I started to protest—of course I was here, but Carl continued:
“And thank you for speaking.”
“I wasn’t sure what would be right to say.”
Carl shook his head, dismissing that worry. “There’s nothing to say,” he said. “It’s just about being here, being together.” There was another couple Carl and Addie’s age waiting next to me, and Charlie’s brother, William, was surrounded, so Jack and I proceeded with the other guests into the church. Awed by the white columns and the red carpet, the sudden shift from bright to dim, Jack took my hand. Long windows glowed on either side of the nave, but the light didn’t penetrate very far into the interior. There was low conversation everywhere, and then children’s laughter. Several of them ran out of a side chapel and down the aisle, chasing each other. I recognized Simmi in a navy dress with white polka dots, and then Terrence stopped her gently, putting an arm around her shoulder. It had taken me a moment to recognize him because his hair was shaved close to his skull; either he’d started losing his hair in the seven years since I’d seen him, like his father-in-law, or he’d purposely cut off the dreadlocks. He looked like a different person in the conservative dark gray suit, guiding his daughter down the side aisle toward one of the forward pews.
“There’s Simmi,” I said to Jack.
“The laughing one?”
“She’s with her dad now.”
“She shouldn’t be so happy.”
I don’t shush Jack often, but I did then. The raw heartlessness of children continues to surprise me. Much is made of their sensitivity and purity—and those things are true of Jack—but I’ve been fascinated to observe that we aren’t born with empathy, that our own needs and wants radically trump those of all others, at least until we learn to feel otherwise.
I thought it would be better to find Terrence after the service, or maybe I was only postponing it. As Jack and I were making our way down the aisle on the other side of the church, I heard my name; when I turned around, I saw Charlie’s college boyfriend, Kwesi, standing next to his English wife, Alison, whose name I remembered because Charlie had called me in tears when they got married.
Kwesi and I hugged each other.
“You’re in London now?”
Kwesi nodded. He was wearing a beautiful brown suit, and his hooded eyes were the same under the same round, wire-rimmed glasses. Even in school Kwesi had been a calming presence—someone you might seek out when you missed the company of adults. Of course there had been adults at Harvard when we were undergraduates, but they had remained mostly in their offices and lecture halls. In our residential houses, we had advisors, but all I remembered of them was that they’d periodically hosted afternoon tea. It wasn’t a place for people who believed they needed guidance or mentoring outside the academic realm.
Kwesi told me the ages of his children, young teenagers, and I introduced Jack, who this time held out his hand to both Kwesi and Alison. I was proud of him.
“I saw that you’re going to speak,” Kwesi said.
“Yes.”
I was worried that he was going to say something that began, She was so…something that would sum Charlie up, turn her into a character. I felt like that would be even worse in front of this strange woman, his wife. But Kwesi didn’t do anything like that.
“I remember the first time my parents took me to a Ghanaian funeral,” he said. “I was amazed. The coffin was in the shape of a stack of American dollars, because he was a businessman. Funerals are almost like weddings there, and equally expensive. People dance.”
“It’s a carnival,” his wife said. “Unimaginable until you experience it.” She was sharp-featured, petite, with a confident, intelligent way of speaking, and I had the strange thought that Charlie would be disappointed not to have met her.
“No one is required to”—Kwesi seemed to search for what he wanted to say—“to sit quietly in their grief.”
“You’ve been to more memorial services than Ghanaian funerals,” his wife pointed out, needling him in a gentle, marital way.
“True,” Kwesi said, “and I’ve always been more comfortable at this type. But I have a great deal of admiration for the other.”
I was afraid that Jack wouldn’t want to stay in the pew when I went up to make my speech, or that I would become too upset to speak, or that I wouldn’t feel anything and that would be apparent in my voice. I was used to public speaking, even used to talking about things that mattered to me a great deal. But at a physics conference, you knew there would always be a conversation after the presentation, sometimes even a collaborative working-out of ideas that continued after that was finished. There was always the next conference, the next paper; nothing was fixed forever. How could I tell just one anecdote about Charlie?
William had begun to speak. Back when we were in college, Charlie’s parents were frequently in a state of panic about William, who was three years ahead of us, ran the radio station with a bunch of his stoner friends, and tended to sleep through his classes. This was in spite (or perhaps because) of all the chess tournaments as a child, Charlie often explained. Although they didn’t always get along, the glamour of William’s life wasn’t lost on his sister. As a young adult, William preferred cards, and in the summers—when other students got jobs in their hometowns, or went off to spend a few weeks building houses in Haiti or Honduras—William went to Vegas as a prop player. He came back rich in the fall, ready to commence partying again.
Since college William had put his talents to work for a hedge fund in Manhattan. He had acquired a very sociable Chilean wife, and adorable, undoubtedly chess-playing twin boys. It was a turn toward convention that I’d seen in other Harvard students who had been disaffected with the university for one reason or another. William had been as reticent and sardonic as Kwesi was earnest and outgoing, and although Charlie had once been in love with Kwesi, I knew her perspective had been more like her brother’s. If either of them had felt discriminated against at Harvard, they would never have said it. Once I’d forwarded an image from the “I too am Harvard” social media campaign—a girl holding a sign that said, “No, you can’t touch my hair”—to Charlie, who didn’t keep up with Harvard news or attend reunions; she had heard of it, but had expressed amazement at the amount of activism around race on campus these days. “Maybe this is totally gen X of me,” she wrote back. “I mean, more power to them. But I can’t imagine us doing any of this, back then.”
