Indignation (3 page)

Later I learned from my mother the full circumstances of that day, about how Mr. Pearlgreen had come to see about the toilet at the back of the store that morning and left my father brooding over their conversation from then until closing time. He must have smoked three packs of cigarettes, she told me, he was so upset. “You don’t know how
proud of you he is,” my mother said. “Everybody who comes into the store—‘My son, all A’s. Never lets us down. Doesn’t even have to look at his books—automatically, A’s.’ Darling, when you’re not present you are the focus of all his praise. You must believe that. He boasts about you all the time.” “And when I
am
present I’m the focus of these crazy new fears, and I’m sick and tired of it, Ma.” My mother said, “But I heard him, Markie. He told Mr. Pearlgreen, ‘Thank God I don’t have to worry about these things with my boy.’ I was there with him in the store when Mr. Pearlgreen came because of the leak. That’s exactly what he said when Mr. Pearlgreen was telling him about Eddie. Those were his words: ‘I don’t have to worry about these things with my boy.’ But what does Mr. Pearlgreen say back to him—and this is what started him off—he says, ‘Listen to me, Messner. I like you, Messner, you were good to us, you took care of my wife during the war with meat, listen to somebody who knows from it happening to him. Eddie is a college boy too, but that doesn’t mean he knows enough to stay away from the pool hall. How did we lose Eddie? He’s not a bad boy. And what about his younger brother—what kind of example is he to his
younger brother? What did we do wrong that the next thing we know he’s in a pool hall in Scranton, three hours from home! With my car! Where does he get the money for the gas? From playing pool! Pool! Pool! Mark my words, Messner: the world is waiting, it’s licking its chops, to take your boy away.’ ” “And my father believes him,” I said. “My father believes not what he sees with his eyes for an entire lifetime, instead he believes what he’s told by the plumber on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!” I couldn’t stop. He’d been driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber! “Yeah, Ma,” I finally said, storming off to my room, “the tiniest, littlest things
do
have tragic consequences. He proves it!”

I
had to get away but I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know one college from another. Auburn. Wake Forest. Ball State. SMU. Vanderbilt. Muhlenberg. They were nothing but the names of football teams to me. Every fall I eagerly listened to the results of the college games on Bill Stern’s Saturday evening sports roundup, but I had little idea of the academic differences between the contend
ing schools. Louisiana State 35, Rice 20; Cornell 21, Lafayette 7; Northwestern 14, Illinois 13.
That
was the difference I knew about: the point spread. A college was a college—that you attended one and eventually earned a degree was all that mattered to a family as unworldly as mine. I was going to the one downtown because it was close to home and we could afford it.

And that was fine with me. At the outset of my mature life, before everything suddenly became so difficult, I had a great talent for being satisfied. I’d had it all through childhood, and in my freshman year at Robert Treat it was in my repertoire still. I was thrilled to be there. I’d quickly come to idolize my professors and to make friends, most of them from working families like my own and with little, if any, more education than my own. Some were Jewish and from my high school, but most were not, and it at first excited me to have lunch with them
because
they were Irish or Italian and to me a new category, not only of Newarker but of human being. And I was excited to be taking college courses; though they were rudimentary, something was beginning to happen to my brain akin to what had happened when I first laid eyes on the alphabet.
And, too—after the coach had gotten me to choke up a few inches on the bat and to punch the ball over the infield and into the outfield instead of my mightily swinging as blindly as I had in high school —I had gained a first-string position on the tiny college’s freshman baseball team that spring and was playing second base alongside a shortstop named Angelo Spinelli.

