37. All the World Was a Campus - Lords of Serendipity

When Patricia found out the Haven student research symposium had been moved to a new location, she expected to receive a Zoom link. To flatten and shine, even more, the life of the mind, the life of the university, including, now, the symposium, which had long been one of the remaining pure things at Haven. Students were nominated by their professors to deliver short papers on major questions like “Does water bring death or life?” “Masks or Masques?” “Are we Americans or anti-Americans?” “Is family obsolete or forever?” There were no celebrity guest speakers, no protests. Even during the pandemic, with elaborate choreography and double the social distancing, the college had admirably kept the symposium going in person.

Over the years she had offered to help organize it. She was always thanked by the Dean’s Office and simply invited to attend. The actual professors organized this one. And now, even though Patricia knew there could be no connection to her recently taking early retirement, the symposium’s change of location suggested to her that the scales of academic justice were weighted that much more to the wrong side.

But she was wrong. Wonderfully wrong, she had to admit. The symposium was now taking place in the college’s old chemistry lab, Patricia’s favorite building on campus, with its peaked wooden roof and cookie-tin shape.

Over the summer, Haven had removed all of the surplus PPE and renovated it into a student research commons, named after yet another silver-toned, wolf-toothed wealthy family. She noticed the large family portrait now hanging in the atrium before she went into the main round for the sessions. The necessary cost of anything at a fine American university these days.

She made herself a cup of tea, took a blueberry scone, and sat near the back. She surveyed the rounded walls, which had been covered with bookshelves filled with uniform hardcovers in a wraparound display of bold primary colors. Books treated as interior design features in the heart of a university. The necessary cost.

A few staff waved at her. She hadn’t been completely forgotten, yet.

Patricia had invited Allard to come. A very small, indomitable part of her had hoped his being around young people excited by ideas might encourage him to return to his own doctoral studies, which, he had finally told her, he’d taken a break from to work on a business idea. He had first mentioned this so-called business idea before their terrible trip to Italy, earlier that year, adding that it would somehow involve her. But he’d said nothing about it since. She really had no idea what he was doing these days. She could never make out what he had on his computer screen except websites about Costa Rica, of all places.

He declined her invitation to come to the symposium. He didn’t even smirk. For years, she knew, he had sustained a condescending patience about his mother’s love of the few things that remained good and true about the university, like the research symposium and the Haven Gaudy, which, to his credit, he did faithfully attend with her. But maybe not this year’s. Things had changed after Rome.

Had she expected him to thank her for defending him from Martin? Or to ask if Martin had been telling the truth, that she had wanted him to take her to the clinic? Did a lifetime of love and loyalty demand, in such moments, the truth, or a lie? Yes. But she never had to choose. They never discussed what had happened when Allard finally met his father.

Instead, the next day, she had tried to rally him, to tell him about all the things in Rome they could see and do and eat. But Allard said he wanted to go home. She wanted to stay. But this was a test. Would she abandon him, now? Having not had the chance at the beginning? And so Patricia left Rome with her son.

Now, months later, she was at least enjoying a respite from home life by listening to students deliver research papers. Her favorite, so far, had been delivered by a young woman who looked somewhat familiar to her, though she also looked like many Haven students these days: a thin, pale girl with brown hair and a wan, if not entirely blank face, wearing a plain but expensive-looking green dress and dun-colored brogues. Thirty years earlier, with different hair and a boxy blazer over her dress, she could have been a student at Mount Hera College, where Patricia had first been introduced to the world of the university by Ms. Tench. And while many such girls had scars that they resiliently displayed on their forearms, this one had what looked like a burn mark on one of her palms that she mostly kept concealed. Good for her. She gave an engrossing presentation about migrant women in contemporary Rome and their experiences of charity and control in seeking support from the Catholic Church. Using graphs that, she acknowledged, she had created with the help of her father, a professor of statistics at another university, she highlighted the tensions and paradoxes around the Vatican’s support of these women through programming offered in a soup kitchen set up in a historic church in the city center. The Church was very supportive of migrants’ rights and of the individual women’s families, and yet completely opposed to women’s rights, barring access in their facilities to any kind of modern family planning. Using a different graph to illustrate her point, the student then made a convincing case for the parallel paradox of contemporary Italian politics, with the ruling party’s pro-family policies—that, statistically, mostly benefited migrants, given their proportionately higher numbers of children—bearing an inverse relationship to the same party’s anti-migrant policies.

