College days, Harvard days: the feeling of time itself changed in those early months, everything rushing past at a frenetic pace. My roommate was named Lucessi. His first name was Frank, though neither I nor anyone I knew ever used it. We were friends of a sort, thrust together by circumstances. I had expected everyone at the college to be some version of the fellow I'd met at the Burger Cottage, with a quick-talking social intelligence and an aristocrat's knowledge of local practices, but, in fact, Lucessi was more typical: weirdly smart, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, hardly the winner of any prizes for physical attractiveness or personal hygiene, his personality laden with tics. He had a big, soft body, like a poorly filled stuffed animal's, large damp hands he had no idea what to do with, and the roving, wide-eyed gaze of a paranoiac, which I thought he might be. His wardrobe was a combination of a junior accountant's and a middle schooler's: he favored high-waisted pleated pants, heavy brown dress shoes, and T-shirts emblazoned with the emblem of the New York Yankees. Within five minutes of our meeting he had explained to me that he had scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs, intended to double major in math and physics, could speak both Latin and ancient Greek (not just read: actually speak), and had once caught a home run launched from the bat of the great Reggie Jackson. I might have viewed his companionship as a burden, but I soon saw the advantages; Lucessi made me appear well-adjusted by comparison, more confident and attractive than I actually was, and I won not a few sympathy points among my dormitory neighbors for putting up with him, as one might have for tending to a farty dog. The first night we got drunk together-just a week after our arrival, at one of the countless freshman keg parties that the administration seemed content to overlook-he vomited so helplessly and at such extended duration that I spent the night making sure he didn't die.

My goal was to be a biochemist, and I wasted no time. My course load was crushing, my only relief a distribution course in art history that required little more than sitting in the dark and looking at slides of Mary and the baby Jesus in various beatific poses. (The class, a legendary refuge for science majors meeting their humanities requirement, bore the nickname "Darkness at Noon.") My scholarship was generous, but I was used to working and wanted pocket money; for ten hours a week, at a wage just above minimum, I shelved books at Widener Library, pushing a wobbly cart through a maze of stacks so isolated and byzantine that women were warned against visiting them alone. I thought the job would kill me with boredom, and for a while it nearly did, but over time I came to like it: the smell of old paper and the taste of dust; the deep hush of the place, a sanctuary of silence broken only by the squeaking wheels of my cart; the pleasant shock of pulling a book from the shelves, removing the card, and discovering that nobody had checked it out since 1936. A twinge of anthropomorphic sympathy for these underappreciated volumes often inspired me to read a page or two, so that they might feel wanted.

Was I happy? Who wouldn't be? I had friends, my studies to occupy me. I had my quiet hours in the library in which to woolgather to my heart's content. In late October, I lost my virginity to a girl I met at a party. We were both very intoxicated, didn't know each other at all, and though she didn't say as much-we barely spoke, beyond the usual preliminary blather and a brief negotiation over the mechanically baffling mechanism of her brassiere-I suspected she was a virgin, too, and that her intention was simply to get the thing done as expeditiously as possible so that she could move on to other, more satisfying encounters. I suppose I felt the same. When it was over, I left her room quickly, as if from the scene of a crime, and in four years I laid eyes on her only twice more, both times at a distance.

Yes, I was happy. My father was right: I had found my life. I dutifully telephoned every two weeks, reversing the charges, but my parents-indeed, my whole small-town Ohio childhood-began to fade from my mind, the way dreams do in the light of day. Always these calls were the same. First I would speak with my mother, who usually answered-the suggestion being that she had spent two weeks waiting by the phone-and then my father, whose jovial tone seemed contrived to remind me of his parting edict, and finally both together. I could easily imagine the scene: their faces angled close together with the receiver between them as they called out their valedictory "I love you"s and "I'm proud of you"s" and "be good"s, my father's eyes locked in an optic death grip on the clock above the kitchen sink, watching his money drain away at thirty cents a minute. Their voices aroused great feelings of tenderness in me, almost of pity, as if I were the abandoner and they the abandoned, yet I was always relieved when these calls ended, the click of the receiver releasing me back into my true existence.

