Class Reunion
A Novel
FOR ZEKE
Prologue
1977: Going Bach
Part 1
The Fifties: Rules
Part 2
The Sixties: Falling Apart
Part 3
The Seventies: Together
Epilogue:
The Reunion
They had come by the thousands on that sunny June day, drawn by the mystique of their own past, or for some, the celebration of the future. Harvard Yard, usually a tranquil enclave in the middle of the bustling city of Cambridge, was filled on this special morning with a mass of people that stretched from the wide stone steps of the Widener Library across to the Chapel, and pressed out to the black wrought-iron gates that bordered the Yard. The buildings and the huge leafy trees were very old; the people were of all ages.
They had come for the Radcliffe Reunion, and for the recently combined Harvard-Radcliffe Commencement, which was the first event of the three-day festivities. Alumnae were here from the Fifth Reunion Class to one woman from the Seventy-fifth. There were also husbands, some grown children, the parents of the graduating class itself, in cap and gown. Every folding chair in Cambridge that could be rented had been set up on the lawn and the walks, but it was already clear that there would not be enough.
The alumnae were to line up at the Johnson Gate, at the edge of this chaos, find their own class, and then the classes would march in separately, announced by the Harvard Marshal. Eventually it would be spectacular and moving, but right now it was noisy and in confusion.
For Annabel Jones it was her twentieth reunion. She had never been to a class reunion before and hadn’t expected so many people. She had found the place where her class was lining up and now she eyed the other women warily, remembering the past. Had they changed, or were they still such prigs? She remembered those glances of hatred and curiosity that had followed her so long ago. Would they welcome her now, everything forgotten, or would they still be the same?
At college people had always said Annabel looked just like Suzy Parker, and she did. Everything about her looks was extraordinary. Her hair was copper with gold glints, wavy soft, thick, worn shoulder-length when almost everyone else was cutting theirs short. Her eyes were cool green, innocent and amused. She had high cheekbones that made her look sophisticated, and a sprinkling of freckles that made her look like a child. She was tall and slender, and her voice was a southern drawl filled with laughter. She was happy and smart and popular and rich, qualities that would have made her admired, but at the end all the girls hated her.
There had been a questionnaire sent out this past winter for the Anniversary Album. One of the questions was: ‘Have you fulfilled the expectations you had after you graduated from Radcliffe?’ Two of the women had answered: ‘I had no expectations.’ One of them was Annabel. She wondered what the other one had meant by that. Her own answer was both hopeful and bitter. After she graduated she had expected life would come to her with surprises because it always had, and she was open to it. But she had also been hurt. No expectations … what a strange attitude for a twenty-one-year-old!
She wondered how many of the thousands of people here today looked back affectionately at the past and called it a simpler time. Annabel knew better. There had been nothing simple about the past; people just remembered it that way because there had been rules. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ She was generous and absentminded, and she had assumed that other people were the same. But they weren’t; they were stingy and they remembered everything, the lies as well as the truth.
She wished that Max could have been here. She hoped nobody was dumb enough to ask: What ever happened to that friend of yours? But at least Chris was here somewhere. She kept looking around for Chris, but she couldn’t find her. Once Chris showed up the two of them could stick together and laugh and make bitchy remarks about everybody, and then it would be fun.
Nobody had made her come. She had been unable to resist the challenge, and the curiosity. She wanted to see what had happened to all those people she had lived with so closely for four years, what had happened to their lives and their dreams. It was as if the past was waiting in the closet to jump out and hurt her, and she wanted to face it head on, teeth and claws and all, and laugh in its face.
Christine Spark English left the huge, impersonal complex of Currier House, where three hundred alumnae (counting husbands) were staying, and walked through the crowded Radcliffe Quad to take a look at her old room in Briggs Hall where she had lived twenty years ago. In those days the Radcliffe Quad had been small, but now it was built up so much that she could hardly recognize it. There was a security desk in Currier House, and enough locks for a prison. There were cars parked where the girls used to keep their bicycles. She hoped they were alumnae cars.
Annabel had thought she was crazy to stay in a dorm for the reunion instead of with her at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. But staying in a dorm and coming here on the train instead of on the air shuttle from New York was the beginning of the journey into herself. She wanted to go back to her college years to find out where it had all started. College and Alexander … they were inextricable. The mystery and fascination had started here, more than twenty years ago, and pursued her for the rest of her life.
Her old dorm, Briggs Hall, looked reassuringly familiar from the outside. Small, made of red brick, with the stone terrace in front where couples used to neck, and the same rows of windows where some girls used to look out of their rooms to watch. She didn’t stop to tour the dorm because she didn’t want to be late for the commencement, and she rushed upstairs. There was a lock on every door here too, but since the students were gone and their rooms stripped bare she could go in. Her old room was nothing more than a cubicle, the walls painted dingy yellowish-white, a few pieces of battered furniture that belonged to the college. She had liked her room–it had suited her monastic spirit. When she thought of the innocence and ignorance of herself at Radcliffe she almost couldn’t believe it. She had been a terrified little girl who wanted to be invisible.
