We all wrote stories for the magazine. Now excelling in English, I fell in love with my English teacher, Dorothy Cole. She was only eight years older than I was. Look for me after school and I was erasing blackboards or doing any room clean-up chore for Dorothy, and waiting patiently until she was alone so I could call her by her first name and listen as she would suggest books that I should read. In class, she made novels like Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, Great Expectations, and Shakespeare’s plays sound so exciting that I couldn’t wait to read them, or act in them.
From six to sixteen, my interest in girls didn’t diminish. My going-to-sleep dreams were always about lovely girls I had read about in novels. They all hugged and kissed me and adored me. In reality, I was a shy, pimply faced adolescent who blushed when girls my own age spoke to me. I was reduced to girlie magazines (Playboy hadn’t appeared yet), which featured young women wearing abbreviated shorts, panties, and bathing suits. I had found my dream woman, Dorothy. I was aware, even then, that she was on the spot because everyone said that I was her fair-haired boy. She took me to local Shakespeare productions, called for me at home (to Blanche and FH’s surprise, in her own car), and never protested when I was always underfoot. Perhaps, in a way, I was her dream man, too. I loved her, but with no sexual demands.
At sixteen, just before my final year in high school, I was a rebel without a cause. An exceptional student in English, fair in languages like Latin and French, mediocre in science, and dismal in math (compare Yale Marratt in the novel), I fell in love with “Gloria,” a young girl who stayed with her aunt in Quincy during the summer. Very pretty and very sophisticated at fifteen, Gloria’s home was in Brookline, some ten miles away. Somehow, blushing, I dared to ask her to go to the movies with me. Before the summer was over, I finally had once again seen and touched a naked girl/woman and held her pretty breasts in my hands, kissed her nipples and touched the lovely triangle of hair between her legs. I was delirious, totally in love all that summer. Since I practically lived in her aunt’s house, Blanche and FH knew where I was. Of course, neither Gloria’s aunt nor uncle knew what we were doing.
I was so much in love that I didn’t care if I went to college or not. When you were kissing and hugging a girl every possible moment that you were with her, I was sure it was time to get married. It was now or never, especially since Gloria would go home to Brookline when summer was over.
I was spending much of my time conniving with my Italian friends, who all seemed to have cars, to drive to Brookline to see how the rich Brookline kids lived. I learned that Gloria’s father made $18,000 a year (multiply 1934 dollars by ten), but I didn’t discover until much later that FH made even more money from his 80-percent-owned printing company.
Even though I flunked two college boards, four exams given in those days in a modem language, English, science, and math, FH was determined that I was going to college. Harvard, of course. So, still mooning over Gloria and a mediocre graduate of Quincy High School in 1934, I was enrolled in a postgraduate course at Thayer Academy near Braintree. I was still too much in love to be intrigued by calculus, chemistry, or Virgil. Despite one more year of postsecondary education, I was no better college material than I had been in high school.
But neither I nor the deans of several colleges reckoned with FH, who proved that he could have made money selling refrigerators to Eskimos. FH contacted the dean of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and I was accepted on trial a week after classes had begun.
The reason I’m detailing my early life in this fashion is that if you read Yale Marratt, The Harrad Experiment, The Premar Experiments, or even my latest unpublished novel, “New Dawn, January 1, 2000,” you will understand some of the motivating factors in the novels and how, much later, I transformed portions of my realities into fiction. Pat Marratt, for example is a fleshier, cigar-smoking version of FH. The conflict between Matt Godwin and his father in The Immoral Reverend has many similarities.
I was still in love with Gloria. Although we had finally consummated our incessant touching and made love without condoms—I had learned about coitus interruptus—I was dimly aware, and so was she, that, at sixteen and eighteen, we could never survive four years of separation. Assuming that I didn’t have to make dates with her because we were going steady, I would occasionally arrive and discover that Gloria had gone out with some other boy.
