The MacGuffin (10 page)

“This is very depressing,” Rose Helen said.

“Well, it is,” Druff said. “That’s why I don’t think that just because someone has six hours of credit in a subject that’s a good enough reason to say, ‘Yes, I have six hours of credit in this subject, I might as well make it my minor.’ You have to be interested in it for its own sake.” (You tell her, Mikey, thought Druff inside a judgmental parenthesis.)

“Yes, but did it ever occur to you that the reason a party already has six hours in a particular subject just might be that the person is already interested in it?”

Then she said she thought he was being pretty sarcastic for someone who didn’t seem to know what he was going to do with his life and talked about self-murder a few years down the line. And now Druff remembered exactly what an attractive, tragic, brooding figure she had made him feel at the time, recalling, who hadn’t forgotten so much after all, though they were seated inside the Union Building—
“La Mer”
on the jukebox was playing—how he had had this vagrant image of himself, how he must have looked in her eyes—this windblown, tempest- tossed guy, collar turned up against the elements, cigarette smoke rolling like fog up the side—it wasn’t that many years since the war had ended—of his doomed resistance-fighter’s sharp features.

“I’m interested,” he said, “—to the extent that I’m interested in anything—in politics.” To fulfill his social science requirement he was taking a course in civics. Monday there might be a snap quiz on the bicameral legislature.

“Really? In politics?”

“I’m like you,” the future City Commissioner of Streets confided offhandedly, “I want to help make sure that future generations of children will have, well, a future.”

They met for coffee, they went to the movies, they went to concerts. They’d become enthusiastic about certain of their professors and from time to time would sit in on each other’s classes. They were the only couple they knew who did this on a date. Though they really didn’t know all that many couples. Rose Helen was a sorority girl. (Yes, it surprised Druff too.) There was this rule that sorority girls couldn’t date Independents. Well, it was an unwritten rule actually, enforceable only while the girls were still pledging. Though even after they were initiated it was strongly discouraged. “They wouldn’t want to be hypocrites,” Rose Helen told him. “That’s what they say, that they wouldn’t want to be hypocrites, the hypocrites. That it would set a bad example for the pledges, that what would
we
think if
we
were still pledging and found out one of our sisters was dating someone who wasn’t a Greek?”

That’s why they didn’t know too many couples. That’s why they met for coffee in various cafés on campus, that’s why they met in front of certain movie theaters, and managed to be on line when the tickets to particular concerts—Odetta, Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel—went on sale. That’s why they sat in on each other’s classes.

Because the pressure was on her not to date an Independent, because she couldn’t bring him to her sorority house (and because the landlady in Druff’s boardinghouse was as strict about men socializing with women in their rooms as the sisters were about fraternizing with Independents), couldn’t and wouldn’t, she said, even if she could. Because she didn’t want any brooding, tempest-tossed,
“La Mer”
-whistling, tragic and sarcastic friend of hers subjected to the silly remarks of a bunch of spoiled, malicious, superficial girls. Though Druff felt he could have held his own with the best of them and wouldn’t have minded. He told Rose Helen as much.

“No,” she said. “Why stoop to their level?”

“Well, why did you?” he asked in turn.

Which was just exactly the wrong question. They were in one of their coffee shops again, or, no, he remembered now, this time not in one of their coffee shops at all, not even on campus, not even in campus town anymore, but in the town proper, in a diner, the sort of place they might drop in on after one of those folk concerts they went to but which they ordinarily avoided, because they were both clearly students, and as much resented by the townies who went there as Druff was by the Greeks or Rose Helen by Druff’s landlady because she was a woman. Where no one they could possibly know would recognize them, except for the types they were. (And maybe he
was
interested in politics, maybe he
was.
Just maybe all this bi- and tri-cameral apartheid of ordinary life was beginning to have an influence on him.) But which was just
exactly
the wrong question. Because she was crying now, Druff’s little poster girl dissolved in tears, and not because she couldn’t answer his oblique reference to her own hypocrisy but because she could. Because she knew herself
that
well.

