The Bancroft Strategy Page 12

  “And you swallowed it whole.”

  Paul Bancroft laughed again, heartily, with his whole body. “I hope you don’t mind dining on the early side,” he said, “The boy’s still at the age where he has a bedtime.”

  Andrea sensed that her host was eager to have her meet his son but anxious as well. She was reminded of a friend who had a child with Down Syndrome—a gentle, sunny, smiling child, whom the mother loved and felt pride in and, on some dark unacknowledged plane, some tincture of shame about, too…a shame that itself inspired shame.

  “Brandon, was it?”

  “Brandon, yes. Apple of his father’s eye. He’s…well, special, I guess you might say. A little unusual. In a good way, I like to think. Probably upstairs on the computer, IM-ing someone unsuitable.”

  Paul Bancroft, too, had a small glass of sherry in his hands, and had taken off his jacket, though the houndstooth sweater vest made him look as professorial as ever. “Welcome,” he said, raising his glass in a toast, and the two settled down in tufted leather chairs in front of an unlighted hearth. The walnut paneling, the old, worn Persian carpets, the simple hardwood floors, darkened with age: It all seemed ageless, tranquil, a kind of luxury that scorned luxury.

  “Andrea Bancroft,” he said, as if savoring the syllables. “I have learned a thing or two about you. Graduate study in economic history, am I right?”

  “For two years, at Yale. Two and half. Never finished the dissertation.” The fino was pale straw in color. She took a sip of it and the flavors blossomed in her mouth, her nose. It had a light toffee-like scent, tasted deliciously of nuts and melon.

  “No wonder, given your independence of mind. It isn’t an attribute that’s valued there. Too much independence breeds discomfort, especially among would-be gurus who don’t quite believe what they’re saying.”

  “I guess I could claim I wanted to be more grounded in the real world. Except the humiliating truth is, I dropped out of grad school because I wanted to make more money.” She stopped, appalled that she had actually said it out loud. Great going, Andrea. Be sure to tell him about the factory outlet sale you drove two hours to get to last weekend.

  “Ah, but our means contour our preferences,” her cousin replied lightly. “You’re not just clear-eyed, you’re honest, too. Two things that don’t always come in one package.” He looked off. “I suppose it would be disloyal of me to express ferocious disapproval of my late cousin Reynolds, but then, as the utilitarian William Godwin wrote near the end of the eighteenth century, ‘What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?’ The circumstances in which your mother was left are something else I recently learned about, to my dismay. But…” He shook his head. “A subject for another occasion.”

  “Thank you,” Andrea said, suddenly embarrassed and eager to change the subject. She couldn’t help but think back to her closets filled with knockoffs of costly designs, her aspirations, the pride with which she paid off her charge-card balances in full every month. It seemed so absurd now. Would she have left the sheltering groves of academe if she hadn’t been concerned about money? Her academic advisers had been encouraging; they’d assumed that she would soon be wheeling along on the tenure track, making the sort of decisions and compromises that they had made. Meanwhile, her student loans grew more onerous; she felt suffocated by the bills she couldn’t quite pay, the credit-card debt she serviced with the minimum payment due as she watched it grow from one month to the next. Perhaps, too, on some scarcely conscious level, she yearned for a life where she wouldn’t have to study the numbers on the right-hand column of the menu—for the life that had almost been hers.

  She felt a strange moment of upheaval as she reflected back on all those “practical” choices and worldly accommodations she had made—and for what? Her salary as a securities analyst was considerably more than what she could have expected as a junior faculty member; but it was, she now saw, a trivial sum. With her grubby fixation on discounts, she had discounted herself.

  When she looked up, she realized that Paul Bancroft had been speaking.

  “So I know what it’s like to lose someone. My wife’s death was shattering both for me and my son. A difficult time.”

  “It must have been,” Andrea murmured.

  “Alice was twenty years younger than me, for one thing. She was supposed to have been the one to carry on. To wear black at my funeral. But somehow she got a short straw in some infernal genetic lottery. It makes you realize how fragile life is. Unbelievably resilient. Unbelievably fragile.”