She saw herself again, the old Chris, with her straight brown hair parted in the middle, sometimes tucked behind her ears with two bobby pins, and her horn-rimmed reading glasses that she almost never took off. The college clothes she chose at Peck & Peck looked like austere prep school uniforms: plain dark shetland cardigans, white cotton blouses, subdued plaid skirts, worn with knee socks and loafers. She had rejoiced because Radcliffe meant she could live away from home. No one would know anything about her home life and she would be free.
But at the last moment, on the day of her liberation, her albatross had followed her. Her mother, that bitch, had shown up at the train station to see her off, dead drunk as usual, loudly sentimental, telling everybody this was her little baby going off to college. There had been two other girls getting on the train to Boston, going to Radcliffe too, standing there with their dignified parents, and they had looked at Chris and her mother with something that seemed like horror. She thought she would die of embarrassment. Then it turned out that one of the girls who’d seen her mother making a fool of herself at the station was not only in Chris’s dorm but had the room right next to hers! Emily Applebaum, the pretty Jewish girl. Chris had been so afraid Emily would say something, but she’d never even mentioned it, and had never said a word to anyone else. Her apprehension about Emily had turned into gratitude. Emily wasn’t going to tell. She could take such things as a drunken mother in her stride. It never occurred to her until years later that Emily probably had problems of her own and couldn’t care less about some stranger’s mother. She wondered if Emily was coming. She’d heard a rumor that Emily was in terrible trouble, but that was a long time ago.
Now she was in trouble. She left the room and walked down the bleak hall. This was only the beginning: there were places to visit, memories she had to bring back, all the little bits and pieces of the girl who had fallen in love with Alexander. Things could not stay the same. Maybe coming back for the reunion and reliving the past would give her the insights she needed so she could see how to go ahead. It was a decision she couldn’t put off any longer. She hurried out of Briggs Hall for the long walk to Harvard Yard.
Emily Applebaum Buchman checked her appearance nervously in her compact mirror as the taxi lurched through the crowded streets. She was going to see all those girls she hadn’t seen in twenty years, all the girls she had been afraid of and awed by, and she wanted them to think she looked young and attractive. Or at least, please God, not worse than they did! She had been pretty at college, small and delicate with dark hair and gray eyes and porcelain skin. She’d had more cashmere sweaters than any girl in the whole dorm, and so many clothes that she had to buy a cardboard closet to set up in her room. But it hadn’t helped to give her confidence. She wanted to be like the others, and they knew things she could never know because they had lived different lives.
She still remembered what it had been like to be Jewish at Radcliffe in the Fifties, accepted under a quota system; a minority, a strange animal whom some of the girls had never seen in their entire lives. She’d been such an oddity to them that some of them hadn’t even known she was Jewish and had said hurtful things. It was all so long ago, but now she was nervous again. They had made her feel ashamed to be Jewish. She had wanted to belong
The one who had scared her the most had been Daphne Leeds. That supergoy debutante with hot potatoes in her mouth, who managed to be both athletic and feminine at the same time, and who was the most beautiful girl in the dorm. A lot of people said Annabel Jones was the most beautiful, but Emily always thought Daphne was. Daphne had straight blonde hair that turned under at the bottom, and slanted cornflower-blue eyes. Her eyes were so blue that they were the first thing you saw in her face when she came toward you, the incredible color of them. And she was tall. Emily hated being ‘petite,’ which was a euphemism for getting stuck with all the short boys on blind dates.
Nobody cared about men’s height very much anymore, just like it was wonderful to be Jewish now and she couldn’t imagine being anything else, but in the Fifties … and she had been nouveau riche and Daphne and Annabel were old money. It was a gap her parents couldn’t understand, but Emily could. It was Daphne’s camel’s hair coat. How desperately Emily had longed for a camel’s hair coat like Daphne’s–understated, sophisticated, collegiate. But Emily’s mother wouldn’t let her have a cloth coat. It was too cold in Cambridge, her mother said, so she got Emily a gray muskrat coat and told her she was lucky to have it. Emily didn’t like boys staring at her fur coat in class and girls asking what kind of fur it was. She wanted a camel’s hair coat that swung jauntily behind her when she ran, and straight blonde hair that swung too. She wanted to be Daphne.
She wondered if Daphne would be at the reunion. Would she still be beautiful? Would her hair be blonde or gray? Would she still talk with hot potatoes in her mouth? Talking like that was a joke now; Wasps were suddenly the minority. All the minorities were turning into majorities in the Seventies. Would Daphne remember her? Or recognize her? Emily knew she would recognize Daphne. She could never forget the Golden Girl, the one everyone in the dorm admired, part of the golden couple in senior year. Oh … It was dumb to be scared. They were grown women now. But Emily couldn’t help it.
The cab stopped in Harvard Square. How tacky it looked, with all those new stores and restaurants and the mobs of people milling around. It looked like Broadway and 42nd Street, not the sweet college town she remembered. All it lacked was a porno shop.
‘I can’t get any closer,’ the driver said. ‘You’ll have to walk.’
