Seating Arrangements (29 page)

Jack Fenn was a legacy of the best kind. Not only his father and brother but his father’s father and his mother’s father and a slew of uncles had belonged to the club; three Fenns had been elected Ouroboros, and all Fenns had been popular and remained active as alumni, donating money or gifts every year and maintaining an open-door policy in their homes for members. In the club’s upstairs great room, mounted in a central position on the longest wall, was an enormous,
curved sword like something out of
The Arabian Nights
, its handle finialed with a fanged python’s head, the empty eye sockets of which supposedly once contained rubies. For obscure reasons, the sword was known as Fenn’s Fiddle, and during the most raucous of club gatherings, it was taken down to be brandished during songs or used for comic effect to slice cheese. On occasion, the blade opened Ophidian fingertips in impromptu ceremonies of blood brotherhood.

When young Jack Fenn arrived at his first punch event, coppery as a new penny and with an abundance of summer freckles, he was greeted enthusiastically and passed from member to member with the same glee and lighthearted reverence as the sword itself. So boisterous were the members that none of them (save Winn) noticed the fatal trace of seriousness hanging over Fenn. He was always holding a glass but seldom drinking from it, and he chatted with the members and took their jokes amiably enough without ever shedding his air of reserve and judgment. Punches were not meant to judge but to be judged. When Winn tried to express his doubts, the other members brushed him off, calling him “Old Sour Grapes.” The Ouroboros himself, an impeccable boy named Frost Jameson, came up with “Van Whiner.” Not until punch season was almost over, in the gray days of winter when the remaining punches were being scrutinized as carefully as yearlings about to go up on the block, did Winn get his hard evidence.

Along with another senior named Bill Midland and a strapping, rigorous, red-faced alum called Denton, Winn was assigned to take Fenn and two other sophomores, twin brothers with the last name Boothe-Snype, out to lunch. Denton chose an oak-and-brass restaurant that was a club favorite, and a dour maître d’ in a tailcoat led them to a curtained alcove where they sat in a horseshoe-shaped leather banquette beneath an oil copy of
The Raft of the Medusa
. Winn, Bill Midland, and Denton each ordered steak, onion soup, corn pudding, baked potatoes, and Caesar salad, and Denton selected two bottles of good burgundy.

“Chilly out,” Denton announced, spooning chives onto his potato. “A nice, hearty lunch is just the ticket.”

The punches nodded, eying the members’ feasts while slicing—elbows well off the white tablecloth—into the more modest entrées they had tactfully chosen: a game hen for Fenn and sole meunière for the Boothe-Snypes. Winn felt a flash of sympathy. He had been in their shoes not so long ago. He remembered the anxiety of trying to choose food that would appear sophisticated and Ophidian but not presumptuous or greedy, the struggle not to say the wrong thing but also not to think so long about what to say that he missed his chance to speak at all, the gnawing self-consciousness of being evaluated as a social entity—that was the point of these lunches, of course: to see if the punches were, first, the kind of men worthy of the Ophidian and, second, the kind of guys the existing members would want to pal around with. They were meant to be brothers, after all, but brothers who chose one another. This process of selection, of rational choice, was, in Winn’s opinion, more profound than any accidental genetic bond. Ophidian members made a mindful commitment, swearing a solemn vow after the mutual recognition of something in one another’s … Winn did not like the word “soul,” but the Ophidian ideal, when you came right down to it, was of a brotherhood bound not by parentage but by souls.

When he was a punch, he had been taken to this same restaurant, and the conversation had revolved mostly around sports—tennis, football, and lacrosse—until one of the other punches revealed that he was an accomplished figure skater, a national champion. Winn had thought
Thank God
as soon as the words “figure skating” left the other boy’s mouth because even then, as a lowly punch, he knew it was not Ophidian to figure skate, and if he joined in the subtle, oh-so-subtle mockery of this boy (who, it turned out, would go to the Olympics the following year in Grenoble and place a very un-Ophidian twelfth), then he would have succeeded in forging a bond with the members. This lunch, however, Jack Fenn’s turn in the hot seat, was held on December 3, 1969, only two days after they had all endured the crucible of the draft lottery, and inevitably the talk turned to numbers. Bill Midland’s number, he volunteered, was 248.

