Hare in March (2 page)

Charles Shepley’s roommate was always fooling with a tape recorder. Two days before the murder in Grandview Park, his latest results were playing in their room at the Pi Pi house, an anastomosis of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” with the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man.”

“Like it, Shep?”

“It’s all right.”

The room smelled of rubbing alcohol and Pub. Dan Thorpe wanted to be a writer (he was midway through a very staccato book; all the conversation was preceded by dashes instead of quotation marks). Ever since he had read in Hotchner’s book that Papa preferred sponge baths with rubbing alcohol, he had not been near soap and water, which was why he needed help from Revlon, and doused himself with their male fragrance.

“Why just all right?”

“Not
just
all right; it’s all right. It’s okay.” “You like it?”

Charles said he did; why start with Dan?

They had been roommates since they pledged Pi Pi in October. By this time, Charles was resigned to most of the facts involving Daniel Quentin Thorpe III.

That Thorpe loved his body, even his eyelids, which were now being soothed by two damp Oculine eye pads, as he stretched out in his red-and-white-polka-dot shorts, atop his Bates bedspread, a copy of
Ramparts,
open to an article berating the C.I.A., containing his Mexsana-powdered feet.

That Thorpe read I.F. Stone religiously, learning the weekly newsletter like a catechism; that you never really had an argument with Dan, but with I.F., or Murray Kempton, or James A. Wechsler, or Far Point College’s lone way-out leftist Dr. Dowdy, who taught Dialectical Materialism and considered himself a Maoist.

That Thorpe, a nice enough guy, well-meaning and wholesome, was too much hot air, always overdid everything, worked too painstakingly at something which was not that important, usually went over the way this thing playing did, this crossing of the Beatles and the staff sergeant; the
time
involved, just to get:

“Shep?” “Hmmm?”

“What are you doing?”

“What am I doing? Listening to your creation, Dan. I mean, I’m not coming because of it, or anything.” “You’re not sitting up and could toss a robe over me?” “Negative.”

“Okay. I freeze to death.” “It’s like the end of spring out.”

“I hope it lasts through Friday. Who you dragging to the Rabbit Hop?” “Lois.”

“Did Blouter give you his permission?”

“That rule doesn’t apply to the school dances, just the ones we give here at the house. I don’t need his permission.”

“I forgot. The school doesn’t object, just the fraternity. It takes a heap of anti-Semitism to make a home a house.”

“Thorpe, she doesn’t give a damn and I don’t either.”

“I’d like to figure out what you
do
give a damn about.”

“Work at it, then … If you care so damn much, why don’t
you
depledge?”

“Termites work better from the inside than the outside.”

“Oh, I see. You’re going to change things.”

“I’m going to try, Shep. I hope that in four years when I leave this place, no Pi Pi pledge will have to
ask
if he can date a Jewish girl.”

“Yawn.”

“Or even a Negro girl.” “Snore.”

“Very blasé cat, aren’t you, Shepley? What
does
get you excited?” “Sex.”

It was at this point in the conversation that Pi Pi Pledge Director Peter Hagerman charged into the room.

“What are your names, farts?” he barked.

Thorpe jumped to his feet. “I’m Daniel Quentin Thorpe the Third, sir.”

Charles stood up too. “Charles Shepley, sir.” “Charles Shepley what, creep?”

There was no love between Hagerman and Shepley, but Shepley knew some things about Hagerman instinctively, as an animal will sometimes be oversensitive to the quirks of another animal, a hostile animal. Shepley knew that while it was common practice to address the pledges as “Fart” Hagerman hated saying the word. Hagerman could make almost any other scene, but not that word; that word made him choke.

“Charles Shepley is my name, sir.”

“Your name is Creep.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your name, Creep?” “My name is Creep, sir.”

“You’re a liar, pledge. Your name is Fuckface.”

