As though freshman year at Columbia isn’t tough enough, I have to cope with a surging onset of overdue puberty. When the semester starts, I am still the small plump baby-face of the yeshiva. Coming home to Pelham, my head spinning with Sophocles and Milton and John Dewey, I play sidewalk handball for an hour or so with any available street boy, before plunging into my heavyweight studies. The incongruity doesn’t bother me, and the kid is never aware of it, for I talk street language with him, and I could pass for an eighth-grader.
But with the coming of springtime, as the earth begins to blossom, so at last does our Yisroelke. The Talmud defines the sprouting of two pubic hairs as legal evidence of the maturing process. I suddenly and abundantly run far over the minimum. I have erotic dreams, with startling results. Such things were not then the common coin of magazine articles, as they are today; even “hygiene” teachers pussyfooted around them, shedding as little light on the topic as possible. Consequently I hardly know what the hell is going on. I consult my mother’s old Home Medical Companion, a fat red volume full of frightful descriptions of diseases, and anatomical pictures that fold out in three dimensions, in garish colors. I have not looked in this vade mecum since I read up on leprosy, and spent a week or two finding numb white spots all over myself and getting used to the obvious truth that I was a leper. Now I seek some clue to this erotic dream thing.
I find it amply discussed by the author, Dr. William Herkimer, under the heading, “Pollutions.” I am told that I have probably been reading salacious books or seeing the wrong sort of plays, which is not a bad shot at my gartered-thighs secret, and I am advised to mend my ways, take very frequent cold showers, and discontinue eating hot red peppers, raw eggs, and oysters. Old Doc Herkimer undoubtedly means well, but I’ve got to keep using the subway, I cannot endure cold showers, and I’ve never eaten an oyster, a raw egg, or a hot red pepper in my life. So where does that leave me?
The thing is going on and on. In desperation I visit the doctor at the Columbia infirmary, a baldish white-coated gent in his late forties. He asks me how often the problem is occurring. When I tell him he looks impressed, and if I’m not mistaken, envious. He tells me not to worry, and to see him again if it happens thirty or forty days in a row. I stop worrying, or try to; but a new alarming symptom crops up. During a touch football game on South Field a huge blocker shoulders me aside as always, but this time my chest hurts like anything, especially my nipples. Now what? I look up nipples in old Doc Herkimer’s Companion. There is a huge full-color picture of a female breast that folds out, showing absolutely ghastly structures under the skin; most disillusioning to one who still treasures the vision of Bernice Lavine’s divine left bosom. But the doc says nothing about male nipples, that I can find.
This happens around Passover. When I see Cousin Harold at the seder in Zaideh’s Bronx flat, the one occasion when the aging and scattering Mishpokha still gathers, I confide in him. Cousin Harold helpfully suggests that I may have breast cancer. This clue enables me to track down my case in Herkimer, who says, yes indeed, while unusual, it is by no means unheard-of for males to be so afflicted, and it is nearly always fatal. I endure hypochondriacal agonies for about a month—all the time composing the Vicomte de Brag’s funny poems, you understand, and working as an associate night editor, and passing exams and writing themes—and at last fear drives me to the college doctor again.
He reassures me, not without a certain testy condescension, that sore nipples are an expected part of what I’m going through. He tells me to stop being so nervous, and asks me how I’ve been doing lately with the dreams. Somewhat annoyed, I pull an astronomical number out of the air. His eyes pop like basketballs. He writes me a prescription, and says I had better keep him informed for a while. Actually the dreams have been tapering off, so I throw the prescription away. After an incredibly long time on a plateau, I plainly am growing up. The purple suit is getting short in pants and sleeves, and before the semester ends I have to shave my hairy upper lip. I use Pop’s razor, of course, not yellow depilatory powder and a bone scraper. I am already very, very far from the yeshiva, though I am still keeping to the rules on food—more or less.
