“Fine. He writes that it’s hard but he thinks he’ll make out all right. He’ll be home for Thanksgiving.”

“I’d like to see him. I saw Cal on the street last night. There’s a smart boy.”

“Cal didn’t take college tests a year ahead,” said Adam.

“Well, maybe that’s not what he’s cut out for. I didn’t go to college. Did you?”

“No,” said Adam. “I went into the army.”

“Well, it’s a good experience. I’ll bet you wouldn’t take a good bit for the experience.”

Adam stood up slowly and picked his hat from the deer horns on the wall. “Good night, Henry,” he said.

[2]

Walking home, Adam pondered his responsibility. As he passed Reynaud’s Bakery Lee came out, carrying a golden loaf of French bread.

“I have a hunger for some garlic bread,” Lee said.

“I like it with steak,” said Adam.

“We’re having steak. Was there any mail?”

“I forgot to look in the box.”

They entered the house and Lee went to the kitchen. In a moment Adam followed him and sat at the kitchen table. “Lee,” he said, “suppose we send a boy to the army and he is killed, are we responsible?”

“Go on,” said Lee. “I would rather have the whole thing at once.”

“Well, suppose there’s a slight doubt that the boy should be in the army and we send him and he gets killed.”

“I see. Is it responsibility or blame that bothers you?”

“I don’t want blame.”

“Sometimes responsibility is worse. It doesn’t carry any pleasant egotism.”

“I was thinking about that time when Sam Hamilton and you and I had a long discussion about a word,” said Adam. “What was that word?”

“Now I see. The word was timshel.”

“Timshel—and you said—”

“I said that word carried a man’s greatness if he wanted to take advantage of it.”

“I remember Sam Hamilton felt good about it.”

“It set him free,” said Lee. “It gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man.”

“That’s lonely.”

“All great and precious things are lonely.”

“What is the word again?”

“Timshel—thou mayest.”

[3]

Adam looked forward to Thanksgiving when Aron would come home from college. Even though Aron had been away such a short time Adam had forgotten him and changed him the way any man changes someone he loves. With Aron gone, the silences were the result of his going, and every little painful event was somehow tied to his absence. Adam found himself talking and boasting about his son, telling people who weren’t very interested how smart Aron was and how he had jumped a year in school. He thought it would be a good thing to have a real celebration at Thanksgiving to let the boy know his effort was appreciated.

Aron lived in a furnished room in Palo Alto, and he walked the mile to and from the campus every day. He was miserable. What he had expected to find at the university had been vague and beautiful. His picture—never really inspected—had been of clean-eyed young men and immaculate girls, all in academic robes and converging on a white temple on the crown of a wooded hill in the evening. Their faces were shining and dedicated and their voices rose in chorus and it was never any time but evening. He had no idea where he had got his picture of academic life—perhaps from the Doré illustrations of Dante’s Inferno with its massed and radiant angels. Leland Stanford University was not like that. A formal square of brown sandstone blocks set down in a hayfield; a church with an Italian mosaic front; classrooms of varnished pine; and the great world of struggle and anger re-enacted in the rise and fall of fraternities. And those bright angels were youths in dirty corduroy trousers, some study-raddled and some learning the small vices of their fathers.