“Yes, sir. My name is Fuckface.” Good. Hagerman could handle that, and it had a nice, virile sound to it. Hagerman looked relieved. To Shepley, the word was comical; he wondered if he could control an impulse to grin. Hagerman told him not to, with one black look. What was it between Hagerman and him? Hagerman had seemed to dislike him instantly. That had been very clear during the second night of Rush, when Blouter had taken Shepley aside and said, “Charles, officially we’re not supposed to ask yet, but how about it? Are you with the Pi Pi’s?”

“Yes, thanks.” Handshake; he was pocket-pledged.

“Fine, Charles!” and Blouter had pounded Charles’s back and called over Peter Hagerman.

Hagerman was very short; he had that certain tortured Mickey Rooney expression a lot of little men possessed, who seemed comfortable only when they sat down, and posed for photographs on stairways standing one step above a woman to be taller than she was, and as boys had stuffed paper in their shoes to seem taller; and Hagerman was a clotheshorse, like so many of them; he was one of the few Pi Pi’s who had real diamonds in his diamond-shaped Pi Pi pin.

And that night he had not said, “Oh, good!” or “Glad to hear it!” or anything superfluous, but simply, “Where you from, Shepley?”

“New York.”

“City?”

“Yes.”

Blouter, hungry always for yaks and fun, had interrupted. “He has a gas of an act, Pete. Charles, do the imitations.”

Which always made it awful, a command performance, bark like a seal, be funny like a new pledge all the brothers are crazy about, and Charles prefaced what he said with a shrug he had not planned on, and heard his own voice make very dull something which was often very funny. “I collect rumors. I imitate someone, and you have to guess the rumor.”

“Let’s hear,” said Hagerman, poker-faced, cracking his knuckles impatiently, as though he wondered how Blouter could ever have gotten him into this.

“Well, here’s one: You’re loaded now, doll; get some sleep and then call me at Peter’s. Don’t forget now; be sure to call no matter what.”

Charles had screwed up the line and his Boston accent had come out poorly. Blouter said, “You changed it,” disappointed.

“I’m not with it, I guess.”

“Who is it?” Hagerman asked.

Blouter said, “What famous contemporary martyr was supposed to be with what famous contemporary suicide, on the night of her demise?”

“Bull!” said Hagerman. “I heard it was Bobby, anyway.”

And he had walked away, and Charles had thought to himself that he would get even with him for it one day, which was a very unCharlesy thought circa Rush Week.

“Fuckface,” said Hagerman, “I think I’ll give you the news first, because you’re the one pledge who’s going to see a er-really big shew, so hear this, Pledge Fuckface: ‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!’ “

Beside Charles, Dan Thorpe moaned.

What Hagerman was saying was that The Divine Comedy had begun. During World War II, Hell Week had been abolished by the F.P.C. fraternities as adolescent behavior. For about twenty years the frats had been Goody-Two-shoes’, hustling their pledges down to Far Point’s Negro district with food packages and tool kits with which to make house repairs, instead of beating their balls red, and leaving them barefoot in their jockey shorts on back roads a hundred miles from the house. Then in the sixties the Greeks had held a series of solemn conclaves given over to philosophizing about why frat life no longer had any real p’zazz, and was not what was happening anymore at all on a campus, and a Deke said frat life had started turning off when the traditions were taken away one by one. Bring them back. Bring back Hell Week; call it angel food cake, if necessary, but order up those wooden paddles and fix up those old bloodletting rituals, and the tears would be back again in the eyes of the men receiving their pins in the initiation ceremony. This would make for bigger and better alumni donations in the future; Keep Greek Town Green.

A Beta said the only safe way to get away with it, since the President of F.P.C. was not a frat fan, was to cut Hell Week down to a few days, give it another name, and have it at separate times.

