The boys and girls met only at meals. There was a piano and two or three of the girls could play and it was actually a pleasant arrangement for me.
I have forgotten to mention that my first night in Columbia, at the hotel and on its stationery, I wrote a letter to Hazel, who was at the University of Wisconsin, proposing marriage. In a week’s time she sent me an appreciative but negative response, explaining that we were still much too young to think about such a thing …
I shared a room with a young somnambulist. One night he got out of his bed and crossed the room to my bed and got in with me. I recall him as a lanky farm boy, blond and a bit blemished with adolescent acne, but not unattractive.
Of course, when he crawled into bed with me, I cried out in dismay. He mumbled something and staggered back across the room to his single bed in another corner.
Now I’m going to make another confession of a comical nature.
For several nights, I waited for this fit of somnambulism to come upon him again and hoped that it would lead him in the same direction.
Well, it only happened that one time.
But one evening, before he’d come to the room, I took the bolts out of his cot so that it would collapse when he got into it.
I suppose I was not quite sane in those days. In any case, the cot did, indeed, collapse when he got into it. However, he quickly and silently reassembled it, giving me several enigmatic glances.
I had been in the boardinghouse for about a month when I was visited by three or four very well-dressed and personable young men from the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.
Well, their visit had come about through Dad’s intervention. He had a pair of young collateral cousins, the Merriwether boys, at the University of Tennessee and they were influential members of ATO there. They had written the local chapter, Gamma Rho, that the son of an executive in the International Shoe Company was “hiding out” in a boardinghouse and that this would not do, since he was descended from the Williamses and Seviers of East Tennessee, since he was a published writer and a traveler of the world.
One of the fraternity brothers laid it on with the most impressive and possibly genuine warmth of feelings; he insisted that I go straight to the fraternity house with him so that I could see at once how preferable it was to the “dismal” boardinghouse.
Nowadays, of course, I would have recognized this “brother,” whom I will call “Melmoth,” as what he turned out to be.
About as gay as they make them …
However, he merely struck me, then, as a person of exceptional grace and charm.
I went to the fraternity house. On the way to it, we passed the new house being constructed, a huge pseudo-Tudor thing that managed to look quite attractive. Before I got to the temporary quarters of the Gamma Rho chapter, I’d made up my mind to join, I mean pledge, if they really asked me to.
The next day they did, and, having observed the brothers with appreciative eyes, I was eager to accept.
The ATO chapter at Missouri U. greeted me with cordiality, at first, but then with growing and growing and growing disconcertion.
Surely, they had never encountered such an eccentric young man, let alone pledged him.
Once a week, at midnight, there was held what was called a “kangaroo court.” At this court, conducted with great solemnity, the transgressions of each pledge were read aloud to the gathering and punishment was meted out in the form of paddling. The paddling was light in some cases, and heavy in others.
In my case, it was practically spine-breaking.
A brother would stand poised with a paddle at the end of the long front room. The pledge to be punished would be instructed to bend over, presenting his backside to the brother with the paddle, and to hold up his balls, since the brother did not want to include castration in the punishment.
Then the brother with the paddle would come dashing across the great chamber and swat the pledge’s backside.
I was often meted out the maximum number of ten paddlings. And they were often administered with such force that I would barely be able to make my way back upstairs to bed …
What were my transgressions?
Various and many. In fact, they were practically innumerable.
A spirit of anarchy had entered into my being. This was partly due to nostalgia for the old boardinghouse. And it was partly due to the meagerness of my monthly allowance from Dad. I was continually out of shirts and in those days you had to appear at dinner, in a fraternity house, in a clean shirt and jacket.
The bell for dinner would ring at six and I would never be prepared for it. Hungry, yes, but always surprised by the sound.
I would wait until the other boys on the floor had descended to the great dining hall in the basement. Then I would scurry into somebody’s room and snatch one of his white shirts and wear it down to dinner and return it, surreptitiously, when the meal was over.
1. Mother at nine years, studying the violin. Grand tried to teach her to play but Mother achieved only a fairly correct pose with the instrument.
2. Dad before the death of his mother and consequent deprival of a gentle influence on his boyhood.
3. Dad as a student at Bellbuckle Military Academy, where, he says, he spent half his time in the guardhouse, fed on turnips—which he never permitted on the table in later years.
4. Mother dressed for riding—man, beast or storm, a delicate survivor of most elements in life.
5. The Rectory in Columbus, Mississippi—very Southern Gothic.
6. Mother in a snapshot taken by her favorite beau, after she had married “C.C.” Williams—hence the wistful look.
7. Mother, Grand and Rose.
8. Mother as Regent of the Jefferson chapter of the D.A.R.
9. Grandfather’s totally natural, never affected or merely social humor is apparent in this snapshot.
10. Grandfather with me in Key West, Florida, early in 1947. I was just beginning to feel well, recuperated from the illness of 1946 and with Streetcar almost ready for submission.
