vol5-no1

BEGINNING

VOLUME 5 NUMBER ONE 70¢ NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY FALL

THE TRI-QUARTERLY is a magazine devoted to fiction, poetry, and articles of general interest, published in the fall, winter, and spring quarters at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Subscription rates: $2.00 yearly within the United States; $2.15, Canada; $2.25, foreign. Single copies will be sold locally for $.70. Contributions, correspondence, and subscriptions should be addressed to THE TRI-QUARTERLY, care of the Northwestern University Press, 1840 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois. Contributions unaccompanied by a self-addressed envelope and return postage will not be returned. Except by invitation, contributors are limited to persons who have some connection with the University. Copyright, 1962, by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

Views expressed in the articles published are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the editors.

EDITORIAL BOARD, The editor is EDWARD B. HUNGERFORD. Senior members of the advisory board are Professors RAY A. BILLINGTON and MELVIIJLE HERSKOVITS of the College of Liberal Arts, Dean JA.MES H. MC BURNEY of the School of Speech, Dr. WILLIAM B. WARTMAN of the School of Medicine, and Mr. JAMES M. BARKER of the Board of Trustees.

UNDERGRADUATE EDITORS, SUSAN F. MC ILVAINE, FORREST G. ROBERTSON, HERBERT M. ATHERTON, and CAROLYN BURROWS.

THE TRI-QUARTERLY is distributed by Northwestern University Press, and is under the business management of the Press.

FOREVER BEGINNING

BY ALVINA KRAUSE

For a school teacher, interviews with the press are invariably disturbing. Theatrical stars have learned all the answers to a reporter's questions; at tongue's tip they have the right words: the colorful words, the sparkling words, the intimate words, the words revealing such tantalizing glimpses of personal lives, the words selling acting as the most carefree, fascinating of all careers. The teacher, however, is not conditioned to this process of enlightening the public. Truth has been her rule - concise, frank, unadorned truth. And so it is that when a reporter asks, "What, in your estimation, is the secret of this actor's success?" she can only tell the truth. "Hard work. An actor is a human being who has the capacity through hard work to master the techniques of his profession." Silence. The interview is abruptly terminated. Her life in theatre is no longer news. This drab statement will never make a headline. If she could divulge secret stories of psychological traumas as the source of an actor's success,

On the stage of the University Theatre, Annie May Sun]: Hall, Inga Swenson appeared as Isabelle in a production of Lean Anouilh's Ring Around the Moon.

It ;s characteristic of Alvina Krause that, although two years ago she joined the list of professors emeriti, she is teaching and directing, full time as usual.

Born in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, she began her collegiate education at Northwestern's School of Speech, graduating in 1928. Two years later she joined the faculty as Instructor in Voice and Interpretation, and, as Associate Professor and presently Lecturer in Dramatic Production, has been a member of the Theatre Department ever since. She received an M.S. at Northwestern in 1933. Since 1945, at The Playhouse, Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, she has been director, manager, and producer of her own summer company, composed chiefly of undergraduate and graduate students - theatre majors - from Northwestern. Many of her distinguished students have begun their careers there. This year was the eighteenth season for the company.

The article below was written for The Tri-Quarterly at the invitation of the editor.

or talk in rapturous terms of the mystical process of creation - this might be news. True: miracles have been known to happen. In the course of many a student-actor's training they happen; in every successful production, they must happen at least once. But always it is hard work which has cleared the way. The time is right for inspiration's release when the techniques have been mastered and forgotten. That the actor as an exotic phenomenon without virtue, or a complex of neuroses, Freudian or otherwise, may be a myth created by press agents whose advertising plays upon the 4

imagination of adolescent minds, is inconceivable in an age when living realities like work are no longer admirable, believable, and certainly not glamorous. That an actor is a human being like other human beings - with this special exception that he has a particular talent for mastering the arts of a particular profession as another individual has the talent for mastering the arts of medicine, law or finance - that he pursues the study of these arts with the same thoroughness, the same concentration, the same dedication, as does any human being preparing to earn a living

with his talents, whatever they may be: this is a concept of actors which is too contrary to the popular image to be tolerated or even understood. There are in theatre schools show-off's and dilettantes engaged in self dramatizations, who are inevitably by their antics the focus of public attention; but do we not meet similar specimens, for instance, in the schools of medicine, law, journalism? Strange: it seems now that I have forgotten these sad seekers of theatrical identities, and their names are too seldom in lights to remind me of their brief, flamboyant moments in the University Theatre Green Room.

I do, however, remember Inga Swenson. As a student she was too interested in too many things to have time to linger in the lounge dissecting the performances of the latest University Theatre leads. She played no spectacular roles in this same University Theatre. Yet when she was on stage in a supporting role, other, more colorful actresses, faded out; attention always went to a tall, quietly beautiful girl seemingly doing nothing to achieve focus. How .she acted was a mystery: she used no tricks of characterization, no incomparable vocal eccentricities: there was nothing in her work to label "theatrical," no moments of bravura acting; yet she invariably wove her spell. From the innocence and purity of Isabelle in Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon to a pointedly satiric Charles Adams comic moment in Waa Mu, she was Inga. She found in a character an idea; she discovered what was most significant, most essential to that idea; she discovered the dramatic force of this idea and she brought to it a radiance and, sometimes, a devastating light. The frame of reference for her acting was that of a perceptive human being, intelligent, well read - a participant in life, not a passive observer. As a director you had only to say to her, "This young girl is French," and a spring was tapped. From a store of knowledge gained from books, music, living, her imagination took off to endow a role with qualities unmistakably Gallic. Or say to her: "This is the period of the Italian Renaissance"; and without long involved searching within or without herself, she was the embodiment of the culture of that brilliant age. Within her was a rich store of images, ideas, sounds, responses to life waiting to be touched off by a playwright's word, a director's suggestion. Furthermore, most rare in actors, she possessed innately a sense of form. There was music in her acting: a rhythm, a tone, a melody, that gave continuity to a role: a direct line to the ultimate goal. Her sense of style pervaded all her work. A director, or the mood of a situation, had only to touch it off. I remember one night: at curtain time in our summer theatre the lights went off, a power failure on the mountain. We held the curtain twenty minutes, the audience getting restless. Announcements were not going to hold it. This was a crisis. The silence

Fall, 1962

of disapproval fell upon the audience, the atmosphere was pregnant with it, when suddenly from the back of the auditorium: music. Ing a softly walked down the aisle singing an old English song; just a girl singing absently, no more. She hesitated for a moment near the stage and then sat down on the apron, still singing, remembering old tunes. She seemed not to see the audience, not to know that listeners were there, yet somehow you knew that she knew that you were there. She sang to you individually, all three hundred of you - an artist in command of herself, the situation, the audience. Fifteen minutes passed, thirty - who knew or cared? When I try to teach the art of good showmanship I think of a girl singing, unaccompanied, "Cockles, mussels, alive, alive-o." I wish I knew how to teach that art!

One September Dean Dennis asked me to hear with him auditions of new students applying for theatre scholarships. Among them was one exceptionally grave young man who read from Maxwell Anderson - a natural selection for one aspiring to theatre honors. Anderson was the new hope of the American theatre with his stirring espousal of the theatre as a temple, a cathedral. My present impression - and it may be false, for imagination plays strange tricks with memory - is that this serious contestant read from Valley Forge. Certainly the image that sticks in my mind is that of Washington: a most somber, tragic figure at the Delaware. I know there were no costumes at these tryouts, yet I have a mental vision, not only of an aquiline profile, but of cocked hat, great coat and all. I still hear a fine, resonant voiceoh, so resonant! - speaking every wordyes, every word - with deep, vibrating significance. Fisk Hall became indeed a cathedral! When the last contestant had finished the Dean raised an eyebrow.

"Well? Anybody you'd care to gamble on?"

"One potential. The tall, lank chap with the tight jaw and the heroic mask."

"What kind of potential?"

"Histrionic. Not fake. Takes himself too seriously, but theatre is where he belongs. Who is he?"

"Chap from Wilmette. Heston. Charlton Heston."

For two years, until he was called into service, he was the epitome of the serious acting-student. He was dedicated to his search for the "inner truth." To discover the playwright's implicit truth, his research was endless. (It still is. The depth and breadth of his private research on The Ten Commandments merits a University degree.) So deep was his concentration during a performance that he spoke to no one backstage. The realistic world of technicians, stage hands, gossiping actresses did not exist for him. He was the world of the character he played. Played? No, he was. He doggedly aimed at mastery of the inner experience which motivated behaviour. He sought

to develop the biography of each character he studied. He was determined to create on stage the effect of life as it would go on if there were a fourth wall between actors and audience. He stopped at nothing in achieving that goal. At one time he was playing in a Workshop production of Riders to the Sea, thoroughly immersed in the life of these Irish fisher folk. He came on stage carrying a rope. I remember thinking: "That's no stage prop, no 'illusion' of a rope. That's the real thing." It was! Next day a note came from the head of the department: "Tell your actors they can't cut down the backstage lines. I don't give a damn how dedicated they are to truth!"

Charlton's last performance in University Theatre was Judge Brack, man of the world, in Hedda Gabler. His performance may have lacked some of the polish requisite to a complete realization of that cock-of-the-walk character, but it was surprisingly good. Charlton had a natural, innate gift he may have been unaware of at that time, or if he was aware of it, he fought it as a threat to truth. The gift was a histrionic sense which gave theatricality to his work, lifting his creation of Judge Brack above mere realism. It was the actor's sense that acting is communication: the awareness that out front are people wanting to be entertained. I could not discuss this with him at that time: such words from me might have destroyed an ideal that acting is truth, not the illusion of truth. He was called into military service before we could progress to acting is art, not life. He has done very well since, on his own.

In one of Patricia Neal's press releases she was asked: "Just what did you do in your acting classes at Northwestern?"

"I had to be a pistol- an army pistol."

It makes a good press release. People like to laugh at that which they do not understand. The story is true, but it is not all the truth. Patricia was told to go on stage to be an army pistol. All sophomore actresses aspire to play Hedda Gabler, and Patricia was no exception. Her attempts on this particular day displayed an awkward girl struggling to act "mortally bored." The torment of defeat was in Patricia's eyes as she slumped into her seat, crawling into herself for protection from classmates in whose eyes she always feared she might read: "Pat Neal? An actress? Did you see her Hedda Gabler?" Fear of failure distorts the vision of many a young actor. Patricia believed with every muscle and fibre of her being that she could be an actress. It was a belief in which she received little support on campus. She was honest, so honest that she called the score straight on all her failures. She had no capacity

to rationalize her defeats, to bolster her ego. The image of the actress she wanted to be was brilliantly clear to her; the step-by-step slow progress to that goal was agonizing. Passionately she wanted to be the ultimate in greatness at once, in one gigantic leap. To play Hedda was not a wishful actress dream for Patricia, as it is for most wouldbe actresses. She did not mentally transform Hedda into Pat Neal; rather, she sensed in herself a capacity to become Hedda, to assimilate Hedda's traits, to think, feel, live as Hedda: to turn Patricia Neal into Hedda Gabler. This sense of character is the mark of an individual who can be more than a personality actress; it is the mark of creative talent. Following Patricia's stage appearance on this particular day, there was the usual discussion of character traits. First the trite, general cliches came like "fascinating," "dangerous"; they were rejected. The actor must have the poet's gift of conceiving in images, of thinking in metaphors. "Fascinating," "dangerous" are labels which sum up appearances. Acting that illuminates the script springs from an imagination which, like the author's, creates from images that are clear, unmistakable like "pistol," Ibsen's metaphor for Hedda. To stir the actor's imagination into creativity, he is asked to dramatize metaphors. When Patricia walked on stage to be

Charlton Heston appeared in the role of the cock-of-the-walk character, Judge Brack, in Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.

In the role of Olivia, Patricia Neat (center, seated) appeared in one of the Unioersity Theatre's Shakespearian offerings, Twelfth Night.

a Hedda who was a pistol, the concept overwhelmed her. She froze; nothing happened; the pistol metaphor misfired. It makes a good press release.

Only a few people on campus believed in Patricia's ability. When she was cast to play Olivia in Twelfth Night it seemed her great opportunity to prove to all her detractors what she believed so firmly: that she was an actress. To me it seemed the role was made for Patricia: she was vital in an Elizabethan sort of way; in a moment she could change from melancholy to laughter; she was innately patrician. In my memory her opening night has the proportions of a nightmare too grotesque for reality. If Patricia ever plays Pirandello she can use the memory of this night as her frame of reference. So can 1. I was only the' detached observer; I had seen no rehearsals to prepare me for what I saw: Olivia was a gawky, awkward girl in a shapeless costume whose ugly lines exhibited a square, ungainly frame with no waistline. All her scenes were played in profile; her chin jutted out in a sharp angular line emphasized by a collar that intensified the angle. As a nightmare distorts all realities, so this performance heightened every fault that Patricia possessed. There is something about the theatre, some strange code operative among theatre folk, that makes the backstage dramas as inevitable in their course as are the tragedies and comedies played by actors on the stage. The curtain comes down Fall, 1962

on the stage play, the offstage action continues. As a figure in a Pirandello play manipulated by an. unseen director, I was compelled to go backstage after the performance. No alternative choice was open to me; offstage entrances and exits are also made on cue. In other instances it might have been possible to breeze through the dressing rooms improvising gaily "Loved the show," with many repetitions, but not with Pat. She was alone in her dressing room. As usual she mustered no defenses. For her no hysterical release of emotion was possible. She looked straight at me, spoke before I could say anything in word or act.

"I shall never act again. Never."

"Never again? You dare call what you did tonight acting? See me tomorrow at nine."

An actor acts with all that he is: mind, memories, imagination" perceptions, voice and body. Acting is total. A body that does not communicate is a defective instrument. As a violinist is proud of his Stradivarius, an actor must be proud of his body. Not vain: proud. Next day I learned what I should have sensed all along.

'''I'm too tail, Of course I slump. My shoulders are too broad. I'm too BIG All my life I've hated being tall."

You have to convince the mind before you can change the body, yet as you change the body, the mind changes too. Where do you begin? It was Saint Joan, not I, who accomplished the miracle. As she studied Joan, Patricia acquired the phys-

ical coordination that is Joan's, the joy in movement that was the Maid's. When the following autumn she opened on Broadway as the vital, beautiful Regina of Another Part of the Forest she was hailed by critics as the season's most promising actress. And beauty played no small part in the decision.

Patricia had a quality that is rare in actors: a quality that cannot be taught: a sense of tragedy. Like the sense of comedy, it must be innate. It can be discovered, trained, developed, intensified, but it cannot be given to any student of acting. A teacher can lecture on the subject; the head can learn about tragedy; but to know about it is not to sense it. Acting which has depth springs from something which is part of the fibre of being, from a grasp, an awareness, a capacity to experience indignation - indignation above the level of personal emotions. It is this grasp which gives to acting the imperative plus so difficult to define. Intellectually an actress may grasp the concept of tragic action. If her knowledge goes no deeper, she will act, as we say, "from the neck up." The result may be art, but art that is intelligent but unmoving. The emotional actor, on the

Theatre production.

other hand, may run his gamut, ironically and illogically untouched by the actualities which motivate his tears, his manifestations of physical anguish. The result may be "exciting" but unilluminating. The actress with a tragic sense of life, and of drama, has the capacity to realize in every fibre of her being the consequence of her tragic decisions. With sensibilities fully vibrant as Antigone, loving life, she chooses death because obedience to eternal laws is more important than life. With her complete being, this actress realizes totally - head, heart, body - the loneliness of the road to her living death. Not only on the personal level does she realize: hers is a world view - the dramatist's view - of the tragic waste of human potentialities. The actress with a tragic sense has the vision and power to speak for all people, of all times, who have known the suffering we call "tragic." Patricia had this power; I believe she still has it. She could today create a Rebecca West that would have the strength, power, passion that would make a production of Ibsen's Ros,mersholm a memorable one. These thoughts make me a little sad.

Paula Prentiss was a different piece of goods. Unlike Patricia Neal, she was never, or seldom ever, sure she was an actress, or even that she wanted to be one. Everyone else was certain the stage was to be her turbulent home. (Emotional outpourings are commonly supposed to be the mark of theatrical talent.) Each of her performances might be riddled to shreds by shafts of barbed criticism from the jury of her peers, who nevertheless stood in awe of, her fireworks; but friends and adversaries alike agreed that the stage was the only place for her. Paula always seemed to be catapulted into the very vortex of storms. Studying music, art, and science in quiet obscurity in a girls' school, she suddenly had an impulse to spend a summer at Northwestern, maybe even to find out what this thing called theatre was all about. That summer idyll came to its climax precipitately three years later when upon my luke-warm but threatening persuasion, she appeared in my office in sullen mood, clad in an incredibly bulky, all-enveloping ugly grey sweater, sneakers and bobby sox, to tryout for M G M. She played her tryout scene to the back wall with M G M gyrating in his chair trying to see her face. The scene completed, without a glance in our direction she started for the door. Disgruntled and irked by her appearance and behaviour, I was tempted to let her walk through the door into deserved oblivion when remnants of my better nature prevailed. I stopped her with a controversial question; "You're from Texas, aren't you, Paula?" She whirled on me: "No. Oklahoma!" At last M G M saw the animated face, heard the thrilling voice of Paula Ragusa who was thus precipitated for life into the role of Paula Prentiss.

Paula Ragusa (whose stage name is Paula Prentiss) played Cleopatra in George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra in n University

The road to that moment had been tumultuous all the way for everyone involved in Paula's life. I remember Caesar and Cleopatra. One night, at last, the opening scene clicked. Weeks of improvise-run-the-scene-, discuss-run-the-scene, improvise-again procedures at last paid off: the scene crystallized; it was ready for performance.

"That's it! Excellent. Keep it just like that, Paula. Understand?"

A grunt and an affirmative nod.

"You and Caesar played together brilliantly. It was witty; even had style. Keep it just like that. Understand, Paula?"

Another indeterminate sound and nod, not so positive.

"No changes after tonight." I was pleading now. "Understand, Paula?"

She found a stick of gum, meditatively unwrapped it, gave it full concentration.

"Want to run it again? To set it permanently?"

A negative response.

You reiterate with Paula because, for all her deep concentration you can never really be sure that her concentration is with you, or whether she has already departed for that little world of her own: her private, creative world. My palpitating hope on this occasion was short lived; the next rehearsal sent it spinning into limbo; despair took its place. If I was baffled by the tenor of the scene, Caesar was dumbfounded. He was too humane to strangle a demonic actress; he could only stare with blank, uncomprehending eyes, and mutter senseless, unmotivated words. This was a Cleopatra created neither by Shaw, nor by any one else in all history.

"Paula, what in heaven's name are you doing?"

"Hm? What's the matter, Miss Krause?" No one in a lifetime of teaching could so confound me with so simple a question, asked in so innocent a tone.

"What's the matter! You were going to keep this scene as it was last night, remember?"

"Oh well. I got to thinking about Cleopatra you know how men fell in love with her I just got to wondering you know Paula's voice always rises softly into the unknown and dies away on an unresolved chord. You feel you must follow her into infinity, into the mysteries of the creative state; but production dates are set and immovable, awaiting the inspiration of no artist. Once more you start back at the very beginning, with the careful underscoring of quiet desperation.

