Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  His weight on top of her felt heavy, perfect. Her breathlessness heightened every sensation, lacing each with adrenaline. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and burrowed her face in his neck. She felt herself taken up in Whit’s well-muscled arms, held the way she had wanted to be. He whispered her name in her ear, and she felt his hot breath, smelled its sweetness. She grazed her lips against his round shoulder, freckled by the Georgia sun, tasting of sweat and honeysuckle.

  He moved over her stroke by stroke, in perfect rower’s rhythm, powerful but gentle. The pleasure moved through them like waves until the heat in her was so hot it became light, the fireworks behind her eyelids of colors so bright they became white. He was the light of a star shooting across time to touch her skin, and she was a supernova.

  46

  The next morning, Cady awoke with a sharp intake of breath at finding Nikos snuggled close to her. He was sharing her pillow—or she was sharing his—close enough that she could see the pores on his nose. He looked handsome and peaceful, thick hair mussed, eyelashes knit, and lips slightly parted, but Cady felt none of the intimacy one should gazing upon a lover. Instead, she felt uncomfortable and disoriented.

  She got up and went to the bathroom, stepping around the condom wrapper and scooping up her crumpled clothes along the way. The bathroom tile was ice beneath her feet. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was tamped down at the temples, her makeup smudged, and her eyes bloodshot; she barely recognized herself. Last night had felt like a beautiful dream, but this morning’s reality was confusing, to say the least. She washed her face with cold water.

  After dressing in the bathroom, Cady stepped softly back to the bed where Nikos lay sleeping. She whispered his name, suddenly shy to touch him. His breathing stayed heavy and regular. She said his name a little louder and managed to tap his shoulder.

  He gave a moan and a mighty stretch, showing his body to its advantage, but Cady felt too shy to look, like they hadn’t spent most of last night entwined. “Good morning, darling.” Nikos opened only one eye and squinted at her. “What are you doing all the way over there?” He pawed at her to pull her back on the bed, but she kept her footing.

  “I should go.”

  Nikos passed his hand down the side of her body, hooking a finger in the waistband of her jeans. “It’s Saturday, where could you possibly have to be that requires pants?”

  “I have stuff I need to do.” Cady’s mind was already on finding that fourth location.

  He pouted. “I was hoping we could sleep in. My parents arrive this afternoon from London, and I’m exhausted already just thinking about it. I’ve made a reservation at Henrietta’s Table for dinner, which is the nicest restaurant in the Square, but I can only imagine the ways it will fall short of Mummy’s standards.”

  “The Bauer Award is being given this weekend,” Cady remembered, slumping into a seat at the foot of the bed. If Eric were still alive, her parents would be in town for that, too. She flashed to a fantasy of the four of them smiling around a fancy dinner table, celebrating, happy—the alternate universe where things were the way they were supposed to be.

  “Yes, the presentation ceremony is Sunday evening, after a banquet reception for all the finalists and their advisers and families at the Faculty Club. I’d invite you to join us for dinner tonight, but flying commercial always puts them in a foul mood.”

  “No worries. You guys have a lot to celebrate. It should just be family.” Cady nodded and patted his leg over the covers. She kissed him quickly on the cheek. “I gotta go.”

  Cady left Lowell via a side gate and emerged onto Plympton Street. She checked her phone: she had five missed text messages. Two from Andrea and one from Ranjoo concerned about where she was and looking for reassurance that she was okay. The last thing she needed was any more well-intentioned meddling from them; she wrote them both back in a group text: “I’m fine, spent the night at a friend’s. Pls give me my space.”

  The next was from her mother, saying she was on the road, giving Cady about four hours to check the fourth and final coordinate location before her mom arrived, plenty of time. Although Cady didn’t know how she was going to navigate Parents’ Weekend and her new problematic roommate situation. She needed to keep her roommates from mentioning any of their concerns to her mother. Luckily, since her mother hadn’t moved her in, they had never met. So as long as Cady could run interference and keep her roommates and her mother apart, they wouldn’t know who to tattle to. Cady texted her mom a heart emoji.

