Spring Fire
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There were voices in the distance, ringing laughter, and the sound of them coming. She put her coat on and got up while Bud began folding the blanket.
Leda came down the fields ahead of Jake, running happily while he followed. “Mitch and Bud,” she shouted, “how goes the mad twosome?”
Mitch said, “Hi, Leda.”
Bud reverted to his old mood of sullen silence as he loaded the blankets in the car and gathered the empty bottles together. Jake helped him and Leda jumped in the front seat, yawning and saying sleepily, “Better hurry. We’ll be out after hours.”
On the way home, after they had come off the dirt road and gone onto the highway, Jake stopped the car. Leda stood beside Mitch while she vomited.
“You’ll be OK,” she promised. “I used to get sick on beer myself. You’ll get used to it, honey.”
The next morning, after breakfast, Mitch waited for Marsha Holmes, as she had been told to do. The president’s suite consisted of three rooms. There was the bedroom, the study room, and the meeting room, all of them attractively furnished with low couches and triangular lamps and small square tables. Mitch sat in the meeting room, thumbing through the magazines on the table in front of her. She stopped at one titled “The Epsilon.” Inside, the columns were devoted to news from chapters of Tri Epsilon throughout the country. Mitch’s eye caught the printing, “Gamma Pi Chapter, Cranston University.”
Gamma Pi Tri Eps are looking forward to a year bustling with excitement. Last year, you remember, they received many honors. For the second year in a row, glamorous Leda Taylor, a Tri Epsilon junior, was voted campus queen. Good luck this year, Leda, and may you cap all awards again for the name of Epsilon Epsilon Epsilon.
“No one can deny it,” a voice said behind Mitch, “Leda is a beautiful girl.”
Mitch turned and faced Marsha. “A very beautiful girl,” Marsha continued. “Do you like rooming with her, Mitch?”
“Yes, I do. She’s been swell to me.”
“Did you have a good time last night? You went out with Bud Roberts, didn’t you? And Leda and Jake?”
“Yes, I did. I’m sorry we were late. It was my fault.”
“Your fault, Mitch?”
“Yes, I got sick coming back. We had to stop.”
“I see.” Marsha thought for a moment, her hands folded demurely, and then she sat down beside Mitch. “Look, Susan, I hate to be the bossy president that starts right in advising pledges, but remember something for me, will you?”
“Certainly, Marsha.”
“Leda has many ideas that some of us—that I don’t agree with. If there are any that you don’t agree with, will you come and talk to me about them?”
“Yes, I will. I didn’t like my date too well, but I shouldn’t have had all that beer. I guess I’m old enough to take care of myself.”
“I won’t say any more, Mitch. I just want you to know that I’m here to help the pledges. I don’t think Leda was wise to have you date Bud Roberts during blind date week. You see, Kitten, our social chairman, tries very hard to arrange a suitable date for each pledge. Someone your own age—usually a fraternity pledge who is as new to college as you are.”
“Oh,” Mitch said. “I didn’t understand. Leda said it would be all right so long as Bud was a fraternity man.”
“You will go along on a blind date tonight, won’t you, Mitch? One of Kitten’s. All the other pledges are enjoying it tremendously.”
“Yes,” Mitch answered, “I will. I’m sorry about last night.”
Mitch wandered out of the suite down the stairs to the porch, where some of the girls were playing bridge. She recognized a few of them as pledges, because they wore the pink and blue ribbons too, but she did not know them.
“… and so I told him,” a short girl with jewel-studded rims on her large-framed glasses was saying, “that as far as I was concerned, he was the blindest date I’d ever had.”
“Robin!” Marybell Van Casey looked horrified. “He was an Omega Phi. They’re a big fraternity, sweetie, and Tri Ep can’t afford to run around insulting their pledges. You be careful.”
“Well, I don’t care. I hate those big oafs that maul you around as though you were a punching bag. I just won’t take it.”
There was a tense silence. Marybell looked across the table significantly at Kitten Clark. Robin was due for a conference with the social chairman.
