Hangsaman

  Thus the college was, in brief, a place modern, authentic, progressive, realistic, honest, and humane, with decent concessions to the fact that it was supposed to be, and had to be, a strictly budget-balanced proposition, a factory in which the intake must necessarily match the outgo. It had a clean-shaven president who played golf and who made speeches to Women’s Clubs in a mildly humorous vein, a board of trustees who came regularly to sherry parties and tours of inspection, a faculty with more-or-less accurate caps and gowns to wear at Commencement, and a set of alumnae ranging from the bold-eyed members of the first graduating class, who were almost without exception divorced and haggard women of the world, to the well-trained members of the most recent graduating classes, who came back comfortably to reunions with their small children.

  It might also be noted that the “original beams” having been found to need constant repair, plastic brick had been substituted wherever possible.

  * * *

  It was, for Natalie, precisely a new start. The room was almost square, perhaps a little longer than it was wide, with only one window that filled almost the entire far wall. So far, completely blank and empty, it was expectant, almost curious, and Natalie, standing timidly just inside the door, in the wall opposite the window, looked at the bare walls and floor with joy; it was, precisely, a new start.

  The walls and ceiling had been painted a dull tan, in the proper institutional bad taste, so uninspired as to be almost colorless, and the dark-brown woodwork and the smallness of the room made it seem cell-like and dismal. The uncurtained window showed the rain clouds; because the room was on the third floor it was lighter than many, but still Natalie had to turn on the light, a bare bulb in the ceiling which lighted with a string, in order to admire most fully the clear spatial beauties of her room. These were walls to be adorned with her pictures, or whatever else she chose to put on them (a fine of twenty-five cents for every nail hole, of course; graduation from the college not allowed until every blemish on the walls of the room, including marks left by scotch tape, had been paid for), the floor was readied for the movements of her feet, presenting itself as exactly right-angled at the corners and in respectful anticipation of anything Natalie might be inclined to set upon it (excepting, of course, scratches, which must be eradicated at the comptroller’s office by the payment of a small fine) and the ceiling, bleak and neat in the unshaded light from the bulb, stood at attention over Natalie’s head, setting her in a sort of package, compact and square and air- and water-proof, a precise, unadulterated, fresh start for Natalie, a new clean box to live in.

  They—the unidentified, fearsome, unsleeping they of the institution—had furnished it, of course. They, along with their nightmare watchfulness, and their frantic concern over marring, possessed an unerring sense of the minimum in form and design, in material and workmanship, in color and quality, which a girl, paying her tuition and her room and board as expected, could endure in silence. The bed was narrow and its mattress thin enough for the sleep of exhaustion, never thick enough for the restless pre-exam sleep of worry. The sheets and pillowcases were piled neatly on the foot of the bed. Natalie had her own blankets in her trunk; her mother had chosen dark rose as most practical, and had indulged Natalie in a bright bedspread and matching curtains for this room.

  For the first time, standing in this doorway of this precise room on the day she first saw the college, Natalie knew a certain pride of ownership. This was, after all, the only room she had ever known where she would be, privately, working out her own salvation. Briefly, she thought of long nights alone in this room (no one to notice her light, no one to tap on her door and ask was she all right, dear) and long afternoons spent at the narrow desk in the corner, writing whatever she pleased and perhaps making only silly pictures on paper if she chose. If she liked, she might lock her door. If she pleased, she could entertain here; if it suited her pleasure, she could shut the windows, open the windows, move the bed, upset the chairs, go in the closet and hide. A purely mechanical love possessed her; the number on the door—it was 27; a good number, owning a seven for luck and a two for work, and adding, triumphantly, to nine—belonged only to her; she might tell people, “Room 27,” and know that her own dear possessions were surely inside. Tomorrow morning, she thought, and leaned back happily against the door, she would wake up in this room.

  * * *

  For the whole first afternoon that she was alone at college Natalie asked herself constantly, Is this meaningful? Is this important? Is this part of what I am to go home knowing?

  They sat around the living room of the house, the girls who were to live in it, eying one another, each one wondering, perhaps which of the others was to be her particular friend, sought out hereafter at such meetings, joined in the terrible sacred friendship of these years. Each one wondering, perhaps, who it was just and right to be afraid of in the room: who, for instance, was to be the belle of the house, superior and embarrassing with her greater knowledge, her secrets? The ones who had been senior queens in high school stood out, the one or two who had been high school class historians were clearly marked, as were the students, the learners of facts, the ascetic amateur writers with their poems safely locked away upstairs; the hangers-on were there, eying the beauty queens, estimating clearly which one it were best to appropriate immediately. The poor ones, with their obvious best clothes, the smart ones, with their obvious right clothes, the girls who would teach the others to dance, the girls who would whisper inaccurate facts of life, the girls who would fail all their courses and go home ingloriously (saying goodbye bravely, but crying), the girls who would fail all their courses and join the best cliques, the girls who would fall in love with their professors, either desperately and secretly, or openly and disgracefully, the girls whose hearts would break and the girls whose spirits would break—a group of girls from whatever kind of homes, with whatever agonized mothers wondering, tonight, at home—herded uneasily together into one room to await the preliminary steps of an education.