"You see, Paula, you have to play the author's idea Not Paula's idea of Cleopatra. This little, housewifely creature you are creating tonight does not fit in Shaw's framework. She is lovely, fascinating, adorable; but that isn't Shaw's idea of this malicious little queen. You must act the playwright's idea I wish we were doing a movie!

Fall, 1962

Last night's performance would be permanently recorded; you could never, never tamper with it agHin.

At least once in rehearsal or performance Paula ga vo a perfect interpretation of each individual scene. How often we thought: "If only an audience were here tonight!" Paula, however, could never do the same thing twice; she could never repeat. Praise works with many actors; Paula was deaf to it. Not through wilfullness nor temperament, nor temper, did she deviate. She simply could not turn off the creative spring. In Paula's shows we never had to worry each night about creating the illusion of the first time. With her, every night, whether it was rehearsal or performance, was the first time - sometimes chaos. Carefully, on performance nights, I used to plan what I might, casually, say to her - or should I write a little note? - that would keep the stream flowing in the direction of the drama's objective. I would watch her brown eyes light up with agreement as I spoke. Then having made my point by subtle implication, I thought, I would retire to watch from a distance until she started to the stage, praying that on the way no one else would let fall a chance remark that might turn loose again that fantastic, creative imagination.

Paula evolved a theory for her acting: every character, everyone, young, old, sad or comic, fat or leaneveryone - "has a little secret." (Being tall- five feet nine inches - and aware of her height, Paula describes everything in wishful diminutives.) The "little secret" may be labelled by psychologists as the subconscious, and by erudite actors as subtext; but in Paula's world these prosaic terms are not stimulants of the dramatic imagination. In solo performances in class she was always at the peak of her form. There was the time when for twenty minutes or more we watched with delight rare in a class room, while on stage a commonplace "little" woman with a "little" secret humming its tune inside her, removed items of food from an imaginary refrigerator. Not a word was spoken, although inarticulate, indescribable sounds communicated a world of meaning. There before us on a bare stage was the bread and butter world of gadgets and things; there, too, was an inner world in which quite a different woman was sweetly singing, I imagined, something like "I think I'll put a spider in Mrs. Applebaum's tea.. a red spider, or a green spider or a striped spider I'll watch Mrs. Applebaum swallow the black spider and I will say, 'Do you like sugar in your China tea, Mrs. Applebaum dear? Of course, I don't know what the little secret was exactly; but it was believable and entertaining, and I could not call time on the assignment.

With most actors, I wish devoutly for power to ignite inadequate, dormant, or lazy imaginations. With Paula I could only pray for the patience I

haven't got that together we might find the way to channel, direct, and discipline the superabundance of her creative energy before it exploded, sending us both to see it through in whatever is the next world for the passionate of heartJ ames Olson could not pass his required public speaking courses. The ability to speak extempore is a gift possessed by few actors. When called upon to deliver a speech, Jim's mind froze, his tongue stuttered, his vocabulary was reduced to: "Well but. ah Yet once he had his moment of eloquence. A performance of Dark of the Moon in our summer theatre had reached the revival scene: the climax of the drama which, in theatrical terms, crystallized the playwright's theme: religion can be distorted to appeal to the baser passions of men. We were playing it with a stern discipline governing the action. Suddenly, and so dramatically that it seemed on cue, there came from the audience a ringing, ministerial voice drowning out the evangelist on stage: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is blasphemy!"

The stage froze for an unquestionably true dramatic pause of several beats. Then Nancy picked up her cue and the action was resumed. Once more the stentorian, solo voice cried out: "Blasphemy!

A sobbing woman joined in: "Sacrilege.

Then both together chanted: "Sacrilege! Sacrilege!"

The silence on stage, and in the house, was vibrant. In the darkness of the auditorium I was making my way toward the disturbance, when from the stage I heard words unrehearsed, not from a play. An authoritative but strangely quiet voice said:

"Ladies and gentlmen, this is a theatre."

I stopped frozen, not daring to think what might come next. Down stage right a tall figure was the focus of attention. Jim Olson, stepping out from the wings where he had been waiting for his witch-boy cue, was talking to us. He spoke about the theatre: a free theatre, where playwrights could speak their thoughts, through actors, to people free to listen. I wish I had a recording of that speech; I can recall only the effect it had, the thoughts it stirred in me. Did he speak for one minute? Two? No more, certainly. With a conviction so deep it had no need for histrionics he spoke straight to us. The agitators too were, apparently, spellbound. Reason prevailed; actors resumed their roles; the play went on. Jim had touched in us a sense of fundamental rights; beliefs we scarcely knew we possessed we heard articulated for the first time. I think I never before realized so fully the lucidity of the English language. By college standards, Jim was a sophomore; in this crisis he spoke wisdom which added up to a credo of the theatre. I have said that miracles do happen when the way has been prepared for them. The Dark of the Moon incident

A large-scale production 0/ Coriolanus by Shakespeare included James Olson (center) in the title role.

supports my belief. An actor can speak extempore when he has discovered for himself that drama is more than individual roles in a play; he can be eloquent when the theatre is for him more than actors strutting on a stage.

James Olson was an all-theatre man: actor, designer, technician, director. By his very nature he was compelled to master each of the theatre arts in order to function more totally in the one which meant most to him: acting. There was no indecision in his approach: the theatre was. to be his profession, his way of life; excellence was his measuring rod. In summer theatre he designed a set, constructed that set, played the leading role in that set - A Herculean accomplishment by any standard. Jim was an actor who, as a designer, designed for actors. As he designed, he saw characters emerging from backgrounds, saw people in movement. No wonder his sets were a joy to directors! As actor, designer, technician he demanded perfection. Jim could not compromise. An actor who professed a love for the theatre and then gave to that theatre less than his best, was guilty of hypocrisy which Jim could not accept nor tolerate. He struck an actor once during a final dress rehearsal. It was one of those times when morale was low, fatigue had mastered the will to do: an apathetic rehearsal. Suddenly Jim's powerful arm shot out: he struck a fellow actor. Physical violence is unjustifiable under any circumstances. What others who condemned him, and rightfully, could not know was that Jim was as horrified by his act as they. Temper was too simple an explanation. Jim was torn by the knowledge that the motivation lay much deeper. He could not understand it, much less formulate it.

Slowly we groped our way to the cause. To Jim, an artist, a play was a work of art, perfect in form, a marvel of unity, balance, rhythm, proportion. Any violation of that form was to him a kind of murder; it produced chaos within him, stirring his indignation to the breaking point. His act of violence itself was unjustifiable; the motivation for that act is something every true artist understands and has experienced when he has witnessed the mutilation of artistic form. The response to such desecration does not necessarily manifest itself in violence; our culture demands that even the artist conform to passive acceptance or indifference. How I long to hear from an audience someday, one frank, resounding "Boo!" when actors on a stage forget the unwritten laws of their profession, when they violate the principles by which we recognize theatre as an art. Such a demonstration might foretell a renaissance in the American theatre.

Sometimes I think that day is near. "A triumph for the American theatre I must not temporize here: this was the finest production of a Shakespearean comedy I have ever seen." The reviewer was writing about the 1960 production of Taming of the Shrew for the New York Shakespearean Festival in Central Park. He continued," The director, Gerald Freedman, is new to me: yet, I have no hesitation in saying, from this job alone, that he is one of the most gifted theatre men in America."

A director is seldom news. He is the man in the shadows usually. When the curtain goes up on opening night he retires into the blackness of the auditorium, silent, invisible, obscure. A few critics may recognize in a production the creative

Playing Androcles, student actor Gerald Freedman took part in this tense scene from Shaw's Androcles and the Lion.

mind of the director. The audience, however, sees, hears, applauds the actors and sometimes, astutely, the play. Only the theatre-wise patron looks first of all for the director's name on a program. Yet Jerry was wise to choose directing as his activity in theatre, for Jerry is a man of many talents; only directing can use them all. On campus we knew Jerry as an actor. Shakespeare, Shaw, Sophocles, Sartre: he was a master in the interpretation of all. I have seen the greats of the commercial theatre attempt Androcles; but Jerry is the only actor I have ever known who could hold a totally logical, intelligent, Shavian conversation with a lion. Others can't resist the temptation to "play for comedy," to burlesque, distort, or play the scene swiftly as too ridiculous to make sense. Jerry had the mind to grasp the Shavian intent; he had the capacity to understand both man and beast. Not only that, he understood all eras. When he played Shakespeare, he was the Elizabethan Renaissance personified. With sufficient pressure, and much kinetic participation on my part, I can induce actors, perhaps in self-defence, into a state of Elizabethan total activity. Knocked about enough, they can be forced out of their contemporary torpor, their physical passivity, so that a stage can come alive with some semblance of the physical joy of living, the mark of the Elizabethans. But the Renaissance mind, that stimulating, many-faceted, creative mind that motivated the activity of the age - how do you endow actors with that? Jerry possessed it: a word, suggestion, a scrap of pantomime, and he could toss off an Elizabethan sonnet, sing a madrigal, fight a duel, bait a bear. So it was with all eras. I might say to actors, "In this play you must be continental; you must discover how the European mind works, how it activates behaviour." They stare at me helplessly. I talk to them at great length, I send them to books, to art, to living people: French, German, Italian. Eventually, with great effort we arrive at some degree of understanding. Not so with Jerry a word, a description, a stage direction, and he walks on, for instance, as an Austriannot an American imitating the outer vestures of an Austrian, his voice and behaviour - this is no imitation: Jerry is what he imagined. He had the ability to conceive what eternities had produced, the historical insight to give substance to his thought, the flexibility of mind and body to transform himself into the role imagined. Other actors, with difficulty, draw upon their memories of personal experience as frames of reference for their characterizations. "With difficulty," I say advisedly, for how limited they are in their store of significant experience; and in their passive state, how unreceptive to the stimuli of life about them! Actors today must be taught to hear, to see, to experience before they possess a memory vivid enough to draw upon. No so with Jerry. His memories went deeper than the personal. Racial mem-

ory ? I do not know the source of this creative spring. I can not endow actors with it; I can only make them aware of the need. Jerry was endowed with it. And he had a greater gift: the gift of communicating, of sharing his experience. Unaccompanied, sitting in a chilly living room after a later rehearsal, Jerry sang Hebrew chants. He is a musician - another of his talents: he writes music, has a tenor voice of unusual beauty. But it was not the beauty or, at least, not the beauty alone, that moved us. As we listened we were one with him; we knew, we understood, deep within us, the origin of those laments. The tribulations which were their source were our tribulations. As an artist-actor Jerry could, always, for a time at least, change the tenor of our lives.

Jerry is a designer too. When he entered the university he had to choose between an art scholarship and his theatre interest. Theatre won, but during his stay here we had many private showings of his paintings. In the theatre this talent was released in scene designs. His set for Midsummer Night's Dream was visual music. It is obvious, then, why Jerry was wise to choose directing as his career, for only in this capacity could he use all of his arts. As a director, he plays not one role in a drama, but all roles. As an artist, he fills his stage with pictures which interpret the play with visual connotations in fluid patterns of color, movement, design. As a musician, he balances voices in harmonies and dissonances; as a symphony conductor produces musical form out of many instruments, so a stage director creates a dramatic structure which is not unlike a symphony - when that director is a Gerald Freedman.

I am often asked by actors, columnists, and laymen, "What makes an actor an artist? What makes him great?" Depending upon my mood I may mutter: "Bloody hard work," or "Who do you think I am: God?" The truth is: I do not know the answer. Sometimes in the class room or in a rehearsal it happens: that electric moment when student-actor is transformed into actor-artist. Why? How? For an instant I think I know: all our work has added up to this inevitable achievement. But that moment of rationality is instantly followed by a deepened sense of the mystery of the metamorphosis. I leave the question now to the researchers: let them find the answer if they can. I think, perhaps, I do not want to solve the riddle, for if I did might I not lose what is the most dynamic reward of all: the eternal astonishment of teaching?

I am indebted to Professor Lee Mitchell for finding early photographs, from plays produced at The University Theatre, of the actors mentioned by Miss Krause. E.B.H.

By William Thomas Page

The new student at Northwestern will often find himself in a quandary, not knowing what to do in many situations; or he may think he knows the proper choice to make when he actually does not, and thus his decision may be incorrect. In either case the results will be unfortunate. I hope that I can establish some rules that will help new students to avoid incorrect decisions. Adherence to my simple set of maxims should guarantee success to anyone.

As a new student, you must always remember that your most important goal (at least at this time) is to win acceptance. Everything must be sacrificed for this one goal if you are to have a happy, successful college career.

Developing an adequate vocabulary is the first step in gaining acceptance. Every day, practice using several significant terms, and you will have flO difficulty comrnunicating exactly what you mean. If you want to praise someone or something, say it is "tough," "cool," or "sharp." You can always make these words more emphatic by prefixing them with "really." The phrase, "got the hots," also indicates something desirable. A boy may say he's "got the hots" for a girl, but a girl may apply the expression to almost anything, even to professors. If you wish to malign someone, you can say he is a "kook" or a "loser." If a person is extremely undesirable, "neatsie" is a powerful term which has as many connotations as anyone cares to give it. But the strongest appellation (and consequently one which must be saved for special occasions) is "nurd," a term which can be applied to anyone who is thoroughly disgusting. "Spastic" can also be used to describe someone you don't like. When anything bad happens, you can say you "took gas." This is particularly good when you think you failed an exam. "Lunch" is also popular. A woman will say, "She is lunch," to describe some one who is "out-ofit," while a man may say he "caught his lunch," which means he "took gas" on a test or broke his ankle in an I.M. basketball game. Don't worry if you don't know the meanings of all these - nobody is sure of what they mean anyway. If you use them, you will reveal what you want to reveal, which is not that you know the meanings of the words, but that you are "cool" enough to use them.

You must also be able to talk about fine arts if you want to make a good impression. Making sure that you are familiar with Ray Charles, Josh White, Miles Davis, and the Kingston Trio, will establish you as an authority on music. In the field of literature, a working knowledge of Catcher in the Rye and "Peanuts" is absolutely indispensable. However, any indication that you are sincerely interested in theatre, painting, serious music, or literature will lead people to assume that you are too cultured, too much a part of the avant-garde to be socially acceptable. Nevertheless, you should drop names such as Albee, Webern, Ives, and Chagall into your conversation, but be careful not to reflect any understanding of their

William Thomas Page is a senior in the School of Speech. Born in Farmington, Illinois, he went to school there, spending his vacations in northern Minnesota, and sometimes helping in his father's clothing store. Recently he has worked in the strip mines of the southern lJIinois coal fields. He has not yet decided what he will do after graduation.

works. Cover Time every week and you will have enough cultural information.

To be accepted, you must also speak derogatorily of the University administration. This is one of the easiest requirements to fulfill since you only need to learn a few simple phrases. Both, "The University is too paternalistic," and, 1'1 don't see why we have women's hours - aren't we old enough to manage our own lives?" are useful. Malign the Health Service every time you get a chance, and ask why they take your temperature every time you go in. Refer to Dean McLeod as "The Great White Father." The expression, "Patsy Thrash, All-American Girl Scout," is essential for every coed. Be sure to use these phrases, even if you don't believe in them. (It follows from this that you will be admired for breaking as many University regulations as you can without getting caught.)

Having a number of psychological terms ready for instant use is also essential. The only important psychologist is Freud, and fortunately you can talk about his writings without understanding them. Just remember that he reduced all behavior to sex, and memorize a few Freudian terms such as suppression, fixation, ego, and libidinal energy, and use them to describe your own behavior and everyone else's. A sketchy knowledge of the Oedipus Rex story is imperative.

Of course if you really want to be accepted, you should not appear to be an intellectual. This does not mean that you aren't allowed to earn high grades; it only means that you aren't allowed to work on Friday nights or to sacrifice a date so you can study at the library. "Study dates," on the other hand, are highly desirable, so long as you don't try to study too hard. (If you're actually working for a graduate fellowship or to get into a professional school, you may be exempted from this rule in some instances.)

But on the other hand, you must not appear to think irrationally. I am not trying to say that you need to think clearly; you only need to make others believe that you do. For this purpose, remember the phrases, "I don't think that's very rational," and, "You're not being very objective," and be sure to drop one of them into every lengthy conversation. Try to utter something serious occasionally, but don't dwell on it.

You will lessen your chances of being accepted if you appear to try hard in class. The person who does this is easy to spot. He usually sits in the front row and answers more questions than anyone else, although many of his answers are obviously wrong. If you need to "brown-up" a professor, go see him in his office, and don't tell anybody that you went. Or if you mention it, be sure to add that you were only trying to make a good impression.

Although I have said that diligent study is frowned upon, you should remember that it is

very important to keep off the probation lists. A few simple rules for writing papers will nearly always guarantee a "C" or better. Be sure to support the same position the teacher holds. Instructors have a most difficult time finding fault with a rguments that coincide with their own. The pass-word on papers is "intellectual restraint." Professors love it. Understate absolutely everything. The word, "perhaps," will save you from criticism in many instances. Practice using the phrase, "in a sense." When you use it, you cannot possibly be wrong; you are always right "in a sense." Say you are not certain even when you are sure you are right. The best way to close a paper is to list all the intervening variables which you have neglected to consider and which will completely invalidate everything you have said. (If you don't know any authentic points you have overlooked, make some up. It shows you're thinking.) Finally, write the introductory page to your paper after you have covered the material and know what you have said.

Another good trick is to tell your teachers that you are really here to learn, since this establishes you as one who shares their values. Professors grow tired of dealing with pre-professional students who are out to make a "fast buck." Therefore, the best way to gain an instructor's respect is to tell him that you want to teach in college. Ask for a list of books that will help to broaden your interests.

Remember that engineers as a group are social and intellectual outcasts, commonly known as "Tech Wienies." The best way to jeopardize your grade in Freshman English is to let the professor know you're in Tech. If he asks you about it, tell him you're transferring into Liberal Arts. Hide your slide rule - never hang it on your belt.

Being seen in acceptable places is important. Plan now to spend at least an hour every day in the Grill. Arrange to frequent Lou's and the Orrington's sidewalk cafe. Going to the Hut is another matter. Often the people who go there are known as the "Hut set" and are looked upon as a group of pseudo-intellectuals who don't bathe over once a week. But you can go there after midnight, so long as no other place is open.

Whether you are expected to drink or not depends on the group you happen to be in. In some cases a person will be rejected if he doesn't drink - regarded as "out-of-it." Women are not disturbed with women who don't drink as much as men are annoyed by teetotaling males. Many men will not date a woman who doesn't drink, and there are women who are not happy to date a man who doesn't. A man must always buy for his date, even if he doesn't drink. Although some groups of women frown on drunkenness at any time, getting drunk often is always bad. If you come in smashed once in a while, be careful where yOU barf. Under-age men who intend to drink should

have fake I.D.'s. Blank draft cards are plentiful and can be obtained for a reasonable price. These also provide a certain satisfaction associated with violating the law. Subsequently, the best polic-y is to go along with whatever crowd you happen to fall into. Never brag that you abstain.

Some people will snub you if you don't smoke, but this attitude is not typical. No man should ever smoke Kents; if he does, women will think he is effeminate, and other men will warn him that he may become sterile. The notion that a man should smoke non-filter cigarettes is popular in only a few circles, but he must be absolutely sure that he doesn't hold his cigarette as a woman does (or, for that matter, do anything that might lead others to think he has homosexual tendencies, for this will immediately label him as unacceptable). No woman should ever smoke anything stronger than MarLboros - Winstons sometimes permitted - for this tends to distort her image of femininity. Spring cigarettes are definitely forbidden. Whether women prefer men who smoke pipes has never really been decided.

