Hare in March (3 page)

Into the wastebasket, Peter Hagerman tossed the manila envelopes.

He said, “Thorpe, you fuckface, put a match to them.”

Thorpe took out a silver lighter and rolled it to a flame, while Hagerman’s vein on the left of his forehead throbbed against the skin and his eyes bulged and he began to scream, “Is that a match, mother? Is that a mother-loving, screwing-mother match, or is that a lighter belonging to a frigging fuckface of a fruity prick?”

Still, he couldn’t handle fart. He’d probably been traumatized as a child, same as Charles. Charles’s trauma was what both his mother and father called a bowel movement. It was called a “boom-boom.” He used to blush in the middle of war games, having to run fast behind a bush, grabbing leaves to take with him; he had been like one of Pavlov’s dogs; all he needed to hear was
Boom! Boom!
and he fell open.

Dan had located a match; he bent over the wastebasket like someone afflicted with Parkinson’s, scratching and scratching, then finally finding a flame to touch to the envelopes.

“Those,” said Hagerman with beady eyes,
“were
your itineraries. Those were rather typical itineraries, even though my reaction to you is not a typical reaction, for I dare venture no pledge director in the history of Pi Delta Pi fraternity, in the history of any fraternity, has ever
loathed
two pledges so very, very deeply. I deeply loathe you. You are not fit to accompany the other pledges on the Inferno; therefore, I have burned your itineraries.”

For some reason, in a slow few seconds of silence that followed, Dan Thorpe croaked, “Thank you.” For what? Weren’t they depledged now?

“Why did I burn these itineraries, Shepley? I loathe
you
so that you should feel my very thoughts frying your skin, baking their way into your yellow guts!”

“I suppose we’re depledged.”

“No such mother-loving luck, Shepley! You are on room quarantine, Shepley! You are on room quarantine, Thorpe! You are to stay in your rooms from now until the time I have sat down and put my mind to composing the most vile and fittingly degrading itineraries I have ever created. You are not to eat or take a leak or use the phone; you are in room quarantine and you are to keep it until I come back with Infernos.”

After he had banged out of the room, Shepley said, “Turn that music off! That got us into all this!” knowing full well that was not true.

“If
you’d
remembered, I wouldn’t have gotten rattled.”

“I’m not taking the blame for it.”

“Don’t blame my tape then.”

Thorpe pressed the
Off
button finally; he was still shaking. When he was this way — not often; usually Hagerman was the cause — then Charles felt something for him. For one thing, Dan looked so vulnerable half-naked, skin and bones, like some old emaciated philosopher from India in diapers and on a three-peas-a-day diet until single-handed he brought about CHANGE; for another reason, poor Dan, out to save the Vietnamese from the Green Berets, and the Mississippi Negroes from the Mississippi whites, and the Lois Fayes from the Pi Delta Pis — and a five-foot runt son of a Mad Avenue ad man leaves his bones loose and rattling.

Charles said, “Hagerman’s bark is worse than Hagerman’s bite.”

“I don’t know, Shep.”

“And there are rules, Dan. He has to stay within bounds or the whole Panhellenic Society will have his head.”

“But that temper of his, Shep. Like, Pow! Zap! It gets way out of proportion with what’s happened, doesn’t it?”

“ ‘Conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma,’ “ Charles Shepley said.
“Now
I remember.”

“Dear God,” said Dan Thorpe, standing in the center of the room, his eyes closed, his hands palms-up, pressed together in prayer, “get Hagerman for us, Lord. Let him break his neck going downstairs, Holy Father. Smash him up some way, our Lord in Heaven to whom we dedicate our lives; I mean, really give Hagerman the business, Sir!”

Shepley walked over to his bed, carrying the charred tin wastebasket and the cardboards from two shirt backs; he began to scrape up the cracker crumbs and pencil shavings and pieces of his mother’s letter.

“God is dead, Thorpe,” said Shepley.

Shepley took advantage of the quarantine to reread his mother’s letter, while Dan went to the typewriter to work on Chapter Ten of his novel, which was about a Green Beret AWOL, anti-Hemingway in its philosophy, but Papa all the way in style. It began:

Natalie Shepley’s letter began:

Then, in another color ink — green — with no paragraph to separate it from the body of the letter, carefully printed, with capital letters for the headline:

Change to Waterman’s blue:

In black ink at the bottom of the last page, Clinton Shepley had written a few lines:

There was never any reference to Pi Delta Pi in the messages Charles’s father scribbled at the bottom of Natalie Shepley’s letters. Charles’s mother had done a neat pre-enrollment job of brainwashing Charles into believing he should suffer the agonies of Rush Week for his father’s sake. Ingenuous as she often seemed, she was not without guile, for the only person she asked to do anything for
her
sake was Billy. (“Billy, it’s Mother; aren’t you going to smile for me? I came all the way here in the pouring rain for your smile, Billy.”)

