Harvard Yard (46 page)

Douglass looked up at the bridge, but his mother and uncle were gone.

“So then,” said Theodore as he and his sister walked back toward what was now known as Harvard Square. “Do you still think that boys will be boys?”

“As Aunt Lydia said, ‘Boys will be boys, even when they grow into men.’”

“She said many things to remember,” answered Theodore. “I still remember the scene she made at President Quincy’s levee, though it’s near twenty-five years ago.”

“All in a good cause,” said Dorothy.

They walked for a bit in silence, then he said casually, “Do you ever wonder what she meant by ‘a small gift of majestic proportion’?”

Dorothy glanced at him from under her parasol. “Theodore, you ask me that question every six months.”

“Someday, you’ll tell me.”

“I’m bound not to. Bound by a codicil in her will.”

“Why did she tell
you?
” Theodore persisted.

“She believed that someone should know the truth.”

“About a book? How many nights I listened to Lydia and Caleb argue over a book, I cannot say.”

“Nor can I. ’Tis a legacy to pass, preferably to a female in the next generation.”

“Female? Why female?”

“Because Harvard gives our males a legacy while, as your friend Emerson says, they deny education to one half of humanity.”

“My friend Emerson.” Theodore kicked at a stone. “Were he my true friend, he might by now have helped me to publish. He helped Thoreau.”

“Thoreau . . . Richard Henry Dana . . . it would have been too much to hope that another great writer would emerge from the Class of 1837. Accept your fate.”

Theodore stopped in the street. “You don’t accept yours.”

“I seek to change what I can . . . the low status of women . . . the enslavement of our sable brethren. But I accept what I cannot control . . . a daughter dead in infancy, a husband dead at thirty-three . . . a son who must grow to manhood and leave his mother . . .”

“Tell me this,” said Theodore. “What was it that you intended to do when you went rushing out of the library today?”

“Save my son from those bullies.”

“Then thank God for Eliot. He saved Douglass from far worse than a little dunking.”

ii

In truth, it might have been better if Eliot had not intervened. Douglass might then have proved his mettle with his fists or taken such a pummeling as would have satisfied the sophomores. Instead, no statement was made, except that Douglass Wedge Warren was a mama’s boy and a poof’s nephew.

So, on rainy days, the sophomores jostled him, causing him to drop his books in the mud. On sunny days, they threw gravel in the window of his room. One morning, as he headed to chapel, which now convened at the civilized hour of 7:30, he was doused with buckets of water by three sophomores hiding behind three trees. And one afternoon, as he stepped into the entry of Hollis, he was struck by an odor both foul and universally familiar. As he climbed the stairs, it grew stronger. As he opened his door, he gagged.

The goodies had been through the rooms, so the beds had been made. The blankets on his roommate’s bed were pulled up tight, but Douglass’s bed was neatly turned down, and right in the middle of the sheet was a large brown turd.

One of the goodies, Anne Callahan, was bustling up the stairs. She carried a dustpan and broom and wore a hoop skirt that itself looked like a giant feather duster skimming dirt off every step. She stopped and peered in over Douglass’s shoulder. “You must have made someone very mad, sir. Shite in the bed . . .”

The goodies came in two sizes—skinny and stringy, or as broad-beamed and big-boned as the mastodon skeleton on display in Boylston Hall. Mrs. Callahan was among the latter, with a wide face, a small mouth, and a mop of curly brown hair.

“I’m not going to take this much longer,” said Douglass.

“Oh . . . take it just a little longer, sir.” With her dustpan, Annie scooped up the turd and told Douglass to open the window.

“The window? I want to put it into someone else’s bed.”

“And get caught doin’ it? Don’t be silly. Just do as I say.”

A moment later, the turd was flying through the air, hitting the slate roof of Holden Chapel, and rolling down into the copper gutter.

“’Tis a fine sunny day,” she said. “In a hot gutter, that turd’ll dry up in no time.”

“What if it should rain this evening?”

“Oh, it won’t rain, sir.”

“How can you be certain?”

