James went to the University of Chicago. It was near his house on the South Side, but his uncle had given him enough money to live in the dorms, so he did. He knew it was best to get out of his neighborhood. He wanted to start anonymous and new.
His dorm room was shabby and historic, as big as the entire downstairs level of his childhood home. He had a roommate, Bill, from New York, who told him the building they lived in was one of the oldest on campus, that the funny little windows they couldn’t open were called casement windows, that he should take three hard classes and two easy ones, so that his homework wouldn’t take up all of the time he would need to date girls.
James liked Bill because Bill was at ease in his own skin, could talk to anyone, and took it for granted that he and James would be best friends. Walking across the cleanly trimmed campus lawns, Bill ran monologues. “That’s Jeffries, he lives one floor below us. He’s brilliant at math and has a gin still in his closet, I hear. And that, over there, is Emmeline Waters. Her father is the dean of the English Department, but she only dates seniors. That’s your first period classroom over there; mine’s the other way. Meet back here after third and we’ll have lunch. But not at the dorm—in the pub.” James didn’t understand why Bill had adopted him, and he did not care. Without Bill, he would have been lost.
His classes were uncompromisingly difficult, even the easy ones. He was assigned hundreds of pages of reading a week and papers one after the other, a gristmill of words and ideas he could not quite understand. His classes were small, and his professors expected discussion; they called him out if he did not participate. He was exhausted. Bill managed to finish his assignments in time to take girls to dinner, leaving James hunched over his small dorm desk, rubbing his forehead in frustration, textbooks and pencil shavings littering the floor.
“I have every faith in your powers of intellect,” Bill said as he exited. “But could you please figure out a way to speed them up so that we can have some fun?”
James knew that Bill’s free time was a result of careless studying and haphazard essay writing. At the end of his first semester, Bill got a raft of Cs and laughed about them. James got a raft of Cs and wrote his uncle an apology.
I study constantly, James wrote, but I can’t figure out what they want from me.
What do you want? his uncle wrote back. Surely not to spend every waking moment chained to your desk. There is more to college than academics.
James exhaled for the first time in months. Then he turned off his desk lamp, lay down on his narrow bed, and slept for twenty-four hours. He awoke stiff, dry-mouthed, and disoriented. It was early afternoon; outside his window, dry February snow blew in circles on the ground. The stack of textbooks on his desk was as strict as ever, but he did not want to study. He smiled; it was the first time he had admitted that. He did not want to study. But then, what did he want to do? He thought for a moment and realized he wanted to be himself. For months he had been nobody: a reader, a listener, blank and amorphous, painstakingly translating the instructions that would help him take on form. He felt deaf and dumb. The silence in his room unnerved him. How could he have spent so many months motionless and alone? He wanted to be in a room full of people, to be part of a pack, to roughhouse as he had with his brothers, to joke and laugh and be loud.
Bill was dating a tall girl named Millie, who studied music. Every weekend, Bill got together with a group of guys to hang out with Millie’s friends, all of whom also studied music. James started to tag along. It was too cold to walk anywhere, but Bill had a car, into which could squeeze four guys and four girls, if they were willing to sit on laps. The boys wore button-down shirts; the girls wore plaid circle skirts and bright sweaters. Their breath fogged the windows; their perfume crept into James’s hair. The group never went too far from campus, just four or five blocks. It was far enough to feel like an adventure, but close enough that the pizza was cheap and the bars were filled with people they knew.
His classes were not any easier, but his uncle had been right; there was more to college than the library and the classroom. On his nights out, James learned much about his new world. For instance, he discovered that no one in Bill’s crowd was going to shoulder him up against the bar and dare him to do something about it. There was no need for James to hang back, size people up, figure out whom he could take easily or who might knock him down.
At first, it was disconcerting. James felt uncomfortable. He stood at the edge of groups, laughing at other guys’ jokes, deciphering what they considered funny and what they considered coarse. He discovered that he should sit back in a booth and relax, that he could cross his legs without it meaning anything, that drinks were bought in rounds, beer in pitchers instead of pints. He got used to guys shaking his hand in greeting, clapping him on the shoulder. He began to trust that if one of them borrowed five dollars, it would always be repaid.
