Alive and Dead in Indiana

THE GREEK LETTER IN THE RED

The skull over the door is stolen from the biology lab. There are red Christmas tree lights in the eye sockets. The triangle has something to do with champagne. They don’t tell me what. The TKE sign stays on all night. Sometimes, the boys from the other houses steal our light, and, sometimes, my boys steal theirs. They hide them in my suite. My suite fills up with Greek letters. I stack them against the wall with the light bulbs still warm. “You boys,” I say. In their plywood frames the bulbs are the size of grapefruit and look like a package that Harry and David, the fruit people, would send. My furniture is alphabetized. When a boy comes in to talk with me about how he misses home, he parks himself on the Tau by my dresser.

These chaise longues must be replaced next spring. The weather wrecks them here on the porch. An alumnus lends us furniture his motel can’t use. We have the finest furniture on campus, and that helps at rush. But the alumnus causes problems now and then, appearing unexpectedly at house parties and telling anyone who will listen about the parties they had when he was a pledge. The boys say you are a Teke for life, but I know his only reason for being there is to watch out for his couches. He doesn’t want anyone to be sick on them.

Of course, I have my own key and even my own entrance around back over the kitchen, but on nights like this one, I like to use the front door to see who is sleeping in the public rooms and the TV lounge. Make sure they’re warm enough. Or I stay up with one and talk about the party. I let him make promises to me that he will never drink again. I pick my way through the bodies. Snores and sour smells. These are the unlucky ones. No one to sleep with so they sleep with each other.

The boys at Wabash call themselves gentlemen. If one of them entertains a lady for the evening, he hangs a knotted tie on the knob of his closed door. There are no locks. Late some nights, when I can’t sleep, I walk through the house with my Boston. We troop down a whole corridor of doors sporting ties. Ties I’ve tied for them. It is the only time they are used. The boys come to my suite with the tie in their hands. I make them stand in the mirror, and I reach over their shoulders, putting together a bold Windsor as a man would do it. I never learned the motherly way of facing them. They slide their ties off, knotted, over their heads. Thanks.

I know why they send me away when they have house parties and mixers with sororities from Hanover or Depauw. One night I found my boys and their dates spread out around the house, peering in the basement windows. They ruined my borders, moss roses and impatiens. Inside, a pledge was earning all of his points by making love to a woman on the billiard table. He was being supervised by his big brother — that’s part of the rules. Usually, you earn your points by vacuuming the hallways or cleaning the head. Outside, everybody hedged in between me and the windows. All I could see were two bare feet sunk in the corner pockets. The next night, I asked that pledge to sit next to me at my table during dinner. He gave the prayer and nothing else was ever said about it.

They send me away on Thursday nights so they can tell their dirty jokes and have food fights or drop eggs from the third-floor landing, trying to hit the heads of pledges in the basement well below. Or the girls arrive for a football weekend. Most of the boys will be lawyers or doctors, and most of the girls want to be those kinds of wives. Meanwhile, I am with the other housemothers in a cottage off campus, playing bridge very fast, eating desserts our cooks make, and boasting about our boys. I wish sometimes we would play euchre instead. Loll says it is not seemly for housemothers to play it. She is from Sig Ep and yaks on about her dead husband. “A man,” she says, “like no other man.” As if she knew. “Loll,” she says he said, “you are like no other woman.” And he would know because he knew a couple of the other housemothers back when we were all younger. He was the football coach and most of the housemothers are local girls. I don’t think Loll knows. That’s when Dorcas will say, “Mighty fine Texas cake, Marcella.” And Marcella will answer, “Well, thank you, hon. More nuts this time.” They are partners and Loll snips at some code. It’s code, all right. All of us have lived too long. Too long with boys. Too long without anything else. Room and board are free, remember. And the boys are always the same age. It keeps me young. The campus never changes. Most of the time we are the only women around. And the boys pretend to be gentlemen. I feel as I have always felt.

Here is a story I always want to tell at those card parties. When I went to Washington, I visited the Capitol. In a room that has all these statues, there is a certain spot you can stand on and hear what’s being whispered on the other side of the room. Hear every word. My room is like that hall. That is how it is in my room in the house. The heating ducts and tunnels, the thin paneling and the laundry chutes must all crisscross above my bed. Nights, I hear the sounds the couples make in the rooms, and I know they are listening, too, to one another through the walls. This is what I want to tell the other housemothers. Listening as if I were on the bottom of some sea with all those noises swimming around my bed, I breathe out a kind of moan and listen to the middle of it being picked up and passed from one mouth to another, sinking back into the new wing where there are bunk beds, a couple above and a couple below, and back again. Each room adds its own layer and then it comes to me, a round dollop of sound, suspended above me. And me, the mother of pearl. No, I never interfere. That is not what a housemother is.

