I was careful to bring the boxes of clothing into the house when I knew my parents were off working at the store. I didn’t want them to know about my buying the clothes. I didn’t want anybody to know. These were nothing like the clothes that the guys at Robert Treat wore. We wore the same clothes we’d worn in high school. You didn’t get a new outfit to go to Robert Treat. Alone in the house, I opened the boxes and laid the clothes out on the bed to see how they looked. I laid them out in place, as you would wear them — shirt, sweater, and jacket up top, trousers below, and shoes down near the foot of the bed. Then I pulled off everything I had on and dropped it at my feet like a pile of rags and put on the new clothes and went into the bathroom and stood on the lowered toilet seat lid so I was able to see more of myself in the medicine chest mirror than I would be able to see standing on the tile floor in my new white buckskin shoes with the pinkish rubber heels and soles. The jacket had two short slits, one on either side at the back. I’d never owned such a jacket before. Previously I’d owned two sport jackets, one bought for my bar mitzvah in 1945 and the other for my graduation from high school in 1950. Careful to take the tiniest steps, I rotated on the toilet seat lid to try to catch a look at my backside in that jacket with the slits. I put my hands in my pants pockets so as to look nonchalant. But there was no way of looking nonchalant standing on a toilet, so I climbed down and went into the bedroom and took off the clothes and put them back in their boxes, which I hid at the back of my bedroom closet, behind my bat, spikes, mitt, and a bruised old baseball. I had no intention of telling my parents about the new clothes, and I certainly wasn’t going to wear them in front of my friends at Robert Treat. I was going to keep them a secret till I got to Winesburg. The clothes I’d bought to leave home in. The clothes I’d bought to start a new life in. The clothes I’d bought to be a new man in and to end my being the butcher’s son.
Well, those were the very clothes on which I had vomited in Caudwell’s office. Those were the clothes that I wore when I sat in chapel trying how not to learn to lead a good life in accordance with biblical teachings and singing to myself instead the Chinese national anthem. Those were the clothes I’d been wearing when my roommate Elwyn had thrown the punch that had nearly broken my jaw. Those were the clothes I was wearing when Olivia went down on me in Elwyn’s LaSalle. Yes, there’s the picture of the boy and girl that should adorn the cover of the Winesburg catalogue: me in those clothes being blown by Olivia and having no idea what to make of it.
You don’t look yourself, Marcus. You all right? May I sit down?”
It was Sonny Cottler standing over me, wearing the same clothes that I was wearing, except that his wasn’t an ordinary maroon pullover sweater but a maroon and gray Winesburg letter sweater that he’d earned playing varsity basketball. That too. The ease with which he wore his clothes seemed an extension somehow of the deep voice that was so rich with authority and confidence. A quiet kind of carefree vigor, an invulnerability that he exuded, repelled me and attracted me at once, perhaps because it struck me, unreasonably or not, as being rooted in condescension. His seemingly being deficient in nothing left me oddly with the impression of someone who was actually deficient in everything. But then these impressions could have been no more than the offshoot of a sophomore’s envy and awe.
“Of course,” I answered. “Sure. Sit.”
“You look like you’ve been through the ringer,” he said.
He, of course, looked like he’d just finished shooting a scene on the MGM lot opposite Ava Gardner. “The dean called me in. We had a disagreement. We had an altercation.” Keep your mouth shut! I told myself. Why tell him? But I had to tell someone, didn’t I? I had to talk to someone at this place, and Cottler wasn’t necessarily a bad guy because my father had arranged for him to come to visit me in my room. Anyway, I felt so misunderstood all around that I might have looked up at the sky and howled like a dog if he hadn’t happened by.
As calmly as I could, I told him about the dispute over chapel attendance between the dean and me.
“But,” Cottler asked, “who goes to chapel? You pay somebody to go for you and you never have to go anywhere near chapel.”
“Is that what you do?”
He laughed softly. “What else would I do? I went one time. I went in my freshman year. It was when they had a rabbi. They have a Catholic priest once each semester, and they have a rabbi over from Cleveland once a year. Otherwise it’s Dr. Donehower and other great Ohio thinkers. The rabbi’s passionate devotion to the concept of kindness was enough to cure me of chapel for good.”
“How much do you have to pay?”
“For a proxy? Two bucks a pop. It’s nothing.”
“Forty times two is eighty dollars. That’s not nothing.”
“Look,” he said, “figure you spend fifteen minutes getting down off the Hill and over to the church. And if you’re you, serious you, you don’t laugh off being there. You don’t laugh off anything. Instead you spend an hour at chapel seething with rage. Then you spend another fifteen minutes seething with rage while getting back up the Hill to wherever you’re going next. That’s ninety minutes. Ninety times forty equals sixty hours of rage. That’s not nothing either.”
“How do you find the person to pay? Explain to me how it works.”
“The person you hire takes the card the usher hands him at the door when he goes in, then he hands it back signed with your name when he goes out. That’s it. You think a handwriting specialist pores over each card back in the little office where they keep the records? They tick off your name in some ledger, and that’s it. In the old days they used to assign you a seat and have a proctor who got to know everyone’s face walk up and down the aisles to see who was missing. Back then you were screwed. But after the war they changed it, so now all you have to do is pay someone to take your place.”
“But who?”
“Anyone. Anyone who’s done his forty chapels. It’s work. You work waiting tables at the taproom of the inn, someone else works proxying at the Methodist church. I’ll find you somebody if you want me to. I can even try to find somebody for less than two bucks.”
“And if this person shoots off his mouth? Then you’re out of here on your ass.”
“I’ve never heard yet of anybody shooting off his mouth. It’s a business, Marcus. You make a simple business arrangement.”
“But surely Caudwell knows this is going on.”
“Caudwell’s the biggest Christer around. He can’t imagine why students don’t love listening to Dr. Donehower instead of having the hour free every Wednesday to jack off in their rooms. Oh, that was a big mistake you made, bringing up chapel with Caudwell. Hawes D. Caudwell is the idol of this place. Winesburg’s greatest halfback in football, greatest slugger in baseball, greatest center in basketball, greatest exponent on the planet of ‘the Winesburg tradition.’ Meet this guy head-on about upholding the Winesburg tradition and he’ll make you into mush. Remember the drop kick, the old vintage drop kick? Caudwell holds the Winesburg record for drop-kicking points in a single season. And you know what he called each of those drop kicks? ‘A drop kick for Christ.’ You go around such creeps, Marcus. A little detachment goes a long way at Winesburg. Keep your mouth shut, your ass covered, smile — and then do whatever you like. Don’t take it all personally, don’t take everything so seriously, and you might find this is not the worst place in the world to spend the best years of your life. You already located the Blowjob Queen of 1951. That’s a start.”