The Huge Season

by Wright Morris

  One day Foley saw him in the gay deck chair of the new laundromat that had opened near the college, watching most of his clothes swill around behind the glass of the machine he faced. He had taken off his shirt, socks, and underwear, but not his pants and coat. He sat at his ease, a toothpick in his mouth, watching the clever, almost-human machine wash, rinse, and spin-dry his clothes. A ladies’ wrestling match on a TV screen couldn’t have absorbed him more. It was clear that he was pleased, but not overly impressed. He seemed to be, like his rope-tied bundle, nearly self-contained. Fussing all round him were a dozen rattled women, their eyes scanning some page, their fingers plucking at their hair, but even the pitiless stare of their spoiled children failed to penetrate him. For one spring, and all of one summer, Foley had hated the old man’s guts, but now he walked in an arc, at the edge of the gravel, to keep from troubling his sleep. The sweat-stained felt hat with the toothpicks in the band remained flat on his face.

  Looking south, beyond the pike and the market, Foley could see the green, parklike gap of the campus and the tops of the drooping willows that surrounded the pond. An island. Not a piece of the main. The world passed it by like the stream of traffic on the pike. One morning, from where he now stood, he had watched the blue heron that summered on the pond appear above the trees, the great wings flapping, water dripping from the feet like wet and trailing kite tails, and cruise over his head like some unnamed bird from the lost world behind the trees. A symbol of the college. A symbol of Foley himself. But the heron could fly, Foley could not, and the heron had other, wilder rendezvous, where the world along the pike was as passing strange as a crazed bat’s dream.

  The tramp sleeping in the station, the heron on the pond, and Foley teaching Pindar to the Quaker freshmen were three examples of the prehistoric present, the persistence of the past. But the heron and the tramp had the better of it. The past that persisted in them had less compromise. Compared with the heron and the apple-cheeked tramp, Peter Foley was as ancient as the coelacanth, that steel-blue fish, long reputed dead, that had somehow refused to give up, and shared with J. Lasky Proctor the news spotlight and the Committee nets.

  Foley stepped back from the edge of the platform as the local pulled in. He started up the steps, backed down, as a passenger, the image of his father, and a Latin teacher at a boy’s school near the campus, was getting off.

  “Morning, Peter,” he said, raised his gobbler’s neck from the raddled rim of his collar, and passed, with a glance, judgment on Peter Foley, playing hookey from his academic duties.

  “Morning, Allen,” Foley muttered, let the old man get off, then walked through the empty train to the smoker. He dropped down in a seat where a morning paper had been left. A New York paper, with a two-column photo on the front page. The Senator from Wisconsin, his back to the camera, was wagging his finger at a man with a saintly, that is, almost silly, smile on his face. A bone-white scar showed in the dark beard along his chin. His hair was clipped like that of a monk, and though he faced the inquisitor his gaze was like that of the marble heads in Foley’s Latin books. The stone eyes open wide, polished and smoothed, but not drilled for the pupils, so that the vacant, dreamy gaze was turned inward rather than out. Very much like the gaze of a tennis player well known in the twenties, and a flyer whose picture Foley had pinned to the ceiling of his room. But this was J. Lasky Proctor, unmasked Voice of America. Foley recognized the scar, and perhaps the gaze was due in part to the flashbulbs that were popping—or was it also due, in part, to the persistence of the past? Jesse L. Proctor, of Brooklyn, Avenue J, shown wearing the expression popular in the twenties, once worn by Lindbergh, by Lawrence, and known as the Lone Eagle gaze.

  “Christ!” Foley said aloud, which was what he had exclaimed when he had bumped into Proctor, or Proctor into him, in the Hoffritz lobby near Forty-third Street.

  “Sorry, old man,” Proctor had replied, “not Him, just one of His humble servants,” then he had turned and limped off, still favoring that foot where he had shot himself.

  THE CAPTIVITY: II

  But I go too fast. Before going to college I stayed out of school and worked for a year. I worked for Mr. Conklin, an insurance broker, and my job was to open and close the windows, put the bottled water on the water cooler, deliver signed checks, and put the stamps on the outgoing mail. Mr. Conklin was a big man in the business, but after signing checks most of the morning there was sometimes not much to do in the afternoon. He would step out of his office to see what I was doing, and if I wasn’t doing very much he would say that he would like to have a word with me. We always had it in his office, where the chairs were more comfortable. He would first ask me how I liked my work, and I would say I liked it all right. Then he would ask me if I planned to lick stamps the rest of my life. I usually said I didn’t think I’d like it very much. Then he would ask me what I expected to do with my life. What did I intend to make, he would say, of myself?

  It had never occurred to me that I had much choice. My father had been a classics scholar, and I was following in my father’s footsteps, but when I told Mr. Conklin that, he would slowly wag his head. He kept a glass of sharpened pencils on his desk, and when he heard that I was following in my father’s footsteps, he would lean forward, take one of the pencils, and use the point to pick his teeth. It was what he did when he feared that he might be led to influence me. He didn’t believe in that. He believed that every young man should decide for himself. Should decide, that is, to make something of himself.

