“Interesting.” Loring nodded.
“In vitro. I mean, not natural.”
“More interesting still. And your siblings, do they share your intellectual interests?”
Harrison smiled. “They don’t have any intellectual interests.”
“Then you are as an only child.”
Yes, he wanted to shout. Yes, yes! Five minutes in, and this person understood him in a way his own family never had.
“It feels like that, sometimes. I mean, they’re not bad people. In a … moral sense, I mean.”
Loring, for the first time, seemed to smile. At least, it looked more like a smile than not.
“Tell me about the moral sense of your family,” he said.
And Harrison did: the sullen sister and doltish brother, the mother who persisted in the notion that the three of them were deeply, intractably bonded, and the father who was seldom present, even when he was.
“You are planning on attending college, I imagine,” Loring said.
“Well, yes. I’m working on the applications now. I mean, everyone at my school goes to college. Wesleyan is very popular, and Brown. And Yale.”
Loring made a face.
“I was thinking about Harvard, myself.”
Harrison was doing more than thinking about Harvard. He was obsessing about Harvard. He had fetishized the school for years, casting it as his personal exit ramp. The notion that Harvard might not lovingly accept him was horrifying, not that he had confessed that to anyone. Deep inside him, so deep even he would not have known how to excavate it, was the rank, gangrenous fear that he was not entirely the intellectual being he had long ventriloquized. Obviously, he wasn’t stupid. Compared to his siblings he was brilliant, and in relation to his classmates, some of them annoyingly capable, he was clearly running with the pacesetters. But beyond the self-esteem-boosting enclave of the Walden School, where grades did not exist? Beyond the Oppenheimer enclave, in which Johanna showered them all with resolutely equal praise? Beyond a culture that handed out participant trophies, in which making a show of your personal suffering passed for debate? To be honest, he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t fear being found out.
The previous spring, he’d walked into the SAT （his first ever standardized test!） under a personal waterfall of terror, and was not at all reassured to come out of it with a perfect score, mainly because certain loudmouths in his own grade were busy boasting of their perfect scores. Harvard—and, he supposed, the few other schools he might deign to apply to—would naturally be inundated with kids brandishing the identical credential. Too many people had obviously figured out how to study for the test and perform those simple tricks that defanged it.
“Well,” said Loring, “Harvard is still a place where actual ideas can be discussed, I’m happy to say. But I wouldn’t advise it for you.”
“Oh?” Harrison felt stung. He’d been expecting Loring to encourage him in the direction of his own alma mater, but what was this? Had he fallen short in some way, already? He groped backward in their conversation, weighing, parsing, excoriating himself for every single thing he’d said, wondering where in the wondrous swirl of ideas he had lost track of himself and revealed his deep core of inadequacy.
“And certainly not Columbia. They bring me in every couple of years, because there are fewer and fewer on the permanent faculty who are equipped to teach the core curriculum to freshmen, and I usually say yes. The library is beyond reproach, but the students there get worse each time I return. Still, the fault’s not specific to this university. It’s a generational failing, I fear.”
Harrison nodded, as if he himself were not being indicted. “Oh, I completely agree.”
“Apart from a contemporary of yours. A young man from the south, who managed to get himself an education with no help from anyone else. I read his book the other day. It gave me hope. I wonder if you know who I mean? His name is Eli Absalom Stone.”