1919

Richard Ellsworth Savage

The years Dick was little he never heard anything about his Dad, but when he was doing his homework evenings up in his little room in the attic he’d start thinking about him sometimes; he’d throw himself on the bed and lie on his back trying to remember what he had been like and Oak Park and everything before Mother had been so unhappy and they had had to come east to live with Aunt Beatrice. There was the smell of bay rum and cigarsmoke and he was sitting on the back of an upholstered sofa beside a big man in a panama hat who shook the sofa when he laughed; he held on to Dad’s back and punched his arm and the muscle was hard like a chair or a table and when Dad laughed he could feel it rumble in his back, “Dicky, keep your dirty feet off my palm beach suit,” and he was on his hands and knees in the sunlight that poured through the lace curtains of the window trying to pick the big purple roses off the carpet; they were all standing in front of a red automobile and Dad’s face was red and he smelt of armpits and white steam was coming out around, and people were saying Safetyvalve. Downstairs Dad and Mummy were at dinner and there was company and wine and a new butler and it must be awful funny because they laughed so much and the knives and forks went click click all the time; Dad found him in his nightgown peeking through the portières and came out awful funny and excited smelling like wine and whaled him and mother came out and said, “Henry, don’t strike the child,” and they stood hissing at one another in low voices behind the portières on account of company and Mummy had picked Dick up and carried him upstairs crying in her evening dress all lacy and frizzly and with big puffy silk sleeves; touching silk put his teeth on edge, made him shudder all down his spine. He and Henry had had tan overcoats with pockets in them like grownup overcoats and tan caps and he’d lost the button off the top of his. Way back there it was sunny and windy; Dick got tired and sickyfeeling when he tried to remember back like that and it got him so he couldn’t keep his mind on tomorrow’s lessons and would pull out “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” that he had under the mattress because Mother took books away when they weren’t just about the lessons and would read just a little and then he’d forget everything reading and wouldn’t know his lessons the next day.

All the same he got along very well at school and the teachers liked him, particularly Miss Teazle, the English teacher, because he had nice manners and said little things that weren’t fresh but that made them laugh. Miss Teazle said he showed real feeling for English composition. One Christmas he sent her a little rhyme he made up about the Christ Child and the Three Kings and she declared he had a gift.

The better he liked it in school the worse it was at home. Aunt Beatrice was always nag nag nag from morning till night. As if he didn’t know that he and mother were eating her bread and sleeping under her roof; they paid board, didn’t they? even if they didn’t pay as much as Major and Mrs. Glen or Dr. Kern did, and they certainly did enough work to pay for their keep anyway. He’d heard Mrs. Glen saying when Dr. Atwood was calling and Aunt Beatrice was out of the room how it was a shame that poor Mrs. Savage, such a sweet woman, and a good churchwoman too, and the daughter of a general in the army, had to work her fingers to the bone for her sister who was only a fussy old maid and overcharged so, though of course she did keep a very charming house and set an excellent table, not like a boarding house at all, more like a lovely refined private home, such a relief to find in Trenton, that was such a commercial city so full of working people and foreigners; too bad that the daughters of General Ellsworth should be reduced to taking paying guests. Dick felt Mrs. Glen might have said something about his carrying out the ashes and shovelling snow and all that. Anyway he didn’t think a highschool student ought to have to take time from his studies to do the chores.

Dr. Atwood was the rector of the St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church where Dick had to sing in the choir every Sunday at two services while mother and his brother Henry S., who was three years older than he was and worked in a drafting office in Philadelphia and only came home weekends, sat comfortably in a pew. Mother loved St. Gabriel’s because it was so highchurch and they had processions and even incense. Dick hated it on account of choirpractice and having to keep his surplice clean and because he never had any pocketmoney to shoot craps with behind the bench in the vestry and he was always the one who had to stand at the door and whisper, “Cheeze it,” if anybody was coming.

One Sunday, right after his thirteenth birthday, he’d walked home from church with his mother and Henry feeling hungry and wondering all the way if they were going to have fried chicken for dinner. They were all three stepping up onto the stoop, Mother leaning a little on Dick’s arm and the purple and green poppies on her wide hat jiggling in the October sunlight, when he saw Aunt Beatrice’s thin face looking worriedly out through the glass panel of the front door. “Leona,” she said in an excited reproachful voice, “he’s here.” “Who, Beatrice dear?” “You know well enough… I don’t know what to do… he says he wants to see you. I made him wait in the lower hall on account of… er… our friends.”

“Oh, God, Beatrice, haven’t I borne enough from that man?”

Mother let herself drop onto the bench under the stagshorn coatrack in the hall. Dick and Henry stared at the white faces of the two women. Aunt Beatrice pursed up her lips and said in a spiteful tone, “You boys had better go out and walk round the block. I can’t have two big hulks like you loafing round the house. You be back for Sunday dinner at one thirty sharp… run along now.”

“Why, what’s the matter with Aunt Beatrice?” asked Dick as they walked off down the street. “Got the pip I guess… she gives me a pain in the neck,” Henry said in a superior tone.

Dick walked along kicking at the pavement with his toes.

“Say, we might go around and have a soda… they have awful good sodas at Dryer’s.”

“Got any dough?”

Dick shook his head.

“Well, you needn’t think I’m goin’ to treat you…. Jimminy criskets, Trenton’s a rotten town…. In Philadelphia I seen a drugstore with a sodafountain half a block long.”

“Aw, you.”