  They sat, murmuring, in the living room of the house they were going to live in, which was to replace whatever houses they had left that morning or the day before or the week before, the old houses still so clear in their minds and so much home, to be so soon replaced by this one, with its careful undistinguished furnishings, designed to be neither better than the worst homes left behind, nor worse than the best; the living room where the perfect college girl could entertain, circumspectly, her immaculate date. It was designed to form a reasonable and not too indicative background for any of the girls who lived in it (who would, of course, never have lived in it if they had not been that most clearly indicated of all types, the college girl), and thoughtfully chosen to harmonize with the best college fashions being shown in the smartest middle-price department stores (in all cities; ask for the College Shoppe or the Sub-Deb Salon or for Teen Tempos or Girlhood Styles, Incorporated: third floor, fifth floor, pen and pencil sets on the main floor, stationery); its discreet neutral walls, the green-and-gray-striped chairs, the helpless vases on the mantel, the picture over the fireplace, which may have been of a past president of the college or of a financial lover of education—all were so carefully devoid of personality that the room as a whole reduced conversation to the exact level which a well-bred girl would choose.

  Natalie, accustomed to rooms and to company which were, as a complete unit, intended to bring out the maximum personality any given organism possessed, felt smothered by the room and by her companions. She sat in a corner, on the floor because when she came in after an uncomfortable farewell to her mother and father and brother, still carrying the money her father had pressed into her hand and the box of cookies her mother had nearly forgotten, more girls were sitting on the floor than on chairs and because by now all the chairs were taken by girls who had obviously exercised a freer choice than Natalie had; and she looked, trying not to seem looking, at the other girls in the room.

  There was one directly
opposite who had bright-red hair, and who was laughing and talking with several girls around her; more girls were listening and edging nearer, and Natalie, drawing back from that side of the room, thought, There is someone I will know only slightly. The girl next to her had hair that grew in an ugly line across her forehead, and when Natalie risked saying, after rehearsing it for some minutes, “Do you know any of these people?” the girl said, “No,” briefly, eyed Natalie for a minute, and then looked away. She is not looking for me, Natalie thought, and the girl on her other side was not looking for Natalie either; as Natalie turned to her, to repeat her question, she rose quickly and went to join the group by the red-haired girl. Will they all notice that I am sitting almost alone? Natalie wondered. Did the red-haired girl thank her fate every morning and night, when she looked at herself in her mirror, with a comb in her hand? Did the girl near Natalie bewail secretly the ugly line of her hair, and persuade herself that she was more aware of it than anyone else? Was someone regarding Natalie, identifying her by some extraordinary characteristic which Natalie did not know or had forgotten or had convinced herself that no one saw? Was it not possible that the girl over there, in the blue dress, had put the dress on that morning wondering if it would do for her first day at college? Because it would not, and had she spent the day concerned with it, or had she forgotten it immediately she put it on? Had the mother of the one in green told her not to forget her pills? Was the one with glasses afraid of waking in the night, alone? Which of them had come to college hoping secretly to meet a thin nervous girl named Natalie? Did she expect Natalie to recognize her first? And, worst of all, what terrible change were they all expecting so immediately, so fearfully? Was something going to happen?

  Natalie had already discovered that it was not possible to think clearly in this bedlam, any more than it was possible to act clearly. All thoughts and actions were called for so quickly, were so subject to immediate and drastic change, that she dared not try to rise to go upstairs and find her room again, and she dared not estimate finally the probable characters of the girls in the room, for fear that, in either case, someone should look at her and laugh; suddenly, permanently, seeing her as, “That girl who . . .”

  Then without warning the room quieted, and Natalie perceived that the red-haired girl was standing. “Shall I?” she said to someone sitting near her, as one who has intended to all the time and merely expects public confirmation; the girls around her nodded and spoke urgently, and the red-haired girl turned prettily to the room, spread her hands, and said, “Listen, everyone, we’ve all got to introduce ourselves to each other. After all, we’ll be living in the same house for a long time.” Everyone laughed as though, unexpectedly, she had voiced the hidden dismay of them all, and the red-haired girl said, “I’ll go first. My name’s Peggy Spencer, and I came here from Central High School in—”

  The girl next to Natalie, the one with the unpleasant hair, leaned over suddenly and said to Natalie, “Isn’t she cute?”

  Cute? Natalie thought. “She certainly is,” she whispered back.

  Around the circle of girls, each one in turn announced her name and her immediate past record. Each one, speaking her own name in a voice she had rarely heard pronounce it, was more or less embarrassed; when Natalie’s turn came, and the girl next to her had identified herself as Adelaide something or other from some school or other, and turned expectantly to Natalie, as one who sees an ordeal safely past and another up for the question, Natalie found herself surprisingly able to say clearly, “My name is Natalie Waite.” Is it my name? she wondered then, afraid for a minute that she had appropriated the name of the next girl, or of someone she had met slightly once and remembered only in the recesses of her mind which seemed called upon unreasonably to function now, socially, and without experience. The name passed without comment, perhaps because no one was listening, actually, to any name other than her own.

