CHAPTER FIVE
Let’s Not Demand So Much Of Every Single Moment
March, 1969
Priscilla said, “Boom!” every time her daughter, Kimberly, knocked down the blocks. After only three tries Kimmie started giggling as she mouthed, “Bmm-m-m”, crashing the three-high stack with a wild sweep of her right arm. Priscilla sitting cross-legged, Kimmie on her haunches, they smiled with eyes engaged and looked ready to continue the exercise all afternoon. While Dr. Kagan spoke into the mike, “Thanks, Priscilla, that’s enough for now!” I noticed there was no column on my recording sheet for “Smiles”.
“Uh, Dr. Kagan, in these mother-baby pairs, when they smile at each other, the baby seems to understand the task sooner. How do I record that?”
“Good observation, … Miss Stein, is it? Why don’t you design a new recording tool, one you can use with your next iteration of this project?”
With that, I felt I had been ushered through a narrow gate into a special garden, one where truth grew like flowers, watered by our questions, our eyes the sun. In high school, reading about science, with hypotheses generating research, followed by recording observations, had felt arid, barren, compared to the lushness of planning, then finally doing an experiment. At Avondale, science had been off-putting and rote. I found no passion in Chemistry, with its mixing and heating, odors and stains, or Biology, our noses curled against formaldehyde as we dissected frogs. But here in Kagan’s psych lab, I found a richness while exploring the foundations of personality. At last, I knew I had a calling. Not to be a research scientist, that was too confining. But to learn about, understand, and help guide the path of these little unformed minds.
Feeling effervescent as I explained all this to Mike, I bubbled as we walked through the Square down to the river in early March. “Spring! It’s almost here!” I swept my arms around, encompassing the spiny trees arrayed along the shore, tiny buds on every branch seeking sun. Raising both arms, I twirled around, almost dancing, leaning my head back to face that sun. I hugged myself, laughed, and headed for a bench where we could sit, and talk.
“What got into you, Sarah Jane?” Mike wondered. Brows twisted, a half-smile growing on his face, he looked a little lost.
“I know what I’m going to do this summer. Kagan’s lab – those kids. I’m going to be part of a new study, right from the beginning. They’re already starting to design it.” Mike cocked his head, asking for more.
“I don’t know yet exactly what it will be, the research protocol I mean. I don’t care, it doesn’t matter what, I get to be with Kagan all summer! He’s so gentle with those moms, doesn’t ever tell them what to do, just lets the action happen, then we observe, tally it up, and see what we can learn.”
Mike gave a little smile, eyes flat, almost sad. “That’s good. It’s what you want, what you’ve always wanted, I know. So you’re really on your way. Do you get to stay in the dorm over summer?”
“No, it’s closed, but I will be here, in Cambridge. Bev’ll be in town working at Mass General, but Leslie’s graduating, so there’s a room at their place. I can stay on next year, maybe with Jeanne or Marcia too, and go off-off.” As I said this, Mike looked thoughtful, down at the grass, where he studied the few green shoots nurtured by recently melted snow. I considered how our summer lives were similar, but so different. Me, in the Ivy Tower, studying children and how they grew; Mike in a lifeguard chair, watching them bounce and splash, trying to keep them safe. And those swimmers he’d help train.
Apparently ready to talk, he started by looking back. “A long time ago, when Kennedy announced the moon-shot program, they were talking on the news about how many scientists they’d need to get there, get there by this year. I’ll never forget, they said something like ‘Half of all scientists who have ever lived are working now.’ I saw a graph about that.” Using his hands to demonstrate the upward slope, he explained, “Starting way back with Aristotle, thru the Dark Ages and the Muslims and the Chinese, up to Newton, the number of people doing ‘science’ was always very small. But then, like we learned in history, in the enlightenment, the number started going up. Not very fast, but up and up through the 16, the 17, the 1800s, and then it started to take off with the world wars. They said the number of scientists in the world had doubled between 1942 and 1957, then doubled again by 1964” His hand curved faster and steeper upwards towards to sky. “If it keeps increasing at that rate, it would reach its asymptote at the end of this year.”
He seemed satisfied with his argument, but I suspected there was more. “So what happens then? After we get to the moon, and we’ve got all those scientists?”
