I chose to live in the fraternity house my junior year. Happily, Mrs. Alcott, the house mother, was more out of touch with reality than ever, and the boys living there were totally unrestrained. Thanks to several sensible upperclassmen, it was still possible to study there, but it could be difficult, and more and more guys headed to the library.
My roommate was Bob Matolka, one of eleven children, from Endicott, New York. He was an engineering student with excellent grades, who became the steward of the house, in charge of meals and snacks. Before coming to Alfred, the closest he had ever been to Jews was when he ate a kosher pickle from a jar in 1956 in Binghamton. Yet for all his bucolic upbringing, he proved incredibly sophisticated and wise, and he had the respect of one and all. He was a serious type, but the zany and nonsensical carried the day at the house, with wild practical jokes planned and executed nonstop. Bobby Chaikin continually rolled an automobile tire down the stairs from his room in the attic, which would smash open the door below with an explosive sound and pin the occupant to the wall. He liked the element of surprise, like four in the morning. Not surprisingly, he became a dentist.
At supper one night, the main-course platter came out of the kitchen, the lid was removed, and on a lovely decorative bed of lettuce sat the head of a dead cat that Steve Levine had purloined from the zoology lab. Mrs. Alcott, whose sight was not much better than her mind, had to be restrained from taking a portion. “Oh, I love hash,” she said as Levine swiped the platter away. At the end of the meal, she was still slightly perturbed that the main course had been removed before she could taste it. On another occasion, Mike Wiener put flour all over his naked body and hid himself in the large industrial-size freezer in the kitchen. Munchkin, the house scaredy-cat, was induced by some of the guys to open the freezer. Wiener fell out like a corpse, and Munchkin almost had a cardiac arrest.
Bessie Hurd, the elderly churchgoing local farm woman who cooked five nights a week for the brothers and had never met a Jew until she took the job, was unfazed by any of this. Naked boys popping out of freezers did not deter her from preparing her hearty farm fare, which was frequently delicious and featured outlandish peach and blueberry pies. The guys treated her like some eccentric aunt, but unlike the house mother, whom she disliked, her perspicacity was intact, and she was unlikely to mistake a cat’s head for hash. I did a fair imitation of Bessie, who was prone to saying “God bless you,” even to people who hadn’t sneezed. She meant well.
I had become the court jester of Kappa Nu, the house comic. I had developed somewhat of a repertoire, which included several accurate impersonations of faculty members. The guys loved sitting around the living room hearing their reserved, scholarly teachers say incongruous things: cursing, soliciting sex, and telling dirty jokes, the more vulgar the better. My imitation of Professor Russell, a Yankee American-history specialist with a down-east Maine accent, was my best. Henry Liederman, a sweet, gullible basketball jock in one of Russell’s classes, was busy studying for the midterm exam and had in his possession several old tests. This was quite common among the students and entirely legal and aboveboard. I called the house from another phone and asked for Liederman. The whole house was in on the caper, and everybody gravitated toward Henry as he took the call. “Mr. Liederman?”
“Yes.”
“This is Professor Russell. Mr. Liederman, it has come to my attention that you have acquired an advance copy of my midterm examination. As you know, this could be grounds for expulsion.”
“What? Oh, no, sir, I don’t have the test. I have some old ones, but not the one you’re going to give. I swear.”
“That’s not what I hear, Mr. Liederman. I’m afraid I’m going to have to report this to Dean Whitlow.”
Henry believed it completely and was in a panic. I kept it going for a couple of more minutes and then decided to give up the ruse by saying something that Willis Cleaves Russell would never say in a million years: “Mr. Liederman, I’ll let you off the hook on one condition.”
“What, sir? Anything.”
“I want you to come to my Pesach seder and eat three helpings of gefilte fish. Is that clear, Mr. Liederman?”
“Oh yes, sir, I’d love to come.”
“And Mr. Liederman, bring a little sponge cake with you, if you don’t mind. Goodbye, Mr. Liederman.”
“Goodbye.”
“Hey, guys I’m in big trouble unless I go to Russell’s seder. I didn’t even know he was Jewish.” Henry was almost in tears. Everyone was cracking up, but he still didn’t get it. Finally, I burst through the door and went right to him and spoke in the professor’s voice: “Mr. Liederman, it has come to my attention . . .” He finally got it and chased me around the house, too relieved to be angry.
There were some attempts at practical jokes that were loathsome, and fittingly backfired on the perpetrators. One such circumstance occurred at the annual Valentine’s Day blast, a highlight of the Kappa Nu social season and a very wild night. Warren Shamansky, a witless senior pre-dental student, hatched a secret plan to hide a tape recorder in the bathroom of the new wing, which on party nights became the ladies’ room. It had showers, sinks, and was a three-bowl affair with no partitions. Only Shamansky knew about his plan. He was hoping to hear comments from the girls about the boys as they powdered their noses. He wound up hearing plenty. He revealed his stunt the next evening, which appalled some of the guys, but everyone wanted to hear the tape, so ethics took a backseat.
The boys gathered around the tape recorder, and Shamansky turned it on with a flourish. The sound quality wasn’t great, but it was good enough to hear an assortment of tinkles and flushes and an occasional fart, all of which cracked up the listeners, some of whom clinked their beer mugs. Several happy girls sang while they urinated. One hummed while she defecated. A few of the voices were recognizable as the steady girlfriends of brothers, and these boys were not pleased, since an intimate line had been crossed, and the entire house had heard their sweethearts fart. If word of this got out, they would have a lot of explaining to do.
So far, the toilet conversation had been innocuous chatter, but it slowly dawned on the listeners that the caper could prove highly embarrassing to the boys as well. We heard Billy Gildner’s date tell her friend about what a lousy kisser he was, and then she complained about “the stench of his breath.” A few guys roared, but Billy wasn’t laughing. Joel Belson was one of the house drunks, and we learned that his date was disgusted by his drinking, was afraid of him, and wanted to leave early without him. Shamansky’s date, who was going out with him for the first time, couldn’t stand him and delivered a monologue that was the hit of the evening. It was as if she knew the tape recorder was on. “He’s such a creep, Madeline. Boring, self-centered. He never stops talking about his two-point-six average. He thinks he’s God’s gift to women. Can you imagine? An ugly jerk like that. He makes my skin crawl. He’s asked me out four times, and I always turned him down. He’s not even nice. Ugh. I’m sorry I said yes. I can’t wait till the night is over. I’m telling you, he positively makes my skin crawl. Can I borrow your lipstick?”
Then she flushed, and Shamansky’s social standing went right down the toilet. He put on a weak front of amused nonchalance that no one believed. There were some snickers, but the mood had changed to a more somber tone. There were a few who said “I told you so,” and someone said something about Shamansky being hoisted on his own petard. A few of the guys were remorseful about the disrespect accorded their girlfriends, some of whom they were pinned to. In any case, Shamansky got what he asked for.
One evening Ricky Sampson, Bob Chaikin, and Mike Benedict were sitting on the front porch of Kappa Nu when a customized 1952 Ford with loud mufflers and a continental kit pulled up in front of the house. The driver revved the noisy engine a few times as five guys got out of the car holding beer bottles. They stood there looking at the guys on the porch until one of them finally spoke. “Hey, Sambo, how come you’re hanging around with those Jew boys?” Another one, good and drunk, said, “Hey, you fuckin’ Jew bastards! Jew boys! Christ killers!”
Immediately, Ricky the halfback leaped over the porch railing and grabbed one of the shouters before he could get back into the car, with Chaikin and Benedict right behind him. He was pummeling the shit out of the guy by the time the rest of us, twenty strong, poured out of the house. The look on the faces of those guys when they saw a horde of angry Jews coming at them was worth remembering. A brief melee ensued, but after each of the cretins had taken a few good blows, cooler heads prevailed, as a homicide would look bad for the house.
