Under Morphine

ABOUT TWO AND A HALF MONTHS after the well-trained divisions of North Korea, armed by the Soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark named for the city’s seventeenth-century founder. I was the first member of our family to seek a higher education. None of my cousins had gone beyond high school, and neither my father nor his three brothers had finished elementary school. “I worked for money,” my father told me, “since I was ten years old.” He was a neighborhood butcher for whom I’d delivered orders on my bicycle all through high school, except during baseball season and on the afternoons when I had to attend interschool matches as a member of the debating team. Almost from the day that I left the store—where I’d been working sixty-hour weeks for him between the time of my high school graduation in January and the start of college in September—almost from the day that I began classes at Robert Treat, my father became frightened that I would die. Maybe his fear had something to do with the war, which the U.S. armed forces, under United Nations auspices, had immediately entered to bolster the efforts of the ill-trained and underequipped South Korean army; maybe it had something to do with the heavy casualties our troops were sustaining against the Communist firepower and his fear that if the conflict dragged on as long as World War Two had, I would be drafted into the army to fight and die on the Korean battlefield as my cousins Abe and Dave had died during World War Two. Or maybe the fear had to do with his financial worries: the year before, the neighborhood’s first supermarket had opened only a few blocks from our family’s kosher butcher shop, and sales had begun steadily falling off, in part because of the supermarket’s meat and poultry section’s undercutting my father’s prices and in part because of a general postwar decline in the number of families bothering to maintain kosher households and to buy kosher meat and chickens from a rabbinically certified shop whose owner was a member of the Federation of Kosher Butchers of New Jersey. Or maybe his fear for me began in fear for himself, for at the age of fifty, after enjoying a lifetime of robust good health, this sturdy little man began to develop the persistent racking cough that, troubling as it was to my mother, did not stop him from keeping a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth all day long. Whatever the cause or mix of causes fueling the abrupt change in his previously benign paternal behavior, he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts. Where were you? Why weren’t you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before you—how do I know you’re not going to places where you can get yourself killed?

The questions were ludicrous since, in my high school years, I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student who went out with only the nicest girls, a dedicated debater, and a utility infielder for the varsity baseball team, living happily enough within the adolescent norms of our neighborhood and my school. The questions were also infuriating—it was as though the father to whom I’d been so close during all these years, practically growing up at his side in the store, had no idea any longer of who or what his son was. At the store, the customers would delight him and my mother by telling them what a pleasure it was to watch the little one to whom they used to bring cookies—back when his father used to let him play with some fat and cut it up like “a big butcher,” albeit using a knife with a dull blade—to watch him mature under their eyes into a well-mannered, well-spoken youngster who put their beef through the grinder to make chopped meat and who scattered and swept up the sawdust on the floor and who dutifully yanked the remaining feathers from the necks of the dead chickens hanging from hooks on the wall when his father called over to him, “Flick two chickens, Markie, will ya, for Mrs. So-and-So?” During the seven months before college he did more than give me the meat to grind and a few chickens to flick. He taught me how to take a rack of lamb and cut lamb chops out of it, how to slice each rib, and, when I got down to the bottom, how to take the chopper and chop off the rest of it. And he taught me always in the most easygoing way. “Don’t hit your hand with the chopper and everything will be okay,” he said. He taught me how to be patient with our more demanding customers, particularly those who had to see the meat from every angle before they bought it, those for whom I had to hold up the chicken so they could literally look up the asshole to be sure that it was clean. “You can’t believe what some of those women will put you through before they buy their chicken,” he told me. And then he would mimic them: “‘Turn it over. No, over. Let me see the bottom.’ ” It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. You slit the ass open a little bit and you stick your hand up and you grab the viscera and you pull them out. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.

Our store fronted on Lyons Avenue in Newark, a block up the street from Beth Israel Hospital, and in the window we had a place where you could put ice, a wide shelf tilted slightly down, back to front. An ice truck would come by to sell us chopped ice, and we’d put the ice in there and then we’d put our meat in so people could see it when they walked by. During the seven months I worked in the store full time before college I would dress the window for him. “Marcus is the artist,” my father said when people commented on the display. I’d put everything in. I’d put steaks in, I’d put chickens in, I’d put lamb shanks in—all the products that we had I would make patterns out of and arrange in the window “artistically.” I’d take some ferns and dress things up, ferns that I got from the flower shop across from the hospital. And not only did I cut and slice and sell meat and dress the window with meat; during those seven months when I replaced my mother as his sidekick I went with my father to the wholesale market early in the morning and learned to buy it too. He’d be there once a week, five, five-thirty in the morning, because if you went to the market and picked out your own meat and drove it back to your place yourself and put it in the refrigerator yourself, you saved on the premium you had to pay to have it delivered. We’d buy a whole quarter of the beef, and we’d buy a forequarter of the lamb for lamb chops, and we’d buy a calf, and we’d buy some beef livers, and we’d buy some chickens and chicken livers, and since we had a couple of customers for them, we would buy brains. The store opened at seven in the morning and we’d work until seven, eight at night. I was seventeen, young and eager and energetic, and by five I’d be whipped. And there he was, still going strong, throwing hundred-pound forequarters on his shoulders, walking in and hanging them in the refrigerator on hooks. There he was, cutting and slicing with the knives, chopping with the cleaver, still filling out orders at seven p.m. when I was ready to collapse. But my job was to clean the butcher blocks last thing before we went home, to throw some sawdust on the blocks and then scrape them with the iron brush, and so, marshaling the energy left in me, I’d scrape out the blood to keep the place kosher.

I look back at those seven months as a wonderful time—wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens. And even that was wonderful in its way, because it was something you did, and did well, that you didn’t care to do. So there was a lesson in doing it. And lessons I loved—bring them on! And I loved my father, and he me, more than ever before in our lives. In the store, I prepared our lunch, his and mine. Not only did we eat our lunch there but we cooked our lunch there, on a small grill in the backroom, right next to where we cut up and prepared the meat. I’d grill chicken livers for us, I’d grill little flank steaks for us, and never were we two happier together. Yet only shortly afterward the destructive struggle between us began: Where were you? Why weren’t you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before you—how do I know you’re not going to places where you can get yourself killed?

During that fall I began Robert Treat as a freshman, whenever my father double-locked our front and back doors and I couldn’t use my keys to open either and I had to pound on one or the other door to be let in if I came home at night twenty minutes later than he thought I ought to, I believed he had gone crazy.

And he had: crazy with worry that his cherished only child was as unprepared for the hazards of life as anyone else entering manhood, crazy with the frightening discovery that a little boy grows up, grows tall, overshadows his parents, and that you can’t keep him then, that you have to relinquish him to the world.

I left Robert Treat after only one year. I left because suddenly my father had no faith even in my ability to cross the street by myself. I left because my father’s surveillance had become insufferable. The prospect of my independence made this otherwise even-tempered man, who only rarely blew up at anyone, appear as if he were intent on committing violence should I dare to let him down, while I—whose skills as a cool-headed logician had made me the mainstay of the high school debating team—was reduced to howling with frustration in the face of his ignorance and irrationality. I had to get away from him before I killed him—so I wildly told my distraught mother, who now found herself as unexpectedly without influence over him as I was.

One night I got home on the bus from downtown about nine-thirty. I’d been at the main branch of the Newark Public Library, as Robert Treat had no library of its own. I had left the house at eight-thirty that morning and been away attending classes and studying, and the first thing my mother said was “Your father’s out looking for you.” “Why? Where is he looking?” “He went to a pool hall.” “I don’t even know how to shoot pool. What is he thinking about? I was studying, for God’s sake. I was writing a paper. I was reading. What else does he think I do night and day?” “He was talking to Mr. Pearlgreen about Eddie, and it got him all riled up about you.” Eddie Pearlgreen, whose father was our plumber, had graduated from high school with me and gone on to college at Panzer, in East Orange, to learn to become a high school phys-ed teacher. I’d played ball with him since I was a kid. “I’m not Eddie Pearlgreen,” I said, “I’m me.” “But do you know what he did? Without telling anybody, he drove all the way to Pennsylvania, to Scranton, in his father’s car to play pool in some kind of special pool hall there.” “But Eddie’s a pool shark. I’m not surprised he went to Scranton. Eddie can’t brush his teeth in the morning without thinking about pool. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went to the moon to play pool. Eddie pretends with guys who don’t know him that he’s only at their level of skill, and then they play and he beats the pants off them for as much as twenty-five dollars a game.” “He’ll end up stealing cars, Mr. Pearlgreen said.” “Oh, Mother, this is ridiculous. Whatever Eddie does has no bearing on me. Will I end up stealing cars?” “Of course not, darling.” “I don’t like this game Eddie likes, I don’t like the atmosphere he likes. I’m not interested in the low life, Ma. I’m interested in things that matter. I wouldn’t so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap!” Whereupon, as though following a stage direction, my father entered the house through the back door, still all charged up, reeking of cigarette smoke, and angry now not because he’d found me in a pool hall but because he hadn’t found me there. It wouldn’t have dawned on him to go downtown and look for me at the public library—the reason being that you can’t get cracked over the head with a pool cue at the library for being a pool shark or have someone pull a knife on you because you are sitting there reading a chapter assigned from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as I’d been doing since six that night.

“So there you are,” he announced. “Yeah. Strange, isn’t it? At home. I sleep here. I live here. I am your son, remember?” “Are you? I’ve been everywhere looking for you.” “Why? Why? Somebody, please, tell me why ‘everywhere.’” “Because if anything were to happen to you—if something were ever to happen to you—” “But nothing will happen. Dad, I am not this terror of the earth who plays pool, Eddie Pearlgreen! Nothing is going to happen.” “I know that you’re not him, for God’s sake. I know better than anybody that I’m lucky with my boy.” “Then what is this all about, Dad?” “It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.” “Oh, Christ, you sound like a fortune cookie.” “Do I? Do I? Not like a concerned father but like a fortune cookie? That’s what I sound like when I’m talking to my son about the future he has ahead of him, which any little thing could destroy, the tiniest thing?” “Oh, the hell with it!” I cried, and ran out of the house, wondering where I could find a car to steal to go to Scranton to play pool and maybe pick up the clap on the side.

Later I learned from my mother the full circumstances of that day, about how Mr. Pearlgreen had come to see about the toilet at the back of the store that morning and left my father brooding over their conversation from then until closing time. He must have smoked three packs of cigarettes, she told me, he was so upset. “You don’t know how proud of you he is,” my mother said. “Everybody who comes into the store—‘My son, all A’s. Never lets us down. Doesn’t even have to look at his books—automatically, A’s.’ Darling, when you’re not present you are the focus of all his praise. You must believe that. He boasts about you all the time.” “And when I am present I’m the focus of these crazy new fears, and I’m sick and tired of it, Ma.” My mother said, “But I heard him, Markie. He told Mr. Pearlgreen, ‘Thank God I don’t have to worry about these things with my boy.’ I was there with him in the store when Mr. Pearlgreen came because of the leak. That’s exactly what he said when Mr. Pearlgreen was telling him about Eddie. Those were his words: ‘I don’t have to worry about these things with my boy.’ But what does Mr. Pearlgreen say back to him—and this is what started him off—he says, ‘Listen to me, Messner. I like you, Messner, you were good to us, you took care of my wife during the war with meat, listen to somebody who knows from it happening to him. Eddie is a college boy too, but that doesn’t mean he knows enough to stay away from the pool hall. How did we lose Eddie? He’s not a bad boy. And what about his younger brother—what kind of example is he to his younger brother? What did we do wrong that the next thing we know he’s in a pool hall in Scranton, three hours from home! With my car! Where does he get the money for the gas? From playing pool! Pool! Pool! Mark my words, Messner: the world is waiting, it’s licking its chops, to take your boy away.’ ” “And my father believes him,” I said. “My father believes not what he sees with his eyes for an entire lifetime, instead he believes what he’s told by the plumber on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!” I couldn’t stop. He’d been driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber! “Yeah, Ma,” I finally said, storming off to my room, “the tiniest, littlest things do have tragic consequences. He proves it!”

I had to get away but I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know one college from another. Auburn. Wake Forest. Ball State. SMU. Vanderbilt. Muhlenberg. They were nothing but the names of football teams to me. Every fall I eagerly listened to the results of the college games on Bill Stern’s Saturday evening sports roundup, but I had little idea of the academic differences between the contending schools. Louisiana State 35, Rice 20; Cornell 21, Lafayette 7; Northwestern 14, Illinois 13. That was the difference I knew about: the point spread. A college was a college—that you attended one and eventually earned a degree was all that mattered to a family as unworldly as mine. I was going to the one downtown because it was close to home and we could afford it.

And that was fine with me. At the outset of my mature life, before everything suddenly became so difficult, I had a great talent for being satisfied. I’d had it all through childhood, and in my freshman year at Robert Treat it was in my repertoire still. I was thrilled to be there. I’d quickly come to idolize my professors and to make friends, most of them from working families like my own and with little, if any, more education than my own. Some were Jewish and from my high school, but most were not, and it at first excited me to have lunch with them because they were Irish or Italian and to me a new category, not only of Newarker but of human being. And I was excited to be taking college courses; though they were rudimentary, something was beginning to happen to my brain akin to what had happened when I first laid eyes on the alphabet. And, too—after the coach had gotten me to choke up a few inches on the bat and to punch the ball over the infield and into the outfield instead of my mightily swinging as blindly as I had in high school —I had gained a first-string position on the tiny college’s freshman baseball team that spring and was playing second base alongside a shortstop named Angelo Spinelli.

