‘You know,’ Ti-Loup confessed, mortarboard and scroll in hand, ‘on the day King was killed, I went into Mem Church to pray. I’d never been inside before. It was half full of faculty and students. Later I went to St Ann’s and Brother Damian and I talked for hours. Why is it no one recognises a martyr until he’s martyred? We listened to sermons that condemned him. We believed he was a Communist stirring up racial warfare. Everyone did.’
‘Not everyone. The Goldbergs joined his march on Washington.’
‘Did they?’ Ti-Loup twisted his graduation scroll as though it were a knot he was tying.
‘Don’t!’ Cap cried.
‘I’ve never done anything worthwhile with my life.’
‘That is a crazy thing to say.’
‘I’m thinking of becoming a priest.’
‘What?’ Cap closed her eyes. She saw Father Boniface raising the chalice in the church of St Gilles. She saw the back of Monsieur Monsard’s turkey neck. She heard Ti-Christophe’s footsteps leaving the nave. She saw the countess and her waif of a son as she and her father passed them in the aisle. She saw the boy’s eyes, his blue shift. She remembered that his eyes and her eyes met for a second. She remembered that his were frightened and that she had made her own face turn grotesque. Perhaps she had poked out her tongue.
If I hadn’t been so heedlessly cruel and bossy, she wondered, would he ever have climbed out his window?
When? she thought of asking him in Harvard Yard. When do you plan to turn celibate? Soon, but not yet, like St Augustine? Do you want to be Father JG, whom you mocked, whom you so often mocked?
She said, ‘Papa never thought very highly of priests. He suspected some of collaboration. They only have to answer to the bishop, he said. We have to answer to God.’
‘And your own graduation?’ Ti-Loup asked, as though their conversation had been moving on a different track altogether. ‘How was that?’
‘Subdued,’ Cap said carefully. ‘Like here. Black armbands.’
‘And your personal guests? What about them?’
‘There was one painful absence. It’s hard to forgive you, but I do.’
‘And my mother? What did she say?’
‘She said she was glad her investment in a Jesuit tutor and a convent school in Tours had not gone astray. She said she was proud of me.’
‘Did she ask about me?’
‘Obliquely. She was afraid to ask. People try not to expose their wounds, Ti-Loup, as you yourself know very well.’
‘I don’t believe my mother has any.’
‘You have massive blind spots, Ti-Loup, like everyone else. Like almost everyone else. I think the only person I’ve ever known who had no blind spots at all was my father. But maybe my view of him is my own blind spot.’
‘It’s not. He and Ti-Christophe and Shannay were the only grown-ups who made me feel safe.’
‘What about Brother Damian? What about the Cabots?’
‘Before them, I mean. When I was still a child. When I prayed Our Father, who art in heaven, it was your father’s face I saw. Still do.’
‘Then why didn’t you …? Your mother and I were at his bedside together when he died. The Goldbergs came over for the funeral but you didn’t even call or write.’
‘Why didn’t I?’ This was a question that Ti-Loup was asking himself. He was casting about for an answer. ‘Remember Father JG and the lip of a whirlpool? Centripetal force? “Descent into the Maelstrom”, remember?’
‘The man sucked into the vortex.’
‘St Gilles is the maelstrom for me. Anything to do with all that. I don’t dare go anywhere near the edge.’
Cap sighed. ‘I told your mother you hadn’t forgiven any of us, that she wasn’t the only one. You avoided us all, I said. You cut everyone off. I didn’t tell her I’d be here today. I just told her you’d forbidden your father to come. I thought that would be some sort of comfort.’
‘And Cabot?’
‘The Cabots were wonderful and so were the Goldbergs. They threw a party for me. You’re just going to have to learn to share, Ti-Loup. Unfortunately, from my point of view, the guest of honour never showed up at the party. But I have some significant pieces of news. The first is that I’ve legally changed my name, with the Goldbergs’ blessing. Lilith belongs to my mother and me, but I also need a name that belongs to Papa and Ti-Christophe. I’m Lilith Jardine now. Legally.’
