4
THE ROCK CLIMBING LEFT ITS INHERITANCE. IN MY SENIOR YEAR AT ST. Matthew’s, I went from second shell to first on the 150-pound crew and rowed against St. Paul’s and Groton. I passed my Entrance Boards with good marks and one full leap ahead of my now domiciled dyslexia. I won the one fistfight I had in my three years at prep school. I even worked out at wrestling which was difficult for me since I was still expunging from my brain every trace of the glom-job by the assistant chaplain (who always nodded when we passed). My loins no longer felt impacted with pus. And I did get into Yale. I had had, as one would suspect, a sense of future mission all through my last year at St. Matthew’s and it continued in college. I entered Yale with the full expectation that some official at one of the freshman inquiry desks would lead me over to my undergraduate CIA unit, but as I soon learned, the Agency did not go in for college cells. No raps sounded on my door at midnight.
At Harlot’s suggestion, I did join ROTC. “You’ll be dealing with idiots,” he told me, “but there are requirements for military service that have to be satisfied before you can join the Agency, and ROTC takes care of that. After Yale, you certainly wouldn’t want to face two years in the armed services before coming to us.”
I did close-order drill over the next eight semesters and managed to get good enough to air out any dank memories of left-foot-club-foot with the Knickerbocker Grays. I discovered a vein of optimism in myself. As one grew older, the traumatic impasses of childhood could actually dissolve.
Harlot would telephone from time to time and prove interested in which courses I chose. Usually it was to push my interests toward English. “Learn your mother tongue and you’ll appreciate the others.” Before sophomore year he sent me what he saw as a great gift, a first edition of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, and truth, it wasn’t bad. There was a time when I could not only locate the roots of a word in Latin and Greek, but enjoy the exotic yams and tubers that come to us from Scandinavian and Celtic. I learned of English words derived from Italian by way of Latin, as well as of Portuguese from Latin (auto-da-fé and binnacle), and French out of Portuguese from Latin ( fetich and parasol), and French out of Spanish from Latin, and Portuguese out of Spanish and Dutch derived from Latin (cant and canal and pink), and German from Latin, and French from Late Latin, and German out of Hungarian from Serbian from late Greek from Latin, all to be tapped for hussar. I learned crossbreeds of French out of Spanish from Arabic from Greek—alembic is one reward—and I will not go on at length about English that came to us from Low German, Dutch, Slavonic, Russian, Sanskrit, Magyar, Hebrew, Hindustani. Harlot, by his lights, was getting me ready for CIA. The theory? Why, look to the tendrils of other tongues that had grown their way into English. Thereby one might develop a taste for the unspoken logic of other lands.
Of course, I saw it all as preparation. For the next four years, my courses and the friends I made, were all there to contribute to my mission as a CIA man. If I had any conflict over my future occupation, it was on spring nights in New Haven, after an occasional and frustrating date with a girl, when I would tell myself that I really wished to become a novelist. Brooding upon this, I would also inform myself that I did not have sufficient experience to write. Joining CIA would give me the adventures requisite to working up good fiction.
I was certainly single-minded. I see myself in junior year before the Yale-Harvard game, drunk at Mory’s with my peers, holding the silver bowl high. I was obliged to keep drinking Green Cup for as long as my table would continue to sing, yes, how I drank and how they chose to sing. The song was long, and I would not quit until the last bar of music was sung, and sung again.
Words I have not thought of in thirty years come to me out of the pale, sunlike glare of the interior of that large silver punch bowl. I quaffed Green Cup at Mory’s and around me in a ring of ten illuminated voices, the song cried on:
It’s Harry, it’s H, it’s H makes the world go round.
It’s Harry, H, that makes the world go round.
Sing Hallelujah, sing Hallelujah,
Put a nickel on the drum,
Save another drunken bum,
Sing Hallelujah, sing Hallelujah,
Put a nickel on the drum,
Save another drunken bum,
Put a nickel on the drum,
And you’ll be saved.
They paused for breath but I had to keep drinking.
Oooh, I’m H-A-P-P-Y to be F-R-double-E,
F-R-double-E to be S-A-V-E-D,
S-A-V-E-D from the bonds of S-I-N,
Glory, glory Hallelujah,
Hip, Hooray, Amen.
And I, drinking that sweet, potent, noxious, liquor-hallowed Green Cup, swallow into swallow, giving my soul to finish the bowl, knew that angels watched me as I drank, and if I drank it all before the song was done, we would beat Harvard tomorrow, we would serve our team from the stands. We would be there to offer our devotion, our love, our manly ability to booze with the gods at Mory’s. Only gods drank to the depths of a silver bowl. We would ring Yale Bowl with the might of our mission at Yale, which was to defeat Harvard tomorrow. God, didn’t I guzzle it down, and the score next day, in that November of 1953, was Yale 0, Harvard 13.