I came home from school one day to find an envelope with the Harvard crest on the living room table.
“You got another college letter,” my dad said.
I dropped my backpack, ran into another room to be alone, and ripped open the envelope, my heart thumping. I’d applied to Harvard almost as a joke, in a moment of either bravado or sheer fantasy. I scanned it quickly, picking out the key words and phrases: pleased to inform you, accepted, and congratulations. I read the letter again more carefully, then a third time, just to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. No, it was there in black and white. Harvard wanted me.
I was not ambivalent. To say this was one of the happiest moments in my life doesn’t begin to do it justice. I thought about my dad’s monotonous nights in the post office, my mom’s fatigue when she kicked her shoes off at the end of the day, my sister’s struggle to start her life over with a toddler, and our whole cramped, confined existence—our living room with its mirrored wall and furniture encased in plastic, the cooking smells in the hallway, the triple locks on the door. That world was about to become my past.
Harvard was almost another planet, one of brilliance, privilege, and financial ease. And here it was, offering me a bridge, welcoming me in. But then the anxiety kicked in. Would street smarts get me through? How would I explain to family and friends after I flunked out in a few weeks? My thoughts were a mixture of exhilaration and terror. Harvard was offering a financial aid package that covered full room and board and tuition. As part of the package, I would have to earn money by working during the school term and over the summer, and also take out loans. Even with all that, it would be a stretch.
In September, my parents drove me to school in our new (to us) car, a maroon 1967 Buick LeSabre. My dorm room was number 32 in Weld Hall, a nineteenth-century Victorian building in Harvard Yard that had recently been renovated. As if the whole experience weren’t foreign and intimidating enough, Harvard listed the prior occupants of dorm rooms and, sure enough, an earlier occupant of Weld number 32 was John F. Kennedy, when he was a freshman.
I had two roommates. Greg Marsella was a skinny wrestler who played the guitar. He was from Cranston, Rhode Island, and had gone to Moses Brown, a prep school known for feeding into Brown. Robert Lazarsfeld, whose father was a famous sociologist, had gone to private school in New York City. They were okay guys, but we were from different planets, and we really went to different Harvard Universities at the same time. Everything they did and said contributed to my insecurity—sometimes on purpose. They both signed up for Math 55, a very advanced course, while I took Math 1A, Introduction to Calculus. “Baby math,” they called it, somewhat cruelly. It probably didn’t help that I was so young for a first-year student—still sixteen when the school year started.
Many of my new classmates had brothers and sisters who were at Harvard or had gone there previously. They all seemed to have come with high school classmates or to have known previous graduates from their high schools. There was definitely no one else there from Jefferson. Roy Geronemus, who became a close friend (and later a top dermatologist in New York), said later that when we met at Harvard, I seemed like the person in our class least likely to succeed.
