He did! He remembered wanting to complain about it at the time, but since he’d passed the tests he hadn’t bothered. The day of the test a sparrow had got into the auditorium. It kept flying witlessly back and forth, back and forth, from one sealed window to the other. Who could concentrate with that going on? They decided that Birdie would apply to be retested on both the Stanford-Binet and the Skinner-Waxman. If for any reason he wasn’t feeling confident on the date the Regents office slotted him into, he could take a rain check. Mr. Mack thought that Birdie would find everyone ready to bend over backward.
The problem appeared to be solved and Birdie was ready to go, but Mr. Mack was obliged, for form’s sake, to go over one or two more details. Beyond hereditary factors and the Regents tests, both of which measured potentiality, there was another group of components for accomplishment. Any exceptional service for the country or the economy was an automatic twenty-five points but this was hardly anything to count on. Similarly, a demonstration of physical, intellectual, or creative abilities markedly above the levels indicated by et cetera, et cetera.
Birdie thought they could skip that too. But here, beneath the eraser, here was something to consider—the educational component. Already Birdie had five points for finishing high school. If he were to go on to college—
Out of the question. Birdie wasn’t the college type. He wasn’t anybody’s fool, but on the other hand he wasn’t anybody’s Isaac Einstein.
In general Mr. Mack would have applauded the realism of such a decision, but in the present circumstances it was better not to burn bridges. Any New York City resident had a right to attend any of the colleges in the city, either as a regular student or, lacking certain prerequisites, in a General Studies Annexe. It was something for Birdie to bear in mind.
Mr. Mack felt terrible. He hoped Birdie would learn to look at his reclassification as a setback rather than a permanent defeat. Failure was only a point of view.
Birdie agreed, but even this wasn’t enough to obtain his release. Mr. Mack urged Birdie to consider the question of contraception and genetics in the broadest possible light. Already there were too many people for the available resources. Without some system of voluntary limitation there would be more, more, disastrously more. Mr. Mack hoped that eventually Birdie would come to see that the Regents system, for all its obvious drawbacks, was both desirable and necessary.
Birdie promised to try and look at it this way, and then he could go. Among the papers in the gray envelope was a pamphlet, “Your Regents,” put out by the National Educational Council, who said that the only effective way to prepare for his reexamination was to develop a confident, lively frame of mind. A month later Birdie kept his appointment on Centre Street in a confident, lively frame of mind. Only afterward, sitting by the fountain in the plaza discussing the tests with his fellow martyrs, did he realize that this had been Friday, July 13th. Jinxed! He didn’t have to wait for the special delivery letter to know his score was a cherry, an apple, and a banana. Even so, the letter was a mind-staggerer. He’d gone down one point on the I.Q. test; on the Skinner-Waxman Creativity Scale he’d sunk to a moron-level score of 4. His new totaclass="underline" 21.
The 4 riled him. The first part of the Skinner-Waxman test had involved picking the funniest punch line from four multiple choices, and ditto the best endings to stories. This much he remembered from before but then they took him into a weird empty room. Two pieces of rope were hanging from the ceiling and Birdie was given a pliers and told to tie the two ropes together. You weren’t allowed to pull the ropes off their hooks.
It was impossible. If you held the very end of one rope in your hand, you couldn’t possibly get hold of the other rope, even by fishing for it with your toe. The extra few inches advantage you got from the pliers was no help at all. He was about ready to scream by the end of the ten minutes. There were three more impossible problems but by then he was only going through the motions.
At the fountain some jerkoff boy genius explained what they all could have done: tie the pliers to the end of one string and set it swinging like a pendulum; then go and get—
“Do you know what I’d like to see,” Birdie said, interrupting the boy genius, “tied up and swinging from that ceiling? Huh, schmuck? You!”
Which the others agreed was a better joke than any of their multiple choices.
Only after he’d lucked out on the tests did he tell Milly about his reclassification. A coolness had come into their love affair about then, just a cloud across the sun, but Birdie had been afraid all the same what her reaction might be, the names he might be called. As it turned out, Milly was heroic, all tenderness, concern, and stout-hearted resolve. She hadn’t realized before, she cried, how much she did love, and need, Birdie. She loved him more now, because— But she didn’t have to explain: it was in their faces, in their eyes, Birdie’s brown and glistening, Milly’s hazel flecked with gold. She promised to stand by him through the whole ordeal. Diabetes! And not even his own diabetes! The more she thought about it the angrier she got, the more determined never to let some Moloch of a bureaucracy play God with her and Birdie. (Moloch?) If Birdie was willing to go to Barnard G.S.A., Milly was willing to wait for him as long as need be.
Four years, as it turned out. The point system was gimmicked so that each year only counted half a point until graduation, but that was worth 4. Had Birdie been content with his old Regents scores, he could have worked his way back up to 25 in two years. Now he’d actually have to go for a degree.
But he did love Milly, and he did want to marry Milly, and let them say what they like, a marriage isn’t a marriage unless you can have children.
He went to Barnard. What choice had there been?
3
On the morning of the day of his Art History test Birdie lay in bed in the empty Annexe dorm, drowsing and thinking about love. He couldn’t get back to sleep, but he didn’t want to get up yet either. His body was bursting with energy, full to the top and flowing over, but it wasn’t energy for getting up to brush his teeth or going down to breakfast. Anyhow it was too late for breakfast and he was happy where he was.
Sunlight spilled in through the south window. A breeze rustled outdated announcements pinned to the bulletin board, spun round a shirt that hung on a curtain rail, touched the down on the back of Birdie’s hand, where her name was now just a faded smudge inside a ballpoint heart. Birdie laughed with a sense of his own fullness and the promise of good weather. He turned over on his left side, letting the blanket slide to the floor. The window framed a perfect blue rectangle of sky. Beautiful! It was March but it might have been April or May. It was going to be a wonderful day, a wonderful spring. He could feel it in the muscles of his chest and the muscles of his stomach when he took a breath of air.
Spring! Then summer. Breezes. No shirts.
Last summer out at Great Kills Harbor, the hot sand, the sea breeze in Milly’s hair. Again and again her hand would lift to push it back, like a veil. What had they talked about all that day? Everything. About the future. About her rotten father. Milly was desperate to get away from 334 and live her own life. Now, with her airline job, she had the option of a dorm, though, not being as used to a communal life as Birdie was, it was hard for her. But soon, soon….