Indignation (17 page)

While I was away in the hospital somebody camping in my room had been masturbating day and night into almost every item I owned. And it wasn’t, of course, Olivia. It was Flusser. It had to be Flusser.
I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.
And this one-man bacchanalia was the revenge on me.

Suddenly I began to gag—as much from the shock as from the smells—and I stepped out the door to ask aloud of the empty corridor what harm I had done Bertram Flusser that he should perpetrate the grossest vandalism on my piddling possessions. In vain I tried to understand the enjoyment he had taken in defiling everything that was mine. Caudwell at one end and Flusser at the other; my mother at one end and my father at the other; playful, lovely Olivia at one end and broken-down Olivia at the other. And betwixt them all, I importunately defending myself with my fatuous fuck yous.

Sonny Cottler explained everything when he came for me in his car and I took him upstairs to
show him the room. Standing in the doorway with me Sonny said, “He loves you, Marcus. These are tokens of his love.” “The garbage too?” “The garbage especially,” Sonny said. “The John Barrymore of Winesburg has been swept off his feet.” “Is that true? Flusser’s queer?” “Mad as a fucking hatter, queer as a three-dollar bill. You should have seen him in satin knee breeches in
School for Scandal.
Onstage, Flusser’s hilarious—perfect mimic, brilliant farceur. Offstage, he’s completely cracked. Offstage, Flusser’s a gargoyle. There are such gargoyle people, Marcus, and you have now run into one.” “But this isn’t love—that’s absurd.” “Lots about love is absurd,” Cottler told me. “He’s proving to you how potent he is.” “No,” I said, “if it’s anything, it’s hatred. It’s antagonism. Flusser’s turned my room into a garbage dump because he hates my guts. And what did I do? I broke the goddamn record that he kept me up with all night long! Only that was weeks ago, that was back when I’d just got here. And I bought a new one—I went out the next day and replaced it! But for him to do a thing so huge and destructive and disgusting as this, that I should stick in his craw so much for so long—it makes no sense. You would think he was miles
above caring about anybody like me—and instead, this clash, this quarrel, this loathing! What now? What next? How can I possibly live here anymore?” “You can’t for now. We’ll set you up tonight with a cot at the house. And I can loan you some clothes.” “But look at this place,
smell
this place! He wants me to
wallow
in this shit! Christ, now I have to talk to the dean, don’t I? I have to report this vendetta, don’t I?” “To the dean? To Caudwell? I wouldn’t advise it. Flusser won’t go quietly, Marcus, if you’re the one who fingers him. Talk to the dean and he’ll tell Caudwell you’re the man in his life. Talk to the dean and he’ll tell Caudwell that you had a lover’s spat. Flusser is our abominable bohemian. Yes, even Winesburg has one. Nobody can curb Bertram Flusser. If they throw Flusser out because of this, he’ll take you down with him—that I guarantee. The
last
thing to do is to go to the dean. Look, first you’re felled by an appendectomy, then all your worldly goods are bespattered by Flusser—of course you can’t think straight.” “Sonny, I cannot afford to get thrown out of school!” “But you haven’t done anything,” he said, closing the door to my stinking room. “Something was done to you.”

But I and my animosity had done plenty, of
course, upon being charged by Caudwell with impregnating Olivia.

I
didn’t like Cottler and didn’t trust him, and the moment I stepped into the car to take him up on his offer of a cot and some clothes, I knew I was making yet another mistake. He was glib, he was cocky, he considered himself superior not just to Caudwell but probably to me as well. A child of the classiest Cleveland Jewish suburb, with long dark lashes and a cleft in his chin, with two letters in basketball and, despite his being a Jew, the president for the second straight year of the Interfraternity Council—the son of a father who wasn’t a butcher but the owner of his own insurance firm and of a mother who wasn’t a butcher either but the heiress to a Cleveland department-store fortune—Sonny Cottler was just too smooth for me, too self-certain for me, quick and clever in his way but altogether the perfectly exemplary external young man. The smartest thing for me to do was to get the hell out of Winesburg and get myself back to New Jersey and, though it was already a third of the way into the semester, try, before I got grabbed up by the draft, to rematriculate at Robert Treat. Leave
the Flussers and the Cottlers and the Caudwells behind you, leave Olivia behind you, and head home by train tomorrow, home where there is only a befuddled butcher to deal with, and the rest is hardworking, coarse-grained, bribe-ridden, semi-xenophobic Irish-Italian-German-Slavic-Jewish-Negro Newark.

