Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

I RODE DOWN TO PHILADELPHIA WITH PRINCETON’S OTHER Keasbey nominee, the starting quarterback of the varsity football team. I’d never expected to meet him in this life. He was smaller than I thought he’d be and a sharper, more impressive talker. Under his short haircut he seemed sad, though, as if he, too, were confronting the possibility that his young life had climaxed in some way. His car was old, with poor radio reception, not a quarterback’s car at all, and I realized that he wasn’t one anymore, except in memory. The season had ended several weeks ago, and Ivy League football players seldom ever went pro. As my father had, they played for parchment, for degrees they might not have been eligible for otherwise. Then they tucked them under their arms and ran.

  “Thanks for the lift,” I kept saying as we drove on. I meant it, too. I liked the guy. He had the reflexive politeness of college athletes who are obliged to kiss up to rich alumni, but his willingness to do a rival a service—on the morning of a game day, no less—was evidence of something beyond good sportsmanship. It spoke of serenity, a mellow fatalism. Fortune was going to speak in a few hours, but until then he planned to leave things to themselves, which isn’t how quarterbacks are meant to think.

  We parked downtown and followed the provost’s map to a stony office building, past whose revolving door and up whose elevators was the main office of the law firm which administered the Keasbey Trust. In the stodgy reception room we met our adversaries—five or six students from the other top colleges that the fellowship’s snobby benefactress had deemed worthy of sharing in her legacy. The tension I’d felt at the Rhodes assembly was absent, perhaps because there was less prestige at stake. The world didn’t know that we were there, and the newspapers wouldn’t publish the results.

  A secretary led us to a larger room, where the trustees were sitting at a table that had been waxed and buffed and waxed again, for decades and perhaps for centuries, until the shine was thicker than the wood. Most of the trustees were older men, their faces soft with patience and good humor. I felt instantly comfortable with them, convinced that, unlike the tribunes of the Rhodes, they’d long ago abandoned any notion that society could be perfected or that the world had any single great problem—let alone one that a squad of model citizens could sally forth and solve. Indeed, the professor I knew who’d held the fellowship had told me that it wasn’t for eager beavers, whiz kids, or perfectionists, but “interesting individuals.” I asked him to be more specific, but he demurred. He said only, “They’ll tell you when you get there. You have a treat in store.”

  The proceedings began with a lengthy presentation by the water-sipping head trustee, who spoke in the fashion of a medieval sheriff reading out tax rolls in a public square. His dry style didn’t suit the narrative—the astonishing life and most peculiar last wishes of Miss Marguerite Keasbey, the spinster heiress to a vast asbestos fortune—but it did render certain details a bit more credible and help to satisfy us, his dumbstruck audience, that we still resided in present-day America and hadn’t passed through a portal to Dickens’s England.

  The saga wasn’t structured as a saga but it quickly became one in the mind, after the footnotes, digressions, summaries, and boilerplate legalisms were thrown away. It opened at a spring formal held in the gardens of an Oxford college. The blushing Miss Keasbey was new to such occasions, but not so new to them, one gathered, was the gallant British undergraduate who strode with her arm in arm onto the dance floor and showed her the time of her life, quite literally, because she not only remembered the dashing bachelor throughout her sojourn on this earth, she gave instructions when she left this earth on how to continually resurrect him. This would be done by funding a fellowship, complete with ample wine allowance, for the education of young Americans who, with the proper training, Miss Keasbey hoped, might someday wear her escort’s cummerbund.

  End of Part One. We were asked if we had questions. We certainly did, as the trustee surely knew, but perhaps too many to ask. If I could have asked only two, they would have been: “Is that really Philadelphia out the window?” and “Why do people bother to write novels?”

  Part Two of the presentation was not as colorful, but it was just as melancholy, for it spoke of the age-old losing battle that romance wages against reason. Miss Keasbey had plainly stated in her will that her largesse was to go to males exclusively, but a court challenge waged in the name of civil rights had made young women eligible, too. The trustee didn’t mask his displeasure with this travesty, this trespass against exquisite private fantasy by thuggish public interest, but there it was, and there it would remain. The old man grimaced and fell silent. He seemed to be reproaching us, and the girls among us most of all. Ours was a low and literal generation. In the name of equality we’d murdered fantasy. In our rush for a place in the sun, we’d stamped out the moonlight.

  He seemed to be offering us a chance to leave, to confess our unworthiness and go—everyone but the prince who knew he was a prince, everyone but the disguised young Lancelot who’d traveled here not to win advancement in the sorry modern quest for status that had replaced the chivalric jousts of Camelot but because he’d been beckoned in a vision by a pale maiden clad in finest asbestos.

  That’s when I started to pity the other applicants. That’s when I recognized them as impostors. They didn’t belong here, and soon they’d be cast out, leaving behind them nothing but glasses of ice water. Because despite what the trustee went on to tell us about the supposed fairness of the judging (“Miss Keasbey’s original wishes notwithstanding, you’ll all be given the same consideration”), I knew that there would be no judging, really.