The intruders were all subdued, some of them bloodied, and then came the beauty part. Ricky had the guy who’d called him Sambo by the hair and on his knees. The guy had a look like he’s about to be killed, but instead of punching him again, Ricky made him apologize like a kindergarten kid. “Say ‘I’m sorry and I will never do that again.’ ” When the guy hesitated, Ricky pulled his hair. “Say it, asshole.”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry and I’ll never do it again.”
Ricky released him. The driver tried to make nice and blamed it on too much beer. “We didn’t mean anything by it, we were drinkin’, just kiddin’ around,” he said.
Steve Murray stepped forward. “You were just kiddin’ around? I like kiddin’ around.” He ran his hand along the ’52 Ford. “Nice car,” he said. Then he took a baseball bat and smashed the rear window. “Now you got air-conditioning in it.”
Ricky’s stock among the boys rose threefold after the incident, and Mike Benedict, a popular Methodist basketball player from Syracuse, was eventually elected president of the fraternity, though not for his fighting prowess. Unfortunately, there were three or four more such fights in my time at Alfred. Drive-by shouting was more frequent than the brawls. The miscreants were stupid enough to scream obscenities and peel out, yet prudent enough not to get out of their cars.
An odd confluence of two aspects of my life at Alfred occurred one day. I was cast as Shylock in the university production of The Merchant of Venice, thus combining theater and anti-Semitism in one enterprise. I wondered how certain segments of the audience would react to the play. Shylock was an actor’s dream, my grandest role thus far. In rehearsal, I developed certain affectations of old age, like stooped posture and trembling of the hands and head. This was a hard sell, as I was only nineteen and Shylock was about seventy, though a gray wig and lots of makeup wrinkles were planned to aid in the effort toward authenticity.
The play involves itself, among other things, in the abstractions of obligation, revenge, and mercy. The way the sixteenth-century author has written the part, Shylock is a vengeful, unpleasant man; certainly not Mr. Nice Guy. Nevertheless, he is a human being vilified for his beliefs who has been wronged, and Shakespeare cannot resist dealing with all sides of the human issue: even expressing, persuasively, the logic of the apparently villainous Jew.
Twentieth-century history being what it is, contemporary productions tend to give Shylock a more sympathetic interpretation than perhaps Shakespeare intended. Given the Elizabethan context, it is unlikely that the Bard was crazy about Jews or even knew many, yet there is a brilliant speech in the third act that is as eloquent a statement on prejudice as has ever been written. It is in the form of a series of questions which I performed in front of a packed Alumni Hall, with all appropriate dramatic pauses and quasi-authentic trembling. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?”
“NO!” came the answer from the Alfred audience. Then they charged the stage, coming at me like a murderous mob, some with growling German shepherds straining at the leashes. I was forced to flee, blowing through the stage door with hundreds of people chasing me, screaming “JEW BOY! JEW BOY! KILL HIM!” They pursued me all over the campus, carrying torches and homemade weapons. I sought refuge everywhere, knocking on doors and pleading, but even the ethics professor, after considering the matter, wouldn’t let me in.
Then I woke up. The nightmare reminded me that the issue was a sensitive one around here, certainly to me, and that this portrayal would not be just another role. It would be a mission much larger and more momentous than merely playing the role; a mission with sociological implications and real-life meaning.
Still, this was such an obvious dream—too obvious. Most of the time, the meaning is hidden and the dream is not about what it appears to be. The one I had was right on the money . . . too right on the money. I began to suspect that it was not what it seemed. I mentioned it to Sam Chororos at the final dress rehearsal, after which I came to an amusing conclusion. The dream was not about anti-Semitism at all; it was about the fear of failure. I was terrified that the old-man act wouldn’t go over. Despite their words, the people were chasing me not because I was a Jew; they were chasing me because I was giving a lousy performance. Regarding the play, I was scared, plain and simple. This revelation cleared my mind and allowed me to concentrate on the role in a new and unfettered way. I gave the passages a lot of thought and made decisions that I applied in rehearsal, which was, after all, its purpose.
Smith and Brown and the other actors noted the progress, which resulted in my confidence shooting way up. When I performed the speech on opening night, I heard not a “no” in the joint, the attentive silence a testament to the veracity of the words and, dare I say it, a hell of a performance. Everybody bought into my old-man act; no one laughed; people were touched. One of the best compliments I received was from James Knox, an associate professor in the philosophy and religion department. He was a bespectacled Lutheran minister, about forty, with a wonderful sense of humor, who always had a good joke or two and told them well. He wore a beret and rode his bicycle around the place, and his secular-oriented course on the Old Testament was one of my favorite classes. He was also one of the few faculty members who was outspoken against the university-approved exclusionary policy of the fraternities. Late in the term, word got out that Dr. Knox had been denied tenure and would not return next year. Everybody in the community knew why, to the shame of half the faculty. There was a small protest, but it was to no avail, and life at Alfred, good and bad, went on.
* * *
The Phoenix Theater Company, a professional bus and truck touring group, came to the campus doing George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion in the afternoon and Hamlet in the evening. I had seen a few Broadway shows from the cheap seats, but I had never seen a professional production at such close range. With their additional lights and expert sets, they transmuted Alumni Hall into a real theater. I got to mingle all day with the actors, since we campus thespians acted as hospitality volunteers, and it reminded me of meeting big-league ballplayers close up. They were not stars, but they were otherworldly; somehow not like us. They looked different; they were different. They didn’t have a typical job. I had always disliked routine, with a particular disdain for getting up every day at the same time for school, putting my underwear on the radiator to warm on cold winter mornings, or egging the classroom clock on to that three o’clock bell. To know for the next ten years exactly where you will be, and when you will be there, struck me as wearisome. Every adult I knew had a conventional job. Was that what I wanted? We observed these actors closely, especially interested in their preparation, how they applied makeup and put on their costumes and got ready to do the play. Then we went out front and watched the very people we had been socializing with transform themselves into exciting characters of the imagination onstage. The performances were thrilling and alive: the attack of their speech crisp, so you could see tiny sprays of spittle going over the footlights into the first row. It was an excellent lesson in craft.
What a wonderful life, I thought: traveling around to different places and performing plays; a sense of freedom, doing something they love. I liked everything about the actors: their nonconformist clothing, hair slightly long, and their self-assured manner, even if it was only acting. Law school seemed a dull prospect compared to this. I was especially fond of John Heffernan, who played Androcles and Polonius: a tall, willowy gentleman who cordially answered a barrage of questions from the members of the Footlight Club. Eight years later, I would appear in a Broadway show with him: Morning, Noon and Night.
Shortly after the Phoenix Theater visit, I had a momentous encounter with Sandra Sherman, Footlight Club member and English scholar. This event was not like the cold, anxiety-ridden episode with the prostitute when I was fifteen; nor was it a matter of grabbing what I could in the back of a car in the Catskills. Though we were not in love, this was real lovemaking, starting with intelligent conversation, into kissing and caressing, all the way to home plate. It took place at an off-campus apartment that had been generously lent by a stage-manager graduate student. There was danger here, because such behavior even away from campus was forbidden and severely punished. Furthermore, all female students, regardless of age, had a curfew, though after freshman year the boys did not, at forward-thinking Alfred University in 1960. We couldn’t stay the night together, but the time we did have was well spent and unhurried, thanks to her calm confidence, which mitigated my deep fear of being caught.
Among other things, Sandra first removed her hornrimmed glasses, then let down her red hair. I had never seen her like this. It was like one of those Hollywood movies in which the secretary takes off her spectacles, undoes her conservative hairdo, and her boss suddenly realizes, “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful.” Miss Sherman was not beautiful, but she had fine facial features; she was gentle, affectionate, mature; and her intellectual nature made her all the more appealing. After sex, I lay in bed with her, and we had intelligent conversation, sort of like a French movie. I was not the first Footlighter to take pleasure from intimacy with her, but that was no matter. She was an independent thinker, a woman ahead of her time on whom I had no claim.