But because I was in a state, I went to the fraternity house instead, and there Sonny introduced me to Marty Ziegler, one of the fraternity members, a soft-spoken boy looking as though he hadn’t yet required a shave, a junior from Dayton who idolized Sonny, who would do anything Sonny asked, a born follower to a born leader, who, up in the privacy of Sonny’s room, agreed on the spot, for only a buck and a half a session, to be my proxy at chapel—to sign my name on the attendance card, to hand it in at the church door on the way out, and to speak to no one about the arrangement, either while he was doing it or after he’d completed the job. He had the trusting smile of one possessed by the desire to be found inoffensive by all, and seemed as eager to please me as he was to please Sonny.

That Ziegler was a mistake, I was certain—the final mistake. Not malevolent Flusser, the college
misanthrope, but kindly Ziegler—he was the destiny that now hung over me. I was amazed by what I was doing. No follower, either born or made, yet I too yielded to the born leader, after a day like this one, too exhausted and flabbergasted not to.

“Now,” Sonny said, after my newly hired proxy had left the room, “now we’ve taken care of chapel. Simple, wasn’t it?”

So said self-assured Sonny, though I knew without a doubt, even then, knew like the son of my fear-laden father, that this preternaturally handsome Jewish boy with a privileged paragon’s princely bearing, used to inspiring respect and being obeyed and ingratiating himself with everyone and never quarreling with anyone and attracting the admiring attention of everyone, used to taking delight in being the biggest thing in his little interfraternity world, would turn out to be the angel of death.

I
t was already snowing heavily while Sonny and I were up in my room in Neil Hall, and by the time we’d reached the fraternity house, the wind had kicked up to forty miles an hour and, weeks before Thanksgiving, the blizzard of November ’51 had
begun blanketing the northern counties of the state, as well as neighboring Michigan and Indiana, then western Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and finally much of New England, before it blew out to sea. By nine in the evening two feet of snow had fallen, and it was still snowing, magically snowing, now without a wind howling through the streets of Winesburg, without the town’s old trees swaying and creaking and their weakest limbs, whipped by the wind and under the burden of snow, crashing down into the yards and blocking the roads and driveways—now without a murmur from the wind or the trees, just the raggedy clots swirling steadily downward as though with the intention of laying to rest everything discomposed in the upper reaches of Ohio.

Just after nine we heard the roar. It carried all the way from the campus, which lay about half a mile up Buckeye Street from the Jewish fraternity house where I’d eaten my dinner and been given a cot and a dresser of my own—and some of Sonny’s freshly laundered clothes to put in it—and installed as the great Sonny’s roommate, for that night and longer if I liked. The roar we heard was like the roar of a crowd at a football game after a touch
down’s been scored, except that it was unabating. Like the roar of a crowd after a championship’s been won. Like the roar that rises from a victorious nation at the conclusion of a hard-fought war.

It all began on the smallest scale and in the most innocently youthful way: with a snowball fight in the empty quadrangle in front of Jenkins among four freshman boys from small Ohio towns, boyish boys with rural backgrounds, who’d run out of their dormitory room to frolic in the first snowstorm of their first fall semester away at college. At the start, the underclassmen who rushed to join them emptied out of Jenkins only, but when residents in the two dorms perpendicular to Jenkins looked from their windows at what was happening in the quad, they began pouring from Neil, then from Waterford, and soon a high-spirited snowball fight was being waged by dozens of happy, hyperkinetic boys cavorting in dungarees and T-shirts, in sweatsuits, in pajamas, even some in only underwear. Within an hour, they were hurling at one another not just snowballs but beer cans whose contents they’d guzzled down while they fought. There were flecks of red blood in the clean snow from where some of them had been cut by the flying debris, which now
included textbooks and wastebaskets and pencils and pencil sharpeners and uncapped ink bottles; the ink, cast wide and far, splotched the snow blue-black in the light of the electrified old gas lamps that gracefully lined the walkways. But their bleeding did nothing to dilute their ardor. The sight of their own blood in the white snow may even have been what provided the jolt to transform them from playful children recklessly delighting in the surprise of an unseasonable snowfall into a whooping army of mutineers urged on by a tiny cadre of seditious underclassmen to turn their rambunctious frivolity into stunning mischief and, with an outburst of everything untamed in them (despite regular attendance at chapel), to tumble and roll and skid down the Hill through the deep snow and commence a stupendous night out that nobody of their generation of Winesburgians would ever forget, one christened the next day by the
Winesburg Eagle,
in an emotionally charged editorial expressing the community’s angry disgust, as “the Great White Panty Raid of Winesburg College.”

