by Packer, Vin
Chuckle, chuckle down the hall, a door slamming behind their Special Selves.
When the Kappa Pi house was finally completed three years later, Harvey’s mother was asked to act as temporary housemother, until they could find someone else. In addition to room and board, his mother received a small salary. Some of it she shared with Harvey to keep their house running. With the rest, she began buying clothes. Harvey often saw his mother being escorted around Columbia by some shiny-faced Kappa Pi pledge. She was either being helped out of a taxicab in front of the local movie house, or being led up the steps of a local church on Sunday, a new hat perched on her head, a strange new smart way about her. Saturday afternoons he waved at her at football games, watched KP’s place blankets across her lap, point out players and strategies to her — and weeknights she was often at the basketball games or track meets, with Kappa Pi boys proffering Cokes and hot dogs, running up and down the aisles to wait on her.
By spring, Harvey was conducting violent anti-fraternity sessions at the house on Wentwroth Street. He was leader of a small band of sour-faced boys who were filled with hard luck stories and liberal ideals. His mother had been asked to stay on permanently at Kappa Pi. Thanks to Kappa Pi, she told Harvey, Harvey could continue his education without her having to worry about him or the house on Wentwroth. More and more in their conversations, she compared Harvey to this one and that — to Farley or Lake or Tub or Blaise. None of them had names like Harvey, it seemed. None of them had names like Earl, Edgar, Harold or Leroy. The boys with names like that were dropping ashes all over Harvey’s living room, leaving Harvey’s kitchen strewn with dirty glasses and empty beer bottles, and agreeing with Harvey that well-groomed, polite, orderly Kappa Pi’s and their like should be abolished. Eventually, Harvey threw them all out and went a solitary way. Some evenings he would call on his mother at the House. It was a huge mansion, built in the grand Southern style, with eight great white columns in front, a vast row of red brick steps, a horseshoe-shaped drive, and a uniformed colored cook, along with two aged Negroes who wore white coats and bowed all the time, and who the KP’s called “houseboys.”
• • •
Harvey’s mother was always asking him what his plans were. He was enrolled in a course of general studies at the university. His mother said that he ought to be pre-something. The fraternity men were nearly all pre-something. Pre-med, pre-law, pre, pre, until Harvey would get so angry with her that he would shout at the top of his lungs. Then, always, came the rapping at the door, the solicitous voice:
“Are you all right, Mom Plangman?”
Outside, as Harvey whipped by and into the night, was an anxious, apple-faced Little Lord Fauntleroy, with his diamond pin fastened to his cashmere sweater.
Harvey did not even know what he wanted to be, and he spent as much time puzzling over that, as he did wondering about KP’s like Case Bolton, for example, who had simply decided to be a corporation lawyer. How did someone simply decide to be that?
All Harvey knew was that he wanted Things.
Once when Tub Oakley had said, “What things?”, Har-very could not answer with one of Tub’s smooth, quick, specifics.
He had answered, “A car.”
“What kind?” Tub wanted to know.
A big one, was all Harvey could think. He did not answer Tub. He knew the KP’s liked to show him up — Things, he wanted. Big things!
From a Columbia stationery store, Harvey stole a genuine leather notebook, in which he recorded the names of things, copied from magazines. In his wallet too, he kept lists of things, along with a vocabulary list he was memorizing.
At Kappa Pi, Harvey was always treated with a great show of cordiality. He was often invited for meals, sitting beside his mother at the front table. In this new phase of Lists Of Things, his fantasies were of Tucker Wolfe or Boy Ames, or some other dignitary of Kappa Pi, taking him aside, arm around his shoulder, voice confidential, warm, saying solemnly: “Harv, the more we’ve known you, the better we’ve liked you! We want you to be one of us!”
He watched their coming and going with despair and desire, going through half a dozen more phases. In one, he took a lover, a woman twenty years older than he was. Gertrude taught shorthand at a business school in Columbia.