“July eleventh,” he said. “Lucky seven-eleven. Didn’t let me down.”

“Good,” Denton said. “That’s a good draw, Midland. Not that you wouldn’t make a fine soldier, but I imagine you have other priorities.”

“A girl drew my number,” Midland said. “Did you see her? From Washington State. Seems odd to have girls draw. What do they have to do with anything?”

“Did you hear about David Eisenhower?” said one of the twins.

“Got called tenth or something like that,” said the other.

“Something like that,” agreed Denton.

Fenn, who had so far said little, spoke up. “Thirtieth.”

“He’ll be all right,” Denton went on. “Fine military tradition in that family. I expect he’ll go over, but he’ll be used appropriately. I’m sure of it.”

“I knew him at Exeter,” said Bill Midland. “Not well, but he was in my class.”

“And?” asked Denton, looking up sharply from his corn pudding. Denton was a fixture at these punch lunches because he had a relentless instinct for digging to the bottom of a man’s character like a pig snuffling for truffles.

Midland shrugged. “Good enough guy.”

Denton nodded. “There you have it,” he said.

Fenn said, “I heard he’s going into the navy reserves.”

“Frost Jameson pulled something low, too,” Winn said. “In the fifties, I think. I told him he should pretend to be queer.” The memory smarted. Jameson had only replied with a look of annoyance.

“What about you, Van Meter?” asked Midland. “What did you pull?”

Winn had gone home to watch the drawing. As soon as he passed beneath the porch lantern of the white stone house and into the tall and chilly entryway, he wished he’d gone to the Ophidian instead. Most of the members had convened at the club. Television watching was usually considered too prosaic for the clubhouse, but they kept an old set on the uppermost floor in a room reserved for unwanted odds and ends: a retired pool table with faded felt and one short leg propped up with a ball of candle wax, a trunk full of moth-eaten
costumes occasionally hauled out for charades and pranks, an ancient Victrola, a library of handed-down textbooks, a few decommissioned lamps. The room was also used to store gifts from alumni that did not make the grade for more prominent display. There was a large African drum that no one knew what to do with. There was a porcelain doll dressed as a yeoman of the guard and a globe with the names of countries written in German. Mostly, though, there were snakes. Haphazardly strewn about the room and stacked among the books and lamps were dozens of snakes collected on exotic travels and mounted by inexpert taxidermists, given walleyes or lumpy bodies or buck fangs or other deformities that disqualified them from exhibition downstairs, where the Ophidian had enough snakes to open a museum of herpetology. A rattler emerged from the bronze lily of the Victrola’s mouthpiece, and an asp coiled beneath the mammoth burgundy Hercules of an armchair that stood opposite the television and spat wooly stuffing from two slits in its back and one in its seat.

To that room, that aerie of the unwanted, Winn’s true family had repaired to await their collective reckoning in the company of their heraldic animal while Winn sat on the rug beside his father’s chair and listened to the radio as he had as a child. Eventually he went into the basement and turned on the black-and-white television there, just for five minutes, because he wanted to see exactly who was conducting this morbid raffle. A young man in his Sunday best stepped up to a plain glass jar and pulled out a capsule, which he handed to a woman at a desk. She opened it and unrolled a slip of paper, handing it to a balding man in a blue suit, who read the date aloud and handed the slip to yet another man, who stuck it to its place on a long, dreary board, halfway down a column of identical slips, next to several identical columns, and announced the numbers again. After a few draws, a new young man appeared in suit and tie and reached into the jar. Each bit of paper was passed rapidly along, held by each person for as short a time as possible. May 19 was slotted into its place on the board (75) and then November 6 (76). Winn wondered what would happen if a boy drew his own birthday. Would he ruin the whole charade
with his grim face, his trembling fingers? After September 5 (82) was pulled, his father called from upstairs. “Winnie,” he bellowed, “come have a talk.”

