Lost and Wanted(88)

This must happen to everyone who loses someone too early: sentences stand out with sudden clarity, take on retrospective meaning. There are turning points that might have been taken, but weren’t. Of course there was no guarantee that an Oxford fellowship would have led to an academic career—Charlie could just as easily have ended up in the cutthroat world of London or New York theater. And it was only magical thinking to imagine that her disease would have manifested itself differently in a different life. But I can’t help picturing her now in a book-lined university office somewhere on the East Coast, where the sun shines at a safe, wintry distance for many months of the year, cloistered with her poetry and plays—insulated, underpaid—alive.

I couldn’t have had any of those thoughts then. Maybe my feeling of foreboding was due to the idea that we would be separated, that I wouldn’t be there to look out for her, or her for me.

“You should still think about it a little,” I said. “Don’t do anything right away.”

But it was Charlie’s style to do things right away, to completion, with very little looking back.





UNCERTAINTY





1.


A few days after Neel had walked me back to my office, talking about the rotor experiment and his wedding plans, I got a call from a Chicago number. This was in the dreary middle of January, when everyone was harried because of the resumption of classes. My sabbatical had started, but I was in the office anyway, reading Jim’s thesis on magnetic fields in the early universe, and how they might have influenced the ultraviolet Lyman-alpha radiation our satellites observe today. I knew Neel was in Chicago for his parents’ party; when the phone rang from that area code, I thought for a moment it might be him.

Instead it was a woman’s voice. She gave me her name, said I didn’t know her, but that she was class of ’92, and she’d been asked to write an article for Harvard Magazine about my friend Charlotte Boyce. Her name—Patricia Young—sounded familiar, although I couldn’t place it at first.

“The magazine ran an obituary when it happened. This is different—more of a profile.” The woman sounded tentative. “I should talk to her family as well.”

“I can connect you.”

“That would be great. Or, you know, ‘great.’ I think I’m the last person she would have wanted. I told them they should look for someone out in L.A., but they said they needed it right away. Do you know Kwesi? He suggested me.”

“I’m sure she’d be glad you were doing it.”

“Really?”

I googled Patricia while we were talking: she was a professor in the History Department at U of C.

I told her the kind of things I thought might be appropriate for an article in a university magazine: about the show Charlie wanted to create, and her frustrations with the diversity-staffing programs in Hollywood. I told her what Charlie had said about having more women in positions of power.

Patricia sighed. “That’s right—that’s what I tell my students, too. Maybe you do the same thing in your field. But then, do you ever feel like you’re selling them a bill of goods?”

    “Sometimes.”

“I want them to be ambitious. But then you get here—the University of Chicago, Berkeley, or MIT, or wherever—and you’re the go-to person. An accomplished black woman has died? I write about her. Someone needs to speak to lawyers, or bankers, or tech company executives about the history of affirmative action? That’s me. You should see the shelf of awards I’ve collected. And then there’s this low-level resentment from my colleagues, right? Who also, by the way, want to co-create courses with me, because there are a lot of popular courses these days that need a black faculty member in order to have any kind of credibility. I’m the only black woman with tenure in this department.”

“We have three tenured women in my department, total.”

“Any black women?”

“No—two are white and one’s Indian.”

“Black men?”

“One. He’s in the ‘career development’ program, with the five nontenured women.”

Patricia laughed. “Right. And you know how many recommendation letters I’m supposed to be writing right now? Eighteen. I’m doing mine, and the letters for one of my colleagues—I insisted on doing hers, because she’s on bed rest for anxiety and exhaustion. We actually do have a lot of young black women who want to go to graduate school in this field—which is terrific. I’ve got to do a great job on those letters for them, because the only answer is more of us. But the question is, what am I signing them up for?”

That was when I remembered: “You’re Trisha Young.”

“Oh—yeah. I went by Trisha then.”

“You were friends with Kwesi, and you knew Charlie from the BSA.”

She laughed. “You just remembered me.”

“It took me a minute.” I hesitated. “Charlie told me you warned her about—” I used his real name.

Patricia got serious. “Oh god, yes,” she said. “He’s not still around?”

“Not teaching,” I said. “But he still has his office. Did you have problems with him, too?”

“No,” Patricia said. “No, but I didn’t look like Charlie, either. I had friends, though. And then later I heard those younger girls were trying to get him out.”