ii
“Did he really say that?” asked Ned Wedge at the family meeting the following June. “Did Bainbridge really say, ‘Now we are all sons of bitches’?”
“Yes,” said George. “Even the grammar was correct.”
“Watch your language, Ned,” said Dickey. “You may still be wearing your navy uniform, but there are ladies present, including your fiancée.”
“Oh, hell,” said Harriet Webster. “Don’t worry about me.”
George thought that Cousin Ned had gotten himself quite a prize—a fine-looking girl, a face that was all Boston bone structure, an accent all Bryn Mawr, and a serve that exploded at your feet before her racquet even followed through. And she was tall, too, which was good because Ned Wedge stood six-one, with square shoulders and a sand-colored crew cut that gave him the look of a man who knew exactly what he thought.
“It must have been something,” said Harriet, “to see the bomb go off.”
“Something . . . yes,” said George.
“Not many have seen that sight,” said Ned’s elder brother Jimmy, who was shorter, quieter, and seldom seen with a woman. “Not many who’ve lived, anyway.”
“Certainly not the poor devils in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Ned.
“They got what they deserved,” said Dickey Drake.
“No one deserved what they got, Dad,” said George. “No one.”
“Well”—Dickey sat at the head of the table—“thank God it’s over. It cost all of us a great deal. And now, in keeping with Victor Wedge’s will, the eldest male in the family—that’s me—shall preside today.”
Since 1937 they had been gathering for the meeting of the Wedge Charitable Trust. All lineal descendants of Heywood and Amelia Wedge were invited to present requests, and all who were present could vote, but the sons of Victor Wedge and their children would make final determinations.
Some years, the event was well attended. Other years, just a few showed up, and the distributions were accordingly small. But it was always a pleasant reunion, a chance for the family to socialize on commencement eve over a buffet supper and to meet for business the next morning in an upstairs room in the Faculty Club.
This year, there were two dozen descendants. Heywood and Amelia had raised two daughters and a son, so the names were Drake, Royce, and Wedge, and a few offshoots of those—close relations and long-lost cousins, all sipping coffee, eating pastries, scooping eggs from the stainless-steel chafing dishes. Outside, rhododendron bloomed in the sunshine, and the crowds made their way into the Yard for the first peacetime commencement in five years.
Dickey had everyone take seats, then he began with a prayer for Victor Wedge and for all those who had lost their lives. Then he said, “As you can all see, George is wearing his academic robes. He has to get down to Eliot House to join his classmates for the procession. So we’re starting early.”
First order of business was a treasurer’s report, delivered by Ned Wedge. He described the equities, bonds, and funds that composed the trust, and noted their performance for the year. The trust was now worth a robust $3 million.
“So,” said Dickey, “let’s spend some of it.”
Certain contributions were automatic—five thousand dollars to the Harvard College Fund, five thousand to the American Red Cross, a thousand to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, two hundred for the upkeep of the Old South Meeting House. The family rejected a request from a man who hoped to open a small theater in the Berkshires. And they turned down Harriet’s request for a grant to a woman who wanted to teach dance in the Negro section of Boston.
“Teaching coloreds how to dance?” Dickey laughed. “That’s like teaching Brahmins how to make money.”
And most of the other people in the room laughed with him.
Harriet showed neither anger nor embarrassment at the rejection, which was very good form, in George’s mind.
Then Ned asked, “What about political campaigns?”
“Whose?” asked Dickey.
“Jack Kennedy. He’s running for Congress.”
“Kennedy!” cried Dickey Drake.
“My father did business with his. He’s Winthrop House and a navy man, too.”
“His father doesn’t need our money,” said Dickey.
“But we might need his friendship someday. I think Jack Kennedy could go places.” Ned had already established a reputation as a young man of hardheaded practicality and stubbornness, too. He said, “Five hundred dollars should be plenty.”
But no one else spoke in support.
Then George smoothed his robes and said, “I think that we should keep politics out of our considerations.”
Ned looked at his brother. “Do you agree?”
“There’s too much controversy in politics,” said Jimmy. “But . . . but if you think you might do some good someday in the political line, maybe it would be worth it.”