Emily paid her fare and got out. There was the gate, the black wrought-iron entrance to her past, and she had never seen so many people in her life. How could she find her class? How could she find anybody? What a noise! She clenched her fists. Her heart was pounding. This trip to her twentieth reunion was the first time she had ever gone anywhere alone in her life, and she was going to enjoy it if it killed her.
Daphne Leeds Caldwell, lining up with her class, lit a cigarette and looked around for people she knew. It was amazing to see so many people all gathered here to celebrate Radcliffe; it gave you a sense of continuity that was overwhelming. Look at those little old ladies who had graduated long before she was born! It must have taken a lot of guts to go to college then. She felt moved and her eyes filled with tears for a moment. It had taken her a lot of courage to get through Radcliffe with her lonely secret, and for four years she had lived with the fear of being found out. She had been so proud at her own graduation, but now she felt even prouder, for she was a part of an immense tradition. She was special. No one understood the way in which she was special–they had always looked at her in superficial ways, and she had fooled them.
They had all thought she was perfect at Radcliffe, the Golden Girl. They even called her that; they were so romantic in those days. Golden Girl. Bullshit. And she, with her need to seem that way, had encouraged them to think so. In the Fifties everyone had wanted to be perfect. Life was a genetic auction; catch the best man, have bright healthy children as quickly as possible, train them to follow in your footsteps. There was no room for the flawed. They could too easily become the weird–pariahs. People were afraid of things they couldn’t understand.
The husbands were off somewhere in the middle of the Yard, trying to get seats to watch the ceremony, except for Richard who had gone off on a sentimental journey of his own and said he would meet her at the picnic later. Daphne wondered how she would ever find him in this mob. She thought how different her life could have been if she had trusted him enough to tell him about herself years ago. But soon everything would be all right. She had come to Radcliffe with her secret and left with it, and now she had come back twenty years later to give it up at last.
Over there by the tree she saw a familiar head of auburn hair. Annabel Jones … she’d recognize her anywhere. She didn’t go over to say hello to Annabel. The past had suddenly returned too vividly. She wondered why Annabel would want to come back.
A small, dark-haired woman came rushing over to her. ‘You’re Daphne! I’m Emily! Emily Applebaum, remember? You look exactly the same. I knew you right away.’
‘Well, thank you,’ Daphne said. She smiled. ‘You haven’t changed either.’ Which was a lie of sorts because she could hardly remember Emily Applebaum at all.
Chapter 1
That year all the nonfiction best-sellers were religious books, except for three. They were the Kinsey Report on female sexuality, Polly Adler’s story of her life as a madam, and a book on golf. It was a time of furtive guilty sex. People talked about love all the time and married strangers.
Emily Applebaum’s parents came with her on the train to college to help her get settled. It was the first day of Freshman Orientation Week, a clear, sunny fall day, the leaves turning red. The red brick buildings under the blue sky gave the campus the look of a New England picture postcard. Emily had been assigned to her permanent room in Briggs Hall, a single as she had requested. Her mother had wanted her to ask for a roommate so she could be assured of one good friend from the start, but Emily had been uncomfortable about having to share a room with someone she didn’t know, and when she saw the tiny cell she knew she had made the right decision. It was a narrow rectangle, at one end a door opening on to the long hall lined with similar rooms, on the other end, a big window looking out at the grassy area called the Quadrangle.
Briggs Hall was one of seven dorms set around the Quad, and each dorm had a reputation for having its own character. Briggs was supposed to be the social dorm, with the prettiest, most popular girls. Emily was delighted she had been assigned there. College was going to be such an adventure–on her own for the first time, all those Harvard men to date! There were not only the Harvard undergraduates, but all the graduate schools full of men: the medical school, the law school, even a school of architecture. And there was M.I.T. down the Charles River, a school for big brains.
‘You’ll certainly find a husband here, if you want one,’ her mother said, helping her unpack. ‘I hope you’ll remember to study, so you won’t flunk out.’
‘You can flunk out after you’re engaged,’ her father said, and laughed. He knew Emily was too smart ever to flunk out. He was so proud of her. Her father’s father had come to New York from Europe, lived in a tenement on Hester Street, worked in a factory, and spoke with a heavy accent until the day he died. Her father, who never went to college, had become the shoe king, owning a chain of shoe stores all over the East. They lived in a nice Colonial house in the suburbs and belonged to the country club, and now Emily was the first girl in her family to go to college–and it was Radcliffe!
So here she was, about to be independent for the first time in her life, in a strange city, in a huge university; and she was scared to death. Her father was setting up the cardboard closet her parents had bought her because there was only one closet in her room. Her parents had given her a small checking account in the bank in Harvard Square–another first–so she could buy her school books and furnish her room. She looked around in dismay. A narrow single bed with a striped mattress, a battered desk and chair, a matching clunky dresser, all chipped, and a bookcase. A dark metal lamp sat on the desk. Emily felt a lump in her throat and knew she was homesick already.
She was an only child, and the only trips she’d ever taken were with her parents. On her school vacations they took her to resort hotels, in Florida, Bermuda, Hawaii, Vermont, New Hampshire, where she could meet nice Jewish boys. She’d even had years of tennis lessons although she hated sports. You could always meet boys on the tennis court.
