At the funeral, neither of us wept. We stood in dry-eyed silence, holding hands. Everyone complimented us on how strong we were. I think of that often. That moment. I wonder if there was some way I could have saved him, had I been a different man. I wonder if he did the only thing he could do—there was no one willing to save him. And perhaps not everyone can save themselves. I wonder if my mother taught me as well as I always thought she had.

I told her about my retirement from Chelsea on one of my rare visits to her nursing home in Chicago. She was surprised—“You a little young yet, ain’t you?”—but she took my explanation of fatigue and a desire to have more time for scholarly pursuits at face value. She has never understood that I am not a major scholar. I did not tell her the disgrace I had brought upon myself. I let her continue to believe that she had raised at least one honorable man.

Reading and running, that’s my life here in the assembly-line quaint Connecticut town that is now my home. I chose it because it is not far from Chelsea and it seemed as good as anywhere else. It is a working-to middle-class community with a fairly sizable Negro population. I did not realize how sheltered I had become living for so long on campus. It’s quite shocking, really, American life at the end of the century. The ridiculous clothes people wear and the lack of decorum and the music that is like an assault out of every doorway. I think often of the quiet rigor of my former life. I did not even fully appreciate how much it costs to rent an apartment on the open market. I had saved over the years—my needs were few when I was at Chelsea—and Fox arranged for me to receive my full pension, so I manage. For a long time, I did not know what to do with myself. Without the school schedule to structure my days, I found that I spent hours, days, in a ceaseless replay of my tenure at the school, particularly the final events of my career there. For a while, my sorrow made it difficult even to read, though I came back to that. Running is what kept me sane—the smooth motion of my legs and the chance to stop thinking, if only briefly.