“After that, who knows? Knowledge will be spinning out of control. We’ve never been there before, had so many people studying so many things, finding new knowledge all the time, every day. There’ll be too much for any one person to make sense of. It’s kinda scary, like the world’s gonna change and we won’t be in charge any more.”
“Aren’t you one of them, a scientist? You’re going to med school to be a doctor, right?”
Frowning, he gripped his mouth, squeezing his cheeks, ring and little fingers tucked under his chin. Dropping his hand, he replied, “I remember the seventh-grade science teacher, Mr. Webb, wrote in my year-book, ‘When one has much, much is expected.’ And in the eighth-grade, Miss Brueggeman wrote, ‘Science in your future? You can handle it!’ But just because it was easy for me, just because I took AP Biology, Math, and Physics, that still doesn’t mean it’s what I’m supposed to do. I want to be a doctor because you get to deal with people at their very core, their true essence. They talk about the ‘Art and Science’ of medicine, don’t they? I can’t shake the feeling I’m an artist, somewhere inside, someone who sees the beauty, and wants to talk with people about it.”
“Isn’t that what being a psychiatrist is all about, talking to people? Using inter-personal interaction to help them?”
“That’s not what I saw on the psych ward. Everybody there was on some kind of medication, for depression or schizophrenia, even the sociopaths. Watching them all sit around in a group therapy session was a joke. They were either nodding off, or in their own little world. If that’s what a psychiatrist does, I don’t know…”
“So are you don’t want to be a doctor anymore? You wouldn’t really become a truck driver, would you? Don’t you have to start applying to schools soon? Which ones are on your list?”
“It’s funny, when we first got to Calvin, they gave us an aptitude test, to see what professions, careers, our interests were most compatible with. My top five were psychiatrist, YMCA physical education director, musician, writer, and minister. Now I look at myself, and I see I am interested in all those things. I can’t play guitar or sing very well, but I’ve got more records than most guys on our floor. I’ve started taking religion classes. So there’s even a little minister in me, I guess. But yeah, no, I’m still applying to med schools. Ten…” He started to tick them off: Boston, New Haven, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Michigan, Ohio.
I scanned a mental map of the US. I could see California, the East, Cincinnati as a “safe school”, Michigan as well. “Denver? Why Colorado?”
“Every time I’ve gone there, in the summer, and now to ski in the winter, it’s felt like home to me. When we went over Christmas, every day was a rush. Each time my sister and I would go down the hill, it was like stopping time, stopping my mind. All I could do was try and keep my body upright. We’d fall, get up, try again.” He shook his head, raised his eyes to the ceiling as if recalling a deep felt wonder. “I can see myself living there, so why not? If I was there, I could ski every weekend!”
“A ‘YMCA physical education director’. That’s the same as being a swim coach, in your mind? Working with kids, organizing things?” I asked. “I guess it kinda makes sense you’d want to spend your summer, again, at that pool, with those kids. I don’t know, though, Mike. Why would you want to go back there? Shouldn’t you be doing something like the psych ward again, put more experience on your applications? It won’t be like going to college from Avondale, where we all knew we’d get in somewhere. Not everybody gets into medical school, you know.” Was he getting side-tracked, first with swimming, and now an infatuation with skiing? Three years earlier, I’d fallen in love with a debater, a boy who used both his mind and his hands, who wanted to spin words into beauty, as well as play at life. He’d seemed so sure of his direction, who he was. And now that I had decided on mine, had become clear on who I should become, he’d grown hesitant, reluctant to grow up.
He grew pensive, resting his elbows on his knees as he stared again at the scraggly new green grass.
I pressed once more, “You could do something here, stay with us at Bev’s place on Oxford. Why do you have to go back, what’s keeping you there?”
He said quietly, as if to himself, “I wish I knew, I wish I knew.” Then louder, stronger, “I get to be free there, to be in charge. The rules are simple, I always know what to do. Being in the sun, all summer, so warm…and the kids are fun, they look up to me.”
I remembered the poem that had fallen out of his pea coat, Molly, a girl, “still a child” with an “unformed mind.”