‘Remember, Emily,’ her mother said, ‘I don’t want you to waste your time doing laundry. Don’t be afraid to send it home.’
‘All right, Mom.’
Her mother looked around the appalling little box where her daughter would spend the next year. ‘You’ll buy a bedspread and a little rug and you’ll see how nice you can make this room,’ she said encouragingly.
The coarse white muslin sheets from the college linen supply service were folded neatly at the foot of Emily’s bed. She was sorry now that she hadn’t asked to bring her own sheets, but there had been so much to bring. She felt more homesick than ever. She took her memory candle out of her suitcase and set it on top of the bookcase and felt a little better.
‘Oh, Emily, you didn’t bring that disgusting thing!’ her mother said.
Emily was an inveterate collector of memories. The memory candle, which she had made herself, was a memento of her graduation from Scarsdale High. It was a glass filled with coloured water, and placecards, matchbooks, a pencil stub a boy had used to write down her address at college, the ribbon from her corsage, even the butt from the cigarette her date had smoked at the dance. On top of these treasures she had melted a thick layer of wax, to preserve them. The experiment had been rathera disaster, with everything losing its colour and shape and floating dispiritedly in the viscous blue fluid. Still, her memory candle was all she had left of her graduation prom, and she meant to keep it. She had bought a large scrapbook for college, and she intended to save every souvenir that came her way from the social life she was going to have. She looked forward to that social life because she knew it would be her last chance to have fun and play the field, because when she graduated she would get married and settle down.
A good college was as much a planned part of Emily’s path to a good marriage as the years of tennis lessons and the resort hotels had been. But college meant something else, and although she didn’t say anything to her family for fear they would laugh at her, she sometimes dreamed of an alternate life. She wouldn’t marry until she was twenty-five. That was really old; maybe she’d make it twenty-four. Before she got married she would go to medical school. The dream stopped there. She didn’t know if she would have the guts to go all the way: intern, resident, actually practise medicine. But she had gotten into one of the best colleges in the United States, and she could study anything she wanted to, under the best professors. She’d always been interested in medicine, and she liked helping people. Perhaps she could be a pediatrician and work with little kids. It was an image that was both intellectual and feminine. And maybe she could marry a doctor and they could work together. He would work with grown-ups and she with children, and then at the end of their workday they would eat dinner together (prepared by their cook), and they would compare their experiences.
‘Is that the only bathroom, the one down the hall?’ Her mother’s voice brought her out of her daydream.
‘I don’t know,’ Emily said.
‘Well, don’t leave your towels there. Someone will use them and you’ll get who knows what. And put paper on the toilet seat.’
‘Yes, Mom.’
‘And don’t use that awful bathtub. Take a shower. I don’t care how much you try to clean that bathtub, it’s not the same as home.
‘Okay.’
Her father was looking at his watch. ‘We’d better get going. She’s a college girl now, she can take care of herself.’
‘Don’t forget to eat the fruit I left you,’ her mother said. ‘Bartlett pears, apples, and those seedless grapes you love. They’re all washed. Share them with the other girls, you’ll make friends fast.’
Emily watched from her window as her parents got into the taxi they had called. It moved away, and suddenly she wasn’t homesick anymore; she was filled with excitement. The adventure was beginning.
She inspected the dorm. Girls were still arriving, struggling with their luggage up the four double-flights of steep stairs. Freshmen had to live on the top floor because they were the least important. Downstairs, on the main floor, there was a huge living room with a fireplace at either end and dark, gloomy-looking furniture. There was a large entrance hall with a desk and switchboard at one side, next to the front door, and a little mailroom on the other side of the front door, with a cubbyhole for each girl, where she would receive mail and phone messages. Off the large main entrance hall there were two card rooms where bridge tables and chairs had been set up, and further on there was a cheerful dining room with a lot of windows in it, a fireplace, and doors leading to the dormitory kitchen. There was a phone booth on the first floor, and some more rooms down a long hall to the side.
That afternoon there was a meeting in the living room and all the rules were explained to the new freshmen.
Curfew was at ten o’clock. Freshmen were allowed two one o’clocks a week. On Sunday night you could stay out until eleven, so it was obvious that Friday and Saturday nights were the ones to use your late privileges. You were given a key. In the front hall of the dorm, next to the door, there was a sign-out book. You had to write down where you were going, what time you left, and most important, what time you came back. You were not to lie. If you came back after one o’clock–and you would be caught one way or another–you would have to go before the House Committee, an elected group of girls from your dorm who would mete out your punishment. The punishment was Social Pro, which meant you had to be upstairs at eight o’clock for however many nights they decided, and you could have no dates. Naturally you could not have visitors, since men were never allowed upstairs in the dorm under any circumstances.
