“You did. But that math component counts for half the grade.”
“Shit.” He said it with feeling, and all three of them laughed, as a young man a head shorter than Merrie came over and asked her to dance. Ted could see immediately that she didn’t want to, and he stepped in before she could even answer. “I’m sorry,” he said to him. “We just got engaged half an hour ago. Betrothed to each other at birth, you know how that goes. We’re getting married over Christmas. Our parents are thrilled.” Ted stood beaming at him, and Merrie’s would-be suitor looked slightly confused, apologized to Ted, and moved on.
“That was actually very good,” Meredith complimented him. “You did that really well.”
“I told you, I’m flawless as a friend. So do I get the job?”
“Yeah, I think maybe you do. You make a good bodyguard too. You should come over and visit us sometime at school. I have a sexy roommate you might like. She’s looking for a husband. Tall blonde, great figure.” As she said it, she noticed Betty in the crowd around the punch bowl and pointed her out to Ted. He looked hesitant.
“I don’t know. She looks like she means business. My mother warned me about girls like that. She looks like she wants a ring and the whole shebang.”
“Definitely,” Meredith confirmed.
“I don’t think I’m ready for the big time yet.”
“Neither are we.” Meredith smiled at him. He asked her to dance after a few minutes, and he was a terrific dancer. They came back breathless half an hour later and had had a good time. By then, Meredith had told him she wanted to go to law school, and he said his father wanted him to go into banking.
“I want to do something more fun. Like professional roller-skating. Or parachute jumping. Maybe surfing in Hawaii. Banking is so boring. My father is a banker and he never has any fun. What does your father do?”
“He’s a tax attorney and estate lawyer,” Meredith answered.
“Mine’s an investment banker,” Claudia added.
“It’s all so boring,” Ted commented. “I want to do something I enjoy when I grow up. If I grow up. I haven’t made up my mind yet about that. At least I don’t have to think about it for the next three and a half years. I’m here to have a good time.” He was honest about it. Meredith was more interested in getting good grades, and Claudia was too. The idea of going wild for four years hadn’t occurred to either of them.
He danced with Meredith again before the evening ended, and walked them both to the bus. His tie was askew by then, and he’d taken his jacket off. He was hot from dancing, and he promised to visit them at Vassar soon. They waved to him from the bus, and Claudia looked at her and raised an eyebrow.
“He’s pretty cute, and very entertaining. You’re really not interested?”
“No. How could you ever take him seriously? But he would be great to have as a friend.”
Claudia nodded in agreement. Seth was much more grown up than Ted, and serious when he needed to be. Ted was the class clown, but they liked him.
“What about him as your escort to the debutante ball?” Claudia suggested, and Meredith laughed.
“My parents would kill me, and they’ve already set up one of their friends’ sons as an escort. I’ve known him forever, and he’s fatally dull, but he’s very proper, and he goes to MIT. He wants to be a physicist. I’m not sure Ted would behave at a debutante ball, although he’d be a lot more fun.” It was going to be a very formal event, with the women in ball gowns and men in white tie and tails.
Both girls went home for Thanksgiving, and Claudia invited Meredith over to meet her parents and sisters. They were extremely polite to her and very pleasant, but in their own way, they were as serious and conservative as Meredith’s parents. But it was nice seeing Claudia at home. They sat in her room and talked for a long time. She said she was in love with Seth Ballard, although they’d only been dating for two months and hadn’t seen a lot of each other. But he called her every day at school. She had no idea what she was going to say to her parents. Nothing for the moment. And he wasn’t telling his either. Which seemed like a recipe for heartbreak to Merrie, with disapproving, prejudiced parents on both sides. It sounded too Romeo and Juliet to her.
The time between Thanksgiving and the deb ball over Christmas break went too quickly for Meredith. Her parents had invited a dozen friends to sit at their table. Meredith went to the rehearsal with her date, Josiah Appleton, on her first day back from school, and he was as dreary as she remembered. The night of the ball, she looked beautiful, and curtsied impeccably to the four hundred guests in the ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, where the cotillion was held. She came gracefully down the stairs, holding her small bouquet of white roses after she made her bow. And she spent the rest of the evening talking to her parents’ friends, meeting up with girls she hadn’t seen since high school, and drinking champagne.
Josiah got blind drunk with his friends and had to be sent home, and she didn’t care. She went home with her parents at two in the morning, having fulfilled their dream of seeing her as a debutante, which meant absolutely nothing to her.
Her grandparents had been there, and her grandfather had danced with her and told her he was proud of her.
“Why, Grampa? This whole thing is so meaningless and stupid.”
“We all need a little tradition in our lives to anchor us. And you made your parents very happy. Some battles just aren’t worth fighting. You have to know how to pick them. Don’t wear yourself out on the small stuff, Merrie. Save yourself for the big stuff.”
She was still waiting for the right fight to come along, but it hadn’t yet. She could see what was wrong with the world but not how to right it. She hoped to have figured it out by the time she finished law school, but for now her life was still a blur without form.
She called Claudia the next day and told her all about the party, and Josiah getting drunk and having to go home. But on the whole it had gone smoothly, and wasn’t such a big deal or so terrible after all. She hadn’t loved it, but she’d survived it.
