I was marinating myself in the moderns, from Empson and Richards to Eliot and Yeats, literally marinating myself as I withered in my bath in Provo, chanting passages from The Waste Land, while my landlady pounded on the bathroom door, hoping I had received the gift of tongues. For Thatchers class I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which I had rehearsed dry. The students listened. Thatcher stopped me outside the classroom on second Moench. The students dribbled down the stairs, as if spilled from coffee spoons which pleased me. He looked down and said, Perhaps something just slightly more public would have served this particular audience better. Wasnt Prufrock served all right? I said. The service was excellent, he said, but they would have preferred beef sandwiches to lady fingers. I have never known just what he meant. I took it as a compliment. Actually, I read Prufrock very well. We heard that Thatcher had been a cowboy in his youth, a forest ranger, a touring actor, a park ranger, a playwright. We believed everything we heard, because the currents of the world beyond the Wasatch front seemed to move through him and shape everything he did. In this respect only he resembled Mr. West. Cosmopolitan, sophisticated, tall, fastidious, decorous, almost prim, in the chastity of his speech, capable of making earthy points in language without vulgarity. During one class of five men and one woman, Melva Campbell, Melva left the room. Thatcher followed her to the door, peered into the hall, and with mischief crinkling his face he returned, replaced his hair, and said, Gentlemen, now that Miss Campbell has retired momentarily, you might like to hear a quatrain from Ogden Nash, who though frequently verbose and careless is often acutely amusing. He then recited, with one eye on the door, the one about how clever turtles are with all their armor on to find a way to be so fertile. You would have thought he was smuggling in an illustrated lecture on the Kama-sutra. Melva, refreshed, returned on cue and the class resumed. At one of the Friday night dances in the ballroom at the top of the gym, I was sitting beside him and Pearl, whom I barely knew until I returned to Weber to teach. Sitting was my favorite dance, the only one whose steps I had mastered. Out on the floor men and women were bobbing about, some flying over the heads of their partners, some squeezing and jiggling in a vertical body press with horizontal yearnings, some stabbing their fingers up in the air then down toward the floor, their shoulders tipping one way then the other, like horses quivering off flies. Thatcher leaned over and whispered into my ear, Dancing should be either aesthetic, gymnastic, or sexual. This indeterminacy is unsettling, dont you think? I did think so. Dancing always unsettled me, whether I was taking in the spectacle from the sidelines or stumbling backwards and forwards on the floor, tangling with a plucky woman doing her bit for charity. I have enjoyed only two dances in my life. When I was a sophomore, I severely sprained my ankle rounding the landing of the stairway between first and second Moench. I was rushing to answer the phone downstairs. By the time I was in a walking cast, a girls dance loomed on the calendar. Most girls dances meant, as I told an assembly, Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe. Carver and Gibson go to a show (laughter). This time a pleasing freshman from La Dianeda resumed the character-building rites of Hell Week, and invited me to the dance. I went. Bold and biodegradable, I hobbled to the center of the floor, thrust my walking stirrup into the waxy wood, like Captain Ahab installing his peg leg in the deck of the Pequod, and danced the night away. I extended my arms and my good leg; the girls eager for a share of me turned me round and round, safe from my clomping feet, oblivious to the beat of the music. We were the center of the calm at the eye of the storm whirling about us. I was the Maypole at Marymount being wound on May day, the Puritans rioting about me. As each girl ended her hitch, she signed my cast and fled to the moist embrace of her date. I had great fun. I had injured no one. Even my date was unbruised. The other dance I enjoyed was at the wedding of my daughter, but the details of that evening are of no interest here. I was magnificent. That is all you need to know. If I had not felt pressure mainly from Mae Welling who had followed me from the Weber High faculty primarily to supervise my social life to leave the sanctuary of the benches and lumber about the floor with a woman who had done no one any harm, I might have enjoyed the dances. I was beginning to enjoy music, and without a lot of help from my friends could tell One-OClockJump from Ill Walk Alone, though I depended a lot on the lyrics. I especially liked the formal dances. There were a lot of them, for nearly every social club sponsored one, often in collaboration with a sister or brother club. The hand- book of 1941-1942 lists at least ten dances that might have been formals. The girls dressed more formally than the men. The men had their club pictures taken for the Acorn in tuxedo shirts, ties, and jackets; but one set sufficed for everyone. You just stuck your head in a frame, the picture was taken, and it came out looking like Cary Grant. We couldnt all attend a dance in one formal suit. But, ah, the women in their moire taffeta gowns, swathes of lace and netting over the shining, swirling taffeta, cute little peplums flaring from the waist, the corsages of gardenias and roses from Klenkes and the Tangee lipstick orange in the tube but so daringly pink on the lips I liked all that. I liked the Evening in Pans perfume from the cosmetic counter at Kresses, the beautifully matched, shuffling couples, growing together here and there, now and then, until the band played Goodnight, sweetheart, till we meet tomorrow and everyone closed together, the ballroom smelling like scented Bounce and partners holding each other closely as if they were having their last dance together. In those years of the war, some of them were. The war was always there; but it, too, wore a corsage or a bouton-niere and smelled of talcum. To know Thatcher at his most memorable and exasperating one had to endure his rehearsals. Somewhere in whatever part of heaven theaters, hallowed by long and loving use, exist in ghostly disrepair, Thatcher is still doing a walk-through or repainting flats in the auditorium of the Moench building. It is three-thirty in the morning, most of the cast is asleep, and