Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  As the morning progressed, our technique improved, with Peter teaching us in pairs the elements of the stroke: hands away, back bent, slide to the front…feather with the left hand, pull with the right, push from the balls of the feet. Unable to stick together, we practiced in twos, then in fours, shifting from the pairs in the bow of the boat down to the ones in the stern. We learned to straighten our arms, stiffen our wrists, lengthen our slides, loosen our grips, and focus our eyes on the back of the neck of the person directly in front. We were told not to swat the ducks on the river and not to catch a crab, the act of snagging an oar in the water that is the rowing equivalent of dropping a relay baton. All the while, Peter pedaled along the bank, shifting from one side of the river to the other, and barking orders in his roughneck style and his stiff-lipped accent.

  “Hey, Charlie Chaplin, keep your head still.”

  “Number Seven, Goofy with the red hair, keep your mouth shut and your head still.”

  “Who’s that—one, two, three, four, five. Five, what’s your name?”

  “Bruce.”

  “Bruce, straighten your back, you look like you’ve fallen over like a sack of potatoes.”

  As we drilled, moving past the boathouses to the long reach and circling back again, the river gradually became more and more congested, like sinus passages succumbing to the flu. Novice boats from two dozen colleges lurched forward in two opposing lines—down the river to the right; up the river to the left (the opposite of British coaches and pedestrian crosswalks). The boats were indistinguishable from one another, except for the colors of each college painted on the blades: gold for Clare, violet for King’s, red for St. John’s.

  At nine o’clock, as our session neared its end and the river began to decongest, Peter announced that he wanted us to try our first informal “piece.” In a piece all eight row at once along a set course and attempt to simulate strenuous racing conditions. For us it was an effort to capture some of the magic of rowing after several hours of drills. We positioned ourselves under the railway bridge, heading back toward the line of boathouses near Midsummer Common. Peter dismounted from his bicycle and stood like a fleet-footed, gold-plated Mercury ready to sound a trumpet.

  “I want to do this piece until you get knackered,” he said. “Cox, take your commands from me. All eight…”

  “Eight.”

  “At backstops…”

  “Backstops.”

  “Half pressure. Full slide. Are you ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Row.”

  “Row.”

  In a fit of adrenaline, we stormed up the slides as fast as we could and dropped our oars in the darkened water, pulling, pulling through the muddy river until our blades sprang free at the end. The lunges were grossly uneven at first, with blades springing free bow-and-stroke in an unsyncopated dog-paddling style that was neither stylish nor mean.

  “Stick together,” Halcyon pleaded.

  “Slow the slide,” Peter cried. “But don’t give up the work.”

  Within several strokes of the awkward start, the boat began to steady with pride and a rhythm began to emerge. Away with the arms, forward with the back, up with the wrists, through with the legs. Back with the blade, ahead with the slide, in with the catch, out with a feather. With each stroke the separate components of each maneuver began to give way to the collective will of the crew. E octopus unum: Out of eight, one.

  “Keep up the work, lads,” Peter called from behind. “You’re almost there.”

  “Almost where?” Halcyon cried. She turned her head to search for our coach, who had begun to climb a bridge and switch sides of the river. “Peter, Peter,” she called. “Where are we going?”

  In that moment of indecision, the octopus lost control. Peter had been left in the wake and Halcyon left alone at the helm. The lads, meanwhile, kept paddling away, streaking toward the footbridge several strokes away where the river curved abruptly to the left and narrowed to a stream.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Max, the stroke of our boat who sat directly in front of the cox.

  “We’ve lost our coach,” Halcyon said.

  “Well, tell us to stop,” somebody shouted.

  “What do I say?”

  “Ahead Eight!”

  The cry came from our rear, which was really our front.

  “Stop your boat, Clare.”

  “I’m trying,” Halcyon whimpered. “Stop. Help! Pull in your blades.”

