by Seth Lerer
There were no posters, no announcements, no calls. Somehow, we knew to assemble at 10 p.m. in the College of Letters Lounge. There must have been a hundred of us from the dorms, from classes, from Billy’s school in DC, and, too, there was the Hungarian. There was no stage, no curtain, and no furniture. Billy strode into the center of the room, cleared a space, and the play began.
He ate the cucumber sandwiches with an aplomb that showed that he’d been eating them all his life, and when he spoke to Algernon’s manservant, Lane, it was with an ease that must have come from living with a household staff. The first act brought out Ernest and Lady Bracknell, and the quiet, overweight girl found her voice behind makeup and costume that had made her unrecognizable to her classmates. We sat, rapt, listening to Algernon on Bunburying—on how his character traveled from city to country, acting out different lies, different personae—and to Ernest revealing that he was Jack in the country, and then to Lady Bracknell, who, upon interrogating Ernest about his having lost his parents, turned to the audience and intoned: “Both? To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune—to lose both seems like carelessness.” We howled, and when Ernest revealed that he was found in a handbag, her incredulous intonation—a handbag?—turned this young girl into the very essence of dragonhood.
We couldn’t wait through intermission, clamoring for the next act, and then the next. We nodded in our undergraduate self-knowingness as Cecily explained that she could only love someone with the name of Ernest. We held our breath for Jack and Ernest to reveal themselves as one, for Cecily and Gwendolen to fall in love again, for Miss Prism to reveal that it was her bag, that she was writing a three-volume novel, that she was the governess of long ago. Prism! Lady Bracknell called, and Merle Kummer sidled across the stage, her face a mask of late-Victorian humiliation, and we all applauded.
The genius of a great performance is to get you to imagine yourself in it. I looked around the room and saw the Chasubles and Prisms, the girls who would grow up into Aunt Augusta, and I saw how they looked on, mouthing the words of the play, seeing themselves in character. I looked at all the handsome boys, some of them still in prep-school penny loafers and crewneck sweaters, others in denim work shirts and barefoot. I looked at Billy, beaming at his great theatrical success, mugging at the lines and twitching joyously at every laugh. But this was not my play. I thought of you and Mom, playing in Blithe Spirit, The Rivals, The Odd Couple; tried hard to see you on the makeshift stage. And I imagined you both, at the play’s end, turning as Jack and Gwendolen turn to each other:
JACK: Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?
GWENDOLEN: I can. For I feel that you are sure to change.
That night, we sat in Billy’s room, replaying all the scenes, drinking champagne and smoking cigarettes, and miming all the accents. But when I tried to play, Billy just looked at me. “The line is immaterial,” each word transformed from its original into a slight so deep that I thought I would never heal.
My first semester ended in the winter of the oil embargo, and the campus turned down the heat in every building to save money. January intercession had been canceled, spring semester would start late, and we prepared for an unanticipated stretch of six weeks back at home. Some of the boys were going to Florida, or to Europe, but I was getting ready to head back to Pittsburgh, looking for a ride to Bradley Field and the Allegheny Airlines flight. Two nights away, and we were packing up, talking about the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War that autumn. A few of our classmates had left that October, flown to Israel on a day’s notice, claimed right of return, and enlisted in the army. At least one was dead. We talked about whether we should have done that, and I looked around at boys whose names were only shards of Jewish selves: Larry, Jon, Mark, Bill; Green, Fink, Ross, Coplon. One of the boys admitted that his parents had been Jewish, but he’d never been Bar Mitzvahed, never studied Torah, didn’t even know the prayers. The RA—a blunt senior who had spent the whole fall studying for his LSATs—stood up and announced, “Well then, we’ll have to give you a Bar Mitzvah now! Lerer, you’re in charge. Get the gear, I’ll get the book.” The RA banged on everybody’s door and woke them up—“Get up, Bar Mitzvah in ten minutes!” I went into the bathroom and dislodged a roll of toilet paper, strung it out and pulled off three foot sections, draped them around everybody’s shoulders, and drew blue lines with my ballpoint on the ends. We put on any hat we had—furred ones with ear flaps, an old man’s fedora, Billy’s straw boater—and at one in the morning we assembled at the head of the dorm’s hall, the nineteen-year-old Bar Mitzvah boy, the RA, and me, all in our toilet-paper tallises.
