I remembered the first time I met Barry. He was a well-shined, skinny, bow-tied, tweed-sport-coated (still bearing the frays of his older brother’s wearing) freshman at Chambers Academy. He was smiling then, and he was smiling the last time I saw him, which was the day we graduated from Harvard College. As a freshman at Chambers, he smiled out of a deep-rooted good nature. His smiles at Harvard emanated from chemical substances that the chief chemist at Dupont couldn’t have identified.
When Barry came to Harvard, he fell in love with three institutions: classical philosophy, some dredged-up cult of the old sixties’ hippie culture, and Cynthia Wallingford. The only one of the three that ever did him any good was classical philosophy. For all of his daffiness, Barry was probably the brightest individual, strictly in terms of raw intellect, that I have ever known. I would probably score Barry: Intelligence-ten; Common Sense-point three.
The funny thing was that Barry never lived in the sixties. He was born in ‘77. On the other hand, he never outlived the sixties.
Barry was a hippie in the nineties, when our classmates didn’t understand the meaning of the word, and they certainly didn’t understand Barry. We traveled in different circles, I’m happy to say, but there was always something warm in our acquaintanceship that harkened back to Chambers days.
I found room 412B with its door open. I peered inside. The room was about the size of Anthony Bradley’s cell, but it seemed a great deal smaller. There was a tiny footpath that led through mounds of books, papers, lecture notes, fruit, and sneakers. At the end was a wooden desk chair with no one in it. Then there was a desk with Barry on it, semireclined and reading. At least I suspected that what was behind the salt-and-pepper beard and under the Don King hairdo was Barry. I caught the aroma of the sneakers, and I knew it was Barry.
I knocked, but it took a yell to get his attention.
“Barry! Michael Knight. You remember?”
He squinted for a second, then sprang like a cat over the chair to the floor. I was amazed that whatever was cooking his brain cells at that point in his life had done nothing to his athletic prowess.
“Mike! I don’t believe it.”
He just laughed, and I did too. It seemed to cover all the trite, conventional questions and answers that would otherwise have been necessary to bring us up to date. There we were, and the last ten or so years were blown away.
“Barry, I want to ask you a question.”
“Shoot, Mike. Hey, would you like some coffee or something?”
I smiled and declined. Much as I still liked Barry, I wouldn’t drink coffee out of any receptacle in the room, and what “or something” meant I’d have needed a degree in pharmacology to figure out.
“I’m a lawyer, Barry. I have a client who’s on trial for murder. He’s a Harvard student. Anthony Bradley. Sophomore. African American.”
I don’t know why I was looking for recognition. If Plato didn’t report on the event, it was unlikely that it would have taken Barry’s attention. Nonetheless, I pressed on.
“He was a football player his freshman year. He lives in Dunster. His father’s a judge.”
Suddenly the beard parted as if to speak. I wondered which of the facts I had ticked off struck the chord.
“He’s a black kid. Runs that group. What do they call them? ‘The Point,’ right?”
“You lost me, Barry. I never heard of the group. What are they?”
“Yeah, well, it’s a group of students. They do some good volunteer things. Mostly they help freshmen get up to speed with their study habits. They help them make the crossover to college.” He grinned. “They help the kids that never went to Chambers.”
“I didn’t realize he was into that, Barry. How long?”
He ruffled the beard. I looked to see what would fly out, but nothing did.
“I don’t know. I heard it eighth-hand. I don’t know Bradley personally. I think he got heavily involved in the spring term last year. This year I think I heard he was running it.”
“Do they have an office?”
“Are you kidding? They’re showcase. The president moved them into the Yard so they could be close to the freshman. I think they’re in Dunlevy.”
I thanked Barry with a wave instead of a shake and promised to keep in touch.
Dunlevy is a neomodern, neo-utilitarian, neogrotesque building in the northeast corner of Harvard Yard. Architecturally, Harvard is much like its faculty. By the time an individual has reached the level of scholarship necessary to be invited to join the faculty, there is usually an independence and self-assurance that has evolved in the mix that makes the individual defiantly unique. To say that a Harvard professor doesn’t fit into a pattern falls somewhere between an irrelevancy and a compliment. The same is true of the architecture.
Unlike Barry’s sign at the front door, the permanently lettered sign at Dunlevy proclaimed that The Point was in suite 203. In this case, “suite” meant two adjoining rooms with identical neo-Ikea desks and chairs in each.
The door was open. There were two students, both white, hovering over a sheaf of papers at a desk. I gathered that one was the tutor, the other was the tutee, and the subject was my old nemesis, calculus. I mercifully decided not to break the train of logic and passed through to the second room. Feeling less intrusive there, I got the attention of what looked like two junior-aged students, both African American, one male, one female, both attractive in spite of the oversized collegey garb they were draped in.
The woman smiled and offered a hand.
“Hi. I’m Gail Warden.”
“Michael Knight.” I shook the hand, and also that of the man who offered his, together with the words, “Rasheed Maslin. What can we do for you? You from the college?”
“No. I’m a lawyer. I’m Anthony Bradley’s lawyer. Can I talk to you?”
They exchanged the kind of positive lip and eye signals that meant, “Well, all right.”
They swung a chair around for me and settled down to offer anything they could to help.
“Tell me something about Anthony.”
Gail was the first to speak. “He’s a man, Mr. Knight.”
My look said I didn’t grasp her meaning.
“That’s not slang, Mr. Knight. I mean he’s mature, more than you’d think from his age. He came through a lot of growing up in the last year.”
“How so?”
Gail nodded to Rasheed and gestured at the door next to him leading to the other room. Rasheed closed it.
“You know about his father? I mean being a judge and a football hero and gonna be on the Supreme Judicial Court? All that was a heavy burden for Anthony.”
“Burden?”
“That’s right. Anthony felt he had to be just as good at the same things. He couldn’t do it. Anthony’s got a lot of talents, but they’re different. Like last year, he had to play football. But he couldn’t just play football. He had to be as good as his father, or maybe his father’s legend.”
“Did his father put pressure on him?”
“I don’t know, but he didn’t have to. Anthony put pressure on himself that nobody could live up to. When he knew he wasn’t making it at football, he went into a depression. He couldn’t study, then his grades started going to pieces. Then he got more depressed.”
Rasheed got into the conversation with a quiet voice. “Did he tell you about the attempted suicide?”
Gail caught his eye and his voice clutched. It was apparently not a well-known fact. We needed some ground rules.
“Listen, folks. Anthony’s on trial for murder. Nobody’s going to fight for his side but me and the lawyer I work for. I need to know everything I can about him. I’ll sift out what I need. And all of it’s confidential.”
Rasheed stole a quick look at Gail like a batter getting the sign from the third-base coach. She apparently gave him the green light.
“Last year, about finals time in the spring, we were supposed to have a meeting about setting up finals tutorials for some of the people we were helping. Anthony didn’t show up.”
I jumped in for a quick one. “Was Anthony a helper or being helped?”
Gail took it. “He was a helper from day one. He had a good prep-school education, which is different from a
