“Just what is the problem, Mr. Nichols?” I said.
The dean opened his desk drawer, took out several theme papers, and passed me the one on top. The sheet was folded in the regulation manner, with Lawrence’s name on the outside. On the inside there were two or three lines at the top of the page. The topic was:
REGARDS BERTRAND RUSSELL
and said:
The works of Bertrand Russell give nice expression to lucid, forward-looking, remarkably shallow mind.
That was all.
“Does it sound like him?” said the dean.
“Not particularly.”
“That seems to be our problem,” said the dean.
I read the statement over, then I looked through the window of the dean’s study at the frosh dormitory, the blind drawn at the window of Lawrence’s room. Behind the blind sat his desk, his onyx pen-and-pencil set, his seahorse in the heavy paperweight, and the photograph of Dickie leering over the shoulder of the nude on his lap. It sounded like Dickie. I knew that without knowing how he would sound.
“The English papers are quite brilliant, but different,” said the dean. “They seem to be concerned with his boyhood in Brooklyn. Remarkably well done”—he waved one in the air—“but—”
“You don’t think he grew up in Brooklyn?” I said.
“There is no mention of it in the transcript.”
“Lawrence has lived all over the world, Mr. Nichols, and he may have got to know somebody from Brooklyn.”
“I’m glad to have you presenting the other side of it, Peter,” the dean said.
“I know that Lawrence has had a very broad background, Mr. Nichols.”
“We are anxious to do what we can, Peter, but we feel that we need something more to go on.” He waved his hand at the paper I was holding.
“Lawrence is not an easy man to figure out,” I said.
“We were wondering if you found that true,” said the dean, and I thought he looked relieved. He reached for the paper I was holding, read the statement over, placed it with the others. “A brilliant mind, Peter,” he said, “but extremely unorthodox.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
“In strictest confidence, Peter, I’m afraid Lawrence intimidates Miss Loucheim. She doesn’t feel that she’s equipped to deal with him. We all feel that one of his friends, one mature enough to understand the situation—” The buzzer under the dean’s desk sounded, and he stood up. “As soon as things quiet down a little, Peter,” he said, “Mrs. Nichols and I plan to have you over. Mrs. Nichols knew your father. You are here for the holidays?”
I said that I was. Going back to Chicago, I said, was too great an expense. The dean said he thought I was very wise to look at it so sensibly, not to mention the free, undistracted time it would give me to work. He placed his hand on my shoulder as I went out the door. I went back across the campus and around behind the dorm to the football field. Four or five cross-country men were jogging around the track. I took a seat in the grandstand on the south side, facing the foothills and the mountains, the snow gone now except for the cap on Baldy’s peak. The bright whiteness of the peak made the sky seem colorless. The foothills were nearly purple in the slanting light, spring green in spots from the heavy rain, and the shadows moved on the slopes like the hands of a clock. I sat there until I heard the supper bell ring in the dorm.
On the way to the mess hall I met Lawrence, walking along with his hands in his pockets, the chewed-off ends of his untied laces slapping on the walk. I waited for him to catch up, then we walked along together, under the new trees in the olive court, to where he opened the door to the mess hall and said, “After you, old man.”
The next morning, following breakfast, I had to come back to the rooms for my books, and I was on my way out when Proctor came up the stairs. He came all the way up two at a time, and there was sweat on his face.
I waited till he got his wind, then he said, “This something I wouldn’t tell anybody.”
“Then why tell me?”
“I got to tell somebody.”
“Which arm is it this time?” I said.
“He’s takin’ me with him,” he said.
“With him?”
“Home for the holidays, old man. Home for Christmas. He’s asked me to go along.”
He watched my face to see how I was taking that. In his own face I could see that he didn’t know how to take it. He wanted to know. He watched me for a cue. “That ought to be mighty nice,” I said.
“You think it’s all right, old man?”
“I don’t know why not.”
He knew why not and said, “If his family didn’t like Jews, would he ask me?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“You really think so, old man?”
“Just so long as he asked you,” I said.
