“‘And the Bard will applaud as humanity learns,’” said Dorothy. “
Bard
may mean Shakespeare. It may simply mean
poet
. Lydia may even have been referring to herself. She was a poet, after all.”
“Not a very good one,” he said.
In front of University Hall, Dorothy stopped and said, “I don’t know what Lydia left us. I know only that an envelope sits in a safe in the Wedge-Fleming-Royce block in Boston. It’s not to be opened unless and until Harvard educates women. There’s a similar envelope in the Tercentenary packet. I have now told you more than I ever told anyone but Douglass. My appointment with the president is private. So . . . good-bye and give my best to Mr. Bunting.” And she started up the stairs.
“You still haven’t answered my question, Dorothy. Why now?”
At the top step, she turned. “Because you’re right, Theodore. Time
is
fleeting. Thirty years since we lost Lydia, ten since we lost Douglass . . . we can’t wait forever to do what’s expected of us. And if we succeed, we can all find out what Lydia’s gift was. I’m curious, too.”
President Eliot’s office was as austere as he was. It contained a desk overlooking the Yard, a bookshelf, three wooden-legged chairs . . . and on that afternoon, it also contained Dorothy’s wooden-legged nephew.
“Heywood!” she said. “What a surprise.”
He was standing to greet her, and doing it with only slightly more wobble than Grandfather Caleb on his wooden foot.
Eliot said, “Your note mentioned ‘a small gift of majestic proportion.’ Hoping that it is more generosity for Memorial Hall, I invited a member of the Committee of Seventy, one of seventy veterans who are building us the great monument.”
“I’ve already made a contribution,” said Dorothy, regaining her composure and taking a seat. “I expected a private conversation.”
“Well”—Heywood puffed up his long mustaches—“if you’d prefer that I leave—”
Dorothy motioned for him to sit again. “Now that you’re the father of a little girl, you should hear what I have to say.”
“How may I be of service, Mrs. Warren?” Eliot folded his hands on his desk.
And with all the blunt force she could muster, Dorothy said, “Commit to educating Heywood’s daughter as you would his son.”
“Now, Dorothy,” said Heywood, “President Eliot is too busy for this.”
Dorothy looked at Eliot. “Are you, Mr. President?”
Eliot raised his chin. He wore glasses and bushy sideburns, which few people noticed until they had glanced at the birthmark that ran down the right side of his face. It began at his hairline and ended at his upper lip, and even when he was listening impassively, it seemed to give him an intimidating air of disapproval.
Heywood said, “We’ve been discussing Harvard’s brave young men . . . and you reduce the conversation to this.”
“I reduce it to its simplest terms,” she said. “If our young women are educated, they may learn to avert wars. Then we won’t need memorials to our young men.”
“Mrs. Warren”—Eliot’s voice conveyed calm authority and, as Holmes once said, all the decorum of a house with a corpse in it—“practical, not theoretical, considerations must determine the policy of the university.”
“So they must,” she answered. “And the enlistment of one half of humanity in the great work of the other half is a purely practical consideration, I would say.”
“We do our best,” said Eliot.
“You educate five hundred and sixty young men, including”—Dorothy took a small notebook from her purse and glanced at it—“by my count, seven Catholics, three Jews, and a Negro graduated in the Class of ’Seventy. But no women.”
“Do not forget,” said Eliot, “we offered lectures to enrich women in pursuit of the one learned profession to which they’ve acquired clear title: teaching.”
“What teacher has time for an afternoon lecture series?” she asked. “Especially when it costs a hundred and fifty dollars, the equivalent of a Harvard tuition, yet offers no degree? Small wonder that neither Emerson intoning on the history of the intellect nor Howells expostulating on Italian literature could draw a crowd.”
“The experiment proved the hypothesis, then,” said Eliot. “This is not the time to be educating women at Harvard, no matter how many ‘small gifts of majestic proportion’ may be offered. Our principles are not for sale.”
“But you
are
interested?” said Dorothy. “In the gift, I mean.”
“Mr. President,” explained Heywood, “Lydia Wedge Townsend offered a mythical gift to President Quincy at the Bicentenary. My father often told of how embarrassed the family was at the scene she made that night.”