  The most recent text was from Alex: “Archives got back to me, found some docs for your slave project! What room r u? Happy to bring it over!”

  No, no, no, Cady thought. She could just imagine how Ranjoo would receive the delivery of archival evidence of her ghosts. She replied: “I’m not in my room. Let’s meet at Annenberg.” Cady picked up her pace. She was starving, and she was excited to see what Alex had found.

  The ellipses appeared, indicating he was replying.

  Great! See you in 15

  Cady arrived at Annenberg, the imposing freshman dining hall inside Memorial Hall. It was unnatural for a cafeteria to be so beautiful: The enormous banquet hall boasted a vaulted ceiling supported by mighty wooden trusses, with stained-glass windows glittering between them, better suited to a cathedral than a mess hall. Fourteen chandeliers with lamps like medieval goblets lit the walnut-paneled space, and past Harvard presidents and distinguished graduates peered down from gold-framed portraits or cool white marble busts mounted along the walls above the diners, joined by life-sized full-body statues of John Winthrop and John Adams at the end. The intimidation factor of these esteemed figures was second only to the scores of boisterous, chattering, hungry strangers who sat below them. There was a reason Cady took any excuse to avoid eating here.

  She got some scrambled eggs and a banana from the kitchen and took a seat at a relatively empty table. She was about to text Alex again when she heard her name called.

  Cady looked up to see Alex happily striding toward her with his tray. He was wearing plaid pajama pants, tennis shoes, and his puffy coat. She waved him over.

  “Well now I feel like a shlub. You’re all dressed for the day!” He set his tray down across from her. “And here I was worried it was too early to text you on a Saturday.”

  “No, you’re fine.” In fact the majority of the students around Cady were wearing casual, cozy clothes, and a few had freshly showered wet heads. Cady was suddenly self-conscious wearing yesterday’s outfit. “I get up early.”

  “Me too. One perk of coming here early—no line for the Veritas waffles.” Alex showed off his plate with a golden brown waffle embossed with the university crest, a shield with three open books spelling VE-RI-TAS. “I thought customized waffles were obnoxious at first, but now I feel like it’s in on the joke, you know?” He squeezed syrup over the center of it.

  “The truth, sugar-coated,” Cady said.

  He laughed. “That’s good! And fitting for your project.” He took a bite before pulling a manila folder out of his backpack. “So the archives librarian helped me find a few records about the slaves under Holyoke. I took photos of them and blew up copies for you. Don’t get too excited, there wasn’t much.”

  “Alex, thank you so much for doing this.” Cady took the folder from him, pushing aside her breakfast to shake out its contents.

  “No problem. I was happy to help, can help anytime you need,” he said as she leaned over the papers.

  She didn’t know what she’d expected to see, but it wasn’t this. The images were of hard-to-read handwritten lists, inventories, on browned, water-spotted paper. She could make out one page labeled “In the Cellar” with listed items like “Rolling Stone & Garden Tools” and “6 Old Chairs in ye. Summer House” and then “Servants Beds & Beding £1.12. Juba £40 Bilhah £12.” Alex had written over the copy in blue pen: “Servant” = slave Listed with pr
operty. Eli wasn’t listed. Either because he was already gone, or because he was worthless in their eyes, Cady couldn’t be sure.

  “Okay, now I can see you’re rocking some serious bed head, so that makes me feel better about showing up in my PJs.”

  “Huh?” Cady reflexively touched her head and felt a huge tangle at the back of her hair.

  “Oh …” Alex’s smile faded, then reappeared, newly humbled. “You weren’t home this morning, the weekday clothes on Saturday morning, rockstar hair. Sorry, I’m a little slow on the uptake.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “Ahh, I’m such an idiot.”

