Sometimes, on those cold mornings, he warmed himself by imagining his siblings at their own pathetically conventional institute of higher education. Fragile Lewyn and caustic Sally, who aspired to nothing and who had produced not one original idea throughout their (enforced) years together; Harrison tried to imagine what they did with themselves all day, in their overheated dorm rooms, alongside their video game–playing, blow-drying, chugging-and-puking classmates. He thought of his siblings in their massive survey courses, doodling their way through PowerPoint lectures, receiving inflated As, learning absolutely nothing. Lewyn and Sally had entered the great education con in which students and their families paid in for four years and were rewarded with a piece of paper, suitable for framing, in return (along with, for those who were not Oppenheimers or of similar alignment, a whole lot of debt). And this appalling proxy for an actual education was what Lewyn and Sally had signed up for while he was here at Roarke! He felt elated when he considered his own fellow students, and the conversations that overran their seminars, trailing them to their chores, their meals, the bunkroom, even the showers. These were men who fell asleep reading then woke up and began reading again. Like him. And he was at home with them, far more than he had ever been with those other two.
A couple of years earlier, tiny Roarke had become more broadly known, courtesy of an influential guidebook called Colleges That Change Lives, which appealed to the reader to look beyond brand-name institutions for an exhilarating array of less-well-known colleges and universities. Harrison, who had come home one day during his junior year to find this very book on the dining room table, assumed it had been purchased for Lewyn and Sally, since he himself would obviously be going to one of those selfsame brand-name institutions; still, when he troubled himself to open the guidebook a few months later, he found that Roarke was actually listed among those justly obscure institutions, and praised for its quirky insistence on the canon, its tiny size, and purist intellectualism. The book had led directly to a sharp spike in applications for its fourteen annual places, and while Harrison had no way of knowing exactly how superior he and his classmates had been to the rest of their applicant pool, there was no disputing that they were a bluntly impressive group. Nearly all of them had declined or deferred admission to the most selective universities in the country, for reasons that soon came to light. Carlos (Princeton, Yale) had anchored last year’s national champion debate team for his high school in Louisiana. One of the Justins (MIT, Stanford) had made it to the finals of the Siemens Competition the previous year. Bryce (Harvard, West Point) had spent the past couple of years essentially explaining policy papers to the dim-witted congressman from his district in suburban Minneapolis and writing first drafts of much of the congressman’s correspondence (not excluding a bill bearing the congressman’s name that had recently passed the House). Emmanuel (MIT, Stanford, Caltech) had won the national Math Olympiad, and Gordon (Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth) had coauthored a monograph with his mentor, the chief justice of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Even Tony (Dartmouth, Princeton), the New Hampshire farm kid Harrison had assumed to be some kind of keeping-the-locals-happy recruit, was deeply immersed in semiotics and intended an academic career.
And then, of course, there was Eli Absalom Stone (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia).
At no point had Eli been precisely friendly to Harrison, but neither was he notably warm to any of the others. Harrison wondered if his celebrated classmate might show a preference for Roarke’s other students of color—a profoundly cerebral second-year from Atlanta named Tyquan, Jonathan Jackson from Nevada, and their classmate Carlos Flores from Louisiana—but he seemed to hold them at the same arm’s length as everyone else. Still, Eli was never the least bit snobbish, as—with all of his accomplishments—he might reasonably have been. He stepped up as much as the rest of them when there was some task requiring community effort, and listened respectfully to differences of opinion and even thoughtful criticism, so long as it was properly supported. In the classroom, of course, he was glorious, and watching him eviscerate somebody else’s position from the other side of a seminar table—often using only a prodigious memory for printed material, a pincer-like grasp of the relevance of any given passage, and a hypnotically calm voice—was a thing of beauty. The rest of their fellow Roarke men might someday impact scholarship, business, and politics but Eli Absalom Stone, Harrison saw, would require the world to orient itself to him.
Harrison had spent the first months of their time at Roarke waiting for the subject of Eli’s book, and its critical response, and the coverage of its critical response, to arise, and he was more than a little surprised when it didn’t. Were none of these brilliant classmates paying attention? Was he the only one whose antennae had picked up this exceptional intellectual, already part of a national dialogue, who was actually living among them? Apparently so. He himself had said nothing, except for one November evening when he looked up from his book to discover that he and Eli were alone together, the last two in the lounge after dinner. Before he could actually consider what he was about to do, let alone choose his words, he blurted out that he had read Against Youth and had thought it very sound and very well written.
“Thank you,” said Eli, barely looking up from his own book.
And then, as if this response had been at all encouraging, which even a dolt could have seen it was not, Harrison heard himself ask about the no-photo-on-the-book-jacket thing, which he totally understood, because the work was the work, and that was what mattered, not some preconceived assumption about ethnicity or a given view of history. But, he stammered, his discomfort obvious, making that choice must have been difficult. Had it been difficult?
“Not at all,” Eli Absalom Stone had said, turning a page. This had closed their discussion, and, it seemed, the topic as a whole, and Harrison resolved—again—that he was absolutely not going to fawn over Eli Absalom Stone, because Eli Absalom Stone clearly did not wish to be fawned over.
Then one night in January, Carlos—of all people—announced that he’d just found a book in the school library by Eli! Eli Absalom Stone! Like, their own Eli Absalom Stone (as if there could be another author by that name), and Wasn’t this so cool? and Why didn’t you tell us, man?
Carlos was a person of great enthusiasms, but Harrison had never seen him this excited.
The other students, every one of them, looked mystified.
“Wait, you wrote a book?” Bryce actually said.
Harrison, repelled and embarrassed, focused on his hands.
“What’s it about?” said Tony.
Eli looked vague. “Just some preoccupations. Juvenilia, actually. You know,” he said. As if they all had collections of essays based on their adolescent musings underway or awaiting imminent publication by major publishers, to be discussed in the pages of the New Yorker and the Nation and parsed by the likes of Leonard Lopate and Charlie Rose.
“I’m going to start it right away,” Carlos assured them all, as if they were anxious about this very thing.
The setting for all this was the regular evening meeting, which took place in the lounge every night after dinner and before they dispersed to final chores, work, occasional leisure, and finally sleep. It was where ordinary concerns were raised, occasionally academic but also related to the practical cogs and mechanisms of the farm and school: library procedures, problems with the milking machine, the hiring of faculty, the reading of application essays by those hundreds of students hoping to attend Roarke the following fall. Sometimes, this time was used to make requests or update projects, like Bryce proposing a trip to see Angels in America in Boston or Tony reporting on his experimental fall planting of onions, overwintering in the north pasture. To Harrison these topics were rarely scintillating, and often, by the end of his physically and intellectually challenging days, it was tough to sit still for—let alone care about—things like onions. Sometimes he even found himself nodding off in one of the old armchairs. He wasn’t nodding off now.