The rest of the summer passed uneventfully; there were no more parties, and Jo took Reuben sailing on the weekends, leaving Parker, Asa, and Roberto to sit by the pool during the dog days. The second tall building remained a hole in the ground and Reuben’s plan for the four of them to make a big climb remained just a plan. By September all of them were ready for a change. Their sweaters and scarves looked like Christmas presents—new and unusual—when they came out of the cedar trunks where they’d been laid in April. Dr. Thayer took Asa to Brooks Brothers and bought him a dark blue cashmere coat that came to his knees and had a flap to hide the buttons; it was his first overcoat and, according to his father, his last. Standing at his mirror late at night he tried it on and pretended he was a playboy, with his suntanned skin against the heavy, deeply colored collar. In St. Moritz for the day, back from the Bahamas—he walked back and forth in front of the mirror hoping to catch himself unawares in it and find himself also new and unusual.
On September 15, the group went down to the Back Bay Station together—except Roberto, who was staying in Cambridge to redo his final year at a cram house called Manter Hall. More than Reuben, Roberto was incapable of putting his heart into school; he had been dismissed from Andover in the middle of his senior year for cheating on a Latin test. Like mother and money, this was not a topic for discussion. In fact, the first Asa heard of it was at the beginning of September, when Roberto started classes. Manter Hall was in the middle of Harvard Square and was filled with “problem” boys whose parents were determined that they go to acceptable colleges. The school offered facts and numbers and topic sentences; there was no pretense of inspiring the students, much less making gentlemen of them. Roberto rode Reuben’s ten-speed in the mornings and sat on the Eliot House lawn to eat his lunch in isolation. At week’s end he was quizzed by his adviser and, after dinner, by his troubled father, who concluded each session by asking how he had produced two dullards and what he was going to do about them.
So Roberto, now in a permanent sulk, was cramming the binomial theorem at ten-fifteen in the morning when Reuben, Parker, and Asa stood in a knot amid hundreds of others heading north and south to school.
Asa wore his coat despite the balmy amber weather. Reuben was wearing a white T-shirt against all regulations (“Andover students are expected to wear jackets and ties at all times when school is in session except in their private rooms”). Parker wore Clem’s outgrown Harris tweed sportcoat, which was baggy but sophisticated. They didn’t speak much. Reuben fiddled with his racquet press and wondered aloud if the Spaniard with the terrific serve would be returning. “You’re such a jock,” snapped Asa, who hated tennis and was tired of watching Reuben dash off to games with Jo, practice his backhand off the garage, and buy five pairs of white shorts and white socks in a ten-minute trip to J. August, Clothiers to Gentlemen. He had dragged Asa along. Reuben had taken large bills from his wallet and handed them to the cashier without looking, the way Asa’s father paid for dinner when he and Asa’s mother came for Parents’ Weekend at Choate; it made Asa nervous to watch Reuben flipping twenties in and out of his pocket. The differences between their lives seemed to be growing. And yet, here in the station, where the sun streaked the floor with dust-infused stripes, where the pigeons who roosted in the painted plaster ceiling swooped down after a dropped piece of raisin bun, where all the young men of good family in the Boston area stood stiff in new khakis, Reuben was everything familiar and comfortable, and Asa hated leaving him and their wonderful, pointless, seemingly endless but now ending summer.
Asa and Parker had taken up smoking during the heat spell when Reuben was off on the Bay in Jo’s boats, and they now lighted their last Pall Malls of the season with Parker’s Zippo, which he’d “clipped” (his new word) from his father’s bureau. Reuben was scornful. “You guys are idiots,” he said. He had stopped smoking because he didn’t want to impair his lung capacity. This reason, repeated whenever they lit up, made the smokers giggle each time they heard it. “Oh, stop it,” Reuben said.
“What? Smoking?” Parker blew some rings; he was good at it.
“You know, your father’s the one who told me it impairs your lung capacity.” Reuben put his hand on Asa’s cashmere arm.
“Yes, it sounds just like him,” said Asa. He inhaled and felt the dusty rasp of tobacco traveling down his throat. He loved smoking. It made him aware of every breath, of the dimensions of his insides, of the taste of his mouth and lips, of the way his hand held and moved objects. He put a cloud of smoke between himself and Reuben. Reuben could be anybody, a stick figure in a drawing, a fifth former he didn’t know.… The train to Wallingford was called.
The Choate-bound boys grabbed their suitcases and ran for the stairs, turning at the top to wave to Reuben, who had to wait for the shuttle to North Station. He was standing alone in the space the three of them had carved out, between two sunbeams. He put his tennis racquet up in front of his face so he looked like a dog in a pound, or a prisoner pressing on his bars. “Live it up!” he yelled. “Give ’em hell!” Then he raised the racquet high and served an imaginary ball in their direction. The crowd pressed them down the stairs to the track, where the air smelled of steam and hot metal and winter was on the heels of the breeze that funneled into the tunnel.
Toward the end of October, when the days had been truncated by the turning back of the clocks, Asa returned to his triple after European history to find a letter from Reuben. It was a four-line note that read:
Dear Asa, I’m taking five courses and playing soccer. I’m flunking four of them but still counting on you as my Harvard roommate. Come up and cheer for me next weekend when we play Exeter. I’ll meet 11:20 train on Saturday.
R.
How like him to assume I’ll come, thought Asa, but already he’d begun to tally up his clean socks and consider what books he’d take to study on the train. He rummaged on top of Parker’s desk to see if he had also gotten an invitation, and was happy to find he hadn’t. Parker was wearing a bit thin on Asa. He insisted on smoking in their rooms, which was grounds for expulsion, he made piles of clothes at the foot of his bed, which smelled long before he got around to taking them to the laundry, and he was under the spell of Baudelaire, whom he quoted unceasingly in French. Harrison Grey, the other roommate, had exchanged his seersucker suit for gray flannel but was as dull as ever. He was dull-witted as well, and had to study hard; every evening he sat with a straight back at his desk and read while Parker tried to distract him.
“Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie n’a bougé,” Parker would intone, flinging open the windows that gave onto the peaceful Connecticut fields. Then, standing behind Harrison’s flannel back, “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère.” None of this had any effect on Harrison, who took German not French, but it drove Asa to the library for peace.
In the library Asa daydreamed. He preferred to read lying down, and to write his papers late at night, so there was little for him to do in the library. He thought about Reuben. At first it seemed he was thinking about the summer; he remembered the glittering water and the feel of the canvas chair against the backs of his knees, and contrasted it with the beige spiky trees clustered outside the long library windows and the mahogany chair where he sat and watched those trees lose their leaves. But in his thoughts Reuben was always sitting in a deck chair beside him, and they were planning escapades, or parties, exchanging stories about girls (something they never did in reality), getting to know each other. For Asa had realized that they didn’t know each other. Friendship in his little gang consisted of Parker and Asa vying for Reuben’s attention and thinking of subtle ways to exclude Roberto. Asa wondered: Did Reuben know he was the focus and that this kept the others divided? Asa decided that Reuben might not only know this but have manufactured it himself. On the other hand, it was possible that he was oblivious, as he pretended to be. But didn’t that oblivion contain a sort of natural arrogance and pride, which took for granted rivalries and jealousy? Perhaps that was why Reuben had gravitated to Jo; he could have conversations with her. But Reuben lying blond and warm on the deck of a boat with Jo had not been seeking a conversation. Asa remembered Jo’s hand on Reuben’s bony wrist in the car, and the mixed-up taste of Jo’s mouth—the conversations those two had were silent, also of a sort Reuben couldn’t have with Asa.
Asa tipped his chair back and watched rain moving in over the tops of trees. He wanted someone to talk to about how he felt watching trees in the rain, which was sad and delighted and hollow, as if his insides had become a receptacle for emotions that floated in the air, looking for a resting place. Parker looking at trees felt he was Baudelaire; what Asa wondered was how Reuben felt. Did he ever stop to look at trees?
So the invitation was opportune, because Asa needed to know more about Reuben. He packed his changes of socks and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, put The Mayor of Casterbridge in the pocket of his cashmere coat, and set out early on Saturday morning by train, which sped along the flat, frost-encrusted lower New England seashore stirring flocks of small gray gulls with its approach. At the Back Bay Station he was a tourist waiting for the shuttle to North Station and another train to take him further up. This train passed through still mill towns where long, black factories with broken windows hunched empty. Asa had enough history to know that only fifty years before, cousins of his had overseen cousins of Reuben’s as they bent over looms in these mills. Or was he mistaken, and did Jews not have cousins? His impression of Jews was that like his own class they were a small group given to marrying each other and avoiding outsiders; such behavior led to a multitude of cousins. He decided to ask Reuben about the family arrangements of Jews.
At Andover everything looked exactly as it looked in Wallingford. There were white houses ringed around a common thick with beeches and oaks; there were fewer than seven shops, and those sold either food, books, or pharmaceuticals; there were handsome dogs sporting on the brown lawns. Waiting for the train to stop moving so he could descend, Asa had a moment of envying Roberto, who had all of Harvard Square to prowl through on his way to and from school. Why was it a privilege to be hidden away in these sleepy country towns?
Reuben was leaning against the side of the ticket booth. For once he was dressed correctly, in a blue-gray tweed jacket, blue tie with white stripes, white shirt, and charcoal-gray pants. His clothes were of excellent quality and excellently tailored, but he seemed to be wearing a costume. Asa stopped at the top step and looked Reuben over, wondering how he managed to appear oddly dressed in what was, after all, the term-time uniform of everyone the two of them knew. It was the sneakers, Asa decided. Reuben wore once-white sneakers so old that his little toes popped through on both feet. Asa wore cordovans his father had bought him in tenth grade, which he hated because the color reminded him of slaughtering chickens with his grandfather. His father had said, as when he’d bought the cashmere coat, “These will last for the rest of your life.” It appeared he was right. Asa’s cordovans trod the grimy steel steps of the train down to the platform and went to Reuben’s side.
The game began at one, so they went immediately to the dining hall, where a number of people said hello to Reuben. Asa hoped to be introduced but wasn’t. Then Reuben put Asa in an armchair in the library, gave him instructions to the playing fields (the grounds were enormous, far larger than Choate’s), and hurried to his pregame strategy meeting in the locker room. “Sit on the right side,” he called from the door, “that’s our side.” Asa read The Mayor of Casterbridge for a while and fell asleep. He had been up at six, and was accustomed to rising at seven-thirty; that tiredness combined with the lulling movement of the train, which persisted in his body, the chicken pie filled mostly with potatoes, and the deliberate unrolling of Hardy’s plot to stupefy him. He slept for a long time. When he woke up the sun was lower, brighter, and shining in a different window. He pulled out his pocket watch: three o’clock. Over the tops of trees, muted by the carpets in the library but clear and high, yells came from the direction Reuben had pointed him in hours before. Asa jumped out of his chair and began formulating excuses. I’ll just tell him I couldn’t get through the crowds to him, he thought. The first order of business, though, was to find out who’d won the game. Then he could make his way to the locker room with congratulations or comfort.
