Indignation (9 page)

“How about your second roommate? Living with him doesn’t appear to have worked out either. Am I correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do you think that was so?”

“Our interests weren’t compatible.”

“So there was no room for compromise there either.”

“No, sir.”

“And now you’re living alone, I see. Living by yourself under the eaves in Neil Hall.”

“This far into the semester, that was the only empty room I could find, sir.”

“Drink some more water, Marcus. It’ll help.”

But my mouth was no longer dry. I was no longer sweating either. I was angered, in fact, by his saying “It’ll help,” when I considered myself over the worst of my nervousness and performing as well as anybody my age could be expected to in this situation. I was angered, I was humiliated, I was re
sentful, and I would not even look in the direction of the glass. Why should I have to go through this interrogation simply because I’d moved from one dormitory room to another to find the peace of mind I required to do my schoolwork? What business was it of his? Had he nothing better to do than interrogate me about my dormitory accommodations? I was a straight-A student—why wasn’t that enough for
all
my unsatisfiable elders (by whom I meant two, the dean and my father)?

“What about the fraternity you’re pledging? You’re eating your meals there, I take it.”

“I’m not pledging a fraternity, sir. I’m not interested in fraternity life.”

“What would you say your interests are, then?”

“My studies, sir. Learning.”

“That’s admirable, to be sure. But nothing more? Have you socialized with anyone at all since you’ve come to Winesburg?”

“I work on weekends, sir. I work at the inn as a waiter in the taproom. It’s necessary for me to work to assist my father in meeting my expenses, sir.”

“You don’t have to do that, Marcus—you can stop calling me sir. Call me Dean Caudwell, or call me Dean, if you like. Winesburg isn’t a military
academy, and it’s not the turn of the century either. It’s 1951.”

“I don’t mind calling you sir, Dean.” I did, though. I hated it. That’s why I was doing it! I wanted to take the word “sir” and stick it up his ass for singling me out to come to his office to be grilled like this. I was a straight-A student. Why wasn’t that good enough for everybody? I worked on weekends. Why wasn’t that good enough for everybody? I couldn’t even get my first blowjob without wondering while I was getting it what had gone wrong to allow me to get it. Why wasn’t
that
good enough for everybody? What more was I supposed to do to prove my worth to people?

Promptly the dean mentioned my father. “It says here your father is a kosher butcher.”

“I don’t believe so, sir. I remember writing down just ‘butcher.’ That’s what I’d write on any form, I’m sure.”

“Well, that’s what you did write. I’m merely assuming that he’s a kosher butcher.”

“He is. But that’s not what I wrote down.”

“I acknowledged that. But it’s not inaccurate, is it, to identify him more precisely as a kosher butcher?”

“But neither is what I wrote down inaccurate.”

“I’d be curious to know why you didn’t write down ‘kosher,’ Marcus.”

“I didn’t think that was relevant. If some entering student’s father was a dermatologist or an orthopedist or an obstetrician, wouldn’t he just write down ‘physician’? Or ‘doctor’? That’s my guess, anyway.”

“But kosher isn’t in quite the same category.”

“If you’re asking me, sir, if I was trying to hide the religion into which I was born, the answer is no.”

“Well, I certainly hope that’s so. I’m glad to hear that. Everyone has a right to openly practice his own faith, and that holds true at Winesburg as it does everywhere else in this country. On the other hand, under ‘religious preference’ you didn’t write ‘Jewish,’ I notice, though you are of Jewish extraction and, in accordance with the college’s attempt to assist students in residing with others of the same faith, you were originally assigned Jewish roommates.”

“I didn’t write
anything
under religious preference, sir.”

“I can see that. I’m wondering why that is.”

“Because I have none. Because I don’t prefer to practice one religion over another.”

“What then provides you with spiritual sustenance? To whom do you pray when you need solace?”

“I don’t need solace. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in prayer.” As a high school debater I was known for hammering home my point—and that I did. “I am sustained by what is real and not by what is imaginary. Praying, to me, is preposterous.”

“Is it now?” he replied with a smile. “And yet so many millions do it.”

“Millions once thought the earth was flat, sir.”

“Yes, that’s true. But may I ask, Marcus, merely out of curiosity, how you manage to get by in life—filled as our lives inevitably are with trial and tribulation—lacking religious or spiritual guidance?”

“I get straight A’s, sir.”

That prompted a second smile, a smile of condescension that I liked even less than the first. I was prepared now to despise Dean Caudwell with all my being for putting me through
this
tribulation.

