The Huge Season

by Wright Morris

  “You know him?”

  “You kidding?”

  “All I know is that his name is Charles Lawrence.”

  “Walk on water,” he said very softly. “Think of that.” From a pack of cigarettes on the edge of the table he took one and tapped it several times on his thumbnail. He used that nail to strike a match, lit the cigarette, and blew out a cloud of smoke. All this time all he had on was his tan, not another stitch.

  “My name is Foley,” I said, “Peter Foley,” for I still didn’t know who he was.

  “Lundgren,” he said, “Edward A., Long Beach, Palm Beach, Rex Beach, and Jack London.”

  He didn’t step forward or put out his hand, and because of the way he looked I didn’t either. I had never shaken hands with anybody in the nude.

  “I don’t think I know much about Lawrence,” I said as he stood there staring at the luggage.

  “You know what barbed wire is?” he asked. When I nodded he said, “Well, they sell it for money. A lot of people buy it. It makes a nice business.”

  “They make it?” I said.

  “His old man invented it,” Lundgren said. While I thought that over he added, “If not his old man, his old man’s old man. It’s in the family. Goddam barbed wire clear around the world.” He hadn’t finished his cigarette, but he stepped into Lawrence’s room, looked around for a tray, then stubbed the cigarette on the corner of the desk. “Saint Cloud,” he said, reading one of the labels. “Where the hell is that?”

  “San Cloo?” I said. “I think San Cloo is just outside of Paris.”

  He did not turn to face me. “You been there?”

  “I’ve done a little reading in French.”

  “That’s nice,” he said. “That’s awfully nice, baby. That means you two will have something in common. Zan Klooo! Well, I’ll be a sonuvabitch.”

  Lundgren had had smallpox at some time, and the lower part of his face was pockmarked. His head was big, but very knobby at the back, like the head of a kid.

  “What a lovely goddam year I’m going to have, baby,” he said and smiled.

  “I guess Lawrence goes in for tennis.” I nodded at the bed covered with framed rackets and several cartons of new balls on the floor at the foot of the bed.

  “You ever hear of the Davis Cup, baby?” he asked.

  I had heard of it, but I didn’t know much about it.

  “Well, they talk about this kid and the Davis Cup, baby,” he said. Lundgren was six foot two, which was pretty tall, but I was pushing five feet eleven myself, and I wondered if he called everybody baby or just his friends.

  “He was out on the courts this morning,” I said, but I didn’t say he had been out there alone.

  “Probably why they sent him here, baby,” said Lundgren. “Here he can just play tennis day and night. All he needs is just a pinch of that barbed-wire dough for the rackets and the balls.”

  He turned and left the room, crossed to his own, and sprawled out on the bed the way I had first seen him. “What a lovely goddam year this is going to be, baby,” he said and groaned.

  “Before I forget it,” I said, “all freshmen are supposed to go up to the mountains. We meet in the olive court and go up in the upperclass cars.”

  Lundgren didn’t answer. The draft through his window stirred the crisp golden hairs on his arms and legs. He was brown all over, except for the band where his swimming jock crossed his buttocks and the mercurochrome stains between his toes and the big pimples on his back. I went into my room, took off my suit pants, put on the khaki pants the dean had recommended, a shirt with short sleeves, and tennis sneakers with suction-grip soles. Then I took my new sweater and wore it with the sleeves tied around my waist.

  It was half-past nine, and I stood at my window, looking through the tangle of vines at the campus, the grass dry now that the sprinklers had been turned off. Students were lying on it as if it had never been wet. In the street below my window were the upperclass cars, the yellow foreign sports car of Lawrence, and an Express baggage truck that had been backed up close to the door. Near the front end of the truck I could see the fake stickers on my own trunk. I had never been to Marquette, Illinois, or Northwestern, but I had found a store that would sell me the stickers and a bottle of shellac to keep them from peeling off. But I didn’t want to be in the room when the Express men brought it up.

  From the door of the suite I said, “You want to tell Lawrence we’re all going to the mountains?”

  “I’ll tell him, baby,” Lundgren said. He had rolled over on his back, his head propped on a pillow, so he could lie there and smoke.