11. Grandfather in Key West, posing with a pelican. His failing eyesight—or his infinite benevolence—made him regard them as beautiful birds
12. Grandfather and me in St. Louis.
13. Mother, Grand and “Jiggs” in front of our house on Arundel Place, Clayton, Missouri.
14. My paternal grandfather, Thomas Lanier Williams II, who practically exhausted the family’s fortune, mostly in real estate, by running repeatedly for Governor against a popular demagogue. The crack across the face in the photograph is a touch of accidental symbolism, as it was not till this handsome but improvident descendant of the Williams-Sevier-Lanier line that things began to go wrong. Although educated in law at Heidelberg University he never rose higher in politics than State Railroad Commissioner. He was a great lady’s man—I wonder if he would have tolerated me …
15. Isabel Coffin Williams, my father’s mother, who died at the age of twenty-eight from tuberculosis. This meant that my father grew up mostly without the emollient influence of a mother.
16. My favorite picture of Grandfather, taken late in his life. A dignity and wisdom—the grace of age—in his face.
17. Cornelius (“C.C.”) Williams—a reluctant paterfamilias and sales manager.
18. Mother and Dad, on a vacation in the Ozarks.
19. A formal portrait of Mother, at the time of her “second debut.”
20. Mother and me after a long conversation in Key West, during the forties.
21. Rose Isabel Williams.
22. Rose on Westminster Place in St. Louis.
23. My sister Rose at the time of her debut in Knoxville.
24. Rose on the beach in Florida.
25. Rose and a friend my mother didn’t like. Mother thought all Rose’s friends were a bad “moral influence” and so Rose became lonely.
26. My sister Rose as a young woman.
27. Rose in a Catholic sanitarium in St. Louis, just after her nervous breakdown.
&nb
sp; I was not very clever at this and was soon found out.
Then, and this is really an awful confession, I had taken to the habit of “kiting checks.” Whenever I would go out on a jelly-date, as afternoon dates were called, and find myself unable to pay the café bill, I would write out a check on a bank where I had no account. These bad checks would be pasted on the cashier’s box of the restaurant.
What in hell was going on in my mind that year?
Nothing presently recognizable.
About once a month the chapter would give a formal dance and the pledges were given a list of sorority girls who were acceptable as dates for these grand occasions. And I would always ignore the list and bring some girl who was either not even a member of any sorority or was from a sorority that was considered of no consequence, such as Phi Mu or Alpha Delta Pi, which owned the dreadful, sub-rosa sobriquet of “After Dinner Pussy.”
There was one particular girl from Alpha Delta Pi that I kept bringing to the dances. This girl was an hysterical nympho: and very, very pretty. She had only one formal dress and it was a shimmering rich brown satin that did not adequately contain her bosom and made no secret at all of her voluptuous behind.
Although her presence at the dance was regarded as a social disgrace, as the evening wore on the brothers began to cut in on us with more and more frequency until she was getting about the dance floor as dizzily as Tippy Smith from the Theta house or the queen of Kappa Kappa Gamma whose name I forget.
The boys would take over my date completely after midnight and they would each dance her into the dark little library and what went on I cannot relate with authority but I can easily conjecture. They would give her what was then called “a dry fuck.”
My own intimacies with this girl were not much: once, in a car, I took hold of one of her breasts and she went into an almost epileptic spasm.
Boys and girls together. You can’t put it down …
The summer after my first year at college I actually obtained and held legitimate employment for a short while, in St. Louis.
I was a house-to-house peddler of a big “woman’s magazine,” and just how this came about I don’t recall but certainly I did it only to please, or should I say pacify, “Big Daddy.”
There were about ten of us recruited by a sort of regional sales manager who put up at a second-class hotel on Grand Avenue; and we were a motley crew. We were paired off, and the pairs worked on opposite sides of streets. The young fellow who was paired off with me came from Oklahoma.
He struck me as being curiously antic in his behavior. I was not yet hip, you see, to the gay world and I didn’t know that this partner was actually an outrageous young camp. He was blond and rather pretty, I remember, but he interested me only as a funny companion at a very tedious job. Neither of us was very successful at pushing the woman’s magazine. Housewives slammed their doors in our faces more often than not: of course this was the first year of the depression. I guess the job lasted for both me and my gay partner about two weeks. But after we’d been summarily dismissed, the kid from Tulsa remained in St. Louis. One evening we went on a double date with Hazel and a girlfriend of hers named Lucy. I was surprised at the Tulsa boy’s lack of interest in having a date with a girl; he said, “Wouldn’t we have more fun if we went to the bars?” I had never been to “the bars,” he did not specify which kind of bars he meant and I certainly didn’t know, not having ever suspected their existence.
After we’d collected our little commissions from the mag subscriptions, we went on the open top of a bus to the neighborhood of Hazel’s house. It seemed to me that the night air had made my partner a bit wacky with exhilaration. He kept repeating the name “Lucy” and going into soprano howls of amusement. The howls had an hysterical note.
