around a dining table or sidled up at a bar in the Ivy Club taproom, whether with friends or alone. If Paul was at home in a classroom or in a book, and Charlie was at home in an ambulance, then Gil was at home wherever a good conversation was to be had, and the rest of the world be damned. Many of the best nights I remember at Princeton were with him.
Late sophomore spring, the time came for us to choose our eating clubs-and for the clubs to choose us. By then, most of the clubs were using a lottery system to determine selection: candidates added their names to an open list, and the new section of the club was chosen at random. But a few maintained the older system, known as bicker. Bicker resembles rush at a fraternity, in that bicker clubs choose their new members based on merit rather than on chance. And like fraternities, the definitions of merit they use tend not to be the same ones you might find, say, in a dictionary. Charlie and I entered our names in the lottery at Cloister Inn, where our mutual friends seemed to be gathering. Gil, of course, decided to bicker. And Paul, under the influence of Richard Curry, an old Ivy member himself, threw caution to the wind and bickered too.
From the outset, Gil was a shoe-in at Ivy. He satisfied every possible criterion for admission, from being the son of a club alum, to being a prominent member of the right circles on campus. He was handsome in an effortless way-always stylish, never flashy; dashing yet gentlemanly; bright but not bookish. That his father was a wealthy stockbroker who gave his only son a scandalous allowance did nothing to hurt his chances. It came as no more surprise when he was admitted to Ivy that spring than when he was elected its president a year later.
Paul's acceptance at Ivy was the product of a different logic, I think. It helped that Gil, and more distantly Richard Curry, stood in his corner, making his case in crowds where Paul would never tread. But it wasn't to those connections alone that he owed his success. Paul was also, by that time, acknowledged as one of the academic luminaries of our class. Unlike the bookworms who never ventured from Firestone, he was driven by a curiosity that made him a pleasure to meet and converse with. Upperclass-men at Ivy seemed to find something charming about a sophomore who had no skill with the tired banter of the selection process, but referred to dead authors by their first names, and seemed to know them just that well. It didn't even surprise Paul when they accepted him. When he returned that spring night, soaked with celebratory champagne, I thought he'd found a new home.
For a while, in fact, Charlie and I worried that the club's magnetism would draw the two of them away from us. It didn't help that, by then, Richard Curry had become a prominent influence in Paul's life. The two had met early in our freshman year, when I agreed to have dinner with Curry on a rare trip to New York. The interest the man showed in me after my father's death had always struck me as a strange, selfish thing-I'd never known which of us was the surrogate, the childless father or the fatherless child-so I asked Paul to join us for dinner, hoping to use him as a buffer. It worked better than I intended. The connection was instant: the vision Curry always seemed to have of my personal potential, which he claimed my father shared, was realized all at once in Paul. Paul's interest in the
But if Charlie and I feared that we were losing our two friends, then we were reassured soon enough. At the end of junior year, it was Gil who suggested that the four of us live together as seniors, a decision that meant he was willing to give up living in the President's Room at Ivy to keep us as his roommates on campus. Paul immediately agreed. And so, with a mediocre draw at the housing lottery, we found ourselves in a quad at the north end of Dod. Charlie argued that a fourth-floor room would force us to get more exercise, but convenience and good sense prevailed, and the ground-floor suite, well furnished thanks to Gil, became home for our final year at Princeton.
Now, as Gil, Paul, and I reach the courtyard between the university chapel and the lecture hall, we're greeted by a strange sight. More than a dozen open-air canopies have been set up in the snow, each with a long table of food beneath it. I know immediately what it means; I just can't believe it. The lecture organizers intend to serve refreshments outside.
Like a country carnival just before a hurricane, the tables are completely deserted. The ground beneath the canopies is choppy with mud and tufts of grass. Snow is creeping in from the edges, and in the hectic wind the white tablecloths flutter uneasily, anchored by large dispensers of what will soon be hot chocolate or coffee, and by cold platters of cookies and petits fours in cocoons of plastic wrap. It cuts a peculiar image in the silent courtyard, like a city extinguished in midmotion by a calamity, a makeshift Pompeii.