  That was the spring of 1927, and as an example of what he had in mind Mr. Conklin often mentioned Charles A. Lindbergh, a young aviator. He was making plans to fly from New York to Paris, entirely on his own. Mr. Conklin read the papers every morning, coming down from his home in Winnetka, and he would clip out everything pertaining to Lindbergh and read it to me. He felt I should plan to do something of that order myself. I wouldn’t have to fly, just so it was something that had never been done. Mr. Conklin himself, when he was no more than a boy, had come to Chicago from Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and lied about his age to get a man’s job with Commonwealth Edison. The rest was history. If there had been planes to fly, or if, as it turned out, he had just been born ten or twenty years later, Mr. Conklin implied that Charles A. Lindbergh would have been too late. Since he liked to talk, and I was paid to listen, we would sit in his mahogany-paneled office and go over what he said life in America was offering me.

  The windows of his office were over Clark Street. One June morning, when I opened the windows, half the people in Chicago seemed to be on Clark Street, or in the windows of the office buildings that lined both sides. That morning Charles A. Lindbergh came to Chicago, and Mr. Conklin held both of my legs at the window while I emptied our wastebaskets over the hero when he passed below.

  I didn’t see much of Lindbergh through the clouds of paper, but Mr. Conklin had placed a large bet on him, and with some of that money he bought me a large signed photograph. I pinned it to the sloping ceiling over my bed. According to Mr. Conklin, I resembled the Lone Eagle quite a bit. I was tall and slender, self-effacing, and said very little. I had no plan to fly to Paris, or anywhere else, but I let him know that my mind was not closed and announced my intention of going to college in the fall. If I should ever need money, Mr. Conklin told me, for the big hop to Paris, or anywhere else, I should let him know, and he gave my mother two shares of his stock to put away for me.

  If you remember the college movies of the twenties, the healthy sun-bronzed boys, the long-limbed girls, the football field green as the grass around a Maypole, the cloudless sky, the great eucalyptus trees, the orange groves like the labels on the ends of fruit boxes—if you remember these things you would recognize them when you saw Colton. The scenic props were all there; nothing had to come down or be put up. The Sugar Bowl, the Model T Fords, the ivy-covered buildings and the red-roofed dormitories with the view of the mountains that the prop man must have had in mind. The barren desert that glared in my father�
��s photographs had disappeared. Hundreds of blackbirds, their eyes like hatpins, walked around under the cloudy mist of the sprinklers, preening and worming the green lawns.

  When I arrived there was no one on the campus but the birds. An old man, a Mexican, watered the shrubs along the walk. The pits dug around the trees had been filled with water, the sandy earth soaked dark. I could hear water running between the shrubs, and see it moving, under a film of dust, between the trees in the orchards, or running clear in the channels where the earth was packed hard. A thin stream of it darkened the asphalt at the edge of the street. Water was everywhere, the sprinklers spit and hissed, but the cloud of mist low over the campus left no smell of morning freshness in the air. It was there, like smoke, and then just as quickly it was gone.

  A young man with a hose was wetting down the gravel near the freshman dorm. I told him who I was, where I was going, and he squirted his hose in the direction of my room. Then he turned it aside, into the bushes, so I could go along the walk.

  Our suite was on the top floor of the dorm, a long narrow room with bedrooms at each corner, and in one of them, sprawled out on the bed, was a young man. He lay on it rather than in it, and wore only the tops of his pajamas. I made a racket coming in, but he didn’t seem to notice it. Room B, at my end of the suite, was full of luggage covered with steamer labels, and four or five tennis rackets, in heavy wooden frames, were thrown on the bed. The bed had been slept in the night before and the covers thrown back. On the desk in the room, the lid up, was a portable phonograph.

  I unpacked my bag, hung up my clothes, then walked down the hall to the shower room, where I sat on the floor, in a cloud of steam, and washed the cinders and soot out of my hair. Then I took a cold shower and stood at the window, wiping it off. The window faced the east, the sun was still low and hot on the roofs of the nearby buildings and the leaves, dark and dust-coated, of a few old oaks. Beyond the oaks a green field, smoking with sprinklers, then the football field with the cinder track around it, and still farther beyond, white and glaring, a battery of tennis courts. A yellow sports roadster was parked in the gravel near the first court.

  On the court the player threw up a ball, hit it, and as he threw the second ball up and hit it, the sound of the first, like a cork popping, came along on the breeze. The player went on serving as if each one was an ace, or out of the court. None of the balls he hit into the opposite court came back. I couldn’t see that court—the scoreboard at the end of the football field blocked it off—but the player went on serving, hitting each ball hard. When he ran out of balls he picked up the green wastebasket he had brought them out in and walked slowly around the court, picking them up. There was no one else on the court. I couldn’t see too well, but I could see that he was out there by himself. He wore a band around his head, and his wrists appeared to be taped. The rest of the courts, ten or twelve of them, were all empty. On beyond were orange groves, then a hot strip of desert, then the loaf-shaped foothills like folds of drapery, then the haze on the mountains and the milky haze on the colorless sky. Nothing moved, between the mountains and the campus, but the tennis player. Waves of heat blurred the yellow hood of his car, and I could see the white sweater spread on the seat to keep the leather from getting too hot. Nothing stirred or seemed alive that morning but the balls that made a sound like a cork popping and the white-banded wrists of the lonely tennis player. His name was Lawrence. I had seen it on the steamer trunk in the hall and the racket presses lying on his bed. Charles Lawrence, of Troy, Indiana, the dean had notified my mother, would be in Room B—the room, that is, right across from mine.

