A Song in the Night (11 page)

The medications were enormously expensive, and I lived with the constant fear that somehow the various insurance
programs of which I was part would figure out a way to exclude me because of my preexisting condition. From day to day I tried not to think about how frequently and urgently I required these injections. Later in life, I made an estimate of how many times I had had to strap on a tourniquet, clean my skin with alcohol, and push a needle through my own skin and into my vein. It came to over ten thousand times.

After years of being the stranger—disabled in elementary school, a foreigner in high school—I mostly wanted to fit in, and I was delighted that I made friends so quickly. Given my enthusiasm at the time for everything about Princeton, I am not so surprised, looking back, that I was pleased to be approached in my sophomore year about joining the most exclusive club on campus, known as Ivy Club.

The “eating clubs” are a Princeton oddity that arose during the nineteenth century. They were, in essence, fraternities that admitted juniors and seniors. Each eating club had its own elegant and spacious headquarters on Prospect Street near campus. Each sported a dining room, library, game room, and backyard. A few of them even had ballrooms, into which they imported bands, women from other colleges, and large amounts of liquor on weekends. They were the huge party engines that drove campus social life all year long.

I had heard about the clubs when I was applying to Princeton, and I was concerned that they might be strongholds of division and snobbery. No, no, no! I was told by the admissions
office and by the students with whom I met during campus visits. They were simply places that served three meals a day, provided a quiet place to study, and held parties. Besides, I was told, they weren’t even really part of the university. They were independent associations, run by their own boards and maintained by their own endowments.

By the time I arrived there, the university had three kinds of clubs: selective clubs that only admitted men, selective clubs that admitted men and women, and “open” clubs, which admitted anyone who signed up. The university provided food and recreational facilities for freshmen and sophomores, but it did not have the capacity to cover all the students on campus, which meant that it was depending on the clubs to provide a key university service.

The annual selection process went by the weird name of “bicker.” The decision of whether to participate came to most students in the fall of their sophomore year. Club members recruited younger students to become part of the process, and the students in turn sidled up to members to express their interest. I was astonished when several members of Ivy Club started dropping by my room or seeking me out in the hulking dining halls around campus.
We would like you to see what it is like
, they said.
Will you come for dinner tomorrow night?

Sure
, I replied.

My closest friends grimaced at me. I had already developed a reputation as someone with passionate views, sometimes conservative, more often progressive. How could I be willing to explore membership in a club—in
Ivy
, of all places?
I listened and I thought, Well, maybe they are right. But it couldn’t hurt to take a look.

I visited Ivy and I was bowled over. It was physically beautiful, with an elegant entry, a comfortable and well-designed living room, a billiards room, and a magnificent wood-paneled dining room. The “men of Ivy” sat at a single long table, where they were served meals prepared by a large kitchen staff and served by waiters in tuxedos and white gloves. They ate off china and silver. When I went upstairs to the library, I found a stylish chamber with oriental rugs, a roaring fire, and endless rows of leather-bound books. Sitting in one of the comfy reading chairs at the end of the room, I noticed a set of elegant books within hand’s reach. They were rare copies of Woodrow Wilson’s five-volume masterwork,
A History of the American People
, written while he was a professor at Princeton and before he became the president of Princeton, the governor of New Jersey, and the president of the United States. I idly pulled one volume off the shelf and opened it to the first page. To my surprise, I found Wilson’s autograph. In fact, he had signed all five.

Yes, the place was lovely in a conservative, English way, and yes, the food was excellent, but that is not what drew me in. It was something more alluring. I had grown up without brothers, I had never seriously participated in an athletic team, and I had not been able to join the military, so I had no experience of extended male camaraderie. And here were these charming, relaxed, and friendly young men, all of them ready with a funny quip or a helpful hand, inviting me to become
one of their band. It touched an inner desire that had lingered within me for years. I went through the long interview process during the first week of February 1976.

Late one night at the end of the week I found that an envelope had been slipped under my door in the dormitory. My heart jumped. The expensive stationery bore the symbol of an ivy leaf.

I was in.

My daily participation at Ivy did not begin until the following fall. I endured the silly initiation rite and enjoyed the banter over every meal. I learned to play billiards. I went to parties where I drank too much, an experience that taught me that however good the alcohol buzz might feel in the short term, it wasn’t worth the misery of throwing up all night in a toilet stall. I made excellent use of the library; every night after dinner I would go up there, lay out my books, and work in silence with the fire crackling behind me for four hours. My grades skyrocketed.

As the weather turned cool and the novelty wore off, I noticed some unexpected aspects of the club’s life. The nervous sophomores who had entered with me the previous spring had now turned into solid juniors who would soon be leading the club. They asked me to start recruiting the next class. What sort of person were they looking for? I asked. They gave me a garbled answer. They wanted someone who was unusual, who was a leader, who stood out, who added spice to the mix. And
also someone who was likable, a regular guy, a team player, who would fit in. They scanned the directory of sophomores to pick out famous names. They brought a string of perfectly friendly but bland roommates and teammates to dinner, trying to make the case that they would be perfect.

