Indignation

the vomit and the last of the smell. I even took my socks off and held them up to my nose. Two students came in to use the urinals just as I was smelling my socks. I said nothing, explained nothing, put my socks back on, pushed my feet into my shoes, tied the laces, and left. That’s how you cope with all your difficulties, Marcus — you leave. Has that never occurred to you before?

I went outside and found myself on a beautiful midwestern college campus on a big, gorgeous, sunlit day, another grand fall day, everything around me blissfully proclaiming, “Delight yourselves in the geyser of life! You are young and exuberant and the rapture is yours!” Enviously I looked at the other students walking the brick paths that crisscrossed the green quadrangle. Why couldn’t I share the pleasure they took in the splendors of a little college that answered all their needs? Why instead am I in conflict with everyone? It began at home with my father, and from there it has doggedly followed me here. First there’s Flusser, then there’s Elwyn, then there’s Caudwell. And whose fault is it, theirs or mine? How had I gotten myself in trouble so fast, I who’d never before been in trouble in my life? And why was I looking for more trouble by writing fawning letters to a girl who only a year before had attempted suicide by slitting a wrist?

I sat on a bench and opened my three-ring binder and on a blank piece of lined paper I started in yet again. “Please answer me when I write to you. I can’t bear your silence.” Yet the weather was too beautiful and the campus too beautiful to find Olivia’s silence unbearable. Everything was too beautiful, and I was too young, and my only job was to become valedictorian! I continued writing: “I feel on the verge of picking up and leaving here because of the chapel requirement. I would like to talk to you about this. Am I being foolish? You ask how did I get here in the first place? Why did I choose Winesburg? I’m ashamed to tell you. And now I just had a terrible interview with the dean of men, who is sticking his nose into my business in a way that I’m convinced he has no right to do. No, it was nothing about you, or us. It was about my moving into Neil Hall.” Then I yanked the page out of the notebook as furiously as if I were my own father and tore it in pieces that I stuffed into my pants pocket. Us! There was no us!

I was wearing pleated gray flannel trousers and a check sport shirt and a maroon V-neck pullover and white buckskin shoes. It was the same outfit I’d seen on the boy pictured on the cover of the Winesburg catalogue that I’d sent away for and received in the mail, along with the college application forms. In the photo, he was walking beside a girl wearing a two-piece sweater set and a long, full dark skirt and turned-down white cotton socks and shiny loafers. She was smiling at him while they walked together as though he’d said to her something amusingly clever. Why had I chosen Winesburg? Because of that picture! There were big leafy trees on either side of the two happy students, and they were walking down a grassy hill with ivy-clad, brick buildings in the distance behind them, and the girl was smiling so appreciatively at the boy, and the boy looked so confident and carefree beside her, that I filled out the application and sent it off and within only weeks was accepted. Without telling anyone, I took from my savings account one hundred of the dollars that I’d diligently squirreled away of the wages I’d been paid as my father’s employee, and after my classes one day I walked over to Market Street and went into the city’s biggest department store and in their College Shop bought the pants and shirt and shoes and sweater that were worn by the boy in the photo. I had brought the Winesburg catalogue with me to the store; a hundred dollars was a small fortune, and I didn’t want to make a mistake. I also bought a College Shop herringbone tweed jacket. In the end I had just enough change left to take the bus home.