But primarily I was learning, discovering something new every hour of the school day, which was why I even enjoyed Robert Treat’s being so small and unobtrusive, more like a neighborhood club than a college. Robert Treat was tucked away at the northern end of the city’s busy downtown of office buildings, department stores, and family-owned specialty shops, squeezed between a triangular little Revolutionary War park where the bedraggled bums hung out (most of whom we knew by name) and the muddy Passaic. The college consisted of two undistinguished buildings: an old abandoned smoke-stained brick brewery down near the industrial riverfront that had been converted into classrooms and science labs and where I took my biology course and, several blocks away, across from the city’s major thoroughfare and facing the little park that was what we had instead of a campus—and where we sat at noontime to eat the sandwiches we’d packed at dawn while the bums down the bench passed the muscatel bottle—a small four-story neoclassical stone building with a pillared entrance that from the outside looked just like the bank it had been for much of the twentieth century. The building’s interior housed the college administrative offices and the makeshift classrooms where I took history, English, and French courses taught by professors who called me “Mr. Messner” rather than “Marcus” or “Markie” and whose every written assignment I tried to anticipate and complete before it was due. I was eager to be an adult, an educated, mature, independent adult, which was just what was terrifying my father, who, even as he was locking me out of our house to punish me for beginning to sample the minutest prerogatives of young adulthood, could not have been any more proud of my devotion to my studies and my unique family status as a college student.

My freshman year was the most exhilarating and most awful of my life, and that was why I wound up the next year at Winesburg, a small liberal arts and engineering college in the farm country of north-central Ohio, eighteen miles from Lake Erie and five hundred miles from our back door’s double lock. The scenic Winesburg campus, with its tall, shapely trees (I learned later from a girlfriend they were elms) and its ivy-covered brick quadrangles set picturesquely on a hill, could have been the backdrop for one of those Technicolor college movie musicals where all the students go around singing and dancing instead of studying. To pay for my going to a college away from home, my father had to let go of Isaac, the polite, quiet Orthodox young fellow in a skullcap who’d begun to apprentice as an assistant after I started my first year of school, and my mother, whose job Isaac was supposed to have absorbed in time, had to take over again as my father’s full-time partner. Only in this way could he make ends meet.

I was assigned to a dormitory room in Jenkins Hall, where I discovered that the three other boys I was to live with were Jews. The arrangement struck me as odd, first because I’d been expecting to have one roommate, and second because part of the adventure of going away to college in far-off Ohio was the chance it offered to live among non-Jews and see what that was like. Both my parents thought this a strange if not dangerous aspiration, but to me, at eighteen, it made perfect sense. Spinelli, the shortstop—and a pre-law student like me—had become my closest friend at Robert Treat, and his taking me home to the city’s Italian First Ward to meet his family and eat their food and sit around and listen to them talk with their accents and joke in Italian had been no less intriguing than my two-semester survey course in the history of Western civilization, where at each class the professor laid bare something more of the way the world went before I existed.

The dormitory room was long, narrow, smelly, and poorly lit, with double-decker bunk beds at either end of the worn floorboards and four clunky old wooden desks, scarred by use, pushed against the drab green walls. I took the lower bunk under an upper already claimed by a lanky, raven-haired boy in glasses named Bertram Flusser. He didn’t bother to shake my hand when I tried to introduce myself but looked at me as though I were a member of a species he’d been fortunate enough never to have come upon before. The other two boys looked me over too, though not at all with disdain, so I introduced myself to them, and they to me, in a way that half convinced me that, among my roommates, Flusser was one of a kind. All three were junior English majors and members of the college drama society. None of them was in a fraternity.

There were twelve fraternities on the campus, but only two admitted Jews, one a small all-Jewish fraternity with about fifty members and the other a nonsectarian fraternity about half that size, founded locally by a group of student idealists, who took in anyone they could get their hands on. The remaining ten were reserved for white Christian males, an arrangement that no one could have imagined challenging on a campus that so prided itself on tradition. The imposing Christian fraternity houses with their fieldstone façades and castlelike doors dominated Buckeye Street, the tree-lined avenue bisected by a small green with a Civil War cannon that, according to the risqué witticism repeated to newcomers, went off whenever a virgin walked by. Buckeye Street led from the campus through the residential streets of big trees and neatly kept-up old frame houses to the one business artery in town, Main Street, which was four blocks long, stretching from the bridge over Wine Creek at one end to the railroad station at the other. Main was dominated by the New Willard House, the inn in whose taproom alumni gathered on football weekends to drunkenly relive their college days and where, through the college placement office, I got a job Friday and Saturday nights, working as a waiter for the minimum wage of seventy-five cents an hour plus tips. The social life of the college of some twelve hundred students was conducted largely behind the fraternities’ massive black studded doors and out on their expansive green lawns—where, in virtually any weather, two or three boys could always be seen tossing a football around.

My roommate Flusser had contempt for everything I said and mocked me mercilessly. When I tried being agreeable with him, he called me Prince Charming. When I told him to leave me alone, he said, “Such thin skin for such a big boy.” At night he insisted on playing Beethoven on his record player after I got into bed, and at a volume that didn’t seem to bother my other two roommates as much as it did me. I knew nothing about classical music, didn’t much like it, and besides, I needed my sleep if I was to continue to hold down a weekend job and get the kind of grades that had put me on the Robert Treat Dean’s List both semesters I was there. Flusser himself never got up before noon, even if he had classes, and his bunk was always unmade, the bedding hanging carelessly down over one side, obscuring the view of the room from my bunk. Living in close quarters with him was worse even than living with my father during my freshman year—my father at least went off all day to work in the butcher shop and, albeit fanatically, cared about my well-being. All three of my roommates were going to act in the college’s fall production of Twelfth Night, a play I’d never heard of. I had read Julius Caesar in high school, Macbeth in my English literature survey course my first year of college, and that was it. In Twelfth Night, Flusser was to play a character called Malvolio, and on the nights when he wasn’t listening to Beethoven after hours he would lie in the bunk above me reciting his lines aloud. Sometimes he would strut about the room practicing his exit line, which was “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” From my bed I would plead, “Flusser, please, could you quiet it down,” to which he would respond—by shouting or cackling or menacingly whispering—“I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” once again.

Within only days of arriving on the campus, I began to look around the dormitory for somebody with an empty bunk in his room who would agree to have me as a roommate. That took several more weeks, during which time I reached the peak of my frustration with Flusser and, about an hour after I’d gone to bed one night, rose screaming from my bunk to yank a phonograph record of his from the turntable and, in the most violent act I’d ever perpetrated, to smash it against the wall.

“You have just destroyed Quartet Number Sixteen in F Major,” he said, without moving from where he was smoking in the upper bunk, fully clothed and still in his shoes.

“I don’t care! I’m trying to get to sleep!”

The bare overhead lights had been flipped on by one of the other two boys. Both of them were out of their bunk beds and standing in their Jockey shorts waiting to see what would happen next.

“Such a nice polite little boy,” Flusser said. “So clean-cut. So upright. A bit rash with the property of others, but otherwise so ready and willing to be a human being.”

“What’s wrong with being a human being!”

“Everything,” Flusser replied with a smile. “Human beings stink to high heaven.”

“You stink!” I shouted. “You do, Flusser! You don’t shower, you don’t change your clothes, you never make your bed—you have got no consideration for anyone! You’re either emoting your head off at four in the morning or playing music as loud as you can!”

“Well, I am not a nice boy like you, Marcus.”

Here at last one of the others spoke up. “Take it easy,” he said to me. “He’s just a pain in the ass. Don’t take him so seriously.”

“But I’ve got to get my sleep!” I cried. “I can’t do my work without getting my sleep! I don’t want to wind up getting sick, for Christ’s sake!”

“Getting sick,” said Flusser, adding to the smile a small derisive laugh, “would do you a world of good.”

“He’s crazy!” I shouted at the other two. “Everything he says is crazy!”

“You destroy Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major,” said Flusser, “and I’m the one who’s crazy.”

“Knock it off, Bert,” said one of the other boys. “Shut up and let him go to sleep.”

“After what the barbarian has done to my record?”

“Tell him you’ll replace the record,” the boy said to me. “Tell him you’ll go downtown and buy him a new one. Go ahead, tell him, so we can all go back to bed.”

“I’ll buy you a new one,” I said, seething at the injustice of it all.

“Thank you,” Flusser said. “Thank you so much. You really are a nice boy, Marcus. Irreproachable. Marcus the well-washed, neatly dressed boy. You do the right thing in the end, just like Mama Aurelius taught you.”

I replaced the record out of what I earned waiting tables in the taproom of the inn. I did not like the job. The hours were far shorter than those I put in for my father at the butcher shop and yet, because of the din and the excessive drinking and the stink of beer and cigarette smoke that pervaded the place, the work turned out to be more tiring and, in its way, as disgusting as the worst things I had to do at the butcher shop. I myself didn’t drink beer or anything else alcoholic, I’d never smoked, and I’d never tried by shouting and singing at the top of my voice to make a dazzling impression on girls—as did any number of inebriates who brought their dates to the inn on Friday and Saturday nights. There were “pinning” parties held almost weekly in the taproom to celebrate the informal engagement of a Winesburg boy to a Winesburg girl by his presenting her with his fraternity pin for her to wear to class on the front of her sweater or blouse. Pinned as a junior, engaged as a senior, and married upon graduation—those were the innocent ends pursued by most of the Winesburg virgins during my own virginal tenure there.

There was a narrow cobblestone alleyway that ran back of the inn and the neighboring shops that fronted on Main Street, and students were in and out of the inn’s rear door all evening long either to vomit or to be off alone to try to feel up their girlfriends and dry-hump them in the dark. To break up the necking sessions, every half hour or so one of the town’s police cars would cruise slowly along the alleyway with its brights on, sending those desperate for an outdoor ejaculation scurrying for cover inside the inn. With rare exceptions, the girls at Winesburg were either wholesome-looking or homely, and they all appeared to know how to behave properly to perfection (which is to say, they appeared not to know how to misbehave or how to do anything that was considered improper), so when they got drunk, instead of turning raucous the way the boys did, they wilted and got sick. Even the ones who dared to step through the doorway into the alley to neck with their dates came back inside looking as though they’d gone out to the alley to have their hair done. Occasionally I would see a girl who attracted me, and while running back and forth with my pitchers of beer, I would turn my head to try to get a good look at her. Almost always I discovered that her date was the evening’s most aggressively obnoxious drunk. But because I was being paid the minimum wage plus tips, I arrived promptly at five every weekend to begin setting up for the night and worked till after midnight, cleaning up, and throughout tried to maintain a professional waiterly air despite people’s snapping their fingers at me to get my attention or whistling at me sharply with their fingers in their mouths and treating me more like a lackey than a fellow student who needed the work. More than a few times during the first weeks, I thought I heard myself being summoned to one of the rowdier tables with the words “Hey, Jew! Over here!” But, preferring to believe the words spoken had been simply “Hey, you! Over here!” I persisted with my duties, determined to abide by the butcher-shop lesson learned from my father: slit the ass open and stick your hand up and grab the viscera and pull them out; nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done.

Invariably, after my nights of working at the inn, there would be beer sloshing about me in all my dreams: dripping from the tap in my bathroom, filling the bowl of my toilet when I flushed it, flowing into my glass from the cartons of milk that I drank with my meals at the student cafeteria. In my dreams, nearby Lake Erie, which bordered to the north on Canada and to the south on the United States, was no longer the tenth-largest freshwater lake on earth but the largest body of beer in the world, and it was my job to empty it into pitchers to serve to fraternity boys bellowing belligerently, “Hey, Jew! Over here!”

Eventually I found an empty bunk in a room on the floor below the one where Flusser had been driving me crazy and, after filing the appropriate papers with the secretary to the dean of men, moved in with a senior in the engineering school. Elwyn Ayers Jr. was a strapping, laconic, decidedly non-Jewish boy who studied hard, took his meals at the fraternity house where he was a member, and owned a black four-door LaSalle Touring Sedan built in 1940, the last year, as he explained to me, that GM manufactured that great automobile. It had been a family car when he was a kid, and now he kept it parked out back of the fraternity house. Only seniors were allowed to have cars, and Elwyn seemed to have his largely so as to spend his weekend afternoons tinkering with its impressive engine. After we’d come back from dinner—I took my macaroni and cheese in the cheerless student cafeteria with the other “independents” while he ate roast beef, ham, steak, and lamb chops with his fraternity brothers—he and I sat at separate desks facing the same blank wall and we did not speak all evening long. When we were finished studying, we washed up at the bank of sinks in the communal bathroom down the hall, got into our pajamas, muttered to each other, and went to sleep, I in the bottom bunk and Elwyn Ayers Jr. in the top.

Living with Elwyn was much like living alone. All I ever heard him talk about with any enthusiasm was the virtues of the 1940 LaSalle, with its wheelbase lengthened over previous models and with a larger carburetor that provided edged-up horsepower. In his quiet, flat Ohio accent, he’d make a dry crack that would cut off conversation when I felt like taking a break from studying to talk for a few minutes. But, lonely as it might sometimes be as Elwyn’s roommate, I had at least rid myself of the destructive nuisance who was Flusser and could get on with getting my A’s; the sacrifices my family was making to send me away to college made it imperative that I continue to get only A’s.

As a pre-law student majoring in political science, I was taking The Principles of American Government and American History to 1865, along with required courses in literature, philosophy, and psychology. I was also enrolled in ROTC and had every expectation that when I graduated I would be sent to serve as a lieutenant in Korea. The war was by then into a second horrible year, with three-quarters of a million Chinese Communist and North Korean troops regularly staging massive offensives and, after taking heavy casualties, the U.S.-led United Nations forces responding by staging massive counteroffensives. All the previous year, the front line had moved up and down the Korean peninsula, and Seoul, the South Korean capital, had been captured and liberated four times over. In April 1951 President Truman had relieved General MacArthur of his command after MacArthur threatened to bomb and blockade Communist China, and by September, when I entered Winesburg, his replacement, General Ridgway, was in the difficult first stages of armistice negotiations with a Communist delegation from North Korea, and the war looked as though it could go on for years, with tens of thousands more Americans killed, wounded, and captured. American troops had never fought in any war more frightening than this one, facing as they did wave after wave of Chinese soldiers seemingly impervious to our firepower, often fighting them in the foxholes with bayonets and their bare hands. U.S. casualties already totaled more than one hundred thousand, any number of them fatalities of the frigid Korean winter as well as of the Chinese army’s mastery of hand-to-hand combat and night fighting. Chinese Communist soldiers, attacking sometimes by the thousands, communicated not by radio and walkie-talkie—in many ways theirs was still a premechanized army—but by bugle call, and it was said that nothing was more terrifying than those bugles sounding in the pitch dark and swarms of the enemy, having stealthily infiltrated American lines, cascading with weapons ablaze down on our weary men, prostrate from cold and huddled for warmth in their sleeping bags.

