Hangsaman (9 page)

There was one directly opposite who had bright-red hair, and who was laughing and talking with several girls around her; more girls were listening and edging nearer, and Natalie, drawing back from that side of the room, thought,
There
is someone I will know only slightly. The girl next to her had hair that grew in an ugly line across her forehead, and when Natalie risked saying, after rehearsing it for some minutes, “Do you know any of these people?” the girl said, “No,” briefly, eyed Natalie for a minute, and then looked away. She is not looking for me, Natalie thought, and the girl on her other side was not looking for Natalie either; as Natalie turned to her, to repeat her question, she rose quickly and went to join the group by the red-haired girl. Will they all notice that I am sitting almost alone? Natalie wondered. Did the red-haired girl thank her fate every morning and night, when she looked at herself in her mirror, with a comb in her hand? Did the girl near Natalie bewail secretly the ugly line of her hair, and persuade herself that she was more aware of it than anyone else? Was someone regarding Natalie, identifying her by some extraordinary characteristic which Natalie did not know or had forgotten or had convinced herself that no one saw? Was it not possible that the girl over there, in the blue dress, had put the dress on that morning wondering if it would do for her first day at college? Because it would not, and had she spent the day concerned with it, or had she forgotten it immediately she put it on? Had the mother of the one in green told her not to forget her pills? Was the one with glasses afraid of waking in the night, alone? Which of them had come to college hoping secretly to meet a thin nervous girl named Natalie? Did she expect Natalie to recognize her first? And, worst of all, what terrible change were they all expecting so immediately, so fearfully? Was something going to happen?

Natalie had already discovered that it was not possible to think clearly in this bedlam, any more than it was possible to act clearly. All thoughts and actions were called for so quickly, were so subject to immediate and drastic change, that she dared not try to rise to go upstairs and find her room again, and she dared not estimate finally the probable characters of the girls in the room, for fear that, in either case, someone should look at her and laugh; suddenly, permanently, seeing her as, “That girl who . . .”

Then without warning the room quieted, and Natalie perceived that the red-haired girl was standing. “Shall I?” she said to someone sitting near her, as one who has intended to all the time and merely expects public confirmation; the girls around her nodded and spoke urgently, and the red-haired girl turned prettily to the room, spread her hands, and said, “Listen, everyone, we've all got to introduce ourselves to each other. After all, we'll be living in the same house for a long time.” Everyone laughed as though, unexpectedly, she had voiced the hidden dismay of them all, and the red-haired girl said, “I'll go first. My name's Peggy Spencer, and I came here from Central High School in—”

The girl next to Natalie, the one with the unpleasant hair, leaned over suddenly and said to Natalie, “Isn't she cute?”

Cute? Natalie thought. “She certainly is,” she whispered back.

Around the circle of girls, each one in turn announced her name and her immediate past record. Each one, speaking her own name in a voice she had rarely heard pronounce it, was more or less embarrassed; when Natalie's turn came, and the girl next to her had identified herself as Adelaide something or other from some school or other, and turned expectantly to Natalie, as one who sees an ordeal safely past and another up for the question, Natalie found herself surprisingly able to say clearly, “My name is Natalie Waite.”
Is
it my name? she wondered then, afraid for a minute that she had appropriated the name of the next girl, or of someone she had met slightly once and remembered only in the recesses of her mind which seemed called upon unreasonably to function now, socially, and without experience. The name passed without comment, perhaps because no one was listening, actually, to any name other than her own.

After each, then, had with shame called upon herself to stand forth alone, the red-haired girl, without so much pretty confusion, said in the voice of one to whom amateur parliamentary procedure is familiar (“Well, of
course
it will be Peggy Spencer for vice-president . . .”), “All right, then, since we're all frosh together, we ought to settle any problems we've got right now.”

Frosh, Natalie thought, problems. Are the problems to be settled here? She wanted desperately to go to her room.