Mitch sat next to Robin Maurer at the pledge meeting that afternoon. Jane Bell was the pledge director. She had an extensive background in directing and leading and counseling. In grammar school she had been the monitor in the cloakroom, and later, a junior counselor at a summer camp for girls. She was a Texan and an Army brat, and her speech was peppered with such phrases as “team spirit,” “pulling together,” “giving it all we’ve got,” and “sticking in there.” Whenever a date gave Jane trouble toward the end of an evening, Jane always looked him squarely in the eye and said, “Now, look—don’t get out of line, son!”
“I guess that’s all. How about you girls? Any questions?”
A girl in a plaid dress raised her hand. “Is it true,” she asked, “that we can only date fraternity men?”
Jane cleared her throat and looked treacherously serious. “That question always comes up among new pledges. Well, girls, all I can say is that you have joined a sorority because you have found that you’re in with a gang you can be mighty proud of. Most men join fraternities for the same reason. They want to pick a bunch that they know have high standards and high ideals. Now, to my way of thinking, it’s only logical to want to date that kind of guy.”
“But,” the girl persisted, “may we date an independent if we find that his standards are high and—” She stopped and wrung her hands and blurted out finally, “My boyfriend is an independent. He can’t af-afford a fraternity.”
Jane said, “I’ll talk to you after the meeting. We’ll have a chat about it, OK?”
“Wait a minute,” Robin said, getting up and resting her hand on the large oak table before her. “I think this is pretty silly. You mean to tell me we have to ask you before we can date an independent?”
There was a stir among the gathering and Jane Bell rapped for order. “You can go out with independents if you want—on weekdays. Weekends, we’d prefer you to be with fraternity men.”
“What a laugh!” Robin exclaimed. “You’re serious!”
Anger swept through the Texan’s whole body and settled in her eyes, black as night. “That’s a demerit for you, Robin Maurer,” she thundered, “and it’ll be wise for you to learn how to talk to an active member of Tri Epsilon.”
Robin turned and walked from the room after she said, “Hooray for the team spirit we’ve all got! Three big cheers for our team spirit!”
It was difficult for Jane to continue. She uttered a few remarks about hours on weekends, and special permission for out-of-town weekends. Then she assigned the Fledge lesson (learn the first three songs in the songbook, and the names of the official alumnae officers) and dismissed the group. She bounded off in the direction of the president’s suite.
“Here you are,” Leda said, pulling Mitch aside as she came from the Pledge Room. “I’ve been looking for you. How about my fixing you up tonight with a date? Not Bud Roberts, spare your soul, but someone else.”
They walked toward the stairs while Mitch explained that Marsha had advised her to take a blind date.
“Marsha!” Leda cried. “She’s from hunger, honey. No kidding. You can do what you want as long as he’s a fraternity boy. Never mind Kitten’s blind dates. Look, I’m sorry Roberts was such a mess. I never should have left you, kid. Tonight it’ll be different.”
“I think I’d better do what Marsha asked. All the other pledges are. You know—I don’t want to be an exception.”
Leda put her arm around Mitch. “I understand, honey,” she said. “I shouldn’t have suggested it. Let’s go upstairs and catch thirty winks before dinner.”
Robin Maurer was waiting outside Marsha’s door on the second floor when Mitch and Leda passed by.
“I’m going in for my fifty lashes,” she said to Mitch. “Care to join me?”
Mitch grinned. She liked Robin. She admired the way Robin spoke up and said what she thought. What Mitch thought, too.
“That kid’s a little too cocky,” Leda commented. “She’d better tone down if she wants to keep those ribbons.”
“What happens when you get a demerit?”
“Oh, you get some horrible duty like taking Nessy to a movie on a Sunday afternoon. Sometimes to church too.” Leda sighed. “Nessy is a peach, really, but who wants to cart her around?”
When they reached the room, Leda flopped down and kicked off her loafers. “Say, honey,” she said, “is everything going OK with you? I mean, I don’t want you to be a stranger around here too much longer.”
“I don’t feel like one,” Mitch said. “Sometimes I just don’t catch on right away.”
“You don’t say much, that’s why I wondered. When you want to unload, just open up, Mitch. That’s what I’m here for.”
