It looked like a scene from
A Tale of Two Cities.
A hundred students were sitting on the antique tables, leaning against the priceless busts, gathering in the corners to argue their strategies, though
strategy
might have been too strong a word. It seemed as if no one knew quite what anyone should be doing, now that they were there. The loudest argument Will heard was between two members of the SDS and somebody who said he had come up from Yale to join the fight. The Yalie wanted to smoke marijuana in the “liberated” hall. The SDS wanted to have a vote on the matter.
And Franklin shouted from another group in another corner, “No dope. Not here.”
“Who the fuck are you?” asked the outsider.
A good question, thought Will. But he didn’t bother to stay for an answer.
He went through the doors and peered into the office of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Half a dozen students were standing over the file cabinets. Sherry Lappen was there, Jerry Royster, Theo Boss, and the one picking the locks on the cabinets was Keegan.
“Here we go!” Keegan popped a lock. “Faculty records. Correspondence. Everything you want.”
“Far out,” said Sherry. “Now we’ll know who’s for killing people in Vietnam.”
“I wish we had some chicken blood or something,” said Boss. “We could dump it all over these things.”
“No,” said Royster. “Better to have them and read them. They’ll help.”
Will had resolved to do no more than observe. But he had to speak up, “Help what?”
“Willie!” Keegan laughed. “You joinin’ the cause? ‘Members of the proletariat, arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains.’”
On the desk was a folder that read “Professor George Wedge Drake.”
“This is private,” said Will. “These are personnel files.”
“The people should know what Harvard has done,” said Sherry Lappen. “Your own relative helped kill hundreds of thousands of people in Japan.”
“Yeah,” said Keegan, “and from what I read, he has himself a house full of valuable old books.”
“Oh, nobody cares about the books,” said Sherry.
“No,” said Royster, bundling the files and taking them back into the meeting room.
Sherry and the others bustled after him, except for Keegan, who snatched Prof. G.’s file and went back to the Xerox machine.
Will said to Keegan, “You couldn’t care less about the revolution.”
“Shit, no.”
“So what are you looking for?”
“The cool stuff. The skeletons in the closet.” He flipped the folder open. “You got all kinds of letters in here about how smart he was as an undergraduate. There’s a letter from the FBI to President Conant, asking if his relationship with the daughter of a known Communist was cause for worry, back when they were sending him off to Los Alamos.”
Then Keegan read a letter from Assistant Professor George Drake to the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science in 1953. “‘Dear Sir, In relation to investigations into Communists on the Harvard faculty, let me assure you that as far as my past relationships are concerned, there is nothing that anyone would interpret as disloyalty.’”
“Jesus,” said Will, genuinely shocked. “He’d helped build the bomb, and Russians got the secret. Maybe they blamed him.”
Keegan laughed. “Now we got commie pinko faggots all over the place.” Then he put another letter under the rubber cover of the Xerox machine and pushed a button.
“What are you doing?” Will watched the copy come out.
“Go ahead,” said Keegan. “Read it. Tell me what you think.”
“No. I don’t read other people’s mail.”
Keegan snatched the letter. “It’s addressed to the director of the rare books collection in Houghton Library. December 1954. ‘Dear Sir, Thank you for your advice in my recent purchase of the
Summa Theologica
—’ You like my Latin?”
“You must be Catholic,” said Will. “They teach it to you.”
“Yeah, mass every Sunday. That’s me.” And he read on. “‘By Thomas Aquinas. It represents the beginning of a pursuit that I hope will one day allow me to create a replica of the original John Harvard library. But I want to assure you that I will not interfere with Houghton’s efforts in this direction, and should any book come to auction, I will defer to you in bidding. I may also know of a book that would complete the collection in a way that no other can. ‘A small gift of majestic proportion’ is the term that echoes in my family’s history. Should I ever discover this small gift, I shall see that we share it.’”
Keegan looked at Will. “Majestic proportion. Sounds rich. Any ideas?”
Will just shook his head. “I don’t know, and you shouldn’t be copying it.”
“Like I said, I look for skeletons, because sometimes they’re wrapped around treasures.” Keegan looked Will up and down, from his crew-neck sweater to his loafers. “And I’ve also
made
a few skeletons, too. Don’t you forget that.”
