Harvard Square A Novel

Harvard Square A Novel - By Andre Aciman



PROLOGUE




“CAN WE JUST LEAVE?”

I’d never heard my son say anything like this in all the weeks we’d been visiting colleges together. We’d seen three universities in the Midwest, then stopped at liberal arts colleges in New England, Pennsylvania, and New York. Now, on the last leg of our summer college tour, in that corner of Massachusetts I had known so well, my son had either reached the limits of his endurance or simply lost his nerve.

“I don’t want to be here,” he said. I told him that leaving was not an option. “Of course it is,” he replied. To avoid being overheard by the families assembled around us in the Office of Admissions, I lowered my voice and told him that leaving before the welcoming speech was totally inappropriate. But he nixed that argument with an equally terse and snappy “Let’s just split.” The wood-paneled room with the thick carpeting was filling up with more visitors. “Like now,” he hissed, almost threatening to raise his voice.

“I don’t get it,” I whispered. “The best university in the world, and all you want is to leave. Seriously?”

But arguing wasn’t going to work. Besides, he must have sensed, just by looking at me, that I wasn’t going to put up a fight. Perhaps I too was tired and had had my fill of these guided college tours. He didn’t wait for me to yield. He stood up and picked up his large brochure and baseball cap. I was forced to stand up as well, if only to avoid looking awkwardly at odds with him in front of the others. Then, before I knew it, the two of us were discreetly making our way out of the admissions office. Almost immediately, our seats were taken by another father and son.

In the vestibule, where more parents had gathered before entering the hall, we heard a member of the admissions staff announce, with a slight, informal giggle in her voice, probably meant to sound kind and reassuring, that following a few words of introduction, she and her colleagues were going to walk us over to such-and-such a place, then to that other place, then head over to yet another spot where we’d all stop at the so-and-so memorial to get a breathtaking panoramic view of yet another Harvard favorite. I recognized at once the slightly smug lilt with which she delivered an itinerary that couldn’t have been more thoroughly planned but that wished to convey we were all in for improvised good fun in an otherwise routine trundle through yet another college campus.

As we walked out, more parents with prospective applicants were still filing in, headed to the staff desk, then directly to the assembly hall.

Outside, on the patio, we inhaled a breath of early morning air. I recognized the incipient pall that heralds a typical muggy summer day in Boston.

I could tell my son felt uneasy. He had run into a familiar face on the patio. The two had tried to avoid each other. When they couldn’t, the other hastily grunted what must have passed for a cordial greeting among students from rival schools. At least that young man knows the rules, I thought. There was contention and muted feuding in the air, and for everyone, parents and children alike, the choices couldn’t have been clearer: either play the game or fold.

We left the building and were cutting through Radcliffe on our way to the river. I wanted to ask why the sudden change of heart, why the itch to leave. But I thought better than to raise the matter quite yet. The tension underscoring the silence between us was palpable enough and couldn’t be dispelled. Then, and almost by way of an explanation that was also trying to pass for an apology, he hesitated a moment and finally said, “I’m so not into this.”

I didn’t know what this meant. Did it mean college tours, college towns, college admission officers, colleges, period? Or was he referring to college visitors who’d been deftly showcasing their children with both awe and muffled pride, each vying not to look too eager or too diffident or too summery to be taken seriously by the admissions staff? Or did he mean Harvard in particular? Or—and this suddenly scared me—was what really irked him most the thought of being asked to like the school because I had?

We had arrived a day earlier and had already visited many corners of Harvard: the Radcliffe Houses, the River Houses, then I’d taken him up the stately stairway of Widener Library where we tiptoed into the main reading room. I stood there for a moment, without moving. It was clear I missed my days as a graduate student here. An almost empty reading room on a beautiful summer day was still one of the wonders of the world, I said as we were about to leave the room. All he could do was to utter a wistful but no less tart “I guess.”

I showed him all the places where I had lived: Oxford Street, Ware Street, Lowell House. Didn’t Lowell House remind him of a turn-of-the-century grand hotel on the Riviera?

“It’s a college dorm.”