Without thinking, I blurted out, “Like Molly? Is she one of the kids who looks up to you?”
Instantly, his face grew firm, a mask to hide behind. “She’s one of the good swimmers, on the big AAU team.” Then he must have wondered, had we talked about her before? His eyes narrowed. “What do you know about her? What did I say?”
I could have lied; he had talked about her before, and he’d accept it if I innocently reminded him. While I may have left some things unsaid at times, for three years with him, I had followed his dictum, ‘Always Be Honest’, and feared the consequences if I wasn’t.
“I saw a poem about her, it fell out of your pocket that night you showed up in the snowstorm.”
He scratched his head as if trying to remember. Maybe the same thought about honesty was racing in his mind. He kept looking at the ground, afraid to meet my eyes. Finally, “She’s just a kid.”
“Just a kid? How old is she, Mike?”
Still not looking up, his cheeks now red. “She’s in the oldest age group, so, I don’t know, sixteen? Seventeen?”
My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t stop asking, “So why did she get a poem? When’s her birthday, are you gonna write her another one for that?”
Finally, he looked up, solemnly, then with the bare hint of a smile. “You’re the only one I’ll ever do that for. Don’t worry about her.”
Still, that night, in bed with Michael, I’d never felt so alone, apart.
ii
Mike stayed over that Sunday, going with Jeanne and me to Leslie’s for brunch. She and Bev had upgraded their place settings, or maybe someone’s parents had bought them a matching set, after experiencing the mismatched plates, cups and utensils. Bev brought in bagels, lox, cream cheese, and blintzes, along with fruit slices and cheese. Coffee came in a shiny chrome carafe, with orange juice and some champagne – “For mimosas!” Les noted. I could see myself having people over during the summer, taking off an apron as I finished bringing in a steaming bowl of vegetables – broccoli, asparagus, carrots, a regular smorgasbord to go with the bread and salad we’d already be enjoying.
Les crashed my fantasy by loudly asking, “Janie! You never went back to Hillel. I thought you were Jewish! You said you didn’t have a bat mitzvah, right?” As usual, she didn’t wait for an answer. “I remember mine. I was twelve. I felt like I was all of a sudden grown-up. One day I’m a kid, riding bikes, getting skinned knees, playing hide-and-seek. Then, Bam! There’s this solemn ritual, everybody humming in Hebrew and – poof! – I’m a woman. I know it didn’t happen all at once, still it seems like right then I had my period, got my first real bra, began to think about what I really wanted to be when I ‘grew-up.’ It’s like I was two different people, before and after. I remember things that happened, people I knew, from before, but they don’t seem to be the memories that make me, me.” She tailed off pensively.
Jeanne jumped into the rare break in a Leslie monologue. “There are things that happen, in our brain, that make those earlier memories less stable, less forceful in a conscious way. Something about myelination of the neurons. What’s happening to us now, from when we go through puberty until our brain stops developing, makes us who we’re going to be.” She sounded so authoritative, so rational. Still, I wasn’t convinced.
“I think there’s more,’ I countered, “not just our thoughts and memories, that determines how we act. I see those moms and their kids, in my psych lab, they can’t talk to each other yet, but they can communicate. And Freud, yes, he was more a philosopher than a scientist, still, he was onto something when he talked about how our earliest childhood experiences, with our mothers especially, set a pattern, a template, for everything we become. I mean, we’re not insects or frogs, we’re not one thing before, and then something totally different after we go through puberty, or a bat mitzvah or whatever. We’re more like snakes, getting bigger and bigger each time we shed our skins, but still recognizable as the same person, growing, evolving.” Thinking of getting hit on the head in Chicago, I went on. “Even when something suddenly makes us see the world in a different way, we still carry all our old memories with us, our previous ways of doing things. We get more complex, life gets more complicated.”
Mike and Bev sat quietly in one corner, a gentile minority to the three of us contemplating our spiritual and temporal growth. I noticed they were making a big dent in the bagels and lox, though.
Wiping some cream cheese off his upper lip, Mike started, “This stuff is really good. Where did you say you got it, Bev?”
“There’s this little deli down on the Square. Sunday morning you have to get there early if you want it soft and warm like this.” She smiled contentedly, sipping on her mimosa.
