Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  abrousard: Sry, it’s Alex. From Hines’s class. Also, from across the room.

  Cady lifted her head and scanned the room. Most students were bent over their work, and one guy was slumped sound asleep in an armchair while still holding a precarious coffee cup. Then her eyes lit upon Alex’s disheveled blond hair, his neck stretched up like an ostrich’s. He waved when she made eye contact. She smiled in return. He looked back down at his laptop.

  In seconds, another chat message:

  How’s the paper coming?

  She typed back only an ellipsis.

  abrousard: Same here.

  me: I don’t believe you.

  abrousard: ha! Come over and see. There’s an open armchair next to me.

  Cady considered it, but she knew she’d only procrastinate more.

  me: I would but I gotta focus:(

  abrousard: ok. bye.

  In the next second, his name grayed and the chat window read:

  abrousard@fas.harvard.edu is offline.

  Cady felt a jab of regret, but she pushed it away and opened her medieval history sourcebook to that week’s reading. She flipped through the pages, mostly photocopies of ancient texts, early biblical writing, and simplistic diagrams of the cosmos. She turned to the section titled “Early Visions: Biblical and Apocryphal, 200 b.c.e.–400 c.e.” She had to remind herself that c.e. stood for “Common Era” and signified the same time period as a.d., Anno Domini, medieval Latin for “In the Year of Our Lord.” Generally, she had a great mind for dates, but she had always been thrown by the fact that the b.c. “Before Christ” years counted backward; she drew a small bracket beside the time period and wrote 200 BC to 400 AD = 600 yrs so that she wouldn’t forget.

  In her high school history classes, it had been nearly impossible for her to comprehend that the advent of Christ permanently modified the way an entire culture conceptualized time. They’d been taught that it was a gesture of devotion and a way to ratify Christ’s importance. But Cady couldn’t imagine how people in the years around Christ’s earthly existence mentally reversed time’s arrow and counted backward. It had seemed so confusing and inconvenient, she’d doubted that laypeople changed it in practice. Now, since her brother had died, it made sense. It’s how the brain wants to work. When something profound occurs in our lives, that becomes the start, and everything before is only a countdown. This was Year One of Life Without Eric. The year before was Year One Until Life Without Eric. The only difference was that she was counting backward from his death, not his birth.

  Cady tried to put Eric out of her head—not easy, as her alternative was pages of dense text—when the appearance of an illustration caught her eye. The first drawing was labeled “Figure 2: Late medieval idea of the location of the ventricles in the human head—with decoration (by Guillaume Leroy II, pub. 1523).” It was a diagram of a head in profile; the cranium was displayed in cross-section with Latin labels, but the face was illustrated with bulging eyes, open mouth, and protruding tongue. A wreath of lush grapevines bordered the diagram. It may have been scientific for its time, but to Cady it looked like something out of a book of spells. The caption read:

  Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s thirteenth-century encyclopedia gave this derivation of the term ventricle: “The brain has three hollow places that physicians call ventriculos, ‘small wombs.’ ”

  Small wombs. Cady waffled, was that what had been happening? Was her brain giving birth to the beings whose voices she was hearing, the immaculate conception of insanity? That was a pretty decent explanation of schizophrenia in thirteenth-century terms. But they didn’t feel like her creation; they felt like strangers, unknown but fully formed, from another time, but real. They felt like ghosts.

  So she perked up when she saw the Middle Ages definition of spirit as “a liquid found in the ventricles of the brain,” spirit as a synonym for soul, spirit as a medium between body and soul, and spirit as a “physical quantity like breath.”

  Like breath—or like voices? It reminded her of what Vivi had said: The spirit world gives us what we need, when we need it, and she should try to be open to whatever form the messages take. What if these voices were messages from the other side, a spirit dimension? These spirits were reaching out to her for a reason, she just had to figure out what it was. Lingering there was the temptation: If she made herself open to these spirits, would Eric reach out to her too?