William said that he’d chosen to read a poem that his sister liked. He himself had always been more interested in poker than in poetry (this got a laugh), but his sister had helped him understand it.
This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this.
Like William, I’d never had the patience for poetry, but I liked this one. I liked its short lines and the way it seemed easy to understand, at first—it was about the moon—but how the “this” of the poem kept slipping away.
For time is inches
And the heart’s changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.
Later I checked Auden’s dates to see whether “time is inches” could be a reference to relativity—based on another poem of his, called “After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics,” he seemed to take a dim view of our discipline—and discovered that it could. At the time, though, I just sat there listening to William, who was so changed from the college student I remembered—saying that love was particular even though it was directed at the same person, that we hadn’t lost just one Charlie but as many as the number of people who were seated here today.
William’s black shoes descended the steps from the chancel on silent red plush, and there was a space that applause might have filled in any other setting. A middle school teacher spoke about Charlie’s multifa
rious artistic talents, and then the chaplain got up to read from the Second Letter of Paul. When he was finished, it would be my turn. I had prepared my remarks, but I didn’t want to deliver them. Sometimes at work, our team would identify a problem in the question we’d asked rather than the solution we’d devised. It wasn’t that I had too much to say, but that I didn’t want to say anything. And that wasn’t because I didn’t love Charlie, but because I couldn’t believe that she was really dead.
Jack had been patient but he was starting to fidget; it would be a disaster if he needed to be taken out just as I was starting to speak. (This was the kind of single-parent problem, purely to do with logistics, that I hadn’t fully considered in advance.) I looked around, but I wasn’t the only one: two other children in our immediate vicinity were looking down in their laps, their faces vaguely glowing. I muted all sounds and handed Jack my phone: he was immediately perfectly still and absorbed in a game, almost as if I’d switched him off.
There was an Amen, and then I patted Jack on the shoulder and walked up the side aisle to the pulpit. The chaplain made way for me, a scientist and a nonbeliever. I looked at the faces and tried to keep Charlie in my mind; it normally helps me to remember that speeches only last a short time, and you always feel that you could do a better job, if you had it to do over again. There were Adelaide and Carl in the front row. Charlie’s father was crying, making no attempt to hide it: his son’s speech had moved him. But Addie’s face was more upsetting; in place of her earlier composure was a fierce tension—she was almost vibrating. Behind her Terrence was bent over Simmi, buried in his chest; I couldn’t see either of their faces. Don’t think of losing Jack, I told myself—don’t think of that.
I was glad I’d chosen something lighthearted to say. It was a story about the time Charlie had made a plane turn around. This really happened. We were on our way to New York for a graduation party. Not only would I never have flown anywhere for a party except under Charlie’s influence, but I would have always allowed enough time at the airport to make missing a flight impossible. Because I was with Charlie, we were late, and when we arrived the plane had just begun to taxi away from the gate. Charlie burst into tears, and to my amazement, told the ground crew behind the desk that if she didn’t get on the plane, she was going to miss her grandmother Althea’s funeral, at Calvary Cemetery in Queens.
The point of the story was Charlie’s unbelievable chutzpah, her skill as an actress, and the joke in the reference to Charlie’s grandmother Althea, who had been very much alive then, on an Elderhostel cruise down the Peruvian Amazon with her new boyfriend, Chester. I had been concerned that the story was slightly transgressive—the lie, the pushiness—but I had gotten the tone right and it had more than gone over. I saw Charlie’s father laughing, and even Addie seemed to have relaxed a bit. Jack hadn’t heard a word of what I’d said, but at least he was quiet, and I had only a few sentences to go.
It was at that moment that I noticed someone had come into the narthex; maybe he’d been standing there, a silhouette against the wall, and the usher had taken the opportunity to seat him during the pause in my remarks. It wasn’t a disruption because he didn’t make any noise. Possibly no one saw him come in but the usher and me. Now he sat down in the last pew, in the sunlight streaming through an arched picture window: Professor Pope.
I’m rarely at a loss in front of an audience. I’ve said foolish things, not-thought-out things—but never nothing. In this case the congregated guests must have attributed my sudden hesitation to strong emotion. In fact, that wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t believe that he could simply walk into the church and sit down, uninvited, that rather than questioning his connection to the proceedings, the usher had hurried to find him a place. He was looking at me along with everyone else, but only because I was speaking. He wouldn’t remember who I was.