College Days—and Nights. During the first six months at Bates, I slowly became aware that I was much more sexually sophisticated tham most of the guys I met. Very unusual for its time, Bates was a coed college. It was only twenty miles from Bowdoin, a kind of male monastery with six hundred guys who depended on special weekends when they could bring in female companionship. Thirty years later, when I wrote The Harrad Experiement, I contrasted a fraternity weekend with the saner sexual environment of Harrad. But Bates College was no Harrad. Young women went to class with you, but dating rituals soon set in. By the end of your freshman year, you were “going steady” or you were a social outcast.
Still a rebel without a cause, I detested the compulsory, presumably nonsectarian chapel assemblies which occurred every weekday morning at 8:30. As often as I could, I spent the half-hour that I was supposed to be in chapel in a local store called the Quality Shop, a few blocks away. I soon discovered a female rebel.
Bunny had widely spaced blue eyes and deep brown hair, and was as tall as I was. She was a fast learner, received straight A’s in French and fairly good marks in other subjects. She could sing and play popular music on the piano. I was soon very much in love with her, but couldn’t resist trying to remake her in my own image.
Was Bunny the inspiration for Cynthia in Yale Marratt? Not quite, but almost. Before we graduated in 1939, I was to all intents and purposes married to her. By the end of our sophomore year, we were making love regularly. Defying all Bates regulations, we sneaked away on weekends to nearby hotels and rooming houses or, in the Indian summers or early Maine springs, we snuggled together on a blanket alongside the Androscoggin River.
I was rooming with John Smith and Eddie Fishman, who were both on the dean’s list. They were known in those days as “greasy grinds,” instead of nerds. Womanless most of the time, they were amused by their romantic roommate. With their driving need to excel and learn everything, they became minor mentors in my life. Eddie was managing editor of the Bates Student, a weekly newspaper. Since there was no room for additional editorial help, I became advertising manager, persuading merchants in Lewiston to advertise their wares. After hours, the keys to the Bates Student office provided a convenient rendezvous for Bunny and me. Once a week, on Sunday night, we’d put the newspaper to bed.
One night, when there were not enough articles to fill the paper, I suggested to Eddie that we condense an article on premarital sex in American colleges that had appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine. A week later, when copies of the Bates Student trickled home to parents, all hell broke loose. The premarital sex that was detailed in Cosmopolitan didn’t happen at Bates, but Eddie was forced to resign as managing editor.
By the end of our sophomore year, I convinced Bunny to major in English as I was doing. Before we graduated, we were, with a few exceptions, taking the same courses. Always studying together, with a small coterie of friends, we became somewhat notorious. Without being aware of it, I was playing Pygmalion to a willing Galatea, who turned her $2 weekly allowance over to me, and I was conning enough money out of FH to support my “wife.”
I was spirited, but clumsy and unpredictable on the dance floor. She was a skilled bridge player, but playing cards bored me. She procrastinated endlessly when it came to writing theses and term papers, so I often wrote them for her, being careful to make her style different from mine. In my sophomore year, I took a year-long writing course, which Bunny did not take. I could imitate the style of well-known writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe, whose rebellion I admired.
Other literary rebels I discovered were Roman Rolland and his novel Jean-Ch
ristophe, George Bernard Shaw and Pygmalion, along with Bertrand Russell’s famous Companionate Marriage. The authors were all rebels in various ways and delighted me. I was also reading everything I could find—and it wasn’t much—on the vagaries of human sexuality.
Scarcely a month went by during these three years that Bunny and I didn’t think our college days would come to a sudden end. She often had irregular monthly periods, and once, when she was a week overdue, we were sure that she was pregnant. We both hated condoms, and, although I knew about diaphragms, in the mid-1930s it was difficult enough to find a doctor who would fit a married woman with one, let alone a single girl.
