The Latecomer, page 25
The plane shuddered to a stop at their gate.
“Will we get to see Charlottesville itself?” he asked Eli. “And Monticello?”
“You will. A couple of Monticello board members are involved with Hayek. Some are on the faculty at the university.”
Harrison turned to look at him. Unlike the other passengers, who were furiously unpacking the overhead bins, he remained in his seat with his eyes closed, and the light through the window lent his skin a distinct note of rose. He had gone for a haircut in town a couple of days earlier, and now it was very short, almost buzz-cut. “How did you meet these guys, again?” asked Harrison.
“Dr. Gregories and I corresponded when I was just starting to think about my book. He teaches at UVA, so I came down to Charlottesville to meet him, and a couple of the others. He suggested I defer Harvard and apply to Roarke. I’d never heard of Roarke. Then again, where I grew up, no one had heard of Harvard.” He smiled, but still didn’t open his eyes. “I was here last summer. These are people with a sincere interest in ideas. Especially ideas we don’t see often enough in the mainstream.”
From the airport they were driven south through farmland and past manor houses, some old, some built to look as if they were, but given away by their overblown dimensions and attached garages. A sign informed Harrison that they were on the Thomas Jefferson Parkway, and he turned to look up the drive toward Monticello. Just before Simeon they pulled off onto a gated property. The massive building came into view as they drove a slow, rising curve: a great estate unfolding along the base of a wooded hillside. At its heart was a white frame plantation house with porches on all three of its floors; on either side, modern extensions.
“I hope you won’t object to a few creature comforts,” Eli said. “I could use a break from Roarke privations.”
It seemed an odd thing for someone who’d grown up in a shack to say, Harrison thought. He himself, emphatically not raised in a shack, was absolutely open to such luxuries as a bath, a soft bed, and an opportunity not to feed chickens twice a day.
They were welcomed by two men not much older than themselves, who took their bags upstairs. Harrison watched them ascend and, at the landing, turn in separate directions, settling one of his lesser questions about whether they’d be sharing a room. A moment later, the kind and supportive Dr. Gregories himself materialized and shook Eli’s hand.
“Young man,” he said to Harrison, when they were introduced.
“Hello,” said Harrison. Then, to his own great surprise, he added: “Sir.”
“Please. Call me Oren. Hello, my friend,” he said to Eli. The two shook hands almost gently, with a kind of mutual contemplation. Professor Greg ories was lanky, tall, and clubbable. He had ash-colored hair in retreat, whisper thin across the pate, scalp glimmering between the remaining strands. He wore immaculate khakis, a dark green belt, and a shirt so blindingly white it might never before have been exposed to air. A broad gold watch emerged as those two hands rose and fell. “How goes the new book?”
Eli had not mentioned that he was writing a “new book.”
“Slowly, but I’m encouraged. I am looking forward to making some progress these next few weeks.”
“Good. I hope you’ll stay as long as you like. You as well, Mr…. Oppenheimer.”
Yes, without doubt, the tiniest of pauses before his surname, which meant … what? Quite probably nothing, and yet, here they were: a young Black man and a young Jew at the hearth of obvious traditional entitlement, on what was quite possibly a once-plantation, snug in this most presidential terroir of American soil. Somehow they had slipped back into the source of it all.
Harrison’s bed was four-posted with a piece of linsey-woolsey stretched across the top. An adjacent study housed a six-foot-long desk in front of a window that overlooked woodland. He went to take a bath, his first since going home to Brooklyn at Christmas break, and there, embraced by the heat and the steam and the lavender smell of the soap, he drifted off for a few minutes or possibly longer. When he woke, it was time to go downstairs.
Later, he would think of that first evening as an irremediable transit from one state of being to another, so momentous and so permanent, not because he couldn’t go back but because he could not, for many years, imagine a reason to do so. The men he would meet that night—and that first night they were indeed all men—were powerfully intellectual, powerfully focused on impact, and just plain powerful, and as he was introduced to them and spoke with them, he began to read his own promise in their reflected interest.
