The Zebra Derby

by Max Shulman

  But I digress. I was telling about my delight at returning to the university. Oh, how happy I was! After I had rolled my fill on the awnless brome, I raced light-footed across the Mall and through the colonnades of Cyrus Northrup Memorial Auditorium and out upon the campus, my raven tresses flying in the wind, my inscrutable amber eyes glowing with excitement. I saw eleven young men coming toward me and I could not contain myself. Leaping upon the back of a medical student named Valsalva who was lying on the bearded fescue reading a copy of Haldane and Priestley’s Respiration, I called upon the eleven young men to join me in a cheer for Minnesota. They responded by hammering me into the ground until only my head showed, after which Valsalva told me that they were the University of Iowa football team, up for the game on Saturday.

  Quieter now, I continued my tour of the campus. My wild joy upon first gazing on these hallowed acres now subsided to a slower, warmer passion. Now a realization of the goodness of it was upon me. Here was I back from the gore and peril of the war, back to take my place among America’s youth, the clean-limbed hopefuls, the clear-eyed boys and sun-browned girls, the children-become-men whom I could see all about me, easy and casual in conversation, gay, bright, strong, straight. How lightly they bore the burden of America’s future. But I knew as my eager eyes drank them in that underneath their frivolity (how typically American!) they were aware of their trust, conscious of their duties, sensible of their mission. Yet while they felt their responsibilities, they were not afraid of them. They were Americans, by God, and they would get the job done with a laugh and a song.

  My native shyness overcome by a sense of ethnic kinship, I loped over and joined a group who were engaged in a lively discussion on the Knoll. “Brethren,” I cried. “Sistren. I am back to take my place among America’s youth, the cleanlimbed hopefuls, the clear-eyed boys and sun-browned girls, the children-become-men. I am Asa Hearthrug returned from the wars.”

  “Hi, Asa,” said one of the young men. “Thought any about joining a fraternity?”

  “No,” I said, “I haven’t. When I was at the university before the war, I was a member of Alpha Cholera, and although they were all darn swell kids and loads of fun, I hadn’t given any thought to joining a fraternity this time. Coming back to college now, when America is on the threshold of a millennium, fraternities seem a little unimportant somehow.

  “I was thinking rather of college as a sort of crucible,” I said, “a crucible for combining and forging ideas, for fashioning a new wisdom that will make America even greater.”

  “So you were an Alpha Cholera,” said the young man. “Well, well, well. Isn’t that a coincidence? We’re Alpha Choleras too. My name is Max Active, and this is Kermit McDermott. And these girls are Helene Updo and Wilma Hepp.”

  “Charmed,” I said simply.

  “Were you a paratrooper?” asked Helene Updo. “I think their boots are so darling.”

  “No,” I said. “I was an infantryman. Fought in the battle of—”

  “I’m so glad that icky war is over,” interrupted Wilma Hepp. “Now you can get all the scotch you want. There’s nothing I like better than scotch and coke with a scoop of raspberry ice cream.”

  “Yum-yum,” said Kermit McDermott.

  “I’ll bet you wouldn’t recognize the old Alpha Cholera house any more,” said Max Active. “We’ve got a roof on it now.”

  “To me,” I said, “the future of America is in its colleges. Here young people will meet and mingle. Some will come from the wars with practical wisdom hard won on the battlefields. Others who have not been to war will come with bright and shining ideals. There will be an alloying of the two, and the result will be a new source of strength for the new America.”

  “We’ve got all kinds of new records, too,” said Max Active. “Arturo Toscanini and his Rush City Four playing “Take Me, Morris, on the Awnless Brome.” Saxe Coburg and his Tooters in “Withdraw, Eric, the Morning Sun Is Nigh.” Herman Woodwind playing “I Bite Your Cheeks, Madame.” And thousands more. Not to brag, but there isn’t another frat house on campus can hold a candle to us.”

  “A historic time,” I cried. “A world in concord. Youth, broadened by the lessons of war, marching arm in arm up the gleaming new peaceway.”

  “Naturally,” said Max Active, “since you are a veteran and a former member of Alpha Cholera, we will waive the initiation. You won’t have to pay an initiation fee. Of course there will be a waiver fee, which is only slightly higher.”

