The Traveling Tea Shop (18 page)

As we round the corner, I can’t help but flinch.

“Are you okay?” Harvey looks concerned.

“This is Harvard Square?” There must be some mistake.

“Not what you were expecting?”

“Not at all.”

I was picturing shiny-haired youths whirring by on bicycles, coattails fluttering in the breeze, highbrow chatter smattered with quotations from Thoreau, Sartre and Zuckerberg, maybe a few horsey laughs and a playful ping of a bow tie. What I get is grunge, and plenty of it. Slap-bang next to the Harvard subway, at the precise point where Harvey tells me the official tour begins, there is a menacing mess of skanky guys with matted hair, strung-out expressions and dogs on strings, hassling passersby for money. I step out of the way of some babbling looney-tune and nearly collide with an elderly gentleman who doesn’t appear to have bathed since the university was established in 1636.

“I don’t want to be politically incorrect,” I begin, “but why are these
particular
people congregating here?”

“Two reasons,” Harvey says matter-of-factly. “A steady flow of tourists to beg from, and a major homeless shelter two minutes’ walk from here—the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter to be precise.”

“Gosh,” I can’t help but snort. “Talk about a dramatic juxtaposition.”

“A lot of the students volunteer there.”

“That must be quite a shock to their systems.”

I imagine some toff trying to explain cutlery etiquette to a wild-haired man with crumbs in his bird’s-nest beard.

“It’s not as privileged a group as you might expect.” Harvey challenges my presumption.

“No?”

“About seventy percent of the students are here on financial aid. I couldn’t have afforded the tuition any other way.” He places a protective hand on my back. “Come on, let’s get you on the campus.”

We hurry across the road, away from the grime and onto the hallowed grounds.

Now this is more like it. No sooner do we pass through the entrance arch than I find myself in the vast grassy courtyard of my imaginings. Historic redbrick buildings surround us, some with rather more recent history.

“See this corner room up here?” He points upward. “That was Matt Damon’s dorm.”

“No!”

“Of course he dropped out, but all first-year students are obliged to reside here on the campus.”

“Even if you’re Natalie Portman?”

“Even if you’re Natalie Portman. Or Natalie Hershlag as she was known when she was here.”

“I can’t believe it. Everyone must have been staring at her twenty-four/seven.” I know I would have been. “Any other celebs?”

“Tons. Michelle Obama. Barack someone or other. Oh, and girls seem to get a kick out of knowing that Stockard Channing went here.”

“Rizzo went to Harvard?” I hoot. “Oh, that’s brilliant.” I make a mental note to tell Krista.

“You know the crazy thing? It’s only in the last twenty years that women have got the same certificate as the men.”

“What, before that they got a girl’s version of a Harvard degree?”

“Exactly.”

I’m sure Alva Vanderbilt would have had a thing or two to say about that.

“Now there’s actually more women getting degrees than men.”

“That’s excellent,” I cheer.

“For you,” he smirks, stepping into the shade of one of the elms. “Where did you study?”

“I didn’t,” I confess. “I think that’s why I have this weird fascination for university life. I’m always wondering what I missed out on.”

“It is a very particular experience,” he concedes, hand instinctively going to his liver.

“It’s not just the partying, I love the idea of all that
reading.
”

“Yeah, it’s a bummer that books aren’t accessible in the real world.”

I give him a playful swat.

“No libraries. No bookshops. No Amazon,” he taunts as he backs away from me.

“You know what I mean,” I huff, instinctively following him.

“Actually, I’ve got a couple of good Harvard book stories for you if you want to hear them?”

“I’m all ears!”

He directs me to a modest stone building. “This is the site of the old library. The night before it burned down, one student was so engrossed in the book he was reading that he decided to sneak it out, which was utterly forbidden—”

“Do you know what it was?” I interrupt. “Which book?”

“
The Christian Warfare Against the Devil, World, and Flesh
by John Downame.”

“My point exactly—I’m fairly certain Barnes and Noble don’t stock
that.
Go on.”

He twinkles back at me and then continues. “Well. He had every intention of returning it the next morning, but of course only burning embers greeted him. Now he was conflicted—he was in possession of the only remaining book in the entire collection, but by unscrupulous means.”

“What did he do?”

“He went to the president and confessed.”

“Good for him! And what did the president do?”

“Expelled him.”

“He didn’t!”

“He did.” Harvey chuckles.

I shake my head. “That’s harsh.”

“Rules is rules.”

I look back at the building. “So is this the new library?”

“Oh no. That’s over here.” He offers me his arm. I like the feel of his linen shirtsleeve on his forearm. He has a very manly physique for an intellectual. Takes after his granddad, no doubt.

“This,” he says, motioning to a vast beaux-arts beauty, a mere twelve columns to the front portico, “is The Widener. Named for Harry Elkins Widener. Another bibliophile graduate.”

“Stunning,” I murmur in reverence.

“Off he goes to Europe on a book-buying voyage, and he happens upon a copy of Bacon’s
Essays
—as in Francis Bacon—circa 1598.”

Talk about an ancient tome.

“So eager is he to get back, that he takes the first Atlantic crossing he can get passage on.” Harvey pauses, looking expectantly at me.

“What?”

“The year is 1912.”

I think for a moment. “Not the
Titanic
?”

“Yes! He’s traveling first class so he gets a spot on one of the lifeboats, but he loses it when he goes back to the cabin to get the book—”

“Oh, he didn’t!”

“He did. And consequently he drowned.”

“Do all your stories have such downbeat endings?”