  “No, I’m embarrassed.” Cady could feel her cheeks go hot.

  “What? No, don’t be. It’s college, right? We’re friends, we should high-five.” He didn’t put his hand up. “I think I see my roommates over at that table, I should join them, let you check out this stuff.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to go.” Cady felt bad, Alex was clearly disappointed that his favor wasn’t paying off the way he’d hoped, but she was anxious to read the papers.

  “No worries. I knew when you walked into the first day of seminar late, you were too cool for me. You still are.”

  Cady shook her head. “You dodged a bullet.”

  “See? Even that, a very cool thing to say. Anyway, good luck with the research. Professors love when you have primary docs as references, the death record was cool.” He rose from the table.

  “A death record—” Cady went cold. “—wait, who died?”

  “Uh, it was a weird name.”

  “Bilhah?” She was frantically tearing into the pages he’d given her, looking for something legal and official-looking like a death record would be, but there was nothing of the sort. Was Bilhah caught? Was she executed? Was Eli punished with her?

  “Yeah, Bilhah. There were only a few mentions of her, just that she birthed a son in 1761, and died in 1765, it doesn’t say how old she was.” He leaned over the table and pointed to one of the pages. “It’s in with the kitchen inventory, see the list of food items? They made a note of her dying from accidentally eating poison mushrooms, I guess. The archives librarian said that was probably so that no one else cooked with or ate whatever she did.”

  Beside what looked like a shopping list of vegetables, Cady found the careless scribble: “Bilhah negro woman supped mushroom soup & died.”

  A nearly soundless whimper escaped her lips. Of course, Bilhah hadn’t accidentally ingested anything, the woman who could make medicine out of plants was hardly an uneducated home cook. She had killed herself.

  “Love that ‘supped’—good stuff. The extra credit writes itself. Anyway, I’ll see you in class.” Alex picked up his tray and left Cady alone to spiral.

  So Bilhah killed herself the same year she dropped off Eli. The pain of saying goodbye to her son must have been too much. Or maybe with her child growing up only a few towns away, Bilhah didn’t trust herself to stay away, to risk it all for one peek to make sure he was okay. Or maybe she had been saying her suicide had been part of the plan all along and Cady was too dense to hear it. Bilhah said she was a black mark on her son’s future, she wanted it expunged, she wanted him reborn a white orphan; she was never going to let a loose end remain that could endanger her son’s new life, even if she was that loose end. The intensity of a mother’s love was matched only by the intensity of a mother’s grief.

  Cady should have known.

  She supposed it was good that there was no mention of Eli anywhere in the archives; it would’ve been big news if a former slave child belonging to the President of Harvard was caught trying to pass himself off as a white boy. He must have gotten away with it. Bilhah’s sacrifice wasn’t for nothing.

  But her death was.

  A teardrop fell onto the paper, and Cady wiped her eyes. Suddenly the din of students talking and silverware clinking seemed to have grown in volume and become unbearable. She pushed up from the table, leaving her plate and tray behind. Cady weaved through her classmates with an increasing sense of claustrophobia, feeling as if everyone was crowding her, looking at her, judging her.

  She was disgusted with herself. She had been so singularly focused on what could happen if Bilhah’s plan didn’t work that she had completely missed what would happen if it did. How could she have been so naive as to think she had “helped” Bilhah, so thoughtless as to have underestimated the anguish of losing a son? She had only been another white person who didn’t get it—and with two hundred fifty years to know better.

  Cady still would have helped her write the note that allowed Eli to escape slavery. But if Cady had thought just two steps ahead, she could have anticipated the risk of Bilhah’s suicide. She could have thought of something else to write, helped her devise another plan, another way out. She could have done something, said something. She could have tried.

  Cady pushed through the big double doors into the light outside. She needed to get to the last location. She needed to end this.

