Hare in March Page 3

  Then, in another color ink — green — with no paragraph to separate it from the body of the letter, carefully printed, with capital letters for the headline:

  MOTHER’S THERE BUT HE CAN’T SEE HER BRAVE SMILE. New York, N.Y. March 20 (AP) Billy Shepley’s eyes were open, but he could not see his mother’s brave smile. His face was turned toward his mother, but he could not hear her cheerful chatter. He probably will never hear her voice again, never see her adoring face again, never even register the fact that she is there, every day, to visit him. Six years ago Billy had an accident in the family car, and since then he has not been conscious. His mother sits by his bedside reading to him. The nuns of Holy Child give him his meals through a feeding tube every three hours. The doctors stop in once a day. But Billy is unaware of all of it; he will live on never knowing he is loved and cared for, because the damage to his nervous system is permanent. Billy has a strong heart, and he is only 23; he may live a very long time. But people, some people in this age of cynicism, still believe in miracles, and Natalie Shepley is one of these people. She is gay and busy during her visits with her son. “I could let this get me down,” she said, “but I don’t. I believe that one day Billy’s going to be ?-Okay, and I don’t mind sounding foolish, if that’s how I sound. I have a lot of faith in Billy; that’s how I manage to keep my chin up.

  Change to Waterman’s blue:

  I thought it was so nice of the newspaper to print this piece about Billy, and it is enough of an Easter gift for me. If you want a copy you can write to the newspaper for one, Charles. Address: 231 East 86 Street, New York, New York 10028. On Easter Sunday I am taking him a calla lily begonia, which has a nice flowery smell and Aunt Agnes is sending him a cyclamen which does not smell but has beautiful blossoms. Cut flowers die so quickly and the nuns have enough to do without changing their water, so I tell people to send him plants instead. His room is so cheery as you know with the blue walls and I have out some of his things like the green and white Michigan State banner where he so dearly wanted to go plus the photograph of Janie who as you know is married now to someone else but would not mind I’m sure. (She still sends X-mas card to him each year at Christmas, did you know that?) He has good color in his face and is a brick about what has befallen him, and his eyes tell me not to worry and I try not to. Send him a humorous Easter card, Charles, not the sick sort but a nice Hallmark as it would mean so much to him. I read cards he receives aloud to him. He always had such a good sense of humor, don’t you think? So much for Billy, though I do not mean that the way it sounds, for I do not begrudge him one cent of all the money he has cost us, for what kind of a life does he have after all, and we are able to walk and laugh and pray for him.

  How are you, dear? It has been several weeks since we have heard and I do not like to call you at Pi Pi like a mother hen, but I do wonder if you are coming home for Easter dinner and a visit to Billy, and to stay for a few days. Charles, 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 you were considering getting me some small Easter remembrance you would want to make it a pin with the Pi Pi crest. Do not go to any trouble for me but if you feel like it I would be happy to please your father in this small way. He is busy with his bugs and I sometimes think Billy will forget who he is if he does not visit him more often, but his job at the institute is so demanding, and for such a small return too. I hope you will think of this when you choose your field, for science unless it is moon-launching and bombs is not rewarding look at your father. If we did not have the income from the money Grandpa Shepley left us we would not be able to keep Billy at Holy Child and you would not even be at Far Point College which was not my dream for you anyway. It is all right to be a Pi Pi but when you are out in the world people’s ears would pick up more if you could say I was a Princeton man. They do not have fraternities but being a Pi Pi never did a thing for your father after he left Michigan State that I know of. So Charles think carefully about your future for if you cannot get somewhere saying you were a Princeton man or a Yale man, then you must have a field that pays. I would not have married your father on his salary but you see we always thought we would have Grandpa Shepley’s money for extras, not knowing what Fate had in store for Billy.

