by Greg Fields
“You know you just went through a red light, son?” said the officer.
“Where?” McIlweath swung his head back to the officer.
“About two blocks back.”
Finnegan again spoke up. “No way, friend. We couldn’t have.”
“Two blocks back, son. I saw it.”
“Impossible,” barked Finnegan. “You came out of a side street well after any intersection with a stoplight. You didn’t see anything. And anyhow, the only light we went through was clearly yellow.”
“I say it was red, son.”
“And I say you’re trying to set us up. And don’t call me ’son’.”
McIlweath was terrified. ’Shut up, you ass,’ he thought. ’What’s the worst this guy could do? A fine, which we can afford. You weren’t even driving. He can fry both our tails, but he’ll make mine a little redder.’
“Boy, don’t challenge my word. The light was red. And I’m the law here. You think anyone’ll believe a coupla California boys?”
At the word ’boy,’ Finnegan started to rise further in his seat, but he checked himself. He did not trust what he might say next. He stayed silent.
The officer continued, “But I’m not going to write you up. I’m going to be nice to you fellas today. I don’t know how it is in California when it rains. I never been to California. But here in Florida the streets get real slick. You can slide right through these wet intersections real easy. You can slide right through without realizin’ a red light. But I’m not going to give y’all a ticket. I’m going to give y’all a warning. Drive slow. On your way out of town. Now.”
McIlweath responded in his quavery voice before Finnegan had the chance to open his mouth. “Yes, officer. We will. Thank you. We’ll be extremely careful.”
“That’s good. Because if I see you in Pensacola again I might not be so kind as to ignore your infraction.” He turned and walked back to his car, but he did not get in. He stood beside it to watch McIlweath and Finnegan drive away.
As McIlweath started the car, Finnegan said, “I guess we don’t stay in Pensacola tonight, huh?”
McIlweath’s hands still shook. As they drove by the patrol car Finnegan shot the officer a wave of his hand and a big smile. McIlweath gripped the wheel with both his hands and looked hard at the road straight ahead.
“God damn you, Conor, you could have screwed us both.”
“He was a jerk, Mac. He was trying to scare us. You know as well as I do that he never even saw us go through any intersection except for the one he came out of. He saw the California plates and wanted to strong-arm us. I just didn’t feel like being intimidated by some cracker cop.”
“You could have just gone along with him,” McIlweath’s voice was returning to somewhat normal ranges. His hands, thought, were still shaking. “He could have made real trouble. We could have spent the night in jail. Maybe longer.”
“Come on, Mac. He didn’t have a leg to stand on.”
“Unless he took us to some judge who doesn’t like strangers any more than he does. They’re probably all cousins down here.”
“No problem. Besides, Mac, there’s a principle involved. The right of free passage, or something like that.”
They found a motel, but it was not in Pensacola. The next morning they slept late, not hitting the road until almost noon. Both felt fresh again. After days of rain, the sun radiated a clear blue sky. Their tempers, grown increasingly short, returned to normal. They headed north, through Georgia and the Carolinas, finally crossing into Virginia well after the sun had set.
***
Theirs was still the only car in the rest area when they awoke shortly after the Virginia dawn. Finnegan rose first and groggily stepped out of the car to stretch his legs. ’Let’s finally put this trip away,’ he told himself. ’It’s time to get on with things.’
For exercise he sprinted the length of the paved area, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards. At the end he took a deep breath and sprinted back. His cramped and compressed legs reacted stiffly. He did not think he was running very fast at all. When he returned to the car McIlweath had begun to rouse himself.
“Good morning,” said Finnegan as the other yawned widely. “And where the hell are we?”
“Damned if I know,” replied McIlweath through his yawn. “Virginia somewhere. Southern Virginia.”
“Where does this road go, do we know?”
“North. Past a bunch of toothless old rednecks who don’t like young guys from the suburbs.”
