36
Four Long Arms, Whirling
It was a sunny September afternoon when I heaved my suitcase through
Harvard Yard. The colonial architecture felt foreign but also crisp and
unimposing compared to the Gothic pinnacles of Cambridge. The central
library, called the Widener, was the largest I had ever seen, and for a few
minutes I forgot the past year and stared up at it, wonderstruck.
My room was in the graduate dorms near the law school. It was small and
cavelike—dark, moist, frigid, with ashen walls and cold tiles the color of
lead. I spent as little time in it as possible. The university seemed to offer a
new beginning, and I intended to take it. I enrolled in every course I could
squeeze into my schedule, from German idealism to the history of secularism
to ethics and law. I joined a weekly study group to practice French, and
another to learn knitting. The graduate school offered a free course on
charcoal sketching. I had never drawn in my life but I signed up for that, too.
I began to read—Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and
Mill. I lost myself in the world they had lived in, the problems they had tried
to solve. I became obsessed with their ideas about the family—with how a
person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin against their obligations
to society as a whole. Then I began to write, weaving the strands I’d found in
Hume’s Principles of Morals with filaments from Mill’s The Subjection of
Women. It was good work, I knew it even as I wrote it, and when I’d finished
I set it aside. It was the first chapter of my PhD.
I returned from my sketching class one Saturday morning to find an email
from my mother. We’re coming to Harvard, she said. I read that line at least
three times, certain she was joking. My father did not travel—I’d never
known him to go anywhere except Arizona to visit his mother—so the idea
that he would fly across the country to see a daughter he believed taken by
the devil seemed ludicrous. Then I understood: he was coming to save me.