by Ivan Doig
More steam-wrapped racks, the swift double grab and flip again and again, the plate piles multiply as if uncoiling upward out of themselves. Across the dishroom at the sink where he washes the glassware, Mister Hurd is chanting a story, as much to himself as to Archie or me. He is a plump ball of a man, somewhere beyond middle age and as brown-black as rich farmland. Only weeks before, he rode by night bus from South Carolina, wife and children left behind until he can earn their way north as well, and Chicago comes as a giant wonder to him. Tell you, I's in a big store this mornin' and I see the talles' man in my life. I's behind him and, tell you, I's lookin' at him right chere —jabbing a thumb to his right buttock.
Archie eyes across at him, seems to make a decision, carefully sets his face innocent. What you doin' lookin' at him there for anyhow, Mister Hurd? Yo, Ivory? What's he doin' lookin' at that man there, you think?
I decide too, before I can know I have done so: Tell you, Arch, he must just be seein' the sights all the time and all the time, hmm? Mister Hurd giggles for minutes, so pleased at his first joshing in this vast new life.
Rank on rank along Sheridan Road past the Northwestern campus, deep-porched houses hung forth their sets of Greek initials, much as the vital gold pin of affiliation tendered itself out to the world on the angora jut of a pledge sister's sweater.
The university's preponderant "Greek system"—I never heard the words without the echo of the expression Dad and the valley men had for being deeply baffled: It's Greek to me —seemed to be meant to bin students into housefuls as alike themselves as could be achieved. It worked wonderfully; there were entire fraternities and sororities where everyone looked like a first cousin of everyone else. And the system's snugness paced itself on from there. Rush Week to Homecoming to winter proms to May Week and with keg parties and mixers betweentimes, residents of Greek Row could count on a college life as preciously tempoed as a cotillion.
By comparison, those of us in Latham House were like bandannaed gypsies grinning rudely beyond the terrace rail.
The first fact of Latham was that the university evidently had not been quite sure what to do with the property, or for that matter, with those of us who lived there as financial-aid students. The building was a glum and aged three-story duplex which hunched by itself at the edge of Evanston's downtown area, as if too life-weary to grope across the street to the actual campus. Where Latham's exterior didn't show several decades of urban soot, it had been blobbed with grayish paint. Inside, the same gravy-like cosmetic simply had tided across the doorsill and lapped on up every wall in sight.
Here the building's odd outer look of frailty and exhaustion quickly explained itself: a colossal incision, an air shaft some six feet across, all but sawed the place in half from back to front. Behind the thin streetside bay of facade, there were stitches of connection only at the front stairwell landing and at a passageway or two which bridged the halves of the house at its top floor. Except for these quick nips seaming it together, Latham House stood divided against itself like a decrepit frigate sprung open from stern to stem, or perhaps an ancient cliffdwelling cut apart by earthquake.
If Latham tottered as a single uncertain roof over two separate hives of rooms, it also sheltered some forty wildly distinct nooks of mind. Here is Votapek on his way to a concert career, coming in from each day's practice of Chopin to walk ritually to the ancient upright piano at the back of the house and tinkle the first bars of Nola: DOO de doo DE doo de doo.... Here, Benjamin holding constant stage in the front hall, now spieling Shakespeare, now doing his impersonation of Wrigley Field—arms arced wide to be the outfield fences, eyes bulging to capacity, out of his mouth the hwaahhHH sound of a crowd heard blocks away. The same again, this time in silence: his version of an open date on the baseball schedule. Then Zimmerman, standing atop one or another of the steam radiators like a penguin on a snowbank, hands forgotten in pockets as he mulls through the visualized pages of his philosophy texts.
All of this, and vastly more, came with the mesh of tensions brought by us inside the walls of Latham. On many of us, family hopes rode heavily, perhaps as the first ever to have made it to college, or as the one to step to success in the place of a dead brother or lost father, or simply to bear the lineage out of one or another crimped corner of American life. Several—the Votapeks, the Benjamins among us—already had the fervors of artistic performance cooking in them. Almost everyone was under the gun of the high grade-point average needed to keep scholarship funds arriving.
