by Max Shulman
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The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
Stories
Max Shulman
to
FERDINAND DE LESSEPS
without whom I never could have dug the Suez Canal
Note
The stories in this volume have appeared in Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, the Saturday Evening Post, Today’s Woman, and American Magazine. They are, therefore, clean and wholesome narratives, quite suitable for the parsonage library. (The publisher wishes me to announce that substantial discounts will be given to parsonage libraries ordering this book in lots of forty thousand copies or more. The publisher also wishes me to announce that he has left over from 1936 a large number of copies of Meet Alf Landon, which he is willing to sacrifice.)
Mean, small, captious, and niggling readers will notice certain discrepancies in the following stories. In some of them, for example, Dobie Gillis is a freshman, in others he is a sophomore. In some he is majoring in law; in others he is majoring in journalism or chemistry or English or mechanical engineering or nothing at all. In some he is shrewd; in others dumb; in some aggressive; in others meek. In some he is seventeen years old; in others eighteen; in others nineteen.
These tiny variations will be noticed, as I said, by mean, small, captious, and niggling readers. But to the intelligent, greathearted, truly American reader, they will be matters of no consequence.
M. S.
The Unlucky Winner
My next girl is going to be honest. I don’t care if she looks like a doorknob. Just so she’s honest.
This determination arises from a late unhappy attachment to one Clothilde Ellingboe. Now, don’t misunderstand; I’m not calling Clothilde a crook. Let’s say she was irresponsible. Or unethical. Or unprincipled. Or amoral Let’s not go around calling ladies crooks. Watch that stuff.
I met Clothilde at the University of Minnesota’s annual Freshman Prom. I was standing in the stag line and I saw her dancing with a fellow halfway across the floor. They were doing the “Airborne Samba,” the latest dance craze at the university. In the “Airborne Samba” the girl locks her hands behind the fellow’s neck and he carries her all through the dance. She never touches the floor; she just lashes out rhythmically with her feet.
I cut in on them, laughing lightly at the resultant abrasions. I transported Clothilde through the rest of the medley, and then we went out on the terrace for some air. There, in a very short time, I knew I was hers. How vivacious she was! How socially aware she was! You would never believe she was only a freshman, the way she had been everywhere and had done everything and knew everyone. In a very short time I was, as I say, hers.
Then began a social whirl that I would not have thought possible. We were out every night—dancing, movies, sleigh rides, hayrides, wiener roasts, bridge games, community sings. Not a night did we miss.
At first I was a little worried. “Clothilde,” I would say, “I’d love to go out tonight, but I’ve got homework. I’ve got to translate ten pages of Virgil for Latin tomorrow.”
“Dobie, you oaf,” she would laugh. “Don’t you know anything?”
Then she would produce a Virgil pony—a Latin textbook with English translations set in smaller type beneath each line of Latin.
When I said that I had to do some work in political science, she would hand me a syllabus that condensed the whole course into an hour’s easy reading. If I was concerned about an English history quiz, she would come up with a card the size of a bookmark on which there was printed the dates of all the kings in the British dynasty, plus thumbnails of all significant events.
“This is all very well,” I said one night, “but I don’t feel that I’m learning anything.”
“To the contrary, Dobie,” she replied, taking my hands in hers. “Without all this social life, you could never become a well-rounded-out personality. What’s more important, Dobie—to know a lot of old facts and figures or to become a well-rounded-out personality?”
“To become a well-rounded-out personality,” I said. “Clearly.”
“There you are,” she said, spreading her palms. “C’mon, Dobie, let’s go down to the Kozy Kampus Kave and hear E-String Eddie and his T.N.T. Trio.”
And so it went, night after night. I’ll confess that I was a stranger to the Phi Beta Kappa selection board, but nonetheless, my grades were adequate. I got by, and whatever happened in my classes, I had the comfort of knowing that I was becoming a well-rounded-out personality. Some nights I could actually feel my personality rounding out—like a balloon.
But occasionally a doubt would dart through my mind like a lizard across a rock. Then I would say to myself, “This can’t go on forever.” I found out I was right one morning in my English class.
On that morning at the end of the class hour, our instructor, Mr. Hambrick, announced, “There will be a five-hundred-word theme due next Friday. Write about any subject you want to. No excuses will be accepted for late themes. Class dismissed.”
The heart within me sank. I had long been worried about Mr. Hambrick. Mr. Hambrick was one of those college English instructors who had taken a teaching job thirty years before so they could have an income while they worked on their novels. Now they were still teaching English and they were still on the first chapters of their novels. They vented their frustration on their students.
Up to this assignment I had managed to get along in Mr. Hambrick’s class. Before this I had had to turn in three or four book reports, all of which Clothilde supplied from the Book Review Digest. But a theme was different. You can’t go about clipping original themes from other sources.
“Clothilde,” I said that evening, “I’m afraid the movies are out for tonight. I’ve got to turn in a theme for English on Friday and here it is Tuesday and I’d better get to work.”