  After each, then, had with shame called upon herself to stand forth alone, the red-haired girl, without so much pretty confusion, said in the voice of one to whom amateur parliamentary procedure is familiar (“Well, of course it will be Peggy Spencer for vice-president . . .”), “All right, then, since we’re all frosh together, we ought to settle any problems we’ve got right now.”

  Frosh, Natalie thought, problems. Are the problems to be settled here? She wanted desperately to go to her room.

  By the second day (waking up delightedly into the strange room, dressing alone without the certain knowledge of her mother moving downstairs, putting away her own things, selecting her own places for underwear in the dresser, books on the shelves, papers in the desk) she was able to find her own room without being puzzled by the stairs or the length of the hall. She had taken to staying around the floor bathroom at bedtime, with the rest of the girls, asking odd, uncertain questions of the others as they did of her, laughing at jokes whose inevitable point was the uncanny ability of new students to outwit old students, shouting meaninglessly at people she hardly knew. She knew the name of almost everyone on the floor; the red-haired girl, who was already running for some freshman office or other, nodded cordially to her whenever they passed on the stairs, the girl with the ugly hair sat next to her at breakfast one morning. It was thus possible to live—breakfast, lunch, dine, brush one’s teeth, sleep, read—in an odd, random fashion, in this world. As one who wakens to find his city destroyed and himself alone in the ruins, Natalie found herself a rude shelter, food, and comfort, by a system almost scavenging.

  * * *

  It could have been a nightmare, but it was a frantic, imperative knock on her door. Natalie, fumbling, turned on her light and looked, as though it were important, at the clock: three o’clock. That meant it was the middle of the night, and her mind, suddenly concerned lest its own signal system be awry, moved quickly over obligations and commitments. No class at this hour, surely, no appointments. A fire, then? Something wholly beyond her own jurisdiction? A murder? Perhaps in the room next door? (A thought of the glories of innocent witness-ship crossed her mind, perhaps for future reference: “But that man is not a postman, Inspector; did you see the way he opened the mailbox?”) Perhaps they were waking Natalie, as someone who might help, who was known to keep her head in emergencies, phone the doctor first, know always who was to apply the tourniquet, who the makeshift splint. Or, perhaps, waking Natalie as the obvious, destined victim? War? Pestilence? Terror?

  “Initiation,” called a long voice down the hall. “All freshmen out . . .”

  “No,” said Natalie, and reached for the cord of her light. Was she a freshman? So designated by those who did not know her name? Or had she been awakened by mistake—or was this meant for her? Natalie alone, then? (Her untrusted mind playing her tricks? A dream, so that she should stand in a moment, shivering and miserable, alone in the hall while doors opened up and down the length of the building and curious, mocking faces peered out, saying, “What is she doing?” and answering, “She dreamed, she dreamed she was a freshman and it was something called initiation, she keeps saying something about a murder, she keeps asking what her name is, she doesn’t seem to know where she is . . .”) “I am a freshman,” she said aloud, and, quickened by a sudden excitement, she swung out of bed and into a bathrobe. “College,” she told herself cynically, hurrying with the bathrobe cord, “initiation,” stuffing her feet into her slippers. She opened her door, tentative at the last moment, to find the hall lights on and the hall full of nervous, curious, bathrobed girls.

  “Where do we go?” someone asked Natalie immediately, perhaps assuming from her late exit from her own room that she had some special inside information.

  “I don’t know,” Natalie said. “We better stay here.”

  “I understand,” said someone, and giggled, “that they make us . . .” The rest of her words were most unfortunately lost to Natalie, whose arm had been seized by a temporarily authoritative hand, and whose ears had been seized by a voice saying
, “Frosh? This way.”

  Resenting again the movie word “frosh” (and, to a certain degree knowing curiosity tempered with excitement, so that she thought consciously, in the midst of an unwanted fear, So this is why they always pick the middle of the night for things to happen! and knew she had hit upon something very profound), Natalie followed the firm hand, and the rest of the girls followed her. Behind her someone still giggled, someone still said, “But where are we going?” Someone insisted nervously, “I’m not sure my doctor . . .”

  “Where are we going?” Natalie asked the person leading her; she discovered with strong embarrassment that this person was masked with a handkerchief over her face, tied approximately at the back of her head; this cops-and-robbers effect conveyed to Natalie the fact that the night’s escapade (she did not phrase it to herself like this until much later, however) was something these people might not care to do in daylight, with their faces uncovered; there was about her conductor a faint air of many people provoking one another, saying, “Go on, I dare you . . . go on; you look wonderful; I will if you will,” and the intoxication which comes of a deed hallowed in tradition but uncertainly remembered in detail.

  “Shut up,” Natalie was told, in answer to her question, and she thought of how bold the lack of a face made one, and, perhaps, how not having a face of one’s own might lead to universal peace, since a face was, after all, only . . .

  “In here,” said the faceless creature.