He put on his coat and went outside under the elms flanking the library to overhear the news. It was clear that Andover had trounced Exeter. The yellow buses at the foot of the great lawn, which had brought the Exeter team and boosters, were filling with quiet pairs of boys; shirt-sleeved Andoverites were doing handsprings and somersaults on the stubbly grass. Asa went up to some boys standing near him who were describing the game play-by-play to each other, relishing their favorite moments.
“Can you tell me how to get to the locker room?” he asked.
“You from Exeter?” Everybody looked at him intently.
“No, Choate. I’m a friend of somebody on your team.”
“Who?” The one asking didn’t relax his suspiciousness, although the others seemed prepared to go back to their game review. He peered through his gold rims as though he suspected Asa of being a spy.
“Sola,” said Asa.
“What position does he play?” Gold Rims, Asa could see, had decided to make sport by grilling him. This was precisely the question he hadn’t wanted to be asked, because he hadn’t a clue to what position Reuben played.
“Oh, leave him alone, Bowditch. I know Sola, he’s left wing,” one of the calmer boys said. “The gym is about three minutes that way, and the locker room’s on your right.” He pointed past the library. “Tell him he made a terrific goal there, at the end.”
“Thanks,” said Asa. He buttoned his coat up and set off, pleased to have gotten two unexpected and useful pieces of information. He could congratulate Reuben on his goal.
But when he got to the locker room and saw Reuben stripped and shiny among all the others, he didn’t want to lie. Reuben asked how he’d enjoyed himself, and Asa said, “I fell asleep and missed the whole thing.”
“Wonderful,” Reuben said. “Just the thing to do. Not worth watching anyhow. It’s fun to play, but I don’t bother going to games I’m not in. It’s cold and boring.” He combed his wet hair back from his forehead with a small tortoiseshell comb that had a gold edge and looked as if it belonged to a woman. “Hold on a second, I’ll be dressed and we can go have something hot.” He winked; Asa wondered if he had a booze cache somewhere and supposed so.
“That’s a very nice comb,” Asa said. Some demon motivated him; he knew it would be the wrong thing to say. Sure enough, Reuben’s face became blank and stiff.
“Thanks,” he said, and slipped it quickly into the pocket of his pants, which were still hanging in his locker.
“Was it your mother’s?” Asa persisted. He amazed himself; he couldn’t imagine why he was pursuing this dangerous topic, but his resolve to “get closer” to Reuben and to find out about Jewish family affairs seemed to justify snooping.
“Forget it,” said Reuben. “Go outside and wait for me.” Asa obeyed. Reuben kept him waiting fifteen minutes as punishment. Asa used the time to formulate more invasive questions, which he resolved to ask late at night, when Reuben was tired. Who was your mother? he would ask, and, Why is she never discussed? What is your father really like? and, Who is Grace? How much money do you have? Where are your cousins? Do you have grandparents? How many kisses, and what besides kisses, have you and Jo exchanged? Do you prefer Parker to me? When he reached this question Asa realized he probably wouldn’t ask any of the questions. He resolved not to be petulant. After all, he, not Parker, was waiting for Reuben. He wondered why the answers to these questions interested him as much as they did.
He thought perhaps the way to find the answers was to confide in Reuben; after all, their ignorance extended both ways. Reuben didn’t know about the whore in June, or Mrs. Thayer’s two stillborn children, one before, one after, Asa. These two pieces of information didn’t seem as thrilling as the information Asa was looking for, but that might be because he possessed them already. Maybe Reuben would find them valuable. He could only offer them and see what happened.
It was dark and chilly outside on the northern wall of the gym, facing the fields and woods whose feathery outlines Asa could no longer see. He had a sense of having traveled north, and this made him long for New Hampshire. Thanksgiving would be at his grandparents’ farm as usual, and he had a vivid memory of tramping through icy mud in the morning to fetch eggs for breakfast from under the warm hens. He liked the cleanness of winter, the way the air was purified and thinned until it became nearly painful to breathe. He took a deep breath, waiting for the minty sharpness of the air, but October was too early for that. And then Reuben came out, with a mist of heat around him and his jacket open, and took Asa’s arm, so that Asa’s solitude was melted. They walked arm in arm back to the dining hall through the moist leaves that clung to the paths.
This time Reuben introduced Asa to a few of the people who greeted him in the food line. But he steered them to a table in the corner that was unoccupied except for a thin, pale-brown boy bent over a plate of steak and potato. This fellow, who rose as they approached, was too tall for himself—his cuffs had not kept pace with his arms, and he wobbled when he stood, so Asa imagined he’d shot up five inches overnight and hadn’t adjusted. All his features were watered-down hazel and looked unhealthy; his hair was slicked sideways with an unguent that gave off an unpleasant glow, his eyes were bloodshot, and his face was nicked and chipped from acne. Instead of a tie he wore a red polka-dotted ascot. To Asa’s surprise, Reuben clapped this character on the shoulder and introduced him enthusiastically.
“Kuhn,” he said, “meet Asa Thayer, my companion in Cambridge. This is Jerry Kuhn, without whom Andover would be unbearable.”
Asa looked at Jerry Kuhn and wondered how he could improve Andover so much, then looked around the dining hall, wondering what had to be improved. It was a larger, more pleasant dining hall than Choate’s, because it was older and therefore had wood paneling, two chandeliers, and decent refectory tables. Choate had in the past five years been given an anonymous million and spent it on building a few new, ugly buildings, one of which was a dining hall with pastel walls and Formica-topped tables for easy cleaning. Asa much preferred this, which was an inflated version of his dining room at home. For that matter, it wasn’t very different from Reuben’s dining room. As to Kuhn, Asa couldn’t imagine what he had to offer. He felt himself sinking into a sulk, but was unable to stop it.
The two of them were full of chat. Reuben was ribbed about being a “jock,” about his having saved the team’s honor with his goal, and then about his clothes.
“You are really looking the part tonight—expecting somebody to take your picture for the yearbook? I see you’ve got your Andover tie on, that’s the school spirit we like to see here. Nice cloth”—Kuhn’s long finger massaged Reuben’s collar—“have that made up for you at Brooks by the dozen, eh?”
“Jerry, you’re the worst snob on campus,” said Reuben cheerfully. He put a potato skin in his mouth and pulled it across his front teeth to extract all the pulp. Asa was glad to see his table manners weren’t any better at school than at home. But apparently Jerry found them offensive.
“Christ almighty, learn to eat with your mouth shut, man, or you’ll never be part of the ruling class.”
“Is that what I’m aiming for?” Reuben asked. They both laughed. Asa, not wanting to be left out, laughed as well, but he felt on dangerous ground. What was he laughing at? One must eat with a shut mouth. That was common knowledge. On the other hand, he took a mystifying but real pleasure in Reuben’s flouting of these fundamental rules; perhaps Jerry shared this pleasure, and it made him laugh. Reuben was satisfying because he didn’t bother with table manners, proper shoes, or proper grades—but Asa assumed this was by choice, not because he was incapable or ignorant. Reuben’s knowing better and behaving worse took courage.
Reuben said, with his mouth full, “I am in the ruling class, Jerry, and don’t you forget it.” Jerry laughed some more and Asa stared at his plate where a half moon of fat was turning hard.
“Money’s only half of it. Around here it won’t even get you in the door. Or just in the door. None of these fellows has any money.” Jerry waved his arm at the ranks of tweed backs. “They pride themselves on not having any money.” He turned to Asa. “How much money do you have at your disposal?”
Asa bristled. This was one of the questions he was meaning to ask Reuben, but it was entirely different to have it posed by a stranger. “Not much,” he said evenly, and hoped he’d covered the topic. But he hadn’t.
“And how much is that?”
“Well, nothing, unless I ask for it.”
“Aha,” said Jerry.
“Come on,” Reuben said, “you’ve got an allowance or something, don’t you?”
“No, I’ve got what I earned last summer, and my mother sends me fifteen dollars a month out of that.” They stared. “It’s not like I need money for anything,” Asa said. “What would I get?”
“Cigarettes,” said Reuben.
“Books,” said Jerry.
“Booze,” said Reuben.
“Tickets to the movies,” said Jerry.
“I can’t smoke at school,” said Asa sadly. He missed it. “How about you?” He looked at Reuben beside him, with gravy on his shirt. “What have you got?”
“Oh, Jesus, I don’t know. I have a checking account, and my father, or the bank, or someone, drops two hundred dollars a month into it.”
“Two hundred dollars a month!” Asa leaned back in his chair. “You could—you could go around the world!”
“If I saved it,” Reuben agreed. “But I don’t save it. I get stuff.”
“Like the car?”
“Oh no, Father got me that. Like these.” He shot his cuffs and showed Asa gold and mother-of-pearl cuff links in the shape of grape leaves.
“And they’re absolutely hideous,” Jerry said. “You have no business wasting your money on horrible things. You ought at least to have some taste. Why don’t you take this young fellow with you when you get the urge to spend? He looks like a fellow of taste. Look at that nice coat. He wouldn’t let you buy these atrocities.”
Asa bristled again at being called a young fellow by another young fellow, but was glad Jerry appreciated the coat. Still, he didn’t like the conversation. He didn’t like Jerry, either. “How much money do you have?” he asked sharply.
“I’m somewhere between the two of you. I don’t have a fortune like Mr. Sola. On the other hand I don’t have cold, grasping Yankee parents who won’t give me enough to take my pals to the show. I assume your family is well-heeled enough to have bought that coat new? It isn’t something you found at Keezer’s?”
“What’s Keezer’s?”
“Point made,” said Jerry.
“And how do you know my parents are cold and grasping?” Asa said this in such a halfhearted way that Reuben put an arm around him.
“Don’t take offense at Jerry,” he said. “Jerry isn’t well brought up. He doesn’t know anything about your parents, he’s just making unpleasant generalizations.”
“But Reuben, they dole out his own money to him, money he earned, for heaven’s sake, and they made him go out and earn it in the first place—”
“They didn’t. I wanted to. I was sick of being sent off to the country, so I stayed in town and worked.”
“No matter. It’s your money, and you shouldn’t have to wait for them to give it to you. Don’t you think I’m right?”