Still, James felt uneasy. He had thought that once he learned to fit in, there would be more. That once they had all gotten to know each other, conversations would move past sports and cars, perhaps expand to include politics or careers. James wanted to learn how these men’s minds worked: What did they worry about, if they did not have to worry about money or fighting or food? They did not tell him, and James could not figure out if it was because they were not that interested in him or they were not that interested in the world.
Nan spent her first semester at Wheaton writing letters to her mother. She told her mother about her roommate, Carol, who was from New York City and so would have her coming out at the Plaza. It sounds very grand, Nan wrote, but intimidating. She wrote that her room was cozy, the food fine, and the girls friendly; someone was always on hand to zip up a dress, lend a bobby pin, hold a door. She wrote that she enjoyed literature and French and that daddy had been right: the music department was terrific. She did not write any more about it, because she did not think her mother would understand. Her mother had grown up in a church that had discouraged listening to music, beyond hymns, of course, and so her mother thought of music simply as one of the sounds of worship. Nothing more.
Nan had joined her church choir when she was seven, partly to have something to do besides sit by her mother in the front pew, partly so that she could stop wearing itchy stockings, since her legs would be covered by robes. But from her first rehearsal, she was overwhelmed by the harmonies and the descants, dissonance and resolution, how so many different notes sat together in one chord and how each one was necessary for that chord to sound whole. She, herself, sang second soprano, but she was fascinated by the depth and intensity of the basses. In the sanctuary, their voices blended with the low notes of the organ, steady as a metronome; in the practice room, the power of their sound was startling, even more so as she matched voices to faces and discovered that the most luxurious tones were sung by the plainest, smallest of men. There were, it seemed, many secrets in music, and she wanted to know all of them.
At eleven, she asked for a piano and had taken lessons twice a week, learned to read time signatures and clefs, rests and fermatas, sharps and flats. She had been given solos at church and in the musicals at school. She was known as the girl who could sing. But, at Wheaton, she was discovering that her experience was the equivalent of a mechanic knowing how to change a tire. Now, she was in classes where they were assigned symphonies to read like books. They picked them apart like taking out stitches, laying the sleeves and collars and skirts out flat, then learning to put them back together. They compared different composers who worked in concurrent years and compositions in the same style that had been written hundreds of years apart. One of her professors held class in an auditorium that housed three pianos, so that students could play different pieces of music simultaneously and then talk about how they fit together, where they fell apart.
Nan did not have the words to explain how this affected her. She could say that it felt like she was a piece of muslin and the lessons were embroidered onto her. Or she could say that her assignments felt like a thousand-piece puzzle, and every time she put one together, it became a part of her. But she was afraid those words would sound crazy to her mother, and that the intensity with which Nan would write them would sound crazier. So she wrote about the weather, how the trees were encased in ice and there was hot chocolate in thermoses on the dining room sideboards all day long. She did not want her mother to worry, because Nan wanted to stay.
She was making friends in her music classes, and she liked the church on campus. The congregation was almost exclusively students, which was new for Nan, and somewhat strange, but it meant that there were parties every weekend. Not Kappa parties, but parties just the same.
Most weekends, one of the girls in James’s group performed in some sort of recital. These were given in various small concert halls on campus, all of which were hushed and carpeted, with a blue curtain that opened to reveal a piano spotlit on the stage. To his surprise, James enjoyed these. It was easy to sit in the darkness and listen to girls sing. There was no mystery to it, nothing to decipher, he could close his eyes and simply feel the fullness of the chords, notice the way the melody wound its weblike way around the room.
He had never been exposed to serious music before, never heard Italian arias or cheerful German folk tunes. It was a relief to encounter something new and not be expected to remember it, to take notes on it, to answer questions about it, or analyze its salient points. After a while, James stopped accepting the mimeographed programs the ushers handed out as the audience walked in. He didn’t care what the music was called or who wrote it; he just wanted to listen.
It was at one of these recitals that James first saw Nan. She was the accompanist. She sat in the spotlight on the shiny black piano bench, her back straight, fingers poised over the keys. She had wavy blond hair held back from her eyes by a rhinestone pin. She wore a plain navy blue dress, a simple gold necklace, and no nail polish. She was almost plump and as pale as milk.
