Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  George did not believe in taking a dare. So he said, “Stopping Dow Chemical from offering jobs to Harvard students is no way to stop a war.”

  “Dow Chemical makes napalm. They sell it to the military. The military drops it on Vietnam. Dow profits from murder. If you work for them, you support murder.”

  “It’s war. Not murder. There’s a difference.”

  “Is there?” Franklin looked at the photograph of the first nuclear explosion, on a bookshelf behind George’s desk. Beneath it was a little sign: NOW WE ARE ALL SONS OF BITCHES.—KENNETH BAINBRIDGE.

  George said, “I keep that picture there to remind my students that science can be our master or our servant. So can chemical companies.”

  Franklin scowled. He had dark brows, so he scowled well, and he had already picked up the humorless demeanor of the campus radicals. What was there to laugh about, they seemed to ask, when people were dying in Vietnam?

  George Wedge Drake agreed. That was why he did not call university police. But he said, “Your father won’t be happy about this.”

  “Maybe it will get his attention.”

  “That sounds like adolescent rebellion. A generation ago, boys ate live goldfish and drank too much. If the political sit-in—”

  Franklin stood. “This is no prank. And even if you call the police now, you’re too late. That’s why I waited till now to tell you.”

  “Thanks.” George Drake thought about going back to work, but it was not a day for work. Work required deep thought, which required an atmosphere of calm, both inward and outward. But calm had not existed at Harvard for some time.

  A year earlier, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had come to a conference at the new Kennedy School of Government. As he left, his car was surrounded outside Quincy House by a mob from a group that called itself Students for a Democratic Society. He was the symbol of an administration that they meant to overturn and one of the architects of a war that they meant to end. McNamara, however, was not one to back down from a fight, so he stood on the roof of the car and tried to talk to the crowd, but they shouted him down.

  “Imagine,” Ned Wedge had told George, “there was the secretary, come to Harvard at the invitation of an assistant secretary of the treasury—me. So it’s my reputation on the line. I look out, and I see kids holding signs, DOWN WITH LBJ and such, and they’re shouting and chanting, and I want to shoot myself. Finally, university police hustle us into the basement of Quincy House, into the goddamn steam tunnels! We go about a mile before we pop up like a bunch of moles in Langdell Hall.”

  George Drake had to chuckle whenever he thought of it: the prickly secretary of defense, university police, and his know-it-all cousin, scurrying along the subterranean corridors that ran north from the river houses, under the Yard, all the way to the Law School. The tunnels carried the pipes that brought steam heat from a generating plant on River Street to all the Harvard buildings. Bare lightbulbs, wet floors, long stretches of asbestos-wrapped pipes, valves, elbows, diverters, wheels: “A real dungeon,” Ned had told George. “And a dungeon is where I’ll send my sons if either of them is ever involved in anything like that demonstration.”

  Well, George now thought, get the dungeon cell ready.

  The Faculty of Arts and Sciences had voted not to punish students exercising their political rights after the McNamara incident. But the rights of “free movement” would also be upheld. So George decided that he should influence Franklin and the others before they restricted anyone’s rights. He went downstairs, but he was too late.

  A hallway ran from the stairwell to the door of the conference room. And two hundred students filled it. They were sitting, standing, leaning, scowling. And at the end of the hall, a balding man in a gray suit stood with his hands in his pockets and a look of utter befuddlement on his face. Mr. Dow Chemical: free movement canceled.

  Deans were stepping over students, looking into faces, entering into conversations, asking politely that the crowd disperse. It was almost genteel. But no one was moving. And they didn’t move for the rest of the day.

  “What do I do with him?” Ned Wedge asked Prof. G. two weeks later.

  “You encourage him to think for himself,” said George.

  “You mean, let some left-wing radical in the SDS do his thinking for him?”

  “Come on, Ned”—Harriet sipped her bourbon—“it’s not the end of the world. The boy is trying to develop a conscience.”

  “Conscience?” snapped Ned.

  All around, heads pivoted from conversations or rose from reading or turned from evening drinks. George made a gesture for Ned to lower his voice.

