The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) Read Online Free Page B

ruling principles. Over his charges on the dance-floor, he exercised a jealous surveillance; woe to those intruders, Baal-worshipers, who tried to spike the punch when he was present. He did not dance, but his eye noted any disorder among the dancers; his plump finger signed; his head beckoned, vigorously nodded with approval when a jitterbugging pair desisted. Jingling a coin in his pocket against his wife’s compact and lipstick, he tested the beat of the music, relayed requests to the band or to the boy in charge of the records.
    To his wife, Catherine, he frequently called out, in his soft, caressive voice, which always sounded coaxing as if it were calling a kitten, to ask whether she were tired, whether he could get her something, obviously for the purpose of receiving her radiant negative, the shake of the white mantilla proclaiming to all present her unquenchable, dauntless vitality. A certain element of tender prearrangement seemed to enter into their public relation, as though she were a film-star and he her discreet devoted manager. The girls loved this, as a sort of testimonial or advertisement of the permanence of romance in marriage. They clustered about the coatroom early to get a glimpse of him on his knees, fumbling with the clasps of her overshoes, while she waited, complacent, tapping her free foot, brightly waving and signaling, powdering her pointed nose. She would kick the overshoes off one by one, with a deft arch of her satined foot and then, with an imperious gesture, slip her old black daytime coat with its fox collar from her strong, full, lotioned shoulders and toss it to him at the coatroom window, with a cry, “Catch, Hen,” clear, bell-like, commanding, and a flash of the even teeth. The conspicuous whiteness and evenness of those teeth gave her beauty an incisory quality.
    Dressed in their “date-dresses” or “semi-formals,” jeweled barrettes in their new-washed hair, the girls gazed at the pair with nudging, sympathetic smiles, like grandmothers watching babies in a play-pen, while the boys, garroted in neckties, their oiled hair striated with comb-marks, stood by with board-like faces, declining to see the meaning the girls squeezed out of this byplay; a few of the taller ones exchanged shrugs of irony that remarked on the married condition and on how the mighty had fallen.
    And yet to the Jocelyn boy who suffered himself to attend these dances the Mulcahys were both “regular” guys. These youths, for the most part, were still squirming in the straitjacket of puberty; their hands trembled when they lit a cigarette; their wrists protruded from their coat-sleeves; they lived in an existential extremity; every instant of communication was anguish. Besides the beer-and-convertible crowd—the ex-bootleggers’ and racketeers’ sons, movie-agents’ sons, the heavy-walleted incorrigible sons of advertising geniuses who had been advised to try Jocelyn as a last resort—the male part of the college included an unusual number of child prodigies, mathematical wizards of fourteen, as well as some spastics and paraplegics, cripples of various sorts, boys with tics, polio victims. There were a deaf boy, a dumb boy, boys with several kinds of speech-defects; there were two boys who had fits, boys with unusual skin diseases, with ordinary acne, with glasses, with poor teeth, a boy with a religious complex, boys who had grown too fast, with long, chickeny necks and quivering Adam’s apples. The girls, by comparison, were blooming, healthy, often pretty specimens, with the usual desires and values, daughters of commercial artists, commercial writers, radio-singers, insurance-salesmen, dermatologists, girls who had failed to get into Smith or nearby Swarthmore, girls from the surrounding region, narcissistic, indolent girls wanting a good time and not choosey, girls who sculpted or did ceramics of animals or fashion-drawing, hard-driving, liverish girls, older than the rest, on