“I bet you don’t remember when we lived in Oak Park, Dick…. Now Chicago’s a fine town.” “Sure I do… and you an’ me going to kindergarden and Dad being there and everything.”

“Hell’s bells, I wanta smoke.”

“Mother’ll smell it on you.”

“Don’t give a damn if she does.”

When they got home Aunt Beatrice met them at the front door looking sore as a crab and told them to go down to the basement. Mother wanted to see them. The back stairs smelt of Sunday dinner and sage chickenstuffing. They hobbled down as slowly as possible, it must be about Henry’s smoking. She was in the dark basement hall. By the light of the gasjet against the wall Dick couldn’t make out who the man was. Mother came up to them and they could see that her eyes were red. “Boys, it’s your father,” she said in a weak voice. The tears began running down her face.

The man had a grey shapeless head and his hair was cut very short, the lids of his eyes were red and lashless and his eyes were the same color as his face. Dick was scared. It was somebody he’d known when he was little; it couldn’t be Dad.

“For God’s sake, no more waterworks, Leona,” the man said in a whining voice. As he stood staring into the boys’ faces his body wabbled a little as if he was weak in the knees. “They’re good lookers both of them, Leona… I guess they don’t think much of their poor old Dad.”

They all stood there without saying anything in the dark basement hall in the rich close smell of Sunday dinner from the kitchen. Dick felt he ought to talk but something had stuck in his throat. He found he was stuttering, “Ha-ha-hav-have you been sick?”

The man turned to Mother. “You’d better tell them all about it when I’m gone… don’t spare me… nobody’s ever spared me…. Don’t look at me as if I was a ghost, boys, I won’t hurt you.” A nervous tremor shook the lower part of his face. “All my life I’ve always been the one has gotten hurt…. Well, this is a long way from Oak Park… I just wanted to take a look at you, good-by…. I guess the likes of me had better go out the basement door… I’ll meet you at the bank at eleven sharp, Leona, and that’ll be the last thing you’ll ever have to do for me.”

The gasjet went red when the door opened and flooded the hall with reflected sunlight. Dick was shaking for fear the man was going to kiss him, but all he did was give them each a little trembly pat on the shoulder. His suit hung loose on him and he seemed to have trouble lifting his feet in their soft baggy shoes up the five stone steps to the street.

Mother closed the door sharply.

“He’s going to Cuba,” she said. “That’s the last time we’ll see him. I hope God can forgive him for all this, your poor mother never can… at least he’s out of that horrible place.” “Where was he, Mom?” asked Henry in a business like voice. “Atlanta.”

Dick ran away and up to the top floor and into his own room in the attic and threw himself on the bed sobbing.

They none of them went down to dinner although they were hun gry and the stairs were rich with the smell of roast chicken. When Pearl was washing up Dick tiptoed into the kitchen and coaxed a big heaping plate of chicken and stuffing and sweetpotatoes out of her; she said to run along and eat it in the back yard because it was her day out and she had the dishes to do. He sat on a dusty stepladder in the laundry eating. He could hardly get the chicken down on account of the funny stiffness in his throat. When he’d finished, Pearl made him help her wipe.

That summer they got him a job as bellboy in a small hotel at Bay Head that was run by a lady who was a parishioner of Dr. Atwood’s. Before he left Major and Mrs. Glen, who were Aunt Beatrice’s star boarders, gave him a fivedollar bill for pocket money and a copy of the “Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” to read on the train. Dr. Atwood asked him to stay after the bibleclass his last Sunday and told him the parable of the talent, that Dick knew very well already because Dr. Atwood preached on it as a text four times every year, and showed him a letter from the headmaster of Kent accepting him for the next year as a scholarship pupil and told him that he must work hard because God expected from each of us according to our abilities. Then he told him a few things a growing boy ought to know and said he must avoid temptations and always serve God with a clean body and a clean mind, and keep himself pure for the lovely sweet girl he would some day marry, and that anything else led only to madness and disease. Dick went away with his cheeks burning.

It wasn’t so bad at the Bayview, but the guests and help were all old people; about his own age there was only Skinny Murray the other bellhop, a tall sandyhaired boy who never had anything to say. He was a couple of years older than Dick. They slept on two cots in a small airless room right up under the roof that would still be so hot from the sun by bedtime they could hardly touch it. Through the thin partition they could hear the waitress in the next room rustling about and giggling as they went to bed. Dick hated that sound and the smell of girls and cheap facepowder that drifted in through the crack in the wall. The hottest nights he and Skinny would take the screen out of the window and crawl out along the gutter to a piece of flat roof there was over one of the upper porches. There the mosquitoes would torment them, but it was better than trying to sleep on their cots. Once the girls were looking out of the window and saw them crawling along the gutter and made a great racket that they were peeping and that they’d report them to the manageress, and they were scared to death and made plans all night about what they’d do if they were fired, they’d go to Barnegat and get work on fishing boats; but the next day the girls didn’t say anything about it. Dick was kinda disappointed because he hated waiting on people and running up and down stairs answering bells.

It was Skinny who got the idea they might make some extra money selling fudge, because when Dick got a package of fudge from his mother he sold it to one of the waitresses for a quarter. So Mrs. Savage sent a package of fresh fudge and panocha every week by parcel post that Dick and Skinny sold to the guests in little boxes. Skinny bought the boxes and did most of the work but Dick convinced him it wouldn’t be fair for him to take more than ten percent of the profits because he and his mother put up the original capital.

