The Rule of Four

His frustration, I think, was rooted in more than his feelings about the diary. He had seen the balance of power shift against him, the chemistry of his work with Richard Curry decompose as my father lured Curry into new approaches and alternative possibilities.

And so a struggle ensued, a battle of influence, in which my father and Vincent Taft conceived the hatred for each other that would last until the end of my father's life. Taft, feeling that he had nothing to lose, vilified my father's work in an attempt to win Curry back to his side. My father, feeling that Curry was withering under Taft's pressure, responded in kind. In one month, the work of the previous ten was undone. Whatever progress the three men had made together unraveled into separate ownerships, neither Taft nor my father wanting anything to do with what the other had contributed.

Curry, through it all, clung to Genovese's diary. It mystified him, how his friends had let petty grudges compromise their focus. He possessed, in his youth, the same virtue he would later see and admire in Paul: a commitment to truth, and a great impatience with distraction. Of the three men, I think it was Curry who'd fallen hardest for Colonna's book, Curry who wanted most of all to solve it. Maybe because my father and Taft were still university men, they saw something academic in the Hypnerotomachia. They knew a scholar's life could be spent in the service of a single book, and it dulled their sense of urgency. Only Richard Curry, the art dealer, maintained his furious pace. He must have sensed his future even then. His life in books was fleeting.

Not one but two events brought matters to a head. The first occurred when my father went back to Columbus to clear his head. Three days before returning to New York he stumbled, quite literally, across a coed from Ohio State. She and her Pi Beta Phi sisters were in the midst of a book drive, soliciting donations from local shops as part of a yearly charity event, and at the door to my grandfather's bookstore their paths crossed before either of them realized it. In a feathery explosion of pages and paperbacks, my mother and father fell to the floor, and the needle of destiny tightened its stitch and shuttled on.

By the time he arrived back in Manhattan, my father was irretrievably lost, thunderstruck by his encounter with the long-haired, azure-eyed sorority girl who called him Tiger and was alluding not to Princeton but to Blake. Even before meeting her, he knew that he'd had enough of Taft. He also knew that Richard Curry had struck out on a path of his own, fixated on the portmaster's diary. Now the call of home nagged. With his father ailing, and with a woman in his one true port, my father returned to Manhattan only to gather his belongings and say good-bye. His years on the East Coast, which had begun so promisingly at Princeton with Richard Curry, were drawing to a close.

When he arrived at their weekly meeting place, though, prepared to deliver the news, my father found himself in the wake of another bombshell. During his absence, Taft and Curry had argued the first night, and fought physically the next. The old football captain proved no match for bear-size Vincent Taft, who took one swing at the younger man and broke his nose. Then, on the evening before my father returned, Curry left his apartment, eyes black and nose bandaged, to have dinner with a woman from his gallery. When he returned to the apartment that night, documents from the auction house, along with all of his Hypnerotomachia research, were gone. His most carefully guarded possession, the portmaster's diary, had vanished with them.

Curry was quick with accusations, but Taft denied each one. The police, citing a string of local burglaries, took little interest in the disappearance of a few old books. But my father, arriving in the middle of it all, sided instantly with Curry. Both of them told Taft that they wanted nothing more to do with him; my father then explained that he had a ticket for Columbus in the morning, and that he intended not to return. He and Richard Curry spoke their farewells even as Taft looked silently on.

So ended the formative period in my father's life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn't the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in. The three dimensions of Patrick Sullivan, when the cold began to claim him, were husband, father, and scholar. They defined him until the end.

After the theft of the portmaster's diary, Taft vanished from the story of my father's life, only to resurface as the gadfly of his career, biting from behind the scholar's veil. Curry would not be in touch with my father for more than three years, until the occasion of my parents' wedding. The letter he wrote then was an uneasy thing, dwelling mainly in the shadow of darker days. The first few words offered his congratulations to the bride and groom; everything after was about the Hypnerotomachia.

Time passed; worlds diverged. Taft, carried by the momentum of those early years, was offered a permanent fellowship at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein had worked while living near Princeton. It was an honor my father surely envied, and one that freed Taft from all the obligations of a college professor: other than agreeing to advise Bill Stein and Paul, the old bear never suffered another student or taught another class. Curry took a prominent job at Skinner's Auction House in Boston, and rose on toward professional success. In the Columbus bookshop where my father learned to walk, three new children kept him occupied enough to forget, for a while, that his experience in New York had left a permanent impression. All three men, wedged from each other by pride and circumstance, found surrogates for the Hypnerotomachia, ersatz love affairs to stand in for a quest left incomplete. The generational clock ground out another revolution, and time turned friends to strangers. Francesco Colonna, who kept the key that wound the watch, must have thought his secret safe.

Chapter 7

Which way? I ask Paul as the library fades behind us.

Toward the art museum, he says, hunched over to keep the bundle of cloths dry.

To get there we pass Murray-Dodge, a stony blister of a building in the thick of north campus. Inside, a student theater company is performing Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, the last play Charlie had to read in English 15lw, and the first one he and I will see together. We have tickets to Sunday night's show. Bubbling over the cauldronlike walls of the stage comes the voice of Thomasina, the thirteen-year-old prodigy of the play, who reminded me of Paul the first time I read it.

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, she is saying, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future.

Yes, stammers her tutor, who is exhausted by the engine of her mind. Yes, as far as I know, you are the first person to have thought of this.

From a distance, the front entrance to the art museum appears to be open, a small miracle on a holiday night. The museum curators are a strange lot, half of them mousy as librarians, the other half moody as artists, and I get the impression most would rather let kindergartners fingerpaint on the Monets than let an undergrad into the museum when it wasn't strictly necessary.

McCormick Hall, home of the art history department, sits slightly in front of the museum proper, the wall of its entrance paneled in glass. As we approach, security guards eye us through the fishbowl. Like one of the avant- garde exhibits Katie took me to see, which I never understood, they have all the trappings of being real, but are perfectly, silently motionless. A sign on the door says meeting of Princeton art museum trustees. In smaller letters it adds: Museum. Closed to Public. I hesitate, but Paul barges in.

Richard, he calls out into the main hall.

A handful of patrons turn to gawk, but no familiar faces. Canvases punctuate the walls of the main floor, windows of color in this dreary white house. Reconstructed Greek vases sit on waist-high pillars in a nearby room.

Richard, Paul repeats, louder now.

Curry's bald head turns on its long, thick neck. He is tall and wiry, wearing a tailored pinstripe suit with a red tie. When he sees Paul walking toward him, the man's dark eyes are all affection. Curry's wife died more than ten years ago, childless, and he now looks on Paul as his only son.

Boys, he says warmly, extending his arms, as if we are half our ages. He turns to Paul. I didn't expect to