Before I knew it, the leaves had turned, then fallen, their desiccated carcasses everywhere underfoot, suffusing the air with a sweet smell of decay; the week before Thanksgiving the first snow fell, my inaugural New England winter, damp and raw. It felt like one more baptism in a year of them. There had been no discussion of my returning home for the Thanksgiving break, and Ohio was too far in any case-I'd have wasted half the time on the bus-so I accepted an invitation to spend the holiday with Lucessi in the Bronx. Stupidly, I had expected a scene of Italian life straight out of Hollywood: a cramped apartment above a pizza parlor, everyone yelling and screaming at one another, his father leaking armpitty garlic sweat through his undershirt and his mustached mother, in a housecoat and slippers, throwing up her hands and wailing, "Mamma mia" every thirty seconds.

What I found couldn't have been more different. They lived in Riverdale, which, though technically the Bronx, was as tony as any neighborhood I'd ever seen, in a huge stone Tudor that looked as if it had been hijacked from the English countryside. No spaghetti and meatballs here, no household shrines to the Madonna, no arm-waving drama of any sort; the house was as stultifying as a tomb. Thanksgiving dinner was served by a Guatemalan housemaid in an aproned uniform, and afterward, everybody repaired to a room they actually called "the study," to listen to a radio broadcast of Wagner's interminable Ring cycle. Lucessi had told me that his family was in "the restaurant business" (thus the pizza parlor of my imagination), but in fact his father was chief financial officer of the restaurant division of Goldman Sachs, to whose Wall Street offices he commuted every day in a Lincoln Continental the size of a tank. I'd known that Lucessi had a younger sister; he had failed to mention that she was a bona fide Mediterranean goddess, quite possibly the most beautiful girl I'd ever laid eyes on-regally tall, with lustrous black hair, a complexion so creamy I wanted to drink it, and a habit of traipsing into a room wearing nothing more than a slip. Her name was Arianna. She was home from boarding school, someplace in Virginia where they rode horses all day, and when she wasn't lounging around in her underwear, reading magazines and eating buttered toast and talking loudly on the phone, she was striding through the house in tall riding boots and clanking spurs and tight breeches, a costume no less powerful than the slip in its ability to send the blood dumping to my loins. Arianna was completely out of my league in other words, a fact as obvious as the weather, yet she went out of her way to remind me of it, calling me "Tom" no matter how many times her brother corrected her and nailing me with looks of such dismissive contempt it was like being doused by cold water.

My final night in Riverdale, I awoke sometime after midnight to discover that I was hungry. I had been instructed to treat the house "as if it were my own"-laughably impossible-yet I knew I would not sleep unless I put something in my stomach. I slipped on a pair of sweatpants and crept downstairs to the kitchen, where I discovered Arianna at the table in a flannel bathrobe, paging through Cosmopolitan with her elegant hands and spooning cereal into her flawlessly formed, generously lipped mouth. A box of Cheerios and a gallon of milk sat on the counter. My first instinct was to retreat, but she had already noticed me, standing like an idiot in the doorway.

"Do you mind?" I asked. "I thought I'd get a snack."

Her attention had already returned to her magazine. She took a bite of cereal and gave a backhanded wave. "Do what you want."

I helped myself to a bowl. There was no place else to sit, so I joined her at the table. Even in the flannel bathrobe, her face without makeup and her hair uncombed, she was magnificent. I had no idea what to say to such a creature.

"You're looking at me," she said, turning a page.

I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. "No, I wasn't."

She said nothing more. I had no place to put my eyes, so I looked at my cereal. The crunch of my chewing seemed intensely loud.

"What are you reading?" I asked finally.

She sighed irritably, closed her magazine, and looked up. "Okay, fine. Here I am."

"I was just trying to make conversation."

"Can we not? Please? I've seen you watching me, Tim."

"So you know my name."

"Tim, Tom, whatever." She rolled her eyes. "Oh, all right. Let's get this over with."

She parted the top of her robe. Beneath it she was wearing only a bra of shimmering pink silk. The sight aroused me indescribably.

"Go on," she urged.

"Go on what?"

She was looking at me with an expression of bored mockery. "Don't be dense, Harvard boy. Here, let me help you."

She took my hand and placed it, rather mechanically, against her left breast. A magnificent breast it was! I had never touched a goddess before. Its spherical softness, sheathed in high-dollar silk with a scallop of delicate lace at the edges, filled my palm like a peach. I sensed she was making fun of me, but I hardly cared. What would happen now? Would I be permitted to kiss her?

