It seemed an odd thing for someone who’d grown up in a shack to say, Harrison thought. He himself, emphatically not raised in a shack, was absolutely open to such luxuries as a bath, a soft bed, and an opportunity not to feed chickens twice a day.
They were welcomed by two men not much older than themselves, who took their bags upstairs. Harrison watched them ascend and, at the landing, turn in separate directions, settling one of his lesser questions about whether they’d be sharing a room. A moment later, the kind and supportive Dr. Gregories himself materialized and shook Eli’s hand.
“Young man,” he said to Harrison, when they were introduced.
“Hello,” said Harrison. Then, to his own great surprise, he added: “Sir.”
“Please. Call me Oren. Hello, my friend,” he said to Eli. The two shook hands almost gently, with a kind of mutual contemplation. Professor Gregories was lanky, tall, and clubbable. He had ash-colored hair in retreat, whisper thin across the pate, scalp glimmering between the remaining strands. He wore immaculate khakis, a dark green belt, and a shirt so blindingly white it might never before have been exposed to air. A broad gold watch emerged as those two hands rose and fell. “How goes the new book?”
Eli had not mentioned that he was writing a “new book.”
“Slowly, but I’m encouraged. I am looking forward to making some progress these next few weeks.”
“Good. I hope you’ll stay as long as you like. You as well, Mr.… Oppenheimer.”
Yes, without doubt, the tiniest of pauses before his surname, which meant … what? Quite probably nothing, and yet, here they were: a young Black man and a young Jew at the hearth of obvious traditional entitlement, on what was quite possibly a once-plantation, snug in this most presidential terroir of American soil. Somehow they had slipped back into the source of it all.
Harrison’s bed was four-posted with a piece of linsey-woolsey stretched across the top. An adjacent study housed a six-foot-long desk in front of a window that overlooked woodland. He went to take a bath, his first since going home to Brooklyn at Christmas break, and there, embraced by the heat and the steam and the lavender smell of the soap, he drifted off for a few minutes or possibly longer. When he woke, it was time to go downstairs.
Later, he would think of that first evening as an irremediable transit from one state of being to another, so momentous and so permanent, not because he couldn’t go back but because he could not, for many years, imagine a reason to do so. The men he would meet that night—and that first night they were indeed all men—were powerfully intellectual, powerfully focused on impact, and just plain powerful, and as he was introduced to them and spoke with them, he began to read his own promise in their reflected interest.
The rest of them arrived over the following days. Two were senators from Midwestern states. One was a governor, another a pundit who wrote historical fiction, just for fun. Harrison met a recently retired member of the Harvard economics department and a rail-thin man with an accent he recognized from his Vineyard summers—moneyed New England, redolent of sailing and boarding schools—who declined to say more than that he worked in Washington. Eli introduced him to a squat man whose very round head segued directly into broad shoulders. This was Roger Fount, the chairman of Hayek.
Harrison spent the next days working on the meandering political journey of American Jews, exploring Charlottesville and Jefferson’s magnificent UVA campus, and visiting Monticello for a tour and a rose garden reception. After the seminars began, he attended every one, elated to find himself in room after room of robust thinkers and incisive questioners. It became commonplace, if never for one moment dull, to meet the authors of books he’d read, who might materialize in the bus seat beside him as they drove to a nearby winery for an outdoor dinner, or ahead of him in the buffet line at breakfast. A certain Princeton historian （for whose sake Harrison had once considered applying to Princeton） had the bedroom next to his and could be heard snoring through the wall. On his other side: a former ambassador to China.