“It’s no fun,” he once told a friend, “to turn the pages of a book and say, ‘Yes, yes, of course, I know that.’ ” Jeanette Mirsky knew Robert well enough in their senior year to think of him as a “special friend.” She never thought of him as shy in the usual sense, only distant. He bore a certain “hubris,” she thought, of the kind that carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. Everything about Robert’s personality— from his abrupt, jerky way of walking to such little things as the making of a salad dressing—displayed, she thought, “a great need to declare his preeminence.”
