Composing a Further Life

to see the same terrible shoot-’em-up kinds of movies, with boobs falling out, and things that I’m not at all interested in doing.”
    “They do guy things together.”
    “I would say that even now Charles is really in fact closer to Barbara than he is to me,” Dick said. “But we’ve gotten much closer.”
    “In 2006, when we took him to sports camp on the Amherst College campus,” Barbara said, “he grabbed my hand and he said, ‘You know, I’m a little bit scared, Grandma.’ Here he was, sixteen years old, starting to drive, and he grabs my hand and says, ‘Do you think they’re going to like me? There are no black kids here.’ I was Grandma that day. And I said, ‘You only see a few kids, there might be more black kids, you don’t know.’ ‘I’m just a little scared, maybe I should go back home.’ And of course within hours he was an integral part of the place. We picked him up three weeks later, he didn’t want to come home … he wasn’t interested in having us visit.”
    “To put it differently, he was otherwise occupied,” Dick added.
    Dick and Barbara have had the geographical problems that attend professional marriages, each receiving offers that would separate them, but have ended up at neighboring institutions, he at Amherst College and she at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sometimes collaborating in their research and sometimes working in tandem. Recently, in exploring family genealogies, Barbara discovered with glee that she has at least one line of black ancestry, what used to be called “a touch of the tar brush,” now greeted with pleasure.
    Selling Hematech, the biotechnology company they had founded, meant that Dick and Barbara had the resources to think ahead, which led to a conversation about different kinds of legacies and appropriate ways to pass on resources. “I think it’s enormously satisfying to be able to talk to somebody, to say, ‘What would you like to do?’ ” Dick commented, “and then when they say what they would like to do, to be able to enable it, like sending Charles to Japan with the Experiment in International Living.”
    Barbara described a conversation in which a young woman had asked Charles about his college plans. He was saying he wasn’t really sure yet what he was looking for, and she’d said, “Well, you’ve got to find a good state school that you can afford to go to.”
    Barbara had joined in and commented, “He doesn’t have to worry about that; he got a part of the company when it was sold and he’s got quite a good nest egg,” and Charles had said, “Yeah, that’s right, I can go wherever I want.” At that point, Barbara added to me, “He really enjoyed the fact that he could choose—he also pointed out that it would be nice if we let him keep that money and we pay for college.”
    “I’ve thought about this,” Dick said, “and wondered about it a bit. So many of my choices—what to do after going to graduate school, where to take a job, and that kind of thing—were made fundamentally looking at money. That’s been until very recently a critical feature in my decisions. I would like to try to take some of that kind of pressure off him. I see how it’s driven me to certain decisions that I might not have made otherwise, but on the other hand, it’s a powerful motivating and focusing influence. I kind of admire rich kids who do very well in school more than I do the poor ones, because the rich ones have other options. I think it’s more difficult maybe to really buckle down when you don’t need to. The poor kids don’t have a choice. I sometimes wonder whether it would be a good thing for Charles to have no feeling of financial pressure at all.”
    “You know, some young people are going to make career decisions that don’t earn them much money, and I would like them to have the option to make those decisions,” I said. “When I see them working hard at what they care about, doing something worthwhile and creative, it doesn’t bother me that they aren’t earning a lot. Scholarships are okay, because they press you to keep up standards and they don’t mortgage your future the way loans do, but Charles wouldn’t be eligible for any kind of need-based scholarship.”
    Barbara nodded. “I think he has enough to get through college comfortably and not incur debt, but he’s going to have to get out and get a job and do something. I think he should feel that he’s got to become gainfully