“But, Dobie,” wailed Clothilde. “It’s Montgomery Clift. He knocks me out. Doesn’t he knock you out?”
“No,” I said truthfully. “Listen, Clothilde, I’d better do this theme. This isn’t the kind of thing I can chisel on. I’ve got to do it myself, and I’d better get started.”
“How long does it have to be?”
“Five hundred words.”
“What’s the topic?”
“Anything I want.”
“Well, then, what’s your hurry? It’s only Tuesday. You’ve got Wednesday and Thursday to work on it.”
“No, I’d better start it right away. I don’t know whether I can finish it all in one night. Don’t forget, Clothilde, I’m not very bright.”
“Yes, I know,” she said, “but even you should be able to write a five-hundred-word theme in one night. Especially if you can pick your own subject.”
“Look, Clothilde, I don’t want to seem stubborn, but I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to start that theme tonight and that’s final.”
“Shelly Winters is in the picture too.”
“Let’s hurry so we can get good seats,” I said.
The next night, Wednesday, I was positively going to work on the theme. Positively. But Benny Goodman was playing a one-night stand at the Auditorium, and, as Clothilde said, “You can’t just not go to hear Benny Goodman. How will you explain it to people?”
And Thursday afternoon there was a Sunlite Dance in the Union with a jitterbug contest for which Clothilde and I had been rehearsing for weeks. Unfortunately, Clothilde threw a shoe and pulled up lame at the end of the second lap and we had to drop out.
Not until six o’clock Thursday evening did I get to the theme. I set two fountain pens, a bottle of ink, an
eraser, three pencils, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a ream of fresh white paper on my desk. I adjusted the goose-neck lamp for minimum eyestrain. I pulled up a straight-back chair. I opened the window. I filled a pitcher with water, I took my phone off the hook. Then I sat down and drew isosceles triangles for two hours.
Not an idea came to me. Not a fragment of an idea. Not a teensy-weensy glimmer of an idea. I had just about decided to drop out of the university and enroll in a manual-training school when I heard Clothilde calling me outside my window.
I stuck my head out. “How ya doin’, Dobie?” she asked.
I grimaced.
“I thought so,” she said. “Well, don’t worry. I’ve got it all figured out. Look.” She held up two white cards.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Stack permits,” she replied.
“What?”
“Come on out and I’ll explain the whole thing.”
“Listen, Clothilde, I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t want any part of it. I’m going to sit here all night if I have to, but I’m going to finish that theme. I don’t care what you say; there’s no other way to do it.”
“Come on out, you jerk. I’ve never failed you yet, have I? Listen, you’ll not only have your theme written tonight, but we’ll be able to catch the last feature at the Bijou.”
“No.”
“You don’t really believe you’re going to get that theme written, do you?”
She had me there.
“Come on out.”
“What’s a stack permit?” I asked.
“Come on out.”
I came out.
She took my arm. “We’d better hurry, Dobie. It’s after eight o’clock and the library closes at nine.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
She was pulling me along, toward the library. “Dobie, you’ve been to the library, haven’t you?”
“I used to go occasionally,” I said, “before I met you.”
“All right. You know how the library works?”
“Sure,” I said. “You go in and look up the book you want in the card catalogue and then you write your name and the card number of the book on a request slip and you give the slip to the librarian and she sends a page boy after your book.”
“Ah,” said Clothilde, “but do you know where the books come from?”
“They keep them on shelves in the back of the library.”
“Stacks,” said Clothilde. “Those are called stacks.”
“So?”
“Ordinarily,” Clothilde continued, “they don’t let students go back into the stacks. They’re afraid we might get the books mixed up or steal them or something. When you want a book, you turn in a request slip for it and they send a page boy after it.”
“This is all very informative, Clothilde, but I wish you had picked another time to tell it to me. I’ve got a theme to write.”
Clothilde’s big blue eyes narrowed craftily into little blue eyes. “Some students, Dobie, are allowed to go back in the stacks. Some graduate students and a few seniors get permits. If they are doing the kind of work that requires a lot of books at hand, particularly obscure books, they can get stack permits. Then they can go back themselves and find the books they want without tying up the librarian and several page boys. These”—she waved the two white cards—“are stack permits.”
“I still don’t see—”
“I borrowed them,” said Clothilde, “from a couple of graduate students I know. With these cards we can get into the stacks.”
“But how is all this going to get my theme written?”
We were almost at the library now.
“Dobie Gillis, you dope. I swear if you didn’t have freckles and a crew haircut, I’d quit going with you in a minute. Don’t you understand? We’re going back in the stacks and find some old book of essays that nobody has ever heard of and you’ll copy one of the essays and that will be your theme.”
I stopped dead. “Clothilde,” I whispered, “you can’t mean it.”
“Why not? It’s foolproof. There won’t be any record of you ever having seen the book. You won’t turn in a request slip for it, so nobody will be able to check back through the slips. We’re going into the stacks on somebody else’s permit, so you can’t be checked that way. You’re not going to take the book out, so there won’t be a withdrawal record on your library card. I’ve got pencil and paper in my purse. You’ll copy the essay out of the book while you’re in the stacks. Then you’ll put the book back exactly where you found it. Then we’ll leave and nobody will be the wiser.”