“I’m two years behind my year,” she sobbed. “I should be graduating in June. Instead I’m only this sophomore. Don’t you know anything? Because why did they rush me if it wasn’t to show off how liberal they are? Not only a cripple but a relatively presentable cripple, and not only a relatively presentable cripple with this almost sanitary deformity, but someone older than they, and aren’t they sisters, and don’t sisters have
big
sisters? So what does that make me if not an intermediary somewhere between an older sister and their housemother? Someone who not only can do for them—make last-minute adjustments on their hairdos, go over their lists of French and Spanish vocabulary with them, help with their mending, give them a hip to cry on—but who looks good on their record too. Don’t you know anything? I wasn’t here three days before they spotted me and rushed me. They didn’t even give me a hard time. I wasn’t even hazed.”

She was telling him—though of course the terms for all this hadn’t been invented yet—that she was their first affirmative-action, primal status token project.

He persisted. “You didn’t answer my question. Why? Well, why did you?”

“Don’t you know anything? You don’t know anything, do you? I told you, they made it easy for me. All I ever had to do was pose with them in the front row when the group picture was taken. I wasn’t even hazed.”

If she was their first affirmative action, Druff was their second.

Rose Helen said she’d told them about him and that they couldn’t wait to meet him. He was invited to come to dinner Tuesday night.

“Well, yes,” he said, “I’m an ‘Independent.’ ” This was in the living room. (He supposed it was a living room, though it might have been a drawing room or a music room or even a library, even, for all he knew, the boardroom of some fabulous, oak-paneled corporate headquarters. There was a huge crystal chandelier, there was a concert-class grand piano. There were leaded glass bay windows and cushioned window seats. There were lacquered wooden tables and tall freestanding lamps. There were shelves packed solid with books in leather bindings, golden titles mounted in layered frames set into their spines like seals. There were long leather sofas and wing chairs upholstered in what looked to Druff like fine Oriental rugs. There were fine Oriental rugs.) He’d never seen anything like it. It could have been a manor house in the family generations.

“No,” he said, answering another girl’s question, “I have nothing against the idea of fraternities,
qua
fraternities. I guess I just never bought into the notion that one could have instant ‘brothers,’ or the odd, exclusive idealism of fraternity life.”

“Rosie tells us that you intend to be a politician,” said another of his hostesses.

“Well,” he said, “I’m not
running
for anything, if that’s what you mean. My eye isn’t ‘out’ for any particular ‘office.’ ” That’s how he spoke to them all evening, in the living room—if that’s what it was—and, later, at the head table at dinner, attempting aphorisms by stressing individual words or setting them off in what he hoped would be understood as quotation marks, sometimes punching up everything, addressing them in a kind of oral Braille. When they were informed that they would be taking their coffee and dessert by the piano that evening, Druff rose, wiped at the corner of his lips with his napkin and thanked the president of the sorority for having him over for dinner. “Really,” he said, “though I’m this, quote, bred in the bone, unquote, quote Independent unquote, I have to admit that the dinner was excellent, and the evening was
fascinating,
and I underscore fascinating. You’re very kind, all of you. As a would-be, quote, public man, unquote, I have to confess to a certain, quote, interest, unquote, in the dynamics of your organization. I find it’s all rather like some loyal politician’s allegiance to, well, ‘
party.’
Quote party unquote underscored.”

In that living room again, Rose Helen and he were directed to seats on one of the leather sofas and offered coffee and cake by a waiter. (Druff recognized him. They lived in the same boardinghouse.) There was some general conversation. Then the waiter went around the room taking up their cups and saucers, their cake plates, their forks and spoons and paper napkins. One of the sorority sisters walked over to the piano and sat down at the piano bench. She was joined by the rest of the girls who ranked themselves about her in what even Druff recognized as a formation, a kind of musical battle stations.

“Oh no,” Rose Helen groaned.

“What?”

“Oh no.”

Two or three of the waiters had come in from the dining room and were leaning against a wall in the entrance hall.

