Now they were far above the clouds—37,000 feet, the pilot’s announcement said, causing Brother Paul to pause in his speculations a moment to translate that into kilometers: about eleven and a quarter—and he could have sworn his ears popped. The flight was level and dull. Some of the other passengers were reading, and others were sleeping, just as though they had made this trip many times before. Even as nostalgia, this was beginning to pall; enough was enough!

  “Who was Will Hamlin?” Carolyn asked suddenly.

  Startled, Brother Paul glanced at her. “What do you know about Will Hamlin?”

  “Nothing,” she replied brightly. “That’s why I asked, Daddy.”

  Brother Paul oriented on the question, for the moment setting aside the other confusions of this odd journey. For there had indeed been a Will Hamlin…

  Paul had first met Wilfrid G. Hamlin as a brand-new freshman college student of eighteen. Paul was going around interviewing instructors, as was the system at this small, unusual institution. He was trying to make up his mind which courses best suited his nascent intellectual needs.

  The oddness of this college was really the reason Paul had come. It had no irrelevant entrance requirements, no tests, no grades, and no set curriculum. The students talked with the instructors, each of whom gave a little sales pitch for his particular class, and then selected the courses that seemed most promising. If an insufficient number of students picked a given class, that class was discontinued before it started. Somehow, each semester, it all worked out, though it always seemed impossibly chaotic. The classes themselves were of the discussion variety with no lectures; the instructors merely tried to organize the expressed opinions and bring out the fine points as the classes proceeded. It was all very relaxed: education almost without pain.

  Will Hamlin was a small man without distinguishing traits other than a slight stutter. He had a little cubbyhole of an office off the unfinished hallway leading to the Haybarn Theater.

  Brother Paul shook his head, remembering. Three years later he had had an adventure of sorts in that hall—but that would hardly interest a child—

  “Yes it would!” Carolyn insisted. “Tell me, Daddy!”

  Um. Well—One of Paul’s classmates, call him Dick, and another friend, call him Guy—though perhaps two other people had actually been involved in this minor escapade—well, the three of them and their three girlfriends, who shall be nameless (no, Carolyn, it is just a kind of convention: you don’t say anything untoward about girls if you can help it. They are supposed to be unsullied)—the grandmother (or was it the grandfather? Call it the former) of one of these six had taken to making his own wine, and lo, a sample was on hand here at the college. Dandelion wine from homegrown weeds—it really was not very good. So in true collegiate tradition these bright young people—and they were pretty bright, their actions and scholastics to the contrary notwithstanding—had decided to improve upon this wine by distilling it. They rigged up a little still in the science lab at night (night was the chief period of action; day was reserved for sleeping and, on occasion, a college class or two), and after various mishaps in the dark succeeded in deriving the essence: perhaps a cup of 100 proof liqueur. But the bad taste of the original had been intensified by the distillation; now it was the very quintessence of awfulness. What to do with it? They carried it through the Haybarn Theater, on the way to the Community Center—but three drops spilled like guilty blood on the floor of the hall outside Will’s office. (That’s right—the college was so informal that all instructors and administrative personnel right up to the president were addressed by their first names.) Brother Paul had lost all memory of the final disposition of Distilled Old Grandma, but he clearly remembered passing through that hall the following morning—and catching a good whiff of Old Grandma. His stomach turned. That region had been impregnated with the stench, and of course no one would confess the cause. Poor Will, whose door opened directly onto it!

  “No, I didn’t think you’d understand,” Brother Paul said. “In retrospect, it really isn’t funny. Just an irrelevant reminiscence—” But Carolyn was stifling a girlish chuckle. Well, perhaps that had been the level of that episode! A stink in a hall…

  Oh, the Haybarn Theater? Well, the whole college had been converted fourteen years before Paul’s arrival—yes, he was actually older than the college!—from a New England farm, and the main building had been the big red gambrel-roofed barn.