The rest of them arrived over the following days. Two were senators from Midwestern states. One was a governor, another a pundit who wrote historical fiction, just for fun. Harrison met a recently retired member of the Harvard economics department and a rail-thin man with an accent he recognized from his Vineyard summers—moneyed New England, redolent of sailing and boarding schools—who declined to say more than that he worked in Washington. Eli introduced him to a squat man whose very round head segued directly into broad shoulders. This was Roger Fount, the chairman of Hayek.
Harrison spent the next days working on the meandering political journey of American Jews, exploring Charlottesville and Jefferson’s magnificent UVA campus, and visiting Monticello for a tour and a rose garden reception. After the seminars began, he attended every one, elated to find himself in room after room of robust thinkers and incisive questioners. It became commonplace, if never for one moment dull, to meet the authors of books he’d read, who might materialize in the bus seat beside him as they drove to a nearby winery for an outdoor dinner, or ahead of him in the buffet line at breakfast. A certain Princeton historian (for whose sake Harrison had once considered applying to Princeton) had the bedroom next to his and could be heard snoring through the wall. On his other side: a former ambassador to China.
A few days later, Vernon Loring turned up.
Harrison had not seen Loring since their meeting at Symposium, when he’d shared the good news of his Roarke acceptance. If he was surprised by their reunion here in Virginia, Loring himself did not seem to be.
“My young triplet friend,” he said mildly, in greeting.
They shook hands, and Loring held on to Harrison’s for a moment too long, actually holding it up for closer examination. “I am looking for evidence of physical labor,” he said.
“Oh, well, I’m in charge of the chickens, if that’s what you mean.”
“And does that suit you?”
“Frankly, not at all. But everything else about Roarke does. I’m so grateful to you.”
“Not at all. By now, I’m sure you understand the importance of steering the right people toward the college. You’ll do the same, I would hope.”
Harrison nodded. But it would be rare indeed to stumble across a young person with a mind like Eli’s, or—he supposed—his own, who’d be willing to be diverted from a Yale or a Stanford.
“Forgive me, but I had no idea you’d be here,” he said.
Loring smiled. “Still asking for forgiveness? We have a ways to go, I see. I understand you’ve made a friend of that brilliant young man we talked about. I wonder, would you introduce me?”
Harrison did, and the two of them began an animated conversation that gradually relocated to one of the library’s dark corners. By the time Harrison rejoined them, hours later, they were discussing St. Augustine.
“That’s an interesting guy,” Eli said the next morning when they sat down together for breakfast. “He found you, I take it?”
“Found me?”
“Well, yes. Not everyone at Roarke, but some of us. Sought out. Pointed in the right direction. It’s a tradition, I understand.”
Harrison refrained from noting that he had been the one doing the seeking, but he confirmed the part about the pointing. “I’d never heard of Roarke until Professor Loring,” he admitted.
“He and Gregories were at Princeton together. Before that, he was at Oxford with Roger Fount. I enjoyed talking with him.”
“Well,” said Harrison, “he’s a fan. Your fan. The first time I met him we discussed you. You were the only one of our generation he had any time for.”
“Oh. Well,” Eli said with his usual vague amusement, “that’s gratifying.”
“Did he check out your hands?” asked Harrison.
Eli’s fork, laden with the end of a sausage link, paused in midair. “What?”
“Oh … it’s just, he wanted to look at my hands last night. Something about evidence of physical labor. In the Roarkian tradition.”
Eli continued to look at him, and as he did, Harrison felt his own face begin to tighten, and the absolute conviction that he had offended Eli started to pulse through him, horribly. But after a moment his friend shook his head in an affable way. “No, he did not. We’re not all meant for the fields, I suppose.”
Harrison flinched. Then, in relief, he managed to smile back.
