Educating Ms. Wise

Twenty-four, industrious, and talented in mathematics, Elizabeth Wise tells herself she’s content with her love life and her job in Boston as a temporary secretary. It’s the early 1970s. Midi hemlines are “in.” Nixon’s Watergate scandal is rocking the nation. The Women’s Movement is igniting fierce debate about entry into male-dominated professions.

When an old boyfriend unexpectedly calls, Elizabeth agrees to meet him for dinner simply to settle a gut-wrenching score. The encounter turns out to be much more. It leads her to drop her semi-committed beau and launch an intriguing relationship with a new man who boldly envisions her pursuit of a professional career that rarely employs women. Elizabeth lets her hopes rise, knowing that to succeed she must conquer a long-standing and crippling personal fear – a challenge that could prove insurmountable.

The opening:

The most noteworthy days in a person’s life – days that bring a fatefully sharp zig or conspicuously pivotal zag – sometimes begin without the tiniest sign anything momentous is about to happen.

Elizabeth understood this, of course. She carried this kind of knowledge in the way every full-grown person keeps millions of facts stored in various parts of the mind, just out of consciousness, ready to surface when appropriate. And certainly she had no suspicion, that mid-December Sunday in 1973, the day would turn out to be consequential.

The first hours had glided by as easily and as routinely as a phonograph needle tracking the faultless groove of a vinyl record. At two o’clock Elizabeth was walking along the stretch of Beacon Street she trod every Sunday afternoon. Her brisk gait, as she passed tall trees and brick apartment buildings, mimicked the whizzing Brookline traffic. Complementing her navy wool coat were her ivory scarf and gloves. Her chunky-heeled Frye boots gave the impression of being sturdy and warm. The oversized purse slung over her shoulder seemed easily borne; so too did the paper bag from Star Market so fully packed that managing it required the use of both arms. Yet there was something frivolous about her. Perhaps the absence of a hat? She’d been told she looked good wearing them. She could consult a mirror and agree that a reasonably attractive hat drew favorable attention to her regular features and blue-eyed prettiness, as long as the brim wasn’t too wide for her petite frame. But she hated the feel of anything clamped too tightly onto her head and chose to brave even the chilliest of weather with her shoulder-length blond hair, cut in the layered style in vogue, hanging free.

Suddenly. From out of the platinum-white sky came the first unusual event of the day -- a silent, sensual, alchemical prelude to the others that would follow: snow. A few white flakes sporadically flitted downward . . . then larger snowflakes fell by the hundreds . . . the thousands. It was the inaugural snow of the season.