Lost in the Meritocracy Part 11

"You're all jazzed up. You're scaring me," she said.

"I'm rus.h.i.+ng. I'm on a break. More books to shelve. Just wanted to phone and give everyone my love."

"Your 'love,'" my mother said suspiciously. It wasn't a word that we used much in our family. I must have stumbled across it in the library.

I treated myself to a pizza that night, a pie with everything on it except pineapple. I ate alone. Kate had gone back to California. Afterward, on Na.s.sau Street, I returned to the storefront where I'd seen the toggle coat. The new display featured autumn back-to-school clothes. Corduroy pants. s.h.i.+rts with alligator insignias. Belts of pebbly hide. I had the money to buy a couple of items, but I'd have to wait until the morning, and I knew that by then I'd lose my nerve. I'd saved myself, by all appearances, but suddenly a new concern arose. With graduation just a year away and no firm career plans or even career desires (my vague interests in drama and poetry didn't qualify), the only game I'd ever learned to play-scaling the American meritocratic mountain-was, I feared, about to end.

MAKING MONEY DIDN'T INTEREST ME. WHILE MY CLa.s.sMATES signed up for on-campus "face-to-faces" with recruiters from Wall Street brokerage firms (becoming an "arbitrageur" was all the rage then, even among students who as juniors had vowed to spend their lives dancing or composing), I scanned the horizon for another test to take, another contest to compete in. I hadn't learned any lessons from my breakdown. The curse had me right back in its grip. Here I was, just this side of mental paralysis, and again I was starving for medals, stars, acceptance letters. To me, wealth and power were trivial by-products of improving one's statistical scores in the great generational tournament of apt.i.tude. The ranking itself was the essential prize. signed up for on-campus "face-to-faces" with recruiters from Wall Street brokerage firms (becoming an "arbitrageur" was all the rage then, even among students who as juniors had vowed to spend their lives dancing or composing), I scanned the horizon for another test to take, another contest to compete in. I hadn't learned any lessons from my breakdown. The curse had me right back in its grip. Here I was, just this side of mental paralysis, and again I was starving for medals, stars, acceptance letters. To me, wealth and power were trivial by-products of improving one's statistical scores in the great generational tournament of apt.i.tude. The ranking itself was the essential prize.

I applied for two scholars.h.i.+ps to Oxford, an inst.i.tution I regarded much as I'd regarded Princeton once-as a sociocultural VIP room that happened to hold cla.s.ses in the back. The first application was for the Rhodes, created to fas.h.i.+on leaders for a future utopian global order dreamed of by the diamond-mining magnate who'd pa.s.sed down his genes to the girl in the TV room whom I'd been too cowardly to court. Why I imagined that I was "Rhodes material"-which at Princeton meant someone resembling Bill Bradley, our most widely known recipient of the honor-I had not a clue. The other kids I knew who had applied were conspicuous campus presences, top athletes and leaders of student government, whereas I was an addled loner in an old raincoat who'd burped out a blank-verse play on Andy Warhol that hadn't been staged yet and might never be, unless Adam dug up some funds for the production. I was also an unindicted vandal, a suspected offender against the Honor Code, a phony theory devotee, and a chain-smoking post-aphasic whose only bulwark against regression was a heavily underlined thesaurus.

Still, I felt I had an outside shot. I'd learned by then that the masters of advancement use a rough quota system in their work, reserving a certain number of wild-card slots for overreaching oddb.a.l.l.s. I suspected that they only did this to keep more qualified candidates on their toes, but I also knew that an opening is an opening. Just get in the room, and then act like you belong there while cozying up to the folks who clearly do-this had always been my winning formula and I saw no good reason to abandon it.

To increase my chances of success, I made no contingency plans for failure. I threw myself on the mercy of the universe. V., who was seeking spots at various grad schools, cautioned me against overconfidence, but once I explained my superst.i.tious reasoning-I wasn't showing confidence at all; I was soliciting an act of grace-he backed me up by citing Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher of the nineteenth century who'd argued that faith in the divine makes sense only because it makes no sense whatsoever. Hearing my position thus affirmed should have heartened me, but it made me antsy. Philosophers weren't reliable authorities on how to operate in the real world. Indeed, if you found yourself acting in accordance with one of their mad principles, it was probably wisest to change course.

