What are these?
I developed our film.
From the movie field?
She nods.
The movie field is a place Katie brought me to see, an open plot in Princeton Battlefield Park that seems to extend farther and flatter than any stretch of land east of Kansas. A single oak tree stands in the middle of it like a sentinel who won't leave his post, echoing the last gesture of a general who died beneath the tree's branches during the Revolutionary War. Katie first saw the spot in a Walter Matthau movie, and ever since then the tree has been an enchantment for her. It became one in a small string of places she visited over and over again, a rosary of sights that anchored her life the more she returned to them. Within a week of her first night at Dod, she took me to see it, and it was as if the old Mercer Oak were a relative of hers, all three of us making an important first impression. I brought a blanket, a flashlight, and a picnic basket; Katie brought film and a camera.
The pictures are an artifact I don't expect, a small part of us locked in amber. We work through them together, sharing between our hands.
What do you think? she says.
Seeing them, I remember how warm the winter was. January's fading light is almost the color of honey, and here we are, both dressed in light sweaters, with coats and hats and gloves nowhere to be seen. The grooves of the tree behind us have the texture of age.
They're wonderful, I tell her.
Katie smiles awkwardly, still unsure how to take a compliment. I notice stains on her fingertips, the color of newsprint, left by one of the darkroom agents bottled along the wall. Her fingers are long and thin, but with a workmanlike touch, the residue of too much film dipped in too many chemical baths. This was us, she's saying, a thousand words at a time. Remember?
I'm sorry, I tell her.
My grip on the pictures loosens, but she reaches for my fingers with her other hand.
It's not because of my birthday, she says, worried I've missed the point.
I wait.
Where did you and Paul go after you left Holder last night?
To see Bill Stein.
She pauses over the name, but presses on. About Paul's thesis?
It was urgent.
What about when I stopped by your room just after midnight?
The art museum.
Why?
I'm uncomfortable with the direction she's taking. I'm sorry I didn't come over. Paul thought he could find Colonna's crypt, and he needed to look at some of the older maps.
Katie doesn't seem surprised. A hush gathers behind her next words, and I know this is the conclusion she's been building toward.
I thought you were done with Paul's thesis, she says.
So did I.
You can't expect me to watch you do this all over again, Tom. Last time we didn't talk for weeks. She hesitates, not knowing how else to put it. I deserve better.
A boy's way is to argue, to find a defensible position and hold it, even if it's not heartfelt. I can feel the arguments crowding into my mouth, the little spurs of self-preservation, but Katie stops me.
Don't, she says. I want you to think about this.
She doesn't have to spell it out. Our hands part; she leaves the pictures in mine. The hum of the darkroom returns. Like a dog I've kicked, the silence always seems to take her side.
The choice is made, I want to tell her. I don't need to think this through. It's simple: I love you more than Hove the book.
But to say it now would be the wrong choice. Part of this isn't about answering the question correctly: it's about showing that I'm correctible; that twice broken, I can still be fixed. Twelve hours ago I missed her birthday because of the Hypnerotomachia. My promises would seem empty right now, even to me.
Okay, I say.
Katie brings a hand to her mouth and bites at a nail, then catches herself and stops.
I should work, she says, touching my fingers again. Let's talk more about this tonight.
I stare at the nub of her nail, wishing I could inspire more confidence.
She pushes me toward the black curtains, handing me my coat, and we return to the main office. I need to finish the rest of my rolls before the senior photographers take over the darkroom, she says on the way, more for Sam's benefit than for mine. You're a distraction.
The artifice is wasted. Sam's earphones are still in place; focused on her typing, she doesn't notice me leaving.
At the door, Katie takes her hands away from the small of my back. She seems prepared to speak, but doesn't. Instead, she leans over and gives me a kiss on the cheek, the kind I used to get in our earliest days, as a reward for jogs in the morning. Then she holds the door for me as I leave.
Chapter 18
Love conquers all.
In seventh grade, at a small souvenir stand in New York, I bought a silver bracelet with that inscription for a girl named Jenny Harlow. I thought it was, in one stroke, a portrait of the young man she wanted to date: cosmopolitan, with its Manhattan pedigree; romantic, with its poetic-sounding motto; and classy, with its understated shine. I left the bracelet anonymously in Jenny's locker on Valentine's Day, then waited all day for a response, thinking she was sure to know who'd left it.
Cosmopolitan, romantic, and classy, unfortunately, didn't form a trail of breadcrumbs leading directly back to me. An eighth grader named Julius Murphy must've had that combination of virtues in much greater supply than I did, because it was Julius who got a kiss from Jenny Harlow at the end of the day, while I was left with nothing but a dark suspicion that the family vacation to New York had been for naught.
The whole experience, like so much of childhood, was built on misunderstanding. It wouldn't occur to me until much later that the bracelet wasn't made in New York, any more than it was made of silver. But that very Valentine's night, my father explained the particular misinterpretation he found most telling, which was that the poetic-sounding motto wasn't quite as romantic as Julius, Jenny, and I thought.
You may have gotten the wrong impression from Chaucer, he began, with the smile of paternal wisdom. There's more to 'love conquers all' than just the Prioress's brooch.
I sensed that this was going to be a lot like the conversation we'd had about babies and storks a few years before: well intentioned, but based on a serious misunderstanding about what I'd been learning in school.
A long explanation followed, about Virgil's tenth eclogue and omnia vincit amor, with digressions about Sithonian snows and Ethiopian sheep, all of which mattered a lot less to me than why Jenny Harlow didn't think I was romantic, and why I'd found such a useless way of blowing twelve dollars. If love conquered all, I decided, then love had never met Julius Murphy.
But my father was a wise man in his way, and when he saw he wasn't getting through to me, he opened a book and showed me a picture that made his point for him.
Agostino Carracci made this engraving, called Love Conquers All he said. What do you see?
On the right side of the picture were two naked women. On the left side, a baby boy was beating up a much larger and more muscular satyr.
I don't know, I said, unsure which side of the picture I was supposed to be learning from.
That, my father said, pointing to the boy, is Love. He let it sink in.
He's not supposed to be on your side. You fight with him; you try to undo what he does to others. But he's too powerful. No matter how much we suffer, Virgil says, our hardships cannot move him.
I'm not sure I ever completely understood the lesson my father was imparting. I got the simplest bit of it, I think: by trying to make Jenny Harlow fall head over heels for me, I was arm-wrestling Love, which my own cheap bracelet had been telling me was futile. But I sensed, even then, that my father was only using Jenny and Julius as an object lesson. What he really wanted to offer was a piece of wisdom he'd come by the hard way, which he hoped to impress upon me while the stakes of my own failures were still small. My mother had warned me about misguided love, my father's affair with the Hypnerotomachia always in the back of her mind; and now my father was offering his counterpoint, riddled in Virgil and Chaucer. He knew exactly how she felt, he was saying; he may even have agreed. But how could he stop it, what power did he have against the force he was fighting, when Love conquered all?