Most of the sixty or so men (and handful of women) who ultimately converged at Hayek were older than Eli and himself by two decades at least, and Harrison got used to being introduced as “our delegate from the land of youth” or “young Mr. Stone’s classmate at Roarke.” He was asked constantly about his origins, his forebears, his experiences, and how they had brought him to Roarke, and where they might lead him next. “I’ve deferred at Harvard,” he said, over and over, to general approval. (Though the Yalies and Princetonians seemed, amusingly, to still nurse old rivalries. “Lord, make me a Harvard man. But not yet!” said one.)
“After that, I think,” said Roger Fount one evening, “you ought to go to Oxford. I’ve said the same to Eli. You appear far too impressed by that,” he told Harrison, looking amused. “There were very few of us, actual intellectuals among the so-called ‘Scholar Athletes.’ You’d be amazed, some of the idiots they took. Squash players who could read. Rowers who could count. At Oxford you should do PPE. And we can help you land in one of the better colleges.”
PPE? Harrison had asked.
Politics, philosophy, and economics. The only course worth studying while on a Rhodes.
He wanted to ask why Fount thought he could actually plan for a Rhodes Scholarship, but he didn’t. Uncharacteristically, he didn’t want to know.
By the second week, in the gloaming of a rich and fragrant evening among the Monticello fruit trees, he found himself ruminating on the notion of family, and how smoothly the word had begun to slide over these new relationships with these amiable and fascinating people, and how fractured and abrasive that same word had always seemed in connection with his actual relations: mother, father, sister, brother. (He did not, at that point, include his more recently acquired sister.) When he considered how the three of them had been made (something he certainly did not make a habit of doing!) he thought of nameless lab workers, gloved in latex and leering over their innocent cellular divisions through a microscope. It was … well, it was many things. But what it wasn’t? Familiar. Maybe the reason he had never felt anything real for any of those people in his nominal family was that he had not actually chosen them. And why, by the same token, should they love him? Did they love him? He had been every bit as forced upon them as they on him, and at the end of the day, none of it meant anything.
This, on the other hand, meant something.
These remarkable people! They wore their brilliance so lightly and were so passionate in their contemplation of America: the ongoing experiment, their country. He inclined toward them, not only intellectually but, he realized, actually physically, and not only from an affinity of mind but through a surge of natural affection that felt revelatory. The relief from pretense, it was so freeing that he floated along with it, released at last after all the long years. He loved everything about this place, and what was happening to him here.
The two of them, himself and Eli, were to speak on the same evening. Following dinner, the group took their seats in the library, some balancing decaf in gold-rimmed cups and saucers on their laps, others holding heavy crystal glasses of whiskey. Harrison knew nothing at all about what Eli had prepared, and was not the only member of the audience to react visibly when his friend announced that the theme of his talk was a reconsideration of Booker T. Washington, nearly a century after his death.
“Oh! Ha ha,” said someone behind Harrison.
Harrison didn’t turn around.
Eli began with Washington’s 1895 “Atlanta Compromise,” in which he’d urged Black Americans to delay direct engagement with the white establishment (aka “the establishment”), both in general and on the issue of civil rights in particular, and focus instead on their own education and financial security, in order to become such hardworking, wealth-accumulating model citizens that even the most recalcitrant racists in even the most Confederate states would see no reason not to share the harvest of American liberties with them. Eclipsed in due course by W. E. B. Du Bois’s more aggressively oppositional outlook, Washington had fallen, over time, into a historical trench of Uncle Toms, to the point that he and his Tuskegee Institute stood for nothing so much as a notion of self-negation. The Walden School had entirely written Booker T. Washington out of the shining story of the Civil Rights Movement, suggesting that the rise of Black Americans jumped directly from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King.
Booker T. Washington’s long game, Eli argued, had been perfectly calibrated. In 1895, American Negroes (as Washington identified this group, and self-identified) were not in a position to oppose, let alone impact, white America; indeed, that would remain the case for decades to come. The notion of using those intervening years to build power and self-reliance within their own community was sound strategy, not capitulation. And, said Eli, looking out at his audience, Black Americans’ abandonment of this strategy in favor of Du Bois’s alternate path had only demonstrated this to be so.
