The Rule of Four (47 page)

The package was waiting at my house when I came back from work today. A little brown mailing tube propped against my door, so unexpectedly light, I thought it might be empty. There was nothing on the outside but my house number and postal code, no return address, only a handwritten routing number in the left corner. I remembered a poster Charlie said he was sending me, an Eakins painting of a lone rower on the Schuylkill River. He’d been trying to convince me to move closer to Philadelphia, trying to convince me that it was the right city for a man like me. His son should see more of his godfather, he said. Charlie thought I was slipping away.

So I cracked the tube open, saving it for after the regular mail, the credit card offers and sweepstakes notifications and nothing that resembled a letter from Katie. In the glow of the television, the barrel seemed hollow, no poster from Charlie, no message. Only when I stuck my finger inside did I feel something thin curled around the circumference. One side of it felt glossy, the other side ragged. I pulled it out less gently than I should have, considering what it was.

Bottled inside the little package was an oil painting. I rolled it open, wondering for a second if Charlie had outdone himself and bought me an original. But when I saw the image on the canvas, I knew better. The style was much older than nineteenth-century American, much older than any century American. The subject was religious. It was European, from the first true age of painting.

It is difficult to explain the feeling of holding the past in your hands. The smell of that canvas was stronger and more complex than anything in Texas, where even wine and money are young. There was a trace of the same smell at Princeton, possibly at Ivy, certainly in the oldest rooms of Nassau Hall. But the odor was much more concentrated here, in this tiny cylinder, the smell of age, hardy and thick.

The canvas was dark with grime, but slowly I made out the subject. In the background stood the statuary of ancient Egypt, obelisks and hieroglyphs and unfamiliar monuments. In the foreground was a single man, to whom others had come in submission. Seeing a hint of pigment, I looked more closely. The man’s robe was painted with a brighter palette than the rest of the scene. In the dusty desert, it was radiant. This man before me, I hadn’t thought of in years. It was Joseph, now a great official in Egypt, rewarded by the pharaoh for interpreting dreams. Joseph, revealing himself to his brothers who came to buy grain, the very brothers who left him for dead so many years before. Joseph, restored to his coat of many colors.

On the bases of the statuary had been painted three inscriptions. The first read:
CRESCEBAT AUTEM COTIDIE FAMES IN OMNI TERRA APERUITQUE IOSEPH UNIVERSA HORREA
.
There was famine all over the world. Then Joseph opened the granaries
. Then:
FESTINAVITQUE QUIA COMMOTA FUERANT VISCERA EIUS SUPER FRATRE SUO ET ERUMPEBANT LACRIMAE ET INTROIENS CUBICULUM FLEVIT
.
Joseph hurried out; so strong was the affection he felt for his brother that he wanted to cry.
On the base of the third statue was simply a printed signature.
SANDRO DI MARIANO
—better known by the nickname his older brother gave him: “little barrel,” or Botticelli. By the date below his name, the canvas was over five hundred years old.

I stared at it, this relic that only one other pair of hands had touched since the day it was sealed below ground. Beautiful in a way that no humanist could resist, with its pagan statuary that Savonarola could never abide. Here it was, nearly destroyed by age, but somehow still intact, still vibrant beneath the soot. Alive, after all this time.

I laid it on the table when my hands became too unsteady to hold it, and I reached into the tube again, looking for something I’d missed. A letter, a note, even just a symbol. But it was empty. The handwriting on the outside, spelling out my address with such care. But nothing else. Only postmarks and a routing code in the corner.

Then that routing code caught my eye: 39-055-210185-GEN4519. There was a pattern to it, like the logic of a riddle. It formed an exchange, a phone number overseas.

At the dark end of a bookshelf I found a volume someone had given me for Christmas years ago, an almanac, with its catalogs of temperatures and dates and zip codes, suddenly useful. Toward the back was a list of foreign prefixes.

39, the country code for Italy.

055, the area code for Florence.

I stared at the rest of the numbers, beginning to feel the return of my pulse, the old drumming in my ears. 21 01 85, a local phone number. GEN4519, possibly a room number, an extension. He was at a hotel, in an apartment.

There was famine all over the world. Then Joseph opened the granaries.

I looked back at the painting, then over at the mailing tube.

GEN4519.

Joseph hurried out; so strong was the affection he felt for his brother that he wanted to cry.

GEN4519. GEN45:19.

