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the stone building where she’d gone to register for her first courses at City College, and there was a statue looking at her, and people passing by started staring at her because they saw the statue staring. They didn’t understand that it was a person they were looking at. It began to rain so heavily that people screamed and ran for shelter.
    She woke up.
    Professor Martin Engle was tall and reed-thin, with curly gray-black hair, a gently sarcastic manner, and beautiful sad eyes, which you didn’t really notice until he took off his glasses and ran a hand wearily across his face. He was a poet and had had a volume of poetryprivately published, as she found out later from two girls in the class, Carol and Rhoda, who were also in love with him.
What will you do, God, when I die?
When I, your pitcher, broken lie:
When I, your drink, go stale or dry?
I am your garb, the trade you ply,
You lose your meaning, losing me. . . .
    He asked if anyone in the class hoped to be a writer. Both Carol and Rhoda raised their hands. Professor Engle said there was no reason for anyone to bother to write who didn’t hope to create lines that were perfect, like these. Few would ever succeed, but those not ready to try should give up before they began. Carol and Rhoda looked solemn.
    “Having said this,” Professor Engle went on in his rather mournful manner, “I will tell you that it is my aim in this class to teach those of you who are wise enough to know you are untalented—” he paused “—but who say to me, in effect: ‘Professor Engle, I know I’m no writer and never shall be, but I come to you from the public high schools of New York City, illiterate. Teach me to write a simple declarative sentence without risking humiliation . . .’ to teach those of you wise enough to know this is what you require to do exactly that. Are there any questions?”
    Most of them sat in their seats, feeling vaguely put in their places without knowing precisely where those places were. Carol and Rhoda looked crushed.
    They were to write, in the first person, a brief description of an unpleasant experience. They were not to garnish it with a lot of silly trifles, like Cellophane panties on a lamb chop. Adjectives, where required for clarity, were to be simple and direct: pretty, ugly, green, purple, etc. Doors were to be open or closed, not ajar. There was to be no sunlight spilling through venetian blinds; if anything spilled, it must be liquid. Did he make himself clear? Hestood at the window, looking down into the courtyard. The sunlight spilled through the open window and glinted on his broad gold wedding band.
    She wrote a description of going to confession with a new priest who was a drunk. There was something she’d really had to confess, something that had happened that week with a boy she knew, but she could hear the priest’s heavy breathing—almost smell him—on the other side of the screen, and when he talked to her his speech was thick from liquor. The booth reeked of cigar smoke. Without seeing him she pictured the way he’d looked at his first mass the week before; he was fat and red and she could see the veins in his nose.
    “Bless me Father for I have sinned. I yelled at my mother three times and I ate a big bag of peanuts that was supposed to be for my sisters and everyone.”
    He gave her twenty Hail Marys and thirty Our Fathers. She left with the burden she’d carried into the booth.
    They were allowed to look at their papers and then they had to give them back to him.
    Good. This is exactly what I asked for.
    “Not only is the content excellent, Miss Dunn,” he said as she stood looking at the paper, a pleasurable flush on her cheeks, “but I hereby award you the 1961 Martin Engle Award for Best Penmanship by a Parochial School Student. Public school graduates aren’t even allowed to enter; it would be a waste of their time and mine.”
    She felt pleased but also confused, a condition in which he would often