Love and Glory

Chapter Thirty-Three

On a June morning Jennifer and I went to the cellar of the Chapel Building at Taft to dig up our Ph.D.s. The diplomas were in cardboard boxes in which copy-machine paper had originally been shipped. Two undergraduate girls were in charge.

“We’ve come,” I said, “to receive our degrees.”

“Names?” one of the girls said.

We gave them. The girls shuffled through the boxes and found the diplomas, bound in red leather with TAFT UNIVERSITY in gold on the cover. The girl who’d asked for our names brought them to us. As she held them out she rendered a brief excerpt of the traditional graduation march, “Dah, da da da dah da.”

Afterward, holding the diplomas, we walked along the Charles River.

“Think how smart we are now,” I said.

“Yes,” Jennifer said, “dumb no more.”

“Should we celebrate?” I said.

“Yes, we should. I actually am very proud to have done this. When I went to college it was so that I could become educated and marry a man with a white-collar job. An educated woman was more interesting at cocktail parties and having dinner with the boss.”

A college crew swept by on the river, the oars moving in muscular unison, the coach following in a small red speedboat yelling instructions through a megaphone.

“I got my B.A. for somebody else,” Jennifer said. “But the Ph.D. was for me.”

“If nothing else,” I said, “it certifies endurance.”

Jennifer nodded. “It’s more,” she said. “It means I can proceed as Jennifer Grayle instead of Mrs. John Merchent.”

“It’s the way I prefer to think of you,” I said.

She smiled. “The Ph.D. is certification. But in fact, I may have learned more from you, Boonie, than I did from the Ph.D. In a way, you’ve brought me up. I had a chance to see in you things I see in no one else. You remain what you are. You are true to yourself.”

I smiled. Jennifer shook her head impatiently.

“I know that’s a cliché, true to yourself, but I don’t care. You are. You don’t betray what you are because you want something from someone or you are afraid of someone. Most men I know, and women, really do lead lives of quiet desperation. You don’t. Because you don’t I know that it’s possible not to.”

I knew if I pointed it out to her she’d see the irony of that, that she’d remember that my life was a single-minded desperation. But it would have led us to an area we tacitly avoided, an area too uncertain for us, where I, as much as she, feared the terrain and the consequences. So I nodded and shrugged. I knew what she meant. In a sense she was right. My one consuming desperation eliminated all others. Caring only for her, I was free to care about nothing else.

“You taught me by being with me, Boonie, and by being what you are. And by being...” Jennifer seemed briefly to search for the right word. Then she made a small laugh. “I’m so taken with my new intellectual eminence that I’m searching for original phrases. The hell with it. What I mean is that you are completely steadfast. Watching you manifest that has been of more service to me than I can say.”

“This should probably all be saved for Valentine’s Day,” I said. “But I have learned as much from you as you ever did from me. I’ve learned that my definitions, my rules, my certainties, are not universal, that feeling something strongly doesn’t make it right. You are good, and when you do things that I wouldn’t do, they can’t be bad. They can only be different.”

We stopped walking and Jennifer turned toward me and we looked at each other.

“Each of us seems to have been able to offer just what the other needed,” she said.

Beyond the point where we stood the river turned and deepened, flowing under trees that darkened its surface. As the channel narrowed and the water hastened in its rush, twigs that had floated placidly past us began to dance upon the surface, tossed by the compressed energies beneath them.

“Yes,” I said. “I have noticed that too.”