‘Lilith Jardine.’
‘Like the sound of it?’
‘Not as much as the sound of Cap. But Lilith Jardine is as beautiful and difficult and alarming as when she first dropped out of our apple tree.’
‘Our apple tree. Papa’s and mine.’
‘My point exactly. Lilith Jardine. She who must not be contradicted.’
‘The second thing is my graduation present to you. I’ve signed up for Harvard Summer School and I’m moving to Boston. Mrs Cabot, bless her, has arranged internships for me at the Fogg and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Minimal intern’s pay but I can afford a studio apartment.’
‘That’s my graduation present?’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘Oh, I love being indebted to the Cabots.’
Cap batted her forehead with the palms of her hands, exasperated. ‘You are as spiky as prickly pear, and yet the Cabots love you, Ti-Loup.’
‘Easy for them.’
‘Why is it easy for them when you treat them so badly and so rudely?’
‘That would take a lengthy paper on the history of privilege and on why some of us would like to divest ourselves of that history.’
‘There’s a course on that topic, or something like it, in the Summer School catalogue. It’s called The Sociology of Power. I signed us both up for it. It’ll be like being back together with Father JG.’
‘Paradise regained,’ Ti-Loup said.
‘Cynicism’s inappropriate for someone who plans to take orders.’
‘You actually signed me up without asking?’
‘There weren’t many spaces left, so I thought I should. You’re free to withdraw.’
‘You haven’t changed. Still Joan of Arc bullying the Dauphin.’
‘You haven’t changed either,’ Cap said.
13.
The summer-school course on The Sociology of Power was held in an old building facing onto Harvard Yard. It smelled of crumbling brick, pigeon droppings and unbathed students. A bourgeois attitude towards laundry was out of fashion in 1968, as were overly clean feet, which would not have matched the funky handmade sandals. Because desks in the amphitheatre rose in curved and stepped ranks – like pairs of frowning brows around the steep central aisle – the students were inclined to take short cuts. They used the serried rows as climbing monkeys might and they scrambled over one another to reach an unoccupied seat.
Each intensive seven-week seminar met daily, either for three hours in the morning or three hours in the afternoon. In June ’68, the first classes were convened a mere twenty days after Sirhan Sirhan blew Bobby Kennedy’s skull into shards, and scarcely two weeks after RFK was laid to rest in Arlington alongside the grave of his brother. This grisly event seemed in no way to cloud the sunny enthusiasm of the Summer School director who made his way from class to class with the same uplifting words. The Harvard Crimson quoted him front-page centre. ‘Harvard Summer School is mainly about fun,’ he said. (He means sex and pot, students sniggered.) ‘We have a long history of testimonials,’ the director said, ‘from students who swear that Summer School was the best part of their Harvard years.’ (Not all of them remember any of it too clearly, students joked.) Of course, the director added, intense intellectual focus was integral to the experience. ‘I do not mean by fun,’ he said, ‘that you won’t exercise brainpower to the nth degree.’ What he promised was that the mental buzz would be fun: classes and study by day, parties by night.
Summer School students from years past were freely quoted by the Crimson. We can’t begin to tell you, they said, how many ho
ok-ups and how much sex happens at night. It’s partly, they said, meeting the same people in class every day and all day for seven weeks, sharing dorms, going to clubs every night. It’s so intense. Those Summer School friendships last for life.
In the lecture hall, Lilith was rudely whacked on the head by a cloth drawstring bag that was heavy with books. Green drawstring sacks, visible on campus by the hundreds, were the only acceptable mode for humping texts from one class to the next. A briefcase was unacceptable. It might suggest a banker or a lawyer or some other lower form of moral life, whereas a Harvard green bag in that particular summer was a potent signifier of political virtue. The student stepping over Lilith was effusive with apology. ‘Terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘Didn’t mean to be clumsy. Just had an overwhelming desire to sit next to you and this was the only way I could get in. D’you mind?’
Lilith rubbed the back of her head gingerly. ‘It will cost you,’ she said drily.
