The Rule of Four

Chapter 9

I think it was my mother who told me that a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask-but a great friend does it without being asked at all. There are so few times in a person's life when a single great friend comes around that it almost seems unnatural when three come around all at once.

The four of us met on a cool night during the fall of our freshman year. Paul and I were already spending much of our time together, and Charlie-who'd introduced himself on the first day of school by barging into Paul's room and offering to help him unpack-was living in a single room down the hall. Thinking nothing could be worse than being alone, Charlie was always on the prowl for new friends.

Paul immediately had misgivings about this wild, imposing character who never stopped pounding at his door with new adventures in mind. Something about Charlie's athletic build seemed to conjure a spell of fear in him, as if he' d been tortured by a bully of that description as a child. For my part, I was surprised that Charlie hadn't gotten tired of us, sedate as we were. Most of that first semester, I was convinced that he would abandon us for companions more like himself. I pegged him for a wealthy minority jock-the kind who had a neuro-surgeon mother and an executive father, who eased through a regional prep school with more tutors than trouble, and who arrived at Princeton with nothing particular in mind except to have some fun and graduate in the solid middle of the class.

That all seems funny now. The truth was, Charlie grew up in the heart of Philadelphia, riding with the volunteer ambulance squad through the worst crime districts in the city. He was a middle-class kid from a public school, whose father was a regional sales rep for an East Coast chemical manufacturer, and whose mother taught seventh-grade science. When he applied to college, his parents made it clear that anything beyond in-state tuition was a burden he would shoulder himself. The day Charlie arrived on campus, he'd taken on more student loans, and was more deeply in debt, than the rest of us would be when we graduated. Even Paul, who came from less, had been given a full scholarship because his need was so great.

Maybe that was why, other than Paul during his month of insomnia as thesis deadlines approached, none of us did more and slept less than Charlie. He expected great things for his money, and to justify his sacrifice, he sacrificed even more. It wasn't an easy thing to maintain a sense of identity at a school where only one in fifteen students was black, and only half of those were men. But identity for Charlie never ran along completely conventional lines anyway. He had a world-beating personality and an irresistible sense of purpose, and from the beginning I felt it was his world we were living in, not ours.

Of course, we didn't know all that on the late October night, only six weeks after we first met him, when he came to Paul's door with his most daring plan to date. Since roughly the Civil War, students at Princeton had been in the habit of stealing the clapper from the bell atop Nassau Hall, the oldest building on campus. The original idea was that if the bell couldn't toll the beginning of a new academic year, then the new academic year couldn't begin. Whether anyone actually believed that, I don't know, but I do know that stealing the clapper became a tradition, and that students tried everything from picking locks to scaling walls to do it. After more than a hundred years, the administration got so tired of the stunt, and so worried about a lawsuit, that it finally announced the clapper had been removed. Only, Charlie had information to the contrary. The removal was a hoax, he said; the clapper was intact. And tonight, with our help, he was going to steal it.

I don't need to explain that breaking into a historic landmark with a set of stolen keys and then fleeing from proctors on my bad leg, all in the name of a worthless bell clapper and fifteen minutes of campus fame, didn't strike me as a world-class idea. But the longer Charlie argued his case, the more I saw his point: if juniors and seniors have their research papers and theses, and sophomores choose their majors and eating clubs, then all that's left for freshmen is to take risks or get caught trying. The deans will never be more forgiving, he argued, than they will now. And when Charlie insisted it would take three people-no fewer-he and I decided that the only fair way to resolve things was to take a vote. In a reassuring test of democracy, we held a slim majority over Paul, and Paul, never being one to rock the boat, gave in. We agreed to be lookouts for Charlie, and after planning our course of attack, the three of us assembled what we could in the way of black clothing and set out for Nassau Hall at midnight.

