There were a dozen men from 1912 there, a dozen more from other classes. They talked of the war, which seemed at last to be ending; of the terrifying influenza, which had swept into Massachusetts in September and was abating after killing thousands; and of old times, which seemed happier with each passing year.
Before the meal, Kennedy and Victor made wide circles around each other as they worked the crowd. Finally, they passed close enough that they had to speak.
Kennedy raised his glass and eyed Victor’s Purple Heart. “You’ve done the nation a great service.”
“So have you.” Victor eyed Kennedy’s silk cravat and expensive suit.
Kennedy had already served as a state bank examiner, as president of one of the few Boston banks not controlled by men related to Victor Wedge, and as a director of the Bethlehem Steel shipyard. He said, “Building ships to defeat Germany seemed a good use of my skills.”
“You know,” said Victor, “one night under the Porcellian Gate, Jimmy and I talked about you. I said you’d checkmate the lot of us. I think I was right.”
“Jimmy and I talked there, too,” answered Kennedy. “He said the best way to checkmate you Brahmins was to outwork you. He said we’d come to Harvard to do more than join your aristocracy. He said we’d build a meritocracy.”
“To meritocracy, then.” Victor touched his glass to Kennedy’s.
“To Jimmy,” answered Kennedy.
Victor Wedge and Joseph Kennedy did not become friends that night. That would be for their sons to do. But when Kennedy offered his hand at the end of the evening, Victor accepted, because he had decided on the
Titanic
that he would accept any hand offered to him, whether it came from a gentleman in first class or an Irish immigrant in a lifeboat.
After dinner, Victor asked Emily to walk with him in the Yard. It was chilly, but they had been warmed by good spirits, good stories, and sentimental speeches.
After they had gone some distance into the shadows, he thought to take her hand, but when he brushed against her, there was no yielding of her posture, no suggestion that she would welcome his touch. So he clapped his hands behind his back and listened to his bootheels clicking on the path.
“I thought there were some lovely sentiments expressed tonight,” she said. “Jimmy would have loved to be there.”
“He
was
there.” Victor put his arm around her.
She pulled away. “Victor . . .”
“Your brother always told me this couldn’t work. But—”
“What about Barbara?”
“She married Bram Haddon while I was working in New York.” He stopped and looked into her eyes. “It’s half the reason I joined the ambulance corps.”
“Victor—”
“I’m not asking for more than a chance—”
“Victor, I’m engaged.”
He supposed that he shouldn’t have been surprised. It had been six years and they had corresponded only sporadically, but he felt his stomach shrivel at her words.
“He’s in the infantry. His name is Ed O’Hill. We’re moving to California after the wedding.” Emily stepped back and withdrew a locket from around her neck. “My grandmother gave me this before she died. But when I took out my grandfather’s picture to put in my Ed’s, I found a picture of a woman. An ancestor of yours.”
Somewhere in his head, Victor heard the voice of his late grandfather, reminding him that the help was the help. “Ancestor? How do you know?”
Emily fiddled with a tiny set of clasps, and a second compartment popped open. “I don’t think my grandmother ever had any idea this was here.” She slipped out a browned sheet of onionskin paper and gave it to Victor.
He unfolded it, and in the dim light of a gas lamp, he read:
Lydia Wedge Townsend’s small gift of majestic proportion: revealed in two gilt-edged envelopes, one in the safe at Fleming and Royce, the other in the packet to be opened at the Tercentenary. If, by 1936, Harvard has not educated women, if ignorance prevails, Douglass Wedge Warren and his assigned successors are granted access to the envelope in the Fleming and Royce safe and are authorized to deny Harvard the gift.
Victor finished reading and said, “I don’t understand. . . .”
Emily gestured for him to follow her . . . across the Yard, through the Johnson Gate, which now formed Harvard’s portal to the world, past the Unitarian Meeting House, and into the burying ground. It was dark among the headstones. But Victor knew the resting place of Lydia Wedge Townsend, the family poet.
“I memorized the inscription,” said Emily. “‘Seek truth through the years, but seek it for all, / Bestow knowledge freely to those who may call / Make this your goal till a century turns, / And the Bard will applaud as humanity learns.’”
