Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“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.”

In that living room again, Rose Helen and he were directed to seats on one of the leather sofas and offered coffee and cake by a waiter. (Druff recognized him. They lived in the same boardinghouse.) There was some general conversation. Then the waiter went around the room taking up their cups and saucers, their cake plates, their forks and spoons and paper napkins. One of the sorority sisters walked over to the piano and sat down at the piano bench. She was joined by the rest of the girls who ranked themselves about her in what even Druff recognized as a formation, a kind of musical battle stations.

“Oh no,” Rose Helen groaned.

“What?”

“Oh no.”

Two or three of the waiters had come in from the dining room and were leaning against a wall in the entrance hall.

The president of the sorority was speaking directly to Druff and Rose Helen on the sofa. “Robert,” she said, “the women of Chi Phi Kappa are proud of all their sisters. Rose Helen, however, whose maturity and unselfish generosity have been an inspiration to all of us, holds a special place in our hearts, and we do not wonder that she should have found one in yours. Now, Rose, in your honor, and in honor of your interesting new friend, the ladies of Chi Phi Kappa house are pleased to honor you this evening with a serenade, one of the most beautiful and cherished of our traditions.

“Your sisters smile on you tonight, Rose, and wish you all the happiness you could wish for yourself. We delight in your delight. We support you, we love you, we bless you.”

They sang the Chi Phi Kappa song. They sang the school fight song. They sang love songs. They sang “Rosie, You Are My Posy.” They sang “La Mer.”

Of course they were embarrassed, of course they were. All that drilled attention, it was like having the attention of a firing squad, a little like taking, at close range and at full force, a blast from a fire hose. Of course he felt patronized, of course he did. Nevertheless (maybe he was a politician, maybe he was; maybe at nineteen he was already developing the politician’s thick skin, or at least a willingness to deal, something quid pro quo in the nature; if they hadn’t actually given him a girlfriend, why at least they had endorsed him; and all he ever had to do for it was eat their dinner, submit to their questioning, good-sport his way through their silly patronage), he felt he had made a good impression.

He had, Rose Helen told him, he’d confirmed all their misgivings, was everything they thought an Independent would be.

“Didn’t you feel it?” she said. “Didn’t you feel any of it? Didn’t you? Don’t you know what that was?” They were in one of the small study rooms — two small typing tables, a couple of desk lamps, two chairs, a narrow cot — at the back of the sorority house. The door to the study room was open. Rose Helen was standing with her hand on the little shelf above her damaged left hip, the akimbo elbow and forward thrust of her body giving her her familiar, faintly bold air, and a suggestion about her mouth (though if this was there at all it was something Druff had penciled in himself) of the pursed pout of some saloon cupid.

“Rosie, you are my posy,” Druff said, reaching for her hand and lifting it from her hip to pull her gently toward the cot.

She held her ground. “If I scream they’ll come running.”

“Why would you scream?”

“Listen, it’s almost ten-thirty. Males have to be out of here by ten-thirty.”

“Why would you scream?”

“We came in here to study. We’re supposed to be studying.”

“Isn’t this the passion pit? Isn’t that what they call it?”