library nearly done.
Sibyl had heard about the library in whispered gossip for three years but hadn’t realized it was so close to completion. Faint hammering was audible inside, but the outside looked perfect, a brick and concrete temple to knowledge. Mrs. George Widener had spent a small fortune on this building, a gift to the university, of course, but a monument to her drowned son more than anything. Rumor was that an exact replica of poor Harry’s study was to be erected at the heart of the library, designated to hold his most precious books.
Everyone said Mrs. Widener had never fully recovered from losing her husband and son. The Widener men put her and her maid into a lifeboat, after an interminable wait, Sibyl read in the papers, and then stepped back onto the deck of the doomed ship, knowing they had no hope of rescue. Sibyl doubted that she would ever have such courage. What if Lan and Harley had been on shipboard, too; might her mother and sister have been put safely into a lifeboat then? Some men survived. Perhaps they all would’ve come back to Boston together, on a chartered rail car, giving interviews in all the papers about the horrors of their ordeal, full of the righteous indignation born of safety and security.
; What were Helen and Eulah doing, when they first saw that the water was coming? When did they know that the water was for them? For a moment Sibyl’s eyes closed, her ears echoing with imaginary screams, frigid water swirling around her mother’s and sister’s feet. But Sibyl shoved the thought away.
What better way to mourn a bibliophile than through the building of a new library, she reflected, steering her mind to safer waters. Though she supposed that certain future generations of Harvard’s men would find reason enough, during exams, to curse the Widener name. Perhaps once the building was open, everyone would stop gossiping about how quickly Mrs. Widener had remarried. Perhaps, but Sibyl wasn’t optimistic.
Helen had been so excited to learn the Wideners were on board that she immediately cabled to share the news. It was, in fact, the last word Sibyl had from her mother.
While she was alive, that is.
SET TO DINE WIDENERS THIS EVE NOT CAPTS TABLE BUT WILL HAVE TO DO STOP EULAH BRIGHTEST BUD YOUNGER SET STOP TAKE CARE PAPA TAKES MEDICINE LOVE MOTHER
Helen never could keep herself under the limit.
Sibyl turned away from the new library and hurried across the Yard, following a half-known path to the Department of Social Ethics, hurrying to make her appointment with a man she hadn’t seen since before he chose another woman for his wife.
On the second-floor landing of the Social Ethics building as she climbed the stairs, a sudden pain in Sibyl’s stomach stopped her. A black fog crept into the corners of her vision. She leaned on the banister, taking long breaths. Her father was right—she hadn’t eaten enough at breakfast. In truth, she’d had only some sweetened coffee and a few bites of Betty’s oatmeal.
Perhaps less than a few bites.
She breathed, feeling the compression of her corset around her rib cage and belly. It would pass in a minute. It always did.
Before long the fog began to dissipate, and the pain receded, replaced by the familiar sensation of perfect emptiness. Of control. She could face him now. Sibyl exhaled in perverse triumph.
Benton’s office was at the end of a dark hallway, the door propped open. Voices traveled down the hall, and she glimpsed a suited figure leaning in the doorway of Ben’s office, shoulders moving in lively discussion.
“Oh, you can’t be serious!” She heard Ben’s voice, friendly, but challenging.
The man in his office laughed. Sibyl, curious, crept closer to listen.
“I’ll tell you the problem, Benton,” said the man. “Hobbyists and charlatans. I read in the Globe about a chiseler who was holding séances for impressionable women. Seducing them, and then taking their money. Article said when he was arrested, his pockets were filled with love letters, blank prescriptions, and clairvoyant calling cards. True Spiritualist inquiry should happen in an academic context for just that reason. Don’t we owe it to science to have an open mind?”
Sibyl swallowed, excited by their vigorous intellectual discourse, but also intimidated. All the women of her acquaintance couched their opinions in such polite language that it could be difficult to know the depth of their convictions. Eulah had been different, of course. She would say anything to anyone. But Eulah had been beautiful enough that she could afford to be shocking.
“Whoop, you’ve got a visitor.” The man had spotted her, and beckoned her over with an easy gesture. She started, a blush creeping over her cheeks.
“It’s a waste of time and energy,” Benton’s voice countered from inside the office. “I’m much more concerned with the practicalities of a life well lived, in the here and now.”
While Benton spoke the man in the door smiled at Sibyl. She edged nearer, reminding herself that she had been invited. The man, younger than she first guessed from the way he was talking, rolled to the side out of the door to make room for her, smiling behind a pair of gold spectacles. His hair was parted in the middle, worn in thin shellacked waves close to his skull, and his suit was of a weathered tweed.
“Practicalities, Professor Derby,” the man rejoined, indicating her.