Slowly I saw my surroundings in a new light. How had I gotten in? I wondered. Perhaps I fell into the celebrity category, since my parents were well-known writers who had published a book about how our family coped with hemophilia. I had been on game shows and national news as part of the publicity for that book. I noticed abruptly that the great majority of the cooking staff and the silent waiters were black, while the huge majority of club members were white. Sometimes when I emerged from the front door of Ivy to return to campus, I crossed paths with African-American and Latino and Asian students who were on their way to the Third World Center, a kind of open club for students of color. In a detail that seemed particularly insensitive on the university administration’s part, these students had to walk every day up and down a long street, past every one of the clubs, with their glowing yellow windows and burbling music, before they reached their gathering place. The clubs did not have a formal policy of excluding minority students, and every club had a few hardy members who were willing to put up with being virtually alone among their peers. Still, the cultural and class divide was communicated clearly through their styles. Ivy radiated English Men’s Club. Cap and Gown was Great Gatsby. Tiger Club was Animal House. Even Terrace, which was an open club, became famous for its
throwback hippie tone, serving endless trays of roasted vegetables and half-cooked eggplant smothered in giant gobs of melted Muenster cheese.

As I went back and forth to my dorm room, I wrestled with a new set of dilemmas about inclusion and exclusion. Yes, I was in, but a lot of people, people I respected, were out. And while Princeton spent a lot of time using its admission and scholarship policies to assemble a diverse student body, why did it then make sense to resegregate the students for their last two years? They were making individual decisions about whether and what to join, but wasn’t it a system that rewarded and molded those who were accepted by this social sorting system and silenced those who were not? I was having a wonderful time with this new group of male friends, but did my enjoyment depend on excluding the women in my class whom I had come to know, to admire, and in some cases to love?

What troubled me more than anything was the slow hardening of my club friends’ attitudes toward the realities and principles at stake. Those who benefited from the system slowly and imperceptibly began to justify it. Those who had chosen not to participate dismissed it. Those who had been rejected resented it. To my dismay, I felt that I was witnessing the intensification of the very kind of discrimination and misunderstanding that I had observed and rejected in my experiences with race, with disabilities, and with human rights.

The ironies abounded. I was a student at a highly selective university that used exclusion to create a theoretically inclusive community. And then, to escape the anonymity of crowds
and the unwelcome burden (to the administration) of providing for everyone, we broke up that same inclusive community with a new form of intensified exclusion.

It was disturbing. No, it was more than disturbing, I decided. It was wrong.

So the question became what to do—not just about myself and my own participation, but about the system as a whole. With this challenge I tackled for the first time the vexing question of strategy. It was not enough to have an intuitive sense of injustice. I realized that I needed to select a goal and then design the process to achieve it. But I had no idea how to do this.

I started with what I knew best, the impulsive act. I knew I had to quit Ivy. This time, however, I pondered the time and place in advance. At first I decided to go all the way through Bicker Week to select the next class and then quietly resign a few weeks later. As we began interviewing candidates, however, the arbitrary nature of our process became more and more evident. Every visiting candidate had an index card on which the interviewers recorded their impressions and indicated their preference: an up arrow for admission, a down arrow for rejection, and a sideways arrow for indifference. To signal my growing objections, I gave every person I talked to an up arrow, until my actions were detected by the club president, who took me aside to scold me. I kept doing it anyway.

The actual process of selection took place over two all-night meetings in the first week of the second term. The aura of secrecy and the bodily trial of sleeplessness had the effect of
binding the club members even more tightly together. I realized that if I quit before the first night, I would never know what it was really like—and I would probably be accused of being too weak physically to endure the challenge. So I diligently sat through the first marathon. As the night wore on and exhaustion set in, the standards of admission and the conversations that surrounded them became more and more peculiar. The group focused on each candidate in turn, and when the discussion opened up, it became a swirling mix of impressions, hearsay, personal details, team affiliations, lasting grudges, and primitive psychoanalysis. I looked around at my friends—for they still were my friends—and felt deeply unhappy, for them and for myself.

The next night we retired to the library again after dinner and attacked the remainder of the list. We spent more than two and a half hours on one poor fellow who had staked his college life and reputation on admission to the club. One of his closest friends finally sank him by saying that his fascination with Ivy was the sign of a weak and dependent character. At the end of the discussion, he was voted down. (I later learned that he sank into such misery that he transferred to another college.)

I had arbitrarily selected midnight as the moment of my announcement. I waited until we had completed voting on the person at hand, and then I stood up.