  When I came back to the room the fellow sprawled on the bed had rolled over on his back. His long legs were brown, with crisp golden hairs, and his feet stuck through the posts at the foot of the bed. One arm slanted across his face to keep off the sun.

  I dressed, put on one pair of my new two-pants suit, hung up one pair, and put back on the shoes I had worn out on the train to take off the new look. Then I went off to look for something to eat. The young man watering the shrubs pointed out the mess hall, one of the new buildings on the campus, with the court plowed up where they were planting olive trees. I walked around the court to keep the sand and gravel out of my shoes. The mess hall, a big, pitched-roof building, was part of the new unit of dorms, and there were men on ladders up in the gables, painting the trim. When I stepped inside I saw four or five students, in white aprons and jackets, seated at one of the tables, eating off the trays they had just brought from the cafeteria line. I picked up a tray and some silver, went down the line myself. I went the full length of the line without choosing anything. The woman serving the coffee told me to go back and come down again. I didn’t know the rules, and there was so much food I couldn’t make up my mind. I ended up with orange juice, bacon and eggs, hot biscuits, a coffee cake I saw after I had the biscuits, marmalade, a bottle of milk, a bowl of hot cereal, and coffee. The woman serving the coffee didn’t bat an eye. I took a seat at one of the empty tables near the door. I could tell a freshman when he arrived, because each one looked around for an empty table, or they came in awkward, gawking gangs, like a bunch of kids. I could see how much good the year out of school had done for me. I didn’t have too much of a beard—I hadn’t had to shave since I left Chicago—but, after sizing me up, these freshmen moved off and sat somewhere else. That would never have happened if I hadn’t had a year of high finance.

  I sat there till eighty or ninety of the freshmen had arrived. I thought Charles Lawrence or the tall fellow on the bed might turn up. They didn’t, however. One of the upperclassmen, a sun-tanned fellow with a numeral sweater, rapped his spoon on his empty milk bottle and said he would like our undivided attention. All freshmen would meet in the olive court, he said, at ten o’clock. At that time they would be driven into the mountains in upperclass cars. No freshmen cars, under any circumstances, would be allowed to go up. We would all go up in the old jalopies belonging to the upperclassmen, he said, and have a wonderful time even though we were freshmen, so to speak. That didn’t get a laugh when he paused, so he repeated it. I didn’t laugh, although I knew it was funny. I was sitting off by myself, and I could see that some freshmen thought I must be upperclass and driving one of the cars. The upperclassman repeated the time and the place, went over the rules about campus smoking, and said that there would be no smoking in the mountains because of the fires. In the fall of the year the mountains were very dry. If we smelled something burning it would probably be a freshman who had not got a card off to his mother.

  I sat around till most of the freshmen had gone off. Then I walked back to the dorm, passing the jalopies with their upperclass drivers and the yellow sports roadster with disk wheels that had been parked near the tennis court. It was a foreign-make car I had never seen before. In the seat of the car was the green wastebasket, full of tennis balls that had been new that morning, for the boxes were crumpled on the floor. When I got upstairs I could see that someone else had taken a shower. I thought that would be Lawrence, because the wet tracks went down the hall and into our suite, but when I opened the door the fellow with the brown legs was drying himself. He was standing in the sun at the window, fanning the air with a towel. He was tall, about six two or three, on the lean side but not quite skinny, with a good even tan but a bad complexion on his face and back. He had athlete’s foot, and he had painted his toes with mercurochrome. When I opened the door the curtain at the window blew the other way, pressing on the screen, but he went on fanning himself as if he hadn’t noticed anything.

  “Pardon me,” I said, “are you Proctor?”

  He bent over and spread two of his toes. Using the towel, he dried the spot carefully, then looked at the mercurochrome stain on the corner. Without looking at me he said, “Who?”

  “Proctor,” I said, “Jesse Proctor. I understand he’s in one of these rooms.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  �
�If Proctor’s here, that must be Gamble.” He snapped his towel at the luggage at my end of the room, the leather bags and steamer trunks covered with foreign labels.

  “I think that’s Lawrence,” I said. “There’s a Lawrence in Room B.”

  “Lawrence who?”

  “Charles Lawrence,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ and little apples!” he said and stared at me. Then he walked past me to the door of Lawrence’s room. He looked at the rackets piled on the bed and leaned in to see the record on the record player. “Well, fan my brow,” he said.