T
hey got inside the three girls’ residence halls—Dowland, Koons, and Fleming—by bulling through
the unplowed snow of the walkways and then on up the unshoveled stairs to the doorways and through the doors that were already shut tight for the night by breaking the glass to get to the locks or simply battering down the doors with fists, feet, and shoulders and tracking gobs of snow and churned-up slush inside the off-limits dormitories. Easily they overturned the on-duty desks that blocked access to the stairwells and then poured up onto the floors and into the bedrooms and sorority suites. While coeds ran in every direction in search of a place to hide, the invaders proceeded to fling open dresser drawer after dresser drawer, entering and sacking all the rooms to ferret out every pair of white panties they could find and to set them sailing out the windows and plummeting down onto the picturesquely whitened quadrangle below, where by now several hundred fraternity boys, who’d made their way out of the off-campus frat houses and through the deep drifts along Buckeye Street to the women’s quad, had gathered to glory in this most un-Winesburgian wild spree.

“Panties! Panties! Panties!” The word, still as inflammatory for them as college students as it had been at the onset of puberty, constituted the whole
of the cheer exultantly repeated from below, while up in the rooms of the female students the several scores of drunken boys, their garments, their hands, their crew-cut hair, their faces smeared blue-black with ink and crimson with blood and dripping with beer and melted snow, reenacted en masse what an inspired Flusser had done all on his own in my little room under the eaves at Neil. Not all of them, by no means anywhere close to all of them, just the most notable blockheads among them—three altogether, two freshmen and one sophomore, all of whom were among the first to be expelled the next day—masturbated into pairs of stolen panties, masturbated just about as quickly as you could snap your fingers, before each hurled the deflowered panties, wet and fragrant with ejaculate, down into the upraised hands of the jubilant gathering of red-cheeked, snow-capped upperclassmen breathing steam like dragons and egging them on from below.

Occasionally a single deep male voice, articulating in behalf of all those there unable to comply any longer with the prevailing system of moral discipline, baldly bellowed out the truth of it—“We want girls!”—but in the main it was a mob willing
to settle for panties, panties that any number of them soon took to drawing down over their hair like caps or to pulling on up past their overshoes so as to sport the intimate apparel of the other gender atop their trousers as though they had dressed inside out. Among the myriad objects seen dropping from the open windows that night were brassieres, girdles, sanitary napkins, ointment tubes, lipsticks, slips and half slips, nighties, a few handbags, some U.S. currency, and a collection of prettily ornamented hats. Meanwhile, in the quadrangle yard, a large, breasted snowwoman had been built and bedecked in lingerie, a tampon planted jauntily in her lipsticked mouth like a white cigar, and finished off with a beautiful Easter bonnet arest atop a hairdo contrived from a handful of damp dollar bills.

Probably none of this would have happened had the cops been able to get to the campus before the innocuous snowballing out front of Jenkins had begun to veer out of control. But the Winesburg streets and the college paths wouldn’t start to be cleared until the snowfall stopped, so neither the officers in the three squad cars belonging to the town nor the guards in the two campus security cars belonging to the college were able to make
headway other than on foot. And by the time they reached the women’s quad, the residences were a wreck and the mayhem was well beyond containment.

It took Dean Caudwell to stop some other, more grotesque outrage from occurring—Dean Caudwell standing six feet four inches tall on the front porch of Dowland Hall in his overcoat and muffler and calling through a bullhorn he grasped in his ungloved hand, “Winesburgians, Winesburgians, return to your rooms! Return immediately or risk expulsion!” It took that dire warning from the college’s most revered and senior dean (and the fact that the draft was gobbling up eighteen-and-a-half-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds without college deferments) to begin to dispel the cheering mob of male students packed together into the women’s quad and get them heading as quickly as they could back to wherever they’d come from. As for those inside the women’s dorms still foraging through the dresser drawers, only when the town and the campus police entered and began hunting them down room by room did the last of the panties cease to drop from the windows—from windows all still wide open despite a nighttime temperature of
twenty degrees—and only then did the invaders themselves begin to leap out the windows of the lower floors of Dowland, Koons, and Fleming into the cushion of deep snow accumulated below and, if they didn’t break a limb in attempting their escape—as did two of them—to head for the Hill.