The audience was packed with undergraduates and their new-found coeds, hissing, booing, and trying very hard to sound like a Brattle audience. The movies were pretty repulsive. All of them consisted of ladies removing their clothing and writhing around--all alone--on sofas, beds, and desk tops. In one of them, the heroine became carried away and used her sun-glasses and a cross she had been wearing around her neck for purposes of self-gratification. I left early.
Back through the now heavy rain to the News. The scene was frantic--with the deadline an hour away, strange faces constantly popping in telling me to hurry up, and half-heard comments about that goddamned Cliffie. At that moment the whole experience was suddenly surrealistic. There I was at Yale, for no reason except that a group of boys just couldn't stand it anymore, sitting in a strange newsroom, writing some story about some lady masturbating with a cross. It was bizarre and slightly absurd. All at once I was feeling isolated and quite lonely.
After the article was finished, I was exhausted. I walked slowly back past Liggets, past their J. Press, and past Maury's (the place where Louie dwells) to Stiles, where I discovered two girls from the University of Connecticut playing a game of bridge that was still going when I left on Wednesday morning. I found the bathroom, which had been cleared out for us. There was a huge female sex sign on the door with the words "Up Against the Wall Mother Yale" scrawled beneath it. I said goodnight to my student host (who left with his radio and alarm clock) and fell, exhausted, into bed.
The next day was election day, and smiles were much scarcer. Besides, by now the boys were more accustomed to girls in their classes and libraries, and the mixer-shine of the first day was beginning to fade.
Through an extra lot of smiling and a great deal of sympathy for a tale of a Harvard rejection I managed an invitation to luncheon at a Secret Society--like a Harvard Final Club but even crustier and more archaic. The Secret Societies are so secret that visitors are not even permitted inside the huge, windowless stone "tombs" that house them, and we had our lunch on the fourth floor of a nearby University administration building.
This was the Yale of 20 years ago, the Yale I had always somehow pictured. Three-piece suits and Pucci prints abounded, as did champagne punch, stuffed figs, and talk of skiing. The steward wore a flower in his lapel from the secret garden of the secret building of the secret society. These very well-cared-for young men seemed quite unaffected by anything that went on outside of their tomb.
My escort pointed to an elderly black waiter who was bowing and scraping a great deal, and announced that that waiter's father and grandfather had worked for this society, and so did his son. "It's like a family tradition for them you know, being waiters here and everything." "Oh," I offered. "Then that's something like slavery then isn't it?" He thought. "Why yes, I guess you might say say that. It's kind of like slavery," and he seemed half astonished, half proud of the discovery he had made. I bolted my stuffed figs and took off as soon as I could.
I left Yale on Wednesday, but most girls stayed on until Sunday. The week was relatively unstructured, so there were always girls alone, or in groups, walking, studying, smiling--being generally approachable.
The boys loved it. Business in New Haven restaurants soared during Coed Week, and parietals were virtually nonexistent. One senior told me that it was the "best thing to happen to New Haven since the blackout." They were happy--you could see it.
But for all of its obvious value, there was something rather peculiar about Coed Week. I suppose the strangeness was unavoidable in such a laboratory-experiment stuation. I found myself as I walked through a building or across a yard smiling left and right, stopping and marvelling at just exactly what it was that I was doing. I realized that I felt almost like a missionary or someone from the Salvation Army. It was as if 1000 angels of peace were being visited upon New Haven to calm the seething inhabitants and to show the benighted the light of coeducational normalcy and tranquility. The ever-present smiles on the faces of the girls were almost beatific, surely maternal, and terribly altruistic. Reverend Coffin said that Coeducation Week was an effort to "reincarnate communities--to transform them from cold routinized bureaucracy into a warm organic existence." We were helping those poor guys, oh yes we were. It was very strange, indeed.
On Wednesday morning, after a sleepless election night, I saw the sun rise over Harkness Tower. Early in the day I bought a post card with Stiles College on it to send to my mother, and boarded the creaky New Haven railroad to Boston.
When I arrived in Cambridge and emerged from the MTA, there were couples all over the place--couples in the U.R., couples in Widener, couples by the river. These kids were totally without the incredible anxiety that seemed to tear at their counterparts in New Haven. It never has to occur to us here that it could be any other way