The Book of Skulls

Honestly, I thought it was just a German name: Jews are called Cohen or Katz or Goldberg. I wasn’t really captivated by Eli’s personality, you might say, but once I found out he was Jewish I felt I had to let him room with us. For the sake of broadening myself through diversity, yes, and also because I had been raised to dislike Jews and I had to rebel against that. My grandfather on my father’s side had had some bad experiences with clever Jews around 1923; some. Wall Street Abies suckered him into investing heavily in a radio company they were organizing, and they were crooks and he lost about five million, so it became a family tradition to mistrust Jews. They were vulgar, pushy, sly, et cetera et cetera, always trying to do an honest Protestant millionaire out of his hard-inherited wealth, et cetera et cetera. In fact, my Uncle Clark once admitted to me that Grandfather would have doubled his money if he’d sold out within eight months, which is what his Jewish partners secretly did, but no, he hung on waiting for still fatter profits, and got clobbered. Anyway I don’t uphold all the family traditions. Eli moved in. Short, somewhat swarthy, a lot of body hair, quick nervous bright little eyes, big nose. A brilliant mind. An expert on medieval languages; already recognized as an important scholar in his field and still an undergraduate. On the other side of the ledger, he was pretty pathetic — tongue-tied, neurotic, hypertense, worried about his masculinity. Forever prowling after girls, usually getting nowhere. Doggish girls, too. Not the spectacularly ugly broads that Ned prefers, God knows why; Eli went after a different sort of female loser — shy, scrawny, inconspicuous girls, thick glasses, flat chests, you know the bit. Naturally, they’re as neurotic as he is, terrified of sex, and they wouldn’t come across for him, which only made his problems worse. He seemed absolutely afraid to approach a normal, attractive, sensual chick. One day last fall as an act of Christian charity I turned Margo on to him and he screwed things up something unimaginable.

Quite a foursome. I doubt that I’ll ever forget the first (and probably only) time all of our parents got together, in the spring of our junior year, at the big Carnival weekend. Up till then I don’t think any of the parents had visualized their son’s roommates in any clear way. I had Oliver home to meet my father a couple of Christmases, but not Ned or Eli, and I hadn’t seen their folks either. So here we all were. No family for Oliver, of course. And Ned’s father was dead. His mother was a gaunt hollow-eyed bony woman nearly six feet tall, in black clothes, speaking with a brogue. I couldn’t connect her with Ned at all. Eli’s mother was plump, short, a waddler, very much overdressed; his father was almost invisible, a tiny sad-faced man who sighed a lot. They both looked much older than Eli. They must have had him when they were thirty-five or forty. Then there was my father, who looks the way I imagine I’ll look twenty-five years from now — smooth pink cheeks, thick hair shading from blond to gray, a moneyed look about the eyes. A big man, a handsome man, the board-of-directors type. With him was Saybrook, his wife, who I guess is thirty-eight and could pass for ten years younger, tall, well-scrubbed, long straight yellow hair, big-boned athletic body, very much the fox-and-hounds sort of woman. Imagine this group sitting under a parasol at a table in the quandrangle, trying to make conversation. Mrs. Steinfeld trying to mother Oliver, the poor dear orphan. Mr. Steinfeld eyeing my father’s $450 Italian silk suit in horror. Ned’s mother completely out of it, understanding neither her son, her son’s friends, their parents, nor any other aspect of the twentieth century. Saybrook coming on all hearty and horsey, talking blithely about charity teas and her stepdaughter’s imminent debut. (“Is she an actress?” Mrs. Steinfeld asked, baffled. “I mean her coming-out party,” said Saybrook, just as baffled.) My father studying his fingernails a lot, staring hard at the Steinfelds and at Eli, not wanting to believe any Of this. Mr. Steinfeld, to make conversation, talking about the stock market to my father. Mr. Steinfeld doesn’t have investments but he reads the Times very carefully. My father knows nothing about the market; so long as the dividends come on time, he’s happy; besides, it’s part of his religion never to talk about money. He flashes a signal to Saybrook, who deftly changes the subject, starts telling us about how she’s chairman of a committee to raise funds for Palestinian Arab refugees, you know, she says, the ones who were driven out by the Jews when Israel got started. Mrs. Steinfeld gasps. Such a thing to say in front of a Hadassah member! My father then points across the quadrangle to a particularly long-haired classmate who had just turned around and says, “I could have sworn that fellow was a girl, until he looked this way.” Oliver, who has let his hair grow to his shoulders, I suppose to show what he thinks of Kansas, gives my father his coldest, coldest smile. Undaunted, or unnoticing, my father continues, “Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but I can’t help suspecting that many of those young men with flowing locks are, you know, a trifle homosexual.” Ned laughs out loud at this. Ned’s mother turns red and coughs — not because she knows her boy is gay (she doesn’t — the idea would be incredible to her) but because that fine-looking Mr. Winchester has said a nasty word at the table. The Steinfelds, who are quick on the uptake, look at Ned, then at Eli, then at each other — a very complex bit of reaction. Is their boy safe with such a roommate? My father can’t comprehend what his casual remark has started and doesn’t know who to apologize to for what. He frowns and Saybrook whispers something to him — tsk, Saybrook, whispering in public, what would Emily Post say? — -and he responds with a magnificent blush extending far into the infrared. “Perhaps we can order some wine,” he says, loudly, to cover his confusion, and imperiously summons a student- waiter. “Do you have Chassagne-Montrachet ‘69?” he asks. “Sir?” the waiter replies blankly. An ice bucket is fetched, containing a bottle of three-buck Liebfraumilch, the best they can offer, and my father pays for it with a brand-new fifty. Ned’s mother stares at the bill in disbelief; the Steinfelds scowl at my father, thinking he’s trying to put them down. A beautiful, beautiful episode, this whole lunch. Afterward Saybrook draws me aside and says, “Your father feels very embarrassed. If he had known Eli was, well, attracted to other boys, he would never have made that remark.”