  On my way down the stairs, between the first floor and the second, I had to press flat against the wall to let two of the baggage men pass with a trunk. I could read the small type on the French spa stickers as they passed my face. Behind the trunk, carrying three tennis rackets, the sleeves of his sweater looped around his neck, was the young man I had seen on the tennis court. For a tennis player he struck me as a little short, but he was wide in the shoulders and had very good arms. His hair was blond but cut so close to his head that it was like the fur lining of a helmet worn inside out. The cropped hair seemed to begin at his eyebrows, with hardly any gap for his forehead, the lower part of his face being the most prominent. The jaw was long, squared off at the bottom, and seemed to be out in front of his face, but that might have been due to the way he held his head. As he came up the stairs his right hand rested lightly on his hip. His elbow brushed against me, as if he hadn’t noticed I was there, and one of the sleeves of my sweater slipped up and over his brown arm. I went on down to the bottom, from where I looked up and watched them make the turn at the top. I could hear him give the men directions in a very low-keyed voice. I think he tipped them pretty well—the first man down was smiling and his hat was still off when he stepped through the door into the sun.

  We went up the mountain a little after ten o’clock. The frat cabins were above the timber line, but this particular mountain went up so fast, and the road along with it, that it was less than nine miles from the center of the campus and the olive court. There were about twenty cars with about five or six of us to a car. The car with Lundgren and Lawrence was an old Packard touring, with a smooth, oil-burning, twelve-cylinder engine, two extra seats in the back, and I could see Lundgren high on one of them. Lawrence was at the front, his right arm holding a bag on the running board. I was in the rumble seat of a Ford coupe with a boy named George, from Seattle, who had a small hole in his forehead to drain a sinus that was very bad. He talked most of the way, but I didn’t hear anything. The wind was on Thy side and blew whatever he said back into his mouth.

  We went up the wide, dry bed of a river full of boulders washed down in the floods, and big rocks that were scored where boulders and trees had dragged over them. We went up fast to a place called Baldy, where there were overnight cabins, hotdog stands, and clear mountain water spilling over the dam just above the bridge. There we began to pass the cars with boys who had got carsick. They would walk down the road, behind the cars, and bend over as if they had lost something. The altitude and the winding road were too much for them. Although we had been at the end of the line we passed every car except the Packard and arrived at the frat cabins at the same time. They had a very sick fat boy in the Packard, but they had let him be sick rather than stop, and he was still on the floor of the car, stretched out, when Lundgren got out. Not counting the sick boy, there were seven of us. Two upperclassmen, who were driving, myself and George, Lundgren and Lawrence, and the fellow named Proctor, who had been sick for a spell but held out. That ride made it clear who would run the freshman class. We sat around in the shade, on the pine needles, looking at the haze that concealed the valley and listening to Proctor and the upperclassmen talk. Neither Lawrence, Lundgren, nor I said much of anything.

  So Lawrence and I were never formally introduced. I knew who he was, of course, but he had no way of knowing about me. Not that it mattered, since he referre
d to all of us as “old man.” I mean he referred to the three of us, Lundgren, myself, and Proctor, as “old man,” but the rest of the class he referred to, when he had to, as “old boy.” There was a nice distinction there, but to get it you had to hear his voice.

  For the mountains he had taken off his tennis shoes, his white flannels, and his crew-necked sweater, and put on gray flannels without cuffs, a tweed jacket with chamois leather patches on the elbows, and a dirty pair of white buckskin shoes with red rubber soles. He hadn’t troubled to tie the laces of his shoes or pull up his socks. Under the tweed coat he wore a turtleneck green jersey with the laundry tag showing on the collar. It was not what I’d expected of an heir to great wealth. He lay on his back, his hands cupped behind his head, where the brown pine needles made a carpet on the slope, one of the needles in his mouth while he listened to Proctor talk. I had always been under the impression that commanding personalities had high foreheads, but Charles Lawrence seemed to have no forehead at all. From the eyes up he looked more like a bird. His forehead seemed to slope back just that fast. As his eyes were not particularly friendly, the part of his face you looked at, when he was talking, was the wide mouth and the lantern jaw. He may have looked a little odd, though I think he looked better lying down.