Admitting you're from a small town (under 50,000) leads to certain rejection. Among those with city and suburban backgrounds, this just doesn't set well. Telling people about a childhood in the country makes you vulnerable to attacks which people might not have considered ordinarily. If you have a problem with this, name the largest city within a hundred mile radius of your home and say you live in a suburb of it.

What you do about sex is unimportant, so long as you have at least one date every quarter; but what you say about your experiences is vital. Opinions on this matter vary from group to group. Find out the norm for your group before you start to talk. A woman may fall into a situation in which it is desirable to rave about her chastity, telling everyone how she has resisted the attacks of many men. In this case she should develop a backlog of stories to use on the proper occasions. The group may take a different attitude, and talk more freely about such experiences, especially if the women happen to be pinned or engaged. Still a third group never discusses the matter at all.

The norms for men are somewhat different, but the pattern still varies from group to group, and even from individual to individual. If you are popular otherwise, you can claim ten or more seductions and at least some of your friends will believe you and look up to you as a "cocksman." But if you are not well-liked, you will be resented for describing even one conquest. Never talk about the girl you are dating at the time - wait till you've given her up. Never brag about being chaste, or someone will say you are self-righteous. Just be sure that everyone feels that you are tolerant of his position and that you believe his stories. Remember that this is a losing proposition, because someone will call you a liar no mat-

Fall, 1962

ter what you say. But as a general rule, when somebody asks you if you "got any" last night, say, "yeah, a little," and in most instances everyone will be satisfied.

Just how much profanity to use is another problem you face. Both men and women swear more freely among members of the same sex. A man can often use profanity to establish a more virile image with women, provided he doesn't say anything coarser than "son of a bitch," and saves this for special occasions. Some girls, however, will tolerate swearing only on rare occasions. A woman must use more restraint. She sacrifices some of her femininity when she goes beyond "damn" or "hell" before a man, and some men object to this. No one should act surprised at anything he hears.

The great emphasis on blasphemous jokes seems to have tapered off, but you are still expected to laugh when you hear one. You will be entirely correct if you refer to the Holy Spirit as the "Big Spook," but to refer to God as the "man upstairs" is taboo. Speak against conventional religion occasionally, remembering that some people think it is contrary to human intelligence. Trying to start a prayer and Bible-study group will most certainly lead to total rejection.

The importance of Greek affiliation is also variable. The affiliated woman assumes, in many cases, that the independent woman must be completely undesirable, although exceptions to this rule do exist. As freshmen and sophomores, affiliated women will have nothing to do with a male independent ; as juniors and seniors, they may admire the man who has de-activated or remained independent; or they may just forget about it. Affiliated men are more apt to view independent men as their equals, except when the former group is composed of freshmen. As far as most men are concerned, there are so few independent girls on campus that whether to date them is rarely a problem. The important thing, then, is simply to be "sharp" and to associate with "sharp" people.

Knowing how to dress is another significant part of your fight for acceptance. Survival without a trenchcoat is impossible. No man can get along without an Ivy League suit. Loafers and white socks are essential for everyday wear. Pleated pants are out of the question. Almost all shirts should have button-down collars, although tab collars can be worn for dress. A large supply of sweaters is helpful, so long as the sweaters reflect a recent style, not one that disappeared two years ago. The supreme commandment is this: everything must be subdued; nothing gaudy is permitted.

For women the traditional camel's hair coat is no longer as popular as it once was. Consequently the color and style of the coat are not important,

so long as it has a fur collar. White socks are equally important for women, and white tennis shoes are the generally-accepted everyday fashion. Aside from these things, the most important consideration is skirt length. Even if short skirts look terrible on a girl, she will be "uri-cool" if she fails to follow the present trend. The best way to dress is the way everybody else does.

In the area of politics, campus elections have verified that a rather conservative outlook prevails, but no strong stereotype can be developed. The safest political position is somewhere between the views of Everett Dirksen and those of Nelson Rockefeller. Never attach yourself to an extreme group on either side. The John Birch Society and the Americans for Democratic Action are both condemned. Selecting an acceptable political position is not as difficult as I have made it seemjust don't have any strong convictions, and you will have no difficulty, since most students have a very limited knowledge of this field anyway.

When you first come to Northwestern, everyone expects that you will be appalled by the apathy of the student body. As a freshman you should go to football games and ask why nobody cheers. But after the football season is over, try to become apathetic, as almost everyone else is. Don't get excited about student government, even if you dabble in it. Remember to say, "The Senate never does anything," and "Student government is just a rubber stamp for the administration."

As you have probably expected, you will find some beatniks at Northwestern. You must either become one of them or avoid them entirely. There is no middle ground. The true individualist is somewhat respected; but if he fails to meet the standards, he will be classed as a "pseudo-" or a "phony" - the worst possible categories. No "beat" ever enjoys widespread acceptance; he is fully accepted only by those who are like him. As a result, any indication that you are different will interfere with your popularity.

A few miscellaneous rules should be covered. Don't carry a green book bag, or you will be classed as a pseudo-intellectual. Take aspirin tablets, No-Doz, and Dexidrine occasionally so people will realize that you, too, are under strain. Never take an examination confidently - tell everyone you're clutched. Take fashionable courses. Physical Geography, Nationalism, and BIO Literature are valuable to the accepted person. Men should scan Playboy every month and remember the Playmate's measurements. Don't be happy all the time. Cynicism and stoicism are more popular attitudes. This is imperative: If your mother had to go to work so you could come here, don't let anybody know it.

Summarizing these rules is simple: Remember that you have nothing to gain by having strong convictions. Try hard to be like everyone else.

Richard W. Ralston, currently the Director of Development of Roosevelt University, has appeared in this magazine twice before. He was once an official of Inland Steel, and his article, "The Dialogue of the Deaf," published in The Reporter magazine last year, was one of the first major critiques on the 1959 steel strike as well as an assessment of the effects of the Common Market on steel's pricing behavior. Ralston's articles have also appeared in the Chicago Tribune magazine, and other journals. He was graduated from Northwestern University in 1943, in absentia, as an English major while serving as a Marine officer in the Pacific.

NO TIME OF DAY

Hewore a watch whose face was divided into two sections: night and day. No numbers were printed on it and only one hand, instead of two, moved slowly around the circumference of the dial three times every twenty-four hours.

"All I give a damn about is when it's night and when it's day. I won't be a slave to minutes and hours like the rest of you time-bound creeps," said Lord Ellingsworth Jones, an Englishman turned American, who was the world's greatest authority on the liquid position of the reserve banks and who was employed by our company because of his British "style" and commanding manner.

Furtively I concealed my conventional wrist watch by plunging my hand more deeply into the pocket of my trousers.

Time to do many things, I reflected, the illusion you get when you watch the face of the clock, is not the measure of your progress, but the way you handle the intervals between night and day, not counting the minutes and hours, not even being aware of the movement of the hands of the clock. Tiempo para gastar, as the Spanish say.

Passing the display window of the corporate gymnasium on our way back from lunch, we

By Richard W. Ralston

stopped for a moment to watch a voluptuous model subject herself to the kneading and rolling of a body-conditioning machine. It was equipped with a set of rollers that firmly embraced her buttocks and hips and moved up and down, vibrating her entire body from the forelock of her tinted hair to the points of her breasts indifferently supported beneath her tight transparent blouse. She was an executive secretary on detached duty to demonstrate the organization's voluntary bodyconditioning program.

Lord Ellingsworth didn't even look at his watch, so intent was he on the functioning of the phenomenal machine - a contraption, when you studied it, that seemed to work on the model's body with an almost human intelligence. I felt a little jealous of it.

"One would think," observed Lord Ellingsworth, "that such a machine would put the human body through an almost insupportable ordeal, that the process might, indeed, be quite painful. Nevertheless the girl does have an enraptured look that probably stems as much from an atavistic sense of sacrifice as from the sensation she gets from the machine. In any case, it's all very odd, and I don't know whether body-conditioning is worth such trouble, particularly in view of the urgency

Fall, 1962

in our balance of payments problem, and the outflow of gold. Yet he paused, "the young lady is quite fetching jiggling about and well, g('nerally being sculptured like that. Live sculpture, that's what it is."

I caught the girl's eye and she smiled at me, bravely attempting to convey a look of dignity and aplomb, which I considered impossible for her to achieve under the circumstances.

"I should like very much to ask her about her experiences," Ellingsworth said as we took the automatic elevators up to our offices. "Perhaps I'll spend a little more time in the corporate gymnasium this afternoon, loosening up a bit, trying to reduce the old waistline, what?" he said.

I decided to accompany Ellingsworth. Our firm was not enjoying good business at the moment, what with the financially unsound high discount rate and a precipitous drop in the fluidity of our reserve accounts. There was very little for us to do except to man the telephones and keep the secretaries busy. It seemed to be an appropriate time to look into body-conditioning. I had been short-winded lately, running to and from the train. A few nights before I had developed heart palpitations. Exercise, well-timed, not too severe, performed in moderation might be just the toning up I needed.

I explained my intentions and my apprehensions to Ellingsworth and he agreed that exercise seemed indicated by my predicament. However, I could tell that his mind was fixed so completely on the body-conditioning machine that I decided to set out at once for the corporate swimming pool, freeing him to go to the machine.

I splashed around in the pool for a while, conscientiously avoiding over-fatigue and the bulbous body of the vice president in charge of sales who rolled, heaved, puffed and panted like a sounding whale. As he listed over, a leviathan of modern merchandising, his rosy arms and shoulders awash, I could read the locker number, a high status single digit, stamped on one of his buttocks. I reflected on how delightful it would be to attain the vice president's stature in business.

After I had finished (my blood was running fast), I clapped my hands and summoned one of the corporate towel room attendants, a young virgin, recently employed, whose classification tests qualified her for development and training leading eventually to our mail room or to some other more lofty position. The small-breasted nymph wore no clothes, in keeping with the company policy of compulsory exposure to the healthful ultraviolet rays emanating from the floors and ceiling of the corporate athletic plant. Self-consciously, ·1 tried to hold myself more

erect to minimize the obtrusiveness of my swelling abdomen. My "obesity" was embarrassing to me, but evidently not to the girl, for she smiled and extended to me those delicate but important attentions usually reserved for directors and officers of the company. Although they induced some coronary palpitations, they were relaxing and thoroughly delightful and I patted the young girl on the forehead and told her that I would look favorably on any request she might make to attend one of my secretarial development conferences, a training program usually restricted to more mature and fully developed women.

She thanked me and danced away, twirling the towel with which I had dried myself, as though it were the diaphanous veil of some Attic bacchante.

I then sought Ellingsworth and found him in the body-conditioning room. Here there were no ultraviolet lights and the mandatory rule about total bodily exposure was not enforced, although most of the devotees of this kind of conditioning wore brief costumes covering only those parts of their anatomy they were modest about. Curiously, there was little conformity in the participants' anatomical sensitivity, some covering their fingers, others their feet, some their eyes, but most their ears. Our psychologists referred to this phenomenon as tactile regressivism.

I found Ellingsworth talking with great animation to the secretary whom we had just observed demonstrating the body-conditioning machine. She was reclining on a floor mat, resting from her exertions, dressed in a skin-tight leotard.

Ellingsworth was in shorts, T-shirt, and tennis shoes. Even in this costume he had an air of sartorial elegance that radiated more from his carriage and nobility of expression than from the clothes he wore.

"Ah, then, it is not painful, but really pleasurable, as I first imagined," he was saying. "And I must confess that it has either helped you to fashion a delightfully healthy body for yourself or else you came to the conditioning process already so generously endowed. How thankful you should be for such an incomparable gift, and how grateful I am for the pleasure of your companonship and the contemplation of your form."

"Oh, sir," she managed to respond, blushing.

Ellingsworth caught my eye and asked the girl to rise so that I too might appreciate how effectively corporate body-development had worked for her. She complied readily, indeed quite proudly, I thought, and even offered to remove all her clothing in order to present more convincing evidence of the state of her health and the efficacy of the system. Ellingsworth demurred at her offer and said, "Another time

perhaps, but now I think you should take a little rest while I tryout the machine."

With that, Ellingsworth mounted the platform and adjusted himself into the contraption while the girl stood by and told him how to brace his body while the machine was performing its good works on him.

"You must hold yourself firmly," she advised, "but you must also be in a receptive frame of mind. You can achieve that by watching me. Oh, yes, and you simply must take off your watch. The motion might disturb its accuracy, and you know

Ellingsworth refused this advice. "It is now daytime. I shall not worry unless it says nighttime in the daytime and I can still observe the sun. Well, start it up, my dear, and let's have a bloody go at body-conditioning, eh?"

The girl pressed the button and the machine started, or I should say, it literally sprang into action like some automated panther, seizing Ellingsworth's hips and thighs and rapidly, but with rhythmic precision and also with a certain relentlessness, beginning to reform his body, according to some specifications that were punched on a card which the girl inserted into the machine. The card contained precise measurements, medically approved and laboratory tested, for the soon-to-be-reconditioned Ellingsworth.

The power and intensity of the machine seemed to frighten him at first, and he uttered a few gasps of apprehension, which brought smiles to the girl's lips. But as soon as it began to hum at its "cruising speed," and he grew used to its motion and touch, he settled back, smiling with godlike indifference at the world beyond the contraption. "May it never stop," he sighed, closing his eyes in ecstasy.

At that point I became conscious that I was undressed and that the ludicrous locker-room stamp was visible on me, but the girl, like the virgin in the locker room, seemed oblivious of my inelegant body and focused her attention on Ellingsworth. While she observed the machine, I studied her, speculating about her probable efficiency at classifying delinquent accounts and her competence in the arts of nonvocational, executive attentiveness - a technique closely related to love and that many progressive corporations had incorporated into their body-conditioning programs, but which ours had not yet adopted because of our uncertainty over its effect on our insurance liability.

I knew it would be only a matter of time before we became committed to a "love" program, since its power to produce a consistently high state of euphoria in executives had been thoroughly demonstrated in the laboratories of the social scientists.

"Night and day, you are the one," was played in the company gymnasium where my wife

worked and where the amatory arts had been practiced for several years. How grateful I was, I reflected, to the Synthetic Fiber Company fOI' nurturing those natural talents of my wife, refining them, so to speak, and what is more, bringing out latent possibilities of whose existence I had been totally ignorant when we first began living together.

But the present moment demanded that I discover more about the girl in the leotard while Ellingsworth languished in technological bliss.

She wasn't angry when I touched her, oh, so deferentially; she merely smiled and came closer to me so that I might participate in the warmth of her body in the lower-than-office temperatures of the athletic plant.

"You are very generous," I told her. "But I can't, for the life of me, understand how they prevailed on you to spend your lunch hours and coffee breaks demonstrating the body-conditioning machine. Are you receiving extra compensation ?"

"Oh, yes, I am excused from my duties for a certain time every day, and I am really improving from my experience on the machine, so I don't consider it work as much as a planned program to develop my character and body in an integrated fashion. It's the Greek ideal, after all, and lowe it to the organization to remain in good physical condition.

"Would you like to see me as I really am, without these clothes? They're really just worn to protect me from the machine, and I shouldnt be wearing them in the plant."

What could I say? She stepped out of her clothes and I had to admit that her body was a tribute to any machine.

"Splendid development," I told her. "Yet I wonder if you are completely euphoric, as you should be? You realize, don't you, that soon the love program will become mandatory for everyone except the towel room virgins, as soon as the question of insurance liability is cleared up?"

"No, I'm not euphoric," she answered. "The coffee in the cafeteria is bad and the cloak room is too small for my umbrella. Oh, I'd better slow down the machine. Mr. Ellingsworth seems to be falling asleep."

She pressed a button and the machine decelerated. Ellingsworth opened his eyes and gazed about the room as though he had never seen it before. "By George, that was an experience! Let me have one more go at it, will you? Or were you waiting to use it?"

The secretary pressed the starting button and the machine had another "go" at Ellingsworth, while the girl and I resumed our discussion.

"Bad coffee, eh? Highly destructive of morale. Well, I'll have a look into it tomorrow with the Director of Participation and Leisure. But getting back to the love program I thought you

Fall, 1962

might want to know about it and, of course, I should like to get your reaction to it - the prospect of its being done here at Ajax Refining, I rnean.

"Well, love, I guess Well, I mean everyone seems to need it and some like it more than others, yet I suppose everyone really likes it, but if it's to be mandatory, as you say, how will everyone work? I mean, how can it all be worked out? It sounds so terribly complicated."

Meanwhile, Ellingsworth was humming and cooing with motion-induced contentment.

Suddenly, a bell rang indicating the change in classes for body-conditioning, and the machine automatically stopped. "I guess it's time to go," she said sighing. She smiled provocatively at me and suggested that we meet a little later to go into the love program more thoroughly. * *

It was time for the corporation's annual nocturnal cook-out and Ellingsworth's patio and wide expanse of lawn where the festivities were taking place were ablaze with the dancing flames of mosquito lanterns and the glowing coals of the barbecue pits. Now and then the outline of one of the naked lawn gods was revealed by the flames. A fat little boy was offering grapes to a round-bodied young man who was playing a flute. I heard Ellingsworth describe the pair as the deities of crab grass, and one of his guests walked away sadly murmuring, "We have become cynical. We no longer believe in the old gods." Images of the traditional deities were placed in the sacred grottoes half hidden behind the rose beds near the barbecue pits.

E,llingsworth's wife, a tall desiccated harpie, her body partially covered by a length of brassstudded calfskin thrown over one shoulder and wound around her hips, stood at the wrought-iron gate and frightened away the starving youngsters and their parents who were begging for food.

Ellingsworth was at the opposite end of the lawn greeting the guests and seeing to it that they were supplied with drinks and condiments. Soon the yard was full of the hubbub of talking and laughing people and, as the evening progressed, the steady droning of the group became more strident, with the women speaking shrilly and the men talking and joking hoarsely.

I had come with my wife, but we soon separated in the dark, promising informality, she retiring to one of the holy grottoes with Ellingsworth's assistant and I explaining our body-conditioning program to one of my banker acquaintances whose friendship I had been cultivating in order to obtain a low interest personal loan. "Too many dollars chasing too few goods. Overproduction and underconsumption with bad payment balance overtones and overextended credit hmmm," he said.

The night breezes, clear and warm, made the

lights flicker and lent a weird perspective to the yard, accentuating the soft lines of the statues in the flowered grottoes and shimmering on the bodies of the women. Silver and gold snowflakes, the fashion representing the latest in epidermal haute couture in our suburb, adorned them.

Before dinner, one of the men was elected Eros and given a bow and an arrow whose tip was saturated with a flammable liquid. At the stroke of ten, he dipped the arrow into a hot coal, whereupon it burst into flame, and shot it toward the moon while the guests stood nearby chanting the lunar anthem of thanksgiving. It was a touching moment and many of the women wiped tears from the edges of their eyes.

1 approached one of the barbecue pits to inspect the food and to escape the dreary financial analyses of the banker. 1 was indifferent to the prospect of offending him, since other bankers, more laconic, were at the party searching for customers and 1 could always make a proposal to one of them.

A small animal impaled on the barbecue spit turned slowly over the coals, dripping grease which sputtered in the flames. Its flesh was white like that of a fowl, delicate looking, but 1 could not identify it, and decided that it was some kind of rare fowl which Ellingsworth had obtained from Europe especially for this occasion. As 1 adjusted my eyes to the brightness of the flames, 1 became conscious of another presence close by, and ,I turned and encountered the secretary who had been demonstrating the body-conditioning machine earlier in the day.