Thus went my four years at Bates: in love, not having as much daily sexual contact as I might have wished (but more than most of the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds I knew), studying anything I wished. FH was happy enough that I was in college and had, to everyone’s surprise, suddenly appeared on the dean’s list, so he didn’t interfere with my choice of courses. I also discovered a new hero/ mentor, Peter Bertocci, who had recently been hired to teach psychology and philosophy at Bates. I was so charmed by Peter’s inquiring mind that, in my junior year, I decided I would take only minimum requirements for an English major and soon had, with Bunny, who protested at taking so much philosophy, a dual major in English plus psychology and philosophy. Before I graduated, Peter gave me a copy of the first of many books, The Empirical Argument for God, that he would write. He inscribed it to me: “With the sincere hope that your mind will continue to ask for reality and your actions continue to adjust to it.”
Many years later, Peter Bertocci’s human-values approach to teaching—he finally became full professor of philosophy at Boston University—would become a key element of the Harrad program. Peter and his wife became partial models for Phillip Tenhausen and his wife. Harrad ends with a quotation from Peter’s book: “Extolling not a Golden Age, but an Age of Creative Insecurity,” which Peter believed could be a common underlying philosophy for all of us.
On graduation day FH and Blanche met Bunny’s mother and stepfather for the first time. They were all aware that Bunny and I were in love and wanted to be married quickly before I entered Harvard Business School. Bunny had been accepted for a buyer’s training position at $18 a week at Jordan Marsh in Boston. I proposed my plan to FH for the first time.
In those days there were no married graduate students living on campus at Harvard Business School, and very few off campus. I told him if he would pay my tuition, and give me the cost of room and board at Harvard (equal to more than $18 a week), then together, Bunny and I could support an apartment in Harvard Square and get married. It wouldn’t cost FH any more than he was already prepared to pay. In 1939, however, such ideas seemed outlandish. FH refused. He had nothing against Bunny and thought she should be happy to wait two years until I finished my education. The problem was that Bunny couldn’t support herself in Boston on $18 a week. She would have to go home to Hartford, get a job, and live with her parents until I graduated. How could I explain to FH that I now needed a regular bed companion as well as a friend to save me from the Philistines at Harvard Business School. Before classes began in September, Bunny wrote me a good-bye note; two years was much too long to wait.
Without even having been married, I suddenly learned what divorce was like. Back home after four years, I had no friends, male or female. I was shipwrecked and totally shocked. A month later I met my Harvard roommate, Paul Williams, son of William Carlos Williams, who was being hailed as one of America’s best poets, although he made a living as a much-loved doctor in Rutherford, NJ.
The shock of losing Bunny was compounded by the first lecture from the nationally known dean Wallace Brett Donham, who had, with the help of a multimillionaire, George Baker, practically created Harvard Business School. Donham told us that we could now forget our easygoing college days. At HBS, unless you devoted seventy hours a week to classes and study, you were sure to flunk out. He assured us that 10 percent of the 1941 class would be gone after the first midyear exams. Paul had graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and unlike me, he had four years of undergraduate business training. Within a few weeks, I was sure that I should have been getting a masters in psychology or sociology from Harvard, which several of my Bates friends were doing.
My new roommate and I had some things in common. Paul, too, had lost the love of his life. Although Paul had no interest in becoming a writer like his father, because he had been raised in a literary household we were on a much closer intellectual level than we were with most of the first-year class, who were graduates of engineering and other business schools. If you read The Rebellion of Yale Marratt, you will get a fictionalized version of my two years in business school. Bunny was transformed into Cynthia, and FH is an interfering Pat Marratt.
Somehow, I survived the hard-driving, one-dimensional, “give it all you’ve got or you’ll never succeed at business” philosophy of the Business School. At the same time, I continued my search for Galatea. I spent many hours in the co-op acquiring nonbusiness books to read as an escape from the boredom of solving endless mimeographed case problems and writing my solutions, which the professors insisted were too literary and not the kind of concise writing that top management required.