• • •

Rush Week was no picnic. Charles was not fraternity material, and all the frats but Pi Pi picked up on it immediately. He had received exactly two return bids after the initial day of rushing — one for the third day (pig day, in the middle of the week) at Rho Kappa, a fraternity that was not national and always had a huge quota to fill, and the prize second-day bid from Pi Pi. It was true that Pi Pi did not always pledge legacies, so Charles was amazed when Blouter pocket-pledged him on Number Two night of Rush Week. There was nothing wrong with the way Charles looked; he was no different from a score of other average-looking young men in button-down shirts and Ivy, hopsack, Glen, J. Press, Fortrel polyester, and Zantrel 700 rayon suits; sandy-haired, five foot eleven, blue-eyed, no pimples, no speech impediment, good teeth — it was his attitude which was wrong. The back slapping, the lusty-voiced singing of “Banging Away on Lulu,” the beer-guzzling false euphoria, the asinine speeches

(“Men! Welcome aboard
S.S.
Pi Pi! We keep a tight ship, men! We’re tight every goddam night, men! We like our women tight, men! We like a wet deck!” — pause for laughter and applause, then solemnly — “To be serial a second, men. Pi Delta Pi was founded in 1891. We represent the very best in — ”); it was the whole schmear. Charles’s face was worn out from forcing his mouth to smile; his face had actually ached at the end of Number One day. The Greeks could spot a lead foot; back at the dorm where the rushees were housed during their ordeal. Dan Thorpe had commented on Charles’s meager return of two envelopes:

“Even Dillon got six returns, and he has pimples the size of pool balls. What’d you do?”

“I
don’t know, but I must be doing something wrong.”

“Well, forget about it. Go for Pi Pi. They hear your music, and they’re first rate. I’m going Pi Pi if I can.”

“I
don’t know how I got a Two. I nearly fell asleep there.”

“Stay awake and don’t ask … You’re not a legacy, are you?”

“Yes, but they don’t take legacies unless they want them.”

“Oh,” Thorpe had said. That answered it for Thorpe.

But after Charles had been pledged, he found out two other Pi Pi legacies had not received bids. He felt better, but he still could not explain it. Except maybe it was Mike Blouter. He was the only one Charles had hit it off with, and Mike was Pi Pi’s president. Charles never could turn on just for anyone, but he could for Mike; he had made Mike laugh without even trying; talking with Mike, he was not aware he was keeping up a conversation, as he was so painfully aware of doing at other houses, with other Greeks. Except for Mike, Charles could not make the scene at Rush Week; he went over like he did with Peter Hagerman, over and out.

Blouter seemed to take the whole Greek bit with a grain of salt; he was Greek Town’s Dean Martin, always a little unsteady on his pins, enjoying his reputation as a booze hound, but sharp, admired — the type who could call the whole frat system an adolescent bag, and get away with it.

If Charles had had to go to anyone but Blouter for permission to ask Lois Faye to the house, he might have brought the minuscule left of his mother’s world crashing to her feet by turning in his pledge pin.

With Blouter it was not as hard:

“What’s her last name?” “Faye.”

“Is she an A ? Pi or a Zeta?”

“She’s not in a Jewish sorority. She’s only half-Jewish.”

“They’d take her anyway, does she know that?”

“She doesn’t want to be in a sorority.”

“What’s she want with a goy like you?”

“She likes the way I dance. You know, the Jews have a natural sense of rhythm.”

“I heard that. They’re smart about music like the Negroes are about money.”

“It’s okay then?”

“Do you have to ask?”

“Would I ask if I didn’t have to?”

“She won’t have to teach you anything about
chutzpah,
Shepley.”

So a Blouter, for Charles, made up for a Hagerman; good food and a Sears-O-Pedic Innerspring Sleep Set took the edge off candlelit song fests in the Pi Pi Pub, a replica of an English tavern located next to the furnace room; the thought of a mother pin fastened to Natalie Shepley’s sparse bosom made up for The Divine Comedy (Charles hoped).

Keep on keeping on, Charles’s father was fond of saying, a winner never quits and a quitter never wins … at least he
had
been fond of saying that, before William Shepley downed a dozen rum-and-Cokes one Saturday evening some six years ago, got into the family Buick, and missed his chance to belong to the Pepsi generation. Billy even missed his chance to belong to the ages. (“I bet you can hear me, Billy. Mother bets that.”)

Charles grabbed a sheet of Pi Pi stationery from his desk drawer and snapped the end of his pen to put the ball point ready for action. His mother liked him to write his letters on the official fraternity paper, “…
not that I care, but your father reads your letters too, and I like to pass them at my Tuesday brunches. I’d be glad to send you money to pay for it if it’s the expense that makes you write on ordinary notebook paper and sometimes actual scrap paper.”

Charles wrote: