7. Flatness and Shine - Lords of Serendipity

A couple of hours north of Jack and Allard, and farther west of Devi, Allard’s mother, Patricia Hamburger—older, broken winged, still flying—took a moment to consider Haven College’s back quadrangle. Her view was framed by the black metal crosshatches of her basement window. She sighed. There were rumors the college was going to replace the grand old building in front of her. Outdated, apparently. Another. Again. If only they could see it as she did, right now: high October, the grass still green, greener than ever really—as if it knew it was soon to die—and itself coined in copper and yellow leaves from the great trees flanking the old three-wing science building. Beyond that, a pond was visible through the higher, thinned-out branches and more trees gave way to rolling hills, red farmhouses, country lanes, horses, and dairy cows.

Patricia checked her watch. She was expecting a guest shortly, a new colleague who went by the name Puck, but she had enough time for a short stroll. Even if she didn’t know this person’s predilections, who wouldn’t enjoy a fresh-baked scone from the campus bakery?

Grabbing her pashmina and N95, she took the stairs up to the rear door that led out to the back quad. She passed students reclined on the stone steps of the old science building, in between the bare pedestals where statues of Charles Darwin and Marie Curie used to stand. Darwin had been pulled down in a student demonstration against White knowledge, and the college authorities had decided to remove Curie a few weeks later, out of an abundance of caution. Off to the side of the bare pedestals was Patricia’s favorite building on the whole campus: the original chemistry lab, a four-story octagon made of big gray rectangular stones. It reminded Patricia of a cookie tin, though she’d never actually seen one like it.

But in a just world, there would be a cookie tin just like it!

The building had a peaked wooden roof so that if ever there were an explosion, the force of it would go up into the empty heavens instead of out onto the peopled quadrangle.

What a charming, civilized, scientifically sound way to plan for the possibility of total ruin and disaster!

The old science building had been given over to the facilities people. Patricia had been at Haven long enough to know that when facilities people were moved into an academic building, this meant it was going to be knocked down soon. Farewell, old stone cookie tin. Everything was being replaced in this world. Everything with substance and history, with texture and nuance, with seriousness, gravitas, was being replaced with flatness and shine and more flatness and shine. The university had become all flatness and shine.

Were it up to her, or even if anyone asked, Patricia would keep the original chemistry lab, line its high walls with hardback books, and fill the floor with library tables, green and gold banker’s-shade lamps, and wooden chairs. Also: she would have some kind of internet jamming device installed so that the only things you could do in there were the only things Patricia thought you should do at college: read books and talk about books.

But it wasn’t up to her, and no one would ask what she thought they should do with the old chemistry lab.

She walked to Alumni House, a red-brick Georgian with long, rippling rectangular windows facing the pond and amphitheater. Patricia’s favorite window was the crescent moon at center-top. She’d never been in the attic and couldn’t imagine making it up there at this point. Frankly, she wouldn’t even if she could. She preferred, instead, the picture in her head, of a fierce and smart young girl living in this house a century before, cozied up on big pillows in the woodsy-smelling attic, reading Little Women and looking up from the page now and then, across the pond and over the hills and trees, with plans to conquer the world.

She had been that girl, once. The book was the same, but certainly not the view: Instead of a crescent-moon view of ponds and hills and trees, the attic in Patricia’s house had given her a bunker-slit lookout over a highway. She could also see a bridge over the highway that had a chain-link fence to stop people either from jumping or from throwing things on cars passing through to better cities. On the other side of the highway she could see parking lots and factories, and finally, far, far away, beyond the smokestacks, the billboards for bail bonds and car accident lawyers, the empty tractor trailers, the metal barrels blackened around the rims from fires lit by striking steelworkers and hobos, and just visible in between two gray box buildings, a statue. It was of a woman. She was high in the air and holding a scepter. Hours and hours Patricia had spent in that attic, sitting on dusty floorboards against a rolled carpet and reading Little Women and wondering who that gravity-defying, powerful woman was while the smell of fried meat and onions rose up and her mother limped and sighed around in the kitchen. Unless it was a Friday, which meant haddock punch: fried scallops in cream of mushroom soup. The scallops came from her father’s buddy down at the docks, who punched them out from pieces of haddock. Patricia’s brothers would press these fake scallops into their front teeth and smile at her with squinty eyes and speak in Mickey Rooney–style Chinese accents, mushroom soup dripping down their nodding, wagging chins. Her parents only yelled and cuffed their heads if the brothers didn’t eventually swallow the scallops and slurp up the drooled soup: torturing their sister with racist stereotypes was fine, even entertaining, but wasting food? Like talking back to your parents. Unforgivable.