Mitch kicked her shoes off and stretched out on the bed. “I used to talk a lot in boarding school. College is different. The girls are more grown up, and I’m not used to talking about dates and boys and stuff.”
“You’ll get used to it.… Your mother is dead, isn’t she, Mitch?”
“Yes. When I was real young.”
Watching the girl lie there, Leda had an odd feeling, like that of a protector who must guard an object carefully, less to keep it from harm than to keep it as a possession. The word mother floated around there somewhere and Leda could not catch it and stop it like that, so it rested with her momentarily. In that moment her breasts felt hard and bothersome. Mother, she thought, and seeing Jan off there again, she felt the sharp edge of hatred gnawing into her boredom, inside where she was thinking now for that very slow minute.
Downstairs in the president’s suite, Marsha talked to Robin.
“… because if everyone had her own way, Robin, we wouldn’t be a unified group. There have to be rules.”
“But rules like that are crazy. I never heard of dating only boys who belong to fraternities. Gee, next week when classes start, I’ll meet a lot of independents. It’s worse than racial prejudice.”
“Robin, tell me something. Why do you want to join a sorority?”
“My mother wants me to. She never had the money when she was in college. I guess she always wanted to make up for it by having me belong.”
Marsha walked toward the window and watched the trees in the yard near the side of the house. “If you don’t believe in all that a sorority does,” she said, “one way to fight is to fight from the inside—where the rules and regulations are being made. Sometimes it takes a while. But there are good things about living here like this, and you can’t fight effectively if you don’t keep those good points in mind.”
Robin looked up at her and smiled. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I’m a pretty clumsy rebel.”
As she left the suite and passed the phone in the hall, it rang shrilly and she lifted the arm from the cradle. It was for Kitten Clark, and reaching up for the buzzer on the left of the booth, she found the name and pushed the tiny button. A voice called down, “Got it on three. Hang up on two, please.” Robin walked past a room where some pledges were gathered, learning the words to the Tri Ep song. “Tri Epsilon is a friendly house where every girl’s a queen,” they sang in close, harmonic tones, raising their voices slightly for the next line: “And all the frat men love her.”
Chapter Three
“… AND THIS,” Kitten Clark said, “is Susan Mitchell.” Mitch stepped forward there in the front hall of the Tri Ep house and shook hands with Dirk Henry. He was a plump, short person, and walking along beside him, Mitch felt like a large wire-drawn giraffe. When they reached the front steps, he said, “Clive’s car is down the street. We’re going to the house.”
“What fraternity are you in?” Mitch asked. “Kitten never even told me what house you were from.”
He opened the jacket to his coat and displayed a plain oval-shaped silver pin, fixed to the pocket of his shirt. “Recognize it?”
Mitch stammered. “I’m afraid I’m not too good at spotting them yet.”
“Sigma Delta,” he said proudly. “It’s just the pledge pin. That’s why you didn’t recognize it. Here’s the car.”
Bud Roberts was president of Sig Delt. Would he be at the party? The thought lost its force when Dirk opened the door, and Mitch saw Robin Maurer seated in front with Clive.
“Hi, Mitch,” she cried. “Want you to meet Clive McKenzie, my unlucky blind date for the evening.”
They drove for a few blocks until they reached a palatial two-story brick house. Oak trees towered self-consciously over the entrance and cast shadows on the Greek letters ΣΔ, outlined in sparkling white lights.
As they piled out of the car and went up the walk, there was a sweet aroma of roses and honeysuckle.
“Smells marvelous,” Mitch said.
“It’s Henry, our houseboy. He has a passion for flowers. Keeps the yard in damn fine shape, Henry does.” Dirk’s tone sounded forced and pontifical, and Mitch glanced sideways at him to see if there were any trace of a smile, but he was dead serious.
At the doorway, a small old woman waited to greet them. In the harsh light of the chandelier inside the entrance, her white face looked heavily powdered like the top of a sponge cake, and her silver-colored hair had a strong purple tint.
“This is Mother Carter,” Dirk said. “How’s the party going, Mom?”