  Now the rough-hewn rafters showed high above the theater section; the hay had been removed, but a bird or two still nested in the upper regions. The office of the college president was in a silo. Will had not rated a silo. Which brings us back to that first encounter. Maybe being educated in a barn causes the mind to become littered with stray thoughts, running around and getting in the way like the stray dogs that roamed the campus. But now we have returned to what we were talking about. There was hardly room in Will’s niche to turn around, but at least he had a window. On hot days that was a blessing.

  “Dos Passos’ U.S.A.,” Will was saying. Brother Paul smiled with the force of another reminiscence. He had thought it was a place. Like Winesburg, Ohio, or God’s Little Acre.

  The problem was that each instructor described his course as though the student already knew what it was all about. Paul had no idea whether he wished to visit Dos Passos, U.S.A., or whether he preferred to contemplate the Individual and Society under the tutelage of another prospective instructor, or perhaps drama or art or music or any several of a number of other offerings. It was all very confusing.

  In the end, Will’s course was one of those which Paul elected to attend. In due course he learned that Dos Passos, U.S.A., was a monstrous place, three volumes long and as big as twentieth century America, and well worth the experience of struggling through its labyrinthine and fragmentary bypaths. It was, indeed, somewhat like life itself.

  Paul learned a good deal more, and grew more, than could be accounted for in horizons of the classroom or dreamt of in the philosophies of the instructors. The college campus itself was a kind of Winesburg or Dos Passos, with devious interactions complimenting the open ones. The grapevine kept all interested parties posted on the on-going student, faculty, and student-faculty liaisons; some interactions were hilarious, some serious, and some pitiful. Some people thrived in this melting pot of intellectual and sexual personality; others were destroyed. A little freedom could be a devastating thing! Paul himself came through it—mainly by luck, he decided in retrospect—more or less whole. But he had learned a certain tolerance and became less inclined to judge a person by some particular aspect of his or her personality such as physical impairment or lesbianism or schizophrenia. During this overall educational experience, much of what Paul was later to become was shaped, though there had been scant evidence of it at the time.

  In those years Will became Paul’s faculty advisor. The advisor system at this college was closer than what was normal elsewhere; the advisor had quite specific involvement in the student’s curriculum and concern with his overall welfare. Paul had by then become a student activist—this too was the normal course—and through him Will had another fairly shrewd insight into some of what was percolating through the deeper recesses of the tangled campus scheme.

  The college tried to prepare its community for life in the great outside world by being a more or less faithful microcosm of that world. Students ran most of the campus routine, washing the dishes, cleaning the floors, tending the grounds, organizing the fire department, and serving on committees. Periodically, the faculty members were routed out to participate in these chores too, rather than being allowed to molder in their ivory towers (as it were: silos), but it was a thankless attempt. Most routed-out faculty soon drifted back to their normal ruts.

  The whole was governed by the Community Meeting, consciously patterned after the Town Meetings of rural New England. Periodically, students, faculty, and administrators got together and thrashed through the agenda, utilizing formal Parliamentary procedure. The assorted committees that ran things in the interims reported to this meeting and were given new directives. Some of these committees tended to develop wills of their own, honoring the adage that power tends to corrupt, and this could lead to trouble. The most notorious was the Executive Committee, called Exec for short, composed of the heads of the other committees together with the president of the college, selected faculty members, and representatives from each student dormitory. At times Exec concealed what it was doing from the larger community in order to prevent its less popular decisions from being reversed by the Community Meeting. “We should be the head of the Community, not the tail,” one Exec member put it. To which an irate community member responded: “Exec’s acting like the asshole of the Community!”

