The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  To solve the problem of Sheila, I was sent to a very posh boarding school for a while, and then to Brightwater Academy. For a couple of summers I tagged along to Europe with Daddy and the current Mrs. Grove. Somehow or other I must have got underfoot. The first thing I knew I was enrolled in a very proper school for French girls and spent my summer in middy blouses ... very giggly, girlish; and far removed from male eyes.

  This kind of life made me a book worm. Plunging into a book is for me the worst form of escapism. I guess I live in a kind of dream world. So what else?

  Since I haven’t had very much of what you might call an adjusted home life, I got the idea that if I read all of the Great Books, I might find why I had been born, anyway. Harold told me I needed God, and Daddy insists that God helps those who help themselves. I didn’t like either of these ideas. I figured God needed me ... but if He does, he hasn’t given me any indication. All my reading accomplished several things. I have been at various times, in my mind, a Unitarian, a Jew, an existentialist, a communist, a brilliant teacher, a loving wife, a whore, a dictator, and a sad-apple, which I am at the moment. Sad-apple Sheila Grove, who graduated last June from Brightwater Academy with the highest marks in the history of the school. Summa Cum Laude ... ugh! Three boys were Magna, and two girls and eight boys ... Cum Laude. My boy friends, as you can see, were limited.

  I guess I am a phenomenon ... a spook of some kind. When Daddy informed me (by telephone) that I was half a millionaire, I told him that’s nice. I’m half a virgin, too. That got him. Especially when I told him the unvirgin half was mental only, and how I was worried that even with a half million dollars I would probably end up a full time mental unvirgin.

  I guess Daddy got the message because a few days later Margaret Tenhausen asked me to lunch. Daddy, who knows practically everybody with money, knows John Carnsworth, who was spending his life giving away to mad-cap projects all the millions his father and grandfather had begged, borrowed and cheated out of sober citizens for nearly a century.

  Margaret is nice. I tried to tell her I’m rather shy and certainly introspective, and the idea of going to a college where I roomed with a boy was terrifying and scary. Margaret implied that I’d better get associated with other brainy types if I ever expected to lead a full life ... that I would be an anathema to any solid, middle class citizen who wanted a fluffy, non-argumentative bed-mate. So I agreed and for two solid days I took every test the half-witted psychologists ever devised to find what makes another human being tick.

  I must have met whatever standards Harrad is looking for, because here I am. Daddy knows. He laughed when he called me from Dallas.

  “Relax and enjoy it, Sheila,” he said. “I think the Tenhausens have a splendid idea. Maybe if I had got it as a balanced arrangement when I was a kid, I might have got it out of my system, and still be happily married to your Mother.”

  Knowing Daddy, I doubt it. He could never settle with one woman for life. Whatever kind of cake he is looking for, women are only the frosting on it, and he eats that first!

  If Mommy knew, she’d die of shame. Those are her words. But all her life she has regularly died of shame, so I guess it isn’t fatal. Mommy is happy to believe I am going to a nice college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mommy doesn’t know too much about colleges ... “Harrad College is a nice name, Sheila,” she said. “It sounds better than those places called universities.”

  I drove up to Harrad yesterday from White Plains in my Buick convertible. I arrived in Cambridge about two-thirty. Using the mimeographed map the Tenhausens had sent to new students, I finally located the grounds. I would guess that few people in Cambridge know that Harrad College or even the old Carnsworth estate actually exists. The estate, which must be fifty acres over all, is completely surrounded by a stone wall about eight feet high. Set into the wall and rising another two feet above are sharp iron pickets. Ivy has obliterated most of the wall and conceals the pickets. Whoever built this wall was not interested in being stared at.

  I finally located the entrance, a one lane tarvia road between two stone pillars that supported an iron picket gate. The gate was open. On one of the pillars a new brass plaque was engraved with one name: Harrad.