The next summer they made quite a thing of the fudgeselling. Skinny did the work more than ever because Dick had been to a private school and had been hobnobbing with rich boys all winter whose parents had plenty of money. Luckily none of them came to Bay Head for the summer. He told Skinny all about the school and recited ballads about St. John Hospitaller and Saint Christopher he’d made up and that had been published in the school paper; he told him about serving at the altar and the beauty of the Christian Faith and about how he’d made the outfield in the junior baseball team. Dick made Skinny go to church with him every Sunday to the little Episcopal chapel called St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea. Dick used to stay after the service and discuss points of doctrine and ceremony with Mr. Thurlow the young minister and was finally invited to come home with him to dinner and meet his wife.

The Thurlows lived in an unpainted peakedroofed bungalow in the middle of a sandlot near the station. Mrs. Thurlow was a dark girl with a thin aquiline nose and bangs, who smoked cigarettes and hated Bay Head. She talked about how bored she was and how she shocked the old lady parishioners and Dick thought she was wonderful. She was a great reader of the Smart Set and The Black Cat and books that were advanced, and poked fun at Edwin’s attempts to restore primitive Christianity to the boardwalk, as she put it. Edwin Thurlow would look at her from under the colorless lashes of his pale eyes and whisper meekly, “Hilda, you oughtn’t to talk like that”; then he’d turn mildly to Dick and say, “Her bark is worse than her bite, you know.” They got to be great friends and Dick took to running around to their house whenever he could get away from the hotel. He took Skinny around a couple of times but Skinny seemed to feel that their talk was too deep for him and would never stay long but would shuffle off after explaining that he had to sell some fudge.

The next summer it was mostly the hope of seeing the Thurlows that made Dick not mind going to work at the Bayview where Mrs. Higgins gave him the job of the roomclerk with an increase of pay on account of his gentlemanly manners. Dick was sixteen and his voice was changing; he had dreams about things with girls and thought a lot about sin and had a secret crush on Spike Culbertson, the yellowhaired captain of his school ballteam. He hated everything about his life, his aunt and the smell of her boarding house, the thought of his father, his mother’s flowergarden hats, not having enough money to buy good clothes or go to fashionable summer-resorts like the other fellows did. All kinds of things got him terribly agitated so that it was hard not to show it. The wabble of the waitresses’ hips and breasts while they were serving meals, girls’ underwear in store windows, the smell of the bathhouses and the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit and the tanned skin of fellows and girls in bathingsuits lying out in the sun on the beach.

He’d been writing Edwin and Hilda long letters all winter about anything that came into his head, but when he actually saw them he felt funny and constrained. Hilda was using a new kind of perfume that tickled his nose; even when he was sitting at the table at lunch with them, eating cold ham and potato salad from the delicatessen and talking about the primitive litanies and gregorian music he couldn’t help undressing them in his mind, thinking of them in bed naked; he hated the way he felt.

Sunday afternoons Edwin went to Elberon to conduct services in another little summer chapel. Hilda never went and often invited Dick to go out for a walk with her or come to tea. He and Hilda began to have a little world between them that Edwin had nothing to do with, where they only talked about him to poke fun at him. Dick began to see Hilda in his queer horrid dreams. Hilda began to talk about how she and Dick were really brother and sister, how passionless people who never really wanted anything couldn’t understand people like them. Those times Dick didn’t get much chance to say anything. He and Hilda would sit on the back stoop in the shade smoking Egyptian Deities until they felt a little sick. Hilda’d say she didn’t care whether the damn parishioners saw her or not and talk and talk about how she wanted something to happen in her life, and smart clothes and to travel to foreign countries and to have money to spend and not to have to fuss with the housekeeping and how she felt sometimes she could kill Edwin for his mild calfish manner.

Edwin usually got back on a train that got in at 10:53 and, as Dick had Sunday evenings off from the hotel, he and Hilda would eat supper alone together and then take a walk along the beach. Hilda would take his arm and walk close to him; he’d wonder if she felt him tremble whenever their legs touched.

All week he’d think about those Sunday evenings. Sometimes he’d tell himself that he wouldn’t go another time. He’d stay up in his room and read Dumas or go out with fellows he knew; being alone with Hilda like that made him feel too rotten afterwards. Then one moonless night, when they’d walked way down the beach beyond the rosy fires of the picnickers, and were sitting side by side on the sand talking about India’s Love Lyrics that Hilda had been reading aloud that afternoon, she suddenly jumped on him and mussed up his hair and stuck her knees into his stomach and began to run her hands over his body under his shirt. She was strong for a girl, but he’d just managed to push her off when he had to grab her by the shoulders and pull her down on top of him. They neither of them said anything but lay there in the sand breathing hard. At last she whispered, “Dick, I mustn’t have a baby… We can’t afford it…. That’s why Edwin won’t sleep with me. Damn it, I want you, Dick. Don’t you see how awful it all is?” While she was talking her hands were burning him, moving down across his chest, over his ribs, around the curve of his belly. “Don’t, Hilda, don’t.” There were mosquitoes around their heads. The long hissing invisible wash of the surf came almost to their feet.

That night Dick couldn’t go down to the train to meet Edwin the way he usually did. He went back to the Bayview with his knees trembling, and threw himself on his bed in his stuffy little room under the roof. He thought of killing himself but he was afraid of going to hell; he tried to pray, at least to remember the Lord’s Prayer. He was terribly scared when he found he couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer. Maybe that was the sin against the Holy Ghost they had committed.