  “What a splendid panorama,” I breathed. “The youth of all the United Nations, millions upon millions, building, planning, realizing—and all together.”

  “We’re gonna have a United Nations ball over at the Beta Thigh sorority house Saturday night,” said Helene Updo. “Everybody has to come dressed to represent one of the United Nations. Me, I’m gonna be Russia. I’m gonna wear a pair of kulaks.”

  “I think it’s fine you’re going to be Russia,” I said. “It will help to build solidarity between the two nations.”

  “I read an article about Russia in the Saturday Evening Post last week,” said Kermit McDermott. “It either said we were or we weren’t going to war with Russia, I forget which.”

  “I never read the Post,” said Wilma Hepp. “That long-hair stuff is too deep for poor little me.”

  “How fine it is,” I said, “to be back at college, thanks to a grateful nation which is sending me here tuition-free with sixty-five dollars a month yet to spend in any way I like with no man to say me nay. How utterly gratifying to merge my battlefield-matured knowledge with your lively, youthful intelligence.”

  “If you join Alpha Cholera right away,” said Max Active, “we can still get you a date to the Beta Thigh United Nations party. You can still fix him up, can’t you, Helene?”

  “Sure,” said Helene. “I’ll get him a date with Hermia Holstein, one of our smoothest pledges. You’ll love her, Asa. She’s your type—real intelligent. She’s taking animal husbandry.”

  “Speaking of husbandry,” said Kermit McDermott, “there’s a fellow over at the Alpha Cholera house who was born through artificial insemination. Every Father’s Day he sends a necktie to a syringe in Provo, Utah.”

  “Ah, the strides of science,” I murmured. “What miracles will not unfold before our eyes in the years ahead? What wonders born of American ingenuity and nurtured by the sun of peace will not be ours to behold?”

  “Yeah,” said Wilma Hepp, “they sure got some keen stuff nowadays. I saw a breakfast coat downtown last week that had an electric brazier attached. Gee, it would be marvy to have a fire in your brazier on these cold fall mornings.”

  “Have you seen the new reading lamps?” asked Kermit McDermott. “They can read English, French, Spanish, and German. More expensive models can read Russian and Calypso.”

  “Come,” I said, “let us examine some burning issues. Forces are at work about us, mighty, deep-running forces that will not be denied. Which way the world—left or right?”

  “I’m real interested in politics,” Helene Updo confessed. “I’m going to run for the Student Council in spring. Why, do you know that there isn’t a window stick in the whole sociology department? Maybe it would be easier to just overlook the whole thing, but I guess I’m just a crusader at heart.”

  “I know where the window sticks went to,” giggled Kermit McDermott. “We swiped them for the Alpha Cholera initiation last year. We made stilts out of them and put them on the pledges and made them peep into the bedroom of the dean of women.”

  “Just an example,” said Max Active, “of the crazy, mad things we do at Alpha Cholera. We’re a regular bunch of nuts. You’ll die laughing after you join, Asa.”

  “What problems can thwart us,” I asked, “once we bring them under discussion? We will find the answers to everything. You will speak from the brave heart of youth, and I will temper your observations with wisdom hard won in the theaters of combat.”

  “Speaking of theaters,” said Kermit McDermott,
“have you kids seen Frankenstein Strangles Hopalong Cassidy over at the Bijou? It’s terrific. Frankenstein and Hopalong are both in love with a sheepherder’s daughter named Leah Lambfry. Hopalong is getting the best of the rivalry, so Frankenstein ambushes him behind a butte and starts to strangle him to death. Hopalong’s horse, Douglas, races into Tucson after aid. He runs into a saloon, neighing frantically. ‘We don’t serve horses,’ says the bartender, and he is about to throw Douglas out when some customers recognize him as Hopalong’s horse. ‘Lovable old Hopalong must be in trouble,’ they say. They organize a posse and follow Douglas back to the butte, where Frankenstein, apparently made sluggish by the sun, is still strangling Hopalong. The monster is apprehended and finally killed after some light fieldpieces are brought up. Then Leah Lambfry comes up and rubs noses with Hopalong. In seventy-five pictures Hopalong has never kissed a girl.”

