Say what you will about Stewart’s father, he actually worked for a living. The taurine jowls of the man’s face, pixelated on A1 of my dad’s newspaper, were still boyish cheeks on Stew, and the son’s eyes were round and sympathetic. Just the fact of being a known quantity set Stewart outside that first, almost royal set of Paulies—kids who passed without any wake through the halls that held their granddaddies’ ghosts, winning prizes and gaining admission to Ivy League schools and needing nothing, troubling nothing, admiring nothing. Their families summered on islands where homes cannot be bought. Their fathers worked, if at all, with silent currents of cash. When you discovered that someone’s mom’s name was Abigail Adams, well, believe it. There were no accidents.
“Tom Buchanan had his polo ponies brought up from Lake Forest,” I told Stewart. I’d read Gatsby right around the time my family moved from a small development to a larger home on a main road, the summer I was twelve. Across the street was a country club that had at its founding been a polo club. I liked to imagine that Daisy’s horses had been stabled there, beneath the trees I could see from my window—enormous oak and ash crowns that moved softly at night.
“Yeah,” said Stew. “He bought them in Lake Forest and got them the hell out of the Midwest.”
Gaby hit him, and after he flinched, he reached, laughing, and took her fist so he could unfold her fingers and hold her hand.
In Stew’s limo we escaped the gates of the school with its demure white sign, and traveled down Pleasant Street toward Concord and the river, and from there to the highways. I kept my face to the glass to give the couple space. I saw each clutch of forest and granite escarpment for the first and last time, dignified it with my seeing, and bade it all farewell. St. Paul’s just wasn’t going to work out. I was thinking about the ponies, was my problem. I wanted to understand them (How were they chosen? Who loaded them into the trailers? Who rode east with them? Who greeted them when they arrived?) when I should have been, like everyone, smitten with Daisy, and the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
“It’s the Crawford Curse,” said my mother about my dorm assignment, my old girl assignment, my infelicitous roommate situation. “Things never work out for us.”
That hadn’t been the case before St. Paul’s, as I remembered. And to most anyone observing my family from the outside, things were working out quite well indeed. So the problem was me. Was I.
My parents always did say I was sensitive. “You’re being very dramatic,” said my dad, finding himself unable to imagine what I felt. I learned from a young age to anticipate moments when I was likely to come in for this response. In the eighth grade, I’d been subjected for a short while to a particularly ingenious bit of bullying from a male classmate who used a portable tape recorder to record me in class and then replayed awkward moments over and over to a clutch of other boys in the hall. They held themselves and shook with laughter. I went home hived from crying. My father called the boy’s mother, who ordered her son to produce his tape recorder. I sniffled politely while Dad listened through the phone, so assured in my indignation that I felt almost sorry for the tape-recording monster.
But Dad’s face settled, then brightened. “Oh,” he said. “I see.” He turned to me, relaxed and frank: “There’s no reason for you to be upset. I heard the tape. It’s just recordings of you answering questions in class. You sound very bright. I’d actually be proud.”
“Dad,” I said, still crying, still twelve years old. How could I explain? “This makes me want to kill myself.”
He frowned. “I don’t think that’s a solution.”
Then there had been a period, following eighth grade, when for six weeks or so I became inconsolable just as the sun began to sink toward late afternoon. This was in summer when I could find no clear reason for sorrow. Long light on the oaks and elms. Two parents, a younger brother, some toy spaniel dogs (we bred them, so for a few years there were puppies). Tennis lessons and afternoons at the pool and church on Sundays. Yet that summer, I watched the sun begin to set and grew nauseated with terror. I was aware that the crisis concerned death, but I had no way of working with that awareness. What frightened me was not the idea of an ending—mine or anyone else’s—but the glimpses I thought I was catching, in panicky micro-bolts, of nothing. Nothing! The idea of it sent my belly dropping like a trapdoor. The universe tended toward nothing. Relentless nothing. Arcs of cold white bending away to invisible warps in space-time (I had read Stephen Hawking, at my dad’s suggestion) and nowhere, not anywhere, a hand or a heart. The terror was unsolvable because no light could survive that dark. It awaited me. I had no choice.
“That’s Huis Clos,” said my mom, when I tried to describe my crisis. “No Exit.” Mom had grown up in Europe, where her stepfather worked. She spoke five languages and read four. She had her hands in a bowl of fruit salad when she told
