American Fraternity Man (13 page)

After awhile, once he’d allowed the silence of the outdoors to smother the emotion of my words, he spoke
again: “Did I ever stop you?”

“Stop me from
what
?” I snapped. I was holding onto the anger. I would not let it slip away.

“Stop you from joining
.” He rubbed his eyes, squinted.

“You never approved of it.”

“I’m not shy about my opinions,” he said. He rummaged in his pockets now, pulled out a small leather case and removed from it a pair of slender glasses. My father never wore glasses during the daytime, never even liked anyone to see him wearing reading glasses at work, hid the fact of his declining eyesight the way that other men his age tried to hide or conceal their bald spots, but once the world went dark and my father’s vision went foggier, street signs turning to bright wordless bars, he’d finally submit. But always slowly, dramatically, unfolding the glasses, inspecting the lenses, polishing the glass even though they were spotless, positioning them over his ears, over his nose, blinking to adjust his vision, all of it an act to show the world that glasses were not
normal
for him. Finally, he looked up and stared me in the eyes. “I always share my thoughts,” he said, “but I never told you
not
to join, did I?”

I still faced him, didn’t break the eye contact that I’d fought so hard to gain, but I had no similar nonverbal gestures or practiced routines which I could force him to watch. No glasses in my pocket. I could only stand and shift my weight from foot to foot, could only slide my fingertips down my pants and rub the front of my legs. Again, again, over and over, until my fingertips were staticky hot.

“Did I?” he repeated.

“Not…you know, expressly.”

“Do you know why I never joined a fraternity?”

I shook my head. As always, it had taken only a short exchange to wear me down, to wring the unthinking aggression from me, and even though I was still spinning I’d at least had some fight for a minute or two, had at least managed for a round. But—like my mother, after kicking him in the chest—now I felt defeated.
He’d asked such a simple question—“Do you know why I never joined a fraternity?”—and the fact that I’d never even thought to ask it myself proved something about me, didn’t it?

“For one thing, I had no money,” he said and smiled
, maybe drifting into some college-years memory to which I’d never have access; I didn’t see my father smile often, committed as he was to showing the world that his actions were not dictated by emotion, that he had complete control over his feelings. But the smile would still creep out on occasion, just a subtle movement of his lips, but real joy overtaking his eyes and making them shine like freshly cleaned silver; it made you want to cry, seeing this, knowing that he had such happiness inside him but that he suppressed it so entirely.

But at the curb of the fraternity house, it faded quickly.

“My roommate—freshman year—he joined a fraternity. He joined Nu Kappa Epsilon.” He stopped, stared me in the eyes again, and it was so sudden and his eyes so searing that I had to look away.

Behind us, on the long and winding campus roadway that snaked through Greek Row and the scattered upperclassmen residence halls, a patrol car rolled past, one portly security officer in the driver’s seat with a Nextel phone in his hand. The “Night Patrol” was what this was called, and it wasn’t an official police force, was really no different than mall cops with cars, but they did have long laminated sheets on their clipboards of every important campus phone number: the residence hall directors, the RAs for Greek Row, the off-campus police. And
if you were having an event that maybe you didn’t want the world to know was happening, the absolute worst thing was that they’d cruise past
without
a head-nod, without a wave, without any acknowledgment that they’d just called someone to investigate an incident they found suspicious. If the security officers stopped, then a fraternity president could at least shake hands, pat them on the back, assure them that calling the authorities would be a waste of time, and would you like to come inside and talk to a few girls, have a drink?

The Night Patrol car sped up after it passed, was gone around the corner.

What had he seen here at the curb? A father and son, a mother in the car? Had he seen us as who we were? Or had the relationships—even the ages of the participants—not registered? Had he seen only a fraternity house, a party, Greek Row a series of blind spots that his mind could fill in with the predictable generalizations of frat life: two drunk guys arguing over keys, a drunk sorority girl the prize whenever they got home.

“Campus police, Charles?” my father asked.

“Just the Night Patrol,” I said. “They patrol for burglaries. Fights. You know.”

“They’re not looking for parties to bust?”

“This is a family event,” I said. “They don’t care.”

My
father shrugged and gave an
if you say so
look. “Your book had some dramatic photos of that Florida house fire, but the caption said nothing. Know how the fire started?”

“If it isn’t in the caption,” I said, “then no.”

“The fraternity claimed it was electrical, but it wasn’t,” he said. And now his hands were in his pockets again, his most comfortable pose, even without a coffee mug in his right hand to finish the look. “I told you that it could have been a major tragedy. That’s not because the fraternity brothers were sleeping upstairs, innocent and unsuspecting.” He adjusted his glasses and squinted again, as if by moving them this way, that way, he could now see farther, deeper, through the walls of the fraternity house in front of us, into my mind, into my soul. “No, it could’ve been a major tragedy because your fraternity had the pledges blind-folded and locked in closets. It was a ceremony called ‘Trust a Brother,’ or something to that effect.”

He paused, perhaps waiting for me to interject, but I just leaned against the car and tried to remain straight-faced, as emotionless and reaction-free as he always seemed.
It was a performance, probably a bad one because I was still swaying, but he continued.

H
e told me that the pledges were supposed to wait in their closets all night long, no matter what happened, until a brother released them. And all night long, apparently, there were distractions and surprises meant to terrify the pledges. Banging pots and pans, fights between brothers, bugs dumped into the closets. And the whole house was dark to preserve a creepy haunted mansion feel for the blind-folded pledges, only a few rows of candles lining the hallways. And then someone knocked over a candle. And who knows how the fire grew? Maybe no one knew what had happened until it was too late. But can you guess what happened next?