  Are you dating nice girls, Charles? 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. I will say one thing for your father his sophisticated ways impressed me the way he knew little things like the tipping of the wine steward in a good restaurant and the English names for French dishes and these are the things you should bear in mind for girls of good families look for these little things believe me. What are some of the things the fathers of the girls you are dating do? These things interest me though you do not seem to pick up on it. A fraternity should broaden you and there is no reason to think you would not have been a Pi Pi if your father had not been one at M.S.U. for I hear they often do not take a legacy, so you got there because you are real Pi Pi material, and never forget that Charles, and live up to it, for you are all we can truly count on if something does not happen soon where Billy is concerned.

  All right Charles I won’t take up any more of your time since I know you are busy but we are having ham for dinner on Easter, and going to Holy Child about three that afternoon and Billy will know if you are not present this I can promise. Think of what his life is like and do not begrudge him that little joy he has so little. If you remember to do something about the mother’s pin okay but if you don’t I will understand. Study hard and consider a good job in the future. Love from your mother Natalie Shepley.

  In black ink at the bottom of the last page, Clinton Shepley had written a few lines:

  C.

  Trust mother wrote all the news. Working with praying mantes this week. You know they usually (females) decapitate their lovers, which solves the mantis population explosion, but one we have is indefatigable. Still a virgin, but has beheaded seventeen partners in one week. We call her Lolita (ha! ha!). Billy doesn’t know the difference between a bunch of tulips and a half-dozen popsicle sticks, though I cannot get N.S. to accept this, so if she is trying to talk you into sending him an Easter plant, save your allowance for other things. Send him a card to please her, though. Better still, make the journey across the miles and let us feast our eyes on you, but only if you feel like it. Not as a duty. Affectionately, Father.

  There was never any reference to Pi Delta Pi in the messages Charles’s father scribbled at the bottom of Natalie Shepley’s letters. Charles’s mother had done a neat pre-enrollment job of brainwashing Charles into believing he should suffer the agonies of Rush Week for his father’s sake. Ingenuous as she often seemed, she was not without guile, for the only person she asked to do anything for her sake was Billy. (“Billy, it’s Mother; aren’t you going to smile for me? I came all the way here in the pouring rain for your smile, Billy.”)

  • • •

  Rush Week was no picnic. Charles was not fraternity material, and all the frats but Pi Pi picked up on it immediately. He had received exactly two return bids after the initial day of rushing — one for the third day (pig day, in the middle of the week) at Rho Kappa, a fraternity that was not national and always had a huge quota to fill, and the prize second-day bid from Pi Pi. It was true that Pi Pi did not always pledge legacies, so Charles was amazed when Blouter pocket-pledged him
on Number Two night of Rush Week. There was nothing wrong with the way Charles looked; he was no different from a score of other average-looking young men in button-down shirts and Ivy, hopsack, Glen, J. Press, Fortrel polyester, and Zantrel 700 rayon suits; sandy-haired, five foot eleven, blue-eyed, no pimples, no speech impediment, good teeth — it was his attitude which was wrong. The back slapping, the lusty-voiced singing of “Banging Away on Lulu,” the beer-guzzling false euphoria, the asinine speeches

  (“Men! Welcome aboard S.S. Pi Pi! We keep a tight ship, men! We’re tight every goddam night, men! We like our women tight, men! We like a wet deck!” — pause for laughter and applause, then solemnly — “To be serial a second, men. Pi Delta Pi was founded in 1891. We represent the very best in — ”); it was the whole schmear. Charles’s face was worn out from forcing his mouth to smile; his face had actually ached at the end of Number One day. The Greeks could spot a lead foot; back at the dorm where the rushees were housed during their ordeal. Dan Thorpe had commented on Charles’s meager return of two envelopes:

  “Even Dillon got six returns, and he has pimples the size of pool balls. What’d you do?”

  “I don’t know, but I must be doing something wrong.”

  “Well, forget about it. Go for Pi Pi. They hear your music, and they’re first rate. I’m going Pi Pi if I can.”

  “I don’t know how I got a Two. I nearly fell asleep there.”

  “Stay awake and don’t ask … You’re not a legacy, are you?”

  “Yes, but they don’t take legacies unless they want them.”

  “Oh,” Thorpe had said. That answered it for Thorpe.

