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Remember last year when he got potted? The last summer before college is a succession of golden days, and shining beaches, the magic of electric lights on summer evenings, and the dance band at the summer bathing club, AN AIRLINE TICKET TO ROMANTIC PLACES, and the touch and smell of young girls, lipstick odor, powder odor, and the svelte lean scent of leather on the seats of convertiblesThe sky always has stars, always has moonlight gilding the black treesOn the highways the headlights lance a silver tunnel through the foliage overhead And he has a girl friend, a great catch, the young beauty at this summer colonyMiss Sally Tendecker of Lake Shore Drive, and the inescapable connotations to come of Christmas holidays, and fur coats, perfume, and college dances in the hue-titled rooms of the big hotels Bob, you drive faster than anybody I know, you're going to kill yourself one of these daysHe's slow at speech with women yet, absorbed for the instant in negotiating the turnHis Buick swings out wide to the left, resists, struggles against going to the right, and then straightens from the turnThere had been panic for a second, and then relief, exultation as he goes streaming down the straightaway I declare you're a wild man, Bob Hearn What goes on in your head, Bob? He parks the car off the highway, turns to her with a sudden fake birkin abrupt outpouring of speechI don't know, Sally, sometimes I thinkbut that isn't true, I just get all worked up, and I stew around, and I don't want to do anything, I'm going to Harvard just 'cause my father said something about Yale, and I don't know, there's things, there's something else, I can't put my finger on it, I don't want to be pushed, I don't knowOh, you're a crazy boy, Bob, I guess that's why all we girls love you You love me? Just listen to him talkWhy, of course I do, BobbyAcross from him on the leather seat cushions, her perfume is a little too strong, a little too mature for a girl of seventeenAnd he senses the truth beneath her banter, moves over to kiss her with his heart beatingOnly back of it is the forecast of dates at all the holidays, of college weekends, and the identification with this summer resort, and the green lawns in the suburbs, and the conversations with his father's friends, the big wedding You know I can't plan on anything if I'm going to be a doctor, because you know eight years, ten years, it's a long time Bob Hearn, you're conceitedWhat do you think I care? You're too conceited, that's all Now, son, now that you're going away to college, there's some things I want to be talking to you about, we don't get much of a chance to say much to each other but, what the hell, we're pretty good buddies I tiffany silver always like to think, and now that you're going to college, just remember that you can always depend on meThere's gonna be some women, what the hell, you wouldn't be my son if there weren't, not since I been married of course -- a patent lie which both of them ignore -- but if you get in any trouble you can always depend on me, what the hell, my old man used to tell me you get in any trouble with any of the mill girls, you just let me know -- the embarrassing ambiguity of the grandfather who has been sometimes a farmer, sometimes a factory owner -- so that goes for you too, Bob, and remember it's always easier, always more natural to buy a woman off than to get in any alliances with her, so you just let me know, letter marked personal is okay And as for being a doctor, well, that's okay, we got lots of friends here, we can set you up in a decent practice, buy into some old quack who's ready to retire I want to do researchListen, Bobbo, there isn't a man you know, not one of our acquaintances who can't buy and sell a carload of research men, that's just some damn fool idea you picked up somewhere, and you're gonna change your mind, I can tell you that right nowThe way I really look at it, your mother and me, is that you'll end up in the business, which is where you belong anyway Well, I ain't gonna argue with you, you're just a damn fool fendi spy kid anyway, you'll change your mind He flounders through the first weeks of freshman year, walks in bewilderment through the YardEveryone knows so much more than he does here -- there is an instinctive resistance to them -- the left-handed remnant of the humus around the mushroom stem -- everyone talks flippantly of things he had thought about in the privacy of his own room, his own head His roommate cozens him, product of another midwestern city, another Country Day schoolYou know when Ralph Chestley comes around, isn't he a swell fellow, you ought to get to meet him, Delphic, which is pretty damn good, better than we'll ever get I can tell you, but of course we've got that thing against us, if I knew then what I know now, I would have come east to Exeter or Andover, although they're not nearly good enough that's what I've been learning, but if we can get to meet the right fellows, we ought to make Speakers anyway, that's not so hard, and we can certainly make Hasty Pudding, but to get into a Final Club that's the trick, although I've heard they're getting more democratic lately I haven't thought about it Well, you ought to, you've got to go at it carefully His first self-assertion Well, now look, Hearn, we get along pretty well, so don't cream it for me, I mean a fellow's chances can be hurt by his roommate, so don't do anything chanel pearl necklace excessive, you know what I mean For the first year Hearn has little chance to do anything excessiveThe skids are not greased that smoothlyHe bogs down, sees his roommate seldom, spends nearly all his afternoons in lab and his nights studyingHe makes himself a schedule which charts everything down to the fifteen minutes he can allow himself to read the comic pages on Sunday morning, and the movie he can see on Saturday nightHe drifts through the long afternoons, copying the changes on the thermometer in his flask, and marking beside it the variations in the hydrometerThere is a nerve in the head of the frog which he is always severingOn the fourth attempt he nibbles successfully with his scalpel at the desiccated preserved flesh of the frog head until the nerve glistens thinly, freed like a tenuous wire of spittleIn his triumph, he feels depressedDo I really want to do this? In the lecture rooms, despite himself, he drowses through classThe voice of the assistant professor with the steel-rimmed glasses and the bony scientist's face laps fuzzily at his ear Gentlemen, I would like you to consider the phenomenon of the kelpNereocystis l?tkeana, macrocystis pyrifera, pelagophycus porra, he writes on the blackboardThey are a very distinctive form of marine life, consider this: they have no roots, no leaves, they receive no light from the chanel earings su