The clash between Truman and MacArthur had resulted, the previous spring, in a Senate investigation into Truman’s firing of the general that I followed in the paper along with the war news, which I read obsessively from the moment I understood what might befall me if the conflict continued seesawing back and forth with neither side able to claim victory. I hated MacArthur for his right-wing extremism, which threatened to widen the Korean conflict into an all-out war with China, and perhaps even the Soviet Union, which had recently acquired the atomic bomb. A week after being fired, Mac-Arthur addressed a joint session of Congress; he argued for bombing Chinese air bases in Manchuria and using Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist troops in Korea, before concluding the speech with his famous farewell, vowing himself to “just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.” After the speech, some in the Republican Party began to promote the vainglorious general with the patrician airs, who was already by then in his seventies, as their nominee in the ’52 presidential election. Predictably, Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that the Democrat Truman’s firing of MacArthur was “perhaps the greatest victory the Communists have ever won.”

One semester of ROTC—or “Military Science,” as the program was designated in the catalogue—was a requirement for all male students. To qualify as an officer and to enter the army as a second lieutenant for a two-year stint in the Transportation Corps after graduation, a student had to take no fewer than four semesters of ROTC. If you took only the one required semester, on graduating you would be just another guy caught in the draft and, after basic training, could well wind up as a lowly infantry private with an M-1 rifle and a fixed bayonet in a freezing Korean foxhole awaiting the bugles’ blare.

My Military Science class met one and a half hours a week. From an educational perspective, it seemed to me a childish waste of time. The captain who was our teacher appeared dimwitted compared with my other teachers (who were themselves slow to impress me), and the material we read was of no interest at all. “Rest the butt of your rifle on the ground with the barrel to the rear. Hold the toe of the butt against your right shoe and on line with the toe. Hold the rifle between the thumb and fingers of your right hand …” Nonetheless, I applied myself on tests and answered questions in class so as to be sure I would be invited to take advanced ROTC. Eight older cousins—seven on my father’s side and one on my mother’s—had seen combat in World War Two, two of them lowly riflemen who’d been killed less than a decade back, one at Anzio in ’43 and the other in the Battle of the Bulge in ’44. I thought my chances for survival would be far better if I entered the army as an officer, especially if, on the basis of my college grades and my class standing—I was determined to become valedictorian—I was able to get transferred out of transportation (where I could wind up serving in a combat zone) and into army intelligence once I was in the service.

I wanted to do everything right. If I did everything right, I could justify to my father the expense of my being at college in Ohio rather than in Newark. I could justify to my mother her having to work full time in the store again. At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, stolid father suddenly stricken with uncontrollable fear for a grown-up son’s well-being. Though I was enrolled in a pre-law program, I did not really care about becoming a lawyer. I hardly knew what a lawyer did. I wanted to get A’s, get my sleep, and not fight with the father I loved, whose wielding of the long, razor-sharp knives and the hefty meat cleaver had made him my first fascinating hero as a little boy. I envisioned my father’s knives and cleavers whenever I read about the bayonet combat against the Chinese in Korea. I knew how murderously sharp sharp could be. And I knew what blood looked like, encrusted around the necks of the chickens where they had been ritually slaughtered, dripping out of the beef onto my hands when I was cutting a rib steak along the bone, seeping through the brown paper bags despite the wax paper wrappings within, settling into the grooves crosshatched into the chopping block by the force of the cleaver crashing down. My father wore an apron that tied around the neck and around the back and it was always bloody, a fresh apron always smeared with blood within an hour after the store opened. My mother too was covered in blood. One day while slicing a piece of liver—which can slide or wiggle under your hand if you don’t hold it down firmly enough—she cut her palm and had to be rushed to the hospital for twelve painful stitches. And, careful and attentive as I tried to be, I had nicked myself dozens of times and had to be bandaged up, and then my father would upbraid me for letting my mind wander while I was working with the knife. I grew up with blood—with blood and grease and knife sharpeners and slicing machines and amputated fingers or missing parts of fingers on the hands of my three uncles as well as my father—and I never got used to it and I never liked it. My father’s father, dead before I was born, had been a kosher butcher (he was the Marcus I was named for, and he, because of his hazardous occupation, was missing half of one thumb), as were my father’s three brothers, Uncle Muzzy, Uncle Shecky, and Uncle Artie, each of whom had a shop like ours in a different part of Newark. Blood on the slotted, raised wooden flooring back of the refrigerated porcelain-and-glass showcases, on the weighing scales, on the sharpeners, fringing the edge of the roll of wax paper, on the nozzle of the hose we used to wash down the refrigerator floor—the smell of blood the first thing that would hit me whenever I visited my uncles and aunts in their stores. That smell of carcass after it’s slaughtered and before it’s been cooked would hit me every time. Then Abe, Muzzy’s son and heir apparent, was killed at Anzio, and Dave, Shecky’s son and heir apparent, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Messners who lived on were steeped in their blood.

All I knew about becoming a lawyer was that it was as far as you could get from spending your working life in a stinking apron covered with blood —blood, grease, bits of entrails, everything was on your apron from constantly wiping your hands on it. I had gladly accepted working for my father when it was expected of me, and I had obediently learned everything about butchering that he could teach me. But he never could teach me to like the blood or even to be indifferent to it.

One evening two members of the Jewish fraternity knocked on the door of the room while Elwyn and I were studying and asked if I could come out to have a talk with them at the Owl, the student hangout and coffee shop. I stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind me so as not to disturb Elwyn. “I don’t think I’m going to join a fraternity,” I told them. “Well, you don’t have to,” one of them replied. He was the taller of the two and stood several inches taller than me and had that smooth, confident, easygoing way about him that reminded me of all those magically agreeable, nice-looking boys who’d served as president of the Student Council back in high school and were worshiped by girlfriends who were star cheerleaders or drum majorettes. Humiliation never touched these youngsters, while for the rest of us it was always buzzing overhead like the fly or the mosquito that won’t go away. What did evolution have in mind by making but one out of a million look like the boy standing before me? What was the function of such handsomeness except to draw attention to everyone else’s imperfection? I hadn’t been wholly disregarded by the god of appearances, yet the brutal standard set by this paragon turned one, by comparison, into a monstrosity of ordinariness. While talking to him I had deliberately to look away, his features were so perfect and his looks that humbling, that shaming—that significant. “Why don’t you have dinner at the house some night?” he asked me. “Come tomorrow night. It’s roast beef night. You’ll have a good meal, and you’ll meet the brothers, and there’s no obligation to do anything else.” “No,” I said. “I don’t believe in fraternities.” “Believe in them? What is there to believe in or not believe in? A group of like-minded guys come together for friendship and camaraderie. We play sports together, we hold parties and dances, we take our meals together. It can be awfully lonely here otherwise. You know that out of twelve hundred students on this campus, less than a hundred are Jewish. That’s a pretty small percentage. If you don’t get into our fraternity, the only other house that’ll have a Jew is the nonsectarian house, and they don’t have much going for them in the way of facilities or a social calendar. Look, to introduce myself—my name is Sonny Cottler.” A mere mortal’s name, I thought. How could that be, with those flashing black eyes and that deeply cleft chin and that helmet of wavy dark hair? And so confidently fluent besides. “I’m a senior,” he said. “I don’t want to pressure you. But our brothers have noticed you and seen you around, and they think you’d make a great addition to the house. You know, Jewish boys have only been coming here in any numbers since just before the war, so we’re a relatively new fraternity on campus, and still we’ve won the Interfraternity Scholarship Cup more times than any other house at Winesburg. We have a lot of guys who study hard and go on to med school and law school. Think about it, why don’t you? And give me a ring at the house if you decide you want to come over and say hello. If you want to stay for dinner, all the better.”

The following night I had a visit from two members of the nonsectarian fraternity. One was a slight, blond-haired boy who I did not know was homosexual—like most heterosexuals my age, I didn’t quite believe that anyone was homosexual—and the other a heavyset, friendly Negro boy, who did the talking for the pair. He was one of three Negroes in the whole student body—there were none on the faculty. The other two Negroes were girls, and they were members of a small nonsectarian sorority whose membership was drawn almost entirely from the tiny population of Jewish girls on the campus. There was no face deriving from the Orient to be seen anywhere; everyone was white and Christian, except for me and this colored kid and a few dozen more. As for the student homosexuals among us, I had no idea how many there were. I didn’t understand, even while he was sleeping directly above me, that Bert Flusser was homosexual. That realization would arrive later.

The Negro said, “I’m Bill Quinby, and this is the other Bill, Bill Arlington. We’re from Xi Delta, the nonsectarian fraternity.”

“Before you go any further,” I said, “I’m not joining a fraternity. I’m going to be an independent.”

Bill Quinby laughed. “Most of the guys in our fraternity are guys who weren’t going to join a fraternity. Most of the guys in our fraternity aren’t guys who think like the ordinary male student on campus. They’re against discrimination and unlike the guys whose consciences can tolerate their being members of fraternities that keep people out because of their race or their religion. You seem to me to be the sort of person who thinks that way yourself. Am I wrong?”

“Fellas, I appreciate your coming around, but I’m not going to join any fraternity.”

“Might I ask why?” he said.

“I’d rather be on my own and study,” I said.

Again Quinby laughed. “Well, there too, most of the guys in our fraternity are guys who prefer to be on their own and study. Why not come around and pay us a visit? We’re not in any way Winesburg’s conventional fraternity. We’re a distinctive group, if I say so myself—a bunch of outsiders who have banded together because we don’t belong with the insiders or share their interests. You seem to me to be somebody who’d be at home in a house like ours.”

Then the other Bill spoke up, and with words pretty much like those uttered to me the night before by Sonny Cottler. “You can get awfully lonely on this campus living entirely on your own,” he said.

“I’ll take my chances,” I said. “I’m not afraid of being alone. I’ve got a job and I’ve got my studies, and that doesn’t leave much time for loneliness.”

“I like you,” Quinby said, laughing good-naturedly. “I like your certainty.”

“And half the guys in your fraternity,” I said, “have the same kind of certainty.” The three of us laughed together. I liked these two Bills. I even liked the idea of belonging to a fraternity with a Negro in it—that would be distinctive, especially when I brought him home to Newark for the Messner family’s big Thanksgiving dinner—but nonetheless I said, “I’ve got to tell you, I’m not in the market for anything more than my studies. I can’t afford to be. Everything rides on my studies.” I was thinking, as I often thought, especially on days when the news from Korea was particularly dire, of how I would go about maneuvering from the Transportation Corps into military intelligence after graduating as valedictorian. “That’s what I came for and that’s what I’m going to do. Thanks anyway.”

That Sunday morning, when I made my weekly collect call home to New Jersey, I was surprised to learn that my parents knew about my visit from Sonny Cottler. To prevent my father’s intruding in my affairs, I told the family as little as possible when I phoned. Mostly I assured them that I was feeling well and everything was fine. This sufficed with my mother, but my father invariably would ask, “So what else is going on? What else are you doing?” “Studying. Studying and working weekends at the inn.” “And what are you doing to divert yourself?” “Nothing, really. I don’t need diversions. I haven’t the time.” “Is there a girl in the picture yet?” “Not yet,” I’d say. “You be careful,” he’d say. “I will be.” “You know what I mean,” he’d say. “Yep.” “You don’t want to get in any trouble.” I’d laugh and say, “I won’t.” “On your own like that—I don’t like the sound of it,” my father said. “I’m fine on my own.” “And if you make a mistake,” he said, “with nobody there to give you advice and see what you’re up to—then what?”

That was the standard conversation, permeated throughout with his hacking cough. On this Sunday morning, however, no sooner did I call than he said, “So we understand you met the Cottler boy. You know who he is, don’t you? His aunt lives here in Newark. She’s married to Spector, who owns the office supply store on Market Street. His uncle is Spector. When we said where you were, she told us that her maiden name was Cottler, and her brother’s family lives in Cleveland, and her nephew goes to the same college and is president of the Jewish fraternity. And president of the Interfraternity Council. A Jew and president of the Interfraternity Council. How about that? Donald. Donald Cottler. They call him Sonny, isn’t that right?” “That’s right,” I said. “So he came around—wonderful. He’s a basketball star, I understand, and a Dean’s List student. So what did he tell you?” “He made a pitch for his fraternity.” “And?” “I said I wasn’t interested in fraternity life.” “But his aunt says he’s a wonderful boy. All A’s, like you. And a handsome boy, I understand.” “Extremely handsome,” I said wearily. “A dreamboat.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” he replied. “Dad, stop sending people to visit me.” “But you’re off there all by yourself. They gave you three Jewish roommates when you arrived, and the first thing you do, you move out on them to find a Gentile and you room with him.” “Elwyn is the perfect roommate. Quiet, considerate, neat, and he’s studious. I couldn’t ask for anyone better.” “I’m sure, I’m sure, I have nothing against him. But then the Cottler boy comes around—” “Dad, I can’t take any more of this.” “But how do I know what’s going on with you? How do I know what you’re doing? You could be doing anything.” “I do one thing,” I said firmly. “I study and I go to class. And I make about eighteen bucks at the inn on the weekend.” “And what would be wrong with having some Jewish friends in a place like that? Somebody to eat a meal with, to go to a movie with—” “Look, I know what I’m doing.” “At eighteen years of age?” “Dad, I’m hanging up now. Mom?” “Yes, dear.” “I’m hanging up. I’ll speak to you next Sunday.” “But what about the Cottler boy—” were the last of his words that I heard.

