Brave the enemy’s gunfire,
March on!
Brave the enemy’s gunfire,
March on! March on! March on!
I must have sung this verse to myself fifty times during the course of Dr. Donehower’s second sermon, and then another fifty during the choir’s rendering of their Christian hymns, and every time giving special emphasis to each of the four syllables that melded together form the noun “indignation.”
The office of the dean of men was among a number of administrative offices lining the corridor of the first floor of Jenkins Hall. The men’s dormitory, where I had slept in a bunk bed first beneath Bertram Flusser and then beneath Elwyn Ayers, occupied the second and third floors. When I entered his office from the anteroom, the dean came around from behind his desk to shake my hand. He was lean and broad-shouldered, with a lantern jaw, sparkling blue eyes, and a heavy crest of silver hair, a tall man probably in his late fifties who still moved with the agility of the young athletic star he’d been in three sports at Winesburg just before World War I. There were photos of championship Winesburg athletic teams on his walls, and a bronzed football was displayed on a stand back of his desk. The only books in the office were the volumes of the college’s yearbook, the
He motioned for me to take a seat in the chair across from his, and while returning to his side of the desk, he said amiably, “I wanted you to come in so we could meet and find out if I can be of any help to you in adjusting to Winesburg. I see by your transcript”—he lifted from his desk a manila folder he’d been riffling through when I entered—“that you earned straight A’s for your freshman year. I wouldn’t want anything at Winesburg to interfere in the slightest with such a stellar record of academic achievement.”
My undershirt was saturated with perspiration before I even sat down to stiffly speak my first few words. And, of course, I was still overwrought and agitated from just having left chapel, not only because of Dr. Donehower’s sermon but because of my own savage interior vocalizations of the Chinese national anthem. “Neither do I, sir,” I replied.
I had not expected to hear myself saying “sir” to the dean, though it was not that unusual for timidity — taking the form of great formality — to all but overwhelm me whenever I first had to confront a person of authority. Though my impulse wasn’t exactly to grovel, I had to fight off a strong sense of intimidation, and invariably I would manage this only by speaking with somewhat more bluntness than the interview required. Repeatedly I’d leave such encounters scolding myself for the initial timidity and then for the unnecessary candor by which I overcame it and swearing in the future to answer with the utmost brevity any questions put to me and otherwise to keep myself calm by shutting my mouth.
“Do you see any potential difficulties on the horizon here?” the dean asked me.
“No, sir. I don’t, sir.”
“How are things going with your classwork?”
“I believe well, sir.”
“You’re getting all you hoped for from your courses?”
“Yes, sir.”
This wasn’t strictly speaking true. My professors were either too starchy or too folksy for my taste, and during these first months on campus, I hadn’t as yet found any as spellbinding as those I’d had during my freshman year at Robert Treat. The teachers I’d had at Robert Treat nearly all commuted the twelve miles from New York City to Newark to teach, and they seemed to me bristling with energy and opinions — some of them decidedly and unashamedly left-wing opinions, despite prevailing political pressures — in ways these midwesterners were not. A couple of my Robert Treat teachers were Jews, excitable in a manner hardly foreign to me, but even the three who weren’t Jews talked a lot faster and more combatively than the professors at Winesburg, and brought with them into the classroom from the hubbub across the Hudson an attitude that was sharper and harder and more vital all around and that didn’t necessarily hide their aversions. In bed at night, with Elywn asleep in the top bunk, I thought often of those wonderful teachers I was lucky enough to have had there and whom I eagerly embraced and who first introduced me to real knowledge, and, with feelings of tenderness that were unforeseen and that nearly overwhelmed me, I thought of the friends from the freshman team, like my Italian buddy Angelo Spinelli, now all lost to me. I’d never felt at Robert Treat that there was some old way of life that everyone on the faculty was protecting, which was decidedly different from what I thought at Winesburg whenever I heard the boosters intoning the virtues of their “tradition.”
“You’re socializing enough?” Caudwell asked. “You’re getting around and meeting the other students?”
“Yes, sir.”
I waited for him to ask me to list those I had met so far, expecting he would then record their names on the legal pad in front of him — which had my name written in his script across the top — and bring them into his office to find out if I’d been telling the truth. But his response was only to pour a glass of water from a pitcher on a small table behind his desk and hand it across the desk to me.
“Thank you, sir.” I sipped at the water so it wouldn’t go down the wrong way and set me to coughing uncontrollably. I also flushed fiercely from realizing that just by listening to my first few answers he had been able to surmise how parched my mouth had become.
“Then the only problem is that you seem to be having some trouble settling into dormitory life,” he said. “Is that so? As I said in my letter, I’m a bit concerned about your having already resided in three different dormitory rooms in just your first weeks here. Tell me in your own words, what seems to be the trouble?”
The night before I had worked out an answer, knowing as I did that my moving was to be the meeting’s main subject. Only now I couldn’t remember what I’d planned to say.
“Could you repeat your question, sir?”
“Calm down, son,” Caudwell said. “Try a little more water.”
I did as he told me. I am going to be thrown out of school, I thought. For moving too many times I am going to be asked to leave Winesburg. That’s how this is going to wind up. Thrown out, drafted, sent to Korea, and killed.
“What’s the problem with your accommodations, Marcus?”
“In the room to which I was initially assigned”—yes, there they were, the words that I’d written out and memorized—“one of my three roommates was always playing his phonograph after I went to bed and I wasn’t able to get my night’s sleep. And I need my sleep in order to do my work. The situation was insupportable.” I had decided at the last minute on “insupportable” instead of “insufferable,” the adjective with which I’d rehearsed the previous night.
“But couldn’t you sit down and work out a time for his playing the phonograph that was agreeable to the two of you?” Caudwell asked me. “You had to move out? There was no other choice?”
“Yes, I had to move out.”
“No way of reaching a compromise.”
“Not with him, sir.” That’s as far as I went, hoping that he might find me admirable for protecting Flusser from exposure by not mentioning his name.
“Are you often unable to reach a compromise with people whom you don’t see eye to eye with?” “I wouldn’t say ‘often,’ sir. I wouldn’t say that anything like that has happened before.”
“How about your second roommate? Living with him doesn’t appear to have worked out either. Am I correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why do you think that was so?”
“Our interests weren’t compatible.”
“So there was no room for compromise there either.”
“No, sir.”
