I was invited by college classmates to write about our 50th reunion, and since reunions are theatrical occasions, I include some fragments here to fill the not very wide gap of time between now and Cymbeline, coming soon to a ranch near you. Here’s my report on returning to a small potted ivy league school 50 years later. It was all boys then.
* * *
The reunion costumes were bland: vanilla pudding polos and khakis, confirming what a preppy homogenized crowd we are. I showed some reunion photos to my adopted god daughter and she said, “You all look very buttoned down.” And Patti Seidman, looking at our class photo in the gym, said, “You all look the same.” We are beige men.
And that might be the largest truth of our 50th reunion. Though not always keeping each other’s company, we belong together, and I suspect now more than ever, having many of our edges rounded off, sloping gently into old age. I think we might have assigned ourselves George Valliant’s recent book about the Grant study, The Triumph of Experience, since it correlates fairly closely with our collective histories. The Grant study closely followed the lives of 268 Harvard men for 70 years—they are a short generation older than us, and probably better and brighter too. But the parallels are close, most notably in their surprisingly high levels of happiness after they turned 70. They were generally intelligent and healthy, fortunate in having had privileged educations and financially secure. Alcohol was their enemy—as it has been ours. Most had career satisfaction, and most enjoyed long and happy marriages. They look like us, or at least the us who came to the reunion. They too probably wear khakis and are men of beige.
***
It was wonderful to run into people I hadn’t seen or thought much about in a quarter or half a century: Bill Sittig, Doug Maxwell, and Clark Hobbie, now a marsh rat in South Carolina. I almost burst into tears seeing my freshman roommate, Elliot Urdang, now fully in bloom. Standing below Steve Weinstock on the Baxter steps took me back to the last time this happened, when the lights went out in the dining hall freshman year and he rose up next to me and hurled a plate of chicken a la king across the room. He was a god. I wonder if I was the only guy at our Saturday dinner half wishing history would repeat itself, but a room full of flying lobsters might have taken quite a toll. Besides, there were ladies present. And that, we all agree, was a good thing.
***
This reunion was noticeably low on drama, but women figured in the closest thing to it, when at group therapy Gordon Davis rose out of nowhere to remind us of our collective abuse of females fifty years ago, recounting the revolting “pig parties,” the forlorn dumped dates of women’s weekends, and the notorious mattress-filled Fiji room in the basement of the Phi Gam house. I have since heard from one reliable source this room was a myth, which is both a relief and a pity; The Fiji room has a grotesque and lurid allure, as well as the indelible imprint of urban legend (my son tells me there was rumor of a similar room at Harvard). Thankfully Gordon’s speech occasioned the confession from Al Mondell that he had never gotten laid at Williams, and this in turned was greeted by a chorus of sympathy and dispelling laughter, and the wives of Williams climbed over desks to hug and console him, and kiss his fair and well shaped ears.
***
A week after the reunion by happenstance I drove with Betty through Williamstown, and we stopped at the Clark Museum, which always seem to be the artistic equivalent to Williams: small, personal, privileged and the best of its kind. I was surprised at how well I remembered the collection, more vividly than most of my classmates. There is the Napoleonic Hussar on horseback, and there is Homer’s heroic and well cut men rescuing drowning damsels—it’s a great collection of boys’ art, among other things. Not on view but unforgettable was Bouguereau’s glossy painting of the callipygian nymphs dragging a hairy satyr into a cold shower, the one painting in the collection I am sure we all remember. It hung for years in New York’s most exclusive gentleman’s club. I am thinking of proposing an installation at Mass MOCA to coincide with our 55th reunion: it will feature only this painting and all the mattresses from the Fiji room. It will blow your mind.
***
My daddy always told me two was the best company, which is not really part of the reunion dance for anything more than 3 minutes. But a highlight for me was the chance to see one of my best friends, David Larry, a further instance of reunion irony. David and I had talked about our mixed feelings over the reunion costs, which seemed rather high for people who were not instinctively drawn to four day rain dances of Eph elders. In the end I caved and paid, and David did not, opting to spend time with friends but not joining the formal occasions. This meant I could skip the Friday night dinner to have time with him at what was reviewed as the “best Mexican food in the northeast.” I will not reveal much about this evening except to say there are things that can be said over an indifferent tamale in Williamstown between two friends and classmates of 50 years that could not be duplicated anywhere. As part of our trip down memory lane Dave brought a few signs and bumper stickers from his gallant campaign for a weed tolerant Sheriff of Eugene Oregon a thousand years ago, and these started showing up everywhere: one was slapped on my rental car, another appeared in our commemorative Morgan photo, and another was posted by our class saint, Jules Quinlan, below what we think was our sacred class tree , planted when Dave, our class poet, read his class poem as part of our graduation ceremonies. So the friend who decided not to join the reunion festivities became its poster child. I love this.