  For example: there was one student in his mid-twenties, a former small businessman called Deacon or “Deac” for short. He organized a Community cooperative store that sold cigarettes, cosmetics, stationery, and sundry other necessaries at reduced prices. The enterprise was doing well, and it served a Community need; therefore, the organizer was cordially disliked by the anti-free-enterprise elements of the Community. They tried to torpedo the co-op in various ways not excluding the rifling of several hundred dollars’ worth of supplies from the storeroom, but Deac was smarter than they, and the co-op survived. He had a candy machine installed; there was a great outcry against it as being counter to “Community spirit.” But one evening the Community Communist, who had protested most vehemently against “commodity fetishism,” was observed to sneak in and surreptitiously infiltrate a coin to obtain a box of raisins from the orifice of the evil machine. That was perhaps the coop’s ultimate success.

  Deac had a little dog. Dogs were not permitted on campus by Community law. But the college president’s beautiful Irish Setter, called Pavlov because he tended to drool, wandered freely around and in the buildings. Pavlov once watered down a terrified student standing in the dining room. So the rule was not enforced. Deac’s little canine was fed and housed off campus, but tended to follow the example set by other members of the community, going where the action was. (No one ever saw a dog attending a class, which showed how well the canines understood the situation.) Certain members of the Executive Committee saw their chance. The owner was responsible for the pet; the dog had broken the law; therefore, Deac was expelled from the Community. (No one suggested the college president should be served in the same fashion; there were, it seemed, limits.)

  There was an immediate outcry. Deac had his enemies in Exec, but he also had his friends in the Community. The majority sentiment was clearly in Deac’s favor, if only as a concern for fair play. So Exec maneuvered cleverly to prevent the issue from being placed on the agenda. With luck, Deac would be gone before the Community could formally discuss the matter: a fait accompli.

  As it happened, Paul was then the Community Secretary, and his friend Dick, of Old Grandma repute, was Chairman of the Community Meeting. They conferred—they were after all roommates, as were their girlfriends, in a singularly cozy arrangement—and discovered that the prior agenda was advisory only; it could be set aside and anything discussed by the simple decision of the majority. So the notice of the Meeting was posted with the old agenda, so as not to alert the opposition, and plans were made and circulated.

  The Meeting was called to order. The formalities were undertaken so that the first thing discussed was the Dog Law. A motion was made: abolish the law. Discussion? Three people spoke in defense of the law; no one spoke against it. With amazing suddenness the matter came to a vote—and the law was terminated by a massive, hitherto silent, majority. Deac was back on campus since he could not be expelled for his dog’s violation of a nonexistent law. Too late, the anti-Deac forces that dominated Exec realized that they’d been had. They had been outmaneuvered and destroyed by the same machine tactics they had initiated. Paul wrote up the whole inside story for the Minutes of the Meeting, hardly concealing his pride in his own participation.

  Later in life, Brother Paul was to find that machine politics, far from being a local Community aberration or perversion of the system, were in fact typical of global politics. It gave him a very special comprehension of the forces at work in the historical McCarthyism and HUAC or House UnAmerican Activities Committee, itself one of the least American institutions. Power did tend to corrupt, in the macrocosm as in the microcosm, and at times desperate measures were required to right the determined wrongness of those supposedly representing the will of the majority. It was a phenomenon Paul never quite understood, the Good Guys acting just like the Bad Guys, but at least he learned to recognize it when he saw it. The college had, indeed, educated him for real life.

  However effective this education was, the enrollment of the college was impecuniously small, and the administration decided to expand. They felt more students would come if Community standards were stricter. Certain faculty members felt that sexual morality was entirely too free among the students. (Certain students felt the same way about the faculty, but that was another matter.) So the faculty set curfews on the lounges: no males in female lounges or females in male lounges after ten p.m. each night.

  Now this stirred resentment; students regarded the lounges as a Community resource and used them at any hour of the night. (A daytime curfew might not have been so troublesome.) In addition, the lounges were under Community authority; the faculty was a minority within the larger Community and could no more preempt control of the lounges unilaterally than Exec could kick out a dog-owning student on its own. So the new curfew was without legal foundation and was duly ignored.

