But here was the sad truth about messy things: they did not resolve themselves. They got resolved, if they got resolved at all, by grunt and confrontation and maybe a little screaming, followed by (gruesome as this was to contemplate) deliberate and redemptive hugging. Mostly, though, as history effortlessly demonstrated, messy things just jolted on until they shuddered to a halt in exhaustion. And so, when it became clear that debate and argument were just so much treading of mud, the students of Roarke commenced not speaking across the lines in their little community, and whatever bonds they’d forged in Plato and animal muck throughout the fall and early winter began to degrade in earnest.
By the end of March the damage felt irreversible. Carlos and a few of the others were no longer sitting down for meals; instead, they loaded their plates in the kitchen and went off to eat in one of the seminar rooms, while the rest conversed in a state of general suppression around the dinner table, sticking to the universal and the strictly academic and absolutely avoiding the topic on everyone’s mind. In the classrooms a fragile pact held longer but it waned soon enough, discussion splintering into first veiled then open hostility and disagreements beginning to feel, for the first time, personal. The center, in other words, was not holding, and as the student body fractured, the systems themselves began to break down, little fissures opening everywhere. Class meetings started after their appointed times or stopped abruptly before they finished, and there was a strange epidemic of oversleeping, which distressed the animals. Some nights, the school even ran out of food due to imprecise planning and indifferent safeguards, and more than once they drifted dangerously low on things the animals needed, like straw and even feed.
At the center of it all, Eli Absalom Stone—prime mover of the crisis, or its victim, depending on your affiliation—remained a still point. Eli had not deviated from his own routines and responsibilities, which now included oversight for the current applicant pool and an active search for a new faculty member to teach the history of science. He still rose at his customary time, took his shower, visited the kitchen for black coffee and a single piece of fruit, then went to one of the classrooms or to the cubicle in the administrative area and began his day’s work. Occasionally he could be seen walking with Emmanuel, or one of the Justins, out along the road up toward Jackson, and he could often be found in his preferred armchair in the meeting room, the one with the shredded arms, powering through a book at his normal, accelerated pace. By evening he’d be at the dinner table, passing the salt, genially complimenting the cook (Gordon, who would now only glare at him), and resolutely not acknowledging the tension. He declined, outside the meetings dedicated to the subject, to mention Carlos or his alleged crime. He declined to give the slightest indication that he held any responsibility for the mire in which they all found themselves. He declined to show his hand, and he never, ever broke. But the damage crept steadily outward, ensnaring them all.
For Harrison, it was the breakdown of camaraderie that hit him hardest. For the very first time in his life he’d found himself actually enjoying the company of male humans his own age, and this was after thirteen years of school, eight years of camp, and the incessant presence of a brother. At Roarke the clarifying notion that these men had first self-selected to apply to the school, then been selected by the school, and finally opted for the school (despite, in every case, such attractive alternatives) had gone a long way toward binding them together, and he had happily been a part of this group of twenty-four, eating with them and reading with them, treating cows for mastitis with them and discussing semiotics with them. For all the years he’d spent in the enforced comradeship of the Walden School, it was Roarke that had finally filled him with a sense of virtuous fellowship. Now all that was gone, or at least going fast.
It was just at this delicate moment that Harrison received a letter from the Harvard Admissions Office, asking whether he would like to matriculate that fall or whether he intended to extend his deferral, as originally indicated, and transfer the following year. He found himself giving this serious consideration, revisiting his earlier decision for the first time since he’d sat opposite Dr. Vernon Loring in that Naugahyde booth at Symposium. While he’d been chasing chickens and rolling hay, hadn’t his contemporaries at Harvard been forming lifelong bonds and getting a pretty good education of their own? Harrison was missing all that. If he transferred as planned the following year he’d be as legitimately enrolled as any other undergraduate, but the reality promised an experience that was decidedly off-brand. Harvard would probably slot him into a random suite with an opening, assigning him the room of some loser on academic warning or in a psych ward, and his new roommates would be guys who’d actually wanted to room with that selfsame loser! And also, what if the university wanted to burden him with all the prerequisites he’d have missed, meaning entry-level classes, probably with teaching assistants leading the seminar discussions. How annoying would that be, after a year of the education he’d been receiving here?
So it was tempting to just go now. This year at Roarke might still be recast as something quirky and transitional, a Gap Year Experience in which he learned about poultry production and agrarian self-rule and linguistics, deep in the New Hampshire forest. He could go off to Harvard only a few months from now as a sophomore or even a freshman with a few extra credits, a do-over his parents—certainly—would celebrate. He could, annoying as it might be, even to himself, change his mind.
But then, and suddenly, into this moment of uncharacteristic vacillation and self-questioning, there stepped a new, thrilling, and thoroughly unanticipated factor.
One morning, as Harrison was stamping his way out to the henhouse with his definitely emasculating egg basket, he was stunned to see the author of Against Youth giving every appearance of a person who was waiting for another person, and there was no person other than Harrison himself who might conceivably turn up at that place and time. He was just working this out when Eli Absalom Stone raised an arm in greeting.
“Harrison,” he said.
For some reason, Harrison’s idea of a proper response to this was to put his basket down on the chicken shit–stained ice.
“Oh, hi,” he said, just to ram that point home.
“I apologize for the intrusion,” said Eli. “I should have found a way to bring this up in a more pleasant setting.”
“More pleasant … than this?” Harrison said.
“It does have a certain bucolic charm.” Eli did not exactly smile as he said this, though there was a gesture toward the idea of a smile.
They were both breathing steam. Harrison, illogically, felt himself on the verge of offering some excuse. For the hens? Or the general state of tension?
“I feel as if I should have given you some warning before I brought my concerns about Carlos to the attention of the community,” Eli said.
“Oh?”
He’d had generally amiable feelings toward Carlos, he supposed. But nothing special. The only one who’d truly stood out to him was the one currently standing in front of him.
“You’re a kindhearted person,” Eli observed, and Harrison nearly erupted in laughter. He was thinking of his brother Lewyn, and his sister Sally—how they would have writhed and scoffed at such a notion. Kindhearted! As if the two of them controlled exclusive access to kindness! Sally had written her college application essay on the wildlife sanctuary that just happened to border our Martha’s Vineyard property, effortlessly adding eighty pristine acres to coastal view. Lewyn had been unable to come up with a community service project (a graduation requirement at Walden) so our mother had phoned up a woman her sister Debbie knew on the board of Dress for Success. He’d spent his required hours in the shoe closet, doing his homework. And he, Harrison, was supposedly the uncharitable, self-serving one? He was as “kindhearted” as they were, even if that was, basically, not so much.