Summer of Dreams (8 page)

“What about Laura?” Clyde pressed. “Does she understand what’s going on?”

Nellie’s painted mouth pursed as though sucking a lemon. She leaned in to whisper. “I think maybe she’s thrown him over. No one has seen her for weeks, and Romulus is in a bad way. He’s quit going to classes, and one of the men in the dorm said he lit a fire in his trash can. A bunch of fellows had to burst inside to put it out before it spread.”

“I’ve got to get to Boston,” Evelyn said.

“I’ll come with you,” Clyde responded.

“Can you?” She held her breath. She had no idea what she
would be confronted with in Boston, and the prospect of dealing with this on her own was terrifying, but Clyde wasn’t a free man. “Are you sure you’ll be able to—”

“I’m coming,” he insisted. “So long as I’m back by Monday morning, it will be fine.”

The resolve on his face reassured her. Somehow, she knew she could conquer anything so long as she had Clyde Brixton by her side.

C
lyde held Evelyn’s hand the entire four-hour train ride to Boston. She was so tightly wound her spine never touched the back of the seat. He ached to comfort her, but until they understood what was wrong with Romulus, there was nothing meaningful he could say.

The dance hall girl sat on the bench opposite them but had little additional insight to share. All Nellie could tell them was that Romulus had been his normal, easygoing self until about a month ago, when he quit attending class and seemed determined to live the life of a drunkard.

They reached the Harvard campus late on Saturday afternoon, and Nellie guided them to Romulus’s dormitory. She had a performance that evening and could not stay, so Clyde and Evelyn approached the front of the dormitory on their own. A handful of students lounged on the steps of Stoughton Hall, swigging from a bottle passed around the group. When Clyde inquired about Romulus, their mood sobered. The students confirmed everything Nellie had said. Romulus was drunk and despondent, and no one had been able to help him.

“We are friends of his from home,” Clyde told them. “We’d like to go up and see him.”

It was an all-male dormitory, and when one of the young men suggested Evelyn would need to wait outside, she lifted her chin a bit but kept her voice calm. “I can see you are men of good character,” she said. “Men who would never make low assumptions when a woman comes to her cousin’s aid. I’m so grateful we share the same values.”

There was no more talk of barring Evelyn after that. One of the young men sprang to his feet and walked them up to Romulus’s room on the third floor. Their footsteps echoed down the dimly lit hallway, and Clyde braced himself for what he might find on the opposite side of the plain wooden door.

He knocked, but there was no response. He wiggled the knob, but it was locked. He tried knocking again, this time hard enough to make his knuckles ache. “Romulus? It’s Clyde and Evelyn. We know you’re in there.”

This time they heard some shuffling from behind the door, but it took several more knocks before a muffled voice replied. “Go away. I’m fine.”

The only thing Clyde knew for certain was that Romulus was
not
fine. He glanced at Evelyn, whose face was pale with fear. “Let me borrow a hair pin,” he whispered.

He ended up destroying three of Evelyn’s hair pins, unfolding and twisting them to pick the rudimentary lock on Romulus’s door. “We’re coming in,” he warned one final time before opening the door.

Romulus was sitting on the floor, legs stretched before him, leaning against an unmade bed, glowering at them from bleary eyes. He held a half-empty bottle of something in one hand, and he raised it toward them. “Can I offer you a drink?” he asked.

Clyde said nothing as he guided Evelyn inside the room and closed the door. It was a tight fit for the three of them, feeling
even smaller since the desk chair was overturned and the wardrobe doors hanging open. Evelyn crossed the small space to close the wardrobe and set the chair upright. The only other pieces of furniture in the room were the bed and a desk beneath a window overlooking a leafy green.

“Who told you?” Romulus said.

“A girl called Nellie,” Evelyn answered as she lowered herself onto the mattress next to where Romulus leaned against the bed. “She came all the way to West Point to tell us you were in trouble, but she didn’t know anything else. Romulus, what’s going on?”

Romulus made no attempt to reply, merely took a swig from the bottle.

“Nellie said you’re not going to classes,” she continued. “Is that true?”

“True.”

“Why?”

