Like a Guilty Thing Upon a Fearful Summons

We come to our readers with lovely tidings indeed, the upshot of which is that our imperial headquarters are to remain in lovely New Haven (with some short-lived exceptions) for the foreseeable future. So gladdened are we by this that we shall forebear giving answer to a commenter whom we shall not name who last week cast aspersions on what she termed “ranting on obscure topics” on the part of our Senior Editor. To give answer to such calumnies would be to stoop—and we choose never to stoop. And in any case, one wonders what sentient being, having spent any portion of the last quarter century in any corner of the solar system outside the perforated borders of North Korea, could possibly term the birthday of the inestimable Mr. Jordan an “obscure topic.” But this is neither here nor there. On with the Review and, with it, our good news.

Monday (February 18): But first the bad news, which is that the Sevys are moving to the nation’s capital within the month. But this ends up being a more complicated process than one might have thought. You see Travis is going into the foreign service, meaning that his new employer is the government of the United States of North America. And said government is a hydra-headed beast, the movement of whose bureaucratic tentacles can never be predicted nor its purposes divined. It turns out that those going into the foreign service are not permitted to enter the premises of the capital within forty-eight hours of the official inauguration of their initiation into the mysterious rites of statecraft. So while the government will willingly put the Sevys up in a New Haven hotel for the next ten days, it won’t spend a dime to host them in the capital city. And while the government would willingly foot the bill to fly the family to D.C., it only provides a limited subsidy to those who drive there. And on and on in a bewildering swirl of red tape and regulations—serpentine, bureaucratic, inscrutable. “Sounds like the entity I want controlling my healthcare,” opined an incredulous John Thompson, hearing of this maddening morass of policy peculiarity.

Anyhow, the upshot for us (i.e. for Lia) is that Travis and Lindsay spent the week packing so we (i.e. she) spent the week babysitting (at premium rate, Travis insisted) the Sevy children. At one point on this particular day Lia entered the girls bedroom where she found Eli and Asher, each standing on the windowsill, noses pressed against the panes, giggling uncontrollably. As usual, Julia and Mayah had a merry time together, though both of them seem saddened of late by their impending separation. Poor Julia—first Callie, now Mayah.

Some time around 5:30 in the evening Justin, ensconced as ever in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, decided to take one last study break before catching the shuttle home at 6. In other words, he closed his books and checked his email. And there it was, the golden words for which he had yearned and which Lia had awaited with fearful trepidation. The message read, relevant part:

“Dear Justin,

“I’m writing to extend my congratulations on your admission to the PhD program at Yale . . . . We look forward to meeting you and very much hope that you will accept our offer of admission.

All best wishes,

Timothy Snyder
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History”

After a few moments of inward rejoicing—which meant mentally reviewing the lyrics to “Eye of the Tiger”—Justin faced the serious task of breaking the news to Lia. Through all that long shuttle ride he pondered how he should go about doing so. A classmate asked if he had heard anything from the history department. “Actually,” he said, “I was just accepted half an hour ago.” The classmate broke out in something of a victory dance and gave Justin a ceremonial knuckle-bump. “Why aren’t you talking to your family about it?” the classmate added, after a pause. “Oh,” said Justin, “well, I don’t have a phone.” “Do you want to borrow my phone?” Wanting more privacy than the law school shuttle for this delicate operation, Justin politely declined.

Arrived home, he took a deep breath, reviewed once again his planned recital, fiddled with the keys, and entered the apartment. It was empty. Justin breathed easy, but only for a moment. He heard Julia’s happy voice outside and soon the ladies of the house had come in. Thinking it best to get things over with, but unable to repeat his practiced lines, Justin simply invited Lia to read the email for herself, which she did. Justin braced himself for the worst.

But received the best. Lia let out a joyful whelp (an elegant, sophisticated, Audrey-Hepburn sort of whelp), ran to her surprised husband, and shouted her congratulations amid a shower of hugs and kisses, in which effort she was soon joined by Julia and Eli. His joy perfected in the knowledge that his wife’s ebullience surpassed his own, Justin shed his former reserve and began to celebrate in earnest. “Break out the bubbly!” he cried, and we did.

We also broke out the hotdogs, and shared a festive feast of Martinelli cider and Price-Rite franks—nectar and ambrosia for our professional student triumphant and his adoring family.

Tuesday (February 19): This was the only non Sevy-sitting day of the week. Lia and the girls took advantage of the sunny day by walking to the library and to playgroup. Lia even took the liberty of going without a coat. This was a mistake. Sun and warmth, while companions elsewhere in the world, have a fickle relationship here in New Haven, and Lia nearly made good on her ancient threat to turn into a popsicle (inside joke understood only by the editors). Thankfully, she survived and even went to her “Women in Scripture” Institute class, where she learned all about the wives of the Patriarchs. “How many of them there were,” observed one thoughtful student at the lesson’s conclusion.