The work program, which they all had to participate in to keep school costs down, consisted of waiting on tables in the dorm dining room, scraping dishes, and answering calls on the switchboard, a job known as Bells. Upperclassmen usually got Bells, because it was much more desirable than working as a waitress. You had to work for two hours two days a week. When on Bells you would buzz the girl who had a phone call or a caller–each room had a buzzer and a light over the door for calls, and there was a phone in the laundry room on each floor. If the girl wasn’t there you were to leave her a note in her mailbox. Since men never asked to be called back and it was unthinkably pushy to return a phone call, Bells wasn’t as hard as it might have been because you didn’t have to write down numbers. Emily decided that if possible she would never get stuck waiting on tables at breakfast because she hated to get up so early.
In the evenings after dinner the House Mother would serve demitasse in the living room, a ritual known as ‘gracious living.’ It was important for a Radcliffe girl to know how to live graciously and to be a lady. Blue jeans were never to be worn to class, nor in Harvard Square, nor to dinner in the dorm. Since Emily didn’t own any, that question was academic. Nor could you wear slacks or any other sort of pants to class, even in the snow.
Smoking in your room was forbidden. There was a smoker on each floor.
Everyone was handed a mimeographed schedule of the week’s events. In the morning they would register for classes, and there would be conferences with their college advisors about their possible choice of majors. Some courses were mandatory, like Freshman English, which was composition. They had to take that one at Radcliffe, but they could take all their other courses at Harvard if they wished. Emily definitely planned to.
They were not to go into the men’s dorms with a man unless there was a third person in the room to act as chaperone, or, of course, if it was a party. This was a rule of the Harvard houses, and they could get the men into trouble if they broke it, not to mention getting into trouble themselves. They laughed at that, because they all knew what it meant.
This week they would also take the fire rope-test, to show them how to get out of the dorm in case of fire, and the swimming test. You couldn’t graduate unless you could both swim and float, so you might as well get it over with as soon as possible. Emily wondered if knowing how to swim and float were also necessary attributes of being a lady.
She looked around the room at the other girls. At high school the girls had tried to make themselves look exactly alike, but these girls all looked different. She had heard regional accents for the first time in her life, and she thought what a miracle it was to be living in a dorm with girls from all over the country, people she might never have met if she hadn’t come to college. There were so many strangers here she didn’t even know their names yet, and she wondered which ones were Jewish.
After the meeting was over the girls milled around casually, getting to know each other. Emily felt shy and went upstairs to her room to get her cigarettes. She had brought her own little ashtray from home, and because she felt too timid to go into the smoker she sat on the floor outside her room and lit a cigarette. Just this one, she told herself, and the next time I’ll go into the smoker and meet some people. She was sure the other girls felt as shy and strange as she did, but still she wished someone would come up to her and start a conversation.
Two tall, beautiful girls came up the stairs chatting. One had long red hair, the other blonde. They were unmistakably not Jewish, she could tell that at a glance. They stopped in front of Emily.
‘Well, I guess we’re next-door neighbors,’ the red-haired one said. She had a southern accent. ‘I’m Annabel Jones.’
‘I’m Emily Applebaum.’
‘I’m Daphne Leeds,’ said the beautiful blonde one. She spoke as if she had a mouthful of hot potatoes and Emily could tell she was some kind of supergoy socialite. ‘What a pretty name …’ Daphne said. ‘Applebaum. I never heard that before. What kind of name is that, German?’
‘Um, I think so,’ Emily said. If she knew it was Jewish she probably wouldn’t talk to me anymore, she thought. ‘Are you two roommates?’
‘No, Daphne’s two doors down. Neither of us have roommates. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, you brought an ashtray!’ Annabel said. ‘How smart of you. Well, I’ll just share it.’ She fished a cigarette from a pack in her skirt pocket and sat on the floor beside Emily. ‘Did you ever hear so many silly rules in your life?’
Daphne sat on the floor beside them and blew a perfect smoke ring. ‘I thought they had rules at Chapin,’ she said, ‘but this is ridiculous. After all, it’s college. What a bore.’
‘We’re allowed to smoke in the hall,’ Emily said quickly.
‘I know,’ Annabel said. ‘I mean all those dating rules. If we’re going to do anything we can do it before ten o’clock just as well as after.’ She laughed. ‘What incredible hypocrites.’
‘I’m not looking forward to that fire rope-test,’ Emily said. ‘Do you think we have to jump out the window?’
‘It can’t be too bad.’ Daphne said. ‘It’s in the gym.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, anything that’s in the gym is bad,’ Annabel said.
Emily giggled in relief. ‘Oh, do you hate gym too?’
‘I loathe it. I like to ride horses, but mainly because I like the drinking that comes afterward.’
Emily looked at Annabel in amazement. She had never met anyone so sophisticated and worldly in her life. She could just picture her in riding clothes, like someone in a movie, being escorted into a hunt breakfast by two tall, handsome young men. Did she drink mint juleps? Champagne?
Annabel finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in Emily’s ashtray. ‘I happen to have a little care package in my room,’ she said. ‘If you two wish to join me. If dinner is anything like lunch I think we should fortify ourselves first.’
What did she mean, Emily thought, liquor? Certainly her mother didn’t make her pack fruit.
