Now at the edge of the Circle, Maurice comes wobbling and scurrying across the grass, waving his arms, uncoordinated and ablaze with greeting. His hair is wild, the words he speaks are chewed and unintelligible. He wears his brown leather jacket and basketball shoes, and he obviously wants something. It takes Bruce half a minute to comprehend: Maurice wants to carry his racket. Given it, he is transformed. He handles it with both hands like a battle-ax, making fierce faces and sweeping the air.
Old Maurice, the campus moron, enthusiastic leader of cheers at football games, self-appointed master of ceremonies at pep rallies, front prancer in snake dances after high school basketball games, adorer of all athletes. Everybody knows Maurice, everybody laughs and groans when he goes scrambling and falling in a frenzy of school spirit out of the stands and onto the cinder track. Some people, especially girls of the snottier kind, find him disturbing and think he should be kept at home, but that would be the worst sort of unkindness. Distorted image of Bruce’s own innocence, Maurice touches and amuses him. He feels protective, and kids him along. Who could resist his adoration? He reveres this hero in his letter sweater with three stripes, he is ennobled to be seen with him. Out of the corners of his odd little mismatched eyes he invites the attention of a couple of gardeners returfing a worn patch of lawn, and when they look up grinning he decapitates them with two swings in the air.
At the steps of the L Building, Bruce offers to take the racket back, but Maurice doesn’t want to give it up. He will look after it. He understands its preciousness, he will take the greatest care of it. So Bruce leaves him sitting on the sandstone steps, cradling the racket in his lap and shielding it from a student who passes too close.
Bill Bennion’s office, always a mess, is on this morning a total mess. The desk overflows with bluebooks and themes, the chairs are piled with books recently returned by undergraduate borrowers and not yet restored to the shelves, which anyway are too jammed with other books, cardboard boxes of notes, stacked mgazines, and wadded lunch bags smelling of banana skins to hold them. The wastebasket has overflowed onto the floor. On the window ledges and on the tops of the radiators the dust is thick over piles of mimeographed sheets that have been there in that condition ever since Bruce first came into this office as a sophomore.
He has been in it many times since that first one. A lot of literary bull sessions have gone on here. He has been introduced to a lot of books here, and has carried them out and brought them back and been profanely quizzed about them. Across these piles of themes and across the littered desk he has broadcast his share of barbaric yawp, and been set straight without impatience by the smiling man who sits across there with the morning sun pouring in on him from behind, turning his bald skull into a fuzzy golden dandelion-head and sending shafts and whorls through the smoke of his pipe.
From the equipment bag he takes Carl Van Vechten’s The Tattooed Countess and Eliot’s For Lancelot Andrews, and pushes clear a corner of the desk and lays them on it.
“Well,” says his professor and friend Bill Bennion, watching him benignantly through his smoke. “The end of something.”
“The very end.”
“Now what?”
“Now what?”
“What are you going to do with yourself?”
“Oh, what a dusty answer gets the soul,” Bruce says, “when hot for certainties in this our life!”
“You horse’s ass,” Bennion says, and takes his pipe out of his mouth to laugh. When he laughs, the slight cast in one eye is accentuated and his benignant expression is touched with completely friendly scorn. In the equipment bag Bruce finds some pages of an old theme, crumples them into a ball, looks for a place to put them, feints left, feints right, and scores with a spectacular hook shot into one tight corner of the wastebasket.
“Hey, look.” He blows his whistle and holds up two fingers.
“Don’t evade the issue, you cretin,” Bennion says. “What are you doing to do?”
“What is there to do? Birth, copulation, death. Choice is an illusion.”
“The hell it is. If you turn out to be a gardener, after all the effort I’ve put in on you, I’ll staple you to a stump by the balls. Have you decided? Or haven’t you put your so-called mind to it at all?”
With his hands behind his head, his arms fuzzy with pale hair all the way around, even on the inside, even on the biceps, he scowls through the smile that never leaves his face—can’t leave his face, that’s the way his face is. He has no other expression except that benevolent, interested, slightly strabismic, pleasantly scornful smile.
“God, I don’t know,” Bruce says. “I suppose maybe I ought to take the fellowship and get an M.A.”
“In English?”
“Isn’t that what you offered me one in? You didn’t think I should take the one Parker offered me in philosophy.”
“That’s right, you shouldn’t. You’ve got better things to do with your life than losing yourself in a subject nobody believes exists. What’ll you do with an M.A. if you get it?”
Bruce shrugs, without an idea, and if the truth were told, untroubled.
“Teach?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Are you prepared to go on for a Ph.D.? If you’re going to teach in any place worth teaching in, you’ll have to have it.”
“Utah doesn’t give Ph.D.s.”
“I know that, for God’s sake. You’d have to go away somewhere.”
“I haven’t thought much about it.”
Bennion looks upward, inviting the roof to fall on him. “Obviously,” he says. “You know, you’re the damnedest, most unmotivated, drifting son of a … Have you talked to Notestein?”
“No.”
“Well, I have. I’ve been talking to him for three weeks, and he’s been talking to everybody he knows. He’s got you a fellowship at the University of Minnesota Law School if you want it.”