You've got to be kidding, Gil says as we park. We get out of the car, and he starts toward the lecture hall, pausing to shake the support poles of the nearest tent. The whole structure trembles. Wait till Charlie sees this.
On cue, Charlie appears at the door of the lecture hall. For some reason he's preparing to leave.
Hey, Chuck, I call out as we approach, gesturing at the courtyard. How do you like all this?
But Charlie has other things on his mind.
How was I supposed to get into the auditorium? he snaps at Gil. You idiots put some girl at the entrance, and she won't let me through.
Gil holds the door for the rest of us. He understands by idiots that Charlie is referring to Ivy. As cochairs of the biggest campus Christian group, three senior women at the club are coordinating the Easter ceremonies.
Loosen up, Gil says. They just thought Cottage might try some kind of prank. They're trying to nip it in the bud.
Charlie grabs himself expressively. Yeah, well, I almost told them to nip this in the bud.
Beautiful, I say, heading for the warmth of the lecture hall. My shoes are already soaked. Can we go inside?
At the landing, a sophomore with frosted blond hair and a skier's tan is sitting behind a long table, already shaking her head. When Gil arrives behind us at the top of the stairs, though, everything changes.
The sophomore looks sheepishly at Charlie. I didn't know you were with Gil… she begins.
From inside I can hear the voice of Professor Henderson from the comparative literature department, introducing Taft to the audience.
Forget it, Charlie says, walking past the table toward the entrance. The rest of us follow.
The auditorium is filled to capacity. All along the walls and toward the back of the hall by the entrance, those who couldn't find a seat are on their feet. I catch sight of Katie in a back row with another pair of Ivy sophomores, but before I can get her attention, Gil nudges me forward, searching for a place where the four of us can stand. He puts a finger over his lips and points toward the stage. Taft is walking to the podium.
The Good Friday lecture is a tradition with deep roots at Princeton, the first of three Easter celebrations that have become fixtures in the social lives of many students, Christian and non-Christian alike. By legend the events were introduced in the spring of 1758 by Jonathan Edwards, the fiery New England churchman who moonlighted as Princeton's third president. Edwards led the students in a sermon on the night of Good Friday, followed by a religious meal on Saturday evening, and a service at midnight as Easter Sunday began. Somehow these rituals were then transmitted intact down to the present, profiting from that immunity to time and fortune which the university, like an ancient tar pit, confers on everything that unwittingly lumbers into it and dies.
One of those things, as it happened, was Jonathan Edwards himself. Soon after arriving at Princeton, Edwards was given a potent smallpox inoculation, and within three months the old man had died from it. Notwithstanding the fact that he was probably too weak to have invented the ceremonies that have been attributed to him, though, university officials recreate all three of them, year after year, in what is euphemistically called a modern context.
I suspect Jonathan Edwards was never much for euphemisms or modern contexts. Considering that his most famous metaphor for human life involved a spider dangling above the pit of hell, hung there by a wrathful God, the old man must turn in his grave every spring. The Good Friday sermon is now nothing more than a lecture delivered by a member of the humanities faculty; the only thing mentioned less often than God in the lecture is hell. The original religious meal, which must have been stark and Calvinist in its conception, is now a banquet in the most beautiful of the undergraduate dining halls. And the midnight service, which I'm sure once made the walls tremble, is now a nondenominational celebration of faith, where not even the atheists and agnostics can feel out of place. Maybe for that reason, students of every background attend the Easter ceremonies, each for a different reason, and all of them depart happily, with their expectations reinforced and their sensitivities respected.
Taft stands at the podium, fat and shaggy as ever. Seeing him, I think of Procrustes, the mythological highwayman who tortured his victims by stretching them on a bed if they were too short, or cutting them down to