  All this time this fellow Proctor sat there and talked. When the upperclassman asked him where he was from, he said the Jewish Alps. I didn’t know at the time that he meant the Catskills above New York. I didn’t have to know that to think it was funny, but I didn’t know how to take it, for it was clear that Proctor was a Jew himself. I had never met a Jew who talked like that about himself. Proctor told one story after another, most of them pretty funny, but nearly all of them having something to do with comical Jews. Some of these stories were good, but neither Lawrence nor Lundgren laughed. Once or twice I laughed because I couldn’t help myself. Proctor was about average in size, with thick curly hair that he liked to run his hands through, a big expressive mouth, and friendly, sheepish eyes. He sat on the ground with his legs folded under, like a girl. Oddly enough, he was dressed quite a bit like Lawrence, with leather patches on his jacket elbows, dirty white shoes, a faded red turtleneck jersey, and dirty sweat socks. That much was similar, but the effect was not the same. Lawrence didn’t seem to care about his clothes, as if he found it too much trouble to tie his shoelaces, and Proctor didn’t care either—but something about it didn’t quite come off. If you wanted your white shoes to look good dirty, they had to be the best sort of shoes in the first place, and the patches on your elbows weren’t supposed to be there to cover up holes.

  We sat there on the slope for an hour or more, until the last car pulled up. While we sat around eating our box lunches we learned and sang the traditional songs, and were tipped off on how you could tell a Colton man, and why you couldn’t tell him much. In the afternoon we were free to mill around and get acquainted, form teams to hunt for firewood, sleep, or go for a walk. Lawrence, Lundgren, Proctor, and I hiked up to the falls. On the way to the falls Proctor did a little sprinting up and down the road, whenever we crossed it, and Lundgren commented that he like the way Proctor used his arms. Proctor said he wished he could say as much about his legs. He was a quarter-miler, and couldn’t run the quarter on his hands. Lundgren asked him what his best quarter had been, and Proctor said he had run a fifty-one flat on a two-curve track, soggy as a mattress, and in the teeth of a driving rain. Lundgren said Proctor ought to run a fifty flat on the springy California tracks. He said he had had the same sort of trouble in Alaska, where he had tried to pole-vault off a grass runway, the pole too short, and had landed on his back in a piece of plowed field. Proctor said he had seen many fine pole vaulters in Madison Square Garden and elsewhere, but he had never seen a man who had a better build for it than Lundgren had. Would Lundgren mind saying just how high he had gone? Lundgren said he wouln’t mind if it was understood that he had had to do his vaulting in a goddam pasture, dodge the cowpies, and with a pole that was something for propping up a clothesline. If that was kept in mind, he would say he had twice vaulted eleven feet. Proctor said if Lundgren didn’t vault twelve feet, maybe higher than that, before the first year was over—well, if he didn’t do that they could ship him, Proctor, back to the Jewish Alps. We said the hell with that, and then Proctor wanted to know what my line was, because I looked like a miler, but I said no, that in the way of sports I hadn’t got around to doing much of anything. Lundgren said you had to choose, and any man who spoke French, and knew French history as well as I did, could not waste his goddam time out on a track, running around and around. Then Lundgren said to Proctor, “Baby, you ever hear of a man named Lawrence?”

  “Lawrence?” said Proctor, coming to a stop. “Don’t tell me! Let me guess!” He thought for a while, his hand over his eyes, then he lowered that hand and wiped it on his pants, stepped up to Lawrence, looked him in the eyes, and offered his hand.

  Lawrence took it, squeezed it, let it drop again. “Glad to meet you, old man,” Lawrence said.

  “What’ll I do with this now?” Proctor said and held up his hand, the fingers glued together like a fin.

  “Have a cast made of it, baby,” said Lundgren. “Plaster cast. This hand shook by Lawrence.”

  “E pluribus unum,” Proctor said, prying apart his fingers and pretending to read that inscription where his high-school ring had dug into the flesh. We all laughed at that, and Lawrence made a low bow.