Patricia endured years of fried, cuffed family life and equally bruising, useless schooling—with classmates who responded to her request to be called by her full first name by calling her Patty instead. As in, Patty Hamburger. Her whole life could be understood as a project to not be someone called Patty Hamburger.

Life finally began to change when she met Ms. Trench, a student teacher from Mount Hera College, who was assigned to their class for all of eleventh-grade English. Ms. Trench gave Patricia the only nickname she ever liked, loved really, because she had earned it and because it said something about who she was, who she was going to be, and that the world, or at least one person in the world, knew this to be true.

What is that? she would ask Ms. Trench, approaching her after class, after every class, about everything she talked about: The New Yorker, the local rep theater, open-mike night, The Group, The Bell Jar, Bitches Brew, Fellini, lentils, a diaphragm, Monty Python, Annie Hall, and, above all else, the magical and mysterious place where all of these things seemed to come from: campus.

What is that? she asked her.

You should visit.

I can visit?

You can definitely visit.

But what is that? What is a campus?

Come and see, Miss What Is That. Miss Wit, Ms. Trench began to call her.

And she did, finally, on a springtime Saturday, and it all made sense. It made deep and perfect sense. Patricia joined Ms. Trench in the college library at Mount Hera for a study session. She had lied to her parents about where she was going. The rest of the girls in her grade lied to their parents that they were spending the night at a girlfriend’s so they could spend the night being pawed and impregnated by brutes in the back seats of their rust buckets and in their moldy basements, sometimes with stick-thin grandmothers sleeping on nearby cots—don’t worry, she grew up under Communism. Don’t worry, she doesn’t speak English. Don’t worry, she’s deaf. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Trust me. Oops. Oh crap. I guess you want me to marry you now?

Whereas Patricia lied so that she could spend a few hours reading Shakespeare under a green-shaded golden lamp in a quiet, book-filled heaven made of oak and stone and clerestory windows. And afterward, Ms. Trench, wearing a black bowler hat and a vest and tie and gabardine pantaloons, took her on a tour of the college that, to Patricia’s amazement, was just three bus transfers and a thirty-minute walk from her front door, its wood cracked from years of weather and occasional fists and steel toes. Inside, family portraits hung on the walls. The only hangings other than a calendar from the insurance company and a crucifix.

Mount Hera, a small women’s college, was worlds away from her street, with its narrow old houses leaning into each other like all the drunks walking home from the bar for dinner or breakfast or to their next shift at the plant.

None of which could be seen from the heart of campus, with its tall trees and green grass and pretty buildings that made her think of a wealthy child’s gingerbread house. Everywhere she looked she saw confident young women in drab colors, including even a few Black women, all of them carrying books and speaking seriously when they weren’t laughing and leaning into each other with a secret knowledge Patricia desperately, desperately wanted.

Campus.

She was meant to be here. She hadn’t even known the word for it, but she was always meant to be here.

It was dark when Ms. Trench’s tour ended. They were standing in a stone pavilion at the back of the main building, a playing field behind them. With Ms. Trench slowly walking behind her, removing her hat and shaking out her frizzy, bushy brown hair, Patricia moved around the pavilion, craning her neck to look up at the top of the dome, to get the right angle, just yes, exactly right, to consider the white statue of the goddess Hera that was there, that had been there, calling her forth from her attic all this time.

What is that? she asked Ms. Trench, but for once Ms. Trench didn’t answer. She was standing behind Patricia, kissing the nape of her neck and kneading and rubbing Patricia’s shoulders and arms and breasts.