As I showed him around town, I kept wondering what it must feel like to walk with your father and watch him stop at places that couldn’t mean a thing to you. You listen to tidbits about his life as a graduate student long before your parents met and find yourself unable or unwilling to relate to any of it, and probably feeling a touch guilty because you can’t even work up the show of interest your father seems to want to stir. Everything he sees is steeped in a stagnant vat of nostalgia, and for all its rosy cheeks, the past always gives off that off-putting, musty scent of old pipes and mildewed rooms that haven’t been aired in years. I tried to tell him about Concord Avenue and Prescott Street, where I’d also lived; but it was like asking him to join me in getting a haircut at my favorite barbershop on Dunster Street. He’d be humoring me, that’s all. But it would mean nothing. Had I asked, he’d have said: I don’t need a haircut.

I told him I knew of a place where they made good burgers. “You sure it’s still there?”

Once again, the sneer and dash of irony in his voice. He’d already heard me say that much had changed after thirty years, not the layout of the streets or of the stores, but the stores themselves, their awnings and marquees, perhaps even the feel of the place. Harvard Square had gotten smaller, felt cramped, crowded. It also seemed that things had been moved around a bit, new buildings had gone up, and the Harvard Square Theater, like so many movie houses around the world, had been drawn and quartered. Even the immutable Coop—short for the Harvard Cooperative Society, the large department store located right on Harvard Square—was no longer the same; a good part of it had become an insignia and souvenir store for visitors. I still remembered my Coop number. I told him my Coop number. “Yes, I know, I know,” I immediately threw in a hasty attempt to preempt yet another quip from him, “it’s just a department store.”

Like many parents who had been students here, I wanted him to like Harvard but knew better than to insist for fear he’d dismiss the school altogether. Part of me wanted him to walk in my shoes. He’d hate that, of course. Or perhaps I wanted to walk in them myself again, but through him. He’d hate that even more. Walking in daddy’s footsteps as daddy’s stand-in come to expiate the past! I could just hear him say: No one’s idea of college.

I wanted to share with him and bring back all of my old postcard moments: the day I crossed the bridge in the snow while friends ran across the frozen Charles and I thought how reckless; the first time I entered my beloved Houghton Library and sat waiting for the librarian to hand over my very first rare book written by Mademoiselle de Gournay, Montaigne’s adopted stepdaughter; the aging face of my long-gone Robert Fitzgerald who taught me so much in so very few words; my last drink at the Harvest bar; down to the stifling reluctance to head out to class on a cold November afternoon when all I’d rather do was curl up with a book somewhere and let my mind wander. I wanted to walk the cobbled lanes leading up to the river with him and, in a spellbound instant, seize the beauty of this sheltered world that had promised me so much and in the end delivered much more. The buildings, the feel of early fall, the sound of students thronging to class every morning—I couldn’t wait for him to heed their call and their promise.

Finally I found the courage to ask if he liked what he’d seen.

“I like it fine.”

But then, unpredictably, he turned the table on me and asked the same question. Had I liked it here?

I said I had. Very much.

But I knew I was speaking in retrospect.

“I learned to love Harvard after, not during.”

“Explain.”

“Life wasn’t easy,” I said, “and I don’t mean the course work—though there was plenty of that, and the standards were high. What was difficult was living with the life Harvard held out for me and refusing to think it might be a mirage. I had money problems. There were days when the margin between the haves and have-nots stood not like a line drawn in the sand but like a ravine. You could watch, you could even hear the party, but you weren’t invited.” What was hard, I was trying to say, was remembering I’d already been invited.

I was the outsider, the young man from Alexandria, Egypt, forever baffled and eager to belong in this strange New World.

The rest I didn’t want to think about or remember, much less discuss right now. Besides, the during memories of my years at Harvard felt tucked away still—not necessarily forgotten, but as though put on ice for a day in later life when I’d have the strength and leisure to revisit them. But now wasn’t the time. For now, it was the magical after love I wished to convey. It had stayed with me all those years and yanked me back to days I missed a great deal but knew I would never for a minute wish to relive again. Perhaps the after love was what made me embark on this odyssey of college stops with my son, because I longed to set foot in Cambridge again—with him as my shield, my cover, my standby.

How to explain this to a seventeen-year-old without destroying the carousel of images I’d shared with him since his preschool days? Cambridge on quiet Sunday evenings; Cambridge on rainy afternoons with friends, or in a blizzard when things went on as usual and the days seemed shorter and festive and all you wanted to imagine was tethered horses waiting to take you to Ethan Frome places; the Square abuzz on Friday nights; Harvard during reading period in mid-January—coffee, more coffee, and the perpetual patter of typewriters everywhere; or Lowell House on the last days of reading period in the spring, when students lounged about for hours on the grass, speaking softly, their voices muffled by the sounds of early summer.