When a letter arrived to tell me I'd been chosen as one of about a dozen state finalists, I prayerfully thanked the G.o.d of desperadoes, bought a blue suit at the store on Na.s.sau Street, and flew back to Minnesota for my interview. I told a flight attendant on the plane that I'd already secured the prize-this to preview the awe I might expect if I ever really did. The woman poured me a Pepsi and moved along.

An hour after I landed, a doorman at the Minneapolis Club showed me upstairs to a gloomy paneled lounge where my name-tagged fellow aspirants were enjoying a get-acquainted party with the distinguished members of the committee that would formally screen us the next morning. I armed myself with a cheese cube on a napkin and a gla.s.s of red wine and strode into the fray, looking for someone important to impress, but my rivals had gotten the jump on me and wouldn't loosen the tight perimeters around the professors and businesspeople tasked with a.s.sessing our leaders.h.i.+p potential. To my mind, the vaunted mission of the Rhodes smacked of a sort of science-fiction n.a.z.ism, but perhaps because it hadn't yet borne fruit in the form of a smarty-pants universal directorate (and because it paid for sw.a.n.k gatherings such as this one), no one had seen fit to put a stop to it.

I poured myself a second gla.s.s of wine and went on circling the inner circle. Seeing my rivals up close unsettled me. Back when I took the SATs, the contest had been abstract, statistical, waged against an anonymous national peer group that was no more real to me than the tens of thousands of other nine-year-olds vying for the presidential fitness prize. But this time the compet.i.tion was all too personal. One short-haired young woman in a pressed dark suit was holding forth on national health-care policy to a man who kept peeking past her at a prettier girl whose panty lines were vivid through her dress. A crew-cutted young roughneck whose tag identified him as a West Point cadet was describing his diet and fitness regimen to a lady who seemed to be sleeping standing up. Every few minutes everyone changed partners, like dancers in a Jane Austen ballroom scene. What expert mixers they were! I hated them.

Then I noticed something more disturbing: the other contestants weren't drinking their wine. They were using their gla.s.ses as props, as things to gesture with.

I looked down at my empty goblet. Caught out again.

By the time I succeeded in cornering a committee member, I was feeling squirrelly and light-headed. To give the irresistible impression of humble origins transcended, I affected a lazy backwoods drawl and combined it with a Sunday-best vocabulary garnered from my brain-restoring drills. I even got off the word "heuristic" once, an elegant bit of scholastic legerdemain, but I p.r.o.nounced it in the manner of Johnny Cash. I knew I sounded demented, but by then I'd committed to the performance and feared that s.h.i.+fting to another register would only compound the impression of schizophrenia. The best I could do was gradually fall silent and pretend to be an avid listener. That, and refrain from lighting another cigarette. Besides being the party's only young drinker, I was its only smoker, it turned out, aside from a bearded old fellow with a pipe whose name tag marked him as an English professor at a local college, Carleton. I approached him, seeking cover for my vice, and babbled away about my love of Whitman, a name I'd plucked out of the air. He seemed to sense this.

"What about Whitman do you admire?" he asked me.

"Well, his first name for one thing."

"Why?"

"I'm kidding. Because it's my name. Walt." I tapped my name tag for proof. The old man squinted. I wondered what qualified him as a Rhodes judge. Not his powers of observation, surely. Some feeling that only an engineered elite could rescue humanity from doom?

"Actually, I admire his populist empathy. Dockworkers, farmers, soldiers-he loved them all."

"But did he just love them as aspects of Walt Whitman? He called the poem 'Song of Myself,' remember."

"Right."

"And you wrote a poem once, at Macalester College, for which you won a prize, and which we've read, because you submitted it in your application, called 'From an Uncolored Room.'"

I confessed the truth of this.

"Enlightening chat. Quite helpful. Good luck, young man."

At the end of the c.o.c.ktail party we drew times for our morning interviews. I drew the very first slot: seven sharp. I showed up white and trembling and dehydrated, speckled with crumbs from a cherry Danish I'd wolfed. My rivals were already seated in the waiting room, some of them paging through The New York Times The New York Times, one of them filling out the last few squares of its famously challenging crossword puzzle, which he must have begun long before he reached the club. This was a stroke I wished I'd thought of, though I would have handled it slightly differently. I would have put random letters in the squares, since who was going to check?

My name was called and I sat down in a conference room at a long table of grim interrogators equipped with pencils, clipboards, and questionnaires. "What, in your opinion," one woman asked me, not even giving me time to sip my coffee, "is the primary problem facing our world today?"

