Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  While awaiting such an invitation, Charlie befriended another freshman Salient writer, a boy named Roger Waldman: Roger was from Cincinnati, Jewish, mild, and, even in his teens, fatherly. He wore suit pants and a beard and had arrived at school already decided upon a major in history and a career in contract law; soon he’d also set his sights on dating a rather plain Korean cellist, a freshman girl named Jasmine. There was a modest practicality to Roger that put Charlie at ease, helped relieve the pressure of his own grand aspirations. They balanced each other, Charlie felt, even if he couldn’t comprehend the limits of Roger’s desires. Had he never wished to be a celebrity or mogul or a hero? Had he never lusted after a girl far beyond his reach?

  —

  Tall with golden curls, high cheeks, and plush lips—she’d been among the marvels to strike Charlie during his earliest hours on campus. He’d spotted her for the first time during a tour: his group was stopped before Widener Library, while she was exiting the building, dressed in white upon the white stone steps. Among the Yard’s several thousand denizens, here was the single creature, Charlie thought, equal to this glorious place.

  Despite being outgoing with everybody else, Charlie hadn’t dared speak to her that day or on any of the other rare occasions when he’d found himself in her vicinity that first year. But on a bracing afternoon in the fall of sophomore year, he’d seen her entering a lecture in Emerson Hall and, feeling courageous, had followed her inside. This was during shopping period, when students were permitted to observe classes before settling on a schedule. The mood on campus was experimental, even boisterous. Students waved and called out Charlie’s name as he moved through the aisle. Undergraduate Council elections were only two weeks away and his face was displayed on posters taped up to every campus kiosk: a good picture that maybe didn’t make him look handsome exactly, but likable, hair slicked back to reveal his best feature, large, blue, expressive eyes.

  For an instant, he caught his crush glancing his way, but she looked right back at her notebook and didn’t seem to observe him settling in beside her. Nor did she notice his eyeing the page open on her desk, a list of classes she was deciding among for the afternoon. He tapped his pen beside Major English Poets.

  “It’s good?” she asked him. “You know something about it?”

  “Beauty is truth. Truth beauty. All you need to know.”

  She’d turned away from him, before he could detect whether or not she’d caught his reference or found him charming or pretentious; the lecturer was at the podium. She listened for fifteen minutes or so (the class was on American art history, Charlie discovered) then rose and walked out, shamelessly, leaving Charlie to pity the young professor who’d left her so unimpressed.

  English Poets met two hours later, but Charlie made up his mind not to attend; he didn’t want to seem like he’d attempted to lure her there for his own benefit and, anyway, he preferred not to study poetry himself. Poetry was something approached privately, in quiet moments, a separate business altogether from the rules of governance and commerce that he’d come to Harvard to master. Only two weeks later, then, did he venture a peek into Lowell Lecture Hall, where lines of Edmund Spenser were scrawled across the blackboard. To his delight, she was there, in the front row, dutifully recording the words into her notebook.

  Shortly thereafter, Charlie lost the UC election. The defeat hadn’t come as much of a shock: on a liberal campus—Charlie had learned too late just how liberal—a guy affiliated with a conservative paper couldn’t expect an easy time. The only person who’d shown faith in his campaign was Roger, now Charlie’s roommate in Eliot House; optimistically Roger had purchased a bottle of champagne that stood on the mantel in their common room. The morning his defeat was announced, Charlie suggested they take the bottle and make off for a picnic at Fresh Pond—it was a clear, blue autumn day, too beautiful to waste inside a lecture hall. But Roger wasn’t one for skipping class, so Charlie set off alone, riding his bike to the reservoir’s edge to spread his blanket on a wide patch of grass.

  He’d popped the cork and was pouring his first glass when he spotted her, his dream girl, jogging up the path. Just a few yards away, she paused to catch her breath, sweating in high red running shorts and a white ribbed tank. Her legs were still tan from the summer; stray ringlets of hair clung to her neck.

