Chapter Eleven
The Precious Object in the Secret Box
In which Harrison Oppenheimer is enlightened at the Symposium,
and gathers with his tribe in a New Hampshire parking lot
Harrison left home four days after his brother and sister, on a bright golden day that seemed to spin the Connecticut River Valley into a lovely autumn haze. At his chosen college there would be no choked-up moms at move-in, no T-shirts and bumper stickers handed out to families under festive tents. There would be no non-matriculants at all beyond the meeting point in Concord, New Hampshire, where the newest Roarke men—all communications, throughout the application process and since, had been addressed to “Roarke men”—were to be deposited for the journey north. Johanna was on edge the whole way, her intensity building as they cut across Connecticut and Massachusetts （states she at least knew and understood） and entered the foreign land of the New Hampshire forests. “If you’d wanted to be in the back of beyond, why not Dartmouth?” she said, trying to make it sound like a joke. It wasn’t a joke.
“Don’t see Harrison at Dartmouth,” said his father.
“No? You see him at this crazy place?”
Harrison, in the back seat, was silent. One more hour, he thought. Then I’m out.
“If he doesn’t like it he can transfer,” said Salo.
Harrison smiled. Of course he would transfer. All of the Roarke men would transfer, in fact, because Roarke was a two-year college, after which every one of them would move on to finish at more conventional universities, regardless of whether they’d liked Roarke or not. This piece of the Roarke enigma had been especially baffling to his mother, Harrison knew. If he was resolved to get to Harvard eventually, if, indeed, he already possessed a letter of acceptance and a two-year deferral, guaranteeing his place in the junior class, why this incomprehensible detour? Why were the three of them unpacking the Volvo in a diner parking lot in Concord, New Hampshire, and not an hour south of here in front of some Ye Olde pile in the Yard, with fluttering ivy around the windows? Harrison declined to explain. He could have had that, but he wanted Roarke. He’d wanted Roarke from the moment the school had first been presented to him, like a precious object in a box only special people could open.
Since middle school, Harrison had been begging the two alleged adults in his alleged family to let him leave Walden, where he and his siblings had been ideologically indoctrinated since preschool. Actually, he’d first raised his concerns even earlier, when he discovered that the school’s widely stated passion for early language immersion incorporated Mandarin and Spanish but neither of the so-called “dead” languages, Latin and Greek. Harrison went on to rage against the years of repetitive, almost identical instruction about civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights, while European history was offered only as a senior spring seminar （a class he was preposterously forbidden to take as a freshman, sophomore, or junior） and the fact that he and every other Walden student had to suffer a pointless Ethical Conflict Resolution class each semester. （It might as well have been called “Let’s talk about race and gender. Again.”） Harrison had pushed back relentlessly against Walden’s English classes, in which discussion always turned to the way the assigned poem or novel or story or essay made each person in the classroom feel. It drove him insane.
Walden had been founded in the 1920s as a school for the children of laborers, so that the bright offspring of the working classes might have an opportunity to ascend to the better colleges, and beyond, to the professions: business, law, medicine. Walden, always friendly to Jews, would open to nonwhite students decades before it was commonplace, and welcomed girls from the outset, but the school truly came into its own when the culture turned in the 1960s. Suddenly little Walden, that Brooklyn experiment, emerged as a prescient institution, both reassuringly established and utterly au courant in terms of its ideals and methodology. Yes, little girls and little boys could learn together—should learn together! Yes, the children of all races, creeds, and colors would find at Walden a common workshop for hungry minds and soaring creative spirits. Yes, making art was central to the life of any developing consciousness, and music must be sampled in forms far more diverse than the narrowly defined tradition of classical European. No, major decisions concerning the institution should not be made without consulting the students themselves, and allowing their voices to be heard.