“S’nice of you to say,” is what he actually said. Where was his wit? He felt pathetically tongue-tied, as if a pretty girl had just declared an unexpected romantic interest in him. He looked down to find his silly basket on the hard ground, one edge unmistakably smeared in brand-new chicken shit.
“I’m impressed by how you’ve handled this. Your friendship with Carlos. I’m sure it hasn’t been easy for you.”
“Oh, we’re not friends, really,” Harrison heard himself say. And lo: he and Carlos were defined as not-friends, if indeed they ever had been friends.
“I know it’s challenging,” said Eli Absalom Stone. “In a community like this. If only the principles weren’t paramount, but they are. They always are.”
“Yes,” agreed Harrison.
“I’ve been asked to a conference this summer, in Virginia. Sort of a think tank some people I know are involved in. It’s in July, near Monticello.” Harrison’s thoughts were racing, both to keep up and to interpret—conference, Virginia, Monticello?—and Eli was still talking. “They’re kind of intentionally under the radar. But really wonderful people. So supportive of my education, and what I want to do.”
Then Harrison was confused. Eli’s education—famously—had been self-administered in a shack on a mountain in West Virginia. Then he realized what Eli must mean.
“Is that how you heard about Roarke?”
Eli nodded.
“Anyway, I thought you might like to come along. I expect you’ll want to be with your family over the summer, but…”
Be with? His family? He nearly shuddered. But then he was already shuddering in the cold, on the iced-over ground. “No,” Harrison managed. “Not at all.”
“I’ll be giving a talk,” Eli said. “You could give one of your own, if that interested you. It’s not a formal thing. Everyone who attends can speak on any topic they like. I’ve generally talked about education, my experience as a self-schooled student. Perhaps you’d like to talk about your exposure to progressive education, and what that was like as a young conservative intellectual. I think this group would find your account fascinating.”
But Harrison was still a sentence behind. Not just on “intellectual” (the word he had long embraced within himself, though it had never once been used aloud, in his presence, to describe him) but on “conservative,” which had not yet entered his lexicon of self-determination. It fell, at first, like a spatter of acid, and he recoiled from it, but that—he realized right away—was Walden, not him. Walden, where the very notion of conservatism (and intellectualism!) was poisonous, initiating a knee-jerk repulsion devoid of engagement. Though not him. Never him! Never, from the moment he’d begun to think critically, independently, and as a sentient being accountable to himself, not some inherited or institutionalized notion of worth. It was an almost comically head-smacking moment, the moment Harrison Oppenheimer understood that he himself was a young conservative intellectual. Naturally Eli Absalom Stone had seen that first. It was final proof, if proof were somehow necessary, that Eli was smarter.
“That’d be okay,” said Harrison. He wondered if they were supposed to shake hands or something, or if he needed to show his gratitude—his wild, deep gratitude—in some even more expressive way, like jumping up and down or throwing his arms around Eli’s slender brown neck. But while he was resisting this impulse they both were interrupted by a shout from the main lodge, where breakfast was not underway and no coffee awaited them or anyone else, because Gordon and Tony and Carlos himself had all, apparently, departed Roarke in the night, leaving a single letter of principled withdrawal for their former classmates and faculty, and never to return.
Chapter Eighteen
Anyone Else
In which Lewyn considers the grave responsibilities of guardianship, and
the seat beside the toilet turns out to be the best one on the bus
Lewyn was the only one of them who went home for spring break. Harrison had skipped the vacation (perhaps his weirdo school didn’t believe in vacations?) and Sally, he learned on his arrival, had apparently opted to stay at Cornell over the break to do some kind of internship with a local antiques dealer. This left Lewyn in a situation of exquisite discomfort, with our mother and the small person (though less small, even he could see, since the winter break) relentlessly present, and our father home even less than usual.
Johanna was in an especially bad way; this much was plain, even to him. The baby’s needs fell squarely on her, except for the four hours each afternoon when a woman named Marta arrived to perambulate it to sleep on the Esplanade and then do laundry in the basement. These were the hours our mother might appear in his room, asking about school and his new friends, or even his old friends, or—worst of all—Sally, who’d apparently been even more withholding from Johanna than he’d been, himself. Who were Sally’s friends? Our mother wanted to know. Was Sally dating any boys? And what did he know about this antiques person his sister had taken up with, who was some kind of a townie and not connected to the college at all? (Leave it to Sally, Lewyn thought, to find a non-Cornell person in a town jammed with students, faculty, and staff.) To these and many other queries Lewyn could provide no satisfying response, nor could he offer the slightest insight into his brother’s activities in New Hampshire, since the only information he possessed came from Johanna herself:
Harrison now knew all there was to know about chickens!
Harrison could drive a truck—a stick shift, no less!
Harrison would be spending part of the summer at some institute in Virginia, where he was giving a speech!
Lewyn had not one thing to say in response to any of these things.
“If you’re free on Thursday,” our mother said, “I’d like you to come with me on an errand. I could use your help.”
“Can’t Marta?” he asked. It was instinctive. He didn’t mean to be oppositional, and it wasn’t as if he had something else to do.
“No, she’s visiting her brother in the Bronx. Won’t take too long.”
So he agreed.
On Thursday, Johanna made him hold the infant while she and the car service driver adjusted a baffling number of straps and buckles to fasten the car seat to the middle of the back seat. There wasn’t adequate room for all three of them back there, which meant that he had to sit up front in the same seat that had recently hosted the driver’s breakfast, and the man made little effort to suppress his annoyance at having to clear away the detritus. A Hindi radio station was turned down low, and the baby objected loudly when her toy fell to the floor and Johanna wasn’t able to reach it. When they set off across the Brooklyn Bridge it began to rain heavily.
He realized, when they came to a stop on Park Avenue, just north of the Pan Am Building, that he’d never asked where they were going or indeed why they were going there, but it seemed clear from the neighborhood that Johanna’s errand was going to be either financial or legal in nature. Now, with the driver and his mother reversing their efforts on the car seat, seemed not a great moment to ask, so Lewyn stood on the sidewalk, awkwardly holding an umbrella over the stroller, waiting for the infant’s cradle to be snapped in. Then, still wielding the umbrella over the two of them, he walked behind his mother into the building.
When they reached the waiting area for Burke Goldman Finn & Emerson, Johanna stunned Lewyn by putting him in charge of the now dozing child.
“What?” he said, with great alarm. “But what if she wakes up?”
“You’ll figure it out,” said Johanna, not looking back as she followed a young man down a corridor.
Wait, he called after her, though perhaps not aloud. His heart was thudding. Before him, clammy, slumped in her plastic cradle, the nine-month-old person, shiny in the face with something unspeakable emerging from a single nostril, made him want to gag.
“Ooh! Can I peek?” The receptionist had stepped out from behind her desk. She leaned forward from the waist, her back remarkably straight, as if she’d spent hours in a yoga practice preparing for just this maneuver. “What a sweetie!” she whispered. “What’s her name?”