“Why? What’s the matter with him?” I said, alarmed.

“He is very brilliant,” Experience said hesitantly.

“Yes, very learned,” Louisa said.

“And why should that cause you to feel sorry for him?” I said.

They looked at each other, and then they gave me the same pitying look.

“Well, you have seen his wife?”

“Yes, you have seen his wife?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. I did not want to hear all the unkind things I’d thought of Madeline Grady said aloud by these two girls.

But they were subtler than me. “It’s a study of what can happen when you do not let pure romantic love lead you,” Experience said.

“When lust takes over,” Louisa said theatrically.

Then they both laughed. I smiled, as well. I wished, perhaps, they were joking.

“Madeline Grady was a laundress when they met,” Experience said.

“Well, that’s respectable.”

“Yes, but she was not just a laundress. She sold beer and spirits from her home.”

“That’s how her first husband died,” Louisa said. “The father of her two boys. He mistook a barrel of lime for beer one night and drank a whole draught before he realized, and then he died in agony.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“And then, she went to see Grady, to help her claim her husband’s pension, and in a matter of course, the two have their little girl, and are married right before she was delivered.”

“And Grady, the best colored legal mind of his generation is interrupted before he even gets a chance to leave here.”

“She has thrift and grift to support him,” Louisa said. “She’s got the constitution for it.”

“Yes,” Experience said. “Those shoulders.” And they both glanced at my own, as if judging how broad they were, to see if they were as broad as Madeline Grady’s.

“But it really is a study in what can go wrong when a brilliant colored man makes the wrong choice for a wife,” Louisa said.

In the women’s dining room at Cunningham College, there was a big panel of fabric, with green velvet leaves bordering a list stitched out in red thread, three meters high.

MAN IS STRONG—WOMAN, BEAUTIFUL

MAN IS DARING AND CONFIDENT—WOMAN, DEFERENT AND UNASSUMING

MAN IS GREAT IN ACTION—WOMAN, IN SUFFERING

MAN SHINES ABROAD—WOMAN, AT HOME

MAN TALKS TO CONVINCE—WOMAN, TO PERSUADE AND PLEASE

MAN HAS A RUGGED HEART—WOMAN, A SOFT AND TENDER ONE

MAN PREVENTS MISERY—WOMAN, RELIEVES IT

MAN HAS SCIENCE—WOMAN, TASTE

MAN HAS JUDGMENT—WOMAN, SENSIBILITY

MAN IS A BEING OF JUSTICE—WOMAN, AN ANGEL OF MERCY

The first time I read it, I thought, Then what is a man? I thought of my mother, of course, and myself. I tried to parcel out where she lay on the fabric, but she was somewhere in between. Men then, for me, were still too terrifying to contemplate directly. They were an abstract. The only man I had seen up close was Mr. Ben, and he was not described by any of the words on that quilt. The left side of the quilt may as well have been stitched in gold thread; that was how fanciful a man’s character was to me. And I had never known anyone who would claim Mama had taste and not science, who would call her deferent and unassuming.

I regarded that quilt as a kind of private joke, something no one who had eyes could believe. I saw its falseness again when I came home to find Mrs. Grady sitting, skirt spread out in front of her, on the kitchen floor.

“It’s the last of it,” she said, turning out the flour sack. “The school is behind on paying for the laundry, and we’ll be short by next week.”

I flushed. “Mama sent you my share, didn’t she?”

Mrs. Grady nodded. “It’s already spent, girl.”

“But why don’t you tell Mr. Grady? I’m sure he will give you more for the household accounts.”

And at this, Mrs. Grady laughed for a long time, rolling the sack into a tighter and tighter ball as she did so.

“It’s me give him his money. Do you think we’d be eating our dinner under other women’s drawers if Grady had anything for a ‘household account’?” And then she laughed again.

But that night, at dinner, she said nothing, and when Grady looked up from his plate and asked if there was any more tea for that evening, Mrs. Grady just smiled and said she had forgotten it. And then a cloud passed over his face, a recognition, and Grady stood up and went to his study.