“It’s perhaps an American trait,” said Eli, in conclusion, “that when we want something, we want it now. Separation from England? Dump the tea in the harbor. Somebody turns up a nugget of gold in California? Everybody head west. It’s understandable that freed slaves should want the whole menu of rights and opportunities before the ink on the Emancipation Proclamation was dry. But Booker T. Washington played what we might call today a multilevel game of chess, always aware that he had opponents on all sides of the board, including the one that was nominally his own. Now, could his vision for Black progress have held? If those generations had risen through education to the professions, and then to politics and wealth and influence, would American society at the rim of the twenty-first century truly be equal, colorblind, and meritocratic? How can we know, because we went another way. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the goal is further away now, in 2001, than it was in 1895.
“But still!” Eli said, gathering his pages. “We beat on, don’t we? Because we believe in the green light, this American utopia where we’re judged by the content of our character and our work ethic and our God-given abilities. You know, I’m frequently asked if I’m trying to be some kind of example to ‘my people.’ This is a serious question, so I want to be very precise when I answer. I ask them: Do you mean the people of western Virginia?”
The two men behind Harrison chuckled.
“Do you mean people born under my astrological sign, Aquarius?”
Applause and laughter. Harrison sat up in his chair. His neighbor, none other than the lauded Princeton historian, was thumping his hand down on Harrison’s forearm, unable to contain his own mirth.
“Or perhaps you mean my people, the left-handed. A sinistra? Or we of the tribe who delude ourselves into thinking the Orioles will one day win the World Series! Or those of us born in 1982, the Chinese Year of the Dog. So I’m confused. Because all I want is what Booker T. Washington wanted. I want an America in which it wouldn’t occur to anyone to suggest that my accomplishments are anything but fully my own. No lower standard. No … affirmative action. You want to know who my people are? People who work hard, and innovate, and take pride in their accomplishments, those are my people.”
“Yes!” someone to Harrison’s left shouted. The Princeton professor had removed his thumping hand from Harrison’s forearm. He was standing, clapping loudly.
“Told you,” said a voice, somewhere on his other side.
“Fuck, yes,” someone else responded. Harrison turned to see who’d spoken, but they were all on their feet, banging their hands together, and no one seemed to be talking.
They broke for more drinks, more coffee, the audience drifting away to the bar. Harrison stayed in his chair. He told them that he wanted to go over his talk one more time, but in fact he couldn’t even bear to look at what he’d written about American Jews and their political shape-shifting. It wasn’t that he took no pride in what he’d pulled together, just that now he couldn’t remember why he’d settled on this topic. There was a reason he was here, and surely it wasn’t to explain how socialism was relinquishing its grip on American Jews. They probably knew that already, and if they didn’t there were any number of scholars, far better credentialed than himself, to tell them. No. He wanted to tell them something he was better equipped to tell than anyone else in the room.
He left his pages behind in his chair when he went to the podium, and over the clinking of new ice cubes in replenished drinks, he explained that he wanted to tell them a story about watermelon. “Not just because it’s a ridiculous story, and you’re going to be entertained, but because it demonstrates so much about what’s wrong with the education I had, until a year ago.”
The Walden School, he told them, had been his alma mater all the way back to kindergarten, and represented, in his hometown of New York City, the bright shining lie of progressive education. At Walden, they’d been taught about the European genocide against Native Americans, about the enslavement of Africans, about eugenics and lynch mobs and the unmitigated evil of the Republican Party, all while fanning the flame of their own goodness. They’d been taught to genuflect before the notion of free speech while shunning anyone who didn’t agree with them. They’d been encouraged to trample traditional values, denigrate the Western Canon, and generally amplify the non-white and non-male and non-heterosexual and non-traditionally gendered, informing those of European descent and Caucasian ethnicity and normative sexuality that their opinions were not required.