I sat down beside a tree in front of the library and pulled her down beside me. “Clothilde,” I said, “why don’t we just get a couple of revolvers and go hold up a filling station?”
“This is no time to be finicky, Dobie. You know very well you’ll never get that theme written.”
“True,” I said after a short silence.
“Then come on into the library. It’s eight-thirty.”
“I can’t, Clothilde. My conscience would never stop bothering me.”
She pulled me to my feet. She’s quite a bit stronger than I am.
“Anyway,” I protested, “it’s not safe. How can we be sure that Mr. Hambrick, my English instructor, hasn’t read the book that I’m going to copy the essay out of?”
Clothilde smiled. “I was hoping you’d ask that question. Come along. I’ll show you.”
She dragged me into the library, up the stairs and to the main desk. “Stop perspiring, Dobie,” she whispered. “We don’t want anybody to remember us.” She showed the two stack permits to the librarian. The librarian nodded us back into the stacks.
The stacks filled me with awe. They consisted of metal bookshelves arranged in banks. Each bank was seven tiers high, and each tier was six feet tall. At the head of each bank was a metal spiral staircase, wide enough for only one person. Narrow catwalks ran along each tier, and the various banks were joined by other catwalks. The whole thing, I thought, looked like the cell blocks you see in prison movies. I shuddered at the significance of the comparison.
“Come along,” said Clothilde. “The essay collections are in the seventh tier of the fourth bank. Hurry. We haven’t much time.”
We raced through the catwalks. Our footsteps echoed metallically, and I expected to hear sirens and see spotlights at any moment. I felt like James Cagney in “White Heat.”
When we got to the essay shelves, Clothilde said, “Now, quickly, look for a book with a lot of dust on it. Don’t take any clean ones.”
We looked for a few seconds, and I found a volume gray with dust. I pulled it off the shelf. “This all right, Clothilde?”
She took it. She opened the book and looked at the record card in the envelope pasted inside the cover—the card that the library files when you take out a book. “This one is no good,” said Clothilde. “The card shows that this book was last taken out in 1942. It’s not very likely, but there’s just a chance that your English instructor was the one who took it out. If so, he might still remember the essays. We don’t have to take chances; we can find a book that hasn’t been taken out for at least ten years. Then, even if your instructor was the one who checked out the book, there’s not much chance that he’ll remember it.”
“You thought any about becoming a gun moll?” I asked.
“Hurry, Dobie, it’s a quarter to nine.”
We found a couple more dusty volumes, but their cards showed that they had both been out of the library within the past ten years. At seven minutes to nine, we found the right one.
“This is perfect,” said Clothilde, holding up the book, a slim collection called Thoughts of My Tranquil Hours by one Elmo Goodhue Pipgrass. Mr. Pipgrass’s picture appeared on the frontispiece—a venerable gentleman with side whiskers and a white string tie. The record card in the book was almost lily white. The book had been taken out only once, and that was ’way back in 1926.
&nbs
p; “This is perfect,” Clothilde repeated. “The book has only been taken out once. It was published”—she looked at the title page—“in 1919. The picture of Pipgrass on the frontispiece shows that he was a man of at least seventy at that time. He’s certainly dead now, so you don’t even have to worry about plagiarism.”
“Plagiarism!” I exclaimed. “You didn’t say anything about that before.”
“No use to alarm you, Dobie,” she said. “Hurry up now. It’s five minutes to nine. Here’s pencil and paper.”
“Plagiarism,” I muttered.
“Hurry, Dobie. For Pete’s sake, hurry.”
With the greatest reluctance, I took pencil and paper and began to copy the first essay in Thoughts of My Tranquil Hours. It started like this:
Who has not sat in the arbor of his country seat, his limbs composed, a basin of cheery russet apples at his side, his meerschaum filled with good shag; and listened to the wholesome bucolic sounds around him: the twitter of chimney swifts, the sweet piping of children at their games, the hale cries of the countryman to his oxen, the comfortable cackling of chickens, the braying of honest asses; and felt his nostrils deliciously assailed with aromas from the kitchen: the nourishing saddles of beef, the beneficent gruels, the succulent tarts; and basked in the warmth of sun and earth, full bounty of abundant nature; and thought, “Of what moment is man’s travail for gain, his mad impetus toward wealth, his great unsettled yearning for he knows not what, when all about him if he would but perceive are the treasures of the globe, more precious far than any jewel which lies deep beneath virgin earth across unplumbed and perilous seas?”
That was the first sentence, and the shortest one. I scribbled furiously until I had the whole thing down, and we left. We got out of the library at five seconds before nine.
Outside, I turned on Clothilde. “Why did I ever listen to you?” I cried. “Not only do I run the risk of getting kicked out of school in disgrace, but I’ve got to worry about getting arrested for plagiarism too. And to top it all off, the essay stinks. He’ll probably flunk me on it anyway.”
