Characters in Hearts in Atlantis

… 30 Andy White and Ashley Rice never came back to college at all—eight down, now. For the rest of us, there was an obvious change for the worse in the three days before that winter’s first storm …

On the questionnaire which I had returned to Housing in April of ’66 (when my biggest concern was deciding where I should take Annmarie Soucie to eat after the Senior Prom), I had said that I was A. a smoker; B. a Young Republican; C. an aspiring folk guitarist; D. …

Sitting with him were two other guys from our floor, Hugh Brennan and Ashley Rice. None of them looked as if they were having the world’s most exciting Saturday morning, but when Ronnie saw me, his eyes brightened. “Pete Riley!” he said.

“What about me?” “You’re too small to help lift him,” Ronnie said, “but it might cheer him up to get his dick sucked.” Nick stood back. Ronnie, Tony, Brad, Lennie, and Barry Margeaux slipped past us on either side. Ronnie and Tony got Stoke by the calves. “Christ Jesus!”

Tom Huckabee told dozens of kids about what was spray-painted on our dorm; so did Becka Aubert. One of the people she told was Franklin’s second-floor proctor, a skinny self-righteous girl named Marjorie Stuttenheimer.

I stood on the sidewalk with Bill Shadwick and Kerry Morin and a girl named Lorlie McGinnis . . . she’s my partner in Botany Lab . . .” He took the sheet of newspaper out of Skip’s hand and studied it, as if to confirm …

… 19 “Son of a bitch, look at this,” Billy Marchant said. Harvey Twiller was shuffling the cards at Billy’s table, Lennie Doria was adding up the current score, and Billy was taking the opportunity to do a quick scan-through of the News’s Local section. Kirby McClendon—unshaven, tall n twitchy, well …

His paisan Tony DeLucca was gone, though. So were Mark St. Pierre, Barry Margeaux, Nick Prouty, Brad Witherspoon, Harvey Twiller, Randy Echolls . . . and Ronnie, of course. We got a card from him in March. It was postmarked Lewiston and simply addressed to The Yo-Yo’s Of Chamberlain Three.

Dearie was small change next to this guy, who was in 1966 a new type on the college campuses of America. Times call the men, Lao-tzu said, and the late sixties called Charles Ebersole. He wasn’t an educator; he was an enforcer minoring in public relations.

The girl was a sallow creature dressed in a Wisdom High majorette’s uniform and clutching a baton like a cudgel. She was Cindy. The dog was Rinty. Both the girl and the dog were sporting identical grins. It was fucking surreal.

“Helping our allies is what we’re doing, you doofus!” he shouted. “If you’re too stupid to see that on your own, I suggest you take Colonel Anderson’s Intro Military History Class! Or maybe you’re just another chickenguts who won’t—” “Hush, Mr. Dearborn,” Dean Garretsen said.

… was smiling, his odd, big-pupiled eyes going from Dave’s face to mine and then back to Dave’s. It was actually our voices his eyes were responding to, I suppose. Dave wanted to know where Annmarie was. I said Annmarie and I had decided to cool it for awhile. Dave started …

“Why?” “Because they’ll turn you into someone else. It may take a little longer than it took ROTC to turn David Dearborn into Dearie, but they’ll get you there in the end.” “What do you know about sports?” Skip asked gently. “What do you know about being on a team?”

Technically neither of us belonged to A and S; as freshmen we weren’t yet eligible to declare majors, but Dean Randle listened to us. He recommended that we go around to each of our instructors and explain the problem . . . more or less throw ourselves on their mercy.

Sometimes they come back. I came in and sat down beside him. “Not bad, O swami.” “Not hard, either,” he said. “It’s that day at the infirmary all over again, except that Carbury’s probably dead and this time I’m the one with a tube in the back of my hand.”

I think I also knew there was romance in our future. It gave me an oddly light feeling, a lifting-off sensation in my midsection. “I could call Esther from Hauck and tell her calc at ten o’clock instead of nine,” Carol said. “Esther’s a sad case. She never goes out.

By then I wanted to get home a lot more than I wanted a draft Hires and a gossip with Frank Parmeleau.

… It was years before I isolated the key part of my final conversation with Frank Stuart. I had told him he couldn’t be so far behind so soon, and he had replied that it happened because he wasn’t a quick study. We were both wrong. It was possible to fall …

“Was Carol with you?” I asked. Nate shook his head. “I think she was with George Gilman’s bunch. There were five carloads of us in all.” I didn’t know George Gilman from Adam, but that did not prevent me from directing a dart of fairly sick jealousy at him.

