Hangsaman Read online

  It was extraordinary how not having faces had changed the bodies of the girls in the house. Falteringly, Natalie was able to pick out two or three, but, reflecting that she had known them at best only by their make-up and the way they did their hair, she was forced to distrust her own judgment and to believe, most charitably, the best of them. One, who seemed to have constituted herself leader, remarked as Natalie, first in line, was brought in, “Do you have any qualification for entering here?”

  They were sitting in a semicircle on the floor, all masked as foolishly as the girl who had brought her, all wearing their own pajamas, which surely their mothers, picking them out, had not destined for such midnight purposes; or, indeed, had they? Did the mothers of such girls encourage their superiority, egg them on to masked acts? Did they, sending their daughters off to college, remark, as last-minute advice, “And, dearest, remember, when you get after the frosh . . . do please wear your blue-and-white-striped p.j.’s—they look the best, and they’ll stand the splinters in that floor . . .”

  “No, I was brought,” said Natalie, and received for reward a push from the girl who had brought her, so that she fell clumsily against a girl sitting, and the girl said, very humanly, “Cut it out,” and pushed back.

  Now I will keep quiet, Natalie thought, knowing—and it was not, after all, any too soon to learn—the resignation of a perceptive mind before gleeful freed brutality—and let someone else get pushed.

  “—for entering here?” the leader was asking the next girl.

  “I don’t know,” said the girl uncertainly, and was pushed.

  As that girl dropped down next to Natalie, she whispered, trembling, “I wish I’d never come.”

  “Me, too,” said Natalie inadequately.

  She found that she was thinking absurdly of Jeanne d’Arc; perhaps the next girl, or the one after that, would turn in contempt from the leader, and, addressing a dim figure in the background, drop to her knees and say, “You, Sire, are my king . . .”

  After the first few girls, their mentor was tired of pushing them—perhaps she had worn out her rage, or her arms?—and they were allowed to seat themselves quietly. No one spoke, and beyond their mutual and spreading apprehension came the sure conviction among the freshmen that their superiors had exceeded themselves, that the “I will if you will” had begun to evaporate, with the laughter and the bad puns; that the torment they had devised extended perhaps to one or two girls and could not, for sheer bodily weariness, be repeated, over and over again, for twenty. Moreover, it became increasingly clear that the party had fallen flat, that the pure number of girls entering docilely had worn thin the viciousness in the voice of the leader, that she and her cohorts were going to skim over the last few girls, relying for their effect upon the first few, and, perhaps even with discomfort for themselves, let the business go to pieces now without further emphasizing their futility; the part of wisdom lay clearly in choosing the weakest first.

  Natalie, at least, felt a grateful relief when, instead of calling upon her as the first girl, the leader waited until all the freshmen were in, and crowded uneasily onto the floor, and sitting or kneeling, then pointed to a girl in the middle and said, “You, there.”

  It crossed Natalie’s mind then that if she had stayed in her room quietly and never heeded the call to frosh, she would have been overlooked, since no one seemed to care about those who did not come. With this in mind, Natalie turned cautiously and scanned the ranks of freshmen for the red-haired girl, but did not find her. Another instance, she thought regretfully (or at least remembered later that she had so thought), of ritual gone to seed; the persecution of new students, once passionate, is now only perfunctory.

  The girl chosen was required to sit upon a low stool in what was, most of them now recognized, the center of the second-floor lavatory—the largest in the house, and the one with most floor space—and she was required further to give her name and her previous educational experience, as though that had not all been gone over before by people more qualified to know, and then the leader, hesitating and prompted, had chosen to confer with a colleague rather than to continue the questioning immediately. Then someone from the masked circle around the new students said, “Look, we’re all allowed to ask questions, aren’t we?”

  “Sure,” said the leader, with obvious gratitude.

  “Then listen, Myrna,” said the girl happily, from behind her mask, “you a virgin?”

  Natalie saw the freshman blushing full-face and the upper-classmen blushing behind and above their masks, and thought, I hope they don’t ask me, and, It’s the girls with masks on their faces blushing too. Could it be, she wondered tiredly, that a mask is no protection at all?”

  “Certainly,” said the girl on the stool, surprised at the question, and blushing as well as the rest.

  “Tell us a dirty joke, then,” said someone else.

  “I don’t know any,” said the girl, writhing, obviously repressing a seemingly forgotten story that came unfortunately to mind. “I don’t listen to those.”

  “Excused,” said the leader. The girl came off the stool and retired, blushing and explaining, to oblivion among her friends; she had passed; she had at that moment taken on a protective coloration among the general run of girls in the house; she was not in any way eccentric, but a good, normal, healthy, American college girl, with ideals and ambitions and looking forward to a family of her own; she had merged.

  “Next,” said the leader. She gestured at random, and her gesture was answered with alacrity by someone who, seating herself on the stool, showed that she, and no other, was possessed of the information the masked girls wanted to hear, and that she was, in addition, prepared to lie valiantly to deprive them of it and to exalt herself in the eyes of the freshmen girls.

  She gave her name in a pleased voice and eyed the circle defiantly, as though daring any of them to match her siren experience or to question it.