The girls agreed to go shopping in a few days, after the holiday. And Seth had called Claudia several times at home.
Meredith was surprised when Ted called her. He had come in from Greenwich for the day, and offered to take her to lunch. She met him at the Carlyle Hotel, and they had an elegant meal in the hotel dining room. Afterward he walked her home. She liked seeing him away from school. It solidified their friendship, and he made her laugh more than ever. He admitted that he’d had a girlfriend at home, a girl he’d dated all through high school. Their parents were best friends and she wanted to get married, but he didn’t. She had decided not to go to college, and he wasn’t ready to make a commitment. He wanted to be free to enjoy college life, date other girls, and meet new people. He said he knew that if he married her, he’d be stuck in Greenwich forever and become a carbon copy of his parents, which was the last thing he wanted. He wanted a more exciting future. Meredith said she didn’t want to become her parents either. She was hoping that law school would make her entirely different from the women she knew. She didn’t realize it, but she already was.
He kissed her on the cheek and told her he’d see her back in school in January. After she left him, she found a plastic frog he’d slipped into her pocket, and she burst out laughing.
The rest of their freshman year flew by. Meredith and Claudia signed up for all the same classes for second semester, and spoke German whenever they were together. Ted came to visit them from time to time. He was dating as many girls as he could, and Claudia’s relationship with Seth was getting more and more serious. He had told her he wanted to marry her one day, although neither of them had figured out how to make that happen. But they had three more years to solve the problem of how to convince their parents. Claudia admitted to Meredith that it was getting harder and harder not to go to bed with him. Meredith advised her st
rongly against it. If she got pregnant, it would ruin everything, and their parents would go crazy. And she’d have to drop out of college, or risk her life getting a dangerous illegal abortion. Having sex with Seth just wasn’t worth it. Claudia agreed, but it was getting increasingly tempting.
At the end of the school year, Meredith and Claudia left together to go back to New York. Meredith was going to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard as she did every summer. And the Steinbergs were going to their house on Long Island. Seth would be in Virginia, so they couldn’t see each other, which Claudia said would be agonizing.
She and Seth devised a plan to meet in New York for a day, but it fell through at the last minute, when the Steinbergs went to Long Island earlier than planned. Claudia told Meredith it would be a long, sad summer without him.
Before they left for Martha’s Vineyard, Meredith went to visit her grandparents in Washington for a few days, and her grandfather invited her to visit his chambers at the Supreme Court. She’d been there before, but it always thrilled her, and excited her about the power of the law again.
Her grandfather explained to her in broad terms the different cases they were working on, and introduced Merrie to three of the justices. It made Meredith prouder than ever to be his granddaughter.
She went back to New York on the train that night, and a few days later, she and Alex and her mother left for the Vineyard. Claudia had invited Meredith to spend a few days with them in August, and she was looking forward to it. The Steinbergs were nice people, had gotten used to her, and always welcomed her warmly. One of Claudia’s sisters was leaving for college in the fall, to go to Wellesley, and her youngest sister was in high school. The Steinbergs never treated Claudia differently or as though she was adopted. She had become their beloved oldest daughter, and acted accordingly. She felt guilty not telling them about Seth but knew that she couldn’t. Her being in love with a Gentile would have broken their hearts, and she couldn’t do that to them. At least not yet.
Meredith met a boy she liked in Martha’s Vineyard that summer. He was a junior at Harvard, visiting friends of theirs. They went out a few times, and kissed on the beach in the moonlight, but it was more fun than serious, and he promised to invite her to Cambridge for a football game that winter. It was the perfect summer romance, and nothing meaningful happened. They were just two young people having a moment together, without deeper implications, although her brother teased her about it. He was nine years old, and disgusted when he caught them kissing.
She had a letter from Betty when she got back to New York after Labor Day, saying that she had gotten engaged over the summer and wasn’t coming back to Vassar. She was getting married in December and needed time to plan the wedding. Her mission had been accomplished. She was marrying a banker from Savannah, she said in her letter. He was twenty-five years old and worked at his father’s bank. She would be nineteen when they married, and she was excited about moving to Savannah. She wished Meredith luck and said it had been nice rooming with her. Meredith called Claudia as soon as she read the letter and told her to write to the housing office immediately to ask to move into Merrie’s room, and she would do the same.
“She’s an idiot to drop out of college and get married at nineteen,” Claudia commented. “And she can’t even be pregnant, if the wedding isn’t for another four months.” A lot of girls had to get married.
“That’s all she’s ever wanted,” Meredith told her.
“How stupid. And now what? She has babies and plays bridge for the rest of her life?” Claudia said in disgust.
“That’s what most women we know do,” Meredith reminded her. And their mothers were no different. It was exactly the life that neither she nor Claudia wanted, and why they were in college, not to find a husband and join the ranks of bored housewives.