Afterward I thought of what I might have said to call him out, without disrupting the ceremony. I could have said that Charlie learned how to survive in Hollywood here at Harvard, where racism and sexism were enshrined in ways equally difficult to disrupt. I could have talked about her unfinished thesis, “Dramatic Liaisons: Reflection and Refraction in Twentieth-Century Stagings of Choderlos de Laclos,” and said that when she most needed a mentor, Harvard’s distinguished faculty had failed her. The memorial was invitation-only, but Widener Library opened at ten o’clock. Since it was now quarter to eleven, it was entirely possible that an interloper might have walked down the stone steps of that historic building, from one of its most coveted offices on the top floor—a perk of his distinguished chair—before crossing the Yard, a distance of perhaps five hundred feet, to the church. Pope nearly eighty, Charlie forty-five. Pope alive, Charlie dead.
In the end I said only what I’d planned, that Charlie had an imagination and a will like no one I’d ever met, that when she wanted something, it seemed she was able to shift the ground in front of her. That no one who had met her could have ever forgotten her. That was all true of Charlie, but I had to struggle while I said it not to look at the man in the back, whose presence had made me stumble.
Then I left the pulpit. The chaplain stepped forward and asked everyone to please rise for…some hymn. I returned to the pew, took my phone from Jack, and showed him the page in the book. He was interested in where the music was coming from, and because I had turned around to show him the organ, I couldn’t resist looking again.
Pope looked older at this distance, thinner and slightly stooped. His hair was still thick and full, but now pure white. No one could consider him a threat, and yet there was his hand, the color of putty, lifting the crimson hymnal from its place behind the pew. His hand could grip the book, his legs could raise his body up—those powers remained to him, while all that was left of my friend was empty space.
13.
Space, as I like to tell Jack, is anything but empty. Four years after I went to California to see Charlie, and to talk about the Large Hadron Collider’s debut at CERN, the physicists there had a triumphant success. Scientists had been looking for the Higgs boson since Peter Higgs’s team had theorized its existence in 1964, but the particle remained elusive. When evidence for the Higgs appeared in the new Collider at CERN, it was widely celebrated as the first groundbreaking advance in the physics of the new century. Neel’s efforts to record gravitational waves were just as important, but at that time, the LIGO collaboration had come up with nothing.
The Higgs discovery happened in 2012, when Jack was four. We were spending a week in California with my sister. Amy and her husband, Ben, kindly offered to take the kids to the beach in Santa Monica while I sat at my computer, waiting for confirmation that the elusive particle had indeed been found. Or not found, exactly. (I explained this to a journalist who asked me to put it in terms anyone could understand.) I said that the Higgs was the final piece in a puzzle called the Standard Model—an organizational chart, I said, that describes the most fundamental particles of matter, as well as how they move and interact. We arrange the particles—quarks, leptons, and bosons—according to electric charge, as well as more exotic properties like “color charge” and “spin”; since the Higgs has none of these properties, it couldn’t actually be seen. It could only be identified by its after-effects: the more familiar particles it left behind in the frigid subterranean racecourse of the supercollider. I told the journalist that the Higgs is important because it creates a field, producing profound effects on the particles around it, while remaining invisible itself; for that reason, it has sometimes been called the “God particle”—a designation most physicists dislike. I have always thought that if a name makes people interested enough to learn more, it’s probably doing more good than harm.
The day Jack came home from school and asked where exactly hell was located, I told him that it didn’t exist, but that there was a very cool laboratory more than five hundred feet under the ground, where I would someday take him to visit. So that’s where b
ad people go? Jack asked. That was too good not to repeat to Neel, who said that all of LIGO Caltech now knew about good physicists going to heaven and bad ones going to CERN.
Neel and I became friends freshman year, but he didn’t meet Charlie until she and I started rooming together as sophomores. We were living in a three-room double under the blue bell tower in Lowell House, a luxurious space that she’d secured for us with a note from her immunologist. Charlie missed more classes because of illness than anyone I knew; in general she suffered from tiredness, headaches, and stomach pain. Because of her chronic fatigue syndrome, Charlie spent a lot of time in bed, reading magazines. Her bed must’ve been the same iron-frame, extra-long single that they issued to all Harvard undergraduates, but she’d added a featherbed, a white comforter, and a plethora of white-on-white decorative pillows. On the walls she’d hung film and theatrical posters, all framed—Charlie believed in framing—Audrey Hepburn in Charade, Charlotte Gainsbourg in Oleanna, Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. The top of the dresser was covered with a vibrant scarf, on which she arranged cosmetics and perfume. There was also one relic from her childhood, also framed: a yarn sampler onto which one of Charlie’s aunts had embroidered A. A. Milne’s “Cottleston Pie” in green on a patterned yellow ground. I couldn’t imagine how long it would have taken, the words as well as the animals in the style of the original illustrations: Pooh, Eeyore, and Piglet, even Christopher Robin with a rainbow umbrella. Carl’s sister had made it in honor of Charlie’s birth, and put her initials at the bottom: PWB ’71.
“You know most of those immune disorders are imaginary?” Neel said, the first time he visited our room.
“Please don’t tell her you think that,” I said, but I shouldn’t have bothered. Charlie had an answer for everything. She walked in just as Neel was finishing the tour of our expansive suite—thankfully, once we were already in the living room.
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