  Natalie, who needed abruptly to establish her own position, leaned to the girl next to her and whispered, “I won’t answer them.”

  “Shhh,” said the girl next to her, bending forward to hear the victim on the stool, who was delivering the punch-line of a joke. The girls in the masks did not laugh, or at least did not show beyond the masks that they were laughing. “That’s not very dirty,” said one.

  “It’s the best I know,” said the girl on the stool innocently.

  “Excused,” said the leader helplessly. Then, unbearably, unbelievably, she looked squarely at Natalie. “You,” she said.

  “No,” said Natalie, but the desire to assume the stool, if not the confessional, drove her. Sitting in the center of light, with everyone watching her, she knew at once and for all time the hard core of defiance with which she might always face unknown faces staring; she knew with strength that it would be as easy, or even easier, to resist than to expose herself.

  She gave her name (was it her name?) and then, when asked if she were a virgin—and this question, gaining adherents from the unkind and the merely curious, was being asked now by three or four voices at once, and even, Natalie saw from the high point of the stool, being echoed by the traitor freshmen themselves—said briefly, “I won’t answer.”

  The worst she had expected was another push, but obviously everyone was afraid to push her with everyone else watching; no single girl there dared expose her own self (“Are you a virgin? Well?”) with any untoward gesture by now; no single girl dared, however much she desired, take on the limelight; because perhaps by now one small gesture of resistance from the freshmen would have dissolved the upperclassmen into tearful dismayed people, without superiority, and tearing off their masks, saying, “It was her idea—I wouldn’t have done it at all except . . .”

  Someone said menacingly that she had better tell, and someone else said that if she didn’t want to tell, well, that proved it.

  “Tell a dirty joke,” s
aid the leader.

  “I will not,” said Natalie, who, like everyone else there, was more afraid of being found not to know dirty jokes than of being found to have a rich supply. “Don’t you know enough jokes?”

  “Bad sport,” someone called, and then others took it up. “Bad sport, rotten sport, not fair.”

  What a silly routine, Natalie thought, not realizing, sitting there alone on the stool in the center of the ring of girls, how she was jeopardizing her own future in college, her own future for four years and perhaps for the rest of her life; how even worse than the actual being a bad sport was the state of mind which led her into defiance of this norm, this ring of placid, masked girls, with their calm futures ahead and their regular pasts proven beyond a doubt; how one person, stepping however aside from their meaningless, echoing standards, set perhaps by a violent movement before their recollection, and handed down to them by other placid creatures, might lose a seat among them by questions, by rebellion, by anything except a cheerful smile and the resolution to hurt other people.

  “I won’t,” Natalie said, not knowing whom she was answering.

  “Excused,” said the leader.

  Natalie, realizing that she must relinquish the stool and the light, said as she rose (and loud enough, she hoped, to carry to the fortunate girls still asleep, the red-haired girl and the others who had not answered the call), “I think this is the silliest thing I ever saw.” Follow me, she prayed to the girls still sitting in the ring, follow me, stand up, and a new world is made; but no one, standing up beside her, or even raising her voice or her eyes, noticed Natalie by now.

  “Dirty joke?” the leader was saying to the new girl.

  “I don’t know,” said the new girl, blushing pleasurably. “Let me think.”

  Natalie opened the door, observed but not interfered with, and went out.

  She went, alone and with a realization of aloneness, to her own private, untouched, room.

  Dear Dad,

  This is going to be my most ambitious letter to date, and please don’t criticize, because I am writing fast and not stopping to correct, and even though that might be the way to get things down best, it makes for a lot of mistakes. Because this is going to be about the college. I know you saw it that first day when you and Mother and Bud brought me down, but at that time we were all strange and didn’t know what it was like, and now, after over two weeks (and it seems like two years, really) I feel so much at home here that I don’t really remember what it was like to live anywhere else, and I sometimes think of how that first day is all you know of the place, and you still see it like that, and I can’t remember.

  First of all, let me tell you about my house. I guess you saw most of it when I moved in—and by the way, that was the only time I saw it that way, like a stranger with her mother and father and brother, I mean, because right after you left it got all different and I started feeling like a college girl who lived here. Do you know what I’m trying to say? Anyway, the house you saw isn’t the one, I think, that I live in at all. By now it’s turned into something where girls are yelling and laughing and feeling somehow completely private, and sort of in a world of their own. It has four stories, and I live on the third, as you know. I have a little room, like all the other rooms they give to freshmen. The third- and fourth-year students can have double rooms or suites, but the freshmen and usually the second-year students have rooms alone.

  Our house is supposed to be the best because it’s attached to the dining room and kitchens, and the girls here only have to go down the stairs and down a hall to get their dinner. Some of the others have to come all the way across the campus, from the other houses we saw. The main part of the campus is a long lawn, where we sit on warm evenings, and I keep thinking about that lawn, because, when I saw it the first day I was with you and Mother and Bud, I kept thinking how I was ever going to find my way back across it and get to my own house, and now I think I know every tree on it, and I go up and down the paths every day. Almost all my classes are in the lecture halls in the big building at the end of the lawn, but one class—Langdon’s English I—is usually held outdoors on the lawn or else in the living room of our house. Some of the girls here asked him to have the class here instead of in a lecture hall so he said yes and the college said OK. I like it better because you can sit in a comfortable chair and smoke and not in a lecture room. There’s more noise, though, and girls keep opening the doors and starting to come in and then they always get scared and excuse themselves and run out.