We had several repeat performances, to our mutual delight, and there was no discomfort in chancing upon her around the little community; in fact, we were adults and friends. I told almost no one about it, it was entirely my affair and hers. This was part of my other life away from the fraternity, where such information instantly would have become public, like the announcements at Grand Central Station. The sexual relationship was brief, but the friendship continued, and I thought of this experience as a breakthrough into adulthood.
* * *
Then love struck. Not with Sandra Sherman. I was smitten with a freshman named Judith Silverman. This should have been a wonderful development, except for one thing: She was the girlfriend of my fraternity brother. I had noticed her from the beginning, but Andy Ruby, a sophomore, had moved in early, and they had been going together for a couple of months. I tingled every time I saw her, though it was a kind of torment. Judy and I liked each other, I made her laugh, though I took care not to reveal how I felt about her. I liked Andy, too; he was one of the guys, he even looked up to me. Andy was intense, to be sure: good-looking, physical, a basketball player, not an intellectual type. He seemed to be totally in love with Judy. He even asked me for advice about Judy, like a big brother, and confided in me that they were leaning toward having intercourse soon.
This was a conversation I could have done without, so like a good friend, I told him it was a bad idea. I found myself cautioning him like somebody’s grandmother: “Of course it’s up to you and Judy. But will you like yourselves in the morning? She’s a good girl, and you love her.” Some of this may have been valid, but for the most part, I was spouting disingenuous bullshit for which I felt a little guilty. Anyway, I could tell by the look in his eye when he talked about it that sex between them was a foregone conclusion.
Going all the way was no small matter between students in love in 1961. It was often a particularly wrenching decision for the girl, given the prevailing mores, one’s reputation, and the fear of pregnancy. Pregnancy presented few options, as abortions were illegal, and the lives of unwed mothers were generally considered ruined. Once in a while, we heard of a girl taking a semester off or leaving school, with fuzzy reasons given, and sometimes there were whispers that she was pregnant. There were many instances in which a guy became suddenly and opportunistically religious. It was usually manifested in praying for his overdue girlfriend to get her period. When it occurred, it provided a happy rationale for tapping a keg at the thirty-foot bar; there were more than a few of these menstruation celebrations.
This was a pivotal time I was living in, when more and more of the good girls were defying what they had been taught and took a chance because they were in love. That seemed to be the assumption, anyway—that love was the reason, the quid pro quo, and that they were mainly doing it for the guy.
Among the boys, the girls’ hormones and natural desires remained subjects unspoken and never seemed to enter the equation. If she liked sex too much, she well could move into another category in the mind of a guy. But love, and the sincerity of a boy, made it almost all right, palliating the seriousness of the situation, easing the conscience. When love was over, however, there could still be a taint in the minds of some, including the girl, because she had given herself before marriage in a relationship that didn’t last. Maybe half the young women would still be virgins when they graduated, though that’s not a scientific assessment. There would be quite a few young men in that category as well, though a lot of talk to the contrary.
The Kappa Nu boys liked to congregate in the living room in the evening, talking, smoking, and snacking. After parties and taking the girls home, the half-drunk, exhausted brothers would come in one by one. Among the guys who had girlfriends, there were those who were really in love but whose relationship had become routine, like a couple married for twenty years. For others, love was still fresh, and they would linger in their girls’ arms for as long as they could till the curfew, when the house mother would come out and tell them they must go. Good-night kisses were exchanged on the sidewalk or in the many cars with fogged-up windows lined up outside wherever the girls lived. Guys who were serious got pinned to the girl, which often was the preliminary step to an engagement. It involved an elaborate ceremony in front of the girl’s residence, in which the brothers serenaded her with the special pinning song. She would come out, and her boyfriend would pin to her chest a gold pin with the fraternity logo on it. All the girls would be looking out the window, a few with tears of joy for their lucky friend. The song was sung slowly—ironically, like a dirge, with the rhythm of the slow beat of a drum before an execution, and it went something like this: “The pin. The pin. The Kappa Nu pin. She wears it for her love.” The serenade duty was supposed to be compulsory, to show solemn respect for a brother’s commitment. But if the couple wasn’t especially popular or the weather was bad, the turnout was small and the singing was terrible. Standing in the twenty-degree night for a guy people didn’t care about made for a lot of grumbling and vulgar, denigrating jokes about what kind of children would come from this union.
One Saturday night after a party, Andy Ruby came into the living room slightly tipsy, with a gigantic grin on his face: He and my beloved Judy had gone all the way. Amid the buzz in the living room, he did not exactly treat the event confidentially. A couple of his pals gave him the old thumbs-up and a slap on the back, though there were no salacious snickers, as would have occurred if the girl was one of those kind who put out for a lot of guys. Yet this was small comfort to me, the unrequited lover. The conjugal venue, Andy revealed, was the back of his ’57 Impala. I was learning much more than I cared to and went upstairs to a sleepless night.
For a while after that, I saw Judy differently. Intellectually, I knew that she hadn’t done anything wrong, that she was just as likable and sweet as ever. Yet I was haunted by the vision of her and Andy in sweaty intimate passion. She was stunningly beautiful but comported herself like someone who wasn’t, and I found it agreeable that she was not self-assured like other pretty girls seemed to be. Though she had a wonderful laugh, there was a seriousness about her, sometimes a sadness in her lovely brown eyes. All of the things that I loved about her were the same as before, and she was still not my girl, but something was different now: She was flawed. I was still a captive of the social values and moral attitudes of my time. I somehow knew there was hypocrisy here, but I couldn’t help it. Andrew Ruby had fucked her, the girl I loved.
* * *
Maybe this question of mores, this code, was starting to crack. As the weeks went by, I found that I was still in love from a distance. I had begun to think differently on the matter; maybe it had to do with growing up and seeing things in a more mature light. She and Andy were a couple, and as such, it seemed more and more natural that they would do what comes naturally. Yet I had begun to notice something about Andy—he no longer had stars in his eyes, that transcendental look of the lover; and maybe I was imagining it, but the couple seemed less affectionate in public. Also, Andy was in trouble academically and didn’t seem to care, the opposite of Judy. He had become irritable and gotten into a couple of near-fights at the house. At a party, I observed them in a mild argument. She huffed off to the ladies’ room, and he seemed not to give a damn. Could this be a sign that love was fading? I unequivocally hoped so.
Sure enough, they broke up shortly thereafter. What would I do now? Protocol dictated that I couldn’t just make a move immediately, before the body was cold, so to speak. It could be the last thing she wanted right then was to date some other guy. Andy was my friend and fraternity brother, and the situation was exceedingly awkward. Apparently, other fellows both inside and outside the house did not share this concern, as Judy was immediately besieged by two or three of them right off the bat. What was more, she went out with a couple of guys without hesitation, while I was sitting like a schmuck on the sidelines, crazy about her. I had to get her attention without revealing my intentions, but it seemed impossible to find her without fifty people around.
An opportunity presented itself at the Campus Center one afternoon between classes, when I saw her go into the building with another girl. I went in shortly after and met her “by chance.” I was welcomed to sit down by a bubbly Judy who was delighted to see me. It was a relief to be able to look at her without having to steal furtive glances from a distance, and she looked wonderful. The three of us chatted amiably, and I got some good laughs imitating Dr. Vasquez, the head of the romance-languages department, who was known to raise the grades of those students who “volunteered” to mow his lawn. It was such a pleasure to see her laugh so heartily, and to know, at least for those moments, that it was I who had made her happy.
I don’t know if the other girl sensed something or had somewhere to go, but after a few minutes, she got up and left, God bless her. I got two cups of coffee at the counter and rejoined Judith at the table. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. By the time we stopped talking, it was eight o’clock, the fastest four hours of my life. I had no sense of time or place; there was only Judy. As profound as this meeting was for me, its importance was not so much in the words we exchanged about parents, future plans, and all that. Not that we hadn’t been listening to each other, but for me, her presence—being near her, absorbing her—was more important. I loved her scent of soap and a trace of Maja perfume. We didn’t yet know each other well and therefore did not exchange intimacies or venture into delicate subjects like her recent relationship.
