Nathan Zabriski had scraped into the finals on Wednesday evening and come in second last at that afternoon’s track and field meet. His ring-rusty, somewhat heavy-footed performances in the fifteen hundred meter trials and the final had, however, hardly been in any way inexplicable given that he had spent most of the last three nights and two days fucking his psychiatrist. No, that was wrong; after their initial urgent rather than frantic, spontaneous re-coupling it had definitely been ‘making love’, not fucking.
And the ‘psychiatrist thing’ was past history by then.
Not that Professor Caroline Konstantis, before the war a luminary of the Chicago School of Medicine, had actually ever considered herself to be her much, much younger lover’s ‘attending physician’. Nathan had resisted any kind of ‘therapy’ so she had settled for just talking to him, as if she was his friend, his big sister… or his mother. And things had well… got out of control. One day she would write a book about it; try to quantify and specify the precise psychopathy which had led her to drive a metaphorical Sherman tank through every single sacred doctor-patient shibboleth which had previously ruled her entire adult life. The sanctity of those quasi-religious professional protocols had ruled her life right up until her first ‘private consultations’ with the man who was a year younger than her son.
Every time she looked in the mirror she figured Nathan was seeing something she was missing. Notwithstanding she had been unhappily dowdy in her youth, her still slim figure was nothing to shout about, and she was absolutely no kind of sultry middle-aged temptress, Nathan just kept coming back for more. The weirdest thing was that he made her laugh. Not often but a lot more than any other man she had ever met, and once he had got past attacking her as opposed to making love to her he had proven to be marvelously imaginative, very gentle and possessed of exactly the stamina one would expect of a middle distance runner in training.
Berkeley’s Edwards Stadium had been almost completely empty for the Wednesday evening local qualifying rounds ahead of the main Saturday Meet. She had been lost in the scale of the place which at a pinch could accommodate some twenty-two thousand people. The arena would have echoed more but for the fact it was open plan at both ends of its north-south alignment. Two great stands flanked the long sides of the stadia — or ‘Field’ — as everybody at Berkeley called it. Apparently, even though it was just a college track and field venue it remained, over three decades after its opening the largest of its type in the US.
Nathan was a mine of information about things like that; as befitting a former B-52 bombardier/navigator he liked to know what he was getting himself into, to research and to examine situations in fine detail before they could bite him. In applying to study at Berkeley he had made himself an expert on the University of California, its curricula, the faculty members likely to be in charge of his combined Geography, Geology and teaching courses, the precise layout of the town and the surrounding Bay Area, and in addition to putting his name down for the running team, he had joined several university clubs and societies, one or other of which already took him out of his garret on Hearst Avenue two or three nights a week, and all this before he had actually attended a single class.
Thus, Caroline — she was ‘Caro’ to Nathan, she did not know why but loved it — was unusually well informed about the athletics stadium which occupied the south western corner of the Berkeley Campus.
The stadium was named for Colonel George C. Edwards. The appellation ‘Colonel’ was an honorific arising out of his leadership of the cadet cadres of the University in the early part of the twentieth century. Born in 1852 Edwards had entered the newly founded University — it had received its charter from California Governor Henry H. Haight, a man now principally commemorated in the name of a street in San Francisco (Nathan was nothing if not exhaustive in his inquiries) — in March 1868. In 1869 Edwards had been in the first class of a dozen graduates. He was destined to become the ‘grand old man’ of Berkeley, a fellow of the University, and from 1909 to 1918 Professor of Mathematics. Athletics had been a lifelong interest of Edwards, and after his retirement he was famous for proudly attending every track and field Meet in his capacity as the University’s oldest alumnus. Although his death in November 1930 pre-dated the opening of the new stadium named in his honor, few men had had their legacy preserved so indelibly in stone, cinder, grass and eternal Berkeley folklore as George Edwards.
Caroline had walked around the great Art-Deco ‘Field’ — nobody could make up their mind whether it was Edwards ‘Stadium’ or ‘Field’ — and discovered that courtesy of the slightly elevated situation of the Campus, from various vantage points in the stands one could enjoy marvelous panoramic views of San Francisco Bay and the San Francisco skyline, the distant Golden Gate bridge to the west, or of the Berkeley Hills and Strawberry Canyon to the east.
What with one thing and another, the idea of making a new start in the Bay Area was growing on her every minute of every day!
There had been perhaps three to four thousand people in the East Stand around her during the finals that Saturday afternoon. She had sat in the sun with the other college kids and their parents, anonymous behind her Ray Bans. Nathan had planned to make his mark; she felt a little guilty — in a tingling sort of way — for having ruined him for today and probably for days to come. However, there would be other days; it was not as if she thought that what they had — whatever it was — was likely to last overlong.
Caroline was a little surprised when Nathan — despite everything still a gung ho go-getting Air Force guy — was relatively sanguine about his lowly position in the last race of the Meet.
“You ran very bravely,” she commiserated after they had settled in a side alcove in a busy coffee house on campus. She wanted badly to employ a comforting ‘sweetheart’, or ‘darling’ to most sentences but as yet neither she nor the man had reconciled themselves to that level of ‘commitment’.
Perhaps, it was because she was back in a place of academia that she was beginning to feel more secure, less foolish. Being at Berkeley was like walking through the gates of a great fortress designed to keep the real world at bay.
“I couldn’t relax,” he explained. “It’s got to be way over three years since I raced for real. I’d forgotten how intense it could be.”
They had settled opposite each other in a quiet corner.
Caroline stirred her coffee.
“I wore you out, sweetheart.”
The word slipped out inadvertently and she instantly blushed, lowering her eyes like a teenager on her first prom date.
The man left her discomfiture unremarked.
“A little, maybe,” he grinned uncomfortably. “But it wasn’t just that. I wasn’t up to speed in my head. I was better than all those guys in the final. Well, most of them. A couple of the guys from out of state were probably out of my league, but I just couldn’t hook everything up. I was never striding economically, I was unbalanced, I was too worried about what the others were going to do, it was as if one of the big birds I flew with the 5136th Bomb Wing was down on power on a couple of its engines. I let the others dictate the pace of the race and which piece of track I got to run on… ”
Nathan halted in mid-sentence, aware that he had turned introspective.
“Next time I’ll run better,” he promised philosophically.
Tonight there was a California Civil Rights Forum sponsored ‘event’ — not a rally, just an ‘event’ — at Wheeler Hall. The CCRF had booked, somewhat optimistically Caroline suspected, the Wheeler Auditorium, the largest lecture hall on the campus. Several student ‘leaders’, representatives of the offices of the Mayors of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, a representative of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a speaker from the NAACP were due to be on the podium. Dr Martin Luther King’s March on Philadelphia had been launched in Atlanta a fortnight ago and so far, protected by National Guardsmen and several companies of regular troops including detachments from the 2nd Marines, Dr King’s progress north through Georgia and Tennessee — one bus leap at a time, each separated by two to three days — had proceeded without bloodshed. Soon the dog-legging route would move east, into North Carolina and Virginia with the condemnation of the Deep South ringing in its ears. More alarming, there were wild rumors of ‘militia columns’ from Mississippi, Texas and Alabama preparing to follow the Civil Rights marchers north; and more ‘columns’ of hundreds of armed bikers racing to get ahead of the ever growing ranks of ‘marchers’, supported by truck loads of Southern States’ Rights activists, Klan men reinforced by disaffected veterans who felt ‘sold out’ by the Federal Government.