“Remember Lester? Down in the dumps because nobody would dump him?”
I nod. I remember. Poor ol’ Lester — the only freshman who didn’t get his turn at being dumped out of bed from a sound sleep. I think it hurt his feelings something awful, to think that nobody liked him enough to want to toss him to the floor and throw his mattress on top of him.
“Good things finally come to he who waits for his dumping,” Lester says through a guffaw. “I got mine soon enough. And a little more to spare. You chuckleheads broke the ventilator over my door with all your roughhousing and you knocked down my bookcase like it was the wall of Jericho!”
Everybody’s laughing now. We’re sitting around the fireplace in Lloyd Hall and all the memories are flooding back. The lump is still there. It’s late. The night and the quiet (save for the crackling of the logs on the fire) have sent our thoughts to dark places where good things are destined to come to an end — all the things that will be so sorely missed — new chances to beat Swarthmore on the gridiron, or to beat whoever has the guts to face us on the cricket field — Cornell, Harvard, the New Jersey Athletic Club!
“Baldy, Thorny, Marmy, Had.”
Baldy remembers forming a bucket brigade the night Denbeigh Hall burned down, and Thorny describes with his customary sailor’s seasoning how we used to fumble with our academic gowns in the blustering winds of our senior year. Damn those gowns and the antediluvian chucklehead who first decided that seniors should wear them! Marmy waxes gastronomical over four delectable years of steak a la Bordelaise, asparagus on toast, iced tea and strawberries and fudge and ice cream. And “Had” puts us all into hysterics by recalling the day the electrical lab short-circuited.
We should — all eight of us — have suspended our group reminiscences and gone back to our rooms to start penning the opening paragraphs of our respective graduation theses.
“A History of Isthmian Canal Failures.”
A History of Isthmian Canal Failures by Jack Thomas. Wireless Telegraphy by Benny Lester. The Philadelphia Filtration System by “Battery” Clark. The Negro Problem by Edgar “Psyche” Snipes. There probably wouldn’t have been such a Negro problem if classes like Nineteen-Four hadn’t put up as their contribution to Junior Play Night a black-face minstrel show of such pasquinading offense as to make even the racially accommodating Mr. Booker T. Washington apoplectic.
“Ethel and beloved Maudie.”
Thoughts of the end of our college careers moving with astonishing illogic (as all thoughts eventually do) to the fairer sex. The nearness of the rosy-cheeked maidens of Bryn Mawr and the utterly unattainable theatrical Misses Ethel Barrymore and our own beloved Maudie — that is to say Miss Maude Adams, who was ours not in reality but only within our heartfelt fancy.
And now into this late hour of throbbing longing suddenly step the conjured wraiths of every girl we have ever loved and those to whom some of us are presently engaged. And suddenly we are facing our own futures as we have never faced them before, accompanied by the women — both real and imagined — whom we will woo and wed and with whom we will make our families. And into that void steps my dear…
“Flora.”
“Yes? What is it, Lindsay? Do you want something?”
She is there standing before me, among the corporeal companions of my collegiate youth. There in that room before the fire, late in the third quarter of my last year at Haverford. And all has come together on this night of mystical invocation — the boys who grew to manhood before my very eyes. And my beloved…
“Flora.”
“Yes, I’m here, Lindsay. I’m sitting right beside you, darling. I have your hand. Are you thinking of me? Am I there, my precious darling? Somewhere within your broken thoughts?”
I take Flora by the hand and we walk together in the midnight moonlight, breathing deeply the bracing wintry air. We walk through the Conklin gate and catch sight of Barclay Hall in all its Victorian Gothic glory, with its abbey-like spire rising up from walls of dark ivy. We stroll along the granolithic walk under chestnut trees bare of leaves, yearning for spring. I show Flora the place where once I was so very happy. A time when life held every promise and there was so much that still lay ahead. It is meet and proper that you should be here, I say to her. It is meet and proper that you should be with me at the beginning, for I do not know if you are with me now at the end. Are you there, Flora? In all those other places? In those places that took the place of Haverford? Where should I seek thee?
“For I do so miss thee.”
“I miss thee, too,” I said.
Did I tell you that my husband Lindsay attended school among Quakers? Even before the senility set in, he would sometimes lapse into the language of his Haverford elders to make a poetic point.
So when life’s long years are almost o’er
When thinking of those times with Nineteen-Four
Amid the myriad memories which rise,
That college ideal stands before our eyes.
The brightest recollection of those days
Seeing it grow real before our gaze
Find we ourselves to be that youthful vision.
Words penned by our class poet Howard Haines Brinton, who sits next to me before the fire, smoking his pipe like all the others, a cup of cocoa at his side. Quiet. The night so quiet. And then the silence broken by a wet snowball splatting the windowpane. We look out to find the fresh and the sophs engaged in mortal brumal combat. And there was a time when without hesitation we would have joined this battle royal wearing only our nightshirts and worsted slippers, eagerly defying the winter cold for pride of class. But not now. Now we are preparing with somber sobriety to troop, instead, into the valley of the shadow of adulthood…
…Or would have, had Helbert (more intimately known as Hellbird) not cried, “Ye gods and little fishhooks! Are we going to let those insolent underclassmen bastards get away with this?”
No, my dear sir, we are not. Avenge this assault upon the honor of Nineteen-Four! We’re still here for three months more!
And out we all went into the embattled night.
“Yes, out I go into that dark night.”
“Don’t go just yet, my love,” I said to my husband, my eyes brimming with tears. “Stay with me, just a little bit longer.”
1905 GENEALOGICAL IN RHODE ISLAND
Here is my draft of the Official Record of the 17th Reunion of the Livergood Family Association of Warwick, Rhode Island, September 27, 1905. Nota bene: I will entertain suggestions for changes to this document in the event that the notes taken by our treasurer and my secretarial assistant Mrs. Medora Livergood Markham (which I have liberally appropriated for this record due to the fact that my withered hand prevents note-taking of my own) are found in error or discovered to be in any other way deficient.
I observed at the September 27 gathering that Mrs. Markham was often inattentive, either in a sort of woolgathering state or engaged in animated conversations with other female Livergoods, whom she perhaps had not seen since last year’s reunion, and thus was not as scrupulous in her transcribing as she might otherwise have been.