Harvard Yard (74 page)

“But what if the majority of students don’t like them?” asked Sherry.

“Mob rule,” snapped Ned.

And now Prof. G. tried again. He said, “You know, folks, the band is playing.”

“I’m ready,” said Will.

Franklin looked his brother up and down. “There you are, Dad. He’s ready. Ready to go to the game and sing ‘Ten Thousand Men of Harvard.’ Give him the raccoon coat. He’ll look good in it. He’ll look good in a uniform, too, because Nixon isn’t going to end this war, either. Fight fiercely, Harvard!” Then Franklin grabbed a plate of shrimp and stalked off, followed by all his friends.

Most people agreed that it was the greatest game ever played in Harvard Stadium. Harvard scored sixteen points in the last forty-two seconds for a tie, but the headline in the
Crimson
was,
HARVARD BEATS YALE, 29-29.

Ned Wedge did not enjoy it, and neither did Harriet.

iii

It was one of the worst winters in memory. The snowbanks in the Yard were chest-high by February. So maybe it was cabin fever that made Harvard seem like a loony bin in those months. Or maybe it was spring fever. Because as the snow melted and the sky brightened in March, things seemed to get worse.

Neither the students who wanted simply to study nor the radicals who seemed never to study were able to keep up with all the leaflets and position papers, the
Crimson
editorials, the demonstrations, the outside agitators interrupting classes, or the arguments between an administration that claimed to support rational discussion and a student opposition that said there was nothing left to talk about.

Something, it was plain, had to give.

Or as Charlie Price said after reading
Julius Caesar,
“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.”

At about 11:30 at night on the Tuesday after spring break, Will was in his room. He was reading about the New Deal, History 169. He was sleepy, not absorbing much, simply underlining words, thinking about Alana Juteau . . . and then he heard loud voices that woke him like a slap.

He went to the window and stuck his head out.

University Hall was next door, and a crowd of people had gathered in front of John Harvard’s statue. They were chanting, “Rotcy must go! Rotcy must go!”

In a moment, the dorm was alive with the rumble of slamming doors and pounding feet. And someone was shouting, “This is it. The SDS is going to do it.”

Will Wedge stepped out of his room and into the stream of students that carried him out into the cold spring night.

Franklin Wedge was on the University Hall steps, right beside benevolent John Harvard, leading the crowd in the chant: “Rotcy must go! Rotcy must go!” while a few nervous university police blocked the doors.

Was this going to be it? The building takeover that so many had feared since fall?

Earlier, three hundred members of the SDS had gathered in Lowell Lecture Hall because the university was dragging its heels on implementing a faculty resolution to strip ROTC of credit and space at Harvard. SDS also wanted to stop university expansion in Cambridge neighborhoods.

A straw vote went against a building seizure, so did a “final” vote, and final “final” vote, which they called a “binding” vote.

Then the ones who wanted to take the building had marched out to the beat of their own chants and nailed their demands to the door of the president’s house. Then they had come into the Yard. But the night must have been too cold, or the cover of dark too uninspiring, because after the first burst of noise, they just milled about, chanting and handing out leaflets.

A loony bin.

No one in Thayer Hall went to sleep early that night . . . not that they ever did. In one room, the Beatles were singing “Fool on the Hill.” In another, the Chambers Brothers were singing “Time.” And in one particularly retrograde room, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was screaming the famous screamer “I Put a Spell on You.”

But on every floor, the usual bridge games, study breaks, and bull sessions had been replaced by one conversation, one topic: Would the WSA faction of the SDS take a building in the morning, and would the administration call the cops if they did? Will told a group of friends that he believed in one thing above all: the ability of rational people to solve their problems rationally.

But when he came back to his own room, he found Franklin standing there with Sherry Lappen and two of his other WSA friends, Jerry Royster and Theo Boss, who had a particularly unfortunate last name for a member of the Worker-Student Alliance.

Franklin said to Will, “We need your help.”

Charlie, who had not cut his hair since arriving at Harvard, said, “I told them they could use the room.”

“What?” said Will.

“We may need a command post,” said Franklin, looking around at the phone, the first-floor windows, the doors.

