beer and laughing loudly. Besides the main tent, there were smaller tents where Bud and Bud Lite were free and on tap, along with water, all served up by student bartenders—at present, by a tanned, good-natured young man wearing an orange bandanna. Charlie had graduated from Princeton before it went coed, and a certain manly feeling pervaded the setting, despite the presence of wives in black-and-orange silk scarves, black or orange blouses or wraparound skirts, wives carrying purses made of woven orange grosgrain ribbons or, in one case, a wooden handbag, like a miniature picnic basket, on one side of which was painted Nassau Hall; I also saw two separate gold tiger pins with emeralds for eyes. The children wore university paraphernalia, and face-painting occurred in a corner of the tent, kids’ cheeks being adorned with black and orange stripes and whiskers.
We walked to the registration booth, where a very pretty girl who had a long blond ponytail and wore an orange T-shirt gave us our room assignment in a dorm called Campbell (I’d previously sent in the reservation form—staying in a dorm would be much more fun for Ella, I thought, than staying at the Nassau Inn). She then directed us toward the pickup line for linens, which was overseen by another girl, also pretty, who was hanging out a first-floor window of Holder, distributing sheets and towels.
Already Charlie had said hello to perhaps twenty men, some of whom I recognized, some on their own and some accompanied by their wives. There were many warm exclamations, bear hugs, backslaps, mild bawdiness: “You’re shitting me, right?” said a fellow named Dennis Goshen, grabbing the bottom hem of Charlie’s jacket. “You still fit into this thing?” Since we’d left Milwaukee, Charlie had had on the socalled beer jacket from the year he graduated: a cotton jacket featuring an illustration of a tiger lying passed out atop an hourglass, its feet splayed, its curving tail forming a 6 and the top and bottom of the hourglass forming the 8; a mug of beer was slipping from its paw.
In greeting, Charlie’s classmates would lean in and kiss me on the cheek, and to Ella, they’d make a pseudo- outrageous proclamation about Charlie. Tapping Charlie’s shoulder with a pointer finger, Toby McKee said, “Spring of ’68, for nothing but a cold six-pack, this guy got me to type his entire thesis. A hundred and twenty pages, and I even corrected his lousy spelling!” Or, courtesy of Kip Spencer: “Don’t even get me started on the time your old man talked me into stealing the clapper from the bell on top of Nassau Hall!”
There’d be inquiries into our lives in Milwaukee, and eventually, I realized Charlie was prompting them, asking his classmates if they were still practicing medicine in Stamford, or still at that ad agency in New York. When they turned the question around, Charlie would say, “Matter of fact, I’ve got a new gig—just went in with a group of fellows to buy the Milwaukee Brewers.”
“The baseball team?” a classmate might say in response. “Not bad!” Or “Holy smokes!” Or, in the case of a guy named Richard Gibbons, “Oh, man, I’m so fucking jealous!” Then Richard glanced at Ella and mouthed to me,
We went to drop our suitcases in the dorm room, which was actually a suite and perfectly serviceable except that the bathroom was a floor below us, and though we’d been gone only a few minutes, the tent seemed twice as crowded on our return. I helped Ella get food. Kip Spencer and his wife, Abigail, had a daughter Ella’s age named Becky, and the girls soon paired off and were racing around. They reappeared with their faces painted, then they appeared again with the paint smudged, and by that point they were part of a gang of ten or more children, and Ella seemed to be having a ball.
I was surprised to be able to relax, settling in to the afternoon. All around me the men in their ridiculous orange-and-black garb seemed to be getting drunk and jolly, Charlie himself was in high spirits, and the other wives and I would exchange indulgent smiles. By four P.M., the idea of ending my marriage seemed less a definite plan than a fragment of a dream. The tension between Charlie and me had dissolved, and though I was on the periphery of most conversations, this had never been a dynamic I minded; I’d always liked to be around loud, laughing, friendly people. When the men broke into a locomotive, or when they referred to Princeton as “the best damn place of all,” which was a line from a school song, they seemed terribly sweet to me. And Charlie was solicitous in a way he rarely was anymore, asking whenever he went to get a refill of beer if I’d like one, too. (Everybody drank out of plastic cups whose tiger icon was different, depending on which tent you were in.)
Dinner was a pleasantly mediocre buffet in the tent, chicken and scalloped potatoes and salad and brownies, and then a Motown band got started, and they were terrific: seven black men in matching pale blue suits and one black woman in a white tank dress who sang “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”
The kids were the first to start dancing, Ella and Becky and the other children, mostly arhythmically but quite happily, punching the air and jumping up and down, and soon the adults had joined in. Charlie was a wonderful dancer; I hadn’t discovered this until a few months into our marriage, when we attended his brother John’s thirty- fifth birthday party, a black-tie gathering at the country club. It wasn’t that Charlie was necessarily the best dancer in any setting, though he was good. But what made him so much fun to watch and to dance with was how uninhibited he was, how thoroughly he seemed to enjoy himself, how he was both confident and extremely silly at the same time. For “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” he shimmied several feet away, turned his back to me, bumped out his rear end, looked grinningly over his shoulder, and hopped backward, one hop for each line—“Ain’t no mountain high enough / Ain’t no valley low enough / Ain’t no river wide enough.” He soon was sweating profusely, and then he was dancing with Pam Sheldon, the wife of his classmate Theo, and I was dancing with Theo, and then Charlie was dancing with Theo, and Pam and I were standing there laughing. Around his peers, it was striking to me how fit and young-looking Charlie still was—many of them were bald or heavy or just seemed worn out beneath their cheer, but Charlie was as handsome as when we’d married. Really, his appearance had hardly changed.
Around nine-thirty, to Ella’s delight, our nephew Harry and our niece Liza showed up, Harry in the beer jacket for that year’s graduating class, and they both were festive and, I suspected, inebriated, Harry more so than Liza. Liza and Charlie danced while Harry and Ella danced, then Harry danced with me—like his uncle, Harry was deft on his feet (I’d have to tell Ed and Ginger that forcing him to attend dancing school had paid off ), and he was flirtatious in the meaningless, endearing way that rich, handsome, self-assured twenty-two-year-old men can be. He would be spending the summer in Alaska, the bulk of it working at a hatchery (this was something else I hadn’t been exposed to before marrying into the Blackwell family, the inclination to travel great distances and invest substantial amounts of money in order to do strenuous and possibly grubby work that subsequently would make for excellent storytelling: my nephew Tommy, Harry’s brother, had spent a summer in high school in a program that built roads in Greece; Liza had volunteered at an orphanage in Honduras; and several of them had participated in Outward Bound or NOLS trips). After the hatchery, Harry would be met by his two brothers and Ed, and the four of them would go on a two-week chartered fishing expedition in northern Alaska; on their return, Harry would start a job as a researcher at Merrill Lynch in Manhattan. Given all this, of course the world looked to my nephew like a joyful and inviting place, of course he was drunk and happy on the eve of his Princeton graduation.
After Harry and Liza moved on, I was surprised to look at my watch and see that it was after eleven. I scanned the tent for Ella—she and a little boy were doing their nine-year-olds’ approximation of a tango—and I told Charlie I was taking her to the dorm to go to bed. I felt a little negligent that it was as late as it was and tried to absolve myself by recalling that in Wisconsin, it would be an hour earlier.