  Work. She had work to do, reading and a response paper. She rubbed her eyes to rid herself of the distraction and returned to the email with the assignment prompt. The TF had included a general note on the readings:

  The biblical and postbiblical visions in this week’s reading testify to the importance of dreams and other kinds of revelatory experience in the Jewish culture from which Christianity sprang. Apocalypse, from Greek apocalypsis, or “revelation,” was used as a genre description for a certain sort of visionary writing, often involving a mix of disaster and promise of transformation. Write a reader response paper to the text of your choice.

  Cady never knew “apocalypse” meant “revelation.” If only real-life catastrophes came with some revelation. She profoundly hoped for one, but in her experience they left only rubble behind.

  She flipped to the first assigned text, The Vision of Paul, which was very long and organized in the biblical style of simple sentences on numbered lines. Next. The following option, Revelation, was the same. The third text she turned to seemed a little more interesting. It was called The Passion of Saint Perpetua, about the martyrdom of Vibia Perpetua, a twenty-two-year-old woman in Carthage, and the headnote said it was believed to be the work of Perpetua herself. Cady was intrigued. There were so few female authors on her syllabus, and certainly none so close to her in age.

  Perpetua’s account was written in first person and felt as candid as a diary entry. She wrote of being tormented with visions of her dead brother, Dinocrates, who was suffering in the afterlife. In her visions, Dinocrates seemed to be in neither heaven nor hell, but somewhere between life and death. Cady thought of Whit the other night, saying his father died in World War I, meaning that Whit also had to be dead. But he’d spoken to her as if he were her contemporary, a fellow student, alive and well. Where was Eric?

  Stay focused, Cady scolded herself. Back to Perpetua:

  Yet I was confident I should ease his travail. … And I prayed for him day and night with groans and tears, that he might be given me.

  On the day when we abode in the stocks, this was shown me.

  I saw that place which I had before seen, and Dinocrates clean of body, finely clothed, in comfort.

  And I awoke. Then I understood that he was translated from his pains.

  Could she have eased Eric’s pain? Surely she had suffered, watching him transform from her funny, sweet, awkward, genius brother to an angry, deranged stranger. Even before he died, she had suffered the loss of her closest confidant, her most trusted adviser. Throughout her entire life, on Cady’s internal compass, Eric had been north. When he became lost within his illness, she, too, lost her way.

  But Cady never had confidence like Perpetua. She hadn’t had faith that she could steer the ship herself. She had anxiously watched while her parents and a revolving door of doctors and experts failed to help Eric. And when she’d had the chance to intervene, she’d missed it.

  She returned to the Perpetua reading; she had only the grim ending left. The prisoners who were not sufficiently mauled by the leopard or bear were sentenced to death by the sword. Perpetua’s executioner was a “novice” and lacked the nerve to go through with it, and in the end, Perpetua took the sword and “set it upon her own neck.” The last line read, “Perchance so great a woman could not have been slain … had she not herself so willed it.”

  So Perpetua killed herself. Which, if you do it for religious reasons, makes you a martyr, a hero, a saint. If you do it as a mentally ill undergraduate,
then people assume you’re pathetic, weak, or selfish. She hated that some people thought those things about her brother, but people wanted to know the reason, and without one, they’d come to their own conclusions.

  She gazed out through the glass wall before her. Everything looked clear and sharp, the sort of day you could tell was cold just by looking. Far across the green, Memorial Church’s snow-white spire pierced the perfect blue sky, yet the clouds racing across the sky betrayed the bitter wind outside. Fallen leaves skittered and bounced across the ground, like fledglings wanting to take flight but losing their nerve. Only a small maple refused to part with its red leaves, fiery and defiant. If she had lost her nerve when Eric was alive, could she find it now that he was dead? Could she undo that wrong from here? If the ghosts were reaching her from the past, could she reach back?