  There would be a homecoming. A welcoming.

  Because the true mad knight could only be me.

  The trustees interviewed the ex-quarterback first, which gave me time to work on my persona as a ramshackle budding ladies’ man whose intelligence was instinctive rather than practiced and whose sense of adventure had sometimes harmed him but not enough to cause him deep regrets. If my schooling had taught me anything, it was how to mold myself—my words, my range of allusions, my body language—into whatever shape the day required, but now, I sensed, I faced a different challenge: to put forth an ideal version of my real nature.

  It worked. I could do no wrong that afternoon. I was in a state of grace. When one of the trustees brought up my D in Spanish—that glaring stain on my academic record, which the Rhodes committee had also noted, provoking in me much defensive stuttering—I confessed that I’d stayed up late drinking before the final and let it go at that. This elicited grins and merry twinkles. When they asked me about my athletic interests—or, rather, my apparent lack thereof—I replied that I like to exert myself in solitude, by taking long, meditative evening walks. “Very British,” said one trustee. When they asked me who my favorite author was, I replied without hesitation: Lord Byron, as much for the life he’d led as for his writing. And when, toward the end, they asked me, hypothetically, how I would occupy myself abroad during the breaks between academic terms, I said, “I don’t believe in planning vacations. I believe in taking them.”

  “What a pleasure. We thank you,” the head trustee said. “I’m sure there’s much more we could chatter on about, but I’m afraid others are patiently waiting their turns and we’ve run over time. By quite a bit.”

  I rose and moved down the table, shaking hands, and all of the handshakes felt like secret handshakes, as though we were exchanging palmed golden tokens. It appeared I’d come through, and by doing what I did best: treating the room as a text and reading it, first to myself and then aloud, to everyone. But this time I’d done it openly, not furtively. Because this time—a time that I thought would never come—it wasn’t mastery they wanted but a certain vain and errant daring.

  They wanted a hustler. They wanted an impressionist. They wanted someone to play a man of mystery who’d caught the fancy of a fool. And soon I’d be off to Oxford as a result. “Result” was not exactly the right word, though, because it suggested that logic governs desti
ny. But now I knew otherwise. Imagination does. And though part of me had always suspected as much and certain teachers had coached me in the notion (“Imagine that you can be anything you want”), what I hadn’t understood at all was that our imaginations don’t act alone. One’s own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another’s.

  Imagine having been imagined. Imagine.

  I couldn’t. I hadn’t. Perhaps because none of my teachers since Uncle Admiral—in whose imagination I’d been born, but whom I hadn’t thought about for years; too busy—had told me that such duets were even possible. No wonder I’d grown so self-pitying and isolated. And no wonder I’d hated Princeton, that dreamland that seemed to dream only about itself (and asked that the world and its students do the same). But then, in Philadelphia, at what seemed to me like the last minute and in the most outlandish fashion, I discovered the truth—if words like “truth” mean anything. And even if they don’t, perhaps.

  Pause in your knowing to be known. Quit pushing—let yourself be pulled. Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.

  Some call this Grace.

  I called it Marguerite.

  It came for me when I was alone and had no plans, asking for nothing but my company, and in return it offered to cover my studies, fill my wineglass, and teach me how to dance.

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS BEFORE I GRADUATED AND ONLY THREE months before I left for Oxford, my mother called to let me know that Uncle Admiral was ailing and that it might buoy him to see me and hear my thrilling news. I knew she’d always sent him Christmas cards and that he occasionally returned the favor by putting in the mail some trinket he’d made by hand. I’d seen a few of them. A Chinese ideogram for luck or happiness soldered together from scraps of silver. An Eisenhower dollar which had been cut away around Ike’s profile and fitted with an eyelet so it could be worn as a medallion. Both pieces were chunky odd, not terribly fetching, and wound up buried in a drawer.

  “Spend a day with him. Tell him what you’re up to. You know how he felt about London,” my mother said.

  “I was four. I don’t remember now.”

  “‘If you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life.’”

  “He got that from Dr. Johnson. Samuel Johnson. Eighteenth-century essayist and wit.”

  “I don’t care where he got it. Get on a train.”

  He picked me up at the station in D.C. in his most recent Mercedes diesel. Back when, he’d bought a new one every few years, but this one had deeply seamed and wrinkled seats, some of them repaired with tape. But there was a compass on the dash, as usual, mounted up high and polished with Windex, and the floor mats had been vacuumed spotless. He looked old, but no older than before, when he’d already struck me as ancient, even immortal.

  “We’ll drink some Chock Full o’Nuts with cake,” he said.

  Until we reached his apartment, that was all he said. I sensed I was still a little boy to him and that he could only picture doing now exactly what we’d done back then. I guessed right. We sat in his kitchen at a small old table that had to be the same one, because why buy a second small old table. He sliced the pound cake with a butter knife and served me the slice I’d remembered: thick enough, but no more than enough. The chicory coffee in my mug stirred memories: of drinking chicory coffee. I looked around for other links to memory but the place, as before, was sparsely decorated—to the point of bleakness, I now felt. But maybe the feeling was unfounded. I’d been living in awfully grand surroundings lately.