The sky was grey and the birds were chirping outside before he got to sleep. All next day, as he sat holloweyed behind the desk, passing on the guests’ demands for icewater and towels, answering inquiries about rooms and traintimes, he was turning a poem over in his mind about the scarlet of my sin and the scarlet of thy sin and dark birds above the surging seawaves crying and damned souls passionately sighing. When it was finished he showed the poem to the Thurlows, Edwin wanted to know where he got such morbid ideas, but was glad that faith and the church triumphed in the end. Hilda laughed hysterically and said he was a funny boy but that maybe he’d be a writer someday.

When Skinny came down for a two weeks’ vacation to take the place of one of the new bellhops that was sick, Dick talked very big to him about women and sin and about how he was in love with a married woman. Skinny said that wasn’t right because there were plenty of easy women around who’d give a feller all the loving he wanted. But when Dick found out that he’d never been with a girl although he was two years older, he put on so many airs about experience and sin, that one night when they’d gone down to the drugstore for a soda, Skinny picked up a couple of girls and they walked down the beach with them. The girls were thirtyfive if they were a day and Dick didn’t do anything but tell his girl about his unhappy love affair and how he had to be faithful to his love even though she was being unfaithful to him at the very moment. She said he was too young to take things serious like that and that a girl ought to be ashamed of herself who made a nice boy like him unhappy. “Jez, I’d make a feller happy if I had the chance,” she said and burst out crying.

Walking back to the Bayview, Skinny was worried for fear he might have caught something, but Dick said physical things didn’t matter and that repentance was the key of redemption. It turned out that Skinny did get sick because later in the summer he wrote Dick that he was paying a doctor five dollars a week to cure him up and that he felt terrible about it. Dick and Hilda went on sinning Sunday evenings when Edwin was conducting services in Elberon and when Dick went back to school that fall he felt very much the man of the world.

In the Christmas vacation he went to stay with the Thurlows in East Orange where Edwin was the assistant to the rector of the church of St. John, Apostle. There, at tea at the rector’s he met Hiram Halsey Cooper, a Jersey City lawyer and politician who was interested in High Church and first editions of Huysmans and who asked Dick to come to see him. When Dick called Mr. Cooper gave him a glass of sherry, showed him first editions of Beardsley and Huysmans and Austin Dobson, sighed about his lost youth and offered him a job in his office as soon as school was over. It turned out that Mr. Cooper’s wife, who was dead, had been an Ellsworth and a cousin of Dick’s mother’s. Dick promised to send him copies of all his poems, and the articles he published in the school paper.

All the week he was with the Thurlows he was trying to get to see Hilda alone, but she managed to avoid him. He’d heard about French letters and wanted to tell her about them, but it wasn’t until the last day that Edwin had to go out and make parochial calls. This time it was Dick who was the lover and Hilda who tried to hold him off, but he made her take off her clothes and they laughed and giggled together while they were making love. This time they didn’t worry so much about sin and when Edwin came home to supper he asked them what the joke was, they seemed in such a good humor. Dick started telling a lot of cock and bull stories about his Aunt Beatrice and her boarders and they parted at the train in a gale of laughter.

That summer was the Baltimore convention. Mr. Cooper had rented a house there and entertained a great deal. Dick’s job was to stay in the outer office and be polite to everybody and take down people’s names. He wore a blue serge suit and made a fine impression on everybody with his wavy black hair that Hilda used to tell him was like a raven’s wing, his candid blue eyes and his pink and white complexion. What was going on was rather over his head, but he soon discovered what people Mr. Cooper really wanted to see and what people were merely to be kidded along. Then when he and Mr. Cooper found themselves alone, Mr. Copper would get out a bottle of Amontillado and pour them each a glass and sit in a big leather chair rubbing his forehead as if to rub the politics out of his mind and start talking about literature and the nineties and how he wished he was young again. It was understood that he was going to advance Dick the money to go through Harvard with.

Dick had hardly gotten back to school as a senior the next fall when he got a telegram from his mother: Come home at once darling your poor father is dead. He didn’t feel sorry but kind of ashamed, afraid of meeting any of the masters or fellows who might ask him questions. At the railway station it seemed as if the train would never come. It was Saturday and there were a couple of fellows in his class at the station. Until the train came he thought of nothing else but dodging them. He sat stiff on his seat in the empty daycoach looking out at the russet October hills, all keyed up for fear somebody would speak to him. It was a relief to hurry out of the Grand Central Station into the crowded New York streets where nobody knew him, where he knew nobody. Crossing on the ferry he felt happy and adventurous. He began to dread getting home and deliberately missed the first train to Trenton. He went into the old dining room of the Pennsylvania Station and ate fried oysters and sweet corn for lunch and ordered a glass of sherry, half afraid the colored waiter wouldn’t serve him. He sat there a long time reading The Smart Set and drinking the sherry feeling like a man of the world, a traveller on his own, but underneath it all was the memory of that man’s trembling white hurt face, the way he’d walked up the area steps that day. The restaurant gradually emptied. The waiter must be thinking it was funny his sitting there that long. He paid his check, and before he wanted to found himself on the train for Trenton.

At Aunt Beatrice’s house everything looked and smelt the same. His mother was lying on the bed with the shades down and a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne on her forehead. She showed him a photograph that he’d sent from Havana, a withered man who looked too small for his palm beach suit and panama hat. He’d been working in the consulate as a clerk and had left a ten thousand dollar life insurance in her favor. While they were talking Henry came in looking worried and sore. The two of them went out in the back yard and smoked cigarettes together. Henry said he was going to take Mother to live with him in Philadelphia, get her away from Aunt Beatrice’s nagging and this damn boardinghouse. He wanted Dick to come too and go to the U. of P. Dick said no, he was going to Harvard. Henry asked him how he was going to get the money. Dick said he’d make out all right, he didn’t want any of the damned insurance. Henry said he wasn’t going to touch it, that was Mother’s, and they went back upstairs feeling about ready to sock each other in the jaw. Dick felt better though, he could tell the fellows at school that his father had been consul at Havana and had died of a tropical fever.