  They were in the lounge of the Harvard Faculty Club, waiting for Franklin. It was a gracious room, with polite groupings of wing chairs and seraphs, flowered drapes, Oriental carpeting, a table in the center of the room with a collection of periodicals arrayed for the reading pleasure of people who had probably written half the articles.

  Ned looked around and said, “This is one of the few rooms in America where people might recognize an undersecretary of treasury and care what he thinks.”

  “Just lower your voice,” said Harriet.

  Ned whispered, “Look at Galbraith over there. He looks down on me like I was some kind of pariah, now that I work for Lyndon Johnson instead of JFK.”

  “He’s six-seven, for God’s sake,” said Harriet. “He looks down on everyone. We’re concerned about out our son, not the opinions of Harvard professors about you.”

  Ned grunted and took a sip of his scotch.

  “If it matters,” George joked, “this Harvard professor thinks you’re a good father to come up from Washington because your son has been ‘admonished’ by the faculty.”

  “A full faculty meeting, was it?” asked Ned. “All the bright lights and great men, all hearing my son’s name uttered in infamy?”

  “Few students were discussed individually,” said George. “Seventy-four were put on probation. Franklin and a hundred and seventy more received a slap on the wrist.”

  On the far side of the room, a man stood suddenly, as if gripped by an overwhelming emotion, dropped his journal on the table, and came over to the Wedges. He was short, slightly built, and wore glasses with frames of tortoiseshell and brass. He also grew his white hair to his collar and favored western-style string ties in the land of regimental stripes: George Wald, professor of biology.

  “Excuse me, Professor Drake,” he said. “But I wanted you to know that your eloquence in support of those students was appreciated at the faculty meeting.”

  “Thank you.”

  Then Wald turned his gaze to the Wedges. “Your son seems to have been raised to think for himself. I congratulate you both for that.”

  “Thank you,” said Harriet. “We’re proud of him.”

  Then Wald narrowed his focus on Ned. “Next time you see LBJ, tell him he needs his eyes checked. He can’t see the forest for the trees.” And with a curt nod, Wald was gone.

  Ned’s lips were still pulled into the smile of a man accepting a compliment about his son, but the rest of his expression had collapsed. “That old son of a bitch.”

  “Your administration has just been insulted by a Nobel laureate,” said George, “cited for his work in the physiology of vision.”

  “So,” cracked Harriet, “he used the right metaphor.”

  “‘Can’t see the forest for the trees,’” said Ned. “Ha-ha. Is he with the SDS, too?”

  “No. But he’s concerned,” said George. “How many more boys have to die?”

  “They don’t have to die. Just serve. Like you and I did.”

  George said, “I served by marrying Harvard brilliance and government money to bring the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. Now I do what I can to pull us back.”

  “You won a war, George,” said Ned. “You saved lives. Maybe mine. And you’ve been taking government grants ever since.”

  “Governments can be dangerous, though,” said George.
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  “Is that why someone at Los Alamos gave our secrets to the Russians?”

  “There were spies there. Klaus Fuchs, the German . . . perhaps others. They decided the world would be a better place with a balance of power.”

  “‘Useful idiots’ is what Lenin called them,” said Ned.

  George laughed bitterly and took a sip of bourbon. “The Russians knew what we were doing all along, and all that security cost me a girl I still think about.”

  Ned looked at his watch, tapped his foot, finished his drink. “Where is that boy?”

  But Harriet was looking at George. “Did you ever try to contact her?”

  “I wrote to her a few times. But she’d moved on. All for the best, considering that the House Un-American Activities Committee got after her father in the fifties.”

  “Yeah,” said Ned. “That would have played hell with your government grants.”

  “Touché,” said George.

  “Hello, everyone,” said Franklin.

  It surprised none of them that dinner did not go well.

  Ned had three scotches in him by the time they sat in the dining room. This made him quicker than usual to anger, more certain than usual of his opinions.

  Franklin wore a veneer of contrition that his father quickly stripped to a layer of defiance beneath.