In the home I’d made, it was easier to find an almanac than a Bible. I had to rummage through old boxes in my attic before coming across the Bible that Charlie claimed to have left behind accidentally after his last visit. He thought he might be able to share his faith with me, the certainties that came with it. Indefatigable Charlie, hopeful to the end.

I have it now, in front of me. Genesis 45:19 comes at the conclusion of the story Botticelli painted. After revealing himself to his brothers, Joseph becomes a gift-giver, just like his father before him. After all he has suffered, he says he will take his brothers back, they who now starve in Canaan, and let them share in the bounty of his Egypt. And I, who have made the mistake most of my life of trying to leave my father behind me, of thinking I could move forward by keeping him in the past, I understand perfectly.

Get your father and come,
the verse says.
Never mind about your property, for the best of all Egypt will be yours.

I pick up the phone.

Get your father and come,
I think, wondering how he understood, even when I didn’t.

I put the phone back down and reach for my daybook, to copy the number before anything can happen to it. In those lonely pages, the new H of Paul Harris and the old M of Katie Marchand are the only two entries on the spread. It feels unnatural to add a name now, but I am fighting the sensation that all I have is this set of digits on the mailing tube, a single chance that could be erased by the simplest mistake, an opportunity that could bleed into nothing beneath a single drop of water.

There is sweat on my hands as I lift the receiver again, hardly aware of the time that has passed as I sat here, trying to think of the words to put to this. Out the bay window of my bedroom, in the glittering Texas night, I can see nothing but the sky.

Never mind about your property, for the best of all Egypt will be yours.

I refresh the dial tone and start pushing the buttons on the keypad. A number I never thought my fingers would form, a voice I never thought I’d hear again. There is a distant buzz, the ringing of a telephone in another time zone. Then, after the fourth ring, a voice.

You’ve reached Katie Marchand at Hudson Gallery, Manhattan. Please leave a message.

Then a beep.

“Katie,” I say, into the hum of silence, “this is Tom. It’s almost midnight here. Texas time.”

The hush of the other end is haunting. It might have overwhelmed me, if I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to say.

“I’m leaving Austin tomorrow morning. I’ll be gone for a while; I’m not sure how long.”

There is a photo of the two of us in a small frame on my desk. We’re slightly off-center, both holding one side of the camera and pointing it toward ourselves. The campus chapel is behind us, stony and still, Princeton whispering in the background even now.

“When I get back from Florence,” I tell her, the sophomore in my picture, my accidental gift, just before the machine in New York cuts off, “I want to see you.”

Then I place the receiver back in its cradle and stare out the window again. There will be bags to pack, travel agents to call, new pictures to take. Even as I begin to realize the magnitude of what I’m doing, a thought occurs to me. Somewhere in the city of rebirth, Paul is lifting himself out of bed, staring out his window, and waiting. There are pigeons cooing on rooftops, cathedral bells tolling from towers in the distance. We are sitting here, continents apart, the same way we always did: at the edges of our mattresses, together. On the ceilings where I am going there will be saints and gods and flights of angels. Everywhere I walk there will be reminders of all that time can’t touch. My heart is a bird in a cage, ruffling its wings with the ache of expectation. In Italy, the sun is rising.

Authors’ Note
                           

The identity of the
Hypnerotomachia
’s author has remained uncertain for over five hundred years. In the absence of definitive proof favoring the Roman Francesco Colonna or his Venetian namesake, scholars have continued to grapple with the strange acrostic, “Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna Peramavit,” sometimes citing it as evidence of the author’s mysterious intent.

Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) was both respected and reviled by the citizens of Florence during his brief tenure as the city’s religious leader. Though to some he remains a symbol of spiritual reform against the excesses of his time, to others he is known only as the destroyer of countless paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts in the bonfires for which he is best remembered.

As of the publication of
The Rule of Four,
no connection has been made between the
Hypnerotomachia
and Savonarola.

Richard Curry amends Browning’s poem “Andrea del Sarto” to suit his needs, and Tom, remembering Curry’s usage, does the same. Browning’s original line is: “
I
do what many dream of, all their lives” (emphasis added). Tom and Paul sometimes refer to scholarly books, including those by Braudel and Hartt, by shorthand titles; and Paul, in his enthusiastic overview of Florence’s history, indicates that Florentine artists and intellectuals spanning several centuries were living “at the same time.” Tom takes the liberty of shortening the official name of Princeton Battlefield State Park to Princeton Battlefield Park, of attributing “Take the ‘A’ Train” to Duke Ellington instead of Billy Strayhorn, and of suggesting, in his first meeting with Katie, that the name of poet E.E. Cummings was intended to appear in lowercase, when Cummings himself (in this respect, at least) probably preferred conventional capitalization.