Harvard students lived better than most, a fact that few of them appreciated. Will and Charlie had a bedroom and a spacious living room with a fireplace, a wall of exposed brick, and three walls painted pea soup green and lined with strips of wood, so that they could tack up pictures and posters without putting holes in the plaster.

Will had tacked a picture of John F. Kennedy above his desk. Charlie Price had put up a picture of Shakespeare in his second week. Then, about the time that his hair reached below his ears, Charlie had put up a poster of Che Guevara, the Castro lieutenant allegedly killed by the CIA in Bolivia. Che was now patron saint of the leftist students, who, as Will pointed out, would have been shot if they ever tried anything around Castro that approached what they had been doing at Harvard. The poster of Che—sometimes in black and white, sometimes in psychedelic colors that made even straight students think they were stoned—had become wallpaper in half the rooms at Harvard.

Franklin looked at Che, then turned to his brother. “We need to know you’ll help.”

“It’s just a contingency,” said Sherry Lappen.

Franklin said, “If the administration cuts the phone lines to University Hall—”

“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?” said Will. “Who the hell gave you the right?”

Franklin grabbed his brother and led him into the bedroom. “Listen, I’m hoping we get something positive from the administration in the morning, but if we don’t—”

Will shook his head. “Dad will kill you.”

“Willie, I have to do this, or I’ll never be able to live with myself.”

“Dad will kill me . . .”

Franklin looked into his brother’s eyes. There was something fiercely ascetic about his gaze: wire-rimmed glasses that emphasized his hollowed cheeks, a scruffy beard that said he was too busy worrying about the world to shave. “I’ll ask you just one question. Give me a yes or no answer. Then ask yourself what you should do. ‘Is the war in Vietnam a just and moral war?’ Yes or no.”

“No. But—” Before he could finish, Will heard a knock on the door and the voice of Jimmy Keegan.

“I’m done here. You guys done?”

Franklin said to his brother, “I’m counting on you.” Then he stepped into the living room. “Let’s go.”

Sherry Lappen said, “Is your brother on board with this?”

Franklin looked at Will, who said nothing.

Charlie Price chimed in. “Count on us if the shit hits the fan.”

Keegan stepped closer to Will. “This member of the proletariat will be very pissed if someone should blow the whistle before tomorrow.”

“You’re not the proletariat,” said Will. “You just sold marijuana on every floor in this dorm. You’re the biggest businessman around.”

“A real capitalist pig”—Keegan grinned—“that’s me.”

“Let’s go,” said Sherry Lappen.

Franklin was the last one to leave. He took his brother’s hand and whispered, “This is right, Willie.”

“Think hard before you do it,” said Will.

“We’ll take one more vote.”

Will walked three circuits of the Yard that night, head down, hands shoved into his pockets. Each time that he walked past the entrance to the University Police Department, in the basement of Grays Hall, he thought about going in and telling them what he knew.

It should have been easy. Blow the whistle. Tell the cops that a faction of the SDS was planning to take over University Hall in the morning. But he couldn’t.

Finally, on the third circuit of the Yard, he went out past ancient Harvard Hall and looked up at the cupola. One of his ancestors had watched the British go by from up there, then he had gone and gotten his gun and gotten into the fight.

Maybe Will should do the same thing now. But who were the British? Who were the real enemies of freedom? And was the war in Vietnam a good war? Yes or no.

So Will walked. He crossed the Square. He went past the ancient home of William Brattle, past the corner where the Wedge house had been, past the majestic old mansion where the ghosts of Longfellow and Washington communed, all the way to the Drake house, a Queen Anne Victorian with a wraparound porch and slate roof. It was two in the morning, but the lights were on. So Will climbed the steps and rang the bell.

Prof. G. opened the door as though he was not in the least surprised to have a visitor so late. He wore a fine silk robe over his pajamas. A bottle of port was open on the table in the middle of the study, and a fire was dying.

“You’re up late,” said Will.

“I’ve just purchased a copy of
Christian Warfare with the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.
Do you know what it is?” He led Will over to the table.

“Sounds heavy,” said Will.