Apparently not. As I was constructing a complete sexual narrative in my head, the wonderful things we might do together, culminating in breathy intercourse upon the kitchen floor, she abruptly pulled my hand away and let it fall on the table with the same contemptuous gesture one might use for dropping trash into a bin.

"So," she said, reopening her magazine, "did you get what you wanted? Did that satisfy you?"

I was utterly flummoxed. She turned a page, then another. What the hell had just happened?

"I don't understand you at all," I said.

"Of course you don't." She looked up again, wrinkling her nose in distaste. "Tell me something. Why are you even friends with him? I mean, all things considered, you seem sort of normal."

This was, I supposed, what passed for a compliment. It also aroused in me a fiercely protective instinct toward her brother. Who was she to talk about him like that? Who did she think she was, teasing me this way?

"You're awful," I said.

She gave a nasty little laugh. "Sticks and stones, Harvard boy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm trying to read."

And that was the end of it. I returned to bed, so sexually charged I barely slept, and in the morning, before anybody else in the house was awake, Lucessi's father drove us to the train station in his monstrous Lincoln. As we disembarked, in an awkward reversal of customary courtesy, he thanked me for coming in a manner that suggested that he, too, felt a little baffled by my friendship with his son. A picture was emerging: Lucessi was the runt of the litter, an object of family-wide pity and embarrassment. I felt profoundly sorry for him, even as I recognized his situation's similarity to my own. We were a couple of castaways, the two of us.

We boarded the train. I was exhausted and didn't feel like talking. For a while we bumped along in silence. Lucessi was the first to speak.

"Sorry about all that." He was drawing meaningless shapes on the window with his index finger. "I'm sure you were hoping for something more exciting."

I hadn't told him what happened and, of course, never would. It was also true that my anger had softened, replaced by a budding curiosity. Something altogether unexpected about the world had been glimpsed. This life his family led; I had known that such wealth existed, but that is not the same as sleeping under its roof. I felt like an explorer who'd stumbled upon a golden city in the jungle.

"Don't worry about it," I said. "I had a great time."

Lucessi sighed, settled back, and closed his eyes. "They can be the stupidest people on earth," he said.

What fascinated me, of course, was money. Not just because of the things it could buy, though these were appealing (Lucessi's sister being Exhibit A). The deeper attraction lay in something more atmospheric. I had never been around wealthy people but had not felt this as a lack; I had never been around Martians, either. There were plenty of rich kids at Harvard, of course, the ones who'd gone to exclusive prep schools and addressed each other with preposterous nicknames like "Trip" and "Beemer" and "Duck." But in day-to-day existence, their affluence was easily overlooked. We lived in the same crappy dormitories, sweated through the same papers and tests, ate the same atrocious food in the dining hall, like co-residents of a kibbutz. Or so it seemed. Visiting Lucessi's house had opened my eyes to a hidden world that lay beneath the egalitarian surface of our lives, like a system of caves under my feet. Except for Lucessi, I actually knew very little about my friends and classmates. It seems improbable to say so now, but the thought had never occurred to me that there could be something so fundamentally different about them.

In the weeks after Thanksgiving, I took clearer stock of my surroundings. There was a boy who lived down the hall whose father was the mayor of San Francisco; a girl I knew slightly, who spoke with a heavy Spanish accent, was said to be the daughter of a South American dictator; one of my lab partners had confided to me, apropos of nothing, that his family owned a summer house in France. All this information coalesced into a whole new awareness of where I was, and the thought made me incredibly self-conscious, even as I longed to learn more about it, to penetrate its social codes and see where I might fit.

Equally fascinating to me was the fact that Lucessi himself wanted nothing to do with any of it. Throughout the weekend, he had made no secret of his contempt for his sister, his parents, even the house, which he called, in typical Lucessian fashion, "an idiotic pile of rock." I attempted to draw him out on this subject but got nowhere; my overtures actually made him angry and snappish. What I had begun to discern in my roommate was the price of being too smart. He possessed an intellect capable of calculating reams of data without taking pleasure in any of it. To Lucessi, the world was a collection of interlocking systems divorced from all meaning, a surface reality governed only by itself. He could, for instance, recite the batting averages of every player on the New York Yankees, but when I asked him who his favorite was, he had no answer. The only emotion he seemed capable of was disdain for other people, though even that possessed a quality of childish bewilderment, as if he were a bored toddler in a man's body, forced to sit at the grown-ups' table and listen to incomprehensible conversations about the price of real estate and who was divorcing whom. I believe this pained him-he wasn't aware what the problem was, only that it existed-resulting in a kind of nihilistic loneliness: he both despised and envied everybody else, except for me, to whom he attributed a similar vision of the world, simply because I was always around and didn't make fun of him.

