Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  “Charlie told me about that.” I didn’t say that she’d been angry at Trisha for giving those girls her name. “She said later that she was sorry she hadn’t joined them. But this part’s off the record, right?”

  “By its very nature,” Patricia said. She paused for a long moment, and I thought that maybe she was going to revise what she’d said; maybe something had actually happened to her, with Pope.

  “She must have told you what I said?”

  “About him?”

  “Yes, but I mean what I said years ago—to her.”

  “She said you told her she’d go far.”

  Patricia laughed bitterly. “What I said was, ‘You’re going to go far, because you’re the type of black person white people like.’ ”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “She didn’t tell you that part?”

  “No.”

  “I guess she wouldn’t have. Anyway, I’ve always felt bad about it. My radical period—but that’s no excuse.”

  “I think Charlie might have wondered if she should’ve stuck it out, gone into academia after all,” I said.

  “I wish I could’ve relieved her mind about that.”

  There was a silence, in which I thought that we had gotten deeper into this conversation than either of us had expected, and were now unsure how to extricate ourselves.

  “I think there was a lot I didn’t understand about the pressure she was under,” I said.

  “No,” Patricia said. She was generous but definitive. “You couldn’t.”

  2.

  On a Wednesday afternoon at the very end of January, I went to Harvard. The purpose was ostensibly to meet a fellow in Laura Bergstrom’s lab, who was interested in collaborating with my post-doc Bence. I’d scheduled the meeting at two o’clock on purpose, and I excused myself a little before three, leaving Bence and Peter talking excitedly in Hungarian about a home-built scanning probe microscope.

  I walked from Laura’s lab to the yard, past Memorial Church, just as the bells were ringing. It was overcast and cold. A group of prospective undergraduates were huddled together in front of the library’s neoclassical façade, listening to a chipper student guide telling the story of the unfortunate Harry Elkins Widener, a member of the class of ’07 who had perished on the Titanic. In her grief, his mother had commissioned the famous library in his name.

  My MIT faculty ID was sufficient for the guard at the desk. We had interlibrary privileges, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t been in Widener since I was an undergraduate myself. I made my way up the marble staircase to the third floor, where everything was exactly as I remembered it. Even the massive wooden card catalogs were still there, each topped with a cardboard placard—something that would have to be replaced periodically—signposting its contents: H–J, K–M, etc. Was it possible that anyone still used them?

  Once you were out of sight of the staircase, the marble flooring became brown linoleum. The linoleum was very clean, reflecting the light from an unnecessary number of globular ceiling fixtures, so the effect was of a beam traveling down a narrow passage. The silence and the absence of people, the symmetrical pairs of doors, gave the corridor a dreamlike quality. The doors didn’t seem to have nameplates—possibly they were shared, or changed hands frequently—and I might have missed Pope’s office if he hadn’t affixed his own name, neatly typed on a folded square of paper, underneath a window of reinforced chicken-wire glass. The window was obscured by a shirred white cotton curtain, and the door was slightly ajar. You couldn’t see whether anyone was inside.

  But Pope had heard me. “Come in,” he instructed, as if he’d been waiting.

  He looked, sitting at his desk, less aged than he had in the church. He was wearing a casual, dark gray Oxford shirt without a jacket, and his thick white hair was styled in the way I remembered, curling around his collar.

  “You’re not Catherine,” he said. “Are you?”

  I introduced myself, and Pope’s whole manner changed. From a slightly aggravated professor conducting mandatory office hours, he became an eager student himself, almost boyish. He stood up and took my hand.

  “I read your book on black holes last year—wonderful! So much science writing is either overwrought or relentlessly technical. I actually thought of getting in touch at the time. Are you still at MIT?”

  I said that I was, and that I’d been an undergraduate at Harvard in the early nineties, then returned as a postdoc four years later. Did he remember me?

  “I was especially interested in the historical component—the idea that black holes were just too radical for early twentieth-century physicists to countenance.”

  I was momentarily taken aback. A conversation about the history of science was the last thing I’d expected.

  “I hadn’t realized that even Einstein doubted their existence.”

  “He didn’t doubt their existence mathematically, only that such an object could be an observable reality. Now we can see them—or rather the marks they leave on the rest of the universe—all the time. I hope I made that clear.”

  “You did.” Pope smiled at me. “It really is such a pleasure to meet you, Helen. I guess it’s too much to hope that you have a burning question about the French Enlightenment?”

  “I’m specifically interested in Choderlos de Laclos.”

  “Really! I never tire of him myself. I’m teaching Dangerous Liaisons through the SorbonneX program. A surprising number of people are interested in studying literature digitally.”

  The office was interior, not large, with an oaken desk and bookshelf, a green banker’s lamp. There were a few family photographs: one of him and his wife on a hiking trail, Pope with a wooden walking stick, and another that might have been his son, in the ocean holding a small child. On the facing wall was a framed pencil drawing of a man in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century dress.

  “Is that him?”