The big event of the spring term is Peter Quat’s Varsity Show, Greek to Me. The scene is ancient Athens after a stock-market crash. Socrates is selling apples, Plato and Aristotle are bankrupt stockbrokers, Pericles has moved into the tub with Diogenes, the chorus of dancing female impersonators forms a bread line, and so on. Zeus is a takeoff on Herbert Hoover, and Pallas Athena talks like Mae West. That sort of thing. Strictly collegiate, full of Columbia jokes and depression wheezes.
To me, the show is a glittering marvel. To think that one man could write it all! Peter himself, playing the god Pan, does a very off-color number with Aphrodite, capers around with her, and dances off to an ovation. I am consumed with admiration for Peter Quat. Football heroes, campus politicians, Randy Davenport—how can they compare with a genius who can do all this? The night I see Greek to Me my college course is fixed. I am going to write a Varsity Show.
And why not? Already I have emerged from the pack. “Who is this Vicomte de Brag?” I hear fellows ask, as they lounge about reading Spectator. Sweet music! The June issue of Jester, the comic monthly, contains two articles by the Vicomte de Brag. I am growing, I am shaving, I am getting into print, and in my dreams at least I am a man. In my waking dream, I am the next Peter Quat. As for the Man in the Iron Mask, while I feel peculiarly attracted to him, I see little of him. They tell me he is a science major, and works like a dog.
***
Sophomore year starts happily. The sparkling fall weather tingles in the blood. I have a warm sense of belonging, enhanced by the sight of callow-looking freshmen forlornly wandering about the Van Am quadrangle in their beanies. My name flowers on the mastheads of both Spectator and Jester as an associate editor.
There is a bit of a scandal about the Jester’s new managing editor. Peter Quat fully expected to be elected to this Jewish seat, so to speak, on the editorial board, since he has been writing about half of the magazine for years. Peter couldn’t be elected editor, the editor is always a Deke: immemorial custom. But another Deke nobody knows, an invisible goy named Preston Burton, has been elected managing editor, and that is that. Royally screwed by the outgoing board, Quat has resigned. I am too small-bore to be drawn into such intrigues, and it doesn’t surprise or anger me that Jews can’t be editors at Columbia, or that Christian fraternities run things. The way of the world; what else is new?
Fraternity rushing begins. The one for me, I know, is Beta Sigma Rho. Nearly all the Jews who matter on the John Jay fourth floor—writers, team managers, politicians—are Beta Sigs. At the Beta Sig rush parties, Monroe Biberman already acts like one of them. He passes drinks, makes easy jokes with the house officers, and remains behind when the rest of us leave. One night I decide to stay late myself, and give the Beta Sigs their chance to bid in the eminent and high-riding Vicomte de Brag. When Biberman sees me hanging around, he leaves. The members cleaning up after the party are polite to me, offer me more drinks and food, but say nothing about my joining. Mark Herz, who has hardly been seen during the rushing rituals, comes downstairs in his shirt sleeves. “Hey, Vicomte,” he says. “There you are. Let’s go up to my room.”
There are moments in life that you never forget. They may be buried out of sight for decades, but when they rise up they hit you with the heat of life itself. So it is with this conversation, my first real one with Mark Herz. As I write, I am back in that dingy attic room, a slope-ceilinged hole lined with science and economics texts, smelling of shaving lotion and stale cigarette smoke. He asks me about my family, where I live, what my father does. I mention that my sister Lee is about to leave on a trip to Europe and Palestine. He scrawls on a bit of paper the address of his relatives in Jerusalem, the offhand gesture which will have such explosive consequences.
How plainly I see—at a remove of forty years—that Mark is knotting a worn tie at a mirror, not looking at me, when he mumbles that he supposes I’ve decided on some other fraternity, since Beta Sig is not my sort of crowd. It is a hint of sledgehammer subtlety; but as unheeding as a girl in love, exalted by this intimacy with the Man in the Iron Mask, I assure him that Beta Sigma Rho is just my style, and I know I’ll be very happy here. Long silence. The tie takes a lot of knotting. He puts on his badly worn tweed jacket, leather-patched at the elbows. “Say, where did you get this nickname, Iggy, anyhow?” he very casually asks, his eyes on the mirror.