  He waved to her from where he sat and she started over, out of politeness, he guessed. Despite the apprehension they inspired, most pretty girls, he’d found, were unfailingly polite.

  “Are you celebrating something?”

  “My opponent’s landslide.” He invited her to join him in a consolation drink. Politeness, pity—any cause of her remaining would do. “Please. I’ve already been rejected once today. I’m Charlie, by the way.”

  “Georgia.”

  “Georgia,” he repeated, as if he didn’t know, as if most every male classmate hadn’t lingered over her photo in the freshman directory. “Have a seat, Georgia, quench your thirst.”

  “I’m not sure I meet the dress code.” She raised an eyebrow and Charlie quickly regretted the outfit he’d picked out that morning—a yellow shirt and white bow tie. He stretched out his blanket for her and she plunked down, cross-legged, on the cloth, her bare knee brushing his, beads of sweat gathered in the crevice above her lip. He drank a full glass before he dared to speak again, waiting to have his courage strengthened by champagne.

  He’d need to take more care proceeding: Georgia’s remark about the dress code was a warning that, already, she found him a little silly. Bow ties were a Salient affectation and not the only one he’d picked up in that company. Quench your thirst. Had he really said that? What an ass he could sound like. He shouldn’t require an election to tell him that elitism was out among his peers. A girl like Georgia especially, a queen in peasant blouses, was just the type to harbor guilty reverence for a working-class background. The smartest course, he decided, was to let her know the real him. But this must emerge naturally, in the course of conversation and after he’d put up, for a time, with her indifference.

  What had drawn her to the park that day, he’d asked, and luckily the champagne came to his aid; dehydrated from her run, she drank more than the promised sip and was tipsy within minutes, unable to jog away and, instead, ready to share with him her mood.

  “I woke up restless.”

  “The change of seasons,” he remarked. “Spring and fall are the worst.”

  “Fall for me. It’s the first one in years when I’ve returned to the same place.”

  “Diplomat’s daughter?”

  “Opposite, really; a provocateur’s.” Jethro Calvin was her father, she informed him, as if Charlie ought to be familiar with the name. He was a famous photographer, apparently, and a lifelong rover; she credited him with inspiring her own need for an ever-shifting vantage, so that she’d very nearly transferred to a different university after freshman year.

  “My dad was cool with it, but my mother insisted I stay put. Four high schools screwed me up enough, she thinks; she always hated it when we moved. Eventually, she just stopped coming along….”

  Such openness so early on in their acquaintance: more than champagne was required to explain it, though Charlie didn’t flatter himself about the reason; probably it was because Georgia didn’t expect they’d speak again. And then this was also the way with pretty girls: rambling on with a sort of abandon that only people automatically exciting could permit themselves. What was there to hide when your skin was tawny smooth and your thoughts free of envy? Later, he considered there might have been more to it than that; she must have known from the start that he’d forgive her every fault, and so he made the perfect receptacle for her confessions.

  “Honestly, I’m not sure I want to be at Harvard—in any college for that matter. My father says the whole educational system in this country is an excuse, as much as anything, to coddle and isolate the rich, distract them from what they’d learn about America if they actually had to deal with
some hard reality.”

  Her father said: the man’s opinion held too much importance for her, Charlie thought, certainly given how little he esteemed his own father’s. Both men, in their way, disapproved of universities like theirs, bastions of privilege. But for Charlie, this was cause to smoke a pipe and drink champagne, whereas Georgia needed to resist her advantages somehow, to show allegiance to her dad’s radicalism, and so she’d sought out contact with the most desperate examples of “hard reality” that she could find.

