Lost and Wanted(89)

    “Charlie told me about that.” I didn’t say that she’d been angry at Trisha for giving those girls her name. “She said later that she was sorry she hadn’t joined them. But this part’s off the record, right?”

“By its very nature,” Patricia said. She paused for a long moment, and I thought that maybe she was going to revise what she’d said; maybe something had actually happened to her, with Pope.

“She must have told you what I said?”

“About him?”

“Yes, but I mean what I said years ago—to her.”

“She said you told her she’d go far.”

Patricia laughed bitterly. “What I said was, ‘You’re going to go far, because you’re the type of black person white people like.’?”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“She didn’t tell you that part?”

“No.”

“I guess she wouldn’t have. Anyway, I’ve always felt bad about it. My radical period—but that’s no excuse.”

“I think Charlie might have wondered if she should’ve stuck it out, gone into academia after all,” I said.

“I wish I could’ve relieved her mind about that.”

There was a silence, in which I thought that we had gotten deeper into this conversation than either of us had expected, and were now unsure how to extricate ourselves.

“I think there was a lot I didn’t understand about the pressure she was under,” I said.

“No,” Patricia said. She was generous but definitive. “You couldn’t.”





2.


On a Wednesday afternoon at the very end of January, I went to Harvard. The purpose was ostensibly to meet a fellow in Laura Bergstrom’s lab, who was interested in collaborating with my postdoc Bence. I’d scheduled the meeting at two o’clock on purpose, and I excused myself a little before three, leaving Bence and Peter talking excitedly in Hungarian about a home-built scanning probe microscope.

    I walked from Laura’s lab to the yard, past Memorial Church, just as the bells were ringing. It was overcast and cold. A group of prospective undergraduates were huddled together in front of the library’s neoclassical fa?ade, listening to a chipper student guide telling the story of the unfortunate Harry Elkins Widener, a member of the class of ’07 who had perished on the Titanic. In her grief, his mother had commissioned the famous library in his name.

My MIT faculty ID was sufficient for the guard at the desk. We had interlibrary privileges, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t been in Widener since I was an undergraduate myself. I made my way up the marble staircase to the third floor, where everything was exactly as I remembered it. Even the massive wooden card catalogs were still there, each topped with a cardboard placard—something that would have to be replaced periodically—signposting its contents: H–J, K–M, etc. Was it possible that anyone still used them?

Once you were out of sight of the staircase, the marble flooring became brown linoleum. The linoleum was very clean, reflecting the light from an unnecessary number of globular ceiling fixtures, so the effect was of a beam traveling down a narrow passage. The silence and the absence of people, the symmetrical pairs of doors, gave the corridor a dreamlike quality. The doors didn’t seem to have nameplates—possibly they were shared, or changed hands frequently—and I might have missed Pope’s office if he hadn’t affixed his own name, neatly typed on a folded square of paper, underneath a window of reinforced chicken-wire glass. The window was obscured by a shirred white cotton curtain, and the door was slightly ajar. You couldn’t see whether anyone was inside.

But Pope had heard me. “Come in,” he instructed, as if he’d been waiting.

He looked, sitting at his desk, less aged than he had in the church. He was wearing a casual, dark gray Oxford shirt without a jacket, and his thick white hair was styled in the way I remembered, curling around his collar.

“You’re not Catherine,” he said. “Are you?”

I introduced myself, and Pope’s whole manner changed. From a slightly aggravated professor conducting mandatory office hours, he became an eager student himself, almost boyish. He stood up and took my hand.

    “I read your book on black holes last year—wonderful! So much science writing is either overwrought or relentlessly technical. I actually thought of getting in touch at the time. Are you still at MIT?”

I said that I was, and that I’d been an undergraduate at Harvard in the early nineties, then returned as a postdoc four years later. Did he remember me?

“I was especially interested in the historical component—the idea that black holes were just too radical for early twentieth-century physicists to countenance.”

I was momentarily taken aback. A conversation about the history of science was the last thing I’d expected.

“I hadn’t realized that even Einstein doubted their existence.”

“He didn’t doubt their existence mathematically, only that such an object could be an observable reality. Now we can see them—or rather the marks they leave on the rest of the universe—all the time. I hope I made that clear.”

“You did.” Pope smiled at me. “It really is such a pleasure to meet you, Helen. I guess it’s too much to hope that you have a burning question about the French Enlightenment?”