Goodie Callahan stretched her small mouth into a smile. “I been on this earth fifty-one years. The last ten of ’em, I’ve walked from Boston to Harvard, six mornin’s a week, to save carfare. I got a nose for rain. And I tell you, Mr. Freshman Warren, a lad does himself no good stirrin’ up a storm over a little shite in his bed.”

“You’re saying I shouldn’t report this?”

“Complain and word’ll get out.” She took off the sheet, bundled it, hurried out to the linen closet, fetched another. “You’ll be called a snitch and get more trouble.”

“So what do I do?”

“Act like nothin’ happened.” She spread the clean sheet and remade the bed. “That’ll get
them
upset. Whoever
them
is. Meanwhile, follow the rules like they was the Ten Commandments.”

“The college rules? They’re silly.”

“The rules was meant to go by. No freshman wears a high hat or carries a cane afore Christmas. He don’t smoke, even in private. He goes to chapel every mornin’ and church every Sunday. And he keeps a straight face, even when he finds shite in his bed.”

Douglass thanked her, pulled a nickel from his pocket, and gave it to her.

“Five cents?” she said, her eyes brightening. “You’re very kind, sir.”

“If not for you, I’d still be wondering what to do with that turd.”

“I’ve done as much for other lads, but never’s the time I got a penny. You’re a gentleman, sir.” She dropped the nickel into her apron. “Now, remember . . . let it pass. But if ever you need a bit of help with these shite-spreaders, my son is a fine, brawny hod carrier with some fine, brawny friends. His name’s Daniel. Dan Callahan. I hoped he’d be a college man, but—”

“Perhaps he will be someday,” said Douglass.

“Oh, no, sir. Bein’ a college man ain’t easy. He knows it. Me, too.”

Douglass Wedge Warren determined that since he
could
be a college man, he would be the best college man possible.

He applied himself to his studies though it bothered him that most classes were devoted to the regurgitation of facts rather than their interpretation. Every student in the class was required to recite each lesson each day, and the curriculum still began with Greek, Latin, and mathematics, much as it had two centuries before, despite the efforts of certain professors. It all struck Douglass as medieval. But he did as he was told and sought intellectual stimulation outside of class.

He found it in the evening lectures of the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, who theorized that a mile-thick sheet of ice had sculpted the landscape of New England. Some students wondered how this could be, since Genesis told of Creation in seven days, but Douglass had been raised in a Unitarian household where such stories were interpreted more liberally. So he imagined the ice and tried to think about the world in new ways.

On a rainy October afternoon, he was standing before the mastodon skeleton in Boylston Hall, trying to imagine an elephant covered in long hair crossing a field of ice in New Hampshire, when he smelled cigar smoke.

A voice behind him said, “An amazing creature, no?”

Douglass turned to look upon another amazing creature: Louis Agassiz himself, his cigar between his teeth, his eyes looking up at Douglass from beneath a great square forehead that some said was the perfect receptacle for his great brain.

“You are Douglass Wedge, no?” Agassiz took the cigar from his mouth and snubbed it out with his fingertips. “Your mother is friend to my wife.”

“My mother speaks often of the girls’ school that your wife runs in your attic.”

“A very hot attic sometimes, a very cold attic others. Very hard work at all times, educating a houseful of girls. But my wife believes they deserve to be educated. So do I.”

“So does my mother.”

“Good. Now, since you are so interested in this creature, educate yourself. Write down your observations, and you may present your findings in my next lecture.”

Douglass sat for three days before the skeleton, because Agassiz sent him back three times, demanding that he look more closely and find something new with each viewing. But when Douglass was done, Agassiz pronounced his work “as fine a collection of paleontological observations as any undergraduate has yet produced.”

Douglass had never felt greater satisfaction. Until, that is, he was given the sixth seat in Eliot’s first boat, a high honor for any freshman.

And through it all, he kept his peace over hazing and fagged for no one.

By late October, Heywood could tell him, “I’ve spoken for you. Even Tall Wall admits you’ve borne it well. I think you may see an invitation to a club table or two.”

It was the goal of Harvard swells to join a club such as the Hasty Pudding or the Porcellian, for membership meant a place to gather with young men of like mind and money, to play billiards, to read the papers, and, most important, to dine. Indeed, so many had chosen the clubs for their meals that Harvard had closed its commons, leaving the unclubbed to eat in local boardinghouses.