There was a girl, if not yet in the picture, one that I had my eye on. She was a sophomore transfer student like me, pale and slender, with dark auburn hair and with what seemed to me an aloofly intimidating, self-confident manner. She was enrolled in my American history class and sometimes sat right next to me, but because I didn’t want to run the risk of her telling me to leave her alone, I hadn’t worked up the courage to nod hello, let alone speak to her. One night I saw her at the library. I was sitting at a desk up in the stacks that overlooked the main reading room; she was at one of the long tables on the reading room floor, diligently taking notes out of a reference book. Two things captivated me. One was the part in her exquisite hair. Never before had I been so vulnerable to the part in someone’s hair. The other was her left leg, which was crossed over her right leg and rhythmically swaying up and down. Her skirt fell midway down her calf, as was the style, but still, from where I was seated I could see beneath the table the unceasing movement of that leg. She must have remained there like that for two hours, steadily taking notes without a break, and all I did during that time was to look at the way that hair was parted in an even line and the way she never stopped moving her leg up and down. Not for the first time, I wondered what moving a leg like that felt like for a girl. She was absorbed in her homework, and I, with the mind of an eighteen-year-old boy, was absorbed in wanting to put my hand up her skirt. The strong desire to rush off to the bathroom was quelled by my fear that if I did so, I might get caught by a librarian or a teacher or even by an honorable student, be expelled from school, and wind up a rifleman in Korea.

That night, I had to sit at my desk until two A.M.—and with the gooseneck lamp twisted down to keep the glare of my light clear of Elwyn, asleep in the upper bunk—in order to finish the homework that I’d failed to do because of my being preoccupied with the auburn-haired girl’s swinging leg.

What happened when I took her out exceeded anything I could have imagined in the library bathroom, had I the daring to retreat to one of the stalls there to relieve myself temporarily of my desire. The rules regulating the lives of the girls at Winesburg were of the sort my father wouldn’t have minded their imposing on me. All female students, including seniors, had to sign in and out of their dormitories whenever they left in the evening, even to go to the library. They couldn’t stay out past nine on weekdays or past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, nor, of course, were they ever allowed in male dormitories or in fraternity houses except at chaperoned events, nor were men allowed inside the women’s dorms other than to wait on a florally upholstered chintz sofa in the small parlor to pick up a date whom the attendant downstairs would summon on the house phone; the attendant would have gotten the young man’s name from his student ID card, which he was required to show her. Since students other than seniors were prohibited from having cars on campus—and in a college with a preponderantly middle-class student body, only a few seniors had families who could provide for a car or its upkeep—there was almost no place where a student couple could be alone together. Some went out to the town cemetery and conducted their sex play against the tombstones or even down on the graves themselves; others got away with what little they could at the movies; but mostly, after evening dates, girls were thrust up against the trunks of trees in the dark of the quadrangle containing the three women’s dorms, and the misdeeds that the parietal regulations were intended to curb were partially perpetrated among the elms that beautified the campus. Mainly there was no more than fumbling and groping through layers of clothing, but among the male students the passion for satisfaction even that meager was boundless. Since evolution abhors unclimactic petting, the prevailing sexual code could be physically excruciating. Prolonged excitation that failed to result in orgasmic discharge could set strapping young men to hobbling about like cripples until the searing, stabbing, cramping pain of the widespread testicular torture known as blue balls would slowly diminish and pass away. On a weekend night at Winesburg, blue balls constituted the norm, striking down dozens between, say, ten and midnight, while ejaculation, that most pleasant and natural of remedies, was the ever-elusive, unprecedented event in the erotic career of a student libidinally at his lifetime’s peak of performance.

My roommate, Elwyn, loaned me his black LaSalle the night I took out Olivia Hutton. It was a weeknight, when I wasn’t working, and so we had to start out early to get her back to her dormitory by nine. We drove to L’Escargot, the fanciest restaurant in Sandusky County, about ten miles down Wine Creek from the college. She ordered snails, the featured dish, and I didn’t, not only because I’d never had them and couldn’t imagine eating them, but because I was trying to keep the cost down. I took her to L’Escargot because she seemed far too sophisticated for a first date at the Owl, where you could get a hamburger, french fries, and a Coke for under fifty cents. Besides, as out of place as I felt at L’Escargot, I felt more so at the Owl, whose patrons were usually jammed into booths together alongside members of their own fraternities or sororities and, as far as I could tell, spoke mostly about social events of the previous weekend or those of the weekend to come. I had enough of them and their socializing while waiting tables at the Willard.

She ordered the snails and I didn’t. She was from wealthy suburban Cleveland and I wasn’t. Her parents were divorced and mine weren’t, nor could they possibly be. She’d transferred from Mount Holyoke back to Ohio for reasons having to do with her parents’ divorce, or so she said. And she was even prettier than I had realized in class. I’d never before looked her in the eyes long enough to see the size of them. Nor had I noticed the transparency of her skin. Nor had I dared to look at her mouth long enough to realize how full her upper lip was and how provocatively it protruded when she spoke certain words, words beginning with “m” or “w” or “wh” or “s” or “sh,” as in the commonplace affirmation “Sure,” which Olivia pronounced as though it rhymed with “purr” and I as though it rhymed with “cure.”

After we’d been speaking for some ten or fifteen minutes, she surprisingly reached across the table to touch the back of my hand. “You’re so intense,” she said. “Relax.”

“I don’t know how to,” I said, and though I meant it as a lighthearted, self-effacing joke, it happened to be true. I was always working on myself. I was always pursuing a goal. Delivering orders and flicking chickens and cleaning butcher blocks and getting A’s so as never to disappoint my parents. Shortening up on the bat to just meet the ball and get it to drop between the infielders and the outfielders of the opposing team. Transferring from Robert Treat to get away from my father’s unreasonable strictures. Not joining a fraternity in order to concentrate exclusively on my studies. Taking ROTC dead seriously in an attempt not to wind up dead in Korea. And now the goal was Olivia Hutton. I’d taken her to a restaurant whose cost came to nearly half of a weekend’s earnings because I wanted her to think I was, like her, a worldly sophisticate, and simultaneously I wanted dinner to end almost before it had begun so that I could get her into the car’s front seat and park somewhere and touch her. To date, the limit of my carnality was touching. I’d touched two girls in high school. Each had been a girlfriend for close to a year. Only one had been willing to touch me back. I had to touch Olivia because touching her was the only path to follow if I was to lose my virginity before I graduated from college and went into the army. There—yet another goal: despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.

After dinner, I drove out beyond the campus to the edge of town to park on the road alongside the town cemetery. It was already a little after eight, and I had less than an hour to get her back to the dormitory and inside the doors before they were locked for the night. I didn’t know where else to park, even though I was fearful of the police car that patrolled the alley back of the inn pulling up behind Elwyn’s car with its brights on and one of the cops coming around on foot to shine a flashlight into the front seat and to ask her, “Everything all right, Miss?” That’s what the cops said when they did it, and in Winesburg they did it all the time.

So I had the cops to worry about, and the late hour—8:10—when I cut off the engine of the LaSalle and turned to kiss her. Without a fuss she kissed me back. I instructed myself, “Avoid rejection—stop here!” but the advice was fatuous, and my erection concurred. I delicately slipped my hand under her coat and unbuttoned her blouse and moved my fingers onto her bra. In response to my beginning to fondle her through the cloth cup of her bra, she opened her mouth wider and continued kissing me, now with the added enticement of the stimulus of her tongue. I was alone in a car on an unlit road with my hand moving around inside someone’s blouse and her tongue moving around inside my mouth, the very tongue that lived alone down in the darkness of her mouth and that now seemed the most promiscuous of organs. Till that moment I was wholly innocent of anyone’s tongue in my mouth other than my own. That alone nearly made me come. That alone was surely enough. But the rapidity with which she had allowed me to proceed—and that darting, swabbing, gliding, teeth-licking tongue, the tongue, which is like the body stripped of its skin—prompted me to attempt to delicately move her hand onto the crotch of my pants. And again I met with no resistance. There was no battle.

What happened next I had to puzzle over for weeks afterward. And even dead, as I am and have been for I don’t know how long, I try to reconstruct the mores that reigned over that campus and to recapitulate the troubled efforts to elude those mores that fostered the series of mishaps ending in my death at the age of nineteen. Even now (if “now” can be said to mean anything any longer), beyond corporeal existence, alive as I am here (if “here” or “I” means anything) as memory alone (if “memory,” strictly speaking, is the all-embracing medium in which I am being sustained as “myself”), I continue to puzzle over Olivia’s actions. Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime’s minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component? Or can it be that this is merely the afterlife that is mine, and as each life is unique, so too is each afterlife, each an imperishable fingerprint of an afterlife unlike anyone else’s? I have no means of telling. As in life, I know only what is, and in death what is turns out to be what was. You are not just shackled to your life while living it, you continue to be stuck with it after you’re gone. Or, again, maybe I do, I alone. Who could have told me? And would death have been any less terrifying if I’d understood that it wasn’t an endless nothing but consisted instead of memory cogitating for eons on itself? Though perhaps this perpetual remembering is merely the anteroom to oblivion. As a nonbeliever, I assumed that the afterlife was without a clock, a body, a brain, a soul, a god—without anything of any shape, form, or substance, decomposition absolute. I did not know that it was not only not without remembering but that remembering would be the everything. I have no idea, either, whether my remembering has been going on for three hours or for a million years. It’s not memory that’s obliviated here—it’s time. There is no letup—for the afterlife is without sleep as well. Unless it’s all sleep, and the dream of a past forever gone is with the deceased one forever. But dream or no dream, here there is nothing to think about but the bygone life. Does that make “here” hell? Or heaven? Better than oblivion or worse? You would imagine that at least in death uncertainty would vanish. But inasmuch as I have no idea where I am, what I am, or how long I am to remain in this state, uncertainty appears to be enduring. This is surely not the spacious heaven of the religious imagination, where all of us good people are together again, happy as can be because the sword of death is no longer hanging over our heads. For the record, I have a strong suspicion that you can die here too. You can’t go forward here, that’s for sure. There are no doors. There are no days. The direction (for now?) is only back. And the judgment is endless, though not because some deity judges you, but because your actions are naggingly being judged for all time by yourself.

If you ask how this can be—memory upon memory, nothing but memory—of course I can’t answer, and not because neither a “you” nor an “I” exists, any more than do a “here” and a “now,” but because all that exists is the recollected past, not recovered, mind you, not relived in the immediacy of the realm of sensation, but merely replayed. And how much more of my past can I take? Retelling my own story to myself round the clock in a clock-less world, lurking disembodied in this memory grotto, I feel as though I’ve been at it for a million years. Is this really to go on and on—my nineteen little years forever while everything else is absent, my nineteen little years inescapably here, persistently present, while everything that went into making real the nineteen years, while everything that put one squarely in the midst of, remains a phantasm far, far away?

I could not believe then—ridiculously enough, I cannot still—that what happened next happened because Olivia wanted it to happen. That was not the way it went between a conventionally brought-up boy and a nice well-bred girl when I was alive and it was 1951 and, for the third time in just over half a century, America was at war again. I certainly could never believe that what happened might have anything to do with her finding me attractive, let alone desirable. What girl found a boy “desirable” at Winesburg College? I for one had never heard of such feelings existing among the girls of Winesburg or Newark or anywhere else. As far as I knew, girls didn’t get fired up with desire like that; they got fired up by limits, by prohibitions, by outright taboos, all of which helped to serve what was, after all, the overriding ambition of most of the coeds who were my contemporaries at Winesburg: to reestablish with a reliable young wage earner the very sort of family life from which they had temporarily been separated by attending college, and to do so as rapidly as possible.

Nor could I believe that what Olivia did she did because she enjoyed doing it. The thought was too astonishing even for an open-minded, intelligent boy like me. No, what happened could only be a consequence of something being wrong with her, though not necessarily a moral or intellectual failing—in class she struck me as mentally superior to any girl I’d ever known, and nothing at dinner had led me to believe that her character was anything but solid through and through. No, what she did would have to have been caused by an abnormality. “It’s because her parents are divorced,” I told myself. There was no other explanation for an enigma so profound.

When I got to the room later, Elwyn was still studying. I gave him back the keys to the LaSalle, and he accepted them while continuing to underline the text in one of his engineering books. He was wearing his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, and four empty Coke bottles stood upright beside him on the desk. He’d go through another four at least before packing it in around midnight. I wasn’t surprised by his not asking me about my date—he himself never went on dates and never attended his fraternity’s social events. He had been a high school wrestler in Cincinnati but had given up sports in college to pursue his engineering degree. His father owned a tugboat company on the Ohio River, and his plan was to succeed his father someday as head of the firm. In pursuit of that goal he was even more single-minded than I was.

But how could I wash and get into my pajamas and go to sleep and say nothing to anyone about something so extraordinary having happened to me? Yet that’s what I set out to do, and almost succeeded in doing, until, after lying in my bunk for about a quarter of an hour while Elwyn remained studying at his desk, I bolted upright to announce, “She blew me.”

“Uh-huh,” Elwyn said without turning his head from the page he was studying.

“I got sucked off.”

“Yep,” said Elwyn in due time, teasing out the syllable to signal that his attention was going to remain on his work regardless of what I might take it in my head to start going on about.

“I didn’t even ask for it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for it. I don’t even know her. And she blew me. Did you ever hear of that happening?”

“Nope,” replied Elwyn.

“It’s because her parents are divorced.”