“The house burnt down,” I said. Shrugged. “Fine. An accident. But how is that—”

And then he was telling me that the house
started
to burn. But the pledges were still in the closets, the flames growing and growing in the rooms around them. Blind-folded. The house getting hotter.

“Come on.”

They were still standing upright in those closets, three or four of them clumped together. Told not to make a sound, no matter what happened.
Trust your brothers
. And outside those doors, does that sound like
real
fire? And boy, does that feel
hot
! How did the brothers manage this? Did they turn up the heat in the house? And the pledges stayed there, thinking it was still part of the game. Until one of the windows upstairs burst out, glass sprinkling far away on the sidewalk outside. And finally, one pledge decided—hell, this is getting
ridiculous
—and he took off his blindfold, come what may, and opened the door, and the house…was…
ablaze
. And it was this pledge brother, this single guy, who searched every closet—and he had no idea where everyone was, he’d been blindfolded the entire time—and he had to find every pledge in every closet, counting to make sure he’d reached them all, convince them this wasn’t part of some elaborate scenario, it wasn’t staged, and then they were all running out of the house, all these pledges in their underwear, and there were over a hundred people on the lawn by now, confused as hell as to why these twenty naked men were
just now
scurrying out of the burning house.

“I’m sure you’ve got it wrong,” I said. “Our
UF chapter is, like, legendary. They’ve never been suspended. They’re—”

I
was on the lawn, my father told me. Watching. Ten minutes before, he’d been in the library. Spent a lot of nights in the library, since he worked days. Someone comes screaming into the library, “Fire at the Nike house! Fire at the Nike house!” Nu Kappa Epsilon? Where his roommate was pledging? And he hurried over there. Saw the fire up close. Saw the pledges. The fire trucks. And you know what I remember most, Charles? I saw the brothers take the pledges aside. God knows what they said. A mixture of apologies and threats, no doubt, because there wasn’t a single pledge who came forward to report the hazing. Why were they in their underwear, everyone wanted to know. The brothers had an easy answer: the pledges were on the top floor, already asleep, they said. We didn’t even realize they’d gone to sleep so early. We feel
terrible
! My God,
we could have lost them all in the fire
!

And the campus bought it, and
oh
, the poor Nikes who suffered this outrageous house fire, and for the next two months, all you would hear on-campus is how lucky they were that no one had died, and could you spare some change for the House Restoration effort? Help put these guys back into their home?

“So how can
you be sure it was hazing?” I asked. “You jump to
conclusions
.”

“My roommate,” my father said.

“Your roommate?”

“He came forward. Spoke to the campus newspaper, finally had the courage.”

“So why does no one talk about this today?”

“Gerry—my roommate—he was blackballed as soon as he spoke. A liar, the fraternity brothers said. The National Fraternity? Your Headquarters? The place where you’re going to start a career? They offered all sorts of support for the beleaguered fraternity chapter, as if they were the victims somehow.
Gerry’s name was dragged through the mud.”

But I shook my head
: this was just his perspective, one story from an outsider, and I imagined that there were dozens of other versions of that night’s event that all conflicted with one another. Hell, how much of this story was sloppy foggy memory, a narrative he’d constructed out of the spare parts available to him? I’d listened to his story, but it was just campus gossip, the talk of outsiders jealous that they weren’t part of what was going on behind that heavy front door. The GDIs, the Goddamn Independents who hated Greek Life, the privileges, the Grand Tradition, the roots of power that burrowed centuries-deep into the campus soil. They
needed
these stories, needed the Fraternity Stereotype and kept it alive as if—like deluded Southerners who speak of the “War of Northern Aggression”— the words and the myths confirm something about their own choices, that it was wise
not
to enter those doors during Rush, that it was wise
not
to pledge, that no one should have to
pay for friends
, etc., etc.

“
And why are you telling me this
now
?” I asked finally. I waited for him to open his mouth, and then I shouted: “Things are different now, don’t you understand? All of that stuff…it just feeds the stereotype, but you don’t want to hear anything different.” Oh,
this was it
. “We’re all a bunch of drunks,” I said. “Or we’re all a bunch of hazers. Just a stereotype, and you eat it up! Do you know what we’re doing at the Headquarters? Do you know that we have a mission? That we offer our members more leadership programming than any other men’s group? Do you know how many community service hours we log? We’re
different
. That—your little gossipy story—that’s not who we are!” I stepped away from the car, from the curb, paced on the sidewalk with fists clenched at my sides and heart pounding. Yes: this was the moment I’d hoped would come, when impulse took over and the space between us was flooded with the rush of my true thoughts.

But as quickly as it had started, it was over, and my father didn’t say a word for what felt like a very long time. I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with him
again, to see the reaction to such deep and intractable feelings. Just kept looking up at my house as if to gain some strength from the comforting columns, from the long green hedges, from those concrete steps. The black “Nu Kappa Epsilon” above the much-smaller address numbers on the white boards below the gutters. The laughter inside, the cracking glass. The bouncing ping-pong ball. The “Yeeeaa-aaaah!”

And at the far end of the road the Night Patrol car had returned, had parked in front of the quiet Kappa Delta sorority house, observing from a distance. Darkness behind the windshield. Only a black shape that made the tiniest of motions, head tilting s
lowly and curiously to the side…he wanted me to know that he was watching, and no, he didn’t care who I was speaking with, what we were saying. The whole Row could hear the bouncing of ping-pong balls, and no matter what, there would be trouble.