Tracy’s reserve was perhaps traceable to his absorption with the Spectator challenge, Harry conjectured. When his mother suggested inviting Tracy for lunch or dinner on Sundays, which Harry spent at home, he said he thought it wise to put off the invitation until after the competition was completed. “Maybe later on in the term, Mom.”
She looked up from her book. “You do like him, don’t you Harry?”
“Yes. I do.” Without great conviction.
Dorothy Bontecou could tell that the answer was ambiguous but knew not to ask for more. And of course she knew that if there was festering incompatibility there, Harry and his roommate needed only to wait until the end of freshman year to make other rooming arrangements. She would not make any further reference to Tracy Allshott.
But Harry, it turned out, did want to talk about him.
“I wish I had a picture of him. I don’t, but there’ll be one in the freshman yearbook they’ll be distributing next week. You know, Mom, I think maybe Tracy is, well, practically an albino. He doesn’t look absolutely bleached, but I mean his hair is so blond it’s almost white. He’s very good-looking, imposing. Blue eyes, of course, maybe one hundred seventy pounds—a little shorter than me, very intense, yet very—vague. Last week he was up all night reading up on Chaucer.”
“Is Tracy—disoriented?” Mrs. Bontecou had reached for an inoffensive word.
“I don’t know. Just plain have no idea. I think he meets all his deadlines on the Spectator. He’s from Iowa. I know—Des Moines. But he’s never said what his father does. I know he has connections, otherwise we wouldn’t have a telephone in the room. There’s something like a year’s waiting time for phones. He was in the Pacific theater but got only as far as Honolulu when Hiroshima happened. He did tell me, somewhere along the line, that he wishes he had declared himself a conscientious objector. Of course I had to ask the obvious question—was it this war he objected to, or all wars? His answer was kind of queer. He objects to all wars, get this, that aren’t ‘civilizationally conclusive.’ ”
“Did you ask what he meant by that?”
“What I did, Mom—look, that’s how freshmen who are war veterans deal with each other: If it has to do with the war, you give a guy a chance to say what’s on his mind. If he wants to, fine. If he doesn’t, fine. So I didn’t say, ‘Tracy, tell me exactly what you mean by civilizationally conclusive.’ I didn’t even say, ‘What is civilizationally conclusive?’ What I said was: ‘Oh?’ ”
“Did he come up with an explanation?”
“No. He just nodded his head a bit, a bit condescendingly, actually. Did I tell you he was terribly bright? Well, he is. And he’s been around. He has a girlfriend he talks to over the telephone. In French. And he served in the Pacific, so I guess he didn’t pick up French there.”
“Is his lady French?”
“No. No, no. He starts and ends the conversations in English. I’ve heard a lot of French spoken in the last couple of years. I suspect it was maybe his first language; he’s that fluent. And oh: He subscribes to a classics quarterly and does their crossword puzzle in Latin.”
Mrs. Bontecou sighed.
“… I’ll keep you posted, Mom.”
She was amused by Harry’s way of telling her that he didn’t want to pursue the conversation (“I’ll keep you posted”). Jesse Bontecou used to do the same thing, using almost the same words. Maybe it’s genetic, Mrs. Bontecou thought roguishly. She hoped not all her late husband’s attributes were transmitted. She comforted herself that Providence had given Harry her husband’s good looks, his curious eyes, his diffident but room-illuminating smile.
Some time late in the Spectator competition it crossed Harry’s mind that Tracy, for all his skills, might actually fail to accumulate the points necessary to put him in the winning circle. The Spectator’s rules were explicit. Contenders would be given points for whatever they accomplished, epochal or trivial. An article about a planned rise in tuition might earn 500 editorial points. Double that if the student dug up the story himself. Fetching a Coca-Cola for the sports editor would get you 10 editorial points. Fetching a Coca-Cola for the business manager, 10 business points; bringing in a semester’s ad schedule from Lucky Strike, 1,500 business points. No student was permitted to give his time exclusively to editorial or to business. The students’ credit points were meticulously tabulated by the assistant managing editor and kept from view in a locked desk. At the end of the eight-week period the senior editors would meet and review the totals of points earned. They were at liberty to draw the line where they chose—to elect none or all thirty of that competition’s aspirants. What they were not at liberty to do was to pass over a student with a higher score in order to elect a student with a lower score, never mind that they thought the lesser scorer a better potential writer or editor, or that they preferred his company. If they wanted K, perforce they had to elect A through J.