Patricia had nearly approached the student during a break between panels, but she was surrounded by other young women, and by several faculty members, praising her findings. She was beaming. Patricia was happy for her. She was glad the young woman was being told she had something to say to the world, about the world. She didn’t need to hear further praise about her paper from a failed academic made redundant by a chatbot. Patricia decided she would try to discuss the student’s presentation with Allard that night, over dinner. This time Patricia would be the one making the case for how clarifying and convincing statistics could be! It might be an opening.

Later on in the symposium, a South Asian student approached the podium to give her paper. This was the second student at the symposium who seemed vaguely familiar to Patricia, even if she didn’t look like your typical Haven student. She might have seen her jogging around town, risking her life by running against the traffic lights, like so many of them did, waving and mouthing sorry to braking cars, assuming that because they were Haven students, it would always work out. Just then the earlier presenter, the young woman with the mark on her hand, came and sat in the front row and waved at her. Suddenly it clicked: they were the student players who had disrupted the Haven Gaudy protest two years earlier by actually performing parts from the Haven Gaudy. Patricia felt encouraged. They hadn’t been canceled. In fact, they were flourishing—traveling the world, learning and discovering things, and now giving papers at the symposium. Advancing knowledge, pursuing the truth. And even if no one else knew it, Patricia knew she had played a small part in this. She truly was one of the university’s crimson threads.

Cham put her laptop on the table and angled it toward herself, then waved at someone on the screen and turned back to the audience. She introduced her research advisor as an internationally renowned professor of astronomy who had labs in the greater Boston area and in Sri Lanka. He had supervised her independent study from the Vatican’s astronomy research institute while she had been on her study abroad year, and had very generously just Zoomed in for her paper on Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, science fiction, and Sri Lankan religious culture. She turned her laptop to face the audience.

Hi, everyone! said Martin. So happy to be here with you, and to hear Cham’s magical paper.

Inside joke, said Cham.

Everyone laughed and applauded. Patricia got up from her seat in the back row, spilling tea on her skirt and dropping her N95. She left her favorite building.

Allard was working on a new accident claim when he heard his mother come home. He’d been gigging as a freelance analyst for several months now. The work was easy after he figured out what his strengths were. And the pay was very good, at least compared to amateur TA-ing. He could work whenever he wanted and as much as he wanted, with no real boss. For regulatory purposes, insurance companies were still required to use human statisticians to measure the specifics of individual claims against several larger data sets focused on age, gender, geography, and car make. Allard analyzed the driver data they sent him and provided companies with expert third-party assessments of the likelihood of a future accident, taking into consideration these various determinants.

At first, he was asked to predict possible one-year, three-year, five-year, and lifetime driving outcomes for individual drivers. Nonwhite urban males, under thirty, driving Mitsubishi Lancers and two-door Scions, with aftermarket muffler modifications, added-on running lights, shark fins on the roof and trunk? Terrible life outcomes. Lethal. White women, over fifty, living in suburban locations and driving Subarus and Volvos with optional dog-restraint tethers installed? Invincible. Later, he was asked to assess the veracity of an accident report. Then more and more of these. An alignment of interests. It turned out Allard was very good at identifying frauds.

His father. His mother.

Allard had always known his mother wasn’t a real university person, a professor. Was this why she was always so obsessed with the place? Why she took it so personally whenever she thought it was failing to fulfill her expectations, which was always? But now he knew why she went on as she did, about flatness and shine, flatness and shine. This was her way of hiding her own hollowness, her wanting to be hollowed out from him. She had never wanted him. Either. She had slapped his father in the face for what he’d said about her wanting him to take her to the clinic, not to protect Allard, but to protect herself.

Months later, Allard was still waiting. Not for a denial or an apology or an explanation, but for her to admit what they both knew, what all three of them knew was true. That she had never wanted him. Either.

Obviously, Allard wasn’t going to invite Patricia to join his business, even though she’d inspired it by helping Chinese students from Haven with their papers while working from home after the chatbot took her job. Allard was planning to use the money he’d made TA-ing STA 105 to create a tutoring company that worked like a dating site. It would match failed university people like his mother, people with no jobs and lots of degrees in English and history and creative writing and philosophy and journalism, with international students who hated reading and writing and had lots of money. Chinese and Indian and Gulf kids. The market was massive, he predicted. Both sides would pay Allard for the chance to meet each other, so that the tutors could help the students make their AI-generated papers sound more human and avoid cheating charges. To please his mother, he’d thought of calling it Shaikespeare.

That would be better than nailing car accident frauds for ramen and manga money. Better, too, than waiting for her to do something, anything, that would let him say what he wanted to say to her, which was the mirror of what he had successfully said to his father.

Do you know who I am?

He had been waiting for months to say to Patricia, Now I know who you are.

And then he’d pack up his laptop and clothes and leave.

