The Adored (18 page)

Attending public schools in Cambridge, Arthur did particularly well. He excelled in math and physics and won one of two scholarships that MIT gave every year to students from the city that housed them. MIT sought the goodwill of the citizens of Cambridge as it constantly battled with the city manager over its fair share contribution for the services the city provided; besides a couple of scholarships annually would not dilute the genius pool that attended the esteemed science school. In the case of Arthur Trout, there was no dilution. He added to the genius pool. His contributions in materials science were significant enough that he stayed to earn his masters and PHD and later became a guest lecturer. He, along with the department of material science, patented several innovations for developing solar panels and modules. With one professor and two other graduate students, he founded Trout Solar Systems. The arrangement worked wonderfully for the school since they received royalties from the patents. The professor, an Indian by the name of Rajit Singh, remained at the school, and the free flow of ideas from theory to practice aided both the school and the company.

Trout Solar was an early player in the war heating up for alternative sources of energy. Arthur Trout sat on several presidential commissions and became a trusted advisor to the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate who was one of Trout senior’s closest friends.

The Cambridge that Arthur Trout grew up in was the Cambridge that Winston Trout grew to love. Father and son would drive by the old pool hall with Arthur imitating old Tom Lynch.

In the winter when they visited, they would take their ice skates, hockey sticks and play one-on-one hockey on the Cambridge common as Arthur did when he grew up. Arthur found it wonderful that the Cambridge Fire Department still hosed down the softball field and made it into the same rink he remembered. The Trouts would always stay at the Sheraton Commander Hotel, just across the street from the common, in back of Harvard Square. It was where Arthur had been staying for twenty years whenever he returned to lecture or work at MIT. The Commander was named for George Washington, Commander of the Continental Army, who took over the army across the street in the common. The hotel was approaching its ninetieth birthday, and it still retained the charm of a boutique European hotel. The Guleserian family had been running the Commander as far back as Arthur could remember and maintained in a quiet luxury that constantly brought former guests back. All of the top law firms still recruited at Harvard Law School out of the hotel’s guest rooms, and almost annually Al Gore would come in to help recruit a hot young law student for a favorite firm.

Kathy, Arthur, and Winston enjoyed the intimacy of Harvard Square, its book stores, diversity of restaurants, and on the summer evenings, all those wonderful music groups playing on every corner in the Square. On Sundays the City closes Memorial Drive, the road winding along the Charles River, just east of the square. When the Trouts were coming to Cambridge in the summer, they attached the bike rack to the Mercedes wagon and brought along three bikes to ride for several miles along the Drive.

Kathy Trout, who Arthur met at a mixer for Wellesley girls and MIT boys while both were in their senior year, would tell Arthur that if they ever were to move from Greenwich, CT, where they moved after setting up their company headquarters in New York City, the only acceptable place would be Cambridge. Arthur understood, and he appreciated that Kathy had adopted the city of his youth as well.

One particular Sunday, around the time Winston was graduating from MIT, the family took their bike ride and ended up by the Weeks footbridge, an ancient connection over the Charles River between Harvard College in Cambridge and Harvard Business School in Allston. A sizeable painting of the bridge hung in the Trout home, and it was one of those reminders of Cambridge that was always around. As they parked their bikes by the bridge and sat on the grass nearby, Arthur told his son of a time when, as a seventeen-year-old Cambridge High & Latin School student, he would regularly come to this almost-exact spot on Friday nights with his friends Terry and Junior and drink quarts of Knickerbocker beer.

“But on this particular night we had Ace and the Cosgrove brothers, Jackie and Donnie with us. It was around eleven, and we were all a little high and right behind us on Memorial Drive a police car pulls up. We took off across the bridge like a shot. Going across the bridge we dropped the quart bottles, and they shattered all over the place. We got to the other side, and there were two more police cars waiting for us there,” Arthur said smiling.

“Have I heard this story?” Kathy kidded Arthur.

“Go on, Dad,” Winston said.

“Well, they were MDC police. They handle all of the parkways around Boston, MDC, Metropolitan District Commission. Anyway, they took us all down to their station, which is right past MIT at Lechmere Square. Turns out they knew most of our fathers. The Cosgrove’s father and my father worked for the city. The police said they could call our parents to come and get us. With that Jackie Cosgrove starts begging, “Please, do not call my father, he’ll kill me.” So one of the officers who took us in says, “I have an idea, Sarge,” and he talks to the sergeant. “OK,” the sergeant says, “we can call your parents or you can go back to the bridge with the officers and sweep up all the broken glass you left there.” It was a good option. The bridge was spotless when we finished, and Friday nights by the river came to a halt.”

Winston was laughing, and even though she had heard it before, Kathy Trout still smiled at her husband’s youthful adventures.

“Well, go on, finish the story,” Kathy offered up.

“There’s more? Come on, Dad, out with it.” Winston challenged his father.

“Well, this part is tame. After graduating and when I first started coming back to work on developing the company, I would stay at the Commander. They always gave me the same room, really a suite, with a bedroom and a living room. In the living room hung a picture of the Weeks Bridge. So whenever I looked up, there was the reminder of my misspent youth.”

“Just like we have a picture of the bridge at home.” Winston exclaimed.

“The exact picture we have at home.” Arthur said.

“What do you mean?”

“I guess I had been staying here eight or ten nights a month for three years and got to know the owners, the Guleserians, pretty well. They would give me their season tickets to the Red Sox games from time to time. You remember those good seats behind the plate?” he said to Winston.

“The best.”