Now he turned to look at me. He had a round face and a large head and his features were so basic that they might have been modeled on those carved by a child for a Halloween pumpkin. Altogether he was constructed on completely utilitarian lines and did not look as though he had, like me, to keep a sharp watch over his emotions—if, that is, he had any of an unruly nature that required monitoring. “She tell you that?” he asked.

“She didn’t say anything. I’m only guessing. She just did it. I pulled her hand onto my pants, and on her own, without my doing anything more, she unzipped my fly and took it out and did it.”

“Well, I’m very happy for you, Marcus, but if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.”

“I want to thank you for the car. It wouldn’t have happened without the car.”

“Run all right?”

“Perfect.”

“Should. Just greased ’er.”

“She must have done it before,” I said to Elwyn. “Don’t you think?”

“Could be,” Elwyn replied.

“I don’t know what to make of it.”

“That’s clear.”

“I don’t know if I should see her again.”

“Up to you,” he said with finality, and so, in silence, I lay atop my bunk bed barely able to sleep for trying to figure out on my own what to think of Olivia Hutton. How could such bliss as had befallen me also be such a burden? I who should have been the most satisfied man in all of Winesburg was instead the most bewildered.

Strange as Olivia’s conduct was when I thought about it on my own, it was more impenetrable still when she and I showed up at history class and, as usual, sat beside each other and I immediately resumed remembering what she had done—and what I had done in response. In the car, I had been so taken by surprise that I had sat straight up in the seat and looked down at the back of her head moving in my lap as if I were watching someone doing it to somebody other than me. Not that I had seen such a thing done before, other than in the stray “dirty picture”—always raggedy-edged and ratty-looking from being passed back and forth between so many hundreds of horny boys’ hands—that would invariably be among the prized possessions of the renegade kid at the bottom of one’s high school class. I was as transfixed by Olivia’s complicity as by the diligence and concentration she brought to the task. How did she know what to do or how to do it? And what would happen if I came, which seemed a strong likelihood from the very first moment? Shouldn’t I warn her—if there was time enough to warn her? Shouldn’t I shoot politely into my handkerchief ? Or fling open the car door and spray the cemetery street instead of one or the other of us? Yes, do that, I thought, come into the street. But, of course, I couldn’t. The sheer unimaginableness of coming into her mouth—of coming into anything other than the air or a tissue or a dirty sock—was an allurement too stupendous for a novice to forswear. Yet Olivia said nothing.

All I could figure was that for a daughter of divorced parents, whatever she did or whatever was done to her was okay with her. It would be some time before it would dawn on me, as it has finally (millennia later, for all I know), that whatever I did might be okay with me, too.

Days passed and I didn’t ask her out again. Nor after class, when we were all drifting into the hallway, did I try to talk to her again. Then, one chilly fall morning, I ran into her at the student bookstore. I can’t say that I hadn’t been hoping to run into her somewhere, despite the fact that when we met in class I didn’t even acknowledge her presence. Every time I turned a corner on that campus, I was hoping not only to see her but to hear myself saying to her, “We have to go on another date. I have to see you. You have to become mine and no one else’s!”

She was wearing a camel’s hair winter coat and high woolen socks and over her auburn hair a snug white wool hat with a fleecy, red woven ball at the top. Directly in from the out-of-doors, with red cheeks and a slightly runny nose, she looked like the last girl in the world to give anyone a blowjob.

“Hello, Marc,” she said.

“Oh, yes, hi,” I said.

“I did that because I liked you so much.”

“Pardon?”

She pulled off her hat and shook out her hair—thick and long and not cut short with a little crimp of curls over the forehead, as was the hairdo worn by most every other coed on the campus.

“I said I did that because I liked you,” she told me. “I know you can’t figure it out. I know that’s why I haven’t heard from you and why you ignore me in class. So I’m figuring it out for you.” Her lips parted in a smile, and I thought, With those lips, she, without my urging, completely voluntarily … And yet I was the one who felt shy! “Any other mysteries?” she asked.

“Oh, no, that’s okay.”

“It’s not,” she said, and now she was frowning, and every time her expression changed her beauty changed with it. She wasn’t one beautiful girl, she was twenty-five different beautiful girls. “You’re a hundred miles away from me. No, it’s not okay with you,” she said. “I liked your seriousness. I liked your maturity at dinner—or what I took to be maturity. I made a joke about it, but I liked your intensity. I’ve never met anyone so intense before. I liked your looks, Marcus. I still do.”

“Did you ever do that with someone else?”

“I did,” she said, without hesitation. “Has no one ever done it with you?”

“No one’s come close.”

“So you think I’m a slut,” she said, frowning again.

“Absolutely not,” I rushed to assure her.

“You’re lying. That’s why you won’t speak to me. Because I’m a slut.”

“I was surprised,” I said, “that’s all.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I was surprised too?”

“But you’ve done it before. You just told me you did.”

“This was the second time.”

“Were you surprised the first time?”

“I was at Mount Holyoke. It was at a party at Amherst. I was drunk. The whole thing was awful. I didn’t know anything. I was drinking all the time. That’s why I transferred. They suspended me. I spent three months at a clinic drying out. I don’t drink anymore. I don’t drink anything alcoholic and I won’t ever again. This time when I did it I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t crazy. I wanted to do it to you not because I’m a slut but because I wanted to do it to you. I wanted to give you that. Can’t you understand that I wanted to give you that?”

“It seems as though I can’t.”

“I–wanted–to–give–you–what–you–wanted. Are those words impossible to understand? They’re almost all of one syllable. God,” she said crossly, “what’s wrong with you?”

The next time we were together in history class, she chose to sit in a chair at the back of the room so I couldn’t see her. Now that I knew that she had had to leave Mount Holyoke because of drinking and that she’d had then to enter a clinic for three months to stop drinking, I had even stronger reasons to keep away from her. I didn’t drink, my parents drank barely at all, and what business did I have with somebody who, not even twenty years old, already had a history of having been hospitalized for drinking? Yet despite my being convinced that I must have nothing further to do with her, I sent her a note through the campus mail:

Dear Olivia,

You think I’ve spurned you because of what happened in the car that night. I haven’t. As I explained, it’s because nothing approaching that had ever happened to me before. Just as no girl ever before has said to me anything resembling what you said in the bookstore. I had girlfriends whose looks I’ve liked and who I told how pretty they were, but no girl till you has ever said to me that she liked my looks or expressed admiration for anything else about me. That isn’t the way it worked with any girl I’ve known before or that I’ve ever heard of—which is something that I’ve realized about my life only since you spoke your mind in the bookstore. You are different from anyone I’ve known, and the last thing you could ever be called is a slut. I think you’re a wonder. You’re beautiful. You’re mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That’s what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me. Say hello to me in class.

Marc

But she didn’t say anything; she wouldn’t even look my way. She wanted nothing further to do with me. I’d lost her, and not, I realized, because her parents were divorced but because mine were not.

No matter how often I told myself I was better off without her and that she drank for the same reason she’d given me the blowjob, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I was afraid of her. I was as bad as my father. I was my father. I hadn’t left him back in New Jersey, hemmed in by his apprehension and unhinged by fearful premonitions; I had become him in Ohio.

When I phoned the dormitory, she wouldn’t take my calls. When I tried to get her to talk with me after class, she walked away. I wrote again:

Dear Olivia,

Speak to me. See me. Forgive me. I’m ten years older than when we met. I’m a man.

Marc

Because of something puerile in those last three words—puerile and pleading and false—I carried the letter in my pocket for close to a week before I dropped it into the slotted box for campus mail in the dormitory basement.

I got this in return:

Dear Marcus,

I can’t see you. You’ll only run away from me again, this time when you see the scar across the width of my wrist. Had you seen it the night of our date I would have honestly explained it to you. I was prepared to do that. I didn’t try to cover it up, but as it happened you failed to notice it. It’s a scar from a razor. I tried to kill myself at Mount Holyoke. That’s why I went for three months to the clinic. It was the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. The Menninger Sanitarium and Psychopathic Hospital. There’s the full name for you. My father is a doctor and he knows people there and that’s where the family hospitalized me. I used the razor when I was drunk but I had been thinking about doing it for a long time, all that while I wasn’t living but went from class to class acting as though I were living. Had I been sober I would have succeeded. So three cheers for ten rye and gingers—they’re why I’m alive today. That, and my incapacity to carry anything out. Even suicide is beyond me. I cannot justify my existence even that way. Self-accusation is my middle name.

I don’t regret doing what we did, but we mustn’t do anything more. Forget about me and go on your way. There’s no one around here like you, Marcus. You didn’t just become a man—you’ve more than likely been one all your life. I can’t ever imagine you as a “kid” even when you were one. And certainly never a kid like the kids around here. You are not a simple soul and have no business being here. If you survive the squareness of this hateful place, you’re going to have a sterling future. Why did you come to Winesburg to begin with? I’m here because it’s so square—that’s supposed to make me a normal girl. But you? You should be studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and living in a garret in Montparnasse. We both should. Farewell, beauticious man!

Olivia

I read the letter twice over, then, for all the good it did me, shouted, “There’s no one around here like you! You’re no simple soul either!” I had seen her using her Parker 51 fountain pen to take notes in class—a brown-and-red tortoiseshell pen—but I had never before seen her handwriting or how she signed her name with the nib of that pen, the narrow way she formed the “O,” the strange height at which she dotted the two “i”s, the long graceful upswept tail at the end of the concluding “a.” I put my mouth to the page and kissed the “O.” Kissed it and kissed it. Then, impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the signature, patiently as a cat at his milk bowl I licked away until there was no longer the “O,” the “l,” the “i,” the “v,” the second “i,” the “a”—licked until the upswept tail was completely gone. I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name. I had all I could do not to eat the whole thing.

That night I couldn’t concentrate on my homework but remained riveted by her letter, read it again and again, read it from top to bottom, then from bottom to top, starting with “beauticious man” and ending with “I can’t see you.” Finally I interrupted Elwyn at his desk and asked him if he would read it and tell me what he thought. He was my roommate, after all, in whose company I spent hours studying and sleeping. I said, “I’ve never gotten a letter like this.” That was the bewildering refrain all through that last year of my life: never before anything like this. Giving such a letter to Elwyn—Elwyn who wanted to operate a tugboat company on the Ohio River—was, of course, a big and very stupid mistake.

“This the one that blew you?” he said when he finished.

“Well—yes.”

“In the car?”

“Well, you know that—yes.”

“Great,” he said. “All I need is for a cunt like that to slit her wrists in my LaSalle.”

I was enraged by his calling Olivia a cunt and determined then and there to find a new room and a new roommate. It took a week for me to discover a vacancy on the top floor of Neil Hall, the oldest residence on the campus, dating from the school’s beginnings as a Baptist seminary, and despite its exterior fire escapes, a building commonly referred to as The Firetrap. The room I found had been vacant for years before I again filed the appropriate papers with the secretary of the dean of men and moved in. It was tiny, at the far end of a hallway with a creaky wooden floor and a high, narrow dormer window that looked as though it hadn’t been washed since Neil Hall was built, the year after the Civil War.

I had wanted to pack and leave my Jenkins Hall room without having to see Elwyn and explain to him why I was going. I wanted to disappear and never endure those silences of his again. I couldn’t stand his silence and I couldn’t stand what little he said—and how grudgingly he said it—when he deigned to speak. I hadn’t realized how much I had disliked him even before he had called Olivia a cunt. The unbroken silences would make me think that he disapproved of me for some reason—because I was a Jew, because I wasn’t an engineering student, because I wasn’t a fraternity boy, because I wasn’t interested in tinkering with car engines or manning tugboats, because I wasn’t whatever else I wasn’t—or that he just didn’t care if I existed. Yes, he had loaned me his treasured LaSalle when I’d asked, which did momentarily seem to suggest that there was more fellow feeling between us than he was able or willing to make visible to me, or maybe just that he was sufficiently human to sometimes do something expansive and unexpected. But then he’d called Olivia a cunt, and I despised him for it. Olivia Hutton was a wonderful girl who’d somehow become a drunk at Mount Holyoke and had tragically tried to end her life with a razor blade. She wasn’t a cunt. She was a heroine.

I was still packing my two suitcases when Elwyn unexpectedly appeared in the room in the middle of the day, walked right by me, gathered up two books from the end of his desk, and turned and started back out the door, as usual without saying anything.

“I’m moving,” I told him.

“So?”

“Oh, fuck you,” I said.

He set down the books and punched me in the jaw. I felt as if I were going to collapse, then as if I were going to be sick, then, holding my face where he’d struck me, to see whether I was bleeding or the bone was broken or the teeth were knocked out, I watched as he picked up the two books and made his exit.

I didn’t understand Elwyn, didn’t understand Flusser, didn’t understand my father, didn’t understand Olivia—I understood no one and nothing. (Another big theme of my life’s last year.) Why had a girl so pretty and so intelligent and so sophisticated wanted to die at the age of nineteen? Why had she become a drunk at Mount Holyoke? Why had she wanted to blow me? To “give” me something, as she put it? No, there was more than that to what she’d done, but what that might be I couldn’t grasp. Everything couldn’t be accounted for by her parents’ divorce. And what difference would it make if it could? The more chagrined I became thinking about her, the more I wanted her; the more my jaw hurt, the more I wanted her. Defending her honor, I had been punched in the face for the first time in my life, and she didn’t know it. I was moving into Neil Hall because of her, and she didn’t know that either. I was in love with her, and she didn’t know that—I had only just found out myself. (Another theme: only just finding things out.) I had fallen in love with an ex–teenage drunk and inmate of a psychiatric sanitarium who’d failed at suicide with a razor blade, a daughter of divorced parents, and a Gentile to boot. I had fallen in love with—or I had fallen in love with the folly of falling in love with—the very girl my father must have been imagining me in bed with on that first night he’d locked me out of the house.