James was used to paying attention to the singer, the girl who clasped her hands beneath her breasts and pushed her voice up and out, flinging it to the back of the room. The singers always wore nail polish, bright pink or red. Nan looked at the singer while she played, nodding her head as the other girl did, waiting for her to catch a breath before she continued playing. Nan held her mouth slightly open, leaned forward, almost, but not quite, mouthing the words of the song. James could not take his eyes off her. She was not singing. She was accompanying. Accompanying, he said to himself, what a wonderful word.
After Nan’s recital James’s group went to the pub on campus, as usual. James knew, now, that the way to approach a girl was to buy her a Coke. If he asked if she wanted a drink, she might say no. If she said yes, he had to leave her and spend ten minutes at the bar while she talked to everyone who wasn’t him. Some girls said no to a beer, but no one said no to a Coke, so he bought two and searched the topography of heads until he saw a blond one wearing a rhinestone pin.
James had never noticed just how many girls there were. They circled around Nan like geese, a maze of pale cardigans and pearl earrings. Bill had managed to infiltrate the circle, to sit on a barstool with Millie on his lap. James watched him whisper something in Millie’s ear that made her peal and blush. James hung back; he was afraid that once he got close to Nan he might crowd her, break something, lean too close and spill ice on her skirt. His head felt loose, too large for his body. But he forced himself to push forward, edging between couples, smelling the mix of perfumes.
As soon as he got to her, Nan looked up. Her eyes were blue.
“Great recital,” he said, handing her the tall glass, which was sweating.
“Oh,” she answered brightly, “I missed four chords, but I was happy with the timing. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” James said. “Having fun?” He felt wooden.
“I am!” Nan said. “We don’t do this kind of thing at Wheaton.”
“You go to Wheaton?” It was an hour-and-forty-five-minute train ride away.
Nan nodded. “I just filled in tonight, for a friend of a friend.” She was smiling at him, small, neat, and clean. The top of her head came to his shoulder. She smelled like vanilla.
James was already working out a plan to borrow Bill’s car.
On Tuesdays, the day on which he had no afternoon classes, James drove forty-five minutes to Wheaton, paid for visitor parking, and met Nan outside her French class to walk her to her dorm. He sat on a bench outside while she went upstairs to change for dinner, and they ate at one of the places in Wheaton’s small campus town. He drove up again on Saturday mornings and they spent nice days in the park, rainy days in the library.
Nan seemed to think this behavior was perfectly normal. Girls from James’s old neighborhood would have teased him, accused him of pestering them, mocked him for the persistent gleam in his eye. Bill raised his eyebrows every time he handed James the car keys and said, “She better be worth it.” Bill was the only other person who knew that James was now cramming all of his schoolwork into four nights a week because, in order to afford all this courtship, James had taken a job bussing tables at a pizza parlor Friday and Saturday nights.
It was worth it; Nan was the gentlest and most considerate person James had ever known. She listened to him as he talked about his academic struggles and lingering sense of alienation. She did not speak until she had thought for a moment or two; then she said things like Some people don’t think about how their actions make people feel and Obviously, you’re going to do well in school, it may just be harder than you want it to be. James could have taken them as platitudes, but when she spoke, she looked him in the eye with an expression that was neither pitying nor patronizing. She meant what she said; she wanted to help him look at his life in a different way.
James wasn’t stupid; he knew Nan was too good for him. From first glance, he could tell she had money and a lineage, grace, kindness, and generosity. He knew what it meant to date girls whose fathers had money. He needed more than a job—he needed a career.
He wrote to his uncle for advice, as he often did. I must find something to do, and no one here wants to help me. The professors are caught up in ideas and theories; their students run in circles around them, barking to be heard.
I wondered when you’d outgrow them, his uncle wrote back. More quickly than I thought. What are you studying?
Philosophy, James told him. Anthropology, Rhetoric, Latin II.
His uncle answered, Philosophy, anthropology, Latin—the underpinnings of religion, the very subjects that drew me to God.
Over the next few weeks, they exchanged a dozen letters, from which James learned that his uncle worked in finance because he liked numbers, specifically their round weight, like that of marbles, sensible and clear. At the same time, James learned that his uncle experienced God as a tangible entity in his life, unseen but present, most often at dusk, and that he prayed to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and all the saints, according to their particular auspices.
James ignored his uncle’s theology and wrote, finally, They’re all so busy being clever they’ve forgotten that once I graduate, I’ve got to get a job.
