The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (9 page)

That fall the seminar assembled from 1:30 to 4:30 every Thursday afternoon in the living room of the house on South Front Street, near the river, that Mildred shared with her faculty friends Harold and Gladys Cook. It was a white clapboard eighteenth-century house with black shutters and a little hedge out front; the front room where we met had a nice old fireplace and worn Oriental carpets on the old floorboards, and shelves and shelves of books. Like young Nathan Zuckerman, in
The Ghost Writer,
contemplating the living room of the New England farmhouse of the writer E. I. Lonoff, I would sit there on those darkening afternoons and—while Pete, Dick, and I competed to outdo each other with “insights”—say to myself, “This is how I will live.” In just such a house I would meet with my classes after I got my Ph.D., became a teacher, and settled into a life of reading books and writing about them. Tenure as an English professor had come to seem a more realistic prospect than a career as a novelist. I would be poor and I would be pure, a cross between a literary priest and a member of the intellectual resistance in Eisenhower’s prospering pig heaven.

Here are a couple of Mildred Martin’s notes from her diary for that year, and another of her memories.

Dec. 21, ’53.
When I was 21, in comparison with Roth and Minton, I was a child. I’m pleased with those two boys, and Tilton is working well, too. Susie Kriss hasn’t been at the seminar for three weeks now, and Mrs. Bender has dropped. Mrs. Bender, after hearing Roth’s paper on “The Fight at Finnsburgh,” burst into tears and said she couldn’t compete. She fled to the dining nook in the kitchen, where she could hear what was being said. At one point she came back, and said, “I know the answer to that question,” answered correctly, and disappeared.

April 23, ’54.
Dismissed Sem. early, and the girls went fast, but the four boys just kept sitting, and we began to have a really good time. We stayed till 4:30, and then Roth came in to talk about his φβκ speech. A book salesman came, the boys left, the salesman left, and Roth and Minton came back.

Memories.
In the Lit. Library [the second-semester meeting place] there was an excited discussion about “the golden bird” near the end of “Sailing to Byzantium.” Roth and Minton disagreed concerning its appropriateness. They rose, began shaking fists. Tasch, delighted, egged them on. I finally had to ask them to be seated. A unique experience.

The classroom had become my stage, usurping the magazine as a laboratory for self-invention and displacing the student drama group, Cap & Dagger, where I’d played supporting roles in ambitious student productions of
Oedipus Rex, School for Scandal,
and
Death of a Salesman.
Having brought to these parts more shamelessness than anything else, by my senior year I had even fewer illusions about becoming an actor than about turning into a Thomas Wolfe. Along with
Et Cetera,
Cap & Dagger had served me as an ersatz family, to take the place of the mainstream social fraternity from which I’d resigned. Though it was a respected organization, whose faculty advisers were among the most popular teachers on the campus, and though most of the student actors were just ordinary extroverted kids out to have a good time, it also harbored some mildly deviant types out to have a good time, as well as several campus misfits and artistic souls, whom I sometimes accompanied downtown for a beer or ate with at the men’s dining hall.

It was there at Cap & Dagger that I found a steady girlfriend, Paula Bates, known as Polly, who came around to Bucknell Hall in the evenings to watch rehearsals or to prompt from the script or to act loosely as the director’s assistant. She had arrived as a junior transfer student in my own junior year. She and her friend Margo Hand, who lived, as she did, in a room in French House, were the most sophisticated girls—and Polly was far and away the most sardonic girl—that I knew on campus. The well-brought-up daughter of a retired naval officer, she chain-smoked and drank martinis. The martinis impressed me when we first met and made me think of her as a woman of the world. She was frail and blond, not quite conventionally pretty, because of something slightly troubled in her expression, signifying, I think, the jagged overlap of the independent, no-nonsense wit who for months treated my declarations of feeling and my sexual persistence as an incomprehensible nuisance (“Stop
mooning
”) with the delicate, kind, passionate girl whose parents’ divorce and father’s painful death had left her astonishingly susceptible to the intensity kindled by our affair.