  “‘Work for the night cometh,’ right?”

  “Sooner than we know,” he said softly. “And the work is never done, is it?” He took another sip of the pale-straw fino. “You’ll have to forgive me for dragging down the mood. It’s the fifth anniversary of her death this week. There’s the consolation that what she left behind is as precious to me as anything.”

  The scrambling sound of coltish footsteps—someone taking the stairs two at a time, then jumping down to the landing.

  “Speaking of whom…” Paul Bancroft said. He turned to the new arrival, who was standing in the arched doorway to the parlor. “Brandon, I’d like you to meet Andrea Bancroft.”

  The mop of curly blond hair was what she noticed first, and then the boy’s apple cheeks. His eyes were an unclouded blue, and he had his father’s fine symmetrical features. He was, she decided, an exceptionally handsome boy, even beautiful.

  Then he turned to her and his face broke in a smile. “Brandon,” he said, extending a hand. “Nice to meet you.” His voice had not yet acquired the husk of adolescence, but it was deeper than a child’s. A beardless youth, as the ancients would have said, but with a perceptible darkening of the down on his upper lip. Not yet a man, no longer a child.

  His handshake was firm and dry; he was a little shy but not awkward. He sprawled on a nearby chair and maintained eye contact with her. There was none of that “command performance” resentment that children his age have around guests. He seemed genuinely curious.

  She was curious herself. Brandon wore a blue plaid shirt, untucked, and gray trousers with lots of zippers and pockets, pretty much standard garb for his cohort.

  “Your father guessed that you were instant-messaging unsuitable people,” Andrea said lightly.

  “Solomon Agronski was whuppin’ my behind,” Brandon said merrily. “We were doing DAGs, and I was way off-base. Got my ass handed to me.”

  “This some kind of game?”

  “I wish,” Brandon said. “DAGs—it’s, like, a directed acyclic graph. I know—snooze city, right?”

  “And this Solomon Agronski…” Andrea prompted, still at a loss.

  “Handed me my ass,” Brandon repeated.

  Paul Bancroft crossed his legs, looking amused. “He’s one of the country’s foremost mathematical logicians. Runs the Center for Logic and Computation at Stanford. They’ve developed quite a correspondence, if that’s the word for it.”

  Andrea tried to hide her astonishment. This was a far cry from Down Syndrome.

  The boy sniffed her glass of sherry and made a face. “Yuck,” he said. “Wouldn’t you like some Sprite instead? I’m gonna have some.”

  “Actually, I’m okay,” Andrea said, laughing.

  “Suit yourself.” Then he snapped his fingers. “I know what we could do. Let’s shoot some hoops.”

  Paul Bancroft traded glances with Andrea. “I’m afraid he thinks you’re here as a playmate for him.”

  “Naw, seriously,” Brandon persisted. “Want to show me your moves? While it’s still light?”

  Paul cocked a brow. “Brandon,” he told his son, “she’s just arrived and she’s not exactly dressed for the playground, is she?”

  “If I had the right shoes,” Andrea said, apologetically.

  The boy was all business. “Size?”

  “Seven and a half.”

  “Which is seven in a man’s size. Each size represents an i
ncrement of a third of an inch, starting at three and eleven-twelfths inches. Did you know that?”

  “Brandon’s filled with fun facts,” his father jested. But there was no mistaking his doting gaze.

  “Some of them are even correct,” the boy chirruped. “Brainstorm!” he announced, leaping up from the chair. “Nuala’s an eight! Close enough, right?” He scampered down the hallway, and from a distance they could hear him call out: “Nuala, can Andrea borrow a pair of your sneakers? Pretty please? Pretty pretty pretty please.”

  Paul Bancroft crooked a smile at her. “Resourceful, no?”

  “He’s…remarkable,” Andrea said, risking polite understatement.

  “He’s already certified as an international chess master. When I achieved the rank, I was twenty-two. People said I was precocious, but there’s no comparison.”

  “An international chess master? Most kids his age spend their time doing Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStations.”