“I would rather keep eating at Mrs. Danson’s than sit with Wall,” said Douglass.

“Come, Douglass, peace is the best course. On the campus and in the nation. If Lincoln wins the election, Hannibal says he’ll go home to Virginia.”

“Good.”

“My father says it would be best if Lincoln lost. War will do nothing good for the textile industry.”

“In the Warren house,” said Douglass, “we hold a somewhat different opinion.”

“As always,” sniffed Heywood.

Such conversations were unfolding all over America that fall. This one took place in a horsecar on the way to Boston. The iron wheels crunched in the rails. The horses’ hooves set up a hollow percussion on the cobblestones. And the high-pitched jingling of the trolley bell mingled with the high-spirited laughter of Harvard boys bound for Boston on a Friday night.

As one college official complained, “The passage of the horsecars to and from Boston nearly a hundred times a day has rendered it impossible to prevent our young men from being exposed to all the temptations of the city.”

And temptations there were.

Sometimes Douglass went to the theater, though an obsolete college law still prohibited Harvard students from seeing plays in Boston, not because of the impact of Shakespeare as performed by Edwin Booth or his ilk, but because of the pernicious effects of melodrama upon a young man’s mind.

Sometimes Douglass found a corner in the Parker House bar, where he and his chums would sip brandy that burned their gullets and puff publicly on cigars, all in contravention of the college rules. If it was a Saturday afternoon, they might spy a group of Harvard men, some aging in body but all still powerful in mind—Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Neptune-bearded Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louis Agassiz among them—convening for the Saturday Club, an excuse to eat, drink, and expose themselves to one another’s brilliance.

Douglass usually spent Saturday nights at his mother’s home and accompanied her to church in the morning. He would later return to Harvard with a note from her, stating that he had attended a church, any church, on the Sabbath. To the Unitarians who ran the college, a man’s religion was his own affair, though it remained unthinkable that he should not have one.

But Douglass did not spend Sundays in Boston simply to hear a familiar minister. After services, there were always invitations—to teas, to dinners, to “at homes” in the houses of people who were like the Wedges, or liked the Wedges, or would like to know the Wedges.

As Uncle Theodore said, on Sunday afternoons, a man could go from Beacon Hill to Church Green and at every stop see faces that might have been seen on the
Mayflower
or the
Arbella,
hear voices that would have sounded familiar to John Winthrop or John Harvard himself, and meet members of every Harvard class back to the War of 1812.

They were not always like-minded people, for these were contentious times. There were deep fissures among the Republican abolitionists, the Constitutional Unionists, and the live-and-let-live Democrats. And the Boston religion, as they now called Unitarianism, was not embraced by all. There were still Congregationalists among them, and other Protestants, too, though all were united in their fear of the Catholic hordes now crowding the waterfront tenements.

They had names such as Jackson and Cabot, Appleton and Forbes, Saltonstall, Pratt, Weld, and Wedge, and though they associated in business and leisure, they no longer called themselves the Boston Associates. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. had given them a better name. He called them Brahmins, after that caste of Hindu priests who passed wisdom, guidance, and good example to all the other Hindus.

They invested together in shipping lines, textile mills, and railroads. They directed hospitals, banks, and charities. They opened their ample coffers to the college. And they taught their children that from those to whom much was given, much was expected, while also hiring lawyers to devise ever more complicated trusts to protect what they would give from the very children to whom it was given. They were like a great, extended family, and they intermarried so often that the metaphor had become fact.

Douglass did not go to their Sunday gatherings, however, to begin his climb up the social ladder. He was an independent boy who dreamed of seeing the Wild West from the back of a horse before he set foot on any rung of Boston life. But there was a girl. . . .

Her name was Amelia Fleming, daughter of Joseph C. Fleming, of the law firm of Fleming and Royce. She was seventeen, a graduate of Madame Dorian’s School for Young Ladies. Her gaze was frank and straightforward, her brown hair was parted in the middle and pulled back simply, and her whole aspect was one of well-read seriousness . . . until she smiled or laughed, and one followed the other as inevitably as young men were drawn to the sound of that laughter.