Though there were rumblings of change and Radcliffe students would soon be admitted to upper level courses at Harvard, the sexes did not yet mingle officially in Harvard classrooms. So George, like other instructors and professors, followed the time-honored practice of delivering his classes twice, to the men in the Yard and to the women on the west side of Cambridge Common.
George Wedge Drake liked teaching, and he thought he was good at it. So did a Radcliffe junior named Olga Bassett.
On the first day of class, George noticed her. He noticed all the girls, but Miss Bassett was wearing slacks when the others were wearing skirts, and she was five-ten, taller than her young instructor. Over the next few weeks, he noticed something new about her at each class. Her smile one day; her dark hair, worn to the shoulder, the next; her brown eyes; the flash of thigh when she wore a pleated skirt and kneesocks. And he sensed her intellectual curiosity, too, because after every class, she stopped to ask him questions about the theorems and equations he discussed.
Six weeks into the semester, he summoned his courage and asked her to dinner at Cronin’s, the tavern with the grouchy waitresses and the good clam chowder.
The following month was the happiest time George had ever known, because on Tuesday nights, he could call Olga and invite her to a weekend movie, and she would accept. And sometimes, after the movie, they would sit in a booth in Cronin’s, sit so close that their legs pressed together, and they would order a pitcher of beer and hamburgers, and sometimes, on the way back to Radcliffe, she would hold his hand.
When she told him that she was not going home to New York City for Thanksgiving, because her father was traveling and her mother did not celebrate holidays, he invited her to the Drake home.
George’s parents acted more casual about the invitation than they may have felt, perhaps because Olga arrived with a group of George’s friends, kids from California and St. Louis and other points west. And they all sat at the dining-room table with Victor Wedge and his sons and other aunts and uncles, too. So there was neither the time nor the opportunity for a father to quiz his son about a young lady from New York whose parents did not celebrate such an American holiday.
But a few days later, George received a note under his door at Eliot House: Come home for a little chat.
This time there was no talk of clubs. The father had absorbed the disappointment of a son so socially inept as to be uninterested in the Porcellian. This time, Dickey Drake did not even wait until his son was settled before he said, “Are you familiar with the American Communist Party?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Has this Olga girl talked with you about it?”
“In passing . . . we all wonder what the world will look like once the war ends.”
“Well, it won’t look the way her father wants it to. He’s a member of the party. Not only that, he writes articles for the Daily Worker.”
George Drake felt a wave of heat rise from his collar to the crown of his head.
“Someone should straighten out those people over at Radcliffe admissions.” His father put a glass of port into George’s hand and said, “Conant called the other day. He wants you to leave after Christmas.”
“Leave? Leave Harvard?”
“He’s putting you onto something top secret. You might have to defer the degree for a year or so, but it will all be taken care of.”
“What is it?”
“If I knew, it wouldn’t be a secret, would it? Of course, if they see you dallying with the daughter of a Communist, they’ll give the job to someone else.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The FBI.”
“FBI?”
“You’re brilliant, George. Conant tells me you understand more about physics than half the senior faculty. And here’s your chance, just as I promised two years ago. But you have to be analytical about your life, as if it were an equation.”
So George went back to Eliot House and tried to be analytical. His future would be in particle physics, and particle physics would change the world. And how many men could change the world? But he was also in love. So . . . would it be physics or infatuation? The promise of future success or present happiness?
All the next week, when he saw Olga, he tried to see her as a student rather than “his girlfriend.” He decided that he would tell her on Friday night, after they went to the movies. At the Harvard Square, they saw Casablanca. It had been out for a year and they had seen it before, but they still loved it. Noble people making noble decisions.
They left the theater arm in arm and headed back to Radcliffe, but in front of the burying ground, they stopped. He began to speak, but she kissed him instead. Then she whispered, “I think our beautiful friendship has already begun.”
And he knew that he couldn’t tell her that night. And he couldn’t resist her. And her kiss told him that she couldn’t resist him. But there were parietal rules, which meant that getting into his room in Eliot House or hers at Radcliffe could be tricky.
So he turned her toward Brattle Street, because on Friday nights, his parents were at the Harvard Club. At their front door, he stopped and looked up and down the street. He did not tell her he was looking to see if any FBI agents were watching. Then he let her into his parents’ house.
In the library, he lit a fire and poured two glasses of his father’s port. He wanted to tell her. Instead, he kissed her. And then his hand was on the cool smoothness of her thigh, between the kneesocks and the skirt she had so conveniently worn. Soon, clothes were askew, clasps unclasped, zippers unzipped, though nothing came off, because Dickey and Doris always came home before ten-thirty. At ten o’clock precisely—George remembered because the mantelpiece clock was chiming—he and Olga experienced the most exciting moment of their lives. At two past ten, it was over.
After that, he did not have the heart to tell her that he could no longer see her. But on the following weekend and the one after that, he manufactured excuses for staying home—too much work, a family party, a gathering of Physics Department instructors. And then she left for Christmas vacation.