She had been married and divorced, and Wednesday evenings without fail, she attended the local meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, where she spoke too, on occasion. She wore a pure white streak down her dyed black hair, off-the-shoulder blouses and peasant skirts, and always something from Mexico, where she had once spent two years.
Harvey moved her right into the house on Wentwroth Street, though Gertrude maintained her own apartment for appearances. He did not love her in the least, but he loved the way he thought it looked — that he was under the spell of a mysterious older woman, who had been a drunk at one time, and had lived in Toluca de Lerdo. He bought her bright scarves and drank beer with her in the student haunts around Columbia, and sometimes he walked her by the Kappa Pi house, pretending he was too absorbed in what they were saying to one another to wave at the boys on the front porch.
• • •
He was relieved when his mother finally insisted that Gertrude was to stay out of the house on Wentwroth. He had grown weary of her incessant chain smoking and Coke drinking, and of her dogged insistence on receiving her satisfaction during the long sessions of love-making required to accomplish this.
Ultimately he dropped out of school because he was failing his subjects. He entered an easy money phase, dreaming of scheme after scheme for making a small fortune overnight. He became a bootlegger for students who were tired of drinking beer in “dry” Columbia, supplying them with whisky he bought in Jefferson City. His profits from this enterprise were considerable, until his customers noticed the whisky was weak-tasting, the seals on the bottles tampered with. He got rid of the remainder of his watered-down stock at drunken frat brawls, where he would show up near the end, when the supply was diminishing. Then he abandoned that business for a part ownership in a Hoagie-Pizza stand. His partner was not nearly so forgive-and-forget as the customers for his whisky. He was forced to make up the shortage in profits, when it was discovered, and forced to sell his half at a loss. There were other ventures, each one a worse failure than the last; each one involving more loss of face.
His mother was still in Enemy Camp, and the Kappa Pi’s were still superior. He accepted this finally, as a fact. The frustration that accompanied it filled him with a longing for a way around the fact. Until he met Lois Cutler, his only resort was to imitate and hate the Kappa Pi’s, to collect their injustices and to love them.
The night Harvey met Lois Cutler, he had just happened to wander over to the Kappa Pi house to visit his mother. He had just happened to wear evening clothes (rented), on the pretext that he was dropping in on the graduation dance at the University gym. The campus was busy with all sorts of dances; it was the last night of school. Harvey feigned great surprise at the elaborate festivities he found underway at Kappa Pi. Elbowing his way through the couples dancing to the twelve-piece orchestra, he went directly to his mother’s suite on the first floor. He knew she would not be there, that she was undoubtedly hovering over the punch bowl in the main room, or making the wallflowers feel wanted, but he assumed an important air as he headed for her suite — an “all-business” attitude. He intended to sit in her parlor and smoke a cigarette, then slowly, unobtrusively, blend with the crowd. When he came upon his mother, he intended to say, with a certain pique in his tone: “I’ve been looking all over for you!”
• • •
He was surprised to find his mother’s suite occupied. The occupant was talking on the telephone in his mother’s bedroom. Harvey sat down on the couch in the parlor and lit a cigarette.
“All right, Daddy, I promise,” a girl’s voice was saying. “I cross my heart … What? No, he didn’t try to get me drunk. No, Daddy. I told you, he flunked geology and he felt bad because he won’t graduate.”
The girl was talking about Tub Oakley, Harvey knew. He guessed she was a Stephens College girl. Tub always dated Stephens girls. They usually had money, for one thing; for another, it was not easy for Tub to get a date with acceptable sorority girls. He was too fat and too short. Stephens girls usually dated Tub to get to fraternity parties where they could meet more men. Stephens was not coeducational.
“Daddy,” the girl said, “I told you I never went out with him before! How was I to know he’d get so drunk! No, I promise. I cross my heart and hope to die … What? … I don’t want you to die either, Daddy … What? … No. I promise I won’t go home with him. I’ll take a taxi. Hmm? … Now? Long-distance?”
The next thing Harvey knew, the girl was singing in a high little squeaky voice.
