Harvard Yard (56 page)
“You, however, are a bookseller who
is
legitimate,” said Wedge, “so work with me, not against me. Follow this story. Find the truth.”
“Why?”
Wedge sat on the edge of his desk so that he could swing his leg. “I don’t know who ripped those pages out, but I simply want this thing to be over. I have important plans for this family. But until the fate of that play is known, one way or the other, my plans are up in the air.”
“Have you asked your mother about it?” asked Peter. “She seems to have read the story in the Theodore Wedge journal back in 1969. Where do you think she heard of it?”
Will Wedge pointed to the portrait on the wall. “Probably from my grandfather. Victor Wedge. A great man, by all that I’ve heard. His grandfather was Heywood, who lost his leg at Antietam. And Heywood knew Theodore.”
“Heywood
hated
Theodore,” said Evangeline.
Wedge seemed surprised by that. “How do you know?”
“I read the journal,” she said.
“Do you think your mother would have torn out the last page?” asked Peter.
“I don’t know. I don’t know who knows what,” said Wedge. “All I know is, that if you can come up with proof, one way or the other, of the existence of that book by commencement week, I’ll personally guarantee your son’s tuition.”
“My son hasn’t been accepted yet,” said Peter. “We won’t know until next week.”
“By commencement week, Peter.”
“Why commencement week? You’ve been pointing toward that for five months, asking me to join the committee and all.”
“Blame him.” Will gestured to the portrait of his grandfather, a vibrant-looking man in a gray three-piece pinstriped suit, painted in the 1930s. “Victor Wedge always said, ‘Of those to whom much is given, much is expected.’”
1909-1912
T
HE
E
ARL
of Mount Auburn. Victor Wedge relished his nickname. He could have called himself a prince, but “Earl of Mount Auburn” had a certain euphony and a bit of false modesty as well, an earl being less important than a prince. And as one of his friends had said after a night of strong punch at the Porcellian Club, they were
all
princes, all rich men’s sons living rich men’s lives.
If there was a center to the universe, thought Victor, it was here on Mount Auburn Street, on the Gold Coast, the stretch of apartment buildings that housed those rich men’s sons, and in the clubs where they ate, conviviated, and congratulated themselves for being who they were.
Victor stood before Claverly Hall and squinted in the bright sun. Spirits had flowed rather too freely at the Porcellian the night before. Still, he had gotten home by midnight and squeezed out three pages for English 47, Professor Baker’s drama workshop. He was writing a play about the Civil War, and he was certain that it would someday make him the Earl of New York, too. But not yet, for he was only a junior, and he had much to do.
There was that touchdown he planned to score against Yale. And he still hadn’t kissed Barbara Abbott, though he had danced with her at half a dozen Boston cotillions that fall. And a new club was starting up called the Harvard Aeronautical Society, devoted to the newest and most scientific form of transportation.
Victor had taken to heart the advice of his grandfather, who had said that when his time at Harvard was over, Victor’s first emotion should be exhaustion . . . from trying to experience too much.
Grandfather Heywood was an extraordinary man, thought Victor, a credit to his class. He had lost a leg at Antietam but had still managed to captivate the most beautiful girl in Boston. He had graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School, fathered two daughters and a son, and, after the Great Fire, had rebuilt the Wedge family firm into one of the most powerful financial houses in Boston. Now, he was a leading figure in many walks of Boston life and a founder of the Immigration Restriction League, an organization that sought to protect America’s borders and blood.
But most important, after Victor’s father had died of yellow fever in Cuba, Grandfather Heywood had seen to it that Victor never lacked for knowledge of the traditions that carried the Wedges through time. Victor may have grown up without a father, but thanks to his grandfather, he knew who he was.
Just then, a Pierce-Arrow motorcar came puttering along, filled with his chums.
“Hello, Victor!” shouted Bram Haddon, a fine fellow with a marvelous laugh and a father in the steel business. “Do you like my new car?”
Victor said, “I expect a ride today!”
Victor’s cousin Dickey Drake jumped out. “
After
the ceremonies, of course.”
“Of course,” said Victor. “Today will be historical!”
“Then come along,” said Bram Haddon. “We want to get close to the platform. Though someone with a Harvard name like yours should be sitting
on
it.”
