Who were left? The cultists, growing wilder and less relevant every year. Looking out now at the two dozen chanting shuffling protesters, Robert Pratt saw on their signs slogans for over a dozen different causes, LEGALIZE MARIJUANA said one, possibly the staidest of them all. FREE ABORTIONS demanded another, and a third cried out LET MY FAGGOTS BE. The Free Speech Movement was there, with its sophomoric acronyms, which had reached their peak at the very beginning, at Berkeley, a decade before, when the movement was known as Freedom under Clark Kerr, Kerr at that time having been president of the university. The struggle to put together words whose initials spelled something obscene had never come close again to attaining the beauty of that first slogan, probably because an obsession with obscenity so rarely has been found in combination with strong imaginative powers.
Not all the signs declared for specific causes, however, some being more general insults, PIGS OFF CAMPUS, for instance, didn’t refer to student behavior in town but called on the police to leave the school. And ONE LOCKRIDGE IS ENOUGH was obviously meant to be insulting not only to Sterling, the president of Lancashire University, but to his older brother Bradford Lockridge as well, one-time President of the United States.
Nodding at the bearded bearer of ONE LOCKRIDGE IS ENOUGH, Robert said, “Do you suppose he has any clear idea who Bradford Lockridge really was?”
Sterling smiled and shook his head. “Since he was probably seven the year Brad was elected,” he said, “I beg leave to doubt it. But if you ever meet Brad, you’d better not use the past tense. He’s still very much alive, thank you.”
“I think of everybody historically,” Robert said. “He lives not too far from here, doesn’t he?”
“About a hundred miles. Near a little town called Eustace.” Sterling looked at him thoughtfully and said, “I could arrange for you to meet him, if you want.”
Surprised, Robert said, “Could you really?”
Sterling grinned and said, “I do have a certain influence.”
It wasn’t a joke Robert could take well. He was always too aware in any case that it was his own influence, as the college roommate of a nephew of Sterling’s wife Elizabeth, that had gotten him his instructorship at Lancashire. His mediocre scholastic record and lack of a doctorate would have condemned him to something much farther down the scale than an Ivy League university if it hadn’t been for the accident of friendship.
Robert Pratt was, in his own eyes, a failure. He’d started life as a spectacular success, and for a while it had seemed as though success were to be a permanent part of his equipment, but all at once a plug had been pulled and success had drained away and now there was nothing left — at least in his own estimation — but failure.
The first success had been in track. He was tall and lean and fast, and as a high school freshman he had no trouble making the junior varsity as a runner in the intermediate distances. His sophomore year he made the varsity track team and All-City, and the football coach urged him to come out for football the next fall. He did, made end on the offensive varsity team, and was voted Most Valuable Player by his team-mates both his junior and senior years. In sixteen games in the two years he’d caught two hundred four passes, twenty-seven for touchdowns.
The college scholarship offers came from everywhere. Robert took over twenty plane trips at no expense to himself, was shown campuses, dormitory rooms and team records, talked with coaches and admissions directors and football-playing seniors, and sat up nights leafing through the letters and the catalogs. (His high school scholastic record was average, just barely above a straight C, but no one cared much about that.)
He chose his college for exclusively football reasons — it was a huge southwestern university almost always in the top ten, with any number of alumni in the pro ranks — and he chose his scholastic major for the same reason. He didn’t want physical education, that was too much like faking, and besides, his father had talked him out of it. “What if you don’t make the pros?” he’d asked. “Phys ed instructors are a dime a dozen, and it’s one kind of college degree that won’t do you much good in the business world. Pick anything else, Bob, from anthropology to zoology, and corporation personnel directors will simply accept you as a man with a college education. But pick physical education, and you mark yourself as brawn without brains.”
Well, there didn’t seem to be much chance of his failing to make the pros after graduation, but it wouldn’t hurt to be on the safe side, so Robert chose the second easiest major, history, with a specialization in American history. The scuttlebutt was that history was nothing but reading, and Robert had always been a heavy reader, so it looked to be a major that wouldn’t get too much in his way.
Nor had it. History was fun, in a quiet way, and he got moderately good marks in his courses. He would have done better, but football was even more fun.
Though not as much as in high school. The competition was fiercer here, he was no longer the big fish in the little pond. It was his senior year before he made first-string varsity, and even then his accomplishments were overshadowed by the other offensive end, an incredibly tall, thin, fast black boy who was also a star of the basketball team in the winter and the track team in the spring.
Still, Robert was on the team, and he was ultimately first string tight end, and that seemed pleasure enough. It also got him Kit McGraw, a slender beautiful girl from Atlanta, two years younger than he and devoted to his every wish. Administrative permissiveness about co-ed housing hadn’t quite become popular yet at that time, but Robert and Kit managed to share a quiet apartment off-campus with no outcry from the college officials. Whether that was because they didn’t know about it or because of Robert’s football status he never did know for sure.
There wasn’t very much pro interest when Robert graduated from college, but there was some, and he turned out to be the Boston Patriots’ twenty-seventh draft choice. With that for security, Robert and Kit married immediately upon Robert’s graduation, spent a three-week honeymoon in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and then Kit went home to her parents and Robert went off to training camp.
And football stopped being fun. The pros weren’t boys any more, they were men, and team spirit — at least in training camp — came in a far second, after self-preservation. There were already two men on the Boston Patriots team who had the job Robert had been hired for, and one other rookie looking for that assignment, too. Before the season began, the four aspirants would be reduced to two, and Robert knew by the second day of training camp that he wouldn’t be either of the two. The men who already had the jobs were older and smarter and tougher than he was, and the other rookie was leaner and hungrier than he was, and Robert knew the only thing left to be decided was which of the four cuts would lop off his head.
It was the next to the last, and by that time Robert was as nervous and miserable as he’d ever been in his life. His digestion was poor, his temper was short, and his depression was unrelieved by the fact that Kit, when she finally learned that he hadn’t made the team, was convinced that in some way he’d let them both down, that he could have made it if he’d only done something differently. The truth was that he wasn’t quite good enough, and he knew it, but Kit couldn’t accept that. He was good enough, she insisted, and he had failed only because of ineptitude in handling the situation.
That was their first really violent fight, and if it hadn’t been for the Army their marriage might have ended right there. But the draft, which both the university and the Patriots had held at bay for him, now descended into the middle of their raging squabble, and with another separation looming up they decided to patch up their differences and be friends again. But not partners. From that point on, they never seemed to be moving quite in the same direction any more.