Mitch and Robin shook her hand and passed on with the boys through spacious rooms with parquet floors to a winding stairway that led downward.
“You’ll like the Tack Room,” Clive assured them. “Cost Sig Delt three thousand.”
Robin groaned significantly, and it was hard to tell whether she was expressing awe or disgust.
The Tack Room was lined on either side with large red leather booths, and around the walls on oak shelves there were pictures and trophies that were difficult to distinguish in the dim lighting. At the head of the room there was a large circular bar. Behind this a pledge worked, opening bottles of Coke and soda. Liquor was forbidden at fraternity parties, and so the flasks were hidden at the tables where a score of couples huddled together. Everyone was singing when Mitch and Robin entered with their dates.
“Roll me over, Yankee soldier.
Roll me over, lay me down, and do it again.
“This is number three and my hand is on her knee,
Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.
Roll me o-ver in the clo-ver,
Roll me over, lay me down, and do it again.”
“I’ll get the setups,” Clive yelled back at them as they settled in a corner, and he pushed his way through the crowd. Robin sighed and said, “Last night I drank chug-a-lug. Not tonight!”
Dirk joined the singing enthusiastically, and Mitch stared around the room, wondering if Leda and Jake were there. And Bud Roberts. Across from her, a girl with long raven hair pulled away from the lean boy who was whispering in her ear. “Kee-ryst!” she exclaimed, and the rest of her words were gobbled and gone amid the singing and the pounding clink of bottles and feet tapping time with the music.
An hour dragged, monotonous and unrelieved, with the same songs and the sour taste of the whisky that Mitch barely touched. Clive and Dirk sang every song, stopping only to swig their drinks and refill them, and point out the various “brothers” who were big shots—football players, and the editor of the campus humor magazine, and a graduate student who was a Phi Beta Kappa, and, inevitably, Bud Roberts. Clive pointed at him, and Mitch looked and saw him, leaning against the wall, grinning crookedly. He began to weave his way toward them, slowly, at an amble, his hands stuffed into his baggy pants pockets, his green checkered sports shirt open at the neck.
Mitch said, “I think I’ll go to the powder room.” She had noticed the red arrow and the dark letters on the wall announcing, “Women go this way!” Dirk nodded as she rose to leave, and Robin said, “Wait a second, friend, I’ll string along.”
“One at a time,” Bud Roberts said, standing squarely in front of the two girls. “It’s a house rule. One at a time.” And then, “How are you tonight, Miss Mitchell?”
“Fine.”
“Good! Now, if you’ll allow me, I’ll lead you to our ladies’ room.” He grinned at Robin. “You’ll have to wait.”
Mitch’s cheeks grew hot as his hand held her elbow and pushed her along. The singing was loud and painful in her ears.
“How do you feel tonight?” he said. “Feel better?”
“Yes.”
“You know, you’re sort of a challenge to me.”
“Why don’t you forget it?” Mitch said. “Why don’t you just be a gentleman?”
“Spoken by a true lady, at the door of the ladies’ room.”
Mitch pulled the door open and slammed it shut, thankful to be rid of him, to have the touch of his hand off her arm. Inside, the room was feminine and attractive, with small dressing tables, flowered couches and chairs, and a downy blue rag rug with green trim. Her examination of the handsome room was arrested suddenly as she stood before the mirror and reached for her comb. There, to the left of her, a huge cardboard figure dangled brazenly. It was that of a man, naked except for a flapping fig leaf across which was written, “Lift and look.”
Automatically, her hand reached for the fig leaf, and drew back. Her curiosity was mixed with shame and guilt. She ignored it and began combing her hair, fixing her lipstick, and powdering her nose. It remained to obsess her in a peculiar way. Again she glanced at it, and then, remembering that Bud had said, “One at a time,” she realized that no one would see her examine the figure, and once more her hand touched the loose leaf. Slowly and fearfully she raised it. Suddenly and swiftly a fierce bell deafened her ears, ringing out a vibrant wail throughout the Sigma Delta fraternity house. Gales of laughter and shouts started in the room outside, and Mitch drew back and stood shocked, her hands shaking with scalding embarrassment.
