“Tell me about the moral sense of your family,” he said.
And Harrison did: the sullen sister and doltish brother, the mother who persisted in the notion that the three of them were deeply, intractably bonded, and the father who was seldom present, even when he was.
“You are planning on attending college, I imagine,” Loring said.
“Well, yes. I’m working on the applications now. I mean, everyone at my school goes to college. Wesleyan is very popular, and Brown. And Yale.”
Loring made a face.
“I was thinking about Harvard, myself.”
Harrison was doing more than thinking about Harvard. He was obsessing about Harvard. He had fetishized the school for years, casting it as his personal exit ramp. The notion that Harvard might not lovingly accept him was horrifying, not that he had confessed that to anyone. Deep inside him, so deep even he would not have known how to excavate it, was the rank, gangrenous fear that he was not entirely the intellectual being he had long ventriloquized. Obviously, he wasn’t stupid. Compared to his siblings he was brilliant, and in relation to his classmates, some of them annoyingly capable, he was clearly running with the pacesetters. But beyond the self-esteem-boosting enclave of the Walden School, where grades did not exist? Beyond the Oppenheimer enclave, in which Johanna showered them all with resolutely equal praise? Beyond a culture that handed out participant trophies, in which making a show of your personal suffering passed for debate? To be honest, he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t fear being found out.
The previous spring, he’d walked into the SAT (his first ever standardized test!) under a personal waterfall of terror, and was not at all reassured to come out of it with a perfect score, mainly because certain loudmouths in his own grade were busy boasting of their perfect scores. Harvard—and, he supposed, the few other schools he might deign to apply to—would naturally be inundated with kids brandishing the identical credential. Too many people had obviously figured out how to study for the test and perform those simple tricks that defanged it.
“Well,” said Loring, “Harvard is still a place where actual ideas can be discussed, I’m happy to say. But I wouldn’t advise it for you.”
“Oh?” Harrison felt stung. He’d been expecting Loring to encourage him in the direction of his own alma mater, but what was this? Had he fallen short in some way, already? He groped backward in their conversation, weighing, parsing, excoriating himself for every single thing he’d said, wondering where in the wondrous swirl of ideas he had lost track of himself and revealed his deep core of inadequacy.
“And certainly not Columbia. They bring me in every couple of years, because there are fewer and fewer on the permanent faculty who are equipped to teach the core curriculum to freshmen, and I usually say yes. The library is beyond reproach, but the students there get worse each time I return. Still, the fault’s not specific to this university. It’s a generational failing, I fear.”
Harrison nodded, as if he himself were not being indicted. “Oh, I completely agree.”
“Apart from a contemporary of yours. A young man from the south, who managed to get himself an education with no help from anyone else. I read his book the other day. It gave me hope. I wonder if you know who I mean? His name is Eli Absalom Stone.”
Harrison did know who he meant. He’d known more or less since “contemporary,” “the south,” the autodidacticism reference and, most of all, the book. There was only one person whose story rang all of these bells, and Harrison had been obsessed with him for months.
Eli Absalom Stone was a name you’d be unlikely to forget if you happened to see it, say, in print, which Harrison had first done as the subject of an Atlantic Monthly profile, before senior year. A wunderkind writer, Stone hadn’t attended school for most of his life. Instead he’d studied at home, and home was a shack on a mountain somewhere in Virginia. (Harrison, who remembered the failure of his own attempts to self-educate, had been especially wowed by the breadth of Stone’s autodidacticism.) Before he was even eighteen, this remarkable young person had become the author of a small publishing miracle called Against Youth, in which he had called out his own generation (their shared generation) for complacency, anti-intellectualism, and carelessness with the English language. Harrison, naturally—and not without envy—had rushed out to purchase this book, which he found to be annoyingly persuasive and unimpeachably well written, and its author the very first of his own contemporaries he might have to muster some actual intellectual regard for, in the unlikely event that they should ever meet. There had been no author photo, Harrison remembered; Stone, whose ethnicity was central to the Atlantic Monthly piece, was apparently uninterested in being identified as African American. Apparently, he had the radical belief that his words alone should represent him.
“I read his book,” Harrison said now. “It was remarkable.”
“A young thinker, untainted by current indoctrinations. Someone who might do some real good in the world.”
Harrison didn’t disagree, not that he’d ever given much thought to the good Eli Absalom Stone might do in the world. He hadn’t even considered the good he himself might do.
“So,” he said, reaching back to the last time the conversation had revolved around himself, “you don’t think I should go to Harvard?”
“Oh, eventually. You could do worse than end up at Harvard.”
Harrison’s head was churning now. He felt defeated. If this was another test, he had obviously failed it, too. “I don’t understand,” he finally admitted. Dr. Loring looked around for the waiter.
“My young triplet friend,” he said. He held up his empty cup. “I hope you are not expected home to your unappreciative family just yet.”
Harrison frowned. “No, not yet.”
“Good. Because I would like to tell you a bit about Roarke.”
And this he proceeded to do, right there in that green Naugahyde booth.