The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [126]
None of this represented mental health, but it got him through. The Disease wasn’t yet well established in him. It was possible to anesthetize himself during his days or weeks of depression.
And then an amazing thing happened. In his junior year, Leonard started getting his act together. There were a couple of reasons for this. The first was that Janet had left for Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington, at the end of August, a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Portland. Though they’d mostly ignored each other growing up, Leonard found the house lonely without her. Janet’s departure made living at home that much more unbearable. And it showed him a way out.
It was a chicken-egg deal. Leonard could never tell which came first, his desire to become a better student or the energy and focus that allowed him to do so. From that September on, he threw himself into his studies. He began to finish his reading assignments and to turn in essays on time. He paid the bare minimum attention it took for him to get A’s on math exams. He did well in chemistry, though he preferred biology, which seemed to him more tangible, more “human,” somehow. As Leonard’s grades improved, he was put in advanced classes, which he found even more to his liking. It was fun to be one of the smart kids. In English, they were reading Henry IV, Part 2. Leonard couldn’t help but secretly identify with Henry’s speech of farewell to his former life of laxity. Though seriously behind in math at the start of the year, by the time he took the SATs, in the spring, he was more than caught up, and aced both the math and verbal sections. He discovered in himself a capacity for unbroken concentration, studying for ten hours at a time, taking breaks only to wolf down a sandwich. He started finishing papers early. He read Stephen Jay Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny and Ever Since Darwin just because he was interested. He wrote Gould a fan letter and received a postcard back from the great biologist. “Dear Leonard, Thank you for your letter. Keep sluggin’. S. J. Gould.” On the front was a portrait of Darwin in the National Portrait Gallery. Leonard hung it over his desk.
Two years later, when Leonard could look back with the benefit of a medical finding, he came to suspect that he’d spent his last two years in high school in a condition of borderline mania. Every time he reached for a word, it was there. Whenever he needed to make an argument, entire paragraphs formed in his head. He could just open up in class and keep going, while also making people laugh. Even better, his new confidence and achievement allowed him to be generous. He excelled at school without showing off, his unbearable table-hockey persona nowhere in evidence. With schoolwork coming so easily to him, Leonard had time to help his friends with their work, never making them feel bad about their difficulties, explaining math patiently to kids who had no clue about math. Leonard felt better than he’d ever felt in his life. His grade point average went from 2.9 to 3.7 in a single semester. Senior year, he took four A.P.s, getting 5s in biology, English, and history, and a 4 in Spanish. Was it a bad thing that his blood contained an antidote to the depression he’d suffered the previous spring? Well, if so, nobody was complaining, not his teachers, not his mother, and certainly not the college counselor at Cleveland High School. In fact, it was the memory of his last two years in high school, when the Disease hadn’t yet grown fangs and was more of a blessing than a curse, that had given Leonard the idea for his brilliant move.
Leonard applied to three schools, all in the East because the East was far away. The school he got into that gave him the most financial aid was Brown, a place he didn’t know much about but which had been recommended by his counselor. After a lot of long-distance wrangling on the phone with Frank, who was now complaining about European tax rates and pleading poverty, Leonard succeeded in getting his father to agree to pay for his room and board. At that point he sent in his letter