Indignation (18 page)

L
ater that night, Elwyn Ayers was killed. Being Elwyn, he’d had nothing to do with the panty raid, but after finishing his homework, he had (according to testimony provided by some half dozen of his fraternity brothers) spent the remainder of the evening back of the fraternity house, camped in his LaSalle, running the engine to keep it warm, and getting out only to sweep off the snow that rapidly settled on the roof, the hood, and the trunk and then to spade it away from the four wheels so he could attach a brand-new set of winter chains to the tires. For the sake of the automotive adventure, to see how well the powerful 1940 four-door Touring Sedan with the lengthened wheelbase and the larger carburetor and the 130 horsepower, the last of the prestigious cars named for the French explorer that GM would ever manufacture, could perform in the high-piled snow of the Winesburg
streets, he decided to take it for a test spin. Downtown, where the railroad tracks had been kept clear by the stationmaster and his assistant throughout the storm, Elwyn attempted apparently to outrace the midnight freight train to the level crossing that separated Main Street from Lower Main, and the LaSalle, skidding out of control, spun twice around on the tracks and was struck head-on by the snowplow of the locomotive bound from points east to Akron. The car in which I had taken Olivia to dinner and then out to the cemetery—a historic vehicle, even a monument of sorts, in the history of fellatio’s advent onto the Winesburg campus in the second half of the twentieth century—went careening off to the side and turned end-over-end down Lower Main until it exploded in flames, and Elwyn Ayers Jr. was killed, apparently on impact, and then quickly burned up in the wreckage of the car that he had cared for above all else in life and loved in lieu of men or women.

As it turned out, Elwyn was not the first, or even the second, but the third Winesburg senior who over the years since the introduction of the automobile into American life had failed to graduate because of having lost out in his attempt to outrace
that midnight freight train. But he had taken the heavy snowfall for a challenge worthy of him and the LaSalle, and so, like me, my ex-roommate entered the realm of eternal recollection instead of the tugboat business, and here he will have forever to think about the fun of driving that great car. In my mind’s eye I kept imagining the moment of impact, when Elwyn’s pumpkin-shaped head crashed against the windshield and splattered very like a pumpkin into a hundred chunky pieces of flesh and bone and brain and blood. We had slept in the same room and studied together—and now he was dead at twenty-one. He had called Olivia a cunt—and now he was dead at twenty-one. My first thought on hearing of Elwyn’s fatal accident was that I would never have moved had I known beforehand that he was going to die. Up until then, the only people I knew who had died were my two older cousins who’d been killed in the war. Elwyn was the first person who died that I hated. Must I now stop hating him to begin mourning him? Must I now start pretending that I was sorry to hear that he was dead, and horrified to hear how he had died? Must I put on a long face and go to the memorial service
at his fraternity house and express condolences to his fraternity brothers, many of whom I knew as drunks who whistled through their fingers at me and called me something sounding suspiciously like “Jew” when they wanted service at the inn? Or should I try to reclaim residence in the room in Jenkins Hall before it wound up being assigned to somebody else?

“Elwyn!” I shout. “Elwyn, can you hear me? It’s Messner! I’m dead too!”

Nothing in response. No, no roommates here. But then he wouldn’t have replied anyway, the silent, violent, unsmiling prick. Elwyn Ayers, in death as in life, still opaque to me.

“Ma!” I shout next. “Ma—are you here? Dad, are you here? Ma? Dad? Olivia? Are any of you here? Did you die, Olivia? Answer me! You were the only gift Winesburg gave me. Who impregnated you, Olivia? Or did you finally end your life yourself, you charming, irresistible girl?”

But there is no one to speak to; there is only myself to address about my innocence, my explosions, my candor, and the extreme brevity of bliss in the first true year of my young manhood and the last
year of my life. The urge to be heard, and nobody to hear me! I am dead. The unpronounceable sentence pronounced.

“Ma! Dad! Olivia! I am thinking of you!”

No response. To provoke no response no matter how painstaking the attempt to unravel and to be revealed. All minds gone except my own. No response. Profoundly sad.

T
he next morning, the
Winesburg Eagle,
in a “double” Saturday edition devoted entirely to all that the blizzard had unleashed at the college, reported that Elwyn Ayers Jr., class of ’52, the sole fatality of the night, had in fact been the spark plug of the panty raid and had driven through the blinking red lights at the level crossing in an attempt to flee from discovery by the police—a completely cockeyed story and one retracted the following day, though not before it had been picked up and printed on page one of his hometown daily, the
Cincinnati Enquirer.