***
We are a lot closer to death now, and I imagine most of us think about it more. It is a simple truth to say most of us won’t see each other again—well maybe not after our 60th. A Boston billboard I saw returning my rental car said one out of every three babies born today will live to be a hundred. That won’t be me, or most of us. I was stunned by Sandy McPeck (I hardly knew him) dying between his bio and our reunion, but of course this kind of thing happens now, and increasingly. I was moved by how Bill Whitney arranged to gather and print a collection of Sandy’s paintings. I sat next to his widow Susan at the Saturday dinner and she showed me how to crack lobster and told me she cried every night. This is how it goes. I went to a funeral the other day: a tiny lovely Vassar girl, 10 years older than us, city council woman, bookstore owner. The funeral went on in the usual Episcopal way. And then someone got up and quoted Yeats:
Think where a man’s glory begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
That’s not bad, I thought. And then they played Ella singing “Every Time We Say Goodbye.”
***
There was some talk of diversity at this reunion, beyond noting the presence of Mexican food in the purple valley, especially at the gathering at the newly named Davis Center, in honor of Allison and John Davis, two truly heroic black graduates of the college, and parents of our of own Gordon and John. It was heartening for all of us to learn how much times have changed since our day: more than half current Williams students are women, and 30% are of color. This is truly great news—and brings new challenges (including getting the students of different colors to connect to each other, which is one mission of the Davis Center). I suspect we still have a long way to go. A few days after the reunion I was riding the New York subway, taking in the sights. Standing across from me was a young black woman wearing a skin tight fuschia body suit which advertised every one of her considerable charms and put a spell on every man in the neighborhood. Further down the car the child of an Asian woman was smiling at a man with a long beard and a shaved head seated across from her, and next to him was a Muslim woman holding her baby, also smiling. Would this one day be the future of our immaculately manicured Williams College? A smiling old white man in a beige cap with Roman numerals (hate the shirt, love the cap) really likes the idea, and knows (having reached Erickson’s age of wisdom) it is only pretty to think so.
***
I’m in North Adams, at the Holiday Inn, possibly the most remote reunion outpost. My room looks east over North Adams, and it’s a beautiful sight. Does anybody remember North Adams? Did anyone ever go there? It’s a real town. It has texture. It has Mass MOCA (an alchemical transformation of Sprague Electric), and one of the largest groups of Chinese Americans in the Northeast. Who knew? I think if I had a million dollars I’d rather give it to the Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts---or UCCS or Pikes Peak Community College. Williams has enough; it always wants and always will get more, and the worthy North Adams school will never come close. One of the genteel and unacknowledged facts of Williams life is that we are nearly all (personal company excepted) one percenters, and we take care of ourselves—to a fault I would say, even though we are also genuinely good citizens. I’ve made this argument to our class president Jim Blume, who nods and shakes his head in agreement, and says, “I know, but I just love the place.” OK, I have to admit I do too. I whined about the parade and the uniforms and then was so happy when we entered the gym and the applause rained down on us sweetly for no good reason at all.
***
Saturday after lobster. The chimes have rung at midnight. Gordon and Peggy and I are sitting in a booth in Baxter: two Williams men are slurping purple cow gelato. It’s just like old times—sort of. I am checking my text messages, the woman law professor is working, and Gordon is trying without success to book a Paris hotel. I walk out into the night air and hear the sound of something I missed the entire reunion: the sound of music. It’s coming from the Class of ’93 tent perched in the freshman quad. I stroll over and find there is an actual rocking band, very little diversity and some real dancing. I walk back into Baxter and tell Peggy what I’ve found, and ask her if she wants to dance. She looks up and smiles. Silly boy.
***
So much for the past: now, onwards into the future of Ancient Britain and Cymbeline!