Such pressures gave Latham House a charged, ozone-like atmosphere, at once intense and giddy. Strange fevers came and went among us. I think of the year of intramural sports dedicated to losing. It was standing policy at Latham to scorn all campus activities; Homecoming alone rated a special gesture, usually rolls of toilet paper slung derisively out the front windows of the house. However, because a number of us had come from small high schools where we had been encouraged into sports, intramurals were the exception to the boycott. But we began to field Latham teams of such ferocious hopelessness—in tag football, a cursing match and then a brawl with the team from the Episcopal seminary; wholesale evictions in the first basketball game—that we decided to work on styles of forfeit.
Sometimes one or another of us—or better, the gaudiest stand-in we could recruit from the nearby delicatessen-cafe-hangout called the Hut—would go in street clothes to present himself single-handed to the other team. Other times nobody would go at all, but the intramurals office would be phoned to insist that the other team had arrived at the wrong place or the wrong time, and to demand that our chance to meet them—and forfeit—be rescheduled. We became phantom competitors in all available leagues, avidly posted the standings which showed us automatically winless. By the last of spring quarter, our softball zeroes daisy-chaining off the end of earlier forfeits, the Latham intramural program had perfected itself out of existence.
Latham House, if any single sum can be put to it, was a scuffed, restive, Aleutian-atoll of a place to spend one's college years—and every whit of it suited me. Friends from then tell me now, and the evidence of habit still is with me, that in the Latham gallery of behavior I was something of a machinelike student. I was asked a dozen times in my first two days at Latham whether I had just come out of military service, so much beyond an eighteen-year-old freshman did I look and behave. In the year I roomed with Zimmerman, stubby and even more baldish than I was beginning to be, the pair of us stood out like a pair of solemn veteran sergeants among green recruits. However gleefully I could join in epidemics such as the obliteration of intramurals, I was careful about what went on in my head on a regular basis. College—learning—was a job I recognized I could do well, and I did it: typing up my course notes and working on systems of underlining and outlining until I had private, handcrafted texts all my own; bearing down hardest where it counted most—the journalism curriculum, and history courses; chanting Russian verb declensions to myself as Archie plunged the rack-loads of dishes through the machine to me; and running a second, random-as-ever education for myself in offhand books alongside the coursework.
Northwestern was tagged at the time with the reputation of being a "country-club university"—an epithet as exotic to me as profanity from Mars; Greek Row was ridiculous, but not mandatory—yet it also had redoubts of famous professionalism in its schools of music, speech, and journalism. In the school of journalism I tapped luck one more time, drawing as my advisor a new faculty member named Ben Baldwin. A cherub-faced man with a passion for work, he had among the batch of students assigned to him a handful of us from the West, and recognized at once our small-town capacity for chores and perseverance. Again, as under Frances Tidyman's gaudy wing, I was given encouragement and answered with effort.
One thing further I gained from Latham House and Northwestern—a room of my own, the first of my life. Throughout Latham's welter of odd-angled walls and random hallways were a few leftover pouches of space which had been made into single rooms, and in my
junior year I qualified for the Shoe, a tiny top-floor room nicknamed for its shoebox dimensions. There was barely space to edge into the Shoe between the cot crowded against one wall and the dresser against the other. The metal clothes closet for the room stood outside the door in the hallway, like a fat man thwarted by a narrow gate. My first act of occupancy was to congest the Shoe further: I saw the chance to swap its spindly desk for a huge, handsomely-shelved one down the hall. With the biggest accomplice I could recruit, I emptied the Shoe of all its furniture, dismantled as much of the pirated desk as I could, wedged the rest into the room and across the far wall, and reassembled the great piece to bulk there like an oak galleon in a bottle. Alone and thoroughly outfitted, I levered my grades up more, multiplied my reading. Across the shelves of my vast desk, Dinesen began to murmur beside Faulkner, Turgenev to tip hats with Wilder.
Dearest Ivan. Well dear toe are done at McTaggarts. Dad gave him notice last nite that we'll stay on another week more. Then dear we are going back south to Ringling to live. Its so awful lonesome up here what with you gone away and no place of our own. The darned old days are longer than ever. Dad don't mind so much as he is with McTaggart or out and doing somewhere but he says he is willing to go we don't have anything here to hold us. So when you come home Christmas come on the train to Ringling. Can you cash in the one train ticket for the other.... Your loveing grandma.
