U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [200]
Perhaps it was the result of living in the Yard that he got to know al the wrong people, a couple of socialist Jews in first year law, a graduate student from the middle-west who was taking his Ph.D. in Gothic, a Y.M.C.A. ad-dict out from Dorchester who went to chapel every morn-ing. He went out for Freshman rowing but didn't make any of the crews and took to rowing by himself in a wherry three afternoons a week. The fel ows he met down at the boathouse were pleasant enough to him, but most of them lived on the Gold Coast or in Beck and he never got much further than hel o and solong with them. He went to al the footbal ral ies and smokers and beer nights but he never could get there without one of his Jewish friends or a graduate student so he never met anybody there who was anybody.
One Sunday morning in the spring he ran into Freddy Wigglesworth in the Union just as they were both going in to breakfast; they sat down at the same table. Freddy, an old Kent man, was a junior now. He asked Dick what
-88-he was doing and who he knew, and appeared horrified by what he heard. "My dear boy," he said, "there's nothing to do now but go out for the Monthly or the Advocate.
. . . I don't imagine the Crime would be much in your line, would it?"
"I was thinking of taking some of my stuff around, but I hardly had the nerve."
"I wish you'd come around to see me last fal . . . . Goodness, we owe it to the old school to get you started right. Didn't anybody tel you that nobody lived in the Yard except seniors?" Freddy shook his head sadly as he drank his coffee.
Afterwards they went around to Dick's room and he
read some poems out loud. "Why, I don't think they're so bad," said Freddy Wigglesworth, between puffs at a ciga-rette. "Pretty purple I'd say, though. . . . You get a few of them typed and I'l take them around to R. G. . . . Meet me at the Union at eight o'clock a week from Mon-day night and we'l go around to Copey's. . . . Wel , so long, I must be going." After he'd gone Dick walked up and down his room, his heart thumping hard. He wanted to talk to somebody, but he was sick of al the people he knew around Cambridge, so he sat down and wrote Hilda and Edwin a long letter with rhyming inserts about how wel he was getting on at col ege.
Monday night final y came around. Already trying to tel himself not to be disappointed if Freddy Wigglesworth forgot about the date, Dick was on his way to the Union a ful hour before the time. The cavernous clatter and smel of Mem, the funny stories of the boneheads at his table, and Mr. Kanrich's sweaty bald head bobbing above the brass instruments of the band in the gal ery seemed particularly dreary that evening. There were tulips in the trim Cambridge gardens, and now and then a whiff of lilacs on the wind. Dick's clothes irked him; his legs were heavy as he walked around and
-89-around the blocks of yel ow frame houses and grass door-yards that he already knew too wel . The blood pounding through his veins seemed too fast and too hot to stand. He must get out of Cambridge or go crazy. Of course at eight sharp when he walked slowly up the Union steps Wigglesworth hadn't come yet. Dick went upstairs to the library and picked up a book, but he was too nervous to even read the title. He went downstairs again and stood around in the hal . A fel ow who worked next to him in Physics I lab. came up and started to talk about something, but Dick could hardly drag out an answer. The fel ow gave him a puzzled look and walked off. It was twenty past eight. Of course he wasn't coming, God damn him, he'd been a fool to expect he'd come, a stuck up snob like Wigglesworth wouldn't keep a date with a fel ow like him. Freddy Wigglesworth was standing in front of him,
with his hands in his pockets. "Wel , shal we Copify?" he was saying. There was another fel ow with him, a dreamy looking boy with fluffy light gold hair and very pale blue eyes. Dick couldn't help staring at him he was so handsome.
"This is Blake. He's my younger brother. . . . You're in the same class." Blake Wigglesworth hardly looked at Dick when they shook hands, but his mouth twisted up into a lopsided smile. When they crossed the Yard in the early summer dusk fel ows were leaning out the windows yel -ing "Rinehart O Rinehart" and grackles were making a racket in the elms, and you could hear the screech of street-car wheels from Mass. Avenue; but there was a complete hush in the lowceiling room lit with candles where a scrubbylooking little man was reading aloud a story that turned out to be Kipling's "The Man Who Would be King." Everybody sat on the floor and was very intent. Dick decided he was going to be a writer.