  “At-risk youth, juvie types, you know. I’ll be volunteering with them Saturdays starting tomorrow. What I wanted was to work with prisoners at Jamaica Plain, but there’s some security issue. Of course, a girl like me, I’ve got to be protected at all costs.” Fully drunk by then, Georgia railed on, objecting to the fortunes paid—another two million for campus security that year—to prevent any one of Boston’s poor or homeless from brushing up against tomorrow’s future leaders. “My dad would say: fuck our protections. Open up the damn gates, let the city’s underclass pour into our classrooms, slap some truth into us Harvard kids.”

  “On that point your dad and mine would agree—except my dad would rather do the slapping part himself.”

  From there, it was simple enough to let her lead him into speaking of his own childhood, to mention that his father hadn’t known that Charlie had even applied to private colleges, how he’d arranged his own scholarships and loans and jobs. As he went on, he could see her studying him afresh, revising her impression. His teeth were clean but crooked—was that because his family couldn’t afford braces? Whatever she was observing, her lids dropped, her expression became softer, more compassionate.

  They’d been talking for over an hour when Georgia announced that she felt woozy from champagne and needed to eat. It was already nearly four and, by the time they got back to campus and she showered and dressed, the dining halls would just be opening for dinner.

  He tagged along, unsure whether she meant to include him in her dinner plans; when they reached her room in Mather House and she invited him up, he couldn’t quite believe his luck. Her room was in the low-rise, a single duplex; he waited in the living room while she visited the shower. The walls were hung with art posters—photographs; rows of art books sat on her shelves, mixed in with the ordinary college reading. The cover of one book read Jethro Calvin: Portraits. Charlie asked Georgia about this when she returned, dressed in a towel; she took the volume down.

  Slowly, she turned the pages, revealing figures tired by life, not unlike the people from Charlie’s hometown, only these had been stripped nude and placed in classical poses.

  “This series is a bit grim. After my mother and father split.”

  She lowered a second book from the shelf then; this one contained images exclusively of Georgia: dozens of pictures of her as a child. In some she was nude, too.

  “And those?” he asked. “The reason for the split?”

  She laughed, a throaty laugh, not girlish at all, and leaned against the stairwell.

  Did she know what she was doing to him, showing him those pictures, lingering on the stairs up to her bed, with just a towel wrapped around her?

  She knew. She must, of course: a girl capable of stealthily supplanting her mother in her father’s life. She knew her power perfectly well, and he, who thought he was schooling himself on all there was to know about power, discovered something new that day: the ecstasy of laying himself and all his future happiness or unhappiness at the mercy of a girl with a throaty laugh and honey hair who would never, he saw even then, take proper, loving care of him.

  Later, as they stepped side by side through the Mather courtyard, Charlie had a fateful feeling: that he was already a different man than he’d been that morning when he’d set out across the campus alone:

  Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:

  I’m martyr to a motion not my own;

  What’s freedom for? To know eternity.

  I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.

  3

  They were going to a dinner with the new housemaster of Adams. Roger sprang the news on Charlie one gusty Thursday evening in the fall of senior year. Charlie had dawdled on the way home, taking a long walk across the leaf-strewn quads.

  “You’ll need to change into a suit,” Roger instructed. “Jasmine says the master likes to keep it formal.”

  Charlie had planned to stay in, maybe catch a late movie alone—the Film Archive was playing Gilda, and Rita Hayworth caught something of Georgia in that role—but Roger claimed this dinner was a chance he couldn’t miss. “We’re lucky a few students got sick; these dinners are just for Adams residents and there’s an invitation list.”

  Apparently the new Adams housemaster—Storrow was his name—attracted interest: he’d arrived only that fall, to act as interim master while the man that he’d replaced was on sabbatical. Storrow wasn’t the typical old married professor usually appointed such a role; he’d served in Washington and in the JAG Corps where he’d received the Bronze Star Medal. The man was worldly; he was sportive; and he’d gone out of his way to be social—coaching intramural men’s squash and rugby and replacing the traditional stuffy and crowded Thursday master’s teas with more intimate dinners in his home.

