by Packer, Vin
STAFF SGT. SADLER: “Back at home, a young wife waits.” (ta dot, dot, da!)
THE BEATLES: “You don’t know what you’re missing.” (twang!)
STAFF SGT. SADLER: “Her Green Beret has met his fate.” (ta, dot, dot, da!)
THE BEATLES: “He’s a real nowhere man.” (twang!)
“Shep?” “Hmmm?”
“What are you doing?”
“What am I doing? Listening to your creation, Dan. I mean, I’m not coming because of it, or anything.” “You’re not sitting up and could toss a robe over me?” “Negative.”
“Okay. I freeze to death.” “It’s like the end of spring out.”
“I hope it lasts through Friday. Who you dragging to the Rabbit Hop?” “Lois.”
“Did Blouter give you his permission?”
“That rule doesn’t apply to the school dances, just the ones we give here at the house. I don’t need his permission.”
“I forgot. The school doesn’t object, just the fraternity. It takes a heap of anti-Semitism to make a home a house.”
“Thorpe, she doesn’t give a damn and I don’t either.”
“I’d like to figure out what you do give a damn about.”
“Work at it, then … If you care so damn much, why don’t you depledge?”
“Termites work better from the inside than the outside.”
“Oh, I see. You’re going to change things.”
“I’m going to try, Shep. I hope that in four years when I leave this place, no Pi Pi pledge will have to ask if he can date a Jewish girl.”
“Yawn.”
“Or even a Negro girl.” “Snore.”
“Very blasé cat, aren’t you, Shepley? What does get you excited?” “Sex.”
It was at this point in the conversation that Pi Pi Pledge Director Peter Hagerman charged into the room.
“What are your names, farts?” he barked.
Thorpe jumped to his feet. “I’m Daniel Quentin Thorpe the Third, sir.”
Charles stood up too. “Charles Shepley, sir.” “Charles Shepley what, creep?”
There was no love between Hagerman and Shepley, but Shepley knew some things about Hagerman instinctively, as an animal will sometimes be oversensitive to the quirks of another animal, a hostile animal. Shepley knew that while it was common practice to address the pledges as “Fart” Hagerman hated saying the word. Hagerman could make almost any other scene, but not that word; that word made him choke.
“Charles Shepley is my name, sir.”
“Your name is Creep.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s your name, Creep?” “My name is Creep, sir.”
“You’re a liar, pledge. Your name is Fuckface.”
“Yes, sir. My name is Fuckface.” Good. Hagerman could handle that, and it had a nice, virile sound to it. Hagerman looked relieved. To Shepley, the word was comical; he wondered if he could control an impulse to grin. Hagerman told him not to, with one black look. What was it between Hagerman and him? Hagerman had seemed to dislike him instantly. That had been very clear during the second night of Rush, when Blouter had taken Shepley aside and said, “Charles, officially we’re not supposed to ask yet, but how about it? Are you with the Pi Pi’s?”
“Yes, thanks.” Handshake; he was pocket-pledged.
“Fine, Charles!” and Blouter had pounded Charles’s back and called over Peter Hagerman.
Hagerman was very short; he had that certain tortured Mickey Rooney expression a lot of little men possessed, who seemed comfortable only when they sat down, and posed for photographs on stairways standing one step above a woman to be taller than she was, and as boys had stuffed paper in their shoes to seem taller; and Hagerman was a clotheshorse, like so many of them; he was one of the few Pi Pi’s who had real diamonds in his diamond-shaped Pi Pi pin.
And that night he had not said, “Oh, good!” or “Glad to hear it!” or anything superfluous, but simply, “Where you from, Shepley?”
“New York.”
“City?”
“Yes.”
Blouter, hungry always for yaks and fun, had interrupted. “He has a gas of an act, Pete. Charles, do the imitations.”
Which always made it awful, a command performance, bark like a seal, be funny like a new pledge all the brothers are crazy about, and Charles prefaced what he said with a shrug he had not planned on, and heard his own voice make very dull something which was often very funny. “I collect rumors. I imitate someone, and you have to guess the rumor.”