As for his unhappy fate: perhaps I didn't value him enough as a friend. Sometimes I think I might have been the only friend he ever had. And it is strange, after so many years, that from time to time my thoughts still turn to him, even though he was, after all, but a minor actor in my life. Probably it is the idleness of my circumstances that draws me to the recollection. With so many years to fill, one inevitably gets around to everything, opens each drawer of the mind to rustle around inside it. I did not know Lucessi well; no man could. Yet the failure to know a person does not rule out his importance in our lives. I wonder: how would Lucessi regard me now? Were he to wander, miraculously alive, into this prison of my own making, this becalmed memorial to things lost, ascend the marble staircase with his graceless Lucessian gait and stand before me in his clunky shoes and ill-fitting trousers and Yankees' jersey stinking of unwashed Lucessian sweat, what would he tell me? See? he might say. Now you get it, Fanning. Now you really get it, after all.

I returned to Ohio for Christmas. I was glad to be home, but mine was the exile's gladness; none of it seemed to pertain to me anymore, as if I'd been gone for years, not months. Harvard was not my home, at least not yet, but neither was Mercy, Ohio. The very idea of home, of one true place, had become odd to me.

My mother did not appear well. She had lost a great deal of weight, and her smoker's cough had worsened. A glaze of sweat appeared on her brow at the smallest exertion. I paid this little mind, accepting at face value my father's explanation that she had overdone it making ready for the holidays. I dutifully went through the sentimental motions: tree trimming and pie baking, a trip to Midnight Mass (we never attended church otherwise), opening my presents while my parents looked on-an awkward ceremony that is the bane of all only children-but my heart was nowhere in this, and I departed two days early, explaining that with exams still ahead of me, I needed to get back to my studies. (I did, but that wasn't the reason.) Just as he'd done in September, my father drove me to the station. The rains of summer had been replaced by snow and biting cold, the warm wind through open windows by a blast of desiccated air from the dashboard vents. It would have been the perfect time to say something meaningful, if either of us could have imagined what such a thing might be. When the bus pulled away, I did not look back.

About the remainder of that first year, there is not much else to say. My grades were good-better than good. Though I knew I had done well, I was still astonished to see my first-semester report with its barricade of A's, each emphatically embossed into the paper by the old-fashioned dot matrix printer. I did not use this as an opportunity to slack off but redoubled my efforts. I also, for a brief time, acquired a girlfriend, the daughter of the South American dictator. (He was actually the Argentine minister of finance.) What she saw in me I have no idea, but I wasn't going to interrogate the point. Carmen possessed a good deal more sexual experience than I did-a great deal. She was the kind of woman who used the word "lover," as in "I have taken you as my," and she applied herself to pleasure's project with greedy abandon. She was blessed with a single room, rare for a freshman, and in that hallowed precinct of draped scarves and female aromas she introduced me to what might have passed for actual, grown-up eroticism, working her way through the full menu of bodily delights, appetizers to dessert. We did not love each other-that sainted emotion still eluded me, and Carmen had little use for it-nor was she what I would call conventionally attractive. (I can say this because I wasn't, either.) She was a little heavy, and her face possessed a slightly masculine bulk around the jawline, which looked like a boxer's. But unclothed, and in the heat of passion, crying out naughty things in her Argentine-inflected Spanish, she was the most sensual creature who ever walked the earth, a fact magnified a hundred-fold by her own awareness of it.

