"Mallach, you say? Mallach? Did I hear correctly, young lady, that your name is Dr. Mallach?"
It is the faculty Christmas party at Olympia College, held in the space they call the Tower Room. It is the first faculty Christmas party that Dana has attended in all the years and many places that she has taught, crisscrossing the country from one college to the next.
The room is one of the college's finest, reached by spiral stairs that ascend from the department of religion.
Modest Olympia is rather proud of its Tower Room, whose proportions are baronial, as Miss Wyndham might say, with walls of rich mahogany, chairs and couches of green leather bordered with brass studs. And there is Miss Wyndham's understated elegance as well, quietly entailed by a few Oriental rugs and parchment-shaded lamps and latticed, leaded windows that face west. The sunset of the early-darkening season stains the glass ecclesiastically, adding a touch of the churchly to the clubby scene, all gone gaga on eggnog, so that no one remarked her quiet entrance.
She stood for a few long moments just inside the door, trying to patch up her jagged breath and wait for the room to stop its spin. Her limp has gotten more severe in the last few months, and the climb up the steep spiral stairs had been accomplished with pain. Three times she had stopped, and three times winced.
She is wearing knee-high boots, a pair of woolen trousers, with two sweaters piled on, and over it all, a long gray coat with a prim black velvet collar, and she thinks that she will never feel warm again.
The snows have covered Olympia for four weeks now, the steep road leading up to the campus plowed three times a day. Down the road, in the buried little town, icicles shaped like great crocodile teeth hang from the house, white on the bottom, with bumpy green shingles on the top. And beside the golf course, in an even tinier house, looking as if it might be made from gingerbread, a poet daughter greedily grabs at the few brief hours that her ancient father will be away at the faculty Christmas party, and is playing Mozart on the cello. Her head is bent low, so that the long hair, streaked wide with white, falls across the instrument that is making music so like the play of light on water.
Dana has felt, since the hard winter arrived, that she barely retains the memory of warmth, and she knows that she will never be warm again. She stood there close to the door for at least ten minutes after entering, unnoticed by any of the tippled faculty, trying to recover the breathing that had been wrung out of her by the climb up the spitefully twisted stairs, the searing jabs awakened in her chest, where the murderous moths are silently swarming in the lump that grows in her right breast.
She knows that they are swarming and she looks away. It is her intent, for now, to look away. She realizes that if anyone knew her cold resolve, they would think her mad, but there had been no deliberation required at all in her decision to look away.
She stood by the door inside the Tower Room, calmly waiting for her breathing to return, for the world's fierce spin to still itself slowly, and when this finally happened she was able to make out some reassuringly familiar faces, the gentle wave of recognition slowly passing over her face.
There, beside the back wall, were two physicists from her department, one of them her special friend, Wallace Low, chatting together with an engineer, and several chemists, all of them composing one cluster, the scientific one, in the crowded Tower Room. The Olympians are scattered in departmental clumps, sipping from plastic cups of eggnog, growing dignifiedly tipsy.
The cluster of her friends was bent down to a small being taking up very little room on a great winged green-leather chair. One could sit a whole other full-sized person beside him.
A child, it seemed at first, its feet in massive black shoes planted firmly on a patterned rug. In proportion to the tiny body the head seems monstrous, its hair once yellow, then white, now yellowing again, no child at all but an aged man, and I know his name:
It is Professor Cock-A-Doodle-Do. It is Cock-A-Doodle-Do, still crowing, or, in any case, breathing. His sunken eyes, magnified behind their lenses, rest on the sagging pillows of fleshiness just beneath them, and his cheeks are like the pleated skirts that Cynthia would carefully iron with her stubby but capable hands. Bent down over the ironing board, she would look up when I entered the kitchen, and she would smile, as Josiah Krebs now looks across the room and smiles, with a gnome's conspiratorial glee, looking straight at me.
The others were bent down low to him, trying to carry on a crooked conversation, but they straightened as soon as Dana, still chilled to the bone, she will nevermore be warm, approached. Wallace Low reached out his hand to take hers, icy and shaky, and pull her in, making rather a silly spectacle of introducing her as the newest member of the department. "Wildly successful, her classes are sometimes oversubscribed. We are actually inducing some students—or should I say victims?—to major in physics."
The others were gone enough on eggnog to laugh uproariously, all except the suddenly wide-awake gnome.
"Mallach, you say? Mallach? Did I hear correctly, young lady, that your name is Dr. Mallach?"
His eyes, vitreous behind the bottle-thick lenses, are uncannily lit, and Dana is still trying to quiet her shivering. Wallace Low, looking solicitous and in love, has run to get her some eggnog, and she gulps it gratefully.
"Do you spell it M-A-L-L-A-C-H?"
She nods her head yes, verifying the spelling of her name, distracted still, so that she misses seeing the strange reaction she has produced in the ancient man perched on the green winged chair.
His feet in the orthopedic clogs are kicking back and forth, and he stares like a lover or a lunatic up into Dana's bloodless face.
"Do you know, young lady, that's a very promising name for a physicist. M-A-L-L-A-C-H." He spells it out again.
Dana turns her attention, from the cup of eggnog she has been trying to down as quickly as possible, to the man with the mothy skin staring bug-eyed at her from below. She stoops down to him in her long gray coat, which she has not been able to bring herself to remove, despite the gallant attempt on the part of Wallace Low. He had taken her free hand between his two great warm palms to try to warm it, but now he must relinquish her as she stoops precipitously down to the shriveled man of science, so improbably alive, and brings her face, so thin and chalky white, near to his, disregarding his old-man breath, her eyes suddenly startled into a wonder of attention.
"I know of another physicist who was named Mallach, same spelling. For some reason, nobody seemed to pay him very much mind. He wrote a grand paper on quantum mechanics. Nobody seems to have read it but me. It was a grand thing that he did. He answered all my doubts, and I had quite a few, I seem to remember. I can't remember any of the details now, but you ought to look it up for yourself someday. After all, young lady, it's your name."
And oh to see her smile! It wrings the soul to see her smile so, the full range of her rapture all at once rekindled by the obscure words of praise spoken by a man whose greatest pride had been the laying properties of his Rhode Island Reds and the music of his fairy-sprite daughter.
It wrings the dreadful pity to see the light that comes into her face, the girl of furious light once more, so that she is utterly ravishing to the sight.