For where, it didn’t matter, so long as the Wi-Fi was stable enough to let him log in to the insurance company’s VPN. Lately, Allard had been looking at Costa Rica. Apparently lots of online poker players and other independent contractors, tired of the aging republic’s red tape, worked from there. Also, he’d learned that while the United States and Costa Rica had an extradition treaty, there were lots of lawyers who specialized in filing motions that kept you permanently safe from going home to face charges. Not that Arcadia or Johannes’s parents or one of his other former clients would come after him at this stage, but still. Just in case. Allard could get a two-floor condo on the coast with just some of the money he had in the bank and still keep a special reserve for lawyers now that he had no need to spend any of it on either of his fraudulent biologicals.

Patricia came home and dropped her book bag on the floor and went straight into the kitchen, where she dabbed the tea stain on her skirt and then went for the small collection of liquor among the array of old and interesting glass bottles she kept for her homemade salad dressings. She poured herself a whiskey. Three fingers. That had been her father’s nightly measure. Suddenly, she missed him. How she wished he could be there to defend her against the world, which he absolutely, loyally, violently would, even if this meant hearing I told you so, I told you so.

You thought you could run with the fancy people, Patty Hamburger, just because you read novels in the attic while the rest of us were downstairs watching TV? Well now look at you. Out of work. Your son won’t speak to you. And the one place you thought was yours, your favorite place on earth, apparently isn’t yours either. Even Zooming in on a student’s laptop while she gave a research paper, the man who ruined your life belongs at your own university more than you do.

She walked into the living room.

Allard, she said.

Allard!

Now he turned around. Why was he smiling? Why did he look like he’d been waiting for this? Had he been watching the symposium on his computer? Had he seen her latest humiliation and enjoyed it? Had he set it up, somehow?

Why are you smiling? Are you pleased that I’m being treated this way?

He stopped smiling.

You? You’re being treated this way? Which way? By who?

Whom.

I said who.

And I corrected you, Allard. It’s whom.

Allard shut his laptop and got up from his chair and approached her. She finished her whiskey in a gulp and held on to the glass and stood her ground. In her apartment. Where he’d been eating and sleeping for free, for nearly two years.

Standing across from each other in the dark, crowded living room, mother and son looked like they were deciding whether to dance or throw something.

Well? she said.

You’re a joke, he said.

Pardon me?

You think knowing the difference between two words that mean the same thing makes you the defender of civilization? You’re not.

Then tell me, Allard, what am I?

He waved around the apartment, at all her old books and journals, her files and printouts, her master’s thesis bound in British racing green, its title and her name and the year in severe gold lettering, the chipped mugs full of pens and pencils, the spools of crimson thread and note cards from her research seminar days, the wood-framed postcards of Simone de Beauvoir, Camille Paglia, Simone Weil, the canvas totes from the Strand and Daunt Books and the Oxfam shop, the signed copies of The Handmaid’s Tale and Orientalism, the little leather-cased British radio that had been dialed to NPR once, decades earlier, and left there, the piles of TLS and New Yorker issues, always waiting to be read. The fittings of a long, hard-won, real life of the mind.

You’re just a janitor for professors, he said.

Patricia wondered if he’d have the balls to say that to his mother, to her face, with his grandfather in the room, had he still been alive. Or his uncles. Even her own mother. Who all might have agreed with him, who’d have said even worse and laughed at her. But a child, talking shit to a parent? No way. Not where Patricia came from. Everything she’d done in life had been to get away from that rough and rusted world. A world she had protected him from, raising him to think all the world was a campus, Gothic towers and great trees, rolling greens and decorative crenellations, battlements for the war of ideas. Not smokestacks and highway billboards and a house on a potholed street whose only green was broken beer bottles leading to a front door that had cracks in it from more than just bad weather. Had she really failed, in the end, to get away, if even her own son thought she was little more than a charwoman with bookmarks?

But really looking hard at her son, looking at him with her family’s eyes, what was he? Just another useless grad school dropout. Her family might have been right about her. They were definitely right about him. And maybe it wasn’t so bad, never entirely getting away from home, when what you needed now and then was to do things the way they did them back home.

Patricia stepped up to Allard, the glass still in her hand.

Say that again and see what happens, she said. Just see what happens.

He looked amused.

Just see what happens, she said a second time. More quietly, but with a little excitement. She was asking him to try it. To try her.

He stepped back.

Was it the glass she was holding, cocked? Was it the whiskey on her breath? Was it the rusted metal of her eyes, her face, her voice?

Allard moved around her and went to the door and left. He wasn’t even brave enough to slam it behind him.