Lost and Wanted(21)

There was an Amen, and then I patted Jack on the shoulder and walked up the side aisle to the pulpit. The chaplain made way for me, a scientist and a nonbeliever. I looked at the faces and tried to keep Charlie in my mind; it normally helps me to remember that speeches only last a short time, and you always feel that you could do a better job, if you had it to do over again. There were Adelaide and Carl in the front row. Charlie’s father was crying, making no attempt to hide it: his son’s speech had moved him. But Addie’s face was more upsetting; in place of her earlier composure was a fierce tension—she was almost vibrating. Behind her Terrence was bent over Simmi, buried in his chest; I couldn’t see either of their faces. Don’t think of losing Jack, I told myself—don’t think of that.

    I was glad I’d chosen something lighthearted to say. It was a story about the time Charlie had made a plane turn around. This really happened. We were on our way to New York for a graduation party. Not only would I never have flown anywhere for a party except under Charlie’s influence, but I would have always allowed enough time at the airport to make missing a flight impossible. Because I was with Charlie, we were late, and when we arrived the plane had just begun to taxi away from the gate. Charlie burst into tears, and to my amazement, told the ground crew behind the desk that if she didn’t get on the plane, she was going to miss her grandmother Althea’s funeral, at Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

The point of the story was Charlie’s unbelievable chutzpah, her skill as an actress, and the joke in the reference to Charlie’s grandmother Althea, who had been very much alive then, on an Elderhostel cruise down the Peruvian Amazon with her new boyfriend, Chester. I had been concerned that the story was slightly transgressive—the lie, the pushiness—but I had gotten the tone right and it had more than gone over. I saw Charlie’s father laughing, and even Addie seemed to have relaxed a bit. Jack hadn’t heard a word of what I’d said, but at least he was quiet, and I had only a few sentences to go.

It was at that moment that I noticed someone had come into the narthex; maybe he’d been standing there, a silhouette against the wall, and the usher had taken the opportunity to seat him during the pause in my remarks. It wasn’t a disruption because he didn’t make any noise. Possibly no one saw him come in but the usher and me. Now he sat down in the last pew, in the sunlight streaming through an arched picture window: Professor Pope.

I’m rarely at a loss in front of an audience. I’ve said foolish things, not-thought-out things—but never nothing. In this case the congregated guests must have attributed my sudden hesitation to strong emotion. In fact, that wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t believe that he could simply walk into the church and sit down, uninvited, that rather than questioning his connection to the proceedings, the usher had hurried to find him a place. He was looking at me along with everyone else, but only because I was speaking. He wouldn’t remember who I was.

    Afterward I thought of what I might have said to call him out, without disrupting the ceremony. I could have said that Charlie learned how to survive in Hollywood here at Harvard, where racism and sexism were enshrined in ways equally difficult to disrupt. I could have talked about her unfinished thesis, “Dramatic Liaisons: Reflection and Refraction in Twentieth-Century Stagings of Choderlos de Laclos,” and said that when she most needed a mentor, Harvard’s distinguished faculty had failed her. The memorial was invitation-only, but Widener Library opened at ten o’clock. Since it was now quarter to eleven, it was entirely possible that an interloper might have walked down the stone steps of that historic building, from one of its most coveted offices on the top floor—a perk of his distinguished chair—before crossing the Yard, a distance of perhaps five hundred feet, to the church. Pope nearly eighty, Charlie forty-five. Pope alive, Charlie dead.

In the end I said only what I’d planned, that Charlie had an imagination and a will like no one I’d ever met, that when she wanted something, it seemed she was able to shift the ground in front of her. That no one who had met her could have ever forgotten her. That was all true of Charlie, but I had to struggle while I said it not to look at the man in the back, whose presence had made me stumble.

Then I left the pulpit. The chaplain stepped forward and asked everyone to please rise for…some hymn. I returned to the pew, took my phone from Jack, and showed him the page in the book. He was interested in where the music was coming from, and because I had turned around to show him the organ, I couldn’t resist looking again.

Pope looked older at this distance, thinner and slightly stooped. His hair was still thick and full, but now pure white. No one could consider him a threat, and yet there was his hand, the color of putty, lifting the crimson hymnal from its place behind the pew. His hand could grip the book, his legs could raise his body up—those powers remained to him, while all that was left of my friend was empty space.





13.


Space, as I like to tell Jack, is anything but empty. Four years after I went to California to see Charlie, and to talk about the Large Hadron Collider’s debut at CERN, the physicists there had a triumphant success. Scientists had been looking for the Higgs boson since Peter Higgs’s team had theorized its existence in 1964, but the particle remained elusive. When evidence for the Higgs appeared in the new Collider at CERN, it was widely celebrated as the first groundbreaking advance in the physics of the new century. Neel’s efforts to record gravitational waves were just as important, but at that time, the LIGO collaboration had come up with nothing.