“My name, among other reasons, is why they call me the Earl of Mount Auburn.” As his friends hooted, Victor straightened to his full six feet, cocked his straw boater, and struck a pose. There was no denying that he had presence: features even and smooth, mustache trimmed, brown suit cut stylishly with four buttons. He could be forgiven if he thought a little too much of himself, because they all did. They were the Gold Coasters.
In the kitchen of Memorial Hall commons, sophomore Jimmy Callahan finished scraping the remnants of poached egg and chipped beef from a dish. The great hall, with its mighty oak hammer beams, oak paneling, and portraits and busts of Civil War heroes, was as baronial a space as could be found in New England. But Jimmy felt no sense of entitlement or aristocratic fellowship washing the dishes of his classmates.
He was just happy for the job. Students did not ordinarily work in the kitchens. Such labor was seen as beneath a Harvard gentleman, best left to lower classes. Indeed, the waiters in the hall were all Negroes. But Mr. Flanagan, who oversaw the dishwashers, had served in the Twentieth Massachusetts with Jimmy’s grandfather, and he would “bend a rule to help out a local lad with a hard schedule.” Flanagan came bustling through the steam and told Jimmy to be on his way, though the shift had not ended. “The new president might take it personal if you missed his inauguration.”
Jimmy hung up his apron, threw on his tweed jacket, and stepped out into a sea of straw boaters and fashionable ladies’ hats flowing into the Yard. Jimmy didn’t have a hat, but he would have stood out anyway, because he was taller than most, and his delicate features were coarsened by a nose broken in a street fight. As for his clothes,
fashionable
was not the word. The cuffs of his corduroys were an inch too high, and the elbow patches on his jacket were more functional than decorative. What he had not outgrown, he had simply outlasted.
Most Americans saw Harvard as an enclave for rich men’s sons, and it surely was. At the beginning, there had been no place else. Later, it had become tradition that there was no place better. And Charles William Eliot had done much to make truth of that tradition, fashioning Harvard into America’s largest and richest university, with four thousand students and an endowment of $12 million.
But from the beginning, Harvard had also educated the sons of New England tradesmen and mechanics and country ministers, boys who held scholarships and small jobs and did their best to make no hardship for their parents. As Harvard’s reputation grew after the Civil War, young men of modest means brought their ambition from all across America, because they had heard that at Harvard, they would meet the giants of American thought, choose from more than four hundred courses, and enjoy brighter prospects for financial aid than at any other college. Not all of them had heard, however, that financial aid might sometimes need the augmentation of a menial job.
The Gold Coasters called these boys Greasy Grinds because they worked too hard and studied too hard and put altogether too much effort into everything. The Greasy Grind might consider a grade of C to be cause for alarm; the Gold Coaster saw it as the emblem of a young gentleman far too busy imbibing college life to spend time studying.
Gold Coasters and Greasy Grinds and young men of all gradations between met in the classrooms, on the athletic fields, and in commons. But there was little reason for the grandson of Dan Callahan and the grandson of Heywood Wedge ever to meet. So it was not by their own design that they were sitting near each other that morning.
Thirteen thousand people had crowded into the Yard. The band played “Fair Harvard.” And the inaugural procession advanced from Holden Quadrangle, across the Yard, to a platform at the west front of University Hall.
Leading the procession were the corporation secretary, the bursar, and the librarian, carrying in turn the college seal, the college keys, and the 1650 charter of the Harvard Corporation. Behind them came President Eliot, now seventy-five and white-whiskered, moving with a regality that proclaimed him every inch the academic patrician. Then came the column of gentlemen in silk top hats and tails, in robes and mortarboards. And finally came the new president.
A. Lawrence Lowell had Brahmin roots as deep as Eliot’s, but he was shorter and stockier and, even in procession, moved like a man impatient to get on with things.
“What do you think?” Dickey Drake asked Victor as Lowell took the platform.
“That drooping mustache, that barreling gait, that puissant presence—”
“
Puissant . . . a fine word, Victor,” said Dickey.
“Yes, it is. But just
look at him. When he puts on his pince-nez, he could be brother to the most puissant man of the decade, Teddy Roosevelt himself.”
“Well, they
are
friends,” said Dickey.