“Compliments of my host. Anyway, when I knew we would not be staying here as much in the future, I went down to see the father and son a few days before returning home. And I told them the Friday night tale of the Weeks Bridge. Two days later as I was checking out, Michael Guleserian meets me at the front desk with the painting that had been in my room for those years and gives it to me as a gift.”

“No way. That’s how you got that painting?” And when Arthur nodded with Kathy smiling, a now laughing Winston said, “That’s cool.”

Arthur taught Winston mathematics and physics and materials science right alongside his high school teachers. And the younger Trout wrestled to grasp new ideas and concepts that his father was encouraging him to learn. And he did learn. As he grew there was never a question that the young man would go into his father’s business. Winston knew the company as well as anyone in the firm. He spent his summers working there; he did his internships with his father, except for one year, his junior year.

That was the only year, the only summer he waivered. During the course of the school year, he had been working on a project called “the vessel.” He talked with his father about it during the spring break, before the end of the school year and the time he was to begin the internship with his father. He wanted to pursue his work a little further but was afraid to disappoint his father. Arthur Trout could tell it was a tough conversation for him.

To listen to Winston talk, his eyes focused, you could see his mind working behind his eyes. He talked rapidly; so fast in fact, it was difficult to understand him. You needed to listen with your mind to what he was saying. The father could see the intelligence on his face, an intelligence that surpassed his own. Winston’s face, with many parts, worked as one, his eyes moving, thinking, the lips were saying what the eyes were seeing in the mind. And the hands joined in, punching the air for emphasis, like a conductor. There was tension behind the thinking. You could feel its tightness. He lived in his science.

“So,” his father began, “this vessel heats plasma, and as the temperature rises it becomes less stable, right?” Arthur asked his son, wanting to understand. “Well, how hot are you getting it?”

“We’re taking it to the temperature of the sun. It gets that hot. But only for one and a half seconds then it starts vibrating and rattling and we need to shut it down.”

“What’s the purpose of the vessel; what are they ultimately trying to do with it?”

“Solve the energy crisis,” Winston said flatly.

Arthur Trout sat back. He thought for a second and said, “Then you should follow your instincts. You’ll be trying to do the same thing we’re working on at the company with solar, only you are thinking of a much greater scale. It sounds like incrementalism, yes?”

“Certainly, in the next ten years we’ll be lucky enough to get it to stay stable for eight or nine seconds. The department has been working on it for fifteen years.”

“So make your contribution. We’ll wait for you.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Winston volunteered. And he was genuinely glad that his father gave him the opportunity that summer. Not so much for his incremental contribution, which was significant, but for another opportunity that occurred.

The big boat lumbered across the line. It was the third time in two weeks that it finished third behind Harvard and Boston University in practice runs for the Head of the Charles Regatta that would take place at the beginning of October. It was Winston Trout’s final year of eligibility for crew, having begun rowing only in his senior year at MIT. This was a big race, and it drew hundreds along the Charles River, which was nothing compared to the thousands who would line the banks of the river and mob the bridges in the fall.

As the eight men fell back in exhaustion, pushed to their limits by the prodding and pounding of their ninety-six-pound freshman cox, they passed under the Weeks Bridge. Winston smiled. When the boat emerged from the other side, something hit his leg. It was a necklace of some sort. He looked up and saw a smiling, pretty girl looking down. “Sorry,” she said. Adding, “Can I have it back?” as the boat continued to move.

“Yes,” he hollered, “MIT boat house. Just after the BU Bridge on the Cambridge side.”

She had a puzzled look on her face, and then called back, “I’ll find it.”

“One hour,” he yelled back as the boat moved further up the river guided by two rowers as the others recovered. He watched as she walked her bicycle off the bridge. She rode along Memorial Drive beside the boat, looking out at the rowers for a while until the boat turned and started downstream towards Boston.

The girl on the bike stopped, turned around and continued riding along the Drive beside the boat. “Catch Winston guys. He can’t take his eyes off his new admirer.”

“It’s the other way around,” Trout laughed. “She can’t stop looking at these pipes,” and he flexed his muscles in a pose that the girl on the bike noticed. The rest of the crew laughed. She smiled sensing somehow that she was being made fun of.

When the “eight” arrived at the boat house, Winston looked around for the girl on the bike to return her necklace, a plain gold chain with an intricate Murano design in a circular pendant. He thought it expensive, but she was nowhere in sight.

After showering he emerged from the boat house, and the necklace’s owner was sitting on the grass with her bike beside her. She popped up, and it was then that her features became clear to Winston. She had medium length brown hair that had a bright shine to it, like it had just been washed. It was pulled back in a ponytail. The hair began where, skin as smooth as he had ever seen, stopped. She smiled at him with almost opaque and yet bright white teeth, perfectly aligned from the brace years. Her eyes smiled along with her mouth; they were hazel.

Winston hung the necklace from his outstretched hand. As she reached for it, he pulled it back. “Not so fast, how do I know this is yours. Do you have any identification that says you are the owner?”

Smiling, she answered, “No, kind, sir. But you will know it is mine, once you see it on me.”

Her voice he found was feminine, her words lilting, rolling off her tongue in a way both playful and mature. “Emily Albright,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Winston Trout. I’m pleased to meet you,” and he was. He could not take his eyes from the picture of loveliness that stood before him in jeans, a white blouse and sandals. Again he held the necklace out, this time in both hands. “May I?” he offered in a gesture she found reassuring, and she turned her back to him so he could put it on her.

As he put the necklace over her head, his hand brushed the top of her head. “Sorry,” he said, now taking in her sweet scent, now brushing her shoulder with his arm, and now fearful that this encounter could end, he dropped one end of the chain across the front of her blouse.