  Vision confirms faith, Cady wrote in the margin. Perpetua wasn’t born brave; she found that courage after her hallucinations. Last year Cady had been too passive, cowardly even; the changes in Eric had scared her. But that was before. The voices she was hearing scared her, too, but what if the experience could “translate” to Eric? What if letting these ghosts infiltrate her mind was a key to reaching his, or at least to understanding him? Cady sensed that the voices were leading her somewhere, either to madness or to clarity, but she didn’t know which. If she had any dream, any sign, if she had any faith at all, maybe she could be brave too.

  Thwap!

  Something slammed into the window. Cady jumped in her seat, knocking over her water bottle. As she fumbled to protect her laptop from the spill, the students around her reacted to see what had just happened, talking at once: “Holy shit!” “Was that a bird?” “Aw, poor thing.”

  Cady rose and approached the window where a couple of students had gathered. “I don’t even see it,” said one. “Maybe it flew away,” said the other. “Did you see how hard it hit? It left freakin’ feathers.”

  Sure enough, there was a smudge on the glass with a few tiny wisps of down clinging by some grisly glue. Cady pressed her forehead against the window to try to see down to the ground but couldn’t. She took a step back. Was that bird her sign?

  She headed for the door, leaving her laptop open and her damp notes on the chair. She passed through the double doors of the library and a cold gust of wind hit her, blowing her hair across her eyes and mouth. She held it aside and hurried around to the front of the library’s main window. A thick hedge lined the foot of the library, and when she thought she was in the right area, she knelt down on the ground to look beneath the bushes.

  A pigeon lay on its side with one wing outstretched, revealing a shock of white feathers where the rest were gray, its scaly toes curled close to its body. But as she inched closer, she was relieved to see its feathered breast rise and fall with regular breath. If only Cady’s own breath were so steady. She had asked for a sign, and the universe had literally flung one out of the air: a pigeon, like a carrier pigeon, with a message. The echo of Vivi’s words: Be open to whatever form the messages take. Messages delivered by birds, or by spirits. Maybe she needed to stop doubting and start paying attention.

  The pigeon’s lava-red eye rotated in her direction, and Cady was about to touch it when crunching footsteps approached.

  “Cady?” Alex peered down at her in a puffy coat that made his tall, lanky frame look even thinner. “I saw you rush out, is everything all right?”

  “Did you see that bird fly into the window? I think it’s hurt.” Cady brushed the mulch off her knees.

  He tilted his head and smiled. “You came out to check on the bird?”

  “Yeah, is that crazy? Don’t answer that.”

  “No, it’s nice. And it’s more interesting than doing work. So where’s our suicide bomber?” Alex crouched down beside her. “Aw, poor guy. This happened once at my aunt’s house, a bird whammed into the patio window and fell right into a trashcan. He was fine, but we had to shake him out. They get stunned or something and they think they can’t fly away, but they can. We’ve got to get him out of the bushes.”

  Cady reached for the pigeon.

  “Whoa, what are you doing?” Alex asked.

  “Getting it out of the bushes, like you said.”

  “With your bare hands? Are you insane? Pigeons are disgusting, you’ll get bird flu or something.”

  “He’s injured. I can’t just leave him.” She needed to help something.

  “Then hold up.” Alex yanked a striped scarf from his neck. “Wrap your hands in this.”

  “And contaminate your scarf?”

  “It’s fine, but this is the full extent of my helping. And I’m warning you, if that pigeon flaps in my face, I’m going to scream.”

  Cady crept deeper into the shrubbery and gently clamped the scarf around the pigeon’s wings, though it didn’t struggle at all. Its only movement was in its pink toes, which closed around her exposed thumb, tight like a baby’s hand. Its skin was surprisingly warm. “Where should I take him?”

  “Um, um—how ’bout over here.” Alex jumped back and pointed her to the stone steps around the side of Lamont. “Beside the stairs, this area gets less foot traffic.”

  Cady ducked under the metal handrail and stepped into the thick, tangled ivy blanketing the hill. She gently placed the pigeon down on a spot where the drape of the vines propped the bird in a semi-upright position. The pigeon allowed her to do this, only blinking one lavender eyelid when an ivy leaf touched its head.