Asa thought about it. He looked at his blood-red shoes and pondered. Jerry said softly to Reuben, “Portrait of a Yankee thinking.” Asa looked up, hurt.
“Yes, I think you’re right, but I don’t think my parents would go along with it. And it’s not worth fighting about.”
“What is worth fighting about? What do you fight with your parents about?”
“I try not to. I mean, it wears me out. I’m not there most of the time …” This reminded him of a conversation he’d had with Parker during the summer. “I hate fighting,” he said.
“I rather enjoy it,” Jerry said, and he leaned back in his chair, triumphant. “And you’re not bad at it either, Sola.”
“Oh, I usually leave it to Roberto. Roberto and Papa have a battle going over honesty, so when I turn up I look like the good boy, which is fine. I’m sick of fighting. I’ve done plenty.”
“But you’re always doing things that will get you into trouble,” Asa said.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m the good son. I can do anything.”
“I wish that would happen to me,” Asa said. “That’s the trouble with being an only child, you’re always the bad one.”
“Or the good one,” Jerry said. “I’m the only son, and so I’m always the good son. My sisters can never be boys, so they’ve failed from the start. Every mother needs a little messiah of her own.”
“That’s an interesting point,” Reuben said. Asa thought it was a crazy point; actually, he didn’t even think it was a point. But Reuben was chewing over this “point” with fascination. “I think you’re right, I think that’s the way it is.”
“But you don’t even have a mother,” Asa protested.
“Everybody has a mother to start with,” Jerry said, “even Reuben.”
“And she thought you were—” Asa couldn’t get the words out.
“Oh no, she wasn’t of that persuasion.” Reuben smiled at Jerry. “But I’ve seen it in other families.”
Asa made a lunge in the direction he thought Reuben had pointed in. “You mean she wasn’t Jewish?”
Jerry folded his napkin into a tiny square; Reuben ate his cold, withered potato skin. But Asa, who had decided he too had a right to ask insulting questions, refused to be daunted. He felt himself momentarily in ascendance over them and repeated his question. “Was she?”
Reuben turned his blank, ice-blond face toward Asa and said, “Yes, she was.” Then he got up and went to a table where apple pie was being topped off with vanilla ice cream by a starchy kitchen aide. Asa waited for a confidence from Jerry; surely he would lean across the table and explain, in two hurried sentences, why Reuben didn’t talk about his mother. Jerry sat straight, worrying his napkin as if he were folding the secret into the linen so it couldn’t get out, and didn’t say anything. Reuben came back with pie, which they ate without talking.
“Let’s have coffee. Let’s go into town,” Reuben said when he’d finished his pie.
“Can we do that?” Asa asked. Wallingford was off limits to Choate students; it required the same signed permission slip to walk into town as to take the train to Boston.
“Who’s going to stop us?” asked Jerry. “They’ve got better things to do than keep track of seniors. Put on your coat.” He leaned across the table, as he had to touch Reuben’s collar, and stroked the sleeve. “Let me try it on.”
“It won’t fit you,” said Asa promptly. He smiled at Jerry, but Jerry had stood up and was staring at the coat. “It won’t fit at all.”
“I’m not buying it, for Chrissake, I just want to try it on.”
Reuben yawned and raised his arms above his head. “I’m going to get a black leather jacket during vacation. With a big silver zipper. I think it’ll look good with my car.”
Asa was defeated; the jacket would supersede the cashmere coat, and he would find himself one step behind, as usual. He passed the coat over the sticky plates to Jerry. The coat transformed Jerry’s awkwardness into length and grace, and imparted an air of importance to his pallid, pocked face. “Gee, you look terrific in that coat,” Asa said, despite himself.
“Not my style,” Jerry said, but he didn’t take it off. He buttoned it and pushed his hands into the pockets. “Well, it’s warm. But doesn’t it make you look like a banker? I’m getting a trench coat—pockets and flaps and buckles.”
“You’ll look like a spy. Is that better than a banker?” Reuben asked.
Asa wanted his coat back. He moved from one foot to another and stared into space and wondered why he felt irritated and left out. Irritated—because he wanted his coat; that was simple. Also because his coat was being maligned, though he could tell Jerry liked it. It was Jerry who looked like a banker, Asa decided. Asa in his coat looked like a young man in prep school; his posturing in front of the mirror had been unconvincing. He was no playboy. Reuben, however, might transform the coat into an emblem of elegance; Reuben seemed to be more powerful than what he wore. Asa decided to offer Reuben the coat. That would get it away from Jerry and bring him closer to Reuben, which would, possibly, ease the feeling of being left out.
“Why don’t you try it?” he said. “I bet you won’t look like a banker in it.”
“Oh, let’s just go get some fucking coffee,” said Reuben. “Let’s just go. I can’t stand this place another minute.” His face was pale and pinched, and he looked like his father for a minute, tightening his lips and grinding his teeth. Asa heard the faint crackle of his jaws moving. It was a distinctive Sola sound. They all did it when irked. Roberto had spent three years in braces to correct the injuries he’d inflicted on his bite; Reuben had knots of muscle at the base of his cheeks that bulged and trembled; Professor Sola sometimes sounded like a firecracker as he shuffled down the hall gnashing on the cud of his private rages.
What was bothering them? wondered Asa. Why were they such a nervous family? His family did not grind teeth, flunk courses, sulk, glower, whisper things to water. In his family everything went according to schedule and everything was as it should be. If Asa were to go to Princeton rather than Harvard, dinner might be more silent than usual for a few evenings, but there would not be scenes, there would not be people snarling in hallways, banging doors, or any of the other peculiar things he had seen at the Solas’. Asa had eaten a meal there in which Professor Sola addressed all his remarks to Roberto via Reuben, in the third person: “Does he think he’s going to get into college by virtue of his blond hair?” “Does he want more salad?” Reuben, playing according to the rules of this bizarre game, would repeat the question to Roberto, receive an answer, and repeat the answer, again in the third person, to their father. Asa was fascinated and uneasy. Neither of the boys had commented on it, and two days later everything was back to normal.
Reuben crunched vehemently. Jerry gave the coat back to Asa. They pushed their chairs up to the table, strode out of the dining hall (“The thing is to look innocent and determined,” Reuben whispered), and cut straight across the broad, brown lawn to the road into town. They turned right and walked downhill, Reuben and Jerry side by side, Asa bobbing behind them, sometimes inserting his shoulder between them, more often kept back by the narrowness of the sidewalk.
After ten minutes of this they reached town, not a minute too soon for Asa, who wanted to flag down a passing bus or slouch off to the train station in the dark. Reuben could send him his socks and his toothbrush—he was not going to trail along like a baby brother. But there was the coffee shop, and Reuben holding the door open for him; maybe on the way back it would be Jerry who walked behind.
The coffee shop was in the back of a drugstore with high shelves ranked with blue glass bottles that read DIGITALIS and PEROXIDE in gold letters. “They put arsenic in the coffee,” Reuben said. Asa believed it. They were served their coffee in thick, white porcelain mugs with the Andover seal. Reuben took a flask from his pocket and put a large shot into his coffee without offering it around. Neither the proprietor, a fat person who looked as though he’d been dipped in talcum powder, nor Jerry took any notice.
Asa draped his coat over a stool and The Mayor of Casterbridge fell out of the pocket. Jerry jumped off his stool and snatched it up before Asa had a chance to move.
“You like this? It’s his worst. You ought to be reading Tess.”
“It’s assigned.”
“Why do they always assign the worst ones? I bet you’ve read Adam Bede and hated it. Right?”
“Yes. Last year.”
“Read Tess, read Jude, read Daniel Deronda—yes, read that. That will tell you something about the Jews.”
“I have too much reading to do already,” Asa said. “I have to read the Metamorphoses by Wednesday.”
“In Latin?”
“No.”
“It’s better in Latin.” Jerry had opened the book and was leafing through it as if it were a picture album. “It’s plodding, it’s safe, there’s more to Hardy than this.”
“No literature,” Reuben mumbled. He was bent over his coffee to inhale the evaporating brandy. “Fuck Hardy. Fuck the Jews in England and Victorian morality.” He put another shot in his cup. “I can’t wait to get to college. I’m so sick of this place—it’s dead. Thayer—” Asa winced. When Reuben called him Thayer it was a sign that a black, remote mood was coming on, one that Reuben would intensify by picking fights and increasing his isolation. “Thayer, if we were in Cambridge, we could go looking for bicycles to steal, you know? We could go down to the Casablanca and see how many drinks we could handle, and whether we could get somebody else to pay for them. We could drive out to the airport and watch the planes take off. No end of entertainment in dear old Cambridge.”
“Sounds like the pastimes of a gang of hoodlums,” Jerry said.
“What do you know? You live in some suburb that tries to look just like this place, where you sit around talking books with your parents after dinner. Did you know that Jerry’s parents are Communists?” He leaned toward Asa.
“No.”
“No, you didn’t know? No, they can’t be? Explain yourself.”
“No, I didn’t know,” said Asa. Reuben’s face was very close to his own and gave off a slight smell of liquor. His eyes were elongated and somewhat Orientalized from drinking and tiredness, his mouth had become thin and venomous—altogether he looked, Asa decided, like a thin and angry version of the man-in-the-moon: inscrutable, dangerous, and pseudohuman. “How remarkable,” Asa said, hoping this would draw Jerry out and shift the focus away from Reuben.
“How remarkable—who are you? Are you your mother? God, what a half-ass town this is,” snarled Reuben. “The place is infectious. Everybody here says things like that, ‘How remarkable.’ If the bomb went off, the whole senior class would get to its feet and say in unison. ‘How really remarkable,’ and then drop dead.”
“I’d rather talk about literature than listen to you knocking Andover,” Jerry said.
“Of course you would, but that’s too bad. I’ve listened to you talk about literature for two years.”
“You had plenty to say yourself.”
“I’ve said it. I’m not saying another word about literature.” Reuben tipped his flask to his cup again, but nothing came out. “Shit,” he said softly. “Oh, well, time to get back.”
Asa obediently rose to his feet.
“Really, why does it always have to be your timetable?” Jerry said. “I’m still drinking my coffee.”
“Nobody’s stopping you,” said Reuben. He didn’t get up either. Asa shifted his feet around and put his coat on, then got back on his stool.
“Thayer,” Jerry said, to nobody in particular. “Thayer, now why does that sound familiar?”
“Just one of those names,” Reuben said. “Just one of those crazy names.” He hummed to the appropriate tune. “Those Yankee names, you know?”
“No, it’s something more specific.”
