Chapter One #2
There was little Ava’s parents could do once the school announced the good news that she had been offered a scholarship other than glumly accept her new fate. Before she left for Cambridge, they sat Ava down in the parlor and ticked off a list of warnings.
Do your work without asking for praise. Be modest and kind. Be wary at all times. Trust no one. Avoid men who drink and girls who stay out past curfew, for such people will only bring trouble down upon you.
Ava nodded in agreement, not daring to admit that trouble was exactly what she wished for.
She wanted it more than anything. She knew about life from the books she sneaked to read at school while her classmates were at recess, novels by Austen and the Brontes and Mary Shelley that had allowed her to see there was another side of life.
She didn’t want to be polite at all costs and as plain as possible.
She wanted to be surprised by life, to walk along dark streets and kiss someone as if her life depended upon it and dance all night, even if her feet ached in the morning, even if dancing was thought to be wicked and vain.
Her mother left her off in town, where the bus to Boston stopped outside the general store.
When Ava looked back she thought she saw her mother crying, but she herself didn’t shed a tear.
When she arrived in Cambridge, she immediately pulled off the scratchy, unfashionable gray jacket her mother had stitched by hand to create what she called a proper traveling outfit.
Proper was not what Ava was after. She quickly unbraided her hair, allowing it to fall down her back, something she had never been allowed to do in public at home.
When she spied a flash of her reflection in a store window, she was astonished to see the person staring back at her.
Right then and there, in the middle of Harvard Square, she had decided that from now on she would do exactly as she pleased.
Most students arriving in Radcliffe Yard were accompanied by families who drove up in station wagons or sedans; brothers and fathers leapt out to drag huge steamer trunks across the lawn to the dorms. Ava had only a single black suitcase, and she was most certainly all alone.
She stopped in front of the brick dormitory and breathed in the blue air.
She might not have a family with her, but she was free to do as she pleased, rescued by an acceptance letter to the place she most wanted to be.
The school had originally been called the Harvard Annex in 1879, then was renamed Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, and had finally been called Radcliffe College, after a donor who valued women’s education.
The same professors who taught the male students held separate classes for the women, although they were paid far less to do so and many of the most esteemed and respected professors simply refused to teach at Radcliffe, considering it a waste of their time.
Radcliffe and Harvard students often hired tutors to help them through the toughest classes, math and chemistry and the natural sciences.
Male and female students received their degrees from separate institutions, and there were scores of guidelines for women that didn’t apply to men, with rules listed in The Red Book, a pamphlet distributed only to newly arrived female students.
The book presented a moral and social blueprint they were obliged to follow at all times.
Women were not to smoke on the street or wear blue jeans in public, and because it was feared that their presence in classrooms would distract men, female students who insisted on taking science classes, allowed with the president’s approval, were made to sit in hallways rather than classrooms or laboratories so they would not distract the male students.
Married female students with children had to leave their children in strollers on the first floor while they ran upstairs to fourth- or fifth-floor classrooms, listening for their babies’ crying and fussing, the sound of which might rise up through the stairwell.
Ava stood where she was, in the middle of Radcliffe Yard, her heart wild with excitement.
There were the twelve crows from Maine gathered on the roof, watching over her.
She would soon learn that class options for women in the sciences included comparative zoology, numerology, a comparative study of plants, as well as anthropology.
Radcliffe students were polite but not pushy, brilliant, but well aware that it was not wise to outshine the men, for who would want to marry you if you were smarter and more accomplished?
Better to enter the Miss Radcliffe beauty contest, judged by Harvard professors who would watch the girls read from a provided passage.
The winner had a spread in Glamour magazine featuring the ten best-dressed college women in America, a lifetime pass to the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, and a stuffed bunny rabbit.
Here it was, the life Ava had always wanted, the one she’d only dared to imagine. Slants of light filtered through the hawthorns and the oak trees. No one knew who Ava was, and she could do exactly as she pleased. That was when she understood that her parents had been right about one thing.
Anything could happen now.