The Rule of Four

The ambulance drives off, lights and sirens fading as it shuttles onto Nassau Street. I stare back at the impression. It is misshapen, like a broken snow angel. The wind hisses, and I wrap my arms around my sides. Only when the crowd in the courtyard begins to disperse do I realize that Charlie is gone. He left with the ambulance, and an unpleasant silence has gathered where I expect to hear his voice.

Students are slowly disappearing from the courtyard with hushed voices. I hope he's okay, Gil says, putting a hand on my shoulder.

For a second I think he means Charlie.

Let's go home, he says. I'll give you a ride.

I appreciate the warmth of his hand, but I stand by, just watching. In my mind's eye the man falls again, colliding with the earth. The sequence fragments, and I can hear the crack of glass breaking, then the gunshot.

My stomach begins to turn.

Come on, Gil says. Let's get out of here.

And as the wind picks up again, I agree. Katie disappeared somewhere in the shuffle of the ambulance, and a friend of hers standing nearby tells me that she went back to Holder with her roommates. I decide to call her from home.

Gil places a gentle hand between my shoulders, and guides me toward the Saab that sits in the snow near the auditorium entrance. With that unfailing instinct to know what's best, he turns up the heat to a comfortable level, adjusts the volume on an old Sinatra ballad until the wind is a memory, and with a little burst of speed that assures me of our impunity before the elements, heads down campus. Everything behind us fades gradually into the snow.

Did you see the person who fell? he asks quietly once we're on our way.

I couldn't see anything.

You don't think… Gil shifts forward in his seat.

Think what?

Should we call Paul and make sure he's okay?

Gil hands me his cell phone, but there's no service.

I'm sure he's fine, I say, fidgeting with the phone.

We hang in the silence of the cabin for several minutes, trying to drive the possibility out of our minds. Finally Gil forces the conversation elsewhere.

Tell me about your trip, he says. I'd flown to Columbus earlier in the week to celebrate finishing my thesis. How was home?

We manage a patchy conversation, hopping from topic to topic, trying to stay above the current of our thoughts. I tell him the latest news about my older sisters, one a veterinarian, the other applying for a business degree, and Gil asks about my mother, whose birthday he's remembered. He tells me that, despite all the time he devoted to planning the ball, his thesis still managed to get written in those last days before the economics department deadline, when I was gone. Gradually we wonder aloud where Charlie has been accepted to medical school, guessing where he intends to go, since these are matters about which Charlie is modestly silent, even to us.

We bear south, and in the murky night the dormitories hunker on either side. News of what happened at the chapel must be spreading through campus, because no pedestrians are visible, and the only other cars sit silently in lots on the shoulder. The drive down to the parking lot, a half mile beyond Dod, feels almost as long as the slow walk back up. Paul is nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 12

There's an old saw in Frankenstein scholarship that the monster is a metaphor for the novel. Mary Shelley, who was nineteen when she began writing the book, encouraged that interpretation by calling it her hideous progeny, a dead thing with a life of its own. Having lost a child at seventeen, and having caused her own mother's death in childbirth, she must have known what she meant by it.

For a time I thought Mary Shelley was all my thesis subject had in common with Paul's: she and the Roman Francesco Colonna (who was only fourteen, some scholars argued, when the Hypnerotomachia was written) made a pretty couple, two teenagers wise beyond their years. To me, in those months before I met Katie, Mary and Francesco were time-crossed lovers, equally young in different ages. To Paul, standing nose to nose with the scholars of my father's generation, they were an emblem of youth's power against the obstinate momentum of age.

Oddly enough, it was by arguing that Francesco Colonna was an older man, not a younger one, that Paul made his first headway against the Hypnerotomachia. He'd come to Taft freshman year as a bare novice, and the ogre could smell my father's influence on him. Though he claimed to have retired from studying the ancient book, Taft was eager to show Paul the foolishness of my father's theories.

Still favoring the notion of a Venetian Colonna, he explained the strongest piece of evidence in favor of the Pretender.

The Hypnerotomachia was published in 1499, Taft said, when the Roman Colonna was forty-five years old; that much was unproblematic. But the final page of the actual story, which Colonna composed himself, states that the book was written in 1467-when my father's Francesco would only have been fourteen. However unlikely it was that a criminal monk had written the Hypnerotomachia, then, it was outright impossible for a teenager to have done it.

And so, like the curmudgeonly king inventing new labors for young Hercules, Taft left it to Paul to shoulder the burden of proof. Until his new protege could shrug off the problem of Colonna's age, Taft refused to assist any research premised on a Roman author.

It nearly defies explanation, the way Paul refused to buckle under the logic of those facts. He found inspiration not only in Taft's challenge, but in Taft himself: though he rejected the man's rigid interpretation of the Hypnerotomachia, he brought the same relentlessness to his sources. Whereas my father had let inspiration and intuition guide him, searching mainly in exotic locales like monasteries and papal libraries, Paul adopted Taft's more thorough approach. No book was too humble, no location too dull. From top to bottom, he began to scour the Princeton library system. And slowly his early conception of books, like a boy's conception of water who has lived his whole life by a pond, was dethroned by this sudden exposure to the ocean. Paul's book collection, the day he left for college, numbered slightly under six hundred. Princeton's book collection, including more than fifty miles of shelves in Firestone Library alone, numbered well over six million.

The experience daunted Paul at first. The quaint picture my father had painted, of happening across key documents sheerly by accident, was instantly exploded. More painful, I think, was the questioning it forced onto Paul, the introspection and self-doubt that made him wonder if his genius was simply a provincial talent, a dull star in a dark corner of the sky. That upperclassmen in his courses admitted he was far beyond them, and that his professors held him in almost messianic esteem, was nothing to Paul if he couldn't make headway on the Hypnerotomachia.

Then, during his summer in Italy, all that changed. Paul discovered the work of Italian scholars, whose texts he was able to wade through thanks to four years of Latin. Digging into the definitive Italian biography of the Venetian Pretender, he learned that some elements of the Hypnerotomachia were indebted to a book called Cormicoptae, published in 1489. As a detail in the Pretender's life, it seemed unimportant-but Paul, coming at the problem with the Roman Francesco in mind, saw much more in it. No matter when Colonna claimed to have written the book, there was now proof that it was composed after 1489. By then, the Roman Francesco would've been at least thirty-six, not fourteen. And while Paul couldn't imagine why Colonna might lie about the year he wrote the Hypnerotomachia, he realized that he'd answered Taft's challenge. For better or worse, he had entered my father's world.

What followed was a period of soaring confidence. Armed with four languages (the fifth, English, being useless except for secondary sources) and with an extensive knowledge of Colonna's life and times, Paul leapt into the text. He gave more and more of each day to the project, taking a stance toward the