The Last of the Savages (14 page)

I was still in the closet ten minutes later when Will returned. Opening the door, he said, “All clear,” and flopped on his bed with his hands behind his head.

“What happened,” I asked idiotically. Having a girl in the room was automatic expulsion.

“Don’t worry about it.” Will smiled. “We both come out exactly where we want to be, and Lollie can take care of herself.”

“What about the draft?” I said. It was the spring of 1967.

“There’s plenty of ways to dodge the draft.”

Stunned with self-loathing, I collapsed onto my bed, hugging my knees against my chest. I couldn’t bear to look at him.

“Besides,” he added coolly, “you’re my best friend.”

I probably would have lived through that miserable scene again to hear this admission.

Over the next two days I was tormented with the idea of turning myself in and, finally, with the realization that I would not do so. My life has been shaped by that decision and by Will’s sacrifice, and though I’m fairly sure he never regretted it, I am still unable to think of that moment without shame. Several times in my career when I’ve been tempted to suppress evidence or lie for a client or otherwise take the expedient path I have turned back, haunted by the memory of that failure of honor. On the other hand, the lesson I learned was hardly a simple one because I would violate almost any of my principles, professional and otherwise, on behalf of Will Savage.

P
arents and siblings alike were baffled by the airborne
FREE THE SLAVES
banner, dragged by a small plane that buzzed back and forth over the fieldhouse lawn. But a cheer rose up from the rows of the begowned graduates, who understood that Will Savage had found his own way of making his presence felt at the commencement ceremony. I could see, from my seat in the third row, that this bit of theater had a mortifying effect on some of the faculty onstage.

Three weeks before, on the very day that Will had left campus for good, a collective derangement had spread through the professoriat. It was eventually determined that the brownies beside the coffee urn at the weekly faculty meeting did not originate in the dining hall. When Matson, who was notoriously fond of chocolate, failed to appear for lights-out that night we did not question our good fortune. Hall hockey, poker and general hilarity prevailed well into the night. Only the next morning, when several classes were canceled, did the rumors begin to circulate. Perhaps they were
only
rumors; there was no official confirmation or inquiry, and I had almost come to regard the story of the hashish brownies as one of those legends which spontaneously combust from time to time within enclosed communities. But Stubblefield
was even more smug than usual the day afterward, and Will’s profession of innocence over the phone a few days later was remarkably coy and unconvincing.

Airplane or no airplane, for my mother the commencement on the lawn was an unalloyed triumph. I had won the history and English prizes and graduated second in my class. Immediately after the ceremony she congratulated valedictorian Isaac Mendel and his parents, eager to show there were no hard feelings about his academic victory.

“I thought Senator Kennedy was wonderful,” she said, after she’d shanghaied Trey Bowman’s Chanel-suited mother into taking a picture of the three of us. “Just push the little button, it’s all automatic. So intelligent and articulate. Wasn’t he just wonderful? If anything I think he’s handsomer than Jack and Bobby. I mean, than Jack used to be, of course.”

This speech was ostensibly directed at her immediate family, though it was freely shared with Mrs. Bowman and all around us. Like a geyser, Mother projected herself into the spring morning in her pink-and-turquoise dress, fizzing between her skinny son and her shorter husband, her bosom threatening to burst with pride. Not only had her son graduated with honors from this Waspy redoubt, but Teddy Kennedy of the Boston Irish-Catholic Kennedys—one of our own, as yet unmarred by major scandal—was the commencement speaker.

