never going to happen. It wasn’t that the dog was certain, somehow, that this time he would prevail. It was simply a sense of, Well, better me than one of these children.
In this he was not so unlike Deedie and me, or most parents, really. We find ourselves driven to all sorts of ridiculous escapades, solely because we think we’re protecting the ones we love.
But sometimes the ones we love don’t want protecting. Sometimes the ones we love don’t understand the thing that is in our hearts. Sometimes the ones we love just look at us, our faces full of quills, and wonder why we thought that this was the way to save them, or how, in fact, we’d ever convinced ourselves they needed saving in the first place.
* * *
Thanksgiving 2017: Our children were now twenty-three and twenty-one. Indigo had been gone for a few months, and Chloe was newly arrived as our adopt-a-dog, after the death of her previous owner from cancer. She’d been part of our family for only a month, though, before we had to bunk both dogs at the bed ’n’ biscuit for the holiday. Chloe gave us a lonesome look as we dropped her off, as if she’d failed us in some way and was now being returned to the dog orphanage forever. I tried to be good, she suggested, although I am not entirely sure this was true. In any case, Ranger led the way into the kennels, as if to say, We got this, trust me, and Chloe followed uncertainly in his wake.
Deedie and I then headed down to New York City, where, incredibly, we found ourselves the leaseholders on a swanky apartment on Riverside Drive. After twenty-five years, I’d left Colby College and joined the faculty at Barnard, the women’s college of Columbia University. The new gig came with a pied-à-terre on the stretch of Riverside that the Columbia faculty calls “the gold coast.”
The apartment had been furnished in part by the magnanimity of my friends: Tim Kreider donated an Oriental rug; a colleague at Barnard had donated hundreds of books, which now lined the walls of the place; and Link, my old friend from high school (and the former owner of poor old Moogus), had loaned me a 1905 Steinway parlor grand. In ninth grade, he and I had pounded on the thing in the wake of smoking a great big doober, playing the blues, laughing our heads off. Now the piano stood in the corner of the apartment, the lid propped open upon the tall stick. These ornate chambers resembled something out of Sherlock Holmes. The Case of the Overrated Professor.
Some days, as I put down the latest stack of papers to grade, I looked around this joint and thought: Who lives here? Is it really me? It seemed an unlikely end for the boy who had spent his days inside a cardboard refrigerator box, waiting for the members of her family to ask her riddles.
A few years earlier, I’d addressed a group of presidents and provosts of the Seven Sisters colleges, as they turned their attention to the gnarly question of what to do about transgender students (and applicants) to their single-sex institutions. It was one of those rare nights when I’d failed to barf all over the podium, and about a week later I got an email from Barnard’s president, who wanted to know what I’d think about joining their faculty, maybe teaching a couple of courses in the spring of each year. Soon enough, I’d become the Anna Quindlen Writer-in-Residence, a position named after one of my favorite authors (and friends) and whom—since I was now writing regular op-ed columns for The New York Times—I’d begun to feel as if I were stalking. It was Anna who, in considering my experiences as both male and female, had remarked, “You’re something, Boylan. The experiment and the control.”
The only fly in the ointment was that Deedie remained in Maine, where she was responsible not only for her students in the social work program at the university but also for her clients in two local schools where she worked as a therapist. She visited New York twice a month in the heart of winter, and I’d make the voyage back for spring break, but this new arrangement did mean that we were separated for three and a half months of the year, with me in New York and Deedie stuck in the dark Maine winter with Chloe and the