  But after Charles had been pledged, he found out two other Pi Pi legacies had not received bids. He felt better, but he still could not explain it. Except maybe it was Mike Blouter. He was the only one Charles had hit it off with, and Mike was Pi Pi’s president. Charles never could turn on just for anyone, but he could for Mike; he had made Mike laugh without even trying; talking with Mike, he was not aware he was keeping up a conversation, as he was so painfully aware of doing at other houses, with other Greeks. Except for Mike, Charles could not make the scene at Rush Week; he went over like he did with Peter Hagerman, over and out.

  Blouter seemed to take the whole Greek bit with a grain of salt; he was Greek Town’s Dean Martin, always a little unsteady on his pins, enjoying his reputation as a booze hound, but sharp, admired — the type who could call the whole frat system an adolescent bag, and get away with it.

  If Charles had had to go to anyone but Blouter for permission to ask Lois Faye to the house, he might have brought the minuscule left of his mother’s world crashing to her feet by turning in his pledge pin.

  With Blouter it was not as hard:

  “What’s her last name?” “Faye.”

  “Is she an A ? Pi or a Zeta?”

  “She’s not in a Jewish sorority. She’s only half-Jewish.”

  “They’d take her anyway, does she know that?”

  “She doesn’t want to be in a sorority.”

  “What’s she want with a goy like you?”

  “She likes the way I dance. You know, the Jews have a natural sense of rhythm.”

  “I heard that. They’re smart about music like the Negroes are about money.”

  “It’s okay then?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  “Would I ask if I didn’t have to?”

  “She won’t have to teach you anything about chutzpah, Shepley.”

  So a Blouter, for Charles, made up for a Hagerman; good food and a Sears-O-Pedic Innerspring Sleep Set took the edge off candlelit song fests in the Pi Pi Pub, a replica of an English tavern located next to the furnace room; the thought of a mother pin fastened to Natalie Shepley’s sparse bosom made up for The Divine Comedy (Charles hoped).

  Keep on keeping on, Charles’s father was fond of saying, a winner never quits and a quitter never wins … at least he had been fond of saying that, before William Shepley downed a dozen rum-and-Cokes one Saturday evening some six years ago, got into the family Buick, and missed his chance to belong to the Pepsi generation. Billy even missed his chance to belong to the ages. (“I bet you can hear me, Billy. Mother bets that.”)

  Charles grabbed a sheet of Pi Pi stationery from his desk drawer and snapped the end of his pen to put the ball point ready for action. His mother liked him to write his letters on the official fraternity paper, “… not that I care, but your father reads your letters too, and I like to pass them at my Tuesday brunches. I’d be glad to send you money to pay for it if it’s the expense that makes you write on ordinary notebook paper and sometimes actual scrap paper.”

  Charles wrote:

  Dear Folks,

  Glad to see Billy made the news. Too bad he can’t be on television as well. Yes, I remember Billy’s sense of humor. Beautiful! I die laughing every time I think of the day Billy put the Annerman’s Siamese in their Coldspot Upright Freezer while they were at the movies. What a comedian! Did that cat ever look funny stiff as a board and dead as a doornail!

  List of the things the fathers of the girls I’m dating do:

  1. Hustle for the buck. (Not that it can buy happiness.)

  2. Get juiced at the local country club on weekends.

  3. Burn crosses at Klan gatherings.

  4. Watch Gomer Pyle on television.

  5. Support Ronald Reagan.

  6. Attend Yale reunions.

  7. Pour a little of the newly opened wine into their own glasses first, to accept cork remnants.

  8.

  Then Charles wadded up the stationery and tossed it into the wastebasket.

  Dan Thorpe said, “I wonder what Hagerman is dreaming up for us right now.”

  “Maybe it’ll be a welcome relief.” said Charles.

  “Now what the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know what the hell that means either.”

