stately stairway of Widener Library where we tiptoed into the main reading room. I stood there for a moment, without moving. It was clear I missed my days as a graduate student here. An almost empty reading room on a beautiful summer day was still one of the wonders of the world, I said as we were about to leave the room. All he could do was to utter a wistful but no less tart “I guess.”
I showed him all the places where I had lived: Oxford Street, Ware Street, Lowell House. Didn’t Lowell House remind him of a turn-of-the-century grand hotel on the Riviera?
“It’s a college dorm.”
As I showed him around town, I kept wondering what it must feel like to walk with your father and watch him stop at places that couldn’t mean a thing to you. You listen to tidbits about his life as a graduate student long before your parents met and find yourself unable or unwilling to relate to any of it, and probably feeling a touch guilty because you can’t even work up the show of interest your father seems to want to stir. Everything he sees is steeped in a stagnant vat of nostalgia, and for all its rosy cheeks, the past always gives off that off-putting, musty scent of old pipes and mildewed rooms that haven’t been aired in years. I tried to tell him about Concord Avenue and Prescott Street, where I’d also lived; but it was like asking him to join me in getting a haircut at my favorite barbershop on Dunster Street. He’d be humoring me, that’s all. But it would mean nothing. Had I asked, he’d have said: I don’t need a haircut.
I told him I knew of a place where they made good burgers. “You sure it’s still there?”
Once again, the sneer and dash of irony in his voice. He’d already heard me say that much had changed after thirty years, not the layout of the streets or of the stores, but the stores themselves, their awnings and marquees, perhaps even the feel of the place. Harvard Square had gotten smaller, felt cramped, crowded. It also seemed that things had been moved around a bit, new buildings had gone up, and the Harvard Square Theater, like so many movie houses around the world, had been drawn and quartered. Even the immutable Coop—short for the Harvard Cooperative Society, the large department store located right on Harvard Square—was no longer the same; a good part of it had become an insignia and souvenir store for visitors. I still remembered my Coop number. I told him my Coop number. “Yes, I know, I know,” I immediately threw in a hasty attempt to preempt yet another quip from him, “it’s just a department store.”
Like many parents who had been students here, I wanted him to like Harvard but knew better than to insist for fear he’d dismiss the school altogether. Part of me wanted him to walk in my shoes. He’d hate that, of course. Or perhaps I wanted to walk in them myself again, but through him. He’d hate that even more. Walking in daddy’s footsteps as daddy’s stand-in come to expiate the past! I could just hear him say: No one’s idea of college.
I wanted to share with him and bring back all of my old postcard moments: the day I crossed the bridge in the snow while friends ran across the frozen Charles and I thought how reckless; the first time I entered my beloved Houghton Library and sat waiting for the librarian to hand over my very first rare book written by Mademoiselle de Gournay, Montaigne’s adopted stepdaughter; the aging face of my long-gone Robert Fitzgerald who taught me so much in so very few words; my last drink at the Harvest bar; down to the stifling reluctance to head out to class on a cold November afternoon when all I’d rather do was curl up with a book somewhere and let my mind wander. I wanted to walk the cobbled lanes leading up to the river with him and, in a spellbound instant, seize the beauty of this sheltered world that had promised me so much and in the end delivered much more. The buildings, the feel of early fall, the sound of students thronging to class every morning—I couldn’t wait for him to heed their call and their promise.
Finally I found the courage to ask if he liked what he’d seen.