Bar’chu et Adonai hamevorach
Baruch Adonai hamevorach le’olam va’ed
Baruch atah Adonai, Elohenu melech ha’olam,
Asher bachar banu mikol ha’amim
Venatan lanu et torato,
Baruch atah Adonai
Notayn hatorah
Someone pulled out a Bible, and we got the Bar Mitzvah boy to read the passage I had read for my own Bar Mitzvah five years before: the story of how Abram became Abraham, the story of God’s covenant with the Jews, the lessons of the circumcision. He read in English and I remembered the Hebrew then as precisely as I remember it now:
V’yehi Avram, ben tishim shana, v’tesha shanim. V’yerah adonai, el Avram, v’yomer elav: Ani el shaddai, hit haleach l’fanai, v’hiyea tamim.
And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Lord thy God; walk before me and be perfect.
We called each of the boys up for an aliyah, and I renamed all of them: Greenberg and Finkelstein and Rosenbloom and Kaplowitz; Lebel and Yankel and Mendel and Velvel. They doubled over as I blessed them in their toilet-paper tallises and earflaps. By now the noise of celebration had roused the floor above us, where the girls lived, and they came down in their Lanz nightgowns and Dr. Scholl’s sandals. One girl, who had grown up in Barbados, ran upstairs and came back down with a couple of bottles of red wine and half a dozen oranges and a wash-bucket, and she poured the wine and cut up the oranges to make sangria, which we passed around and drank in sacramental service. On the sidelines, Billy stood there, in his silk robe and lit cigarette, and when I paused to look him in the eye, he took a drag and said, “I’m told my father was a Jew.”
As the ceremony drew to its close and we had made that night another Jewish man, the girls turned to me and said, Sing something Jewish! The sangria bucket was empty and wine-red flecks bled into the blue lines on the tallises, and they turned to me, and even Billy cocked his head. And thinking of the only song I knew, the song you sang on car rides and in restaurants, the song that made us clap along, I sang:
Az der Rebbe Elimelech
Iz gevoren zeyer freylach
Iz gevoren zeyer freylach Elimelech
Hot er oysgeton di tfilen
Un hot ongeton di brilen
Un geschikt nokh di fiddler drey.
I mimed the lines, becoming giddy as I took off my tallis, replaced my glasses, and called at the end: Where are my fiddlers three? Lebel, Yankel, and Mendel turned on their heels and bent their knees and mimed their fiddling, dancing and twitching, and I kept on singing:
Un az di fiddledike fiddlen
Hobn fiddledike fidlen
Hobn fiddledike fidlen hobn zey
And as the snow fell in Connecticut, the cinder-block hall ruptured into one of Chagall’s roofs, and green with wash-bucket sangria we danced.
That winter break, I wandered around Pittsburgh, looking into bookstores near the university, driving past my high school haunts. My grades came in the mail: B’s all around. Seems that I simply didn’t get the purpose of this great books program; seems that I didn’t understand just what it meant to “keep a journal” in these classes. Keep a journal, said the Hungarian. Maybe the other kids had gone to schools where the phrase meant somet
hing like, write personal, sensitive essays on the books we’re reading, type them up, and hand them in, but to me it meant scribble down what you are thinking when you think it. I wrote about The Importance of Being Earnest and the Bar Mitzvah. I wrote about how alone I was and how I thought that you were seeing someone else, and what did Mom think. I wrote of how I showered in the evenings in the gym, afraid of running into Billy. I don’t know what my teachers made of this, but they seemed as baffled at me as I was with them. It was six weeks before second semester would begin, and all my high school friends were back at their own college campuses by early January. By then, you were off on business trips again, though there was that one evening when you stayed for dinner. Mom made the shrimp dish that I liked and the big salad with the Green Goddess dressing. She was too exhausted to eat. You were, as you reminded us, “cutting back,” and my brother, who was fourteen, had spent that year eating nothing but SpaghettiOs. So I was left to eat the whole meal by myself. At one point you looked me right in the eye and said, “Have you thought about a sport?”
