Then my mother died.

My father informed me of this in a letter. Suddenly, a great deal was made clear to me. A month before I’d left for Harvard, my mother had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. She had delayed surgery—a total abdominal hysterectomy—until after my departure, not wanting to cast a shadow over this occasion. Postoperative biopsies had revealed that the cancer was an aggressive and rare adenosarcoma that left her with no hope of recovery. By winter, she had metastases in her lungs and bones. There was simply nothing to be done. It was, my father said, her dying desire that the son she loved so much should suffer no interruption in his progress toward the fulfillment of all her proud hopes: in other words, that I should go about my life and know nothing. She had died two weeks previously, her ashes buried without funereal pageant, in accordance with her wishes. She had not suffered much, my father wrote, rather coldly, and it was on loving thoughts of me that she had traveled into the life to come.

He wrote in closing, Probably you’re angry with me, with both of us, for keeping this secret from you. If it’s any consolation, I wanted you to know, but your mother wouldn’t hear of it. When I told you that day at the bus to leave us behind, those were her words, not mine, though she eventually made me see the wisdom of them. Your mother and I were happy together, I believe, but never for a moment did I doubt that you were the great love of her life. She wanted only what was best for you, her Timothy. You may wish to return home, but I encourage you to wait. I am doing reasonably well, under the circumstances, and can see no reason for you to interrupt your studies for what would be, in the end, a painful distraction that would serve no purpose. I love you, son. I hope you know that, and that you can forgive me—forgive us both—and that when we next meet, it will be not to mourn your mother’s passing but to celebrate your triumphs.

I read this letter standing in the front hallway of the house of a woman I barely knew, cats nosing around my feet, at ten o’clock on a warm night in early August when I was nineteen years old. What I experienced is nothing I have words for, and I will not make the attempt. The urge to telephone him was strong; I wanted to scream at him until my throat ripped open, until my words were blood. So was the urge to get on a bus to Ohio, go straight to the house, and strangle him in his bed—the bed he had shared with my mother for nearly thirty years and where, no doubt, I had been conceived. But I did neither. I realized I was hungry. The body wants what it wants—a useful lesson—and I availed myself of the old woman’s larder to make myself a cheese sandwich on stale bread with a glass of the same milk she left in saucers all around the house. The milk had turned, but I drank it anyway, and that is what I remember most vividly of all: the taste of sour milk.

* * *

16

The remainder of the summer passed in an emotionless haze. At some point I received a letter informing me that I had been placed in Winthrop House with an as-yet-unnamed roommate who was returning from a year abroad. That I cared nothing about this news is a gross understatement. As far as I was concerned, I could have gone on living with the old woman and her dirty litter boxes. About my mother, I told no one. I worked at the lab right up until the first day of the new semester, leaving no transitional interval in which I might find myself with nothing to distract me. My professor asked me if I wanted to continue working with him during the academic year, but I turned him down. Perhaps this was unwise, and he seemed shocked that I should decline such a privilege, but it would leave no time for the library, whose consoling silence I missed.

I come now to the part of the story in which my situation changed so radically that I recall it as a kind of plunge, as if I had been merely floating on the surface of my life until then. This commenced the day I moved into Winthrop House. Lucessi and I had sold off our Salvation Army furniture, and I arrived with little more than the same suitcase I’d brought to Harvard a year ago, a desk lamp, a box of books, and the impression that I had once again slipped into an anonymity so pure that I could have changed my name if I wanted to with nobody the wiser. My quarters, two rooms arranged railroad-apartment-style with a bathroom at the rear, was on the fourth floor facing the Winthrop quadrangle, with a view of Boston’s modest skyline behind it. There was no sign of my roommate, whose name I was yet to learn. I spent some time mulling over which space to choose as my own—the interior room was smaller but more private; on the other hand, I would have to endure my roommate trooping through at all hours to the toilet—before deciding that, to get things off on the right foot, I would await his arrival, so that we might decide together.

I had finished carting the last of my belongings up the stairs when a figure appeared in the doorway, his face obscured by the stack of cardboard boxes in his arms. He advanced into the room, groaning with effort, and lowered them to the floor.

“You,” I said.

It was the man I’d met at the Burger Cottage. He was wearing frayed khaki pants and a gray T-shirt that said HARVARD SQUASH, with crescents of sweat under the arms.

“Wait,” he said, peering at me. “I know you. How do I know you?”

I explained our meeting. At first he professed no recollection; then a look of recognition dawned.

“Of course. The guy with the suitcase. I’m guessing this means you found Wigglesworth.” A thought occurred to him. “No offense, but wouldn’t that make you a sophomore?”

It was a fair question, with a complicated answer. Though I’d been admitted as a freshman, I had enough AP credits to graduate in three years. I’d given this matter little thought, always expecting to hang around for the full four. But in the weeks since receiving my father’s letter, the option to bang out my education at a quickstep and skedaddle had grown more appealing. Evidently the Harvard higher-ups had thought so, too, since they’d housed me with an upperclassman.