Between these carnal escapades-Carmen and I would often race back to her room between classes for an hour of furious copulation-and my voluminous classwork and, of course, my hours at the library-time well spent replenishing myself for our next encounter-I saw less and less of Lucessi. He'd always kept odd hours, studying through the night and living on naps, but as the semester wore on, his comings and goings became more erratic. When I slept over at Carmen's, I might not see him for several days in a row. By this time I had widened my society beyond the walls of Wigglesworth to include a number of Carmen's friends, all of them far more cosmopolitan than I was. Lucessi obviously resented this, but any effort to pull him into the circle was sternly rebuffed. His hygiene took another dip; our room stank of socks and the trays of moldy food he brought back from the cafeteria and never removed. Many times I entered to find him sitting on his bed, barely dressed, muttering to himself and making odd, twitchy hand gestures, as if involved in earnest conversation with some unseen party. At bedtime-whenever he decided that was, even if it was the middle of the day-he would smear his face with a layer of acne cream as thick as a mime's makeup; he began to sleep with a scuba diver's knife in a rubber sheath strapped to his leg. (This should have disturbed me more than it did.) I worried about him, but not very much; I was simply too busy. Despite my new, more interesting circle of friends, I had always assumed that the two of us would continue to room together. At the end of the year, all freshmen entered a lottery to determine which of the Harvard houses they would live in for the next three years. This was regarded as a rite of passage as socially determinant as whom one married, and it possessed two aspects. The first was which house one sought to live in. There were twelve, each with its own reputation: the preppy house, the artsy house, the jock house, and so forth. The most desirable were the ones located along the Charles River-extremely fancy real estate for the price of an undergraduate tuition. The least were the ones in the old Radcliffe Quad, far up Garden Street. To be "quadded" was tantamount to exile, one's life forever chained to a schedule of shuttle buses that, inconveniently, stopped running long before the party had ended.

The second aspect was, of course, who would room with whom. This made for an uncomfortable few weeks as people sorted out their allegiances and prioritized their friendships. Rejecting one's freshman roommate in favor of other parties was common but no less awkward than a divorce. I considered having this very conversation with Lucessi, then found that I didn't have the heart. Who else would be willing to room with him? Who else would tolerate his quirks, his doleful personality, his unhealthful aromas? On top of which, come to think of it, nobody else had asked me. Lucessi, it seemed, was mine.

As the day of the lottery approached, I sought him out to see what he wanted to do. I told him I thought we might go in for Winthrop House, or else Lowell. Quincy, maybe, as a backup. They were river houses but without the distinct social slant of some of the others. This conversation occurred in the middle of the afternoon of a warm spring day that Lucessi had apparently slept through. He was sitting at his desk, wearing only briefs and an undershirt, fussing with a calculator as I spoke, punching in meaningless digits with the eraser end of a pencil. A white crust of dried toothpaste ringed his mouth.

"So what do you think?"

Lucessi shrugged. "I already entered."

His words made no sense. "What are you talking about?"

"I asked for a single in the quad."

Psycho singles, they were called. Housing for the maladjusted; rooms for people who couldn't handle roommates.

"It's pretty nice up there, actually," Lucessi went on. "Quieter. You know. Anyway, it's done."

I was dumbfounded. "Lucessi, what the hell? The lottery's next week. I thought we were going to go together."

"I just kind of assumed you didn't want to. You have lots of friends. I thought you'd be happy."

"You're supposed to be my friend." I strode furiously around the room. "Is that what this is about? I can't believe you're doing this. Look at this place. Look at you. Who else do you have? And you're doing this to me?"

These awful, unrecallable words: Lucessi's face crumpled like a wad of paper.

"Christ, I'm sorry. I didn't mean-"

He didn't let me finish. "No, you're right. I really am pretty pathetic. Believe me, it's nothing I haven't heard before."

"Don't talk about yourself like that." My guilt was excruciating. I sat on his bed, trying to get him to look at me. "I shouldn't have said what I did. I was just upset."

"That's okay. Forget it." A moment went by, Lucessi frowning at the calculator. "Did I ever tell you I was adopted? I'm not even related to her. Not technically, anyway."

The comment came from so far out of left field it took me a moment to realize that he was talking about Arianna.

"Everybody always thinks it's the other way around," he continued. "I mean, God, just look at her. But no. My parents got me out of some orphanage. They didn't think they could have kids. Eleven months later, wouldn't you know, along comes Miss Perfect."

I had never heard a confession of such absolute misery. What was there to say? And why was he telling me this now?

"She really hates me, you know. I mean hates. You should hear the things she calls me."

"I'm sure that's not true."