Romulus let out a tremendous sigh, then rose on unsteady feet. Clyde darted to the door, leaning against it and barring any attempt Romulus might make to bolt from the room. It didn’t matter. All Romulus did was heft himself up onto the mattress, landing with an ungainly bounce. With the saddest eyes in the world, he stared across the room to the maple tree outside the window.

“It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “Look . . . I appreciate that you came all this way, but there was no need. There’s nothing you can do to help, and I’ll figure this out on my own.”

Clyde kept a close eye on Evelyn, who looked torn between weeping and lashing out in anger. The bond between Evelyn and Romulus went back to childhood. As much as it hurt for him to see Romulus like this, it must be devastating for Evelyn. He wanted to lunge across the room and shake some sense into a man who appeared to be throwing his life away.

He forced his voice to remain calm. “You’re not alone,” he said. “Tell us what we can do to help, and we’ll do it. You know we will. Whatever it takes.”

Romulus dragged both hands through his hair, drawing a shaky breath. “Thanks, but there is nothing you can do. It’s about Laura. She told me it’s over, and . . .” His voice trailed off so that it could barely be heard. “And I’ve managed to pretty much destroy everything.”

Romulus had always been prone to exaggeration and overblown language, but Clyde couldn’t doubt the hollow despair in each of Romulus’s words.

“Rom, there’ll be other girls . . .”

“Maybe, but not for me. Laura was pretty clear about my many failings, and the worst of it is, everything she said about me is right.”

Evelyn bristled. “What bad things did she say about you?”

“That I’m scatterbrained and disorganized. That I’ve changed my course of study five times and can’t commit to anything. That I know a little of everything but not a lot of anything—”

“Doesn’t she get it? That’s what makes you so interesting!” Evelyn said.

Romulus snorted. “That’s what makes me unemployable and a total failure, and she’s right. She says I’ll never be able to hold down a job. That I couldn’t be depended on to support a wife and children, and I wouldn’t be a good husband.”

“Nonsense!” Evelyn said. “Any girl would be lucky to have you. You’re smart and funny, and I shouldn’t say this because your head is already too big, but you are probably the handsomest man in all of Boston. Can’t she see that you’re brilliant?”

Romulus usually preened in the face of Evelyn’s adoration, but he just hung his head and stared at nothing. “Evelyn, I’m really not,” he said softly. “I can put on a good show, but there’s not a lot underneath it all. I guess she finally figured that out.
And I love Laura so much. It wasn’t just that she is smart and pretty, it’s that she knows how to dream. We had such plans to see the world, to build a house with our own two hands, to write a symphony together. But as graduation got closer, she started changing. She’s gotten very practical all of a sudden, and she thinks I won’t be able to make it in the real world.” His voice became tense and ragged, as though the words were torn from his throat in a sudden rush. “She’s in my blood and bones and every dream about the future I’ve ever had. No woman will ever be able to surpass what I’ve felt for her. So I guess she’s pretty much ruined me for any other woman.”

A fat tear rolled down his face. With a flick of his palms, Romulus scrubbed his eyes and drew a heavy breath. “I quit going to class,” he admitted. “At first it was because I didn’t care, but now it’s too late to repair the damage. I’m going to fail trigonometry, so I won’t even be able to graduate.”

Over the next few minutes, Romulus outlined his situation. Harvard’s attendance policy was lax, but three weeks of missing classes could not be overlooked. A disciplinary hearing had been called, which he did not bother to attend. He gestured to a stack of papers heaped on his desk.

“Those are the disciplinary reports,” Romulus said. “A copy of everything was sent to the people organizing the expedition to Brazil, and they’ve cut ties with me, too. They said I lack the character necessary for an expedition of that caliber. Everything I’ve ever worked for is over. Ruined. It’s all my own fault, which makes it doubly humiliating.”

Clyde frowned. He didn’t know much about the culture at Harvard, but West Point cadets were trained never to accept defeat. He skimmed the disciplinary report and Romulus’s academic scores to date, including a zero on a trigonometry test he’d missed. He closed his eyes and ran the mental calculations. It would be hard to overcome a zero on a test, but it was still
mathematically possible for Romulus to pass if he could sober up, hit the books, and fight for something better than seeing the bottom of a whiskey bottle. It was going to be a close call, but there was valor in fighting all the way to the end.

