I shook my head quickly—too quickly. "No," I said. "Why? Do I look worried?"
"You look worse than worried. You look obsessed."
We laughed about it, and finally we went down to the student center and had a few beers, and before long my tongue had loosened a little.
I said, "There is something worrying me. And you know what it is? I'm afraid I won't live up to the standards my family set for me."
Guffaws greeted me. "Come off it, Harry! Phi Bete in your junior year, top class standing, a brilliant career in history ahead of you—what do they want from you, blood?"
I chuckled and gulped my beer and mumbled something innocuous, but inside I was curdling.
Everything I was, I owed to Mother. She made me what I am. But I was played out, as a student of history; I was the family failure, the goat, the rotten egg. Raymond still wrestled gleefully with nuclear physics, with Heisenberg and Schrodinger and the others. Mark gloried in his fastball and his slider and his curve. Paul daubed canvas merrily in his Greenwich Village flat near N.Y.U., and even Robert seemed to take delight in keeping books.
Only I had failed. History had become repugnant to me. I was in rebellion against it. I would disappoint my mother, become the butt of my brothers' scorn, and live in despair, hating the profession of historian and fitted by training for nothing else.
I was graduated from Princeton summa cum laude, a few days after my twenty-first birthday. I wired Mother that I was on my way home, and bought train-tickets.
It was a long and grueling journey to Wisconsin. I spent my time thinking, trying to choose between the unpleasant alternatives that faced me.