“Let’s hear,” said Hagerman, poker-faced, cracking his knuckles impatiently, as though he wondered how Blouter could ever have gotten him into this.
“Well, here’s one: You’re loaded now, doll; get some sleep and then call me at Peter’s. Don’t forget now; be sure to call no matter what.”
Charles had screwed up the line and his Boston accent had come out poorly. Blouter said, “You changed it,” disappointed.
“I’m not with it, I guess.”
“Who is it?” Hagerman asked.
Blouter said, “What famous contemporary martyr was supposed to be with what famous contemporary suicide, on the night of her demise?”
“Bull!” said Hagerman. “I heard it was Bobby, anyway.”
And he had walked away, and Charles had thought to himself that he would get even with him for it one day, which was a very unCharlesy thought circa Rush Week.
“Fuckface,” said Hagerman, “I think I’ll give you the news first, because you’re the one pledge who’s going to see a er-really big shew, so hear this, Pledge Fuckface: ‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!’ “
Beside Charles, Dan Thorpe moaned.
What Hagerman was saying was that The Divine Comedy had begun. During World War II, Hell Week had been abolished by the F.P.C. fraternities as adolescent behavior. For about twenty years the frats had been Goody-Two-shoes’, hustling their pledges down to Far Point’s Negro district with food packages and tool kits with which to make house repairs, instead of beating their balls red, and leaving them barefoot in their jockey shorts on back roads a hundred miles from the house. Then in the sixties the Greeks had held a series of solemn conclaves given over to philosophizing about why frat life no longer had any real p’zazz, and was not what was happening anymore at all on a campus, and a Deke said frat life had started turning off when the traditions were taken away one by one. Bring them back. Bring back Hell Week; call it angel food cake, if necessary, but order up those wooden paddles and fix up those old bloodletting rituals, and the tears would be back again in the eyes of the men receiving their pins in the initiation ceremony. This would make for bigger and better alumni donations in the future; Keep Greek Town Green.
A Beta said the only safe way to get away with it, since the President of F.P.C. was not a frat fan, was to cut Hell Week down to a few days, give it another name, and have it at separate times.
Pi Delta Pi chose to have it at a different time each year in order to keep the pledges in suspense; they organized it into a three-day period. The Divine Comedy began with the Day of Inferno, during which the boys were hazed in whatever way the Pledge Director devised. The Day of Purgatorio followed — the pledges were assigned various duties, some benefiting the community, some the house, some a Pi Pi date’s car or the rec room of her sorority house, or the front sidewalk of a female dormitory. On the last day, Day of Paradiso, Pi Pi pledges became members. Membership usually carried with it a special surprise for each pledge, a particular thing he wanted. Last year, Bud Burroughs had been presented with a life-size, cut-out photograph, mounted on cardboard, of Ursula Andress. Made from a film clip of The Tenth Victim, it showed her in a silver bikini, with a blazing bra revealing two guns blasting bullets at the pull of an underarm trigger.
At the announcement, in Italian, “Abandon hope, all ye that enter,” the pledge was notified that The Divine Comedy would commence in exactly twenty hours; he was to answer, in Italian, “Conosco i segni dell’ anti
ca fiamma.” (I recognize the signals of the ancient flame.) The Pledge Director would then present him with his individual itinerary.
But Charles Shepley stood dumbstruck; despite all the drills in pledge class, he could not remember a word of the Italian response.
In the background,
STAFF SGT. SADLER: “Put silver wings on my son’s chest.”
THE BEATLES: “He’s as blind as he can be.”
STAFF SGT. SADLER: “Make him one of America’s best.”
THE BEATLES: “He’s a real nowhere man.”
STAFF SGT. SADLER: “He’ll be a man, they’ll test one day.”
THE BEATLES: “YOU don’t know what you’re missing.”
STAFF SGT. SADLER: “Have him win the Green Beret.”
THE BEATLES: “For nobody.”
Finally, Shepley said, “Sir? I forgot the Italian.”
“You what?”
“I forgot the Italian, sir.”
