Holyoke? Why had she wanted to blow me? To “give” me something, as she put it? No, there was more than that to what she’d done, but what that might be I couldn’t grasp. Everything couldn’t be accounted for by her parents’ divorce. And what difference would it make if it could? The more chagrined I became thinking about her, the more I wanted her; the more my jaw hurt, the more I wanted her. Defending her honor, I had been punched in the face for the first time in my life, and she didn’t know it. I was moving into Neil Hall because of her, and she didn’t know that either. I was in love with her, and she didn’t know that — I had only just found out myself. (Another theme: only just finding things out.) I had fallen in love with an ex — teenage drunk and inmate of a psychiatric sanitarium who’d failed at suicide with a razor blade, a daughter of divorced parents, and a Gentile to boot. I had fallen in love with — or I had fallen in love with the folly of falling in love with — the very girl my father must have been imagining me in bed with on that first night he’d locked me out of the house.
Dear Olivia,
I did see the scar at dinner. It wasn’t hard to figure out how it got there. I didn’t say anything, because if you didn’t care to talk about it, why should I? I also surmised, when you told me that you didn’t want anything to drink, that you were someone who once used to drink too much. Nothing in your letter comes as a surprise.
I would very much like it if we could at least get together to take a walk—
I was going to write “to take a walk down by Wine Creek” but didn’t, for fear that she would think I was perversely suggesting that she might want to jump in. I didn’t know what I was doing by lying to her about noticing the scar and then compounding the lie by saying I’d doped out her drinking all on my own. Until she’d told me of the drinking in her letter, and despite the drunkenness I witnessed each weekend while working at the Willard, I’d had no idea that anyone that young could even be an alcoholic. And as for accepting with equanimity the scar on her wrist — well, that scar, which I had not noticed the night of our date, was now all I could think about.
Was this moment to mark the beginning of a lifetime’s accumulation of mistakes (had I been given a lifetime in which to make them)? I thought then that it marked, if anything, the beginning of my manhood. Then I wondered if the two had coincided. All I knew was that the scar did it. I was transfixed. I’d never been so worked up over anyone before. The history of drinking, the scar, the sanitarium, the frailty, the fortitude — I was in bondage to it all. To the heroism of it all.
I finished the letter:
If you’d resume sitting next to me in History it would enable me to keep my mind on the class. I keep thinking of you sitting behind my back instead of thinking about what we’re studying. I look over at the space previously occupied by your body, and the temptation to turn is a perpetual source of distraction — because, beauticious Olivia, I want nothing more than to be close to you. I love your looks and am nuts about your exquisite frame.
I debated whether to write “am nuts about your exquisite frame, scar and all.” Would it appear insensitive of me to be making light of her scar, or would it appear a sign of my maturity to be making light of the scar? To play it safe, I didn’t write “scar and all” but added a cryptic P.S. — “I am moving to Neil Hall because of a disagreement with my roommate”—and sent the letter off through the campus mail.
She did not return to sit beside me in class but chose to remain at the back of the classroom, out of my sight. I nonetheless ran off every day at noon to my mailbox in the basement of Jenkins to see if she had answered me. Every day for a week I looked into an empty box, and when a letter finally appeared it was from the dean of men.
Dear Mr. Messner:
It has come to my attention that you have taken up residence in Neil Hall after having already briefly occupied two separate rooms in Jenkins. I am concerned about so many changes of residence on the part of a transfer student who has been at Winesburg as a sophomore for less than a semester. Will you please arrange with my secretary to come to my office sometime this week? A short meeting is in order, one that I’m sure will prove useful to both of us.
Yours sincerely,
Hawes D. Caudwell,
Dean of Men
The meeting with Dean Caudwell was scheduled for the following Wednesday, fifteen minutes after chapel ended at noon. Though Winesburg became a nonsectarian college only two decades after it was founded as a seminary, one of the last vestiges of the early days, when attending religious services was a daily practice, lay in the strict requirement that a student attend chapel, between eleven and noon on Wednesdays, forty times before he or she graduated. The religious content of the sermons had been diluted into — or camouflaged as — a talk on a high moral topic, and the speakers were not always clergymen: there were occasional religious luminaries like the president of the United Lutheran Church in America, but once or twice a month the speakers were faculty members from Winesburg or nearby colleges, or local judges, or legislators from the state assembly. More than half the time, however, chapel was presided over and the lectern occupied by Dr. Chester Donehower, the chairman of Winesburg’s religion department and a Baptist minister himself, whose continuing topic was “How to Take Stock of Ourselves in the Light of Biblical Teachings.” There was a robed choir of some fifty students, about two-thirds of whom were young women, and every week they sang a Christian hymn to open and close the hour; the Christmas and Easter programs featured the choir singing renditions of seasonal music and were the most popular chapels of the year. Despite the school’s having by then been secularized for nearly a century, chapel was held not in any of the college’s public halls but in a Methodist church, the most imposing church in town, located halfway between Main Street and the campus, and the only one large enough to accommodate the student body.
I objected strongly to everything about attending chapel, beginning with the venue. I didn’t think it fair to have to sit in a Christian church and listen for forty-five or fifty minutes to Dr. Donehower or anyone else preach to me against my will in order for me to qualify for graduation from a secular institution. I objected not because I was an observant Jew but because I was an ardent atheist.
Consequently, at the end of my first month at Winesburg, after having listened to a second sermon from Dr. Donehower even more cocksure about “Christ’s example” than the first, I went directly from the church back up to the campus and headed for the library’s reference section to sift through the college catalogues collected there, to look for another college to transfer to, one where I could continue to be free of my father’s surveillance but where I would not be forced to compromise my conscience by listening to biblical hogwash that I could not bear being subjected to. So as to be free of my father, I’d chosen a school fifteen hours by car from New Jersey, difficult to reach by bus or train, and more than fifty miles from the nearest commercial airport — but with no understanding on my part of the beliefs with which youngsters were indoctrinated as a matter of course deep in the heart of America.
To make it through Dr. Donehower’s second sermon, I had found it necessary to evoke my memory of a song whose fiery beat and martial words I had learned in grade school when World War Two was raging and our weekly assembly programs, designed to foster the patriotic virtues, consisted of us children singing in unison the songs of the armed services: the navy’s “Anchors Aweigh,” the army’s “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” the air corps’ “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,” the marine corps’ “From the Halls of Montezuma,” along with the songs of the Seabees and the wacs. We also sang what we were told was the national anthem of our Chinese allies in the war begun by the Japanese. It went as follows:
Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves!
With our very flesh and blood
We will build a new Great Wall!
China’s masses have met the day of danger.
Indignation fills the hearts of all of our
countrymen,
Arise! Arise! Arise!
Every heart with one mind,
