Lewyn stewed. As usual his brother was persuasive, but only because he himself had somehow agreed to stand still as Harrison ran around him. On this particular subject, he had only one argument, and it bent toward the emotional.
“Don’t you feel sorry for him, though? Don’t you feel we owe those people something? The ancestors who suffered so you could … I don’t know, have a nice house on Martha’s Vineyard? It’s like … it’s a responsibility.”
“Don’t be pathetic, Lewyn,” his brother snapped. “We’re responsible for fulfilling our own potential, and that’s it. If Eli had sat around thinking about how his forebears were slaves, I doubt he’d have had the wherewithal to do what he’s done.”
“Well, it’s great what he’s done,” Lewyn said carefully. “I mean, writing a book before you’re even out of high school, and getting it published…”
“He didn’t go to high school.” Harrison said “high school” as if he meant reformatory for the incorrigible and pathetic. “He educated himself better than any high school could have educated him. And he didn’t just get his book published. Some of the most important innovators we have in this country consider his work critical to the intellectual conversation we’re having. Or should be having,” he added. But Harrison was already unsure about the conversation the two of them were actually having, let alone the one they—or … somebody else?—should be having.
“I’m glad you’ve made such a good new friend,” was all Lewyn could think of to say, though this, predictably enough, only made his brother turn from him in evident disgust. There would not, of course, be a reciprocal query from the other child’s bed under the peaked ceiling. No How was your freshman year? or What are you going to major in? let alone Have you happened to fall in love with a person who may just possibly be as clever as I am, and much, much nicer to boot? Lewyn, the aimless and pudgy brother who’d taken his leave one year earlier, bound for a college of least resistance and without a single affinity or interest, let alone a vision for his future? Lewyn, who’d never kissed a girl let alone had sex with one （whether or not she provided the condom）？ That Lewyn was not the Lewyn who had reappeared, and there was much about him of potential interest to Harrison （even if that interest were of the teasing and disbelief variety）， but Harrison never asked him a question and Lewyn, who had some pride now in addition to his other new attributes, declined to make an unforced offering.
“Must be nice for you and Sally,” Harrison said pointedly on the morning of the birthday. “Having each other so close by. To lean on,” he finished with a kind of flourish.
“Yes!” said Johanna. They were all—except for Salo—in the kitchen, drinking coffee. The baby was in her highchair, and Johanna was feeding it something vile and brown. “I’m happy thinking of the two of you, meeting up to study or have coffee. Even just running into each other by accident.”
“Weirdly,” Lewyn said, “it never happens.”
“Big campus,” Sally said, blowing into her mug. “Anyway, we were both doing our own thing. Busy. You know.”
“Busy doing what, exactly?” Harrison said. “I’m curious. What’s a real college like? What do people do there?”
Then he grinned, in case either of them might have thought he was sincere.
“Well, it’s like this,” Sally said. “People spend years keeping their heads down, working really hard so they can get into an Ivy League school, doing sports and music and community service and getting straight As. It’s been the only thing for so long, and then they get in, and now here they are together in the same place, all these high-achieving good boys and good girls who’ve delayed adolescence, and they’re like, Now what am I supposed to be trying to accomplish? And they kind of realize they’re on their own—no more parents or coaches or advisors keeping them on the straight and narrow, and suddenly it’s Billy has a keg in his room.