I walked her back to the Brick, wanting desperately to hold her hand, but I didn’t dare. So I said good night and extended my hand, and we shook. “I really enjoyed our talk,” she said, “and I want to see you again.”
“Me, too.”
Our hands were still clasped in the shake position when she planted a gentle kiss on my lips. “I want you to know something,” she said. “I like you a lot. I’ve liked you for a while, and it was nice to spend time with you. I want to get to know you better.”
My mouth turned dry, and I had difficulty getting words out. There was so much I wanted to say, and it was two minutes to curfew, so I went to a joke: “I don’t exactly hate you, either.” I could feel my knees shaking. “Judy, if you only knew. Well, what the hell. I’ve liked you from the first time I saw you. I more than like you—this word ‘like’ is really a substitute, because I’m sort of scared—to tell you how I really feel.”
“How do you really feel?” she said without hesitation.
“I’m crazy about you,” I said, too scared to use the proper word, “love,” and deciding against “adore.”
“Oh,” she said, and threw her arms around me. We had the most wonderful kiss, the unattainable kiss I had been longing for, that happy-ending kiss from the movies; only this was the beginning. “I’ve got to go now,” she said, running her index finger gently along my lip. “I got a little lipstick on you.”
“One more, please,” I said, like a man dying of thirst who has been given only one sip of water. She smiled and we kissed again, shorter but better, and she ran into the dorm, and I watched until the last fragment of her coat disappeared from view.
I stood there in the ten-degree cold that I did not feel; heard voices but could not hear words and paid no attention to them. I was numb, under a spell. I had never felt like this before. “Happy” hardly described my mood: It was more like supreme elation, exhilaration.
“Hey, Bob, what’s with the new girlfriend? You and Judy?” It was Roger Lang of Kappa Nu, one of Andy Ruby’s best friends. Just what I needed. He was soon joined by a few others as we all walked back to the house. “Is this the new couple on campus? That kiss sure looked like it,” said Howie Horowitz, whose date was a good friend of Judy’s.
“Howie, you should have been kissing your girl instead of watching me,” I said.
“This is out of the clear blue sky, how long has it been going on? Are you two an item?” said Howie.
This exchange was annoying because it was transporting me from the clouds back to earth, and I wanted to enjoy the heights a bit longer.
Earth called soon enough. I had not been back at the house ten minutes when Andrew Ruby approached me with a forced smile. He was known to be a fighter, and it flashed through my mind for a brief moment that he wanted to hit me. He seemed to be a little tense. “I heard about you and Judy. Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“You know, you two.”
“It’s true that we talked.”
“I heard it was more than that.”
“What?”
“I heard you kissed.”
“Did we? Oh yes, we had a little kiss good night.”
“I heard it wasn’t so little.”
“Maybe so. Little, big, I don’t know.”
“There’s no hard feelings, but it’s a little uncomfortable,” he told me.
“You’re not still in love with her, are you?” I envisioned one of those “I still love you, take me back, darling” scenarios. Maybe he really did still love her. I loved her. How could anyone not love her?
“Nah, I’m not in love with her. I thought I was in love with her,” he said. “We had a good time, though.”
What did he mean by that? Quickly, that unpleasant image again, of he and Judy doing it. It was clear to me that his displeasure had more to do with proprietary rights than his heart, as if I had taken something that was his. The hell with him. I could not sleep, waiting for the next day to come; to see her, to be assured that she had not changed her mind, to kiss her again.
I arranged another chance encounter outside the Foreign Languages Building. I didn’t want to wave or attract attention, so I waited on a plowed snowbank until she saw me. Her eyes lit up and told me everything I wanted to know. She carried several textbooks in her right arm and gave me a half-hug with her left.
I carried her books like a proper Joe College while we walked. “Where are you headed?” I asked.
“To the library. I have a math exam Wednesday, and I’m sick of the dorm. I can’t get enough studying done there with all the noise and the gossip. Speaking of gossip,” she said, “we caused quite a stir last night.”
“Yeah, I know. I took a little razzing, but it was worth it,” I said, not wanting to mention Andy just yet. It was too early to discuss him, but I reckoned if we were to be true lovers, the subject would be broached sometime. “You’re not sorry, are you?” I said.
She smiled the most beautiful smile. “No, I’m not sorry at all.”
We got to the library, and I decided to study, too, though I had no exams pending; I had only Judy pending. We sat opposite each other at a long table with a fair number of others, all studying. There was a large sign that said QUIET in the middle of the room, and there was only the sound of pages turning and an occasional cough. I opened my textbook on state and local government and began reading, but from the start, I was thinking about when and how I might look at the lovely Judy. I looked up, and she was reading and underlining. I looked up again, and our eyes met. We were a little embarrassed and went right back to our books.
This went on for about an hour. I found that I had gone over the same paragraph fifteen times and didn’t have the foggiest idea what I’d read. I stopped the pretense, put down the book, and gazed unabashedly across the table, having had enough of stolen glances; I wanted to look to my heart’s content. In short order, she noticed me looking at her and put down her book, and we were staring at each other straight in the eye. It was a look that I had seen in others, a gooey hearts-and-flowers look that previously made me want to puke. But I had never been a lover, and this new perspective eliminated all such negative feelings.
I couldn’t stand not touching her for one more minute, so I gestured with my head for her to follow me, and I stood up and pushed back my chair. I was trying to be surreptitious, but the chair made a loud noise against the floor, like a dinosaur fart, and the whole room looked up. I ambled into the maze of library shelves, pretending to be looking for something, with Judy close behind me. I found a dusty corner and beckoned for her to join me. We looked at the same book, holding it together so that our hands were touching and I could feel and smell her sweet breath. We looked around like a couple of bandits and then crushed each other in a mad kiss.
It was not enough. We returned to the table, collected our books, and got the hell out of there as fast as we could. Where to? Privacy was so difficult to find without a car, and it was December in the snow belt, making the outdoors an option for only the hardiest of lovers. It had gotten dark, and as usual, it was snowing, and the famous Alfred carillon bells were playing a beautiful rendition of “The First Nöel.” We walked along a path up the hill toward the bell tower, to a spot behind the Steinheim, an old and picturesque building that looked like a tiny castle. It was traditionally a lovers’ place, and there were two or three kissing couples obscured by the scant light and the blowing snow. We put our books down on the stone steps, Judy leaned against the wall, I removed my gloves and took her face in my hands and kissed it all over. I could not see her well, but feeling her face was enough: her breathing, her holding me and squeezing me. She was far from a passive kisser—we were both hungry, and there was much that had been held back for so long. I could feel her body against mine through the dense winter clothing; Loden coats, but with our hoods on, the whole thing was cozy beyond belief. I had my arms around my girl, protecting her from the cold and snow.
It came out of my mouth before I even realized it: “I love you, Judy.”
“I love you, too,” she said. I took off her glove and kissed her hand, but this was not the vicarious experience of a movie; it was the real thing, to which I was unaccustomed, and it was so much better.
I gathered our books, and we returned down the dark path through flakes and mounds of white, walking so close together that we could have been participants in a three-legged race, while above us the carillon played “Joy to the World.”
* * *
Christmas vacation was upon us. Judy and I would be going home together via the eight-hour Erie Lackawanna train ride, a raucous trip with dozens of reveling college students, lots of beer, singing and laughter, merry train conductors, and smiling black car porters. Minus the raccoon coats and ukuleles, it was the epitome of, dare I say it again, a Hollywood college movie. Sitting next to Judy, with rustic winter scenes of upstate New York whizzing by the window, I hoped the journey would last forever. We held, we clutched, we kissed every two minutes and kept each other warm in the chilly car.