I also discovered a minor literary hero/mentor, Henry Miller, and after many discreet inquiries found a bookseller in Harvard Square who kept copies of The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn (printed in Mexico) in a safe. When he had determined that I wasn’t connected with the FBI or the Cambridge police, he told me the price, $25 per copy. It was exorbitant, but since I had no woman in my life, I had plenty of money to spend reading about sex.
Because my grades were good enough, during the final year at the Business School I was permitted to enroll in a special, one-year course that would teach us how to mobilize the United States into a full, wartime economy. The assumption was that those who completed their final year at HBS would end up in Washington, D.C., if war were declared, with an Army or Navy commission. With the wisdom we acquired at Harvard, we’d save England and bury Hitler. Another year would pass before the Japanese surprised us at Pearl Harbor. But even in a world at war, I was more concerned that I still hadn’t found a woman with whom I could share a mental / sexual merger and the wide interest in literature, art, and music that I had acquired at Bates.
Erma, Dear Erma. In the fall of 1940, I met Erma. Blanche had mentioned that the family dentist in Boston had a new dental hygienist, Miss Richards. Since I was constantly looking for dates, why not ask her? Why not? I needed my teeth cleaned, and soon a very pretty blue-eyed brunette with firm breasts was leaning close to my face as she scaled my teeth, creating an aura of sexual intimacy. When she finished, I asked her point-blank, “How about a kiss?” There was no kiss, and no date. Dating clients was against the doctor’s rules. But she warned me I must be sure to come back. I needed some new fillings, and missed appointments were charged. When I purposely missed the next appointment, I told the doctor it was because Miss Richards wouldn’t have a date with me. He gave in.
Erma was a most affectionate and loving woman, who had recently been deserted by a former high school boyfriend. Not only didn’t Erma reject me when we were finally naked on her parents’ sofa, but she encouraged me. Even though I was sure that her father would soon stomp downstairs and put an end to me, we were frequently making love in her parents’ living room.
At twenty, a year younger than I, Erma needed to be loved as much as I did. To my amazement, she seemed very willing to be molded into my ephemeral Galatea. I soon convinced her that while we were most certainly in tune sexually, if a long-lasting relationship were to develop, we must be able to communicate. The business world didn’t matter, but I told Erma that she must read and acquire what Edward Hirsch would define as “cultural literacy” a quarter of a century later.
I was falling in love, and I was sure that I could re-create Erma, who was smarter than I
was in the practical world, and make her more literary than all the women I had known with bachelor’s degrees, including Bunny. I told her all she had to do was read—read and take a few courses, particularly in psychology. I had it made—a woman who loved me and was eager to learn all the things she had never been exposed to. Was I playing Svengali? Not quite. Time would prove that Erma had a mind of her own.
Before I graduated, after playing Russian roulette in the baby-making area for nearly a year, Erma and I set the wedding date, August 2, 1941. FH couldn’t believe what was happening. A year and a half ago, I had been in love with Bunny. Since she couldn’t wait two years, he agreed it was just as well I hadn’t married her, but Erma Richards? A girl who worked for Dr. Tracy and cleaned teeth? What did I have in common with her?
Unknown to me, my always interfering father called Erma, interrupting her at work, and asked her point blank why she wanted to marry me. “Does Bob really love you? Did you know that he was madly in love with another girl just a year ago?” Obviously, FH was still trying to direct my life. In tears, Erma assured him that we were in love. If you read Yale Marratt, you’ll find a similar story.
Erma and I were married. She soon discovered that, along with our wedding furniture, we had to make room for my close to a thousand books in our four-room apartment. I wasn’t making much progress in sculpting my Galatea, but we were newlyweds who had many things to do, and we enjoyed sexmaking.
Erma continued to work as a dental hygienist for a couple of months, but then we bought a dog and were affluent enough for her to stay home. Not to read, but to cook and sew and decorate, at which she was very competent. In addition, for a few happy months, she was able to flit around Melrose in the handsome Ford convertible that FH gave me.
The Harrad Experiment Page 33