The three of them went into Annabel’s room. It was an identical cell to Emily’s, but there the resemblance stopped. The room looked as if she had lived in it for a year. Cashmere sweaters and tweed skirts were tossed on the chair, across the bed, dropped on the floor. A few things hung in the closet. Shoes, unpaired, were scattered on the closet floor, and there was a jumble of makeup and toilet articles on the dresser. All the drawers were open. The only thing that was neat was the bookcase. Annabel had obviously brought her most treasured books from home, and had put them in order on the shelves. There was a complete collection of the Oz books, all the Winnie the Pooh, the complete works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. There was a portable phonograph on the floor, and next to it a pile of old 78 rpm Noel Coward records. Annabel put on ‘Someday I’ll Find You,’ and pulled a box out from under the bed. It contained water biscuits, caviar, a tin of smoked oysters, cheese, and two splits of champagne.
‘You didn’t,’ Daphne said.
‘I did.’
‘We’ll get expelled our first day,’ Emily said in delight and terror.
‘Go get your toothbrush glasses and we’ll lock the door,’ Annabel said.
The champagne made Emily slightly tipsy. She could tell that Daphne and Annabel were used to such things because they didn’t look high at all. She didn’t feel so shy now, and she thought how incredible it was to be here with these two from such a totally different world and to be getting along with them. In many ways Daphne and Annabel were different from one another–their accents for one thing–but in other ways they seemed the same. Both had gone to fancy schools. Both were Wasps. Both were rich, and had a careless self-confidence Emily knew she would spend years trying to attain. But Annabel was warm and friendly, while Daphne seemed aloof. She was pleasant enough, but it was hard to tell whether she was just being polite and well-bred or if she really liked you at all.
‘Are you coming out in Atlanta or New York?’ Daphne asked Annabel.
‘Atlanta,’ Annabel said. ‘But I might go to the Grosvenor Ball.’
‘Oh, do,’ Daphne said. ‘Then you can come to my party before. I’m having a supper at the Maisonette.’
Emily had never met anyone who came out. She’d read about it in the newspapers, skimmed over it really, because it was of no interest to her and had nothing to do with her life.
‘Are you coming out?’ Annabel asked Emily. She shook her head, feeling a little embarrassed. ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Annabel said quickly. ‘You can meet all the same Harvard men right here at the great high point of Orientation Week, the Freshman Mixer.’
‘Freshmen,’ Daphne said. ‘I don’t want to meet freshmen.’
‘Upperclassmen will crash, you wait and see,’ Annabel said. ‘They’re all here, right in their dorms, waiting to see the new crop. That’s us.’
New crop, Emily thought. They were like flowers, opening, waiting to be discovered and picked. It was all so romantic, frenzied and short-lived, their wonderful college days. She tried to imagine the men in their dorms, waiting to meet her, waiting to fall in love. How great to be eighteen with a whole world of men out there, hoping to find her, hoping to be found. Somewhere was the right one, the one with whom she would fall in love. She had four whole years of parties and mixers and Jolly-Ups and football games and dates to find him. Someday I’ll find you, moonlight behind you … It was just like in that record Annabel liked so much.
The next day Emily had a meeting with her freshman advisor. It was a fair-sized walk to the Radcliffe campus where her meeting was scheduled, and a long walk to the Harvard campus where most of her classes were, and Emily could see she was going to get a lot of exercise. Many of the girls were getting bicycles, but she was afraid of bikes ever since she had fallen off one as a child. Besides, your skirt kept getting in the way. She didn’t mind walking. There were so many new things to look at, and Cambridge was really pretty, with its cobblestone streets and all those historic little old houses tucked away behind fences and gardens. Even the Radcliffe Yard–she had to remember to call them ‘Yards’ not ‘campuses’–had a sense of history. She could picture the first brave women who’d gone there years ago, in their hats and long skirts, arms full of books, seeking higher education and all the things that were forbidden to women, walking down these same paths beside the same manicured lawns, entering the same venerable red brick buildings, even fingering the same books in the library. In those days women didn’t have much choice: if you went to college you hardly ever got married–you just became an intellectual, a bluestocking. But now of course you were expected to go to college, if you could get in. Life certainly was better for women now in the Fifties.
Her advisor was an attractive middle-aged woman named Mrs. Tweedy. ‘Sit down, Emily,’ she said pleasantly, looking through a folder she had on her desk. ‘I see you came to us with an excellent academic record. Have you thought what you’d like to major in?’
Emily took a deep breath. ‘I’d like to take premed.’
‘Premed?’ Mrs. Tweedy looked surprised.
‘I thought I’d go to medical school. I’ve always been interested in medicine.’
‘Well, now, let’s see …’ More exasperatingly slow looking through the folder. ‘You want to be a doctor?’
‘Well, yes.’ She didn’t know why she was starting to feel so silly. Why couldn’t she have an exciting career? She was eighteen and the world was ahead of her.
‘You had four years of math in high school, four years of biology, but no chemistry. You didn’t have any chemistry, Emily, you’re way behind.’
‘Nobody told me you were supposed to.’ Now she was really feeling embarrassed, as if she had suddenly been revealed as a pretentious fool. ‘I could take it now and make it up, couldn’t I?’