“Not Eli,” I said. “Eli’s straight. Ned.”

Saybrook is flustered. She thinks I may be putting her on. She wants to say that she and my father hope I’m not fucking around with either of them, whichever one may be queer, but she’s much too well bred to tell me that. Instead she slides into neutral chitchat for the prescribed three minutes, gracefully breaks free, goes back to explain to my father the latest twist. I see the Steinfelds conferring in anguish with Eli, no doubt giving him hell for rooming with a snotty Gentile and warning him sternly to keep away from that little faygeleh, too, if it isn’t (oyl veh!) already too late. Ned and his mother are generation-gapping also, not far away. I pick up stray phrases:

“The sisters are praying for you… transfer to Holy Cross… novena… rosary… your angel father… novitiate… Jesuit… Jesuit… Jesuit…” To one side, alone, is Oliver. Watching. Smiling his Venusian smile. Just a visitor on Earth, he is, is Oliver, the man from the flying saucer.

I’d rate Oliver as the deepest mind of the group. He doesn’t know as much as Eli, he doesn’t give the same appearance of brilliance, but he has a more powerful intelligence, I’m sure. He’s also the strangest of us, because on the surface he appears so wholesome and normal, and he really isn’t. Eli has the quickest wits among us, and he’s also the most tormented, the most troubled. Ned poses as our weakling, our fairy, but don’t underestimate him: he knows what he wants all the time, and he sees that he gets it. And me? What’s there to say about me? Good old Joe College. The right family connections, the right fraternity, the right clubs. In June I graduate and begin to live happily ever after. An Air Force commission, yes, but no combat duty — it’s all arranged, our genes are deemed too good to waste — and then I find an appropriate Episcopalian debutante, certified virgin and belonging to one of the Hundred Families, and settle down to be a gentleman. Jesus! Thank God Eli’s Book of Skulls is nothing but superstitious crap. If I had to live forever I’d bore myself to death in twenty years.

chapter fifteen Oliver

When I was sixteen I gave a great deal of thought to killing myself. Honestly. It wasn’t a pretense, a romantic adolescent drama, an expression of what Eli would call a willed persona. It was a genuine philosophical position, if I can use so impressive-sounding a term, which I arrived at logically and rigorously.

What led me to the contemplation of suicide was, above all, my father’s dying at thirty-six. That seemed like such an unbearable tragedy to me. Not that my father was in any way a special human being, except to me. He was just a Kansas farmer, after all. Up at five in the morning, in bed by nine at night. No education to speak of. All he read was the county newspaper, and sometimes the Bible, though most of that was over his head. But he worked hard all his short life. He was a good man, a dedicated man. It was his father’s land first, and my father worked it from the age of ten, with a few years out for the army; he brought in his crops, he retired his debt, he made a living, more or less, he even was able to buy forty acres more and think of expanding beyond that. Meanwhile he