The Music School (17 page)

Carter had broken up. He bent above his tray, his eyes tight shut, his dark face contorted joyfully. “Puhleese,” he gasped at last. “You’re making my stomach hurt.”

“Ah, Carter,” Kern said loftily, “if that were only the worst of it. For then, one day, while the innocent hen sits cradling this strange, faceless, oval child, its little weight swaying softly in her wings”—he glanced hopefully at Carter, but the colored boy bit his lower lip and withstood the jab—“an enormous man, smelling of beer and manure, comes and tears the egg from her grasp. And why? Because
he
”—Kern pointed, arm fully extended, across the table, so that his index finger, orange with nicotine, almost touched Hub’s nose—“
he
, St. Henry Palamountain, wants more eggs to eat. ‘More eggs!’ he cries voraciously, so that brutal steers and faithless pigs can continue to menace the children of American mothers!”

Dawson slammed his silver down, got up from the table, and slouched out of the dining room. Kern blushed. His high spirits had rubbed his roommate the wrong way. In the silence, Petersen put a folded slice of roast beef in his mouth and said, chewing, “Jesus, Hub, if somebody else kills the animals you might as well eat ’em. They don’t give a damn any more.”

“You understand nothing,” Hub said simply.

“Hey, Hub,” Silverstein called down from the far end of the table. “What’s the word on milk? Don’t calves drink milk? Maybe you’re taking milk out of some calf’s mouth.”

Orson felt impelled to speak. “
No
,” he said, and his voice seemed to have burst, its pitch was so unsteady and excited. “As anybody except somebody from New York would know, milch cows have weaned their calves. What I wonder about, Hub, is your shoes. You wear leather shoes.”

“I do.” The gaiety left Hub’s defense of himself. His lips became prim.

“Leather is the skin of a steer.”

“But the animal has already been slaughtered.”

“You sound like Petersen. Your purchase of leather goods—what about your wallet and belt, for that matter?—encourages the slaughter. You’re as much of a murderer as the rest of us. More of one—because you think about it.”

Hub folded his hands carefully in front of him, propping them, almost in prayer, on the table edge. His voice became like that of a radio announcer, but an announcer rapidly, softly describing the home stretch of a race. “My belt, I believe, is a form of plastic. My wallet was given to me by my mother years ago, before I became a vegetarian. Please remember that I ate meat for eighteen years and I still have an appetite for it. If there were any other concentrated source of protein, I would not eat eggs. Some vegetarians do not. On the other hand, some vegetarians eat fish and take liver extract. I would not do this. Shoes are a problem. There is a firm in Chicago that makes non-leather shoes for extreme vegetarians, but they’re very expensive and not comfortable. I once ordered a pair. They hurt my feet. Leather, you see, ‘breathes’ in a way no synthetic substitute does. My feet are tender; I have compromised. I apologize. For that matter, when I play the piano—‘tickle the ivories,’ as they say—I encourage the slaughter of elephants, and in brushing my teeth, which I must do faithfully because a vegetable diet is so heavy in
starch, I use a brush of pig bristles. I am covered with blood, and pray daily for forgiveness.” He took up his fork and resumed eating the mound of squash.

Orson was amazed; he had been impelled to speak by a kind of sympathy, and Hub had answered as if he alone were a serious enemy. He tried to defend himself. “There are perfectly wearable shoes,” he said, “made out of canvas, with crepe-rubber soles.”

“I’ll look into them,” Hub said. “They sound a little sporty to me.”