The moisture returned to my mouth, but it was sour, as though mucus membranes can perspire, too. I'd expected a little small talk first. I knew in my gut that to answer the question creatively would be a mistake; these were sober, high-minded people who'd woken up early to serve the citizenry by preselecting future American presidents and United Nations amba.s.sadors. The only issues worthy of their seriousness, I strongly suspected, were the obvious two: poverty and war. My chance to show originality would come with the inevitable follow-up: "And how would you deal with this problem?" That's where the challenge lay. I wanted to bring in poetry-but how? By calling for a new, transformative literature pledged to the empowerment of the voiceless through a concern with the universal values of justice and mutual respect?

That might be a winner, if I could just remember it.

But I couldn't remember anything. All I could think about were the other applicants pretending to read their papers in the lounge while secretly wis.h.i.+ng an epileptic fit on me. I could feel their ill will oozing in under the door. I could feel the high-pressure cell of their ma.s.sed ambition pressing against the hinges of the door.

"Miscommunication would be my answer."

Horrible. But my ad-lib would have to stand.

"Expand on that, please," said a quiet female voice as pens began scratching across important papers. "Miscommunication among whom?"

I offered a roster of miscommunicators that included governments and their subjects, men and women, adults and children, and even-absurdly-human beings and animals. Halfway through my speech I knew I'd lost. Aside from the presidential rope climb, I'd never lost at anything before except for a spelling bee in Phoenix, and the feeling was like waking on the moon after having gone to bed on earth. I left my body. Or maybe my body left me. They zoomed away in opposite directions, with only an echoing "human beings and animals" indicating the spot which they'd once shared.

I returned to the waiting room ten minutes later, after a ceremonial round of questions about my beliefs as a "young artist." My rivals scanned my face for clues: How had my interview changed the odds for them? I gave them more information than they deserved, hoping to win their favor for the future. Someday one of them might rule all earth, and I wanted to be remembered as a good sport.

"You're safe," I announced to all of them. "I blew it."

"How?" said someone, eager for a tip.

"Don't worry. It's only going to happen once today."

My compet.i.tors couldn't help grinning. Then one girl hugged me-the health-care expert, whom I realized I'd known at Macalester, back when. "You really shouldn't consider it a loss," she said. "You should feel honored that you reached this level."

I returned the hug against my will, my desire for pity prevailing over my dignity. Then I turned away and left the building, unwilling to wait for the winners to be named. Later I learned that the health-care girl was one of them-one of only two Rhodes from our home region-which made her gesture seem false in retrospect. She knew she was bound for the sharp end of the pyramid, and was merely rehearsing her royal manners.

"Is this Walter Kirn?" asked the phantom of Na.s.sau Hall.

"It is," I said. "It's him." Anxiety over poor grammar ensures poor grammar.

"The provost would like to meet with you next week about a confidential matter. Would Wednesday at noon work?"

"Any time would work. May I ask you a question?"

"Please," the ghost said.

"How bad is it?"

"It's good."

The meeting spot was a modest diner across the street from Princeton's grand front gate. A letter I'd received the day before explained why I'd been summoned: to talk about another overseas scholars.h.i.+p, less coveted than the Rhodes but more exclusive (only a handful were awarded each year) sponsored by the Keasbey Foundation, an organization based in Philadelphia. I'd applied for the Keasbey at the urging of a junior English professor, the cheerful medievalist whom I was fond of because he paused between his sentences and went light on theory. He'd won the Keasbey himself a few years back and thought it the finest scholars.h.i.+p on offer because it gave winners a choice of universities-not just Oxford, but also Cambridge, Edinburgh, and even Aberystwyth, in Wales-as well as supplying a generous "wine allowance" of a few hundred dollars per year. I asked why this was. "It's in the will," he said. I asked him whose will. "Marguerite Keasbey's."

I ordered a BLT and perched on a stool in the window of the diner, wondering how I'd recognize a being whose t.i.tle had always been a cipher to me. It was easy, though. Provosts behave exactly like provosts. They shake your hand a moment before you're ready, they lay a heartening arm across your shoulder that drops away the instant you feel heartened, they lightly scold you for using your own money to buy your BLT, and they don't touch their coffee after the first sip because they're granting you their full attention, which they somehow convince you that you deserve.