When they went back to school they were thrilled to see each other and to share a room. Ted came to visit them that weekend and said he’d had an uneventful summer working for his father in Greenwich. And Seth took Claudia to dinner. They had missed each other unbearably all summer. He had called her whenever he knew her parents weren’t around. They came back late for curfew the night they had dinner, and Claudia got a warning slip when they let her in. She promised never to do it again, and said they’d had a flat tire on the way back from dinner, which was the excuse everyone used. Meredith guessed that they’d lost track of time in the back of Seth’s car, and hoped it hadn’t gone too far, but Claudia promised they’d been good. And she looked flushed and happy to have seen him. The summer had seemed endless to both of them.
Meredith and Claudia took all the same classes again, and went to fewer mixers sophomore year. They already knew a lot of people in neighboring schools, and Claudia saw Seth every chance she could. And Meredith had dinner with Ted whenever he didn’t have a date. He told her about all his romances, which never seemed to last more than a week or two. As he admitted himself, he had great opening charm but no staying power. And as soon as the girls he dated talked about looking for a serious relationship, he ran for the hills, or back to Meredith for a friendly dinner.
“I don’t know why you don’t want me,” he complained occasionally. “We get along perfectly, and we have a good time together.”
“That’s the whole point. It works perfectly as a friendship. Why screw it up with sex and romance?” she said sensibly. Besides, she knew him well enough now to realize that he was flaky and unreliable and didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life after he graduated. The last thing she wanted was a confused man on her hands. She was still trying to figure out her own life.
He had just come to see her after the Thanksgiving weekend, and she and Claudia were in the visiting room, when a news report on television mesmerized her, and everyone in the room stopped talking. A forty-two-year-old colored woman named Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger when ordered to do so by the bus driver, and had been arrested in Montgomery, Alabama. Buses were segregated, whites at the front of the bus and colored persons in the rear, and once the white section was full, Negro passengers were expected to give up their seats to them. The woman had refused and been arrested and removed by police. Public outcry from the Negro community had been instant. A boycott had been declared against the Montgomery bus system, and it was disclosed that the woman was a member of the NAACP, dedicated to equality between the races. The protest was being organized by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. Something told Meredith that the story was going to be a very big deal. She and Claudia watched the newscast and were still talking about it when they went back to their room. The news report said that Rosa Parks was not the first Negro woman to refuse to give up her seat and be arrested, but it was the most powerful and public response of its kind, with the boycott of the bus system, which would cripple the city.
“It’s time that they do something about segregation in the South,” Merrie said to Claudia, who nodded in agreement. Only a month before, the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation of public recreational facilities was unconstitutional. “My grandfather and I have talked about it. He said it’s going to happen, but when it does, it will be a bloody battle, and neither side is going to give in easily. Do you realize that minister organizing the bus protest is only six years older than you are?” Claudia was twenty. And Martin Luther King Jr. was only twenty-six years old. “Rosa Parks must be a brave woman.” She was set to stand trial four days later.
Meredith thought about it all night, and went into the sitting room to watch the television there several times in the course of the next few days. The bus boycott in Montgomery had taken hold. Seventy-five percent of the people who rode buses in Montgomery were said to be colored, and without their business, the bus companies would be hurting soon.
Four days later, on December 5, Rosa Parks was fined fourteen dollars and convicted of breaking the laws applicable to colored passengers on
public buses. The boycott continued, and Rosa Parks became a household name as people all over the country talked about her, the bus boycott in Montgomery, and the young minister who quietly but with determination continued to organize the protest of the laws that applied to colored people on buses, in Montgomery and throughout the South. Meredith couldn’t wait to discuss it with her grandfather when she went home for Christmas, and they spent most of Christmas dinner talking about it until her father complained that they’d heard enough about it and it wasn’t suitable dinner conversation, particularly on Christmas. It was the only topic that interested Merrie.
“What do you think is going to happen, Grampa?” Meredith asked him after dinner. “Do you think they’ll change the laws now?”
“Not yet, Merrie. It’s going to take time and probably a lot of bloodshed before it’s over. And it will land in our laps at the Supreme Court again eventually,” which Meredith found even more interesting. She had heard the young minister speak on TV, and found him compelling and inspiring. She wished she could be in Montgomery so she could see what was happening. The bus boycott had garnered more publicity than any other act of protest so far. The eyes and ears of the country were riveted to it.
And in the end, her grandfather’s prediction was right. A bus segregation case was brought before the Supreme Court in November 1956, a year later, and they ruled that segregation laws on public buses were unconstitutional, upholding an earlier decision by a Montgomery district court that had been appealed. It was a landmark decision that began to unravel segregation laws throughout the South. The boycott lasted for 381 days, and successfully challenged the existing segregation laws. Rosa Parks became a national hero for her courage, and was held up as a role model in the black community.
Meredith followed every detail of the case for the entire year, and Claudia wrote several articles for the Vassar newspaper. Meredith talked about it again at length with her grandfather during Thanksgiving dinner, a year after Parks’s protest, after their landmark decision in the Supreme Court. It was a highly volatile issue. Northerners thought the Supreme Court ruling desegregating public transportation was the right one, while southerners thought it an outrage. It was Meredith and Claudia’s junior year at Vassar by then, and they were still roommates.
The Good Fight Page 8