She had been dipped in a fragrant mosquito repellent, a tub of which Ellingsworth kept at the front gate for those of his guests whose bodily condition entitled them to frolic unadorned. She was carrying a toy poodle cradled in her arm, a stratagem that enabled her to assume a statuesque position whenever she stopped to converse.

"I'm not euphoric again tonight, surprisingly," she said.

"Not even after the machine?" 1 asked.

"Oh, it helped, but 1 need something more than that, valuable as it is. There is desolation in my spirit, a certain emptiness. Ii pleut dans mon coeur, as the French poet said. I've forgotten his name."

"You know French. How interesting and yet how important for an understanding of AngloSaxon belles-lettres."

"Yes, but 1 return always to my spiritual desolation, and 1 feel utterly without fulfillment. Actually, as 1 said to Lord Ellingsworth, 1 feel terribly utterly," she said.

"I know exactly. Yet you shouldn't feel that way. We have structured an entire human relations program down at Ajax, just to eliminate spiritual desolation. Our gymnasium, the forthcoming program in amatory arts during coffee

breaks, the sensuous isolation cell for the refinement of tactile sensitivity - the entire range of our human relations program 1 took her arm and guided her away from the barbecue pit toward one of the grottoes with a small fountain whose waters splashed over mermaids and water babies holding tridents. "I will admit that we haven't devoted enough time to the purely spiritual, but here at Ellingsworth's you see before you, in grottoes like this, evidence of the tastes of a contemplative man, a person for whom the worship of the holy naiads is as important as speculation about the nature of man."

We stopped and looked into the pool, amusing ourselves by watching the shifting configurations of our reflections on the rippling water. I was a hydra-headed man, hovering over a maiden with tiers of copper-pointed breasts. It was diverting and absorbing and we shifted our positions from time to time to create new and unexpected reflections of ourselves. I reached out and clasped her waist to prevent her from falling into the pool, a disaster which appeared imminent as she leaned over too far. Her poodle growled and snapped at me.

She apologized for the dog's behavior and put it on the ground, slapping it lightly but affectionately so it would run away. "Be sure and come back now, Simone," she admonished it. Then she turned to me.

"I would rather you didn't try to embrace me just now. I can feel your affection spiritually. It is palpable and I need no physical demonstration of it, at least not for the moment."

We began to stroll slowly through the darkness while she expressed to me profound longings which she told me she revealed only to thosewhose sensitivity was attuned to her own. Beyond the flicker of the mosquito torches we heard excited laughter. Some of the guests had divided themselves into teams, the men on one side and the women on the other. They were blindfolded and were observed by a referee who enforced the rules. The object of the game was for the men to pursue and apprehend the women and identify them by touch. Each correct identification counted as a single point. As soon as a team had scored six points, the other side assumed the offensive. The referee gravely pursuing each play or "scrimmage" was accompanied by the secretary's poodle, which darted and barked at the sportive couples who were dueling and moving in a flame illumined spectacle that resembled some recondite and primitive ballet.

"Body-contact sports are even yet the most effective character-development activities. It's too bad that our younger people, so full of energy, are not permitted to indulge in such games freely and without restraint," 1 observed.

My companion, whose arm by this time was entwined in mine, pulled me gently away from

the contest to a less populous section of the yard toward the main grotto in which the patron god and goddess of fiscal probity reposed, their limbs intertwined and forever fixed in marble.

"I suspect that the games also relieve tension;" don't they?"

"Indeed they do," I answered. "As a matter of fact, I was line backer on the country club men's team three years ago when we defeated the women in the play-offs twelve to six. We were simply exhausted after that contest. I have the trophy in my office. You must drop in and see it sometime. I'm quite proud of it, you know. It reminds me of the days when I was young and vigorous and before destiny inflicted this marsupial protuberance on me But I digress. Suffice to say that the games are extremely effective in relieving tensions and also teach the highest standards of sportsmanship.

"I, too, have tensions to release," she said. "Perhaps I should play the game, but better another time, when I'm not so made up. I did want to ask you about the amatory arts," she said, changing the subject. "Actually I've had very little experience in loving. Oh, I have been the object of generous and uncontrollable passions, and I must admit that the sensations were interesting, but love and loving I really know very little about it. That is, I really cannot say I have penetrated its recesses deeply. I have read the philosophers, especially the works of the supermarket heiress whom they call the underprivileged rich girl, and she says that there are latent and manifest aspects of love - one involving self-abnegation and the other dedication to its physical possibilities. The truly loving person, according to the underprivileged rich girl, is the one completely oriented to the maternal approach to livingpassive, forgiving, non-philosophical, and physical.

"Does the self-abnegation aspect of it exist apart from the physical side of love or are the two so interrelated that the cultivation of the latent characteristics of it produces the manifest aspects of it or vice versa? What does your philosopher say of this? By the way, what is her name? Perhaps I shall read her."

"Prudence Wadsworth. As you know, she is an expatriate who has dedicated her life to the Quartz King of Crete. Her permanent residence is on his yacht, from which she refuses to go ashore, preferring the life of the sea with its proximity to the elements or eternal things."

We were close to the wrought-iron gate and the solitary figure of Lady Ellingsworth - a dark sentinel, poised, motionless - when we heard a series of subhuman growls. Among these sounds, which seemed to be coming from beggars grouped at the gate, we could hear the thin, agonized cries of a small animal. We rushed to the gate to see what had happened.

Fall, 1962

My companion gasped and brought her hand to her lips in horror. I looked and was repelled by tho sight of one of the ugly stunted children rending apart the carcass of a dog and munching on its leg while the others crowded about, tearing pieces of flesh from the still live animal.

"My poodle!" she screamed. She flew furiously at the urchins, but Lady Ellingsworth restrained her, saying, "After all, the loathsome little creatures are hungry."

I guided my companion away from the revolting spectacle. She regained her composure as she realized that her hot tears were streaking the artificial shadows she had painted beneath her eyes. "Let's hide in one of the grottoes until I can restore my make-up," she said.

I led her carefully over some fountain-washed rocks and around a bed of Ellingsworth's precious and fragrant blue-veined poppies which surrounded an onyx carving of two copulating seals precariously balanced on a rock beside the pool. In real life, I reflected, they must frequently tumble from some insular precipice locked together, splashing into the heaving, fathomless water. An overhead lattice covered with grapes concealed a small bench where she sat and remade her eyes with the subtle pollen of the blue-veined poppies. As I waited, I knelt and dipped my hand in the pool, tracing it idly back and forth to cool my hand and arm.

'Suddenly I heard my wife's voice from a hedge beyond the bed of poppies. She was speaking but I could not distinguish her words. When she stopped talking, I heard male laughter, long sighs and a slight commotion in the underbrush, and I knew that my wife had not been lonely or bored in my absence. I hoped that the man's voice belonged to the banker and that he would recall his experience with my wife with a certain zest when I approached him later for a personal loan.

When my companion and I emerged from the grotto, she with her make-up completely restored and I with my curiosity somewhat piqued by the provocative noises I had heard from the bushes, we found the lawn completely devoid of people. The games had ceased and the guests, half hidden in the grottoes, were feasting on barbecued meats and salads and drinking from the pools which, I later discovered, had been ingeniously flavored with wine. The torchlights burning low cast dark frightening shadows.

"My poor little dog," she murmured as we walked across the cool grass. "What shall I do for companionship now?"

Before I could answer we were startled by Ellingsworth, who stepped out of the shadows and put his hand on her arm. "Oh," she cried, and pressed against me. "You could have warned me," she reprimanded him.

Ellingsworth accompanied us. "I'm awfully

sorry about your dog," he said. "But perhaps I can get you another. These children don't get enough to eat and they make routine inspections of our garbage, and when we have parties, they come in herds to wait for the leavings. Why don't you come with me and I'll get you another dog."

"You mean you have one here?" she asked suspiciously.

"Of course, and I fancy I can give you one that you will appreciate even more than the one you lost. Come along.. my dear. You will excuse us, won't you?" he asked me.

I assured him that excuses were unnecessary and watched him guide her into the darkness and out of my sight.

As I hesitated about where I should go, Eros stepped out of the darkness with a laughing woman in one arm and his bow in the other. I recognized her as the wife of one of my neighbors. She was president of the woman's board of the local family service settlement house, a generous and accommodating woman. Her body was scarcely covered by a net of blue cloth. Eros told me he had caught her in one of the pools as easily as an overfed trout.

While he was talking to me, she slipped away and ran off into the night while he pursued her.

Finding nothing better to divert me, I set off in search of my wife, hardly expecting to find her in a night which was rapidly becoming crepuscular, as the sun marched toward the eastern horizon. I wandered from grotto to grotto, stopping occasionally to respond to the blandishments of women who concealed themselves in the rose bowers and hedges and granted unique rewards to the men who discovered them.

At the rear gate, a group of guests was teasing the hungry urchins outside by extending pieces of barbecued flesh to them on silver fishing poles. The children would jump toward the bait, and if they succeeded in leaping high enough, the bait was lowered into their hungry mouths. They would seize it ravenously, then shriek as the tender membranes of their mouths would be torn by the jagged fishhooks.

Becoming bored with this, two men lifted one of the anointed women and held her vulnerable body over the fence while the urchins leaped hungrily attempting to tear at her. She screamed and writhed, imprisoned in the arms of the men, while the other guests laughed and shouted directions at her captors. "Lower! Lower!" they shouted. "Let them touch her."

But the men, after frightening her almost to unconsciousness, brought her back. Her breast heaved with the breathing induced by her terror and one of the bystanders, another neighbor, took her into the darkness to comfort her.

I could not help but reflect on the kindness and humanitarianism of these people; neighbors and co-workers, all of whom willingly incon-

venienced themselves to be kind to one another. The satisfied sounds and gasps from the dark recesses of the yard attested to that. Even wives and husbands, refusing to hoard their exclusive affection for one another, or their possessiveness, readily projected a universal love for all mankind in festive collaborations such as this one. The highest aspirations of mankind were converted from abstract ideas to unique tactile experiences in the magic grottoes of Ellingsworth's estate.

Even my companion, that superbly proportioned goddess of bodily conditioning, found another dog in Ellingsworth's house, a suitable companion for her loving and trusting nature. Much later I discovered that she chose to live with Ellingsworth, sacrificing her privacy so that she might reform him physically in order that his form might match his wit.

My wife, a woman as selfless as the blessed martyrs, had sacrificed herself in the grottoes so that I might readily obtain the collateral-free loan I had sought.

DEMOCRACY

I n many respects the suburbs are likely to become, if they have not already, the key spots in the American political system. Population movements in the United States, for example, are enhancing and will continue to enhance the sheer numerical importance and influence of the suburbs in politics. Furthermore, because of the nature, status, and aspirations of suburban residents, it

No wonder the liquid position of the reserve banks had improved, lifting our noble land from an incipiently debased coinage to a fiscally sound economy. Later, as I experienced the delights of the body conditioner in the corporate gymnasium, I reflected on these and other Parnassian delights still awaiting me. How efficacious, after all, was the admonition, "Love one another, not forgetting thyself."

For Ellingsworth the end came blissfully as he was vibrating in the body conditioner. An embolism, said the doctors. The secretary inherited his watch and one night, after spending several hours with her, I looked at it to learn the time. She was asleep and I lifted her arm gently so I wouldn't awaken her, and stared horrified at the luminous dial. The hand was moving rapidly around the face of the dial from night to day and night to day again and again, while the light outside seemed to blink on and off. Time to do many things, I reflected, the illusion you get when but there was, suddenly, no more time.

By David W. Minar

UBURBS

seems likely that suburban communities will supply much of the leadership and tone of American life, political and otherwise, in the coming generation. Given its importance for the entire American political picture, it is interesting to ask questions about the political situation of suburbia itself. What kind of ethos and what kind of training ground does the typical suburban area offer American democracy?

There are two sides to the question, "What is the condition of democracy in the suburbs?" It involves, on the one hand, consideration of what Fall, 1962

David W. Minar is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Research Associate in the Center for Metropolitan Studies at Northwestern. Born in Portland, Oregon, he received his undergraduate education at Reed Col/ege and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California (Berkeley). Before joining the Northwestern faculty in 1958 he worked as administrative analyst for the President of the University of California and taught at Columbia University. He has previously published in scholarly journals and has contributed chapters to forthcoming books on education in urban society and on the politics of state reapportionment. At present Mr. Minar is conducting research on the government and politics of school systems in suburban areas.

democracy requires, and on the other hand consideration of what the peculiar social circumstances of the suburbs permit. In the discussion to follow, we will ease from the first problem into the second.

Democracy means many things in the modern world, and to say what lies at the heart of it may seem an impermissible exercise in pretentiousness. Its symbolic uses, important in themselves, tend to make it cover all truth and beauty. But reflection on the operating meaning of democracy in Western culture suggests that the crucial ele-

ment of the democratic political system lies in a mechanism for providing the great body of the people with meaningful choices between meaningful alternatives. In a modern society, particularly a complex, large-scale society where numbers create isolation and man is separated from an intimate understanding of his environment, meaningful choice requires structure - political structure to mediate between the individual and the decision-making process. The mechanisms that provide this structure are of the genus political party, although many mechanisms that fill the mediating function are not ordinarily labeled parties. Whatever name they are given, these mechanisms ideally do for the voter what the concept of structure implies, namely, give order to a body of confusedly related phenomena, and in this role they seem to be essential to the masschoice process. Without them the voter confronts frustration and misunderstanding. With them he mayor may not establish some control over the choice-process, depending on the way the mediating mechanisms work. In the simplest terms, the mechanisms are to be judged on two counts, whether they offer alternatives for choice, and whether they help give the choice-process meaning through clarification. Thus the "democraticness" of a political system may be evaluated by examination of the operation of its intervening party structure.

On these tests local government in the United States does not in general come off well. While it has developed structures to fulfill the party function, these structures have not often been successful in assisting the citizen in meaningful selection between meaningful alternatives. Consider the variety of party systems commonly found in American municipalities. For convenience, though at the risk of considerable oversimplification, we will classify these into five types, as follows:

1. No-party non-partisanship. In this category fall those systems which, because of formal legal inhibitions or otherwise, make no use of identifiable parties in selecting candidates or clarifying issues in local elections. In such systems there is no visible party structure; candidates presumably select themselves with the assistance and urging of friends. 'mle operating result of such systems can usually be described as "crypto-caucus" or "crypto-party" control. That is to say, party functions are fulfilled by self-selected groups acting below the level of public visibility. The difficulty with such a system, by democratic standards, is that it provides neither continuity nor responsibility except on a strictly personal basis. Personality and personal performance are obscure grounds for judgment in a community of any size or complexity.

2. The ad hoc party system. In this category we include those systems in which parties bob up at 24

election times and presumably disappear in the interim periods. Such appearances and disappearances are in fact ordinarily changes in name and other external trappings of a persistent but invisible local political group. From the point of view of democratic standards the problem with this system, like that with the system discussed immediately above, is that it offers little opportunity for the assertion of responsibility or the assurance of continuity as grounds for popular judgment and choice.

3. The caucus. By caucus we mean a system in which a small and formally recognized group in the community arrogates to itself the function of selecting candidates for public office and, on occasion, the function of developing positions on public issues. The caucus differs from the "ad hoc" party system in its permanence, and from the "no-party non-partisanship" system in its formality and public visibility. In most kinds of communities where the caucus is an established mediating institution, its choices are in effect final. There is little social or political capital in opposing the caucus slate. Such opposition is seldom offered and even more seldom successful, leaving the caucus with a monopoly over the leadership recruitment process. The difficulty with the caucus system is that it is not, under these circumstances, a mechanism for popular choice. Choice is made before the balloting process, and the role of the citizen becomes merely that of validator of the decisions of the controlling group.

4. Major party partisanship. In many communities, particularly larger cities, local elections are fought along Republican-Democratic lines, with local parties seeking, by use of party labels, the support of those whose general political position is oriented toward one major national party or the other. This arrangement, historically a prime target of municipal reformers, is attacked on the ground that it confuses issues. The attack proceeds along two lines, 1) that there is "no Republican or Democratic way to build a sewer," and 2) that even if local issues do excite differences and conflict, these differences are irrelevant to whatever it is that divides the two major parties on the state or national level. Thus whether one favors John Kennedy or Richard Nixon for President has little to do with his choice for mayor or village trustee. It may be noted at this point, however, that the major party partisanship does provide structure where there is a reasonable basis for the existence of two and not just one of the major parties in the attachments of the local citizenry. In two-party communities, in other words, and particularly in larger towns where. friendships are unlikely to provide the basis for a party structure, the Republican-Democratic dichotomy as the basis for a structure of choice may have a good deal to be said for it.

5. Local party partisanship. Under this label we refer to situations where two parties, strictly local in nature and without ties to the national political groups, contest for political office visibly and persistently. In respect to the democratic criteria of meaningful choice between real alternatives, this arrangement might appear to be ideal. It affords structure for the political situation without the confusion introduced by the major party system. It must be said, however, that there is serious question whether local parties can sustain themselves in many and perhaps most communities, whether they can elicit the enthusiasm and find the acceptable grounds for conflict which will make them persistent forces on the community scene. Though perhaps this suggestion is unduly pessimistic, in the typical suburban setting the ideal of two local groups fighting it out over local issues for the voters' approval may be little more than a reformer's dream.

These would seem to be the principal choice mechanisms in use in American towns. The answer to the problem of democracy in the suburbs, however, is not as simple as picking the best from a list of models and imposing that form on the local community. Such a procedure smacks a good deal of old-style municipal reform by recipe, but contemporary social science has come to appreciate, as indeed Aristotle appreciated centuries ago, that some things work some times in some places and others don't, that the system that may be congenial to one situation may utterly fail in another. Politics, in other words, is an outgrowth of the society in which it is set, and the nature of the society imposes limits on what can be expected of the political system. What, we might now ask, does the culture of the suburbs permit?

We will treat this question in two parts, first dealing with some general similarities that seem to tie the suburban social structure together as a genus, and then with some differences among suburbs, differences that are perhaps even more important than the similarities. There is, indeed, something rather deceptive in talking about "the suburbs" at all. A passing acquaintance with suburban communities reveals variety as much as it does likeness. Yonkers and Scarsdale, Secaucus and Ho Ho Kus, are socially poles apart, as are Calumet City and Palatine, Dixmoor and Winnetka. Among the ninety-five Cook County, Illinois, suburbs of more than 2,500 population, for example, there are nine with more than 5 per cent non-white residents. Of these nine, the non-white proportion of the median community is 19.1, but three have more than 60 per cent non-whites in their total populations. Nearly all the Cook County suburbs except these nine have infinitesimal proportions of non-whites.

Thus it is difficult to treat the suburbs as a "thing" that can be described. Most suburban societies do, however, display some common social

Fall, 1962

characteristics, of which we will briefly discuss only the four that seem most vital. One of these is a high degree of what many sociologists call "familism." Familism is reflected in a variety of ways - high fertility ratios, large numbers of children, living accommodations designed for the common convenience of the family unit and particularly for the pleasure of children, community activities that are child-centered in nature, and a tendency for these activities to be in fact womandirected.

