The Moviegoer

college he was one of those upperclassmen freshmen spot as a model: he was Phi Beta Kappa without grinding for it and campus leader without intriguing for it. But most of all he was arbiter of taste. We pledges would see him in the fraternity house sitting with his hat on and one skinny knee cocked up, and so the style was set for sitting and wearing hats. The hat had to be a special kind of narrow-brim brown felt molded to a high tri-cornered peak and then only passable after much fingering had worn the peak through. He liked to nickname the new pledges. One year he fancied “head” names. He lined them up and sat back with his knee cocked up, pushed up his hat with his thumbnail. “You over there, you look to me like Pothead; you talking, you’re Blowhead; you’re Meathead; you’re Sackhead; you’re Needlehead.” For a year after I joined the fraternity I lived in the hope of pleasing him by hitting upon just the right sour-senseless rejoinder, and so of gaining admission to his circle, the fraternity within the fraternity. So when he stopped before the last pledge, a boy from Monroe with a bulging forehead and eyes set low in his face, he paused. “And you, you’re—” “That’s Whalehead,” I said. Walter raised an eyebrow and pulled down his mouth and nodded a derisive nod to his peers of the inner circle. I was in.
    A pledge too felt the privilege of his company and felt the strain too. For one lived only to walk the tightrope with him, to be sour yet affable, careless but in a certain style of carelessness, sardonic yet likable, as popular with men as with women. But strain or no strain, I was content to be his friend. One night I walked home with him after he had been tapped for Golden Fleece—which was but the final honor of a paragraph of honors beneath his picture in the annual. “Binx,” he said—with me he had at last dropped his sour-senseless way of talking. “I’ll let you in on a secret. That business back there—believe it or not, that doesn’t mean anything to me.” “What does, Walter?” He stopped and we looked back at the twinkling campus as if the cities of the world had been spread out at our feet. “The main thing, Binx, is to be humble, to make Golden Fleece and be humble about it.” We both took a deep breath and walked back to the Delta house in silence.
    When I was a freshman, it was extremely important to me to join a good fraternity. But what if no fraternity invited me to join? During rush week I was invited to the Delta house so the brothers could look me over. Another candidate, Boylan “Sockhead” Bass from Bastrop, and I sat together on a leather sofa, hands on our knees while the brothers stood around courting us like virgins and at the same time eying us like heifers. Presently Walter beckoned to me and I followed him upstairs where we had a confidential talk in a small bedroom. Walter motioned to me to sit on the bed and for a long moment he stood, as he is standing now: hands in pockets, rocking back on his heels and looking out the window like Samuel Hinds in the movies. “Binx,” he said. “We know each other pretty well, don’t we?” (We’d both gone to the same prep school in New Hampshire.) “That’s right, Walter,” I said. “You know me well enough to know I wouldn’t hand you the usual crap about this fraternity business, don’t you?” “I know you wouldn’t, Walter.” “We don’t go in for hot boxes around here, Binx. We don’t have to.” “I know you don’t.” He listed the good qualities of the SAEs, the Delta Psis, the Dekes, the KAs. “They’re all good boys, Binx. I’ve got friends in all of them. But when it comes to describing the fellows here, the caliber of the men, the bond between us, the meaning of this little symbol—” he turned back his lapel to show the pin and I wondered if it was true that Deltas held their pins in their mouths when they took a shower—“there’s not much I can say, Binx.” Then Walter took his hat off and stood stroking the tricornered peak. “As a matter of fact, I’m not going to say anything at all. Instead, I’ll ask you a single question and then we’ll go down. Did you or did you not feel a unique something when you walked into this house? I won’t attempt to