“Daddy, I want a diamond ring, big cars, everything,
Daddy, you’ve got to get the best for me, eee,eee,eee,
Oh, Daddy, you’ve got to get the best for meeeeeeeee.”
Then the girl giggled for a few seconds … “I miss you too. Hmmm? Oh, a mile’s worth … All right, a trillion, million miles worth. Don’t worry. I cross my heart, Daddy.”
Harvey was beginning to feel uncomfortable and curious. He leaned forward and peered around the corner of the parlor slowly. The girl’s back was to him. She was sitting on his mother’s bed, the phone cradled in her arms, her head bent to her shoulder, squeezing the phone’s neck in place. Her hands were caressing her arms. She had long yellow hair which spilled down a very white, bare back. She was wearing a lemon-colored net gown, ankle-length, and high-heeled gold slippers.
“Here’s a kiss,” she said. She made a smacking noise with her lips.
Harvey leaned back. He heard her say, “See you tomorrow night, Daddy. God bless me and God bless you, keep each one and keep us two … I will, Daddy … I won’t, Daddy. I promise. Bye-bye!”
She jumped when she came out of the bedroom and saw him sitting there.
Harvey stood up and bowed. He introduced himself. He apologized for being unable to help overhearing her telephone conversation. Then he offered to see that she got home all right. She accepted this offer, along with Harvey’s offer of a soda en route. Harvey escorted her from the Kappa Pi house with a sense of deep satisfaction. If there was any Kappa Pi he hated more than all the rest, it was Tub Oakley. If there was any Kappa Pi he longed to show up above all the others, Oakley was that Kappa Pi.
“Shouldn’t I try to find Tub and tell him I’m going home with you?” Lois Cutler asked.
“He’s probably upstairs getting sick,” said Harvey. “Anyway, he doesn’t deserve any courtesy. Never mind his excuses, it was very bad form.”
“That’s what Daddy says.”
“Did you call him long distance just to ask what to do?”
“I always consult Daddy.”
“Are you from Kansas City or St. Louis?”
“Pennsylvania,” she said. In his mind, Harvey was adding up the minutes — estimating the phone call’s cost.
“Daddy and I are extremely close,” Lois Cutler said. “So it seems.”
“He’s such an old silly,” she said.
“That’s very nice,” Harvey told her.
He looked down at her. She was not a very pretty girl. Her eyes were a trifle too close together, and her lips were as straight as a boy’s. Her hair was really golden, though, and she had very bright green eyes, that were now lit with high pleasure. “A silly old silly,” she purred, “and I loves him!”
Instead of the soda, they went for beers to one of Columbia’s tawdry cafes, on the fringes of the university campus. She had just been graduated from Stephens, and she was eager to return to Pennsylvania — to Daddy. She was unable to concentrate for very long on any subject besides Daddy. Around her neck, a tiny gold locket contained a picutre of Hayden Cutler. From her jeweled brocade clutch bag, she produced another, a larger one which showed him full-length, leaning against a white Citroen DS 19. (Harvey had no trouble identifying the car; it had been on one of his April lists.) Daddy was a dapper, laughing gentleman, with a thick head of white hair and a beefy youthfulness.
“Isn’t he cute?” Lois wanted to know. “He’s a very nice looking man.”
“Him works too hard,” Lois said to the photograph, pouting and slapping it with her finger. “Him works his fingers to the bone!”
“What sort of work does he do?”
“He has a seat on the New York Stock Exchange,” Lois said. “Him’s a biggy old Wall Street daddy doll.”
Harvey found that he was not bored or even repelled by the subject of “Daddy,” even though he was beginning to suspect that Tub Oakley’s geology grades might not have been the sole reason he had gotten drunk. Harvey had never seen anyone of Lois Cutler’s type in such a vulnerable position, unless she were intoxicated. At first, he listened to her palaver about Daddy with the excited feeling that at any moment she would realize she had been talking about nothing else. He expected that then she would be embarrassed and apologetic, and attribute her uninhibited confidences to the fact that Harvey made her feel unselfconscious. When he realized no such thing was going to happen, he took a new tack. He began extolling her utter devotion to “Daddy,” hoping to shame her into some sort of awareness of the fact she was the next thing to neurotic about her father. He expected her to say during a pause, which he tried desperately to effect: “I guess you think I’m crazy or something.” But there were no pauses. The subject of Daddy was an inexhaustible reservoir. Unable to fight it, Harvey joined it. He found himself not only interested in Daddy, but vaguely delighted by the unabashed Lois, who poured out her feelings to him, and whose hands were whiter, whose hair was longer and more shining than any other girl Harvey had known — and whose penetrating eyes Harvey found himself looking into without flinching.