A second suburban characteristic is mobilitymobility in a geographic sense. Even old and settled suburbs in the Chicago area experience yearly mobility indices as high as fifteen per cent and more. This mobility is stimulated both by the nature of the suburbanite's job attachment and by his social aspirations. The job attachment factor may be simply the force of the corporation moving personnel from plant to plant, from metropolitan area to metropolitan area, or the movement of professional or managerial or sales types to seek greener fields in some new metropolis. Social mobility ties to geographic mobility as those on the way up move from crackerbox ranch houses to split levels and from split levels to junior estates, usually finding residence farther and farther from the central city in the process.

A third characteristic of suburbs is social homogeneity. Suburban communities tend to segregate on a variety of social characteristics. Particularly, new suburbs tend to draw together people of similar economic means and standards and aspirations. Perhaps the most striking form of segregation achieved in the suburbs is ethnic, the extent of which is suggested by the statistics on the Chicago area cited above. But this is only the most dramatic of the variety of social dimensions, including social and economic level, on which suburban populations tend to fall into segregational patterns.

A fourth social characteristic of suburbanites we might call divided loyalty. This is a function in part of the mobility of the suburban population of which we spoke above. Few suburban residents have roots in what are presumably their own communities. Many are recent comers to the metropolitan area, and many even to the state and region. The occupational career and family pattern of the suburbanite may before he is thirty have cut his ties to any community to which he might feel able to belong in a real and traditional sense. The old home town, the college site, the wife's home town, the cities of the first and perhaps the second and third jobs - all of these are communities of which the suburbanite was once a part but to which he no longer truly belongs except perhaps in spirit. Small wonder if he feels tentative the ties with the community in which he now happens to reside. There are other dimensions, too, to the matter of divided loyalty, for

in the average case loyalty will be torn between place of residence and workplace in the central city or in another suburb, as it will also be torn between the community of the home and the "community," i.e., the network of interactions, of the corporation or perhaps the profession to which the suburbanite belongs and with which his ties may be older and more persistent. Even recreational "communities" often reach across city and village limits.

All of these factors and more are reflected in the political situation characteristic of the suburban area. On the one hand, the political attitudes of suburbanites toward the local community would seem to be summed up in a demand for high services, a willingness to pay for them, and a desire for a high degree of personal political participation and control. Part of the suburbanite's impetus to move to the suburban area, it has been suggested, lies in his urge to recreate the small town, to restore the frontier situation where politics could be handled in face-to-face interaction and community consent was an active thing. Some of the social characteristics of the suburb would seem conducive to the realization of these goals; particularly community homogeneity and to an extent familism provide grounds on which a politics of popular consensus and personal control might work.

But on the other hand, some aspects of the suburban social situation pull in a contrary direction and probably in the long run have the better of it. These pulls away from real local political control might be described as distractions - distractions from adequate commitment to the local community. The factor of geographic mobility, the factor of upward social aspiration, the functional ties to workplace and corporation and professional group obscure the importance of local participation and limit its practicability. The occupational life-style of the commuting suburban male often renders a high rate of local political participation impossible. Furthermore, the political basis of the most crucial (and expensive) of all local governmental services, the provision of education for the young, whose importance the familistic culture of the suburbs maximizes, is usually separated from the political basis of local community life. Thus, the school district and its political affairs, legally separated from the local municipality for good or ill reasons, becomes in itself a distraction from municipal politics and perhaps even the basis Of a substitute local polity. In many localities school affairs provide the only real occasions for civic action and political excitement.

A fairly common result of the interaction of this complex of forces would seem to be a high degree of reliance in suburban communities on what might be called "technical authority," usually embodied in the person of a city or village

manager. The manager, formally the employee of the citizens of the community, is permitted and even forced to take upon himself the active functions of the local government. He is expected to handle problems and settle disputes with a minimum of trouble to the citizenry of the area. In this fashion, the form of popular control is preserved while the substance of control is radically revised.

In sum, the political situation of the suburb is likely to be the victim of the suburban resident's own split personality. High demands on government and good intentions for democracy must battle the many forces, physical, social, economic, and personal, that inhibit the suburbanite's full commitment to his community. In part this condition is a particular instance of the contemporary American's disinterest in political affairs. Much more than apathy is involved, however, for the suburban citizen's expectations of his local government are high and his fundamental ideology tells him he should participate substantially. Circumstances stand between him and fulfillment of this latter element of his social needs and drives. As a result, decision-making in the suburban community is likely to rest with paid employees and choice to be handled by a mediating mechanism with the appearance but not the real qualities of democracy. These are the political time-savers and conscience-preservers of suburban life.

As we pointed out above, there are substantial and significant variations on the suburban theme. Even given the fairly common characteristics of suburban political life discussed in preceding paragraphs, some attention in our evaluation of democracy in the suburbs must be given to differences among suburbs that make a difference in politics. Since it is impossible to treat the infinite varieties of suburban political systems in comprehensive fashion, we will attempt here only to describe the central political characteristics of three mythical but typical suburban towns.

The first of these we will call Status View. Status View is a newer suburb, likely to be further from the central city than the types described below, set on what was forest or open country a few years back, or imposed on a country town it has probably overwhelmed. Socially, its residents are characterized by high mobility, unfulfilled aspirations, and more and younger children. The community itself has more development problems, the problems of streets and sidewalks and curbs and sewers, the problems of water supply and overcrowded schools, the problems of zoning and an inadequate-because-non-industrial tax base. In Status View there are more visible grounds for political conflict than in other suburbs and probably less general fear of it. Politics may be seen by some in Status View as a game and

sometimes even as a springboard to participation in politics on other levels of government. Typically, Status View will utilize a local-party or majorparty framework for political choice, though in some of its counterparts a no-party or ad hoc system will be found in operation. If the town has "matured" to the point where a manager is employed, the manager will be allowed less latitude here for decision and initiative than elsewhere. His role will be more nearly that of the classical model- the technical employee. In general terms the political problem of Status View is to maintain sufficient community continuity to develop the consensual framework for the solution of problems. The difficulty of continuity arises out of the frantic life-style of its residents and the high population turnover of the community.

A second type of suburb might be called Higher Station, a community characterized by high integration and high homogeneity. Higher Station, an older suburb, is the place of residence of those who "have it made" or can afford to pretend they do, and it is often the goal of those who are on their way up. In Higher Station the small town syndrome has reached its schizophrenic peak. Its residents do not seek the small town, they believe they have attained it. They dislike conflict, fear its implications, and resent its disruptions. Above all. else they desire to sustain the town in its pristine character. Politics they regard as a duty without social rewards. Higher Station's characteristic political manifestations are the caucus or the crypto-caucus, which keeps government conflict-free and under control, and a very high degree of devolution of functions to the technical authority, who is as secure in his job as his ability to contain or suppress conflict within the community can make him.

A third suburb we will call Precipitous Heights. Precipitous Heights is the fringe community, usually with a glorious past but with a present and future much less certain. Precipitous Heights, an old suburb lying near the borders of the central city, is suffering urbanization problems, physical deterioration, and heterogenization of population. In political style it usually looks back to its old situation, to the time when its politics were gentlemanly and without conflict. Perhaps the shell of the old political structure remains, but its relevance to the social character of the community is gone or fast disappearing. As the problems of change press on the community, it must undergo traumatic adjustment to new needs and demands. It experiences conflicts, perhaps over zoning violations or police scandals, perhaps over social disadjustments rooted in ethnic and religious changes. As a result of its reaching for the past, Precipitous Heights is likely to try to sweep its conflicts under the rug and attempt to live life as it has always been lived, even when such life is clearly obsolete. The grip of the caucus

Fall, 1962

is likely to loosen and major party partisanship, perhaps even the grasping tentacles of central city machine, may take its place. Or, the political structure of the community may seem to dissolve away before the eyes and real control fall into the hands of a covert structure operating beneath the social surface. This is the suburban situation in which the role and stability of the technical authority is most likely to be in question, as the number of groups in the community increases and the manager finds it increasingly difficult to play the game of all of them. This fact in itself creates further instability in an already tentative social situation.

Beneath this account may seem to lie a deterministic view of suburban politics. It may seem that we have been describing here an inexorable evolutionary process. But such an interpretation misses the point. Deterioration can be forestalled and democratic political form achieved. The point, however, is that this can be done only in the face of obstacles like those detailed above, of which three merit reemphasis. One of these is the adverse effects on suburban politics of what we might call disinvolvernent. Disinvolvement is often identified as apathy, but apathy is only a part of the story. The politics of the suburban area suffers disinvolvement not only because citizens are apathetic, but also because they are the subjects of numerous social distractions and real social fears. Secondly, suburban politics often suffers from a deep-rooted fear of conflict. It often seems easy to pretend that disputes cannot exist and to provide structures for their concealment, though such courses of action do nothing to keep the objective situation in repair. But fear of conflict does stifle much of what might be done to create a system where real alternatives may be offered and real choices made. Thirdly, democracy in suburban politics may suffer from over-reliance on technical authority. There are, to be sure, situations where technical authority is effective and even situations where it is necessary. But to rely on technical authority to perform the basic functions of government is to abdicate popular control. Furthermore, it mixes into the local problem-solving process the needs, personal and professional, of the local bureaucracy. These needs are human and some of their effects are unavoidable, but they do little to rationalize citizen control of the political system.

Such factors as these, rooted in ideology and social situation, tend to inhibit the development of democracy in the suburbs. Even where service levels are high and satisfaction is general, the democratic condition of popular choice is stultified. Thus by the test of abstract standards, democracy in the suburbs is often to be found wanting.

In turn, the situation of suburban government doubtless has an impact on the readiness of the community and the individual to accept responsi-

bilities of various sorts. On one level these may be the responsibilities of the local political structure itself to respond and adjust to new needs. The recognition of growing groups, the institution of new services, the general function of planning may be ignored or put off by an unresponsive polity. On another level they may be responsibilities in the broader arena of the metropolitan area. Though the chief political characteristic of today's metropolitan areas is fragmentation, most of their social problems must in the middle run have area-wide impact. One of the most difficult matters for the suburbanite is realization of his stake in the welfare of the entire metropolis. Without the stimulus of local political vigor, it is doubtful that suburban communities will often contribute their share of the initiative, leadership,

POEMS by RAY RIPTON

and support that the solution of these problems requires. While in general metropolitan pluralism has much to be said for it, the frictions and disadjustments caused by the failure to meet certain specific problems head-on will impose burdens on the entire urban community.

Finally, the suburbs have responsibilities for the development of political interest and talent. Suburban residents must offer themselves and prepare their children for political service to the entire American society as well as to the local community, or they must expect to surrender leadership to more politically vigorous social groups. A major link in the development of the suburbs' political responsibility to the whole society may well lie in the vitalization of political democracy in the suburban community itself.

Ray Ripton, L.A. '58, is an ex-Marine, who formerly was Director of Public Relations at Yankton College, Yankton, South Dakota. He has published some of his poems in Pasque Petals, South Dakota state poetry journal, and is now beginning work upon a novel. After his graduation he worked for a year with Northwestern's Office of Information Services. Currently he is studying for his Master's Degree in Journalism at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Compartmental

To know the picture-not the painter,

To discern the perfume-not its wearer,

To hear a ship's horn-not its passengers, This the price we pay for compartments of self-concern.

FOR HOLLY

May Holly's world be fresh and bright And hold no might-have-been.

Mayall her candles last the night, Her hopes stay evergreen.

JOY

Hot, moist forehead, Pain and sudden tears, But then. a child is born.

WINTER'S TALE

Crisp snow, A wisp of smoke Trails through a rose-blue sky. It moves me. yet I always get Wet feet.

SAILING

By a frozen lake

A boat waits, a tall sail sags. Summer frees them soon.

LEGACY

Three things I leave to you

After my heart is dust: Some stocks and bonds, the house in town, Much love.

COLD SPELL

Cold is my heart, Cold my brain, Cold my spirit. I cannot explain.

Full blows the wind; My sails do not fly. Fresh falls the rain; My thoughts are dry.

Colder than zero to a small child's touch Is my grasp on life. Perhaps I ask too much.

Cold is my heart, Cold my brain, Cold my spirit. I cannot explain.

on the Czech Border

BecauseBy Shirley (Stuckert) Zoeger

Shirley Stuckert, now Mrs. John E. loeger, was born in Milwaukee and attended the University of Wisconsin, transferring to Northwestern's School of Journalism, where she received her B.S. in 1946. She was a member of Theta Sigma Phi, honorary professional society in journalism. Variously as society editor, photographer, feature writer, and reporter, she worked on newspapers in Texas City, Mexico City, and Milwaukee. For a time she taught at the Santa Monica (California) High School, and attended graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her husband is a zoologist. Their home is presently in Woodland Hills, California.

The incident described in the story below occurred the day after the Youth Festival in Vienna ended, in August, 1959. Mrs. loeger writes concerning it, "l was doing free lance photography in Europe at the time and managed to come away with several 'verboten' pictures of the border barricades, despite the chase by the :Czechy.'"

she was late for the excursion Katherine hurried across the Neuer Markt, circling the gently spraying fountain of the Donnerbrunnen and thinking in enchantment that Vienna was the glittering jewel on the last finger of freedom pointing into that other world, that Central European way of life now stretching into surrounding Poland and Czechoslovakia and Rumania and Hungary and, beyond, over all the Russias toward the East She was thoroughly enjoying the indulgence of romantic observations, since she was quite young, in Europe for the first time, and only the night before had witnessed a rather overwhelming culmination of the seventh Weltjugendfest in the Rathausplatz.

But there was something in Vienna, something effervescent and buoyant, so different from the heavy Germanic strain she had expected to find, some infusion of Turk and Slav and Magyar that magnetized her. Yet about what it was she hadn't time to ponder, for there were Holden and Richard standing before the Europa, waiting with martyr-like impatience, leaning their dacron-covered thighs a bit guiltily against the dusty fender of a Simca.

"Oh, you have it!" Katherine cried. "We're going?"

"Of course," Holden answered peevishly. "We said we'd leave at noon."

"But how did you get it?" Katherine patted the hood of the car. "We couldn't find one for three days with all this Youth Festival activity going on, and I do want to drive down there to

see if it's true, whether there is an Iron Curtain. You're quite a wonder to have done it. And I'm awfully pleased we ran into each other like that a t the Sacher." She spoke excitedly, still surprised at encountering in Vienna two tablemates from the ocean crossing a month ago.

"It's only for the half-day." Richard's mouth pursed with prim precision. He was a short and compact youth, bespectacled and somewhat pale of eye and skin. "There was this cancellation at the agency."

"And we've yet to get the route straight," Holden muttered, shifting long, loosely-jointed limbs. His large blue eyes protruded slightly beneath blond eyebrows in a face quite cherubic.

"Where were you, anyway?"

"I told you I'd be on the Kahlenburg tour this morning, and after we came back we grabbed a bite in the Opernpassage. There were three terribly dark men there, Iraqis it turned out, and one wore a bright red tie with someone's picture on it. Aunt Alice had a fit when I asked who it was, and it was Kessem. They were furious when I guessed Tito at first."

"Where is your aunt?"

"Just freshening up at the Bristol." Katherine 'gave a little gasp. "Oh, I rushed so! And we're awfully happy you'll drive us down. Aunt Alice thinks it silly and that there'll be only a fence to see, but I do so want to go." Her tawny hair, clipped closely around a head held high, ruffled almost imperceptibly in a sudden warm wind; she smoothed it with a whisk of a freckled hand while getting into the car.

Holden drove around the fountain, passing the crypt of the Capuchin monks. "Oh, it is a splendid city, isn't it?" Katherine insisted, craning to view again the small medieval chapel. "It's where all the Hapsburgs are buried, you know. All of that glory, all gone now!" The boys did not reply; they stared ahead as the crowded Karntnerstrasse came under the wheels. "There, you can see the Bristol to the left, just across from the Staatsoper." To herself she said it again, Staatsoper, a trifle smug at so casually incorporating the German.

She had come to attend the university for a year's study of Germanic language and literature, to be watched over by her father's sister Alice, a sort of watered-down Auntie Mame who still suffered acutely from the defection of her only daughter, now a novitiate in a Roman convent. Travel with mother - a henna-haired divorcee who after the war had waited voraciously for the first passenger ships to resume an Atlantic run, so eager was she to disperse the generous alimony acquired from a suddenly wealthy manufacturer of dried milk products - was not what the shy child needed. She missed her father, solidarity, a stable home on a suburban street. The Dorchester in London or the Grand in Paris,

the life of the boulevards and the pilgrimages to the great repositories of art were meaningless to the lonely girl. After completing the last year at her Swiss school she announced to Alice in Rome (where they were sojourning before settling in Austria) that she intended to enter a convent. After months of fruitless pleading with her child, Alice resigned herself to ingratitude. After all she had done for the girl! Sparing her the middle-class horror of American adolescence, such as had befallen her brother's child, Katherine. Ah, Katherine! A slender, bright imp, as she recalled, with a thick tuft of reddish-brown hair and eyes almost cobalt in color. There was a girl who undoubtedly would revel in the Continental climate.

"And it is a pleasure to see dear little Katherine enjoying herself so tremendously," avowed Aunt Alice to the American boys after introductions in the hotel lobby. "But it's a terrible pity my car is being - 'loobed' - isn't that your word for it? Franz simply wouldn't hear of its going another day; he is the most dedicated chauffeur. Anyway, it's nice of you boys to drive us to the country. I want my niece to do everything she desires and to see all things possible before classes start. You know, I really believe she'll work at the university here, since. The three young people, nodding and assenting with ill-restrained eagerness, convoyed the garrulous chaperon to the diminutive automobile. "Oh, dear," grunted Alice, bending almost double and backing herself into the rear seat where she was forced to crush a bouffant green-and-blue floral print into her allotted corner.

"You ought to have the drip-dry things I brought from home," suggested Katherine, uncomfortably wedged as far as possible from the billowing skirt, thinking that, replete with brooch and earrings, her aunt was dressed as for the approaching opening of the opera.

"Oh, I don't expect this excursion to last long! My dear, what do you think you'll see down there? You tourists' are so amusing about this thing. When you live with it at your doorstep, well, it's nothing, it's simply nothing." She fingered a disarranged side curl before adding, "I thought you all might like a nice Wiener Schnitzel when we get back, and then I can take you up to Grinzing to one of those dear little Heurige places. You know, where the green boughs dangle over the doors to announce the new wine? Well, I thought

"Hand me the map, Rick," ordered Holden, at the wheel. In some silence they proceeded southeast through rather grey suburbs until Alice remembered that Schonbrunn Palace was out this way. She started to describe the collection of golden state carriages there, but Richard interrupted to say they'd been there on a city tour and no coaches were to be seen.

"Oh," replied Alice. "Of course, you don't have long and you have to do things the tourist way. It's too bad. We could have driven to Mayerling today instead, but this child, this adventuresome child is determined that at the border.

"Have you ever met any Communists, Mrs. Canfield?" asked Richard, turning his neat little head to peer with intense innocence at the older woman.

Momentarily, she was arrested. Then, "Do I know any, you mean?" He nodded politely. "I have no idea. Why, I mayor I may not. Vienna is full of them, so's all Europe. We don't fuss over them here the way you Americans do. Right now the city is brimming with 17,000 young ones, I hear. I don't see that it matters. They're going their way, and they don't give much trouble that I can see. And if you're expecting anything at the border, well you might see some sleepy sentries or bored boys, that's' all." She took a moist cleansing pad from her handbag, dabbing on nose and forehead, although the group had been en route only a few minutes and the day was without dust or oppressive heat.