There was absolutely no way she was going to get pregnant. This was simply the price of a campus tour conducted by Ms. Trench. Somewhere inside, Patricia had always known.

She stared up at Hera while she was rubbed and pressed against, until she was turned around for a long, dewy kiss. Ms. Trench asked if Patricia wanted to see a dorm room. Patricia shrugged.

She ended up going there, and made it well past proud little Mount Hera College, all the way to a well-regarded graduate program at a prestigious institution just outside Boston that even her brothers and their pregnant girlfriends had heard of. There, she completed coursework, passed her comprehensives, and had had a dissertation prospectus accepted when she caught the eye of a new assistant professor. They were both reading at a chocolate shop just off campus.

What is that? he asked her, about the silver tea infuser steaming in its stand beside her mug.

He was a scientist named Martin. He joked that his last name was nearly as long as pi, and also Polish. He was even skinnier than one of those deaf basement-sleeping grandmothers. She imagined bringing him home to meet her family. A night of punched haddock and dumb Polack jokes.

He asked her the same question—What is that?—again and again. In curry restaurants and art galleries and, finally, during a female anatomy lesson at his apartment, where, she noticed, the only novels he had were by Arthur C. Clarke.

Martin never understood why she began calling him Mr. Wit.

But in fact she was wrong to call him that—or, as she learned in the months that followed, to call him anything other than a coward.

When she told Martin that she was pregnant, he swallowed his lips and bugged his eyes. Then he nodded, silently, at the decision she’d already made. He respected it, he agreed with it, but he also declined to split the cost of the procedure, citing the faith that he had abandoned as a teenager. Cooperation with evil, the priests called it. Those bloody priests.

Making me pay for this isn’t evil, but splitting the cost is? Is that the case, Martin?

He smiled, thinking she was making the old joke between them, a play on What is that? But Patricia wasn’t joking.

He nodded, wincing.

So yes, exactly, this is why I left the Church, you see. Anyway, I can meet you there, afterward. And I can drive you to your apartment. Afterward. These things I can do. For you.

You’ve done enough, thank you.

She almost called her brothers. Not to meet her there. But to meet him at his apartment.

He called, more than a week later.

She’d been in bed more than she’d expected and was having trouble reading, which she resented nearly as much as Martin himself.

I’m just so behind in grading, sorry, he said. It’s this survey course they’re making me teach. The department is really unfair to its junior faculty, you know? They’re making me cut corners with my research. What I’m doing, it’s not cheating.

I don’t care.

Just to be clear, there’s nothing technically wrong with how I’m conducting my research, but still, I don’t like having to do it. And I have to do it to keep up with the Germans! You know, over there, they don’t do any teaching? But anyway, I called, you know, to find out.

Find out what, Martin?

How are things?

Things?

Yes. Did it, did everything go okay? As planned?

There’s nothing between us.

Meaning?

There’s nothing between us.

They never spoke again.

She had Allard the following winter and was denied a spot in family housing. She took a leave from her program and she denied her family the victory of her coming home like this: another dropout with a baby and no ring, only this one had lots of books. Instead, Patricia began tutoring, bringing along Allard and his wooden abacus. She was good at it. Eventually a grateful parent told her about an opening in student research services at Haven College. Patricia got the job and she and Allard moved up the coast and into the New England woods. At Haven she taught research methods seminars. Eventually, she told Allard about his father, who by that point wasn’t just a professor but held a research chair at the same university in the greater Boston area. She asked Allard if he had any questions. He had only one.

Does he know who I am?

He will someday, Allard. We are going to make sure of that, she said.

She was never on faculty at Haven, but she raised Allard at a university. He became the person he became because he was surrounded by great books and grand buildings, by young people and old people who spent days, nights, years, whole lives searching for truth, goodness, beauty, friendship, and even love. And sometimes, the most fortunate even found some of these things. And so it was no great surprise that, having grown up in such a world, Allard decided to pursue a doctorate himself. But a doctorate in statistics? Patricia, a historian, did not consider statistics a legitimate academic discipline. It was like creative writing—very popular but frankly cheap and easy compared to the real thing, and not just her own field but fields like English and math, too, which had a pedigree, established practices, tradition, canons, and nobody wanted to study them anymore when they could be professional creative writers and statisticians instead. But even in statistics he was taking a very, very long time to complete his degree at a highly undistinguished institution, Arcadia Tech.