Dearest Ivan. Just some lines to tell you we are counting the days till you come home for summer. I am at the Higgins ranch outside Ringling with Dad now. Cooking for the crew. Dad says he can get you on the crew here for summer. That way we can be all together for a while again there is a place upstairs in the cookhouse here for you to sleep. The job will be haying mostly they put up a whole lot of hay.... Your loveing grandma.
Behind the bale stack, the pair of us sat waiting for the morning to inch on. Jeff swore steadily, like a sewer gurgling after a downpour: sparrowheaded sonofabitch him anyhow. ...'II show the bastard, he can keep his goddamn stack fences and do the sonsabitches hisself.... Jeff was burly, bright-nosed with decades of boozing, tobacco-stained at the corners of his mouth from the splatters he exploded to punctuate the cusswords. His forehead sloped back under his greasy hat, and his mind sloped off into hatreds and furies I could scarcely imagine. In the bunkhouse after breakfast, he had crossed tempers with the rancher as the day's work was doled out. It had been only an instant, Jeff going hard-mouthed as quickly as he had flared. Now, the two of us sent out together to fence haystacks, he had been in eruption all morning, in one spate sledgehammering posts into the ground as if he were a fence-building machine, in the next plopping behind the haystack to curse some more. I know he's the world's bastard to work with, Dad had said, but he's an old hand on this place and if you say anything against him, there'll be hard feelings for all three of us. Stand the scissorbill if you can, will ye? I thought back to my farming summers at Dupuyer and Valier, alone on a tractor with the north mountains to sight on over the silent rich pattern of fields, and began to count the time—July suck-egg sonofabitch August never seen such a jangled-up spread half of September brain like a bedbug— until I would step abroad the train toward Northwestern again.
***
Back from whatever chore had taken me into Ringling, I turned the ignition key to kill the motor of the pickup and stared with dread at the cookhouse. Then I stepped down and went in to say what had to be told. Dad quizzed me with a quick look. It's Angus, I said. I heard it in town. His horse fell with him while he and the boys were working calves. They've got him at the hospital in White Sulphur. My father whitened and whispered: Just-like-Jim. But there was to be a grim difference: this second brother of his to die off the back of a horse lay unconscious for more than two years before the last life went from him.
Each trip to and from Northwestern hinged into a midmorning wait between trains in St. Paul. I made it a habit to leave Union Station and walk the neighborhood, nosing into a used-book store, dawdling over coffee in one half-awake cafe or another, and going at last back toward the depot along a hill street overlooking the Mississippi River, which I liked for its great fjordlike channel gouging through the city.
The coldest of these mornings, as I stood at the river overlook a last minute, a noise scuffed close behind me. I turned quickly to find two tan-skinned men tottering in broken shoes and wavery caps and dirt-stiffened blue jeans.
Buddy, the bigger and less drunk one began to recite, you ever heard of Ira Hayes? Ira Hayes was Navajo like us. Come off the Gila River Res'vation. Wait, buddy. Listen. You know about Iwo Jima in that war? Sonuvabitch island there in that war? When they put that flag up there on that Iwo Jima, Ira Hayes was one of 'em. Know that, buddy? An' he come home, big hero. An' one morning they find him dead on the ground. Like that. Drowned in his own puke. Passed out, choked to death in his own puke, buddy. Muscatel got him. Helluva way for dying, buddy. The second Navajo wobbled, tried to firm himself somewhere between dignified listening and the threatening hunch of his mate. I used the interruption, put a silver dollar in the air before me as I had one other time. This time, it was shakily grabbed.
The pitcher's mound at Wrigley Field swelled from the infield grass like the back of a giant turtle swimming in a dark green sea—and atop it, I was throwing as teeterily as if the turtle had caught the hiccups. My stride awkward on the curved height, a pitch to Grant in the batter's box would fly high and away from him, then the next one explode off the dirt two feet in front of the plate.