  “I won a nice fellowship, Uncle Admiral. To Oxford. I know how you always loved London.”

  “I did,” he said. He turned his fork on its side above his plate and cut off a square from a corner of his cake. A perfect square, of one square inch. His mood was flat and hard to gauge. It had probably been that way when I was small, but when I was small I’d had no cause to gauge it. I was his pupil, he loved me, he loved the world, and he loved “mankind,” his name for the great community of dreamers whose dreams, with his own, had sent him out to sea, to map the boundaries of the dreams. What did his mood matter in all of this?

  “I like to dunk my pound cake in my coffee now.” This was new. He showed me how he did it. I smiled and did it the same way. We weren’t going to talk much, it was growing clear. But we’d done all our talking, so it was fine with me. I hadn’t come here to talk. Or even to listen. I’d come here just to be here.

  And then, at sixteen hundred hours—to give himself time to mix his daily cocktail and sit on the lawn chair in the yard from which he could see across the river to the white tip of his favorite obelisk—he drove me back to the station and said, “Safe trip.”

  As I rode home on the train, I read a copy of the letter Uncle Admiral had sent for me to the Rhodes Committee and gave to me as I left his apartment.

  I am pleased to support the application of Walter N. Kirn III for a Rhodes Scholarship.

  I have known the applicant since he was a babe in arms and during the first four or so years of his life was his surrogate father. From the time Walter could talk it was evident to me that he was a child of great potential and with a span of attention of great length. Many examples of precocity could be cited, perhaps one will suffice: when Walter was about five years old, I gave him a slide rule and in one lesson of an hour or less taught him to use it in multiplication and division.

  Walter is personable in appearance, enjoys excellent health, and is modest about his scholastic accomplishments. If accepted in the Rhodes program I am certain that he will be a great credit to Princeton University and the United States.

  Very truly yours,

  Robert W. Knox

  RADM USC&GS (Ret.)

  That summer I found myself back home, drinking beer with an old high-school friend in a pickup truck parked next to the river. His name was Karl, and he’d stuck around the area to lend a hand on his family’s dairy farm. Most everyone else from our crowd had moved away, part of the ongoing small-town diaspora that may someday depopulate much of rural America and in some districts already has. Our old buddies had mostly gone down to the Twin Cities, but some had gone farther. They did different things. They dealt cards in Las Vegas. They sold Toyotas in Denver. Some, having grown up with low-wage shift work, were studying computer programming or starting small businesses with borrowed money. I had a hard time envisioning their lives, especially if they’d married and had kids, but I didn’t have to: they were gone. I’d gone away, too, up a ladder into the clouds. Up a ladder made of clouds. And thanks to the miracle of Miss Keasbey’s will, a cloud had appeared that I might be able to stand on.

  “So what are your views on Emerson?” Karl asked me.

  We’d been discussing books, at his request. He’d looked me up that night for this very purpose. While I’d been off at Princeton, so busily polishing my act that I wore right through it and it cracked, he’d become a tireless reader as well as a devoted Buddhist. He said he had no one to talk to now, no one who shared his interest in art and literature and the “way of non-attachment,” so when he’d heard I’d be home for a few months before moving to England, he’d driven right over. We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

  But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or “masterpiece,” for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

  Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my
friend, were the ways to get ahead now—not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself, and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.

  But I kept all this to myself; I didn’t tell Karl. He was a reader, a Buddhist, and an old pal, and there were some things he might not want to know. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know them either.

  My cynicism was creeping back, but later that summer something happened that changed me—not instantly but decisively. A few weeks before I was scheduled to fly to Scotland to spend a few days before I started at Oxford (Adam was staging Soft White Kids in Leather in a secondary venue at the Edinburgh Festival), I came down with a drippy summer cold that lingered, festered, and turned into pneumonia, forcing me to spend ten days in bed inside a fog bank of mentholated steam. One feverish night I found myself in the living room standing before the bookcase containing my mother’s classics for the masses. I’d passed right by them a thousand times, scanned their titles no more than once a year, skimmed a couple of them, finished just one (and hilariously misread it—The Great Gatsby), but that night, bored and sick, I took one down and held it tight: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then I did something unprecedented for me: I carried it to my steamy bedroom and actually let it absorb me, page by page, chapter by chapter, straight on to the end. A few days later I repeated the feat with Great Expectations, another canonical stalwart that I’d somehow gotten through Princeton without opening. Shockingly, I already knew the story: Miss Havisham, a lunatic old woman, is thought to be the secret patron of Pip, the waifish boy who becomes a London gentleman.

  And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education. I wasn’t sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete (forever, I had an inkling), but for once those weren’t my first concerns. Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.