  I get up as early as I can in the morning, but it’s usually just in time for my eight-o’clock class, which is music two days a week and philosophy another two. Classes last an hour and a half, and I get terribly sleepy along about nine o’clock, especially since I don’t usually have time for breakfast and I get hungry too. Then at nine-thirty I usually go up to the campus store for a coke and doughnuts, and of course I usually run into my professors there, because somehow everyone always goes there between classes. Then at ten o’clock two days a week, after music, I go to French, which I hate. I would drop it only I’d have to take something like Spanish instead. They won’t let you graduate without one year of language. Lots of people think Spanish is easier. And I have a sociology course two afternoons a week, and the other two afternoons, of course, is English with Arthur Langdon. That’s supposed to be an hour and a half too, but it’s usually longer because we all stay around talking to him. I guess he’s the most popular person on the campus. He runs the beauty contest before the Senior Dance.

  The meals are terrible. They have a kind of salad made of sliced bananas and peanuts, and it seems like we have it five times a week. Also liver. And the coffee is no good, which is why no one ever bothers to go to breakfast.

  I played some tennis yesterday with a girl named Helen something. I went down to the courts to practice, and she was there and asked if I wanted to play so I said yes. I wasn’t half good enough for her, and we only played one set. We’re going to try again sometime when I’m more used to these courts.

  I’m looking forward to coming home for a weekend but guess I’ll be too busy for a while yet. I’m working hard and having a fine time, and I’m very glad to be here. We’re starting Romeo and Juliet in English next week.

  Tell Mother I am well and I think I am gaining weight. In spite of the bad food, I eat a lot more here than I did at home. Tell her I could use a box of cookies or a cake, lots of the girls get packages from home.

  I guess there are about three hundred girls here. Some very nice ones.

  Lots of love to everyone at home,

  Natalie

  It was almost dark outside; the one window of Natalie’s room showed black when she had the light on, and pale when she had the light off. When the light was off the room was beautiful and shadowy, with the light from the window moving gently onto the bright bedspread, touching slightly the paper on the desk, coming to rest on Natalie’s own hands and the page of the open book before her. When, reluctantly, she turned the light on again—feeling that to seem to be abed at this hour was somehow disgraceful, and indicated perhaps a guilty conscience or perhaps even loneliness—the window fell black and the bed became square and neatly made, and the corners of things became then apparent, from the corners of the room to the corners of the book, and the feet of the desk on the floor were somehow obscene.

  She was not trying to study; the fact of study was still strange to her, so that she read with appetite the freshman English textbook, and took novels from the library, and read with mild interest and a wandering mind the textbook of biology (having read, the first day, as had everyone in the class, the chapter on human reproduction), and saw no pattern and no meaning in the French text, the sociology book (past the chapter on prostitution), and regarded with blank contempt the book which very likely held all the world’s carefully alphabetical facts upon the analysis of words—learned, very likely, and infinitely
careful about theories, but duller than words had any right to be. For music, fortunately, she had only to arise at eight the next morning with both ears still attached to her head; so long as her ears were there, the fact that she did not use them to listen enthusiastically was unimportant to the music lecturer. For philosophy she had long ago evolved a complex and—she suspected—meaningless theory, which she kept by her in case the professor should raise his old head, ever, and look in her direction. “Sir,” she meant to say brightly, “if Descartes really means that he exists because his mind thinks he does, then wouldn’t it be true that . . .”

  A knock on her door was as strange a thing to her as the fact of the door itself; at first she thought, It is across the hall, how clearly it sounds; then she thought, It is a mistake; she wasted a minute thinking of someone looking at the outside of the door steadfastly, as she looked at the inside, and meant to mark the next day whether the panels outside were the same as those inside; odd, she thought, that someone standing outside could look at the door, straight ahead, seeing the white paint and the wood, and I inside looking at the door and the white paint and the wood should look straight also, and we two looking should not see each other because there is something in the way. Are two people regarding the same thing not looking at each other?

  The knock came again. “Come in,” occurred to Natalie then as reasonable thing to say, but the door was locked, so she stumbled, hastily and spilling her book, off the bed and across the room and finally remembered how to turn the key and open the door.

  “Yes?” she said blindly, now that the door was removed.

  “Hello,” said the girl outside; Natalie remembered, as though once the door was opened the world outside it slowly established itself, small section after small section—as though, in fact, it had not been prepared tonight for Natalie to open her door again, and had been caught completely unaware, and was putting a bold face on things and getting everything back together as quickly as possible, so that Natalie should not perceive it, looking through her door, and say, “Just as I thought; this confirms everything I have always suspected”—she remembered, slowly, seeing the girl’s face before and then, that her name was Rosalind.