Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides the Hurt

“Oh,” he said.

They drove a ways. The few people out on the street shuffled under slickers and umbrellas but Albie recognized them nonetheless, waving out the window excitedly and shrieking, not caring if the rain got inside. The people made their greeting motions, shook umbrellas in their direction, and trudged on. Whenever Albie passed a car, he clapped twice on the horn at the other driver and bobbed his head. “Everybody knows me,” Albie explained. “I’m everybody’s uncle.”

The people honked back or ignored him. There’s that crazy bastard again, is how he decoded these brief exchanges.

“That’s old Frank’s son,” Albie said as a red SUV zipped toward them. Albie honked and Frank’s son swerved, startled. “Frank was our foreman for many years,” Albie explained. “He came up from the floor. Started on the floor with the Bessemer and moved up.”

“That right?”

“Shoot. Never worked anywhere else. That’s his house over there. Went there for a barbecue once. Guess you don’t barbecue that much in the city, huh?”

“Hadn’t noticed.”

“Don’t barbecue much at all, I guess.” Albie honked at a station wagon. “Hey! Mason! Hey!” And there was almost an accident.

He deliberated and then decided, yes, the Winthrop family spread qualified for estate-hood, and with a few wings to spare. They drove through an iron gate that took them past a low stone wall and wound their way up the driveway. Feral hedges clawed the car. As they approached the house he was reminded of good-for-you public television shows where there were always a lot of goings-on in the servants’ quarters. But there were no more servants. No signs of life besides them in fact, until they got around back, and something crunched as the car slowed. They inspected the damage. The Mighty Wheels was now yesterday’s toy, mashed to yellow-and-red bits beneath the front tire. “Aw, will you get a load of that,” Albie groaned. “The tenants in the guesthouse, the kids leave all their stuff around.” He shook his head.

It was always a perplexing event, he found, to help people put away their groceries. You never know where the other person’s system of grocery placement connects and diverges from your own. The cabinets and drawers are avenues in a maze. One man’s sponge nook is another man’s soup hutch. So he leaned against the refrigerator and watched Albie unpack the week’s shopping, limiting his contribution to two bag-carrying trips from the Bentley to the kitchen. He had calculated that it would require five trips to unload the car, so he exaggerated his limp to keep his trips down to a pat and optimum two.

“Have you eaten?” Albie asked, folding the last paper bag flat. “I’m going to make some hot dogs.”

“Sure.”

“I usually boil them, but if you want I can put them in the toaster. Put it on broil .”

Albie interpreted his silence and prepared their repast, such as it was, placing a tiny pot of water on what had to be one of the biggest ovens he had ever seen. Albie grabbed a pair of pliers to light the burner. There were no knobs on the stove. His host offered no explanation.

“I really appreciate you coming out here all this way to help straighten out this thing,” Albie said.

“It’s my job.”

“At first I didn’t know if I could trust them to bring in someone who would give me a fair shake, you know what I mean? After what happened at the council meeting. And then you working for the company Lucky hired to think up that new name of his. How much you get paid for one of those things?”

“It varies from case to case, really. I didn’t handle that account. I’ve been on a sabbatical.”

Albie looked him over. “Heard about that,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to trust you. But then Lucky told me you were a Quincy man, and I knew I would get a fair shake. A Quincy man is a man of his word.”

Albie asked him about that old groundskeeper, the one who always had a cigar plug jutting off his lips. There had been this geezer who used to trim the shrubbery and leer at the freshman girls, and he decided this must be the codger in question, so he said yes. What the hell did he know about beloved campus characters? He was not the kind who went around befriending beloved campus characters.

School days. Albie asked him what dorm he’d lived in, what year did he graduate. He didn’t need to tell Albie that he’d lived next to the Winthrop Library. There was no need; Albie knew the layout of the quad and had his answer on hearing the name of the dorm. When he’d arrived at the hotel, he’d thought it was just coincidence. There were a lot of rich white people named Winthrop. But of course he of all people should have known that with names there is no coincidence. Only design, design above all. There were a lot of rich white people named Winthrop and they were all related, if not by blood then by philosophy. Old Albie’s great-granddad or what have you had been a big booster of his alma mater. Their alma mater. And now that name was supposed to bind them together. Like it always did.

. . . . . . . .

Some names are keys and open doors. Quincy was one.

It was the third oldest university in the country, founded on a Puritan ethic, structured on the classic British model, whatever that meant. It was prestigious. Quincy men formed the steel core of many a powerful elite, in politics, business, wherever there were dark back rooms. The sons and daughters of the famous attended Quincy and were anointed anew, for now they had two royal titles, one from the circumstance of their birth and the second from the four-year galvanizing process that occurred behind those ivy walls. The sons and daughters of the working class attended and became prows to pulverize the swells of new middle-class oceans. The presidents of foreign countries sent their sons to be educated at Quincy and they returned double agents, articulating American and Quincian directives in their native tongues. The great-grandsons of presidents would sit next to him in Modern European History and exude. Those who wanted to be president one day would leave the room when someone lit a joint. Superfamous academics and former cabinet members and Nobel laureates joined the faculty to be tenured and formaldehyded.

For the right amount of money, it was possible to get your name on a Quincy edifice. The university had a complicated pricing plan based on square footage versus prestige of placement, from the new pool to the new dining hall to the new astronomy building. Their names would live long, tattooed on the granite skin of an eternal university. Their kids would get in, too, no hassle. On Parents Weekend, the proud relatives swarmed the square and snatched up sweatshirts and mugs with the bright green Q so that everyone would know they were a satellite of the pulsing Q star and somewhere in the Heavens, too. It was a strong brand name, as they said in his business.

They reached out to him in his last year of high school. He had filled out a form the previous summer at the African American Leaders of Tomorrow conference, a weeklong program held in the nation’s capital where teenagers debated U.S. policy and tried to break curfew. The pamphlet that came in the mail was his introduction to the world of mailing lists, target marketing. Quincy believed in diversity. He applied. He got in, and ended up there the next fall. What clinched it for him was the Pre-Fresh Weekend, where they pulled out the stops to convince him to come. And come he did. He got laid for the first time at a party his freshman host had taken him to, and the Quincy name now meant manhood, or at least the end of expectant masturbation and the start of default masturbation.

He never bought into the Quincy mystique. He did not learn the words of the drinking songs. He did not demonize the other colleges in their academic stratosphere. He did not come to appreciate the peculiar magnetism of the Quincy name until he graduated, when its invisible waves sorted the world into categories, repelling the lesser alloys, attracting those of kindred ore at job interviews, parties, in bedrooms. There was no secret handshake. The two syllables sufficed. Quincy was a name that was a key, and it opened doors.