  “Guess what. Brandon does, too. He’s always playing Sim City. The thing to remember is, he’s just a kid. He’s got the intellectual firepower to make significant contributions to a dozen fields, but—well, you’ll see. He’s also a kid. Loves video games and hates to clean his room. He’s an American thirteen-year-old. Thank goodness.”

  “You ever have to tell him where babies come from?”

  “No, but he’s asked some pretty pointed questions about the molecular basis of embryology.” A contented look settled on the savant’s face. “He’s what they call a sport of nature.”

  “Sounds like a good sport, anyway.”

  “With a good nature.”

  Brandon galumphed back into the parlor triumphantly holding a pair of canvas sneakers in one hand, green track pants in another.

  His father rolled his eyes. “You can say no, you realize,” he told her.

  Andrea changed in a bathroom off the foyer. “You’ve got five minutes,” she told Brandon when she emerged. “Time enough to show me your stuff.”

  “Fine. You want to see my moves?”

  “Bring it, on kid,” she deadpanned, spoof streetwise. “You gotta represent.”

  The court—basic concrete with chalked lines—was tucked behind a tall privet hedge to one side of the house.

  “You gonna show me your old-school moves?” He tossed the basketball from behind the three-point line. It glanced off the rim but didn’t go through. Andrea stepped in and scooped up the ball, doing a fast dunk. She’d played varsity basketball in high school, still remembered the basic plays.

  “Just keepin’ it real,” Andrea returned. Brandon drove to the hoop and picked up the rebound; he was unpracticed and inexperienced, but surprisingly coordinated for a boy of his age. He seemed to study her stance when she put the ball through the net, and copied her moves. Each time he shot, he came a little closer. By the time they returned to the house—she insisting on keeping to the five minutes they had agreed on—they both had color in their cheeks. She changed out of the athletic shoes and track pants in a small powder room off a side parlor—how many did this house have, anyway?—and returned to the sitting room with the leather furniture.

  The dinner was simple but delicious—a sorrel soup, grilled poussin, savory wild rice, a salad of lamb’s lettuce—and Paul Bancroft steered the conversation back to the issues they had discussed earlier, without appearing to hold forth.

  “You’re a woman of many talents,” he said, with a twinkle. “What do they call it? ‘Ball control.’ I’d say that’s what you have. A skill that applies to argumentation as well as to competitive sport.”

  “It’s just a matter of keeping your eye on the ball,” Andrea said. “See what’s in front of your eyes.”

  Paul Bancroft tilted his head. “Was it Huxley who said that common sense was just a matter of seeing what’s in front of your eyes? That’s not quite right, is it? Lunatics see what they take to be in front of their eyes. Common sense is the gift of seeing what’s in front of the other person’s eyes. That’s what makes it something we have in common. And what makes the skill itself, in turn, so uncommon.” His expression grew serious. “You think about the history of our species, and it’s striking the way that evil—institutions and practices that we all recognize to be insupportable—had been countenanced for centuries. Slavery. The subjugation of women. The extravagant punishment of consensual, victimless activities. All in all, hardly an edifying spectacle. But Jeremy Bentham, two hundred years ago, called everything right. He was one of the few men of his generation who truly belong to our moral modernity. Indeed, he was father to it. And it all began with the simple utilitarian insight: Minimize human suffering—and never forget that each person counts for one.”

  “Dad’s idea of the eleemosynary,” said Brandon, stumbling over the last word. “However you say it.”

  “Try el-ee-uh-mosynary,” Bancroft said, correcting his son’s pronunciation. “From the Latin eleemosyna, alms.”

  “Got it,” the boy said, a new datum stored away. “But what about the idea that you should treat others as ends, never as means?”

  Paul caught Andrea’s eye. “He’s been reading Kant. German mysticism, when you come down to it. Rots the brain, I tell you. Worse than Grand Theft Auto. We’ve had to agree to disagree.”

  “So you have a problem with adolescent rebellion, too, huh?” Andrea smiled.

  Brandon looked up from his plate and returned her smile. “What makes you think it’s a ‘problem’?”

  Suddenly the hooting of a distant owl could be heard. Paul Bancroft looked out the window, where tall trees were silhouetted in the dusk. “The owl of Minerva, Hegel said, flies only at dusk.”