“I probably have some cousins here,” said Asa. “Actually, I do have one, he’s in one of the lower forms, his name is Dana, I think he’s eleven—”
“I’ve got it! It’s that painting.” Jerry turned to look at Asa. “It’s not a bad painting, by Thayer. Abbott Thayer. And you know, it looks a bit like you. Doesn’t it?” He poked Reuben’s shoulder. “Look at him.”
“I’ve seen him,” said Reuben.
“Look, he looks like it.”
“Probably a cousin,” said Reuben, with a grin.
“Don’t you have any cousins?” asked Asa, surprised at what a lucky opportunity he’d been given. Reuben didn’t bother to answer him.
“Jews don’t have cousins,” said Jerry. “All Jewish cousins are dead. But I think we ought to go see this painting.”
“Where is it?” Asa asked. He hoped it was somewhere far away so the whole thing would be forgotten in the morning.
“It’s right next to the library, in the museum.”
“Oh, well, then it’s shut,” said Asa.
“We’ll break in,” Reuben said, sitting up and opening his eyes. “We’ll be in there before you know it. There’s a skylight that can’t be locked above the stairwell. We can just drop down—all we need is rope.” He rapped his spoon on the thick handle of his coffee cup to rouse the powdery proprietor. “Got any rope for sale?” The proprietor drew a ball of string from under the counter. “No, rope, like for rock climbing.”
“You’d have to get that at McBurr’s,” he said.
“We could break in there,” Reuben said. “It’s just down the block.”
“They’ll be open at eight,” said the proprietor. “Gotta climb that rock tonight?”
“I’ll find some at the gym.” Reuben put his flask in his pocket and stood up. “Let’s go. I’m sure there’s rope at the gym.”
This time, as Asa had hoped, it was Jerry who trailed behind; Reuben actually put his arm through Asa’s. Asa could feel Reuben’s muscles quivering. He talked the whole way up the hill about his plan for getting them in. “I’ll do the entering, then I’ll open the door for you guys. You softies won’t want to drop down on a rope, I guess. But you might have to—the door might be wired or something. We’ll see. It’ll be easy. I’ve thought of doing it many times.”
“Why?” asked Asa.
“Steal some art. Raise a ruckus. Mainly because it occurred to me that it could be done.” He detached himself from Asa and stepped into the road. “Never pass up a challenge,” he yelled. Then he returned to the sidewalk. “That’s why.”
At the gym there was enough rope to hang them all, thought Asa grimly. Now that the expedition was inevitable, he tried to show some interest in it. “What’s the name of the painting?”
“The Monadnock Angel,” Jerry said.
Asa got a chill down his back. He didn’t want to be like an angel; it was reminiscent of being a ghost. And Monadnock was the mountain that shadowed his grandparents’ farm. “This guy’s name is Thayer? You’re sure?”
“He’s almost famous. Abbott Thayer. He lived up there. They have a number of his paintings here, I don’t know why.”
“He probably went here,” said Asa.
“Artists don’t go to Andover,” said Reuben, winding up rope.
The stars had gone out and the whole school had gone to sleep when the three emerged from the gym. It was cold, much colder than it had been during the day, and the leaves left on the trees crackled when the wind shook them. Asa turned up the collar of his coat. “Don’t talk,” whispered Reuben. “I’ll lead. When we get there, I’ll tell you what to do.” They walked single file down the path. At the museum Reuben drew them into the shadow of a large, dead bush.
“You’ll give me a leg up, hoist me up to that window,” he pointed to the sill of an arched, leaded window about five feet above the ground, “and then throw me the rope. Up above there’s a ledge with a little roof. That’s where the skylight is. You’ll be able to see me through the window, so you’ll know when to go to the door. If I don’t open the door in five minutes after I’ve gotten inside, you’ll know it’s wired. Then come back here and I’ll pull you up by the rope.”
“It just doesn’t look possible,” Asa said. “Let’s come back tomorrow. It’s open on Sunday, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Jerry said. “How about it, Reuben? I don’t think we can lift you all the way up to that window.”
“Come on,” said Reuben. “Come on, guys, you don’t have to do anything except give me a leg up. Jesus, can’t you just do that? I’m sure the door isn’t wired. You’ll be able to walk right in.”
So they made a brace of their hands and arms, and Reuben hopped onto it. He was surprisingly light, Asa thought, and as he kept moving, straining his body up and urging them to raise him, he seemed to be flying away from them and to weigh less and less the higher they lifted him. In a matter of seconds he had gained the roof and was poised on the edge of it, prying open the hatchway before they’d had time to disentangle their arms. There was the sound of glass breaking. Reuben’s head peeped over the edge: “Had to,” he said. “I couldn’t undo it.” Then there was a creaking, grinding noise as the skylight opened. “Throw me the rope,” he said. They couldn’t see him.
“Where are you?” hissed Asa.
“Don’t worry. Throw it, I’ll catch it.”
Asa threw and heard it hit the slates; one piece came dislodged and landed in the bush. “Did I make it?” he called.
Reuben’s head rose over the edge of the roof again. “Shh. I’ve got it. Just watch through the window and you’ll see me hit the floor. Then go to the door.”
Jerry was pacing back and forth. “Do you do things like this all the time in Cambridge? You two seem adept at this kind of stuff.”
“Reuben wants to, but I don’t. There’s another boy, Parker—he likes this sort of thing. They go climbing together, I think. They’ve stolen things.” Asa didn’t know any of this to be true, but it felt true, so he said it. Parker and Reuben shared a daredevil streak that left him out, and if the stories he was reporting to Jerry hadn’t happened yet, they would happen someday. “We’d better pay attention,” he said.
The two of them pressed up to the bottom pane of the window. After a minute the end of the rope came snaking down. About three feet from the floor it stopped. Then it began to ascend. “What’s he doing?” asked Jerry. “Probably tying the rope up top,” Asa answered. They couldn’t see the rope at all for a while, then it was flung down again. This time it reached only to the middle of the window, about seven feet above the floor. A pebble crashed onto the parquet. Then there was silence. Suddenly the rope jerked and started to twirl counterclockwise. “He’s on it,” said Asa, and held his breath. The rope’s shadow drew a dancing, ever-incomplete circle on the floor; Asa thought his lungs would pop, and he couldn’t hear Jerry breathing either. And then Reuben’s torn sneaker appeared, and its mate, and the cuffs of his gray pants, and the two at the window exhaled, misting the glass with their long-held breath.
Very slowly, as a dream set underwater is slow and thick, the rope lost its tension and the body on it, still twelve or more feet above the floor, began to fall. First the legs lost their grip on the now-slack rope. Then the torso, passing their wide-open eyes as it descended, swung out into space. Then the arms stretched away from the body, flailing and waving. Then the head, fallen onto the chest, eyes shut, mouth open, limp, white, frightful in its blankness, spun past them. Wriggling and whirling, the rope, loosened from above, followed Reuben down like a comet’s hairy tail.
“Oh no,” screamed Asa, not knowing he was screaming. “Please.”
Reuben hit the floor on his hands and knees, the rope fell on his neck, and as he straightened up it draped itself around him so he looked like an animal about to be led somewhere. For a few seconds he stood dumbly, staring off into space. Then he looked out the window, saw their four glazed eyes looking at him, made a V sign with his right hand, and trotted off to open the door.
Asa started laughing and could not stop. Jerry punched him in the arm to startle him out of it, but he continued. “Shut up,” said Jerry. “Someone will hear you.” Asa laughed and laughed, he doubled over and laughed into the cold earth, he banged on the ground with his hands. “Come on, let’s get over to the door,” said Jerry, grabbing him and pulling him up.
The effort of walking and laughing simultaneously calmed Asa a little; by the time they’d walked halfway around the building he was just panting softly, simmering with subsiding laughter but paying more attention to getting his breath back. “It wasn’t real,” he said between gasps, “he was kidding us, wasn’t he? He was just scaring us.” He grasped his chest with both hands because it hurt. “Oh, God,” he said, “I’m so tired.”
When they reached the door, it was open, and Reuben was standing on the threshold looking for them. “Asshole,” said Jerry. “What the hell was that for?”
“What?” Reuben made his hands into fists and scowled. “What?”
“Forget it,” said Asa. “Leave him alone. Let’s go see this angel thing.” He was still heaving and pressing on his chest with one hand. It was his heart that was hurting him; it seemed to have been pumped up with air and to be taking up more room than was allotted for it in his body.
“It’s upstairs,” said Jerry.
They tramped upstairs, all of them leaving dirt on the floor. The museum appeared originally to have been a mansion; it had homey touches, fireplaces and wainscoting, that seemed superfluous to a museum. And it smelled like any house on Brattle Street, thought Asa—mixed furniture wax, flowers, discreet amounts of dust. They mounted the stairs, walking through the site of Reuben’s fall, or prank, gingerly to avoid the slivers of glass on the floor. “Where is it?” asked Asa.
“Here,” said Jerry. They had reached the top of the staircase. On the wall ahead of them was an enormous, dark painting. “I’ll get some light.” He walked assuredly to the right, found a switch, and flipped it.
The figure was larger than life-size, although Asa wondered if anyone knew an angel’s size. Draped in Hellenic robes it rose from a forbidding landscape as familiar to Asa as his backyard, the lumpy, naked ridge of Mount Monadnock. Its wings were half obscured by clouds, its halo dimmed by the bad weather moving in behind it and darkening the earth. Each hand was held at a slight angle away from the body, palms turned outward in the position of forgiveness and acceptance used in Byzantine icons—thumb extended, third and fourth fingers folded in. It was a figure at once static and mobile, being rooted in the rocky land and rising, illuminated, to an illuminated upper atmosphere. Its face was small-mouthed and straight-browed, with an expression at odds with the merciful arrangement of its hands; it looked arrogant and disdainful. And it looked, Asa thought, exactly like Reuben. This seemed so improbable that he looked closer, tracing the shape of its nose and cheeks carefully. This second survey yielded him some understanding of Jerry’s contention that it looked like him. The triangular face, the long nose, the broad eyebrows and sharply defined jaw—these were Asa’s own. But it had Reuben’s flavor. It had passion and it had pride, it had what Asa knew he lacked, what Reuben’s father yearned for: Grace.
“I guess it doesn’t really look like you that much,” said Jerry, startling Asa out of his intent observation. “But a bit, around the jaw. It’s certainly got the same coloring you do.”
“Well, Reuben has that coloring too,” ventured Asa. He wasn’t quite prepared to say that he thought this was, in some way, a portrait of Reuben’s character.
“Yeah,” said Reuben. “I think it looks just as much like me as it does like Asa. Which is to say, Kuhn, that I don’t think it has anything to do with either of us. And I think it’s a crummy painting. You can’t even tell whether the thing is standing on the ground or floating or what.” He turned his back on it. “But,” he went on, addressing the stairwell, “we got a good adventure out of it.”