Laughter swept the table and ended the subject. After lunch Orson walked to the library with the beginnings of indigestion; a backwash of emotion was upsetting his stomach. There was a growing confusion inside him he could not resolve. He resented being associated with Hub, and yet felt attacked when Hub was attacked. It seemed to him that Hub deserved credit for putting his beliefs into practice, and that people like Fitch and Kern, in mocking, merely belittled themselves. Yet Hub smiled at their criticism, took it as a game, and fought back in earnest only at Orson, forcing him into a false position. Why? Was it because in being also a Christian he alone qualified for serious rebuke? But Carter went to church, wearing a blue pin-striped suit with a monogrammed handkerchief peaked in the breast pocket, every Sunday; Petersen was a nominal Presbyterian; Orson had once seen Kern sneaking out of Mem Chapel; and even Koshland observed his holidays, by cutting classes and skipping lunch. Why, therefore, Orson asked himself, should Hub pick on him? And why should he care? He had no real respect for Hub. Hub’s handwriting was childishly large and careful and his first set of hour exams, even in the course on Plato and Aristotle, had yielded a batch of C’s. Orson resented being
condescended to by him; the knowledge that at the table he had come off second-best galled him like an unfair grade. His situation with Hub became in his head a diagram in which all his intentions curved off at right angles and his strengths inversely tapered into nothing. Behind the diagram hung the tuck of complacence in Hub’s lips, the fishy impudence of his eyes, and the keenly irksome shape and tint of his hands and feet. These images—Hub disembodied—Orson carried with him into the library, back and forth to classes, and along the congested streets around the Square; now and then the glaze of an eye or the flat yellowish nail of a big toe welled up distinctly through the pages of a book or, greatly magnified, slid with Orson into the unconsciousness of sleep. Nevertheless, he surprised himself, sitting one February afternoon in Room 12 with Dawson and Kern, by blurting, “I hate him.” He considered what he had said, liked the taste of it, and repeated, “I hate him. I’ve never hated anybody before in my life.” His voice cracked and his eyes warmed with abortive tears.

They had all returned from Christmas vacation to plunge into the odd limbo of reading period and the novel ordeal of midyear exams. This was a dormitory, by and large, of public-school graduates, who feel the strain of Harvard most in their freshman year. The private-school boys, launched by little Harvards like Andover and Groton, tend to glide through this year and to run aground later on strange reefs, foundering in alcohol, or sinking into a dandified apathy. But the institution demands of each man, before it releases him, a wrenching sacrifice of ballast. At Christmas, Orson’s mother thought he looked haggard, and set about fattening him up. On the other hand, he was struck by how much his father had aged and
shrunk. Orson spent his first days home listening to the mindless music on the radio, hours of it, and driving through farmland on narrow straight roads already banked bright with plowed snow. The South Dakota sky had never looked so open, so clean; he had never realized before that the high dry sun that made even sub-zero days feel warm at noon was a local phenomenon. He made love to his girl again, and again she cried. He said to her he blamed himself, for ineptitude; but in his heart he blamed her. She was not helping him. Back in Cambridge, it was raining, raining in January, and the entryway of the Coop was full of gray footprints and wet bicycles and Radcliffe girls in slickers and sneakers. Hub had stayed here, alone in their room, and had celebrated Christmas with a fast.

In the monotonous, almost hallucinatory month of rereading, outlining, and memorizing, Orson perceived how little he knew, how stupid he was, how unnatural all learning is, and how futile. Harvard rewarded him with three A’s and a B. Hub pulled out two B’s and two C’s. Kern, Dawson, and Silverstein did well; Petersen, Koshland, and Carter got mediocre grades; Fitch flunked one subject, and Young flunked three. The pale Negro slunk in and out of the dorm as if he were diseased and marked for destruction; he became, while still among them, a rumor. The suppressed whistling of the trumpet mouthpiece was no longer heard. Silverstein and Koshland and the basketball crowd adopted Carter and took him to movies in Boston three or four times a week.

After exams, in the heart of the Cambridge winter, there is a grateful pause. New courses are selected, and even the full-year courses, heading into their second half, sometimes put on, like a new hat, a fresh professor. The days quietly lengthen; there is a snowstorm or two; the swimming and squash teams
lend the sports pages of the
Crimson
an unaccustomed note of victory. A kind of foreshadow of spring falls bluely on the snow. The elms are seen to be shaped like fountains. The discs of snow pressed by boots into the sidewalk in front of Albiani’s seem large precious coins; the brick buildings, the arched gates, the archaic lecterns, and the barny mansions along Brattle Street dawn upon the freshman as a heritage he temporarily possesses. The thumb-worn spines of his now familiar textbooks seem proof of a certain knowingness, and the strap of the green book-bag slung over his shoulder tugs at his wrist like a living falcon. The letters from home dwindle in importance. The hours open up. There is more time. Experiments are made. Courtships begin. Conversations go on and on; and an almost rapacious desire for mutual discovery possesses acquaintances. It was in this atmosphere, then, that Orson made his confession.

Dawson turned his head away as if the words had menaced him personally. Kern blinked, lit a cigarette, and asked, “What don’t you like about him?”

