Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy Page A

come to discover, ambiguity had its virtues.
    I threw myself into work, writing two pages of my dissertation per day, six days per week. I kept a low profile, seeing Hawthorden twice a month for an hour-long conference, but otherwise spending most of my time at the library or at my apartment. I vanished for the next nine months. Bar Christy, my life at Harvard had been David. And with David gone . . .
    But I liked the solitude. Check that: I needed the solitude . . . needed the time to . . . grieve, I suppose. But also to somehow reorder my brain and put David’s death in a box that I had already marked ‘ Off Limits ’. Though I might quietly mourn him, I had to accept the cold brutality of his demise. Just as I was determined that no one would ever be privy to the grief I actually felt.
    There was a considerable amount of public hand-wringing at Harvard and in the press about whether David had been unfairly victimized by certain English department colleagues. Fair play to the Harvard Crimson – they outed the bastards who had been calling for his head. But what did it matter now? David was still dead. There was also a memorial service held at the college chapel three months after his ‘accident’. Naturally I attended. Afterwards, as everyone spilled out of the church and Polly found herself shaking a lot of hands, I stood by the chapel door surveying the scene. At that very moment, Polly glanced around and her eyes happened to land on me. Her gaze was cold, yet level – and followed by a very fast nod of acknowledgement. Then she turned back to a group of mourners who had gathered around her. That look haunted me for a very long time. Was she telling me that she knew exactly who I was? But why follow such an arctic stare with a gesture that almost seemed to acknowledge the connection – and loss – that we both shared? Maybe I was simply trying to impose far too much interpretation on five seconds of eye contact. Perhaps the cold gaze was just the look of a woman trying to stay in control of things during a difficult public juncture, the nod nothing more than a simple ‘Hello to you . . . whoever you are.’
    We can never really determine the truth behind the unspoken. A gesture can have any meaning you wish to impose on it. Just as the truth behind an accident will never be fully understood. Just as embracing ambiguity can shield you from so much.
    That’s something David’s death taught me. If you confess to nothing, you provide those around you only with supposition . . . and no proof. That which remains hidden does, indeed, remain hidden. I took some comfort in this realization – not just because I saw it as a way of constructing the defensive shield I needed to get through the subsequent months at Harvard, but also because it somehow allowed me to compartmentalize all the rage and sadness; to control the demons within. So I went to ground. I did my work. I allowed myself little latitude when it came to a life outside of my thesis. Professor Hawthorden – who read each chapter as it came ‘off the press’ – seemed pleased with its progress. When I completed it, he expressed his amazement that I had managed to deliver it six months before its provisional due date.
    ‘I’ve just had an extended burst of . . . concentration,’ I said.
    Usually there is a four-month gap between the delivery of the thesis and your defense of it. But Hawthorden – evidently wanting to speed things along – informed me that he would be arranging the defense before all faculty members disappeared for the summer break. As it turned out, there were only three other members of the department quizzing me on the finer points of The Infernal Duality: Obedience and Defiance in American Literature . There were questions about whether there was any real Zola-esque leitmotif in Dreiser, and about the uses of progressive political thought in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle . One professor got rather tetchy about my