“Don’t you think,” said Asa, “don’t you think it does look like both of us? I mean as if we’d been mixed together. Like if we’d had a child?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Reuben said. “Getting bonkers from too many years of prep school? Turning into a pansy?”
“No, no, Reuben, I see what he means,” Jerry said. “It’s sort of a combination plate of your characteristics; it’s got Asa’s features and it’s got your bad temper—you can see that in its scowl.” He laughed.
Reuben turned back to the painting, which he looked at briefly, then looked at Asa, then at Jerry. “I see why you like it,” he said to Jerry. “It’s a Jewish angel—an avenging angel. It doesn’t have that wishy-washy expression you see on Christmas-tree angels. But I think it’s a trashy painting; romantic, pseudo-Blake stuff. And yes, it looks like Asa. I’m sure he’s a cousin. Now let’s go.”
“Son of the art collector has spoken,” said Jerry. He turned off the light. “I think he used his daughters as models—there are some more conventional portraits in the other room.”
Neither Reuben nor Asa had an inclination to go into the other room, Reuben because he wanted to leave, Asa because he did not want to leave off looking at his celestial double. In the now-dim hallway the painting was nearly imperceivable, merely a darker darkness framed in gold, spattered with the occasional glimmers that were the backlit halo and right arm. Reuben was on the landing kicking pieces of gravel around; Jerry had gone into the room where the more conventional portraits were hung. Asa stood undisturbed before the Angel of Monadnock.
But the painting disturbed him. First because he was unable to make a judgment of it as art, whereas Jerry and Reuben could and differed. He told himself it was an excellent painting; that was credible. Then he told himself it was romantic daubing, and that was credible too. Maintaining such a distance from it was difficult, though—he kept being entranced by what it meant rather than by its style. Wasn’t that a proof of its claim to being “art”? Maybe only a proof of his sentimentality—that quality responsible for the blocking of his throat and the blurring of his eyes while he looked at the painting, or the dash of his pulse when the train pulled into Andover Station. Likewise for somber yet not unhappy dreams in which he and Jo walked down dark lanes between trees, and Reuben was a badger or an owl or even a stone fence, present but not himself. Asa knew his sentimentality was a poor substitute for passion, although the only way he could formulate this was to deride his life for its safeness and predictability and envy others who surprised themselves, and him, with the way things turned out. “Others” meant Reuben; Parker made attempts to surprise himself, but Asa could too easily project him five years into the future at a desk in his father’s law firm. Reuben was unprojectable.
For this reason the painting disturbed him—because while Asa looked at it he had the illusion of seeing himself as a knotty, unpredictable person, although he knew himself to be otherwise. Yet there was his head and his neck (even the outstretched naked arms had dimpled elbows and broad wrists like his), imbued with danger, revenge, authority, and mystery. This was a portrait of his unrealizable ambitions.
Was he to let them go? Ought Reuben to be discarded because he was nothing but a form of self-torture, a way for Asa to have his face rubbed in failure? Alternatively, had he been hoping that Reuben would “rub off” on him? Soberly, he considered the likelihood of his changing into a more compelling, compelled person; he had to admit it was chancy. At Harvard things would be different: He would be his own guardian; two hours every evening women would be free to come to his rooms; there was no telling what the combination of new ideas and new people would do. But all these opportunities seemed tame. They were opportunities offered to him in the normal course of things, not pathways he’d hacked out for himself. There was no tall building he yearned to climb, nor had he desired Jo enough to bed her in the back of the garage.
On the landing Reuben tapped his feet urgently. But Asa wasn’t finished with the painting. What had his ancestor Abbott meant by it? Was it a message, and what was it? He could not, of course, have imagined an Asa to stand before it a generation in the future, pondering his own character; therefore, it was a message for a larger audience.
“Let’s go,” Reuben called. Jerry came out of a room down the hall and stood beside Asa.
“What do you think this painting is about?” Asa asked him.
“About? It’s not about anything. It’s not a book.”
“Aren’t paintings about things too?”
“What do you think it’s about?” When Asa didn’t say anything, Jerry continued. “You think it’s about you, don’t you? You think it’s a picture of your genetic heritage, or something like that, right?”
“What? No.” Asa had no idea what Jerry meant.
“The Puritan will imposed on New England, the shaping of America—that sort of stuff. Well, it isn’t. It’s a picture of one of his daughters draped in a sheet, standing in front of a window that looks out on some mountains.”
Asa looked at the painting from this point of view; it was exactly what Jerry said. And yet, it was other things too. A pebble hit him on the shoulder.
“Let’s get the hell out of here, I’m tired of this place,” Reuben said. He had a handful of pebbles and was tossing them at the ceiling. The rope was slung over his shoulder, wrinkling and wriggling every time he raised his arm. “I’m tired. I played a soccer game today. I just want to sack out.”
Asa shut his eyes, to have the pleasure of opening them and seeing the angel still there. But Jerry took him by the arm, while his eyes were closed, and turned him toward the stairwell, so that he saw the arched window and Reuben’s yellow head, upright this time but silhouetted as it had been when he was falling. There was to be no more dawdling. Asa buttoned his blue coat. On the way out, both to impress Reuben and to keep alive a memory for himself, he snitched a postcard of the painting from the rack on the information desk.
“Why not steal the painting?” Reuben said. “That’s not much of a reproduction.”
For a minute it seemed like a good idea—that is, an idea Asa could imagine enacting. They could slice it out of its frame and he could roll it up and take it back to Choate in his suitcase. This was how art thieves operated in movies. He desired the painting enough to consider doing it; did that mean Reuben acted on his desires because they were more powerful than Asa’s? But what possible desire could he have to break into this museum? Or to steal rugs from out of his neighbor’s front hall, or steam open his father’s mail, or any of the daring and useless things he did? Perhaps he desired action—any action—and would go to great lengths to provide himself with it. Reuben wanted to make an impression on the world, to leave his footprints all over the snow; Asa wanted to enjoy the snowstorm. No, he was not being accurate, he was letting himself off too easily. He just wanted to get through life, and that was difficult enough without adding the danger of falling off the scaffolding or ending up in juvenile court for larceny.
Just to get through life was no ambition. It was the opposite of ambition. Walking through the leaves with Jerry and Reuben, both yawning, Asa tried to infuse himself with desires and hopes and plans. The night was helpful; dim now, and misty, warming as rainy air moved in, it was an atmosphere of change in which trees and buildings blurred and might be something else, anything. Halloween was coming, and Asa recalled himself as a pirate, a soldier, a ghost (this gave him pause, but he refused to dwell on past ghostliness), knocking on Brattle Street doors. Blackening his upper lip with cork had convinced him of his mustache; a costume was useful in that way—it could catapult you into another life. Would a white silk scarf and different shoes make his life at Harvard dangerous and free?
Asa resolved to do a dangerous thing sometime before going off to college.
Early in April, Parker and Asa were accepted at Harvard. This was no surprise. What was surprising was that Reuben managed to get in as well, and that they were to room together. Jerry would be their fourth. This, and the fact that their rooms were in Weld Hall, an ungainly Victorian folly, rather than in the more distinguished Georgian Holworthy, upset Asa. Weld had the reputation of housing out-of-towners and football players. “We don’t belong in there,” Asa said. Parker was unsympathetic. “We’ll never be in there,” he said, “we’ll be busy.” And then there was the problem of Jerry.
“I don’t see what’s the matter with him,” Parker said.
“He knows too much.”
“You mean he’s a wonk?”
“No, I think he just knows stuff, without studying. His parents are Communists.”
“Hey, terrific. Does he have a beard?”
“He and Reuben kind of shut people out, you know.”
“They won’t shut us out. Reuben can’t shut us out, we’re his pals.”
Asa wasn’t sure of anything. Packing his suitcases in June, taking down his framed photographs of the farm in New Hampshire and himself with father and mother on the Nantucket beach, shaking hands with his teachers, exchanging summer plans with his classmates—a full quarter of whom would be in the Yard with him in September—he brooded on the summer ahead of him, the Last Summer, and how to cement his relations with Reuben, and what bold feat he could achieve.
It was late in June, approaching another midsummer, and they were racing up the coast in Reuben’s car. Jo sat in the front seat with her hand on Reuben’s naked thigh, Asa and Parker sat in the back, squirming on the sand left over from previous trips. As usual, they had argued about where to go. Asa and Jo wanted to go south, where the sand was fine and the water warm. Parker always took Reuben’s side, and Reuben wanted to go north, to Plum Island, because there it was forbidden to swim or picnic. “It’s too cold up there,” Asa said, “and we’re not supposed to swim anyhow.” “No crowds,” Reuben answered, and blasted out of the circular driveway at forty miles an hour. “Skinny-dipping, herons, no lifeguards—it’s paradise.” Asa and Jo smoked more than usual in protest.
Each time Jo took out a cigarette Asa leaned forward between the front seats to light it. Sometimes their hands brushed. Then, in reparation, Jo stroked the gold hairs on Reuben’s leg more intently. Reuben had become gold all over, like a perfectly done piece of french toast. Jo was brown, dark brown, and the whites of her eyes and her teeth looked like porcelain chips. Parker burned, so he kept a hat on his head and a towel around his neck at all times; nonetheless, his nose was blistered. To protect it, he’d bought a plastic nose cover, which he kept in place with a piece of masking tape. He looked somewhat like a heron with this beaky attachment, which he called “my nib.” Reuben now referred to him as His Nibs. Asa found all of this irritating. He did not burn, he did not toast, either. He became ruddied and flushed and looked like a six-year-old who’d spent too long making sandcastles. He put tropical balms all over himself and wished he had a real tan, but he never achieved one until August.
They sped north, weaving from lane to lane because Reuben wanted to break his record from the last trip. They had a cold chicken and a loaf of rye bread and eight hard-boiled eggs packed by Lolly in a hamper. Parker had supplied a six-pack bought by Clem and warming rapidly in the hot car. The hope of a still-cool beer kept Reuben’s foot on the accelerator; Parker kept placing his hand on the bottles and yelling, “Faster, faster, it’s cooking!”
The road out of the city passed over the Mystic River. From the crest of the bridge Asa could see all of the Charlestown shipyards laid out in a snaking line, with half-built boats—gray destroyers and cargo carriers—fixed in the still, silver water. It was a view he looked forward to. The bridge was high enough to miniaturize the sight, so that it seemed to be a toy industrial center, complete with tiny workers and thin plumes of factory smoke. Reuben had noticed him craning and twisting around to take in the spectacle each time they passed it. On this steamy late-morning ride he chose to comment.