Hagerman’s face got very red; he began clearing his throat, a sure sign he was trying to bring himself under control so his words would not come out garbled. He could go to pieces all of a sudden. The pledges had seen this side of Hagerman often. Charles Shepley had seen it more often than most, but Dan had been its catalyst too. Hagerman, for example, had done a long, laudatory term paper for American Civilization on Peter Dawkins; and Hagerman’s grim countenance that afternoon had not been softened any by the blasphemous rendition from the Webcor atop Thorpe’s bureau.
“Thorpe?” said Hagerman. “Thorpe?” “Ye-yes, sir.”
“ ‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!’ “ “Ah. Um. Cocono … Ah, I know this, sir, like the back of my hand, if I may just go slowly.”
“You may not, you goddam fuckface Vietnik! Spit it out!”
“Cocono … cocono … I — I’m blocked.”
“Spit it out!”
“I can’t, I tell you!”
“Spit it out, you prick! You get those wop words out of you, you mother!”
“Coco … co … co …”
Thorpe stopped like a train unchugging and coming to a halt; he stood there, his tall skinny body shivering — he was always cold, even in the middle of summer, and goose bumps began on his arms. He rubbed them, studying them tenderly, as though the poor things were awfully sick and needed him; his pinched-in little waist barely assumed the responsibility of holding up the silk polka dot shorts. Every now and then Dan jerked them up above the waist; it took some seconds for them to start the very slow descent.
Hagerman took two manila envelopes from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket with its leather elbow patches. He looked around the room until he spotted a wastebasket.
“Empty that basket on your bed, pledge.”
Charles sighed; it was a bad day for this. He had emptied his electric pencil sharpener in there; he had ripped up into hundreds of little pieces his weekly allotment of three letters from his mother, who was thirty-five minutes, or fifty cents, away from him, yet still wrote, sometimes six pages back and front, and he had emptied the ash trays that had collected for days in the room. Old tube of Crest. Empty packs of Marlboros. (Dan, who didn’t smoke, always said, “Come to Marlboro Country where the big C is boss!”). Empty package of Lorna Doones. Empty box of Ritz crackers, not empty of crumbs. Dirty Q-tips from a vigorous ear-cleaning session. Yyikh!
He did it, bravely — he had changed the sheets that morning.
“Set the wastebasket in the center of the floor, Shepley.”
Charles had a feeling Hagerman was going to command him to urinate into the basket, something like that. He didn’t feel at all like any of that crap today. The latest letter from his mother, which he had not yet ripped into shreds, the seven-pager which he had found in his box at the house that noon when he came home for Pi Pi chili-chow had depressed the hell out of him. He had not admitted that to himself before this moment when he stood there with the wastebasket between Hagerman and himself. He could feel its bulge in the back pocket of his corduroys.
I hope you will not forget Paris, France, and the custom you learned there of pouring a little of the newly opened wine into your own glass first, to accept cork remnants which are often unavoidable, for these are the things which do impress so very much the daughters of the better class, and Charles, you know me well enough to appreciate that I do not necessarily mean $$$, for it cannot buy happiness. Though we were a happy family when we had it, for life is easier, and now we eat humble pie.
Into the wastebasket, Peter Hagerman tossed the manila envelopes.
He said, “Thorpe, you fuckface, put a match to them.”
Thorpe took out a silver lighter and rolled it to a flame, while Hagerman’s vein on the left of his forehead throbbed against the skin and his eyes bulged and he began to scream, “Is that a match, mother? Is that a mother-loving, screwing-mother match, or is that a lighter belonging to a frigging fuckface of a fruity prick?”
Still, he couldn’t handle fart. He’d probably been traumatized as a child, same as Charles. Charles’s trauma was what both his mother and father called a bowel movement. It was called a “boom-boom.” He used to blush in the middle of war games, having to run fast behind a bush, grabbing leaves to take with him; he had been like one of Pavlov’s dogs; all he needed to hear was Boom! Boom! and he fell open.
Dan had located a match; he bent over the wastebasket like someone afflicted with Parkinson’s, scratching and scratching, then finally finding a flame to touch to the envelopes.