At their election meeting in the Spectator’s single formal room, with its wood paneling and bound volumes of eighty years of the daily, the senior editors called out their opinions of the competitors, going down the line beginning with the highest scorer. When they came to Tracy Allshott, they all agreed that he was a gifted student with marked, if erratic, writing skills. But his scorecard was not impressive, this very much owing to the extensive time he had given to his ambitious but ultimately unpublishable series on the (imputed) corruption of the Gardiner Trust. Tracy was “a little disconnected,” was how the features editor, Henry Bevan, put it.
“We’d go broke if we had to depend on him for ads,” the business manager contributed, commenting on Tracy’s low score at the business end. To elect Tracy, who was tenth in overall points, the editors would have to elect the students whose points ranked eighth and ninth. The editorial board voted to draw the line at eight.
Harry Bontecou came in first. He knew he was doing well, but he dreaded the traditional alcoholic extravaganza only at the end of which the elections were announced. The party convened at five in the Spectator offices. Twenty-three student competitors (seven had dropped out) were present to hear the results, to the extent they could hear or understand anything after they (with some help from their seniors) had consumed six pitchers of dry martinis, chuga-lugged and passed from victim to victim to the metronomic beat of the managing editor, who served exuberantly as master of ceremonies.
Harry did what he could to sip the booze slowly but was roundly jeered for malingering and egged on to do better. During drinking time his eyes were on Tracy. When Tracy’s turn to chugalug came, Harry was surprised, as were the junior—and senior—party goers, to see someone so self-disciplined swallow down, to the mounting cheers of the assembly, what seemed like a pint of gin. Finally, the editor called for silence. Two hours had gone by. Half the competitors were lying in various postures on the floor, two or three of them sound asleep.
Abe Rosen read out the names of the successful competitors, in order of precedence. Bontecou … Jelway … Hesse … Aubrey … Shapiro … Carton … Ilsen … Shevitts.
Silence. And then: “Congratulations!” The editor led the applause in which the senior staff joined. Gradually, shaken from their torpor, the winners joined in the applause, applauding themselves, actually, applauding also those among them who had scored higher. Then came the applause from those who had not made it, were awake, and had taken in the proceedings. That applause—the good-sport applause—was perfunctory. The hurt was too great and the anesthetizing of the event too dulling.
Now, Harry thought, after being congratulated by what seemed twenty classmates, I have to go back to Wallachs Hall. He had kept his eye on Tracy during the felicitations, hoping he would slide away from the party room. If so, after an interval, Harry too could go back to their quarters, perhaps even to find Tracy asleep. But Tracy lingered there in the large boardroom, propped up against one of the bookcases, an empty glass in hand, his blond hair hiding one eye and most of his forehead.
Harry braced himself. He wal
ked over to him. “Sorry about how it went for you, Tracy.”
“Congrashulations, Harry.”
“Tracy, shall we go get something better to eat than the junk they gave us? Or shall we just … go back and … sleep it off?”
“We go back, yes,” Tracy said, achieving his balance with some difficulty, then setting out through the thinning crowd toward the door.
Harry extended his hand discreetly to Tracy’s glass, removed it from his hand, and put it down on one of the trays. Without appearing to do so, he tried to give Tracy the balance needed to effect the walk down the staircase of the Spectator offices in John Jay Hall. They walked in tandem in the mercifully bracing December air, across the frozen and silent quadrangle to Wallachs Hall. Harry had to help him up the first two flights of stairs. Tracy was prepared to end his climb at the second-floor landing.
“Shall we just ask them if we can shay here tonight?—”he pointed to the marker beside the door on which the names of the students in that room were printed.
“No, Tracy. We have only one more flight to climb and we can sleep in our own beds.”
“Awright, Harry. After all, you won. You give the orders, I say Yesssir.”