Will wanted to laugh in his face. But he didn’t think that was a good idea. He didn’t think that staying in that hall was a good idea either, so he slipped down the stairs without speaking to his brother. He didn’t know what he would say, anyway.
The choices that the administration faced were few: (1) wait the demonstrators out indefinitely; (2) wait until a group of moderate students could formally condemn the takeover, then remove the demonstrators by moral force or police action; (3) clean them out as quickly as possible.
The first option was untenable. The longer the radicals stayed in the hall, the longer they would have access to sensitive material, the longer the university would be in turmoil, and the more likely that radicals heading to Cambridge from all over the country would arrive and the uprising would spin out of control. The second option was under consideration, and a meeting of moderates was scheduled for the next morning, but some in the administration believed that even a meeting of moderate students could spin out of control in that climate. So . . . the third option.
At four
A.M.
, Will Wedge was awakened from a fitful sleep by a chest-piercing electric scream. He jumped up and grabbed for his trousers, then he realized that he had gone to bed in his clothes a few hours before. And Charlie Price was cursing and tripping over his own shoes in the dark and screaming that they had to get out, that there was a fire.
But there was no fire. The SDS had pulled the alarms throughout the Yard because the bust was coming.
Half asleep, Will stumbled onto the steps of Thayer, and it was as if his dream would not end. The alarms were still screaming everywhere, and a cold wind was whipping storms of paper and debris through the gray light, and a disembodied bullhorn-voice was echoing off the pillars of Widener.
Sleep-deprived freshmen were staggering out of every dorm. Students who had spent the night in the Yard wrapped in blankets were moving now toward the steps of University Hall like spectral figures from Cotton Mather’s imagination. Journalists who had been in the Yard since the takeover began were finding vantage points. Upperclassmen from the houses were climbing over fences or through the locked gates. Even professors were arriving.
And all the while, the bullhorn kept up: “The cops are coming. Stand with us.” “Don’t let them take back your university.” “Join us on the steps of the hall.” “Sheets and pillowcases. We need sheets and pillowcases for gas masks. All who have them, bring them to the northeast door.”
Will heard one of the ROTC men from Thayer saying to no one in particular, “If they hang wet sheets on the windows, they’ll just make a gas chamber for themselves.”
How much more surreal could it get?
Well, try big yellow school buses rumbling from somewhere north of the Yard, speeding down the driveway between Thayer and Memorial Church, pulling up in front of majestic Sever, and disgorging Massachusetts state police in baby blue uniforms, jackboots, helmets, and shields.
And as the state police formed themselves into tight phalanxes, like Romans preparing to move against the barbarian horde, local police units in darker blue uniforms appeared from corners of the Yard and moved in columns, two abreast behind shields and upraised clubs, like flanking troops.
Will shivered. And the crowd started to roar.
In the southeast foyer of University Hall, Franklin Wedge joined arms with Royster and Boss and all the others. Sherry Lappen slipped in beside him.
“You don’t have to stay,” he said.
“I’m not afraid,” she said.
“The local pigs will clear the steps,” he explained. “Then the state cops will come through the west entries and push us through the building, right out the east doors.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said, then kissed him.
“You’ll be arrested. Maybe expelled,” he warned.
And Sherry Lappen’s eyes widened. “Expelled? Shit. My father would kill me.”
“Here they come!” cried someone near the door.
On the steps of Widener, Professor George Wedge Drake watched in shock. He had always believed in the ability of rational people to settle problems rationally. He had never expected it to come to this.
Then a woman came up beside him with a notepad and pen in her hand. “A hell of an assignment for an old broad.”
And if he wasn’t shocked by the sight of the police, he was by the sight of the woman. “Olga?”
“They sent me to cover this from New York, because I’m a ’Cliffie.”
“I’d say I was glad to see you, but—”
The crowd was booing, and cries of “sieg heil” and “fascist pig” were rising.
At Thayer, Charlie Price said to Will, “Come on.”
“What?”
“To the steps. Come on. This is wrong. They can’t do this at Harvard.”
“They can. It’s their college.”