But primarily I was learning, discovering something new every hour of the school day, which was why I even enjoyed Robert Treat’s being so small and unobtrusive, more like a neighborhood club than a college. Robert Treat was tucked away at the northern end of the city’s busy downtown of office buildings, department stores, and family-owned specialty shops, squeezed between a triangular little Revolutionary War park where the bedraggled bums hung out (most of whom we knew by name) and the muddy Passaic. The college consisted of two undistinguished buildings: an old abandoned smoke-stained brick brewery down near the industrial riverfront that had been converted into classrooms and science labs and where I took my biology course and, several blocks away, across from the city’s major thoroughfare and facing the little park that was
what we had instead of a campus—and where we sat at noontime to eat the sandwiches we’d packed at dawn while the bums down the bench passed the muscatel bottle—a small four-story neoclassical stone building with a pillared entrance that from the outside looked just like the bank it had been for much of the twentieth century. The building’s interior housed the college administrative offices and the makeshift classrooms where I took history, English, and French courses taught by professors who called me “Mr. Messner” rather than “Marcus” or “Markie” and whose every written assignment I tried to anticipate and complete before it was due. I was eager to be an adult, an educated, mature, independent adult, which was just what was terrifying my father, who, even as he was locking me out of our house to punish me for beginning to sample the minutest prerogatives of young adulthood, could not have been any more proud of my devotion to my studies and my unique family status as a college student.

My freshman year was the most exhilarating and most awful of my life, and that was why I wound up the next year at Winesburg, a small liberal arts and engineering college in the farm country of north-
central Ohio, eighteen miles from Lake Erie and five hundred miles from our back door’s double lock. The scenic Winesburg campus, with its tall, shapely trees (I learned later from a girlfriend they were elms) and its ivy-covered brick quadrangles set picturesquely on a hill, could have been the backdrop for one of those Technicolor college movie musicals where all the students go around singing and dancing instead of studying. To pay for my going to a college away from home, my father had to let go of Isaac, the polite, quiet Orthodox young fellow in a skullcap who’d begun to apprentice as an assistant after I started my first year of school, and my mother, whose job Isaac was supposed to have absorbed in time, had to take over again as my father’s full-time partner. Only in this way could he make ends meet.

I was assigned to a dormitory room in Jenkins Hall, where I discovered that the three other boys I was to live with were Jews. The arrangement struck me as odd, first because I’d been expecting to have one roommate, and second because part of the adventure of going away to college in far-off Ohio was the chance it offered to live among non-Jews and see what that was like. Both my parents thought
this a strange if not dangerous aspiration, but to me, at eighteen, it made perfect sense. Spinelli, the shortstop—and a pre-law student like me—had become my closest friend at Robert Treat, and his taking me home to the city’s Italian First Ward to meet his family and eat their food and sit around and listen to them talk with their accents and joke in Italian had been no less intriguing than my two-semester survey course in the history of Western civilization, where at each class the professor laid bare something more of the way the world went before I existed.

The dormitory room was long, narrow, smelly, and poorly lit, with double-decker bunk beds at either end of the worn floorboards and four clunky old wooden desks, scarred by use, pushed against the drab green walls. I took the lower bunk under an upper already claimed by a lanky, raven-haired boy in glasses named Bertram Flusser. He didn’t bother to shake my hand when I tried to introduce myself but looked at me as though I were a member of a species he’d been fortunate enough never to have come upon before. The other two boys looked me over too, though not at all with disdain, so I introduced myself to them, and they to me, in a way
that half convinced me that, among my roommates, Flusser was one of a kind. All three were junior English majors and members of the college drama society. None of them was in a fraternity.

There were twelve fraternities on the campus, but only two admitted Jews, one a small all-Jewish fraternity with about fifty members and the other a nonsectarian fraternity about half that size, founded locally by a group of student idealists, who took in anyone they could get their hands on. The remaining ten were reserved for white Christian males, an arrangement that no one could have imagined challenging on a campus that so prided itself on tradition. The imposing Christian fraternity houses with their fieldstone façades and castlelike doors dominated Buckeye Street, the tree-lined avenue bisected by a small green with a Civil War cannon that, according to the risqué witticism repeated to newcomers, went off whenever a virgin walked by. Buckeye Street led from the campus through the residential streets of big trees and neatly kept-up old frame houses to the one business artery in town, Main Street, which was four blocks long, stretching from the bridge over Wine Creek at one end to the railroad station at the other. Main was
dominated by the New Willard House, the inn in whose taproom alumni gathered on football weekends to drunkenly relive their college days and where, through the college placement office, I got a job Friday and Saturday nights, working as a waiter for the minimum wage of seventy-five cents an hour plus tips. The social life of the college of some twelve hundred students was conducted largely behind the fraternities’ massive black studded doors and out on their expansive green lawns—where, in virtually any weather, two or three boys could always be seen tossing a football around.

