Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “I memorized the inscription,” said Emily. “‘Seek truth through the years, but seek it for all, / Bestow knowledge freely to those who may call / Make this your goal till a century turns, / And the Bard will applaud as humanity learns.’”

  He mused on the last line. “‘The Bard will applaud as humanity learns.’”

  “That’s Shakespeare, right?” said Emily. “Love’s Labours Lost.”

  “A small gift of majestic proportion,” said Victor, “which we just gave to the Harvard rare book collection in the name of James Callahan.”

  “Do you think those gilt-edged envelopes give directions to Townsend House?”

  “It would make sense,” said Victor. “But considering all the records that were lost in the Great Fire, we won’t know for certain until the Tercentenary.”

  Emily took his hand. “Victor, that book went to the Harvard library to honor my brother. Don’t let anything diminish that gift.”

  “What’s done is done.”

  “But when the Tercentenary comes around, don’t forget what Jimmy always said . . . to Joe Kennedy, to me, maybe even to you. The way you fight ignorance is through meritocracy. So don’t give Harvard anything it hasn’t earned.”

  After a moment, Victor laughed. “I think Lydia would agree. And the Bard would applaud.”

  She looked into his eyes, and the steam from her breath mingled with his. “My brother was right about a lot. But I think he might have been wrong about us.”

  “Then give me a chance, Emily.”

  “I love my infantryman, Victor. I never knew if I loved you. It’s too late to find out. Just remember Jimmy.” She kissed his cheek and turned away.

  He stood in the dark and watched her picking her way past the headstones. Then he folded the sheet of onionskin and put it into his wallet.

  ii

  The Class of 1911 Report for the tenth reunion:

  Victor Wedge, A.B. Home Address: Louisburg Square, Boston. Occupation: investment banker, Wedge, Fleming, and Royce, 58 State Street, Boston, Mass. Spouse: Barbara Abbott (November 2, 1919). It has been my good fortune, after many adventures, to have married my college sweetheart. I am now learning about finance. Wedge, Fleming, and Royce is my school. And the college remains my passion. Whose heart did not swell with pride when our Crimson won the ’19 Rose Bowl? After that, who would hesitate to join the Alumni Association? And after all that we have seen, who would not contribute to the college? For it is only through the expansion of knowledge that we will combat whatever lies before us. I personally have contributed a bit of knowledge to the library, a volume in memory of our classmate James Callahan. Go and read it. I hope to see as many of you as possible at the reunion.

  Victor poured optimism into the report, and none of it was false. He and Barbara had reunited a year after her divorce, and the future looked promising.

  But something happened a few months after his reunion that caused him to re-read that sheet of onionskin, especially the part about Harvard ignorance.

  On an afternoon in the fall of 1921, he received a letter from one of Harvard’s ancients, Moorfield Story, ’66, a past overseer and current president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It requested Victor’s signature on a petition that Harvard end Jim Crow policies in regard to the housing of Negro freshmen.

  Jim Crow? At Harvard? Victor knew there had been talk about limiting the number of Jews, but what was this? He read the note included with the petition:

  President Lowell has decreed mandatory residence for freshmen in the new halls he’s building along the river. He sees this as a way of promoting class solidarity and identity, but not, apparently, for Negroes. A colored freshman named Knox had his room assignment withdrawn after administrators learned the color of his skin. Considering your war record and your family’s association with President Lowell, your signature would carry great weight in reminding Lowell of his responsibilities.

  Victor did not sign the petition. Instead, he took the subway to Cambridge.

  He came up the stairs in the circular kiosk, which was like a rock in a fast-flowing stream of clanging streetcars and clattering Model Ts. The country quiet of Harvard Square was now a thing of memory. But the noise of modernity made the Yard seem even more a place of refuge from the fashion of the moment, a place out of time, perhaps because it embraced all time, at least as America marked it.