“It’s
our
fucking college.” And Charlie Price clenched his fist in Will’s face. “‘In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man / As modest stillness and humility: / But when the blast of war blows in our ears / Then . . . then . . . something . . . something something.’ It’s from
Henry V.
”
“To be or not to be,” answered Will. “And you
won’t
be if you go over there.”
“Fuck it,” said Charlie, and he ran over to the stairs on the northwest side of University Hall.
As the police approached, Will thought he could hear Charlie shout, “Once more into the breach, dear friends!”
From the office that looked out over John Harvard’s statue, Jimmy Keegan watched the Cambridge and Somerville police wade into the students on the stairs.
By then, he had dumped a hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana from his pockets and taken on two hundred dollars in petty cash that he’d rifled from desks and abandoned purses all through the building. In his jacket, he had a fine miniature portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, lifted from a wall.
“I didn’t sign up for this shit,” he said to Sherry Lappen, who had left the foyer and was looking out, too.
She said, “My father will kill me if I get expelled. Kill me.”
“If I help you out of here, will you give me a blow job?”
“You’re a lowlife.”
He pushed open a window, letting in the cold air, the roaring of the crowd, and the distinct sound of nightsticks cracking bones. “Come on, anyway.”
She straddled the windowsill and looked down. “It’s a seven-foot drop.”
“Go.” With one hand, he grabbed her wrist and with the other, he pushed her, so that she half fell to the ground and crumpled on an ankle that popped when she hit.
He jumped down right after her, and she reached up to him. “Help me!”
“Sorry, babe. No b.j., no Bingo.” Then he sprinted out from behind John Harvard’s statue. A cop took a swing at him, but he kept going, and the cops turned to easier targets.
After running all the way over to the college pump, Keegan circled around, joined the crowd in front of Thayer, and started chanting, “Fuck the pigs! Fuck the pigs!”
And once he had everyone around him—longhairs, shorthairs, freshmen and graduate students—chanting right along, Jimmy Keegan started laughing.
Will Wedge saw Keegan, and he thought of some malevolent Shakespearean figure churning up disorder for its own sake and taking great pleasure in the power he could wield.
Then he saw Charlie Price clubbed off the steps and dragged away, and Will started shouting, too.
Then the state police kicked forward.
Will thought of his brother, somewhere inside, and wished him luck. He might have said a prayer, but he had no time, because now that the Somerville police had cleared the steps of University Hall, they were turning on the crowd in front of Thayer.
Will slammed open the door of the dorm and dove into his room.
Meanwhile, the cops chased students up the stairs and down the halls, slamming nightsticks on the brick walls and the paneling and the metal balustrades, and shouting, “Get in your rooms and stay there!”
And Will turned to see a complete stranger, a guy in a jacket and tie, about thirty, dialing his telephone. “Who the hell are you?” asked Will.
“I’m the stringer for the
Washington Post.
I have to file a story. I’ll pay for the call. They’ll never believe this happened at Harvard. Never.”
iv
“What a year to have your twenty-fifth reunion,” said Ned Wedge on the first Thursday of June.
“Now, just keep calm,” said Harriet. “Have a cup of coffee, and don’t order a shot for it. It’s too early. Just run the meeting, then get on to commencement.”
“Yeah . . . yeah.”
“And may I say, you look marvelous in top hat and tails.”
“Yeah . . . yeah.” Ned was one of the class marshals, a signal honor for members of the twenty-fifth reunion class, and he had announced that he’d be damned before anything, including his own son, would stop him from taking part.
There had been times in the previous two months when it seemed that nothing would ever be the same again, at least at Harvard, and yet traditions had to be observed, because traditions mattered.
Will thought that whoever it was in Thayer who had come up with a counterslogan “Tradition Unhampered by Progress” had been onto something.
On the morning of the bust, the final chant was “On strike! Shut it down!” In the following weeks, there had been mass meetings, caucuses, guerrilla theater, position papers, leaflets . . . and committees. There were not enough letters in the alphabet for all the committees, but the one that mattered most was the Committee of Fifteen, ordained by the faculty to determine punishments for the 170 students who had been arrested, hauled off to the Cambridge District Court, and charged with criminal trespass.