He got in. He held the acceptance letter before him as if it were a religious artifact, the Shroud of Turin. He told Mr. Macklin before he told his parents.
Caltech gave him a scholarship, but there were other questions that presented themselves to him, one after another: About where he would live. About how he would eat. This was the Depression; hunger was something to be concerned about.
“I’ve spoken to Arnold already,” said Mr. Macklin. Arnold was his friend from the Navy, who now worked as a lecturer at Caltech, and who was in need of help at the boardinghouse his family ran in Pasadena. Harold could live there and eat there, said Mr. Macklin’s friend, in exchange for honest work.
“You know you’re not getting any money out of us,” said his father, and that was all he said.
“Goodbye,” said his mother—his mother, in whom he could sometimes see reflections of Susan, when she turned her head a certain way, or on the rare occasions when she smiled. When he saw them, he looked away. They glinted too forcefully, like sun in his eyes.
I’ll never be back, he wanted to say, but he felt it was better to say nothing.
He hitchhiked to California. In 1936, Kansans were heading there anyway, in droves. He was eighteen years old. He had one parcel with him, a sort of bag he had made himself from bolts of oilcloth they had in the shed.
He spent four years living and working at the boardinghouse run by Mr. Macklin’s friend. Harold’s coursework was in mathematics. He fell asleep on his books; he had never been happier.
The thoughts he had suppressed for his whole life came bounding forth again, forcefully, joyfully, as if they could sense that, for the first time, they might be welcomed.
He met a graduate student named Ernest Clemson.
Ernest, too, was studying mathematics. He was six years older, slight and serious, ponderous and still. He was brilliant: everyone said it. He would go far in the field, they said. As an undergraduate, he had studied with Einstein. It was said, too, that Ernest was a natural teacher; that he would get the appointment of his choice. He had a beautiful well-formed face and neat small hands with which he gestured gracefully while speaking.
One night, taking a late solitary walk together on the outskirts of Old Town, Ernest fell toward him almost with a cry of pain, and kissed him. He said aloud what each one of them had been thinking for some time. “I’m sorry,” Ernest said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
It was the opening of a world.
Harold was set to graduate in 1940, when the rest of the world was at war. Pearl Harbor was one year away. In the States, the draft had already begun. So, like all young men, like Ernest, he went that spring to his local recruitment office and registered. But the vision that had impaired him since he was young had worsened to the point of severe impairment when he was not wearing his glasses. He took them off and blinked into what had become an abstraction, a blur of middle distance. “You’re blind,” said the officer. “And you can’t tell your colors apart, either.”
For the first time, then, Harold wondered what he would do when he graduated. He spoke to Ernest, who said, a bit mysteriously, “Why don’t you wait before making any decisions?” Ernest, unlike Harold, was in perfect health. He was drafted.
Shortly before he graduated, Harold received a letter. He would wonder, later, whether it was Ernest’s doing; he would wish to believe it was.
The letter asked him two things: First, what languages he knew. Second, whether he would be interested in working for the United States government in Washington, D.C.
If so, said the letter, please reply.
Yes, said Harold. I am immediately available for employment and relocation if necessary.
It was necessary. In 1940, shortly after graduating at the age of twenty-two, Harold packed up and moved across the country, from California to Arlington, Virginia. He said goodbye to Ernest, who, one year later, would be sent to fight in the Pacific theater.
For the next ten years, Harold worked in intelligence for the United States government. First, for the Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall; next, for the Signal Security Agency, which swallowed the SIS; next, for the U.S. Army Security Agency, which swallowed the SSA; finally, for the Armed Forces Security Agency, comprised of all intelligence units for every branch of the military. He broke codes: Japanese, mainly, but also German, and also, eventually, Russian. He was good at his work.
With William Friedman, he worked on the Venona Project that broke Soviet codes emanating from New York. He was integral to the building of the PURPLE machine that was a replica of a Japanese encryption device; with this duplicate, the United States was able to decrypt information that contributed directly to American success in the Pacific theater. He imagined, as he was working, that he was protecting Ernest. He worked harder.
For the first years of the war, he and Ernest wrote long and complicated letters to one another. Both of them, in person, had been happily loquacious, talking to each other for hours in a tumbling, almost psychic way. This tendency carried over into their letters.
Let me tell you about my day, Ernest might begin, and what followed was vivid, lucid writing, a detailed account of his every thought.
They employed a code the two of them had invented years earlier; relying on words, not numbers, it went undetected by the censors who scanned the mail. Brother, they called one other. Friend.
In these letters they made plans: following the war, Ernest would get a job at George Washington University, or Georgetown, or American. Harold would go to graduate school after the war. Washington, at that time, was flourishing with men like them. Lafayette Square, Dupont Circle, Logan Circle. Many of the public parks in the city. A community was forming. You’ll see when you get here, wrote Harold, in code.
In 1944, the letters stopped.
It took another six months for Harold to learn, definitively, that Ernest was gone. Killed in action. Harold had no one, after all, to ask: certainly not Ernest’s family, whom he had never met, who did not know of his existence. At last, a friend of theirs was able to confirm it. Harold took two days off from work, citing a stomach illness. He stayed home. He thought of Ernest. He thought of Susan.
When he returned, he threw himself into his work. Arlington Hall was brimming, then, with talented people, and in them Harold found friends. He sorted them out, assessing them carefully, wondering who might be an ally, deciding at last that there were several.