He left a queen of spades with the words “I quit” written across it on his pillow. George Lessard joined Steve Ogg and Jack Frady in Chad, the brain dorm. Six down, thirteen to go. It should have been enough.

Glad to know that you didn’t have to turn into a Hearts junkie to have problems. Human nature can be so shitty sometimes. “I rode up with Stoke and Harry Swidrowski and a few other guys,” Nate said. “Was Carol with you?” I asked. Nate shook his head.

This second fellow’s name was Harvey Brundage, and he was the first person to ever say “Wow, man, bummer!” in my presence.

His paisan Tony DeLucca was gone, though. So were Mark St. Pierre, Barry Margeaux, Nick Prouty, Brad Witherspoon, Harvey Twiller, Randy Echolls . . . and Ronnie, of course. We got a card from him in March. It was postmarked Lewiston and simply addressed to The Yo-Yo’s Of Chamberlain Three.

It passed as rapidly as it had come. “Nate’s okay,” I said. “He’s got some funny ideas, that’s all.” “Some funny communist ideas is what he’s got,” Hugh Brennan said. His older brother was in the Navy and was most recently heard from in the South China Sea.

“Nope. What would be the use? For that matter, what would I tell him? That for me it’s all about Bobby Garfield? That all the stuff Harry Swidrowski and George Gilman and Hunter McPhail say seems like smoke and mirrors compared to Bobby carrying me up Broad Street Hill?

I don’t know if I can take care of her or not, but I’m going to try. For my brother as much as my mother. Rionda says Ian doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. Of course he never did.” She smiled. “Carol, that’s maybe not such a good idea.

He left a queen of spades with the words “I quit” written across it on his pillow. George Lessard joined Steve Ogg and Jack Frady in Chad, the brain dorm. Six down, thirteen to go. It should have been enough.

We did the makeup work, squeaked through the finals, and returned to Chamberlain Hall in mid-January. Skip told me he’d written a letter to John Winkin, the baseball coach, over the holiday, saying he’d changed his mind about coming out for the team. Nate was back on Chamberlain Three.

One bypass for each million, I guess you could say. Hard on Dave and Katie’s heels came Mom from the Ladies’ Aid, dusted with flour, exhilarated from good works, and overjoyed to have both of her sons in the house. There was a lot of cheerful babble.

The most insidious thing about Ronnie was that weak minds found him worth imitating. I left my seat at the original table, where I had spent the balance of the day, and my place was immediately taken by a young man named Kenny Auster.

I stood on the sidewalk with Bill Shadwick and Kerry Morin and a girl named Lorlie McGinnis . . . she’s my partner in Botany Lab . . .” He took the sheet of newspaper out of Skip’s hand and studied it, as if to confirm again that yes, it …

“I will,” Skip said. “I will, too,” I said, never once glancing in the direction of my geology book. “Hearts?” Kirby McClendon asked. He was the tallest boy on the floor, maybe one of the tallest boys at school—six-seven at least, and possessed of a long, mournful bloodhound’s face. “Sure.

Not the first victim of Hearts-mania that fall, nor the last, but the only one to try and off himself by eating two bottles of orange-flavored baby aspirin. Lennie Doria didn’t even bother looking after him. He looked over at me instead. “You want to sit in, Riley?”

Someone from the lounge answered and when I asked for Carol, the girl said Carol wasn’t there, she’d gone over to the library to study with Libby Sexton. “Is this Pete?” “Yeah,” I said. “There’s a note here for you. She left it on the glass.”

I stood on the sidewalk with Bill Shadwick and Kerry Morin and a girl named Lorlie McGinnis . . . she’s my partner in Botany Lab . . .” He took the sheet of newspaper out of Skip’s hand and studied it, as if to confirm again that yes, it …

One of the people she told was Franklin’s second-floor proctor, a skinny self-righteous girl named Marjorie Stuttenheimer. Marjorie became quite a figure on campus by 1969, as founder and president of Christians for College America.

Skip said nothing about how fast Stoke had been moving, as if he wanted to kill the whole world and then die himself, and he said nothing about how we’d laughed, Mark St. Pierre so hard he’d wet his pants. When Skip finished, Dearie glanced uncertainly at Ebersole.