  Harriet smoked eight cigarettes and had a case of motherly fidgets, as Ned called them—verbal fidgets as she kept jumping about, looking for conversational topics that would defer the inevitable argument, tabletop fidgets as she played with the silverware, her cigarette lighter, and the food on her plate.

  George just watched and hoped to play the mediator.

  At one point, Harriet turned the conversation to George’s hobby, rare books. This led to some speculation about an old family treasure—“a small gift of majestic proportion.” George said he was working on a few theories.

  Ned said he couldn’t care less, because he and his brother would have to be dead twenty-one years before his sons could access the safe-deposit boxes that Victor had left them. Then Ned turned on Franklin. “My father believed that all the Wedges are in this together. So . . . when one Wedge engages in troublemaking, he’s not just hurting himself. He’s hurting the whole family.”

  “I could tell you as much, Dad,” said Franklin, “when you go to Washington.”

  “Dammit!” Ned slammed his hand on the table. “It’s not as easy as it used to be to get into this place. Just being a Wedge doesn’t always cut it.”

  “It worked for me,” said Franklin.

  “I want it to work for your brother, too,” said Ned. “But why should Harvard want another Wedge when the one who’s here has been admonished?”

  Franklin did not answer. Instead, he turned to his mother and said, “I’ve been thinking of majoring in English.”

  “That’s wonderful, dear.” Harriet put her hand on his arm.

  George tried to play the mediator. “There’s a long tradition of rebellion at Harvard, Ned. Harvard likes the iconoclasts and troublemakers.”

  “I don’t,” said Ned. “And that’s not what Will is, anyway. He’s a serious boy.”

  “And I’m not?” Franklin stood and pulled off his necktie. “Will is serious about girls and prep school grades. I’m serious about . . . about serious things.”

  And with that, Franklin Wedge stalked through the dining room, past the famous professors enjoying their boeuf bourguignonne and their wine, through the paneled foyer, past the concierge, who bid him a polite good night that brought no answer, through the vestibule, and into the autumn night.

  Franklin was angry, and he was still hungry.

  He looked at his watch: 6:50. Still time to get a meal in the Freshman Union, just across the courtyard from the Faculty Club. He jammed his necktie into his pocket and headed for a supper he might enjoy, a supper with friends.

  The student handbook said, “One of the immutable laws of Harvard University is that gentlemen shall wear jackets and ties in dining halls at all times.” Franklin supposed that there must have been a time when such a law had been taken seriously. But this was 1967. No one who knew the lyrics to “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” would be caught dead in a tie, if he could help it.

  So the freshmen rebelled over ties. They went to the Union wearing T-shirt, jacket, jeans . . . and a tie. Or work shirt, Bermuda shorts, windbreaker . . . and a tie. Or, the best that he had seen, bathrobe, pajamas, tuxedo shirt . . . and black tie.

  And every day, the Union doorkeeper, a beleaguered-looking guy with receding hair and a strong Boston accent, upheld the immutable law. No one knew his name, so they called him Windsor-Knot Wally. He wore a blue blazer, a white shirt, and a crimson tie, and he watched for violators.

  A few hated him, but most knew he was just a guy doing a job. If you got into the food line and weren’t wearing a tie, he would produce a skinny black rayon rattail and, if you chose to put it on, you would be admitted to the wonders of mystery meat, chipped beef, and red bug juice, all consumed in a magnificent hall beneath a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. Or you could give him an argument, and he would ask you for your bursar’s card. Then he would ask you to leave.

  To Franklin, it was all silly and arbitrary. There were people dying in Vietnam, and at Harvard they were worried about neckties. After the debacle in the Faculty Club, he was in no mood for anything silly or arbitrary. So he wasn’t putting his tie back on.

  He was almost disappointed when he did not see Wally minding the door. Dinner ran from 5:30 to 7:00, so there were just a few students trickling in, and there were loud voices in the kitchen, so Wally must have been off mediating some dispute.

  Franklin showed his card, then grabbed a tray and headed for the row of serving ladies, behind their wall of stainless steel, creamed spinach, and Swedish meatballs.