A warm grey sky through which the white and hesitant sun made brief sorties arched over unspectacular countryside. Little wonder the Danube wasn't blue, Katherine thought, if it reflected only a leaden dullness. She turned from the conversation of her companions to watch a peasant load his wooden wagon with dry yellow straw. Entire families were out working huge bundles into homemade carts that rumbled after complacent oxen. In the villages along the way large flocks of geese waddled and honked as the passage of the car disturbed their foraging. Old women sat fat and immobile, like kerchiefed grey mushrooms, in the stone-surrounded Platz at Hainburg. The quiet fields and dun-colored clusters of human habitation, drab now even in the fullness of summer what must they be like in winter, Katherine wondered, when the snow swept out of the Arctic

"But I thought it was terrible," insisted Richard, with as much vehemence as he had yet displayed about anything, "the way the Americans fought at the festival, with the Chicago antiCommies and the New York pros actually beating each other in the streets. We should have shown a united front."

Holden coughed, nodding; his Adam's apple slipped up and down rather fascinatingly as he drawled, with slow-blinking eyes meeting Katherine's in the rear-view mirror, "The program last night at the Rathausplatz was disgusting, we thought. Did you go?"

"She did," grumbled Alice, "thereby missing a perfectly delightful organ recital at St. Stephen's.

Defensively Katherine exclaimed, "Oh, but I thought it rather amazing. After all, it was the

Fall, 1962

first time on the free side, and they were all so =cohesive. Didn't you feel it, that tremendous I'(>(>J ing sweeping through them all?"

"It was only on their side of the rope," Holden said, settling it.

"Yes, it was awful where we were," agreed Richard, "with the Austrians sweating and shoving and old women fainting. They'd all just come to watch a curiosity, we thought."

But Katherine, who had been atop the wobbly West German press platform with a RadioFree-Europe friend of Alice's, could not agree. Swaying aboard the frail wooden structure in the ocean of youth, she imagined what the Pope felt when he appeared in the Piazza San Pietro. What an evening it had been, against a flag-of-allnations backdrop with the World Youth Banner a blue globe surrounded by five petals in five colors on a field of white! And the exuberance, as Rumanians capered in a twirling scarf dance; Czechs swirled in a vast circular polka; the VietNamese delegation marched in with coolie-hatted heads lowered and flowering cherry branches held aloft; husky East German tumblers in baggy blue sweat suits leapt around the very base of the platform. Everywhere black, yellow, brown, white faces, Senegalese and Siamese, Austrian and American, Italian and Iranian, mingling, kissing, sporting, singing, laughing. Hundreds of balloons in great grapelike bunches were loosed into the warm air, floating over the old towers of the Rathaus, and gigantic sparklers like corkscrews burned slowly in the hands of the crowd. On stage the Chinese darted nimbly in a fantastic fire dance, waving serpentine red scarves; and then the speeches, the bands playing, the flags furling

"I thought it was rather a spectacle to see," Katherine said aloud. "It's something we ought to see and recognize, I mean."

"Too bad you arrived so recently," smirked Holden. "You'd have seen something, all right."

"Yes, you'd have seen something," parroted Richard.

"Well, what? What?" demanded Alice.

"We mean the Austrian anti-Communist group. They fought the festival all the way."

"Oh, they would," snapped Alice, still smarting over her daughter's decision. "They're mainly Catholic, aren't they?"

"I've no idea," drawled Holden, "but. He swerved to avoid four geese at the roadside. "You tell them, Rick."

"They simply ran free busses down to the Iron Curtain for anyone to see. Every hour, free rides forty miles east, because the barbed wire had been torn down for one kilometre, and they - the Communists, I mean - brought all their young people through from the East and said, 'See, there is no Iron Curtain.''' Richard licked his lips, breathing audibly. "So the Austrians drove

down anyone who wanted to see where the barricades began again."

"Well, now, children," Alice advised. "Countries must have borders, and what they do with them well!" She flipped her slender hand lightly, seeming to imply that boundaries didn't matter unless they separated her from something she wanted.

"Were you in Vienna after the Hungarian uprising, Mrs. Canfield?" Richard asked.

"No, we still lived in Lausanne then, where my daughter was in school, but I can tell you

"1 think we're coming to the end of the trail," interrupted Holden in a monotone. "If it's Kittsee, this is it. Check the upcoming sign, Rick."

"Kittsee," nodded Richard as the little car scooted around a curve past low, dirty-white dwellings. All the town's geese appeared to be enclosed in a sort of cooperative wallow in one corner of the settlement. A single railroad track like a spur into nowhere ended on the far side of the village. Two other small cars, a Volkswagen and a Renault, had stopped alongside, with what apparently were Americans hovering nearby, pointing cameras at a sign which announced in red and white lettering, "Achtung! Staatsgrenze.

"Someone else wants to see, too," whispered Katherine.

Aunt Alice settled back to become immobile when Holden turned off the ignition. "The Department of Tourism obviously is missing a bonanza here. There really ought to be luxury hotels and souvenir shops and observation towers," she chided, raising one speculative eyebrow. She refused to budge, and her niece had to crawl over her rigid legs as Holden opened the door.

The three young people approached the other visitors, and one of them, a blue-jacketed fellow who might have sold insurance in Oklahoma, grinned amiably. "Looking for adventure, aye? It's dull here, boys, but go on south there to Andau. They pulled guns on us at Andau just a few hours. ago." He ducked to look into the Renault, "Didn't they, honey?"

Katherine glanced past the warning sign. On each side of the road six dusty little red and white Austrian flags fluttered at intervals up to a cement post marked with a zero. Far down the frost-broken and grass-grown thoroughfare into no-man's-land there arose a yellow wooden barricade, a staunch blockade behind which great black logs were piled. A youth on a bicycle suddenly braked beside the tourists and panted in German that the "Czechy" had shot some British and American persons the day before. "Oh, surely not shot them!" cried Katherine.

"1 think he meant held a gun to them. Stick 'em up?" Holden questioned, posturing his hand in a cops-and-robbers gesture.

"Ja, ja!" nodded the boy, pointing toward the border.

"But there isn't a soul visible." Richard stared accusingly, frowning at the uncomprehending child who with the foreigners gazed across quiet fields until their eyes, almost simultaneously, sighted a distant watchtower.

"Is that a water tank or is it actually Holden hoisted a small slate-covered movie camera.

"Ja, ja!" cried the Austrian boy, vindicated.

"From which they light the fields at night?" whispered Katherine.

"Probably," answered Richard. "A lot still try crossing over, they say."

Aunt Alice's trim head bobbed through a car window. "Whatever is keeping you so long in this sepulchral place? The country is always so deadly dull."

"Damn," muttered Holden, bending his long thin neck to peer at the tripper of his camera. 'It's jammed, 1 think, just when 1 want it most."

"Let's go," said Richard, beginning to move. "It's quiet, but you can't tell, down by the clump of trees near the fence there might

"You drive, then," Holden ordered his friend," while 1 fiddle with this blasted thing."

"Where to? Vienna?"

"Oh, we're not going yet?" Katherine whimpered.

"Toward that tower," decided Holden. "I'd like a close-up, now that we're this far, if this thing gets to working."

"Let's go," called Alice. "I'll be permanently jack-knifed.

Richard drove left along a narrow dirt road leading to the northern edge of the village. "Up to the border sign," urged Holden. "Just this side of the flags."

"What's this?" demanded Alice. "What's this?" She delved into her bag for another cleansing pad.

"Oh, do get out this time," begged Katherine.

"I'll have to stretch if I'm ever to function normally again." Alice crawled out slowly, braced herself on plastic-heeled shoes, slender legs slightly astride in the dust, toes pointed out as though she were aboard a ship about to enter a sea rated at seven. Off to the right a hefty peasant woman left her raking to view the startling blue and green apparition. The object of local scrutiny, head lowered as she flicked some foreign elements from her shoulders and fluffed out her skirt, asked Katherine, "Did you know we're both part Czechoslovakian? 1 expect quite a royal welcome here! Long ago my grandmotheryour great-grandmother, of course - came across this very border, for all we know, on her way to America, and even had her first baby in Vienna, although they say it was stillborn She raised her head to survey the area and abrupt-

ly stopped speaking. Katherine turned to look at her, waiting to hear further family history. Alice's lips had parted slightly, her head shook slowly from side to side. She was uncommonly silont so long that Katherine asked whether or not she were ill.

"No, no, but it's quite incredible," the aunt answered at last. "Quite unbelievable."

"What is?"

"Why, the way it looks, as if But how it looked she did not say.

Katherine turned from the unusual sight of her aunt's somewhat astounded face to see that the road before them ended in a gully of muddy ruts running up to a yellow barricade perhaps half a metre distant. Thick-branched trees lined each side of the abandoned lane; peasants worked in small groups, scattered across the surrounding grain fields, stacking their wagons. Far across what one knew must be the Danube there loomed in the summer haze a castle-like building in old Bratislava. A somnolent stillness hummed in the ears like heat-hungry gnats.

Richard lifted a still camera to photograph the watchtower that arose nearby, a metallicroofed wooden cylinder on four high, connected stilts. Curious Holden, giving up on his movie film, began to amble down the road toward the slatted wooden fence. A sudden muted drone curved into earshot, and Katherine, still puzzled by the soft reverie overspreading her aunt's features, was glad to joke, "Here comes the armored patrol!"

Up ahead Holden stopped, pointing. Behind the closely-boarded barricade there was murky movement. Then through a narrow aperture in the fence, like the lunging bull breaking from blackness into a blinding arena, there sped six brownuniformed soldiers, sprinting in silence, one of them waving a tommy-gun and two others holding huge straining hounds as they bore down upon the Americans momentarily immobilized by incredulity. With heads bent and knees pumping, the Czechs rapidly approached the zero marker.

"My God!" gasped Richard, his head wagging jerkily as Holden, now tearing toward the getaway vehicle, shouted, "Start the car!" Katherine had to tug at a stupefied aunt who teetered sideways into a low ditch before clutching for the door. Within seconds the Simca, dragging weeds and grass from its hastily-slammed doors, found refuge for its four flustered occupants well across the Austrian line.

"But wait," panted Katherine, her heart thumping and her limbs quite flabby, "but stop a moment! They might have only wanted to scare us, they may only be bored boys

"I'm going on," said Richard tightly.

"No, stop." Holden's face for the first time held high color, animation glinted in his formerly sleepy eyes. "We're safe this side, let's have a

Fall, 1962

check." Out he went to wander back, the others silent in the car, watching his search in the surprisingly quiet, now empty lane. A wagon loaded high with straw turned into the old road toward him. The stocky farmer on the front seat covered his sunburned lips with one finger, pointed down into the ditch with his rein-holding hand. Protected from view by the wagonload, he warned of the hiding Czechs.

Holden turned back at once. "I'd say you're about ready for your military service," Richard told him, starting the car.

"But did they mean it?" Katherine asked nervously, leaning her arms on the top of the front seat, her head almost between Holden and Richard. "I mean, what if

"They meant it all right."

"They were waiting there in that ditch for me, just waiting." Holden couldn't get over it. "Waiting.

"Boy, I'd like to send one of those gullible kids from the festival last night, you know? One of those, send him down that lane, unknowing and unknown," Richard nodded, "send him down that lane."

"They didn't say a word," Holden brooded. "Not a bit of warning, not a sign."

"But why?" croaked a weeping voice. "Why would they run at us like that? What are they breeding behind that fence?" Aunt Alice huddled in her corner, one earring gone, her cheeks stained with little rivulets of mascara-laden tears. Katherine noticed that some burrs still stuck to her pale blue hose. "It was so lovely there," the older woman whined dreamily, "it was just like at home, like the lane in Wisconsin where Frank used to drive the herd when we were young, and Janie used to run to meet him at milking time.

No one spoke. Katherine looked away, silent. She wanted to say something, to touch Alice's hand, but it was an invasion of privacy, almost, an interruption of a confessional, and instead she looked out at the rolling fields stretching ahead to Vienna, to music and freedom of life as she knew it, wondering about the waiting presence behind her, crouching like an immense intensity over half the earth.

Waiting.

NOBLER

in the

MIND

By Carolyn Burrows

If you take a light bulb and smear it with wallpaper paste and then wrap strips of newspaper around it and keep wrapping and pasting and shaping, you can make a puppet. That's what Farley had been doing every night for about three weeks now. He had each puppet head resting in an empty barley soup can. The cans filled both window sills in the kitchen, the top of the stove back, and the latest ones were lined up in big semicircles on the other half of the round oak table where he worked. Farley worked carefully over a hundred watt bulb, building up a large nose with an exaggerated crook, and then he added one cauliflower ear. That head was formed on the last light bulb, so when it was finished, he gathered the newspaper strips into one pile, put them under the sink, washed the left-over paste down the drain, and put the coffee can on top of the cupboard.

It was then about midnight. It was always about that time when the best part of the evening finally started. His head had grazed the lone light bulb over the sink when he put the paste can up, and the light was swinging back and forth, the metal chain clanking against the bulb. The shadows of the puppet heads on the round table stretched out long onto the floor, then short, then back long onto the table. Farley stood looking at the elastic shadows, and when they stopped growing and shrinking, he gave the bulb another quick tap so the chain rattled more, and the shadows grew even longer before they grew shorter.

The paints were lined up on the crusty linoleum counter top. Farley transferred several bottles of the tempera to the table and got the brushes out of the silverware drawer. He took all the heads from the window sills - they were dry enough to paint now - and placed them in straight rows in front of the half-circle ranks of younger

heads. The heads were first painted over with a flesh color, either pale pink or a deep, almost brown buff. He painted ten light heads and then ten dark ones. By the time the last dark head was painted, the first light one was ready for features. He breathed heavily, leaning over the bulb, working hard at making his bent and calloused fingers remain steady enough for the delicate work. He painted red hair over the top and around two thirds of the head, red hair ending in two large turned-up curls covering the ears that this puppet didn't have, then side bangs over the round forehead and a straight bob in back. The hair style was pasted down, without fluff or any hairs out of place, like a flapper hair-do. The idea struck him so he painted a narrow turquoise headband on the forehead, connecting the bangs with the side hair. He added black hairline eyebrows, kewpie-doll blue eyes, curled-up

Carolyn Burrows, who comes from Warren, Illinois, is a senior in the College of Liberal Arts, majoring in English. She plans to continue her studies in graduate school. Summers she has had a diversity of jobs, including playing the Rute in a symphony orchestra at Estes Park, Colorado. At Nort�western she is Co-Chairman of the Committee on Speakers for the coming season's Symposium.

and curled-down eyelashes, a beauty mark, and some faint rouge. She only needed a mouth. Farley didn't paint the mouth next, that would come later. Instead he rinsed the small eyebrow brush and dipped it in the bottle of green and then quickly in the brown. Starting up near the eye without the beauty spot he painted a brown-green scar, jagged and uneven, running through the flushed cheek down across the delicately built-up chin and stopping at last at the metal threads of the bulb. He rinsed the brush again, dipped it into the black, and painted black stitch marks of unremoved stitches crossing the scar crookedly, spread now close now far. He put some flecks of bright red between a few of the narrow stitches, then he held the bulb by the base at arm's length and looked at it. The suture thread needed a knot at the end. When that was painted in, he put the now hideous flapper girl, still without a mouth. back in the soup can.

The rest of the heads were done with the same tireless care and precision. One had no nose, only a grey-red shape of color between the eyes. One dark-flesh puppet had no hair at ali, and snake tattoos snarled on the baldness. Another had one eye deep brown with a fleck of white attempting to be a twinkle and the other eye larger, pale blue with crooked red lines in the white around the blue. Some of the heads had been shaped with large moles and warts, bulbous noses, knots on foreheads; one had a huge goiter almost as large as the head itself. The last head of the twenty was a light one, with proportioned symmetrical features. It became the head of a young girl, probably high school age. Farley put a smart green hair-bow in the side wave of her blonde hair. She was pretty. Then he covered her face and neck with red and purple pimples, pimples on her nose and even her ear lobes, only clear skin where the mouth would go. All twenty heads were still without mouths.

Farley got up from the table and stretched, giving the light bulb another tap. He rolled down the dirty flannel shirt sleeves over his hairy arms and opened and closed the bent fingers with paint in the cracks of the hard places and under the broken nails. He rubbed the whiskers which seemed to have grown much since supper, enjoyed their roughness, and left some wet paint from his hand among them. A few grey hairs were stuck in the sweat on his forehead. As he brushed them back he left paint there too.

The refrigerator was years old or it would also have been covered with canned puppet heads, but the round rumbling electric unit on the top ruined its storage possibilities. He pulled the handle of the roll latch and took a bottle of beer from the top shelf. He opened it and hit the waste basket across the room with the cap. Farley took big swallows of the beer right from the bottle, some of it foaming through his whiskers, while he walked into the large room of his apartment.

The rug was mostly threads of old red flowers, not nap. All the pieces of furniture were at the edge of the rug, not treading upon it but resting on the wide, dark-stained floor boards, except for a low table in the center of the rug and of the room. Farley had made it from a door, a big wide modern door, flat without grooves, of fine-grained parana pine. He had gotten the door and the modern black iron legs at a lumber yard after a fire sale. After the legs were bolted on and a few coats of shellac applied, it made a large sturdy table and at the same time, its too bold shape and size and angular legs overpowered the frayed sagging furniture and made the whole room ludicrous.

Farley hadn't made the table to improve the interior of his apartment. The door was for just one thing. On it, all the finished heads were placed; there they remained. Paired off in rows of

Fall, 1962

two's, marching or walking or just standing in couples, they weren't in soup cans now but resting in wire frames, the kind you use for dying Easter eggs, with the end of the wire jabbed into a thick piece of dry sponge, the foundation for each head to stand on. All of these heads had mouths.

He rearranged a few of the heads on the table, putting an old woman with one eye next to a man with no eyes at all. That left an old man with a misshapen head and a young girl with a moustache. He looked at the two left-overs a moment, then nodded his head slightly and placed the two dose together, looking at each other at the beginning of one of the columns of people.

He swallowed the last inch of beer and walked back into the kitchen where the puppets were. He put the empty bottle under the sink and washed his hands hard with Lava soap. His face smiled, his pink-grey lips not parting but turning up, making the wrinkles around them turn up too, and his eyes did sparkle, not just attempt as the puppet eyes did. The eyebrow brush was rinsed again, carefully and again and again. He poured a mason jar lid half full of the red, then added some white, mixing and adding red or white until the color was a deep rich red-pink, not a barn door red or a toilet paper pink. He tested the color on the newspaper covering the oilcloth. It was right.

Farley flexed his fingers and picked up the flapper girl. He rested the little finger of his brush hand on the table for steadiness and began painting the mouth. He painted all the puppet heads with exactly the same mouth until all twenty people were complete, lined up in front of him, waiting to be paired. All twenty people, misshapen, scarred, deformed, freakish, staring at him, some with only one eye, some without any, but all facing him with the same mouths - delicate smiling happy mouths.

It was almost noon before Jesse Farley got to work the next day. Since he had started making the puppets he'd been staying up later and later so he hardly ever got to work before eleven or twelve. Nobody cared. If Farley didn't show up at his candy stand in the elevated station, about the only person who even noticed was Lillian Hawkes. She sat in the ticket office opposite the counter that Farley stood behind all day. The turnstiles separated Lillian and Farley always, but they didn't talk much anyway because if a candy customer didn't interrupt them, Lillian's bell, which rang every time a green transfer popped out of the metal cage, did.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Farley. I'd say good mornin', but already it ain't mornin' no more. You know that, Jesse? Hell, it's damn near one o'clock, and you're just startin' work?"