The ordeal of overcoming Polly’s wry skepticism was followed by the difficulties of finding a place to make love. We baby-sat for the Maurers and the Wheatcrofts and used their beds. We barricaded ourselves in a dormitory laundry room and lay on the cold floor. Vacations came, and back in New Jersey—where she stayed with her mother in Scotch Plains—I borrowed my father’s car and we parked on dark, out-of-the-way streets. Over one Easter break someone lent us an apartment in New York for an afternoon and we luxuriated not only in the clandestine big-city hideaway and the feeling it gave us of being both free and on the run but also in finding ourselves unclothed together in a room full of sunlight. In the summer of 1953 we got jobs as counselors at a Jewish camp in the Poconos, where I had worked the year before, and there at night we took off for the woods. What with the obstacles to passion having to be surmounted again and again, our erotic life, along with the sheer thrill of its newness, had the underground piquancy of adultery. Even more than lovers, we became, through this drama of concealment and secrecy, the closest of companions and the most devoted of friends.

For my senior year I rented a room in town from an elderly widow, Mrs. Nellenback, white-haired and kindly-looking, a very strong Christian and, if I remember correctly, a Daughter of the American Revolution. Her simple white clapboard house, on a street corner not far from the women’s quadrangle, was heavily laid with old carpets, and there were antimacassars and arm doilies on the upholstered furniture. The house was dark and quiet, with an unaired, not unpleasant smell of secure enclosure. The room I was offered was precisely what I wanted, potentially as much a love nest where Polly and I could stealthily retire to the narrow single bed as a scholar’s secluded cell. I was duly informed on the day I rented the room that women were allowed in the house only on Sundays, when I could bring a fiancée for tea, provided the door to the hallway was left open. The room, which had once been the front parlor, was just off the main entryway on the first floor and had windows on two sides opening onto a summer porch that led down a little set of stairs to the quiet street. Since Mrs. Nellenback slept at the rear of the house—as did the housekeeper, a simpleminded woman who limped about with her feather duster, always smiling and singing babyish songs—and the other two roomers (one of them Pete Tasch) lived upstairs, it seemed to me that opportunities would abound for Polly to sneak in and out. After showing me the house, Mrs. Nellenback asked if I happened to be Armenian; I told her I was not. When I came back from studying at the library only a few nights after I’d moved in, I found on my bureau a plate with an apple and a cookie. When apples and cookies continued turning up, I knew I had a problem. How could I tell her to keep out of my room without making her suspicious of me as well as seeming ungrateful about the snack? And then again, now that we’d begun, how could I stop letting Polly in through the porch window after all the lights had gone out downstairs?

Several months after I’d moved in, Mrs. Nellenback took me aside one day as I was heading for my room and said, “I had a Jewish boy living here in 1939.” I didn’t know how to respond and said something like, “That’s a long time ago.” “Arthur Schwartz,” she said, or some such name—“he was the nicest boy.” Inside the room, with the door closed, I thought,
She knows,
meaning not that she knew that I was Jewish but that she, if not the readers of my
Et Cetera
fiction, knew that I wasn’t entirely harmless.

We were caught a few weeks after the start of the second semester. I had thought, one Sunday evening, that Mrs. Nellenback had traveled the ten miles to Mifflinburg, as she often did, to visit her family, but apparently she had only gone for a visit in town, and she was home little more than an hour after she’d been driven away in her son’s car. My shades were down, the room was black (and locked from the inside), and Polly and I were in bed. After the car had, surprisingly, pulled back up outside, and Mrs. Nellenback had come into the house and passed through the hallway just the other side of my door, we got up and, in the dark silence, groped about, dressing ourselves. Then the most sophisticated undergraduate couple at Bucknell tried their best to outsmart this elderly widow who never in her life had left Union County. I motioned for Polly to crawl under the bed and to hide there until I gave the all clear. Then I found a coat, grabbed a book, and, unlocking the door, stepped out of the dark room into the hallway. My plan was to be sure that no one was about, leave the house by the front door, and then from the porch quietly open the window so that Polly could step out and escape. Coming into the hallway, however, I found Mrs. Nellenback standing directly in front of me, still in her coat and hat. I was startled and she was grim. “Good evening,” I said cheerily, and closed my door behind me. I couldn’t lock it without giving everything away, and since she gave no sign of moving, I continued on out the front door and started walking toward the campus, book in hand, as though all along that had been my intention.

Some minutes later—already a little out of my mind from wandering aimlessly about—I saw Polly running up the street toward French House. She was in tears and could hardly speak. Mrs. Nellenback had waited only seconds for me to pass out of sight and then, having opened my unlocked door, turned on the light and made straight for the bed. “Get out of there, you hussy,” she had said, poking with her foot under the bed, and Polly, covering her face with her hands, had rolled out from her hiding place and fled the room. Mrs. Nellenback followed her out onto the porch, threatening that she was going to have me thrown out of school.