  “I don’t like that kind of picture,” said Wilma Hepp. “I love pictures like the ones with Joseph Cotten. Bro-ther!”

  “I’m a Humphrey Bogart gal myself,” said Helene Updo. “Bro-ther!”

  “I used to be,” said Wilma Hepp, “but I broke with Humphrey Bogart when I read in Fearless Hollywood Exposés that he had a partial plate.”

  “The rugs on the floor at the Alpha Cholera house,” said Max Active, “are attached to rollers like window shades. When you want to dance, you don’t have to spend a lot of time rolling up the rugs. You just give them a yank and they roll right up against the wall. Say! Why don’t we all go over to the house now and do a little dancing? We can sign up Asa at the same time.”

  “We’d love to,” said Helene Updo, “but we’ve got a class at four-thirty and it’s after four already.”

  “After four!” I exclaimed. “Good heavens! I haven’t seen the veterans’ adviser yet about making out my program. I must run. Let’s meet again real soon and wed my hard, practical wisdom with your bright and shining ideals. Aloha, fellow students, aloha.”

  And as the setting sun bathed my new friends in shafts of golden light, I made my way to the office of the veterans’ adviser, feeling warm and good inside, feeling secure and at home, at home at last among the clean-limbed, clear-eyed, sun-browned youth of America, home, home, home.

  chapter twenty-five

  Hat in hand, I entered the office of Max Ivycovered, one of the staff of veterans’ program advisers. I was at once impressed with Mr. Ivycovered, for he was an impressive figure with his suit of tweeds so luxuriant that there was a covey of grouse in the back pleats, his fluorescent Phi Beta Kappa key, his double-boiler pipe, his English woolen socks with clocks that actually ticked.

  “How do you do?” I said. “I’m Asa Hearthrug and I’ve come for advice.”

  Mr. Ivycovered sighed. “Well,” he said, “I suppose we might as well get right to work on this nasty problem.”

  “Problem?” I asked.

  “A nasty problem,” he repeated. “Nasty. How do they expect us to fit you people back into college life? You come back from the battlefields brutalized, narrow-eyed killers. You’re restless. You’re lawless. You crave violence. You’re impatient with the cloistered atmosphere of academic life.”

  “To the contrary, sir,” I replied, “I want nothing more than to—”

  “Shut up when I’m talking,” he said kindlily. “The ways of civilization are repugnant to you. The tranquillity of books is an anathema. Ideas bore you; theories make you chafe. What can be done with you people?”

  “But, Mr. Ivycovered,” I said, “that’s not true. College life is exactly what I—”

  “Don’t be silly, Hearthrug. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You listen to me. Long before you came back from the war I was studying this problem. I read hundreds of books on the subject not to speak of thousands of papers and articles in the scholastic journals. As a matter of fact, I did a little paper myself called From Camps to Campi: A Diagnostic Scherzo. It was very well received at the faculty dinner of the agricultural school, and I’m sure that it was no small factor in my being awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Butterfat Enzymes three weeks later. So you see, Hearthrug, I know this problem.”

  “Indeed you do, Mr. Ivycovered,” I agreed. “But just the same, you did all your research on the subject before the veterans came home. Isn’t it possible that you could have been wrong?”

  “No,” said Mr. Ivycovered.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, what is to be done with me, Mr. Ivycovered?”

  Mr. Ivycovered shrugged. “We’ve got to let you go to school, Hearthrug. It’s your right, even if you have been turned into a ravening beast, a bloodthirsty engine of destruction.”

  I snarled and kicked over a lamp.

  “How can we expect to interest you in the liberal arts?” said Mr. Ivycovered. “How can the humanities and social sciences claim your attention? For you have been schooled in mayhem and uproar, in ferocity and tumult, in outrage and infraction.”

  I upset a settee and clawed plaster from the walls.

  “All barriers have been stripped from you,” said Mr. Ivycovered. “You demand commotion and frenzy, rampage and fulmination, turbulence and riot.”

  I butted my head through a window and set fire to a bookcase.

  “Alas,” said Mr. Ivycovered, “and alack. That the university has come to this. Well, we must make out a program for you. How about some courses in English literature?”

