The Huge Season

by Wright Morris

  “Let me get this coffee,” Lawrence said. Some of it had splattered on Foley’s pants, and one of the spoons, had flipped into the cuff. “It’s a feather in your cap, old man,” Lawrence said. “Mother only spills things, on people she likes.” He used his handkerchief to wipe off Foley’s shoes, then he passed it to his mother, who-was reaching for it.

  “This floor needs waxing, Charles,” she said, and crawled around on her knees, sopping up the spilled coffee. She found a hairpin, which she filed in her hair, an Indian penny, which she handed to Foley; then she went into the bathroom, filled the bowl with hot water, washed the handkerchief, and spread it to dry on the mirror. What Foley’s mother might have done, but she would not have done it in her bathrobe, the tassel dragging, while a boy in his second year of college stood watching her.

  Coming back into the room, she said, “Charles is like his Grandfather, Peter”—as if the thought had just come to her.

  “She means Grandfather thinks he knows everything,” Lawrence said.

  “He does not know how to die,” she said and hung the wet napkin over the towel bar.

  “Mother!”

  “Well, he doesn’t,” she said, and then she noticed the box of face powder on the bureau. “What in the world—?”

  “Dickie,” said Lawrence.

  “Your grandfather was asking about him,” she said and placed the lid back on the powder, pressed it down, and fanned at the cloud of dust that had squeezed out.

  “Mother,” Charles said, “if Grandfather is so—”

  “Go tell him you are here, Charles.” She put the empty tray in his hands, the box of powder on it, and Charles left the room.

  Mrs. Lawrence went back into the bathroom to rinse her hands. From there she said, “I don’t really see how you can stand him, Peter,” which was what Foley’s mother would have said if he had brought Lawrence home and she had got him alone. Then she would have waited for Lawrence to say how marvelous he was.

  “Charles is not so bad, Mrs. Lawrence,” he said, because she gave him the impression she knew her son pretty well. She didn’t answer that but drew the blinds at the window to keep the sun off the green bedspread.

  “Sometimes, Peter, I just wish he would break both of them.” She was facing the window, gazing down the drive at the roofs of the snow-covered cars, and Foley thought she must be seeing whatever it was she wished Lawrence had broken. He looked, but he saw nothing to break.

  “Both of what, Mrs. Lawrence?” he asked, but her mind seemed to have moved on to something else. She lowered her eyes and ran her hands into the loose sleeves of her robe. Foley thought she might be cold, in the draft from the window, but she did not move away from it.

  “I might have known it,” she said.

  “What is that, Mrs. Lawrence?”

  “He didn’t tell you,” she said. “I might have known he wouldn’t tell you,” and suddenly pushed back the sleeves of her robe, rubbing her hands on the arms and wrists that were more like those of a girl. She thrust out her right arm, the small fist clenched, and flexed it at the elbow, slowly, as if it hurt her. When she did that Foley understood.

  “He broke it?” he said, and could see Lawrence’s arm, the one he never flexed, poised on his hip, like a dancer’s.

  “They said he’d never be good at anything,” she said. “He can’t throw with it. He can’t even bend it,” and she doubled up her own arm, the fist close to her face, to show him what she meant.

  “I don’t see how he ever did it,” Foley said.

  “Skiing,” she replied. “He did it skiing.”

  But that was not what Foley meant. What he meant was that he didn’t see how Lawrence got away with it. How with one bad arm he played such marvelous tennis, and how with one good arm he shaved, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and gave the impression that he wasn’t really trying.

  “He can do whatever he has a mind to,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to matter if he kills himself trying.”

  Foley believed that himself. He knew Lawrence well enough to see the truth in that. But he thought she must be worried about Lawrence and Proctor, because it was Proctor, just the year before, who had almost killed himself with Lawrence’s gun, while riding in his car.

  “Mrs. Lawrence,” he said, to put her mind at ease, “you’ll never catch Lawrence shooting himself.”

  “Not unless he has a mind to, Peter,” she said and lowered the blind another notch at the window. She said it so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that Foley heard it, but it did not penetrate. “His Grandfather would shoot anything,” she said, “and he is worse than his Grandfather.” Then she turned from the window, for someone in the hall was calling her.