I was careful to bring the boxes of clothing into the house when I knew my parents were off working at the store. I didn’t want them to know about my buying the clothes. I didn’t want anybody to know. These were nothing like the clothes that the guys at Robert Treat wore. We wore the same clothes we’d worn in high school. You didn’t get a new outfit to go to Robert Treat. Alone in the house, I opened the boxes and laid the clothes out on the bed to see how they looked. I laid them out in place, as you would wear them — shirt, sweater, and jacket up top, trousers below, and shoes down near the foot of the bed. Then I pulled off everything I had on and dropped it at my feet like a pile of rags and put on the new clothes and went into the bathroom and stood on the lowered toilet seat lid so I was able to see more of myself in the medicine chest mirror than I would be able to see standing on the tile floor in my new white buckskin shoes with the pinkish rubber heels and soles. The jacket had two short slits, one on either side at the back. I’d never owned such a jacket before. Previously I’d owned two sport jackets, one bought for my bar mitzvah in 1945 and the other for my graduation from high school in 1950. Careful to take the tiniest steps, I rotated on the toilet seat lid to try to catch a look at my backside in that jacket with the slits. I put my hands in my pants pockets so as to look nonchalant. But there was no way of looking nonchalant standing on a toilet, so I climbed down and went into the bedroom and took off the clothes and put them back in their boxes, which I hid at the back of my bedroom closet, behind my bat, spikes, mitt, and a bruised old baseball. I had no intention of telling my parents about the new clothes, and I certainly wasn’t going to wear them in front of my friends at Robert Treat. I was going to keep them a secret till I got to Winesburg. The clothes I’d bought to leave home in. The clothes I’d bought to start a new life in. The clothes I’d bought to be a new man in and to end my being the butcher’s son.

Well, those were the very clothes on which I had vomited in Caudwell’s office. Those were the clothes that I wore when I sat in chapel trying how not to learn to lead a good life in accordance with biblical teachings and singing to myself instead the Chinese national anthem. Those were the clothes I’d been wearing when my roommate Elwyn had thrown the punch that had nearly broken my jaw. Those were the clothes I was wearing when Olivia went down on me in Elwyn’s LaSalle. Yes, there’s the picture of the boy and girl that should adorn the cover of the Winesburg catalogue: me in those clothes being blown by Olivia and having no idea what to make of it.

You don’t look yourself, Marcus. You all right? May I sit down?”

It was Sonny Cottler standing over me, wearing the same clothes that I was wearing, except that his wasn’t an ordinary maroon pullover sweater but a maroon and gray Winesburg letter sweater that he’d earned playing varsity basketball. That too. The ease with which he wore his clothes seemed an extension somehow of the deep voice that was so rich with authority and confidence. A quiet kind of carefree vigor, an invulnerability that he exuded, repelled me and attracted me at once, perhaps because it struck me, unreasonably or not, as being rooted in condescension. His seemingly being deficient in nothing left me oddly with the impression of someone who was actually deficient in everything. But then these impressions could have been no more than the offshoot of a sophomore’s envy and awe.

“Of course,” I answered. “Sure. Sit.”

“You look like you’ve been through the ringer,” he said.

He, of course, looked like he’d just finished shooting a scene on the MGM lot opposite Ava Gardner. “The dean called me in. We had a disagreement. We had an altercation.” Keep your mouth shut! I told myself. Why tell him? But I had to tell someone, didn’t I? I had to talk to someone at this place, and Cottler wasn’t necessarily a bad guy because my father had arranged for him to come to visit me in my room. Anyway, I felt so misunderstood all around that I might have looked up at the sky and howled like a dog if he hadn’t happened by.

As calmly as I could, I told him about the dispute over chapel attendance between the dean and me.

“But,” Cottler asked, “who goes to chapel? You pay somebody to go for you and you never have to go anywhere near chapel.”

“Is that what you do?”

He laughed softly. “What else would I do? I went one time. I went in my freshman year. It was when they had a rabbi. They have a Catholic priest once each semester, and they have a rabbi over from Cleveland once a year. Otherwise it’s Dr. Donehower and other great Ohio thinkers. The rabbi’s passionate devotion to the concept of kindness was enough to cure me of chapel for good.”

“How much do you have to pay?”

“For a proxy? Two bucks a pop. It’s nothing.”

“Forty times two is eighty dollars. That’s not nothing.”

“Look,” he said, “figure you spend fifteen minutes getting down off the Hill and over to the church. And if you’re you, serious you, you don’t laugh off being there. You don’t laugh off anything. Instead you spend an hour at chapel seething with rage. Then you spend another fifteen minutes seething with rage while getting back up the Hill to wherever you’re going next. That’s ninety minutes. Ninety times forty equals sixty hours of rage. That’s not nothing either.”

“How do you find the person to pay? Explain to me how it works.”

“The person you hire takes the card the usher hands him at the door when he goes in, then he hands it back