“Just one more, come on boys, smile now,” she urged us, as Mrs. Bowman readied the camera again. “This is a graduation, not a wake. Pat’s poor father looks like he’s thinking about how much the tuition costs at Yale,” she confided to Mrs. Bowman, who was beginning to look dazed by all this Hibernian bonhomie. I was afraid Mom was also going to tell her that one of her distant cousins was married to one of the Kennedys’ distant cousins, but she was saving this news for the senator himself, whom she managed to corner shortly before he escaped in his limousine. My father and I refused to accompany her on this mission—I experienced a rare flash of kinship and warmth for the old man when he rolled his eyes. “What do you think?” he said. “Teddy will probably want
to invite us all down to Hyannisport once he hears how close we are.” Mom got someone to take a picture of this meeting, and it’s still framed on the mantel at home—a thin, boyish, slightly dazed-looking Ted Kennedy smiling crookedly at my mother’s chest while she beams at the camera.

My graduate cynicism was a bit of a sham; I’d found myself misty-eyed at the end of the senator’s speech, and while the immediate stimulus was the senator’s oblique reference to his murdered brother, I was also mourning my departure. The melancholia was amplified by Will’s absence, and by the fact that I was responsible for it.

That morning I had received a congratulatory telegram from Cordell Savage. If there was anything he could do for me at Yale, he wrote, I shouldn’t hesitate to let him know.

My letter of apology to Lollie Baker caught up with her in Memphis, to which she had retreated—or, by her account, returned in triumph—after being thrown out of Miss Porter’s.

It was the postscript that intrigued me the most. “Do you know anything about this colored girl Will’s gone crazy for? Lord, that boy surely knows how to stir things up.” While I had my suspicions, I learned nothing definite for almost a year. Will had announced a grand pil-grimage
through the Far East as his nongraduation present to himself, and by the time I heard from Lollie he was gone.

Throughout the summer and fall, news of Will’s adventures dribbled in on postcards. The first came from Japan, where he was studying Zen at Daitoku-ji in Kyoto and cornering the market on used silk kimonos; apparently he could buy the latter dirt cheap at flea markets and sell them at a huge profit to a buyer in San Francisco. His next stop was Bali, where he spent a month sheltering in a hut on the beach and feeding on psychedelics. The last postcard was from Chiang Mai, in Thailand, and then—nothing for months.

In September I went off to Yale. Arriving at my assigned room on the Old Campus, I was less ashamed of my parents than I had been two years before, not because I’d become a better person but because I was determined to believe that I truly belonged at Yale. In any case, my parents were gone by the time my prospective roommates arrived. I was unpacking in one of the two single rooms when Aaron Greeley alighted in the doorway, unaccompanied, puffing from his trip up three flights with two suitcases. Within minutes I’d learned that he was from Evanston, Illinois, played lacrosse and wanted to major in English. Like me he was turned out in the uniform—Weejuns, chinos, button-down shirt—and among the possessions he had toted in his first trip up the stairs were a Jack Kramer tennis racket in its wooden press and a lacrosse stick. Statistically speaking, he was a very conventional Yale roommate, except that he was black, though he did not seem particularly aware of it himself. It took the advent of Dalton Percy and his father to remind him.

They appeared as Aaron and I were arranging the few pieces of basement-salvaged furniture I’d brought down in the station wagon and gaseously discussing the plays of Edward Albee. Dalton Percy was the very image of the roommate I had envisioned for myself: expensively dressed, haughty in bearing. His cruel, handsome face conveyed the impression of someone who engaged in duels over obscure breaches of honor. Although it was quite warm he wore a long topcoat of toasted-nut color and an old Yale scarf. His father was built along much the same lines, but fiercer: rather than a duelist he looked like someone who had people killed by his subordinates.

I had plenty of time to observe the Percys at rest; they seemed paralyzed after we introduced ourselves. They were cryptic and clipped when we offered Dalton his choice of rooms and invited them to share a bite with us downtown. Both men kept their coats on. Finally Percy Senior said, “If you’ll excuse us, we have a previous engagement at Mory’s.” I was sorry to see them go. Though I liked Aaron, Dalton seemed the kind of boy who arrived already plugged into everything worth aspiring to socially, and I dimly suspected I was going to have to choose between them. Fortunately, perhaps, the choice was made for me.

