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Chapter 13. Drinks at the Professor’s
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C h a p t e r 13 Drinks at the Professor’s When we got the invitation for “pre-dinner” drinks at the home of one of Jack’s professors (English 412, Nineteenth-Century English Poetry), we knew it was not going to be a “Let’s get a bottle and get drunk in a pile” party, nor its variation, the BYOB, which meant, depending on where in the state you called home, “Bring Your Own Bottle” or “Bring Your Own Booze.” Nor would it be a tuna casserole dinner among the artillery shells at the Retmans’. Because the invitation made a point of saying “pre-dinner” drinks, we were clearly not going to get dinner at all. Furthermore, unlike typical Saturday night parties, where all attendees were GI Bill boys and their wives, this event was limited to undergraduate and graduate students in English literature. It was the kind of party that was brand new to me, and I was in a state. It was at a professor’s house! Lord, what would I wear? I finally accepted that we couldn’t not go: if Jack was going to be a professor of English, he— and I—were going to have to learn how that life was lived. Just going up to the house in the Harper’s “Chivy” was unnerving. If I had been panicked about what to wear, going out there I was panicked by what I had chosen. I did not have anything that remotely resembled the “new look”—no dresses with fullish skirts and mid-calf hemlines—and my prewar dresses were by now pretty scruffy. I had only one decent dress (bought during wartime), a thing of a troubled yellow that couldn’t make up its mind what color it was. Like Lucky Strike, which before the war had been in a green package and during the war was in a white one and whose advertising proclaimed that “Lucky Strike green has gone to war,” the color 220 Drinks at the Professor’s of my dress had apparently gone to war as well. At any rate, I wore it, and Bobby wore her gray wool dress with her pearls. The professor’s place was a bit outside Gainesville, and when we drove up to it, it appeared to us to be a country estate, with the house at the end of a long driveway. We made jokes about it, about maybe we were in England or maybe we were in some kind of English movie produced by J. Arthur Rank. Well, George and Bobby made jokes. I was a little unsettled at this splendiferous vision, and I didn’t make jokes. Jack didn’t make any either. If the owners were trying to project the image of a lushly forested English estate, the profusion of Gainesville’s matchstick pines in the front yard fought them hard. But the house itself—a two-storied red brick, with a few ornamentals clustered near the door—was English to the last leaded window. When the professor came over to us, he talked softly and easily, and used words not ordinarily heard in conversation, not big ones especially, but words typically read and not said. He explained, for example, that the “erstwhile” owner of the house had been another English professor, and he said, yes, the pair of corgis scampering around us were “engaging” but one was more “taciturn” than the other. I wondered if Jack would eventually pick up on this way of speaking. Would he turn in his endearing New York “beauteeful,” in favor of—oh, say not so—“beauteous”? What comforted me was the thought that Jack didn’t do anything just because everybody else was doing it. Other students joined us and immediately started talking about the professor’s course, which the professor referred to as the one “you boys are suffering through.” He said this with a little laugh—a “chuckle,” he would have called it—seemingly confident that “you boys” would offer a protest. And some, no doubt non-GIs, did. The boys talked about the course, which was apparently now concentrating on Lord Byron, and they seemed to take pleasure in pronouncing the name of his protagonist as “Don Joo-ahn,” and not “Don Wan,” as I would have said. “Don Joo-ahn” was apparently how the British did it, and how the British did it, as I was continuing to learn, was for English majors the one and only...