By the second day (waking up delightedly into the strange room, dressing alone without the certain knowledge of her mother moving downstairs, putting away her own things, selecting her own places for underwear in the dresser, books on the shelves, papers in the desk) she was able to find her own room without being puzzled by the stairs or the length of the hall. She had taken to staying around the floor bathroom at bedtime, with the rest of the girls, asking odd, uncertain questions of the others as they did of her, laughing at jokes whose inevitable point was the uncanny ability of new students to outwit old students, shouting meaninglessly at people she hardly knew. She knew the name of almost everyone on the floor; the red-haired girl, who was already running for some freshman office or other, nodded cordially to her whenever they passed on the stairs, the girl with the ugly hair sat next to her at breakfast one morning. It was thus possible to live—breakfast, lunch, dine, brush one's teeth, sleep, read—in an odd, random fashion, in this world. As one who wakens to find his city destroyed and himself alone in the ruins, Natalie found herself a rude shelter, food, and comfort, by a system almost scavenging.

*   *   *

It could have been a nightmare, but it was a frantic, imperative knock on her door. Natalie, fumbling, turned on her light and looked, as though it were important, at the clock: three o'clock. That meant it was the middle of the night, and her mind, suddenly concerned lest its own signal system be awry, moved quickly over obligations and commitments. No class at this hour, surely, no appointments. A fire, then? Something wholly beyond her own jurisdiction? A murder? Perhaps in the room next door? (A thought of the glories of innocent witness-ship crossed her mind, perhaps for future reference: “But
that
man is not a postman, Inspector; did you see the way he opened the mailbox?”) Perhaps they were waking Natalie, as someone who might help, who was known to keep her head in emergencies, phone the doctor first, know always who was to apply the tourniquet, who the makeshift splint. Or, perhaps, waking Natalie as the obvious, destined victim? War? Pestilence? Terror?

“Initiation,” called a long voice down the hall. “All freshmen out . . .”

“No,” said Natalie, and reached for the cord of her light. Was she a freshman? So designated by those who did not know her name? Or had she been awakened by mistake—or
was
this meant for her? Natalie alone, then? (Her untrusted mind playing her tricks? A dream, so that she should stand in a moment, shivering and miserable, alone in the hall while doors opened up and down the length of the building and curious, mocking faces peered out, saying, “What
is
she doing?” and answering, “She dreamed, she dreamed she was a freshman and it was something called initiation, she keeps saying something about a murder, she keeps asking what her name is, she doesn't seem to know where she is . . .”) “I
am
a freshman,” she said aloud, and, quickened by a sudden excitement, she swung out of bed and into a bathrobe. “College,” she told herself cynically, hurrying with the bathrobe cord, “initiation,” stuffing her feet into her slippers. She opened her door, tentative at the last moment, to find the hall lights on and the hall full of nervous, curious, bathrobed girls.

“Where do we go?” someone asked Natalie immediately, perhaps assuming from her late exit from her own room that she had some special inside information.

“
I
don't know,” Natalie said. “We better stay here.”

“I understand,” said someone, and giggled, “that they make us . . .” The rest of her words were most unfortunately lost to Natalie, whose arm had been seized by a temporarily authoritative hand, and whose ears had been seized by a voice saying, “Frosh? This way.”

Resenting again the movie word “frosh” (and, to a certain degree knowing curiosity tempered with excitement, so that she thought consciously, in the midst of an unwanted fear, So
this
is why they always pick the middle of the night for things to happen! and knew she had hit upon something very profound), Natalie followed the firm hand, and the rest of the girls followed her. Behind her someone still giggled, someone still said, “But where are we going?” Someone insisted nervously, “I'm not sure my
doctor
 . . .”

“Where are we going?” Natalie asked the person leading her; she discovered with strong embarrassment that this person was masked with a handkerchief over her face, tied approximately at the back of her head; this cops-and-robbers effect conveyed to Natalie the fact that the night's escapade (she did not phrase it to herself like this until much later, however) was something these people might not care to do in daylight, with their faces uncovered; there was about her conductor a faint air of many people provoking one another, saying, “Go
on
, I dare you . . . go
on
; you look
wonderful
;
I
will if
you
will,” and the intoxication which comes of a deed hallowed in tradition but uncertainly remembered in detail.