Wednesday (February 20): The Sevys came over and the indomitable quintet went exploring in the cavernous depths of the Whitehall basement. Asher at one point thought he had struck oil; it was rather the primordial slime.

Thursday (February 21): More adventures with the Sevys and more struggles on Justin’s part to focus on the laws of corporations and federal income taxation amid the heady excitement of his history program acceptance. Justin taught Institute in the evening, where his success in driving away students becomes ever more apparent. He had four (all of them male, so they managed to put away the whole of the cookies Lia had prepared for a more regular-sized class). Lia and the girls went to book club, together with the incomparable Gretchen Cheney and Bianco Santos, where they discussed My Grandfather’s Blessing. Lia read the book and loathed it, writing a scathing review of it on her GoodReads page on the theory that so doing would divest her system from the animosity the book inspired, on the theory that this purgation of inner animus would cause her not to say anything offensive about the book to the book club hostess who selected it. Like many a good theory, this one was unfortunately dashed by the practical event. We will not recount the painful details. And certainly some of Lia’s miscues can be pardoned by reference to the concomitant ill conduct of her daughters. After leaving the hostess’s apartment an ashen-faced Lia opined to her comrades, “I behaved very badly.” Not wanting to concur too enthusiastically, Gretchen merely looked away. Bianca tried to look on the bright side, “Well, I didn’t like the book either—and while you certainly put your foot in your mouth with staggering regularity, I at least said nothing about it.”

But all of this was forgotten in a merry exchange of dresses between Lia and Gretchen. As tacitly anticipated, both ladies wore the dresses to church on Sunday and praised one another extravagantly. Lia, who has an unmistakable crush on the admittedly lovely Gretchen, simply beamed to see her elegantly pregnant heroine parading in her very own dress. So the evening wasn’t a total flop. Nearly so, however, nearly so.

Friday (February 22): The Sevys were over again and Lia, in search of creative means of maintaining order, made home-made pretzels that formed the cursive initials of each member of their fearsome fivesome. When all else failed to grip the kids’ attention, Lia turned on a movie. Now it is a hard thing for four yahoos to view the same film on a four-inch screen. The initial seating arrangement had the quartet in a semicircle around Julia’s tiny “computer” with Julia and Mayah on the ends and Asher and Eli in the middle. Julia and Mayah soon realized that this arrangement was to their disadvantage and soon began a series of ingenious explanations as to why the arrangement ought to be changed. When Eli came close to scratching Asher’s cheek, for instance, Mayah quickly volunteered to brave the terrors posed by the ferocious Eli and switch seats with her younger brother. Julia similarly offered to trade with Eli, lest close proximity to a flickering screen damage her little sister’s eyes. In the end, as in the nineteenth century, generosity came to look a lot like imperialism.

In the evening, Justin and Lia watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s for date night. This was a confusing film, indeed, though the scene late in the film where Holly Golightly cruelly turns her unnamed feline loose into the rainy alleys of New York marked the first time in all his twenty-six years that Justin felt anything approximating sympathy for a cat. But mostly he came away wanting to do his hair like that dreamy George Peppard.

Saturday (February 23): If there is one convention the survival of which into the modern era remains as mysterious as its simultaneously inspiring rapture in the hearts of mothers and abhorrence in the hearts of all other thinking featherless bipeds, that convention is the convention of the family picture. Now it happened some time back that Lia had gotten it into her head to get some family pictures taken and, unfortunately for the rest of the family, a friend in the ward happens to be a respected photographer willing to take the pictures in question. So we all got dressed up in the morning, mounted the bull and braved the snow all the way down to the law school—and then all the way back to get the key Justin had forgotten—where Liz Frandsen took pictures of us in the courtyard. Julia and Eli, of course, had absolutely zero interest in having their pictures taken but a great deal of interest in running wildly up and down the vaulted corridor that lines the courtyard. So there were some cute action shots of them so running. But set shots of the studio variety were resolutely refused, most vigorously by Julia who, after pining away all week after the prospect of dressing like a princess for family pictures, begged to be taken home within a minute or two of the photo session’s beginning. We tricked her into smiling by singing songs from Dora. In the end Justin was taken in by a similar ruse. When the session was over he grew reflective. “What could a perfect week entail,” he wondered, “if not acceptance into the graduate program of one’s choice and the promise of not having to submit to family pictures in the foreseeable future?” At length concluding that such a week could never be surpassed, he drove home in perfect serenity and, returned home, serenely cleaned the bathroom.