Also that morning, promptly at seven A.M., the reckoning began on campus, with every underclassman who admitted to taking part in the panty raid furnished a snow shovel—the cost of which was
tacked on to their semester’s residence fees—and dragooned into snow-clearing squads whose task was to clear the campus roads and walkways of the thirty-four inches of snow that had been dumped by the blizzard and that in places had drifted to more than six feet. Each squad was overseen by upperclassmen on the university’s athletic teams and the enterprise supervised by faculty members from the physical education department. At the same time, interrogations were conducted throughout the day in Caudwell’s office. By nightfall eleven underclassmen, nine freshman and two sophomores, had been identified as ringleaders, and, having been denied the possibility of absolving themselves by doing penance on a snow removal crew (or of being punished with semester-long suspensions, as the families of the offenders were hoping would be the worst their young sons would be made to endure for what they tried to argue was no more than an undergraduate prank), they were permanently expelled from the college. Among them were the two who had broken limbs leaping from the women’s residence halls and who had appeared before the dean in their fresh white casts, both, reportedly, with tears in their eyes and profuse apologies pour
ing from their lips. But they begged in vain for understanding, let alone for mercy. To Caudwell they were the two last rats fleeing the ship, and out they went for good. And anyone called before the dean who denied participating in the panty raid and who was subsequently discovered to be lying was summarily expelled as well, bringing the total expulsions to eighteen before the weekend was out. “You can’t deceive me,” Dean Caudwell told those called to his office, “and you won’t deceive me.” And he was right: nobody did. Not a one. Not even me in the end.

O
n Sunday evening, after supper, all Winesburg’s male students were assembled in the lecture auditorium of the Williamson Lit. Building to be addressed by President Albin Lentz. It was from Sonny, as we tramped up to the Lit. Building that evening—all student cars having been banned from the still largely snow-covered town—that I learned about Lentz’s political career and the speculation locally about his aspirations. He had been elected to two terms as a tough, strikebreaking governor of neighboring West Virginia before serving as an undersecretary in the War Department during World
War Two. After running unsuccessfully in that state for a U.S. Senate seat in ’48, he’d been offered the presidency of Winesburg by business cronies on the college’s board of trustees and arrived on the campus dedicated to making the pretty little college in north-central Ohio into what, in his inaugural address, he called “a breeding ground for the ethical propriety and the patriotism and the high principles of personal conduct that will be required of every young person in this country if we are to win the global battle for moral supremacy in which we are engaged with godless Soviet Communism.” There were those who believed that Lentz had accepted the presidency of Winesburg, for which his qualifications were hardly those of an educator, as a steppingstone to the Ohio governorship in ’52. If he succeeded, he would become only the second person in the country’s history to have governed two states—both states heavily industrial—and thereby establish himself as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in ’56 who could set out to break the Democrats’ hold on their traditional working-class constituency. Among the students, of course, Lentz was known barely at all for his politics but instead for his distinctively rural twang—
he was the self-made son of a Logan County, West Virginia, miner—that penetrated his rotund oratory like a nail that then penetrated you. He was known for not mincing his words and for his ceaseless cigar smoking, a predilection that had earned him the campus epithet “the All-Powerful Stogie.”

Standing not back of the lectern like a lecturing professor but solidly in front of it with his short legs set slightly apart, he began in an ominous interrogative mode. There was nothing bland about this man: he
had
to be listened to. He aspired not to cut a high-and-mighty figure like Dean Caudwell but to scare the wits out of the audience by his unbridled bluntness. His vanity was a very different sort of force from the dean’s—there was no deficiency of intelligence in it. To be sure, he agreed with the dean that nothing was more serious in life than the rules, but his fundamental feelings of condemnation were delivered wholly undisguised (intermittent rhetorical embellishment notwithstanding). Never before had I witnessed such shock and solemnity—and fixed concentration—emanate from a congregation of the Winesburg student body. One could not imagine anyone present who even to
himself dared to cry, “This is unseemly! This is not just!” The president could have come down into the auditorium and laid waste to the student assemblage with a club without inciting flight or stirring resistance. It was as though we already
had
been clubbed—and, for all the offenses committed, accepted the beating with gratification—before the assault had even begun.

Probably the lone student who had neglected to show up at a convocation of males billed as mandatory was that sinister free spirit, spite-filled Bert Flusser.