And the Kennedy for Congress campaign received a five-hundred-dollar contribution from the (mostly) Republican Wedges. Dickey wondered if Joe Kennedy would laugh out loud.
That afternoon, there was a smaller meeting. It took place at the Drake table in the Eliot House courtyard. After the commencement ceremonies in Tercentenary Theater, members returned to their houses for luncheon and a degree ceremony in the company of their friends.
Before the master stepped to the podium, Dickey took out three envelopes. He gave one each to Ned, Jimmy, and his own son, George. “These envelopes contain keys to safe-deposit boxes in the Back Bay Institute for Savings. You are supposed to pass them to your descendants, who are not to access the contents until the trust liquidates.”
“What’s in them?” said Ned.
“‘Three poems that foretell a small gift of majestic proportion.’”
Ned looked at Harriet, then said, “This sounds like a fairy tale.”
“I’m just quoting Victor’s will,” answered Dickey. “I think your father wanted to have something for his descendants to remember him by, even after they had stopped gathering to honor the Wedge Charitable Trust.”
“Any ideas of what it is?” asked Jimmy.
Dickey said, “The words come from Lydia Wedge Townsend at the Bicentenary.”
“Lydia the poet?” asked Jimmy.
“The
bad
poet,” said Dickey. “That’s all I know.”
Ned slipped his envelope into his pocket. Jimmy studied his, as if wondering what was in it. George wrote the words “small gift—majestic proportion” on his.
“That was not Victor’s favorite quote, though.” Dickey sipped his wine and leaned back in his chair. “The one he liked most came from old President Lowell: ‘Two things are always new—youth and the quest for knowledge.’”
And it was forever true, as the seasons turned and the semesters came and went . . . as Dickey Drake took his rest in Mount Auburn Cemetery . . . as Ned and Harriet gave two sons to the Wedge line . . . as George Wedge Drake earned tenure at Harvard . . . as Ned went to Washington in 1961 . . . as Jack Kennedy, ’40, faced down the Russians over missiles in Cuba and George wondered if the scientists who built the bomb were about to become the biggest sons of bitches in history . . . as the bell tolled in Memorial Church on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, and the world changed . . . as the Beatles came to America three months later and it changed again . . . as the Senate voted the Tonkin Gulf Resolution . . . as the Red Sox won the pennant but lost the ’67 Series . . .
There was always someone wanting to know more, about something.
iii
George Wedge Drake had Lowell’s phrase engraved and framed and kept on his desk so that students could see it when they visited him, and he could remind himself of it when he faced a student like Franklin—“don’t call him Frank”—Wedge, first son of Ned and Harriet, tall, intelligent, and far more opinionated than a freshman should be.
It was an October afternoon in 1967. George had just finished a class and returned to his office in Mallinckrodt Hall. It was the fifth week of the semester, so he was talking about classical mechanics—Newtonian laws on the attraction of masses and universal gravitations. No heavy lifting for a man who had been teaching as long as he had.
Like many a Harvard professor, he saved his muscle for his research. He was working under a $2 million National Science Foundation grant for the creation of more efficient and safer nuclear power. His goal was a heavy-water reactor that would address the problem of neutron flux absorption. But the work was slow.
Science, he always told his students, required patience. But the young presence churning in the chair on the other side of the desk seemed the embodiment of
im
patience.
“So,” said George, “you’re having problems with Physics Ten? We can’t have a Wedge failing my class.”
“I’m not having any problems,” said Franklin Wedge. “I just thought you should know that this building isn’t going to be a good place to be in a little while.”
George looked at his telephone. “Should I be calling the university police?”
With a jerk of his head, Franklin flipped his hair away from his eyes.
Ever since the Beatles came along, boys were making that motion, and George found it faintly effeminate, but not when Franklin did it. With Franklin, it was like saying, “Go ahead. I dare you.”
George did not believe in taking a dare. So he said, “Stopping Dow Chemical from offering jobs to Harvard students is no way to stop a war.”