“Well”—Orson shifted his weight uncomfortably in the black but graceful, shapely but hard Harvard chair—“it’s little things. Whenever he gets a notice from the Portland draft board, he tears it up without opening it and scatters it out the window.”

“And you’re afraid that this incriminates you as an accessory and they’ll put you in jail?”

“No—I don’t know. It seems exaggerated. He exaggerates everything. You should see how he prays.”

“How do you know how he prays?”

“He shows me. Every morning, he gets down on his knees and
throws
himself across the bed, his face in the blanket, his arms way out.” He showed them.

“God,” Dawson said. “That’s marvellous. It’s medieval. It’s more than medieval. It’s Counter-Reformation.”

“I mean,” Orson said, grimacing in realization of how deeply he had betrayed Hub, “I pray, too, but I don’t make a show of myself.”

A frown clotted Dawson’s expression, and passed.

“He’s a saint,” Kern said.

“He’s
not
,” Orson said. “He’s a fake. I’m taking Chem I with him, and he’s worse than a child with the math. And those Greek books he keeps on his desk, they look worn because he bought them second-hand.”

“Saints don’t have to be good at math,” Kern said. “What saints have to have is energy. Hub has it.”

“Look how he wrestles,” Dawson said.

“I doubt if he wrestles very
well
,” Orson said. “He didn’t make the freshman team. I’m sure if we heard him play the piano it’d be awful.”

“You seem to miss the point,” Kern said, eyes closed, “of what Hub’s all about.”

“I know goddamn well what he thinks he’s all about,” Orson said, “but it doesn’t go. All this vegetarianism and love of the starving Indian—he’s really a terribly cold bastard. I think he’s about the coldest person I’ve ever met in my life.”

“I don’t think Orson thinks that; do you?” Kern asked Dawson.

“No,” Dawson said, and his puppyish smile cleared his cloudy face. “That’s not what Orson the Parson thinks.”

Kern squinted. “Is it Orson the Parson, or Orson the Person?”

“I think Hub is the nub,” Dawson said.

“Or the rub,” Kern added, and both burst into grinding laughter. Orson felt he was being sacrificed to the precarious
peace the two roommates kept between themselves, and left, superficially insulted but secretly flattered to have been given, at last, a nickname of sorts: Orson the Parson.

Several nights later they went to hear Carl Sandburg read in New Lecture Hall—the four adjacent roommates, plus Fitch. To avoid sitting next to Hub, who aggressively led them into a row of seats up front, Orson delayed, and so sat the farthest away from the girl Hub sat directly behind. Orson noticed her immediately; she had a wide mane of coppery-red hair which hung down loose over the back of her seat. The color of it, and the abundance, reminded him, all at once, of horses, earth, sun, wheat, and South Dakota. From Orson’s angle she was nearly in profile; her face was small, with a tilted shadowy cheekbone and a pale prominent ear. Her ear reminded him of Emily; she was Emily with long red hair and Cambridge sophistication. He yearned to see her face, and felt her about to turn. She turned away. Hub had leaned forward and was saying something into her other ear. Fitch overheard it, and gleefully relayed it to Dawson, who whispered to Kern and Orson, “
Hub said to the girl, ‘You have beautiful hair
.’ ”

Several times during the reading, Hub leaned forward to add something more into her ear, each time springing spurts of choked laughter from Fitch, Dawson, and Kern. Meanwhile, Sandburg, his white bangs as straight and shiny as a doll’s wig of artificial fibre, incanted above the lectern and quaintly strummed a guitar. Afterward, Hub walked with the girl into the outdoors. From a distance Orson saw her white face break into a laugh. Hub returned to his friends with the complacent nick in the corner of his mouth deepened, in the darkness, to a gash.

It was not the next day, or the next week, but within the month that Hub brought back to the room a heap of coppery hair. Orson found it lying like an animal corpse on a newspaper spread on his bed. “Hub, what the hell is this?”

Hub was on the floor playing with his spinning wheel. “Hair.”

“
Human
hair?”

“Of course.”

“Whose?”

“A girl’s.”

“What happened?” The question sounded strange; Orson meant to ask, “What girl’s?”

Hub answered as if he had asked that question. “It’s a girl I met at the Sandburg reading; you don’t know her.”

“This is
her
hair?”

“Yes. I asked her for it. She said she was planning to cut it all off this spring anyway.”