Mike plowed on, looking first at Leslie, then Jeanne, finally resting his gaze on me. Inwardly, I prepared for a lecture. Instead he looked up, then warmly back to me. Without pontificating, he started, “You’re right. There’s a continuity, at least if we’re sane, from when we’re born, and probably even before, an unbroken chain of fundamental personality.” He turned to Leslie, then Jeanne. “I wonder, do you feel the same as when you were ten? You may not act the same, or have the same beliefs. Even so, you are, deep down, one person your whole life, aren’t you?”
Jeanne nodded, but I knew she would not let him off so easily. “OK, yeah, I get it, I’m the same, but I’m always growing, like Janie says. I still think the things that count, that feed our growth, they come when we’re ready, after our brains are ready to absorb them. What is it, Janie, there’s a time when a kid starts to get a sense of self? Before that, they can’t tell the difference between themselves and the outside world? Well, that doesn’t happen all at once.”
Mike put in, “You said ‘Our brains stop developing.’ When does that happen?”
“Supposedly, around 25, 26, 27.”
“And so we’re very volatile then, between puberty and when our brain has grown?” He pursed his lips in thought. “Hmm, I got to thinking, when I worked on the psych ward, that no one should see a shrink between the ages of 15 and 25, ‘cause we’re all crazy then anyway. It’s hard work, being young. And some of us, I guess, don’t make it.” He spread his arms wide, as if to ask everyone at the table, “Are we adults yet? It feels like it, kind of, sitting here at ‘brunch’, no one older serving us or telling us how to act. But what…how will we know when we’re adults, when we’re officially grown up? When I start a career? When we have kids, get married, vote? What?”
Leslie snickered, “When you have a checkbook and start paying all your bills yourself.” She turned serious. “No, you’re an adult when you start thinking for yourself, when you’ve done enough, seen enough, to know what’s right for you. You stop letting the world tell you what to do, who you should be.” She stood up, grabbing dishes, empty or not, and took them back to the kitchen. Water sloshed, pots clanged as she washed and dried in there.
Mike took up the thread. “In that case, I think we’re always as grown up as we’re going to be, each moment in time. Right now, I’m as old as I’ve ever been, right? When we were sixteen,” he said, looking over at me, “you acted like – or at least you seemed to me like – you knew exactly who you were, and where you were going. That’s changed a bit, gotten broader, fuller, but you’re still the same you, the same Sarah Jane Stein I first knew. Do you remember?”
I answered, “I remember then, but I remember so much more now, everything that’s happened since. Every memory builds on the one before, making you richer. You can see more, hear more, learn more. There’s just more to you. And it never stops, does it?”
“Memories are all we are, then, is that what you mean?” Mike asked.
Jeanne and Bev munched on the cookies Leslie had brought in, staring out the bay window, when Mike pointed out, “I’ve got to get back sometime this evening. We ought to go back to your dorm.”
Walking back to Radcliffe, Mike picked up on memories again. “That all made me think…there is a split that happens, right around puberty. It could be that our brain does change, physically, like Jeanne was saying. But you know better than any of us, babies have a real personality even before birth. Their mothers and others they come into contact with react to that personality, and babies react in turn, building memories right from the start, about the world, about people, mostly about emotions, ‘cause they don’t have any words.”
I just nodded, didn’t want to stop wherever he was going. Times like this, when he was teasing through his thoughts, sifting, rejecting, accepting, trying to analyze, synthesize, were when I liked him best.
“I feel like I’m a different person since I was in eighth grade, about thirteen. After that, I stopped living in the moment, using my past only for casual entertainment. When somebody asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I stopped saying something childish like ‘baseball player’ or ‘mountain climber’. I took the question seriously. How much of who I am now comes from the times I can’t remember?”
He wasn’t asking rhetorically, so I offered, “The thing I see between those babies and their mothers is love. Moms, most of them anyway, love their kids without any thought or hesitation. It’s the first thing most of us experience. And babies eat it up. We all want to be loved, it’s like we’re born that way. Everything flows from that.” I thought of the unlucky ones who came through the study room, age ten or twelve and already at war with the world. “If you don’t get it the right way, or enough of it, you can get stunted, shunted down a path it’s hard to find your way back from. Then there’s all the kids you play with, you learn how to be with people, but in the end, you find your way back, to love, spiraling up from your mother, to friends, to just one person, and then renew the cycle with your own kids.”
Mike stopped, took his hands out of his pockets, and spread them apart, first close together, then gradually wider and wider, a fisherman telling about the big one that got away. “My memories, the older I get, the less time any one moment represents in my whole life. When I’m fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, with so very few of them, they all seem outsized, laden in importance. Now, I’m doubled in age since then, compared to turning thirteen, so each thing that happens, each memory in the past and each one I create today, becomes, little by little, less and less meaningful, in the overall scheme of things.”
I added, “And the earliest ones, the ones we’ve had the longest, those are the easiest to remember, to come back to, and the last to leave us, I’ve heard. I can recite the words to so many songs I heard in the car when I was fourteen riding with my sister, singing along.” Mike nodded vigorously, smiling in agreement. “I bet when I’m senile, in an old folks’ home, I’ll still be able to sing ‘It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to’…”
Mike chimed in, “…you would cry too if it happened to you.” We both laughed, acknowledging that silly as the song was, it apparently made a big impact on both of us.
“Our memories are who we are,” Mike pronounced.
“Memories are who we are,” I murmured in assent.
Back in my room, I picked up a book, hoping to get a little studying in before dinner. Mike lay back on the bed, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. His eyes fluttered as he breathed softly, evenly. Then, his leg kicked suddenly, and he asked, “Ever wonder where we go when we sleep?”
Sighing, I pointed at my book, then acquiesced with, “What’s that Hamlet said, ‘To sleep, perchance to dream’? I don’t think we go anywhere, we just stop making memories. We’re in suspended animation, with a few random thoughts and emotions in our dreams to confuse us when we wake up.”
“But if memories are who we are, then don’t we cease to exist when we’re asleep? And when you’re dead, are your memories gone, too?”
“Maybe not, as long as the last person who knew you is still alive, making memories about you.” As I said this, I came over to the bed, pushing him towards the wall, trying to stop this endless sophomoric philosophizing. It didn’t work. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, we made a few more memories together. What stuck with me was the electric quivering inside my legs, flowing up through my curling fingers, into my skull, a small explosion moving from the back of my neck, then shooting forward and out my temples. I lay back, satisfied, ignoring his intensity.
“Why’d you stop,” he moaned.
All I could do was breathe deeply and smile. When I’d calmed down, I pulled him back towards me. Once again, his words had captured me, torn away my sense of self. I wanted to envelop him, pull everything I could out of him. He obliged.
After we’d dressed, he gathered his books, ready to leave. “What was that all about?” I asked, shaking my head with a small rattle of a laugh.
“I think,” he said, “that was a double dip ice cream cone we shared.” I cocked my head quizzically. In response, he went on, “You got your flavor, I got mine, but we each got to taste them both.”
I wondered what it would be like if we had some extended time together, if Mike weren’t always coming and going, spending a night or a weekend with me, then going away for a week, or a month, only writing letters, not talking to each other. I saved up my feelings all that time, they took over when he came back. We weren’t growing together, were singing the same song over and over, not writing any new ones. He always talked about dreams, the future, building a life together. But we weren’t together, not this way, not in two college towns a two hour drive apart. And he wouldn’t try and build that life with me, wouldn’t make the effort to spend the summer here, with me.
iii
Spring break that year, I stayed at Bev and Leslie’s place, thankful for the solitude. So much riled my brain that week. Women’s literature, with Dr. Shulmeister, opened a new arena of intrigue, providing a sense of mystery and power. She loved little vignettes, forgotten stories of women taking control of their own destiny, forging new rules to follow. The best combined tragedy and strength, like Franceska Mann. A Polish-Jewish ballerina, in the fall of 1943 she arrived by train at Auschwitz, stuffed into cattle cars with 1700 other women. Told at first they must undress for disinfection before moving on to Switzerland, in exchange for 600 German POWs held by the Allies farther south, they soon realised what was on the other side of the doors. Franceska, so the story goes, mesmerized the SS officers with a slow strip-tease. Down to her shoes, she removed one, stabbed the nearest Nazi with its stiletto heel and, grabbing his gun, proceeded to kill another. This led all the other women to attack their captors, clawing and ripping at their clothes, tearing noses and ears, and generally creating havoc. Soldiers rushed in from all over the camp, mowing down the women with machine gun fire.
In March she introduced us to Anais Nin, her diaries and novels. That week by myself, I had time to read A Spy In The House of Love. The main character, Sabina, fascinated and frightened me. Married to Alan, a stable, stolid, patient man, she seeks excitement in serial assignations with exotic men. Lyrical and episodic, this tale of erotic heights and guilt-filled home life forced me to think about my own needs and desires. Sabina reveled in the pleasure she found with men, but did not feel a need to stay with them. She seemed to say, “I did not choose to love, love chose me.”
Love and sex for me had so far been tightly bound together; either without the other seemed wrong, stunted, denying the value of both. On the one hand, there were girls who claimed to be in love, but were saving “it” for marriage.I’d known others who managed the separation without a care, or at least not one they would admit – girls who thought nothing of a one-night stand, knowing only someone’s first name, then never seeing him again. I’d already foreclosed the first option, and was glad I had. I wondered if that were a slippery slope to the second, if I could be someone who could love more freely. Or was I a serial monogamist: would I need to let go of Mike before allowing another man so fully into my life?
Strange posters appeared that week across the deserted campus. The upraised fists, bright red and angry, reminded me the SDS had vowed to bring Harvard to its knees in April. The College still offered ROTC, Reserve Officers Training Corps, as a credit class. With college deferments in question and, despite the assurances of newly-elected Richard Nixon, no end in sight to the war, more men were taking this option to avoid the draft and gain some control over their terms of service. In addition, the Harvard Corporation was gobbling up land all around the campus, threatening to throw out the low-income workers who called it home. The SDS seized on these two issues, planning demonstrations against the University itself, no longer content with objecting to the government and corporations. Rumors of building take-overs dominated conversations among the few of us still in town.
Sunday evening before classes would start again on April 7, Bev and Leslie returned. Les had been admitted to Harvard Law the coming fall, and she brought Howard Lehrman along for dinner.
“Sarah, are you going to join us, when the SDS takes action?” he asked. “Keep your eyes open, something big is going to happen. We’re all going to have to choose, do we stand with peace and freedom, or do we cow-tow to Harvard?”
I thought of Mike and his roommate Rich, singing Desolation Row over and over again. “Dylan’s right, as usual. ‘Everybody’s asking, which side are you on?’ What are the issues? I’ve heard people want to take over a building, call Pusey’s bluff on ROTC.”
Les and Howard filled us in on the grievances. The punishment of nine students who had led the sit-in at Paine Hall in December against ROTC; Harvard President Nathan Pusey’s unwillingness to go all the way in abolishing ROTC; the aggressive incursion of the University into the neighboring communities; the increasing lack of relevance in college classes, the watering down of black and women’s studies. Bev and I stayed silent while Leslie and Howard became more and more agitated.
“Tomorrow, Les, tomorrow, we’re going to University Hall, give them an ultimatum. Six points.” Howard ticked them off on his fingers. “Abolish ROTC, give Harvard scholarships instead, restore the Paine Hall demonstrators’ rights, roll back rents in Harvard buildings to January 1968, don’t knock down the University Road apartments for that Kennedy school, and let those 200 black workers in Roxbury keep their homes. Simple enough.”
“And if they don’t agree?” Les asked.
“Like I said, be ready. Be in the Yard, outside Uni Hall, see what happens. We all need to support this.”
But they didn’t go to Uni Hall on Monday. Classes resumed, and it seemed all might return to normal. I’d be in Dr. Shulmeister’s class on Wednesday, talking about Anais Nin’s erotic vision, then sitting behind the one-way mirror in Child Development, recording mother-baby interactions. The war would go on forever, ROTC graduates would eagerly join the fight, Harvard would buy up more and more land, expelling their own workers.