There, just there, begins the redirection of Bruce Mason’s life, but he does not realize it. He is simply astonished. “He what?”
“You heard me. He thought he could, and it turns out he can. He must have lied like a thief about your miserable little capacities, to get you in this late. So what are you going to do, tell him no thanks?”
“Well, but Jeez, that complicates …”
“You bet it complicates. It complicates you right into where you have to make up your mind, for a change.”
“Hell, Bill, I never had any ambition to be a lawyer. Why law?”
“Because that’s what’s available. Because Notestein’s a lawyer and that’s where his connections are. Because he has this half-baked confidence that you might make a lawyer. That’s the trouble with all of us. We think you’re fit for something or other, and break our asses trying to set something up for you, and you don’t know, you can’t make up your mind, you haven’t thought about it. Well, think about it!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Look, you moron,” Bennion says. “I know I offered you a fellowship, but that was just to keep you from wasting your time in philosophy. I never did think taking an M.A. in English, here, would do you any good. You’ve taken all our courses, you’ve learned anything we can teach you. You need to get out and knock your head against bigger people and bigger ideas. If you had the initiative of a banana slug, or I had, we’d both have thought of this a lot sooner, and we might have got you something at Berkeley, or even Harvard or Yale or some place East that would really jar you loose. But you didn’t, and I didn’t, so Minnesota is the only decent shot you’ve got.”
“Yeah, but law.”
“Law’s one kind of education, maybe a damn good kind. You don’t have to practice it, or even teach it. Just let it educate you—and don’t think you’re past being educated. My point is, if you don’t make your break now, at the natural time to make it, you never will. You’ll sit out in that nursery growing roots in your behind, and marry one of those half-mast-eyed girls you squire around, and wind up with six kids in primary
school, twins in the baby buggy, triplets in the oven, your ass in a sling, and your double hernia in a nice supportive truss.”
They both have to laugh. “Minnesota,” Bruce says, trying out the idea. “My mother came from Minnesota. I just missed being born there, right out there in the cornfield. I haven’t been that far east since I was four.”
“What I’m telling you. Time you went. Somewhere, to study something.”
“Subpoena duces tecum,” Bruce says, by Joe Mulder out of his lawyer brother. “With or without the ad testificandum clause. How long is law school?”
“Two years?” Bennion says. “Three? I’m not sure.”
“Good God, what would I tell my goil?”
“That’s just what I thought was on your mind,” Bill says, as grimly as his overweening benevolence will permit. The cast in his eye gives him a mad, squinting, leprechaunish look. “I expect you could tell her a lot of things she’d rather hear, but I know what I’d tell her.”
“What would you tell her?”
“I’d tell her to wait.”
Out on the steps old Maurice, Fidus Achates, is still guarding Bruce’s racket. Bruce thanks him profusely and shakes his hand. Maurice loves to shake hands, standing to it with his chest out and his eyes front like somebody having the Congressional Medal of Honor pinned on him. Then Bruce gives him a nickel for a root beer and turns him around and starts him down the hill with a pat on the back. All the way across the Circle he keeps turning around to wave.
Leon Notestein, the president’s assistant, is not in his office, but he has left an envelope for Bruce. It contains a letter from the dean of the Minnesota Law School, saying that Leon knows perfectly well it is too late to admit anyone, and much too late for fellowships, but on the strength of Leon’s uncritical admiration for this boy, he is holding a tuition scholarship and will hold it for two weeks at the most. Clipped to this letter is a scribbled note: “If you want this, get the application in, with all papers and fee, right now. Call me Tues. A.M. if questions.”
Questions Bruce has plenty of. Doubts—and this strikes him as curious—he has none. Only a sort of wonder: this is the way things will happen. From the time he left Bennion’s office he has been as little complicated by indecision as Maurice on his way to the soda fountain. They put this nickel in his hand and turn him around and pat him on the back and start him on the way he is supposed to go, and off he goes, waving back bravely. Regardless of his worth or his wishes, his destiny is directed by fairy godmothers. If glass slippers are in the script, they will be his size. If pumpkin coaches roll up, he will be the one for whom their doors open.
God’s fool, he floats through the errands he came to do. Marv Eldridge is not in the bookstore, where he said he would be, and after waiting ten minutes Bruce gives him up and goes to clean out his locker in the Park Building basement. Then back to the bookstore to turn in his key and get his refund. Still no Eldridge. He goes on up to Ham Barrentine’s office and picks up his last sweater. Ham gets a little sentimental over the last four years, and shakes his hand and grips his shoulder. He asks what Bruce is going to do now that he has graduated, and Bruce tells him that he is probably going to law school in Minneapolis.
Emerging from the Park Building on his way to the gym to clean out his locker there, he finds Joe Mulder sitting under a tree with his sweater box beside him, intently watching dozens of little red-and-black box-elder bugs crawl among the hairs on his arms. He offers an arm to Bruce. “Have some?”
“I wouldn’t want to deprive you.”
“Nice bugs. No bitee. Just friendly and gregarious. I see you got your sweater.”
“Yeah.”
“Giving it to Nola?”
“I guess.”