Dear Olivia,

I did see the scar at dinner. It wasn’t hard to figure out how it got there. I didn’t say anything, because if you didn’t care to talk about it, why should I? I also surmised, when you told me that you didn’t want anything to drink, that you were someone who once used to drink too much. Nothing in your letter comes as a surprise.

I would very much like it if we could at least get together to take a walk—

I was going to write “to take a walk down by Wine Creek” but didn’t, for fear that she would think I was perversely suggesting that she might want to jump in. I didn’t know what I was doing by lying to her about noticing the scar and then compounding the lie by saying I’d doped out her drinking all on my own. Until she’d told me of the drinking in her letter, and despite the drunkenness I witnessed each weekend while working at the Willard, I’d had no idea that anyone that young could even be an alcoholic. And as for accepting with equanimity the scar on her wrist—well, that scar, which I had not noticed the night of our date, was now all I could think about.

Was this moment to mark the beginning of a lifetime’s accumulation of mistakes (had I been given a lifetime in which to make them)? I thought then that it marked, if anything, the beginning of my manhood. Then I wondered if the two had coincided. All I knew was that the scar did it. I was transfixed. I’d never been so worked up over anyone before. The history of drinking, the scar, the sanitarium, the frailty, the fortitude—I was in bondage to it all. To the heroism of it all.

I finished the letter:

If you’d resume sitting next to me in History it would enable me to keep my mind on the class. I keep thinking of you sitting behind my back instead of thinking about what we’re studying. I look over at the space previously occupied by your body, and the temptation to turn is a perpetual source of distraction—because, beauticious Olivia, I want nothing more than to be close to you. I love your looks and am nuts about your exquisite frame.

I debated whether to write “am nuts about your exquisite frame, scar and all.” Would it appear insensitive of me to be making light of her scar, or would it appear a sign of my maturity to be making light of the scar? To play it safe, I didn’t write “scar and all” but added a cryptic P.S.—“I am moving to Neil Hall because of a disagreement with my roommate”—and sent the letter off through the campus mail.

She did not return to sit beside me in class but chose to remain at the back of the classroom, out of my sight. I nonetheless ran off every day at noon to my mailbox in the basement of Jenkins to see if she had answered me. Every day for a week I looked into an empty box, and when a letter finally appeared it was from the dean of men.

Dear Mr. Messner:

It has come to my attention that you have taken up residence in Neil Hall after having already briefly occupied two separate rooms in Jenkins. I am concerned about so many changes of residence on the part of a transfer student who has been at Winesburg as a sophomore for less than a semester. Will you please arrange with my secretary to come to my office sometime this week? A short meeting is in order, one that I’m sure will prove useful to both of us.

Yours sincerely,

Hawes D. Caudwell,

Dean of Men

The meeting with Dean Caudwell was scheduled for the following Wednesday, fifteen minutes after chapel ended at noon. Though Winesburg became a nonsectarian college only two decades after it was founded as a seminary, one of the last vestiges of the early days, when attending religious services was a daily practice, lay in the strict requirement that a student attend chapel, between eleven and noon on Wednesdays, forty times before he or she graduated. The religious content of the sermons had been diluted into—or camouflaged as—a talk on a high moral topic, and the speakers were not always clergymen: there were occasional religious luminaries like the president of the United Lutheran Church in America, but once or twice a month the speakers were faculty members from Winesburg or nearby colleges, or local judges, or legislators from the state assembly. More than half the time, however, chapel was presided over and the lectern occupied by Dr. Chester Donehower, the chairman of Winesburg’s religion department and a Baptist minister himself, whose continuing topic was “How to Take Stock of Ourselves in the Light of Biblical Teachings.” There was a robed choir of some fifty students, about two-thirds of whom were young women, and every week they sang a Christian hymn to open and close the hour; the Christmas and Easter programs featured the choir singing renditions of seasonal music and were the most popular chapels of the year. Despite the school’s having by then been secularized for nearly a century, chapel was held not in any of the college’s public halls but in a Methodist church, the most imposing church in town, located halfway between Main Street and the campus, and the only one large enough to accommodate the student body.

I objected strongly to everything about attending chapel, beginning with the venue. I didn’t think it fair to have to sit in a Christian church and listen for forty-five or fifty minutes to Dr. Donehower or anyone else preach to me against my will in order for me to qualify for graduation from a secular institution. I objected not because I was an observant Jew but because I was an ardent atheist.

Consequently, at the end of my first month at Winesburg, after having listened to a second sermon from Dr. Donehower even more cocksure about “Christ’s example” than the first, I went directly from the church back up to the campus and headed for the library’s reference section to sift through the college catalogues collected there, to look for another college to transfer to, one where I could continue to be free of my father’s surveillance but where I would not be forced to compromise my conscience by listening to biblical hogwash that I could not bear being subjected to. So as to be free of my father, I’d chosen a school fifteen hours by car from New Jersey, difficult to reach by bus or train, and more than fifty miles from the nearest commercial airport—but with no understanding on my part of the beliefs with which youngsters were indoctrinated as a matter of course deep in the heart of America.

To make it through Dr. Donehower’s second sermon, I had found it necessary to evoke my memory of a song whose fiery beat and martial words I had learned in grade school when World War Two was raging and our weekly assembly programs, designed to foster the patriotic virtues, consisted of us children singing in unison the songs of the armed services: the navy’s “Anchors Aweigh,” the army’s “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” the air corps’ “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,” the marine corps’ “From the Halls of Montezuma,” along with the songs of the Seabees and the wacs. We also sang what we were told was the national anthem of our Chinese allies in the war begun by the Japanese. It went as follows:

Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves!
With our very flesh and blood
We will build a new Great Wall!
China’s masses have met the day of danger.
Indignation fills the hearts of all of our
    countrymen,
Arise! Arise! Arise!
Every heart with one mind,
Brave the enemy’s gunfire,
March on!
Brave the enemy’s gunfire,
March on! March on! March on!

I must have sung this verse to myself fifty times during the course of Dr. Donehower’s second sermon, and then another fifty during the choir’s rendering of their Christian hymns, and every time giving special emphasis to each of the four syllables that melded together form the noun “indignation.”

The office of the dean of men was among a number of administrative offices lining the corridor of the first floor of Jenkins Hall. The men’s dormitory, where I had slept in a bunk bed first beneath Bertram Flusser and then beneath Elwyn Ayers, occupied the second and third floors. When I entered his office from the anteroom, the dean came around from behind his desk to shake my hand. He was lean and broad-shouldered, with a lantern jaw, sparkling blue eyes, and a heavy crest of silver hair, a tall man probably in his late fifties who still moved with the agility of the young athletic star he’d been in three sports at Winesburg just before World War I. There were photos of championship Winesburg athletic teams on his walls, and a bronzed football was displayed on a stand back of his desk. The only books in the office were the volumes of the college’s yearbook, the Owl’s Nest, arranged in chronological order in a glass-enclosed case behind him.

He motioned for me to take a seat in the chair across from his, and while returning to his side of the desk, he said amiably, “I wanted you to come in so we could meet and find out if I can be of any help to you in adjusting to Winesburg. I see by your transcript”—he lifted from his desk a manila folder he’d been riffling through when I entered—“that you earned straight A’s for your freshman year. I wouldn’t want anything at Winesburg to interfere in the slightest with such a stellar record of academic achievement.”

My undershirt was saturated with perspiration before I even sat down to stiffly speak my first few words. And, of course, I was still overwrought and agitated from just having left chapel, not only because of Dr. Donehower’s sermon but because of my own savage interior vocalizations of the Chinese national anthem. “Neither do I, sir,” I replied.

I had not expected to hear myself saying “sir” to the dean, though it was not that unusual for timidity—taking the form of great formality—to all but overwhelm me whenever I first had to confront a person of authority. Though my impulse wasn’t exactly to grovel, I had to fight off a strong sense of intimidation, and invariably I would manage this only by speaking with somewhat more bluntness than the interview required. Repeatedly I’d leave such encounters scolding myself for the initial timidity and then for the unnecessary candor by which I overcame it and swearing in the future to answer with the utmost brevity any questions put to me and otherwise to keep myself calm by shutting my mouth.

“Do you see any potential difficulties on the horizon here?” the dean asked me.

“No, sir. I don’t, sir.”

“How are things going with your classwork?”

“I believe well, sir.”

“You’re getting all you hoped for from your courses?”

“Yes, sir.”

This wasn’t strictly speaking true. My professors were either too starchy or too folksy for my taste, and during these first months on campus, I hadn’t as yet found any as spellbinding as those I’d had during my freshman year at Robert Treat. The teachers I’d had at Robert Treat nearly all commuted the twelve miles from New York City to Newark to teach, and they seemed to me bristling with energy and opinions—some of them decidedly and unashamedly left-wing opinions, despite prevailing political pressures—in ways these midwesterners were not. A couple of my Robert Treat teachers were Jews, excitable in a manner hardly foreign to me, but even the three who weren’t Jews talked a lot faster and more combatively than the professors at Winesburg, and brought with them into the classroom from the hubbub across the Hudson an attitude that was sharper and harder and more vital all around and that didn’t necessarily hide their aversions. In bed at night, with Elywn asleep in the top bunk, I thought often of those wonderful teachers I was lucky enough to have had there and whom I eagerly embraced and who first introduced me to real knowledge, and, with feelings of tenderness that were unforeseen and that nearly overwhelmed me, I thought of the friends from the freshman team, like my Italian buddy Angelo Spinelli, now all lost to me. I’d never felt at Robert Treat that there was some old way of life that everyone on the faculty was protecting, which was decidedly different from what I thought at Winesburg whenever I heard the boosters intoning the virtues of their “tradition.”

“You’re socializing enough?” Caudwell asked. “You’re getting around and meeting the other students?”

“Yes, sir.”

I waited for him to ask me to list those I had met so far, expecting he would then record their names on the legal pad in front of him—which had my name written in his script across the top—and bring them into his office to find out if I’d been telling the truth. But his response was only to pour a glass of water from a pitcher on a small table behind his desk and hand it across the desk to me.

“Thank you, sir.” I sipped at the water so it wouldn’t go down the wrong way and set me to coughing uncontrollably. I also flushed fiercely from realizing that just by listening to my first few answers he had been able to surmise how parched my mouth had become.

“Then the only problem is that you seem to be having some trouble settling into dormitory life,” he said. “Is that so? As I said in my letter, I’m a bit concerned about your having already resided in three different dormitory rooms in just your first weeks here. Tell me in your own words, what seems to be the trouble?”

The night before I had worked out an answer, knowing as I did that my moving was to be the meeting’s main subject. Only now I couldn’t remember what I’d planned to say.

“Could you repeat your question, sir?”

“Calm down, son,” Caudwell said. “Try a little more water.”

I did as he told me. I am going to be thrown out of school, I thought. For moving too many times I am going to be asked to leave Winesburg. That’s how this is going to wind up. Thrown out, drafted, sent to Korea, and killed.

“What’s the problem with your accommodations, Marcus?”

“In the room to which I was initially assigned”—yes, there they were, the words that I’d written out and memorized—“one of my three roommates was always playing his phonograph after I went to bed and I wasn’t able to get my night’s sleep. And I need my sleep in order to do my work. The situation was insupportable.” I had decided at the last minute on “insupportable” instead of “insufferable,” the adjective with which I’d rehearsed the previous night.

“But couldn’t you sit down and work out a time for his playing the phonograph that was agreeable to the two of you?” Caudwell asked me. “You had to move out? There was no other choice?”

“Yes, I had to move out.”

“No way of reaching a compromise.”

“Not with him, sir.” That’s as far as I went, hoping that he might find me admirable for protecting Flusser from exposure by not mentioning his name.

“Are you often unable to reach a compromise with people whom you don’t see eye to eye with?” “I wouldn’t say ‘often,’ sir. I wouldn’t say that anything like that has happened before.”

“How about your second roommate? Living with him doesn’t appear to have worked out either. Am I correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do you think that was so?”

“Our interests weren’t compatible.”

“So there was no room for compromise there either.”

“No, sir.”

“And now you’re living alone, I see. Living by yourself under the eaves in Neil Hall.”

“This far into the semester, that was the only empty room I could find, sir.”

“Drink some more water, Marcus. It’ll help.”

But my mouth was no longer dry. I was no longer sweating either. I was angered, in fact, by his saying “It’ll help,” when I considered myself over the worst of my nervousness and performing as well as anybody my age could be expected to in this situation. I was angered, I was humiliated, I was resentful, and I would not even look in the direction of the glass. Why should I have to go through this interrogation simply because I’d moved from one dormitory room to another to find the peace of mind I required to do my schoolwork? What business was it of his? Had he nothing better to do than interrogate me about my dormitory accommodations? I was a straight-A student—why wasn’t that enough for all my unsatisfiable elders (by whom I meant two, the dean and my father)?

“What about the fraternity you’re pledging? You’re eating your meals there, I take it.”

“I’m not pledging a fraternity, sir. I’m not interested in fraternity life.”

“What would you say your interests are, then?”

“My studies, sir. Learning.”

“That’s admirable, to be sure. But nothing more? Have you socialized with anyone at all since you’ve come to Winesburg?”

“I work on weekends, sir. I work at the inn as a waiter in the taproom. It’s necessary for me to work to assist my father in meeting my expenses, sir.”

“You don’t have to do that, Marcus—you can stop calling me sir. Call me Dean Caudwell, or call me Dean, if you like. Winesburg isn’t a military academy, and it’s not the turn of the century either. It’s 1951.”

“I don’t mind calling you sir, Dean.” I did, though. I hated it. That’s why I was doing it! I wanted to take the word “sir” and stick it up his ass for singling me out to come to his office to be grilled like this. I was a straight-A student. Why wasn’t that good enough for everybody? I worked on weekends. Why wasn’t that good enough for everybody? I couldn’t even get my first blowjob without wondering while I was getting it what had gone wrong to allow me to get it. Why wasn’t that good enough for everybody? What more was I supposed to do to prove my worth to people?