  47

  Cady marched across the green, letting the bitter wind dry the wetness on her cheeks. The towering elm trees of the Old Yard, previously so lush with foliage and adorned with welcome banners when she’d moved in, now stood bare. All the brightly colored chairs and café tables that had sat below them in the gentler months had been taken inside. The grass was stiff and pale with frost. Cady pulled her coat tighter and hurried toward Johnston Gate on one of the long, diagonal paths of the quadrangle. The paths that crisscrossed the yards of Harvard were perhaps the only haphazard part of the entire campus. There was no divine plan or even symmetry to the irregular lattice of intersecting lines. There were only paths taken at different angles, by different people, from different times, gone over and over again and again in different combinations of all three, until they were finally, forever set in stone.

  The shushing crunch of Cady’s footsteps through the fallen leaves were the only sound until she heard a noisy sneeze behind her. “Bless you,” she said, before turning to look over her shoulder. Only when she did, no one was there to answer.

  Pardon me. I told you, I was falling ill.

  Robert.

  You’re walking awfully fast. Where are we going?

  First Parish Church.

  Bless me indeed! Church, where I should’ve been going along, apparently. Might I join you? Maybe I can convert.

  I’m not going inside.

  I was only joking. It’s too late for me anyway. I was raised a secular humanist, so naturally I have a great sehnsucht for the supernatural. Sehnsucht is German for yearning. In truth, I could use the distraction today.

  You already seem plenty distracted. Is everything all right?

  No. I got very bad news today. I made a mistake, I missed something that should have been obvious, and the worst happened. I’m not up for talking about it.

  That’s all right, I’m in a similar fog myself. Again, the Germans have a word for the feeling: lebensmüde. Life-tired.

  Cady sighed heavily. Life-tired. She was exactly that. Or maybe death-tired. Probably both. —Where are you getting all this German?

  The German Romantic poets—I reach for them whenever I’m feeling self-pitying.

  That Eliot paper you helped me with was so good they didn’t believe I wrote it. You should get your doctorate in poetry instead of physics.

  I may have to after today.

  Why, what happened?

  At the risk of stringing you a lengthy Miserere, I got my letter from Cavendish. I was rejected.

  How is that possible? Your credentials are insane.

  I couldn’t understand it either. So I asked to see a copy of Bridgeman’s recommendation letter. I thought the praise of an admired professor who knew me best would lift my spirits.

  And didn’t it?

  Allow me to read you the final paragraph. “As appears from his name, he is
a Jew, but entirely without the usual qualifications of his race. He is a tall, well-set-up young man, with a rather engaging diffidence of manner …” it continues with further description of my, and I quote, “prodigious power of assimilation,” and my “genteel nature.” I dearly hope the pun was intended.

  They rejected you because you’re Jewish?

  Apparently nothing else matters as much. Not my advanced standing, not my perfect marks or published work. All that, but Bridgman knew they must be assured the Heeb tailor’s son is sufficiently tall. Don’t worry, I’ll keep my hair short, I can pass. And yet I can’t. It’s not enough. Rutherford clearly didn’t believe I’d ‘assimilate’ in his lab. Robert was trying to sound bitter, but he sounded hurt.

  That’s so wrong, I’m sorry. I’m sure other opportunities will open up. Not every lab can be so bigoted.

  I might make the atoms spin in the other direction, my horns could reverse the polarity. We’re on the cutting edge of quantum physics and yet still riding in the turnip truck of anti-Semitism. Lowell will have to begrudgingly sign my diploma as it is.

  Lowell … House?

  Robert Lowell, the president of this university. He instated the quota for Jewish students, so our numbers don’t get out of hand. I made the cut, but alas, an exceptional Jew is still a Jew.

  Cady had no idea there was such a policy.

  I suppose I should’ve expected it. I’ve always been an underdogger. It’s not Bridgman’s fault. Robert’s voice softened. He endeavored to help me, I recognize that. It’s the reality of my situation, and he had to address it. As he said, my last name gives me away.

  What is your last name?

  Oppenheimer.