And what job would you like to find? his uncle asked.
I don’t know, James answered. I want to be useful. I want to see results. I don’t ever want to have to go back home.
His uncle took longer than usual to reply. I think you should know, he wrote, eventually, that I tried to help your mother. A hundred times I tried to help her, and she wouldn’t let me.
Because she was afraid?
Because she wouldn’t subject your father to the shame of being supported by another man. That’s the choice she made.
James had never realized his mother had been given choices. He took some time to write his answer. When he finally did he said, I don’t ever want to have to stand by and watch people suffer. I want to confront the things that need confronting. How do I do that?
Politics, his uncle answered, medicine, religion, education, law.
James nodded as he read the letter. Law, he thought, I’ll be a lawyer, and Nan will be proud.
On Tuesdays, Nan arrived early for her afternoon French class so that she could get a seat by the window and watch for James to come loping up the pathway in his khakis and grey tweed coat. At first sight of him, she closed her notebook and put her pencil in her bag, so that she could pack up as quickly as possible and be the first person out the door.
Nan had always expected to meet her husband in college. She had assumed some boy would find her pretty and charming, like her more than he liked other girls, trust her enough to let her choose a house and raise his children. She had assumed she would find a boy she thought was handsome, who was on his way to making money, whom she trusted to buy her jewelry and pick out their cars.
She had not expected James, with his wry smile and messy hair. She had not expected to wake up in the morning and wish he were with her, to hurry through breakfast, leave class directly at the ring of the bell so she could be with him more quickly. She had not expected to feel panicked when he was late or relieved when she saw him, to relax when he put his arm around her. She had not expected her heart to race furiously when he kissed her, or to want to be with him more than anyone else. She had not expected to need him as surely as she needed shoes. She had not expected him to become so quickly, so irreversibly, essential.
She wanted James to love her. She knew he was wary. He often walked awkwardly, one shoulder hunched, tense, ready to run away. She recognized his vigilance; she had seen the same look of distrust in so many eyes on her visits to parishioners with her father. It was the look people had when they needed to be treated with dignity after so much of life had been unfair. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, hold him as she would a frightened bird, thumb on its back, fingers on its shaking, feathered chest.
She thought he might be worried that she was as silly as her friends, only interested in clothes and cars and television. So she told him about music: about learning how to tune a piano, to transpose a score, her first experiments in conducting. She told him about her mother and father, and how they had fought about her leaving home. She told him how homesick she was, sometimes—how much she missed the smell of mown grass and the ironed sheets on her childhood bed. As she spoke about them, she realized she was letting them slip away.
She invited James to church. The prospect terrified her. James had told her he was not religious; he had meant it, and the determination in his voice had given her great pause. Of all the things she thought she could give up for him, she could not give up her faith in God. She had pondered this as deeply as her father would have wanted her to, and she had come to the conclusion that her faith was an essential part of the person she wanted to be. Who would she be without God? What purpose would her childhood have served? Whom would she thank for her blessings? How would she understand the workings of the world? How would she accept its mysteries?
On the appointed Sunday, James arrived in a coat and tie that he had obviously borrowed from Bill. Nan was instantly less nervous; it was a gesture that meant he was willing to try. They arrived for the eleven o’clock service ten minutes early and sat in the third pew. Nan was usually in the choir stalls, as she had been since childhood, but she didn’t want this to be a performance. She didn’t want James to be her audience. She wanted him to be her date, her partner. She wanted to listen to the word of God with him, to have a shared experience of faith. She wanted it so badly she felt made of glass.
It had been years since she had sat in a church pew, facing the altar instead of standing with her back to it, looking out over the congregation as she sang. She felt ordinary and plain. But she didn’t mind, because she was sitting next to someone whose hand she could reach out and hold, marveling at how astonishing it felt to love God and man so fully at the same time.
James, however, was obviously distracted. It seemed he could not be still. He opened and closed the hymnal and the prayer book, read ahead in the bulletin, took his offering cash out of his pocket much too early, folded and unfolded it until the offering plate finally came around. He rubbed his temples during the sermon and sat on his hands during the prayers. Nan had never seen him so uncomfortable, and she sat through the service wondering if he would ever want to try it again, anxious that this Sunday would be his last.