  “Pap,” I shrieked, demolishing a wastebasket.

  “Some sociology or economics, perhaps?”

  “Milk and water,” I roared, and hurled a bust of Pallas Athene through the casement upon an old lady walking below.

  “History and anthropology? Psychology?”

  “Kid stuff,” I bellowed, twisting a metal filing cabinet with my bare hands.

  Mr. Ivycovered threw up his hands. “You see,” he cried. “I was right. You have been brutalized. You are a ravening beast. I can do nothing for you. Perhaps one of the other veterans’ advisers can help you. Go into the next office and see Miss Berisha-Faertz.”

  Ignoring the door, I kicked a hole in the wall and lunged into Miss Berisha-Faertz’s office.

  chapter twenty-six

  I crouched before Miss Berisha-Faertz’s desk and coiled to spring at her bodice.

  “Stop!” she cried, whipping a revolver out of her tunic. “You must have been talking to Mr. Ivycovered. This always happens. Listen, young man, you’re not a killer.”

  “Oh, happy day,” I said, much relieved.

  Miss Berisha-Faertz put the revolver back in her tunic. “I’m sorry I had to pull a gun on you,” she said. “It’s just that they’re always so violent after talking to Mr. Ivycovered.”

  “That’s all right,” I murmured. “You couldn’t have hurt me anyway. You were holding it by the barrel.”

  “Far be it from me to run down my colleagues,” said Miss Berisha-Faertz, “but I don’t think Mr. Ivycovered is the right man for the job. He oversimplifies. He jumps to conclusions. He doesn’t have the proper background in psychology to realize what a complex problem you returning veterans are.”

  “Honest, lady,” I said, “I’m not a complex problem. I’m no kind of problem. All I want is to go back to school.”

  “Nonsense,” she replied. “Don’t try to tell me. I’ve had three semesters of psychology.”

  “Oh,” I said, impressed.

  Miss Berisha-Faertz took off her trifocals and leaned forward friendlily. “Young man,” she said, “I’m going to rehabilitate you.”

  “Thank you! Thank you!” I cried hoarsely.

  “First of all,” she said, “we must establish rapport, as they say in Psychology Two. I want you to know that I am your friend and I am going to do my best to help you.”

  I climbed up in her lap and laid my head on her bosom, shifting it later to her collarbone, which was softer.

  “In order to rehabilitate you,” said Miss Berisha-Faertz, “we must delve into your personality. We must probe pati
ently until we find all the scars that the Army has left upon your subconscious. We must heal those scars, and then we must prescribe a treatment that will make you a useful citizen again. With my vast knowledge of psychology and your co-operation, we shall succeed. You shall take your place in society once more.”

  I planted a soft kiss on her collarbone.

  “First,” said Miss Berisha-Faertz, “let us analyze what the Army has done to you. You must understand, young man, that for the past few years you have been alienated from the world. You have been living in a world of your own—an army world, a world of peril, strife, and sudden death.”

  “You said it,” I said. “I remember one night on Okinawa—”

  “Don’t try to talk about it, dear schizoid,” said Miss Berisha-Faertz. “As I was saying, you’ve been living in a world of your own. All your thoughts, all your actions, have been conditioned by the Army. The mores of your civilian life have been stripped away; your set of values has been altered. Take your speech, for instance. You have become so used to profanity that it is now second nature with you.”

  “Fudge,” I said. “Land o’ Goshen, heck, tarnation, crim-a-nentlies.”

  “Not only profanity has crept into your speech,” she said, “but also the peculiar jargon of the Army.”

  “Snafu,” I said, “tarfu, fubar, and weft.”

  “And,” continued Miss Berisha-Faertz, “Mr. Ivycovered was partly right. It is true that you have been made into a killer. You have been taught cruelty.”

  I pulled the wings off a fly.

  “But at the same time,” she said, “you have learned to protect and rescue your comrades, to minister to the wounded. You have been taught compassion.”

  I put the wings back on the fly.

  Miss Berisha-Faertz went on. “You’ve learned fear.”

  I trembled.

  “You’ve experienced boredom.”

  I yawned.

  “You’ve known hunger.”

  I bit her collarbone.

  “You’ve been cold.”

  I shivered.