A sport? I’d done nothing athletic in high school, managing at one point to get out of senior gym class all together with a doctor’s note that Mom had forged. Wesleyan was hardly a sports school—the football team hadn’t had a winning season in years, and a bunch of students were petitioning for ultimate Frisbee as a letter-eligible activity. As far as I knew, the only sport that mattered around campus was women’s field hockey, and that was largely out of the desire to watch eighteen-year-olds at this newly coed college run around in tartan skirts with sticks. Then there was the crew. I’d seen them in the autumn, rowing on the Connecticut River in the afternoons, curly-haired white boys rippling out of a Thomas Eakins painting.
Sure. I’ll sign up for crew.
I called the athletic department and was told that training would begin a week before the term. I packed my books and records and my clothes and got a plane, got Mom to drive me to the airport, and flew to Bradley Field and paid a taxi forty dollars to drive me to Middletown. The dorm was closed up and unheated, but I managed to get let in by a passing janitor. I still had my room key, and I threw my stuff down. Then I thought: I’d never rowed a boat.
The crew was filled with boys who had been rowing since they were thirteen. Kent, Choate, Andover—all the prep schools had teams, and these boys came to it as naturally as I came to complaining. There was no chance of getting in a boat. But the coach looked me up and down and said, “What do you weigh?” I shaved a little off. One-thirty. “Drop ten pounds and you can be the cox of the lightweight boat.”
I spent the first weeks of the semester losing weight, talking to students about just what a cox did, and running down whatever I could find about how the shells worked, what an ergometer was, and how I was supposed to steer the boat. I’d hang out in the boat house, looking at the pictures of the crews from past years, all the way back to the 1880s. There were the boys, looking much older than I looked, I thought, in striped jerseys and big mustaches, posing with the oars. Each year the mustaches got smaller, the parts in their hair inched from the middle to the side, and the boys seemed younger, until by the 1920s they were totally clean-shaven, posed in profile with the oars, looking altogether like the casting call for a Noel Coward play.
I bought a sweat suit and wore it constantly, imagining that I could sweat the pounds off. Afternoons, I’d be at the Nautilus, pushing the lead weights with my legs. I skipped lunches, trying to imagine what would help me shed the weight the fastest way possible. One day, I ate nothing but prunes. By mid-February I weighed one twenty-four.
The coxswain is the only person facing forward in a scull. His primary responsibility is to steer the boat. In our shells, there were wires soldered to the rudder, and I held one in each hand, pulling to move the rudder and direct the boat. The cox’s job, as well, is to call out the stroke, keep up the pace, and urge the rowers on. A shell’s speed is measured in the strokes per minute. Thirty-two is a good clip; thirty-six, and we pulled a wake. To keep the stroke, I had a stopwatch tied with string over my right thigh. The coach taught me to count the strokes over thirty seconds, and then multiply by two. I’d call out, “pull, pull, pull,” and with each word the eight boys facing me would pull deep on their oars, then lift them out of the water at the stroke’s end, turn them so that the blade shot back flat over the surface, and then turn them back so that they caught the water just below the surface for another pull. The really good oarsmen would know just how deep to set the blade, maximizing pull and minimizing drag. They’d know just how to twist the oar to get the blade up (this was known as feathering). Watching a really good eight, you’d see them seamlessly working as one, pulling and feathering, moving the boat forward in a perfect skim, breathing together.
Mine was not that boat. The boys knew how to row, but they were off in synchrony. The blades dipped unevenly. The feather was low. Once, during practice, one of the boys caught a crab: the blade dipped in the water as he was returning to the start of the stroke, the force of the boat moving forward snapped the whole oar back, and—like Archimedes’s lever moving earth—the handle took him in the chest and threw him out of his seat into the water.