Dalton never returned to our rooms. Exactly what channels were employed remained a mystery, but the younger Percy received a new room assignment the next day. Aaron and I knew how to interpret his defection, though we pretended to be happy about not having to share one of the bedrooms.

We were both eager to be remade in the image of Yale, though we were of scant help to each other in this regard, and ultimately Aaron became frustrated in the attempt. And yet, he started out so very close. He
looked
Yale. I don’t mean that his features were Caucasian, but neither were they insistently Negroid, and to me he seemed indisputably princely. Although he’d attended a public high school in Evanston he seemed terribly preppie: he played lacrosse and spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where he raced Flying Juniors. On land he retained a sort of nautical aspect. He wore dock shoes and often sported a blue blazer. He owned two dozen Brooks Brothers shirts—I was amazed to hear that Brooks had a branch in Chicago—a gray herringbone Harris tweed jacket and a gray flannel suit, with the appropriate accessories, all of which at any given moment were filed in closet and dresser according to an immutable code.

Among Aaron’s vital possessions was a stereo, but he was not interested in the music that Will had taught me to like. Trying to casually establish my credentials as a soulful roommate, I spun my “James Brown, Live at the Apollo” as we unpacked the first day. Aaron closed the door to the suite and said, “You don’t mind if I turn it down a little, do you?”
He fingered the volume knob with a fastidious gesture which suggested a desire to keep his distance from the noise. I wondered if James Brown was already passé with his own people. Eventually I understood that Aaron was embarrassed by my blues and soul records; he was afraid that our dormmates might associate him with the music. “I’m not a big fan of folk art,” he announced one day after enduring a side of Sonny Boy Williamson. “All that raw, unmeditated emotion.” His own record collection favored the Everly Brothers, Johnny Mathis, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel.

I invited him home with me for Thanksgiving, a gesture more complicated than even I was willing to admit at the time. I would have been ashamed to reveal my modest roots to Dalton Percy or any of his fair-haired ilk. Though I knew from his snapshots that Aaron’s own home was more impressive than my own, he too was an outsider, and I trusted him not to betray me. Still, on the train I warned him not to expect much. “Sartre says hell is other people,” I quoted, repeating something Matson used to say. “But I think it’s a split-level on half an acre.”

My parents in fact were more elegant in their hospitality than I was in describing them. My father was delighted to have someone in the house with whom to discuss the fine points of pro football, which interested me not in the least. My mother confided to me shortly after we arrived that she thought Aaron was extremely handsome, and she was hooked from the moment he held her chair for her at supper. Even Nana Keane was impressed, noting that he was “very polite and seems to be quite attentive to me.” By the end of the weekend, it seemed clear that he was the son and grandson they deserved.

“Did you ever think a mistake had been made,” he asked the second night. “A switch, a last-minute bungle—and you were dropped down the wrong chimney, into the wrong house, the wrong time, the wrong body, the wrong skin?”

“God, yes.” I nodded madly, even as I supposed he was talking about a more acute sense of displacement than my own. We were parked above the reservoir in my dad’s Chevy, bloated with Thanksgiving dinner, finishing a six-pack purchased from a package store renowned for its laxity about IDs.

“My father grew up on the South Side,” he confided. “He was a good student, made it all the way to Howard University. Then his father died and he had to come home to support the family, six younger brothers and sisters. All he could find was janitorial work. Within three years he started an office-cleaning business and not long after I was born we moved to Evanston.”

“Admirable,” I mumbled.

“Yeah.” With an exasperated sigh, he ripped the fliptop off a final beer and dropped the tab into the foaming slot. “He chose it because the school system was good. And he got Mama fixed after my sister was born—no way he was going to breed himself back into poverty. And I grew up playing tennis and taking piano lessons with white kids, so I could look down on my relatives on the South Side. And even look down on my old man because he can’t play tennis or sail a boat.” He took a long swig of beer. “And because he’s a
Negro.
”