  But Charles Shepley knew. He meant what it was like that summer when what had happened to Billy really began to hit home, after the doctors stopped skirting around the plain fact that Billy was and would always be a vegetable, and there was no Princeton in Charles’s future anymore, no more point to cracking the books the way he did, nor to dreaming the dreams he did, the corny ail-American shiny-faced own his-own-sports-car fantasies, wear a cap and run down to P.J.’s with a girl and be like Billy bigshot bubbles … that summer would have been impossible had Charles not had all the trouble with his teeth, because the deeper the dentist drilled into his nerves, the more he scraped at the rawness of his gums, the greater the physical pain, the less the gnawing hatred of Billy, the really murderous hatred of Billy, always just below the surface, then spilling over the top, leaving him awake nights to confront ghostly Billys in the dark of his bedroom, with a switchblade sprung and ready in his hand; in the dentist’s chair it was a welcome relief.

  One letter like that from his mother could do it, start it up again, even make Hagerman’s idea of hell seem less like hell.

  Four

  When Bud Burroughs came back from lab that afternoon, he was busting to tell someone about it, but Hagerman was his only confidant in Pi Pi, and Hagerman was in a bad mood.

  “I am goddam sick and tired of that mother-loving thing on the wall,” said Hagerman, after Burroughs had tossed his books on the bed, and begun to change his pants; “goddam fed up seeing it day after day.”

  “Jesus, Peter, it was your idea in the first place.”

  “Jesus Peter is tired of it, Burroughs!”

  “Then take it down.”

  Hagerman was talking about the life-size Ursula Andress poster over Burroughs’ desk. Hagerman was sitting on the floor in a silk blue-and-white Pi Pi robe, cross-legged with his clipboard propped against his knees, staring up at it.

  “You take it down, Burroughs!”

  Burroughs stepped out of his pants and crossed the room in his stocking feet and gave a yank forceful enough to jolt
his spectacles to the end of his nose and bring the poster crashing to the floor.

  “Okay now? Okay now, Peter?”

  “Well, what the hell is eating you, Burroughs?”

  “Wasn’t that an order? It sounded like an order.”

  “Goddam it, I’ve got enough trouble without your prima donna scenes!”

  “Jesus, Peter, I come home pretty excited about something that happened today, and I’m not in the room ten seconds before you start chewing me out! I didn’t even have my pants off before you started in on me!”

  “What got you so excited, Burroughs? Did your old man let you play with his gun?”

  “Get off my back about my old man. You don’t like your old man — okay — but I like mine.”

  “I know you do, Burroughs. You’re a cop-lover.”

  “Knock it off, Peter! I mean it.”

  “You ought to live at home, Burroughs. You could play with your old man’s gun every night … Hey, that’s a thought!”

  “Every time you’re in a lousy mood, you start on my old man!”

  “Wait a minute! That’s a thought!”

  Burroughs didn’t care to hear the thought. He was sore at Hagerman now. He went across to the closet and pulled a pair of old khakis from a hook. Peter was right about one thing: Burroughs ought to live at home. It was costing Burroughs’ father a hundred dollars extra a month for Burroughs to live at Pi Pi, and that spelled s-a-c-r-i-f-i-c-e on a policeman’s salary. Burroughs’ father was making this sacrifice so Burroughs could consort with the likes of Peter Hagerman, a little rat-faced New Yorker who smoked foreign cigarettes and wore cuff links. Whenever Burroughs was angry with Peter, he began to think about Peter as his father would, which was not the way he liked to think, nor was it the way he really felt. He liked the smell of Gauloises; he liked cuff links too, but Peter’s meanness often made Bud Burroughs revert to the kind of thinking he had been brought up on. Anything foreign was suspect; men, real men, didn’t wear jewelry. There was a God, and J. Edgar Hoover was a good guy. The law, and not the man, was right. Bud Burroughs had been sixteen years old before he had ever even remotely entertained the idea that his father was less than perfect; he had gone a long way in three years. He had been taken part of the way by law books, when he had thought of becoming a lawyer. His literal, exacting mind had been alarmed at the capriciousness of the law; his righteous approach to justice he soon saw was grandiose, really self-righteous, even laughable. He devised a mathematical formula for getting away with murder: OA = ?M X SL; the opportunity for acquittal equals a plethora of money times a smart lawyer…. He decided on chemistry for a career.