The C is actually something of a gift. Sloppy work.” I thought of approaching him after class, then rejected the idea. Mr. Babcock, who wore bowties and big hornrimmed glasses, had made it clear in just four weeks that he considered grade-grubbers the lowest form of academic life.

I put it up to my face and smelled it and thought of Period 5 study-hall with Mr. Mezensik—the bitter aroma of pencil-shavings, the girls whispering and giggling under their breath, faint shouts from outside as the phys ed kids played what the jocks called Remedial …

I guess that’s good, isn’t it? Even if it isn’t, you have to admit it’s pretty goddam American. I stood at the window over the kitchen sink, watching the taillights of Mr. Soucie’s truck disappear down the road.

A peace sign had been drawn on both with the laundry-marker Mrs. Brennan had sent to school with her baby boy—it was probably the first time the fuckin thing had been used all semester. “So you see,” Skip said when show-and-tell was over, “it could have been any of us.”

As the fall of 1966 wore out and winter replaced it, Mrs. DeLucca’s sampler seemed to glare bigger and brighter with each passing hand, each fall of The Bitch, each night I rolled into bed with my textbooks unopened, my notes unstudied, my …

Ronnie smiled widely, sat down, picked up the deck of cards, began to shuffle. “I broke her in pretty good, didn’t I?” You couldn’t get lower than Mrs. Malenfant’s little boy, that was the thing. Many tried, but to the best of my knowledge no one ever actually succeeded.

In the photo there are three Magi standing around a straw-filled cradle on the snowy office lawn. Behind Mary and Joseph you can read the sign on the door: NATHANIEL HOPPENSTAND, D.D.S. He married Cindy. They are still married, and their three children are mostly grown up.

“Haven’t you ever heard about the domino theory, shitbird?” a banty little freshman named Nicholas Prouty asked Nate one afternoon. My roommate rarely came down to the third-floor lounge now, preferring the quieter one on Two, but that day he had dropped in for a few moments.

That everyone on the floor is going to flunk out by Christmas, including you. Penny Lang says that by the start of spring semester there won’t be anyone left up there but that shithead proctor of yours.” “Nah,” I said, “that’s an exaggeration. Nate’ll be left.

His paisan Tony DeLucca was gone, though. So were Mark St. Pierre, Barry Margeaux, Nick Prouty, Brad Witherspoon, Harvey Twiller, Randy Echolls . . . and Ronnie, of course. We got a card from him in March. It was postmarked Lewiston and simply addressed to The Yo-Yo’s Of Chamberlain Three.

… as if to confirm again that yes, it had all really happened; the master of Rinty and the boyfriend of Cindy had actually gone to an antiwar demonstration. He sighed and then let the piece of newspaper drift to the floor. This was so unlike him it kind of hurt …

“Relief?” “Relief. He’s been seeing this girl in Bridgeport for a month or more . . . except my mom’s friend Rionda told me she’s actually a woman, maybe twenty-four or -five.” “Sounds like a recipe for disaster,” I said, hoping I sounded measured and thoughtful. I was actually delighted.

Skip said, and I jumped a little at the raw anger in his voice. “It’s not a broken anything! It’s a damn peace sign!” “What is your name, sir?” “Stanley Kirk. Skip to my friends. You can call me Stanley.”

He left a queen of spades with the words “I quit” written across it on his pillow. George Lessard joined Steve Ogg and Jack Frady in Chad, the brain dorm. Six down, thirteen to go. It should have been enough.

Stoke Jones was capped off by nothing so prissy. His medium-length hair just went where it wanted to. His back was hunched in a way that would soon be permanent, if it wasn’t already. His eyes were usually cast down, seeming to trace the arcs of his crutches.

Sitting against the green cinderblock wall, hands folded in his lap and knees primly together, was Sven Garretsen, the Dean of Men. He said almost nothing during that meeting, and looked benign even when the air grew stormy.

There were queer tracks there—not footprints but drag-marks, almost, and deep punched holes running in lines outside them. Tom Huckabee said they reminded him of tracks made by a person wearing skis and wielding ski-poles. Neither of them thought that someone using crutches might have made such tracks. Not then.

It was summed up by a sampler which hung in the third-floor lounge, where our marathon Hearts tournaments were played. Tony DeLucca’s mother made it, told him to hang it someplace where he’d see it every day, and sent him off to college with it.