Questioning Denny

President of what? Whatever happened to that Hansen boy? Could it have been that long since Denny and I had seen each other? Do we ask too much of our most able young people? Can’t you see what’s happening? Whose counsel does he seek in finding someone? Who else? Why couldn’t we see it on the twenty-fifth? Couldn’t believe it? Did some people commit suicide over bad backs? But suicidal? I say, Schley, you were Hotchkiss, weren’t you? Got a good crowd? What’s your Andover crowd like? If all of these Eastern prep-school types like Prescott and Michael Arlen (who went from St. Paul’s School to Harvard in Exiles) and John Gregory Dunne (who went from Portsmouth Priory to Princeton in Vegas) were not actually as self-assured and sophisticated as they appeared to be, why did they have to wait twenty years to tell us so? How was he supposed to get elected? How was he supposed to get the nomination? Mad at him? Don’t you ever feel like going home? What’s their word for weenie? What are you talking about? What’d you think it was? Have you belonged here long? So what was I doing there, the day after his memorial service, in his house in Georgetown? Looking for more material for anecdotes? Just picking up some pictures and personal effects to take to Aunt Norma? Why am I only learning this now, when it is too late? You know what they told me? Don’t you have any professors in the place anymore? Which successful person does not have that feeling at times? No doubts? No understanding that a lot of it was luck? How much of what happens to Rhodes Scholars in later life has to do with the judgment of the selection committee and how much with the fact that Rhodes Scholar became part of their identity? And what is the criterion for, say, promise fulfilled? A listing in Who’s Who? A listing in the issue Forbes devotes annually to the richest people in American? Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences? A seat in the Senate? A lifetime of service? A ticket that has been punched so many times that it’s practically in tatters? Can I handle another one? ‘A Farewell to Bright College Years?’ Who knows what might have happened had he been sitting up? I thought, Oh, my God, what if I was, in a sense, the problem? Now you think I should come back home and advise somebody on the tax implications of his real estate deal? President? What in the hell was he doing at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? What was the point of the point of getting an additional master’s degree? Why wasn’t he in law school? Why wasn’t he in California running for the state legislature? Why did Denny seem more or less parked when he was supposed to be out there getting on with it? Is this a job for a college graduate? Lacked a certain social skill? Closed in? Ivy League air? Could this be Denny Hansen, who attracted a coterie when he was plopped down on the Old Campus of Yale from Sequoia High School? Where was the Denny Hansen who wowed everybody’s parents at graduation-the person who acted completely natural while he was being photographed the entire weekend by Alfred Eisenstaedt? Where was the Denny Hansen who, even in the early days in Washington, had, in Susan Semple’s words, ‘the ability to make people feel comfortable, the ability to make people feel as intelligent as he was’? Was one of the things that Denny (and the rest of us) had picked up from Yale a tone that we would have considered cool and others might see as an Ivy League air? Had Yale taken someone who had been an unambiguous hero-someone who was to high school students what Frank Sinatra was to popular music-and given him a crippling disdain for anything that smacked of wearing your letter sweater with the letter showing? Could any graduating senior in 1953 whose own striving was aimed toward, say, the law think the day would come when he’d be asked what his own son did and he would answer cheerfully that his son was a chef? Could he imagine that there would be a day when he’d be asked if his daughter was married and he would answer, equally cheerfully, that she and her boyfriend had been living together for a few years but hadn’t yet decided whether to tie the knot? What was so great about being manipulative? Was I meant to admire someone who was willing to trim his beliefs to fit the next Administration? If there’s a cartel in bananas, so what? Did he still smile? And me? Had I become my father? Did they feel they might be weenies too? Are we fairly represented by the person who told me in 1970 that if the undergraduates had no word for weenie they were all weenies? Do your thoughts tend to dwell morbidly on the future of your prostate? Do you fly the eight o’clock shuttle often? Also, was the Foreign Service where Denny truly belonged? Was a man who applied scrupulous moral standards to every decision of every person he came in contact with really cut out to be a diplomat? Charming Roger? Why didn’t you call? I was surprised at first, and then it occurred to me that she had, in fact, been the person Denny had been closest to as an adult; if she had been removed as the beneficiary, who was there to put in her place? Did we make up a life for Denny to lead?