That summer Dick worked for Mr. Cooper at $25 a week getting up a prospectus for an art museum he wanted to found in Jersey City and delighted him so by dedicating to him a verse translation of Horace’s poem about Maecenas that he worked up with the help of the trot, that Mr. Cooper made him a present of a thousand dollars to take him through college; for the sake of form and so that Dick should feel his responsibilities he put it in the form of a note maturing in five years at four percent interest.

He spent his two weeks’ vacation with the Thurlows at Bay Head. He’d hardly been able to wait going down on the train to see how Hilda would be, but everything was different. Edwin didn’t have the paperwhite look he used to have; he’d had a call as assistant in a rich church on Long Island where the only thing that worried him was that part of the congregation was low and wouldn’t allow chanting or incense. He was comforting himself with the thought that they did allow candles on the altar. Hilda was changed too. Dick was worried to see that she and Edwin held hands during supper. When they got alone she told him that she and Edwin were very happy now and that she was going to have a baby and that bygones must be bygones. Dick stalked up and down and ran his hands through his hair and talked darkly about death and hellonearth and going to the devil as fast as he could but Hilda just laughed and told him not to be silly, that he was a goodlooking attractive boy and would find many nice girls crazy to fall in love with him. Before he left they had a long talk about religion and Dick told them with a bitter stare at Hilda, that he’d lost his faith and only believed in Pan and Bacchus, the old gods of lust and drink. Edwin was quite startled, but Hilda said it was all nonsense and only growing pains. After he’d left he wrote a very obscure poem full of classical references that he labelled, To a Common Prostitute and sent to Hilda, adding a postscript that he was dedicating his life to Beauty and Sin.

Dick had an exam to repeat in Geometry which he’d flunked in the spring and one in Advanced Latin that he was taking for extra credits, so he went up to Cambridge a week before college opened. He sent his trunk and suitcase out by the transfer company from the South Station and went out on the subway. He had on a new grey suit and a new grey felt hat and was afraid of losing the certified cheque he had in his pocket for deposit in the Cambridge bank. The glimpse of redbrick Boston and the state house with its gold dome beyond the slatecolored Charles as the train came out into the air to cross the bridge looked like the places in foreign countries he and Hilda had talked about going to. Kendall Square… Central Square… Harvard Square. The train didn’t go any further; he had to get out. Something about the sign on the turnstile Out To The College Yard sent a chill down his spine. He hadn’t been in Cambridge two hours before he discovered that his felt hat ought to have been brown and old instead of new and that getting a room in the Yard had been a grave mistake for a freshman.

Perhaps it was the result of living in the Yard that he got to know all the wrong people, a couple of socialist Jews in first year law, a graduate student from the middlewest who was taking his Ph.D. in Gothic, a Y.M.C.A. addict out from Dorchester who went to chapel every morning. He went out for Freshman rowing but didn’t make any of the crews and took to rowing by himself in a wherry three afternoons a week. The fellows he met down at the boathouse were pleasant enough to him, but most of them lived on the Gold Coast or in Beck and he never got much further than hello and solong with them. He went to all the football rallies and smokers and beer nights but he never could get there without one of his Jewish friends or a graduate student so he never met anybody there who was anybody.

One Sunday morning in the spring he ran into Freddy Wigglesworth in the Union just as they were both going in to breakfast; they say down at the same table. Freddy, and old Kent man, was a junior now. He asked Dick what he was doing and who he knew, and appeared horrified by what he heard. “My dear boy,” he said, “there’s nothing to do now but go out for the Monthly or the Advocate.… I don’t imagine the Crime would be much in your line, would it?”

“I was thinking of taking some of my stuff around, but I hardly had the nerve.”

“I wish you’d come around to see me last fall…. Goodness, we owe it to the old school to get you started right. Didn’t anybody tell you that nobody lived in the Yard except seniors?” Freddy shook his head sadly as he drank his coffee.

Afterwards they went around to Dick’s room and he read some poems out loud. “Why, I don’t think they’re so bad,” said Freddy Wigglesworth, between puffs at a cigarette. “Pretty purple I’d say, though…. You get a few of them typed and I’ll take them around to R.G…. Meet me at the Union at eight o’clock a week from Monday night and we’ll go around to Copey’s…. Well, so long, I must be going.” After he’d gone Dick walked up and down his room, his heart thumping hard. He wanted to talk to somebody, but he was sick of all the people he knew around Cambridge, so he sat down and wrote Hilda and Edwin a long letter with rhyming inserts about how well he was getting on at college.

Monday night finally came around. Already trying to tell himself not to be disappointed if Freddy Wigglesworth forgot about the date, Dick was on his way to the Union a full hour before the time. The cavernous clatter and smell of Mem, the funny stories of the boneheads at his table, and Mr. Kanrich’s sweaty bald head bobbing above the brass instruments of the band in the gallery seemed particularly dreary that evening.