  “Mother!” Charles called from the landing on the stairs. “Oh, Mother—it’s Grandfather!”

  “Excuse me, Peter,” she said and left the room.

  As she hurried down the hall Foley could hear her knocking on all the doors. “Hurry, please!” she said each time she knocked. “It’s your grandfather!”

  But that was not it. Almost, but not quite. He had a stroke, he lost the sight of one eye, but four days later the crisis had passed, and the snow-covered cars parked in the driveway drove off. They went off, Foley remembered, crowded with the clever people he had never met, like a caravan of Princeton cars leaving the Yale bowl after a defeat. The following day he and Lawrence took the train back to school.

  “This seat taken?” the woman said, took it, then leaned over Foley to tap on the window, wave at the child, the dog, and the man on the leash. The train jolted, she sat down, then arose to take from the seat the front section of the Times and smooth out the wrinkles she had ironed into Proctor’s smiling face.

  THE CAPTIVITY: III

  One of those tarnished mirrors they hang on walls to cover up cracked plaster or peeling paper hung on the wall in the middle of our suite of rooms. Thanks to that mirror. I came to know Proctor’s room as well as my own. If he was seated at his desk, or lying on his bed, it reflected him. If he wasn’t there I saw his desk, with the pair of chipped Lonely Indian bookends, or his bed with the blanket from the Brooklyn YMCA. Over the towel rack on his door he had towels from the La Fonda, in Santa Fe. He kept his two pairs of shoes under the bed, on trees he made out of wire coat hangers, and in one drawer of his desk he kept a green metal cashbox with a padlock and key.

  The rest of us had suitcases in our rooms, or mailing cartons we shipped our laundry home in, but Proctor said he couldn’t stand to have his room all cluttered up. He did his own laundry, and he had learned to travel light, with just his typewriter case. The typewriter meant a lot to him; he would oil it with a feather whenever he used it and put it under his pillow when he was gone long from his room.

  He kept a pad of yellow paper in a drawer of his desk, and in the water glass he took from the bathroom he kept eight or ten pencils, with their sharpened points sticking up. He sharpened the pencils with a knife shaped like a woman’s leg and honed down the points on a piece of fine-grain sandpaper. Proctor majored in English, with a minor in French, spent four hours a day washing dishes in the mess hall, and did what studying he had to late at night. Between the Lonely Indians on his desk he had four books. The Story of Philosophy and The Sun Also Rises had library numbers on the spine, but Peter Whiffle and the other one might have been his. That one had no spine, but Proctor had printed his name on the flyleaf as if he were the author of This Side of Paradise. They were books I hadn’t read, but I planned to when I got the time.

  Lundgren’s room was usually full of a strong yellow light. He liked to sleep late and kept the yellow blind at his window down. He liked to wear army shoes, with army pants, shirts, and socks, and when whatever he was wearing got dirty he took off the shoes, stepped into the shower, and washed the pants, shirt, and socks right on his body. He took them off to wring them out, then put them back on to dry. That way he didn’t lose, he said, any of the body heat he liked to conserve.

  Under his bed a w
ooden locker with a screw-down lid, the letters US ARMY stenciled on the ends, held his extra army shirts, socks, and several years’ supply of mercurochrome. On his desk he kept a magnet, a tin pie tray with steel shavings that responded to the magnet, a large magnifying glass, a dissecting kit, a small geologist’s pick with a sharp-pointed end, and a Kraft cheese box in which he kept rock specimens. The Field Book of the Skies, with the maps marked off by the ribbons he had won pole-vaulting, was usually on the chair, with his Lucky Strikes, beside the bed. The sky charts in the book were easier to study when he was lying down.

  If Lundgren was in his room he was usually on the bed, his feet through the iron rails at the end, his head propped on the pillow, and the air full of smoke. If he was not in the bed the room looked unoccupied. The Field Book of the Skies, the small pick, and the magnifying glass would be gone. The tin plate with the metal shavings looked like something left by the cleaning woman. He never used an ashtray because he didn’t like the smell of stale cigarettes. When he was down to a butt he removed the bit of paper, rolled it into a small wad, and dropped the tobacco on the floor. It was like sawdust in a bar, he said, and kept the dust down. He worked out on the track from two to four, in the mess hall from five to seven, and did most of his studying in the library over at the Physics Lab. He took a straight science major with ROTC instead of Physical Ed.