Tuesday, Howard found me on the Widener steps after morning classes. Head exposed to the biting April wind, his hair a black flag across his forehead, he furiously wound a camel-hair muffler around his neck with one hand, while the other struggled to retain control of a large batch of paper, fluttering dangerously close to premature dispersal.
“Jane – Hey! Come and help me!” he exhorted, waving the papers above his head. One fell from the rest; I grabbed it before it could fly away.
“STOP HARVARD EXPANSION!” ran across the top. It continued, “What is Harvardization? Harvardization is the transformation of Cambridge into a concentrated center for private and government research – the creation of an insulated city for developing weapons and programs to oppress people here and overseas…” Complaints about the “upper-middle class”, “federal government”, and “the Harvard Corporation” followed.
“Take some over to Radcliffe, will ya? Hand them out to everyone you see, a few in each dorm lounge, go into Hilles, drop some off there.” Howard thrust the whole bunch at me, then dug into his satchel for more. I looked up at Widener, torn between studying for those classes on Wednesday with Shulmeister and Kagan, and following Howard’s passion, wrapping myself into the SDS cocoon of anger and action.
I grabbed the papers, and said, “What’s next?”
“Read it, hand them out, then come to the meeting tonight. We’re going to decide what to do, when to strike, and how. Lowell hall, after dinner, OK?”
Lowell’s lecture hall was massive, could hold hundreds. Students filled most seats, but I found Howard’s wiry mop-top and scooted into the empty chair beside him. He was buzzing, turning around on all sides, engaging allies it seemed. At the lectern, two guys huddled, checking their watches.
Howard dropped his voice, leaned over to me, and pointed, “See that guy on the left? That’s Kazin. He’s a junior, he’s really smart, knows how to lead a mob like this.” Tall and lean, with a slight stoop, he had deep set eyes and a gentle smile. “Chaos all around him, there he is, coasting above it. He’ll get us somewhere, I bet.” Howard then explained the dilemma facing SDS leadership: two factions, the Worker Student Alliance and the New Left Caucus, saw different routes forward. The WSA was for immediate action, an occupation of Harvard’s administrative nerve center, University Hall. The NLC, Howard’s group, favored a more measured approach, “educate” the campus first, expand the engagement outside of those in Lowell, find strength in numbers. Arguments, some raging, some quiet, see-sawed for several hours. They took three votes, straw, “final”, and, when that didn’t go the way WSA wanted, another, “binding”, all with the total 180-140, to march that night to Pusey’s house, present him with demands, then spend five days in campus-wide discussion, returning on Monday for an occupation if Pusey would not relent.
Even though it was past midnight, those of us who’d stayed filed out, and marched to Pusey’s house on Quincy Street. A few campus police stood guard at the outside gate, but swiftly stepped aside when they saw the size of the crowd. Kazin knocked vigorously for several minutes on the solid wooden door. He loudly, but politely, announced our presence. Finally, like Luther with his theses, he tacked our six demands below the knocker, and we all turned back, heading home at last.
A powerful energy filled my head, as I walked through the Yard with Howard. I should have been exhausted, but felt exhilarated. “Something’s really going to happen, isn’t it? I don’t know what, but this many people, they can’t ignore it any longer.”
Howard stayed silent, walking slowly. Finally, he said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
When he didn’t elaborate, I asked, “What don’t you know?”
“Everything. Will they listen? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure a few hundred kids tacking paper on his door isn’t going to make Pusey do anything. And if he doesn’t, I know those guys in the WSA aren’t going to just talk and wait. Something’s going to happen tomorrow – today by now, huh? We’re going to have to decide how much we’re willing to risk, to get some movement here.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked with some trepidation.
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. I heard some people talking about taking over a building tomor…today. At noon, or something.”
“Where? Which one?”
“All I heard was ‘Be at Mem Church before noon.’ I’ll go there, listen to what people are saying. Are you going to your classes?”
I hesitated. I could feel Howard’s excitement, but I knew these two, Women’s Lit and Psych Lab, were what I really wanted out of Harvard, not another noisy demonstration. “No, I can’t drop them. I’ll be out at noon. Where will you be?”
“Let’s see, why don’t I say I’ll be at John Harvard’s statue between noon and 12:30. Find me there if you want.”
I realized I’d better get some sleep.