“Some bridge,” he said.
Asa shifted his glance up; it was an extraordinary bridge. The lacework of its struts and wires was beautiful in the way a birch forest is beautiful in winter: feathery, spare, seeming to have great depth by virtue of intricacy. “Yes, pretty,” he said.
“It’s a goddam monument,” said Reuben. “Anything this high and complicated is a work of art.”
“I was really looking at the shipyard,” Asa mumbled.
“Huh?” Reuben said. He passed a few cars. “How’s the beer?”
“Hot, hot, hot,” said Parker.
At the beach Asa and Parker spread their towels the customary twenty feet away from Reuben and Jo, to leave them in privacy. As payoff for this, Asa and Parker kept the food in their area. Parker dug a hole near the high-water mark and buried the beer. Asa draped Parker’s shirt over the hamper and put a rock on top. But the beer never cooled down, the shirt blew off the hamper twice, and the eggs, when unpeeled, were sweating and rubbery. Still, the pleasures of the beach—the simplicity of the horizon, the fresh, tart smell of the sand, the gulls who circled the picnic crying for scraps—put them all in a good mood. After eating, Reuben and Jo retired to their towel, where they stripped and lay in each other’s arms for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes their limbs thrashed a little. Asa tried not to look in their direction.
That was difficult. Parker had a tendency to stare at them and describe what they were doing to Asa, who sat with his back resolutely turned toward them. But the descriptions were tantalizing and incomplete—“Oh wow, she’s really … boy”—and Asa would crane his head over his shoulder to see for himself. What he saw made him miserable. They were beautiful and naked and in each other’s arms and he was hot, stupid from beer, and alone. He wished he could tap Reuben on the shoulder and cut in, replace him as Jo’s partner as simply as he might at a dance.
Could he steal Jo away with cigarettes and subtle touches? After all, she had kissed him. That would be a dangerous project. Why had she kissed him? He pretended to look down the beach and watched, for a moment, the star shape they had made of themselves on the red towel. Reuben lay sideways on top of Jo reading a comic book; she was staring up at the sky. One breast pointed toward Asa. The day was very hot, and their images wiggled before Asa’s eyes, as if they were melting. He turned toward the sea, which was also quivering. At the horizon a band of dancing molecules confused the border between water and air. There was a melting boat—or was it a gull? Maybe only a wave cresting on a sandbar. The shape of everything began to change. Even his own feet, where he rested his eyes for relief, were huge and pulsing and nacreous in the heat. It had been nearly a year since she’d kissed him. She might not remember doing it. But didn’t the fact of it guarantee him some sort of access to her? He peeked over at them again. Reuben had shifted and now lay blocking Jo’s body with his own. One of his legs enclosed both of hers, his weight was on his elbow, his hand was on her belly. Some of her thick, salt-curled hair was caught in the crook of his arm.
Asa drank another beer. The sun got lower and hotter. Parker, who’d been asleep, woke and said, “Let’s go swimming.” But the water was cold. It curled their toes and made their heads hurt. Parker ran in yelling “Here I go!” and shot up from the water almost instantly. Asa watched from shore. “Too damned cold,” said Parker, resuming his nib, hat, and towel. Then the wind shifted and some flies arrived. Asa placed an egg at the edge of the towel to distract them, but they wanted blood. The trick was to kill them in midbite, when for a moment they were still. After six bites and two deaths, Asa was ready to leave. They didn’t bite Parker. “They don’t like my smell,” he said. “You are just what they like.” There was a cloud of them above Asa’s head, humming.
“Let’s go,” he called toward the red towel.
“Not yet,” Reuben called back.
“There are flies,” Asa insisted.
“Not over here.”
“I’m coming over with them.” Asa stood up and walked toward them with his halo. Jo turned onto her belly for modesty. A fly settled on her ass.
“All right,” she said. There was a flat, dark welt on her buttock. “Let’s go.”
They left the uneaten eggs in a row on the sand. Reuben forgot his comic book, Jo forgot her watch (“Good,” she said in the car, “I want a new one, with Roman numerals”), Asa forgot the brass-handled bottle opener he’d remembered to take from the lowboy at the last minute that morning, and Parker forgot his shirt. Before the low, white car had reached the edge of Boston, these objects had been washed over by the ocean and changed. The comic book swelled with water, the watch stopped, the shirt ripped and curled into a ball, the brass took on the green cast of the sea. Gulls poked the eggs with their beaks and tattered them. Sand and tide crept up on these things, and by ruining them made them mysterious. To the next visitors, the next afternoon, they would be not debris but artifacts, visible memories. “Look, an old picnic. There was a woman with this watch, and they were drinking …” And that couple’s afternoon would be enlarged to include all the other summer afternoons when people had warmed their water-cold feet in the sand and looked across the waves to see—couldn’t you, just over the horizon, see it?—Spain.
The ride back was punctuated by realizations of loss: “My watch!” “My shirt!” “Shit, my comic,” “Oh God, mother’s brass thing.” Only Jo was pleased. Reuben complained most, though his loss was the easiest to rectify. “I hadn’t finished it,” he groaned. “You can get another with a nickel,” Jo said. “Too cheap?” “I just wanted to finish it.” Asa decided the best approach with his mother was to announce having lost the bottle opener immediately and be contrite. Parker was planning to buy a pink shirt—maybe two—at J. August on Monday. Jo wanted to go directly to Shreve’s for her watch, but nobody else wanted to. Asa and Parker got a chance to see her work on Reuben. “It wouldn’t take fifteen minutes,” she said, stroking his arm that stretched to the steering wheel. “I know just the one I want. We could just run in—we could double-park and leave them in the car.” She tilted her head back to indicate “them.” Reuben stared at the road. She began to stroke his upper thigh, and once or twice her fingers dipped into the dark above the edge of his shorts. Reuben smiled but said nothing. Then he took her hand, rather roughly, and placed it in her lap. “Forget it,” he said. He turned his face toward her, smiling and remote. “Go with your daddy.”
Although Asa was surprised by Reuben’s coldness and unsusceptibility (what wouldn’t he, Asa, do to have Jo’s fingers walking up and down his thigh?), he also felt a sympathetic dislike of her and an urge to torment her. Jo would be gratifying to hurt because she was tough and beautiful and expected to be treated well. He could sense Reuben’s pleasure in denying her, and wondered if they didn’t both take delight in his meanness—he for the simple power of it, she for the novelty. How long, Asa wondered, would it be before he was sure enough of himself to be mean rather than abject with women? It might never happen. He couldn’t imagine being anything but accommodating to a girl he was crazy about. More evidence of his weakness, or, from another point of view, his good upbringing.
They had come to the bridge again. The fat, four o’clock June sun was lighting up the structure, making a net that caught Asa’s attention. He looked at it, rather than the scene it encircled, and saw it as a “monument,” as Reuben saw it. Under their tires the steel rang and quivered—the bridge was a vibrating corridor between country and city. Asa was struck by an awareness of progress through a landscape, as if for the first time he understood what travel was: He moved and things stayed behind. Yet that description was not exactly right, and he let his head fall back against the cushions openeyed, so the scaffolding of the bridge could strum his vision and, perhaps, provoke a better explanation. Everything was shiny and hot and changing, everything was moving past him—he reversed his understanding: He was the same, an open eye, and the world shifted and shone. And these thoughts themselves flashed through his mind the way the changing scene flashed past his eye; for a moment each was entire and round, then had gone and was unimaginable, or rather lived only in the imagination because it was not present. But where was he in this landscape? Only an eye, either moving or static? He remembered his resolve to Do Something. But it was hot, the car smelled comfortably of cigarettes and suntan oil, and the world flickering beyond the windows could be a roll of pictures unfurled for his pleasure—Reuben pulled the car over abruptly and got out.
“Hey,” said Parker.
“Checking out this bridge,” said Reuben. He put his hand on one of the girders (it was almost too large for his palm to fit around) and leaned on it.
Asa sank into a stupor. He knew what was coming: Reuben saying, Who’s going to climb this bridge with me? He could hear himself volunteering, to placate his ambitions. He could hear Jo’s protests, or encouragement, it didn’t make any difference because she was irrelevant to bridge climbing. Parker stepped out of the car also, and stood beside Reuben on the grillwork of the walkway, assessing the possible approaches they could take. Asa stayed in the backseat and thought about how he was too cowardly to refuse to climb and too cowardly to enjoy what he would agree to do. Then he stopped thinking about it. He said, “Yes, sure,” and decided it would be like a trip to the dentist—he would determine to live through it nobly. His objective was to endure.
But he knew that objective made the enterprise a failure. What he did might fool Parker, and even Reuben, into thinking he was brave, but he wouldn’t be brave, he would be acting brave. He was out of alignment somehow—and when had he not been? Bicycling around sleeping Cambridge, but what sort of adventure was that? When Jo had kissed him and he’d asked her to kiss him again: That had been the intersection of desire and action. But it hadn’t worked. She’d gone back into the garage.
“Great bridge, I’ve wanted to climb it for years,” Reuben said, settling himself at the steering wheel. “We’ll go Monday night. Thayer, you’re not going to fink out, are you?”
Asa could say yes and grow up in a hurry, discard his friends with one word, and put pranks and daredeviltry behind him. He realized it would mean that. The pressure of having to reaffirm popped the shell of the situation; the inside, the foolishness and foolhardiness, was exposed. He realized there was a choice, and he wanted summer, risk, admiration—all waiting for him on the struts of that bridge. Climbing the bridge was the closest he could come to being Reuben, and wasn’t that his real ambition? He wanted that the way Reuben wanted to be high and perilous.
“No, no,” he said urgently, “I won’t fink out.”
On Monday morning Reuben phoned to say he should wear sneakers, long pants, and a long-sleeved shirt. “And wear dark colors, so they don’t notice us.” They were to meet at the Solas’ at eight; Roberto was going along. “Should I bring some rope?” Asa asked. Reuben laughed and said they weren’t going to use rope. “That’s cheating,” he said, and hung up.
Asa mowed the back and front lawns without being asked, oiled the lawn mower, and sanded the rust off his bicycle. At four in the afternoon he thought he might die before the sun went down. He lay on his mahogany bed and stared at the ceiling and wished he could sleep, and oversleep, to wake at ten o’clock when the crickets were singing and his friends had reached the halfway point on those thick wires. For a while he did sleep, and dreamed he was kissing Jo, lying in the hollow of a dune. He woke up sweating and empty-headed, feeling he had passed through danger. Flies bombarded his screen, the late sun fell on his naked feet, and he was conscious of summer, the slowness, the roundness of it. From far below he heard the faint rattle of his mother making dinner. He stretched. In the middle of stretching, just at the point when his muscles were about to tingle with relief and pleasure, he remembered the climb; a pain went through him, and in his mouth was a bath of penny-flavored saliva. The clock in the hall bonged six. He got up and put on a navy-blue sweatshirt.