"That's right, Lillian. I been workin' late every night at home. Later and later. And anyhow, the candy business ain't no good in the morning anyway."

"Well, I know, but ya oughta let people at least get acquainted to the fact that you're here."

"If I'm here, I'm here. If I'm not, I'm not. It don't make no difference to nobody - hardly. Why else would the Authority be gonna take away my contract? Huh?'"

"Hell, Jesse. They ain't gonna take away your contract. They may close this station, but they ain't gonna just screw you outta here. No, they'll screw us all, all together." The bell clanked twice for two boys in leather jackets. Farley was busy filling up the spaces in the sloping counter with fresh candy bars and gum from the boxes stored underneath and behind him.

"Jesse, I worry 'bout you stayin' out so late every night. You're too old already to be trampin' around that way. Why, if Emma was alive, what would she think?"

"Emma ain't alive, Lillian. That crazy drunk'en driver saw to that, If she was, I wouldn't be doin' it, and I've told you before, I don't go out, I stay home. I work."

"Okay, so you work- but what on earth do you do?"

"I told you that before too - that if you want to know, you have to come over and see it. I can't tell you about it, you have to see it."

"I can't come over, Jesse, you know that. Lobo would strike me dead - and you too. Or else bust you up so bad you couldn't work at all."

"I been busted up before. Do you know why I work here? Cause I got a stiff knee and I can't get around on scaffolds no more. But do you know how I got that stiff knee?"

"No," said Lillian. The bell rang three more times.

"Mister, how much is Hershey bars with amods? Is it ten cents?" A small boy with metalrimmed glasses and a thickly running nose stretched to hold his dime up to the counter.

"Hershey'S with almonds cost twelve cents," said Farley, not accepting the dime.

"Ya got any with peanuts instead of amods, Mister? I only got a dime."

"Yah, I got one left. They don't make 'em much with peanuts nomore, but I got one here, and you can have it for a dime."

"Thanks, thanks a lot. I only got a dime, and I like peanuts better than amods anyhow."

Farley looked hard into that small face, noting the eyes and the freckles as well as the glasses and dripping nose. As soon as the little boy was gone, Lillian, enjoying this rare openness, returned to the conversation.

"How'd ya hurt your knee, anyhow, Jesse? Ain't it always been like that?"

"No, I was a sign painter, a good one too. You know the murals in the Marboro? And the gold letters on Neeseman's before they got the neon? Well, I painted 'em. Me and Ernie used to always paint on the same rigging. Ernie would never let my work be, he always had to touch up something. I wouldn't of minded, but he never just touched it up, he usually blotched it up. I put up with a lot, a helluva lot. But one day I got really mad, and I sorta hit him. So he gave a shove and I went off the scaffold onto the brick pavement two stories below."

"Oh, God!" The bell joined in the exclamation. "Why weren't you killed?"

"I damn near was. My head got bashed open - that's how I got this scar. And it smashed my knee cap all to pieces. By the time I got out of the hospital my job was taken, and my knee too stiff anyhow. Jobs were scarce then so I took over this stand of Emma's old man's."

"Jesse, you're lucky to even be alive."

"That's what Emma always told me. Now she's dead, and I'm about to lose the stand, and I wonder sometimes. There just ain't a damn thing dependable no more - except the faces."

Lillian missed the last words as the bell clanged again. A short girl in a dark mouton coat much too large picked up the transfer. Her hair was covered by a maroon knit cap which fitted so tightly it almost made her eyes slant. She had lively blue eyes, long black lashes, and a clear pink complexion, except for her left cheek. A red-purple birthmark almost covered that cheek, and extended gnarled tentacles up to her temple, down to her chin like a giant scorpion. The young woman turned and stepped up to Farley's candy counter; her mouth turned up in a quiet, sincere smile, an undaunted smile. Farley's puppet-making smile flashed across his face, pulling his mouth and eye-wrinkles upward.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Farley. How's the candy business today? You haven't sold all of my brand of licorice, have you?"

"Dorothy! Hello! Hello there, how are you? I missed you yesterday. Yes sir, I missed my best licorice customer, and I have a whole new fresh carton just for you. Yes, just for you. But tell me, how do you keep that fine smile, when you eat that awful black stuff all the time?"

"Oh, I don't eat it, Mr. Farley. It's not for me. I take it for the children at the hospital."

"You work at a hospital, Dorothy? I didn't know that. I thought you was in school."

"No, I help out in the physical therapy department at the hospital. We work mostly with crippled children, and I like to reward their progress with licorice. It's not too sweet, you know."

"Is that right? You help cripples, Dorothy? That's, why that's just a damn fine thing. I knew you were a fine, a nice girl, I could tell by your

smile, but I didn't know you was doing such a fine thing too." They smiled at each other with quiet, closed mouths, then Farley reached under the counter, got out the box of licorice, and gave it to Dorothy. "Here, you take thisyou take it all.

"Oh, thank you. Oh thank you so - so very much, Mr. Farley. I - I really appreciate this. We appreciate it."

"You run along now and help those kids."

Farley watched the girl push through the dirty doors and run up the dingy cement steps to the wooden platform. She was gone quickly, but the moments Farley had spent looking at her smile, not at her birth mark, were indelible. The first time she had bought licorice, about a month ago, Farley had been hypnotized by that smile. He tried constantly to recall it, to keep remembering that one thing, dependable - not messy, but overcoming ugliness, turning the grotesque into beauty.

He had known he had to preserve it, but drawing it was not enough, and he was not an artist. Then a walk past a department store window displaying hand-puppets had given him an idea. He had searched through all the puppets, looking for a Dorothy puppet. There were none. Their smiles weren't right, either toothy or clownish; and of course, none of them had birth marks, only clear enameled skin. He had thought then that the mark was the reason the smile was so much better than other smiles. The smile's overpowering of that hideous bug shape made it extra. The clerk had finally showed him a puppet book. Since then, Farley had made Dorothy after Dorothy until she was just right. But Dorothy was alone. She soon had a boyfriend with an even larger red-purple mark. A whole community had followed, a community still growing, still smiling, and kept harmonious yet changing by the Mayor, Jesse Farley.

Lillian brought Farley back from thoughts of his populated table with the ranks of paired smiles.

"Damn, but she's ugly, Jesse. Have you ever seen a more awful mark?"

"Yes, Lillianevery time I shave. She's a fine girl, you hear- We need more girls like her."

"But she's so lonely!"

"We need more girls like her. No, she isn't lonely. Not any more. Because I'm working on it."

"What'd you say? Can't hear over this damn bell.

"Nothing, Lillian. Not a damn thing."

*

Farley made more puppets that night - several more of Dorothy with a variety of young distorted men to exist with her on his door. Beads of sweat filled the hollows of the long, curved scar on his forehead and right temple, and he was happy to

Fall, 1962

return the smiles of the new group of people standing around the empty beer bottle on the table. Farley went to bed tired after the night's work, but when he stood above his fiat, neat community he knew the fatigue was of the same fine kind that he had felt when he painted their bedroom just the blue that Emma had wanted.

His first customer late the next morning was another girl. She wasn't Dorothy, but she was almost a Dorothy - without the birth mark. The same blue eyes always in motion, long eyelashes, dark brown hair, soft fair skin, even the same shape of face, a narrow chin and high cheek bones made her almost a sister. Her coat fitted, a deep green with a velvet collar, and her hat was white fur, not maroon. Farley looked at the girl and squinted. He could not believe that she had that same smile, that she was looking at him, Jesse Farley, with that same smile. The fur-hatted women never smiled at Farley, neither did the men with Borsalinos. Fine clear faces and firm straight bodies always kept their eyes lowered when they bought candy, and they seldom bought twelve cent candy bars. The students who faced Farley behind his counter were in such a continual hurry they tossed change and ran on at once.

This girl, this lovely-faced young woman, was smiling, was actually looking at him and smiling. She even spoke.

"Hello, do - do you have any butterscotch toffee? I've been looking all over for this special kind that's made in England. It's wrapped in silver paper, and I can't find any, anywhere. You have such an assortment, I thought maybe you would carry it. Do you?"

"No. I don't have fancy stuff." Farley leaned forward over the counter and frowned so the scar stood out on the folds of his forehead.

"Oh, oh shoot, I guess they don't make it any more. Well, I'll take six mint patties anyway." The girl smiled again as she handed him the change, and then walked slowly up the smelly cement stairway to get on the northbound train.

He was angry, at her for being Dorothy yet not being Dorothy, angry that she dared to look at him, and that she could possess that smile when she didn't deserve to, when she didn't understand what it meant at all. Lillian's bell rang, and Farley watched the old woman who was trying to get through the turnstile with two shopping bags. She was a broken woman. Grey hair the color of the dirty door frames was stuffed under a coarse hair net, and the elastic holding it in place looked painful on her forehead. Her mouth was set stiffly over false teeth, not turning up. He wondered if it ever had - it deserved to. He imagined pleasant looks were always pulled off her face by rheumatism or bills due or shirts to be ironed or a drinking husband.

But that girl, she had no right. The bell rang, another passenger climbed the stairs, and Far-

ley's thoughts were signaled on, they jumped ahead. He shook his head slowly, and the scar stood out further as he realized what was going to happen. That poor girl, the sweet innocent thing, the horror of what would no doubt happen to her, unless unless. He brought his grimy fist down on the counter, shaking rolls of Lifesavers from their precarious positions. Yes, he had seen her in time. He could save her, just as he had saved Dorothy and all the rest. He could do it tonight.

Lillian usually left work at seven, but an abnormal rush kept her about twenty minutes extra so she couldn't leave until Farley had his candy all locked underneath the counter or covered by the dark roll-top. He and Lillian walked out of the station and down the street together. Lobo was waiting for Lillian in his red Mercury under the tracks. As she said goodby to Farley and told him for God's sake to go to bed early for a change, the girl in the green coat and fur hat came out of the station doors. Lillian saw Farley stare at the girl and then turn and follow her as Lobo drove off.

Farley walked faster until he was right behind her. Then he passed on the street side and turned enough to get a quick but close look at her face, the small nose, short upper lip and pointed chin. He walked on past her and was almost running when he reached the old apartment building. Not stopping for supper, he sat down at the round table and began painting. All the dry heads on the window sills were painted the light flesh color, so he would have plenty to work with, enough for several mistakes until just the right face was painted.

The first two tries he didn't succeed. The third blank head had the small nose. After he covered the top and sides with dark brown curls and carefully mixed the blue for the eyes and almost caught their vitality on the paper-covered bulb, he knew this would be the one. This one would save her. Brown eyebrows, black eyelashes, the faint blush high on the cheeks and she was the same beautiful girl- Dorothy without the magenta insect.

He rinsed the small brushes and blew lightly on the half-finished head before he went on. The mouth would, of course, come last, but much was to be done before that mouth could be worn honestly. He dipped the smallest brush in the brown and the green, ready to begin scarring and distorting. But as he held the brush over the smooth forehead and looked at the girl in his hand, he could not touch the brush's ugly colors to that lovely face. He couldn't maim. But she had to be saved!

The light bulb started to swing slightly as someone overhead entered the kitchen above with

heavy feet. The shadows began to grow and shrink, Farley's shadow on the table mixed with those of the blank faces, long faces then short faces, old then young. The old woman with the hair-net cutting her forehead came back somehow, and her face faced his. He knew what he could do now. He rinsed the brush and filled it with grey - to age, not to make grotesque. He would add years ahead of time and save the destruction of that smile that would have to be, as he had saved Dorothy's smile from disintegration by loneliness and self-ridicule.

Wrinkles were painted across the firm brow, on the cheeks, in the smile lines, crows feet at the eyes and around the mouth space, sagging skin on the neck and half-circle hollows under the eyes. A touch of the grey took the twinkle from the blue eyes, made the nostrils larger, and weathered the brown curls.

Farley's face let go as he mixed the paint for the aged girl's mouth. The paint was perhaps half a shade redder than usual, but when the mouth filled the empty, unwrinkled part of the face, it was the same mouth exactly - an upturned one.

Three blocks away, at the instant the light bulb came to life, the girl wearing the white fur hat was pulled down an alley by rough hands, raped, beaten, slashed, and murdered. Farley didn't hear her screams. He thought he had succeeded.

When he got to work in the morning, Lillian, who was talking in a different voice with less edge and more sadness and with eyes more resigned than usual, barely had time to tell him of the pretty girl's brutal murder before the police came. The two uniformed men told him he was going to be questioned and probably held for twenty-four hours. Their eyes reflected their conclusions, but Farley didn't notice. He stared at his candy, muttering, "It does work. I was just too late, too late, too late. I tried. God, I tried. I tried.

Lillian came out of her cage and locked up the candy which he had been unlocking. Two boxes of silver-wrapped butterscotch fell to the cement, but she didn't notice. Farley asked the taller policeman for some paper and began writing a note. He left the note and his apartment key with Lillian, who promised again and again to make sure it reached Dorothy:

Dorothy, Take this key and go to my apartment 1128 MacDonald number B and get all the people I have made. I made them all. They are for your crippled kids. You may think they are all wrong for kids. I did for awhile but they are not. No, they are right exactly. The kids will know and you too I think. I will make more when I get back if I do. Keep the smile.

Yours,

Jesse Farley

Mark Reinsberg is a native Chicagoan who received his schooling in Chicago and graduated from the University of Chicago (Ph.B.) in 1947. In 1949 he received an M.A. from Colorado College, and, as a Fulbright fellow, spent the following year at the University of Amsterdam. He has taught in Chicago in various city divisions of the Universities of Illinois and Chicago, and has served on the administrative staffs of Roosevelt College and of WFMT. He came to Northwestern last year as Staff Associate at the Transportation Center.

NOTES ON MOBILITY

By Mark Reinsberg

We are probably unaware of many important restrictions placed upon our freedom, like fish unable to comprehend the glass walls of an aquarium. Knowing no other medium, we may think. that some of the imposed restraints are inherent limitations. In this respect we are all prisoners to a varying degree. I do not, however, think anyone would consider it normal for a person or a population to seek less freedom, or willingly to suffer imprisonment.

It is conceivable, of course, that a man would rather be jailed, literally, than endure some harsh condition in the outside world. I remember an episode in a Chaplin film of the mid-thirties which had the Depression as a background. Charlie, un-

employed, has fallen off a truck delivering explosives. The vehicle's red warning flag also drops to the street. As the truck moves on, Charlie jumps to his feet, waving the red flag to attract the driver's attention. Behind Charlie, simultaneously, a mob of hungry workers rounds a corner in a protest march. The next instant Charlie is swept forward by the crowd, its supposed leader waving a Bolshevik emblem, as police arrive to quell the riot.

Again and again, over the years, I have recalled this swift comic moment with undiminished admiration, paying, unfortunately, no attention to the next episode in the film. It is a prison scene which suddenly seems very significant, now that I stub my toe on its obtruding allegory.

After spending some time in jail Charlie performs a curious act of courage. He prevents the escape of some dangerous criminals. Abruptly his fortunes are reversed. A grateful warden showers favors on the prisoner. We see him next as a privileged, trusted inmate, in a private, unlocked cell with all the doilied comforts of home. He eats the finest foods, smokes expensive cigars, enjoys the companionship of prison guards, and all manner of special indulgences.

He is at the peak of contentment when the warden arrives to make the ultimate gesture of gratitude. He has obtained a pardon for Charlie. It has been many years since I watched this scene, and the other details are blurred. But I recall now how beguilingly and frantically the little man seeks to decline the honor - an eviction notice plunging him back into the cold competitive world.

2

I suppose that for every Thoreau or Bromfield who returned to the land we might find a million farm boys in the past century who saw the city, all in all, as a place of liberation from plowslavery. It seems simple-minded to say it, but what attracted people to cities in the first place was the relative advantage of urban over rural life. Creature comforts, before the era of electricity and indoor plumbing, may not have weighed very heavily in the city's favor, but people found greater variety in whatever there was. Today we would use the phrase, wider range of consumer choice.

In countless ways, the alternatives offered by the city seemed superior. For example, a farm community has only one basic form of employment, a small town has very few, a city has many. We would find this choice in almost any other comparison of resources, medical, cultural or educational. From this wider range of alternatives flowed the possibility, at least, of greater personal freedom.

Nevertheless, there was probably no period when the advantages of urban life were not partially offset, in the feelings of many city dwellers, by severe disadvantages. Some chafed at the rented apartment as a way of life. Many resented the dirt and noise and congestion. All, or almost all, recoiled from the incidence of crime.

We do not know how many felt a sense of aesthetic deprivation or mourned the lost contact with nature. But in my childhood, on Sundays, the grown-ups would pack picnic baskets and desperately "escape to the country." It seems to me apparent that the stronger the pastoral yearnings of a city people, the more vividly they must feel themselves imprisoned. One best-selling book I recall from the thirties was entitled Five Acres and Independence. From the trend of population in those years we see that its popularity was largely sentimental. There was no mass exodus from the city in the Depression because the city still offered demonstrable advantages, though it was then possible for people with high incomes to carry most of those advantages with them to the suburbs.

The actions of the American middle class since World War II say that city life has now lost many of its advantages. If you look for the subtle indicators you find the scales beginning to tip as

early as 1926. That was the peak passenger year for urban mass transit in the United States. Thereafter (except for the war years) transit steadily lost passengers, and no one has ever doubted that automobile ownership was the cause. It is possible, had the crash not occurred when it did, that the great suburban movement might have flowered during Hoover's administration.

3.

The advent of gunpowder in Europe five centuries ago caused a revolution in city planning. Medieval walled cities became untenable, militarily. New political, and often new economic, realities shaped municipal life. The ramparts which had not been blasted by siege cannon were eventually torn down voluntarily by the inhabitants to make room for warehouses, boulevards and residential plots. Thus emerged the unwalled city, free to grow in size beyond comprehensible limits, and to suffer problems of like magnitude.

4.

Freedom. Consumer choice. Mobility. Rebellion. Flight. We are in the habit of assigning separate and distinct meanings to these words. When grouped together they appear, to me at least, as facets of a common concept.

There are very ancient and even honorable traditions of flight which we share with Plato's Greece and with a great many other nations of the modern and classical world. I do not mean to discuss the refugee, immigrant or displaced person as though these were new phenomena. I continue to be disturbed by Socrates' example. I do believe, however, that a country such as the United States, which has been nourished so uniquely, so repeatedly, and so recently by fugitive populations, must have developed a special attitude towards physical mobility. I think we would be justified in calling it a value. If we accept mobility as a value we get ra better understanding of something in the American character which seemed unstable and irresponsible. We see it not as an excess of freedom but as a means to it fullest exercise.

The earlier forms of settlement in the New World, such as the chartered company, have become as remote to our experience, and as irrelevant, as the colonial efforts of ancient Greek city-states, but we are still very close to traditions of our own proper origin. A century after the Civil War we still "follow the drinking gourd." It is deeply satisfying to see the Underground Railroad transformed into the Freedom Ride.

This is something deeply embedded now in our national consciousness. It was less securely rooted when Article Four of the Constitution was composed, with its implacable contradiction between movement and fixity. The Thirteenth Amendment edited out the contradiction but only theoretically did it widen the range of alternatives for ex-slaves. After the Reconstruction its

leverage was lost. All that the Thirteenth really decided in the South was the issue of mobility. The Negro was free to get out.

