Shep didn’t show.
My New York friend explained the next day: Shyla had tucked into his post-office box a blue satin bra and a note that read, “If you want to see the other piece of this set, meet me in my room tonight.”
Even New York was impressed.
Blue satin bras and killing pits were ever after twinned in my mind. The one, in its self-conscious cupidity, limned the depths of the other. All at once I appreciated the depravity and banality of the human animal. I was positively wearied by wisdom. Shyla’s bra, my friends and I discussed at length. The horror page stayed secret in my mind. Silly gorgeous girls, they weren’t ready for that sort of knowledge. Not yet and maybe not ever.
I got my bras on hometown outings with my mother to Mimi’s, which was pronounced “Mimmy’s” and did not sell blue satin anything. The ladies made Cs with their wrinkled fingers and pressed them to my rib cage. Baby hangers tinkled like xylophones. The place smelled like peonies.
The Holocaust was more interesting to me than bras or Shep or, for that matter, sex—unless it was, as it might have been, an elaborate unconscious substitution for the threat of sex. (You, a girl, are waiting to meet a boy. Which book do you pick up? One that looks inviting, or one that looks forbidding?) Death for sex, terror for maturation—there’s a well-traveled path there, of course. At fourteen, I suppose, I found what I imagined of war less frightening than the possibility of a boy’s body on mine.
I beheld Shyla’s triumph without regret or envy. The entire experience was clarifying. I was not a girl who belonged to boys. I had known that already. Nor did I long for what such girls had: men to squire them to island retreats when it all got too dreary, badger-bristle brushes for their hair.
I went back to the library. This was the school’s old library, which was decommissioned a year later, following the completion of the enormous Robert A. M. Stern–designed new library across the way. The old library was squat and gray, all stone, and built so close to the edge of the pond in the center of campus that from many angles it appeared to rise out of the water. I never picked up the Nazi book again, though I kept my eye on it from the couches, the way you watch a spider on the wall. The library took me in most nights that fall. In the cold blaze of novelty of the first months at school, I had forgotten this simple thing about myself: that I loved books.
There was something else new, too. If I played my cards right, this school might offer the world—devastated and astonishing—to me.
Among all the silly questions and squirrelly concerns traded with my two friends that first semester at St. Paul’s, there was one thing I said that caused them to stop and listen: I mentioned, casually, that a man wanted to fly his plane up to see me.
“Wait, who is he?” asked New York. She had been filing her fingernails with a silver emery board, and now the zip-zip sound stopped. Her head was tipped, her lips pink, and she was looking right at me.
A nascent instinct for seduction told me not to give his name. “He works with my dad,” I said. Not true—he was one of the sons of a storied financial institution, and back home in Chicago my dad worked for an investment arm of that institution. I wasn’t sure if this man worked at all. “He takes me to lunch in the city.”
This was true. I had taken the train downtown the previous summer with my father, who then went on to the office. Mr. Lane chose an Italian restaurant in the gallery district, hip and loud. I drank iced tea and concentrated on not spilling on my dress. I had gotten everything right: I remembered to kiss him on both cheeks, the way he preferred to be greeted; I remembered to thank him for everything, I remembered the books I was reading when he asked. (St. Paul’s had assigned The Unbearable Lightness of Being as summer reading. This is incredible to me now—that this novel, with its themes of loveless sex and careless coupling, could have been required reading for sophomores—but Mr. Lane seemed unsurprised. He nodded and sipped, and smiled wet teeth.) I made him laugh.
“It’s important,” said my mother, “to have adults like that in your life. It’s an honor that he wants to spend time with you.”
New York nodded coolly—lunch with a man did not impress her. My mom was right, then—one had to have adults like this in one’s life.
My Washington friend was Catholic, the daughter of a European mother. “Is he like a godfather?” she asked.
The Lanes had surged into our world once my father joined the firm that bore their name. We’d moved to a bigger house closer to town and begun to meet different sorts of families from the city, where Dad now worked. He spoke of having gotten a late start to his career, and his path in early adulthood formed a founding narrative for my brother and me, since the story was about fairness, luck, and the value of education. As a senior in college my father had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, but in spring 1968, a few months before he was due to head to England, President Lyndon Johnson ended graduate-school deferments for men seeking to delay service in Vietnam. Dad’s hometown of St. Louis had already been under pressure regarding the inequitable use of student deferrals. He was told he’d be classified 1-A and called up immediately.
Dad abandoned his Rhodes and presented himself to a