Thursday nights in the cottage are for buttermints and the little stadium pillows Blanche brings for the folding chairs embroidered with “Sit on Depauw.” Autumn nights, we can hear the boys singing. One house might come by to serenade us, singing “Greensleeves” and “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Or a wife of some faculty member will bring a covered dish and her Avon samples. But we don’t have much truck with the wives. We aren’t wives now, after all. Not mothers either, except to places, to houses. And because we keep houses, we are thought to be deaf and dumb. I probably am. We are for appearances only and our appearance — the same Butterick pattern in sixteen fabrics. “I thought that man would be the death of me,” Loll says. “Always after me.” Some nights we play hearts instead.

Nor will I tell them about that fellow, Pound, the crazy poet, and how I was the one who made him leave this place. When it is my turn to deal, I deal. But it is true. I was the woman in his room that night. Because of me he went to Europe, and that’s where he got famous.

I was with a circus that fall, and Crawfordsville was the last show before we wintered at Peru. I took tickets mostly, guessed weights and ages on the little midway we had. I read minds. I stayed in Crawfordsville after being paid off, hoping to go south. I spent the first night in the open with some flyers who next day left for parts unknown. That’s how I met Mr. Pound, near a mailbox on Grand Avenue. He was mailing a stack of letters — there must have been twenty. He was mailing them one at a time, reading each address before pushing each envelope in the slot. He wore a big white Panama, and he had a malacca cane. Not to mention a red beard.

“You look cold,” he said.

“I am cold,” I said.

I was cold. Crawfordsville has never been friendly to a single woman. The college is all men. The town is used to men. At the circus, most of the crowd was made up of boys from the college in collarless shirts and crew-neck sweaters, hanging around an older man, a professor. What girls there were always carried an armful of dolls and teddy bears, those were just becoming popular, escorted by the boys who kept winning the prizes. I was waiting for a Monon passenger going south.

“You must stay with me,” he said. “I need someone to talk to, and you’ll do very nicely.” He rapped his cane against the mailbox. “Besides, it will be fun getting by the housekeeper.”

The day had been bright but never warm with those flat-bottomed, fast-moving clouds that seem to make the land flatter and the wind colder. Now that it was night, it had a head start to the first frost. Besides, it was nothing new. I had been in a circus.

“You must tell me my fortune,” he said. I went to his rooming house. The stair was opposite the front door. His room was at the top and to the right. He went first and made the housekeeper make some tea, following her to the kitchen. I snuck in and up the stairs. The room was small — a bed, some chairs. Doilies and fringe. There was a big square pillow with a needle-worked “P” that I thought stood for his name but he said later it was for Pennsylvania, where he had gone to school. “Your girl makes you a pillow there. It’s all the rage.”

“You have a girl?”

“No,” he answered.

The tea tasted good. It was English tea. He had some cold cornbread in his pockets. He gave me the bed and put the chairs face-to-face for himself and ht a cigarette without asking me.

“There is much literary tradition in Crawfordsville, you know. Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, died here.” He said he visited Indianapolis just to see James Whitcomb Riley, that he’d found him entertaining schoolchildren on his porch, a little girl on his lap. Mr. Riley had suggested they get drunk. And, later, they did.

“Won’t she hear us?” I said.

“She thinks I talk to myself.”

He must not have been a poet then. He talked about the provinces in France because he had been there the summer before. “Hills and peaks and castles,” he said. “Not this flat Athens of the Midwest.” He was lonely and young. You could tell that. The boys in the Teke House today would have thought him strange, a sissy. The way he dressed. He never did anything but talk to me. He told me about his friends in Pennsylvania and how he loved to take baths. There was something in his voice. The way he talked was like writing a letter. He stretched out in the chairs, throwing his head back and closing his eyes. He fretted about not being happy here or not wanting to stay in Indiana. “I shouldn’t feel that way,” he said. “I’m a nomad, you see. You are too, aren’t you? Don’t you want to stop wandering? Don’t you want to stay someplace?”

I didn’t. I suppose if I could have known about it then, I would have headed out to Hollywood. Instead, I went to sleep, listening to his voice, wondering why there are so few people with red hair. I never told his fortune. Were there leaves I could read? I was his fortune. Behind the red hair was a blue wall, and the ashtray and the tea tray were filled with cigarette butts.