It had been ten days since my rebirth as a man in requited love, and I had been making up for lost time. The only moments of trepidation had come during especially heavy necking sessions outside the Steinheim when it became a question of how far we would go. At these moments she gently calmed us down. The last thing I wanted to do was push it; I was content to kiss, hug, and hold; to do the virtuous thing—this despite my aching gonads, eager for release and an end to their agony after each session. My gonads notwithstanding, it was I who may not have been ready to go further.
Somewhere passing Binghamton, Judy and I were holding hands, watching the silos and telephone poles whiz by. She turned her head and leaned in to my ear. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.
“What?”
“Kiss me first.”
And I did. “I know it’s all so new. But I want you to know that I love you very much, and I want to know that you love me, no matter what,” she said. For the first time, I realized that we were surrounded by forty noisy people, though a quick check revealed that they were not paying the slightest attention to us.
“I love you so much I can’t even tell you how much,” I said.
“I want to tell you . . . I need to tell you . . . that when I was going with Andy, we made love. We had sex.”
Hearing it directly from her own lips, the lips that had kissed Andy’s, was an emotional jolt, but I didn’t show it. “I sort of expected you would. You loved him, didn’t you?”
“I thought I did. But I know now that I didn’t, and I’m sorry that we went that far.”
“It doesn’t matter, that’s over now,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Quickly, the wound that was disappearing was opened again, and those images flooded in.
“I don’t want us to make the same mistake,” she said.
“Are you saying it’s a mistake to ever have sex until you’re married?”
“No, no. It’s just that it should happen at the right time. Not yet, when it’s too early. It should happen when we feel sure about it.”
“How will we know?”
She brushed my hair off my forehead and looked at me. “I’ll know.”
“You will?”
“Oh yes, I’ll know. So I want you to promise me that you’ll wait and be patient. Because I want to make love to you very much already, and if we do it too soon, it could—well, ruin things or . . . hurt our relationship.”
Everything she said made consummate sense and was expressed in a heartfelt way. Yet this was bittersweet, in that I now felt guilty for my desire, and goddammit, Andrew Ruby had slept with her and I hadn’t. Despite how close I felt to Judy, he had been intimate with her tenfold. Why couldn’t I shake this crap from my mind? Because I was nineteen years old and living in December 1960, that’s why.
“Does it bother you a lot? About Andy?” she said.
I cast my eyes down, then out the window, taking a long time to answer. “I know I have no right to object. It was your business—and, I guess, his. Anyway, it’s over and done with.”
“You’re not answering my question. Does it bother you?”
“It’s just that I care so much, that the thought of you and—”
She took my head to her breast and stroked my hair and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Judy. Maybe it’s a little painful, but I’m glad we talked about it.”
The train groaned to a brief stop in Hancock, New York, and we poked our noses out the door amid the loud roar of the big Lackawanna diesel. The arctic air was a shock and practically burned the lungs, but it was fresh and cleansing, like the conversation we had just had. About two hours from home, I felt comfortable enough to bring up the matter again, with a kind of mischievous smile, to tell her that I was not uptight about it. “Did you like it?”
“What?”
“Sex with Andy.”
She was a little embarrassed but not offended. “I guess so, initially.”
“Whaddaya mean, you guess so?”
“Should I have not liked it?”
She laughed and I laughed and the rest of the ride was carefree and we could talk about it easily, and it was back to the clouds. By the time we pulled into the terminal in New Jersey, I had matured by ten years: a new man, confident and in love.
* * *
Judy and I made plans to see each other as much as possible during vacation, though she lived on Long Island and I was in the Bronx. I had a driver’s license, and I was sure I could get my father to lend me his huge ’59 Pontiac Bonneville a few times. Then the next day, as if we hadn’t seen enough snow at Alfred, there was a major blizzard in the metropolitan area, and driving was out of the question. I had to content myself with the telephone. One, two, three calls a day were not enough, until conversation was exhausted and I found myself calling just to hear the sound of her voice.
After three days I could stand it no longer and planned a trip to her home by subway and Long Island Rail Road. I had a nagging cough that had been going on for two weeks, which I had neglected through the chimera of love. My father had told me to go to the doctor several times, but I felt fine, so I dismissed the idea. The cough persisted, and my father insisted, so I promised to stop by Dr. Rosenstein’s office, which was next to the subway entrance, on my way to see Judy.
Our family doctor, my old inspiration for pursuing a career in medicine, was a caring practitioner worshiped by the neighborhood. Catholics and Jews both prayed for him. He was also a little absentminded, as when he was doing a gynecological examination on my mother and took a phone call in the next room and forgot about her, leaving her in the stirrups for a half hour—with her hat on, yet.
As someone who had known and treated me since the age of five, he wanted to know everything about what was happening with me in college while he looked into my throat and ears and poked around in my nose. All I could talk about was the anticipation of seeing Judy in a couple of hours, but as he listened to my chest, he shushed me and his expression changed. “You got that walking pneumonia again, kid. I want you to go right home to bed. Your mother can get this prescription filled.”
“Go right home? You gotta be kidding, Doctor. I gotta see this girl, I’ve been waiting for three days, snowed in.”
“No, go home, we don’t want this to get serious.”
“But I feel okay.”
“You’re not well now, but you’ll be all right in a few days, and guess what, your girlfriend will still be there. Go home.”
I went out on to Bainbridge Avenue and right into the subway, determined that nothing would prevent my visit. I would tell my parents that I went to the doctor and had a cold and would take care of the pneumonia later, though I very much hoped that my father would not find out about my deception.
The trip seemed to last a year, but I would have hitchhiked to Nebraska to see her, and see her I did. It was an added novelty to be out of the college setting and with her in the simple, tidy house where she was brought up. Her mother and kid sister were home, which confined our initial greeting to a small peck of a kiss, until we found a corner in the finished basement to do the job properly. It went with the territory, having to look over our shoulders every time we wanted to embrace.
Her sister was shy but her mother was not, and she got right to the point: “So, I hear you two are cuckoo about each other.”
“Mother, please,” Judy said, blushing.
“Uh . . . I guess ‘cuckoo’ could describe it,” I said.
Judy’s mother was a pretty, self-confident woman with a competitive twinkle in her eye, who enjoyed giving us the needle, and she continued with playful gems like “Judy is gaga over you” and “Are you gaga over her?” It was a difficult gauntlet for a first visit, but I was game for her game and as charming as I could be, which calmed Judy, who was not amused by her mother’s audacity. If it was some sort of test, I think I passed, but I understood why Judy had said they didn’t get along.
Her father came home, a quiet, gentle man who greeted me warmly and with dignity. He was prematurely gray, tall and thin, and looked like Judy. Like love itself, meeting the parents was a new experience for me, and slightly unnerving, because there was the incongruity of their being strangers and my passion for their daughter.
After a nice chicken dinner, we found a few moments of privacy to talk. Her parents had noticed my cough, as had she, and I let slip the doctor’s admonition. Much to my chagrin, she immediately told her parents, saying that my health was more important than pride. Her father then insisted on driving the fifty-minute trip to the Bronx and would not take no for an answer. I was terribly embarrassed, but Judy came along with us, so the extra time with her was compensation, though she sat up front with her father while I sat in the back.
In front of my building, I gave her a measly buss good night, with her father looking on. After my twentieth apology, I went up to our apartment, my head in the clouds once again. I opened the door and could see my father from the back, watching live television news of the aircraft carrier Forrestal on fire. He did not turn around to greet me. My mother came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish cloth with a concerned look that I knew well. I crashed back to earth with a bang. They had called the doctor and knew everything, and my mother’s worried countenance told me that my father was livid. He turned around with that curling of his upper lip that had terrified me all my life. I was too old to smack across the face (I thought), but he was as angry as I’d seen him in a long time, and he began a tirade at the top of his lungs. “YOU HAVE PNEUMONIA, AND YOU GO TO LONG ISLAND? TO LONG ISLAND! YOU STUPID IDIOT!”
“Dad, I feel fine. I just had to see this girl. I love her, and I couldn’t wait any longer.”
“A GIRL! YOU WENT BECAUSE OF A GIRL! YOU LOVE HER! DON’T TALK TO ME, I DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU! GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!”
