The Book of Skulls

The spring of our sophomore year we acquired Ned. Oliver and I had signed up to room together again that year. Ned was in two of Oliver’s classes: physics, which Ned needed to fulfill his minimum science requirement, and comparative lit, which Oliver needed to fulfill his minimum humanities requirement. Oliver had a little trouble digging Joyce and Yeats, and Ned had a lot of trouble digging quantum theory and thermodynamics, so they worked out a reciprocal coaching arrangement. It was an attraction of opposites, the two of them. Ned was small, soft-spoken, ski

y, with big gentle eyes and a delicate way of moving. Boston Irish, strong Catholic background, educated in parochial schools; he still wore a crucifix when we were sophs and sometimes even went to mass. He intended to be a poet and short-story writer. No, “intended” isn’t the right word. As Ned explained it once, people with talent don’t intend to be writers. Either you have it or you don’t. Those who have it, write, and those who don’t, intend. Ned was always writing. Still is. Carries a spiral-bound notebook, jots down everything he hears. Actually I think his short stories are crap and his poetry is nonsense, but I recognize that the fault probably lies in my taste, not in his talent, since I feel the same way about a lot of writers much more famous than Ned. At least he works at his art.

He became a kind of mascot for us. He was always much closer to Oliver than he was to me, but I didn’t mind having him around; he was somebody different, somebody with a whole other outlook on life. His husky voice, his sad-dog eyes, his freaky clothes (he wore robes a lot, I suppose by way of pretending he had gone into the priesthood after all), his poetry, his peculiar brand of sarcasm, his complicated head (he always took two or three sides of every issue and managed to believe in everything and nothing simultaneously) — they all fascinated me. We must have seemed just as foreign to him as he to us. He spent so much time around our place that we invited him to room with us for our junior year. I don’t remember whose idea that was, Oliver’s or mine. (Ned’s?)

I didn’t know he was queer, at the time. Or rather, that he was gay, to use the term he prefers. The problem with leading a sheltered Wasp life is that you see only a narrow slice of humanity, and you don’t come to expect the unexpected. I knew such things as fags existed, of course. We had them at Andover. They walked with their elbows out and combed their hair a lot and talked with a special accent, the universal faggot accent that you hear from Maine to California. They read Proust and Gide all the time and some of them wore brassieres under their T-shirts. Ned wasn’t outwardly swishy, though. And I wasn’t the sort of meatball who automatically assumed that anyone who wrote (or read!) poetry had to be queer. He was arty, yes, he was hip, he was nonjock all the way, but you don’t expect a man who weighs 115 pounds to have much interest in football. (He did go swimming almost every day. We swim bare-ass at the college pool, of course, so for Ned it was like a free beaver flick, but I didn’t think of that then.) One thing, he didn’t go around with girls that I noticed. Still, that in itself isn’t a condemnation. The week before finals, two years ago, Oliver and I and a few other guys had what I guess you’d call an orgy in our room, and Ned was there, and he didn’t seem turned off by the idea. I saw him balling a chick, a pimply waitress in from town. It was a long time afterward that I realized: one, that Ned might find an orgy useful to him as material to write about, and two, that he doesn’t really despise cunt, he just doesn’t care for it as much as he does for boys.

Ned brought us Eli. No, they weren’t lovers, just buddies. That was practically the first thing Eli said to me: “In case you’re wondering, I’m hetero. Ned doesn’t go for my type and I don’t go for his.” I’ll never forget it. It was the first hint I had had that Ned was that way, and I don’t think Oliver had realized it either, though you never really know what’s going on in Oliver’s mind. Eli had spotted Ned right away, of course. A city boy, a Manhattan intellectual, he could put everybody into the proper category with one glance. He didn’t like his roommate and wanted out, and we had a huge suite, so he said something to Ned and Ned asked if he could transfer in with us, the November of our junior year. My first Jew. I didn’t know that, either — oh, Winchester, you naive prick, you! Eli Steinfeld from West Eighty-third Street, and you can’t guess he’s a Hebe! Honestly, I thought it was just a German name: Jews are called Cohen or Katz or Goldberg. I wasn’t really captivated by Eli’s personality, you might say, but once I found out he was Jewish I felt I had to let him room with us. For the sake of broadening myself through diversity, yes, and also because I had been raised to dislike Jews and I had to rebel against that. My grandfather on my father’s side had had some bad experiences with clever Jews around 1923; some. Wall Street Abies suckered him into investing heavily in a radio company they were organizing, and they were crooks and he lost about five million, so it became a family tradition to mistrust Jews. They were vulgar, pushy, sly, et cetera et cetera, always trying to do an honest Protestant millionaire out of his hard-inherited wealth, et cetera et cetera. In fact, my Uncle Clark once admitted to me that Grandfather would have doubled his money if he’d sold out within eight months, which is what his Jewish partners secretly did, but no, he hung on waiting for still fatter profits, and got clobbered. Anyway I don’t uphold all the family traditions. Eli moved in. Short, somewhat swarthy, a lot of body hair, quick nervous bright little eyes, big nose. A brilliant mind. An expert on medieval languages; already recognized as an important scholar in his field and still an undergraduate. On the other side of the ledger, he was pretty pathetic — tongue-tied, neurotic, hypertense, worried about his masculinity. Forever prowling after girls, usually getting nowhere. Doggish girls, too. Not the spectacularly ugly broads that Ned prefers, God knows why; Eli went after a different sort of female loser — shy, scrawny, inconspicuous girls, thick glasses, flat chests, you know the bit. Naturally, they’re as neurotic as he is, terrified of sex, and they wouldn’t come across for him, which only made his problems worse. He seemed absolutely afraid to approach a normal, attractive, sensual chick. One day last fall as an act of Christian charity I turned Margo on to him and he screwed things up something unimaginable.