I believe that Hazel was much wiser about the sex scene than I was at that time. When she admitted him to the Kramer residence, she looked at the Oklahoma kid with a touch of dismay in her great brown eyes. All during the evening he kept chattering like a bird and putting special emphasis on the name “Lucy.” I must admit Lucy would not have rated at a fraternity dance: she looked quite a bit like what her name suggested. She was tall and angular and there was a sort of Luciness about her. But my partner’s behavior was really quite overboard and the “double date” ended upon a somewhat ambiguous note. Hazel seemed more than a bit put off with me for the first time in our long relationship.
When I say that Hazel was probably much wiser about the sex scene than I, I am not altogether sure what I mean by that. For five or six years she had been a loving girl-friend but the love was what the Victorians would describe as pure. Now this will come as a rather incredible bit of news, but Hazel permitted me to kiss her only twice a year on the lips, and that was at Christmas and on her birthday. In retrospect I wonder if she was actually what the shrinks call “frigid,” or if she was being coquettishly demure to bring out a more aggressive attitude in me. I am inclined to think the latter is true, since I remember an afternoon in our very early teens when we visited the St. Louis art gallery, atop Art Hill in Forest Park; she headed straight for a room of ancient statuary containing The Dying Gaul, who was clad only in a fig leaf. Now take my word for this, it’s the absolute truth: the fig leaf could be lifted and Hazel knew it. She lifted the fig leaf and asked me, “Is yours like this?”
She got no answer but a maidenly blush …
I have incorporated that little occurrence in one of my best short stories, published by The New Yorker, no less: its title was “Three Players of a Summer Game.” The New Yorker cut it out of the story, that incident of the fig leaf, but I restored it when the story appeared in Hard Candy and I think rightly so, for the little girl in the story was based upon Hazel as a child—including the bit about the old car, the “electric.” Mrs. Kramer, grand’mère, had an “electric” automobile and the pretentious old lady loved to sit in its square glass box tooling sedately among the more fashionable residential sections of the city. She doted on Hazel and she would sometimes allow Hazel to take me for rides. The electric only went at a speed of about twenty miles an hour, at the most. Later on the Kramers were to give Hazel a light green Packard, but that was quite a bit later …
I didn’t know why the boy from Oklahoma kept hanging around St. Louis, which is all but intolerably hot in summer, but he did hang around and he did keep suggesting that we go to “the bars”—but I continued to decline. Something about him disturbed me and I was somewhat relieved when he finally went home. (Later I received from Tulsa a written declaration of love.)
Cut, now, back to college. And to a youth with large and luminous eyes which gleamed at night like a fire-cat’s.
I was now an initiated member of ATO and at one point I had this roommate with the exceptional eyes, dark hair and one hell of a physique—I’ll call him Smitty.
Once each autumn the ATO’s would have “Old Home Week” when the great Tudor house would be packed with alumni. On these weekends, everyone doubled up in bunks for the night. I shared a bunk in the dormitory on the third floor with Smitty, sleeping under—no, not sleeping under but lying under—a very light blanket, the influx of alumni having put a great strain on the supply of bedclothing. Well, that night a singular adventure occurred. He and I were both sleeping in underwear. I had on shorts and a singlet and I think he only wore shorts.
After lights out in the dormitory, I began to feel his fingers caressing my upper arms and shoulders, at first almost imperceptibly and then, and then—
We were sleeping spoons and he began to press hard against my buttocks and I began to tremble like a leaf in a gale.
But that’s as far as it went.
Then, a few weeks later, when we were back in our regular sleeping quarters and I had climbed into my upper bunk, the boy suddenly jumped up there with me.
Automatically, virginally, I said, “What do you want?” or “What are you doing?”
He laughed, sheepishly, and jumped back down from the upper.
&nbs
p; I think I must have lain awake nearly all night, cursing myself for my inadvertent “put-down” of this (for those days) very daring approach. How mixed up can you be, and how ignorant!
Another boy began to visit our bedroom at night and one of those nights—they were purely for conversation, or “rapping” as the kids say now—Smitty grinned at our visitor and said, “You know what I’m going to do tonight? I’m going to corn-hole Tommy.”
Well, I didn’t know what that meant, in those days I had never heard of the idioms for pederasty.
There was a bit of puppy-love-play among the three of us on the lower bunk. We were all in shorts. And we sort of tangled our legs around a bit, but that’s as far as it went.
Smitty and I were going on double dates with girls from Stephens College, and were both frustrated. The girls were not giving much.
Now I remember one night in particular and we were not double dating with girls from Stephens but with a couple of very wild coeds, unaffiliated with a sorority for quite apparent reasons. One of them had a roadster and we drove out toward the quarry and stopped by it in the moonlight. Then Smitty said, “Why don’t you two walk down the road a piece?”
Memoirs Page 5