The voices and calls persisted and Mitch sat down for long, frenzied minutes. She could hear them coming closer until they stood at the door, singing.
“Never lift a fig leaf, lady, let the poor guy be!
That is,
That is,
If it’s idle cu-ri-os-i-ty!
“Never lift a fig leaf, lady, just to steal a glance,
Unless,
Unless
You fol-low with ro-mance!
“Now! Ain’t you coming out?
Ain’t you coming out?
Ain’t you ev-er, ev-er comin’ out?”
She knew that she could not. They were waiting for her and she could not get up and walk to the door and pass them. Not now. It was a joke, she realized that, but it was his joke. And everyone would be shaking with laughter, knowing what she had done. Anger mounted in her, and her hands wrung with a seething anxiety. Over and over they sang the song and shouted and she sat there. Very gradually the voices died away and then it was finished and they had left the door. Short, round tears loitered in the corners of her eyes and escaped down her face as she blotted them with her handkerchief and straightened herself. She listened at the door, and the noise was not there, but back at the booths where they all were. Opening it a few inches, she saw that Bud had waited. There was a look of smug defiance on his face.
“C’mon,” he said. “No one will bother you now.”
She slammed the door shut harshly and held onto it from the inside. He was the last one she could look at—his face leering that way, the slimy, suggestive tone, and the hand that reached for her.
“By God, you’ll come out! You’ll come out!” he shouted, and heaving himself at the door before she could twist the lock and secure it, he held her arms back and kicked the door shut behind him.
“Damn you,” he said, the sick, sweet odor of liquor flowing from his mouth. “Damn you and your damn innocence! You wanted to look, didn’t you? By God, look, then!”
Mitch wrested herself free, and grabbing the china vase on the table, she brought it down on his head, and left him staggering back against the wall. Then, running, she tripped up the stairs, past the ghostlike face of Mother Carter, through the door, and beyond the gangling oak trees. She ran down the street in the tarblack night.
When she stopped running, a block away, the near lights of the stadium told her she was streets away from the Tri Epsilon house. Gasping for breath, her body perspiring feverishly, she stumbled along until she saw the white house on the corner. As she approached it, she noticed the sign ΔP, and she remembered Fredna, the girl she had met at the hotel during rush week. Instantly, she quickened her pace and climbed the rows of brick steps. A couple sat on the porch, and the girl looked up at Mitch as she passed the swing where they were.
“May I help you?” she said, standing, coming toward Mitch so that she could view her in the light of the porch. “Fredna Loughead. I was—looking for her.”
The girl said, “Fredna’s on a blind date tonight. She won’t be home until closing hour. Can I take a message?” She had a quizzical expression in her alert eyes.
“Well, I—I guess I’m lost.” Mitch stuttered nervously. “I’m a Tri Epsilon pledge. I can’t find the house.”
“Really?” the girl said, her tone gaining interest, her lips parting in a ready smile. “Well now, how did that happen? You’re a pledge, you say?”
“Yes, I am. I—I had a fight and—well, I just got lost.”
“A fight? That’s terrible. Why, that’s awful. Look, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Biff and I will walk you home. It’s just a few blocks, and we were going to take a walk anyway, weren’t we, Biff?”
The boy got up from the swing and studied Mitch. “Yes,” he said. “We’d be glad to walk you home.” There was a bright jeweled pin on his sweater. “I live right across the street from you. Delta Pi. We’re neighbors.”
“And,” the girl said in syrupy tones, “you can tell us all about this fight of yours while we walk along.”
“There isn’t much to tell,” Mitch said as they started down across the damp grass. “I guess I just lost my temper.”
Bud Roberts reeled back against the pale blue wall, and felt the warm trickle of blood on his forehead. He touched it with his finger and stared at its vivid color and stood there, slumped unevenly, resting. The door was partially open and the sound of many feet came rushing to him, and he straightened himself and walked into their midst, not stopping the blood as it ran. A girl shrieked out at the sight of him, and two young men rushed to aid him as he walked up to them all.
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