The television was blaring casualty reports from the carrier fire as my mother gingerly tried to intercede on my behalf. “Benny, stop yelling, the neighbors can hear. He likes this girl, he couldn’t help it, he’ll go right to bed now.”
“YOU BUTT OUT AND MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!”
“Don’t talk to Mother that way, it—”
“SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE!”
This was humiliating, sending me right back to my guilt-ridden, futile childhood quest to please him. I was a helpless boy again, descended rapidly from the firmament of love, which for the moment seemed very far away indeed. My father gave me the silent treatment, his ultimate punishment, for six days, and it took its toll every second that we were together in the small apartment. I could understand parental concern, but his anger was vicious. Couldn’t he let up, knowing that my action was a foible of youth and for the sweetest of reasons? I found myself as angry at him as he was with me, since he had put a sizable dent in my manly romantic euphoria. Worse, Judy and I would have to wait until we went back to school before we saw each other again, So, housebound, I counted the hours until I could flee the close quarters of this, at the moment, unhappy place.
* * *
As my junior year rolled by, I was having a grand time, what with my academic studies, the theater, and my social life all ducks in a row. I truly enjoyed my classes, especially International Relations, taught by an intellectual World War II marine combat veteran named David Leach. I loved his lack of pretense, the absence of elitism in his style, though he was eminent in his field and sought after by Yale and Harvard. I also had the privilege of studying under Frederick Engelmann, the brilliant Austrian-born political scientist. He displayed all the eccentricities of the genius professor as he lectured, complete with an assortment of fidgets, tugging at his trousers, and weird facial expressions, all of which I had down pat. He replaced Professor Russell as the premier faculty imitation in my living room shtick.
My participation in the Footlight Club was marching on. We put on a production of a recent Broadway hit called A Majority of One, which was about an old couple, a Japanese and a Jew, who fall in love against the wishes of their families. For a change, I did not play the old Jew. The honor fell to Sara Calvalli, a vivacious English major who was the first woman I ever knew to wear black tights every day as outerwear: These Bohemians were ahead of their time. I played the old Japanese gentleman, once again using makeup and acting tricks to depict age, and an accent borrowed from a World War II movie.
A Majority of One is a fluffy piece, a little too cute for its own good, and neither Smith nor Brown was in favor of doing it. It’s the sweet culture-clash idea in which the audience is charmed and amused to hear a Japanese pronounce Yiddish words and vice versa; but the professors acceded to the kids’ wishes and put on the play, which was a success.
I was now the biggest star of stage in Allegheny County, New York. Judy and I were a solid couple, as steady as any on campus, and were almost always seen together. One spring afternoon in 1961, we were photographed strolling along a scenic walk and were told it might be used for the college brochure: Joe and Judy College, documented at last.
There was an important development regarding the issues of privacy and mobility: I had been given a new car. My father surprised me during spring break with a four-door Ford Galaxie sedan, a leftover 1960 model (yes, Pop had his good points, too). He presented it to me dramatically, enjoying the occasion as much as I did. It was not a flashy rich boy’s car, like a number of the sports cars and convertibles parked outside the fraternity house, but who was complaining? It was brand-new and smelled like it, and it was mine. Never mind the two-hundred-horsepower engine that could push your head back when you stepped on the gas, or the stylish whitewalls; the roomy six-passenger interior was the feature I most coveted, since it would serve as a romantic refuge for my girl and me. Soon enough, we joined the motorized fogged-window throng for all we were worth.
It was all so grown up: I had my woman, my job of college, and my car. At the end of the term, it appeared that I might have an enticing future as well. The two-man drama department, the talented, tasteful, wonderful Smith and Brown, had cornered my father on Parents’ Weekend and suggested that I go for graduate work in drama upon graduation. The stereotypic contrast between my New York Jewish father and these two professorial gentlemen was quite amusing. Professor C. Duryea Smith, replete with suede patches on his tweed jacket, fiddled with his pipe and very politely said, “Mr. Klein, Robert has a good deal of talent, and he should study at the Yale School of Drama.” Professor Brown concurred: “Yes, indeed. Yale would be best.”
My incredulous father replied, “Yale? You mean the Ivy League Yale—boolah-boolah and all that? To be an actor? A person goes to graduate school to be an actor? Did Eddie Cantor go to Yale to be an actor?”
Dad had an excellent point. But as I would be graduating college at only twenty, it seemed a good idea to stay in school, to pursue and immerse myself in what would now become, legitimately, my chosen field—one my father viewed with a worried eye. To his way of thinking, it would have been safer to take his suggestion and somnambulate into law school. That pretense, faint as it was, would now be cast aside, thank goodness.
There was a symmetry, in that most of my buddies would be going on to graduate school, mostly for medicine, dentistry, and law. For them there was no equivocation: It had been their goal for years, their pursuit of which had never wavered; they belonged there. What, then, could be more appropriate for me than to go where I belonged, to pursue my true ambition, sheltered by the comforting structure of academia? Yale, yet.
* * *
The summer was full of beaches, picnics, movies, bowling, and the deepening maturation of a loving couple. Judy came on a picnic with my extended family of cousins and aunts, and I was invited to her cousin’s wedding. We had developed a good relationship with each other’s parents, who approved of the courtship. We had also become adept at stealing intimate moments at her house and in the beloved Ford, yet not going all the way.
I was working in a Pepsi-Cola plant in Long Island City for the summer: eight hours a day of clanging machines and intense heat. They hired temporary additional help for the season, a few of whom were college boys, at eighty-five dollars a week. I was an American assembly-line worker, pride of the proletariat and a bona fide member of the Teamsters. The veteran workers, most of them grizzled tattoo types, really laid it on the novices: “Hey, college boy this” and “Hey, college boy that.” When the midmorning ten-minute-break whistle blew, I was chastised by one of the Teamsters for not leaving my workstation promptly enough: a union transgression I would not commit again.
I ate my lunch on the East River pier every day and was fascinated to watch the unloading of sugar from Filipino and German freighters. I also enjoyed watching one of the forklift operators (the plant bookie) scoot about the huge building and around the dock, taking numbers and racing bets. My sandwich was always accompanied by a Pepsi, as there happened to be about a million bottles handy, and the company rules permitted you to drink all you wanted as long as you did not remove any from the plant—a transgression which could get you fired. You could just grab a cold bottle from the assembly line before it was capped and take a swig and put the bottle in the unwashed-bottle box.
Drinking all the free Pepsi I wanted would have been a dream when I was eleven, but these moving lines of it were endless, and I wondered if people would ever stop drinking it and give me a rest from the deafening noise and repetitive routine. The place was always two inches deep in the stuff, which was somewhat corrosive, so by summer’s end, my tough, thick work boots had turned into Egyptian sandals. The old-timers at the plant drank soda by the ton and, not surprisingly, had severe dental problems. Inversely, you could tell how long someone had worked there by how few teeth he had.
I was in the bottling department, and one of my jobs was taking flat-folded cardboard six-packs designed to hold bottles, pushing them open, and placing them four at a time into wooden cases going by on the assembly line. It was sometimes difficult to keep up, which made me feel like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, or Lucy in the chocolate factory. I repeated this motion over a thousand times a day for days on end, so that I could feel my hands forming the six-pack for years afterward and in my dreams.
Another job was watching clean empty bottles go by in front of a light, making sure they weren’t dirty or broken before they were filled. Watching bottles go by for long periods of time is a soporific of the first order, so there were periods of dozing in which broken and contaminated ones passed my station. Odd objects frequently turned up in the previously used bottles, from bracelets and condoms to love notes between Juan and Matilda. Many of the empties had spent months in the basements of Bronx candy stores, and the occasional dead mouse presented itself: a collector’s item. For some time afterward, I would thoroughly inspect any Pepsi before I drank it, fearing that it had been produced on my watch.