  Feeling a little shaky, I drove slowly along a tree-lined drive. I had entered a nineteenth century world of ancient greenhouses, manicured gardens, tall trees, and carefully mowed lawns. Here and there a water sprinkler indicated that human beings did exist somewhere. About a quarter of a mile further in, I turned into a circular drive and stopped in front of a home that looked as if it might have been built by one of the nineteenth century robber barons. It was a huge imitation of an English hunting lodge. In sharp contrast at the rear of the lodge, was a modem three story stone and glass building about five hundred feet long. I saw some kids walking in front of it and a couple of girls sunning themselves in beach chairs. This was evidently Harrad.

  Having got this far last night in my journal, I finally couldn’t stand the silence on the other side of the room any longer. I don’t really know how to write this ... it is so crazy and impossible. Here am I, Sheila Anne Grove, sitting in a strange dormitory room with a boy I never saw until this morning. A boy whose name is Stanley Kolasukas ... now Stanley Cole, because, as he told me, it was simple and he liked things simple.

  Stanley and I ate dinner with a bunch of other kids in a very pleasant wood-paneled dining room with round tables big enough to seat eight people around them. We picked up our meal cafeteria style. All I remember (I was so jittery) was taking some roast beef and other stuff that was shoved on my tray. I guess I ate it, but I wasn’t actually conscious of doing so. I wondered how I was ever going back to my (our) room with this smirking character Stanley Cole. He has wavy brown hair and his sideburns—at least an inch too long—are strictly Greenwich Village (my room-mate, God help me). I tried to keep abreast of a conversation with Harry Schacht and his roommate Beth Hillyer, who sat on one side of me. Across the table; Dorothy Stapleton and Valerie something-or-other belong (yucks, is that the right word?) to Herbert Snyder and Peter Longini. I felt like a blushing, tongue-tied simpleton. Especially so because Beth Hillyer is enough to scare any plain jane like me half to death. She has blonde hair—natural—blue eyes, a turned up nose, and everything else to go with it. I’ll bet a dollar she would be asked to pose for one of those pull-out pages in Playboy, the kind where the girl, naked, is lying half on her hips so that in one glance you can see her breasts (big) and shapely behind, with a smile on her face that says to all boys with their tongue hanging out: “Wouldn’t you like to cuddle me?” Beth has this and intelligence, too. During most of the dinner, she and Stanley carried on a long discussion about our foreign policy and the bad image the United States has created in African countries. Why the heck didn’t the Tenhausens pick them for roommates?

  Everybody was aware that I had a bad case of aphasia, and politely avoided directing any questions at me. Finally, we finished eating. Some of the kids went into a huge recreation room just off the dining room and played ping pong, others turned on a stereo phonograph and listened to Mozart, and still others went downstairs to a basement “nightclub” called the Cellar Club, where they danced to a juke box. I tried the Mozart group a while. Here, conversation was frowned upon. Stanley disappeared.

  About an hour later Stanley walked in, said he had taken a walk. He then relapsed into silence, occasionally staring at me as if I were some kind of ogre. Finally, he decided to walk back to our room with me, where the silence continued until finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I asked him if he thought I was some kind of drip.

  Stanley didn’t agree or disagree. He tried to give me the impression that girls were girls and that I wasn’t so bad. And then he, with his smart haircut, tries to tell me that maybe my hair is too tight. Of course, all the time I know that he is thinking about Beth Hillyer. Then he pulls the old chestnut that handsome men should marry homely women. I felt like hurling this journal right at his smug face
. So what if he looks like Hollywood’s answer to a teen-ager’s prayer?

  I wonder what he is writing? I’d give ten dollars to read what he has to say about me. When I suggested the idea ... real nicely . to him, what does he do but start a lot of guff about his privacy. He can have his nasty little privacy, but if I ever catch him leaving his journal around, all bets are off. Harold Tripp has some old World War II posters in his cellar with Hirohito on them looking very hideous, and underneath them in big red letters: KNOW YOUR ENEMY! Good tactics, I’d say.