“Look, you did something really stupid,” Clyde said. “You’ve dug yourself into a hole, but now it’s time to start climbing out, and guzzling whiskey won’t help. The only way to find your dignity again is to stand up, admit your mistakes, and fight for what you’ve always wanted. For what you
still
want.”

“The life I wanted is closed to me,” Romulus said.

“Then make a new one,” Evelyn replied. “Don’t you think I know about having doors slammed in my face? I won’t let you give up your future over one mistake.”

Clyde set down the papers, flipped the desk chair around, and sat directly in front of Romulus, who was still slumped on the mattress, staring at the ground.

“I’m willing to tutor you,” he said. “You can’t give up yet. I’ve been trained to go down fighting. We’ve got four days until your final exam in trigonometry—and a fighting chance at getting there. We may not make it across the finish line. You might spend the next four days working and striving, and it still won’t be good enough . . . but we can’t give up until it’s over. If we die on this field, we die as fighters, not quitters.”

For the first time since they’d entered this room almost an hour ago, a spark of hope lit Romulus’s reddened eyes.

Perspiration beaded up on Clyde’s palms. He had planned to take the train back to West Point tomorrow afternoon. If he missed class on Monday, he’d be slammed with a whole new set of demerits. He’d worked hard all year to remove some of his demerits, and he was in good shape, having cleared away almost sixty demerits. But graduation was less than a month away, and it was impossible to know how many demerits this would cost him.

He swallowed hard as the full understanding of everything he risked by staying to tutor Romulus washed over him. A degree from the nation’s finest engineering program and the automatic commission as an army officer hung in the balance. All his life, he’d focused, with steely-eyed determination, on his plan to achieve, strive, and conquer. He’d earned his first patent when he was only seventeen. He had the audacity to get into West Point by knocking on the vice-president’s front door and asking for a recommendation. He’d never looked back, never let another person divert him from the goal of a West Point diploma.

But that was before he’d learned the meaning of friendship. Was there any price he would not pay for the gift of a genuine friendship? There was no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. He’d never fully understood the meaning of that passage until this very moment.

Romulus was his friend, and Clyde would do what was necessary to lift him back onto the right path.

As Clyde started tutoring Romulus, there was little for Evelyn to do other than tidy the room, but soon enough it became a genuine team effort. She ran to the grocer’s shop a block from campus for some sandwiches and a jug of tea, as it appeared Romulus had not had a decent meal in weeks. While Clyde went over the principles of how to calculate distance equations, she wrote out study questions from a trigonometry book. It seemed as soon as she had them copied, Clyde was sliding them before Romulus, who attacked them with growing confidence.

It was a little embarrassing when she ventured outside the dormitory room. It was impossible to blend in when she was the sole woman in a building of two hundred men, but after some initial awkwardness, everyone was quite decent to her. Romulus was a popular man on campus, and his fellow students
did their best to help however possible. They brought hot coffee and extra blankets and pillows. One of them even dragged in a pallet, for Evelyn, Clyde, and Romulus would be sharing this tiny space for the next few days.

They worked well into the night. The moon rose, and they lit a lantern, and eventually there was nothing else for Evelyn to do but curl up on the corner of the rumpled bed and listen to Clyde’s patient voice coaxing Romulus through the problems. The window was open, and she could hear shouts of male laughter and carousing from the courtyard below.

A sense of well-being flooded her as she realized that this was her first night of college. She wasn’t enrolled, and her time here would amount to no more than a few days, but for this snippet of time, she shared in the comradery and pursuit of knowledge here on campus.

Romulus insisted she take his bed, while he and Clyde stretched out on the pallet, but she was still stiff and cramped by morning, and she knew she needed to get another telegram to Aunt Bess. She’d sent a message to her aunt yesterday, alerting her of an urgent need to see Romulus but assuring her aunt she would return soon. That wouldn’t be the case now, and she composed a carefully worded telegram to explain that circumstances would prohibit her return until Wednesday evening.