  “Excuse me, sir.” Winsdor-Knot Wally appeared from somewhere. He was looking angry and red-faced, but seemed to be doing his best to stay polite.

  “What?” said Franklin.

  Wally pulled a necktie from his pocket.

  “What?” demanded Franklin fiercely, though he knew exactly what.

  Wally said in a very low voice, “I got other troubles in the kitchen tonight. I’m in no mood for any cheap shit. So put on the fuckin’ tie, or get out.”

  “What did you say to me?” Franklin acted as insulted as he could.

  And just then, there was a thunderous crash in the kitchen.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Wally.

  The kitchen door banged open, and Franklin got a glimpse of a dozen plates, some shattered on the floor, others spinning on their edges before they wobbled over. Out came a young man, wiry, well built, with reddish hair that he wore to his shoulders. He saw Wally and said, “Fuck you, Uncle Jack. And fuck every fuckin’ cocksucker in this place.”

  Wow, thought Franklin.

  “Walk out that door, Bingo, and you’re fired,” said Wally. “I can’t get you another job.”

  “Fuck you. And don’t call me Bingo. My name’s Jimmy. And I ain’t washin’ dishes for minimum wage anymore.”

  “You tell him, Jimmy,” said Franklin.

  “Fuck you, too, asshole,” said Jimmy.

  And Franklin turned on Windsor-Knot Wally. “And fuck you, too, for exploitin’ workers and makin’ students wear neckties.”

  All that Windsor-Knot Wally could say was “Jesus Christ.”

  Franklin stalked out, too. “Hey. Hey, wait.”

  “What?” said Jimmy.

  Franklin caught up to him. “Way to give it to the man back there.”

  “The man?” He laughed. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Can I walk with you?” asked Franklin. “If they come after you, they should know that the students have solidarity with the workers.”

  “Oh, yeah? Pisser.”

  Franklin offered his hand and his name.

  The young guy took it and said, “I’m Jimmy Keegan. And I’m never washin’ another
fuckin’ Harvard dish or another fuckin’ Harvard floor.”

  “I’m with you, man.”

  “Oh, yeah? You with me? Pisser.” And they walked into the Yard. After a time, Keegan said, “So . . . you rich?”

  “Not as rich as a guy who flips the bird to the world and walks out on the man.”

  Keegan laughed again. “Unh . . . I got an ounce of weed on me. Fifteen bucks. Want to buy?”

  Franklin stopped right there, in front of Houghton Library, and looked into Keegan’s eyes. “Are you a narc?”

  “What?”

  “They always tell us to ask that. If you’re a narc, and I ask, you have to tell me the truth. Are you a narc?”

  “No fuckin’ way.”

  So Franklin dug into his pocket. He had been at Harvard for six weeks and hadn’t smoked a joint yet. It was time. And from what he heard, fifteen bucks an ounce was a dollar cheaper than you could get it anywhere else.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  IN EARLY May, Harvard invited all high school seniors who had been accepted to come for a weekend, whether they had decided to go to Harvard or not.

  It was a no-pressure sort of thing. Classes on Friday, orientation lectures, some fun on Saturday night. If you wanted to see what student life in Cambridge was all about, this was a good way to do it. Then you could make up your mind.

  Peter Fallen was going to the parents’ program. A nice May day, a chance to hear a few lectures. He couldn’t resist.

  He and Jimmy came into the Yard through the Class of 1875 Gate, the one with the inscription from Isaiah. Peter resisted a lecture on its meaning. “Open ye the gates that the righteous nation which keepeth the truth may enter in.”

  The leaves still had a light green tint that made them look delicate and new, but they had filled out enough that the monstrous Science Center, which now loomed over the north end of the Yard like a creature in a fifties horror movie, could not be seen.

  Of course, the Yard never looked greener than in mid-May, or neater. Commencement was coming, so all the brown patches had been sprayed with grass seed in green fertilizer. And just so no one stepped on any of the new grass, miles of wire had been strung along every paved path in the Yard. As commencement week began, all the wire would be unstrung, all the wooden posts put away for another year, and in a single week, all the grass would be trampled again.