  Since we were making rules, I decided to get this going to bed bit straightened out. I had wanted to ask some of the other girls what they were going to do, but between the fact that I was too embarrassed to initiate the conversation with just any girl I didn’t know, and the way the Tenhausens kept us hopping from one thing to another all day (I made appointments to talk with the deans of “A” College, and “B” University),a I never did solve the problem.

  The funny thing is that by myself I’m not really modest. I have often lain on my bed naked and read, or looked at myself in a mirror. I have even touched myself once in a while and made believe that I was both me and some nice boy who liked me, and once I must have even masturbated. I guess I did, anyway, because while it was happening it was just impossible to stop, and then afterwards I felt awful. But no one has ever seen me naked since I was old enough to wash myself, and Stanley Dreamboat Cole isn’t going to break that record ... at least, not easily.

  So, after we got these points settled, it was about eleven-thirty. I told Stanley that I was going to bed. I locked the bathroom door, did my business, brushed my teeth, and scrambled into some new pajamas I had bought. Then I turned out the bedroom lights and burrowed into my bed. I gave Stanley the all clear, but remained very rigid. Let Mr. Cole try something and he’d regret it, by gosh.

  What did Stanley do? He sauntered into the bedroom, turned on his dresser lamp, looked at me with my eyes squeezed tight, and then calmly undressed right down to his bare skin. Okay, so I watched him through my eyelashes. Didn’t I say “Know your Enemy?” Besides, I had never seen a boy naked. Stanley looked very nice. A little round-shouldered, a little hair on his chest, a very small behind, and nestled in a soft growth of hair, a fragile looking penis that wobbled when he walked to the bathroom. Somehow, he seemed much younger naked ... as if he might be a scared little kid, too.

  He finally got into his bed, still naked.

  “Good-night, She,” he said softly.

  “Good-night,” I whispered, and felt like crying. How did he know Mother and Daddy called me She ... once, a long time ago when they lived together?

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BETH HILLYER

  October, the First Year

  Three weeks at Harrad and by this time I don’t know whether I’m afoot or on horseback. Funny thing, its not the environment of Harrad that’s got me bugged. It’s trying to find time to get all the work done.

  Pops told me last summer, “Keep in mind, Beth, just because you come from a medical family you don’t have to be a M.D. Your grandfather is still practicing. You’ve got one brother interning and one in Ohio determined to make a living as a General Practitioner ... and there’s me. Four Hillyers determined to help mankind is probably enough. Maybe a very pretty girl like you should take a nice easy college course at some girl’s college, then get married and have children. After all, that’s what your mother did.”

  Pops knows how to goad me. I love Mommy and all that, but I want to do more with my life than have babies. If you’re a girl and you’re pretty, everyone thinks you should be a dumb bunny who lives and breathes just because some man (your husband) lives and breathes. Reminds me of a story by Chekov, The Darling. The poor girl in the story had no personality or individuality of her own. Just a big apher. When her husband died she had to get another in a hurry ... with each new husband she acquired a new identity.

  “Listen, Pops,” I told him. “It can be done. I love medicine. I’ve lived, breathed, and slept with Hippocrates since I was hatched. I’m going to do it. I’m going to be a doctor ... I’m going to marry a doctor ... I’m going to have babies ... and my own husband will deliver me. And when your female patients see me hang my shingle out next door to yours ... you’re going to lose them all ... especially the ones with big bellies, because I’ll know more of what’s happening in their head and in their womb than you and Gramp do if you live a million years.”

  So Pops, you can chuckle, but even this load of courses which includes: Advanced Chemistry, Sophomore Biology, German, English, and American History, not to mention the Tenhausen’s course in Human Values, in which they assign books as if there is no tomorrow, doesn’t frighten me. It’s fun. Everyday is new and exciting, with a million-billion things to learn.