Now, I've said before that the new Tom-the one who survived the terrible car wreck and lived to fight another day-was made of braver, more adventurous stuff than the shrinking violet who was old Tom. But let's be clear. Old or new, Evel Knievel I am not. For an hour after we arrived at Nassau Hall, I stood at my post in a tense sweat, fearing every shadow and twitching at every sound. Then, shortly after one o'clock, it happened. As the first of the eating clubs closed their taprooms for the night, a westward migration began of students and security officers retreating to campus. Charlie had promised that we would be well clear of Nassau Hall by then, but now he was nowhere to be seen.

I turned and hissed at Paul, What's taking so long?

But there was no response.

Taking a step toward the darkness, I called out again, squinting into the shadows.

What's he doing up there?

But when I peered around the corner, there was no sign of Paul. The front door to tine building was ajar.

I ran to the entrance. Sticking my head inside, I could make out Paul and Charlie in a distant conversation. It's not up there, Charlie was saying. Hurry up! I said. They're coming.

Suddenly a voice rose from the darkness behind me. Campus police! Stop right there!

I turned in terror. Charlie's voice choked into silence. I must have misheard, because I thought Paul swore.

Put your hands on your hips, came the voice again. My mind fogged up. I imagined probation; dean's warnings; expulsion. Put your hands on your hips, the voice repeated, louder now. I obeyed.

For a moment there was silence. I strained to make out the proctor in the darkness, but I could see nothing. The next sound I heard was his laughter. Now shake it, baby. Dance.

The figure who emerged from the shadows was a student. He laughed again and did a tipsy rumba thrust as he approached. He was about halfway between my height and Charlie's, with dark hair that fell over his face. His tailored black blazer covered a starched white shirt with too many buttons undone.

Charlie and Paul crept warily from the building behind me, empty-handed.

The young man walked up to them, smiling. So it's true? he said. What is? Charlie growled, glaring at me.

The young man pointed at the bell tower. The clapper. They really took it out?

Charlie said nothing, but Paul nodded, still full of adventure. Our new friend thought for a second. But you got up there? I began to see where this was leading. Well, you can't just leave, he said.

Mischief danced in his eyes. Charlie was liking him better by the second. Before long I was back at my post, guarding the east door, as all three of them vanished into the building.

When they returned fifteen minutes later, they weren't wearing pants.

What are you doing? I said.

They came toward me, arm in arm, doing a little jig in their boxers. Looking up toward the cupola, I could make out six pant legs flapping from the weather vane.

I stammered that we had to get home, but they looked at each other and booed me. The stranger insisted that we go back to one of the eating clubs to celebrate. Time for a few toasts at Ivy, he said, knowing that at this hour on Prospect Avenue, pants would be optional. And Charlie was happy to agree.

As we walked east toward Ivy, then, our new friend told us stories of his own pranks in high school: dyeing the pool red for Valentine's Day; releasing cockroaches in English class when the freshmen were reading Kafka; scandalizing the drama department by inflating a giant penis above the theater roof on opening night of Titus Andronicus. You had to be impressed. He, too, as it happened, was a freshman. A graduate of Exeter, he said, by the name of Preston Gilmore Rankin.

But, he added, as I remember to this day, call me Gil.

Gil was different from the rest of us, of course. In retrospect, I think he arrived at Princeton so used to the affluence of Exeter that wealth and the distinctions it imposed on life had become invisible to him. The only meaningful yardstick in his eyes was character, and maybe that was why, during our first semester, Gil was drawn immediately to Charlie, and through Charlie, to us. His charm always managed to smooth over the differences, and I couldn't help but feel that to be with Gil was to be in the thick of things.

At meals and parties he always reserved a place for us, and while Paul and Charlie quickly decided that his idea of a social life wasn't exactly like theirs, I found that I enjoyed Gil's company most when we were sitting around a dining table or sidled up at a bar in the Ivy Club taproom, whether with friends or alone. If Paul was at home in a classroom or in a book, and Charlie was at home in an ambulance, then Gil was at home wherever a good conversation was to be had, and the rest of the world be damned. Many of the best nights I remember at Princeton were with him.