Lucessi shrugged hopelessly. "They all do it. They think I don't know, but I do. Okay, I'm king of the dorks. It's not like I haven't figured that out. But Arianna. You've seen her-you know what I'm talking about. Jesus, it just kills me."

"Your sister is a total bitch. She probably treats everybody like that. Just forget about her."

"Yeah, well. That's not really the issue." He lifted his gaze from the calculator and looked me dead in the eye. "You've been really nice to me, Tim, and I appreciate it. I mean that. Promise me we'll stay friends, okay?"

I realized what Lucessi was doing. What I'd thought was jealousy or self-pity was actually a kind of backhanded generosity. Just as my father had done, Lucessi was severing his ties to me because he thought I'd be better off. The worst part was, I knew he was right.

"Sure," I said. "Of course we will."

He held out his hand. "Shake on it? So I know you're not too mad."

We shook, neither of us believing it meant a thing.

"So that's it?" I said.

"I guess so, yeah."

He was in love with her, of course. Though he'd told me as much, this was the part of the story that took me a long time-too long-to figure out. He loved the thing he also hated, and it was destroying him. The other thing Lucessi had told me, without actually saying it, was that he was in the process of flunking all his courses. His living arrangements were moot, because he wouldn't be returning.

In the meantime, this left me with the problem of finding a place to live. I felt betrayed, and angry with myself for having so badly misunderstood the situation, but also resigned to my fate, which seemed somehow deserved. It was as if I'd lost some cosmic game of musical chairs; the song had stopped, I was left standing, and there was simply nothing to be done about it. I called around to see if anybody I knew was looking for a third or a fourth to round out a suite, but no one was, and rather than dig deeper into my list of acquaintances and embarrass myself further, I stopped asking. There were no singles in any of the River Houses, but it was still possible to enter the lottery as a "floater"; I'd be placed on a waiting list for each of the three houses I chose, and if a student dropped out over the summer, the university would give me his slot. I put in for Lowell, Winthrop, and Quincy, no longer caring which one I got, and waited to hear.

The year came to an end. Carmen and I went our separate ways. One of my professors had offered me a job working in his lab. The pay was negligible, but it was an honor to be asked, and it would keep me in Cambridge for the summer. I rented a room in Allston from a woman in her eighties who favored Harvard students; except for her collection of cats, which was voluminous-I was never quite sure how many there were-and the overwhelming stink of the litter boxes, the situation was close to ideal. I left early and returned late, usually taking my meals at one of the many cheap eateries on the fringes of Cambridge, and the two of us rarely saw each other. All my friends were gone for the summer, and I expected to be lonely, but it didn't turn out that way. The year had left me enervated and overstuffed, as if by a too-rich meal, and I was glad for the quiet. My job, which involved collating reams of data on the structural biology of plasma cells in mice, could be conducted virtually without interaction with another human being. Sometimes I barely spoke for days.

It shames me to say this, but during that silent summer, I forgot all about my parents. I do not mean that I ignored them. I mean that I forgot that they existed at all. I had told them in a letter where I would be staying and why but hadn't given them the phone number, because I didn't know it at the time-an omission I never got around to correcting. I did not call them and they could not call me, and as the summer wore on, this casual oversight became a psychological buffer that eradicated them from my thoughts. Doubtless, in some pocket of my mind I knew what I was doing, and I would need to contact them before the fall to file the proper paperwork for my scholarship; but at the level of conscious awareness, they simply ceased to matter.

Then my mother died.

My father informed me of this in a letter. Suddenly, a great deal was made clear to me. A month before I'd left for Harvard, my mother had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. She had delayed surgery-a total abdominal hysterectomy-until after my departure, not wanting to cast a shadow over this occasion. Postoperative biopsies had revealed that the cancer was an aggressive and rare adenosarcoma that left her with no hope of recovery. By winter, she had metastases in her lungs and bones. There was simply nothing to be done. It was, my father said, her dying desire that the son she loved so much should suffer no interruption in his progress toward the fulfillment of all her proud hopes: in other words, that I should go about my life and know nothing. She had died two weeks previously, her ashes buried without funereal pageant, in accordance with her wishes. She had not suffered much, my father wrote, rather coldly, and it was on loving thoughts of me that she had traveled into the life to come.