Schulte, behind his camera tripod, began to look dismayed. The May morning was his—his idea to meet a course assignment in film-making with a quick reel of baseball instruction, his notion that because Grant and I knew something about baseball we would be his cast, his family connection with the management of the Chicago Cubs which ushered the trio of us into the empty stadium—and his film whirring away in frames of me firing baseballs to sky and earth.
I drew a pitcherly breath, looked up at the colossal shell of grandstand roof above us, its high straight fines fitted onto the sky above the green-and-buff geometry of the baseball field. Full of inhaled inspiration, I grinned into the giddy expanse of it all and got down to business, lobbing the ball now as tamely as if playing catch with a toddler. Grant cautiously timed the spongy throws and smashed ground hits which went whopping in huge easy bounces into the outfield. Encouraged, Schulte filmed busily: lob-splak! —whop, lob-splak!—whop.
What else do toe show? he asked at last. I've got to fill five minutes of reel. I trotted to first base, poised myself a short three steps off the bag, broke for second with my left leg coming across to put me in full stride, splayed into a ragged hook slide. Twice more as Schulte shot. Then Grant fielded balls I rolled to him at shortstop, maneuvering massively as a skating bear to scoop into the caretended dirt and paw the ball across to an invisible first baseman. Each thrown ball gave off, an instant after expectation, a hard whunk as it ended its catchless throw against the grandstand, as if the geometric gravity which drew such heaves into a first baseman's glove had broken down.
Grant shortstopped on and on, his barrage of pellets thwacking against a cliff of wood. Then I jogged to the outfield and caught balls Grant lobbed high for me, the dotlike white satellite each time diving to me with surprising dazzle down the backdrop of thousands of vanished spectators. My throws, on a single bounce across home plate, skidded through to make the eerie delayed whunk, metallic now, against the foul screen.
At last Schulte doubtfully said he supposed he had filmed enough. Now, my wage in the bargain we had set. I carried a bucket of balls to home plate. Swinging a bat as hard as I could, I found I could mortar a ball to where the center fielder might stand and catch it with a casual saluting flip of his glove.
I walked from the plate, around the high bubble of pitcher's mound, to second base. Standing over the square wad of canvas, I tossed, slugged hard, and now one after another the balls flew away to arc out over the ivy-dressed outfield walls, dropping into
the bleachers in wild clunking ricochets through the empty seats. I hit bucket after bucket of them until my hands began to wear raw.
Dearest folks.... Professor Baldwin has offered me a summer ph here at college. I would he teaching and counseling in an institute they run here for high school students in terested in journalism.... It would be for five weeks, and I can earn more than I can at Higgins' all summer. But it would mean I won't be able to come home until middle of August...
Dear son.... If you want the summer job back there you ought to take it. Your Grandma and I will miss you and wish we could all be together again this summer, but it don't always work out that way. We will be happy to see you when you come home later on ... With love, Dad.
Early in my senior year, when I had begun to write fillers for a magazine in Milwaukee and when an article of mine was the only one by an undergraduate in the glossy new quarterly being published by the school of journalism, Holden, my closest friend in Latham, squinted toward me through his steady fog of cigarette smoke and said: Damn you, Doig, you're just gonna be bigger than any of us, aren't you? I thought that over, as I did everything, and faced my judgment on myself: No, Thomas, not necessarily so.
As if arguing against myself., in the spring of 1961 I finished up my intended four years at Northwestern by being awarded a scholarship for a year of graduate study. I bargained a military deferment out of my draft board, and set to work again at the school of journalism. A pair of messages markered my completion of that year. When the last pages of my thesis were handed back from their final reading by one of my research advisors, a note was clipped atop: Around 1836 and 1837, people used to stand on the dock in New York and wait for the latest installment of the Pickwick Papers. With something of the same anticipation, I've waited for and read the chapters of your thesis. The other arrived from Grandma: Dearest Ivan. Well dear one I have sad news for you. Mrs Tidaman that you liked so much at Valier died a couple days ago. I'll send you the clipping out of the Gt Falls paper when I get my hands on it. Gertie says in her letter that Mrs Tidaman fell at school and broke her hip and died somehow of that. I'm sorry dear I know she was a wonderfull person to you....