  What’s more, I’ve got a roommate who is a brain ... and he looks it, too! Harry Schacht. He wears big Hollywood-style tortoise shell glasses. Since he is nearly a six-foot string bean, the thing that impresses you most is that Harry looks like someone’s day dream of a science-fiction superman. But Harry is only nearsighted. When it comes to fine print and reading just about everything that has been written, Harry terrifies me because he knows so much more than I do. But there’re compensations. In the ways of women, Harry is just a frightened boy.

  Last night when I was undressing, Harry was lying on his bed, watching me.

  “I can’t get over it,” he mused. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. The Tenhausens certainly wanted to keep the tea-kettle boiling. The only possible reason we could have been picked to room together is that we’re both planning to go to medical school. You know what the kids have nicknamed us, don’t you?”

  Naked, I jumped on his bed and landed ftat on him. He was wearing clothes, which I guess was lucky. “They call us Beauty and the Beast.” I kissed him, a quick peck, and scrambled under the covers into my own bed.

  “Don’t you think that excites me?” Harry leaned on his elbow and looked at me.

  “Sure, I guess so. Maybe I’d better not do it again. I just thought it would be nice to be friendly.”

  “Oh, gosh, don’t stop being you. I look forward to it. I never dreamed I’d go to college and have a room-mate who kissed me good-night.” Harry sighed and started to undress. “I really like you Beth ... you’re so sunshiny, and I’m so gloomy.” Still wearing his shorts, he turned down his bed.

  “Why do you wear shorts to bed?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m embarrassed to have you see me.”

  “I see you naked practically every damned day in the gym.”

  “That’s different There’s a lot of other kids around.”

  I laughed. “Your shorts don’t conceal a thing. I can see your jamoke, and it’s sticking in the air.”

  That made Harry laugh. He took his shorts off and stared at himself. Still laughing, he stared at it. “That’s a pretty good name for it. How did you ever get the way you are, Beth?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know ... so easy ... so spontaneous ... so un-embarrassed.”

  “I guess it’s being brought up in a family of doctors. In my family we call a spade a spade, and devil take the hindmost. Most doctors don’t pussyfoot around about the facts and functions of life.”

  Harry got into his bed, turned out his bed light, and we talked about an exam that was coming up tomorrow in Chemistry. By the time we finished questioning each other for more than an hour, I knew we had it licked. I think we were practically ready to take mid-years instead of a lowly lab test. “Gosh,” I said finally, “I’ve got to go to sleep. I’m not a night owl like you.”

  “Beth, can I ask you one thing?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you think you and I will ever actually have intercourse.”

  “I’m ready when you are,” I said, grinning.

  “You make it sound so casual.”

  “It isn’t going to be casual with me. It’s going to be nice
and snuggly, and lots of fun.”

  “How can it be fun with a Beast.”

  “Harry, you are not a beast. You’re a nice warm skinny boy who is scared to death because he’s living with a girL Aren’t you learning anything in the H.V. course? Love is in your head, and I am sure proud of what’s in that head of yours.”

  “You mean you love me, Beth?”

  “I like you a lot ... that’s a darned good beginning.”

  “Beth, have you ever made love with a boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh?”

  “Harry, you sound gloomy again. I did twice. With a very nice boy. He was scared and I was scared. I was sixteen. He was nineteen. I kept wondering what if I had to marry him. He was very handsome. He sang all the popular songs, and knew the words by heart. In fact, the only words he knew to make love with, he parrotted right out of songs. Did you ever hear that song, “Too Young” ... he sang it all the time, and threatened to commit suicide if I didn’t marry him.”

  “Did he commit suicide?” Harry asked hopefully.

  “In a way. He got married last year. His wife is pregnant for the second time.”

  “You must have liked him. You kept track of him.”

  “Harry,” I said, “Go to sleep. He called me last summer, and wanted to have a date. He was bored with his wife, and told me we could make beautiful music together. I told him that I loved music but was only interested in music for unaccompanied violin. You didn’t know that I can play a violin, did you, Harry?”

  “I can play the piano,” Harry chuckled. “We should try it sometime. They sound good together.”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF HARRY SCHACHT