“Christ’s sake, old man, you think I’d ask him?”
I didn’t answer.
“He asked me what I had in mind over Christmas, and I said I didn’t have anything in mind. I didn’t. So he asked me how I’d like to come home with him. I said, ‘Lawrence, stop your kiddin’.’ He said, ‘I’m serious, old man.’ I said, ‘Look, where is it?’ ‘Back in southern Indiana, old man.’ ‘And how do we get there?’ I said. ‘I drive it in about three days, old man.’ Then he said, ‘Well—’ so I naturally said yes.”
“Well, that’s that,” I said.
“I can’t believe it,” Proctor said.
“They probably have a very nice place,” I said.
“You think I’m just a crazy bastard, old man?”
“I’d have gone if he’d asked me,” I said.
“Why don’t I put it to him?” he said. “Why the hell not? More the merrier.”
“I’ve been asked to meet the dean and his wife,” I said. “Guess the dean knew my father. They’ve asked me to drop in on them during the holidays.”
“That ought to be pretty nice too,” said Proctor.
I agreed.
Then he said, “Foley, old man—”
“What’s on your mind?”
“If you’re going to be stickin’ around,” he said, “if you don’t think you’ll need that second pair of pants—”
“I’m pretty sure I won’t,” I said and went back to the door of my closet. I took the new pair off of the hanger, the pair I’d never worn, and tossed them to him. “I still got a pair,” I said. “What the hell I need with two pair?”
“I tell you what we do,” said Proctor, “we’ll swap. You loan me the pants, I loan you my typewriter.”
“I don’t typewrite much,” I said.
“Now’s your chance to learn, old man,” he said. “You got three weeks. You got three weeks to practice.” He went off with my pants, came back with his typewriter. “The ribbon may be a little old,” he said and opened the lid, peered at the ribbon. The bottom half was so chewed you could see the yellow sheet on the roller through it.
“I probably won’t get around to it,” I said, “but if I do I’ll pick up a ribbon.”
“I got to run,” he said, ran, then stopped and said, “Keep it under the bed or somewhere, old man, would you?” I said that I would. Then I heard him go down the stairs, about four at a time, and out the front door.
I had my Phys. Ed. class in the afternoon, and on my way to the gym I passed Lundgren on his way to the field with his track shoes and vaulting pole. He was wearing his Long Beach High sweat pants and eating a Sportsman’s Chocolate Bracer.
“Well, son,” he said to me, “think you can bear up?”
“Under what?”
“Proctor’s leaving us, baby. He’s got a moral obligation. He’s got a feeling that Lawrence needs him at Christmas. He feels that you an’ me might make it alone, but Lawrence is a lonely cuss.”
“He told you this?” I said.
“No, baby—just everybody else on the campus.” He balanced the pole in his hand, tossed off the candy wrapper. “Lawrence ever mention a
ny sisters?” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“How you think it sounds better, baby,” he said, “Lawrence and Proctor, or Proctor and Lawrence? Proctor and Lawrence sounds more natural, don’t you think?”
I didn’t know what to think, and in the spell-down drill with the Indian clubs I dropped out very early, which was not like me, and sat on the mats near the door from where I could see the snow cap on Baldy and the legs of Lundgren when he came down the runway and rose into the air. There was something on his mind, too, for he dropped out around ten feet.
Proctor and Lawrence got off after dinner on Wednesday night. That was a day early, strictly speaking, but they had about two thousand miles to drive, and by leaving at night they would cross the desert while it was cool. Driving day and night they would be in Indiana on the third day. A frosh named Crowell went along as far as Tulsa, and Proctor, to occupy his mind when he wasn’t at the wheel, took along his copy of The Story of Philosophy.
Lundgren and I had one meal a day at the Sugar Bowl. On the way back to the dorm we would come up through the campus orange trees. The new crop of Valencias were dropping on the ground, and if they hadn’t dropped, they would with a little shaking. We ate a couple dozen a day between us, and we both had a touch of the hives. Lundgren had it worse because there was wool in his socks and his army uniform.