Tracy fell into his bed fully clothed and was asleep in one minute. Harry wanted badly to sleep, but he would not disappoint his tense mother. He reached her on Tracy’s telephone and gave her the good news. Dear old Mom, thought Harry. What else would proud mother Dorothy Bontecou say?
“Of course, I’m not surprised, darling.”
10
Trying out
It was the Wednesday after Monday’s editorial elections. In the little space reserved for in-house bulletins directly under the Columbia Spectator’s masthead appeared the notice: “Senior editorial meeting called for 5 P.M.”
The senior board comprised six officers. The editor in chief, Abe Rosen, plus the deputy editor, managing editor, assistant managing editor, the features editor, and business manager. Joe Benedict, the assistant m.e., had left word that he would be late. He was on a story—out covering the United Nations meeting at Flushing Meadows. The UN was scheduled to vote that day on whether to make New York City the permanent capital of the organization. The Spec had run two spirited articles from senior editors, one of them favoring the idea (he was a Californian), the other (a New Yorker) opposing it. Benedict’s note to Abe Rosen said he would check the Spectator office on his return; if the meeting was still going on, he’d step in.
At 6:35 the meeting was very much alive. Rosen summarized for the benefit of Joe Benedict, who had just come in, the purpose of their assembly. Rosen wore a khaki shirt left over from his army days, his Zeta Beta Tau fraternity tie loosely in place. Cigarette in hand, he told Benedict, “What this’s all about is Allshott.” He peered through his glasses to the penciled score sheet in front of him. “In the elections, Allshott came in tenth. Joe, we’ve been sitting here going over Allshott’s complaint. It’s six pages long, and the appendices are—”he looked down at the paper folder in front of him—“twenty-three pages. Here it is in a nutshell. Allshott says his six-article expose on the Gardiner Trust was turned down by George—”he pointed to the managing editor—“because it leveled charges against several powerful people, one of them a trustee. What he’s saying is that George chickened out, scared of the consequences of running the series.”
He turned to Benedict. “Joe, did you also read the pieces when they were submitted?”
“No. I think I remember George saying something about them. That they were … unsubstantiated?”
“The actual text, the articles he wrote, make up the appendix of the complaint, and we’ve been reading them here, before you arrived. Only George and Henry—“Henry Bevan was the features editor—”read them when Tracy submitted them just before Thanksgiving. So … tell us, George, why you turned them down.”
George Stillman was a solemn twenty-two-year-old, stocky and tidy. He was headed for law school and already inclined to the use of formal language. “It’s just this simple: There wasn’t any hard evidence of the kind of skulduggery Allshott alleged. Here’s the situation—”he took the pages from the business manager, quickly refreshing his memory.
His recital was orderly. “The Gardiner Trust is presided over by John Heather, son-in-law of the old man, Henry Taylor Gardiner, Columbia, 1892. Heather apparently runs the trust, even though there are six other trustees. Over the last ten years Columbia has received four or five gifts from the Gardiner Trust, from ten thousand dollars—that was for a museum purchase—to one million, pledged for a chair in the political science department. When the poli sci chair was set up last year, a faculty committee of three was appointed to look for someone to fill it. The chair is for Russian studies.” George Stillman lifted his head from the folio and spoke on.
“Allshott’s article says that the faculty committee recommended Professor Pierre Enfils—you heard of him? Big deal at Johns Hopkins. Well, Allshott says Enfils has written a couple of books which are friendly—‘objective’ is Allshott’s word—to the Soviet, uh, enterprise. And—I’m quoting from Allshott, understand—when Big-bucks Heather heard about it he raised holy hell. He went right to the president at Hamilton Hall, says Allshott, and Hamilton Hall backed down. In doing so, it violated the sacred faculty independence that Columbia University et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Well, that sounds pretty raw,” Rosen said.
“But where was the proof?” George’s eyes went back to the articles in hand, scanning the last two. “Allshott didn’t interview John Heather. Heather isn’t even quoted. Only one of the faculty committee was quoted, and he wouldn’t permit the use of his name. Why didn’t he check with the other two? They wouldn’t see him, he said. All-shott’s inquiries to Hamilton Hall yielded nothing, but Allshott here attributes the vagueness and the silence of the three or four people he tried to get information from to a conspiracy of silence.