“Make that girl a four-letter word,” Joe says. “How about a couple of sets to wrap up the season?”
“I ought to be out to work by eleven. There’s about twenty tons of bullshit to bag.”
“Let Welby bag it. Break him in right. We can play a couple of sets and still get there before noon.”
“O.K., but I have to allow time to get there on the streetcar. My car’s in the shop.”
“I’ve got mine. Come on, I smell the blood of an English major.”
“I’ll beat your brains out,” Bruce promises him. “On the last day of the season Mulder learns how it feels to be number two.”
It really is a solar myth morning. For five years, ever since that day at the tennis club when he was fifteen, Bruce has been giving his body his devout attention, playing basketball in Ward amusement halls and in the commercial league, seizing every spare hour at school to work out on the weights and run laps, hitting tennis balls against the bangboard, playing anybody handy, running practice sessions a set or two sets long. There is a lot of physical work at the nursery, too, and he likes it. Nobody is going to admire him for his physique, but he has labored to make them admire his old college try, and in spite of his ulcer he is in the shape of his life. That morning, a Sir Gareth out of the kitchens, he takes on Lancelot, who taught him everything he knows, and he unhorses him.
The varsity courts are cement, and very fast, made for big servers. Joe’s service is not only big, it is heavy—it can twist your racket out of your hand. Overhead he is brutal. If you feed him a lob anywhere short of the base line you might just as well turn your back and hope he misses you. He is too high to lob over, too long-armed to pass, too severe to be outsteadied. The only way to play him, at least on these courts, is power against power, and that is the day Bruce can do it. He has modeled his game on Joe’s, after all.
They are taking the net at every chance. Nobody loses any points—the other wins them. They ace each other many times, they are both bouncing smashes over the fence and punching volleys off at sharp angles. Or else getting cleanly passed. It must be spectacular, the way they are hitting them, for by the middle of the first set they have begun to draw a crowd. By the end of it the crowd is cheering every point.
When they change courts after Bruce has won the first set, Joe works his pink eyebrows at him ferociously: from here on, he will get his. Bruce shrinks his shoulders together and cringes. “Now the roof falls in,” he says. He could not be more dishonest. He knows he is invincible. Joe goes on playing his best, which is good enough to beat nearly anybody in the state, and still Bruce beats him. Just to make it convincing, he aces him on match point.
Red, grinning, and amazed, as wet as if he has stood under a sprinkler, and with his hair dark red and kinky with sweat, Joe comes up to the net pretending he is going to throw his racket at Bruce’s head. “God damn, Joe,” Bruce says, as happy as he has ever been in his life. “Why can’t I play like that every time out?”
“Because you can’t be unconscious all the time,” Joe says. “You silly son of a bitch, Mason, if you played that way every time out you’d be beating Doeg and Vines.”
The crowd is dispersing. The sky has developed very white puffballs of cloud down over the Oquirrhs. The sun pours down, still well short of noon. Bruce falls like a tower, catching himself on his hands, and kisses the cement of the court.
The locker and shower rooms are entirely empty, hollow and reverberant and thick with the smells of old fellowship—Ivory soap, steam, Lysol, fresh sweat and stale sweat, the rubbery fragrance of tennis balls kept in a locker, even the lingering smell of the shellac with which they doctor frayed strings to make them last. They take a long, ceremonial shower, perhaps their last in that place, and sit on the worn benches and dress without hurry.
“You know something, Mason?” Joe says. “This could be the summer we do it. We play the way we were both playing this morning and there’s nobody around here can take us. We could win the Adams, the State, the Intermountain, the whole shebang.”
“Maybe a lot of California ringers will be coming through looking for tournament experience.”
“They won’t bother with anything but the Intermountain. They don’t like the high-altitude bounce.”
> “All right,” Bruce says. “We’ll take the Adams and the State. What the hell, why not the Intermountain, too, ringers or not. When does it come?”
“September, I think. About the middle.”
“Oh, hell,” Bruce says, shot down by a thought. “I might not be here.”
“Why? You taking a Hawaiian vacation or something?”
“I might be going to law school.”
Joe stares. “Don’t shit me, Mason.”
“I’m not. Notestein and Bennion have wangled me a scholarship at Minnesota. I guess I’m in if I want to fill out the papers.”
Joe pulls on a sock, watching Bruce as if he expects him to break out laughing. Bruce can see him begin to believe. As he pulls on the other sock he says, “Have you told my old man?”
“No. I just heard about it two hours ago.”
“Because,” Joe says, “he’s been talking about retiring in a few years and turning the business over to you and me.”
“You mean to you.”
“Both of us. He’s got this plan for letting you buy in—you know, a little at a time, out of your wages, or maybe giving you some stock as a bonus. He thinks people work better when they own part of what they’re working at.”
Bruce is troubled, for this is what in his most ambitious hour he would have dreamed of until a few hours ago. His eyes catch Joe’s, he reaches for his shoes. “That sounds like something you dreamed up. Keeping the old team together.”
“No. He likes you. He likes the way you work. Always has.”
Feeling like a heel, selfish and ungrateful, Bruce says, “Well, I haven’t really made up my mind. I’ve still got a day or two.”