There were tulips in the trim Cambridge gardens, and now and then a whiff of lilacs on the wind. Dick’s clothes irked him; his legs were heavy as he walked around and around the blocks of yellow frame houses and grass dooryards that he already knew too well. The blood pounding through his veins seemed too fast and too hot to stand. He must get out of Cambridge or go crazy. Of course at eight sharp when he walked slowly up the Union steps Wigglesworth hadn’t come yet. Dick went upstairs to the library and picked up a book, but he was too nervous to even read the title. He went downstairs again and stood around in the hall. A fellow who worked next to him in Physics 1 lab. came up and started to talk about something, but Dick could hardly drag out an answer. The fellow gave him a puzzled look and walked off. It was twenty past eight. Of course he wasn’t coming, God damn him, he’d been a fool to expect he’d come, a stuck up snob like Wigglesworth wouldn’t keep a date with a fellow like him.

Freddy Wigglesworth was standing in front of him, with his hands in his pockets. “Well, shall we Copify?” he was saying.

There was another fellow with him, a dreamy looking boy with fluffy light gold hair and very pale blue eyes. Dick couldn’t help staring at him he was so handsome. “This is Blake. He’s my younger brother…. You’re in the same class.” Blake Wigglesworth hardly looked at Dick when they shook hands, but his mouth twisted up into a lopsided smile. When they crossed the Yard in the early summer dusk fellows were leaning out the windows yelling “Rinehart O Rinehart” and grackles were making a racket in the elms, and you could hear the screech of streetcar wheels from Mass. Avenue; but there was a complete hush in the lowceiling room lit with candles where a scrubbylooking little man was reading aloud a story that turned out to be Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King.” Everybody sat on the floor and was very intent. Dick decided he was going to be a writer.

Sophomore year Dick and Blake Wigglesworth began to go around together. Dick had a room in Ridgely and Blake was always there. Dick suddenly found he liked college, that the weeks were flying by. The Advocate and the Monthly each published a poem of his that winter; he and Ned, as he took to calling Blake Wigglesworth, had tea and conversation about books and poets in the afternoons and lit the room with candles. They hardly ever ate at Mem any more, though Dick was signed up there. Dick had no pocketmoney at all once he’d paid for his board and tuition and the rent at Ridgely but Ned had a pretty liberal allowance that went for both. The Wigglesworths were well off; they often invited Dick to have Sunday dinner with them at Nahant. Ned’s father was a retired art critic and had a white Vandyke beard; there was an Italian marble fireplace in the drawingroom over which hung a painting of a madonna, two angels and some lilies that the Wigglesworths believed to be by Botticelli, although B.B., out of sheer malice, Mr. Wigglesworth would explain, insisted that it was by Botticini.

Saturday nights Dick and Ned took to eating supper at the Thorndike in Boston and getting a little tight on sparkling nebbiolo. Then they’d go to the theatre or the Old Howard.

The next summer Hiram Halsey Cooper was campaigning for Wilson. In spite of Ned’s kidding letters, Dick found himself getting all worked up about the New Freedom, Too Proud to Fight, Neutrality in Mind and Deed, Industrial Harmony between capital and labor, and worked twelve hours a day typing releases, jollying smalltown newspaper editors into giving more space to Mr. Cooper’s speeches, branding Privilege, flaying the Interests. It was a letdown to get back to the dying elms of the Yard, lectures that neither advocated anything, nor attacked anything, The Hill of Dreams and tea in the afternoons. He’d gotten a scholarship from the English department and he and Ned had a room together in a house on Garden Street. They had quite a bunch of friends who were interested in English and Fine Arts and things like that, who’d gather in their room in the late afternoon, and sit late in the candlelight and the cigarettesmoke and the incense in front of a bronze Buddha Ned had bought in Chinatown when he was tight once, drinking tea and eating cake and talking. Ned never said anything unless the talk came around to drinking or sailingships; whenever politics or the war or anything like that came up he had a way of closing his eyes and throwing back his head and saying Blahblahblahblah.

Election Day Dick was so excited he cut all his classes. In the afternoon he and Ned took a walk round the North End, and out to the end of T wharf. It was a bitterly raw grey day. They were talking about a plan they had, that they never spoke about before people, of getting hold of a small yawl or ketch after they’d graduated and following the coast down to Florida and the West Indies and then through the Panama Canal and out into the Pacific. Ned had bought a book on navigation and started to study it. That afternoon Ned was sore because Dick couldn’t seem to keep his mind on talk about sailing and kept wondering out loud how this state and that state was going to vote. They ate supper grumpily at the Venice, that was crowded for once, of cold scallopini and spaghetti; the service was wretched. As soon as they’d finished one bottle of white orvieto, Ned would order another; they left the restaurant walking stiffly and carefully, leaning against each other a little. Disembodied faces swirled past them against the pinkishgold dark of Hanover Street. They found themselves on the Common in the fringes of the crowd watching the bulletin board on the Boston Herald building. “Who’s winning? Batter up…. Hurray for our side,” Ned kept yelling. “Don’t you know enough to know it’s election night?” a man behind them said out of the corner of his mouth. “Blahblahblahblah,” brayed Ned in the man’s face.

Dick had to drag him off among the trees to avoid a fight. “We’ll certainly be pinched if you go on like this,” Dick was whispering earnestly in his ear. “And I want to see the returns. Wilson might be winning.”

“Let’s go to Frank Locke’s and have a drink.”

Dick wanted to stay out with the crowd and see the returns; he was excited and didn’t want to drink any more. “It means we won’t go to war.” “Razer have a war,” said Ned thickly, “be zo amuzing… but war or no war lez have a lil drink on it.”