We had the place to ourselves, but it took time to grow on us. During the day we might hear some of the maids mopping up the showers or the hallways, or the suction wheeze of the pump that was cleaning out the swimming pool. At night we’d hear the whine of the traffic on Foothill, and later, on the foggy mornings, the honking of the big electric cars.
Christmas Eve, Lundgren offered me one of his cigarettes. He had opened a fresh pack of Luckies and held it out toward me.
I took one, put it between my lips, and said, “What do you do?”
“Light it and suck on it like a titty,” he said.
After Luckies I tried Melachrinos, for the flags that came in the box. To start the New Year I bought a pipe and a four-ounce tin of Three Nuns tobacco, and Lundgren bought a sack of Bull Durham, to roll his own.
I read all the books on my spring assignment, then I started on the books on Proctor’s desk, but he had them pretty badly marked up and underlined. This Side of Paradise had pages I couldn’t make out. Whenever Amory Blaine made a clever remark it was underlined. If Proctor had found it clever the second time around he had underlined it again. I recognized quite a few remarks he had made himself. His favorite word seemed to be “touché,” which he put in the margins of all the pages, usually followed by a row of exclamation marks. At the top or the bottom he would jot down what he thought of the characters.
I finished Peter Whiffle on New Year’s Eve, and I was still in bed, mulling it over, when Lundgren asked me how about a little hike. What he had in mind was getting up in the foothills, he said. Up there we would have a fine view of the valley, the signs of the zodiac, and any meteor shower, shooting stars, or comets that might turn up. We took along tobacco, hotdogs, coffee, and a supply of Sportsman’s Bracers.
We got up to what they called the Summer House just before sundown. The house was gone, burned off in a grass fire, but the concrete foundation was still there, and the fireplace that had been at the east end of the club room. We watched the shadows, like an ebb tide, slowly cover everything in the valley, till there was nothing but the broomlike tops of the palms sticking out. Then they went under, the hills went under, and we sat with our backs to the fire, eating hotdogs and smoking our own brand of cigarettes.
Lundgren pointed out the planets, the constellations, the narrow band of the sky that the planets whirled in, and indicated about where the two of us were in the shape of it. I could see that talking did him good. In the glow from the fire it even seemed to me he had a good face. I wasn’t struck by the pockmarks that covered it. I wondered how long it would take a girl, one of the smart girls at Phipps, to look at Lundgren, as I did, and see only his fine points—his good teeth, his sky-blue eyes, the way he could slouch like Gary Cooper—without troubling to notice that his complexion was hot so good. I had reached that point myself. I could be with Lundgren without keeping my eyes off him. I wondered if Proctor, spending Christmas with Lawrence, would forget that Lawrence’s right arm was overdeveloped, or if that was why Lawrence had taken Proctor home with him. To get used to it. To feel that Proctor had stopped seeing it. So he could be with Proctor the way I could be with Lundgren, sit and listen to him talk, watch him roll his cigarettes, without thinking what a shame it was that he had such a pockmarked face. And as for himself, he might forget to notice that Proctor was a Jew.
I let him finish with the sky, then I said, “Why are you so down on Proctor, old man?”
“Et tu?” he said.
“Et tu what?” I said.
“This old man crap, baby.”
“I don’t see a hell of a lot of difference,” I said, “between the old man crap and baby.” I think that hurt him. Besides, I didn’t often swear. When I swore it may have sounded stronger than I meant. “I know he looks pretty bad,” I said, “but he’s not so bad as he looks.”
“Maybe I just don’t like him,” Lundgren said.
“I happen to know,” I said, “that he’s doing a lot for Lawrence.”
“We supposed to be doing something for Lawrence?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.
“Suppose we skip it.”
“I happen to know,” I said, “that Proctor is doing some of his papers.”
He let some of the tobacco he was holding in the paper spill into his lap. “I’ll be a sonuvabitch,” he said.
“This is between you and me,” I said, “and besides, I don’t think it means much to Lawrence. It isn’t like cheating. It’s like Proctor’s picking up his tennis balls.”
