Some of the women wore their key chains tucked into their back pockets so that the keys dangled outside, and jingled when they walked. Tom did not understand why they wore their keys that way. It seemed like an easy way to lose them. Few people there danced, and those who did dance did not move much. Tom noticed that if they danced too hard their clothes became disheveled. Shirts became untucked and no longer looked so form-fitting. Most of the people continually circulated, a beer in one hand always giving them a reason to be wherever they were. Drinking was always a legitimate activity. Other people stood in one place, their shirts pulled down in clean lines, and let their eyes roam for them. They were drinking too, and it gave them a reason for standing in one place.
As the party progressed people finally became drunk, and their clothes began to look rumpled. People laughed easier and danced more. Men and women began having long conversations, unlike the brief exchanges that had characterized the beginning of the party. The alcohol broke down some of the tension of the party's start, some of the pressure to know many people and talk to many people. Circulation slowed.
Tom walked up to a few women and asked about their school, where they were from, why they were there. He was genuinely curious, and he seemed so confused that most women talked to him freely. He was hardly a threat. Walter, standing against the wall, did not understand why Tom was doing so well. But Tom had no ulterior motives. As soon as he had found out all he wanted from one woman he moved on and talked to another. A few trusted him quite far, because he seemed so harmless. They told him they did not like getting to know men at parties like the one they were at. The situation was too artificial. People were not honest with each other. Tom gradually realized that the other men there had not come out of curiosity.
Tom met a friend who had been disgruntled with the party from the start. Mike confirmed Tom's suspicion that most of the conversations going around them were contrived. Tom became self-conscious about his appearance. He realized there was a game going on at the party and he had not known the rules. He had not known how he was expected to behave.
Mike told him most college parties involved role-playing, but this was worse than most. Tom nodded in understanding as though he were being apprenticed. Mike proposed they make a joke of it, and he outlined a plan to Tom. Tom agreed to it.
The two of them walked up behind a group of three women. Tom and Mike spoke in unison. "Hi! How's the party?" they asked, in a preposterously enthusiastic voice. The women ignored them. Tom and Mike laughed.
They again addressed the women in unison, "Hi! Don't I know you?" The women still made no response.
Third time paid all. Mike and Tom once more spoke together: "Hi! I go to Harvard." Probably more out of annoyance than anything else, the women turned around to look at Tom and Mike. But the two Harvard men decided it was not annoyance but the college that had worked for them. They decided they had found what the women were really interested in--the magic name.
Walter still stood silently against the wall. There were evidently limits to the name's magic. Tom and Mike got him on their way out.
Walter heard their story as the three rode the trolley home. Tom and Mike said it proved a sad stereotype. Going home alone, they were quite willing to believe that. Walter thought to himself that the story proved the Harvard magic name could work. In any case, the word would be passed about Pine Manor women.
Epilogue
The experience left its mark on Walter. If the name could have worked for Tom and Mike, why couldn't it work for him? He resolved that he would make it work.
Before his all-male dorm threw a party one weekend, he made 50 notices saying in big letters, "HARVARD PARTY," with the time and place underneath. He posted them at three different colleges for women. With the bait cast he eagerly anticipated the big night. The night of the party he put on his best Harvard rugby shirt and stood against a wall by the party's entrance. He stood there for a long time after the party had started. Tom came by after a while and Walter asked jokingly, but really wanting to know, "Seen any cows yet?" Tom laughed. He thought it was funny to call women from women's colleges "cows."
That night only two "cows" came, and they barely showed their faces. They walked up, saw Walter waiting anxiously by the door, and turned around without stopping. They laughed on the way out. Walter was deflated.
If Tom was naive about college parties when he came to Harvard he at least learned about them his first year. Early in his junior year he was still naive about people's feelings. One day at breakfast he was getting to know a woman in the House whom he had not met before. He found out she was from Wellesley, and was at Harvard for one semester to take some special couses.
"Oh," he said, "you're a cow." She got angry and asked why he said that.
He said, "You got to Wellesley, right? So you're a cow."
She told him to get lost. He did not understand.