“I didn’t ask about your grades,” he said. “I know your grades. You have every right to be proud of them, as I’ve already told you.”

“If that is so, sir, then you know the answer to your question about how I get along without any religious or spiritual guidance. I get along just fine.”

I had begun to rile him up, I could see, and in just the ways that could do me no good.

“Well, if I may say so,” the dean said, “it doesn’t look to me like you get along just fine. At least you don’t appear to get along just fine with the people you room with. It seems that as soon as there’s a difference of opinion between you and a roommate, you pick up and leave.”

“Is there anything wrong with finding a solution in quietly leaving?” I asked, and within I heard myself beginning to sing, “Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves! With our very flesh and blood we will build a new Great Wall!”

“Not necessarily, no more than there is anything wrong with finding a solution in quietly working it out and staying. Look where you’ve wound up—in the least desirable room on this entire campus. A room where no one has chosen to live or has had to live for many years now. Frankly, I don’t like the idea of you up there alone. It’s the worst room at Winesburg, bar none. It’s been the worst room on
the worst floor of the worst dorm for a hundred years. In winter it’s freezing and by early spring it’s already a hotbox, full of flies. And that’s where you’ve chosen to spend your days and nights as a sophomore student here.”

“But I’m not living there, sir, because I don’t have religious beliefs—if that is what you are suggesting in a roundabout way.”

“Why is it, then?”

“It’s as I explained it—” I said, meanwhile, in full voice, in my head, singing, “China’s masses have met the day of danger”—“in my first room I couldn’t get sufficient sleep because of a roommate who insisted on playing his phonograph late into the night and reciting aloud in the middle of the night, and in my second room I found myself living with someone whose conduct I considered intolerable.”

“Tolerance appears to be something of a problem for you, young man.”

“I never heard that said about me before, sir,” said I at the very instant I inwardly sang out the most beautiful word in the English language: “In-dig-
na
-tion!” I suddenly wondered what it was in Chinese. I wanted to learn it and go around the campus shouting it at the top of my lungs.

“There appear to be several things you’ve never heard about yourself before,” he replied. “But ‘before’ you were living at home, in the bosom of your childhood family. Now you’re living as an adult on his own with twelve hundred others, and what there is for you to master here at Winesburg, aside from mastering your studies, is to learn how to get along with people and how to extend tolerance to people who are not carbon copies of yourself.”

Stirred up now by my stealthy singing, I blurted out, “Then how about extending some tolerance to me? I’m sorry, sir, I don’t mean to be brash or insolent. But,” and, to my own astonishment, leaning forward, I hammered the side of my fist on his desk, “exactly what is the crime I’ve committed? So I’ve moved a couple of times, I’ve moved from one dorm room to another—is that considered a crime at Winesburg College? That makes me into a culprit?”

Here he poured some water and himself took a long drink. Oh, if only I could have graciously poured it for him. If only I could have handed him the glass and said, “Calm down, Dean. Try this, why don’t you?”

Smiling generously, he said, “Has anyone said it
is a crime, Marcus? You display a fondness for dramatic exaggeration. It doesn’t serve you well and is a characteristic you might want to reflect upon. Now tell me, how do you get along with your family? Is everything all right at home between your mother and your father and you? I see from the form here, where you say you have no religious preference, that you also say you have no siblings. There’s the three of you at home, if I’m to take what you’ve written here to be accurate.”

“Why wouldn’t it be accurate, sir?” Shut up, I told myself. Shut up, and from here on out, stop marching on! Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t because the fondness for exaggeration wasn’t mine but the dean’s: this meeting was itself based on his giving a ridiculously exaggerated importance to where I chose to live. “I was accurate when I wrote that my father was a butcher,” I said. “He is a butcher. It isn’t I alone who would describe him as a butcher. He would describe himself as a butcher. It’s you who described him as a kosher butcher. Which is fine with me. But that’s not grounds for intimating that I’ve been in any way inaccurate in filling out my application form for Winesburg. It was not inaccurate for me to leave the religious-preference slot blank—”

“If I may interrupt, Marcus. How do you three get along, from your perspective? That’s the question I asked. You, your mother, and your father—how do you get along? A straight answer, please.”

“My mother and I get along perfectly well. We always have. So have my father and I gotten along perfectly well for most of my life. From my last year in grade school until I started at Robert Treat, I worked part time for him at the butcher shop. We were as close as a son and father could be. Of late there’s been some strain between us that’s made us both unhappy.”

“Strain over what, may I ask?”

“He’s been unnecessarily worried about my independence.”

“Unnecessarily because he has no reason to be?”