Late sophomore spring, the time came for us to choose our eating clubs-and for the clubs to choose us. By then, most of the clubs were using a lottery system to determine selection: candidates added their names to an open list, and the new section of the club was chosen at random. But a few maintained the older system, known as bicker. Bicker resembles rush at a fraternity, in that bicker clubs choose their new members based on merit rather than on chance. And like fraternities, the definitions of merit they use tend not to be the same ones you might find, say, in a dictionary. Charlie and I entered our names in the lottery at Cloister Inn, where our mutual friends seemed to be gathering. Gil, of course, decided to bicker. And Paul, under the influence of Richard Curry, an old Ivy member himself, threw caution to the wind and bickered too.

From the outset, Gil was a shoe-in at Ivy. He satisfied every possible criterion for admission, from being the son of a club alum, to being a prominent member of the right circles on campus. He was handsome in an effortless way-always stylish, never flashy; dashing yet gentlemanly; bright but not bookish. That his father was a wealthy stockbroker who gave his only son a scandalous allowance did nothing to hurt his chances. It came as no more surprise when he was admitted to Ivy that spring than when he was elected its president a year later.

Paul's acceptance at Ivy was the product of a different logic, I think. It helped that Gil, and more distantly Richard Curry, stood in his corner, making his case in crowds where Paul would never tread. But it wasn't to those connections alone that he owed his success. Paul was also, by that time, acknowledged as one of the academic luminaries of our class. Unlike the bookworms who never ventured from Firestone, he was driven by a curiosity that made him a pleasure to meet and converse with. Upperclass-men at Ivy seemed to find something charming about a sophomore who had no skill with the tired banter of the selection process, but referred to dead authors by their first names, and seemed to know them just that well. It didn't even surprise Paul when they accepted him. When he returned that spring night, soaked with celebratory champagne, I thought he'd found a new home.

For a while, in fact, Charlie and I worried that the club's magnetism would draw the two of them away from us. It didn't help that, by then, Richard Curry had become a prominent influence in Paul's life. The two had met early in our freshman year, when I agreed to have dinner with Curry on a rare trip to New York. The interest the man showed in me after my father's death had always struck me as a strange, selfish thing-I'd never known which of us was the surrogate, the childless father or the fatherless child-so I asked Paul to join us for dinner, hoping to use him as a buffer. It worked better than I intended. The connection was instant: the vision Curry always seemed to have of my personal potential, which he claimed my father shared, was realized all at once in Paul. Paul's interest in the Hypnerotomachia resurrected memories of Curry's glory days working on the book with my father and Vincent Taft, and it was only a semester later that he offered to send Paul to Italy for a summer of research. By then, the intensity of the man's support for Paul had begun to worry me.

But if Charlie and I feared that we were losing our two friends, then we were reassured soon enough. At the end of junior year, it was Gil who suggested that the four of us live together as seniors, a decision that meant he was willing to give up living in the President's Room at Ivy to keep us as his roommates on campus. Paul immediately agreed. And so, with a mediocre draw at the housing lottery, we found ourselves in a quad at the north end of Dod. Charlie argued that a fourth-floor room would force us to get more exercise, but convenience and good sense prevailed, and the ground-floor suite, well furnished thanks to Gil, became home for our final year at Princeton.

Now, as Gil, Paul, and I reach the courtyard between the university chapel and the lecture hall, we're greeted by a strange sight. More than a dozen open-air canopies have been set up in the snow, each with a long table of food beneath it. I know immediately what it means; I just can't believe it. The lecture organizers intend to serve refreshments outside.

Like a country carnival just before a hurricane, the tables are completely deserted. The ground beneath the canopies is choppy with mud and tufts of grass. Snow is creeping in from the edges, and in the hectic wind the white tablecloths flutter uneasily, anchored by large dispensers of what will soon be hot chocolate or coffee, and by cold platters of cookies and petits fours in cocoons of plastic wrap. It cuts a peculiar image in the silent courtyard, like a city extinguished in midmotion by a calamity, a makeshift Pompeii.

You've got to be kidding, Gil says as we park. We get out of the car, and he starts toward the lecture hall, pausing to shake the support poles of the nearest tent. The whole structure trembles. Wait till Charlie sees this.

On cue, Charlie appears at the door of the lecture hall. For some reason he's preparing to leave.