“It is. A copy of this book was the only volume saved from the Harvard Hall fire.” He opened it and said, “Go ahead. Touch it. I don’t handle them often, but late at night, it’s a kind of guilty pleasure. Feel the words. It’s like feeling the thoughts of a man who lived over four hundred years ago.”

Will ran his hands over the words and felt nothing but the bumps on the paper.

“I can quantify the universe,” said Prof. G., “but I can’t explain it. So I’m up late, trying to see what answers the Elizabethans have. What’s your excuse?”

“Do you know what happened tonight?”

“Franklin told me. He has a powerful conscience. We’d all do well with such a gift.”

“He’s going to take over a building,” said Will. “Dad will kill him.”

“Dad will also be secretly pleased that his son is taking a stand.”

“I don’t know if I should tell anyone or not.”

“Rebellion is like a gas under pressure. The greater the pressure, the greater the explosion. This might let off a little steam and force the administration to confront the issue of the war more directly.”

“So your advice would be to keep my mouth shut?”

“Think for yourself, Will. If you do, you may come to find that you agree with your brother about the war. Then everything else may fall in line.”

That was the trouble with this damn place, thought Will. Nobody made anything easy, not even the scholars sitting up late puzzling over the meaning of life.

The dorm was quiet when he finally crawled into bed. He decided to see how the vote went the next day.

They voted, but it went like this:

At noon, about seventy members of the SDS stood in the sunshine on the steps of University Hall. They read their demands. Then they declared that the time for talk had ended. And with a shout of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” they invaded the hall. A few moments later, angry deans in Brooks Brothers were bouncing unceremoniously out of every door, followed by administration and staff, while an SDS banner—black field, red center, white letters—was unfurled.

In the time that it took them to do it, word spread like a stomach virus. At class change in the lecture halls, in the dining halls, in the labs and the museums, people were soon finishing what they were doing and heading for the Yard.

By 12:30, the crowd had grown into the hundreds. Someone with a bullhorn was trying to work them into a chant: “Smash Rotcy! No expansion!” And someone in Weld Hall was playing the Beatles’ “Revolution” on an industrial-strength sound system that had windows rattling all around.

As Will Wedge came from a gulped-down lunch at the Union, he wondered, was this a demonstration or a festival? And what happened to the vote?

And there was Franklin, on the University Hall steps, working the bullhorn, waving his arms as “Rotcy must go!” was met with a counter chant: “Out! Out! Out!”

Finally, Franklin lowered the bullhorn, which caused the chanting to stop, then he raised it again and said, “Let’s vote. How many of you oppose this takeover?”

And a roar went up from the crowd.

Franklin gave a look at Sherry Lappen, who was standing near him, then he shouted, “And how many are in favor?”

No one needed a sound meter to hear the truth: the opposition had the votes.

And someone shouted, “You just lost, so get out!”

“Get out!” shouted someone else. “Or go against your own democratic ideals.”

And for a moment, Franklin seemed at a loss, so Theo Boss grabbed the bullhorn and shouted, “Be quiet, all of you. You’ve had your silly vote.”

The crowd booed. The Beatles fan in Weld cranked up the volume.

So much for democracy among the Students for a Democratic Society.

A loony bin, thought Will Wedge.

“Hey, Will.” Charlie Price sidled up, his pockets bulging with his afternoon supply of apples and bananas from the Union fruit bowl. “Let’s go in.”

“What? Inside?”

“Nothing’s going to happen. It’s been liberated, man. Power to the people.”

Will hesitated, but for only a moment. He sensed that he was witnessing history. So they went in by the door on the southeast, closest to Widener Library.

In the foyer, a reporter for WHRB, Harvard’s radio station, was preparing to interview a radical leader. Charlie Price went by, stopped, pulled a banana from his pocket, and offered it to the radical.

A loony bin.

Will left Charlie vending fruit to revolutionaries and went upstairs to the faculty meeting room.

Once this had been Harvard’s chapel. Here hung the portraits of past presidents, here the Bicentenary packet had been opened, and here the faculty debated important issues and fought the skirmishes of academic politics, all beneath crystal chandeliers on magnificent Oriental carpets. Now a sign above the door proclaimed it “Che Guevara Hall” and the smell of cigarette smoke hung like a film over the smell of body odor.