His father shrugs amiably; he is trying to be helpful. “I don’t know. Clothes? Shoes? Did you take your certificate? I’m sure you’ll want that.”
He is speaking of the boy’s second-place award in the Western Reserve District 5 Science Day competition. “The Spark of Life: Gibbs-Donnan Equilibrium and Nernst Potential at the Critical Origin of Cell Viability.” The certificate, in a plain black frame, hangs on the wall above his desk. The truth is, it embarrasses him. Don’t all Harvard students win first prize? Nevertheless, he makes a show of gratitude for being reminded and places it atop the pile of clothing in the open suitcase. Once in Cambridge, it will never make it out of his bureau drawer; three years later, he will discover it beneath a pile of miscellaneous papers, regard it with a quick, bitter feeling, and pitch it into the trash.
“That’s the spirit,” his father says. “Show those Harvard smarties who they’re dealing with.”
From the base of the stairs, his mother’s voice ascends in an insistent song: “Tim-o-thy! Are you ready yet?”
She never calls him “Tim”; always it is “Timothy.” The name embarrasses him—it feels both courtly and diminutive at the same time, as if he were a little English lord on a velvet cushion—though he also secretly likes it. That his mother vastly prefers him to her husband is no secret; the reverse is also true. The boy loves her far more easily than he loves his father, whose emotional vocabulary is limited to manly pats on the back and the occasional boys-only camping trip. Like many only children, the boy is aware of his value in the household economy, and nowhere is this value more lofty than in his mother’s eyes. My Timothy, she likes to say, as if there are others not hers; he is her only one. You are my special Timothy.
“Haaa-rold! What are you doing up there? He’s going to miss the bus!”
“For Pete’s sake, just a minute!” He returns his eyes to the boy. “Honestly, I don’t know what she’s going to do without you to worry about. That woman’s going to drive me crazy.”
A joke, the boy understands, but in his father’s voice he detects an undertone of seriousness. For the first time he considers the full emotional dimensions of the day. His life is changing, but his parents’ lives are changing, too. Like a habitat abruptly deprived of a major species, the household will be wrenched into realignment by his departure. Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are; for eighteen years he has experienced their existence only insofar as it has related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he’s not around? What secrets do they hold from each other, what aspirations have been left to languish? What private grievances, held in check by the shared project of child rearing, will now, in his absence, lurch into the light? They love him, but do they love each other? Not as parents or even husband and wife but simply as people—as surely they must have loved each other at one time? He hasn’t the foggiest; he can no more grasp these matters than he can imagine the world before he was alive.
Compounding the difficulty is the fact that the boy has never been in love himself. Though the social patterns of Mercy, Ohio, are such that even a modestly attractive person can find opportunities in the sexual marketplace, and the boy, although a virgin, has been from time to time its beneficiary, what he has experienced is merely love’s painless presage, the expression without the soul. He wonders if this is a lack within himself. Is there a part of the brain from which love comes that in his case has drastically malfunctioned? The world is awash in love—on the radio, in movies, in the pages of novels. Romantic love is the common cultural narrative, yet he seems immune to it. Thus, though he has yet to taste the pain that comes with love, he has experienced pain of a different, related sort: the fear of facing a life without it.
They meet the boy’s mother in the kitchen. He expects to find her dressed and ready to go, but she is wearing her flowered housecoat and terry-cloth slippers. Through some unspoken agreement it has been determined that his father alone will accompany him to the station.
“I packed you a lunch,” she declares.
She thrusts a paper sack into his hands. The boy unfolds the crinkled top: a peanut butter sandwich in waxed paper, cut carrots in a baggie, a pint of milk, a box of Barnum’s Animal Crackers. He is eighteen: he could devour the contents of ten such bags and still be hungry. It’s a meal for a child, yet he finds himself absurdly grateful for this small present. Who knows when his mother will make him lunch again?