Eventually, we learned to pull together, feather high, and sail across the river at a comfortable twenty-eight strokes per minute.
The rowing season was the last eight Saturdays in term. Each of those days, we would get up at 5 a.m. and jog down to the boathouse. Carefully, we’d lift the shells into the trailer, secure them, tie red flags to their tails, which projected three feet beyond the end of the trailer, and then get into a school bus for the drive to the meet—Williams, Amherst, Worcester Polytechnic. By ten o’clock or so, we’d be unloading with all the other schools, getting the shells in the water, trying out the oars, and lubricating the locks. Then the lineup, the call, and the gunshot.
Pull, pull, pull. Take it up to a thirty-two. Feather high.
We lost every race. At one, in Worcester, we were just crossing the halfway mark when the winning boat finished. Because I was the only one facing forward, I was the only one in the boat who could see how far behind we were. Of course, the oarsmen would look back and, seeing no boats behind us, knew we were losing. They just didn’t know by how much.
When we raced at Williams, we were nose to nose with one boat, somewhere in the middle of the pack. We couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet away, and I was worried that our oars would interlock. We were pulling a thirty-three, and the boys were breathing together, and we matched the stroke of the boat next to us, so close that I could see the brown of the other cox’s eyes. And then he looked right at me, turned back to his oarsmen, and yelled, “Take ’em,” and with six perfect pulls, they disappeared.
The final meet for the small colleges was the Dad Vail Regatta, held on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. It had been going on for nearly forty years and was named for Harry Emerson “Dad” Vail, the coach at Wisconsin. Anyone who raced there simply called it “the Dad.” The event was famous for the competitiveness of the rowers, the beauty of the river, and the historic boathouses along the Schuylkill, where the colleges would be hosted. Two days before the race, we loaded up the boats, our clothes, our gear, and drove south out of Middletown, along the turnpike, into the Bronx, across the bridges, down the parkways, and through New Jersey into Philadelphia. The trailer had been loaded up with all four of our boats, each one named for a onetime coach at Wesleyan. My boat, the men’s lightweight eight, was the Garafalo. We followed in the school bus, making good time at fifty miles an hour. We knew we’d never win, but we talked about the other schools, and famous rowers, and some legendary boats that could, word had it, pull a forty stroke per minute rate throughout a race.
About half an hour north of Philadelphia, someone said, Look! And we looked and saw the trailer with the boats fishtailing behind the pickup truck. The restraining pin had obviously come loose. The balance of truck and trailer was off and the whole assembly was weaving back
and forth across the highway. We watched in silence as the driver tried to get back in his lane, and then, as he seemed to right himself, the trailer swung out to the right and the tails of the boats, flags flapping in the wind, clipped a telephone pole, which sheared them off like a band saw cutting through balsa. The rear three feet of all four boats went skittering along the shoulder of the highway.
Our bus stopped immediately, and we watched the truck and trailer slow down, finally halting a quarter mile ahead. We got out and saw the shell ends strewn on the shoulder, each one just long enough to show the whole name of its boat. I picked up the Garafalo, not knowing what to do with it, and simply held it, realizing that these sweet shells could never be repaired.
I don’t remember much after that. I think I recall the coach shooing us back into the bus and getting us to Philadelphia and into a dorm room for the night. The next morning, we toured all the boat clubs on the river, trying to secure replacements for our race. We finally found a club that let us use their boats. They were big, heavy, old things, thick with shellac. We lifted them and strained under their weight. When we got out to practice, the oarlocks creaked. We sat at the dock, watching the racers in the early heats: Massachusetts, La Salle, Marietta. Young men with veins that seemed as thick as my wrist pulled at the drive of each stroke. I had the stopwatch and I timed them: gunshot, then ten strokes that calculated to a forty-two, then settling down into an easy, loping thirty-eight, and then, for the last quarter of the race, a set of strokes that worked out to close to a forty-four. These heats took half the time of our New England races, and I turned to face the eight boys in my lightweight boat, looking at me at that moment, for the first time in the season, hungry for guidance. Men, I said. We’re going for form.