  Just as she cried, our blades slapped against an oncoming boat with the deafening patter of a giant castanet. As the boat lunged toward a willow weeping over the bank, my oar plunged breathlessly into my gut, and a blade behind me snapped off at mid-stem, somersaulting in the air and landing with a splash beside Charlie Chaplin, who was bobbing at mustache level in the middle of the Cam. And in that chaotic moment, as some of the boys began to curse and others began to laugh, as all of us turned toward the other boat and recognized the terrified faces of the Clare Second Novice Ladies’ Crew, a four-foot swan with a fire-hose neck burst from its haven beneath the willow tree, flapped its wings in a frightened fury, and skipped across the water with a trumpeter’s squawk because it, as we, was unable to fly since its wings had been clipped.

  “Good day, ladies,” said Charlie Chaplin when the swan had settled back on the water and our oars had come to rest. “Would you like to join us for a Crew Meal next month? We promise to make this up to you. We’ll even buy all of you pints.”

  “I hear you went swan hunting on the Cam today.”

  Simon came to my door later that evening snickering about our misfortune. Since our meeting beneath the alphabet signs, he had begun to stop by my rooms regularly—usually offering a presupper cocktail, or seeking a postpub nightcap. Though tall enough to visit pubs from age twelve, Simon had the kind of fuzzless face that would make it difficult for him to order drinks until well past the age when he would be eligible for his M.A. degree.

  “You must know that you need a license to hunt birds in this country,” he said, “and nobody—not even you—is allowed to touch the swans: they belong to the Queen.”

  “Practice is at six tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll be glad to find you a spot.”

  “I’ll leave the swanning to you…” he said.

  “And keep the sharking to yourself.”

  He looked at me with bemused surprise as he flopped down in one of my grey easy chairs, stretching his flare-bottomed, blue-jeaned legs halfway across my bed. “How do you know that word?” he asked.

  “Sharking, you mean? It’s all the boys in the boat talk about. Who sharked who, and what sharks do, and how to exploit our status as rowers to shark a ladies’ boat. I’m telling you, rowers catch much more than crabs. You ought to give it a try.”

  “I’ve already got my hands full, I’m afraid. But I see you’ve had some success in the sharking department.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Your lovely Chinese neighbor.”

  His remark caught me off guard. When I first met Halcyon, I had considered sharking her. She was attractive, un-Britishly friendly, and she had an accent so captivating that during our earliest days at Clare I would often keep my door open when she was in her room and even keep my mouth shut when she was in mine. Gradually, however, I relinquished the idea of coming on to her as she began actively coming on to me first. I first became concerned about this otherwise appealing idea, when, just days after we met, Halcyon asked me why I had sat with Simon at dinner instead of sitting with her. Several days later, she asked me why I hadn’t come home until one o’clock in the morning. And finally, just a week into October, she asked me if I would agree to be her date to the Clare May Ball. Faced with the prospect of this long-term shark, I suddenly wanted “just to be friends.”

  “Halcyon?” I said to Simon. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Besides, you should know better than to get involved with the girl next door.”

  He smiled. “I wouldn’t be
so sure.” Turning away, he quickly surveyed my room but seemed disappointed by what he didn’t find. “Mind if I have a drink?” he said.

  “Don’t tell me you’re a lush as well.”

  “There’s no sin too great for me,” he said, producing a bottle of whisky from underneath his baggy navy blue sweater. “I am lost in a sink of depravity.”

  “Those are pretty big words for an engineer,” I said.

  “I know, but I don’t know what they mean, so I can use them.”

  I put down my copy of Clausewitz’s On War and went to fetch a glass from the gyp. Simon kicked off his scruffy black brogues and unscrewed the top of his bottle. A product of an English public school—a kind of boot camp for the elite—Simon carried himself in the slightly disheveled but still preppy manner that makes little old ladies and their pubescing granddaughters go weak in the knees. Like most boys who come of age in these all-male nunneries, however, Simon’s sexual education was anything but genteel. Arriving at Marlborough at age thirteen, with a warning from his father to avoid buggery, Simon was thrust into a world of adolescent fantasies and porn magazines, hormonal surges and communal showers. In one common stunt Simon told me about, a group of boys stand half-naked in a circle and masturbate over a piece of bread, which the last person to ejaculate onto is then forced to consume. Many graduates of these schools come out terrified of sex; others, like Simon, come out consumed with it.