  Jasmine, Roger’s girlfriend since freshman year, lived in Adams, and was on the guest list for that night. She’d been the one to arrange for Roger and Charlie to tag along.

  “You can’t miss this,” Roger urged him. “The guy was at the Pentagon, chief of the International Law Branch. This is precisely the kind of man you need to know.”

  Roger, better than anyone, was privy to Charlie’s professional goals—aware that he still wavered between pursuing a career in business or national service, and hadn’t yet abandoned his admiration for his childhood heroes, men whose résumés bore significant resemblance to Storrow’s.

  Back in his room, Charlie studied the three suits he kept hanging in his closet. The invitation to meet this young housemaster was tempting, he had to admit: the most tempting offer his friend had come up with until then. All that fall, Roger had been hounding him with extra tickets to the New College Theatre and Bach Society concerts, requesting a fourth on dates with Jasmine and some next single friend—anything to get Charlie’s mind off Georgia and wrest him from his solitude.

  It was depression, Charlie supposed; this gloom had been plaguing him, along with a seemingly incurable flu, ever since the summer. Disappointment over Georgia was at least in part to blame (about that Roger wasn’t wrong), but what had undone him, really, was the decision to spend his summer vacation at home. Since setting off for college Charlie had avoided staying more than a few days in Garden City, but he’d been lured back by just about the only thing able to accomplish such a feat: his brother’s return.

  In June, after six years of active duty, Luke had left Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska and moved, temporarily, into his old bedroom. It was an extraordinary chance—maybe the last the two brothers would have—to share a room again for three months, to get to know each other now as men. Without hesitation, Charlie had canceled his prior plans: the past two summers he’d forgone the prestigious internships in Washington and Wall Street to rake in thousands as a live-in tutor for wealthy families in the Hamptons. Now, he meant to sacrifice the hefty paycheck and focus these same energies on helping his brother. To qualify for a commercial pilot’s license, Luke would need a college degree: Charlie meant to prep him for his tests and guide him through his applications.

  Over the phone, Luke sounded game, but once Charlie had come to join him, he found his brother more disposed toward sunbathing than study. Luke seemed to want to spend his days just like their father generally did now, working small jobs for small money and mostly sitting and drinking beer on their front lawn.

  “A little break,” Luke told Charlie, “if that’s okay with you, Chief.”

  Sure it was okay with him: everything was okay with him: his beloved brother
was back. “Go easy, melt off that Alaskan frost.”

  Three weeks later, Luke still hadn’t approached a single one of the study guides that Charlie had saved for him, nor had he, or anyone in the family, made any mention of college. Eventually Charlie became afraid to raise the subject, concerned that Luke might be ashamed to accept help from a little brother who had, in a certain regard, surpassed him. On outings in town, people remarked more on Charlie’s achievements—Dean’s List, your mother says—which left Charlie to wonder why his mother hadn’t bragged to them about Luke. It was his parents’ fault that a bigger deal wasn’t made of Luke’s homecoming. For his part, Charlie tried to compensate, but this—like everything he did that summer—only seemed to grate on Luke.

  Each time Charlie came to join his brother and his father on the lawn, the pair would grow quiet—leaving off the idle talk of everything they planned to do—bet we could put in a pool here, do the whole job ourselves. A new reserve would grip them, as if Charlie really were “the judge” his father once made him out to be. That old, loathsome nickname echoed in Luke’s increasingly acerbic “Chief.”

  By July, when Luke and his father began talking about starting a business together, Charlie felt he couldn’t sit by any longer. Maybe his dad didn’t give a shit whether or not Luke got his pilot’s license, whether or not he made good on his dream—he was perfectly satisfied to have his elder son stuck home along with him—but their mother was not so selfish. Charlie made up his mind to speak with her.

  “Better not to pressure Luke just now.” His mother’s tone was hushed and nervous, the same she’d used over the phone to neighbors these past weeks: We’re just glad Luke’s back and safe; we don’t need to make a fuss.