He mused on the last line. “‘The Bard will applaud as humanity learns.’”
“That’s Shakespeare, right?” said Emily. “
Love’s Labours Lost.
”
“A small gift of majestic proportion,” said Victor, “which we just gave to the Harvard rare book collection in the name of James Callahan.”
“Do you think those gilt-edged envelopes give directions to Townsend House?”
“It would make sense,” said Victor. “But considering all the records that were lost in the Great Fire, we won’t know for certain until the Tercentenary.”
Emily took his hand. “Victor, that book went to the Harvard library to honor my brother. Don’t let anything diminish that gift.”
“What’s done is done.”
“But when the Tercentenary comes around, don’t forget what Jimmy always said . . . to Joe Kennedy, to me, maybe even to you. The way you fight ignorance is through meritocracy. So don’t give Harvard anything it hasn’t earned.”
After a moment, Victor laughed. “I think Lydia would agree. And the Bard would applaud.”
She looked into his eyes, and the steam from her breath mingled with his. “My brother was right about a lot. But I think he might have been wrong about us.”
“Then give me a chance, Emily.”
“I love my infantryman, Victor. I never knew if I loved you. It’s too late to find out. Just remember Jimmy.” She kissed his cheek and turned away.
He stood in the dark and watched her picking her way past the headstones. Then he folded the sheet of onionskin and put it into his wallet.
ii
The Class of 1911 Report for the tenth reunion:
Victor Wedge, A.B. Home Address: Louisburg Square, Boston. Occupation: investment banker, Wedge, Fleming, and Royce, 58 State Street, Boston, Mass. Spouse: Barbara Abbott (November 2, 1919). It has been my good fortune, after many adventures, to have married my college sweetheart. I am now learning about finance. Wedge, Fleming, and Royce is my school. And the college remains my passion. Whose heart did not swell with pride when our Crimson won the ’19 Rose Bowl? After that, who would hesitate to join the Alumni Association? And after all that we have seen, who would not contribute to the college? For it is only through the expansion of knowledge that we will combat whatever lies before us. I personally have contributed a bit of knowledge to the library, a volume in memory of our classmate James Callahan. Go and read it. I hope to see as many of you as possible at the reunion.
Victor poured optimism into the report, and none of it was false. He and Barbara had reunited a year after her divorce, and the future looked promising.
But something happened a few months after his reunion that caused him to re-read that sheet of onionskin, especially the part about Harvard ignorance.
On an afternoon in the fall of 1921, he received a letter from one of Harvard’s ancients, Moorfield Story, ’66, a past overseer and current president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It requested Victor’s signature on a petition that Harvard end Jim Crow policies in regard to the housing of Negro freshmen.
Jim Crow?
At Harvard? Victor knew there had been talk about limiting the number of Jews, but what was this? He read the note included with the petition:
President Lowell has decreed mandatory residence for freshmen in the new halls he’s building along the river. He sees this as a way of promoting class solidarity and identity, but not, apparently, for Negroes. A colored freshman named Knox had his room assignment withdrawn after administrators learned the color of his skin. Considering your war record and your family’s association with President Lowell, your signature would carry great weight in reminding Lowell of his responsibilities.
Victor did not sign the petition. Instead, he took the subway to Cambridge.
He came up the stairs in the circular kiosk, which was like a rock in a fast-flowing stream of clanging streetcars and clattering Model Ts. The country quiet of Harvard Square was now a thing of memory. But the noise of modernity made the Yard seem even more a place of refuge from the fashion of the moment, a place out of time, perhaps because it embraced all time, at least as America marked it.
Victor walked to University Hall beneath the elms that had been replanted after the blight. He waited a polite twenty minutes and was then admitted to the office of Abbott Lawrence Lowell.
“Victor, my boy”—Lowell pumped his hand—“how’s Barbara?”
“Just fine, sir. Fine.”
“I can’t tell you how happy the Abbotts were when you two got together.”
“I was very lucky, sir.”
“Yes . . . yes. Her aunts all said she married Bram Haddon ‘on the rebound,’ so to speak. Bram’s a fine fellow, but—”
“Barbara and I are very happy, sir.”
