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.
It 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 touchdown’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
They 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