  She backed away, keeping her eyes on the bird, but it didn’t move. Cady felt a pang of guilt that maybe she ought to have let the animal rest in peace. She looked over her shoulder at Alex, who was frowning.

  Suddenly she heard a coo and flutter of wings, and Cady turned to see the bird take flight up into the sunlight.

  Alex clapped his hands. “Ha! What’d I tell you?”

  “I can’t believe it!” Cady threw her arms around Alex with relief.

  They both realized they were embracing a moment later and loosened their hold, although Alex didn’t quite let go. Instead, he said, “Do you know what you need to do now?”

  Did she? He had inadvertently asked the very question she’d been asking herself. Cady searched his sky-blue eyes for the answer.

  “Wash your hands.”

  Back inside, Cady began to head back for the café, but Alex said he had to start his shift and motioned toward Lamont’s front desk.

  “You work at the reference desk?” Cady’s wheels began turning.

  He nodded. “It’s a nice campus job. Pretty easy, gives me plenty of time to get my own work done, but it can be boring. Unless someone wants to keep me company.” He raised his eyebrows at her.

  “Yeah, I’ll hang for a bit.”

  “You will? Awesome!”

  “Great. I’ll just get my things …” He looked so happy, Cady felt a little blush in her heart. But not quite enough to distract her from her newfound focus. “And maybe you can help me with something I’ve been researching.”

  “Absolutely, I’d love to.”

  It was only a few minutes before they reconvened behind the reference desk, but it was enough time for Cady to come up with a vague American History assignment on slavery at Harvard, more specifically, the slave at Wadsworth House named Bilhah. Excitingly, Alex was familiar with the topic and seemed eager to help her.

  He frowned and typed quickly while Cady peered over his shoulder. “Okay, searching Hollis—that’s the library database—I’m getting a ton of hits on Harvard history in general around President Holyoke’s time, ooh, here’s George Washington in Cambridge, Harvard: Cradle of the American Revolution,” he said in a mock-serious voice. “We can pull some that look good. As for specifically Holyoke’s slaves …”

  “Bilhah and Juba,” Cady supplied.

  “Hm?” Alex looked up from the computer.

  “Tho
se are their names, Bilhah and Juba.”

  “Juu-bah,” he played with the word in his mouth, “So cool. Well, this whole slaves at Harvard thing must be pretty new, like, not new in actuality, but new to academic writing, because these are some lean search results.” He pushed back from the computer. “The best shot for small details like that would be the Harvard Archives, but they’re closed on Sunday, and they can be kind of strict about letting students near the primary docs. But they like me down there. I’ll follow up on it for you this week and let you know if I find anything.”

  Cady thanked him. She was grateful for Alex’s help, sincerely, but she couldn’t match his casual attitude as they hunted down the books in the stacks. They weren’t “cool,” and they weren’t “details.” Bilhah was a person, she had a name.

  And she was trying to tell Cady something.

  22

  In her bedroom, Cady spread out on her desk the library books Alex had given her, filling her bedroom with the pleasantly musty, resinous smell of aged paper. They had titles like Three Centuries of Harvard; VERITAS: Harvard College and the American Experience; even a booklet from the National Park Service, George Washington’s Headquarters and Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts, which Alex the library ninja had found included a chapter called “Wadsworth House Pre-Revolution.” The only book that seemed remotely focused on race was a newer one titled Ebony and Ivy. Cady figured she would try to learn whatever she could about Bilhah and the time in which she lived. Maybe that would help Cady understand what she wanted from her, and what might come next.

  She flipped through the index of the first book, Three Centuries of Harvard, but there was no “Slavery” under S, no “African” under A, no “Race” under R, and definitely no mention of the names of any of the slaves at Wadsworth House. However, there were plenty of mentions of President Holyoke and an entire chapter titled “Good Old Colony Times.” Well, she would gather what she could by learning about the slave woman’s general historical context. All she knew was that she worked for President Holyoke sometime between 1737 and 1769. The rest she would have to read between the lines.