  Victor walked to University Hall beneath the elms that had been replanted after the blight. He waited a polite twenty minutes and was then admitted to the office of Abbott Lawrence Lowell.

  “Victor, my boy”—Lowell pumped his hand—“how’s Barbara?”

  “Just fine, sir. Fine.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy the Abbotts were when you two got together.”

  “I was very lucky, sir.”

  “Yes . . . yes. Her aunts all said she married Bram Haddon ‘on the rebound,’ so to speak. Bram’s a fine fellow, but—”

  “Barbara and I are very happy, sir.”

  “And doing quite well, from all I hear.” Even at sixty-five, his hair and walrus mustache gone gray, Lowell seemed like nothing so much as energy compacted and waiting to be released upon an unsuspecting world. “I hope you received my note of thanks for your reunion contribution. Gifts like yours—”

  “I’m not here about money, sir,” said Victor. “I wanted to ask you about a petition that’s crossed my desk.”

  Lowell’s face reddened. “Mr. Story doesn’t understand the dilemma we face.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, either.”

  “You can’t force white men, especially from the South and West, to live and eat with Negroes.”

  “I thought your goal was to create a sense of identity in each class, so democracy could flourish and exclusivity would be based on achievement rather than bloodline.”

  “A concept that should be alien to an old Porcellian like you,” grunted Lowell. Though his bloodlines were as ancient as any, Lowell prided himself that he had not bothered with a final club as an undergraduate. “I’ve always believed that any club is useless, unless it exists to keep somebody out.”

  “Keeping people out is no longer of interest to me,” said Victor. “I’ve met too many good people who were kept out, starting here at Harvard. I met them on the Titanic, too. Of course, on the western front, it was different. The dead exclude no one.”

  “Well said, Victor, and bravely done.” Lowell came around the desk. “We owe the Negro the best possible education. But I’m not going to give up a plan of compulsory residence for freshmen, which is to the benefit of a vast majority of our students, simply because it conflicts with the theoretical principle of treating everyone alike.”

  “You once said of the Irish that we had to absorb them. You wanted them to become rich, send their sons to our colleges, share our prosperity.”

  “And it’s happening. Look at James Byrne, the first Catholic on the Harvard Corporation. I appointed him. Look at that Joe Kennedy. It’s happening, Victor, but by degrees, as it will for the Negro.”

  “And the Jew?”

  “We have a Jewish overseer, but Jews are a different problem entirely.” Lowell went back to his desk and began to shuffle papers, signaling his irritation.

  “Too many Jews at Harvard?”

  “Twenty-two percent of the student body. I’d say that’s too many, considering the percentage of Jews in the wider population. Once we adopted the so-called New Plan for admissions and put extra weight on entrance exams, the Jews came flooding in.”

  “Because they did well on the exams. That’s what’s called meritocracy.”

  “Put too many Jews in one place, they all lump together. Then we can’t offer them opportunities for assimilation, as we have to the Irish.”

  Victor saw no further point to this discussion. He stood and said, “I shall sign the NAACP petition. If another comes my way regarding Jews, I’ll sign that, too.”

  “Just don’t f
orget to sign your checks, or we shall be forced to raise tuition, and then it will be even harder for the Negroes and the Jews and the Irish to come here.”

  Victor left the Yard through the Class of 1875 Gate and was struck by the irony of the inscription. It was from Isaiah, an Old Testament prophet, a Jewish prophet: “Open ye the gates that the righteous nation which keepeth the truth may enter in.”

  Five years later, Victor wrote this in his Class Report:

  Expansion is the theme for 1926. Our family has expanded with a pair of rambunctious little boys. Business expands, as my cousin Dickey Drake, ’12, and I work closely in equities. Our philosophy, freely shared with all of you since it has been written up on the business page, is to pick companies with low debt, strong cash flow, steady dividends, and growth projections that are realistic rather than outlandishly optimistic. I’m proud to say that our success has allowed us to contribute to another kind of expansion—President Lowell’s expansion of the college, a physical manifestation of Harvard’s spiritual advance into the twentieth century.