The Gradys may have followed the rules of that quilt, but only by a kind of willed fiction between the two of them.

Mama and Madeline Grady and Lenore insisted that men were to be babied and entertained, but not obeyed. The Graces seemed to revere obedience, at least in the abstract. Louisa and Experience, these girls I loved, who I thought held providence on their tongues, were so sure of themselves. I began to doubt myself. Perhaps the rules Mama and Lenore and Madeline Grady lived by were wrong. Or not wrong, but they seemed only to apply in the velvet waiting room and whitewashed examination room of Mama’s practice or in the humid air of Mrs. Grady’s laundry. And how good was a rule, how strong, how sensible was it to obey, if it lost all meaning as soon as you left your front door?

I wondered who Experience and Louisa would pick if they could pick their mate, since it was so important. Both were ignored by the men of Cunningham College, though they did not seem bothered by this.

“The other ones here, they call us the Graces because they think they’re clever,” Louisa told me. “Look at Experience. She’s bright, but gawky.”

I tried very hard not to look at Experience. “No, she is not,” I said.

Louisa laughed. “Yes, she is. Not naming it isn’t gonna change it.”

“I’m gawky,” Experience said, and that set Louisa to laughing.

“And I’m like you, Libertie,” Louisa said. “Pretty but dark. And fat. And this scar. Altogether helpless. They called us the Graces, and maybe it’s meant to be an insult or a tease or a joke, but I think it’s a love note.”

“It makes it easier to sing for them,” Experience said, “when you think of it that way.”

“My mama made it a point to never comment on another woman’s beauty, or lack thereof,” I said, and this made them both laugh, though I wasn’t sure why.

It was the same way when they sang. They looked each other in the eye, and it seemed like they always kept their gaze like that. Nothing broke it. It was deeper than whatever was stitched across that musty quilt in the dining room. It was the same connection that exists between a flower and a bee, between a river and its bank, between a muscle and a bone.

And it was because of that I thought perhaps they were right and Mama and Mrs. Grady were wrong, and something turned over again inside me, some resolve that pushed me away from Mama a little bit more.

I DID NOT go home for winter term, so my grades were given to me directly to mail to my mother, which I did not do. I was close to failing—not quite, but close, and I took the letter with this message and pressed it into my old anatomy book and put it at the bottom of my trunk, resolved to think about it when I could get the sound of the Graces out of my head.

Over the Christmas break, the snow was so high we did not have mail for many weeks, so that when my mother’s letters came, there were five of them to read in a row, and each one, every single one, was filled with the addition of a new name: Emmanuel.

He is a student of homeopathy, recently graduated from a medical school in Philadelphia. He is eager to study under anyone, including, he says, myself, “though you are a woman” (ha).

It was only one pair of parentheses, but Mama may as well have written me in dried berry juice. What did this “ha” mean, from a woman who I knew would bristle at a dismissal like that? A woman who had never been fond of parentheses.

Madame Elizabeth has sent him to me—he is lately of the city of Jacmel, Haiti, before he came to America to study medicine. He was not able to find a doctor who suited his interests in that city. So Madame Elizabeth and the church who sponsored him have sent him here, and he has been a welcome addition to the practice.

He sleeps in your bedroom—he has found it most comfortable. He has also suggested a new way to organize the garden—we will try it come this spring.

He recently saw one of our most persistent cases, Mrs. Cookstone, the judge’s wife, who lives on Pineapple Street. She was resistant that a colored man should treat her, but Emmanuel is able to get by. He is a high yellow homme de couleur (as Emmanuel is known back home in Haiti, he tells us). She relented once she saw him. She agreed that he should consult with her from behind a sheet. Lenore conducted the actual physical exam, and Emmanuel asked questions.

As you remember, Mrs. Cookstone is a bit of a nervous case, but she has written already to tell me that under Emmanuel’s care, she already is quite recovered from the pain in her chest and is even able to walk in her garden now, for a few hundred paces without needing to sit down and rest.