The president of the sorority was speaking directly to Druff and Rose Helen on the sofa. “Robert,” she said, “the women of Chi Phi Kappa are proud of all their sisters. Rose Helen, however, whose maturity and unselfish generosity have been an inspiration to all of us, holds a special place in our hearts, and we do not wonder that she should have found one in yours. Now, Rose, in your honor, and in honor of your interesting new friend, the ladies of Chi Phi Kappa house are pleased to honor you this evening with a serenade, one of the most beautiful and cherished of our traditions.

“Your sisters smile on you tonight, Rose, and wish you all the happiness you could wish for yourself. We delight in
your
delight. We support you, we love you, we bless you.”

They sang the Chi Phi Kappa song. They sang the school fight song. They sang love songs. They sang “Rosie, You Are My Posy.” They sang
“La Mer.”

Of course they were embarrassed, of course they were. All that drilled attention, it was like having the attention of a firing squad, a little like taking, at close range and at full force, a blast from a fire hose. Of course he felt patronized, of course he did. Nevertheless (maybe he
was
a politician, maybe he
was;
maybe at nineteen he was already developing the politician’s thick skin, or at least a willingness to deal, something
quid pro quo
in the nature; if they hadn’t actually given him a girlfriend, why at least they had endorsed him; and all he ever had to do for it was eat their dinner, submit to their questioning, good-sport his way through their silly patronage), he felt he had made a good impression.

He had, Rose Helen told him, he’d confirmed all their misgivings, was everything they thought an Independent would be.

“Didn’t you feel it?” she said. “Didn’t you feel any of it? Didn’t you? Don’t you know what that was?” They were in one of the small study rooms—two small typing tables, a couple of desk lamps, two chairs, a narrow cot—at the back of the sorority house. The door to the study room was open. Rose Helen was standing with her hand on the little shelf above her damaged left hip, the akimbo elbow and forward thrust of her body giving her her familiar, faintly bold air, and a suggestion about her mouth (though if this was there at all it was something Druff had penciled in himself) of the pursed pout of some saloon cupid.

“Rosie, you are my posy,” Druff said, reaching for her hand and lifting it from her hip to pull her gently toward the cot.

She held her ground. “If I scream they’ll come running.”

“Why would you scream?”

“Listen, it’s almost ten-thirty. Males have to be out of here by ten-thirty.”

“Why would you scream?”

“We came in here to study. We’re supposed to be studying.”

“Isn’t this the passion pit? Isn’t that what they call it?”

He stood up and kissed her.

“The door’s open.”

“I’ll close it.”

“It’s supposed to be open. You’re not allowed to close it.”

“The door across the hall is closed. That one over there is.”

“Girls are studying in those.”

“Sure,” he said.

“They are,” she said. Then she went over to the door and closed it herself. Druff stood waiting to embrace her. “They are,” she said, “but even if they’re not, even if they’re in there with boys, even if they’re slow dancing with their hands all over each other’s behinds, even if they’re French-kissing. Even if they’re quote doing it unquote, I wouldn’t let you touch me. I wouldn’t even let you hold my hand.”

“Why? My God, Rose Helen, why? They’re your sisters. They serenaded us. Isn’t that like piping us aboard? Didn’t they just practically marry us at sea?”

“Don’t you know what that was? Don’t you? They as good as made you their mascot. They brought the waiters up from downstairs as witnesses.”

“Come on,” Druff said, “I don’t care about them.”

“You don’t?”

“Listen, Miss Kitty, we’re like men without a country.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Well, we are,” he said, “just exactly like men without a country. Except for those coffeehouses, this is the first time we’ve been alone since we met.”

She was crying again, and Druff suddenly understood that that was why she’d closed the door, because she knew they were going to have this conversation. And why she’d extended their invitation in the first place, because it was exactly the conversation she’d wanted to have with him from the beginning. Understood she was permitting him something far more intimate than just the groping he had anticipated, showing him a glimpse of her turf, an unrestricted view of what her cards looked like on the table.

He tried to comfort her. “Oh, Rose Helen. Rose Helen, oh.”

“Don’t you?”