Pi Delta Pi chose to have it at a different time each year in order to keep the pledges in suspense; they organized it into a three-day period. The Divine Comedy began with the Day of Inferno, during which the boys were hazed in whatever way the Pledge Director devised. The Day of Purgatorio followed — the pledges were assigned various duties, some benefiting the community, some the house, some a Pi Pi date’s car or the rec room of her sorority house, or the front sidewalk of a female dormitory. On the last day, Day of Paradiso, Pi Pi pledges became members. Membership usually carried with it a special surprise for each pledge, a particular thing he wanted. Last year, Bud Burroughs had been presented with a life-size, cut-out photograph, mounted on cardboard, of Ursula Andress. Made from a film clip of
The Tenth Victim,
it showed her in a silver bikini, with a blazing bra revealing two guns blasting bullets at the pull of an underarm trigger.

At the announcement, in Italian, “Abandon hope, all ye that enter,” the pledge was notified that The Divine Comedy would commence in exactly twenty hours; he was to answer, in Italian, “Conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma.” (I recognize the signals of the ancient flame.) The Pledge Director would then present him with his individual itinerary.

But Charles Shepley stood dumbstruck; despite all the drills in pledge class, he could not remember a word of the Italian response.

In the background,

Finally, Shepley said, “Sir? I forgot the Italian.”

“You
what?”

“I forgot the Italian, sir.”

Hagerman’s face got very red; he began clearing his throat, a sure sign he was trying to bring himself under control so his words would not come out garbled. He could go to pieces all of a sudden. The pledges had seen this side of Hagerman often. Charles Shepley had seen it more often than most, but Dan had been its catalyst too. Hagerman, for example, had done a long, laudatory term paper for American Civilization on Peter Dawkins; and Hagerman’s grim countenance that afternoon had not been softened any by the blasphemous rendition from the Webcor atop Thorpe’s bureau.

“Thorpe?” said Hagerman.
“Thorpe?”
“Ye-yes, sir.”

“ ‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!’ “ “Ah. Um. Cocono … Ah, I know this, sir, like the back of my hand, if I may just go slowly.”

“You may not, you goddam fuckface Vietnik! Spit it out!”

“Cocono … cocono … I — I’m blocked.”

“Spit it out!”

“I can’t, I tell you!”

“Spit it out, you prick! You get those wop words out of you, you mother!”

“Coco … co … co …”

Thorpe stopped like a train unchugging and coming to a halt; he stood there, his tall skinny body shivering — he was always cold, even in the middle of summer, and goose bumps began on his arms. He rubbed them, studying them tenderly, as though the poor things were awfully sick and needed him; his pinched-in little waist barely assumed the responsibility of holding up the silk polka dot shorts. Every now and then Dan jerked them up above the waist; it took some seconds for them to start the very slow descent.

Hagerman took two manila envelopes from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket with its leather elbow patches. He looked around the room until he spotted a wastebasket.

“Empty that basket on your bed, pledge.”

Charles sighed; it was a bad day for this. He had emptied his electric pencil sharpener in there; he had ripped up into hundreds of little pieces his weekly allotment of three letters from his mother, who was thirty-five minutes, or fifty cents, away from him, yet still wrote, sometimes six pages back and front, and he had emptied the ash trays that had collected for days in the room. Old tube of Crest. Empty packs of Marlboros. (Dan, who didn’t smoke, always said, “Come to Marlboro Country where the big C is boss!”). Empty package of Lorna Doones. Empty box of Ritz crackers, not empty of crumbs. Dirty Q-tips from a vigorous ear-cleaning session.
Yyikh!

He did it, bravely — he had changed the sheets that morning.

“Set the wastebasket in the center of the floor, Shepley.”

Charles had a feeling Hagerman was going to command him to urinate into the basket, something like that. He didn’t feel
at all
like any of that crap today. The latest letter from his mother, which he had not yet ripped into shreds, the seven-pager which he had found in his box at the house that noon when he came home for Pi Pi chili-chow had depressed the hell out of him. He had not admitted that to himself before this moment when he stood there with the wastebasket between Hagerman and himself. He could feel its bulge in the back pocket of his corduroys.