Harvard Yard (59 page)

But however they arrived, they left in high spirits, enveloped in carols and full of the best cheer that Heywood Wedge could provide, because after all those dark New England Decembers, the descendants of even the staunchest Puritans had come to realize that faith should inspire joy rather than hold it back.

Part of the celebration was a buffet—great hams, roasts of beef, trays of lyonnaise potatoes, tureens of creamed onions, pickled oysters, broccoli florets and . . . desserts, cakes, sweetmeats, oranges, tangerines, nuts . . .

Before the butler rang the dinner bell, Victor took Barbara by the elbow and pivoted her into the dining room, away from the people milling through the front parlor, the study, the foyer, the stairwell. The room was brilliant with candlelight and, for a moment, deserted. So he kissed her.

She giggled and kissed him back, and the kiss grew more passionate than either of them had expected.

Then she pulled away. “Victor, this is terribly naughty, kissing me in your grandfather’s dining room with your trousers looking like . . . like a tent at a campsite.”

Then Victor heard someone step into the dining room and discreetly clear his throat. Victor turned toward the painting on the wall and said to Barbara, “Marvelous work, don’t you think?”

“What . . . oh, yes . . . Copley, isn’t it?” Barbara stepped closer to the painting. “Of course, it looks to me as if someone else painted that Bible on the table.”

“Someone did.” Heywood Wedge stepped into the room, doing it as gracefully as a man with two good legs. “Your eye is excellent.”

Barbara smiled. “Well, I have studied in France.”

“What does the Bible cover?” asked Victor, angling his body so that the old man would not see his trousers, which had not fully deflated.

“A play, supposedly, and since Reverend Abraham was one of the authors of the anti-theater laws of 1767 . . .”

“That’s ironic,” said Victor.

“Whenever Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Theodore came, you’d find them in front of this painting, bickering over the play that is supposedly beneath that Bible.”

“What was the play?” asked Victor.

“A quarto of some sort,” said Heywood. “I once overheard Theodore asking her if they left it in England, in the house where they were exiled.”

“Have you ever been there?” asked Victor.

“No. But perhaps you two can go exploring there someday.”

Victor and Barbara shot each other nervous glances.

“Yes,” Heywood chuckled. “Young people stealing kisses at our Christmas parties quite often end up married. Rather a wonderful honeymoon can be had in England. . . .”

Victor could almost feel the heat of embarrassment from Barbara.

“Yes,” mused the old man, “Wales, the Lake District, Scotland . . .”

Victor stammered, “It . . . it sounds wonderful, Grandfather, but—”

“But not for a while.” The old man pivoted on his cane and made for the door. “Victor has much yet to learn. All that playwriting business was fine, but economics . . . money . . . there’s a future for a young man.”

When Heywood had left the room to rejoin his guests, Barbara slipped her hand into Victor’s. A moment later, a servant rang the dinner gong. Victor was glad to hear it, though talk of marriage had tightened his stomach considerably.

Commencement seemed to come in six weeks rather than six months. By then, Barbara Abbott was no longer speaking to him.

On a night in May, he had been enjoying billiards and cigars with his mates at the Porcellian when he heard a commotion, followed by the sound of someone rushing up the stairs, and one of the porters shouting, “S’cuse me, ma’am, s’cuse me, but you ain’t supposed to be in here.”

Victor looked up to see Barbara, in riding boots and jodhpurs, striding toward him, teeth clenched. “Baseball?” she growled. “You like baseball that much, do you?”

“Barbara, dear.” He put out a hand to usher her out.

“They say that you’ve sat with the same little hussy from East Cambridge at every game this year!” And with a crack that resounded like the cue ball, her open hand struck his cheek. Then she turned and stalked out.

Victor stood for a moment, his hand to his face, then he heard Dickey Drake say, “Bad form, Victor. Bad form all round.”

“Shut up,” said Victor.

“We haven’t had entertainment like that in here,” said Bram Haddon, “since Biff Mulvehill’s mother found out he was tickling burlesque cunnies at the Old Howard.”

Victor stalked out to the sound of his mates’ laughter, something he might court as a rule but did not welcome now.

