The room was typical for Hollis. It was huge, and what a view. The back windows looked out on Holden Chapel and Harvard Hall, eighteenth-century Harvard. The window by Jimmy’s bed gave him a view all the way to the tower of Memorial Hall, built in the nineteenth century, magnificently restored in the late twentieth.
Peter tried to stay cool about it all. He didn’t want to embarrass the kid. But how could anyone get any work done with so much to look at? But how could anyone want to do anything but work, considering how much knowledge there was in that course catalog that was splayed open on James Wilson’s bed?
He envied those kids, but he didn’t say so.
“Any advice, Dad?” asked Jimmy.
Peter knew his son was just looking for a way to ease Dad out. He understood. Who’d want Dad around when you had all these new people to get to know?
So Peter said, “When you’re done in four years, you should feel satisfied, and mature, and well taught, but most important, you should feel tired.”
“Tired?”
“Burn the candle at both ends. Never tell yourself there’s no time to direct a play or sing in a choral group or play rugby. Take a course in gene-splitting if you’re an English major. If you major in biology, take a course in short-story writing. Study Chinese. Learn statistics. Get drunk at least once.”
The boys laughed at that.
“But remember university policy against drugs.”
That said, he shook both their hands and left. On the second floor, he passed a pretty girl going into a room. Hollis was a coed dorm, as all the housing at Harvard was coed. He wondered what Charles William Eliot or Cotton Mather would think of that, or better yet, Mrs. Agassiz.
Outside, he stopped for a moment and took it all in. The older he got, the more sacred this space felt to him. It had been here, literally, since the beginning.
He walked past the old college pump and made for John Harvard’s statue.
Evangeline was waiting for him there in the gathering dusk.
“I’m starving,” he said.
“Me, too.” She had an envelope under her arm.
“What’s in that?”
“A couple of things I found in the back of the first family Bible, the one from the 1600s. Katharine Nicholson Howell’s Bible.” She gave Peter the envelope. He opened it. Inside were two pieces of paper. The first that he pulled out was an ancient copy of
Quaestiones.
“Wow,” he said. “This looks like it’s from the first Harvard commencement. The program of disputations. This could be worth a lot of money, Evangeline.”
“Look at the other thing.”
He carefully slid the
Quaestiones
back into the envelope and pulled out a small sheet of paper in exquisite condition, with not a tear or watermark. It was signed at the bottom by Charles Nicholson, June 5, 1638. “I hereby swear, as a Freeman of the Colony of Massachusetts . . .”
“My God,” said Peter after he had read a bit more. “Do you know what this is?”
“No. What?”
“The Holy Grail of American antiquaria. The Oath of a Freeman. The first document printed in the New World. Printed on the first printing press, printed right here in Cambridge.”
After a moment she said, “How much?”
“Evangeline,” he said. “You can’t put a price on something priceless.”
“Try.”
“Three million . . . maybe more. Do you want to sell it?”
“If you want to broker the sale.” She slipped her arm into his.
After a moment, he kissed her. “I guess now I can pay that Harvard tuition. We’d better get this to someplace safe.”
Arm-in-arm, they started across the Yard.
After a moment, Peter said, “Do you hear them?”
“The voices?”
“They’re always loudest at dusk,” he said. “The Yard echoes with them.”
She looked at all the kids carrying suitcases and cartons into the dorms. “I wonder if these freshmen hear them.”
“Not yet,” said Peter. “But they will. They will.”
And from his pedestal, John Harvard watched them go.