“And us two such lovable creatures. Come on, let’s find some breakfast. I’ll bet there’ll be grits.”
“Then let’s get this trip over with,” said McIlweath, retreating back into the driver’s seat.
They had made better time than they had planned. Along the way there had been precious few diversions to renew their excitement. They would be able to make New Brunswick that day, arriving days early and well before the dormitories were scheduled to open. But they did not for a moment consider any alternative. They were too tired; it was time to alight.
***
On the outskirts of New Brunswick, near the New Jersey Turnpike, Finnegan and McIlweath once again checked into a motel. Money at this late stage posed no problems because they had spent little of it by traveling so simply. If they had to, they could spend the next week in motels until campus housing opened. But enraptured at the prospect of finally being a college man, even a premature one, Finnegan wanted to petition the housing office to let them stay in their rooms. But they had arrived too late that afternoon to do so that night. The offices would be closed, so again they would sleep in the sterility of a cheap motor inn. They would wait until the next day to take a look at the campus. The center of their next few years, and the focus of so much Romantic affectation, thought Finnegan, needed to be first viewed in the morning’s freshness.
The next morning, early September, they drove across town to the campus. At the eastern end of New Brunswick the congested, narrow flow of traffic thinned and the tattered buildings of a thousand eastern downtowns gave way at once to something different. Crossing under the railroad tracks, there it was, rising at first on a small hill to their left, marked by a wrought-iron gate, then settling back to its long, flat, rectangular main campus. The streets, main roads of New Brunswick, ran around it without being part of it.
They drove down George Street, and on the right the river, the old Raritan—dirty, sudsy, murky, a repository of filthy runoff—flowed steady and silent. Around the bend of George Street, then, to the three river dormitories, identical brick and coldly austere, but to Finnegan and McIlweath powerful sentinels which stood watch in front over the creeping river and in back over the remainder of the campus.
At the base of the rectangular campus sat Buccleuch Park, a sprawling green expanse that was remarkably well kept. Turning left onto College Avenue they continued their introduction: the library, brick with white pillars, on their left; the gymnasium, appearing to both of them by its colonial architecture and traces of ivy as another classroom building; further down the road, fraternities on one side and the heart of the old campus, Queen’s Mall, on the other. The buildings ringing the Mall were clearly older, their grey stones faded unevenly, the ivy thicker, the gables more pointed, their windows more deeply set. This campus was old, Finnegan thought; it had its ghosts.
Ghosts indeed. Finnegan imagined them, his reverie engaged. This campus has stood for more than two centuries. And each year its halls received a group fueled by the furies of youth, guided by aspirations, unleashed and wild and brave and thoroughly convinced of their own distinctive splendor. He imagined the young men of the post-Revolution, apprentice gentlemen, men of good breeding whose families could afford to send them off. They gave way in his mind to a rougher group, with nineteenth-century cockiness, more serious in their straight-backed suits, developing traditions and songs that stood to the present day. Finnegan saw the sport coats and baggy white trousers of the early part of the twenti
eth century. He saw the great Paul Robeson, a curious, proud and immensely strong black man, moving through this mall to his small white room. Finnegan saw too the years of the Great Depression, the war years, and afterward the mobs of new students who had survived the worst of all of it, deprivations and warfare, and in their survival grown older and sadder.
Finnegan sensed the ghosts in the walls, heard them tread the stones of the old walkways. Outwardly different, all of them, but come here for the same purposes. Motivations rarely change. And what had they found here? What had become of them?
What is a ghost if not the residue of a man’s desires? Here, all around them, they felt the passage of two centuries of those desires, and the faces that held them. Finnegan was to consider later in depth what only flashed through his mind briefly as he beheld the core of the campus for the first time. And he would come back to the mall at odd hours, with no one around, on Sunday mornings or late at night when he could not sleep. Under moonlight, at dusk, on deadened and soggy afternoons he would walk the mall, sit on a bench, lean against a tree, and try to put himself into context. At those times he would feel completely the ghosts he only now glimpsed. He would seek their wordless empathy. And, in the end, he would find himself considering the limits of his youth, the finite nature of all desire.
