Medora Goes To The Game

"Why did they do that?" Medora asked.

"It apparently puts a terrific strain on the plumbing system," I said. "Floods things all over town. So it was a kind of weapon. It was to tell the Cambridge citizens and the college administration not to fool around with their bells."

"I would like to have heard them," Medora suddenly said.

I thought she was referring to the Lowell House plumbing, but it turned out to be the bells. "I wish Harvard had won," she said wistfully, "so that you could stand here and listen to them."

Impossible to tell about Medora. Didn't she want to listen to them, too?

Not long after our trip I wandered into her room when she wasn't there. Tiffany, her parrakeet, was scrabbling around in its cage. Her room has always been an irresistible place to visit from time to time to see what is new in there—to check on the detritus of her complicated schoolgirl life. A "secret" note from a school chum pinned up on the cork bulletin board. What she has dropped into her fish tank lately. The newest of the mice figurines she has added to a fearsome array on a shelf.

On her desk was a draft of a newspaper that she was apparently putting together as a Christmas present. Green holly leaves were pasted at each corner. The headline read YALE BEATS HARVARD BY FAR, the subhead, SCORE IS 14-0 YALE ON FREEZING DAY. Involuntarily, I glanced back over my shoulder, to make certain I wouldn't be caught prying in her room, and then turned back to read: "Harvard fans had little to cheer about yesterday as Yale handkerchiefs fluttered in the air. There was lots of cheering coming from the Yale stands. Harvard players slipped too much on the grass. At the end of the game the two gold posts were torn down by Yale fans. The Harvard fans went off to partys to drown their sorrows."

A pile of photographs from newspaper sports sections were waiting to be pasted in. I recognized Earl Campbell of the Houston Oilers in one of the pictures, vaulting into a dense pile of tacklers, the distinction of what team Campbell actually played on being of little significance to the young editor. I couldn't resist browsing through the paper. On the second page was a large advertisement for cats illustrated with a dozen silhouette studies of cats with their tails hanging down, as though the cats were sitting on an imaginary shelf. Medora does a great many of these studies.

What caught my eye was a story on the same page under the large headline (with a line through the second word, the spelling of which had apparently stumped her): BLACK HORSE BUYED. The text, again with a number of words crossed out, read as follows: "The black horse arrived in a truck shortly after nightfall. It was dark outside. His name was [Abraham Lincoln Tom, Blueboy] Prince!" I suspected I knew then what those thoughtful silences I had detected on that chilly November afternoon were all about—not about whether she was going to hiccup or whether a pigeon had crossed a goal line or even whether she preferred Harvard, or Yale or even Princeton. Names were under consideration but not the names of colleges.

A small story caught my eye on the last page of the paper. The headline read HARVARD NOT DISCORAGED.