He wrote in closing, Probably you're angry with me, with both of us, for keeping this secret from you. If it's any consolation, I wanted you to know, but your mother wouldn't hear of it. When I told you that day at the bus to leave us behind, those were her words, not mine, though she eventually made me see the wisdom of them. Your mother and I were happy together, I believe, but never for a moment did I doubt that you were the great love of her life. She wanted only what was best for you, her Timothy. You may wish to return home, but I encourage you to wait. I am doing reasonably well, under the circumstances, and can see no reason for you to interrupt your studies for what would be, in the end, a painful distraction that would serve no purpose. I love you, son. I hope you know that, and that you can forgive me-forgive us both-and that when we next meet, it will be not to mourn your mother's passing but to celebrate your triumphs.

I read this letter standing in the front hallway of the house of a woman I barely knew, cats nosing around my feet, at ten o'clock on a warm night in early August when I was nineteen years old. What I experienced is nothing I have words for, and I will not make the attempt. The urge to telephone him was strong; I wanted to scream at him until my throat ripped open, until my words were blood. So was the urge to get on a bus to Ohio, go straight to the house, and strangle him in his bed-the bed he had shared with my mother for nearly thirty years and where, no doubt, I had been conceived. But I did neither. I realized I was hungry. The body wants what it wants-a useful lesson-and I availed myself of the old woman's larder to make myself a cheese sandwich on stale bread with a glass of the same milk she left in saucers all around the house. The milk had turned, but I drank it anyway, and that is what I remember most vividly of all: the taste of sour milk.

16.

The remainder of the summer passed in an emotionless haze. At some point I received a letter informing me that I had been placed in Winthrop House with an as-yet-unnamed roommate who was returning from a year abroad. That I cared nothing about this news is a gross understatement. As far as I was concerned, I could have gone on living with the old woman and her dirty litter boxes. About my mother, I told no one. I worked at the lab right until the first day of the new semester, leaving no transitional interval in which I might find myself with nothing to distract me. My professor asked me if I wanted to continue working with him during the academic year, but I turned him down. Perhaps this was unwise, and he seemed shocked that I should decline such a privilege, but it would leave no time for the library, whose consoling silence I missed.

I come now to the part of the story in which my situation changed so radically that I recall it as a kind of plunge, as if I had been merely floating on the surface of my life until then. This commenced the day I moved into Winthrop House. Lucessi and I had sold off our Salvation Army furniture, and I arrived with little more than the same suitcase I'd brought to Harvard a year ago, a desk lamp, a box of books, and the impression that I had once again slipped into an anonymity so pure that I could have changed my name if I wanted to with nobody the wiser. My quarters, two rooms arranged railroad-apartment-style with a bathroom at the rear, was on the fourth floor facing the Winthrop quadrangle, with a view of Boston's modest skyline behind it. There was no sign of my roommate, whose name I was yet to learn. I spent some time mulling over which space to choose as my own-the interior room was smaller but more private; on the other hand, I would have to endure my roommate trooping through at all hours to the toilet-before deciding that, to get things off on the right foot, I would await his arrival, so that we might decide together.

I had finished carting the last of my belongings up the stairs when a figure appeared in the doorway, his face obscured by the stack of cardboard boxes in his arms. He advanced into the room, groaning with effort, and lowered them to the floor.

"You," I said.

It was the man I'd met at the Burger Cottage. He was wearing frayed khaki pants and a gray T-shirt that said HARVARD SQUASH, with crescents of sweat under the arms.

"Wait," he said, peering at me. "I know you. How do I know you?"

I explained our meeting. At first he professed no recollection; then a look of recognition dawned.

"Of course. The guy with the suitcase. I'm guessing this means you found Wigglesworth." A thought occurred to him. "No offense, but wouldn't that make you a sophomore?"

It was a fair question, with a complicated answer. Though I'd been admitted as a freshman, I had enough AP credits to graduate in three years. I'd given this matter little thought, always expecting to hang around for the full four. But in the weeks since receiving my father's letter, the option to bang out my education at a quickstep and skedaddle had grown more appealing. Evidently the Harvard higher-ups had thought so, too, since they'd housed me with an upperclassman.

"I guess that makes you a real smarty-pants, doesn't it?" he said. "So, let's have it."

He had a way of speaking that was both elusively sarcastic and somehow complimentary at the same time. "Have what?"