The barkeep at Frank Locke’s wouldn’t serve them, though he’d of ten served them before, and they were disgruntedly on their way down Washington Street to another bar when a boy ran past with an extra in four inch black type HUGHES ELECTED. “Hurray,” yelled Ned. Dick put his hand over his mouth and they wrestled there in the street while a hostile group of men gathered around them. Dick could hear the flat unfriendly voices, “College boys… Harvard men.” His hat fell off. Ned let go his hold to let him pick it up. A cop was elbowing his way through toward them. They both straightened up and walked off soberly, their faces red. “It’s all blahblahblahblah,” whispered Ned under his breath. They walked along toward Scollay Square. Dick was sore.

He didn’t like the looks of the crowd around Scollay Square either and wanted to go home to Cambridge, but Ned struck up a conversation with a thuggylooking individual and a sailor whose legs were weaving. “Say, Chub, let’s take ’em along to Mother Bly’s,” said the thuggylooking individual, poking the sailor in the ribs with his elbow. “Take it easy now, feller, take it easy,” the sailor kept muttering unsteadily.

“Go anywhere they don’t have all this blahblahblahblah,” Ned was shouting, seesawing from one foot to the other. “Say, Ned, you’re drunk, come along back to Cambridge,” Dick whined desperately in his ear and tugged at his arm, “They want to get you drunk and take your money.”

“Can’t get me drunk, I am drunk… blahblahblahblah,” whinnied Ned and took the sailor’s white cap and put it on his head instead of his own hat.

“Well, do what you damn please, I’m going.” Dick let go Ned’s arm suddenly and walked away as fast as he could. He walked along across Beacon Hill, his ears ringing, his head hot and thumping. He walked all the way to Cambridge and got to his room shivering and tired, on the edge of crying. He went to bed but he couldn’t sleep and lay there all night cold and miserable even after he’d piled the rug on top of the blankets, listening for every sound in the street.

In the morning he got up with a headache and a sour burntout feeling all through him. He was having some coffee and a toasted roll at the counter under the Lampoon Building when Ned came in looking fresh and rosy with his mouth all twisted up in a smile, “Well, my young politico, Professor Wilson was elected and we’ve missed out on the sabre and epaulettes.” Dick grunted and went on eating. “I was worried about you,” went on Ned airily, “where did you disappear to?” “What do you think I did? I went home and went to bed,” snapped Dick. “That Barney turned out to be a very amusing fellow, a boxing instructor, if he didn’t have a weak heart he’d be welterweight champion of New England. We ended up in a Turkish Bath… a most curious place.” Dick felt like smashing him in the face. “I’ve got a lab period,” he said hoarsely and walked out of the lunchcounter.

It was dusk before he went back to Ridgely. There was somebody in the room. It was Ned moving about the room in the blue dusk. “Dick,” he began to mumble as soon as the door closed behind him, “never be sore.” He stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets swaying. “Never be sore, Dick, at things fellows do when they’re drunk…. Never be sore at anything fellows do. Be a good fellow and make me a cup of tea.” Dick filled the kettle and lit the alcohol flame under it. “Fellow has to do lotta damn fool things, Dick.”

“But people like that… picking up a sailor in Scollay Square… so damn risky,” he said weakly.

Ned swung around towards him laughing easily and happily, “And you always told me I was a damn Backbay snob.”

Dick didn’t answer. He had dropped into the chair beside the table. He wasn’t sore any more. He was trying to keep from crying. Ned had lain down on the couch and was lifting first one leg and then the other above his head. Dick sat staring at the blue alcohol flame of the lamp listening to the purring of the teakettle until the last dusk faded to darkness and ashy light from the street began to filter into the room.

That winter Ned was drunk every evening. Dick made the Monthly and The Advocate, had poems reprinted in The Literary Digest and The Conning Tower, attended meetings of the Boston Poetry Society, and was invited to dinner by Amy Lowell. He and Ned argued a good deal because Dick was a pacifist and Ned said what the hell he’d join the Navy, it was all a lot of Blah anyway.

In the Easter vacation, after the Armed Ship Bill had passed Dick had a long talk with Mr. Copper who wanted to get him a job in Washington, because he said a boy of his talent oughtn’t to endanger his career by joining the army and already there was talk of conscription. Dick blushed becomingly and said he felt it would be against his conscience to help in the war in any way. They talked a long time without getting anywhere about duty to the state and party leader ship and highest expediency. In the end Mr. Cooper made him promise not to take any rash step without consulting him. Back in Cambridge everybody was drilling and going to lectures on military science. Dick was finishing up the four year course in three years and had to work hard, but nothing in the courses seemed to mean anything any more. He managed to find time to polish up a group of sonnets called Morituri Te Salutant that he sent to a prize competition run by The Literary Digest. It won the prize but the editors wrote back that they would prefer a note of hope in the last sestet. Dick put in the note of hope and sent the hundred dollars to Mother to go to Atlantic City with. He discovered that if he went into war work he could get his degree that spring without taking any exams and went in to Boston one day without saying anything to anybody and signed up in the volunteer ambulance service.

The night he told Ned that he was going to France they got very drunk on orvieto wine in their room and talked a great deal about how it was the fate of Youth and Beauty and Love and Friendship to be mashed out by an early death, while the old fat pompous fools would make merry over their carcasses. In the pearly dawn they went out and sat with a last bottle on one of the old tombstones in the graveyard, on the corner of Harvard Square. They sat on the cold tombstone a long time without saying anything, only drinking, and after each drink threw their heads back and softly bleated in unison Blahblahblahblah.