5.

The automobile is an instant-readiness weapon for men distrustful of society.

People place a value on mobility who have experienced its benefits, who see its curtailment as a destructive act impairing pursuit of happiness if not life and liberty. The Mobile Man is a new creature who has come to successful terms with authority for the first time in a thousand generations. These terms (if Mobile Man were to draw up a bill of particulars) would include:

- choice of residential environment with steadily diminishing regard to place of employment;

- personal behavior supported by outside alternatives with which to resist neighborhood social pressures;

- explosively widened choice of goods, services, entertainment, recreation;

- improved ability to maintain friendly intercourse and kin relationships at greater physical distances;

- improved ability to insulate one's self by distance from undesired relationships;

- freer choice of religious affiliation or nonaffiliation;

- wider range of selection with regard to schools, medical care and comparable needs;

- advantages of anonymity through movement ouside familiar haunts when one's mood, appearance or purpose is better promoted by an impersonal role;

- movement without commitment as to final destination.

Such are the blessings of mobility, which I believe to be an essential condition of the competitive economy.

6.

The refugee is man making use of his ultimate weapon short of physical opposition. The course of action is anything but cowardly. It is arduous and hazardous, both in its doing and in its consequences. Politically, it is a sterile gesture. The society is rendered more tranquil and often more secure through the departure of malcontents; the objectionable institutions are more easily perpetuated. Economically, it can be disastrous at once for the refugee. And if the State should suffer in the long run through loss of a creative segment of the population (as Spain was intellectually impoverished by the flight of the Jews during the Inquisition) that is small consolation to the man attempting to rebuild his life in a foreign land.

There is yet another class of refugees, the exile who hopes to return, perhaps as part of a liberating army, perhaps in a general amnesty. This man does not make a new start, he does not naturalize. The type is better understood in

Fan, 1962

France (c.f., White Russians) than in the United States. For the great mass of our immigrants, the trip over was an irrevocable act. The Cuban refugee is a new experience for this country. 7.

I sometimes wish the automobile were not such a smelly, dirty machine, so voracious, loud and lethal, so quickly decaying, cannibalized without decent burial, polluting the city air with its incinerated remains. For the car has led the American people in a subtle rebellion against a subtle enslavement, and one would rather hold aloft a more dignified symbol of liberation.

Seeing the automobile in this light, I begin to wonder why we waste so much energy each year on the floor of the Senate flagellating the Deep South. Looking at the entrenched bigotry of a Mississippi local election board, I ask myself whether a Negro's political salvation might not come faster through a driver's license than through abolition of the literacy test.

A moment's reflection should provide anyone with a list of modern nations whose citizens enjoy equal voting privileges that are worthless.

In Europe, especially since World War II, we have seen hundreds of thousands of people risk their lives to leave countries where the voting franchise was universal.

One can indeed entertain a view of society in which ownership of an automobile represents a more basic political weapon than the right to vote. The mayor of any large U.S. city would understand this. Watching his population and industries move to the suburbs and unincorporated areas, the astute political leader must feel in his viscera that some primal form of self-determination is taking place. Choices are being made from a set of alternatives he cannot structure into the yes or no of a ballot, and he is losing the election to a political unknown, the internal combustion engine.

The middle class has finally come to believe that political action can no longer significantly improve the central city's environment. It is confident now that it can neither reduce the incidence of violence nor increase the aesthetic appeal of rental housing by means of elections. So the middle class is getting out.

Before the Berlin wall, journalists used to describe the East German refugees as people who were "voting with their feet." I find that expression profoundly apt. If there is any freedom more important than the voting franchise, it is that historic remedy for conditions beyond immediate repair by secret ballot: namely, a person's Godgiven right to get out.

What truer measure of a despotism can there be than the restraints a government places on the movement of its citizens?

Without freedom of movement any society is a jail.

POEMS by EMILY (SINGER) I(APLAN

Emily (Singer) Kaplan was born in Lincoln, NebrllSka. She was educated in the Chicago Public Schools and at Northwestern (L.A. '41), and now lives in Evanston with her husband and two children. She recalls that when she was in college, she was II contributor to Neeley Orme', The Student Workshop.

Piano and Cat

My child mother

And her cat Mozart Practiced Beaux Arts With one another.

On her word

The cat lay under A piano chord And overhung thunder,

Not too much grieving For a lost kitten Or the sad written Work of bereaving.

In the same office

I had no cat

Under the piano; sat Doing caterpillar scales

And read on pedal-raised Lap Poe's tales: An ingenious affix To art unpraised.

Belief

I have seen a family across the way

Set up several pumpkins for display. Affections was the theme and they began To organize from smallest to the man.

Ponderous the father pumpkin stood. Last of all a baby in the wood. All had read favorably the text And learned their graduation from the next.

A human child stepped aside to see What recommended faith in trinity. His father had in carving with a knife Sharpened up the features of his wife,

Divested shell of all the natural grace It might have still possessed without a face. Changing it: changed the model as well. His wife began accountably to tell.

No sooner said than put up in the air

To ride a broomstick. Feathers were her hair. Beans her pretty eyes and when they went Something else more proven to ornament.

As say the silk of corn to stroke her ear And make a false impairment. She could hear. And rise above the fact she had no reason For raising pumpkins up until the season.

Cat-birth

We saw a cat fit to be tied not caring any more, hideous, to hide the suffering from our eyes that focused on birth and saw it for what it was, for what it was worth.

While in the counteract of pain by toeing the sides of the box she seemed knowing; turned and clawed where she had been put in to birth, not caring if seen.

Should have been a snake for the way she twisted, have laid her eggs painlessly, not hoisted herself up in agony and then let out small cats. in muteness. without shout.

To Maeterlinck

Laughing at the brood mare

And her miseries to compare With human, or the male bee

Who has his one rare Moment in the air:

It's bitter of her to delight In his brief dispensing flight When he For his sins Disintegration wins, And to find just The sad outcome of lust. Still the venom stings And closer brings Parallels: replacements Mere restatements.

A century weighs The primacy of days, Febrile mounting Dying counting.

The Movies

What wonderful movies they used to make when we were young. Now they're all too realized, lose the suspense that held over from week to week.

Before, under Tarzan's spell we waited till a chapter fell and saw each character renew only when the film was due.

We didn't know if vineyard held the heroine as plot developed: if swinging from the grasp of ape she managed paramount escape.

We didn't know how much the vineyard held until the ape moved forward: Imagined several frames ahead because cut off we went to bed.

Saturday at two o'clock we lined up in the midst of block; held our sister's little hand to make her TERROR understand.

Introduced her to a man who leaped beyond an ordinary span. The trees have not a forest withstood. All the same in Hollywood.

I Pulled No Strings

I played Edgar Bergen to my son brain to the words while he in the actual eruption was Charlie MacCarthy MacCarthy MacCarthy.

A son is a runaway thing. Think mother you've got hold of him as a slippery eel. Then you no longer have feel.

His words ran away with me. In abject silence I lipped no sound. It was unforthcoming. As far as the eye could see.

Walking down an aisle skipped ahead of me to the point where vanishing in the dim lights there was no sight of him out of one's care.

This man who had a twin-headed son And said, 'I've always wanted a son,' Certainly made the best of it. What a freak split That trunked them into one.

Though he knew in half an egg There usually isn't just a leg Or Siamese nose For mirror pose, He still an answer wouldn't beg.

He thought his son was foremost fair In symmetry of equal share

With features of unusual grace Reproduced on double face Crowned with beautiful human hair.

Classroom VVedge

Forty pairs of eyes regard from equidistant points and rooted to the floor in seats my aspect, while my part's to see theirs, the vantage one.

Am I forty pairs' reward? The return is multifarious glance that makes me fail an only son net casually by parents done; I see many, they see one.

Unraised by podium still I stand and face them all, alone; deliver the text, a century's store. I was a student once, I say, but they see me and they are more.

Two Children, Long Ago

I replaced two children long ago, With them considered, the only one to grow, To reach the flowering: towering of a growth. I've been the upper branches of them both.

Driven to their spot and separate beds Marked to keep the walkers off the heads, Soiled in removes whenever we made the trip And parents over the grave would service lip,

Mourn the early harvest of their fruit, Geraniums plant in earthenware to root. If monuments had lived and not waylaid Our parents wouldn't have come to the place they prayed

Over the dead bodies of their young. Gladness songs instead would have sung. Not taken me with them, riding to rehearse And passages sculptured into verse.

Fall, 1962

PORT_RAIT GOWN

By Charles-Gene McDaniel

Charles-Gene McDaniel received his B.S. ('54) and M.S. ('55) in the School of Journalism at Northwestern. As an undergraduate writer he won a Shuman Award. At York, Pennsylvania, he worked for three years as a reporter for The Gazette and Daily. In 1958 he returned to Chicago as newsman for the Associated Press. Two essays by him have been published in the Nieman Reports, Harvard University.

Margaret approached the elevator starter halfconfidently and asked politely, "Excuse me, Miss, but could you tell me on what floor do they have evening gowns?"

It was not her first trip to Marshall Field & Company to shop, but it was the first time she ever went there to shop for something so important and so expensive as a gown. She needed the gown to wear to the photographer's to have her portrait taken. And she knew the best place to go to buy a gown was Field's. Everybody knew that. Field's was where the debutantes went to buy their gowns for their coming-out parties. "Sixth floor, Miss."

Margaret Daly - Maggie everybody called her - wanted to be a singer, a singer who in a short time would go to Hollywood to be in pictures. She was finished St. Mary's High School two years now and was working as a switchboard operator while she took singing lessons and sang in amateur contests and at parties.

She thought she was ready to break into the big time. Well, at least she would start in a small Chicago nightclub and in no time she would be "discovered" by a producer. The producers, everybody knew, went to those clubs all the time and "discovered" girls and took them to Hollywood where they became stars in no time and made lots of money and had their names in lights. Somebody at work had told her that she had to have an agent to get a job. You just couldn't walk in cold and get yourself hired. She asked her music teacher how to get one and he gave her a name. Maggie took a late lunch hour one day and stopped in at the building on Wabash Avenue in the Loop where the agent - most theatrical agents, in fact - had his office.

She hesitated at the threshhold of the open door of the agent's stuffy, cluttered office. Sitting behind the wooden desk was the agent, Sam, with his feet on the top. He was reading a copy of Billboard. In his mouth was the stub of a cigar, unlighted. Aware of her presence, he looked up.

"Come in, come in, Girlie. No sense wasting time in the hall. What can I do for you?" He didn't get out of his chair or remove his feet from the desk.

She crossed the barren floor into the cubicle of a room. Its one window admitted weakened, reflected light and furnished a soot-obscured view of a neighboring building. An incandescent bulb protected by a milk-glass shade provided further illumination for the toppling piles of Variety, Billboard and Downbeat magazines, old newspapers and yellowing contracts which covered the desk, the relic of a piano against one wall, and two of

the three dilapidated wooden chairs. The vacant chair, which was not always so, was for callers. The dirty walls of a one-time neutral color were covered with framed photographs of singerx, dancers, jugglers, M.C.s, dog acts, and assorted other entertainers with touching inscriptions attesting to the agent's greatness.

"Mr. Tom Higgins sent me here. He told me you might be able to book me professionally," Maggie told the agent.

"Yeah? What do you do?"

"I play the piano and sing. I'm interested in going into the movies, but 1 think maybe it would be good to start in a club here in Chicago."

This Sam had heard before - about six million times. He ceased even to think it funny any more. What the hell. He got them jobs and he got his percentage.

"OK, Baby, let's hear what you can do." He waved a chubby, dirty-fingernailed hand in the direction of the battered, dusty upright piano with a sagging keyboard.

Maggie sat down, cleared her throat, played a few introductory bars of "Embraceable You" in the "style" she had learned from Mr. Tom Higgins, then started to sing.

Sam listened through a few bars, then went back to reading the paper until she had finished. He knew the song backwards and upside down. Everybody, but everybody, who auditioned did it. Maggie was no better and no worse than most. She turned around on the swivel stool and looked at him. He put his paper down and took his feet off the desk.

"OK, Sis, I'll see what 1 can do for you."

He opened the center drawer, took out a battered small black notebook and thumbed through smudged pages until he found one with space remaining. He asked her name, address, and telephone numbers at home and at work.

"I'll need some professional shots, Doll - evening gown, low cut, ya know, something to catch the eye of a club owner. Send me two or three poses. And make sure they're in formal gowns and not snapshots. Portraits, ya understand?"

He had gone through all this with enough young girls before. From a lot of them he had just got his percentage for a week or two and then they decided nightclub singing was not for themor, most frequently, the owner of the club decided. Some a little longer. A few old timers had been making the rounds of the small clubs in outlying parts of the city for years and provided a pretty good income for him. Maybe someday he would get one into the Gardenia Room. Then.

"Six, coming out on six. Going up. Up."

Margaret stepped off the elevator onto the beige carpet of the sixth floor. The uncluttered showroom with its indirect lighting and the hushed voices of the clerks talking with smartly dressed

Fall, 1962

customers awed Margaret for a moment as she paused to get her bearings and was struck with the elegance of the place.

Somewhat hesitantly she walked toward a rack of dresses recessed in the wall. A matronly clerk, primly dressed, approached her in the traditional Field's manner - more with the bearing of a woman executive than with the self-effacing attitude ordinarily displayed by one in that station.

"May I help you?"

"Why, yes," Margaret replied. "I am looking for a gown, a formal gown, to wear in a musical program at our church parish house. 1 am going to sing and play the piano."

"Oh, yes, I see. And did you have anything particular in mind?"

"Well, not definitely."

Seeing that Maggie really had no idea of what she wanted, the clerk said, "Come with me. Perhaps we have something over here that you will like.

"I can't wear red or pink," Maggie said, brushing her hand past her strawberry blonde hair, to try to convey to the clerk a knowledgeable air to compensate for her indecisiveness.

When Maggie looked over the rack she tried to conceal her awe. And she succeeded, except for the widening of her green eyes - but she was looking toward the gowns, so the clerk did not see.

"There's a gown here that I'm sure is just the one for you. It has been waiting for you and I know you'll like it. 1 think the size is just right, too," the clerk cooed in her trilly commission-sale soprano voice, dropping the cool indifference of a Field's clerk.

From the rack of vari-colored wispy young-girl gowns the clerk picked a frosted mint green-andwhite gown of net. The bodice was of green with a draped bosom, a low-cut neckline and just a hint of a sleeve. The skirt, with its own hoop, was fashioned in alternating tiers of green and white.

Yes, that was the gown for her, Maggie decided. The clerk helped her try it on - and it did fit. Maggie took a surreptitious look at the price tag while the clerk fussed around with the skirt. It was $150.

Maggie looked in the three-view mirror and secretly admired herself.

She must show more sophistication than to take the first gown showed her, though. While assuring the clerk how much she liked it and was sure it was the gown for her, she asked to look at some others.

"Of course," the clerk said. "We want you to be perfectly happy."

The clerk picked several other gowns one at a time and showed them to Maggie as she stood off and looked to get a full view. She tried on one other, an ice-blue gown, but she told the clerk she did not feel right in it. And the clerk agreed that the gown was not quite the one for her.

Again she tried on the first one, just to be sure. And, while posing in front of the mirror again, she casually remarked to the clerk that only one thing about the gown worried her.

"I'm afraid this neckline might be too low to suit the pastor."

"Oh, but such a nice figure as you have should be shown to best advantage," the clerk told her. "This gown is just right for you - it complements your lovely coloring and its shows your nice figure without being immodest."

"Still, I'm afraid," Maggie replied. "If I buy the gown and show it to the pastor and he does not like it, may I return it?"

"Why, yes, of course, Dear."

Maggie paid for the gown with the cash she had taken from her savings account at the bank that morning before going shopping. With the purchase the clerk handed Maggie a card and told her, "Next time you come in, please ask for me again.

"Thanks, I will," Maggie replied, and put the card in her purse with the sales slip.

She carried the gown with her in the box in which it was packed and stopped at Field's buffet for lunch. Afterward she filled the appointment she had made to have her hair fixed, then to the photographer's studio where she also had made an appointment.

It was one of those fashionable photographers on Michigan Avenue. Maggie had seen samples of the work in a glass case attached to the front of the building while on a window-shopping trip to the elegant shops she was afraid to enter. She had jotted down his name and telephoned for an appointment from work one day.

Maggie unwrapped the gown very carefully, leaving the tissue paper spread open on the floor of the dressing room just as she had unfolded it. Carefully she removed the tag pinned beneath the sleeve and fixed in her mind the place of the pin holes so she could replace the tag exactly.

She applied all her make-up while sitting in her brassiere and panties and saw to it that it was perfect so she would have to do no retouching and risk soiling the gown. The anxiety of the shopping trip and being photographed and the anticipation of returning the gown caused her body to feel clammy with her nervous perspiration and she worried that this might soil the gown, so she washed carefully and rubbed herself thoroughly with a towel.

At last she got into the gown. The tag on a string attached to the zipper catch in the back of the bodice she tucked carefully inside the dress. Then she went out.

The photographer, Mr. Andre, looked her over, then asked her requirements. She told him that she was a singer and planned to use the portraits for publicity. For that reason, she said, she thought poses of her standing up would be

most suitable. He argued that she at least should have om' or two shots sitting down. But she insisted that she wanted to stand and he acquiesced.

Mr. Andre placed Maggie in the position he wanted her and got behind his camera. Then he turned on the lights. Maggie was fearful that she would perspire more under the hot lights and soil her dress.

"Try to relax more, Miss. You're too tense." He flipped a switch and soft music began to play from hidden speakers.

It did not help Maggie to relax much, however. During the entire photographing session, Mr. Andre repeated in exasperation that Maggie must relax some more. But she could not. She must be very careful not to soil the dress.

Finally it was over.

Maggie was relieved and went immediately to the dressing room to remove the gown. This she did as carefully as she had put it on. She found the two tiny holes pierced by the pin on the price tag and replaced the tag exactly as it had been. She checked the gown to see that no dirt had got on it during the photographing and to be sure she had not perspired in it. Then she folded the gown with meticulous care, replaced it in the box among the tissues, and refolded the tissues along the creases made in packing.

She hurriedly put on her street clothes and left the dressing room, paid a deposit to Mr. Andre, and promised to return in a week to see the proofs and make a final selection for retouching.

During her lunch hour on the following Monday. Maggie went back to Field's with her package and took the elevator to the sixth floor. She was approached by a different clerk and asked for Mrs. Aaronson, the name on the card. The clerk went to fetch her. After exchanging greetings, Maggie came straight to the point.

"I showed the gown to the pastor yesterday and he was quite upset. He says it is much too daring for a girl and particularly for a performance in the parish house. So I've decided to wear one of my street dresses. I'm so sorry. 1 wonder if 1 might get a refund."

She said all this hurriedly yet clearly, lest she forget the story she had memorized to tell Mrs. Aaronson. She affected a suitably pained expression on her face as she said it.

Mrs. Aaronson was properly sympathetic and felt sorry for the girl.

"Of course, 1 understand, Dear."

The clerk took the box, unwrapped the gown, and took it into an area concealed from the customers. Soon she was back with the refund for Maggie.

"Do ask for me again next time you come to the store."

"I will, Ma'am. And thanks so much."