  Until Paul, with five other students, was spied sitting and talking in a female lounge at 10:40 p.m. by the night watchman. Now Paul had not endeared himself to certain elements of the faculty, and this was not merely a matter of helping to overturn the dog law. He had stood up for his student rights on other occasions and generally carried the day. From a shy freshman he had become a self-assured senior. Theoretically, this was the very kind of development the college favored: individualism was character. In practice, this was frowned upon when it manifested as opposition to new faculty curfews for lounges. Paul was summoned before the faculty Social Standards Committee, popularly known as the Vice Squad.

  Now Paul had tangled with the Vice Squad before. The precepts of its formation and operation were anathema to him. He happened to be one of two student members of that Squad, part of the window dressing to make it seem like a Community guidance operation. He had been extremely awkward dressing. He had brought to the attention of the college president a private student-faculty liaison involving one of the faculty members of the Squad itself. “How can this Committee be expected to enforce social standards that it does not itself honor?” The encounter was all very polite on the surface, and the president made no specific commitments. But that member of the Squad had been expeditiously removed for reasons never quite clarified. It had not been the first time Paul had locked horns with the president. He had respect for the man and had learned how to prevail without causing unnecessary embarrassment. The president was tough but basically honorable: the ideal administrator. Still, the Squad no longer felt comfortable with Paul.

  Another time, the night watchman had caught a student couple in dishabille and in a compromising juxtaposition—but by morning had forgotten the name of the boy involved. The girl was known, but she refused to name her companion, and it was against faculty policy to punish girls for that might create a bad image in the eyes of the parents of prospective future female students. Thus the new law was applied selectively with discrimination practiced for the sake of image. The hypocrisy of this was evident to the students, if not to the faculty. Some girls were temperamentally innocent, but others were otherwise; to assume that the male was necessarily the instigator was at best naive.

  At any rate, the entire student body knew via the grapevine who this boy was, and possibly certain faculty members knew it too—but this information was not available to the Squad. The lines of battle were hardening. In a community that had once been united, ugly currents were manifesting. Like the historical war in Asia, an originally simple and possibly justifiable idea had been transformed into self-destructive force. Paul, when questioned by the Squad, repeated his philosophical aversion to its purpose. “I know who the boy is—but I shall not tell you.” And he smiled, rather enjoying the situation. Perhaps, he thought in retrospect, that smile had been a mistake. The Committee was unable to act, and had to drop the matter, but—

  Next time the watchman caught a couple (coupling was a popular form of education), he took down both their names. There would be no slipping the noose this time! By sheer chance, the boy this time was Paul’s friend Dick, and the couple had been using, with Paul’s permission, Paul’s own nocturnal hideaway: in the attic of the Community library, under the eaves. It was set up over the rafters with a mattress, tapped-wire electricity, and a bottle of 100-proof vodka (definitely not Old Grandma!), and was accessible by a rope ladder and trap door. It was perhaps the finest and most private love niche on campus. But Paul was not in it, that particular night, and so the turn of fortune had led to the discovery of his friend instead. Dick had been hauled before the Vice Squad and suspended from campus for one week.

  There, but for the grace of God… (Oh, that’s just a figure of speech, Carolyn. It means—well, if you had a piece of candy, and you gave it to a friend, and she ate it and got sick, how would you feel?) Actually, he was simplifying the story considerably, saying in a few words what was passing in voluminous review through his head and editing the juicier details.

  Paul, necessarily silent about his own stake in this matter, did not take this lying down. There was a policy in the Community that the victims of theft be reimbursed for their losses from the Community Treasury. Paul introduced a motion in the Meeting that his suspended friend be similarly reimbursed for his travel expenses, owing to the illicit action of the Vice Squad. It was a preposterous notion—but such was the sentiment of the aroused Community at this stage that the motion carried. The money was paid—and the implications were hardly lost upon either faction. The Vice Squad had suffered another black eye, even in its technical victory. But Paul, too, had been privately wounded. He had lost his hideaway and had a friend suffer in lieu of himself. The stakes were rising, and his brushes with disaster were narrowing his options.