“I loved it,” I finally said. “I still do.”

By then we had entered the Coop.

“Don’t ask if they still have your Coop number,” implored my son, who knew how my mind ticked and didn’t want me to embarrass him by growing nostalgic about times past with a salesclerk who couldn’t have cared less.

I promised not to say a thing. But when I bought two T-shirts, one for him, and one for me, I couldn’t help myself. “346-408-8,” I said.

I told the clerk that I still remembered the number because I would always say it out loud when buying a pack of cigarettes at the Coop. And in those years I’d buy a pack a day, twice a day.

The salesclerk checked his computer and said I wasn’t in their system.

The way my old phone number here was no longer in my name, I presumed.

The way, unless we do something with our lives, some of us come to Cambridge, spend a few years here, then leave this place and then the planet without a trace.

Not in the system, it was called. It made me question whether I’d ever really been in the system here.

I belonged here once, but had it ever been my home? Or was it my home, though I could never really claim I’d belonged here? Not in the system covered both options.

My son was urging me not to engage in a conversation with the salesclerk. But something in me didn’t wish to accept that I was not in the system or had never been. I asked the clerk to check once more and repeated my Coop number.

“Apologies, sir,” blurted the young man. “Your number is still under your name, but you will need to reactivate your Coop number.”

So I was in the system but inactive, like a mole, or a spy, forever in but on the fringes. That summed it all. I did not wish this for my son.

When we approached Brattle Street, I suddenly realized how much and yet how little the block had changed. The Brattle Theatre hadn’t budged; but it had a new entrance underground. Casablanca too hadn’t budged, but they’d gutted and truncated it. And finally Café Algiers had moved from downstairs to upstairs, though its green logo hadn’t changed. I stood outside the old coffee shop where I’d spent years reading and where, one summer long ago, I’d run into someone who came so close to altering the course of my life that today I might not even be my son’s father.

“What do you mean ‘not my father’?” asked my son, who’d never heard anything like this before and was more than mildly miffed by what I’d just said.

I didn’t want to answer, partly because I wasn’t sure I knew the answer, but also because I wanted to spare him the thought that so much of who he was depended on tangents and the whims of fate.

“There were days when I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay here any longer—when I too wanted to split.” I wanted him to know I was using his word. “And I don’t mean just from Harvard, but from the United States.”

“And?”

“I wasn’t even a citizen in those days and a side of me, just a side of me, craved to move back somewhere on the Mediterranean. This fellow was from the Mediterranean as well and he too longed to go back. We were friends.”

I was still staring at the emblem of Café Algiers and, without even trying, could almost heed the loud slap of backgammon chips summoning me from decades back. I used to hang around here to put off heading home, to find light and fellowship in my evenings, because there were days when nothing else promised light or fellowship.

“Why did you want to leave?”

“Many things. I had failed my comprehensive exams. They said I could take my exams a second time, but not a third. I just wanted to leave before they’d throw the book at me if I failed again.”

But these were all words. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to share any of this with someone who was himself already having a hard time making up his mind about Harvard.

“I passed,” I finally said. “Harvard was generous, magnanimous even.”

But I couldn’t forget my days and evenings at Café Algiers where I’d come because that small underground café at the time was the only place this side of the Atlantic I could almost call home. The smell of Turkish coffee, the French songs they played here, the verbal fireballs of a Tunisian nicknamed Monsieur Kalashnikov and the chatter of the men and women who’d gather around when he presided, down to the clammy, wooden dampness of my tiny square table next to which hung a makeshift poster of a deserted beach in a coastal town called Tipaza, its turquoise sea forever limpid and beckoning, everything in this small coffee shop reminded me of a Middle East I thought I had lost and put behind me and suddenly realized I wasn’t ready to let go of. At least not just yet. Not for Harvard, not for America, not for anyone, not even for the children I wished one day to be a father to. I was not like everyone else in Cambridge, I was not one of them, was not in the system, had never been. This wasn’t really my home, might never be. These weren’t my people, were never going to be. This wasn’t my life, wasn’t my birthplace, wasn’t even me, couldn’t be me. This was the summer of 1977.