All in all, I had never wanted so badly for school to start. Seeing Judy only on weekends, the rivers of Pepsi, and the routine of getting up every day at six A.M. and counting the minutes to that five o’clock whistle made me long for college life.
I purchased a suit on my own for the first time, from Paul Sargents in Greenwich Village: a banker’s double-breasted stripe, but far from conservative in cut. It was called a Continental suit and was very hip; the jacket was short and barely covered my buttocks. It cost $69.95, most of a week’s salary, and I brought it home knowing my father would scrutinize it thoroughly, as an expert on garments and fabrics. He had always accompanied me and paid for clothing, and I was prepared for him to nitpick, though I vowed to shrug it off.
He took it out of the box and rubbed the lapels, the shoulder pads, and the lining. “How much did you pay for this?”
“Sixty-nine ninety-five.”
“Yoy ishtanem! They saw you coming! They saw you coming! [He imitated a moron with a funny walk.] They said here’s someone coming with money who doesn’t know anything about suits. It’s garbage, this suit. A piece of crap.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Look at this lapel stitching: cheap. Crappy buckram in the shoulder pads, probably reprocessed wool.”
“What’s buckram?”
“The stuff in shoulder pads.”
“Who cares? I like the suit.”
“Who cares? Who cares? You spent seventy dollars on a piece of shit.”
“But it’s my seventy dollars.”
“Don’t be a wise guy.”
He’d gotten my dander up once again, a little reminder of who was the grown-up and who was the child. Once again, he couldn’t accept the mistakes made in another rite of passage for a young man. Was I being unfair? Maybe. Of course I loved him, but I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.
* * *
Ah, sweet autumn in the country, the bracing air, the sentimental carillon bells playing the alma mater, and everyone reading Franny and Zooey. College life fit me like an old glove now; I, the big wheel. I was elected social chairman of Kappa Nu, which meant that I would plan the parties, buy the kegs and booze, and hire those great black musicians from Buffalo for the big weekends.
I got a fair number of accolades for my performances in the plays from people who had never attended them before; the kind of respect usually accorded a good campus athlete. My schoolwork was well under control, with excellent grades, and I shortly got some fine news: Yale had accepted me. And of course there was Judy. Stan Friedman and I took an off-campus apartment together. I tried my hand at directing a one-act play, Crawling Arnold, by Jules Feiffer. It was the American premiere of the work, about a neurotic man clinging to his childhood. For years afterward, it would be the opening topic with the wonderful Jules at New York cocktail parties, that I had directed his premiere. The experience was enlightening, but I found that I couldn’t shake my actor’s instinct, so while watching the performance, I found myself wanting to take the stage and play all the parts myself. The Footlight Club concluded its season with Rashomon, the story of a Japanese bandit from ancient times. In a continuation of my Japanese specialty, I portrayed the bandit: There were no Jews in this play. I almost poked someone’s eye out during the sword fight, but the production was well received.
It was inevitable. In March, Judy and I were pinned. In contrast to my experiences at previous ceremonies, I didn’t find this one the least bit funny. The turnout was good, the singing as usual left much to be desired, and I went for the whole thing emotionally, hook, line, and sinker. As I put the pin on her chest, looking into her eyes, I thought the boys sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. A definite bridge had been crossed in our relationship, which was now more sanctified, the commitment more firm.
Meanwhile, Stan Friedman, my roommate, had gotten himself a nice girlfriend, a math-major Theta Chi sorority sister of Judy’s named Karen Cummings. She was from Endicott, like my friend Bob Matolka, and she and Stan really hit it off. She was also a Roman Catholic, so Stan dared not tell his mother, who, to put it mildly, would have vigorously objected and disowned him.
An idea popped up among the four of us, a daring exciting notion to go to Niagara Falls for a weekend. It would require courage, secrecy, careful strategic planning, and lying through our teeth. Any way you looked at it, this was heavy stuff for all of us, very much against the rules, with potentially serious consequences. Nevertheless, we were all keen, besotted with romance, and decided to do it, picking a weekend in April.
In the weeks before D-day, the four of us were all smiles and conspiratorial winks. The plan was for the girls to sign out for the weekend, pretending to be going home in order to circumvent curfew; Stan and I would pick them up in my car at a secluded place near campus. Unmarried couples did not rent motel rooms without questions and opprobrious glances in 1962, so we planned to buy cheap wedding bands at a Woolworth’s on the way. The night before, Judy and I talked about the trip as if it were a honeymoon, but left unspoken was what sleeping in the same room and marriage bands implied. There was a nervous anticipation, like the feeling one must get before parachuting from a plane (a feeling there was little chance I would ever experience).
After class on Friday at about one o’clock, we gathered in the car and successfully scooted out of town without being seen (the girls in the backseat crouched down out of sight), west toward Niagara. Once we were safely on the road, Stan joined Karen in the backseat, and my honey sat shotgun for the two-hour journey. In Scio, New York, a tiny town that looked like it had been built in frontier times, we spotted a five-and-dime. We discovered that we had not discussed the logistics of the ring purchase, a crucial element of the operation. Should one of us go in or a couple? Either way, we could arouse suspicion in a clerk or a nosy customer. Why was a young man buying a fifty-cent imitation gold wedding band? Would a young couple, even in Scio, have bought such a sacred keepsake in a Woolworth’s?
My car was amply stickered with the Alfred University name and logo: Some snooping prude might put two and two together and report us. It had happened before. “All right, you kids hold it right there. Hello? Operator, get me Alfred University. Hello, Dean Whitlow? I’ve got four of your students here trying to buy phony wedding bands. Yeah, that’s right. Probably trying to shack up out of wedlock.”
Karen made a suggestion: “Why don’t you or Stan tell them you’re getting married tomorrow and the real ring has been misplaced?”
“Why would I be getting two of them?” I asked.
Karen said, “You’ve been so careless that you want an extra ring in case you lose another one.”
“Too complicated, they won’t believe that,” said Stan.
“Maybe we only need one ring,” said Karen. “We could check in to the motel separately, and once a couple is inside, they can pass the ring to the other couple.”
“Too complicated,” said Stan. “We need two rings.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Anyway, we’ll have to go in and out of the motel. What if one of the girls is seen without a wedding ring?”
“Maybe we should get four rings and you boys wear them, too,” said Judy.
“Is that necessary?” I said. “My father doesn’t wear one.”
“Mine does,” said Judy.
“So does mine,” said Karen.
“Mine, too,” said Stan.
It was decided that I would go in alone and purchase four wedding rings, the explanation for which was up to my improvisational mind, if indeed an explanation was needed. There was always the happy possibility that I would see what I want, take it to the cashier, and leave without comment, sneer, or confrontation.
I entered the store with the mentality of a criminal pulling off a job, and soon located a counter with dozens of rings: diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, all under two dollars. There were many engagement rings, but being engaged wouldn’t do us any good, we had to be married. I looked and looked, but there were no wedding bands. Then I heard those dreaded words: “Can I help you, sir?” The woman was speaking in a Scio accent, so I decided to answer her in the same dialect, to avoid being downstate conspicuous. “Oh, hi, yeah. We’re heeaving a castume perty, and I’m looking fer those . . . what do you coll thim . . . those little rings theat people put an ther fingers when they’re merried?”
“YOU MEAN WEDDING BANDS?” she said, a little too loudly.
“Uh, yeah, but nat real ones, for goodness sake, just cheap fake ones. Lerd, we’re nat merried, we’re just pretending for the castume perty.”
“What ere you going eas?” she asked.
“Oh, Romeo and Juliet . . . and her parents.”
“Theat’s vury original,” she said as she pulled out a tray with phony wedding bands. “You wahnt diamonds er gold?” she said.
This was getting complicated and I glanced around to make sure no one was watching me. “Anything. How about diamonds fer Juliet and Mrs. Capulet and gold for the men?” I said, anxious to get moving.
“Wull, in theat case, you better take two diamond engagement rings, too. Girls nermally wear engagement rings with diamond wedding bands like these,” she said.