“And doing quite well, from all I hear.” Even at sixty-five, his hair and walrus mustache gone gray, Lowell seemed like nothing so much as energy compacted and waiting to be released upon an unsuspecting world. “I hope you received my note of thanks for your reunion contribution. Gifts like yours—”
“I’m not here about money, sir,” said Victor. “I wanted to ask you about a petition that’s crossed my desk.”
Lowell’s face reddened. “Mr. Story doesn’t understand the dilemma we face.”
“I’m afraid I don’t, either.”
“You can’t force white men, especially from the South and West, to live and eat with Negroes.”
“I thought your goal was to create a sense of identity in each class, so democracy could flourish and exclusivity would be based on achievement rather than bloodline.”
“A concept that should be alien to an old Porcellian like you,” grunted Lowell. Though his bloodlines were as ancient as any, Lowell prided himself that he had not bothered with a final club as an undergraduate. “I’ve always believed that any club is useless, unless it exists to keep somebody out.”
“Keeping people out is no longer of interest to me,” said Victor. “I’ve met too many good people who were kept out, starting here at Harvard. I met them on the
Titanic,
too. Of course, on the western front, it was different. The dead exclude no one.”
“Well said, Victor, and bravely done.” Lowell came around the desk. “We owe the Negro the best possible education. But I’m not going to give up a plan of compulsory residence for freshmen, which is to the benefit of a vast majority of our students, simply because it conflicts with the theoretical principle of treating everyone alike.”
“You once said of the Irish that we had to absorb them. You wanted them to become rich, send their sons to our colleges, share our prosperity.”
“And it’s happening. Look at James Byrne, the first Catholic on the Harvard Corporation. I appointed him. Look at that Joe Kennedy. It’s happening, Victor, but by degrees, as it will for the Negro.”
“And the Jew?”
“We have a Jewish overseer, but Jews are a different problem entirely.” Lowell went back to his desk and began to shuffle papers, signaling his irritation.
“Too many Jews at Harvard?”
“Twenty-two percent of the student body. I’d say that’s too many, considering the percentage of Jews in the wider population. Once we adopted the so-called New Plan for admissions and put extra weight on entrance exams, the Jews came flooding in.”
“Because they did well on the exams. That’s what’s called meritocracy.”
“Put too many Jews in one place, they all lump together. Then we can’t offer them opportunities for assimilation, as we have to the Irish.”
Victor saw no further point to this discussion. He stood and said, “I shall sign the NAACP petition. If another comes my way regarding Jews, I’ll sign that, too.”
“Just don’t forget to sign your checks, or we shall be forced to raise tuition, and then it will be even harder for the Negroes and the Jews and the Irish to come here.”
Victor left the Yard through the Class of 1875 Gate and was struck by the irony of the inscription. It was from Isaiah, an Old Testament prophet, a Jewish prophet: “Open ye the gates that the righteous nation which keepeth the truth may enter in.”
Five years later, Victor wrote this in his Class Report:
Expansion is the theme for 1926. Our family has expanded with a pair of rambunctious little boys. Business expands, as my cousin Dickey Drake, ’12, and I work closely in equities. Our philosophy, freely shared with all of you since it has been written up on the business page, is to pick companies with low debt, strong cash flow, steady dividends, and growth projections that are realistic rather than outlandishly optimistic. I’m proud to say that our success has allowed us to contribute to another kind of expansion—President Lowell’s expansion of the college, a physical manifestation of Harvard’s spiritual advance into the twentieth century.
Victor had decided that, for all of his contradictions, Lowell served Harvard and Harvard served the nation. And if certain problems vexed Lowell and Harvard, they vexed the nation, too.
The struggles over Negro housing and Jewish quotas had simmered quietly, as they would until a new president and another war brought greater egalitarianism. But Victor’s eyes had already been opened, and the best way for the gates of Harvard to remain open, so that the righteous of the nation might enter, was for alumni of conscience to remain involved.
So Victor spoke his mind, which sometimes irritated Lowell and sometimes irritated his cousin Dickey Drake.