“Those,” said Hagerman with beady eyes, “were your itineraries. Those were rather typical itineraries, even though my reaction to you is not a typical reaction, for I dare venture no pledge director in the history of Pi Delta Pi fraternity, in the history of any fraternity, has ever loathed two pledges so very, very deeply. I deeply loathe you. You are not fit to accompany the other pledges on the Inferno; therefore, I have burned your itineraries.”
For some reason, in a slow few seconds of silence that followed, Dan Thorpe croaked, “Thank you.” For what? Weren’t they depledged now?
… though I am not one to make a thing of fraternities, your father is very pleased, so pleased, really, Charles, at your being a second-generation Pi Delta Pi, and I have heard him make mention of a mother’s pin, which the mother of a member may wear, and though I am not much for cheap costume jewelry, having been used to the real thing, it would so please your father that I wonder if …
“Why did I burn these itineraries, Shepley? I loathe you so that you should feel my very thoughts frying your skin, baking their way into your yellow guts!”
“I suppose we’re depledged.”
“No such mother-loving luck, Shepley! You are on room quarantine, Shepley! You are on room quarantine, Thorpe! You are to stay in your rooms from now until the time I have sat down and put my mind to composing the most vile and fittingly degrading itineraries I have ever created. You are not to eat or take a leak or use the phone; you are in room quarantine and you are to keep it until I come back with Infernos.”
After he had banged out of the room, Shepley said, “Turn that music off! That got us into all this!” knowing full well that was not true.
“If you’d remembered, I wouldn’t have gotten rattled.”
“I’m not taking the blame for it.”
“Don’t blame my tape then.”
STAFF SGT. SADLER: “Trained to live off nature’s land.”
THE BEATLES: “Nowhere land.”
STAFF SGT. SADLER: “Trained in combat hand to heepity, heepity, heepity, yart — ”
Thorpe pressed the Off button finally; he was still shaking. When he was this way — not often; usually Hagerman was the cause — then Charles felt something for him. For one thing, Dan looked so vulnerable half-naked, skin and bones, like some old emaciated philosopher from India in diapers and on a three-peas-a-day diet until single-handed he brought about CHANGE; for another reason, poor Dan, out to save the Vietnamese from the Green Berets, and the Mi
ssissippi Negroes from the Mississippi whites, and the Lois Fayes from the Pi Delta Pis — and a five-foot runt son of a Mad Avenue ad man leaves his bones loose and rattling.
Charles said, “Hagerman’s bark is worse than Hagerman’s bite.”
“I don’t know, Shep.”
“And there are rules, Dan. He has to stay within bounds or the whole Panhellenic Society will have his head.”
“But that temper of his, Shep. Like, Pow! Zap! It gets way out of proportion with what’s happened, doesn’t it?”
“ ‘Conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma,’ “ Charles Shepley said. “Now I remember.”
“Dear God,” said Dan Thorpe, standing in the center of the room, his eyes closed, his hands palms-up, pressed together in prayer, “get Hagerman for us, Lord. Let him break his neck going downstairs, Holy Father. Smash him up some way, our Lord in Heaven to whom we dedicate our lives; I mean, really give Hagerman the business, Sir!”
Shepley walked over to his bed, carrying the charred tin wastebasket and the cardboards from two shirt backs; he began to scrape up the cracker crumbs and pencil shavings and pieces of his mother’s letter.
“God is dead, Thorpe,” said Shepley.
Three
Shepley took advantage of the quarantine to reread his mother’s letter, while Dan went to the typewriter to work on Chapter Ten of his novel, which was about a Green Beret AWOL, anti-Hemingway in its philosophy, but Papa all the way in style. It began:
Jack didn’t like war very much. He didn’t like to know there was nothing much left of the rich flat lands south of the Vaico Oriental River. He didn’t like kill ratio. He didn’t like napalm. He didn’t like Dean Rusk. He didn’t like Robert McNamara.
Natalie Shepley’s letter began:
Dearest Charles first read the piece about your brother which I have copied from New York East a small neighborhood but very good newspaper word for word. I would have sent the clipping but I wanted one for Aunt Martha and another for Aunt Agnes which left me only one for myself as I had just three copies of the paper. But I have not left a word out.