“I’m not done with this one yet,” he grins, inviting me to splay a little beneath a nearby tree. “His mother is keen to honor him and so she approaches the president of Harvard and says she wants to build a library in his honor, sweetening the deal with a multimillion-dollar donation. Eager to please, Harvard says they’ll demolish the current building and start afresh. Well, this worried her—what if they did that to the Widener Library a few years down the line, when a mother with a greater sob story comes a-calling? So she made certain conditions to her donation: firstly, not a brick could be altered. So as the collection expanded—and there’s fifty-seven miles of bookshelves in there—they had to go underground. Four stories.”

“What?” I look back over at the building now, viewing it as something Bruce Wayne might have devised.

“There must always be fresh flowers in the office and, on account of the way her son died, every Harvardian must be able to swim in order to graduate.”

My eyebrows rise. “You had to swim for your degree?”

“Well, actually they had to stop that when the various disability laws came in.”

“Amazing. You just don’t get stories like these at your local polytechnic.”

“Don’t sound so hard done by—your people have got Oxford and Cambridge!”

“I know! My
people
do. I don’t.” My eyes narrow. “What’s it like,
really
? To be a part of something so legendary?”

He leans back against the tree trunk and ponders. “Well, you certainly feel a sense of honor and responsibility in a way, to do your best. I mean, you’re walking in the footsteps of presidents here. But at the end of the day, a class is a class.”

“This is just a classier class of class.”

“Who says you’re not smart?” He beams at me.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t smart, I’m just not
educated.
” I watch as a group of Bright Young Things jolly across the quad and wonder if I might get some glasses when I get back to New York. “I’d like to be inside one of these brains for just ten minutes. To know what it’s like to be
that
clever.”

Harvey sits forward. “You know, these aren’t all straight-A kids.”

I frown. “Surely, to get in—”

“Grades are one aspect. But a third of the assessment is what you do that’s different—they want to know in what
other
ways you excel.”

He gives me some examples from his year—one guy had volunteered with Habitat for Humanity in EI Salvador; another organized a sponsored cycle around Peru to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation; someone invented a system to keep zoo animals more mentally stimulated and, rather bizarrely, there was a flying trapeze artist named Montana who, after graduating, became the first woman to dive off the perilous cliffs in Acapulco.

Visionaries. Questers. Daredevils. Men and women of action.

“I love that!” I marvel. “Bonus points for having a souped-up zest for life. So what was yours?”

He looks shy for the first time. “It wasn’t such a big deal. No exotic locations or daredevil feats.”

“Is it a secret?”

“No,” he smiles. “It concerns old people, so I didn’t win any of the sexy points.”

I find that hard to believe.

He takes a breath. “I compiled the autobiographies of sixteen octogenarians.”

My head tilts. He’s going to have to go into more detail.

“It was actually my grandfather’s idea. He had all these friends who didn’t have any family and were destined to become Nursing Home Zombies, his words, and he said they would die in there and no one would know all their incredible stories. Even if no one ever read them, he felt there should be a record. And so we started this project—This Is My Life. I teamed up with some English majors and we started interviewing his friends. And then their friends.” He plucks a blade of grass. “It was remarkable how lively they became when they were reminiscing, their childhood memories were so keen, and it was fascinating to hear of love lives, the choices they made, their regrets, their triumphs. It seemed to be a very satisfying process for them, reviewing all the events that had led them to this day, reflecting on their life, making peace with it and now feeling that they had some kind of legacy, that they wouldn’t be forgotten.”

My eyes are a little damp.

“We put together all their photographs, labeled and dated, and even did a present-day portrait—for the women we got their hair and nails done, for the gents, we arranged a proper hot-towel shave and trimmed their ears!”

I chuckle in delight.

“The project is still running now, and of course these days we can create e-books so their stories will always be accessible.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“Plus we do a bit of advocacy in these homes—if anyone is having any issues, we make sure that everything is taken care of in a prompt manner.”

“Something tells me you don’t take no for an answer.”

He gets a playful look in his eye. “They call me The Heavy.”

If I found him attractive before, I am now heart-heavingly smitten.

My whole life, it seemed as though the dating choices were Man A who drinks too much or Man B who considers video games a participation sport. I couldn’t even really list the redeeming qualities of the men I dated—I just fixed on them after some passing physical attraction. They paid me some attention and that was that. Sold to the lady with low self-esteem! Did I ever once take the time to consider their admirable qualities or review their acts of valor? I did not. It was enough that they had a good head of hair. Just the idea of dating someone inspirational or altruistic is Blowing My Mind.

“I need a minute!”

I lie flat out on the grass and stare up at the sky, imagining what life might have been like had I teamed up with someone like that. What it might have triggered in me. Could I too have done something vigorous and life-enhancing?

And then I think of Pink’s dad’s words:
Be what you want to attract
 . . . and I jolt upright.

Harvey laughs. “Talk about wishing you could step inside someone’s brain for ten minutes! It looks very busy in there.”

“I was just wondering what my contribution might have been—what I would have chosen to do to make my mark.”

He shuffles around to face me, the sunlight filtering through the trees, casting patterns on his shoulders. “Let’s see—I’m guessing you’ve traveled a fair bit?”

“I’ve traveled a lot,” I tell him, explaining a little more about my job. “But I never left a place better for my being there.”

“Are you sure?” His voice softens.

I look back at him. Something weird just happened to my insides.

“I mean, you’ve inspired people to take journeys off the beaten path; you’ve brought money to local families; maybe made a certain worker feel special or take extra pride in his job.”

Goodness, it’s like listening to Sherlock.

“Maybe you smiled at someone—and you have a lovely sunny smile—and they passed it on and made someone else’s day better.”