The Solas were eating dessert when he arrived. Professor Sola sat at the middle of their long, polished table with a son at either end. Each had a bowl of cream with strawberries bobbing in it. Reuben had a cream mustache. Asa was deposited in the chair opposite Professor Sola by Lolly, who then brought a bowl for him too.
“What are your plans for tonight, boys?”
“Midnight ride,” Reuben said.
“Sultry. Are these the dog days?”
“No, Papa, those are in August,” Reuben said. “Why don’t you swim?”
“Perhaps.” He pushed his spoon around, trying to gather more cream. “I’ll have coffee,” he said, quietly. Lolly appeared immediately with a cup. “Will you have some?” He smiled at Asa.
“Thank you.” Again the instantaneous appearance of a cup, as though Lolly were a mind reader. Reuben and Roberto were not drinking coffee.
“A cognac?” asked Professor Sola.
Reuben started laughing. “Papa, it’s Asa,” he said.
“No reason not to be hospitable.”
Reuben slumped in his chair, and Asa felt something banging at his ankle. It was Reuben’s foot, warning him not to accept cognac.
“No, thank you, sir,” he said obediently.
“No cognac?” Professor Sola was nearly awakened by this. “Remarkable. If I were to offer it to my children, I can’t imagine them refusing.”
“You never do,” Roberto said.
“It’s too hot for cognac,” said Professor Sola. “So, you will go on a midnight ride. Where will you go?”
“Oh, somewhere cool,” Reuben said, airily. “The beach or something.”
“Summer nights,” Professor Sola muttered. “Summer nights.” Then he looked at Asa. “What is your field?”
“I don’t know yet, sir. We won’t have to decide until sophomore year.”
“But you must have an inclination. A tendency. Even Reuben has that—a tendency to daydream. So he will probably major in art history. That’s an excellent field for a dreamer. And Roberto”—he leaned his head slightly to the left, where Roberto sat; Roberto shut his eyes—“if and when he reaches college, will probably major in rebellion and criticizing his betters, or, as it’s called these days, political science. But you strike me as more contemplative than rebellious. And contemplative is not the same as dreamy. Perhaps mathematics? That’s a contemplative science.”
“No, sir, I can’t do calculus.”
“I think English literature,” Asa said.
“Pah,” said Professor Sola. Asa flinched. “That’s for women.” This was astonishing, because Professor Sola taught English literature. “It’s the refuge of those who can’t think,” he continued. “Botany. Quiet, orderly, elegant. Consider botany, Asa.”
“But sir, there must have been some reason that you chose English literature.”
“It was different,” he said. He said nothing else, so Asa was left wondering if English had been different once, or if Professor Sola’s case was different from his own.
He tried again. “I love to read.”
“Then for God’s sake major in botany. If you enroll in my department, every book you’ve loved you will learn to hate; and by the end of two years you will have become an illiterate. It is only useful if you begin as an illiterate, such as Roberto.”
“What good is it then, having an inclination?” Asa asked.
The bell rang. “That’s Parker,” said Reuben, rising.
“Lolly will answer it. We’re not finished with dinner.” Professor Sola swirled the dregs in his coffee cup and looked into it; he seemed disappointed and put the cup back on its saucer.
Parker came in, got strawberries, told Professor Sola he intended to major in French. “Why not Russian?” he was asked.
“Baudelaire didn’t write in Russian.”
This answer started Asa giggling. Professor Sola politely pretended not to notice and continued his conversation with Parker in counterpoint to Asa’s muffled gasps.
“Tolstoy wrote in Russian.”
“Rimbaud didn’t write in Russian.”
“All the French speak English; why learn French?”
“All Americans speak only English. I think it’s impolite.”
“And Pushkin.”
“I’ve read him in English.”
Asa stood up and headed for the bathroom in the hall, where he could let himself laugh. It was the image of Baudelaire in an enormous, bulky Russian coat made of weasel or fox, striding down the green boulevards, smelling of herring, mooning over his melancholy, that had done him in. He pounded his hand on the wall beside the sink and looked at himself in the little mirror. There were tears in his eyes. He realized he was probably hysterical. Somebody ought to come and slap him on the cheeks to calm him down. He put his head under the faucet and ran cold water on his face.
“Are you okay?” Reuben asked. He was standing in the hallway, looking at Asa through the half-open door.
“Fine. Wasn’t that a funny conversation, though? Wasn’t the idea of Baudelaire in a big coat—” Asa sputtered and drops of water flew off his cheeks.
“Cut it out,” Reuben said. “You don’t have to come.”
“That isn’t it.”
“You don’t want to. Why don’t you stay here and talk to Papa about books?”
“You think I’m chicken.”
“He’ll give you some brandy, he’ll show you his dirty etchings, you’ll have a great time.” Reuben leaned against the wall with one shoulder, crossed his arms, and smiled. “It’s more your style.”
Asa began to cry; his throat got bigger than his neck, his back and shoulders shook independently of the rest of his body, which he held straight and rigid. One hot tear contrasted on his skin with the cold water; the rest he suppressed. Reuben put a hand on his wiggling arm.
“You’re not going to fool anybody by coming. You’ll just be a liability.”
“Terrific,” Asa whispered. He didn’t trust his throat enough to speak.
“Jesus,” Reuben said, turning away. “I don’t give a damn. Don’t do it for me.”
“Why not?” A few more tears got out. Asa drank them. “Why not?” he repeated.
“Look, Asa. We’re pals.” Reuben was facing him again. “I know what you’re like. We’re not the same—but we’re pals. Okay? Okay?”
“You mean it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, what have I been—” Asa stopped.
“Trying to prove? Is that what you mean? I don’t know, Thayer. Peer pressure.”
Asa sniffed and wiped his cheeks. Reuben had retreated again and was smiling in his usual chilly way. “Stop sniveling,” he said. “We’re going now.”
Reuben went back into the dining room. Asa could hear the chairs scraping the floor as Roberto and Parker stood up. He blew his nose and went in there also. Everyone was standing except Professor Sola, who had started on a second cup of coffee.
“We’re off, Papa,” said Reuben.
“Yes, boys. Be back by midnight.” He laughed, and so did his sons.
“And entertain Asa.”
“Asa’s not coming?” asked Parker, addressing Reuben. Asa stood behind his chair. They could all hear the early crickets.
“Asa’s not coming,” said Reuben.
The screen door at the back of the house banged three times, the Porsche’s motor made its small explosions in the night, and they were gone. Asa stood behind his chair listening to the silence they had left, which was unbroken by Professor Sola. He felt tired, and old, and sat down again.
“What are they really going to do?” asked Reuben’s father, suddenly.
“Climb the Mystic River Bridge.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “You are a brave young man,” he told Asa. “Have a cognac.” Lolly appeared with two glasses. “Here’s to …” He held his glass up and looked at Asa, but didn’t say anything.
“What, sir?”
“Here’s to History,” concluded Professor Sola, after a long pause. “We’ll all be part of it sooner or later.”
When at ten-thirty the car turned into the driveway again, Asa and Professor Sola were on the sofa, bent over a folder of Picasso’s erotic drawings, just as Reuben had predicted. The air conditioner muffled the sound of tires on gravel and the screen door, which banged twice. So Parker and Roberto, materializing out of nowhere in the study whose atmosphere was gilded by the amber-glass lamps that hung from the bookshelves, startled the pair. Professor Sola recovered himself quickly, but Asa had seen a horrible expression fix itself briefly on his face—open eyes, open mouth, eyebrows climbing to his hairline. He clenched his teeth (the Sola sound of grinding competed for a moment with the hum of machinery) and put his face in order.
“Professor Sola—” Parker said.
“Papa—” Roberto broke in.
Asa felt the cold air streaming unpleasantly past his head. Parker’s sleeves were torn, he noticed, and Roberto’s pants were damp and spotted with mud.
“Reuben fell,” Roberto said. “He fell off. We tried, we couldn’t, we looked, we didn’t see.” He was speaking in bursts, but flatly, each phrase an uninflected exhalation. He sat down in an armchair, but still he kept talking, or what seemed to him to be talking. “We thought maybe, but it wasn’t, there weren’t any rocks, and we tried on the shore, I didn’t see, we heard that splash.”
“Enough,” said his father. “That’s enough now.”
“I’ve called the Coast Guard,” said Parker. “I’m going back. They’re going to drag the river. I’m going back.” He turned toward Asa, fierce. “You should have been there,” he said. “You belonged there.”
Asa was cold. The book, with its sporting couples and beribboned dogs and centaurs, lay open on his lap. He was aware of his toes wiggling inside his sneakers, of Professor Sola’s cigarette burning untended in the marble ashtray. The phone rang. Nobody answered it. Roberto started up again: “It wasn’t easy, we didn’t notice until, there was so much garbage in the river, I never imagined—because it was pretty straightforward.”
At that, his father began to laugh. “Pretty straightforward! As a climb, you mean? It wasn’t much of a challenge, you mean that? You can’t understand how it happened, because Reuben kept saying how it wasn’t very difficult? Do you mean that?” He sat up and opened his eyes wide. “Do you, Roberto?”
“Oh, Papa,” Roberto said. He sounded tired and resigned.
“When she jumped—” Professor Sola said. Asa came out of his daze. But Roberto interrupted.
“No, no. It wasn’t—he was never like you, never.”
“Me? I’m not talking about myself.”
“You plural, you together, you who weren’t brave enough to live, that’s who,” Roberto said.
“And what do you know about bravery?” said Professor Sola, softly, shutting his eyes.
“I’m going back there,” Parker said. “I’m taking the car. Are you coming?” He looked at Asa. Asa shook his head.
“I’m coming,” said Professor Sola.
The river was dragged until one in the morning and the whole of Tuesday as well. Professor Sola sat on the bank in his black suit and watched. Tuesday evening he called Parker and asked him to arrange a memorial service—“Get in touch with his friends. We’ll never have a body.” Thursday at midday a hundred and fifty young men and women gathered in the Solas’ living room, rarely used, where they heard a string quartet by Mozart and a speech on youth by a junior-faculty history teacher at Andover. Professor Sola did not attend. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” was read, and Jerry Kuhn, who’d flown up from New York and seated himself beside Asa, who still felt cold, leaned close to him and whispered, “I knew they’d do that. I knew it.” Jo wore bleached linen; she had cut most of her hair off and her unsuntanned neck rose up from her collar like a white pillar. When it was over everybody left quickly. Professor Sola had decided that the pool needed to be repainted and was having it drained; he was overseeing the workmen during the service. Jerry, who’d caught a glimpse of this scene as he left the house in Asa’s wake, said, “Does he think he’ll find Reuben at the bottom of that body of water?” Asa dragged his bicycle out of its spot in the bushes without answering and rode all the way to Walden Pond for a swim.