Quite a foursome. I doubt that I’ll ever forget the first (and probably only) time all of our parents got together, in the spring of our junior year, at the big Carnival weekend. Up till then I don’t think any of the parents had visualized their son’s roommates in any clear way. I had Oliver home to meet my father a couple of Christmases, but not Ned or Eli, and I hadn’t seen their folks either. So here we all were. No family for Oliver, of course. And Ned’s father was dead. His mother was a gaunt hollow-eyed bony woman nearly six feet tall, in black clothes, speaking with a brogue. I couldn’t co

ect her with Ned at all. Eli’s mother was plump, short, a waddler, very much overdressed; his father was almost invisible, a tiny sad-faced man who sighed a lot. They both looked much older than Eli. They must have had him when they were thirty-five or forty. Then there was my father, who looks the way I imagine I’ll look twenty-five years from now — smooth pink cheeks, thick hair shading from blond to gray, a moneyed look about the eyes. A big man, a handsome man, the board-of-directors type. With him was Saybrook, his wife, who I guess is thirty-eight and could pass for ten years younger, tall, well-scrubbed, long straight yellow hair, big-boned athletic body, very much the fox-and-hounds sort of woman. Imagine this group sitting under a parasol at a table in the quandrangle, trying to make conversation. Mrs. Steinfeld trying to mother Oliver, the poor dear orphan. Mr. Steinfeld eyeing my father’s $450 Italian silk suit in horror. Ned’s mother completely out of it, understanding neither her son, her son’s friends, their parents, nor any other aspect of the twentieth century. Saybrook coming on all hearty and horsey, talking blithely about charity teas and her stepdaughter’s imminent debut. (“Is she an actress?” Mrs. Steinfeld asked, baffled. “I mean her coming-out party,” said Saybrook, just as baffled.) My father studying his fingernails a lot, staring hard at the Steinfelds and at Eli, not wanting to believe any Of this. Mr. Steinfeld, to make conversation, talking about the stock market to my father. Mr. Steinfeld doesn’t have investments but he reads the Times very carefully. My father knows nothing about the market; so long as the dividends come on time, he’s happy; besides, it’s part of his religion never to talk about money. He flashes a signal to Saybrook, who deftly changes the subject, starts telling us about how she’s chairman of a committee to raise funds for Palestinian Arab refugees, you know, she says, the ones who were driven out by the Jews when Israel got started. Mrs. Steinfeld gasps. Such a thing to say in front of a Hadassah member! My father then points across the quadrangle to a particularly long-haired classmate who had just turned around and says, “I could have sworn that fellow was a girl, until he looked this way.” Oliver, who has let his hair grow to his shoulders, I suppose to show what he thinks of Kansas, gives my father his coldest, coldest smile. Undaunted, or u

oticing, my father continues, “Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but I can’t help suspecting that many of those young men with flowing locks are, you know, a trifle homosexual.” Ned laughs out loud at this. Ned’s mother turns red and coughs — not because she knows her boy is gay (she doesn’t — the idea would be incredible to her) but because that fine-looking Mr. Winchester has said a nasty word at the table. The Steinfelds, who are quick on the uptake, look at Ned, then at Eli, then at each other — a very complex bit of reaction. Is their boy safe with such a roommate? My father can’t comprehend what his casual remark has started and doesn’t know who to apologize to for what. He frowns and Saybrook whispers something to him — tsk, Saybrook, whispering in public, what would Emily Post say? — -and he responds with a magnificent blush extending far into the infrared. “Perhaps we can order some wine,” he says, loudly, to cover his confusion, and imperiously summons a student-waiter. “Do you have Chassagne-Montrachet ‘69?” he asks. “Sir?” the waiter replies blankly. An ice bucket is fetched, containing a bottle of three-buck Liebfraumilch, the best they can offer, and my father pays for it with a brand-new fifty. Ned’s mother stares at the bill in disbelief; the Steinfelds scowl at my father, thinking he’s trying to put them down. A beautiful, beautiful episode, this whole lunch. Afterward Saybrook draws me aside and says, “Your father feels very embarrassed. If he had known Eli was, well, attracted to other boys, he would never have made that remark.”