  “Then wisdom comes too late,” Brandon said. “Thing I don’t get is how the owl got a reputation for wisdom, anyway. What an owl is, actually, is just an efficient killing machine. That’s the one thing it’s good at. Flight’s nearly silent. Their powers of hearing are almost like radar. Ever see one fly? You see these big wings flapping, and it’s like someone turned the sound off. That’s ’cause they’ve got tattered fringe feathers that break up the sound of rushing air.”

  Andrea tilted her head. “So you never hear it coming until it’s too late.”

  “Pretty much. Then there’s four hundred pounds of pressure at the tips of each talon, so by that point you’re history.”

  Andrea took a sip of the simple and refreshing Riesling that Nuala had poured. “Not wise, then. Just deadly.”

  “Efficient when it comes to means-end rationality,” Paul Bancroft put in. “Some would say there’s a kind of wisdom in that.”

  “Are you one of them?”

  “No, but efficiency has its place. Too often, though, talk of such things is taken to be heartless, even when it’s in the service of kindness. You were talking about perverse consequences earlier, Andrea. That can be an intricate subject indeed. Because, once you accept the logic of consequentialism—the notion that acts must be judged by their consequences—then you realize that the puzzles go beyond the matter of good deeds that have bad effects. We must also grapple with the conundrum posed by bad deeds that have good effects.”

  “Maybe so,” Andrea reflected. “But there are some acts that are simply heinous in themselves. I mean, it’s impossible to imagine anything good coming out of, oh, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., let’s say.”

  Paul Bancroft lifted an eyebrow. “Is that a challenge?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  The savant took a small sip of wine. “You know, I met Dr. King on one or two occasions. The foundation helped him with financing at a couple of critical junctures. He was truly a remarkable man. A great man, I’d even say. But not without certain personal flaws. Small ones, lowly ones, but ones that could have been amplified by his foes. The FBI was always ready to leak sullying reports about personal indiscretions. In his final years, he was preaching to dwindling crowds, on a downward spiral. In death, he became a potent symbol. Had he lived, he would h
ave been a far diminished one. His assassination was a galvanizing event. It actually catalyzed the legal fulfillment of the civil-rights revolution. Crucial legislation barring discrimination in housing was passed only in the wake of that tragic event. Americans were shaken to the core of their being, and the country became a kinder place as a consequence. If you want to say that the man’s death was a tragedy, I won’t argue. But that one death accomplished vastly more than many lives.” The aging philosopher spoke with mesmerizing intensity. “Was it not more than redeemed by its positive consequences?”

  Andrea put her fork down. “Maybe as a matter of cold calculation…”

  “Why cold? I never understand why people think that the calculus of consequences is cold. The betterment of humanity sounds abstract, yet it entails the betterment of individual men and women and children—each with a story that could tug at your heart and ravage your soul.” The tremor in his voice bespoke conviction and resolve, not diffidence or doubt. “Remember, there are seven billion people living on this small planet. And two-point-eight billion of them are under twenty-four years of age. It’s their world we need to maintain and improve.” The savant’s eyes drifted toward his son, who, with the appetite of a growing boy, had already cleaned his plate. “And that’s a moral responsibility as grave as any.”

  Andrea could not tear her eyes away from the man. He spoke with penetrating logic and a gaze as clear as his argument. There was something magical about the force of his conviction, the sinuous power of his mind. Merlin, of Arthurian legend, must have been inspired by someone like him.

  “Dad’s a big one for running the numbers,” Brandon said, perhaps embarrassed by his father’s intensity.

  “The harsh light of reason tells us that a prophet’s death can be a boon to humanity. On the other hand, eradicate sand fleas in Mauritius, say, and you may discover that the knock-on consequences are dire indeed. In either scenario, the line we draw between killing and letting die is something of a superstition, don’t you think?” Paul Bancroft pressed on. “It makes no difference to the one who dies because of our action or failure to act. Imagine that a runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks. If it continues on its course, it will kill five people. If you throw a switch, it will kill only one person. What do you do?”