Hey, Chuck, I call out as we approach, gesturing at the courtyard. How do you like all this?

But Charlie has other things on his mind.

How was I supposed to get into the auditorium? he snaps at Gil. You idiots put some girl at the entrance, and she won't let me through.

Gil holds the door for the rest of us. He understands by idiots that Charlie is referring to Ivy. As cochairs of the biggest campus Christian group, three senior women at the club are coordinating the Easter ceremonies.

Loosen up, Gil says. They just thought Cottage might try some kind of prank. They're trying to nip it in the bud.

Charlie grabs himself expressively. Yeah, well, I almost told them to nip this in the bud.

Beautiful, I say, heading for the warmth of the lecture hall. My shoes are already soaked. Can we go inside?

At the landing, a sophomore with frosted blond hair and a skier's tan is sitting behind a long table, already shaking her head. When Gil arrives behind us at the top of the stairs, though, everything changes.

The sophomore looks sheepishly at Charlie. I didn't know you were with Gil… she begins.

From inside I can hear the voice of Professor Henderson from the comparative literature department, introducing Taft to the audience.

Forget it, Charlie says, walking past the table toward the entrance. The rest of us follow.

The auditorium is filled to capacity. All along the walls and toward the back of the hall by the entrance, those who couldn't find a seat are on their feet. I catch sight of Katie in a back row with another pair of Ivy sophomores, but before I can get her attention, Gil nudges me forward, searching for a place where the four of us can stand. He puts a finger over his lips and points toward the stage. Taft is walking to the podium.

The Good Friday lecture is a tradition with deep roots at Princeton, the first of three Easter celebrations that have become fixtures in the social lives of many students, Christian and non-Christian alike. By legend the events were introduced in the spring of 1758 by Jonathan Edwards, the fiery New England churchman who moonlighted as Princeton's third president. Edwards led the students in a sermon on the night of Good Friday, followed by a religious meal on Saturday evening, and a service at midnight as Easter Sunday began. Somehow these rituals were then transmitted intact down to the present, profiting from that immunity to time and fortune which the university, like an ancient tar pit, confers on everything that unwittingly lumbers into it and dies.

One of those things, as it happened, was Jonathan Edwards himself. Soon after arriving at Princeton, Edwards was given a potent smallpox inoculation, and within three months the old man had died from it. Notwithstanding the fact that he was probably too weak to have invented the ceremonies that have been attributed to him, though, university officials recreate all three of them, year after year, in what is euphemistically called a modern context.

I suspect Jonathan Edwards was never much for euphemisms or modern contexts. Considering that his most famous metaphor for human life involved a spider dangling above the pit of hell, hung there by a wrathful God, the old man must turn in his grave every spring. The Good Friday sermon is now nothing more than a lecture delivered by a member of the humanities faculty; the only thing mentioned less often than God in the lecture is hell. The original religious meal, which must have been stark and Calvinist in its conception, is now a banquet in the most beautiful of the undergraduate dining halls. And the midnight service, which I'm sure once made the walls tremble, is now a nondenominational celebration of faith, where not even the atheists and agnostics can feel out of place. Maybe for that reason, students of every background attend the Easter ceremonies, each for a different reason, and all of them depart happily, with their expectations reinforced and their sensitivities respected.

Taft stands at the podium, fat and shaggy as ever. Seeing him, I think of Procrustes, the mythological highwayman who tortured his victims by stretching them on a bed if they were too short, or cutting them down to size if they were too tall. Every time I look at the man I think of how misshapen he is, how his head is too big and his gut is too round, how the fat dangles from his arms as if the flesh were pulled from his bones. Still, there is an operatic quality to the figure he cuts onstage. In his wrinkled white dress shirt and worn tweed coat, he is larger than his own circumstances, a mind bulging at its human seams. Professor Henderson steps toward him, trying to adjust the microphone on his lapel, and Taft remains still, like a crocodile having its teeth cleaned by a bird. This is the giant at the top of Paul's beanstalk. Remembering the story of Epp Lang and the dog, I feel my stomach turn again.