  Victor had decided that, for all of his contradictions, Lowell served Harvard and Harvard served the nation. And if certain problems vexed Lowell and Harvard, they vexed the nation, too.

  The struggles over Negro housing and Jewish quotas had simmered quietly, as they would until a new president and another war brought greater egalitarianism. But Victor’s eyes had already been opened, and the best way for the gates of Harvard to remain open, so that the righteous of the nation might enter, was for alumni of conscience to remain involved.

  So Victor spoke his mind, which sometimes irritated Lowell and sometimes irritated his cousin Dickey Drake.

  One morning in 1928, as Victor studied the ticker, Dickey Drake stalked in and threw the Harvard Alumni Magazine on his desk. “Bad form, Victor. Very bad form.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What you said in this month’s issue.” Dickey read, “‘I support President Lowell’s new house system. I believe it can be both national and democratic in nature.’ A lot of blather, Victor. The system we had worked just fine.”

  “Not if you were poor,” answered Victor, “or couldn’t get into a club.”

  “Did you know that Lowell is going to make everyone pay for meals in the houses, even if they take their meals in the clubs?”

  “The clubmen can afford it,” said Victor.

  “Lowell is out to kill the clubs.” Dickey aimed a finger at Victor. “You once told me that when your boys were old enough, you’d want them both to be Porcellians.”

  “I want them to be good students and good citizens. The house system will give them the chance. They’ll live in the Yard as freshmen, then move into one of the houses with a few hundred students, where they’ll live, eat, mingle, have their own tutors. . . .”

  “Social engineering.”

  “I should think you’d like it, you’re such an Anglophile. It’s modeled on the system at Oxford and Cambridge.”

  “But it’s all so artificial . . . bringing poor boys and rich boys together in some neo-Georgian palace by the Charles.”

  “Dickey, you’re a snob,” said Victor.

  “And you’re a class traitor.”

  In the report for 1931, Victor wrote:

  Barbara and I have moved year-round to Manchester-by-the-Sea, where our family has summered for years. The town is quiet, and the train reaches Boston in an hour. I can still get to the office before the open on Wall Street, and the problems of the city can be left behind at night. The problems of Wall Street cannot, although at Wedge, Fleming, and Royce, our philosophy has protected us. I am proud to say that we began to withdraw from the market in the spring of ’29, when it became apparent that stock prices were racing far ahead of earnings. On the home front we are happier than ever. Our two sons grow like weeds on the front lawn. And Barbara fills the house with her paintings. To make room for them, we have even contributed to the college several portraits of Harvardians in our line. Go see them in the new Fogg Art Museum.

  In the spring of his twentieth reunion year, Victor and other leaders of the reunion classes were invited on a walk with President Lowell, a sort of fund-raising tour.

  They began in the science area, north of the Yard, before the giant rhinoceroses at the entrance to the biology laboratories, and they came away certain of Harvard’s preeminence in science. They walked past Langdell Hall, new home of the Law School, and were comforted that American jurisprudence was in good hands. They admired the Fogg Art Museum but did not go in; simply knowing that it existed assured them that good minds were caring for the cultural life of college and nation. They looked up at Memorial Church, which honored the dead of the Great War with a tall white spire, its delicacy a counterpoint to Widener’s bulk, its elegance suggestive of the neo-Georgian beauty they would find along the river.

  Then they walked out of the Yard and south toward the new walls of red brick, the chimneys and bell towers, the orderly rows of windows and slate-covered dormers—the houses, imposing themselves on the curve of the Charles yet conforming to the ancient pattern of Cambridge streets.

  By now, Victor had slipped in beside Lowell.

  “Ah, Victor. What do you think?” asked the old man.

  “Hard to believe how handsome it is.”

  “Just two years ago, the house system was no more than a dream. And now . . .”