The year was 1954 and the locale central Pennsylvania. She could do it. I took Polly to French House and then ran back to my room to find Mrs. Nellenback dialing the hall phone. I was sure that she was trying to reach the dean of men, who was no particular friend of mine since my assault on the
Bucknellian.
When I demanded that she speak to me, Mrs. Nellenback put down the phone and said, “I can have you thown out of the college for this.” I replied loudly, “You had no right to scare that girl that way!” I was bluffing but didn’t know what else to do except try to intimidate
her.
In the meantime I saw my life in a shambles. Polly’s, too. Even though I intended to deny that it had been Polly who was in my room, I was sure the college authorities would haul her up for identification by Mrs. Nellenback. When this was over, I would have ruined not only my future but the future of the darling of the French department, who planned, like me, to begin graduate school in September.

It was the mid-1960s before I got round to exploiting this painful, ludicrous episode for a scene in my novel
When She Was Good.
The young couple there, Roy Bassart and Lucy Nelson, are extremely provincial small-town kids having virtually nothing in common with Polly and me. If anything, the drunkard’s embittered Midwestern daughter Lucy has far more gritty rage with which to fight off her sense of shame than had the martini-drinking sophisticate from Scotch Plains, New Jersey. As for easygoing, unfocused, lackadaisical Roy, he hadn’t any future at all to worry about losing. What happened to us, however, had a meaning very different; ours was a story about two intelligent, hopeful young people whose college success had given them everything to look forward to but whose infraction of the rules regulating their sexual lives rendered them, before the unlikely powers-that-be, just as powerless as a Roy and a Lucy.

I slept for a couple of nights at the Maurers’, waiting to be summoned by the dean and subsequently sent home to Newark without a college degree (and for just the reason my father had always feared). When nothing happened, I took Bob Maurer’s advice and quietly returned to my room and resumed my life at Mrs. Nellenback’s. The incident was not mentioned by either of us, nor did I invite Polly to visit again, not even for tea, disguised as a fiancée. Afterward I couldn’t figure out why Mrs. Nellenback had failed to make good on her threat—whether it was because she didn’t want to be done out of the remaining rent and knew that with the second semester already under way it would be virtually impossible to replace me, or whether it had been an act of mercy by a good churchgoing woman, or whether I owed my luck to Arthur Schwartz, Bucknell ’39.

For nearly six weeks early that spring we thought that Polly was pregnant. If she was, we didn’t see how we could do anything but give up our graduate-school plans, marry, and stay on at Bucknell as salaried teaching assistants. We were in love, we were faculty favorites, Lewisburg living was cheap and simple, and it would even be possible to work toward an M.A. right there, though a second Bucknell degree was hardly what either of us had in mind. I had applied to go to Oxford or to Cambridge as a Fulbright or a Marshall scholar, and in the event that neither scholarship came through—unlikely, I thought, because I was near the top of my class—I had also put in for fellowships at three American universities; one was the University of Pennsylvania, where Polly planned to work on a Ph.D. Now we were as stunned to think that we might have to stay on at Bucknell indefinitely, living in the outlying university settlement, Bucknell Village, with the balding vets and their wives and babies—and our baby—as we’d been only a few months earlier, when we feared I was to be driven out of town for moral turpitude.

We would meet regularly for supper in the men’s dining hall, where a number of nonsorority women also took their meals; Polly usually arrived first and waited for me by the door, and every evening when we caught sight of each other she’d shake her head, indicating that another day had passed without the onset of her period. Over our gravied Swiss steak and potatoes we’d buck each other up about the new and unexpected future as a married couple with a child and no money. I was reminded that as a father I wouldn’t be drafted and have to waste two years of my life, after graduate school, as a private in the infantry. (Despite good relations with the colonel in charge of the Department of Military Science and Tactics, who had urged me to go on for a commission in the transportation corps of the post-Korea Army, I had quit ROTC, out of opposition to campus military training.) We tried to find some comfort in thoughts of the small, lively social circle of faculty people whom we liked to be with; certainly in the Maurers and the Wheatcrofts we had good and helpful friends, not really very much older than we were, with small children of their own. Heartbreaking as the situation was, and trapped as we felt, it seemed a test of maturity before which we simply could not bend; neither of us ever suggested that there was any other way out, at least not that early in the game.