‘Exactly what I was hoping. Can I take you to lunch after this?’
‘No, you can’t,’ Vanderbilt interjected, leaning forward from the seat on Lilith’s far side. ‘What are you, a freelance lecher?’
Lilith laid a gentling hand on Vanderbilt’s forearm. ‘I was only joking when I said it would cost you,’ she told the book-bag man.
‘That’s a pity,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Lilith Jardine. What’s yours?’
‘Rumpelstiltskin. Find out my real name and I’ll take you to dinner at the Ritz. I’ll treat you both to dinner at the Ritz, you and your keeper.’
‘We don’t eat at places like the Ritz,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘On principle.’
‘What’s your guard dog’s name?’ Rumpelstiltskin asked.
‘My name is Patrick McVie. Does behaving like a lout come naturally to you? Or do you have to work at it?’
‘Hey, look, you’re right. I apologise. I’m behaving like an asshole. Happens when I’m nervous. I’ve had girlfriends turn straw into gold who swear I can turn gold into shit.’ Rumpelstiltskin leaned across Lilith and extended his right hand. ‘Shake on it?’ His smile was beatific, his manner warm.
Patrick McVie paused for three seconds then extended his hand. ‘Okay. Shake. Sorry to be so prickly.’
The professor entered the room then, and to get attention he clapped his hands twice, very loudly. Even so, the din of chatter did not stop instantly but faded in a slow diminuendo, during which McVie murmured against Lilith’s ear: Oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor. She turned to him, startled. ‘Rumpelstiltskin,’ he whispered. ‘Not the professor.’
The professor was moderately famous and had appeared on national television to discuss the assassination epidemic (JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy). His hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he wore jeans and a Harvard T-shirt. A peace symbol made of soldered nails hung from a leather cord around his neck. ‘Much as I regret having to disagree publicly with the Harvard Summer School director,’ he said, ‘this course will not be about fun, unless we are talking about the ways in which the powerful have fun on the backs of those they exploit, on the backs of those who are sent into combat to preserve the privileges of power, on the backs of those whose disgracefully underpaid labour funds the good times of those at the top.’
That was his opening salvo.
He quoted Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
He quoted Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body: I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property … The boundaries of our property are extended by mixing our persons with things, and this is the essence of the labor process.
‘Since they were on the reading list,’ the professor said, ‘I trust you have already read both books. If not, stay up all night and make sure you have read them by tomorrow. Herbert Marcuse himself will speak to this class next week. He will be open to debate and discussion. I will expect your questions and discussion points to be both knowledgeable and astute.’
Someone called out from the third row: ‘Are Marcuse and Brown in political and philosophical agreement?’
‘For the most part, yes,’ the professor said. ‘They are personal friends. There are some points on which they disagree. So.’ He cast his eyes over the class. ‘Are you your things? Your commodities? Or are you something other than your things? Do you believe you have a soul? Can your soul express itself independently of your desire to hang on to your things?’
‘Doesn’t that depend, sir, on what we consider our things?’ another student called out. ‘I mean, “having fun in Summer School” or having a mini-fridge in my dorm room is not one of my things or I wouldn’t have signed up for your course. Shifting gears in our political culture so that we change leaders by ballot box and not by assassin’s bullet, that’s one of my things. It’s not tangible though. It’s not a commodity.’
‘Are you claiming,’ the professor asked, ‘that your Harvard degree will not function as a commodity? That you will not exchange it in the marketplace for your future income level, for instance? For where you will live? For whether you will live in the safe or unsafe areas of a city, for example?’
‘Does that mean, sir,’ the challenger parried, ‘that you and Marcuse and Brown hold all things equivalent? Are you saying there is no moral gradation between a new refrigerator and a passion for social justice?’