“Jesus!” Lundgren said, and I could see that it made an impression on him. He rubbed his arms and legs as if he suddenly felt cold, and pulled me up. We kicked some loose dirt on the fire, wet it down a little with the last of the coffee, then made our way back in the tracks we had made coming up. On Foothill Boulevard the traffic was heavy, with snow on the cars returning from the mountains, and a car with chains had stopped along the road to take them off. They had a radio with them, and Guy Lombardo was playing one of Proctor’s favorite numbers.
“ ‘A cup of coffee, a sandwich, and you, baby,’ ” Lundgren said and whistled it.
Proctor and Lawrence pulled in about sunrise that same night. We saw Lawrence right away, but not Proctor. He had shot a hole in his left foot with a big Colt revolver that he had been holding between his knees. He had been shooting at the rabbits that popped up and ran between the lights. That had been near Needles. Lawrence had driven it in two hours and a half. The hole went right through Proctor’s foot, his rubber-soled buck shoes, and then through the floorboard. Lawrence had driven to the infirmary and carried him in. Then he had driven into town with the Colt revolver and reported the accident to the police, who called me up at the dorm—he gave my name as reference. They held him till it seemed reasonably certain that Proctor had shot himself, and not been shot by Lawrence, then they fined him for possessing an illegal weapon and turned him loose. Lundgren and I drove over and picked him up.
In the mail that morning we got the postcard that Proctor had dropped in the box at El Paso, showing a giant grasshopper and saying that they were having a hell of a time.
FOLEY: 5
Escorted by a coach-and-four advertising chocolates, Foley crossed to the shady side of the street, left arm brushing elbow of a woman in cloud of night-scented stock. Lou Baker’s fragrance. Foley knew it well. Young man on her other elbow in charcoal flannels, patent-leather oxfords, chap at corners of his mouth, expression of comedian paid not to smile. Fayum portrait gaze of living on far side of the grave. Hand cupped to her elbow, wheeling her slowly, like Seeing-Eye dog. Walked her briskly, confidently, into
air-cooled draft, along corridor between windows of cut flowers, inspirational pamphlets, and latest flood of how-to-do-it books. How to Stop Smoking on top. “How to Stop Letching” next big thing. At front of window, beneath advertising clipping, what looked like a compass, individually boxed. Foley stooped to read:
RECORDING ROSARY
Work & Pray
$2. P.paid.
(Auto clamp extra)
KEEPS TABS ON MYSTERY
Arrow points to bead to be prayed.
Car
Pocket or
Purse!
FATIMA ROSARY
Foley straightened with a sigh, loosened topcoat button, walked away. Going north on Madison, left the curb and walked in the street. Stopped at lights, avoided fireplugs, made way for those who saw less than he did, without actually seeing the things he passed. Operating on his electric eye. Like passing cab drivers with their eye on the ballgame at Ebbetts Field.
At Fifty-ninth, turning west, he could see the green gap over the park. A policeman mounted on a horse, a child with spindly legs holding up shreds of grass to the policeman’s horse. Also balloons, a bright cluster, that seemed to suspend the peddler above the street and beyond the balloons. Three horse-drawn cabs lined up at the curb. Helping a young woman into first of the cabs was tall, graying man with more courage than Foley. About Foley’s age. Old enough to know what he was doing, that is. Courage to rent a horse-drawn cab and take young woman for a spin in the park. Proctor had taken Lou Baker. Lawrence had ridden down the avenue by himself.
Once in his life Foley might have done it. Spring he had signed the contract for his book. Had advance royalties check in his pocket, rain-making impulse in his heart. In the doughnut shop on the corner he had called up Lou Baker, the corn-dance maiden, but the phone had not answered, and his coin had dropped, clinking, into the slot. Foley had sat there in the phone booth watching other gallants go for the ride. Lacked the guts, as it turned out, to go it alone. Lacked the know-how, as it turned out, to make rain in the book.
The Huge Season Page 10