“Your father embarrassed too easily,” said Dorothy.
Eliot stood, as if he had no time for familial bickering. “George Wedge Jr. was a good friend to the college. He did great service in raising funds for the library. He understood the true meaning of aristocracy and passed it on to his son.”
Heywood gave the president an appreciative nod. Among gentlemen, certain gestures were universally understood—a slight inclination of the head, a small smile, a wordless expression of assent or approval.
Dorothy felt as if she were in a club rather than in the president’s office.
Eliot went on. “We seek to build more than an aristocracy of inherited wealth or affectation of manners here.”
“Ah, yes”—Dorothy recited the words that George Jr. had spoken often—“‘If America must have an aristocracy, let it be born in the bower of our own good breeding, good learning, good faith, and hardheaded business sense.’”
“You remember it well,” said Heywood.
“I prefer to remember what President Eliot said in his inauguration . . . that Harvard is ‘intensely American in affection, intensely democratic in temper.’”
“Democratic, yes”—Eliot glanced at the clock—“but Harvard’s sons must stand firmest for public honor in peace, and in war they must be first into the murderous thickets. That’s the work of a true aristocracy. Your family has always understood it.”
“If the sons are joined by the
daughters,
” she answered, “we can do even more.”
Eliot picked up his tall hat and gloves. “I’m afraid we must continue this at another time, Mrs. Warren. Unless your nephew offers you a ride back to Boston.”
Heywood laughed nervously. “That means twenty or thirty minutes more with my aunt complaining in your ear, sir.”
“Stimulating conversation is never complaining,” said Eliot.
“In that case”—Heywood turned to Dorothy—“allow me to offer you a ride. The president and I are bound for the office of the college treasurer.”
“Yes,” said Eliot. “We’re off to visit Harvard’s money.”
The Wedge carriage went by way of Harvard Street. Any who gave it a glance would have seen a burly Irish footman at the reins, then heard a female voice counterpointed by the muffled bass mutterings of two males repeating, “Yes . . . perhaps . . . hmmm . . . yes . . . yes,” until the famous Eliot birthmark flashed by, the voices receded, and the carriage clattered on.
But the woman never stopped talking, because on that day, she had felt the energy of expansion everywhere—before Memorial Hall, monument to past glory and bright future; in Eliot’s office, where that future was planned; on the elm-lined avenues of Cambridge, now a town far grander than the quiet academic village of her childhood; and on the West Boston Bridge, with the city rising before her, a living, breathing brick-and-granite creature of capitalism. How, in the midst of such energy, had she remained grief-stricken and silent for so long? She owed it to those who had gone before her never to be silent again.
As they passed Massachusetts General Hospital, Heywood instructed his driver to stop first at the office of Harvard’s treasurer, on State Street. Dorothy’s talking had so plainly exhausted him that he couldn’t get out of his own carriage fast enough.
But Eliot stepped out slowly, looked back, and doffed his hat. “Thank you, Mrs. Warren, for a marvelous monologue.”
“You’ll hear more,” she said. “For I intend someday to bestow Lydia’s gift.”
“You would do us all a favor,” said Heywood, “if you told us what it was.”
“I shall tell you when I know, which will be when Harvard educates women.”
“We all wait breathlessly,” said Heywood.
“I know that you have allies,” said Eliot. “Tell Mrs. Agassiz that I agree with you. Together we shall arrive at a solution. If not in the immediate future, in good time.”
Dorothy no longer lived on Colonnade Row, which had fallen to the creature of capitalism. Like most who had lived there, she had moved to the Back Bay, the fashionable neighborhood built on landfill expanding over the Charles River estuary. She lived on the first block of Marlborough Street, in a four-story brownstone that some said was too large for a fifty-five-year-old widow and her domestics.
As she alighted, she took the footman’s hand for support and thanked him. As she started up the walk, she heard these words: “I knew your son.”
She turned and looked the Irishman up and down. “You knew Douglass? Where?”
“In the Twentieth, ma’am. I carried him from the field at Antietam.”
She put a hand on his arm, more to keep her balance than as a gesture of affection. “You saw my Douglass on the day that he died?”
“Never’s the man died more bravely,” said Dan Callahan.
