Free The Life of the World to Come by Dan Cluchey Page A

same pale stars, not so very long ago?
    When Buchanan was twenty-eight, his fiancée took her own life, and it ruined him forever. Tragedy anneals great leaders—the horror tends to forge them into soulful and determined visionaries—but it leaves the rest of us broken: Tyler, to take one example, lost his wife in office and never recovered. Lincoln, on the other hand, outlived three of his four sons, and through grave depression extinguished our national fire. On Valentine’s Day, 1884, Teddy Roosevelt’s wife and mother died in the same house, eleven hours apart, just two days after the birth of his first child. “The light has gone out of my life,” he wrote in his diary that night, and by 1901 he was president. To overcome the worst loss you are capable of imagining, to fashion it, somehow, from a seemingly barren future into a character-building speck of past—that is the mark of greatness. It is the skill that separates Lincoln and Roosevelt from Buchanan and Tyler, and, when the time comes, it separates us all.
    Buchanan was chosen to save the republic in its hour of fracture and despair because he was capable, and careful, and wise: a serious man with a servant’s heart. He couldn’t imagine a future that didn’t resemble the past, and when South Carolina bolted like a frightened colt from the Union, he announced confidently to friends that he was to be the last American president. He couldn’t imagine a future in which he wasn’t the future.
    â€œI shall carry to my grave the consciousness that at least I meant well for my country,” said Buchanan to the Congress less than eight weeks before the end of his term as president.
    Three months later came Fort Sumter. He did the best that he could, and still he broke the world.
    *   *   *
    I took the bar exam up in Saratoga on the sixteenth and seventeenth of July. Boots and Emily, Sona, Gracie, and I had made a pact: twenty-four hours would elapse between the moment we arrived back in the city and the moment we would allow ourselves to discuss, commiserate over, or, after knocking all of the wood in Brooklyn, celebrate what had just happened. We each took the eighteenth to rest; I slept late and stonily, took a long walk solo into neighborhoods I hadn’t even known were there before—neighborhoods without names—and met Fiona, who was filming that day, for a late lunch. We were all supposed to get drunk together that night, but when the hour came, no one had the resolve. Gracie came over for Thai food, and she and Fiona fell asleep on the couch half an hour into a documentary about big cats. I saw it through to the end, then made myself into a starfish, collapsing alone on our bed.
    July 19 was a Friday, and our deferred bash came to be. None of us would have our test results back for several months, but this was secondary to our concerns—the thing was done, the beast bested, and we could all move on with our lives. Sona and Gracie took eager belts from a handle of watery gin. Emily nursed a little jug of hand-crafted cider—something peachy, with a calligraphic name. Boots and I shared a bottle of the darkest liquor the adult versions of ourselves could stomach: a russet rye that sprayed bullets through my throat. Everybody guzzled champagne, and we drained the night away trading stories of heart-stopping computer scares, barbaric multiple choice guesswork, and essay question responses that flew the coop of reason and coherence as our proctors’ clocks ticked themselves down towards the exhausting freedom to come.
    Fiona was late; it was her last day of filming for Mercy General , and she had a wrap party of her own that evening. She slunk through the door just before midnight—by that time, we were all in assorted stages of maniacal repose on the furniture—and her lower eyelids were billowy, cerise gobs. This time, I asked: “Is something