The Saddest Confetti

The freshmen Cliffies came to history's first joint registration in a group, having just left a class meeting at Aggasiz, and as a group they entered the darkened throat of Mem Hall to make their convenant.

And then, with the aplomb of a carnival barker, they filled forms, parried salesmen, made dates--and disappointed everyone who had expected a sweaty confrontation between them and the newest Harvard stalwarts.

One girl, tastefully dressed for the season but not the day, which was streaked gray like an old aluminum pan bottom, glided through the official file card givers and takers only to be stopped by a tall youth with high cheek bones and red magazines in his left hand.

"I am selling Confi Guides," he said in a voice carefully tuned to imitate Beethoven bubbled through ambrosia.

She flounced her artfully strewn blondness and let gravity do what volubility can not.

Here they were interrupted by a voice urging the salesman back, for he had left his assigned station in the tabled-off area in the rear of the hall to make the sale.

"John-O. Are you selling the Guide or making a date?"

To which John-O replied with the spontaneity of a hiccup: "Making a date." So he did.

Other upper-classmen waited to make that kind of sale with their minds newly stocked with wonderfully voweled names like Penelope, Delia, Venessa, Deborah, and Irene and pages of snap-shot-size visions of the prime side of a secondary aspect. Sometimes the upperclassmen were smiled at skittishly and sometimes they were given genteel laughs from deep in the throat; sometimes they heard the patently private, as when a girl with small shoulders and slight hips told a friend whose nails were dirty: "The only reason my family needs to love me is that I'm alive."

The men were over-dressed to the point of utter psychological nakedness, and they handled themselves in the wise-cracking, vaguely bullying way men have always reserved for that condition. Their comments on the officials and the hawkers were full of logic so well whittled that its point disappeared; when they came to a bit of merchandise they had heard of they often bought it with a grand flourish, thus recommending its advantages and their expertise to friends. Most of them were feeling the gorge of possessive passion that comes when one is first deeply convinced that he is going to Harvard; the only flaw is that the beer mugs and stationery purchased in this fit don't evaporate with it.

When the crowds sagged, the vendors pattered amongst themselves, each, one suspects, glorying in his own casualness, his uniquely spotted pants or his single bit of pin wheeling sartorial supremacy. They often happened to be leaning on the table piled with Cliffe registers, and so it was natural enough that they discuss the stars in the new class, the girls who would be hoisted up as public monuments and whose motions would churn up the earth:

"Cute, yes--but tall. Very tall. I can tell from the jaw: when the skin hangs like that, it means tall."

A moment's inspection later indicated that it actually meant baby fat, but in girl-picking as in horse racing, systems are always infallible and human judgement the ever-present bugaboo.

Towards lunch a few girls who clearly had a sense of the event as an event rather than as an irritation wandered around looking for conversation. Two of them wore clothes of fine paisley and looked like gay moths fluttering from one sweet basil to another. They thought to make themselves appear innocent, but true innocence like true madness never perceives itself, and they achieved the super come-on. At last report they were being escorted out of Mem Hall through the said confetti of fallen circulars.