The authors take responsibility for other inventions and simplifications. The Nude Olympics traditionally began at midnight—not at sunset, as
The Rule of Four
suggests. Jonathan Edwards was indeed Princeton’s third president, and died as described in this novel, but he did not initiate the Easter ceremonies described here, which are fully invented. Though the eating clubs on Prospect throw many formal events each year, the particular Ivy ball Tom attends is fictional. And the floor plan of the Ivy Club, like those of a few other locations mentioned, has been changed to suit the needs of the story.

Finally, time itself has taken a toll on some of the Princeton fixtures so familiar to Tom and his friends. Katie’s sophomore class was the last to run naked in Holder Courtyard on the night of the first snowfall (though it did so in January, not in April): the university outlawed the Nude Olympics just before Tom’s graduation in 1999. And Katie’s beloved tree, the Mercer Oak that once stood in Princeton Battlefield State Park, collapsed on March 3, 2000, of natural causes. It can still be seen in the Walter Matthau movie
I.Q.

In nearly all other respects, we have tried to remain as faithful as possible to the history of the Italian Renaissance and of Princeton. We are deeply indebted to those two great settings of the mind.

I.C. and D.T.

Acknowledgments
                           

We owe many thanks.
The Rule of Four
was nearly six years in the making, and for two young men in their twenties it felt like a lifetime.

First to Jennifer Joel—überagent, friend, muse—who believed in us long before anyone else did; and to Susan Kamil, who loved us as her own, and toiled over the manuscript as feverishly as Tom and Paul would have.

Many thanks to the others without whom this wouldn’t have been possible: Kate Elton, Margo Lipschultz, Nick Ellison, Alyssa Sheinmel, Barb Burg, Theresa Zoro, Pam Bernstein, Abby Koons, and Jennifer Cayea.

Ian would like to begin by thanking Jonathan Tze. The idea for Paul’s thesis, from which much of this book sprang, is half his. At Princeton, thanks also go to Anthony Grafton, who suggested a research paper on the
Hypnerotomachia
; to Michael Sugrue, whose enthusiasm and encouragement were never in short supply; and, especially, to David Thurn, whose wisdom and friendship made all the difference. At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Mary O’ Brien and Bettie Stegall gave literature and creative writing a voice in the wilderness. Joshua “Ned” Gunsher was an inspiration for Tom’s clapper misadventure, and also helped to map out the Ivy Club of fact, before we reimagined it in fiction. For fifteen years, Davin Quinn’s writerly companionship has been a comfort and a guiding light; with Robert McInturff, Stewart Young, and Karen Palm, he formed part of the model for a book about friendship. Above all, my mother and father, my sister, Rachel, and my fiancée, Meredith, kept faith when hope seemed lost, not only these past six years, but every time I seemed to be a hopeless case. Their love makes even the joy of writing seem small.

For their editorial guidance and great friendship, Dusty would first like to thank Samuel Baum, Jose Llana, and Sam Shaw. Thanks go, too, to those who were there in as many different ways as there are names: Sabah Ashraf, Andy and Karen Barnett, Noel Bejarano, Marjorie Braman, Scott Brown, Sonesh Chainani, Dhruv Chopra, Elena DeCoste, Joe Geraci, Victor and Phyllis Grann, Katy Heiden, Stan Horowitz, the Joel family, David Kanuth, Clint Kisker, Richard Kromka, John Lester, Tobias Nanda, Nathaniel Pastor, Mike Personick, Joe and Spencer Rascoff, Jeff Sahrbeck, Jessica Salins, Joanna Sletten, Nick Simonds, Jon Stein, Emily Stone, Larry Wasserman, and Adam Wolfsdorf. To my family, Hyacinth and Maxwell Rubin, Bob and Marge Thomason, Lois Rubin, and all the Thomasons, Blounts, Katzs, Cavanaghs, and Nassers, thank you for your unending support. Most of all, my love to James and Marcia Thomason, and Janet Thomason and Ron Feldman, for whom no words could be enough, and to Heather Jackie, for whom four letters are enough: BTPT.