By the time we find a pinch of standing room at the back of the auditorium, Taft has begun, and already it's far from the usual Good Friday drivel. He's delivering a slide show, and over the broad white projection screen comes a series of images, each more terrible than the last. Saints being tortured. Martyrs being slain. Taft is saying that faith is easier to give than life, but harder to take away. He has brought examples to make his point.

Saint Denis, he says, voice pulsing through the speakers mounted high overhead, was martyred by decapitation. According to legend, his corpse rose and carried his head away.

Above the lectern is a painting of a blindfolded man with his head on a block. The executioner is wielding an enormous ax.

Saint Quentin, he continues, advancing to the next image. Painted by Jacob Jordaens, 1650. He was stretched on the rack, then flogged. He prayed to God for strength, and survived, but was later put on trial as a sorcerer. He was racked and beaten, and his flesh was pierced with iron wires from the shoulders to the thighs. Iron nails were forced into his ringers, skull, and body. He was ultimately decapitated.

Charlie, failing to see the point of all this, or maybe just unimpressed after the horrors he's seen with the ambulance team, turns to me.

So what'd Stein want? he whispers.

Across the screen comes a dark image of a man, naked but for a loincloth, being forced to lie across a metal surface. A fire is being lit below him. Saint Lawrence, Taft continues, familiar enough with the details not to need cues. Martyred in 258. Burned alive on a gridiron.

He found a book Paul needs for his thesis, I say.

Charlie points to the bundle in Paul's hand. Must be important, he says.

I expect something sharp in the words, a reminder of how Stein cut our game short, but Charlie says them with respect. He and Gil still mispronounce the Hypnerotomachia's title five times out of ten, but Charlie, at least, can identify with how hard Paul has worked, and how much this research means to him.

Taft presses a button behind the lectern again, and an even stranger image appears. A man lies on a wooden tablet, with a hole in the side of his abdomen. A string from within the hole is gradually being turned on a spit by two men on either side of him.

Saint Erasmus, Taft says, also known as Elmo. He was tortured by Emperor Diocletian. Though beaten with whips and clubs, he survived. Though rolled in tar and set on fire, he lived. Though thrown into prison, he escaped. He was recaptured and forced to sit in a burning iron chair. Finally he was killed by having his stomach cut open and his intestines wound around a windlass.

Gil turns to me. This is definitely different.

A face in the back row turns to shush us, but seems to think better of it after seeing Charlie.

The proctors wouldn't even listen to me about the screen, Charlie whispers to Gil, still looking for conversation.

Gil turns back toward the stage, not wanting to resurrect the topic.

Saint Peter, Taft continues, by Michelangelo, around 1550. Peter was martyred under Nero, crucified upside-down at his own request. He was too humble to be crucified the same way as Christ.

Onstage, Professor Henderson looks uncomfortable, picking nervously at a spot on her sleeve. Without any thread of argument connecting one slide to the next, Taft's presentation is beginning to seem less like a lecture than like a sadist's peep show. The usual rumble of conversation in the auditorium on Good Fridays has dissolved into titillated silence.

Hey, Gil says, tapping Paul's sleeve, does Taft always talk about this stuff?

Paul nods.

He's a little off, isn't he? Charlie whispers.

The two of them, having stayed out of Paul's academic life for so long, are noticing this for the first time.

Paul nods, but says nothing.

We arrive, then, Taft continues, at the Renaissance. The home of a man who embraced the language of violence I have been trying to convey. What I wish to share with you tonight is not a story he created by dying, but something of the mysterious story he created while still alive. The man was an aristocrat from Rome named Francesco Colonna. He wrote one of the rarest books ever printed: the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

Paul's eyes are fixed on Taft, pupils wide in the dark.

From Rome? I whisper.

Paul looks at me, incredulous. Before he can answer, though, there is an outburst at the entrance behind us. A sharp, violent exchange has erupted between the girl at the door and a large man, as yet obscured. Their voices are spilling through the lecture hall.

To my surprise, when the man emerges into the light, I recognize him at once.