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By Root 1364 0

’d have to separate them with her fingers, gaining a new understanding of the term manual typewriter. Unsticking the keys or changing the ribbon left her fingers ink-stained. The inside of the typewriter was repulsive: there were dust balls, eraser filings, bits of paper, cookie crumbs, and hair. Madeleine was amazed the thing still worked. Once she became aware of how dirty her typewriter was, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was like trying to sleep in the grass after someone mentioned worms. Trying to clean the Royal wasn’t easy. It weighed a ton. No matter how many times she managed to lug it to the sink and turn it over, it never stopped leaking detritus. Bringing it back to her desk, she put a sheet of paper in the roller and set to work again, but the nagging thought that gunk remained in the typewriter, as well as the constant sticking of the keys, made her forget what she’d been writing. And so she took the typewriter back to the sink and got the rest of the gunk out with an old toothbrush.

In this manner, Madeleine tried to become a Victorianist.

She hoped to get her abridged essay rewritten by December, in time to include it as a writing sample in her grad school applications. To have the article accepted by The Janeite Review by then and list it as “forthcoming” on her résumé would be an additional boon. Yale’s rejection, like that of a boyfriend she wasn’t sure she liked that much, had predictably increased its allure. Nevertheless, she wasn’t going to stay home waiting for the call. She was going to play the field this time, and therefore had been flirting with rich old Harvard, urbane Columbia, cerebral Chicago, and trustworthy Michigan, as well as giving face time even to lowly Baxter College. (If Baxter didn’t accept her into its mediocre program in English, despite her being the daughter of the former president, Madeleine would take this as a sign to give up the idea of becoming an academic altogether.) But she didn’t expect to go to Baxter. She prayed that she wouldn’t have to go to Baxter. To that end, she began studying for the GRE again, hoping to raise her scores on the math and logic sections. To prepare for the English literature test, she filled in her gaps by reading through The Oxford Book of English Verse.

With none of this, however—with neither the writing nor the reading—did she make much headway, for the simple irrefutable reason that her duty to Leonard came first. Now that they were on Cape Cod, Leonard didn’t have a local therapist to talk to. He had to make do with telephone therapy, once a week, with Bryce Ellis in Providence. Additionally, he’d started seeing a new psychiatrist, Dr. Perlmann, at Mass General, with whom he had no rapport. Under pressure to perform at the lab, Leonard came back to the apartment every night and began telling Madeleine his troubles. He treated Madeleine like the next best thing to therapy. “I was shaking like a madman today. I can barely make media anymore because of my tremor. I keep dropping stuff. I dropped a flask today. Agar broth all over the place. I know what Kilimnik’s thinking. He’s thinking, ‘Why did they give this guy a fellowship?’”

Leonard kept his diagnosis a secret at Pilgrim Lake. He knew from experience that when people found out he’d been hospitalized and, especially, that he was taking a drug twice a day to stabilize his mood, they treated him differently. Sometimes people wrote him off, or avoided him. Madeleine had promised not to tell anyone, but in August, in New York, she’d confessed to Kelly Traub. She’d sworn Kelly to secrecy, but Kelly would inevitably tell one person, swearing her to secrecy, and that person would tell one person, and so on and so on until Leonard’s condition became general knowledge.

Madeleine couldn’t worry about that now. The important thing, on this October day, as she waited for the puddle-jumper carrying Phyllida and Alwyn from Boston, was to keep them from finding out. Hopefully, Alwyn’s marital crisis would deflect attention away from Madeleine’s own relationship, but just to be sure, Madeleine