  Ahead of them was the largest house, named for the Lowell family, with a bell tower modeled after Independence Hall. A perfect symbol, thought Victor, for a system meant to foster in young men a sense of democratic idealism and responsibility. Of those to whom much had been given, it proclaimed, much was expected.

  “Marvelous, sir,” he said.

  “We’ve broken up the Gold Coast now,” said Lowell. “We’re doing our best to give everyone a chance.”

  “I was a Gold Coaster,” said Victor. “But I think you’ve done something remarkable here, even if you haven’t given everyone a chance.”

  Lowell made a little grunt, then hurried ahead.

  The tour ended on the Weeks footbridge, which connected the river houses and the Business School. Lowell told them to reflect on what they saw: magnificent examples of Colonial Revival architecture on both sides of the river, buildings that echoed America’s idealistic beginnings and looked toward an orderly future. He reminded them that the money for the Business School had come from Wall Street giant George F. Baker and the money for the houses from Standard Oil heir Edward Harkness. And neither was a Harvard man. What’s more, Harkness had gone to Yale!

  And Lowell made his pitch: “If outsiders could do all this for Harvard, how much more should Harvard men like all of you be expected to do? How much . . . how much . . .”

  Lowell’s words faded for Victor. He was at the edge of the group now, thinking about all that Lowell had achieved, not only in remaking the body of the university but also its soul. He had been gifted with great vision.

  But he had his blind spots, too. He had denied Marie Curie an honorary degree because she was a woman, or so the story went. He had approved a memorandum to house masters, telling them not to accept more Jews than “what the traffic will bear.” He had sought to protect young white gentlemen from the sight of black men who did not merely serve in the dining halls but actually dined in them. Lowell, like Harvard and America itself, still had far to go in the fight against ignorance.

  So in late 1935, Victor wrote:

  It is impossible to believe that a quarter century has flown past. We of 1911 are fortunate to enjoy our twenty-fifth reunion in the spring and the Tercentenary in the fall. And you’ll see me at both, since I am secretary of the Alumni Association.

  Barbara enjoys painting and volunteering, I find relaxation in shaving strokes from my handicap. Our older boy is off to Phillips Andover, and his brother will leave next year. We are proud of them but loath to lose them to young adulthood. They both love Harvard football games, which we attend in our
1934 Ford beach wagon.

  On the business front, Wedge, Fleming, and Royce has developed a series of stock-buying funds to spread risks and maintain profits for large investors and small, even during the downturn. I refuse to use the term depression. I reserve that for my feelings when I look to Europe and the Far East. Let us hope that when we fought the War to End All Wars, we were not deceiving ourselves. Let us hope that the Harvard man in the White House perseveres and that Harvard does the same.

  There is an epitaph on the grave of one of my ancestors. “Seek truth through the years, but seek it for all.” This should be carved next to “Veritas” on the Harvard seal. For if all are not inspired to seek the truth, ignorance will prevail and dark clouds will produce a deluge that drowns us all.

  The night that he finished his 1936 report, he took out that thin sheet of onionskin once more, read it, and wondered what he would do when the gilt-edged envelope with all of its symbolism was finally within his grasp. And it would be. As secretary of the Alumni Association, he would be there when it finally came to light.

  iii

  It was the morning of September 8, 1936. Victor Wedge sat at the president’s table in the faculty meeting room of University Hall.

  On the walls, the portraits of Harvard presidents gazed down. In the chairs around the room sat two dozen alumni. Though the day was warm and sunshine poured through the Palladian windows of University Hall, each gentleman wore a three-piece suit or, if he was an official of the Alumni Association, striped trousers and swallow-tailed coat.

  On the president’s table lay the packet of letters from 1836. It was wrapped in brown paper, bound with string, sealed in wax. President Quincy’s handwriting was still easily read. Harvard’s new president, an ascetic-looking young chemist named James Bryant Conant, stood over the packet, ready to break the seals.