by Laura Argiri
He thought, “Perhaps I could actually be of some use to him. I could buy him smart clothes and tell him all those things about salad forks and fish knives that Stratton-Truro thought he was God for teaching me.” He heard more discreet snickers, traced them to some of his well-dressed older students, and silenced them with a smoking black glare: Just let me catch you. He spoke, though, with less certainty.
Simion, innocently astonished at that fearsome stutter, leaned forward with his face propped on his hands and made an indiscreet, gentle, but withal quite merciless scrutiny. He had not expected to hear Yale professors stutter and lose their way in the midst of their own sentences, but this man’s looks suspended his criticality; Simion could have listened to him stutter all day. Indeed, he was quite surprised when the end of the hour came round. He’d been thinking that Klionarios’s long black boots, without fussy spats or buttons, put him in mind of the leg-shields on the handsome limbs of those painted heroes on Simeon Lincoln’s picture-tiles. “I wonder,” he thought, “if he’ll notice if I keep looking at him this way.” He already was staring, quite formidably, but he allowed himself the luxury of a longer stare, rousing only at the end of the lecture. He was downwind of Klionarios, and as he rose to go, a breeze brought him the light, sweet, skin-warmed smell of almonds. “My God, he smells wonderful,” thought Simion, and smiled.
Indeed, as Doriskos mulled over the idea of Simion’s possible misery in the dormitories, that misery was getting under way in earnest. A couple of days earlier, Simion had moved into 34 South Middle, the oldest dormitory at Yale, and had eaten his first meal of Yale College codcakes. At the end of his first week there, he lay awake on an upper bunk, which felt hard as a church floor but much less stable, with a stomachache and a radical case of disillusionment, and in his head wrote an angry letter to Simeon Lincoln about his role in the latter—for the former, more codcakes were to blame. Then he realized his own foolishness, for he’d not gotten any of his illusions from Lincoln, who was a scrupulously honest man and whose felicitous accounts had not had to do with pleasant fellow-students or nice meals. No, he’d gotten the silliest of these ideas from himself, in the two years he’d spent playing assistant schoolmaster and dreaming of the day he’d come here. Now he saw that while he’d been teaching school, or cutting firewood, or watching his potatoes bake in the coals, his imagination had gone to work. He’d come to expect something time-seasoned, deeply civilized; instead, he’d matriculated at an arriviste American college in a gray industrial town. Its positive features thus far included only its distance from John Ezra and the presence of one unusual Greek professor; its negative features outnumbered them easily.
As he could not sleep—too cold, too uncomfortable, and altogether too agitated—he lit his candle and began drafting a tempered version of his letter in pencil.
Dear S.,
Well, I have finally arrived and got settled. I was really very vexed with you at first —this place is not as I expected—but then I thought about it and saw that you had not led me on. I suppose I led myself on. There were things I’d been expecting—I don’t know where I got them—I expected something more welcoming and civilized somehow. I imagined coming in out of the cold and the blowing leaves with an armload of books, to a parlor with a fire and a chandelier and a pretty old red Persian rug, where someone would invite me in and offer me a glass of brandy. Ha!
The food here is disgusting, worse by far than what I used to make for myself, which is really saying something. At my first meal here, they served a roast raw in the middle along with some frightful pudding made out of cornmeal and glue that the Original Colonists supposedly served. Plus a dreadful dessert of cooked blueberries that I cannot even describe in polite language. I fill my pockets with boiled eggs at breakfast and eat them instead of the unspeakable dishes that appear at luncheon and supper.
You are fond of me and won’t mind the truth, I guess. The truth is that there are many quite uncultivated people here. Though lacking all discernible causes for amour propre, they are snobs. The snobbery is not a complete surprise, but the fact that so many of them never study and have such contempt for anyone who does is a surprise. They are also dirty in their talk about women and personal subjects in that way that you told me was the sure mark of a vulgarian. I am puzzled about how people who are so vicious and mean have the nerve to despise anyone. They seem to regard poverty as a form of moral turpitude.
You would think that, as used as I am to vicious pigs of people from Haliburton, I would take this in my stride, but somehow I can’t. I suppose I am angry that I should have worked so hard and gotten my bones rattled so often and vigorously, and for what?—to do what I’ve done before, to live with vicious people who have false values and can’t leave me in peace to do my work.
Anyway, I never went back home after the entrance comp. I stayed here. I got the use of a barn loft in return for taking care of an old professor’s horses while he was at a resort called Newport. Until it got cold, it was delightful, in spite of the mosquitoes. I had all my things up in the loft, and I slept in the hay; I rolled myself up in all my winter quilts. It did rather itch, but it was otherwise quite all right. When the learned gentleman, one George Apthorpe, returned to town, he also had me copy out his letters and briefs. He said—isn’t this egalitarian of him—that it was a great convenience to have an educated groom and that he’d keep me on for the secretary part of the job for the school year. I actually preferred the horses—they, unlike the professor, are not snobs and did not make insufferable remarks. As well as snide, he is also cheap.