“None at all.”

“Is he worried, for instance, about your inability to adjust to your roommates here at Winesburg?”

“I haven’t told him about my roommates. I didn’t think it was that important. Nor is ‘inability to adjust’ a proper way to describe the difficulty, sir. I don’t want to be distracted from my studies by superfluous problems.”

“I wouldn’t consider your moving twice in less
than two months a superfluous problem, and neither would your father, I’m sure, if he were apprised of the situation—as he has every right to be, by the way. I don’t think you would have bothered moving to begin with if you yourself saw it merely as a ‘superfluous problem.’ But be that as it may, Marcus, have you gone on any dates since you’ve been at Winesburg?”

I flushed. “Arise, ye who refuse—” “Yes,” I said.

“A few? Some? Many?”

“One.”

“Just one.”

Before he could dare to ask me with whom, before I had to speak her name and be pressed to answer a single question about what had transpired between the two of us, I rose from my chair. “Sir,” I said, “I object to being interrogated like this. I don’t see the purpose of it. I don’t see why I should be expected to answer questions about my relations with my roommates or my association with my religion or my appraisal of anyone else’s religion. Those are my own private affair, as is my social life and how I conduct it. I am breaking no laws, my behavior is causing no one any injury or harm, and in nothing that I’ve done have I impinged on anyone’s rights. If any
one’s rights are being impinged on, they are mine.”

“Sit down again, please, and explain yourself.”

I sat, and this time, on my own initiative, drank deeply from my glass of water. This was now beginning to be more than I could take, yet how could I capitulate when he was wrong and I was right? “I object to having to attend chapel forty times before I graduate in order to earn a degree, sir. I don’t see where the college has the right to force me to listen to a clergyman of whatever faith even once, or to listen to a Christian hymn invoking the Christian deity even once, given that I am an atheist who is, to be truthful, deeply offended by the practices and beliefs of organized religion.” Now I couldn’t stop myself, weakened as I felt. “I do not need the sermons of professional moralists to tell me how I should act. I certainly don’t need any God to tell me how. I am altogether capable of leading a moral existence without crediting beliefs that are impossible to substantiate and beyond credulity, that, to my mind, are nothing more than fairy tales for children held by adults, and with no more foundation in fact than a belief in Santa Claus. I take it you are familiar, Dean Caudwell, with the writings of Bertrand
Russell. Bertrand Russell, the distinguished British mathematician and philosopher, was last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One of the works of literature for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize is a widely read essay first delivered as a lecture in 1927 entitled, ‘Why I Am Not a Christian.’ Are you familiar with that essay, sir?”

“Please sit down again,” said the dean.

I did as he told me, but said, “I am asking if you are familiar with this very important essay by Bertrand Russell. I take it that the answer is no. Well, I am familiar with it because I set myself the task of memorizing large sections of it when I was captain of my high school debating team. I haven’t forgotten it yet, and I have promised myself that I never will. This essay and others like it contain Russell’s argument not only against the Christian conception of God but against the conceptions of God held by all the great religions of the world, every one of which Russell finds both untrue and harmful. If you were to read his essay, and in the interest of open-mindedness I would urge you to do so, you would find that Bertrand Russell, who is one of the world’s foremost logicians as well as a philosopher and a mathematician, undoes with logic that is be
yond dispute the first-cause argument, the natural-law argument, the argument from design, the moral arguments for a deity, and the argument for the remedying of injustice. To give you two examples. First, as to why there cannot be any validity to the first-cause argument, he says, ‘If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God.’ Second, as to the argument from design, he says, ‘Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?’ He also discusses the defects in Christ’s teaching as Christ appears in the Gospels, while noting that historically it is quite doubtful that Christ ever existed. To him the most serious defect in Christ’s moral character is his belief in the existence of hell. Russell writes, ‘I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment,’ and he accuses Christ of a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to his preaching. He discusses with complete candor how the churches have retarded human progress and how, by their in
sistence on what they choose to call morality, they inflict on all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. Religion, he declares, is based primarily and mainly on fear—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, and fear of death. Fear, Bertrand Russell says, is the parent of cruelty, and it is therefore no wonder that cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries. Conquer the world by intelligence, Russell says, and not by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from living in it. The whole conception of God, he concludes, is a conception unworthy of free men. These are the thoughts of a Nobel Prize winner renowned for his contributions to philosophy and for his mastery of logic and the theory of knowledge, and I find myself in total agreement with them. Having studied them and having thought them through, I intend to live in accordance with them, as I’m sure you would have to admit, sir, I have every right to do.”