Finnegan sensed the entire panoply of a young man’s experiences. He could sense the heartbreak of unrequited or aborted love, the excitement of intellectual discovery and the curiosity behind it, the morose sorrow of the death of friendship, the prideful joy of accomplishment, the drunken frenzy of celebration, the anguish of rejection, the stark fear of indecision, the loneliness of distance and time. All, all had preceded him here. He could add nothing new to the wisdom of these walls save his own interpretation, however insignificant, of the age-old processes of the expanding man.
A wind blew up behind him, warm and dry on his neck. Crawl now into the crucible and await the flame that, for the silent, surrounding ghosts had long since died.
These thoughts passed through his mind instantly as a spasm. The seed of his future ruminations had been planted. He shook his head, and returned to present realities.
But McIlweath had put his own first impressions aside immediately. There would come a time he might ponder where he was and what it all meant, but not now. There was a task at hand—they had to find their beds. Besides, he reasoned, there really didn’t seem to be anything terribly distinct about this place. This is a campus, an old one, and not particularly attractive. Old stone, new bricks, a goodly amount of flora. McIlweath’s initial exhilaration, shared with his friend upon first seeing the campus, had faded to mild disappointment.
They had parked the car illegally in a restricted lot adjoining the mall. The housing office stood across the way, in Milledoler Hall, which McIlweath translated as ’the hall of a thousand sorrows.’ The housing office was on the second floor, up a slate-grey staircase. Paint peeled off the walls.
The assistant appeared, the embodiment of matronly love. She wore a dark print dress with a light red floral pattern. Her grey hair was pulled back in a bun, sitting high atop a face marked by a smile, seemingly as permanent a part of her features as a nose or two ears. Here was a woman who had no struggle with the nature of her work. She was a comfort, someone whose very presence might reassure not only a young man away from home for the first time, but his parents as well. She would do the college far more good here than anywhere else.
“Can I help you boys?” Her voice complemented her appearance. She spoke in a lilt.
“We’re incoming students,” Finnegan replied, “and we were hoping we might get our dormitory assignments and move in early. I know we’re ahead of schedule, but we’ve come across country and there’s really no place else we can go other than a motel. We’re from California.” Finnegan considered this last his trump card. He would come to use it often.
“Oh my, that is a long way,” she cooed. “What are your names? If your dormitories have been approved by maintenance and have been cleaned, we may be able to help you. Some of them have been finished already. Of course we would have to charge you for the extra days.”
Finnegan told her their last names, and she flipped through a file of room assignments. “Conor Finnegan? You’re in luck. You’re in one of the river dormitories. They were the first to be made ready. Campbell Hall, Room 605. You’ll even have sheets on your bed,” she smiled.
“Luck of the Irish again,” said Finnegan as she went back to her file.
“Thomas McIlweath?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he responded, stepping forward from behind Finnegan, whom he had willingly let do the talking.
“Campbell 609. It looks as if you two will be neighbors. There’s some paperwork you’ll need to complete. You can start on the registration forms, but there’s also a legal waiver for the extra days. The new charges will be appended to your tuition bill. I’ll get your keys.”
The two looked at each other as the lady spoke. Finnegan nodded his head slowly toward McIlweath to acknowledge his surprise that, yes indeed, they would be neighbors. Neither of them had considered that. There were too many dormitories, too many floors. Rutgers prided itself on mixing its students. First year students were not segregated, nor were out-of-staters. For them to land two doors apart was the wildest luck.
And so, McIlweath’s desire for an anonymity in which he could reconstruct himself with no remembrance of things past had been futile from the start. Had he known in springtime that he would not only be unable to lose Finnegan but would have him at the closest proximity around the clock, he might well have declined to come here at all. In fact, he was sure of it. He had other offers, all tempting in their own way. He didn’t have to come here. But it was as if fate had welded the two of them together. The situation defied coincidence.