‘Well, I suppose that would be possible,’ Mrs. Tweedy said with no enthusiasm. She looked up at Emily with an air of weary patience. ‘People who want to be doctors plan their careers, Emily. You haven’t had any advice, haven’t made any plans. You can’t decide to be a doctor just like that.’
‘I know …’
‘Let’s be realistic. You should major in Social Relations. You can take lab psychology, you’d like that. And you’ll find the related courses very interesting. Then if you want to you can go on to graduate school, and then do social work. That way you can have a normal life and a part-time career if you want it.’
Emily had heard the girls talking about Social Relations. It was supposed to be a gut major. A social worker wasn’t glamorous or exciting. That was only a step removed from what her mother did with her free time–volunteer work. Her mother had never gone beyond three years of high school.
‘I think you’ll enjoy Social Relations, Emily,’ Mrs. Tweedy closed the folder and patted it, as if she’d just tidied up Emily’s life. She smiled, and her face took on that confidential look older people put on their faces when they were going to let you know how much they knew and how little you did. ‘If you’re so interested in medicine, Emily, you marry a doctor. You’ll meet a lot of very nice young men here who are going to be doctors. The Harvard Medical School is one of the best in the country.’
She stood up and held out her hand. Emily shook hands with her and left. She walked slowly back to the dorm through the cobblestone streets and she no longer felt like a part of the great history of intellectual women; she felt like a dimwit. Life was out there, and she was on the outside looking in.
Marry a Doctor; good-bye Emily. Her parents would be delighted, and Mrs. Tweedy would feel that in five minutes she had solved all Emily’s problems. She could be The Doctor’s Wife. She could run a nice home so that he could do his important work in peace. She could bring up his bright children. And if she got bored she could do part-time social work. What was so terrible about that? Marrying a doctor had always been half of her daydream.
Emily felt confused and miserable. She would never be anybody on her own. She would only be important because of her relationship with somebody else. That was what marriage was; you made a good catch. What was wrong with that? She didn’t want to be a doctor. Chemistry was boring. She hadn’t really tried, so why did she have this dull, letdown feeling that she had failed? She had exposed too much of herself, she had revealed that she was a silly person. She decided that she would never talk about her dopey ambitions again.
At lunch in the dorm dining room Emily sat with Annabel and Daphne. They introduced her to a new girl, Christine Spark, who was called Chris, and who it turned out had the room on the other side of Emily’s. Chris, Emily was relieved to note, wasn’t frighteningly pretty or sophisticated. She had a neat, quiet plainness that was reassuring, and her clothes looked like a school uniform, as if she wanted to pass through life unnoticed. Emily remembered seeing her at the train station on her way to college. Chris’s mother had been obviously drunk. At the time it hadn’t made much of an impression on Emily because she had been concerned with her luggage, and besides everyone knew that the goyim drank like fish.
Over a buffet lunch of asparagus on top of soggy cornbread covered with a gloppy white sauce, a meal none of them could eat, they talked about what they were going to major in. Annabel was going to major in English. Daphne was going to major in Fine Arts. Chris was going to major in Medieval History. When Emily told them she was going to major in Social Relations none of them seemed to think there was anything wrong with that. Social Relations and English were the two most popular majors.
‘Isn’t it nice that we all know what we’re going to major in already?’ Daphne said. ‘It saves so much time. Now we can concentrate on important things, like men.’ She smiled to show that she was kidding. They all knew Radcliffe was going to be very difficult and they would have to work hard.
‘Let’s go downtown to the doughnut shop,’ Annabel said, pushing her untouched plate aside. ‘I’m starving.’
‘I have some fruit in my room,’ Emily offered.
‘Oh, good,’ Chris said. ‘That’s not so fattening.’
‘You don’t have to diet.’ Emily said in surprise. ‘You’re so thin.’
‘Yes I do,’ Chris said. ‘I’m careful.’
How odd she was, Emily thought. When you looked at her straight, mousy hair tucked behind her ears, and her scrubbed face, and those horn-rimmed glasses with fingerprints on the lenses, you’d think she couldn’t care less about how she looked. But she evidently cared a little. She supposed nobody was impervious to the demands of society, even Chris.
By the end of Orientation Week all the girls felt more at home, less scared. They had chosen their courses, figured out how to get to the necessary buildings without getting lost. They had bought their school books at the Harvard Coop, which was like a combination of the largest bookstore and office supply store that Emily had ever seen. It was in Harvard Square, which was to be their city, with Harvard on one side, the mysterious place of knowledge and men, the reason most of them had come here in the first place.
Harvard! Radcliffe had its own cachet as the best of the Seven Sisters, as the seven top women’s colleges were called, but a lot of people had never heard of it. But when you said, ‘It’s part of Harvard,’ then everyone knew.
Emily, who had never had much school spirit before, bought a crimson and white Harvard banner and put it on her wall. They had all furnished their rooms with bedspreads, lamps, cushions, rugs, and individual touches, some from home, some bought here. Daphne had taped up small museum reproductions of famous paintings and prints. Annabels’ room remained in the same disarray it had appeared in the first day, and since she never once made her bed no one knew if she had bought a bedspread or not. Chris was the only freshman on the floor who hadn’t bothered to fix up her room at all. Her only purchase had been a good floor lamp. Her room looked like a monk’s cell, and she liked it that way.