On the day after New Year’s, George and three other juniors boarded a train for New Mexico. On the train, he wrote her a letter, but he decided not to send it. If the train was taking him to the place he expected, there would be someone reading his mail, making sure he was not revealing anything. So he tore up the letter.
Someday she would understand. Still, he cried that night, alone in the sleeping car, as the train sped over the Appalachians and into the heartland.
“. . . three, two, one . . .”
George held his breath. Thoughts of Olga faded. So did thoughts of Harvard.
He had given up much to be here now, but he told himself it was worth it. For eighteen months, he had operated in an environment of mental stimulation he could never have hoped for in Cambridge. Here, in what he later described as an intellectual utopia, he had exchanged ideas with the greatest physicists of the age. But in those final seconds, ideas faded, too, before the enormity of what they had done. And then there was only a single thought, a single word:
Light.
The bunker was open at the back, and even through the welder’s glasses, the flash illuminated every fold and every gully on the hills to the south. It was as though the working of the universe had suddenly been accelerated, causing the sun to leap from below the eastern horizon to its noonday apex in an instant.
They had been told to expect the flash. But the light did not fade. Instead, it rose in height, in intensity, and changed from white to boiling red. George and the others could wait no longer. They had to look at it. They had to see what they had made. So they stood and turned, and in their black welder’s goggles was reflected something that no one had ever seen before, the most beautiful, horrible sight in history.
Then they heard a train coming toward them—the waves of shock and sound, racing hand in hand.
George glanced at Oppenheimer, who was holding a support
post in the bunker, his mouth agape, his long skinny face contorted in shock, as though he had been painted by Edvard Munch. Later, Oppenheimer said that at that moment, he was thinking of a passage from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Perhaps . . . but George agreed with Professor Bainbridge, who turned to Oppenheimer a moment later and said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
ii
“Did he really say that?” asked Ned Wedge at the family meeting the following June. “Did Bainbridge really say, ‘Now we are all sons of bitches’?”
“Yes,” said George. “Even the grammar was correct.”
“Watch your language, Ned,” said Dickey. “You may still be wearing your navy uniform, but there are ladies present, including your fiancée.”
“Oh, hell,” said Harriet Webster. “Don’t worry about me.”
George thought that Cousin Ned had gotten himself quite a prize—a fine-looking girl, a face that was all Boston bone structure, an accent all Bryn Mawr, and a serve that exploded at your feet before her racquet even followed through. And she was tall, too, which was good because Ned Wedge stood six-one, with square shoulders and a sand-colored crew cut that gave him the look of a man who knew exactly what he thought.
“It must have been something,” said Harriet, “to see the bomb go off.”
“Something . . . yes,” said George.
“Not many have seen that sight,” said Ned’s elder brother Jimmy, who was shorter, quieter, and seldom seen with a woman. “Not many who’ve lived, anyway.”
“Certainly not the poor devils in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Ned.
“They got what they deserved,” said Dickey Drake.
“No one deserved what they got, Dad,” said George. “No one.”
“Well”—Dickey sat at the head of the table—“thank God it’s over. It cost all of us a great deal. And now, in keeping with Victor Wedge’s will, the eldest male in the family—that’s me—shall preside today.”
Since 1937 they had been gathering for the meeting of the Wedge Charitable Trust. All lineal descendants of Heywood and Amelia Wedge were invited to present requests, and all who were present could vote, but the sons of Victor Wedge and their children would make final determinations.
Some years, the event was well attended. Other years, just a few showed up, and the distributions were accordingly small. But it was always a pleasant reunion, a chance for the family to socialize on commencement eve over a buffet supper and to meet for business the next morning in an upstairs room in the Faculty Club.
This year, there were two dozen descendants. Heywood and Amelia had raised two daughters and a son, so the names were Drake, Royce, and Wedge, and a few offshoots of those—close relations and long-lost cousins, all sipping coffee, eating pastries, scooping eggs from the stainless-steel chafing dishes. Outside, rhododendron bloomed in the sunshine, and the crowds made their way into the Yard for the first peacetime commencement in five years.
Dickey had everyone take seats, then he began with a prayer for Victor Wedge and for all those who had lost their lives. Then he said, “As you can all see, George is wearing his academic robes. He has to get down to Eliot House to join his classmates for the procession. So we’re starting early.”
First order of business was a treasurer’s report, delivered by Ned Wedge. He described the equities, bonds, and funds that composed the trust, and noted their performance for the year. The trust was now worth a robust $3 million.
“So,” said Dickey, “let’s spend some of it.”
Certain contributions were automatic—five thousand dollars to the Harvard College Fund, five thousand to the American Red Cross, a thousand to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, two hundred for the upkeep of the Old South Meeting House. The family rejected a request from a man who hoped to open a small theater in the Berkshires. And they turned down Harriet’s request for a grant to a woman who wanted to teach dance in the Negro section of Boston.