Could Allard’s receiving a PhD from such a school, from such a discipline, possibly lead someone like Martin, holding a research chair at the most famous university in the world, to know who Allard was? No. Patricia knew that, because she knew successful male academics for who and what they were. Picky gluttons. Cultured carps. Coddled dragons. And she didn’t want to ask Allard if he still thought about his father because she wouldn’t know what to do if he said yes, and if he said no, her asking him that question might start him thinking. Also, she didn’t really care about Martin. She had never finished her doctorate because of him. Because of both of them, but she loved the one, Allard. And he was going to finish. And then they would celebrate, together, the all-but-dissertation mother and the PhD son, with a trip to Athens, to the Parthenon, to walk among the ruins where the original Hera had once surveyed the known world, where it had all started: the university, Patricia, both.

She walked through the lacquered red front door of Alumni House, which had been donated to the college decades before and had been the president’s house and the grandest bivouac in US military history, and also occupied by antiwar protestors before being given over to the student newspaper and various arts journals and several student literary clubs, which now worked out of the apse chapels in the college’s decommissioned chapel. Room after room was filled with midcentury-style furniture and flat-screen televisions hidden in creamy white shaker cabinets. There was a student-run bakery and fair-trade coffee shop on the main floor.

Patricia ordered two blueberry scones and gently corrected the clerk’s pronunciation as she accepted the crisp paper bag. She lowered her N95 to inhale the fresh baking, her glasses steaming up. She smiled at the clerk and raised and lowered her shoulders vigorously. The clerk gave her a thumbs-up without looking away from her phone.

She returned outside, still smiling but once more behind her mask. She hoped that anyone seeing the tears in her eyes would assume they were from the October winds coming up off the water. But there were no winds coming up off the water. She was teary because she was dreading the meeting ahead of her.

Never mind what she read in the Chronicle, which she still took as a proper paper subscription—so too TLS and the LRB—even after the library and (she was told) the faculty club canceled their subscriptions. It was happening even here, at Haven: chapels being turned into wellness centers; library stacks being eliminated to make space for meditation zones, test kitchens, flex spaces. But, of course, she thought, as she walked back to her office, for no number of millions in donations would they ever, ever touch the exteriors of the historic buildings that made up the front quadrangle—the chapel, the library, the main academic hall, and the dining hall. This was a collegiate Gothic quartet in blackened gray stone and greened copper, with gargoyles and turrets peeking and popping out everywhere. There was even a pepper-pot belfry on one building. What glorious uselessness, what hope, what confidence in the goings-on that would happen inside, when these were built a century ago!

Going, going, gone.

Now it was the world’s most beautiful front for hedge fund investments. She’d read an article in the student paper that called Haven a thirst trap. She looked up this term online and found it very vulgar. Fitting.

Front Quad was featured on the university’s homepage, and on the recruitment and fundraising letters that constantly went out alongside pictures of Haven students changing the world by pumping fresh water onto dusty African plains surrounded by laughing, macrocephalic children wearing bright tattered clothes. Flatness and shine. All of it, flatness and shine.