“Shut up,” Natalie was told, in answer to her question, and she thought of how bold the lack of a face made one, and, perhaps, how not having a face of one's own might lead to universal peace, since a face was, after all, only . . .

“In here,” said the faceless creature.

It was extraordinary how not having faces had changed the bodies of the girls in the house. Falteringly, Natalie was able to pick out two or three, but, reflecting that she had known them at best only by their make-up and the way they did their hair, she was forced to distrust her own judgment and to believe, most charitably, the best of them. One, who seemed to have constituted herself leader, remarked as Natalie, first in line, was brought in, “Do you have any qualification for entering here?”

They were sitting in a semicircle on the floor, all masked as foolishly as the girl who had brought her, all wearing their own pajamas, which surely their mothers, picking them out, had not destined for such midnight purposes; or, indeed, had they? Did the mothers of such girls encourage their superiority, egg them on to masked acts? Did they, sending their daughters off to college, remark, as last-minute advice, “And, dearest,
remember
, when you get after the frosh . . .
do
please wear your blue-and-white-striped p.j.'s—they look the best, and they'll stand the splinters in that floor . . .”

“No, I was brought,” said Natalie, and received for reward a push from the girl who had brought her, so that she fell clumsily against a girl sitting, and the girl said, very humanly, “
Cut
it out,” and pushed back.

Now I
will
keep quiet, Natalie thought, knowing—and it was not, after all, any too soon to learn—the resignation of a perceptive mind before gleeful freed brutality—and let someone else get pushed.

“—for entering here?” the leader was asking the next girl.

“I don't know,” said the girl uncertainly, and was pushed.

As that girl dropped down next to Natalie, she whispered, trembling, “I wish I'd never come.”

“Me, too,” said Natalie inadequately.

She found that she was thinking absurdly of Jeanne d'Arc; perhaps the next girl, or the one after that, would turn in contempt from the leader, and, addressing a dim figure in the background, drop to her knees and say, “You, Sire, are my king . . .”

After the first few girls, their mentor was tired of pushing them—perhaps she had worn out her rage, or her arms?—and they were allowed to seat themselves quietly. No one spoke, and beyond their mutual and spreading apprehension came the sure conviction among the freshmen that their superiors had exceeded themselves, that the “
I
will if
you
will” had begun to evaporate, with the laughter and the bad puns; that the torment they had devised extended perhaps to one or two girls and could not, for sheer bodily weariness, be repeated, over and over again, for twenty. Moreover, it became increasingly clear that the party had fallen flat, that the pure number of girls entering docilely had worn thin the viciousness in the voice of the leader, that she and her cohorts were going to skim over the last few girls, relying for their effect upon the first few, and, perhaps even with discomfort for themselves, let the business go to pieces now without further emphasizing their futility; the part of wisdom lay clearly in choosing the weakest first.

Natalie, at least, felt a grateful relief when, instead of calling upon her as the first girl, the leader waited until all the freshmen were in, and crowded uneasily onto the floor, and sitting or kneeling, then pointed to a girl in the middle and said, “You, there.”

It crossed Natalie's mind then that if she had stayed in her room quietly and never heeded the call to frosh, she would have been overlooked, since no one seemed to care about those who did not come. With this in mind, Natalie turned cautiously and scanned the ranks of freshmen for the red-haired girl, but did not find her. Another instance, she thought regretfully (or at least remembered later that she had so thought), of ritual gone to seed; the persecution of new students, once passionate, is now only perfunctory.

The girl chosen was required to sit upon a low stool in what was, most of them now recognized, the center of the second-floor lavatory—the largest in the house, and the one with most floor space—and she was required further to give her name and her previous educational experience, as though that had not all been gone over before by people more qualified to know, and then the leader, hesitating and prompted, had chosen to confer with a colleague rather than to continue the questioning immediately. Then someone from the masked circle around the new students said, “Look, we're all allowed to ask questions, aren't we?”