“Does any one of you here,” President Lentz began, “happen to know what happened in Korea on the day all you he-men decided to bring disgrace and disrepute down upon the name of a distinguished institution of higher learning whose origins lie in the Baptist Church? On that day, U.N. and Communist negotiators in Korea reached tentative agreement for a truce line on the eastern front of that war-torn country. I take it you know what ‘tentative’ means. It means that fighting as barbaric as any we have known in Korea—as barbaric as any American forces have known in any
war at any time in our history—that very same fighting can flare up any hour of the day or night and take thousands upon thousands more young American lives. Do any of you know what occurred in Korea a few weeks back, between Saturday, October 13, and Friday, October 19? I know that you know what happened here then. On Saturday the thirteenth our football team routed our traditional rival, Bowling Green, 41 to 14. The following Saturday, the twentieth, we upset my alma mater, the University of West Virginia, in a thriller that left us, the heavy underdogs, on top by a score of 21 to 20. What a game for Winesburg! But do you know what happened in Korea that same week? The U.S. First Cavalry Division, the Third Infantry Division, and my old outfit in the First War, the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, along with our British allies and our Republic of Korea allies, made a small advance in the Old Baldy area. A small advance at a cost of four thousand casualties. Four thousand young men like yourselves, dead, maimed, and wounded, between the time we beat Bowling Green and the time we upset UWV. Do you have any idea how fortunate, how privileged, and how lucky you are to be here watching football games on Saturdays
and not there being shot at on Saturdays, and on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays as well? When measured against the sacrifices being made by young Americans of your age in this brutal war against the aggression of the North Korean and Chinese Communist forces —when measured against that, do you have any idea how juvenile and stupid and idiotic your behavior looks to the people of Winesburg and to the people of Ohio and to the people of the United States of America, who have been made aware by their newspapers and the television of the shameful happenings of Friday night? Tell me, did you think you were being heroic warriors by storming our women’s dormitories and scaring the coeds there half to death? Did you think you were being heroic warriors by breaking into the privacy of their rooms and laying your hands on their personal belongings? Did you think you were being heroic warriors by taking and destroying possessions that were not your own? And those of you who cheered them on, who did not raise a finger to stop them, who exulted in their manly courage, what about
your
manly courage? How’s it going to serve you when a thousand screaming Chinese soldiers come
swarming down on you in your foxhole, should those negotiations in Korea break down? As they will, I can guarantee you, with bugles blaring and bearing their bayonets! What am I going to do with you boys? Where are the adults among you? Is there not a one of you who thought to
defend
the female residents of Dowland and Koons and Fleming? I would have expected a hundred of you, two hundred of you, three hundred of you, to put down this childish insurrection! Why did you not? Answer me! Where is your courage? Where is your honor?
Not a one of you displayed an ounce of honor! Not a one of you!
I’m going to tell you something now that I never thought I would have to say: I am ashamed today to be president of this college. I am ashamed and I am disgusted and I am enraged. I don’t want there to be any doubt about my anger. And I am not going to stop being angry for a long time to come, I can assure you of that. I understand that forty-eight of our women students—which is close to ten percent of them—forty-eight have already left the campus in the company of their deeply shocked and shaken parents, and whether they will return I do not yet know. What I reckon from the calls I have been receiving from other
concerned families—and the phones in both my office and my home have not stopped ringing since midnight on Friday—a good many more of our women students are considering either leaving college for the year or permanently transferring out of Winesburg. I can’t say that I blame them. I can’t say that I would expect any daughter of mine to remain loyal to an educational institution where she has been exposed not merely to belittlement and humiliation and fear but to a genuine threat of physical harm by an army of hoodlums imagining, apparently, that they were emancipating themselves. Because that’s all you are, in my estimation, those who participated and those who did nothing to stop them—an ungrateful, irresponsible, infantile band of vile and cowardly hoodlums. A mob of disobedient children. Kiddies in diapers unconstrained. Oh, and one last thing. Do any of you happen to know how many atom bombs the Soviets have set off so far in the year 1951? The answer is two. That makes a total of three atomic bombs altogether that our Communist enemies in the USSR have now successfully tested since they have discovered the secret of producing an atomic explosion. We as a nation are facing the distinct possibility of an un
thinkable atomic war with the Soviet Union, all the while the he-men of Winesburg College are conducting their derring-do raids on the dresser drawers of the innocent young women who are their schoolmates. Beyond your dormitories, a world is on fire and you are kindled by underwear. Beyond your fraternities, history unfolds daily—warfare, bombings, wholesale slaughter, and you are oblivious of it all. Well, you won’t be oblivious for long! You can be as stupid as you like, can even give every sign, as you did here on Friday night, of passionately
wanting
to be stupid, but history will catch you in the end. Because history is not the background—history is the stage! And you are
on
the stage! Oh, how sickening is your appalling ignorance of your own times! Most sickening of all is that it is just that ignorance that you are purportedly at Winesburg to expunge. What kind of a time do you think you belong to, anyway? Can you answer? Do you
know?
Do you have any idea that you belong to a time
at all?
I have spent a long professional career in the warfare of politics, a middle-of-the-road Republican fighting off the zealots of the left and the zealots of the right. But to me tonight those zealots are as nothing compared to you in
your barbaric pursuit of thoughtless fun. ‘Let’s go crazy, let’s have fun! How about cannibalism next!’ Well, not here, gentlemen, not within these ivied walls will the delights of intentional wrongdoing go unheeded by those charged with the responsibility to this institution to maintain the ideals and values that you have travestied. This cannot be allowed to go on, and this
will
not be allowed to go on! Human conduct
can
be regulated, and it
will
be regulated! The insurrection is over. The rebellion is quelled. Beginning tonight, everything and everyone will be put back into its proper place and order restored to Winesburg. And decency restored. And dignity restored. And now you uninhibited he-men may rise and leave my sight. And if any of you decide you want to leave it for good, if any of you decide that the code of human conduct and rules of civilized restraint that this administration intends to strictly enforce to keep Winesburg Winesburg aren’t suited to a he-man like yourself—that’s fine with me! Leave! Go! The orders have been given! Pack up your rebellious insolence and clear out of Winesburg tonight!”