It was late in June when Reuben died. Asa caught a cold and stayed in bed reading Sherlock Holmes until a few days before the Fourth of July. Parker called once, to see if he wanted to go to the beach; Asa said no, and Parker didn’t call again. On July 3, Asa put himself on a bus going north to spend some weeks with his grandparents in New Hampshire. He did not drive into town with them to see the fireworks, although this had been one of his favorite events when he was a boy. He stayed home, blowing his nose and reading Maupassant’s short stories, which comforted him with their predictability. He was asleep; even his limbs were asleep, and tingled every time he tried to move them. He woke up briefly at the start of August, when he decided to return to Cambridge. When he got there, he had fallen asleep again. Although it had been easier to cease functioning with his grandparents, who were indulgent and didn’t expect him to do anything more than gather some eggs for breakfast, he was too tired to go back, or go anywhere else. He mowed the lawn, he polished the silver, he ran errands for his father, he did his own laundry. Now and then he surfaced—it was as though he lived underwater, what with the remnants of his cold and the dearth of sensation or emotion—and looked at the calendar. August 29, September 2: He wouldn’t have been surprised to see June on the page and find himself living the whole of the blank and chilly summer over again.
Eventually it was time to register. The authorities had decided, perhaps out of sympathy, to leave Parker, Asa, and Jerry alone in their four-room suite. Roberto was back at Manter Hall for another year of cramming; he took over the empty room as a storage space for the growing pile of stolen objects he was accumulating. While Parker and Asa were unpacking new tweed suits and old Shetland sweaters, Roberto was unfolding Oriental rugs of mysterious provenance and putting first editions of Hemingway into bureau drawers. “Art collecting seems to run in the family, one way or another,” Jerry said to Asa.
Asa refused to speak to Jerry, and Parker refused to speak to Asa. Asa couldn’t forgive the comment about Professor Sola and the pool; Parker couldn’t forgive Asa’s absence at the bridge. Inevitably an alliance developed between Parker and Jerry. They did Baudelaire together (that was how Asa thought of it), speaking French, wearing European-style shirts without buttons on the collar, replaying all the banal conversations they’d overheard in the Union, and spoofing their classmates.
Asa didn’t want a friend. He was thinking of concentrating in art history, with a minor in English, or perhaps the other way around. He was taking an intimate slide-lecture course on the history of Western art at the Fogg. Every Tuesday afternoon, from three to five-thirty, he sat in the dark, dusty-smelling basement auditorium and was lulled by a succession of beautiful, colored images looming at the end of the room. There were about fifteen other students, half of them Radcliffe girls; these contrived to bump against him as they went in and out of class. He didn’t pay attention.
One November afternoon, in the middle of Greek vases, there flashed onto the screen a painting, startling in its color and scope by contrast with the ebony and umber of the terracottas, which they’d been looking at for two weeks. “Icarus,” said the professor, “as he was seen a thousand years later. How insignificant he is here. You can barely distinguish him.” The pointer moved to a ripple in the water, bisected by two little legs. “It’s the peasant and the land that are dominant.” And Asa looked. Yes, in the corner, the flurry of drowning, while all around the world hummed and plowed and trod between its furrows. His face got hot and his palms began to sweat. Nobody had noticed—that he was crying, that Icarus was dying. He kept crying and getting hotter, as if the cold that had clamped onto him in the Solas’ study had finally let go, and he were now thawing. All that had been was changed, all the world was different, there weren’t any heroes, there weren’t any summers at the pool to come, there weren’t any myths—Asa’s litany of loss, first enunciated in that basement, became a train of thought he carried everywhere. Down the street to romantic poetry at Seaver Hall, accompanied by his inner chant: No more myths, no more summer; into the Union, filling his tray with meat loaf and custard: Everything is changed, everything is gone. Eventually he got used to it, it was a familiar part of the landscape, this voice that never stopped. He bought a print of Breughel’s painting from the Fogg and hung it on the wall opposite his bed. He stopped going to the museum course; he had gotten what he needed from it.
Asa graduated in 1960 in English, without honors. He and Jerry had resumed relations in the middle of junior year and were going to Paris together to get jobs at the Herald Tribune. Parker had drifted into club life, had written for the Lampoon and given black-tie dinners in his Eliot House rooms, to which he always invited Jerry (who wouldn’t go because of Parker’s friends’ anti-Semitism) and never invited Asa (who would have welcomed a touch of the high life). To their surprise Parker got a summa in history and went straight into graduate school, where he distinguished himself while Asa and Jerry ate tripe and suffered grievous stomach pains. The grim Paris autumn sent Asa back to America and a stopgap job reading novel manuscripts at Little, Brown. They were terrible, but unlike most of the readers, he wasn’t convinced he could write a better one. What had he got to write about? Within three years Jerry was ensconced at a rewrite desk near the Champs-Élysées, Parker had a job waiting for him at Yale when he finished his thesis, and Asa was learning book production—riffling through pages without reading them to count the lines, poring over type catalogues, making deals with paper suppliers.
And by then Roberto had vanished. He was to turn up periodically, always enthusiastic about a new project. Desalinization of Cape Cod Bay was one; for several years he worried about the water table on the Eastern seaboard. Then he got a job at Sotheby’s in London, but that didn’t last long because there was some trouble about the disappearance of a Bernini plaster study for an angel. He was against bomb shelters and for disarmament, and circulated a newsletter on these issues for a year or two; Asa always got a copy. After a long period of silence he resurfaced, having become a documentary filmmaker specializing in Latin America. Sometimes he appeared in Cambridge with a new car and a beautiful, sleek woman, took Asa—later Asa and Fay—out to dinner at the Ritz and told incredible stories about his life. Other times he came alone, in Reuben’s Porsche, getting on for a decade old, and sat in Asa’s living room drinking rum and brooding. He stayed in touch with Asa because Asa stayed in touch with Professor Sola, and Roberto had, in his words, “divested” himself of the family. “What’s left of it to divest,” he added. But he wanted the news.
The news wasn’t good. Professor Sola had had a throat cancer and now whispered and wheezed his infrequent sentences. He rarely saw anyone except Asa, who had started visiting while he was at Harvard out of desperation and continued visiting out of duty. The professor spent most of his time in his study with the amber lights on, making a catalogue of his art holdings; these had been increased by Roberto’s hoard, which had been abandoned by Roberto and presented by Asa to the father as recompense for losing his other son. Roberto had disappeared when Asa was a sophomore and still dependent on Professor Sola’s company. He went there every Friday night for dinner and listened to rambling monologues about Rembrandt, Germany in the twenties, the Harvard English faculty, and the problems of the pool.
“You know, it only alienated my neighbors more when I built the pool. They thought it was the height of ostentation. I was prepared to invite them all, to consider it their pool as well. They didn’t want it in the vicinity.”
“Why alienated them more? What had alienated them to begin with?” Asa asked. He had learned that Professor Sola, unlike Reuben, didn’t mind being asked direct questions.
“Oh, why does anybody dislike the Jews? I never knew.”
“It was that?”
“Maybe.” The old man said nothing else, and Asa felt unsatisfied, for once.
He found out, too late to make any difference, all that he’d wanted to know about Reuben’s mother. Blonde and rich, she’d passed for Aryan, supplied her husband and infant (Roberto; Reuben had been born in America) with food, obtained passports for the family and gotten them out of Germany, and killed herself five years later. “Why not?” Professor Sola had said, telling this story one long summer evening. “What was the point of her life after that? She’d saved the people she cared about, given me two children, compromised her identity, abandoned her country. Her work was done.”
“Did you feel the same?”
“Did I want to die? Well, yes, but she died first, and there were the boys, so I stayed.”
Asa never forgot his saying “stayed,” as though the world were a place, like Boston or Paris, and there were other places to be.
“And what was her name?”
“Marthe. Martha.”
So Grace remained a mystery. It was a mystery Asa pondered by himself in his living room late at night, after Roberto had come and gone, or anytime he felt adrift or startled by some memory of the past. He avoided the Solas’ end of Brattle Street, driving down Mount Auburn to get to his parents’ house on Sundays when he and Fay went there for dinner. He braved that five-pronged intersection only when he intended to visit Professor Sola.
And at the end of the sixties, Professor Sola died. His cancer had recurred, and he told Asa he didn’t intend to have it treated. Asa wrote to Roberto, care of General Delivery, Hollywood; the letter returned after two weeks, addressee unknown. He put a few ads in the movie trade journals, called Parker at Yale, but Roberto was untraceable. There was a strange funeral at the Mount Auburn Cemetery with Asa and Fay and their baby girl, two cadaverous professors emeritus of English, and Lolly. Lolly had arranged the service, which consisted of a Unitarian minister reading Psalms. Reuben’s marker was on the left, Marthe’s on the right.
Roberto turned up several weeks later, drank rum, listened to the news, and talked about home computers, which he claimed were the wave of the future. Never, in all those years, in all those evenings Asa spent with Roberto or his father, did any of them say Reuben’s name.
After Professor Sola was dead, Asa unrolled the Breughel print, which he’d kept in the back of the off-season clothes closet in the guest room, and tacked it above his desk, which stood in a corner of the living room. Fay didn’t like it. “I think that’s an ugly painting,” she said more than once. “It’s depressing, that’s what.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Asa. “It’s about how life goes on, you know?” But he used it to get depressed with. During the day, or when there were people in the room, he never looked at it. At night, after Fay, tired from the baby, went to sleep at nine, he’d sit on the sofa, and stare at the plowman, the hillside, the feeble effort of Icarus not to drown, and drink his scotch, and—what? He described it to himself as “remembering.” But he avoided specific memories. He drifted around in the past, smelling the roses that studded the Solas’ garage, seeing again the finely turned column of Jo’s arm, tasting the chlorine in his throat from too many dives into the pool. Occasionally he tasted real tears. And sometimes he heard his old litany: No more summer, no more myths—but it was halting and faint and had lost its power to hypnotize. Because life did go on, he and Fay had bought a shack on the Cape and had their own summers now. So what was he lacking, and what was he crying for?
Quite simply, the best love he’d ever known.