Once Around the Carousel

Chapter Twelve

Well before their Christmas break, the girls had fallen into a Friday routine of going to the Public Library. Only a few blocks from school, they would walk over and spend the afternoon looking through the Time-Life picture books and atlases, finding fun facts, or watching the cool filmstrips that came in every week. After their first couple of weeks, they made a standing arraignment with Linda's father to pick them up on his way home from work.

For Linda, visiting the library was like walking an Ethiopian refugee into a supermarket and telling them to grab a snack. Combing through shelves packed with knowledge, ideas, and stories, she gorged herself. Linda usually acted as their guide, with Sharon deriving as much pleasure from Linda's enthusiasm as from any thrill of learning. In many small towns, weekly library excursions might quickly grow dull, but Metuchin's library exceeded anyone's expectations – thanks to the generosity of its benefactor: Titus Dwight.

In the summer of 1949, after Gloria's meltdown at his Fourth of July party, Titus made his first trip to India. He'd suppressed his desire to travel there for years. Initially planning to go after college, The War instead carried him off Europe. Then when he returned home, the sub-continent erupted during its struggle for independence. When he finally did go, violence persisted. How dangerous could it be, he thought? Although, like many in his generation, after facing the front lines during WWII, his bar of what constituted danger was set relatively high.

Titus planned on touring India and Nepal for six months but ended up staying two years, most of which he spent in the low Himalayas. Once he did leave, rather than returning home, he went to England to study at Cambridge University, obtaining an advanced degree in Psychology. While Titus took his studies at Cambridge seriously, his time in England rekindled a love he picked up during the war. He joined Triumph Motorcycle's factory racing team.

Titus had dutifully enlisted in the army the day after he graduated from Harvard in the spring of 1942. Knowing him to be an avowed pacifist, a friend of his late father had arranged for a stateside desk job in intelligence. It was an offer Titus politely refused. Instead, he spent the war atop an iron horse delivering messages along the front lines. While never requiring him to shoot a weapon, his duties were not for the faint of heart. However, Titus concerned himself less with Nazis shooting at him than the karmic repercussions of taking another man's life. His fellow curriers, mainly Brits who had joined the courier corps out of a passion for motorcycles, took to the gangly, pacifist; and Titus quickly earned a spot as one of their own. After the war, several of his war buddies went to work for BSA's Triumph Motorcycle Division, and when Titus ended up in England, they again took him in. He would have stayed longer, but his racing days ended after a serious wreck, an irony he enjoyed with a laugh years later.

"I made it through the war with barely a scratch," he would say about his days riding along the battle lines on Triumphs, Indian Scouts, or when the need arose, appropriated BMWs. "We rode down bombed-out roads in all imaginable weather. Then, ten years later, I nearly kill myself on the test track behind Triumph's factory in Birmingham."

While Titus's concept of the universe's inner workings allowed him to see his accident more as an amusing sub-plot than a life-changing development, it still ended his racing career. He required a trip home in any case. He hadn't set foot on American soil in five years, and an obligation compelled him to return for his 32nd birthday. Not to celebrate his birth; his trip constituted more of a business affair.

Orphaned a week shy of 14, Titus had lived off a very generous allowance from his father's estate. The birthday he returned home marked the date he gained control of the principle - some 37 million dollars. Titus never believed the money properly his, and for years had considered what to do with his inheritance. He'd thought of using it to ease the burden brought on by the poverty he saw in India, but time changed his feelings. In the end, he chose to use the money to help those whose work helped his family amass the small fortune, the people of Southern New England.