“Why, in all the years that you’ve driven this carriage, have you not told me?”
“Well, you been wearin’ widow’s weeds so long, announcin’ how sad you were, I didn’t think it was my place to make you sadder by talkin’ about him.”
“But . . . but news like this—”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
With the same bluntness she had used on Eliot, she said, “My son was gutshot.”
“Yes, ma’am. Gutshot it was.”
“And a man suffers greatly with such a wound. Does he not?”
“He was a brave one, ma’am, brave on the field, brave in the hospital, too.”
“Brave . . . yes.” She started to walk into the house. Then she stopped and said to him, “Did he have any last words for me? Did he give you anything to bring home?”
“Nothin’ . . . nothin’ to send to you,” answered Dan Callahan, “but he said to tell you that . . . that he loved you.”
“He loved me . . . yes. Thank you.” And she shook her head. “An Irishman.”
“What do you mean, ma’am?”
“Who would believe that the last friendly eyes my son would see would belong to an Irishman?” And she went into the house.
Driving back to State Street, Dan Callahan felt relieved that he had finally revealed himself to Mrs. Warren, worried that Mr. Wedge might find out, and guilty that he hadn’t offered her the truth about the locket. He felt angry, too, because in Boston, old prejudices died hard, even among ladies like Mrs. Warren.
She had campaigned most of her life to free the slaves, she had just spent half an hour lecturing the president of Harvard himself on the rights of women, but she still had that old Yankee blind spot: No dogs or Irish need apply.
A strange organ, the human mind, that it could hold such contradictory thoughts: it was all right to free darkies or educate flighty girls, but the thought that an Irishman could have carried your son from the battlefield was enough to give you the vapors.
Dan’s mother had warned him about such things, just as she had warned him that if he did not speak to Mrs. Warren about her son right away, he should not speak at all, for doing so later would only raise her suspicions.
He had never felt compelled to speak to Amelia, for her happiness with Mr. Wedge was plain. But every mother should know if her son showed courage in his final moment. By telling Mrs. Warren that truth at least, Dan had lifted a weight from himself. It was too late to tell the truth about the locket, however, because the locket now belonged to his wife.
Dorothy Wedge Warren did not give Dan Callahan a second thought. She could not have imagined how deeply she had insulted him. The truth was that those Irish she had known, whether in service or in chance meetings between one social class and another, seemed incapable of noticing when they had been insulted.
She went into her house, dropped her hat and shawl on a chair, and called for tea. Then she went upstairs, to her writing desk, which she had placed in a bay window so that she could look east toward the Public Garden, west toward the marshlands disappearing under the landfill.
She picked up the framed photograph that she kept on the desk—her brave young lieutenant in his uniform—and she began to cry. She had cried for a time when her father died, and for a time longer when her husband died. But she had cried for her son every day for a decade, and she dreamed of him every night, of the sweet child drawing pictures at her desk while she wrote letters, of the gangly boy growing faster than clothes could be bought, of the serious young man going off to Harvard, of the serious young soldier going off to war.
ii
Dan Callahan would have preferred to live in a home of his own, no matter how humble, for he was a proud man. But the Wedges insisted that their footman live in the servants’ quarters, because a man with one leg had particular need of a footman.
So Dan cared for the Wedge horses, while his wife, Alice, became the Wedge cook. The Callahan couple had one day off a week and time for mass on Sunday. They shared a warm bed in a room off the kitchen of the Wedge bowfront on Louisburg Square. They saved a few dollars each month. And they dreamed of having a son who might someday take another step up the ladder of Boston respectability, one whose son after him might climb all the way to Harvard College.
They knew that it was only a dream. But on cold nights, as they performed love’s labors, the dream enhanced their pleasure. Dan would unbutton the front of his union suit and Alice would push up her nightgown. And in the intimate dark, beneath the blankets, they would dream as one, and for a few moments, there would be no reality but their dream and no sound but their movement.
On one particularly chilly Saturday night in November, their dream was so loud that they did not even hear the thumping of a wooden leg on the kitchen floor or the pounding on their bedroom door, and it was not until they were finished that they heard the voice of Heywood Wedge: “Dan, get up! Boston’s on fire!”