Promptly the dean mentioned my father. “It says here your father is a kosher butcher.”

“I don’t believe so, sir. I remember writing down just ‘butcher.’ That’s what I’d write on any form, I’m sure.”

“Well, that’s what you did write. I’m merely assuming that he’s a kosher butcher.”

“He is. But that’s not what I wrote down.”

“I acknowledged that. But it’s not inaccurate, is it, to identify him more precisely as a kosher butcher?”

“But neither is what I wrote down inaccurate.”

“I’d be curious to know why you didn’t write down ‘kosher,’ Marcus.”

“I didn’t think that was relevant. If some entering student’s father was a dermatologist or an orthopedist or an obstetrician, wouldn’t he just write down ‘physician’? Or ‘doctor’? That’s my guess, anyway.”

“But kosher isn’t in quite the same category.”

“If you’re asking me, sir, if I was trying to hide the religion into which I was born, the answer is no.”

“Well, I certainly hope that’s so. I’m glad to hear that. Everyone has a right to openly practice his own faith, and that holds true at Winesburg as it does everywhere else in this country. On the other hand, under ‘religious preference’ you didn’t write ‘Jewish,’ I notice, though you are of Jewish extraction and, in accordance with the college’s attempt to assist students in residing with others of the same faith, you were originally assigned Jewish roommates.”

“I didn’t write anything under religious preference, sir.”

“I can see that. I’m wondering why that is.”

“Because I have none. Because I don’t prefer to practice one religion over another.”

“What then provides you with spiritual sustenance? To whom do you pray when you need solace?”

“I don’t need solace. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in prayer.” As a high school debater I was known for hammering home my point—and that I did. “I am sustained by what is real and not by what is imaginary. Praying, to me, is preposterous.”

“Is it now?” he replied with a smile. “And yet so many millions do it.”

“Millions once thought the earth was flat, sir.”

“Yes, that’s true. But may I ask, Marcus, merely out of curiosity, how you manage to get by in life—filled as our lives inevitably are with trial and tribulation—lacking religious or spiritual guidance?”

“I get straight A’s, sir.”

That prompted a second smile, a smile of condescension that I liked even less than the first. I was prepared now to despise Dean Caudwell with all my being for putting me through this tribulation.

“I didn’t ask about your grades,” he said. “I know your grades. You have every right to be proud of them, as I’ve already told you.”

“If that is so, sir, then you know the answer to your question about how I get along without any religious or spiritual guidance. I get along just fine.”

I had begun to rile him up, I could see, and in just the ways that could do me no good.

“Well, if I may say so,” the dean said, “it doesn’t look to me like you get along just fine. At least you don’t appear to get along just fine with the people you room with. It seems that as soon as there’s a difference of opinion between you and a roommate, you pick up and leave.”

“Is there anything wrong with finding a solution in quietly leaving?” I asked, and within I heard myself beginning to sing, “Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves! With our very flesh and blood we will build a new Great Wall!”

“Not necessarily, no more than there is anything wrong with finding a solution in quietly working it out and staying. Look where you’ve wound up—in the least desirable room on this entire campus. A room where no one has chosen to live or has had to live for many years now. Frankly, I don’t like the idea of you up there alone. It’s the worst room at Winesburg, bar none. It’s been the worst room on the worst floor of the worst dorm for a hundred years. In winter it’s freezing and by early spring it’s already a hotbox, full of flies. And that’s where you’ve chosen to spend your days and nights as a sophomore student here.”

“But I’m not living there, sir, because I don’t have religious beliefs—if that is what you are suggesting in a roundabout way.”

“Why is it, then?”

“It’s as I explained it—” I said, meanwhile, in full voice, in my head, singing, “China’s masses have met the day of danger”—“in my first room I couldn’t get sufficient sleep because of a roommate who insisted on playing his phonograph late into the night and reciting aloud in the middle of the night, and in my second room I found myself living with someone whose conduct I considered intolerable.”

“Tolerance appears to be something of a problem for you, young man.”

“I never heard that said about me before, sir,” said I at the very instant I inwardly sang out the most beautiful word in the English language: “In-dig-na-tion!” I suddenly wondered what it was in Chinese. I wanted to learn it and go around the campus shouting it at the top of my lungs.

“There appear to be several things you’ve never heard about yourself before,” he replied. “But ‘before’ you were living at home, in the bosom of your childhood family. Now you’re living as an adult on his own with twelve hundred others, and what there is for you to master here at Winesburg, aside from mastering your studies, is to learn how to get along with people and how to extend tolerance to people who are not carbon copies of yourself.”

Stirred up now by my stealthy singing, I blurted out, “Then how about extending some tolerance to me? I’m sorry, sir, I don’t mean to be brash or insolent. But,” and, to my own astonishment, leaning forward, I hammered the side of my fist on his desk, “exactly what is the crime I’ve committed? So I’ve moved a couple of times, I’ve moved from one dorm room to another—is that considered a crime at Winesburg College? That makes me into a culprit?”

Here he poured some water and himself took a long drink. Oh, if only I could have graciously poured it for him. If only I could have handed him the glass and said, “Calm down, Dean. Try this, why don’t you?”

Smiling generously, he said, “Has anyone said it is a crime, Marcus? You display a fondness for dramatic exaggeration. It doesn’t serve you well and is a characteristic you might want to reflect upon. Now tell me, how do you get along with your family? Is everything all right at home between your mother and your father and you? I see from the form here, where you say you have no religious preference, that you also say you have no siblings. There’s the three of you at home, if I’m to take what you’ve written here to be accurate.”

“Why wouldn’t it be accurate, sir?” Shut up, I told myself. Shut up, and from here on out, stop marching on! Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t because the fondness for exaggeration wasn’t mine but the dean’s: this meeting was itself based on his giving a ridiculously exaggerated importance to where I chose to live. “I was accurate when I wrote that my father was a butcher,” I said. “He is a butcher. It isn’t I alone who would describe him as a butcher. He would describe himself as a butcher. It’s you who described him as a kosher butcher. Which is fine with me. But that’s not grounds for intimating that I’ve been in any way inaccurate in filling out my application form for Winesburg. It was not inaccurate for me to leave the religious-preference slot blank—”

“If I may interrupt, Marcus. How do you three get along, from your perspective? That’s the question I asked. You, your mother, and your father—how do you get along? A straight answer, please.”

“My mother and I get along perfectly well. We always have. So have my father and I gotten along perfectly well for most of my life. From my last year in grade school until I started at Robert Treat, I worked part time for him at the butcher shop. We were as close as a son and father could be. Of late there’s been some strain between us that’s made us both unhappy.”

“Strain over what, may I ask?”

“He’s been unnecessarily worried about my independence.”

“Unnecessarily because he has no reason to be?”

“None at all.”

“Is he worried, for instance, about your inability to adjust to your roommates here at Winesburg?”

“I haven’t told him about my roommates. I didn’t think it was that important. Nor is ‘inability to adjust’ a proper way to describe the difficulty, sir. I don’t want to be distracted from my studies by superfluous problems.”

“I wouldn’t consider your moving twice in less than two months a superfluous problem, and neither would your father, I’m sure, if he were apprised of the situation—as he has every right to be, by the way. I don’t think you would have bothered moving to begin with if you yourself saw it merely as a ‘superfluous problem.’ But be that as it may, Marcus, have you gone on any dates since you’ve been at Winesburg?”

I flushed. “Arise, ye who refuse—” “Yes,” I said.

“A few? Some? Many?”

“One.”

“Just one.”

Before he could dare to ask me with whom, before I had to speak her name and be pressed to answer a single question about what had transpired between the two of us, I rose from my chair. “Sir,” I said, “I object to being interrogated like this. I don’t see the purpose of it. I don’t see why I should be expected to answer questions about my relations with my roommates or my association with my religion or my appraisal of anyone else’s religion. Those are my own private affair, as is my social life and how I conduct it. I am breaking no laws, my behavior is causing no one any injury or harm, and in nothing that I’ve done have I impinged on anyone’s rights. If anyone’s rights are being impinged on, they are mine.”

“Sit down again, please, and explain yourself.”

I sat, and this time, on my own initiative, drank deeply from my glass of water. This was now beginning to be more than I could take, yet how could I capitulate when he was wrong and I was right? “I object to having to attend chapel forty times before I graduate in order to earn a degree, sir. I don’t see where the college has the right to force me to listen to a clergyman of whatever faith even once, or to listen to a Christian hymn invoking the Christian deity even once, given that I am an atheist who is, to be truthful, deeply offended by the practices and beliefs of organized religion.” Now I couldn’t stop myself, weakened as I felt. “I do not need the sermons of professional moralists to tell me how I should act. I certainly don’t need any God to tell me how. I am altogether capable of leading a moral existence without crediting beliefs that are impossible to substantiate and beyond credulity, that, to my mind, are nothing more than fairy tales for children held by adults, and with no more foundation in fact than a belief in Santa Claus. I take it you are familiar, Dean Caudwell, with the writings of Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell, the distinguished British mathematician and philosopher, was last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One of the works of literature for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize is a widely read essay first delivered as a lecture in 1927 entitled, ‘Why I Am Not a Christian.’ Are you familiar with that essay, sir?”

“Please sit down again,” said the dean.

I did as he told me, but said, “I am asking if you are familiar with this very important essay by Bertrand Russell. I take it that the answer is no. Well, I am familiar with it because I set myself the task of memorizing large sections of it when I was captain of my high school debating team. I haven’t forgotten it yet, and I have promised myself that I never will. This essay and others like it contain Russell’s argument not only against the Christian conception of God but against the conceptions of God held by all the great religions of the world, every one of which Russell finds both untrue and harmful. If you were to read his essay, and in the interest of open-mindedness I would urge you to do so, you would find that Bertrand Russell, who is one of the world’s foremost logicians as well as a philosopher and a mathematician, undoes with logic that is beyond dispute the first-cause argument, the natural-law argument, the argument from design, the moral arguments for a deity, and the argument for the remedying of injustice. To give you two examples. First, as to why there cannot be any validity to the first-cause argument, he says, ‘If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God.’ Second, as to the argument from design, he says, ‘Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?’ He also discusses the defects in Christ’s teaching as Christ appears in the Gospels, while noting that historically it is quite doubtful that Christ ever existed. To him the most serious defect in Christ’s moral character is his belief in the existence of hell. Russell writes, ‘I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment,’ and he accuses Christ of a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to his preaching. He discusses with complete candor how the churches have retarded human progress and how, by their insistence on what they choose to call morality, they inflict on all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. Religion, he declares, is based primarily and mainly on fear—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, and fear of death. Fear, Bertrand Russell says, is the parent of cruelty, and it is therefore no wonder that cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries. Conquer the world by intelligence, Russell says, and not by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from living in it. The whole conception of God, he concludes, is a conception unworthy of free men. These are the thoughts of a Nobel Prize winner renowned for his contributions to philosophy and for his mastery of logic and the theory of knowledge, and I find myself in total agreement with them. Having studied them and having thought them through, I intend to live in accordance with them, as I’m sure you would have to admit, sir, I have every right to do.”

“Please sit down,” said the dean once more.

I did. I hadn’t realized I had again gotten up. But that’s what the exhortation “Arise!,” stirringly repeated three successive times, can do to someone in a crisis.

“So you and Bertrand Russell don’t tolerate organized religion,” he told me, “or the clergy or even a belief in the divinity, any more than you, Marcus Messner, tolerate your roommates—as far as I can make out, any more than you tolerate a loving, hardworking father whose concern for the well-being of his son is of the highest importance to him. His financial burden in paying to send you away from home to college is not inconsiderable, I’m sure. Isn’t that so?”

“Why else would I be working at the New Willard House, sir? Yes, that’s so. I believe I told you that already.”

“Well, tell me now, and this time leaving out Bertrand Russell—do you tolerate anyone’s beliefs when they run counter to your own?”

“I would think, sir, that the religious views that are more than likely intolerable to ninety-nine percent of the students and faculty and administration of Winesburg are mine.”

Here he opened my folder and began slowly turning pages, perhaps to renew his recollection of my record, perhaps (I hoped) to prevent himself from expelling me on the spot for the charge I had so forcefully brought against the entire college. Perhaps merely to pretend that, esteemed and admired as he was at Winesburg, he was nonetheless someone who could bear to be contradicted.

“I see here,” he said to me, “that you are studying to be a lawyer. On the basis of this interview, I think you are destined to be an outstanding lawyer.” Unsmilingly now, he said, “I can see you one day arguing a case before the Supreme Court of the United States. And winning it, young man, winning it. I admire your directness, your diction, your sentence structure—I admire your tenacity and the confidence with which you hold to everything you say. I admire your ability to memorize and retain abstruse reading matter even if I don’t necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities.”

“But what about the Nobel Prize!”

“I even admire you now, Marcus, when you hammer on my desk and stand up to point at me so as to ask about the Nobel Prize. You have a fighting spirit. I admire that, or would admire it should you choose to harness it to a worthier cause than that of someone considered a criminal subversive by his own national government.”

“I didn’t mean to point, sir. I didn’t even know I did it.”

“You did, son. Not for the first time and probably not for the last. But that is the least of it. To find that Bertrand Russell is a hero of yours comes as no great surprise. There are always one or two intellectually precocious youngsters on every campus, self-appointed members of an elite intelligentsia who need to elevate themselves and feel superior to their fellow students, superior even to their professors, and so pass through the phase of finding an agitator or iconoclast to admire on the order of a Russell or a Nietzsche or a Schopenhauer. Nonetheless, these views are not what we are here to discuss, and it is certainly your prerogative to admire whomever you like, however deleterious the influence and however dangerous the consequences of such a so-called freethinker and self-styled reformer may seem to me. Marcus, what brings us together today, and what is worrying me today, is not your having memorized word for word as a high school debater the contrarianism of a Bertrand Russell that is designed to nurture malcontents and rebels. What worries me are your social skills as exhibited here at Winesburg College. What worries me is your isolation. What worries me is your outspoken rejection of long-standing Winesburg tradition, as witness your response to chapel attendance, a simple undergraduate requirement which amounts to little more than one hour of your time each week for about three semesters. About the same as the physical education requirement, and no more insidious, either, as you and I well know. In all my experience at Winesburg I have never come across a student yet who objected to either of those requirements as infringements on his rights or comparable to his being condemned to laboring in the salt mines. What worries me is how poorly you are fitting into the Winesburg community. To me it seems something to be attended to promptly and nipped in the bud.”