The rumors had flown, and those who spread them assumed that even though this East Cambridge girl was the sister of Harvard’s right fielder, there could be only one way that she might attract a Porcellian.

Grandfather Heywood had some intuition in all of this. And in Dickey Drake, he had a fine spy. The week before commencement, Heywood heard the latest from Dickey, the son of his eldest daughter.

“And Barbara slapped him? Just like that?” said Heywood.

“Just like that,” said Dickey.

“Because he’s been to the baseball games with that . . . that Irish girl?”

“I don’t know if he’s taking her to the games, actually, but he sits with her and cheers for her brother.”

“And you saw them kissing?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. They got into your car on Mount Auburn Street, after one of the baseball games. They looked at each other and smiled and then, it was as if they couldn’t wait or didn’t care who saw them. They just . . . kissed.”

Heywood Wedge puffed his cheeks and blew up the sides of his mustache and made a plan to separate Victor from his Irish paramour.

But before Victor heard from his grandfather, he heard from Jimmy Callahan.

Victor was going into the Porcellian for a late dinner. He was alone, though he knew that he would meet friends inside. They would distract him from his predicament and from the sense of melancholy he felt now that his college days were almost over.

He had sent Barbara a note telling her that she had a right to her anger but that there was nothing between him and the Irish girl. This was a lie, but he knew that his attraction for Emily could not last. She could never be suitable company in places where a young man with ambition hoped to go, so he shouldn’t burn his bridges with someone as companionable as Barbara. Still, he could not stop seeing Emily . . . for lunch at Jacob Wirth’s or long walks on Boston Common, well away from the prying eyes in the Yard.

Just before he stepped into the club, Victor heard someone calling his name.

Beneath the Porcellian Gate, he saw the shadow of Jimmy Callahan. So he stepped across the street and said hello.

A flask flashed in Jimmy’s hand. “A year ago, Joe Kennedy stood here, looking up at all you swells celebrating yourselves. He was crushed that he was down here. I told him he was a fool to worry about your phony aristocracy.”

“Good advice,” said Victor, accepting the proffered flask. “What did he say?”

“Nothing, but I think he took the advice.”

“He’ll checkmate the lot of us.”

“The other night, I told my sister the same thing about a phony aristocrat. Told her to put you behind her and get on with things.”

Victor took another sip. “What did she say?”

“She left the room. Went off and cried. She’s in love with you, Victor.”

“She’s a wonderful girl.” Victor handed the flask back to Jimmy.

“Your grandfather doesn’t think so.”

“My grandfather?”

“He came to Memorial Hall yesterday. Found me in the kitchen. Promised to pay my tuition if I saw to it that you and Emily stopped seeing each other.”

“Why . . . the old bastard,” said Victor. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him to go and fuck himself.”

Victor had to smile. He could not imagine anyone saying that to his grandfather.

Now Jimmy took a step closer to Victor. “But here I am, saying what he wanted me to say, all on my own.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you love her, stop, because it won’t work. If you’re using her, stop, because I’ll kill you.” And Jimmy Callahan walked off into the shadows.

The elms were dying in Harvard Yard. The leopard moth blight had attacked in 1909. Two years later, the famous Class Day Elm in front of Holden Chapel was dead, and half the trees, seemingly as permanent as Harvard itself, were gone or pruned so drastically that they looked like amputees, their hacked limbs sprouting sad leaves that gave little shade and less inspiration.

Across this sad space marched the Class of 1911 to their commencement in Sanders Theater. All the Wedges attended—Victor’s mother and stepfather, his two aunts, his grandparents. As they paraded back through the Yard to a luncheon in University Hall, Grandfather Heywood hobbled along beside Victor.

“It’s a proud day, Victor,” he said.

“Yes.” Victor walked slowly so the old man on his cane could keep pace. “Though I wish the trees were alive.”

“Some change cannot be stopped. But some can.”

“What do you mean?”

“The greater changes in the country. The mingling of classes, creeds, races. You know, President Lowell joined our Immigration Restriction League because he agrees.”

“Yes, sir,” said Victor with a touch of sarcasm. “The help is the help.”

“To have order in society, there must be a chain of being,” said Heywood. “On the battlefield and in the bedroom. You can’t have the rabble overturning things. So we control immigration and see that we don’t marry beneath us.”