I woke up the next morning and the first thing I saw was Miss Grundy, her arms full of sheets, looking as if she was disappointed I wasn’t dead. “That man,” she said. “You poor girl.” He was fired that morning by President Mackintosh. I was told Ezra begged to stay. It was understood nothing happened between us and that I was not the reason he was dismissed. The trustees thought it a charitable action, suggested Wabash was not suitable for Mr. Pound. I gave Ezra my ticket, and that night he was on his way south to Indianapolis, pillow under his arm. Miss Grundy suggested the college find me a position. Next thing you know, I was centering a canned cherry in the middle of each chocolate pudding in the TKE house.

I got a letter from him, care of Miss Grundy, a few months later. “Venice, a lovely place to come to from Crawfordsville, Ind.”

The other mothers wouldn’t care, anyway. We swap recipes, sour cream cookies and butter brickle bars. We plan menus and really worry about color on the plate. The price of tea in China. And the boys don’t dream. The ones who know who he was and that he was here, never ask me. I hear his name sometimes after English 3. Another gentleman with a girl in his room. He forgot his tie. Maybe if I was a poet, I could tell them how it was. Instead, I am quiet at my table. The only thing I’m asked about, besides the salt, is when the letters were stolen and when they were returned. And if it’s true that the skull is all that’s left of the one pledge that told the house’s secrets.

Walking through the halls at night with my Boston, I look at the annual pictures. Mine is the only face that never changes. My vanity. It is the same picture every year since the first year. That peek-a-boo look. I had skull-tight hair, veiled eyes, dark, bow lips. What a funny way to grow older and stay younger. The matting is the same every year — a circle for me, their sweetheart and their favorite. The boxes are filled with boys aging over four years like presidents in office. When I meet the real mothers during parents’ weekends, I look for the faces in those faces. The way I stare must make them uncomfortable. “Boys,” I say, “will be boys.”

I saw that Pound again in 1958 when he was in the hospital. I took my vacation that year in Washington so I could try to see him. Ever since the war, The Star had run these articles about him because he had been here once. I didn’t think I would be able to see him. I was too early at the hospital, so I waited. At two, another woman arrived. She had the profile of a face on a coin. I found out later it was his wife. She never said a thing to me but hello. She had an accent. I followed her and a man in a white coat up a metal spiral staircase. We went down a hallway. In an alcove by a window, I was introduced. He couldn’t remember me, of course. But that’s because he was sick.

“Indiana,” he said. “Elephants walking in the corn.”

He made tea. He talked about Italy. There was a chance then that they would let him go in the care of his wife. She sat with her back to the window. Other patients came up to the screen that divided us from the ward. He gave them pennies and sent them away. He wore a green visor cap like a card player or a banker. I thought of crumbs in my lap and I brushed my skirt with the side of my hand. He talked about Idaho and maybe going there. The potato.

Other people visited. They called him E.P. He talked about poetry to them. I thought then: Had I been a poem? Maybe I was a poem. The only other visitor I recall was another woman because she was from Fort Wayne. She could remember walking the tow path on the canal. She talked to him in Greek. She told me that later. Then, I was watching two of the other patients dancing. Two men, dancing.

I gave him a pound cake meaning a little joke by it, or a token of who he was.

“It’s got a pound of butter, a pound of flour, and a pound of sugar,” I told him.

He smiled at that. I knew he didn’t remember me.

I followed his wife and the other woman out of the hospital. The woman took me back downtown in her limousine.

“He’s an old fart,” she said, “but important.” She said that Wabash was a good school. “I taught in an all-girls’ school in Baltimore for years. I have never been back to Indiana. I must go back sometime before I die.” I thought that was a strange thing to say.

I went back to Indiana on a night train. The cars were powder blue, and the trip through Ohio seemed to take forever. Have you been through Ohio? I would like to say that the boys missed me, but my vacation is during initiation in the house. That is in early January. They are too busy to miss me. I would like to say too that I was important to someone, to E.P. maybe, but that would not be true. I’m simply one of the somethings that happened to him. I didn’t change myself. Or I’m left over, an extra part. The clock still runs. What happens to yeast in bread? There’s no story here. He took the stories with him. I think people think sometimes that they make up their own world. There always has to be people like me in those made-up worlds. Nothing would happen if there weren’t.

Did I tell you what I do when the nights are cold like this one? I put a big Greek letter in my bed and plug it in. The lights are so bright, they bleach the blankets. It looks like a person curled up in bed. When I get home, it is nice and toasty. I pull back the covers like I was opening a living thing. I look at the huge θ or π lighting up my bed. And my room’s all upside-down because the light’s coming from below. What does it look like? It looks like nothing else at all. It looks like a letter in a bed.

You must see it sometime. That skull, it never sleeps. Do you need a place to stay?