“Listen,” he said, clutching my arm eagerly, “while you’re home, you couldn’t get some money from your old man, could you, and lend it to me so I can buy a raccoon coat?” “Home for the weekend.” I threw a few things into the bag. “Nothing, nothing,” I said innocently, and took my suitcase out of the closet.
“In other words, if you were out of the picture, the field would be open. “Is there,” I asked, “any other man for whom she has a particular fondness?” We see each other quite a bit, but we both have other dates. “Do you,” I asked, “have any kind of formal arrangement with her? I mean are you going steady or anything like that?” “I think she’s a keen kid,” he replied, “but I don’t know if you’d call it love. “Petey,” I said, “are you in love with Polly Espy?” It is, after all, easier to make a beautiful dumb girl smart than to make an ugly smart girl beautiful. But I believed that under my guidance she would smarten up. In fact, she veered in the opposite direction. I had seen her at the Kozy Kampus Korner eating the specialty of the house–a sandwich that contained scraps of pot roast, gravy, chopped nuts, and a dipper of sauerkraut–without even getting her fingers moist. She had an erectness of carraige, an ease of bearing, a poise that clearly indicated the best of breeding. She was not yet of pin-up proportions, but I felt sure that time would supply the lack. With one omission, Polly fitted these specifications perfectly.īeautiful she was. The successful lawyers I had observed were, almost without exception, married to beautiful, gracious, intelligent women. I was well aware of the importance of the right kind of wife in furthering a lawyer’s career. In a few years I would be out in practice. I wanted Polly for a shrewdly calculated, entirely cerebral reason. She was, to be sure, a girl who excited the emotions, but I was not one to let my heart rule my head. Let me emphasize that my desire for this young woman was not emotional in nature. He didn’t have it exactly, but at least he had first rights on it. It also happened that Petey had something I wanted. My father had had one in his undergraduate days it lay now in a trunk in the attic back home. It so happened that I knew where to get my hands on a raccoon coat. “Anything,” he affirmed in ringing tones. “Anything?” I asked, looking at him narrowly. My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear. “You don’t understand,” he interrupted impatiently. “I’ve got to have a raccoon coat,” he said passionately. He leaped from the bed and paced the room.
“In the library,” I said, naming a place not frequented by Big Men on Campus. “All the Big Men on Campus are wearing them. “Can you mean,” I said incredulously, “that people are actually wearing raccoon coats again?” Like a fool I spent all my money for textbooks, and now I can’t get a raccoon coat.” “I should have known they’d come back when the Charleston came back. “I should have known it,” he cried, pounding his temples. I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental. One afternoon I found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of such distress on his face that I immediately diagnosed appendicitis. To be swept up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender yourself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it–this, to me, is the acme of mindlessness. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. A nice enough fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ok. Take, for example, Petey Bellows, my roommate at the university. It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a scalpel.
Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute, and astute–I was all of these.
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