“I told him: Tracy, look, we can’t run six pieces by you on this business unless you can back them up, and you simply haven’t done that. He was sore and argued that the evidence—I like this—the evidence in the articles ‘is incandescent.’ I finally told him, Tracy, it’s my job to decide whether an article merits publication.”
“Now,” Rosen took over again, “Tracy says that if the six articles had been accepted, the points he’d have been awarded from them would—he is certain—have lifted him into the winners’ circle. By the way,” he said, now addressing Joe as assistant managing editor and bookmaker in charge of the competitors’ score sheet—“is that in fact the case? How many points would he have earned if we had run with his series?”
“A lot. They were his idea. His research. His writing. Figure fifteen hundred points each: nine thousand.”
Rosen looked down at the large paper spread, three stiff sheets of paper Scotch taped together, listing, after the name of each applicant, the number of points earned in editorial, in business, and then the totals, in descending order.
“Let’s see. We did elect Shevitts. He came in number eight, with 47,526 points. Allshott wasn’t ninth just behind Shevitts. He was tenth, with 39,800 points.” He looked up. “The answer is: Yes. With nine thousand extra points he’d have come in ahead of Shevitts.
“Allshott doesn’t know that with nine thousand extra points he’d have been elected. We haven’t yet sent the score sheet out for framing. It has to be ready for the Christmas party, when our board presents it—”he reminded his colleagues—“to the winner. It becomes his souvenir.”
George said: “You’re talking about Bontecou. As winner, he gets the score sheet, right?”
Rosen nodded. “Yeah. Harry.”
“He rooms with Tracy Allshott!”
Rosen paused and then said out of the blue, it seemed, “Anyone know anything about the Civil Rights Congress? Allshott says here he is sending a copy of his complaint to the Civil Rights Congress.” He looked around the table. He reached over to the coffee table and
picked up the phone. “I’m calling my father,” he said as he dialed the number. “He’s an expert on this kind of thing.
“Dad, I’m at an … important meeting here, the Spectator. A student who didn’t make it on Monday—that’s when we elected junior editors—is saying we cheated on him and he’s sending a copy of his complaint to the Civil Rights Congress. Who are they? You got any idea?”
He listened.
“Thanks, Dad.” He hung up the phone.
“The Civil Rights Congress, my father says, is a Communist front. It takes on complaints by pro-Communists.”
There was silence.
Then George said, “You know, I think it would make sense, in our situation, to check with counsel, as the lawyers say. Bill Bradbury is a trustee of the Spec. He was editor sometime before the war; 1938, I think. He’s with Coudert Brothers.”
“What do we do in the meantime?”
Rosen took off his glasses and stuffed the papers back in the manila folder. He announced his decisions. “One, we hold up the score sheet. Lock it up. Two, I’ll check out the legal scene. Three, then I think it makes sense for me to call Harry on over, see if he can help figure it all out. Next item, four, is chow.”
Harry Bontecou walked from the Spectator offices to the Butler Library. To do so he had to cope, as he had got used to doing, with the renowned irregular bricks modeled after the famous School of Athens. Reaching the library, he brought up the book Shadows of Change, by Pierre Enfils. It was published in 1945. He ran his eyes over the text, a history of the Soviet Union beginning with the “October” uprising. He scanned the chapter summaries. They told of events Harry was first told about by Erik Chadinoff at Plattling during his discourses on the perfidy of the Communists. He had told of the John Dewey Commission, and later Harry had read about the famous commission and its expose of the 1938 Soviet “show trials.” In 1937, the philosopher John Dewey agreed to head up a commission of inquiry to examine the great trials in Moscow. His pretense back then was that he was searching out collaborators of the despised Leon Trotsky, exiled from the Soviet Union in 1928. Stalin, two years after the trials, consummated his hatred of Trotsky by arranging for his assassination in Mexico. The show trials had been followed by the execution—for alleged treasonable activity—of a large number of what had been the Communist cadre in Moscow. The ruling of the Dewey Commission was emphatic and conclusive: The so-called confessions from high Communist functionaries had been fraudulent, coerced, contrived.
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