  Pope glanced up. “Oh—that’s Rousseau. Laclos’s contemporary, and one of the earliest critics of modernity. Rousseau saw the problem from the beginning. He says that the ancients talked about morals and virtue, while all we talk about is business and money. This was in reference to his own time—can you imagine what he’d think of ours?”

  “No.”

  “Laclos was in many ways a more practical man, an army general and a military engineer. He perfected Vauban’s geometric fortifications—those might interest you, a pattern of intersecting fractals—and so they sent him to fortify the Île d’Aix. He was there for a year, but it was never attacked. He was bored, and so he came up with Dangerous Liaisons—the only novel he ever wrote.”

  “There was a production of the play when I was an undergraduate here.”

  “It’s a perennial favorite. I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon, but I have a quarrel with almost all of the adaptations, stage or film. It’s an impossible book to dramatize, precisely because of how brilliantly Laclos structures it—I’m talking about the letters, of course. He absolutely refuses to let us know what the characters really think, because we have only their written words. Performing it on the stage or the screen, you lose that moral ambiguity.”

  “My friend might have said that that’s the actor’s job. She played Madame de Merteuil.”

  “I don’t know much about acting,” Pope said. “But it seems to me that the actor would have to know his, or her, character’s motivation. I’m not sure that Laclos intends them to be knowable in that way. What are we supposed to make of the ending? Valmont is killed, or perhaps allows himself to be killed, by Danceny. Merteuil suffers smallpox and loses her beauty, a great part of her capital. But she escapes to Amsterdam with a box of valuable jewels, whereas Cécile is shut up in a convent, and Tourvel dies there.”

  I thought: He doesn’t recognize me.

  “Tourvel is the only purely moral character, in spit
e of her transgression with Valmont. She’s the only one who loves unreservedly, against her own self-interest, and we see what happens to her. I found that the book baffled my undergraduates—when I was teaching undergraduates. It’s astonishing for someone of my generation to see how uncritically young people today believe in romantic love. They’ve exploded gender, race, class, all the old shibboleths. But for some reason love is unassailable.”

  “You don’t believe in it.”

  Pope sighed. “I’m saying that the ambiguity in Laclos serves a purpose, namely to respond to Aristotle’s question about tragedy. Why do we enjoy watching Antigone, or Hamlet for that matter? What do we get out of entering into other people’s suffering in art, when we often avoid it in life?”

  “But what’s his answer?”

  “He won’t answer it. And that’s the genius of this novel, because he rejects the notion that either the characters’ pain or their romantic passions can be used to illustrate the author’s ideas. It’s disconcerting for us, because we expect a novel to possess some sort of underlying moral structure. What Laclos suggests—and this is just my opinion—is that you would have to step outside of conventional society in order to negate some of the power relations that corrupt love. To achieve reciprocity between men and women. Even more than Rousseau, Laclos was a feminist; he left a long, unfinished essay at his death about the position of women in society. Incidentally, he himself had a long, happy marriage—none of the intrigues he writes about in Les Liaisons.”

  “That’s interesting,” I admitted. What had I thought it would be like? I would come in here and find a sad old man, accuse him of a twenty-year-old offense, and inspire—what? Some kind of remorse or repentance?

  “My friend loved the play,” I said. “I don’t think it baffled her.”

  “Your friend who played Merteuil?” Pope asked.

  “In ’92, our senior year. Her name was Charlotte Boyce.”

  He didn’t catch his breath, or sit down, or make any other sort of dramatic gesture. It was only that his attention was suddenly fully engaged.

  “That’s it,” he said. “At the memorial. I thought I recognized you, but out of context…”

  “She was my best friend.”

  “Ah. I’m very sorry.”

  “You and I met here once before, when Charlie and I were undergraduates.”

  “That would’ve been a different office, around the corner,” Pope said. “I appreciated what you said about her.”

  “It was just one story.”

  “An illustrative one. Je suis mon ouvrage.”

  “What?”

  “I am my own piece of work. I remember how well your friend Charlotte said that line—Merteuil’s credo.”

  “She wanted to go to Oxford, continue studying.”

  Pope looked at me, and put a hand on his massive desk. “As I remember it, I encouraged her to persist with a fellowship.”

  “But you’d already made that impossible.”

  “Those fellowships are very difficult to get.”

  “You told her she would get it, though.”

  Pope looked politely perplexed by this. “How could I have helped her, if she didn’t even bother to apply?” He sat down, crossed one leg over his knee, and indicated the chair opposite.

  I didn’t want to sit. “She was twenty-one.”

  “She was brilliant. I was quite taken with her.”

  Pope was watching me with his intelligent blue eyes. I thought that Charlie had been right not to come back.

  “She moved to L.A.,” I said. “She was very successful there, in television. But then she got pregnant and her disease flared.”

  He raised his hands in front of his chest. “You can hardly blame me for that.”

  “Hollywood wasn’t good for her. There was a lot of bias and stress.” I was speaking faster than usual: “Sunlight is apparently a trigger—her mother thinks L.A. was a death sentence for her.”

  Pope gave me a distasteful look. “That seems somewhat unscientific.”