Delaying the meeting a little more, Patricia went around to the main doors of the library, nodding at the student clerks checking their phones at the circulation desk. She passed vitrines dedicated to Native American cultural preservation practices and took the elevator to the ground floor. She was, until the new junior staff member joined her shortly, the only human being still working down there. The other offices had long been occupied by library staff. Her kind of people. Most of them unmarried women in whimsical glasses and rococo jewelry, Haven graduates who slowly, then suddenly, became old. After the pandemic, they took buyouts instead of returning to work. The few men among them were gay and lovely and wickedly funny and knew all the latest trends in international food, but Patricia no longer saw them, either: they too had either taken buyouts and moved away with their older, wealthy husbands, or had been promoted to higher jobs at the library and elsewhere at the university. She was now alone on the ground floor of the library, but she didn’t mind. Coming to campus every day, being on campus like this, was still better than being alone in her small apartment in town. But she was alone. Definitely. All of Patricia’s work friends had been replaced by younger people, most of whom went by single initials, hard consonants. They all looked and dressed the same, like the production crew of a radical theater: tattoos and piercings and black T-shirts and black jeans and black Blundstones and lumberjack hats, year-round. Buttons everywhere. They drank strong coffee in metal canisters and worked in flex spaces on the two or three days a week they came to campus. They declined invitations to tea. They had no sense of moral shading. You were an ally or you were part of the problem. And the way they looked at Patricia, those rare times they did look at Patricia—while walking into the latest bargaining update from their local, or in line for the microwave in the lentil-smelling lunchroom—she knew they weren’t completely, completely sure she was an ally, which meant she was part of the problem.

Which was absurd! Need she tell them about her own past? How demeaning that would be. How desperate and showy and obvious. How like the senior administrators at the college—every one of them straight and white, cisgender men and cisgender women—who advertised their completely predictable pronouns everywhere and made George Floyd their Zoom backgrounds. She’d never said a word to anyone about Ms. Trench, even after watching the Kavanaugh hearings. But Patricia was on the right side, and had been before she even knew she was supposed to be.

The only thing she really wanted, other than her son completing his PhD, was to be part of a tradition of knowing how to seek knowledge, and of transmitting this knowing to others. And she felt this belonging as a duty, a duty that mattered beyond herself, although more and more she had come to feel like she’d become the ghost in the machine. The departed staff’s offices were given over to big black containers of computer guts; techno-coffins, Patricia called them while complaining to Allard on his occasional visits. Server racks, Allard always explained, reaching for more Brie.

There was a knock on the door, a few doors down the hall from her office.

Patricia smiled to herself. Nothing human in there, dear Puck. Try again.

She was about to meet a new junior coworker who, she had been given to understand, would begin sharing her office and learning from her before starting to co-deliver Patricia’s Introduction to Research Methods sessions. Which were the best part of her job, because they allowed Patricia to introduce students to a lifetime, or at least four years, of curiosity, rigor, testing, and knowledge. The students queued outside a library seminar room and were invited in, one at a time. She always waited at the front of the room with an idiosyncratic-seeming array of primary and secondary materials, lines of crimson thread dropped across them. By the end of the hour, the students would know that a sound approach to research methods was the crimson thread uniting their natural curiosity, their capacity for rigor, their commitment to testing, and their discovery and advancement of knowledge. At the end of the session, she would wait by the door, presenting each student with a line of crimson thread as they left, so they would never forget. More than a few of them would eventually present papers at the college’s annual undergraduate research symposium, and Patricia would always attend, sitting near the back, never noticed, never acknowledged, probably not even remembered, but never mind. She wasn’t doing this for glory. For twenty years this had been her job—no, her vocation and mission: welcoming students to the campus, to the life of the mind.

But now Patricia was in her midfifties.

And she didn’t have her PhD.

She knew what was happening. She knew exactly what was happening, with this new coworker, Puck.

There was another knock, on another door, a little closer.

Goodbye, old stone cookie tin.

Hello, more flatness and shine.

Puck would learn from her. And in time—it was only a question of time—he would replace her. Patricia’s only hope was the name, which suggested a fellow reader, of Shakespeare no less, or at least a mother who was. Surely there had to be some humanness to him?

The next knock was closer.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

Closer.

She rearranged the scones on their matching plates.

There it was. The knock at her door.

She arranged her pen and notepad.

The doorknob began to turn.

She prepared her face.

Yes! Good morning! Please, come in! Welcome, Puck! she said.

She heard low rolling and then saw the procession of server racks, the wheeled black coffins, one after the other, being pushed into her office by gloved men in masks. A Zoom call suddenly started on her laptop. A senior librarian informed Patricia that the college was evolving the research methods seminar. Puck, it turned out, was the name of the college’s new artificial intelligence research bot. Patricia was assured she would be kept on staff to help train it and also given a new laptop since she would now be working permanently from home.