Bitterly, Winn switched off the TV and climbed the stairs. He should have known he would not be allowed simply to sit and listen. No, he had to hear for the hundredth time Tipton’s story of how he had, at the age of thirty-three, tried to join up. He claimed he would have been among those who landed at Normandy if not for a grace note in his heartbeat. Instead he had been forced to stay home with the women, women who wanted to date soldiers and not men with complicated heartbeats who worked for their fathers. Faced with few options, he had married Winn’s mother, not a fresh young girl but a woman his own age—well bred, humorless, and dyspeptic. They had both been thunderstruck when, as she neared forty, she became pregnant, an ordeal for which she never forgave either husband or son. “Once,” Tipton intoned while Winn edged closer to the radio, straining to hear the numbers, “Cort Wilder’s brothers were home on leave at the same time, and Cort and I dressed up in their spare uniforms and we all went out to a dance hall. What a night that was. Lord.” The word expanded slowly from his lips, filling up like a bubble with the romance and shame of that one night as a glamorous impostor—
Lord
—before it popped into silence.

The voice on the radio announced that June 6 was number 110. Winn looked over his shoulder at his father. “Close one,” he said.

Tipton was studying the bottom of his glass, turning it so the crystal facets caught the lamplight. “If they call your number,” he said, “you will go.” At once Winn was tearful and full of rancor. Given the chance, he might have declared his manfulness unprompted.
If they call my number
, he might have said,
I’m going
. And then, in a perfect world, Tipton would have said,
No, you’re my only son. Run to Canada. I don’t care what anyone says
. But Tipton had the moony look he got when he was lost in his dreams of the past. This wasn’t World War II, Winn wanted to tell him. No one thought so. He didn’t need to dress up as a soldier to get girls. He had thought that his father, who
had never gone to war, would not mind if his only son, his only child, followed suit and stayed home to live a long and peaceful life. If Communism could be distilled into a single combatant, a juggernaut in a red singlet, then Winn would offer his own body, throw himself into the arena as a martyr, but to leave the comfortable brick womb of Harvard and the promise of a good career to be shot at by Vietnamese villagers … it didn’t sit right. Everyone Winn knew felt the same way. He suspected Tipton would feel the same way if it were Tipton’s head to be shorn, Tipton’s life to be interrupted, Tipton who would crawl through the jungle. Not that the situation would come to that, of course. At least Winn didn’t think so. If push came to shove, Tipton could at least be convinced to pull strings to get him into the National Guard or the reserves. He would only carry this warrior-father charade so far. And so Winn, without looking at his father, said okay, he would go, and then they had waited, and the numbers had followed one after the other, until finally, after Tipton nodded off, his glass spilling its clear dregs into his lap, Winn’s number had come up.

“June eighth,” he said to Bill Midland. “Three hundred sixty-six. Dead last. And my name starts with V. Last in the alphabet lottery.”

Midland’s face filled with awe. “Holy moly. The Cong could take the White House, and you wouldn’t get called up.”

“Well done, Van Meter,” said Denton. “Good day to be born.”

“Do you oppose the war, Mr. Denton?” asked Fenn, cutting into his hen.

Denton head bobbed backward in perplexity like a struck speed bag. “Christ, no. You can’t have the Russians rolling down the Mekong. No, not at all. It’s got to be fought, but we need a certain kind of young man here to keep things running smoothly. I think you all are more use to capitalism than you are to the army.”

“Here, here,” said Winn, trying to close the subject.

“Then who do you think should do the fighting?” Fenn persisted. He seemed relaxed, curious, unaware of his treacherous footing.

The question was an obvious one, but Winn would never have asked it. A cardinal rule of Ophidian punch events was that butting
heads with a member was discouraged but possibly forgivable while offending an alum was suicidal. Denton colored and sawed at his steak. “Well, son, starting off with the delinquents is a good idea. If you’re causing problems for us over here, you might as well go cause them over there. And then, to be frank, I think we should call on the lower classes. If you’re not in school and you don’t have much of a future in any event, then get out there and do your part. Greater good, and so on. Boys’ll amount to more in the army than by working in, I don’t know”—he waved his knife in a thoughtful circle—“an auto body shop or someplace. They do their part, then they come home and get a free education. Lift themselves up.”

“So,” Fenn said, “the poor should fight.” He spoke in a mild, secretarial tone as though he were reading back shorthand notes of Denton’s speech.

Denton looked at him narrowly, his eyes traveling over the bright hair that covered the tops of his ears and brushed his collar. “You’re Auggie Fenn’s boy?”