I’m being expelled, I thought. I’m being sent back home to be drafted and killed. He didn’t comprehend a single word I repeated to him from “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Or he did, and that’s why I’m going to be drafted and killed.

“I have both a personal and a professional responsibility to the students,” Caudwell said, “to their families—”

“Sir, I can’t stand any more of this. I feel as though I’m going to vomit.”

“Excuse me?” His patience exhausted, Caudwell’s startlingly brilliant, crystal-blue eyes were staring at me now with a lethal blend of disbelief and exasperation.

“I feel sick,” I said. “I feel as though I’m going to vomit. I can’t bear being lectured to like this. I am not a malcontent. I am not a rebel. Neither word describes me, and I resent the use of either one of them, even if it’s only by implication that they were meant to apply to me. I have done nothing to deserve this lecture except to find a room in which I can devote myself to my studies without distraction and get the sleep I need to do my work. I have committed no infraction. I have every right to socialize or not to socialize to whatever extent suits me. That is the long and the short of it. I don’t care if the room is hot or cold—that’s my worry. I don’t care if it’s full of flies or not full of flies. That isn’t the point! Furthermore, I must call to your attention that your argument against Bertrand Russell was not an argument against his ideas based on reason and appealing to the intellect but an argument against his character appealing to prejudice, i.e., an ad hominem attack, which is logically worthless. Sir, I respectfully ask your permission to stand up and leave now because I am afraid I am going to be sick if I don’t.”

“Of course you may leave. That’s how you cope with all your difficulties, Marcus—you leave. Has that never occurred to you before?” With another of those smiles whose insincerity was withering, he added, “I’m sorry if I wasted your time.”

He got up from behind his desk and so, with his seeming consent, I got up from my chair as well, this time to go. But not without a parting shot to set the record straight. “Leaving is not how I cope with my difficulties. Think back only to my trying to get you to open your mind to Bertrand Russell. I strongly object to your saying that, Dean Caudwell.”

“Well, at least we got over the ‘sir,’ finally … Oh, Marcus,” he said as he was seeing me to the door, “what about sports? It says here you played for your freshman baseball team. So at least, I take it, you believe in baseball. What position?”

“Second base.”

“And you’ll be going out for our baseball team?”

“I played freshman ball at a very tiny city college back home. Virtually anybody who went out for the team made it. There were guys on that team, like our catcher and our first baseman, who didn’t even play high school ball. I don’t think I’d be good enough to make the team here. The pitching will be faster than I’m used to, and I don’t think choking up on the bat, the way I did for the freshman team back home, is going to solve my hitting problem at this level of competition. Maybe I could hold my own in the field, but I doubt I’d be worth much at the plate.”

“So what I understand you to be saying is that you’re not going out for baseball because of the competition?”

“No, sir!” I exploded. “I’m not going out for the team because I’m realistic about my chances of making the team! And I don’t want to waste the time trying when I have all this studying to do! Sir, I’m going to vomit. I told you I would. It’s not my fault. Here it comes—sorry!”

I vomited then, though luckily not onto the dean or his desk. Head down, I robustly vomited onto the rug. Then, when I tried to avoid the rug, I vomited onto the chair in which I’d been sitting, and, when I spun away from the chair, vomited onto the glass of one of the framed photographs hanging on the dean’s wall, the one of the Winesburg undefeated championship football team of 1924.

I hadn’t the stomach to do battle with the dean of men any more than I had the stomach to do battle with my father or with my roommates. Yet battle I did, despite myself.

The dean had his secretary accompany me down the corridor to the door of the men’s room, where, once inside and alone, I washed my face and gargled with water that I cupped into my hands from beneath the spigot. I spat the water into the sink until I couldn’t taste a trace of vomit in my mouth or my throat, and then, using paper towels doused with hot water, I rubbed away as best I could at whatever had spattered onto my sweater, my trousers, and my shoes. Then I leaned on the sink and looked into the mirror at the mouth that I couldn’t shut. I clamped my teeth together so tightly that my bruised jawbone began throbbing with pain. Why did I have to mention chapel? Chapel is a discipline, I informed my eyes—eyes that, to my astonishment, looked unbelievably fearful. Treat their chapel as part of the job that you have to do to get through this place as valedictorian—treat it the way you treat eviscerating the chickens. Caudwell was right, wherever you go there will always be something driving you nuts—your father, your roommates, your having to attend chapel forty times—so stop thinking about transferring to yet another school and just graduate first in your class!

But when I was ready to leave the bathroom for my American government class, I got a whiff of vomit again and, looking down, saw the minutest specks of it clinging to the edges of the soles of both my shoes. I took off the shoes and with soap and water and paper towels stood at the sink in my stocking feet, washing away the last of the vomit and the last of the smell. I even took my socks off and held them up to my nose. Two students came in to use the urinals just as I was smelling my socks. I said nothing, explained nothing, put my socks back on, pushed my feet into my shoes, tied the laces, and left. That’s how you cope with all your difficulties, Marcus—you leave. Has that never occurred to you before?

I went outside and found myself on a beautiful midwestern college campus on a big, gorgeous, sunlit day, another grand fall day, everything around me blissfully proclaiming, “Delight yourselves in the geyser of life! You are young and exuberant and the rapture is yours!” Enviously I looked at the other students walking the brick paths that crisscrossed the green quadrangle. Why couldn’t I share the pleasure they took in the splendors of a little college that answered all their needs? Why instead am I in conflict with everyone? It began at home with my father, and from there it has doggedly followed me here. First there’s Flusser, then there’s Elwyn, then there’s Caudwell. And whose fault is it, theirs or mine? How had I gotten myself in trouble so fast, I who’d never before been in trouble in my life? And why was I looking for more trouble by writing fawning letters to a girl who only a year before had attempted suicide by slitting a wrist?

I sat on a bench and opened my three-ring binder and on a blank piece of lined paper I started in yet again. “Please answer me when I write to you. I can’t bear your silence.” Yet the weather was too beautiful and the campus too beautiful to find Olivia’s silence unbearable. Everything was too beautiful, and I was too young, and my only job was to become valedictorian! I continued writing: “I feel on the verge of picking up and leaving here because of the chapel requirement. I would like to talk to you about this. Am I being foolish? You ask how did I get here in the first place? Why did I choose Winesburg? I’m ashamed to tell you. And now I just had a terrible interview with the dean of men, who is sticking his nose into my business in a way that I’m convinced he has no right to do. No, it was nothing about you, or us. It was about my moving into Neil Hall.” Then I yanked the page out of the notebook as furiously as if I were my own father and tore it in pieces that I stuffed into my pants pocket. Us! There was no us!

I was wearing pleated gray flannel trousers and a check sport shirt and a maroon V-neck pullover and white buckskin shoes. It was the same outfit I’d seen on the boy pictured on the cover of the Winesburg catalogue that I’d sent away for and received in the mail, along with the college application forms. In the photo, he was walking beside a girl wearing a two-piece sweater set and a long, full dark skirt and turned-down white cotton socks and shiny loafers. She was smiling at him while they walked together as though he’d said to her something amusingly clever. Why had I chosen Winesburg? Because of that picture! There were big leafy trees on either side of the two happy students, and they were walking down a grassy hill with ivy-clad, brick buildings in the distance behind them, and the girl was smiling so appreciatively at the boy, and the boy looked so confident and carefree beside her, that I filled out the application and sent it off and within only weeks was accepted. Without telling anyone, I took from my savings account one hundred of the dollars that I’d diligently squirreled away of the wages I’d been paid as my father’s employee, and after my classes one day I walked over to Market Street and went into the city’s biggest department store and in their College Shop bought the pants and shirt and shoes and sweater that were worn by the boy in the photo. I had brought the Winesburg catalogue with me to the store; a hundred dollars was a small fortune, and I didn’t want to make a mistake. I also bought a College Shop herringbone tweed jacket. In the end I had just enough change left to take the bus home.

I was careful to bring the boxes of clothing into the house when I knew my parents were off working at the store. I didn’t want them to know about my buying the clothes. I didn’t want anybody to know. These were nothing like the clothes that the guys at Robert Treat wore. We wore the same clothes we’d worn in high school. You didn’t get a new outfit to go to Robert Treat. Alone in the house, I opened the boxes and laid the clothes out on the bed to see how they looked. I laid them out in place, as you would wear them—shirt, sweater, and jacket up top, trousers below, and shoes down near the foot of the bed. Then I pulled off everything I had on and dropped it at my feet like a pile of rags and put on the new clothes and went into the bathroom and stood on the lowered toilet seat lid so I was able to see more of myself in the medicine chest mirror than I would be able to see standing on the tile floor in my new white buckskin shoes with the pinkish rubber heels and soles. The jacket had two short slits, one on either side at the back. I’d never owned such a jacket before. Previously I’d owned two sport jackets, one bought for my bar mitzvah in 1945 and the other for my graduation from high school in 1950. Careful to take the tiniest steps, I rotated on the toilet seat lid to try to catch a look at my backside in that jacket with the slits. I put my hands in my pants pockets so as to look nonchalant. But there was no way of looking nonchalant standing on a toilet, so I climbed down and went into the bedroom and took off the clothes and put them back in their boxes, which I hid at the back of my bedroom closet, behind my bat, spikes, mitt, and a bruised old baseball. I had no intention of telling my parents about the new clothes, and I certainly wasn’t going to wear them in front of my friends at Robert Treat. I was going to keep them a secret till I got to Winesburg. The clothes I’d bought to leave home in. The clothes I’d bought to start a new life in. The clothes I’d bought to be a new man in and to end my being the butcher’s son.

Well, those were the very clothes on which I had vomited in Caudwell’s office. Those were the clothes that I wore when I sat in chapel trying how not to learn to lead a good life in accordance with biblical teachings and singing to myself instead the Chinese national anthem. Those were the clothes I’d been wearing when my roommate Elwyn had thrown the punch that had nearly broken my jaw. Those were the clothes I was wearing when Olivia went down on me in Elwyn’s LaSalle. Yes, there’s the picture of the boy and girl that should adorn the cover of the Winesburg catalogue: me in those clothes being blown by Olivia and having no idea what to make of it.

You don’t look yourself, Marcus. You all right? May I sit down?”

It was Sonny Cottler standing over me, wearing the same clothes that I was wearing, except that his wasn’t an ordinary maroon pullover sweater but a maroon and gray Winesburg letter sweater that he’d earned playing varsity basketball. That too. The ease with which he wore his clothes seemed an extension somehow of the deep voice that was so rich with authority and confidence. A quiet kind of carefree vigor, an invulnerability that he exuded, repelled me and attracted me at once, perhaps because it struck me, unreasonably or not, as being rooted in condescension. His seemingly being deficient in nothing left me oddly with the impression of someone who was actually deficient in everything. But then these impressions could have been no more than the offshoot of a sophomore’s envy and awe.

“Of course,” I answered. “Sure. Sit.”

“You look like you’ve been through the ringer,” he said.

He, of course, looked like he’d just finished shooting a scene on the MGM lot opposite Ava Gardner. “The dean called me in. We had a disagreement. We had an altercation.” Keep your mouth shut! I told myself. Why tell him? But I had to tell someone, didn’t I? I had to talk to someone at this place, and Cottler wasn’t necessarily a bad guy because my father had arranged for him to come to visit me in my room. Anyway, I felt so misunderstood all around that I might have looked up at the sky and howled like a dog if he hadn’t happened by.

As calmly as I could, I told him about the dispute over chapel attendance between the dean and me.

“But,” Cottler asked, “who goes to chapel? You pay somebody to go for you and you never have to go anywhere near chapel.”

“Is that what you do?”

He laughed softly. “What else would I do? I went one time. I went in my freshman year. It was when they had a rabbi. They have a Catholic priest once each semester, and they have a rabbi over from Cleveland once a year. Otherwise it’s Dr. Donehower and other great Ohio thinkers. The rabbi’s passionate devotion to the concept of kindness was enough to cure me of chapel for good.”

“How much do you have to pay?”

“For a proxy? Two bucks a pop. It’s nothing.”

“Forty times two is eighty dollars. That’s not nothing.”

“Look,” he said, “figure you spend fifteen minutes getting down off the Hill and over to the church. And if you’re you, serious you, you don’t laugh off being there. You don’t laugh off anything. Instead you spend an hour at chapel seething with rage. Then you spend another fifteen minutes seething with rage while getting back up the Hill to wherever you’re going next. That’s ninety minutes. Ninety times forty equals sixty hours of rage. That’s not nothing either.”

“How do you find the person to pay? Explain to me how it works.”

“The person you hire takes the card the usher hands him at the door when he goes in, then he hands it back signed with your name when he goes out. That’s it. You think a handwriting specialist pores over each card back in the little office where they keep the records? They tick off your name in some ledger, and that’s it. In the old days they used to assign you a seat and have a proctor who got to know everyone’s face walk up and down the aisles to see who was missing. Back then you were screwed. But after the war they changed it, so now all you have to do is pay someone to take your place.”

“But who?”

“Anyone. Anyone who’s done his forty chapels. It’s work. You work waiting tables at the taproom of the inn, someone else works proxying at the Methodist church. I’ll find you somebody if you want me to. I can even try to find somebody for less than two bucks.”