AT THE TWO-WEEK MARK of emailing Elisabeth under the guise of trying to plumb “Radcliffe Memories,” I dared myself to call her. It was a Thursday, and I reached her at work. I introduced myself. “Yes, I know who you are. I’ve been ducking you,” she said. I apologized for having been so persistent. She laughed and invited me to call her back on Saturday.
When she picked up the phone two days later, Elisabeth’s voice was warm and buoyant. For almost half an hour we talked about her experience at Radcliffe without any mention of Jane. Elisabeth, the daughter of a New York Times foreign correspondent, had grown up abroad. When she got to Radcliffe, “I was a complete alien who nobody knew was an alien. I spoke the language, enough. And I didn’t let on.”
Blend in, she scolded herself. But it didn’t help the isolation. Radcliffe felt more like living in a hotel than in a community. “It was just so demeaning to me if you compared the women’s housing to the men’s.” The girls had curfews and “parietal” rules like “three feet on the ground at all times” when men were over. Class was a fifteen-minute walk to campus in mandatory skirts and stockings that were barely a shield against the cold. It wasn’t until 1973, after the houses went co-ed and men started living in the Radcliffe quad, that Harvard committed to the shuttle service that I knew.
But I recognized more of my experience than I expected. The ambition and grit of the undergraduates. The true nature of a Harvard education: learning how to get around red tape, excelling at the game of opportunity-making, deciphering academic double-speak. And most of all, the sink-or-swim nature of its advising: “You can’t cry at Harvard,” Elisabeth was told her freshman year, after a Kafkaesque battle over paperwork had kept her shuttling back and forth between administrative offices. At least, Elisabeth said, she enjoyed the food at Radcliffe. The food at her British boarding school had been “the liver of ancient cows that died of scurvy; cabbage boiled down to a puddle.”
But before I could ask about Jane, Elisabeth brought up her roommate: a young woman from Washington State who, she said, “was a perfectly nice person, but we didn’t really have a lot in common.”
As sure as I was that Jane was from Massachusetts, I was more sure that no one would dare describe her as “perfectly nice.” I worried Susan Talbot had gotten everything mixed up.
Elisabeth continued: “My best friend was a couple of doors down. She had been from early teens interested in anthropology.” This girl, Elisabeth explained, encouraged her to attend her first anthro class. “She got me smoking. She was the one who encouraged me to drink. All the wonderful gateways were opened by her.” Compared to her roommate, “Jane—the girl I became good friends with—was very much more worldly and also a hoot.”
Jane.
“To be totally honest with you,” I said, “one of my main interests in this era, is…” I stumbled. “I heard about what happened to her—” I trailed off.
“Yeah,” Elisabeth said, which gave me just enough courage to continue.
“—Or the rumors of what happened,” I said, “and I’m interested in finding out what exactly did.”
Her voice didn’t falter. “Boy, I would be happy to help you with that,” she said. I could feel relief pour through me like a tourniquet had been removed. “It was just horrifying.”