You will want to know about my living situation. I am in South Middle, because it is cheap, as indeed it should be: The barn was cleaner, and the company was better. I’m with three others in what’s called a suite—one common room with a fireplace, and a bedroom on each side, each big enough to be a pantry, with a set of bunk beds in it, and windowed closets known as “studies,” though they are far too draughty for anyone to sit still in for more than five minutes.
In the other bedroom, there are two sophomores. One of them is named Gibbs Baker and comes from New Hampshire, he is an ugly piece of work. I caught him trying to find my geometry to copy it. Naturally I didn’t allow this, so I am not in well with Gibbs. I am not in well with his roommate Topher, either. His real name is Christopher Holloway; he’s a hulking foul-mouthed lout, always swaggering about with a bat and ball under one arm. When pensive, he has a way of staring at one with his mouth hanging open, as if he were about to drool. He’ll focus his eyes in a mean dim way, like a bad horse that means to bite and needs a dose of the crop smack across the nose. He is always making filthy comments about me, the substance of which are that because I have not got my growth yet and am not a great hulk like him, I’m less than fully male; he’s got a sort of hectoring zeal about it. He seems to like to exhibit himself like he’s a good example of something; he gets out of bed naked and shaves without pulling the shades down. He was in some sort of trouble last year, he and the boy from Georgia whom he used to room with. This Georgian, one Peter Geoffrey, looks like Nero and is rather disturbing in his own right. He has relatives from a fancy Charleston family, and he is always going on about this as if it were some rare accomplishment which took him years to master. Did you meet any Tattnalls during your stays in Charleston? That’s their name; you would think they were right up there with Queen Victoria. I wonder what is the matter with this boy, he wears scent like a woman, and not light violet or rosewater like a lady, but stuff which hits you right in the face the minute he enters the room. Perhaps he’s what John Ezra called a degenerate. I forgot to mention the man with whom I share the room; his name is Jedediah Barnes, and he is from Philadelphia. When I walked in here, Jed appropriated me and prophetically remarked, “You’re going to room with me, elsewise you’ll surely be killed.” The arrangement about our room is satisfactory thus far, though Jed has terrible outbreaks on his face that I am afraid of catching. However, he at least is a gentleman. He
also was supposed to room with someone else, who was put out of the room lottery for not going to chapel.
Speaking of chapel, it occurs twice a day, before and after classes, and they don’t light a fire in the church stove for us. I shiver until I go numb, and by the conclusion of the pious exercises, I can’t feel my feet or my hands. I don’t blame that boy for not going; not rooming with Jed seems a light price to pay. I am considering not going and hoping they punish me by not letting me room with anyone. I don’t want to go back to Haliburton, but I realize now that it had its points. When I wasn’t being manhandled by John Ezra, I was on my own and did what I wished, with no one to pester me. No one watched me while I undressed or paraded naked before me, for instance. Father also did his drinking and vomiting in his own filthy study, whereas Topher doesn’t care what spot he chooses. The quiet, too, was lovely. If I am homesick for anything, I am homesick for the hot afternoons during that nice stretch from July through mid-September, when I used to lie in the high grass on Spruce Knob and let the sun bake me. I loved it, that heat, and hearing the wind and grass but no human sounds. I am not used to not hearing the wind—that constant noise it made, the big sound of mountains and forests.
How did you get on here? Please answer and tell me something useful. How are you now? I shall try to do you honor.
This was a mild and abbreviated account, formulated for an invalid, that played down the writer’s major disappointments. The roommates provided social torment, the eating club steward inedible food. Perhaps, in fact, the social misery began in earnest over food, that necessary bane of Simion’s existence. Finding the commons food intolerable, he set about catering for himself; he bought a tin bread box in which he stored cheese, bread, crackers, chocolate, and similar items, and a bowl for apples and pears and nuts. It was soothing to come home to the dark suite while the others were at supper, smell the apples, build a fire, and toast himself some cheese on a fork.
A couple of weeks into the term, he came back to his suite in the middle of the afternoon and found Topher in his room with a half-eaten apple in one hand, a slab of Cheddar in the other. Shells from the black walnuts Simion had intended as a Saturday treat—for himself—littered his desk. His sense of trespass over his little stock of food was keen, as he budgeted carefully for it and needed it for his daily well-being, in a way that Topher did not need this impromptu snack.
Simion put his books down on his desk. “You must have been starving,” he said, implying as strongly as he dared that this was the sole possible justification for such an imposition. He flicked the shells into the tin wastebasket, not even wanting to see them.
