(who were themselves slow to impress me), and the material we read was of no interest at all. “Rest the butt of your rifle on the ground with the barrel to the rear. Hold the toe of the butt against your right shoe and on line with the toe. Hold the rifle between the thumb and fingers of your right hand …” Nonetheless, I applied myself on tests and answered questions in class so as to be sure I would be invited to take advanced ROTC. Eight older cousins — seven on my father’s side and one on my mother’s — had seen combat in World War Two, two of them lowly riflemen who’d been killed less than a decade back, one at Anzio in ’43 and the other in the Battle of the Bulge in ’44. I thought my chances for survival would be far better if I entered the army as an officer, especially if, on the basis of my college grades and my class standing — I was determined to become valedictorian — I was able to get transferred out of transportation (where I could wind up serving in a combat zone) and into army intelligence once I was in the service.
I wanted to do everything right. If I did everything right, I could justify to my father the expense of my being at college in Ohio rather than in Newark. I could justify to my mother her having to work full time in the store again. At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, stolid father suddenly stricken with uncontrollable fear for a grown-up son’s well-being. Though I was enrolled in a pre-law program, I did not really care about becoming a lawyer. I hardly knew what a lawyer did. I wanted to get A’s, get my sleep, and not fight with the father I loved, whose wielding of the long, razor-sharp knives and the hefty meat cleaver had made him my first fascinating hero as a little boy. I envisioned my father’s knives and cleavers whenever I read about the bayonet combat against the Chinese in Korea. I knew how murderously sharp sharp could be. And I knew what blood looked like, encrusted around the necks of the chickens where they had been ritually slaughtered, dripping out of the beef onto my hands when I was cutting a rib steak along the bone, seeping through the brown paper bags despite the wax paper wrappings within, settling into the grooves crosshatched into the chopping block by the force of the cleaver crashing down. My father wore an apron that tied around the neck and around the back and it was always bloody, a fresh apron always smeared with blood within an hour after the store opened. My mother too was covered in blood. One day while slicing a piece of liver — which can slide or wiggle under your hand if you don’t hold it down firmly enough — she cut her palm and had to be rushed to the hospital for twelve painful stitches. And, careful and attentive as I tried to be, I had nicked myself dozens of times and had to be bandaged up, and then my father would upbraid me for letting my mind wander while I was working with the knife. I grew up with blood — with blood and grease and knife sharpeners and slicing machines and amputated fingers or missing parts of fingers on the hands of my three uncles as well as my father — and I never got used to it and I never liked it. My father’s father, dead before I was born, had been a kosher butcher (he was the Marcus I was named for, and he, because of his hazardous occupation, was missing half of one thumb), as were my father’s three brothers, Uncle Muzzy, Uncle Shecky, and Uncle Artie, each of whom had a shop like ours in a different part of Newark. Blood on the slotted, raised wooden flooring back of the refrigerated porcelain-and-glass showcases, on the weighing scales, on the sharpeners, fringing the edge of the roll of wax paper, on the nozzle of the hose we used to wash down the refrigerator floor — the smell of blood the first thing that would hit me whenever I visited my uncles and aunts in their stores. That smell of carcass after it’s slaughtered and before it’s been cooked would hit me every time. Then Abe, Muzzy’s son and heir apparent, was killed at Anzio, and Dave, Shecky’s son and heir apparent, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Messners who lived on were steeped in
All I knew about becoming a lawyer was that it was as far as you could get from spending your working life in a stinking apron covered with blood — blood, grease, bits of entrails, everything was on your apron from constantly wiping your hands on it. I had gladly accepted working for my father when it was expected of me, and I had obediently learned everything about butchering that he could teach me. But he never could teach me to like the blood or even to be indifferent to it.
One evening two members of the Jewish fraternity knocked on the door of the room while Elwyn and I were studying and asked if I could come out to have a talk with them at the Owl, the student hangout and coffee shop. I stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind me so as not to disturb Elwyn. “I don’t think I’m going to join a fraternity,” I told them. “Well, you don’t have to,” one of them replied. He was the taller of the two and stood several inches taller than me and had that smooth, confident, easygoing way about him that reminded me of all those magically agreeable, nice-looking boys who’d served as president of the Student Council back in high school and were worshiped by girlfriends who were star cheerleaders or drum majorettes. Humiliation never touched these youngsters, while for the rest of us it was always buzzing overhead like the fly or the mosquito that won’t go away. What did evolution have in mind by making but one out of a million look like the boy standing before me? What was the function of such handsomeness except to draw attention to everyone else’s imperfection? I hadn’t been wholly disregarded by the god of appearances, yet the brutal standard set by this paragon turned one, by comparison, into a monstrosity of ordinariness. While talking to him I had deliberately to look away, his features were so perfect and his looks that humbling, that shaming — that
The following night I had a visit from two members of the nonsectarian fraternity. One was a slight, blond- haired boy who I did not know was homosexual — like most heterosexuals my age, I didn’t quite believe that anyone was homosexual — and the other a heavyset, friendly Negro boy, who did the talking for the pair. He was one of three Negroes in the whole student body — there were none on the faculty. The other two Negroes were girls, and they were members of a small nonsectarian sorority whose membership was drawn almost entirely from the tiny population of Jewish girls on the campus. There was no face deriving from the Orient to be seen anywhere; everyone was white and Christian, except for me and this colored kid and a few dozen more. As for the student homosexuals among us, I had no idea how many there were. I didn’t understand, even while he was sleeping directly above me, that Bert Flusser was homosexual. That realization would arrive later.
The Negro said, “I’m Bill Quinby, and this is the other Bill, Bill Arlington. We’re from Xi Delta, the nonsectarian fraternity.”
“Before you go any further,” I said, “I’m not joining a fraternity. I’m going to be an independent.”
Bill Quinby laughed. “Most of the guys in our fraternity are guys who weren’t going to join a fraternity. Most of the guys in our fraternity aren’t guys who think like the ordinary male student on campus. They’re against discrimination and unlike the guys whose consciences can tolerate their being members of fraternities that keep people out because of their race or their religion. You seem to me to be the sort of person who thinks that way yourself. Am I wrong?”
“Fellas, I appreciate your coming around, but I’m not going to join any fraternity.”
“Might I ask why?” he said.
“I’d rather be on my own and study,” I said.
Again Quinby laughed. “Well, there too, most of the guys in our fraternity are guys who prefer to be on their own and study. Why not come around and pay us a visit? We’re not in any way Winesburg’s conventional fraternity. We’re a distinctive group, if I say so myself — a bunch of outsiders who have banded together because we don’t belong with the insiders or share their interests. You seem to me to be somebody who’d be at home in a house like ours.”
Then the other Bill spoke up, and with words pretty much like those uttered to me the night before by Sonny Cottler. “You can get awfully lonely on this campus living entirely on your own,” he said.