Annabel had gotten her hands on a copy of the Harvard Freshman Register, which contained not only photographs of each of the boys, but their home addresses and the names of the prep schools they had graduated from. That book was the most pored over of any book in the school, with girls rushing in and out of her room to choose the ones they wanted to meet.
The girls in the dorm were mixing more with each other. Emily had met some Jewish girls, and she felt at home with them. Daphne had found some more debutantes. But because Emily, Annabel, Daphne, and Chris had met at the beginning, and because their rooms were all in a row, they had a certain closeness. They got in the habit of sitting on the floor together outside their rooms to smoke. Emily thought how amazed her mother would be to see her with such unusual friends.
The four of them sat together during the Dean’s speech to the new freshman class. ‘Look at the girl to the right of you,’ the Dean said, ‘and the girl to the left of you.’ They all looked at each other and smiled. ‘Each of those girls was the valedictorian of her senior class,’ the Dean said. ‘The competition will be far different here than it was in the schools where you came from. You will be up against the top students in the country. You will be expected to work very hard.’
Imagine, Emily thought, this big room all full of leaders. She began to feel inferior again. Annabel’s father was a famous heart surgeon, and Chris’s father was a chemistry professor at Columbia. Daphne’s father was the senior partner of the leading prestigious Wasp law firm in New York. And her father owned a chain of shoe stores. Her parents weren’t intellectuals. All those other girls seemed to have come out of generations of power and birthright. They’d all gone to private school. She wondered if she could keep up. She really wanted to do well.
‘Education for education’s sake,’ the Dean was saying. ‘For the enrichment that education can bring to your lives …’
Not for careers, is what she’s saying, Emily thought. To be a better person, an educated person. It all seemed simple now. You always had to try to be perfect. Your cashmere sweater sets had to match the colors in your plaid skirts, your hair and nails had to be perfectly done, you had to be polite, witty, sympathetic, interested. You had to be interesting. Getting good marks and a good education was just another part of it. She was glad that at last she understood. A good education was never wasted.
Chapter 2
Annabel Jones was putting on her makeup for the Freshman Mixer, the culmination of their Orientation Week. The ritual of preparing for a dance or a party was almost as much fun as the event itself. There was always an air of anticipation before it, the knowledge that tonight anything could happen … She had washed the scratchy little bathtub and taken a bubble bath, slightly nostalgic for her great big tub at home where she could stretch her legs out. Her auburn hair, freshly washed, gleamed. She had chosen her favorite black taffeta dress with the swirly pleated skirt, and it was lying on the bed. She put on the second coat of mascara and dabbed Arpège on all her pulse points, and then into the cleavage made by her strapless bra. There was a stack of Noel Coward records on her phonograph, playing sweetly, and she hummed along with them, dancing around her room by herself, her happiness rising. College was strange and new and a bit frightening, but this ritual, at least, was familiar.
She loved parties. In a room full of men, with music playing, she felt suffused with giddiness, a mad euphoria that made everything anyone said seem funny. She was tireless, she loved to dance. She knew there would be nothing alcoholic to drink at the Freshman Mixer, but she didn’t mind, she didn’t need it. She would just have to walk in the door to be drunk with happiness. Parties always affected her that way, and she thought it was her destiny to be a debutante forever, a southern belle, to go to dances, to flirt, to be held in a man’s arms and whirled around and passed on to another man who was waiting. She always felt the center of attention at parties. She knew she was beautiful; people had been telling her that for years. But more than that, she gave off her own excitement. She loved men.
She slipped into her dress and, holding it together with one hand, went to the room next door to be zipped up. Emily wasn’t there, so she went to the next room to Chris. Chris was sitting in bed, reading, wearing her pajamas.
‘My goodness,’ Annabel said. ‘Are you sick?’
Chris looked up, those huge glasses sliding down her nose. ‘No,’ she said calmly.
‘Would you zip me up, please?’ Chris did. ‘Why aren’t you getting ready for the mixer?’
‘I’m not going,’ Chris said.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t feel like it.’
Annabel sat down on the foot of Chris’s bed. ‘Don’t be shy,’ she said. ‘Everybody’s scared. Those men are more nervous than we are.’
‘I’m not scared,’ Chris said. ‘I hate parties, that’s all.’
‘Hate parties?’ She was astounded. ‘Why?’
‘People saying silly things. You can’t get to know somebody when you dance with him for two seconds. At a party when you talk to someone he’s always looking over your shoulder for somebody better. How would he know the difference?’
‘Well, you just look him straight in the eye like you would a snake,’ Annabel said. ‘That’s how they charm snakes, you know.’
‘I thought they played the flute.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ She jumped up. ‘Let’s pick you out a dress, and I’ll help you do your makeup if you want. I love to do makeup.’ Poor Chris, she thought, she’s probably afraid she’ll be a wallflower, and I’ll bet someone was really wretched to her once.
‘I didn’t bring a party dress,’ Chris said matter-of-factly.