Harvard Square Read Free

be. This wasn’t my life, wasn’t my birthplace, wasn’t even me, couldn’t be me. This was the summer of 1977.

1

    CAMBRIDGE WAS A DESERT. IT WAS ONE OF THE HOTTEST summers I’d ever lived through. By the end of July, you sought shelter wherever you could during the day; at night you couldn’t sleep. All my friends in graduate school were gone. Frank, my former roommate, was teaching Italian in Florence, Claude had gone back to France to work for his father’s consulting firm, and Nora was in Austria for a crash course in German. Nora wrote to me about Frank, while Frank wrote about Nora. He’s losing all his hair and he isn’t even 25 . She, he’d write, was a jittery flibbertigibbet who should be flipping burgers instead. I was trying not to take sides, but I found myself envying their love and fearing its dissolution, sometimes more than either of them did. One would quote Leopardi to me, the other Donna Summer. Both had sprouted quick romances abroad.
    My other friends who had stayed in Cambridge to teach summer classes had also left. Postcards trickled in from Paris, Berlin, Bologna, Sirmione, and Taormina, even Prague and Budapest. One of my fellow grad school friends was doing the Petrarch route, from Arquà to Provence, and wrote that, like Petrarch himself, he was about to ascend Mont Ventoux with fellow medievalists. Next year, he added on his postcard with his stingy, minuscule script, he was planning a climb up Mount Snowdon in Wales; I should come, since I loved Wordsworth. Another friend, a devout Catholic, had set out on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Both were to meet in Paris and come back on the same plane before we’d all start teaching this fall. I missed my friends, even those I didn’t like very much. But I owed them money and didn’t mind their extended grace period.
    All the summer school kids were gone, as were the foreign students who flocked to take classes at Harvard every summer. Lowell House was empty and its gate padlocked and strapped with a chain. Sometimes, just the thought of stopping by and standing in its main courtyard, flanked by a row of balusters, was sufficient to stir the illusion of Europe. I could knock at the window and ask Tony, the gatekeeper, to open the gate for me, say I needed to get to my office. But I knew that my visit might take no more than a minute or two, and I’d hate to disturb him.
    This was a different Cambridge.
    As happened every year once its students and most of its faculty were gone by midsummer, Cambridge began to acquire a different, gentler, working-class character. The pace slackened; the barber would stand outside his shop to smoke a cigarette, salesclerks at the Coop would be chatting it up among themselves, the waitress at Café Anyochka would still not have made up her mind whether to leave the glass door open or if it was time to turn on their rickety air conditioner. Cambridge in early August.
    I was staying the whole summer, holding a very part-time summer job in one of the Harvard libraries. The job paid a puny sum per hour. To make ends meet I tutored French. Money went toward rent. Other priorities were: food, cigarettes, a drink whenever possible. When money ran out, which it inevitably did by the end of each month, I’d put on a shirt, a jacket, and a tie and have lunch at the faculty club, where, amidst the established Harvard faculty and visiting dignitaries, I would eat on credit. I had failed my comprehensive exams in January, which left me just one more chance to retake them. I was reading books for my second try, scheduled for early in the new year, always lugging books wherever I went. Inside me I had the sinking feeling that graduate school would wear on and on with no end in sight till, before I knew it, I’d turn thirty, then forty, then die. Either this, or I’d flunk my comprehensives again, and they’d find out what they probably suspected all along: that I was a fraud, that I was never cut out to be a