plainness that I remember it.
Among those Nordic blond farm girls and soft-spoken boys, I continued to excel, overheated and driven. My letter of application had begun my shaping of my own story; happily, application essays are kept in locked places where my mother could never experience that betrayal. But I knew the way to a Lutheran’s heart was to prostrate myself for salvation at their hands, and they were duly enthusiastic. Herb was recast as the heavy, my mother was substituted with someone sinful and irredeemable, and I was the boy in the wilderness. And they bought it! They even gave me clothes, so I wouldn’t be embarrassed. Within days of arriving on campus, I began to again reshape the narrative all over again.
The unexpected advantage of attending a college called Bethany was that not only were there multiples (the teams of Bethany in West Virginia were also “The Swedes,” although the Bethany in California fielded the “Bruins,” more fearsome than even a Terrible Swede). But beyond that, the school’s name, absent locus or eponymy, had the generic decentralized property of the accents I so astutely cultivated. A lot of people seem to think it’s a good school located in Pennsylvania, or an up-and-comer in the Twin Cities. I disabuse no one of such notions. I arrived at history as my course of study, maybe owing to the endless facts of other times that one could drink in.
I never actually met a Terrible Swede in college, only very good-hearted ones. And the best of all was my professor of history, who was a gentleman farmer and amateur poet in the Edgar Lee Masters mode. He saw what I had, and he wrote the recommendations, and when I got the graduate fellowship, he bought me a celebratory coffee in that mostly dry town. I never bothered telling my mother where I was headed. At commencement, the president alluded to my salvation from hard times, to the confusion of my classmates, who’d been led to believe (notice me using the passive voice) that I was money from St. Louis.
I cannot view that old school from my stealthy Street View vantage, nor can I really see the faces of any of those peers, whom I scrubbed from my memory like the sheen of Kansas dirt that would blow in during spring planting. But the next place I seek on my computer represented a truer sense of arrival, thanks to that professor: When he’d coughingly mentioned he was himself a graduate of Dartmouth, it was frankly the first I’d heard of it. (I’d been led to believe the Ivy League consisted only of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.)
Dartmouth, up there in the woods, is exceptionally well documented on Street View, even to the point of each crosshatched foot path on the College Green having its own blue line to drop onto. I can parachute my little Street View man, that similarly generic-and-golden avatar, onto exact spots. I can stand and again see places that still smolder in sky-clear memories.
I tend to linger especially on that curve of Cemetery Lane where, in a scene lighted only by a New Hampshire moon and its reflection off the deep February snow, I stood as Barbara walked off, disgusted at my intractability. I can drag and rotate the Street View image as if turning my head, canning those trees (still!) for her receding figure.
“I don’t know who you are,” she had said.
“I am who I am,” I said. “Graduate student at Dartmouth. Eastern European history. Thesis proposal on the effects of Serbian exceptionalism.”
She sighed. “So you are what you study,” she said.
“In a way.”
“Then I don’t know who you were,” she said, and to this I offered nothing. Not my accent, clothing, nor mannerisms betrayed a place of origin, or a story.
My own undergraduate students use Facebook addictively (even during my lectures!), pouring their minutiae out into the ether; I look at my own story and wonder if such transparency (more, really, than transparency, in its willful launch of facts into a universe presumed to care) could allow these children any chance for thrilling reinvention. My Barbara walked off into the shadows, and for the first time in my life I truly agonized, wondering if her love was worth disclosure. We never spoke again.
I realized, leaving Dartmouth with my first graduate degree, that I had acquired two firm addictions.
First, I knew I had become a collector of degrees. I chose not to pursue my doctorate at Dartmouth in order to add a different school to the list. I moved to New York, to Columbia, to begin my work in Early Modern Europe.
The second of my addictions was to change myself as I changed my location. As I left my graduate housing up in the woods, one of my female classmates said, “You need a haircut.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, and firmly. The person I would be in New York wore his hair much differently.
Street View seems to have delivered a higher-resolution image of that apartment building on Morningside Avenue, and I tilt up into overcast sky to see the window of that walk-up on the fifth floor, with the fire escape outside, where as a man of long hair and fading history I smoked weed and romanced girls from Marymount. Histories indeed are like sediments; I accumulated personas in a way that, should I be asked something of what I had been, I had ready anecdotes and winning yarns. I look at that building on my computer screen and I smell the burn of the joint, and feel the throb of The Bird , and remember moist kisses but not the names of the girls being kissed.
Was I dishonest in all this? I would say not. I was who I was at any moment; my growing scholarly success suggested I was now who I should have been. In kind, I had escaped being the person I should never have been. I avoided judiciously any study of the South, with its Gothic tragedies, and I also abandoned in time the backwaters like Serbia, focusing instead on the great empires. Provincials are provincials, no matter where you go looking.
I was living on stipends and fellowships, a kind of welfare for the brainy, but New York fashioned my fashion. I roomed with a student named Will Featherly, of Short Hills, New Jersey; he became my primary observation subject. He was who he was. Never a doubt or veer. Money, smarts, and blond looks. Good at tennis. We shared a nodding and polite proximity; I was never invited by him to do anything or go anywhere. Yet I noted every nuance of his clothing. As I could squirrel money away, I accumulated like items, then never wore them. They were for the next stop. I could stare for hours at the custom-made shorts, with their mother-of-pearl buttons and hand-stitched plackets.
The doctorate came in quickly, and the offers of postgraduate fellowships were many, spread on the table as the array of people I could next be. I favored juxtaposition that year.
At UCLA, my faux-British accent returned to full flower, as did my bow-tie habit. It gave me a fish-out-of-water superiority that played surprisingly well in that sunny clime, both among my flip-flop-shod students but also my open-neck-shirteded faculty colleagues. I was presumed, with my Ivy degrees, to be a prince-in-waiting for higher stations.
Then I met Estelle.
The low hills west of campus, as it meanders toward Bel Air, come up on my screen vivid and bittersweet. Cars still triple-nose into the parking spaces under the canopies of apartment buildings on Midvale Avenue. Like pups pushing for the teat. The buildings are utilitarian, just grids of rectangular slider windows. I had my own “unit” of plain Sheetrock walls, a kitchenette, and a foam mattress on the floor, but I walked out that door each day as if to the manor born.
Estelle wore her South like a pair of chew-stained dungarees. She was a graduate assistant who came from Arkadelphia, “But I was