  “Aren’t you drinking?” he said when I returned.

  “I’m in training,” I said, laughing before he could. “Anyway, you sound like you’re the one with the trouble.”

  “I just got a letter from Japan,” he said.

  “From your mother?”

  “From my girlfriend.”

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “Neither did I.” He took a gulp. “But now I seem to have more. She says that we’re engaged.”

  While he was in Tokyo preparing to come up to Cambridge, Simon indulged in the principal expat hobby and picked up a Japanese girl. With other girls in other stops on his round-the-world Grand Tour, Simon was able to pursue his fancy with complete discretion. In Japan, however, he was living at home. “My mum would die,” he said. “She idolizes her son. She’s something out of the last century.”

  One day, about a week after the affair started, his father came to his room.

  “Son,” he said, “I think we should have a chat. Your mother and I think you are looking very tired lately. You’ve been coming home about—what did you say?—two o’clock, and then you don’t emerge until midday. Well, that’s about ten hours of sleep. Your mother is concerned that you’re on drugs.”

  “I took a deep breath,” Simon said, “and stretched my arms just like you do when you’re about to tell a big lie.”

  “Dad,” he said. “There’s a reason why I look so tired. There’s a girl living in my room.”

  “Well,” his father said. “That’s better than we expected. Is she on the pill?”

  “Of course, Dad, of course.”

  “Is it serious?” his father asked.

  “I guess not,” his son answered. “We went to bed on the very first date.”

  Simon had broken off the affair when he came to Cambridge, but with this letter it became apparent that she did not understand. In fact, she had broken off an arranged betrothal to devote herself to him.

  “I guess I have this problem,” he said. “Girls fall in love with me.”

  “Some problem,” I said.

  “I know, but my father advised me to have casual affairs while I was at Cambridge.”

  “I suppose he doesn’t want you to settle down too quickly.”

  “But when you move around as much as I do, you begin to wonder if you can only have casual affairs. You begin to wonder if you can ever fall in love. I’ve already had this happen to me several times at Cambridge. I go to the pub, consume large amounts of alcohol, and have a really great conversation with someone—you know, ‘true love’ and all that—then we go home and have it off. I’ll see them several days later and they won’t remember.”

  “So it’s not exactly true love?”

  “Guess not. They’re just casual affairs at the pub on the way to a wife, two-point-three kids, and a commuter train to London. My life is so programmed. I wish I had more stimulating conversation. This is Cambridge, after all, the cream of the crop.”

  “Aren’t you impressed with your classmates?”

  “Not really.”

  “They’re not smart?”

  “Oh, they’re plenty clever. They’re just not interesting. We all came here expecting to talk about world politics and philosophy, but in truth all we talk about are the shows we watched on the telly when we were three. I haven’t found anyone here that I like as much as Emiko.”

  “Well then, maybe that means you can fall in love.”

  “I hope not,” he said. “I can’t stay celibate until Christmas. After all, I’m only human.”

  Simon took a last sip of whisky, doffed his imaginary cap, and lumbered out the door. Seconds later he was back with a knock.

  “Mr. Feiler,” he said, employing the mock deferential tone he used to remind me I was almost old enough to be his father, “I hope you enjoyed our little conversation.”

  I assured him that I did.

  “Good,” he said, “because I blew it. There was a note on my door upstairs.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. I’ll probably forget by tomorrow.”

  “Well,” I said. “You can’t complain. You asked for conversation.”

  “Wrong,” he retorted. “I can complain. I asked for stimulation.”