The sick flash comes after a puzzled instant. Biberman! He has managed to talk the Beta Sigs around against the Vicomte de Brag. I am not going to get a bid; and the Man in the Iron Mask has found the tersest, subtlest, kindest possible way to signal to me what has happened. He glances at me, his usually frigid face somber but friendly. I know I don’t have to reply to his question. It’s over. I yawn, stretch, look at my watch, and say I’d better get on back up to the Bronx.
“This room costs me half what a dorm room would,” says Mark Herz, putting on his hat. “That’s why I’m here. Otherwise fraternities are bullshit.” For all his threadbare garb, he looks the perfect fraternity man.
I say, “Once you’re in, maybe.”
He darts me the sharp glance of our first encounter, and sticks out his hand. “Peter Quat and I are collaborating on the Varsity Show this year. You should start thinking of an idea for next year. There’s nobody else.”
I ride the subway home, nursing a bleeding ego, yes; but also thinking hard of Varsity Show plots. Couldn’t I do something funny about Hitler, for instance, the German ranter with the Chaplin mustache? A title even occurs to me: To Heil with It! Not bad. And to heil with the Beta Sigs! They’ll be remembered in Columbia history for only one reason: they passed up I. David Goodkind, the Vicomte de Brag, the author of the memorable 1933 Varsity Show, To Heil with It!, in favor of a forgotten nobody named Biberstein, or something.
Next day, out of nowhere, Peter Quat comes up to me at the fourth-floor water cooler. “You know what? I’ve decided to call you Tex,” he says, with a charming smile that astounds me. “Come and have lunch at the Tau Alpha Epsilon house.” I have never given that place a thought, having been told it’s an “interfaith” house. Nonsense, Quat assures me, all the brothers are Jewish, great guys. Just a chapter or two down south may have mixed memberships. So I go to lunch. The long and short of it is, I’m invited to join Tau Alpha, and I do join. The initiation fee is hefty, but my Regents scholarship covers it. Besides, things are looking up a bit at the laundry, and Lee got all that money for the trip abroad; so Pop and Mom don’t demur at Tau Alpha, nor do they make religious inquiries. Yisroelke is a Columbia man now.
Well, Peter Quat sort of adopts me as a protégé, and I respond with a spell of slavish adoration. Natural enough! Cast adrift at Columbia from Pop, from Zaideh, from the Bronx, from the yeshiva, I have no model, no pattern, no received set of manners, no role to play. I’ve already decided to be another Peter Quat in achievement, and when the great PDQ takes me under his wing, I decide to be Peter Quat at all points. I carry it to ludicrous extremes. He smokes Spuds, a mentholated cigarette, so I smoke Spuds. He has a way of gesturing for emphasis with his left hand, a cigarette in his rigid fingers, and that becomes my own emphatic gesture. When excited or angry Quat twists his mouth sideways, rolls his eyes upward, and addresses the air. I do the same, especially in my arguments about religion at home, which are becoming more frequent; so that Mom finally asks me to stop making those crazy faces when I talk to her. I prolong this preposterous aping for about a year. That is as long as Tau Alpha lasts.
For when Quat recruits me, the house is dying. Its few members are Manhattan Jewish snobs to end all snobs. The old Arista crowd isn’t in it with these birds. But the Wall Street crash has cut down the number of Jewish freshmen with fancy East Side addresses, so Tau Alpha has wasted away, its members unwilling to compromise their lofty standards. This year, in a sudden convulsive clutch at survival, they are grabbing virtually anybody: a South American scholarship student for whom they have to waive all fees, two actual Brooklynites, and Goodkind of the Bronx. Brooklynites! A Bronxite! A pathetic haul. Nor does it help. Both Brooklynites soon depledge, ill at ease in that company. The South American has to go home when he fails all his courses, owing to excessive pool-playing at Tau Alpha. Only I hang on, because of Peter.
One day I remind him of our days at Camp Eagle Wing. “Good Christ!” he exclaims. “Of course. You were that Les Misérables kid. A million years ago, wasn’t it, Davey?” He never does call me Tex. That was just his suave approach to a Bronx boy who rhymed sword and broad.