Victor stopped and looked at the old face, heavy, drooped, reddened by the bright sun. “I won’t marry beneath me, sir. No matter who I marry . . . when I marry.”

Heywood waved the rest of the family on, then said, “Your father would tell you that it’s time for you to put off boyish enthusiasms and consider your future.”

“I have, sir. You know that. I start in the accounting offices in September.”

“That can wait.” The old man smiled and took out an envelope and put it into his hand. “A steamer ticket. A year in Europe did marvels for your father. He saw the sights. Met the right people. I want you to do the same.”

“Do you want me to meet people, Grandfather, or leave them behind?”

“Just go. You’ll see things clearer when you come back.”

iv

Victor Wedge was not so much in love with anyone that he would turn down the grand tour, but he did not leave until September, after the second Harvard-Boston Aeronautical Meet, during which he paid a hundred dollars to fly in a Blériot monoplane.

Then he took a month in France. He was in Bavaria for Oktoberfest. He reached Rome in time for a Boston Protestant to hear Christmas mass in St. Peter’s. He spent January skiing in the Alps, February in Spain. And at every stop, he followed his grandfather’s prescription. He saw the sights, both simple and grand, and he met the people, especially the right people, because in every European capital the Wedges had friends and business associates who saw to Victor’s comfort, entertainment, and female companionship.

In late March, he arrived at last in the land of his ancestry and made the pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon.

After visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace and the site of New Place, he walked up the street to Harvard House and signed his name in the guest book set aside for Harvard men. Then he toured the rooms, peered through the wavy old glass, ran his hand along the ancient adze-hewn beams. He had found one of the taproots of American civilization, sunk in the same sacred earth that formed Shakespeare, for in this house, Robert Harvard had courted Katherine Rogers.

Then he went north to the Lake District, where Wordsworth and his friends had found their inspiration. He climbed the Grisedale Pike. He sat at the head of Derwent Water, at the spot that Ruskin had called the most beautiful view in the world. He felt as if he were taking a grand survey course in English literature. So after Shakespeare and the Romantics, he should have gone back to London and visited some Dickensian slum.

Instead, he hiked west across the greening hills, following the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall until he reached the Northumberland village of Barrasford. In the churchyard, he found a grave:
REVEREND ABRAHAM WEDGE, 1702-1782, A MINISTER OF GOD, LOYAL TO HIS KING.

A mile beyond, Victor came to Townsend House, an ancient half-timbered manor presided over by Mildred Dunham, Lady Townsend, a wizened old widow with a cynical laugh, a grouchy staff, and a powerful taste for port.

That night, over a dinner of spring lamb and mint jelly, she told him stories passed down to her, of Reverend Wedge and Lydia in exile. Then, she filled her port glass for the fourth time, took him into the library, and showed him the table at which John Singleton Copley was supposed to have painted them.

“The painting hangs in my grandfather’s dining room,” he told her.

“Does it indeed?” Then she pulled down an ancient volume with a flaking binding. “This is the very book that was on the table before them. The granddaughter was reading
Love’s Labours Lost
to the reverend while Copley did his work. She left it as payment for Townsend hospitality.”

Victor opened the book and saw two signatures on the endpapers. He did not recognize the first name—Burton Bones—but beneath it was “Ex Libris Lydia Wedge Townsend.” And beneath that, the inscription: “To Lord and Lady Townsend, We leave this gift, left to us by an old actor born Benjamin Wedge, as thanks for your hospitality. Your loving American daughter-in-law, Lydia.”

Victor could see Lydia before him, reaching out of the past. Then he turned to the title page and saw that it was a quarto, printed in 1598. “I would like to buy this from you, if I might, Lady Mildred.”

“Buy it?” The old woman seemed insulted. “I shall give it to you. If I could find the reverend’s old commonplace book, which is buried somewhere in my attic, I’d give you that, too. But be satisfied with this.”

The next morning, he offered to pay her again, believing that it had been the port speaking the night before, and she reiterated. “It belonged to your ancestor.”

“But it’s very valuable.”

“I have no children. What my greedy nieces and nephews don’t know won’t hurt them. So take this back to America.”