My roommate Flusser had contempt for everything I said and mocked me mercilessly. When I tried being agreeable with him, he called me Prince Charming. When I told him to leave me alone, he said, “Such thin skin for such a big boy.” At night he insisted on playing Beethoven on his record player after I got into bed, and at a volume that didn’t seem to bother my other two roommates as much as it did me. I knew nothing about classical music, didn’t much like it, and besides, I needed my sleep if I was to continue to hold down a weekend job and get the kind of grades that had put me on the Robert Treat Dean’s List both semesters I was
there. Flusser himself never got up before noon, even if he had classes, and his bunk was always unmade, the bedding hanging carelessly down over one side, obscuring the view of the room from my bunk. Living in close quarters with him was worse even than living with my father during my freshman year—my father at least went off all day to work in the butcher shop and, albeit fanatically, cared about my well-being. All three of my roommates were going to act in the college’s fall production of
Twelfth Night,
a play I’d never heard of. I had read
Julius Caesar
in high school,
Macbeth
in my English literature survey course my first year of college, and that was it. In
Twelfth Night,
Flusser was to play a character called Malvolio, and on the nights when he wasn’t listening to Beethoven after hours he would lie in the bunk above me reciting his lines aloud. Sometimes he would strut about the room practicing his exit line, which was “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” From my bed I would plead, “Flusser, please, could you quiet it down,” to which he would respond—by shouting or cackling or menacingly whispering—“I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” once again.

Within only days of arriving on the campus, I
began to look around the dormitory for somebody with an empty bunk in his room who would agree to have me as a roommate. That took several more weeks, during which time I reached the peak of my frustration with Flusser and, about an hour after I’d gone to bed one night, rose screaming from my bunk to yank a phonograph record of his from the turntable and, in the most violent act I’d ever perpetrated, to smash it against the wall.

“You have just destroyed Quartet Number Sixteen in F Major,” he said, without moving from where he was smoking in the upper bunk, fully clothed and still in his shoes.

“I don’t care! I’m trying to get to sleep!”

The bare overhead lights had been flipped on by one of the other two boys. Both of them were out of their bunk beds and standing in their Jockey shorts waiting to see what would happen next.

“Such a nice polite little boy,” Flusser said. “So clean-cut. So upright. A bit rash with the property of others, but otherwise so ready and willing to be a human being.”

“What’s wrong with being a human being!”

“Everything,” Flusser replied with a smile. “Human beings stink to high heaven.”

“
You
stink!” I shouted. “You do, Flusser! You don’t shower, you don’t change your clothes, you never make your bed—you have got no consideration for
anyone!
You’re either emoting your head off at four in the morning or playing music as loud as you can!”

“Well, I am not a nice boy like you, Marcus.”

Here at last one of the others spoke up. “Take it easy,” he said to me. “He’s just a pain in the ass. Don’t take him so seriously.”

“But I’ve got to get my sleep!” I cried. “I can’t do my work without getting my sleep! I don’t want to wind up getting sick, for Christ’s sake!”

“Getting sick,” said Flusser, adding to the smile a small derisive laugh, “would do you a world of good.”

“He’s crazy!” I shouted at the other two. “Everything he says is crazy!”

“You destroy Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major,” said Flusser, “and
I’m
the one who’s crazy.”

“Knock it off, Bert,” said one of the other boys. “Shut up and let him go to sleep.”