Sibyl stepped into the doorway and found a room barely larger than her closet, stuffed to the gills with papers, a desk, a chair, books, a filthy brass ashtray, and a few trinkets scattered across the upper bookshelves. One window was wedged open with a telephone book, letting in the wet afternoon fog. A desk lamp cast the office in a greenish tint. Behind the desk, leaning back in a swivel chair with his muscular arms folded, leaned Benton Derby, associate professor of psychology. When he spotted her, he got quickly to his feet, scattering a few papers to the floor in his haste. He blushed and bent to retrieve them, cursing under his breath.
Benton would be about thirty-five now, perhaps a little less. Older, at any rate, than the fellow in the doorway, who was around Sibyl’s age. Ben still had the build of a man who’d wrestled at school: overmuscled for his suit, which bunched in places, sewed by a tailor accustomed to slight society men. His hair had gone carbon gray in the past three years. The graying hair on a young frame gave Benton a funny air of exoticism, and it was cut short, a sign of an impatient man who doesn’t wish to waste time on his appearance. Benton had round wire-rimmed glasses pushed up the bridge of his nose, making his steel eyes seem smaller than she remembered. Sibyl wondered if he truly needed the spectacles, or if he were trying to seem professorial. Of course, all those years of study were bound to ruin one’s eyes. That was one reason Helen had been dead set against Sibyl going to college.
Sibyl smiled, waiting to be introduced.
“Here, let’s ask her,” Benton said, waving a hand in her direction, as though she had been present for the entire duration of their argument. “A neutral party.”
Sibyl was taken aback by Benton’s informality until she saw that he was shuffling the papers in his hands with more vigor than was called for. His eyes settled on her, lit up, and darted to the bookshelf. It occurred to her that Benton might have been nervous about seeing her again, too.
“Ask me about what?” Sibyl said.
“You’ll have to forgive him.” The man leaning in the doorway smiled, extending a hand. “It’s a truism about psychologists that they should all probably be put away. I’m Professor Edwin Friend.”
She accepted his hand, laughing. Benton pretended to glower. “And it’s a truism about philosophers,” he said, “that they don’t make a lick of sense when they talk. Professor Friend, meet Miss Sibyl Allston. Go ahead. Ask her.”
“I’d hate to bore Miss Allston before you get the chance to do it yourself,” Friend said, smiling.
Benton wrinkled his nose at the other professor and tossed the papers onto his desk.
“The question,” Professor Friend said, folding his arms, “concerns the American Society for Psychical Research. Dissension in the ranks. One faction thinks we should concentrate on psychic phenomena, like telepathy and precognition. It’s possible that the human mind has qualities that aren’t fully understood, which could be explained within the laws of physics.”
Sibyl nodded, aware as she did so that Benton was staring at her. Her eyes flickered off of Friend’s face and caught Benton’s gaze, which darted back to his desk surface. He cleared this throat.
“The alternative view,” Professor Friend continued, “wants to emphasize Spiritualist phenomena. Communicating with the dead, ectoplasm, spirit writing, and so on. Which is a kind of human potential, but of a very different sort. So which direction can most reveal something meaningful, something true, about human existence? Expanded talents in this world, or transcendence with the next?”
Sibyl smiled, intrigued. “My goodness. What weighty concerns you professors have on a spring afternoon.”
“See, Edwin?” Benton exclaimed. “Miss Allston’s far too practical a woman to be concerned with nonsense. I can’t imagine what your excuse is.”
“On the contrary,” Sibyl said, giving Benton a long look. “I have a rather strong opinion on this matter.”
“There,” Professor Friend said, talking over Benton’s incr
edulous “You do?”
Benton collapsed into the chair behind his desk and made a show of sinking his head in his hands. Sibyl laughed. “Now, Professor Derby, you have no idea what mischief we practical ladies get up to away from prying eyes. I think you’d be surprised.” She turned to Professor Friend. “Of course I would never presume to comment on what’s worthy of scientific inquiry. But as it happens, I have, myself, witnessed some remarkable events.”
Benton suppressed a gasp as Professor Friend’s ears perked up. “Have you, then?” he said. “Of which type, may I ask?”
Sibyl had never discussed her involvement with Mrs. Dee. Mrs. Dee insisted on discretion, and revealing her activities to two members of the Harvard faculty would hardly qualify.
“Of . . .” She hesitated.
Professor Friend leaned forward. Benton rested his chin on his fist, watching her with apparent amusement.
“Of the . . . spirit type. As a matter of fact.” She could obfuscate who was involved. And she found herself wanting to impress them. Helen had warned Sibyl that men didn’t appreciate women who were too smart, but she had always found herself wanting to seem serious for Benton.
“Is that so?” Professor Friend said, keen with interest. “Can you tell me any details?”
“I’m afraid that I’m required to keep most of it in strictest confidence,” Sibyl said, enjoying the suggestion that she might have secret knowledge that this eminent scholar could not fathom. “But suffice it to say that, for my own part . . . Well, we experienced some loss. In our family. Within the past few years.”
He nodded in sympathy, accepting her euphemisms, encouraging her to continue. “There’s a regular meeting, not far from my home. Of people who’ve suffered the same loss.”