“Good idea. I’ll take these two, and these and those. That’s six, right?”
“Yeah. But eren’t these diamond ones too madern for Romeo eand Juliet?”
“No, I don’t think so, they’re fine. I’ll take um.”
“Okeydoke.”
She rang up the rings on the noisy cash register. “Sex dallers eand sex cents.” She put them in a bag and I was off. “I hope you win fer best castume,” she said as I darted out the door to the getaway car.
On the road again, we divided up the loot like the John Dillinger gang. “These engagement rings are the phoniest-looking things I ever saw,” said Judy.
Karen agreed. “They don’t look real. They’ll attract more attention and suspicion if we wear them,” she said.
“Why don’t they just wear the wedding bands?” said Stan.
“The girl in the store said this kind of band is always worn with a ring like those,” I said.
“Why didn’t you get all gold ones?” Judy asked.
“I thought it would look suspicious if we all had on exactly the same band.”
“I don’t think what she said is necessarily true, that we have to wear two rings,” said Karen.
“Maybe in Scio it’s the custom that if you have a fifty-cent wedding band, you have to wear a two-dollar engagement ring,” I said.
It was decided that the girls would go with the bands only. There was much self-conscious giggling as we put on the rings and contemplated our fingers, though none of them fit properly and were jerry-rigged with Band-Aids to stay on.
Before long, we were in the vicinity of Niagara, though still a few miles from the falls. Much to my surprise, it was an incredibly ugly area of industrial sites, some abandoned, that were built to take advantage of the cheap power source. Somehow I did not expect such eyesores so close to one of the most beautiful places on earth. Then we saw an assortment of motels advertising vacancies and had to decide on which one and how to pass as married. “Just look bored with each other,” I quipped.
“That’s not funny,” Judy said. “You won’t be bored,” and she gave me a little kiss.
We pulled up in front of a decent-looking place with “Niagara” in the name and gave one another an “Are you ready?” look. We decided to enter together; going in as separate couples could raise a red flag if someone noticed that we came in one car. The lobby was done up in rustic wood, with a large American flag and an appropriate deer head staring at us as we approached. At least he wouldn’t tell. The place smelled a little damp, like wood that had survived another ferocious western New York winter, and the unsmiling survivor behind the desk looked like just the kind of son of a bitch who would turn us in. He was about fifty, American Gothic, with a cowboy string tie. “Good afternoon, checking in?”
“Yes, uh . . . the four of us,” I said. “That is, two couples.”
“Newlyweds?”
Karen was about to say yes when I cut her off: “No. We’ve been married for two years, and they’ve been married for one. We’re just getting away, you know, for the weekend . . . see the falls . . . left the kid with my mother-in-law.”
Judy and Stan were about to choke, while Karen, an incessant giggler, almost broke out laughing. But the guy pushed the register forward for me to sign. I signed the predecided “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Henry, New York City.” Stan signed “Mr. and Mrs. Charles MacDonald, Hackensack, New Jersey.” He looked like a Charles MacDonald like I looked like a Wong Fong, but the guy paid no mind and gave us the keys. We felt an urge to run to the rooms and private sanctuary, but we walked nonchalantly, to look normal and unassuming. We split up, and I closed and locked the door behind Judy and me, forgoing the urge to carry her over the threshold. Alone at last, we fell down on the bed, clenching and grabbing. Judy suddenly interrupted: “Let’s see the falls first. I really want to see the falls.”
“You’re right, I want to see them, too. But we have to wait until this bulge in my pants goes down before I’m presentable in public.”
I knocked on the MacDonalds’ door, and they had the same desire to see Niagara Falls that the Henrys did, so off we went. The beauty and power of these falls was beyond unbelievable, beyond stunning. Judy and I wrapped around each other in the chilly spray and wind, against the incessant roar. Standing there together amid such majesty, I felt like the cascades were performing just for us, like a thunderous cosmic show; and when we left, they would rest until we returned. It was small wonder that honeymoon couples came here to feel alone even among people.
We went to the Canadian side, whose vista was even more gorgeous, and saw a couple of red-clad Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which made me realize that this was my first trip outside the United States. We had a nice dinner in Ontario and, broadened by travel to a foreign land, we returned to our new home, the lovely Room 120 at the Niagara Something Motel.
Upon locking the door, we looked in each other’s eyes. We kissed, we lay down together, and slowly, we removed each other’s clothing in the semidarkness. “We’d better hurry, it’s close to curfew,” I whispered as I kissed her breasts.
“Yes, the house mother’s coming to get me. She ought to see me now,” Judy whispered back as she ran her hand down my thigh. For a while, we could hear only our breathing and the little slurping sounds made by eager lips and tongues. A few cars whizzed by on the road, their headlights sending momentary dancing pools of light across the window shade. It was all so gentle, taking our time like this, and while I was hot as could be, I was in no hurry. We were naked, entwined like a kudzu vine around a slender tree. I had to speak, I simply had to speak: “Judy, I love you.”
“I love you very much,” she whispered back. “Do you have protection?”
“Of course, that was in the plan,” I said as I leaped out of bed, looking like the letter L, and grabbed a package of prophylactics from my bag. My hands were a little unsteady as I unwrapped the thing and tried to put it on. She assisted me, taking care that it was rolled as high as possible. She lay down and beckoned me with outstretched arms and the most beautiful look on her face: part smile, with the slightest glistening of moisture in her eyes.
I was inside her now, though we were really inside each other. I was in a new place, a place I belonged, and it felt like home. How do I describe it? I had enough trouble describing Niagara Falls. The two experiences were similar in grandeur and emotion, power and permanence; I felt that a monumental event had occurred, and that I would be making love like this to her for the rest of my life. Though the sex by itself was exciting, I had never experienced the awesome combination of love and sex that I’d heard about all my life. Before Judy, sex as a concept had been naughty, lacking in romance, and romance as a concept had been sexless. It occurred to me that before we began dating, when I was worshiping Judy from afar, I had never even had a sexual fantasy about her, but rather a vision of us married, with adorable kids bouncing on our knees. Making love to Judy was tender and sexy at the same time: the perfect combination of naughty and nice.
We lay together on the queen-size bed, looking at the sprinting headlights on the ceiling, exhausted, secure, happy. “Thank you, my darling,” I said. I had never used the word “darling” before, but I used it unself-consciously. Love makes you say things like “darling” and “I adore you” and “I love you” and not be embarrassed.
“Thank you,” she said as we maneuvered our bodies around each other like a couple of mating pythons. “Oh, Judith.” “Oh, Robert.”
Then it was morning, and she was next to me, facing me. I had never seen her sleeping before, so I took advantage of the opportunity to drink her in, unseen. I was careful not to move, since I did not want her to awaken just yet. Her face was perfectly serene, with none of the drooling, openmouthed facial contortions or snoring common to sleepers. Her eyes opened and met mine, a big smile from both of us, a kiss. “Well, here we are,” I said. “Do we hate ourselves in the morning?”
“Uh-uh,” she said. We not only didn’t hate ourselves in the morning, we positively loved ourselves in the morning and were soon entangled in a blissful way again. The Niagara Falls adventure was a great success, and there were four happy people in the car going home.
* * *
Knowing where I would be the next year, and looking forward to it, made the rest of the term a pleasant coast to graduation. Judy decided to transfer to Hofstra University to be nearer to me. I would come home from New Haven on weekends, and she would live at home; there lay the only serious rub, because she and her mother were less than harmonious.
When classes and finals were at last over, only the seniors were left until the ceremony, which would occur in five days. It was the first week of June, and there was a heat wave, and the boys took to frequenting an old local swimming hole right out of Tom Sawyer. The portable radio blared out our rock-and-roll favorites as we bebopped around, singing along: “Ooh, baby . . . I want to know, will you be my girl?” Beer cans in hand, future doctors, dentists, lawyers, actors, not a care in the world. Then caps and gowns, long boring speeches in the summer heat, proud parents, handshakes, and hugs, and it was over.