“Dow Chemical makes napalm. They sell it to the military. The military drops it on Vietnam. Dow profits from murder. If you work for them, you support murder.”
“It’s war. Not murder. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” Franklin looked at the photograph of the first nuclear explosion, on a bookshelf behind George’s desk. Beneath it was a little sign:
NOW WE ARE ALL SONS OF BITCHES.—KENNETH BAINBRIDGE.
George said, “I keep that picture there to remind my students that science can be our master or our servant. So can chemical companies.”
Franklin scowled. He had dark brows, so he scowled well, and he had already picked up the humorless demeanor of the campus radicals. What was there to laugh about, they seemed to ask, when people were dying in Vietnam?
George Wedge Drake agreed. That was why he did not call university police. But he said, “Your father won’t be happy about this.”
“Maybe it will get his attention.”
“That sounds like adolescent rebellion. A generation ago, boys ate live goldfish and drank too much. If the political sit-in—”
Franklin stood. “This is no prank. And even if you call the police now, you’re too late. That’s why I waited till now to tell you.”
“Thanks.” George Drake thought about going back to work, but it was not a day for work. Work required deep thought, which required an atmosphere of calm, both inward and outward. But calm had not existed at Harvard for some time.
A year earlier, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had come to a conference at the new Kennedy School of Government. As he left, his car was surrounded outside Quincy House by a mob from a group that called itself Students for a Democratic Society. He was the symbol of an administration that they meant to overturn and one of the architects of a war that they meant to end. McNamara, however, was not one to back down from a fight, so he stood on the roof of the car and tried to talk to the crowd, but they shouted him down.
“Imagine,” Ned Wedge had told George, “there was the secretary, come to Harvard at the invitation of an assistant secretary of the treasury—me. So it’s my reputation on the line. I look out, and I see kids holding signs,
DOWN WITH LBJ
and such, and they’re shouting and chanting, and I want to shoot myself. Finally, university police hustle us into the basement of Quincy House, into the goddamn steam tunnels! We go about a mile before we pop up like a bunch of moles in Langdell Hall.”
George Drake had to chuckle whenever he thought of it: the prickly secretary of defense, university police, and his know-it-all cousin, scurrying along the subterranean corridors that ran north from the river houses, under the Yard, all the way to the Law School. The tunnels carried the pipes that brought steam heat from a generating plant on River Street to all the Harvard buildings. Bare lightbulbs, wet floors, long stretches of asbestos-wrapped pipes, valves, elbows, diverters, wheels: “A real dungeon,” Ned had told George. “And a dungeon is where I’ll send my sons if either of them is ever involved in anything like that demonstration.”
Well, George now thought, get the dungeon cell ready.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences had voted not to punish students exercising their political rights after the McNamara incident. But the rights of “free movement” would also be upheld. So George decided that he should influence Franklin and the others before they restricted anyone’s rights. He went downstairs, but he was too late.
A hallway ran from the stairwell to the door of the conference room. And two hundred students filled it. They were sitting, standing, leaning, scowling. And at the end of the hall, a balding man in a gray suit stood with his hands in his pockets and a look of utter befuddlement on his face. Mr. Dow Chemical: free movement canceled.
Deans were stepping over students, looking into faces, entering into conversations, asking politely that the crowd disperse. It was almost genteel. But no one was moving. And they didn’t move for the rest of the day.
“What do I do with him?” Ned Wedge asked Prof. G. two weeks later.
“You encourage him to think for himself,” said George.
“You mean, let some left-wing radical in the SDS do his thinking for him?”
“Come on, Ned”—Harriet sipped her bourbon—“it’s not the end of the world. The boy is trying to develop a conscience.”
“Conscience?” snapped Ned.
All around, heads pivoted from conversations or rose from reading or turned from evening drinks. George made a gesture for Ned to lower his voice.
They were in the lounge of the Harvard Faculty Club, waiting for Franklin. It was a gracious room, with polite groupings of wing chairs and seraphs, flowered drapes, Oriental carpeting, a table in the center of the room with a collection of periodicals arrayed for the reading pleasure of people who had probably written half the articles.