There was a great clamour of support and dissent from the class. Amid the hubbub, McVie (astonishing Lilith) stood and demanded in a loud and clear voice: ‘I have to ask, sir, if Marcuse or Brown ever had to take an axe to a turkey’s head? Did they ever pluck a chicken and disembowel it? Did they ever gut a calf or bone a forequarter of beef? Did they ever themselves go to a butcher shop and buy their own steak? Did they ever go hungry? Did they ever get drafted? Do they have the faintest idea of what things might mean to people who don’t have many things?’
‘The peasant speaks!’ someone else in the class called out.
‘The so-called peasant has a valid point,’ the professor said. ‘Do Marcuse and Brown speak only, and obliviously, for the middle class?’
‘Can the peasant speak? Can he ever speak?’ Rumpelstiltskin was standing now. ‘Does the peasant have words in which to speak? Or can only the ex-peasant parrot the words of Marcuse? Can he only speak when he has swapped his farm overalls for a Harvard green bag?’ Rumpelstiltskin did not shout, yet his voice was crisp and clear above the din. He required a response as his due and yet he did not come across as aggressive. He had an air of charming disdain. ‘Isn’t this romantic agrarianism?’ he asked. ‘Tolstoy pretending to be a serf? Gandhi sufficiently propped up by wealthy donors to sit at a spinning wheel and turn out homespun? Is this moral bullshit or isn’t it? I’m laying bets that the faux-peasant is a guilt-ridden private-school type, wealthy as Croesus.’
McVie was still standing. He looked stunned, like a boy caught red-handed in an apple tree.
Lilith could not take her eyes off Rumpelstiltskin. She wanted to throw something at him but she was also mesmerised by him. He caught her eye and held it. He had the most intense and unnerving gaze she had ever been skewered by. He smiled slightly and raised one eyebrow, implying sardonic collusion.
She turned away and reached for McVie’s hand and tugged him back down to his seat. ‘That was superb,’ she whispered. ‘I’m proud of you.’
‘Well,’ the professor said. ‘Class warfare breaks out! It is not the intention of this course to be a political confessional or a public-shaming event in the manner of Madame Mao’s Red Guards, so I won’t ask our two provocateurs to identify themselves or their backgrounds.’
There was a percussive response, as of kettledrums, palms thumping desks, a traditional academic sound of either fierce agreement or of protest.
‘I do, however,’ the professor continued, ‘hope to shake you all out of compla
cency. I hope to rattle your received and mostly unexamined preconceptions. And if I were to make a deliberately provocative guess, by way of purposely flustering you, let me suggest that speaker number one is of genuine peasant stock but has had experience of being socially excluded by the elite. He is legitimately angry. I would say that speaker number two is projecting. He is projecting vehemently. He doth, in fact, protest far too much it seems to me. He sounds like one of Madame Mao’s Red Guards desperate to prove how fiercely revolutionary he is and how very untainted he is by the counter-revolutionary strains of the bourgeoisie. So I will hazard a guess that he is actually from a wealthy and privileged background, feels not the slightest impulse to apologise for this, but feels he can readily detect what he thinks of as the Tolstoy syndrome in someone else. This syndrome infuriates him, particularly, I suspect, because his ancestors profited from the “romantic agrarianism” he so disdainfully mentions, which is to say from the labour of the happy peasant.’
‘Talk about hypocrisy and blind spots,’ Rumpelstiltskin murmured in Lilith’s right ear. ‘The professor’s family has huge land holdings in Virginia. Ancestors were big slave owners. My family happens to know his.’
Lilith raised one quizzical eyebrow. Does that mean, her eyebrow suggested, that your ancestors also owned slaves?
‘Naturally.’ Rumpelstiltskin answered her unspoken question. ‘It takes one to know one. Southerners, I mean. Prof’s a Southerner who shed his accent as fast as he could.’
A black student, one of only two in the class, stood in the top back tier and spoke calmly and clearly. ‘I would like to congratulate you, sir, on your intention to shake the class out of complacency. Speaking of the sociology of power, can I ask you to comment on the statement by the director of the Summer School, as reported in the Harvard Crimson, that there is no racial tension whatsoever at Harvard. What there is, he said, is a universal concern about race relations. I would very much appreciate your gloss on this, sir.’
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