Jimmy Callahan overheard this conversation because he was sitting with Joe Kennedy, who had positioned himself behind Victor. Jimmy had met Kennedy on the baseball diamond, and he now counted the amiable, square-shouldered son of an East Boston tavernkeeper as a good friend.
Kennedy said to Jimmy, “Wedge is right. Lowell reminds me of Roosevelt.”
Victor Wedge looked over his shoulder and offered a thin smile.
Callahan had seen that smile before, usually when some Gold Coaster dined in commons and smiled at the Greasy Grind who dared sit next to him. To Callahan, the smile said noblesse oblige, which was worse than being ignored. But Kennedy didn’t seem to mind. He answered Wedge’s smile with a toothy grin of his own.
As the ceremony unfolded beneath the elms, there were invocations and speeches, and in the undergraduate section, jokes and whispered sarcasms. Then the corporation secretary announced that he had a telegram from Mr. Heywood Wedge, and Victor and Dickey elbowed each other, for Heywood was grandfather to both of them.
The telegram congratulated Lowell on his inauguration and informed him that, as representative for the university, Mr. Wedge that very day had accepted the deed to the home of Katherine Rogers, mother of John Harvard, in Stratford-on-Avon.
“That’s the town where Shakespeare lived,” Kennedy whispered to Callahan.
And once more, Wedge glanced over his shoulder and bestowed his smile.
“‘Her house,’” read the secretary, “‘bequeathed to the university, shall henceforth be called Harvard House, a home away from home for all alumni who visit.’”
As the applause rolled across the Yard, Victor doffed his boater and bowed his head left and right to his friends, who guffawed and joshed and slapped him on the back.
Then Joe Kennedy leaned forward and offered his hand. “Congratulations, Victor. Your grandfather’s done Harvard quite a service.”
“Yes”—Victor’s smile froze in place—“thank you, Kennedy. But in truth, my grandfather is touring in England. They asked him to receive the deed to the house because it was convenient.”
Victor’s coolness froze Kennedy’s smile, too, so that the young men were now looking into each other’s eyes, as if taking the measure of each other, of their social classes, their character, and their aspirations, all at once.
“Others did all the work,” Victor went on. “One of the best things to learn in life, Kennedy, is how to take credit while others do the work.”
And then, Victor turned back, whispered something in his cousin’s ear that caused Dickey Drake to snicker, and did not turn around again or acknowledge Kennedy in any way for the rest of the ceremony.
All the while that Lowell was taking the oath, stepping before the audience, and delivering a speech that promised to join new academic discipline to the elective system, Jimmy Callahan could feel Joe Kennedy seething. Jimmy knew that Kennedy wasn’t seething at Wedge but at himself, for giving Wedge the chance to condescend to him.
Jimmy was as indifferent to the Gold Coasters as they were to him. They had nothing that he could ever hope to afford, need, or want.
Kennedy, on the other hand, always put himself forward with clubmen like Victor Wedge. As he said, “It’s the best way to guarantee that they’ll remember you when it comes time to vote new members.”
“That Kennedy is an upstart,” said Dickey Drake.
“I’ve seen his type before,” answered Victor as they made for lunch at the Porcellian. “Because he plays baseball and has an easy manner, he thinks he can ingratiate himself into the Porc. He’s the sort of hail-fellow-well-met that a true gentleman can’t stand.”
“Well, he
is
in the DKE. That’s the first step up the ladder.”
“Anyone can make a waiting club like the DKE. Few are elected to a final club like the Porc. We even turned down Theodore Roosevelt’s cousin.”
“Franklin . . . I heard about that. What about T.R.’s
son?
Will he make it?”
“Kermit? He has a chance. He’s a fine fellow.”
“What about me? I won’t be blackballed, will I?”
“Bad form to be asking about yourself, Dickey. And bad form is not what we’re about. A final club becomes the center of your world at Harvard and a mark of distinction later. No bad form allowed.”
“No bad form. Sorry.” Dickey was shorter than Victor and looked up to his cousin in more ways than one. He took most of the same courses as Victor. His skimpy mustache was as carefully trimmed as Victor’s. He used Victor’s tailor and, following Victor’s example, ignored the tailor’s bills.