Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) Read Free Page B

were busy trying to get a start in life and by people on pensions who were just as busy keeping an eye on the younger people’s children, who ran around in the grassy courtyard, unsupervised, throwing rocks and battling with sticks. I was one of the neglected runts. My father was studying patent law at night, clerking in a court during the day, and my mother was working part-time as a nurse and caring for my new baby brother, Andy. If I fell and skinned my knee, there was often no one to go crying to, but one day, after a scuffle with a bully that left me with a bloody nose, an old man who was reading in a lawn chair called me over, produced a handkerchief, twisted it into a point, and gently inserted it in my ruptured nostril.
    When the bleeding stopped we went into his apartment, which was two doors down from ours, and he dabbed my face clean with a washcloth. Then he made us tea with milk and sugar, which he served with slices of Sara Lee pound cake. His movements were precise, efficient, tight, as though he was used to working in close quarters, and in no way did he evoke the fearsome strangers that my parents had warned me to beware of. Indeed, he’d met my parents, he informed me, and he felt that it might ease their hectic lives if I were to let him watch me on occasion. He’d ask them about it. If they agreed, I should come over tomorrow morning at eight and we’d have our first “lesson.”
    “In what?”
    “All sorts of things. I’ll be in my study upstairs. Come right on up.”
    And so it began, my two-year private tutorial under a world-traveling old Scotsman who treated me not as a child but as a first mate. The vessel he’d helmed was named the Pathfinder . It belonged not to the U.S. Navy but to the Coast and Geodetic Survey, a little-known branch of the Treasury Department whose mission traced back to the time of President Jefferson, an era of far-flung cartographic quests. What Lewis and Clark were sent off to discover about the American continent’s western wilderness, the corps of seagoing explorers that became the C&GS was tasked with learning about the coasts. Uncle Admiral’s part in this endeavor ran from the twenties to the fifties and focused on the supremely crooked shorelines of Alaska and the Northwest.
    “Name the chain,” he asked me in his study, touching an index finger to his big globe.
    “The Aleutians.”
    “That’s correct. And from whom did we buy them? Which great nation?”
    “Russia?”
    He nodded, biting the woody stem of his dime-store corncob pipe. My pipe, identical, lay on his desk next to the mugs of milky chicory coffee he prepared for us each weekday morning at precisely eight hundred hours. Later, at twelve hundred hours on the dot, he’d whip up two bologna and mustard sandwiches. Then, exactly three hours later, he’d bring out the tea and pound cake. He lived as he had on shipboard in the Pacific: briskly, austerely, and by the clock. I found his routines reassuring and relaxing. At my parents’ place, meals were served irregularly, squeezed in between other chores and obligations, and were frequently broken up by phone calls, but at Uncle Admiral’s apartment routines ran smoothly, time never wobbled, and each bite was chewed and swallowed.
    “Whose idea was the purchase of Alaska—a decision for which he was widely, harshly mocked?”
    I didn’t remember. I scanned the study for clues. A wooden slide rule resting on an atlas. A polished brass sextant in a felt-lined case. Shelf upon shelf of leather-bound photo albums documenting Uncle Admiral’s meetings with everyone from a band of Inuit fishermen to the Queen of England. He stood the same way no matter who stood beside him, his arms at his sides and his shoulders squared, chin out. His uniform was an extraneous formality. His rectitude was intrinsic, skeletal.
    “Secretary Seward,” he said at last, sounding as if he’d known the fellow personally. For all I knew he might have. Cortés,