  Whenever I walked out of my room I faced Lawrence’s. He left one trunk in his closet, and several of the bags were under his bed. The trunk was a wardrobe, and he left his clothes in it, as if he couldn’t bother to unpack them, and one of the larger steamer trunks we set up in the center room. That was Proctor’s idea; he thought the steamer labels helped the atmosphere. The trunk contained racket frames, each one in a press, and the presses screwed into special racks so that the frames wouldn’t rattle when the trunk was tossed around. Some of his bags had held nothing but cartons of English tennis balls.

  Lawrence had no pennants on his walls either, but in October, from New York, he received a big carton full of Hudson Bay blankets, football robes, canes with Ivy League pennants, and a half-dozen pillows that he asked us to distribute around the room. He didn’t want them on his bed, and they gave our big room a very nice touch. He came supplied with gray flannels, white flannels, dozens of shirts, several jock straps with silk mesh pouches, made in France, but he didn’t have a tie of any kind and had to borrow one of mine. In the evening, at dinner, we all had to wear coats, ties, and buttoned shirts. I let him have my good tie, saying, at the time, that I thought it was a pretty infantile custom, but he said, “When in Rome, old man, you know—” and gave me that smile. At first I thought he might have braces on his teeth. I had seen girls with braces smile like that.

  I may have looked for the braces, for he said, “Just a small chip, old man, but the cold air, you know—” and showed me a very small chipped edge on a front tooth.

  “I didn’t even notice it,” I said.

  “Came down on the ten-foot board,” he said, slipping my tie around his neck. “Notice it as soon as the air gets a little cool.”

  Lawrence had no pennants on his walls, but there were two photographs on his desk. One was Cochet, the French Davis Cup player, crouching for a low volley at the net, and the other showed a young man with a nude woman seated on his lap. He wore a stiff straw hat and was sitting on a wire-backed drugstore chair. We all took a good look at this picture because we thought it must be faked. The woman had her back to the camera, and the young man was leering over her shoulder. The strap marks from the bra the woman had taken off showed up very well. A pair of long black sheer stockings had been left on. The picture had been taken somewhere in France, for there was French dialogue painted on the backdrop, but most of the words were not in my Larousse. It was signed “Love and kisses from us both, Dickie,” and there was no indication that it had been faked.

  Between the two photographs Lawrence had an onyx pen and pencil set, a glass paperweight containing a seahorse, and a small traveling clock, in a leather case, with an alarm. The alarm went off every morning at six o’clock. He would get up, brush his teeth, then fill the green wastebasket with balls, take along several rackets, and drive out to the tennis courts. He would practice by himself till seven-thirty, then come back and take his shower, have his breakfast, and go along with Proctor to his nine o’clock class. Three times a week, from three to five, a pro from Pasadena would come over and slam drives at him or try to lob over his head. Lawrence would hit everything, or try to, before the ball bounced. He would volley from the baseline as well as from the center of the court. All kinds of tennis were new to me, but this was new to the old tennis players, who found that his razzle-dazzle game more or less unbalanced their own. Lawrence either netted the ball, hit it out, or put it away. It was more like badminton than tennis—as if all the ground strokes had been ruled out. But you couldn’t talk to Lawrence. That is, you couldn’t tell him anything. Lawrence was on his own, but the coach let it be known that a kid named Crewes, who played for Southern Cal, would pin his ears back in the spring.

  As he had lived all over Europe, Lawrence took his major in languages. He spoke French very well, and while living in France he had been tutored in German and English. The name of his tutor was Richard Olney Livingston. Livingston had gone to Oxford, was now at Princeton, and turned out to be the Dickie on the photograph, the leering young man with the French moll on his lap. Lawrence would have gone to Princeton himself, if Princeton had been in California, on the Riviera, or anyplace where he could play tennis most of the time. He had come out to California because the California game was fast.

