Philip Roth - Indignation

Sonny Cottler explained everything when he came for me in his car and I took him upstairs to show him the room. Standing in the doorway with me Sonny said, “He loves you, Marcus. These are tokens of his love.” “The garbage too?” “The garbage especially,” Sonny said. “The John Barrymore of Winesburg has been swept off his feet.” “Is that true? Flusser’s queer?” “Mad as a fucking hatter, queer as a three-dollar bill. You should have seen him in satin knee breeches in School for Scandal. Onstage, Flusser’s hilarious — perfect mimic, brilliant farceur. Offstage, he’s completely cracked. Offstage, Flusser’s a gargoyle. There are such gargoyle people, Marcus, and you have now run into one.” “But this isn’t love — that’s absurd.” “Lots about love is absurd,” Cottler told me. “He’s proving to you how potent he is.” “No,” I said, “if it’s anything, it’s hatred. It’s antagonism. Flusser’s turned my room into a garbage dump because he hates my guts. And what did I do? I broke the goddamn record that he kept me up with all night long! Only that was weeks ago, that was back when I’d just got here. And I bought a new one — I went out the next day and replaced it! But for him to do a thing so huge and destructive and disgusting as this, that I should stick in his craw so much for so long — it makes no sense. You would think he was miles above caring about anybody like me — and instead, this clash, this quarrel, this loathing! What now? What next? How can I possibly live here anymore?” “You can’t for now. We’ll set you up tonight with a cot at the house. And I can loan you some clothes.” “But look at this place, smell this place! He wants me to wallow in this shit! Christ, now I have to talk to the dean, don’t I? I have to report this vendetta, don’t I?” “To the dean? To Caudwell? I wouldn’t advise it. Flusser won’t go quietly, Marcus, if you’re the one who fingers him. Talk to the dean and he’ll tell Caudwell you’re the man in his life. Talk to the dean and he’ll tell Caudwell that you had a lover’s spat. Flusser is our abominable bohemian. Yes, even Winesburg has one. Nobody can curb Bertram Flusser. If they throw Flusser out because of this, he’ll take you down with him — that I guarantee. The last thing to do is to go to the dean. Look, first you’re felled by an appendectomy, then all your worldly goods are bespattered by Flusser — of course you can’t think straight.” “Sonny, I cannot afford to get thrown out of school!” “But you haven’t done anything,” he said, closing the door to my stinking room. “Something was done to you.”

But I and my animosity had done plenty, of course, upon being charged by Caudwell with impregnating Olivia.

I didn’t like Cottler and didn’t trust him, and the moment I stepped into the car to take him up on his offer of a cot and some clothes, I knew I was making yet another mistake. He was glib, he was cocky, he considered himself superior not just to Caudwell but probably to me as well. A child of the classiest Cleveland Jewish suburb, with long dark lashes and a cleft in his chin, with two letters in basketball and, despite his being a Jew, the president for the second straight year of the Interfraternity Council — the son of a father who wasn’t a butcher but the owner of his own insurance firm and of a mother who wasn’t a butcher either but the heiress to a Cleveland department-store fortune — Sonny Cottler was just too smooth for me, too self-certain for me, quick and clever in his way but altogether the perfectly exemplary external young man. The smartest thing for me to do was to get the hell out of Winesburg and get myself back to New Jersey and, though it was already a third of the way into the semester, try, before I got grabbed up by the draft, to rematriculate at Robert Treat. Leave the Flussers and the Cottlers and the Caudwells behind you, leave Olivia behind you, and head home by train tomorrow, home where there is only a befuddled butcher to deal with, and the rest is hardworking, coarse-grained, bribe-ridden, semi-xenophobic Irish-Italian-German-Slavic-Jewish-Negro Newark.

But because I was in a state, I went to the fraternity house instead, and there Sonny introduced me to Marty Ziegler, one of the fraternity members, a soft-spoken boy looking as though he hadn’t yet required a shave, a junior from Dayton who idolized Sonny, who would do anything Sonny asked, a born follower to a born leader, who, up in the privacy of Sonny’s room, agreed on the spot, for only a buck and a half a session, to be my proxy at chapel — to sign my name on the attendance card, to hand it in at the church door on the way out, and to speak to no one about the arrangement, either while he was doing it or after he’d completed the job. He had the trusting smile of one possessed by the desire to be found inoffensive by all, and seemed as eager to please me as he was to please Sonny.

