in which it was impossible to get below a B), and a D in French 2. Because the single B was in a three-unit course and the D in a four-unit course, she supposed that she was down grade points and therefore on probation. Had the postcards arrived at school, she would have been embarrassed. Here, it did not seem to matter. As her mother had observed, she had read some interesting books and gone to some nice parties; once she was home, that was about the sum of Berkeley. She did not want to go back anyway. She could read books at home; she could have a better time at parties at home. It was not that she had not been asked, at least at first, to the parties which were the parties to go to; she had. On a campus where healthy color and easy smiles were commonplace, her fragile pallor, her uncertainty, had attracted a good deal of attention and speculation. Only when the boys who asked her out discovered how real the uncertainty was did they begin, bewildered and bored, to lose interest. As one of them told Lily’s roommate (who, reprovingly, told Lily), taking out Lily Knight was like dating a deaf-mute. “You have to kid around with them, be more fun,” the roommate advised. “Be yourself.” Although these admonitions seemed to Lily in some sense contradictory, she tried, the next weekend, to be more like the girls who were considered fun. Out with a Sigma Chi who had just been accepted at Princeton Theological Seminary, she had attempted some banter about Reinhold Niebuhr; when that failed, she admired the way he played the ukelele. After several drinks, he told her a couple of double entendre stories, and although she neither understood them nor thought he should be telling them to her, she laughed appreciatively. When he asked if she would like to drive up in the Berkeley hills, she smiled with delight and said it sounded like fun; later, she reflected that it had not been entirely his fault that he had misinterpreted her behavior that evening, which had ended in front of an all-night drugstore on Shattuck Avenue where, the prospective theologian told Lily, he could get some rubbers. (“Rubbers?” she had said, and he had looked at her. “Safes. Contraceptives.” She had begun shaking her head then, unable to think what to say, and he, sobered, had driven her in silence up the hill to the Pi Phi house.) After that, she had refused all invitations for three weeks. During the spring semester she had gone out briefly with a graduate student who read for her psychology class, a Jewish boy from New York City named Leonard Sachs. He had graduated from the University of Chicago and knew none of the people Lily knew. They had taken long walks in the hills above the stadium, back through Strawberry Canyon; had eaten dinner by candlelight in the small apartment he shared with a friend who did not like Lily and made a point of going to the library whenever she was around; and had sat on Thursday nights in the empty box at the San Francisco Symphony for which the Pi Phis paid every year. He gave her articles clipped from The New Republic outlining the intrinsic immorality of an itinerant labor force, hunted up for her an old pamphlet demanding repeal of the California Criminal Syndicalism Law, took her to San Francisco on the F train to hear a tribute to Harry Bridges, and urged her, after he had observed her knitting a sweater for her father, to utilize what slender talents she had by teaching handicrafts in a settlement house. Unable to locate “settlement houses” in the Berkeley Yellow Pages, she finally abandoned that project. He referred to the ranch as “your father’s farm,” and regarded her with an uneasy blend of the disapproval in which he held defective mechanisms and the craven delight he secretly took in luxury merchandise; she asked him if he would not miss being home at Easter, and regarded him in constant and only occasionally unwilling wonder. What both aggravated and enthralled him was her total freedom
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