  “I didn’t think you were still on campus. Then I saw you at the memorial.”

  “And so you decided to drop in.” He looked me over, then tapped his right hand impatiently on a leather blotter; I saw that he still wore his mother’s ornate sapphire ring. “To discuss Laclos. And your best friend.” There was just a slight emphasis on the last two words, which made them sound juvenile.

  “She changed her whole life because of you.”

  He paused and leaned back in his chair. “Isn’t that what you all come here for?”

  A current of pure rage—it seemed, for a moment, to short-circuit my heart.

  “There should have been more about her career at the memorial.” My hands were shaking, but my voice was even. “She went out at the very top.”

  Pope met my stare, but remained silent.

  “So few people can say that.”

  “It’s rare,” Pope said drily.

  There were footsteps in the corridor, and then a knock.

  “Come in,” he said.

  A woman stepped into the office. She was perhaps in her mid-sixties, wearing Birkenstocks and carrying a backpack, gray hair tucked behind her ears.

  “Catherine?” Pope confirmed. He turned to me with a hard little smile. “Catherine is one of my wonderful correspondence students, who’s been kind enough to drive all the way from Woburn.”

  Catherine beamed. “It’s such an inspiring class. I have some questions about Molière, but I don’t want to interrupt.”

  “Professor Clapp was just leaving,” Pope said. “We were discussing moral ambiguity in Laclos.”

  “I’ve seen both movies,” Catherine said. “I’m so eager to read the book.”

  “It resists every reductive explanation,” he told Catherine. Then he turned to me: “Like its subject.”

  “What is its subject?” I asked.

  Pope exaggerated his surprise. “Love,” he said. “It’s a book about love.”

  3.

  The first weekend in February, Jack was invited to a slumber party. On the way to Miles’s house, we talked about kidnapping. It wasn’t the first time we’d discussed the subject. When I was pregnant, other single parents told me that our bond would be profound in both positive and negative ways, and that Jack might suffer more separation anxiety at school or camp than the average child. That hasn’t been the case, maybe because the scope of my childcare needs got Jack used to a variety of different environments early. I did notice that he had certain fears which might have been more intense than those of children in two-parent families.

  “What if a stranger says, ‘Do you want some candy?’ and you say no in a loud voice, and you run the other way, but the stranger runs after you and grabs you and puts you in his car?”

  “Kidnapping is very rare,” I told him.

  “But I mean, if?”

  “Even when it does happen, in most cases the kidnapper is someone the child already knows.”

  This piece of information seemed to intensify Jack’s anxiety rather than comfort him. “Why would someone you know kidnap you?”

  “Usually it’s the other parent. For example, if the parents are divorced, and one parent wants more time with the child than they’re allowed in their agreement. And so maybe they take the child and go somewhere for a while, just because they miss them.”

  “Like Stella in my class?”

  I wondered if I’d gotten myself into more complicated territory than I’d realized, in my attempt to reassure him, “I’m sure neither of Stella’s parents would kidnap her. I just meant that you don’t have to worry about it, because it’s just you and me.”

  I couldn’t look back, because I was turning, but I could tell from the silence in the backseat that Jack wasn’t buying it. I had an inspiration. “If
you want, we could make up a safety word.”

  Jack was interested immediately. “What’s that?”

  “It’s something only the parent and the kid know. If someone other than the parent is supposed to pick up the kid, the kid can say, ‘Do you know the safety word?’ And if the person knows it, then the kid knows it’s okay to go with them.”

  “Because the parent told them the safety word?”

  “Right. It’s like a code.”

  Jack didn’t hesitate. “I want to do it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You choose. It can be any word.”

  “ ‘Jack,’ ” Jack said.

  “Maybe something harder to guess than that.”

  “ ‘Ninja’?” he suggested.

  “ ‘Ninja’ is fine.”

  “Okay!”

  “Then we’re all set.”

  Jack was quiet for a few minutes. I thought I’d handled the situation well, and that he was just processing the conversation. When we stopped at the light, I glanced back at him: he was staring out the window, holding his backpack on his lap. He was thinking hard, but he waited until we were moving again, perhaps intentionally, to ask his next question:

  “Do donors ever kidnap kids?”

  “No, never.”

  “Why not?”

  “Our donor doesn’t have any information about us. He couldn’t find us, even if he wanted to.”

  I pulled up in front of Miles’s family’s large, Colonial house in Somerville. Miles’s three siblings would be there in addition to the guests, and you could hear the noise inside already. Another child was getting out of the car in front of us.

  “There’s Graham,” Jack said excitedly.

  “Jack,” I said. “Do you have any more questions before we go in?”

  He hesitated. I could see his desire for information warring with his eagerness to get to the party.

  “Do the kids who get kidnapped ever want to be kidnapped?” His eyes darted to mine, then away again. “I mean the ones whose other parent kidnaps them. Who isn’t a stranger.”

  There was an expression on his face I’d never seen before, a more mature kind of empathy than he’d so far demonstrated. I realized that he was concerned about my feelings.