Irwin

Irwin is a mathematics professor Esther Greenwood meets near Widener Library during the final stage of her asylum treatment. Esther chooses him for her first sexual experience because his intelligence, apparent experience, and distance from her everyday life seem to answer her own criteria. The encounter instead exposes how sharply sexual freedom remains entangled with physical risk and medical consequences: Esther suffers a hemorrhage and requires emergency care. Her final contact with Irwin is practical rather than romantic; she tells him about the hospital bill, refuses the opening to continue their conversation, and hangs up relieved.

Identity and Introduction

Esther first meets Irwin on the steps of Widener Library, where she is preparing to catch a trolley back to the asylum. He approaches carrying a load of books and asks her for the time. Esther notices his intelligent-looking face and bony wrist; in the conversation that follows, he tells her that his name is Irwin and that he is a well-paid mathematics professor. The encounter begins with an ordinary request, not an overt romantic approach, and takes place while Esther is still expected back at the asylum for supper.

Esther’s Choice and Expectations

Esther decides to accept Irwin’s invitation for a small cup of coffee partly as practice in behaving like a new, normal self. They walk together down the long, ice-encrusted steps. After three cups of bitter coffee at a student cafe, Irwin drives her to his basement apartment in outer Cambridge, ostensibly for a beer. His study, with its stuffed brown leather chairs and piles of books marked by large formulas, gives Esther the setting in which she decides to seduce him.

Her choice rests on a deliberate set of expectations. Esther thinks her first sexual partner should be intelligent enough to command her respect, and Irwin’s achievement—he is a full professor at twenty-six—appeals to that standard. She also wants someone experienced, so she takes reassurance from the women he has known. At the same time, she prefers a man she does not know and expects not to keep knowing: she imagines an impersonal, almost ceremonial encounter. These requirements make Irwin less the beginning of an intimate relationship than a person Esther selects to help her cross a boundary on terms she has defined.

That boundary has been shaped by her long defense of virginity and by the example of Buddy Willard, whose sexual history has made Esther’s own abstinence feel like an unfair burden. She has guarded her virginity for five years and is now tired of defending it. Earlier, she had also witnessed childbirth and understood the prospect of pregnancy as a continuing threat to women’s freedom. Her mother’s mailed article, “In Defense of Chastity,” argues that sex belongs within marriage and that men and women inhabit different emotional worlds; Esther later tells Doctor Nolan that fear of pregnancy could keep her under a man’s thumb. Her decision to seek contraception reflects a practical effort to act despite those pressures, rather than simply accept either the article’s ideal of chastity or the risks of sex without protection.

The Encounter and Its Consequences

At Irwin’s apartment, Esther is confident enough in her choice to have no doubts about him by the end of the evening. During the encounter, she finds that he had not believed her when she said she was a virgin. She is grateful that she has begun practicing birth control during the day, since she doubts she would have managed it after drinking wine. Yet the change she had expected does not arrive as a simple liberation: she feels sharp pain and asks whether it is supposed to hurt. Irwin answers that sometimes it does.

The experience has an immediate consequence beyond Esther’s expectations of sex. She suffers substantial bleeding, and Joan Gilling insists on accompanying her by cab to the Emergency Ward. Esther tells the nurse what has happened before Joan enters. A doctor examines her with the nurse’s help, while Joan stands rigidly beside Esther and holds her hand. The scene shifts the consequences of Esther’s private decision into a medical setting and makes clear that taking precautions has not prevented the emergency. The available account does not establish that Irwin is present at the hospital or show him responding to Esther’s condition at the time.

The Bill and the Ending

Afterward, Esther calls Irwin from the asylum’s pay phone in the administration building and tells him quietly that she has a bill. The call is a brief, practical connection to a man she had intended not to go on knowing. When Irwin asks whether she really wants to know, Esther replies, “Never,” and hangs up with a decisive click. She wonders briefly whether he will send the check to the hospital, then concludes that, as a mathematics professor, he will not want to leave loose ends. The possibility of payment remains a matter of her expectation rather than a confirmed outcome in the account.

Esther feels weak-kneed but relieved after ending the call. Irwin’s final significance in her story is therefore not as a continuing partner but as the person through whom she tests a version of sexual independence, encounters its bodily consequences, and then asserts the limit of their relationship. Her refusal closes the interpersonal connection even as the unpaid—or not yet confirmed paid—bill leaves one practical tie unresolved.