But it was not springtime, and Tom McIlweath had changed his attitude. Or rather, Conor Finnegan had changed it for him. Finnegan had approached their mutual destiny with an openness and excitement that broke down barriers. He had not considered that McIlweath hovered on the periphery of friendship; it had not mattered. He drew McIlweath along with an innocence that bordered on naiveté. Finnegan’s world had precluded the possibility that one might prefer solitude or anonymity, that one might be so discontent with the course of his life that he might choose to go to abnormal lengths to redirect it. He could not imagine it, so it didn’t exist. As a result, Conor Finnegan had approached Tom McIlweath with an open hand.
They had thrown themselves together in a confined space, a metallic wheeled womb. Finnegan through it all had been a partner, genuinely interested in McIlweath’s thoughts and reactions. He had never been overbearing. He respected their conversations, probing the line of McIlweath’s ideas, picking up pieces of his words and turning them in his hand, examining all sides. McIlweath had done likewise. He had responded in kind so that, although much of the trip had been couched in boredom as it invariably had to be, there had been an unfolding, a recognition of one another as characters of merit. And not once had Finnegan invoked the past. Not once had he played a superior hand or made McIlweath feel awkward or unaccepted. Not even the slightest nuance had conveyed anything less than a fraternal, uncomplicated affection. Through fatigue, through discomfort, through boredom, they had remained in tune.
McIlweath’s surprise at their room assignments turned at once to satisfaction. He would be starting college with an advantage he could never have foreseen.
The assistant returned with their keys. “Of course you know that your meal plan won’t begin until next week. You’ll have to find some way to feed yourselves. If either of you has a car, you’ll have to register with Public Safety and get a parking sticker. Do you have any questions?”
“No, thank you. You’ve been a great help,” said Finnegan.
“Welcome to Rutgers.”
CHAPTER V
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but no such thing in t
he life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss it, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Jordan Brophy leaned back in his chair and watched the leaves rustle outside his office window. Unlike most of his colleagues, he did not share his office. Age, at least in this instance, had its rewards, although he still flinched at hearing himself referred to as the “Dean of the Department.” He did not feel old; he merely felt relaxed.
Comfort comes through familiarity, which itself breeds security. After thirty-one years in the same place, Jordan Brophy felt comfortable indeed. He had, almost from the earliest days of his learning, set himself upon a scholarly career. Even as a young boy he had been fascinated by the processes of education. Knowledge was the ultimate stimulant. He often found himself physically stimulated by intellectual discovery. The mind could step outside the body, cross unknown borders and keep going. He would not be limited by his thin, rather brittle physique, nor by his retiring personality. What his classmates saw as shortcomings he would turn into assets, for he would have fewer distractions. While others developed themselves physically and socially, Jordan Brophy would build his mind. Therein he would establish his own dignity, his own standards of self-worth. And, while he had few other excitements with which to compare it, his genuine thrill of learning made this alternative not an alternative at all, but a destiny.
As a young man, Jordan Brophy experienced no doubts about his future or how to go about attaining it. He would study. Endlessly, forsaking all else. He did not see this as a sacrifice. He was simply translating his love into duty.
Jordan Brophy attended Harvard on scholarship, studied English literature and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He passed four years without developing a single lasting friendship. He would not have seen it so. Instead, he would argue that he formed the greatest most trustworthy friendships—he had gone boating with Melville, walked the streets of Cambridge with Matthew Arnold, sat under an elm tree with Eugene O’Neill, climbed into bed with Edna St. Vincent Millay. He carried these people with him constantly, reflected upon their thoughts, honored their judgments, viewed the world through their unique prisms. They did not counter him, nor did they argue; they built him, and, from their graves, defined his very nature.