Sailing for France on the Chicago in early June was like suddenly having to give up a book he’d been reading and hadn’t finished. Ned and his mother and Mr. Cooper and the literary lady considerably older than himself he’d slept with several times rather uncomfortably in her doubledecker apartment on Central Park South, and his poetry and his pacifist friends and the lights of the Esplanade shakily reflected in the Charles, faded in his mind like paragraphs in a novel laid by unfinished. He was a little seasick and a little shy of the boat and the noisy boozing crowd and the longfaced Red Cross women workers giving each other gooseflesh with stories of spitted Belgian babies and Canadian officers crucified and elderly nuns raped; inside he was coiled up tight as an overwound clock with wondering what it would be like over there.

Bordeaux, the red Garonne, the pastelcolored streets of old tall mansardroofed houses, the sunlight and shadow so delicately blue and yellow, the names of the stations all out of Shakespeare, the yellowbacked novels on the bookstands, the bottles of wine in the buvettes, were like nothing he’d imagined. All the way to Paris the faintly bluegreen fields were spattered scarlet with poppies like the first lines of a poem; the little train jogged along in dactyls; everything seemed to fall into rhyme.

They got to Paris too late to report at the Norton-Harjes office. Dick left his bag in the room assigned him with two other fellows at the Hotel Mont Thabor and walked around the streets. It wasn’t dark yet. There was almost no traffic but the boulevards were full of strollers in the blue June dusk. As it got darker women leaned out towards them from behind all the trees, girls’ hands clutched their arms, here and there a dirty word in English burst like a thrown egg above the nasal singsong of French. The three of them walked arm in arm, a little scared and very aloof, their ears still ringing from the talk on the dangers of infection with syphilis and gonorrhea a medical officer had given the last night on the boat. They went back to the hotel early.

Ed Schuyler, who knew French on account of having been to boarding school in Switzerland, shook his head as he was cleaning his teeth at the washstand and spluttered out through his toothbrush, “C’est la guerre.” “Well, the fist five years’ll be the hardest,” said Dick, laughing. Fred Summers was an automobile mechanic from Kansas. He was sitting up in bed in his woolly underwear. “Fellers,” he said, solemnly looking from one to the other, “This ain’t a war…. It’s a goddam whorehouse.”

In the morning they were up early and hurried through their coffee and rolls and rushed out hot and cold with excitement to the rue François Premier to report. They were told where to get their uniforms and cautioned to keep away from wine and women and told to come back in the afternoon. In the afternoon they were told to come back next morning for their identity cards. The identity cards took another day’s waiting around. In between they drove around the Bois in horsecabs, went to see Nôtre Dâme and the Conciérgerie and the Sainte Chapelle and out on the street car to Malmaison. Dick was furbishing up his prepschool French and would sit in the mild sunlight among the shabby white statues in the Tuileries Gardens reading Les Dieux Ont Soif and L’Ile des Pinguins. He and Ed Schuyler and Fred stuck together and after dining exceeding well every night for fear it might be their last chance at a Paris meal, took a turn around the boulevards in the crowded horizonblue dusk; they’d gotten to the point of talking to the girls now and kidding them along a little. Fred Summers had bought himself a prophylactic kit and a set of smutty postalcards. He said the last night before they left he was going to tear loose. When they got to the front he might get killed and then what? Dick said he liked talking to the girls but that the whole business was too commercial and turned his stomach. Ed Schuyler, who’d been nicknamed Frenchie and was getting very continental in his ways, said that the street girls were too naïve.

The last night before they left was bright moonlight, so the Gothas came over. They were eating in a little restaurant in Montmartre. The cashlady and the waiter made them all go down into the cellar when the sirens started wailing for the second time. There they met up with three youngish women named Suzette, Minette and Annette. When the little honking fireengine went by to announce that the raid was over it was already closing time and they couldn’t get any more drinks at the bar; so the girls took them to a closely shuttered house where they were ushered into a big room with livercolored wallpaper that had green roses on it. An old man in a green baize apron brought up champagne and the girls began to sit on knees and ruffle up hair. Summers got the prettiest girl and hauled her right into the alcove where the bed was with a big mirror above the whole length of it. Then he pulled the curtain. Dick found himself stuck with the fattest and oldest one and got disgusted. Her flesh felt like rubber. He gave her ten francs and left.

Hurrying down the black sloping street outside he ran into some Australian officers who gave him a drink of whiskey out of a bottle and took him into another house where they tried to get a show put on, but the madam said the girls were all busy and the Australians were too drunk to pay attention anyway and started to wreck the place. Dick just managed to slip out before the gendarmes came. He was walking in the general direction of the hotel when there was another alerte and he found himself being yanked down into a subway by a lot of Belgians. There was a girl down there who was very pretty and Dick was trying to explain to her that she ought to go to a hotel with him when the man she was with, who was a colonel of Spahis in a red cloak covered with gold braid, came up, his waxed mustaches bristling with fury. Dick explained that it was all a mistake and there were apologies all around and they were all braves alliés. They walked around several blocks looking for some place to have a drink together, but everything was closed, so they parted regretfully at the door of Dick’s hotel. He went up to the room in splendid humor; there he found the other two glumly applying argyrol and Metchnikoff paste. Dick made a good tall story out of his adventures. But the other two said he’d been a hell of a poor sport to walk out on a lady and hurt her sensitive feelings. “Fellers,” began Fred Summers, looking in each of their faces with his round eyes, “it ain’t a war, it’s a goddam…” He couldn’t think of a word for it so Dick turned out the light.