Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams Page B

Antietam.
    Roger had a photographic memory, of which Richard was wildly proud. His own memory was erratic; he easily memorized poetry but he had a lot of trouble with names and dates, with facts. As they walked across the Yard in the brilliant September air, Roger recited several pages from that book, still in that wildly exaggerated accent: “… and before the Northern armies could marshal their forces …” while Richard gamboled beside him, laughing like a monkey.
    They were taking a course called Philosophic Problems of the Postwar World. With everyone else they stood around outside Emerson Hall, waiting for the hour to sound. Richard was overheard to say to Roger, in that crazy Southern voice, “As I see it, the chief postwar problem is what to do with the black people.”
    At the end of the summer Roger had four A’s and Richard had two A’s, a C and a D, the D being in Biology. They had no friends. Richard regarded their friendlessness as a sign of their superiority; no one else was as brilliant, as amusing, as his brother, and thus they were unappreciated. Roger didn’t think much about that sort of thing then. He was solely concentrated on getting top grades.
    Those Harvard years were, or perhaps became in memory, the happiest of Richard’s life. Completely isolated from their classmates and from the war that for most peopledominated the scene, he and Roger went about their scholarly pursuits; he had Roger’s almost undivided attention, and it was a time when Roger laughed at all his jokes.
    Aside from the Southern joke, which was their mainstay, they developed a kind of wild irony of their own, an irony that later would have been called sick, or black. Roger’s obesity came into this. “You must have another hot dog, you won’t last the afternoon,” Richard would say as Roger wolfed down his seventh hot dog at lunch at the corner stand. And when Roger did order and eat another hot dog they both thought that wildly funny. Richard’s heart was funny too. At the foot of the steps of Widener Roger would say, “Come on, I’ll race you up to the top,” and they would stand there, helplessly laughing.
    That was how Richard remembered those years: big fat Roger, tilted to one side chuckling hugely, and himself, dark and wiry and bent double laughing, in the Cambridge sun. And he remembered that he could even be careless about his health in those years; he almost never hurt. They went for long walks in all the variously beautiful weathers of Cambridge. Years later, in seasonless California, Richard would sigh for some past Cambridge spring, or summer or fall. Roger remembered much less: for one thing he was in later life so extremely busy.
    They were reacted to at Harvard for the most part with indifference; other people were also preoccupied, and also that is how, in general, Harvard is—it lets you alone. However, they did manage to be irritating: to the then current remark, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” both Roger and Richard Washington had been heard to respond, “Sir, the War has been over for almost a hundred years.” Also, those were very “liberal” years; racism, or what sounded like it, was very unpopular. No one made jokes about black people, no one but Roger and Richard.
    Therefore, it is not too surprising that one night Roger and Richard came back from the movies (a revival of a
Broadway Melody
in Dorchester: Roger loved musicals) to find that someone had put a swastika in black chalk on the door to their room. Richard was absolutely enchanted; in a way it was the highest moment of his life. All his sense of the monstrosity of the outside world was justified, as well as his fondness for drama; he was persecuted and isolated with his brother. “Roger,” he said very loudly and very Southernly, “do you reckon that’s some kind of Indian sign they’ve gone and put on our door?”
    Roger laughed too, or later Richard remembered Roger as laughing, but he recalled mainly his