  On my own desk was a snapshot of my mother holding one of Arlene Miller’s new Belgian hares, one of the few that the male had not eaten out of the last batch. Between my father’s bookends, two chunks of marble said to be part of the Acropolis, I had his set of Rabelais, in cracked morocco, and his Oxford Book of Greek Verse, with the translations he had written in the margins forty years ago. I would get up when I heard Lawrence’s alarm, work on some vocabulary until breakfast, then walk with Lundgren or Proctor to our first class. After class we would end up together in the aisle or on the concrete steps out in front, quite a bit like the filings in Lundgren’s magnetic experiments. Lawrence was the magnet, but I doubt very much if we’d often have got together, or stayed together, if Proctor hadn’t manipulated it. He was drawn, of course, but he didn’t want to do it all by himself. That was true of all of us, but it took Proctor to figure it out; he wasn’t afraid, as we were, of making a fool of himself. He didn’t seem to mind if he wasn’t left holding the bag alone. He would yell, “Hey, Foley! Here’s Lawrence!” just as if I’d been looking for him; or say to Lundgren, “Hey there, beanpole! Here’s Foley,” although Lundgren never had anything to say to me. But I don’t remember any of us holding off or pointing that out. We were all feeling the pull, and Proctor just gave us the excuse.

  I know that when we walked together other groups of frosh would step to the side. We gave the impression of being a pretty solid outfit, I think. One reason we gave this impression was that we let Proctor do all the talking and stood around listening, as if giving him support. We would go along abreast, around the big Lab buildings, then out on to College, where the whole student body, after the nine o’clock classes, would wait for Chapel in Smiley Hall. We weren’t really that solid at all, which may have been why, at the start, Proctor had to carry the ball and keep up a line of talk. I think he felt if he didn’t we might just walk away from him.

  The steps were reserved for the upperclassmen, and the big crowd of frosh, the frosh that mattered, were between the rails that went along the sidewalk at the front. Proctor would sit on this rail, and the rest of us would stand facing it. Looking up the street, up the lane of trees that made a green tunnel toward the mountains, I could see the tawny fire break that went along the ridge to the big Colton C. In November some of the frosh went up with shovels and rakes and cleaned it off. On a clear d
ay it seemed to rise above the campus like the bright green dink Lundgren was wearing, and wherever you saw Lundgren, in the morning, you would find the rest of us.

  There were more girls than boys at Colton, but somehow they didn’t cut any ice with us. The Colton girls were in the big dormitories or the sorority houses I could see from my study window, and about two hundred Phipps girls were on the new campus a few blocks north. The Phipps school was more or less new, with a Maxfield Parrish campus and some smart girls, but the Humanities program didn’t give them too much free time. The Colton boys, as Proctor said, had a pretty wide choice. The Colton girls were mostly of the type that might have come from homes like mine, but Phipps featured girls of a different type. They had more, as a rule, of what Proctor referred to as “class.” When the Colton women threw a dance in the gym there was a band at one end, down under the basket, with something like a no-man’s land out on the floor. The Colton stags, over on the north side, would stand facing the Colton fillies near the door, with two or three sophomores running around clipping the lambs. There was very little of that sort of thing at Phipps. The Phipps girls had more know-how, and if the music stopped when you were dancing with a Phipps girl she didn’t act as if she was being compromised, as Proctor pointed out. I didn’t dance that year, but I could see the point in what he said.

  On the weekends Proctor would go up to Phipps, Lundgren would look around for a Garbo movie, Lawrence would go to bed, and I would work at my desk. If my window was open I could hear the two bands playing at once. The Phipps band was better, with a crooner out from Los Angeles. A little after midnight they would break up, since some of the boys had to get back to Cal Tech. I would see the lights of their cars up on Foothill Boulevard. The local boys would come down through the orange groves, smoking their cigarettes. Some of the upperclassmen, with the upperclass girls who had taken out two o’clocks, would ride over into the wash to do a little necking, or go for a ride. Proctor would sit on the floor in the shower and sing “Sometimes I’m Happy.” I was not indifferent to girls, myself, but I was a full-time scholarship student and had my father’s reputation, as Proctor put it, around my neck. I was interested in making an agreeable impression, as my mother said. What I had seen of Colton I liked, and it had crossed my mind that Oberlin, where my mother had gone, would not be quite the same. It snowed back there. It would never suit Lawrence’s fast type of game.