“I’m interested,” he said, “—to the extent that I’m interested in anything — in politics.” To fulfill his social science requirement he was taking a course in civics. Monday there might be a snap quiz on the bicameral legislature.
“Really? In politics?”
“I’m like you,” the future City Commissioner of Streets confided offhandedly, “I want to help make sure that future generations of children will have, well, a future.”
They met for coffee, they went to the movies, they went to concerts. They’d become enthusiastic about certain of their professors and from time to time would sit in on each other’s classes. They were the only couple they knew who did this on a date. Though they really didn’t know all that many couples. Rose Helen was a sorority girl. (Yes, it surprised Druff too.) There was this rule that sorority girls couldn’t date Independents. Well, it was an unwritten rule actually, enforceable only while the girls were still pledging. Though even after they were initiated it was strongly discouraged. “They wouldn’t want to be hypocrites,” Rose Helen told him. “That’s what they say, that they wouldn’t want to be hypocrites, the hypocrites. That it would set a bad example for the pledges, that what would we think if we were still pledging and found out one of our sisters was dating someone who wasn’t a Greek?”
That’s why they didn’t know too many couples. That’s why they met for coffee in various cafés on campus, that’s why they met in front of certain movie theaters, and managed to be on line when the tickets to particular concerts — Odetta, Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel — went on sale. That’s why they sat in on each other’s classes.
Because the pressure was on her not to date an Independent, because she couldn’t bring him to her sorority house (and because the landlady in Druff’s boardinghouse was as strict about men socializing with women in their rooms as the sisters were about fraternizing with Independents), couldn’t and wouldn’t, she said, even if she could. Because she didn’t want any brooding, tempest-tossed, “La Mer”-whistling, tragic and sarcastic friend of hers subjected to the silly remarks of a bunch of spoiled, malicious, superficial girls. Though Druff felt he could have held his own with the best of them and wouldn’t have minded. He told Rose Helen as much.
“No,” she said. “Why stoop to their level?”
“Well, why did you?” he asked in turn.
Which was just exactly the wrong question. They were in one of their coffee shops again, or, no, he remembered now, this time not in one of their coffee shops at all, not even on campus, not even in campus town anymore, but in the town proper, in a diner, the sort of place they might drop in on after one of those folk concerts they went to but which they ordinarily avoided, because they were both clearly students, and as much resented by the townies who went there as Druff was by the Greeks or Rose Helen by Druff’s landlady because she was a woman. Where no one they could possibly know would recognize them, except for the types they were. (And maybe he was interested in politics, maybe he was. Just maybe all this bi- and tri-cameral apartheid of ordinary life was beginning to have an influence on him.) But which was just exactly the wrong question. Because she was crying now, Druff’s little poster girl dissolved in tears, and not because she couldn’t answer his oblique reference to her own hypocrisy but because she could. Because she knew herself that well.
“I’m two years behind my year,” she sobbed. “I should be graduating in June. Instead I’m only this sophomore. Don’t you know anything? Because why did they rush me if it wasn’t to show off how liberal they are? Not only a cripple but a relatively presentable cripple, and not only a relatively presentable cripple with this almost sanitary deformity, but someone older than they, and aren’t they sisters, and don’t sisters have big sisters? So what does that make me if not an intermediary somewhere between an older sister and their housemother? Someone who not only can do for them — make last-minute adjustments on their hairdos, go over their lists of French and Spanish vocabulary with them, help with their mending, give them a hip to cry on — but who looks good on their record too. Don’t you know anything? I wasn’t here three days before they spotted me and rushed me. They didn’t even give me a hard time. I wasn’t even hazed.”
She was telling him — though of course the terms for all this hadn’t been invented yet — that she was their first affirmative-action, primal status token project.
He persisted. “You didn’t answer my question. Why? Well, why did you?”
“Don’t you know anything? You don’t know anything, do you? I told you, they made it easy for me. All I ever had to do was pose with them in the front row when the group picture was taken. I wasn’t even hazed.”
If she was their first affirmative action, Druff was their second.
Rose Helen said she’d told them about him and that they couldn’t wait to meet him. He was invited to come to dinner Tuesday night.
“Well, yes,” he said, “I’m an ‘Independent.’ ” This was in the living room. (He supposed it was a living room, though it might have been a drawing room or a music room or even a library, even, for all he knew, the boardroom of some fabulous, oak-paneled corporate headquarters. There was a huge crystal chandelier, there was a concert-class grand piano. There were leaded glass bay windows and cushioned window seats. There were lacquered wooden tables and tall freestanding lamps. There were shelves packed solid with books in leather bindings, golden titles mounted in layered frames set into their spines like seals. There were long leather sofas and wing chairs upholstered in what looked to Druff like fine Oriental rugs. There were fine Oriental rugs.) He’d never seen anything like it. It could have been a manor house in the family generations.
“No,” he said, answering another girl’s question, “I have nothing against the idea of fraternities, qua fraternities. I guess I just never bought into the notion that one could have instant ‘brothers,’ or the odd, exclusive idealism of fraternity life.”
“Rosie tells us that you intend to be a politician,” said another of his hostesses.
“Well,” he said, “I’m not running for anything, if that’s what you mean. My eye isn’t ‘out’ for any particular ‘office.’ ” That’s how he spoke to them all evening, in the living room — if that’s what it was — and, later, at the head table at dinner, attempting aphorisms by stressing individual words or setting them off in what he hoped would be understood as quotation marks, sometimes punching up everything, addressing them in a kind of oral Braille. When they were informed that they would be taking their coffee and dessert by the piano that evening, Druff rose, wiped at the corner of his lips with his napkin and thanked the president of the sorority for having him over for dinner. “Really,” he said, “though I’m this, quote, bred in the bone, unquote, quote Independent unquote, I have to admit that the dinner was excellent, and the evening was fascinating, and I underscore fascinating. You’re very kind, all of you. As a would-be, quote, public man, unquote, I have to confess to a certain, quote, interest, unquote, in the dynamics of your organization. I find it’s all rather like some loyal politician’s allegiance to, well, ‘party.’ Quote party unquote underscored.”