“I don’t ‘identify.’ It’s more of a genetic factor. Like being Aboriginal, or a Pict. You don’t go around feeling good about it or bad about it. It just is.”
“But still,” said Eli, though he was smiling, “the sacred brotherhood of the Negro and the Jew. Go down, Moses. Two peoples bonded in suffering. Do you think that explains our friendship?”
It was the reference to “friendship” that landed first. It distracted Harrison for a joyful moment, but then he had to address the question.
“I wouldn’t think so. Besides, my family’s had a pretty sweet couple of centuries. I did have this ancestor, though…” he heard himself say.
The landing gear was down. Below them, the legendary soil of the Commonwealth rose to meet them.
“What’s that?” said Eli. He was handing his plastic cup back to the flight attendant.
“My ancestor. Joseph Oppenheimer. Court Jew to a nobleman in Stuttgart in the 1730s. Arrested and executed for almost certainly nonexistent crimes.”
Beside him, his friend was frowning at some spot on the airplane floor. Harrison recognized this expression; it meant that Eli was searching his own cerebral accordion file. “You don’t mean Jud Süss,” he suddenly said. “Goebbel’s punching bag?”
“The very same,” said Harrison.
“You never said.”
“Why would I? There’s no sense in churning over these old events, however horrible. Despicable things have happened to lots of people, ever since human beings figured out how to harm one another. We’re alive now. Until someone invents a time machine, that should be the focus. Or do you disagree?”
“I don’t disagree. I’m just surprised. It would be like … well, myself descending from Nat Turner.”
The plane dropped onto the runway, bounced, and dropped again.
“Both targeted for what they were trying to do, to help their own people.”
Harrison shrugged. “Well, how much more fortunate are we, to be living today?”
After a moment Eli said: “Indeed.”
The plane shuddered to a stop at their gate.
“Will we get to see Charlottesville itself?” he asked Eli. “And Monticello?”
“You will. A couple of Monticello board members are involved with Hayek. Some are on the faculty at the university.”
Harrison turned to look at him. Unlike the other passengers, who were furiously unpacking the overhead bins, he remained in his seat with his eyes closed, and the light through the window lent his skin a distinct note of rose. He had gone for a haircut in town a couple of days earlier, and now it was very short, almost buzz-cut. “How did you meet these guys, again?” asked Harrison.
“Dr. Gregories and I corresponded when I was just starting to think about my book. He teaches at UVA, so I came down to Charlottesville to meet him, and a couple of the others. He suggested I defer Harvard and apply to Roarke. I’d never heard of Roarke. Then again, where I grew up, no one had heard of Harvard.” He smiled, but still didn’t open his eyes. “I was here last summer. These are people with a sincere interest in ideas. Especially ideas we don’t see often enough in the mainstream.”
From the airport they were driven south through farmland and past manor houses, some old, some built to look as if they were, but given away by their overblown dimensions and attached garages. A sign informed Harrison that they were on the Thomas Jefferson Parkway, and he turned to look up the drive toward Monticello. Just before Simeon they pulled off onto a gated property. The massive building came into view as they drove a slow, rising curve: a great estate unfolding along the base of a wooded hillside. At its heart was a white frame plantation house with porches on all three of its floors; on either side, modern extensions.
“I hope you won’t object to a few creature comforts,” Eli said. “I could use a break from Roarke privations.”
It seemed an odd thing for someone who’d grown up in a shack to say, Harrison thought. He himself, emphatically not raised in a shack, was absolutely open to such luxuries as a bath, a soft bed, and an opportunity not to feed chickens twice a day.
They were welcomed by two men not much older than themselves, who took their bags upstairs. Harrison watched them ascend and, at the landing, turn in separate directions, settling one of his lesser questions about whether they’d be sharing a room. A moment later, the kind and supportive Dr. Gregories himself materialized and shook Eli’s hand.
“Young man,” he said to Harrison, when they were introduced.
“Hello,” said Harrison. Then, to his own great surprise, he added: “Sir.”
“Please. Call me Oren. Hello, my friend,” he said to Eli. The two shook hands almost gently, with a kind of mutual contemplation. Professor Gregories was lanky, tall, and clubbable. He had ash-colored hair in retreat, whisper thin across the pate, scalp glimmering between the remaining strands. He wore immaculate khakis, a dark green belt, and a shirt so blindingly white it might never before have been exposed to air. A broad gold watch emerged as those two hands rose and fell. “How goes the new book?”
Eli had not mentioned that he was writing a “new book.”
“Slowly, but I’m encouraged. I am looking forward to making some progress these next few weeks.”
“Good. I hope you’ll stay as long as you like. You as well, Mr.… Oppenheimer.”
Yes, without doubt, the tiniest of pauses before his surname, which meant … what? Quite probably nothing, and yet, here they were: a young Black man and a young Jew at the hearth of obvious traditional entitlement, on what was quite possibly a once-plantation, snug in this most presidential terroir of American soil. Somehow they had slipped back into the source of it all.
Harrison’s bed was four-posted with a piece of linsey-woolsey stretched across the top. An adjacent study housed a six-foot-long desk in front of a window that overlooked woodland. He went to take a bath, his first since going home to Brooklyn at Christmas break, and there, embraced by the heat and the steam and the lavender smell of the soap, he drifted off for a few minutes or possibly longer. When he woke, it was time to go downstairs.
Later, he would think of that first evening as an irremediable transit from one state of being to another, so momentous and so permanent, not because he couldn’t go back but because he could not, for many years, imagine a reason to do so. The men he would meet that night—and that first night they were indeed all men—were powerfully intellectual, powerfully focused on impact, and just plain powerful, and as he was introduced to them and spoke with them, he began to read his own promise in their reflected interest.
The rest of them arrived over the following days. Two were senators from Midwestern states. One was a governor, another a pundit who wrote historical fiction, just for fun. Harrison met a recently retired member of the Harvard economics department and a rail-thin man with an accent he recognized from his Vineyard summers—moneyed New England, redolent of sailing and boarding schools—who declined to say more than that he worked in Washington. Eli introduced him to a squat man whose very round head segued directly into broad shoulders. This was Roger Fount, the chairman of Hayek.
Harrison spent the next days working on the meandering political journey of American Jews, exploring Charlottesville and Jefferson’s magnificent UVA campus, and visiting Monticello for a tour and a rose garden reception. After the seminars began, he attended every one, elated to find himself in room after room of robust thinkers and incisive questioners. It became commonplace, if never for one moment dull, to meet the authors of books he’d read, who might materialize in the bus seat beside him as they drove to a nearby winery for an outdoor dinner, or ahead of him in the buffet line at breakfast. A certain Princeton historian (for whose sake Harrison had once considered applying to Princeton) had the bedroom next to his and could be heard snoring through the wall. On his other side: a former ambassador to China.