"The first round of judging for the Keasbey is done by the university itself. That process has been concluded. Concluded in your favor, I'm pleased to say." He brought out a sheaf of neatly folded doc.u.ments and slid it across the Formica toward my plate, a gesture familiar from movies about espionage. I followed what I gathered to be the script and immediately tucked the papers out of sight, in a pocket of my jeans.

"Don't lose those. Make sure to read them," the provost said. "They contain details on next week's interview."

"I'm grateful. Thank you, sir. Sincerely. Wow."

"You don't want to read them now and ask some questions?"

"Is that what you want?"

"It's whatever you want."

"Really?"

The provost accompanied me back to campus, a ghostly red carpet unfurling before him that I was allowed to set my feet on, too. People waved at him, people I'd never seen before. I imagined that they were deans, administrators, and I wondered through what quirk of quantum physics they'd suddenly managed to gain materiality. At the foot of the staircase to Na.s.sau Hall's front doors, watched by the twin bronze tigers, who were purring now, I received a second provostian handshake, a second fleeting shoulder clasp, and then he was gone, in a twinkling, my own Saint Nicholas, traveling undercover in a brown suit. I touched the papers in my back pocket. Real.

The euphoria only lasted a few minutes. In my dorm room, I sat down on my bed next to the leafless potted plant in which I sometimes urinated when the hike to the men's room felt too long, and handicapped my chances in the last round. The Rhodes debacle had broken my confidence, but rather than learning from it the obvious lesson-that I should prepare for auditions before the wise ones-I doubled up on my old strategy of conjuring mercy through helplessness and squeezing inspiration from despair. I drifted through my cla.s.ses the next day, and every day for the next week, astonished anew by how little four years of college had affected me. The great poems and novels mystified me still, particularly the ones I'd written papers on, and my math skills, once adequate for the SATs, had atrophied to nothing. The science cla.s.ses I'd been required to take, on geology and psychology, had been graded pa.s.s-fail, and though I'd pa.s.sed them, barely, I'd already forgotten what "igneous" meant and where in the brain short-term memories were stored.

Worse, I had no prospects. All around me friends were taking positions with worldwide corporations and securing places in lofty grad schools, but I had nothing but three sheets of paper, one of them mapping the quickest route from Princeton to downtown Philadelphia, the site of my upcoming ultimate rebuff. I'd never bothered to contemplate the moment when the quest for trophies would end, as would the game of trading on previous trophies. Once I had nowhere to go but up. Now I had nowhere to go at all, it seemed. The only suspense was what shape defeat would take. There he goes, the Ivy League grocery bagger. There he lies, the hobo with the diploma.

"Stop it," said V. during one of my moping orgies. My interview was just two days away. "This is unwarranted. And it's beneath you."

"It isn't Kierkegaardian? No, you're right. It's Schopenhauerian."

"The fact that you can even make such jokes means that you've come further than you know."

"But you're the only person I can make them to. They're good for another few months, until we leave here, and then I'll be all alone with them," I said.

"You don't know what 'all alone' means, obviously."

"What? It means something different in Pakistan?"

V nodded. Not immediately, reluctantly. Then he folded his hands and stared down into his lap. He seemed disappointed in me, or in our friends.h.i.+p. I began to understand. His time here was precious, he'd stolen it from his government, and he'd paid for it with a separation. The fact that he'd spent so much of it with me-who not only didn't appreciate the privilege but didn't appreciate anything, apparently, beginning with himself-must have struck him as a ghastly waste.

I RODE DOWN TO PHILADELPHIA WITH PRINCETON'S OTHER 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. 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 sportsmans.h.i.+p. 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 fellows.h.i.+p's sn.o.bby benefactress had deemed worthy of sharing in her legacy. The tension I'd felt at the Rhodes a.s.sembly 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 fellows.h.i.+p 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 fas.h.i.+on of a medieval sheriff reading out tax rolls in a public square. His dry style didn't suit the narrative-the astonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed through a portal to d.i.c.kens'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 blus.h.i.+ng 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 fellows.h.i.+p, 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 c.u.mmerbund.

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 trespa.s.s 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 gla.s.ses 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 destiny. 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 pus.h.i.+ng-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 winegla.s.s, and teach me how to dance.

A COUPLE OF WEEKS BEFORE I GRADUATED AND ONLY THREE 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 sc.r.a.ps 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. 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 sc.r.a.ps 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."