  III

  TOURING

  Cons and Dons

  This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,…

  This happy breed of men, this little world

  This precious stone set in the silver sea,…

  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

  —Shakespeare

  Richard III, 1592

  On the first day of Michaelmas Term the weekly student newspaper Varsity led with the sensational headline, HOAX LEAVES FRESHER NO PLACE TO GO: MYSTERY RECRUITER CONS AMERICAN STUDENT OUT OF $5,000. The story, written with a dramatic flair verging on the tragic, told how “Cynthia Shepard,” a twenty-three-year-old American from Miami, arrived in Cambridge at the beginning of term to study English literature at Corpus Christi College, only to find that officials at the college had never heard of her.

  Distraught, the teary-eyed Floridian explained that she had been approached the previous spring by a man claiming to be a recruiter for Cambridge University. He produced “official-looking brochures” and a “curriculum prospectus,” she said, and even made her sit a two-hour entrance examination. When the man announced she had passed the exam and produced a letter of acceptance, Cynthia gladly paid him five thousand dollars to secure her place.

  “Duped into payment from her own savings by the smooth-talking American,” the newspaper reported, “she gave up the chance of a $20,000 scholarship at the University of Miami to chase her dream of studying at Cambridge.”

  Unlike Varsity, the university itself was not moved by Cynthia’s plight and insisted it could not find her a place.

  “Really?” editorialized The Sun, one of the nation’s largest tabloids. “All Cambridge University cannot find room for ONE girl. Cambridge bombards American alumni with appeals for money. It should show it has a heart as well as a begging bowl.”

  The university, however, showed no heart. Ignoring the national crusade and the potential international scandal, it refused to alter its regulations and Cynthia Shepard was sent back to Florida with no degree from Cambridge.

  “It can’t be helped,” Terry the Philosopher-Porter said to me when we discussed the story. “I’m afraid we have procedures up here. If the young lady would like to understand how we do things here at Cambridge,
she should sign up for the tour.”

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Cambridge. It’s up to you to make clear to me how I can make your afternoon most enjoyable and edifying. My name is Roger and I’m here to please you.”

  Roger Alabaster, Esq., was a veritable vision of tweed. His limbs were long, his neck was narrow, and his nose was twisted like a banister. His thinning hair hung over his pedimental forehead with the wisp of a schoolboy awakened from a class-time nap. At Terry’s suggestion, nay insistence, I decided to take the “Official Blue Badge Tour of Cambridge” before I got caught in a social faux pas and before I had become such a “Cambridge man” that I would be embarrassed to be seen with a pack of tourists mispronouncing Magdalene, which sounds like maudlin, and complaining that the beer was warm. Halcyon, my fellow outlander, asked if she could come along.

  “We want to see the most historic spots,” blurted an American woman dressed in tennis shoes and a brand-new sweatshirt from Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

  “The most historic spots?” Roger repeated. “You’re asking for trouble. I thought there would be a shower of cries for the well-known frothy stuff: King’s College Chapel, Trinity College, perhaps a glimpse of Clare College. But these are in fact not the most historic spots. You see, the oldest college is only thirteenth century, but the oldest part of town is twice as old as that….”

  He paused to let the effect linger.

  “I think what we’ll try to do is get the famous buildings out of the way and see if we have time for more. But don’t fret, you will get to see some history as well, although I warn you, you need very skilled eyes to spot the really interesting parts of our history, the really obscure signs. That’s why you’re lucky to have me as your guide.”

  At the sound of the two o’clock chimes, Roger led the group of two dozen to a small medieval church beside the central market. When we arrived, he began an extended paean on the nuances of construction materials—the buildings in town were built from rubble, he said, so they had fallen into disrepair; the ones in the university were built with stone, so they still stood for viewers to enjoy. As he spoke, clearly enjoying himself, Roger rocked back and forth in place in a manner that resembled a wobbly lectern. His vowels echoed upward, his r’s genuflected, and he enunciated every polysyllable of his polysyllabic vocabulary.