Through a double mouthful of Cheddar and bread: “Nmmmf. Ain’t that bad. That cussed Geoffrey’s got nothing in his room now.”
“What, did you eat whatever he had too?”
Topher swallowed, then looked down. “Is this backchat, or what?”
“Topher, you must have observed that I have to be careful about money,” said Simion. “I meant that to last a few days. You ought to ask other people before you appropriate their things, anyhow.”
“Whyn’t you eat the stuff at commons? After the first few days, you never did.”
“I can’t. I have ulcers, the grease made them worse. Unfortunately, the steward won’t refund my money. Didn’t anybody ever teach you to use a knife rather than tear up a bread loaf with your hands?” he added, noting bitterly that he’d have to throw it out—he couldn’t eat what this creature had mauled.
“Oh, sorry!” said Topher, opening his mouth to show what he’d chewed. “Want it back?”
“No, swallow it down, and go play somewhere, I am not in the mood for company, and I want to work,” said Simion.
Holding a truculent stare: “Whyn’t you got any pictures of your family in here? You ashamed of them, or what?”
“I haven’t many. There’s just my father. I don’t need a picture of him. I know quite well what he looks like.”
“Sounds like you’re not too keen on him. Maybe he’s not very keen on you, either.”
“That about sums it up. Now do please excuse me,” said Simion.
“What for? Did you fart or something? That’s Gibbsy’s department.”
“That’s polite English for leave me in peace. Look, we’re in very close quarters here—we have to have decent manners toward one another and give each other some respect, or we’ll not get along. If you raid my food and stand around being nasty, we certainly won’t. We have—”
Topher’s face changed, the ginger brows coming together. “Look, snit, I don’t have to do nothing you say or put myself out to get along with you—I outweigh you by ninety pounds, and I have a cock! I could throw you out the window right now, and I’m beginning to think it’d be the best thing I could do for peace in this suite!” And with this he took another bite of cheese, chewed it slowly and luxuriously, and spat it out on the floor.
Simion mulled over whether to count this as the ill humor of the moment or as provocation requiring immediate action. The situation clarified itself swiftly: This was Topher’s customary behavior (Gibbs was almost as bad) and it would require swift reprisals. Though what these reprisals might be, short of the bloody beating he couldn’t inflict, Simion didn’t know. Topher’s food foray was only the beginning of the Topher-Gibbs team’s invasion of Simion’s things, which led to comments on his mended clothes, games of catch with his books, even strangely suggestive talk about his hair, which he was particular about—he liked to keep it clean, well brushed, and precisely parted. It never seemed to help to explain such things as the fact that light hair showed dirt easily; they seemed amused at his willingness to take the fantastic amount of trouble necessary for clean hair. Rather than hauling water upstairs to heat, he began to have his Sunday night hair wash and all-over bath at an obscure tap in the gymnasium cellar even though this meant walking home with a wet head. It was one of the ways that he found himself going to more and more trouble to protect a diminishing circle of personal peace. But somehow they learned about this expedient, for one Sunday night when he had completed these hygienic chores and rushed back to South Middle to get warm, he opened his bedroom door and was hit with an icy crash of water. The bucket clanked onto the floor as he stood there shocked and wavering. Then he heard the hyena chorus of laughter and understood. He stalked out with the bucket in hand.
“Haw, haw—see, you don’t need to walk way across campus for a wash! You can have one right here! Don’t he look like a drowned rat, Gibbsy?”
“A dead rat, maybe, Toph.”
Simion opened the window and threw the bucket out. It clanked again, three stories down.
“Hey, now, don’t you understand a bit of fun—you go get that!”
“Piss on your teeth,” Simion told them, and closed the door before they got to him. Though not prone to headaches, he got a pounding one that night—from the sheer shock, from the unrelenting rage. Shivering in bed, he thought of a good return—some night when they were out drinking, he’d fill their chamber pots to the brim and set them out on the fire stairs to freeze. Then he’d put the pots back in their places and hope to remain awake long enough for Topher to reel home in the dark and take a long, steaming piss that would end up puddled around his feet, or, better yet, get a serious shock to his meaty buttocks. I’ll hold that idea in reserve for the first hard freeze, he thought. Unfortunately, though the weather continued cold, it was not that cold. And meanwhile the fun went on—
“Here, don’t be a little puke, have a drink with us! You ain’t friendly!”
“No, thanks, I don’t intend to form the habit of drinking. My father has a difficulty over it. I don’t want to court that.”
“Your father what?”
“He’s a dipsomaniac.”
“Hey, Petey, he says his father’s a maniac!—What? A sot? He says his father’s a sot. A nice loyal son you are! A wicked lot, to talk that way about yer poor old daddy up there in them mountains! Right, Toph?”