  We could see the falls from where we were standing, and on our way back, on the slope above the cabins, we could see smoke from the fires and hear the twang of a ukulele string.

  “It’s going to be a lovely goddam year, baby,” Lundgren said and slapped his hand on my back.

  In the evening we gathered in the main lodge, around the fireplace. We sang over all the songs we had learned and heard a few words from Stan Lowell, a football man, who told us that he had some very big news for all of us. He had stumbled on it himself by the purest chance. He had just happened to run his eye down the list of the freshman class. On that list was the name of a man who was internationally known, and he was going to ask that man to step forward at this time. Then he asked for quiet, and asked Charles Lawrence please to stand up.

  Lawrence, Proctor, and I were sitting on a ping-pong table at the back. Lundgren was standing, leaning back against the wall. When Lawrence slid quietly off the table and just stood there, saying nothing, some of the frosh thought it must be Lundgren that was meant. Beside him, Lawrence looked a little small. He just stood there, waiting, until Stan Lowell asked him to step up to the front. So Lawrence walked up and stood beside him, his back to the fire.

  I couldn’t see his face, with the light behind him, but against the fire he looked like a dancer; there was something nearly feminine, something a little insolent, in his pose. He stood with the weight on the balls of his feet, his hands balanced on his hips. Stan Lowell led the applause, then he said that it was hardly necessary to tell us that Charles Lawrence was considered one of the hopefuls for the Davis Cup. He for one, Stan said, would like to shake his hand, and he offered his hand, Lawrence shook it, and right at that solemn moment Proctor cried out, “Have a cast made of it, Stan!”

  That brought the house down, naturally. We were all just a little tense till he made that remark. There was nothing particularly relaxed about Lawrence, and he made me think, the way he stood there, of a firecracker that had been lit but not gone off. He was so quiet, so intact, it made you tense just to look at him. Proctor’s remark put an end to that, and when Stan Lowell called for class nominations, and then for quiet, I heard Proctor’s voice. As luck would have it, he said, he knew just the man for the post. One who was quiet, self-effacing, but with a background of travel and experience that peculiarly fitted him for leading a class. He went on in this vein, then he paused and mentioned my name. Everyone applauded, and he raised my right hand in the air. Stan asked if there were any further nominations, then moved that the nominations be clos
ed, and I was elected by unanimous consent. Called upon to say a few words, I said that I would gladly accept the post, since I knew that my old friend Jesse Proctor would do all the work. That went over very well, and Proctor was elected class secretary. Stan Lowell then said that the sergeant at arms should be a man big enough to keep our meetings in order, and half the frosh in the room turned and pointed at Lundgren, who was leaning on the wall. No official vote was taken. And that was how we wrapped it all up.

  We topped the meeting off with doughnuts and cider, sang “Hail Colton, Alma Mater,” then organized in five teams to see that all the fires were out. Lawrence, Lundgren, Proctor, and I went down the mountain in the Packard with Stan Lowell. We took it easy. We didn’t use the motor all the way. Proctor said the road was like a ribbon of moonlight, and when we got below the fire area Stan Lowell and Lundgren lit up cigarettes. With the motor dead we could hear the whine of the suction tires. The dry bed of the river looked wet in the moonlight, and when we were alone, with no frosh cars behind us, Stan Lowell switched the headlights off. The blacktop road curved along the white river, the straps holding the top creaked like buggy harness, and far below, bobbing like lanterns, we could see the lights of the upperclass cars and the moonlight on the boys who had gone into the mountains with their pith helmets.

  FOLEY: 2

  In the Philadelphia station, changing trains, Foley looked to see if the Times carried the story, and saw a photograph of Proctor with “a faded blond companion” on the front page. Her faded blond hair showed, but not her face, because she had hid behind her handbag as the flashbulbs popped. Something in the gesture seemed a little old-fashioned, like the camera dodging of Greta Garbo, and indicated that this woman was perhaps more faded than she looked. A fossil of some sort, like Proctor himself. Fished up from the past, the murky depths, in the haul of the Committee nets.