Three-Day Town

Начало книги

Diane Chamberlain, Katy Munger, Sarah Shaber, Alexandra Sokoloff, Kathy Trocheck, and Bren Bonner Witchger—who were there at the conception and cheered me on to the delivery.

Thanks, ladies!

DEBORAH KNOTT’S FAMILY TREE

I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.

—James Cameron

1940

With flirtatious ceremony, Associate Professor Steinberg, Art History, lifts the heavy silver table lighter from the coffee table in front of his brown leather couch and clicks it two or three times till the wick catches fire before holding it out to Miss Barclay, who teaches Modern Poetry. Two of their students roll their eyes at each other when Miss Barclay cups her slender hands around his, as if the flame might be blown out by a strong wind before her cigarette is fully lit.

Professor Abernathy, Modern American History, watches, too, but her steely blue eyes are narrowed in disapproval. In her opinion, a lady does not smoke—not that Miss Barclay is a lady if she lets herself be wooed by the first Jew in the long (and previously all-Protestant) history of Stillwater College. And what the dean was thinking of, she could not fathom. “A modern liberal education should include exposure to other races and other cultures,” he had told the faculty search committee, but really!

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