• • •
When Harvey and Lois reached the dormitory at Stephens late that evening, small knots of other couples stood under the eaves embracing. While Harvey was deciding whether or not to kiss her, she pulled him under the porch light.
“I’m going to do something I’ve never done before,” she said.
He felt like kissing her, but he wondered how such small lips would feel. He did not think it would be much of a kiss.
“What’s that?” he said. He wanted to guide her back from the light a bit, but when he stepped back, she pulled his sleeve again.
“No, stay right there.” Then she fumbled in her clutch bag until she came up with a wrinkled piece of paper. “I’m going to show you something.”
She was not going to kiss him after all.
“It’s the beer,” she said. “I’ve never shown this to anyone before. That old silly wrote it.”
“Your father?”
“Himself!” she giggled.
“It’s a poem.”
“Well, let me see it.”
“First I want to tell you that he’s such a silly old silly. He scribbled it on a menu at 21 in New York City. He took me there before I left for school last fall. We had frogs’ legs and wine, and wine, and wine. It’s his silly old wine poem.”
“They’ll be calling curfew any minute, Lois.”
Behind them, a thin boy with intense eyes was comforting a weeping blond with the promise that he would tell Kathy the truth about them, the moment he arrived home.
“Just remember it’s a silly old daddy wine poem,” Lois said. Daddy said I should show it to every boy I go out with. But I never have. For reasons that will become obvious when you cast your eyes upon old silly’s silly.”
She handed it to him, and pressed her fingers to her lips, giggling again. “I copied it off the menu and typed it up,” she said.
FOR BOYS WHO KNOW LOIS
by a man who knows her better!
Lois is a lady, have no doubt at all,
Presented to Society at New York’s Gotham ball,
The New York Junior Assembly counts her as a member,
Her maternal grandpare
nts were Bea and William Kemper,
Descended from John Alden, and Henry Adams too,
Her uncle is a Boocock, affectionately called “Boo.”
The Cutlers came from Devonshire in 1636,
They excel in everything, industry, politics.
Bear in mind the facts, my boy, regard the family tree,
If you want no more, even, than just to be her caddie;
If you’re not a gentleman, you’ll answer to her daddy!
“Isn’t that an old silly, though?”
“Can I write you?” said Harvey Plangman.
• • •
All of that was two months ago.
Between then and now Harvey had spent his time managing Woolworth’s five-and-ten, pocketing a good quarter of the inventory, and corresponding daily with Lois Cutler. He fantasized their honeymoon visit to his mother, the Citroen DS 19 they had borrowed for the cross-country trip parked outside the Kappa Pi house. Even Tub Oakley (who was in summer school trying to pass geology) was impressed by the volume of mail that came from Lois to the Kappa Pi house, addressed to Harvey. Harvey had not bothered to mention the fact he was neither a university student, nor a Kappa Pi. He had borrowed a set of maternal and paternal grandparents from the wedding announcements in The New York Times, and he had killed off his father, a colonel, in World War II. His letters to Lois were as filled with “embellishments” as hers with references to Daddy. As the weeks wore on, a change came over Harvey Plangman. The more he lied, the more he wished his lies were true. He began to brood over the unfairness of the fact they were not true. He began to feel protective toward his lies, almost as though they were little living creatures whose existence depended on him. He became slightly reticent and suspicious, and in the fantasy of his honeymoon visit-to his mother, he was always compelled to go out on the steps of the KP house and shout, “All right, boys, please get away from the car!”