“Teaching coloreds how to dance?” Dickey laughed. “That’s like teaching Brahmins how to make money.”
And most of the other people in the room laughed with him.
Harriet showed neither anger nor embarrassment at the rejection, which was very good form, in George’s mind.
Then Ned asked, “What about political campaigns?”
“Whose?” asked Dickey.
“Jack Kennedy. He’s running for Congress.”
“Kennedy!” cried Dickey Drake.
“My father did business with his. He’s Winthrop House and a navy man, too.”
“His father doesn’t need our money,” said Dickey.
“But we might need his friendship someday. I think Jack Kennedy could go places.” Ned had already established a reputation as a young man of hardheaded practicality and stubbornness, too. He said, “Five hundred dollars should be plenty.”
But no one else spoke in support.
Then George smoothed his robes and said, “I think that we should keep politics out of our considerations.”
Ned looked at his brother. “Do you agree?”
“There’s too much controversy in politics,” said Jimmy. “But . . . but if you think you might do some good someday in the political line, maybe it would be worth it.”
And the Kennedy for Congress campaign received a five-hundred-dollar contribution from the (mostly) Republican Wedges. Dickey wondered if Joe Kennedy would laugh out loud.
That afternoon, there was a smaller meeting. It took place at the Drake table in the Eliot House courtyard. After the commencement ceremonies in Tercentenary Theater, members returned to their houses for luncheon and a degree ceremony in the company of their friends.
Before the master stepped to the podium, Dickey took out three envelopes. He gave one each to Ned, Jimmy, and his own son, George. “These envelopes contain keys to safe-deposit boxes in the Back Bay Institute for Savings. You are supposed to pass them to your descendants, who are not to access the contents until the trust liquidates.”
“What’s in them?” said Ned.
“‘Three poems that foretell a small gift of majestic proportion.’”
Ned looked at Harriet, then said, “This sounds like a fairy tale.”
“I’m just quoting Victor’s will,” answered Dickey. “I think your father wanted to have something for his descendants to remember him by, even after they had stopped gathering to honor the Wedge Charitable Trust.”
“Any ideas of what it is?” asked Jimmy.
Dickey said, “The words come from Lydia Wedge Townsend at the Bicentenary.”
“Lydia the poet?” asked Jimmy.
“The bad poet,” said Dickey. “That’s all I know.”
Ned slipped his envelope into his pocket. Jimmy studied his, as if wondering what was in it. George wrote the words “small gift—majestic proportion” on his.
“That was not Victor’s favorite quote, though.” Dickey sipped his wine and leaned back in his chair. “The one he liked most came from old President Lowell: ‘Two things are always new—youth and the quest for knowledge.’”
And it was forever true, as the seasons turned and the semesters came and went . . . as Dickey Drake took his rest in Mount Auburn Cemetery . . . as Ned and Harriet gave two sons to the Wedge line . . . as George Wedge Drake earned tenure at Harvard . . . as Ned went to Washington in 1961 . . . as Jack Kennedy, ’40, faced down the Russians over missiles in Cuba and George wondered if the scientists who built the bomb were about to become the biggest sons of bitches in history . . . as the bell tolled in Memorial Church on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, and the world changed . . . as the Beatles came to America three months later and it changed again . . . as the Senate voted the Tonkin Gulf Resolution . . . as the Red Sox won the pennant but lost the ’67 Series . . .
There was always someone wanting to know more, about something.
iii
George Wedge Drake had Lowell’s phrase engraved and framed and k
ept on his desk so that students could see it when they visited him, and he could remind himself of it when he faced a student like Franklin—“don’t call him Frank”—Wedge, first son of Ned and Harriet, tall, intelligent, and far more opinionated than a freshman should be.
It was an October afternoon in 1967. George had just finished a class and returned to his office in Mallinckrodt Hall. It was the fifth week of the semester, so he was talking about classical mechanics—Newtonian laws on the attraction of masses and universal gravitations. No heavy lifting for a man who had been teaching as long as he had.
Like many a Harvard professor, he saved his muscle for his research. He was working under a $2 million National Science Foundation grant for the creation of more efficient and safer nuclear power. His goal was a heavy-water reactor that would address the problem of neutron flux absorption. But the work was slow.
Science, he always told his students, required patience. But the young presence churning in the chair on the other side of the desk seemed the embodiment of impatience.
“So,” said George, “you’re having problems with Physics Ten? We can’t have a Wedge failing my class.”
“I’m not having any problems,” said Franklin Wedge. “I just thought you should know that this building isn’t going to be a good place to be in a little while.”
George looked at his telephone. “Should I be calling the university police?”
With a jerk of his head, Franklin flipped his hair away from his eyes.
Ever since the Beatles came along, boys were making that motion, and George found it faintly effeminate, but not when Franklin did it. With Franklin, it was like saying, “Go ahead. I dare you.”
Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon) Page 54
