that merged into the nature reserve.
On the day they viewed the house, a red-tailed hawk sat on one of the streetlights in the territory of vacant lots, scanning the rolling grassland. Apart from the roads, the fields were punctuated only by a regular rhythm of utilities points awaiting houses that might never be built. Someone had made a patriotic attempt to sow chicory and daisies and pale red columbines in the area closest to the last of the finished houses, but it was impossible to deny that what remained was a sign of failure and waste, fertile land lying fallow. Fine silt blew from the places where the ground remained bare. All the finished houses were occupied, but a majority of the residents owned properties worth less than half what they had paid for them. No one was buying. Everyone wanted to sell. The population of the city, after rising for decades, was in sharp decline. Birth rates were dwindling and the whole region was contracting. Nathaniel had read an article that suggested a bill might soon make its way through the state legislature that would propose leasing more than a third of the state to the federal government, either to be run as a nature reserve, or to build a vast prison farm complex of detention centers for illegal immigrants, failed asylum seekers, enemy combatants, and domestic terrorists. We must be crazy, Nathaniel thought, the hot summer wind hurling grit into his face, to imagine we’d want to live here. The truth was that they could not begin to afford the kind of solid historic home they thought they wanted. A simulacrum was the closest they were going to get, and Dolores Woods, however unfinished it might have been, had pretensions to historical awareness that most suburbs lacked.
That evening, when they were eating dinner downtown in what Elizabeth had recommended as the city’s best restaurant, located in the storage vaults of a recently redeveloped warehouse, Nathaniel tried to explain to Julia the nature of his larger reservations. It was not just about this house that she loved, a house even he had to admit was impressive, tempting in its way, but appealing as a kind of trophy rather than somewhere he would ever want to live. It would be an irrational purchase. They had agreed they were not going to have more children, and three people did not need so much space.
“But it’s also got me thinking—I wonder if we’re making the right decision about this whole thing. We love Boston. Copley loves Boston. He loves the Lab School,” Nathaniel said, lowering his voice and watching as his son struggled with a bowl of noodles.
“I don’t want to leave the Lab,” Copley said. “I’m not ever leaving there.”
“Come on, guys, we’re going to have a much better life here,” Julia said. “We’ll have space like we’ve never had before. We’ll have a yard and a vegetable garden. You can have a playroom, Copley. This is what we’ve always said we wanted. And if the new school isn’t up to scratch, Nathaniel, well, we’re intelligent people. We can pick up the slack, or hire a tutor.”
Since making the decision to leave Boston, Nathaniel had begun to think of himself as
deferring to Julia
. She, in turn, pleaded with him to trust her, asking him to abandon his otherwise sensible tendency to play devil’s advocate and stop second-guessing what was, by all objective measures, professional progress for both of them, as well as the kind of increase in their standard of living that would have been unattainable in Boston.
“You’re leaving the best lab in the country. Do you understand what that means? People will think you’re crazy.”
“I never would have made director there. This is about power and autonomy, Nathaniel. I can do things here that I never could have done in Boston. I can do other, better, more ethical kinds of work. I’m not interested in defense applications or space exploration or mapping oil wells. I want to create
useful
tools that can improve the
On the day they viewed the house, a red-tailed hawk sat on one of the streetlights in the territory of vacant lots, scanning the rolling grassland. Apart from the roads, the fields were punctuated only by a regular rhythm of utilities points awaiting houses that might never be built. Someone had made a patriotic attempt to sow chicory and daisies and pale red columbines in the area closest to the last of the finished houses, but it was impossible to deny that what remained was a sign of failure and waste, fertile land lying fallow. Fine silt blew from the places where the ground remained bare. All the finished houses were occupied, but a majority of the residents owned properties worth less than half what they had paid for them. No one was buying. Everyone wanted to sell. The population of the city, after rising for decades, was in sharp decline. Birth rates were dwindling and the whole region was contracting. Nathaniel had read an article that suggested a bill might soon make its way through the state legislature that would propose leasing more than a third of the state to the federal government, either to be run as a nature reserve, or to build a vast prison farm complex of detention centers for illegal immigrants, failed asylum seekers, enemy combatants, and domestic terrorists. We must be crazy, Nathaniel thought, the hot summer wind hurling grit into his face, to imagine we’d want to live here. The truth was that they could not begin to afford the kind of solid historic home they thought they wanted. A simulacrum was the closest they were going to get, and Dolores Woods, however unfinished it might have been, had pretensions to historical awareness that most suburbs lacked.
That evening, when they were eating dinner downtown in what Elizabeth had recommended as the city’s best restaurant, located in the storage vaults of a recently redeveloped warehouse, Nathaniel tried to explain to Julia the nature of his larger reservations. It was not just about this house that she loved, a house even he had to admit was impressive, tempting in its way, but appealing as a kind of trophy rather than somewhere he would ever want to live. It would be an irrational purchase. They had agreed they were not going to have more children, and three people did not need so much space.
“But it’s also got me thinking—I wonder if we’re making the right decision about this whole thing. We love Boston. Copley loves Boston. He loves the Lab School,” Nathaniel said, lowering his voice and watching as his son struggled with a bowl of noodles.
“I don’t want to leave the Lab,” Copley said. “I’m not ever leaving there.”
“Come on, guys, we’re going to have a much better life here,” Julia said. “We’ll have space like we’ve never had before. We’ll have a yard and a vegetable garden. You can have a playroom, Copley. This is what we’ve always said we wanted. And if the new school isn’t up to scratch, Nathaniel, well, we’re intelligent people. We can pick up the slack, or hire a tutor.”
Since making the decision to leave Boston, Nathaniel had begun to think of himself as
deferring to Julia
. She, in turn, pleaded with him to trust her, asking him to abandon his otherwise sensible tendency to play devil’s advocate and stop second-guessing what was, by all objective measures, professional progress for both of them, as well as the kind of increase in their standard of living that would have been unattainable in Boston.
“You’re leaving the best lab in the country. Do you understand what that means? People will think you’re crazy.”
“I never would have made director there. This is about power and autonomy, Nathaniel. I can do things here that I never could have done in Boston. I can do other, better, more ethical kinds of work. I’m not interested in defense applications or space exploration or mapping oil wells. I want to create
useful
tools that can improve the
Similar Books