That Ziegler was a mistake, I was certain — the final mistake. Not malevolent Flusser, the college misanthrope, but kindly Ziegler — he was the destiny that now hung over me. I was amazed by what I was doing. No follower, either born or made, yet I too yielded to the born leader, after a day like this one, too exhausted and flabbergasted not to.

“Now,” Sonny said, after my newly hired proxy had left the room, “now we’ve taken care of chapel. Simple, wasn’t it?”

So said self-assured Sonny, though I knew without a doubt, even then, knew like the son of my fear-laden father, that this preternaturally handsome Jewish boy with a privileged paragon’s princely bearing, used to inspiring respect and being obeyed and ingratiating himself with everyone and never quarreling with anyone and attracting the admiring attention of everyone, used to taking delight in being the biggest thing in his little interfraternity world, would turn out to be the angel of death.

It was already snowing heavily while Sonny and I were up in my room in Neil Hall, and by the time we’d reached the fraternity house, the wind had kicked up to forty miles an hour and, weeks before Thanksgiving, the blizzard of November ’51 had begun blanketing the northern counties of the state, as well as neighboring Michigan and Indiana, then western Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and finally much of New England, before it blew out to sea. By nine in the evening two feet of snow had fallen, and it was still snowing, magically snowing, now without a wind howling through the streets of Winesburg, without the town’s old trees swaying and creaking and their weakest limbs, whipped by the wind and under the burden of snow, crashing down into the yards and blocking the roads and driveways — now without a murmur from the wind or the trees, just the raggedy clots swirling steadily downward as though with the intention of laying to rest everything discomposed in the upper reaches of Ohio.

Just after nine we heard the roar. It carried all the way from the campus, which lay about half a mile up Buckeye Street from the Jewish fraternity house where I’d eaten my dinner and been given a cot and a dresser of my own — and some of Sonny’s freshly laundered clothes to put in it — and installed as the great Sonny’s roommate, for that night and longer if I liked. The roar we heard was like the roar of a crowd at a football game after a touchdown’s been scored, except that it was unabating. Like the roar of a crowd after a championship’s been won. Like the roar that rises from a victorious nation at the conclusion of a hard-fought war.

It all began on the smallest scale and in the most innocently youthful way: with a snowball fight in the empty quadrangle in front of Jenkins among four freshman boys from small Ohio towns, boyish boys with rural backgrounds, who’d run out of their dormitory room to frolic in the first snowstorm of their first fall semester away at college. At the start, the underclassmen who rushed to join them emptied out of Jenkins only, but when residents in the two dorms perpendicular to Jenkins looked from their windows at what was happening in the quad, they began pouring from Neil, then from Waterford, and soon a high-spirited snowball fight was being waged by dozens of happy, hyperkinetic boys cavorting in dungarees and T-shirts, in sweatsuits, in pajamas, even some in only underwear. Within an hour, they were hurling at one another not just snowballs but beer cans whose contents they’d guzzled down while they fought. There were flecks of red blood in the clean snow from where some of them had been cut by the flying debris, which now included textbooks and wastebaskets and pencils and pencil sharpeners and uncapped ink bottles; the ink, cast wide and far, splotched the snow blue-black in the light of the electrified old gas lamps that gracefully lined the walkways. But their bleeding did nothing to dilute their ardor. The sight of their own blood in the white snow may even have been what provided the jolt to transform them from playful children recklessly delighting in the surprise of an unseasonable snowfall into a whooping army of mutineers urged on by a tiny cadre of seditious underclassmen to turn their rambunctious frivolity into stunning mischief and, with an outburst of everything untamed in them (despite regular attendance at chapel), to tumble and roll and skid down the Hill through the deep snow and commence a stupendous night out that nobody of their generation of Winesburgians would ever forget, one christened the next day by the Winesburg Eagle, in an emotionally charged editorial expressing the community’s angry disgust, as “the Great White Panty Raid of Winesburg College.”