Observe him, a capable young man of passable looks, slender and shaggy-haired, tan from a summer of honest outdoor work, good with math and things mechanical, not without ambition and bright hopes and possessing a solitary, inward-looking personality, alone in his bedroom beneath the eaves as he packs his suitcase of folded shirts and socks and underwear and not much else. The year is 1989; our setting is a provincial town named Mercy, Ohio—famous, briefly, for its precision brassworks, said to produce the finest shell casings in the history of modern warfare, though that, like much else of the town, is long faded. The room, which is to be unoccupied within the hour, is a shrine to the young man’s youth. Here is the display of trophies. Here are the soldier bedside lamp and matching martial-themed curtains; here the shelves of serial novels featuring intrepid trios of underappreciated teenagers whose youthful intellects enable them to solve crimes their elders cannot. Here, tacked to the neutral plaster walls, are the pennants of sports teams and the conundrumous M. C. Escher etching of hands drawing each other and, opposite the sagging single bed, the era-appropriate poster of the erect-nippled Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, beneath whose lubricious limbs and come-hither gaze and barely concealed pudenda the boy has furiously masturbated night after adolescent night.
But the boy: he undertakes his packing with the puzzled solemnity of a mourner at a child’s funeral, which is the scene’s appropriate analogue. The problem is not that he cannot make his belongings fit—he can—but the opposite: the meagerness of the bag’s contents seems mismatched with the grandeur of his destination. Tacked above his cramped little-boy’s desk, a letter gives the clue. Dear Timothy Fanning, it reads on elaborately decorated letterhead with a crimson, shield-shaped emblem and the ominous word VERITAS bespeaking ancient wisdoms. Congratulations, and welcome to the Harvard class of 1993!
It is early September. Outside, an earthbound, misting rain, tinged by summer’s green, hugs the little hamlet of houses and yards and storefront commercial concerns, one of which belongs to the boy’s father, the town’s lone optometrist. This places the boy’s family in the upper reaches of the town’s constricted economics; they are, by the standards of that time and place, well-off. His father is known and appreciated; he walks the streets of Mercy to a chorus of amiable hellos, because who is more admirable and worthy of gratitude than the man who has placed the spectacles upon your nose that enable you to see the things and people of your life? As a child, the boy loved to visit his father’s office and try on all the eyeglasses that decorated the racks and display cases, longing for the day when he would need a pair of his own, though he never did: his eyes were perfect.
“Time to go, son.”
His father has appeared in the door: a short, barrel-chested man whose gray flannel trousers, by gravitational necessity, are held aloft by clip-on suspenders. His thinning hair is wet from the shower, his cheeks freshly scraped by the old-fashioned safety razor he favors despite modern innovations in shaving technology. The air around him sings with the smell of Old Spice.
“If you forget anything, we can always send it to you.”
“Like what?”
His father shrugs amiably; he is trying to be helpful. “I don’t know. Clothes? Shoes? Did you take your certificate? I’m sure you’ll want that.”
He is speaking of the boy’s second-place award in the Western Reserve District 5 Science Day competition. “The Spark of Life: Gibbs-Donnan Equilibrium and Nernst Potential at the Critical Origin of Cell Viability.” The certificate, in a plain black frame, hangs on the wall above his desk. The truth is, it embarrasses him. Don’t all Harvard students win first prize? Nevertheless, he makes a show of gratitude for being reminded and places it atop the pile of clothing in the open suitcase. Once in Cambridge, it will never make it out of his bureau drawer; three years later, he will discover it beneath a pile of miscellaneous papers, regard it with a quick, bitter feeling, and pitch it into the trash.
“That’s the spirit,” his father says. “Show those Harvard smarties who they’re dealing with.”
From the base of the stairs, his mother’s voice ascends in an insistent song: “Tim-o-thy! Are you ready yet?”
She never calls him “Tim”; always it is “Timothy.” The name embarrasses him—it feels both courtly and diminutive at the same time, as if he were a little English lord on a velvet cushion—though he also secretly likes it. That his mother vastly prefers him to her husband is no secret; the reverse is also true. The boy loves her far more easily than he loves his father, whose emotional vocabulary is limited to manly pats on the back and the occasional boys-only camping trip. Like many only children, the boy is aware of his value in the household economy, and nowhere is this value more lofty than in his mother’s eyes. My Timothy, she likes to say, as if there are others not hers; he is her only one. You are my special Timothy.
“Haaa-rold! What are you doing up there? He’s going to miss the bus!”