Once Florentyna had reached the top of the building she found herself standing in front of a frosted door. The name ‘Professor Ferpozzi’ was newly stenciled in black paint on the glass. She recalled that in 1945 it was this man who had sat with President Conant in Munich and between them they had decided the fate of German architecture: what should be preserved and what should be razed. She was only too aware that she shouldn’t bother him for at least another hour. She half turned, intent on retreat, but the elevator had already disappeared to a lower floor. Turning again, she knocked boldly on the door. Then she heard the crash.
‘Whoever that is, go away. You have caused me to break my favorite teapot,’ said an angry voice whose mother tongue could only have been Italian.
Florentyna stifled the impulse to run and instead slowly turned the door knob. She put her head around the door and looked into a room that must have had walls, but there was no way of knowing because books and periodicals were stacked from floor to ceiling as if they had taken the place of bricks and mortar.
In the middle of the clutter stood a professorial figure aged anywhere between forty and seventy. The tall man wore an old Harris tweed jacket and gray flannel trousers that looked as though they had come from a thrift shop or had been inherited from his grandfather. He was holding a brown handle that moments before had been attached to a teapot. At his feet lay a tea bag surrounded by fragments of brown china.
‘I have been in possession of that teapot for over thirty years. I loved it second only to the Pietà, young woman. How do you intend to replace it?’
‘As Michelangelo is not available to sculpt you another, I will have to go to Woolworth’s and buy one.’
The professor smiled despite himself. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, picking up the tea bag but leaving the remains of his teapot on the floor.
‘To enroll in your course,’ Florentyna replied.
‘I do not care for women at the best of times,’ he said, not facing her, ‘and certainly not for one who causes me to break my teapot before breakfast. Do you possess a name?’
‘Rosnovski.’
He turned and stared at her for a moment before sitting at his desk and dropping the tea bag into an ashtray. He scribbled briefly. ‘Rosnovksi, you have the thirtieth place.’
‘But you don’t know my grades or qualifications.’
‘I am quite aware of your qualifications,’ he said ominously. ‘For next week’s group discussion you will prepare a paper on’ — he hesitated for a moment — ‘on one of Borromini’s earlier works, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Good day,’ he added as Florentyna scribbled furiously on her legal pad. Without giving her another thought, he returned to the remains of his teapot.
Florentyna left, closing the door quietly behind her. She walked slowly down the marble steps trying to compose her thoughts. Why had he accepted her so quickly? How could he have known anything about her?
During the following week she spent long days in the crypts of the Fogg Museum poring over learned journals, making slides of the reproductions of Borromini’s plans for San Carlo, even checking his lengthy expense list to see how much the remarkable building had cost. She also found time to visit the china department of Shreve, Crump & Lowe.
When Florentyna had completed the paper, she rehearsed it the night before and felt confident about the outcome, a confidence that evaporated the moment she arrived at Professor Ferpozzi’s seminar. The room was already packed with expectant students and she was horrified to discover that she was the only nongraduate student, the only non-Fine Arts major and the only woman in the course. A projector was placed on his desk facing a large white screen.
‘Ah, the home wrecker returns,’ the professor said, as Florentyna took the one remaining seat in the front. ‘For those of you who have not come across Miss Rosnovski before, do not invite her home for tea.’ He smiled at his own remark and tapped his pipe into an ashtray on the corner of the desk, a sign that he wished the class to commence.
‘Miss Rosnovski,’ he said with confidence, ‘is going to give us a talk on Borromini’s Oratorio di San Filippo Neri.’ Florentyna’s heart sank. ‘No, no.’ He smiled a second time. ‘I am mistaken. It was, if I remember correctly, the Church of San Carlo.’
For twenty minutes Florentyna delivered her paper, showing slides and answering questions. Ferpozzi hardly stirred from behind his pipe, other than to correct her occasional mispronunciation of seventeenth-century Roman coins.
When Florentyna finally sat down, he nodded thoughtfully and declared, ‘A fine presentation of the work of a genius.’ She relaxed for the first time that day as Ferpozzi rose briskly to his feet. ‘Now it is my painful duty to show you the contrast and I want everyone to make notes in preparation for a full discussion next week.’ He shuffled over to the projector and flicked his first slide into place. A building appeared up on the screen behind the professor’s desk. Florentyna stared in dismay at a ten-year-old picture of the Chicago Baron towering above a cluster of elegant small-scale apartment buildings on Michigan Avenue. There was an eerie silence in the room and one or two students were staring at her to see how she reacted.
‘Barbaric, isn’t it?’ Ferpozzi’s smile returned. ‘I am not referring only to the building, which is a worthless piece of plutocratic self-congratulation, but to the overall effect that this edifice has on the city around it. Note the way the tower breaks the eye’s sense of symmetry and balance in order to make certain that it’s the only building we shall look at.’ He flicked a second slide up onto the screen. This time it revealed the San Francisco Baron. ‘A slight improvement,’ he declared, staring into the darkness at his attentive audience, ‘but only because since the earthquake of 1906 the city ordinances in San Francisco do not allow buildings to be more than twenty stories in height. Now let’s travel abroad,’ he continued, turning to face the screen again. Up on the screen came the Cairo Baron, its gleaming windows reflecting the chaos and poverty of the slums huddled on top of each other in the distance.
‘Who can blame the natives for backing the occasional revolution when such a monument to Mammon is placed in their midst while they try to survive in mud hovels that don’t even stretch to electricity?’ Inexorably, the professor produced slides of the Barons in London, Johannesburg and Paris, before saying, ‘I want your critical opinion on all of these monstrosities by next week. Do they have any architectural value, can they be justified on financial grounds and will they ever be seen by your grandchildren? If so, why? Good day.’
Everyone filed out of the professor’s room except Florentyna, who unwrapped the brown paper parcel by her side.
‘I have brought you a farewell present,’ she said, and stood up holding out an earthenware teapot. Just at the moment Ferpozzi opened his hands, she let go and the teapot fell to the ground at his feet and shattered into several pieces.
He stared at the fragments on the floor. ‘I deserved no less,’ he said, and smiled at her.
‘That,’ she rejoined, determined to say her piece, ‘was unworthy of a man of your reputation.’
‘Absolutely right,’ he said, ‘but I had to discover if you had backbone. So many women don’t, you know.’
‘Do you imagine your position allows you—’
He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Next week I shall read your defense of your father’s empire with interest, young woman, and I shall be only too happy to be found wanting.’