Miss Parsley's Pilgrimage

In the Age of the Common Man more things are tedious than tragic. But the saga of Portia Parsley is a legitimate tragedy--one of the great wastes we think about over stale beer and dirty postcards.

It all started a week ago. Portia--a toothy, freckled, hayseed and broom-bottom blonde from North Dakota's School of Co-ed Agriculture--began her first week of Harvard's summer session with a stroll. The day was heavy with clouds and traffic and disillusion, a time of ivory idols crumbling and tears in the lemonade. For Portia's dream died hard.

She paused in the shadow of Widener to apply a roll-on deodorant stick, and the past (like so much Proust) loomed up with the moist of memory. For four long years Portia had pursued the stuff and stench of animal husbandry. She had mastered the chemistry of manure and the physics of the plow. She had emerged from North Dakota Ag (crossing a calf with a jumping bean for ready-made cheese) summa cum laude. And all those years she had nourished a dream.

Portia's big disappointment had come early in life. About the same time she realized that cows and the local Lotharios wanted something different around the haystack, she also discovered (for peripheral reasons) that she would never get to Harvard. And Portia had always wanted the best.

So she waited--through thrice-weekly seminars in nurtured alfalfa and required junior tutorial on irrigation and canning preserves. And all the while there had been the dream of someday coming East, of walking up Brattle Street in a pair of Bermuda shorts, of bookshops and bohemians and coffee-house jazz. Today it had all come true.

There were young men in cotton cord suits, belt-buckled and buttoned and pale blue starched; there were sweat-shirt and tennis-shoe esthetes and the wearily omniscient.

"Slip me a spare match, sister?" inquired one tweed-beaten young man at the corner. Portia didn't smoke; and moved on in injured innocence.

The coffee-house was full of wholesome types sipping ginger ale and looking at each other in off-beat anxiety. Portia passed on, swinging her book bag. Her soul trembled; but, of course, imperceptibly.

A cluster of crew-cuts congealed at a brick wall and pitched pennies and told jokes and joined in spasmodic bursts of coarse laughter. A gaunt, triangular face asserted by a brown goatee told Portia her slip was showing. "It's snowing down south," he said wryly.

Portia side-stepped into the Porcellian doorway (to the red-eyed dismay of a vanishing aristocrat who had chanced to the building in high hopes of a little wit and bourbon). She was just in time to avoid a pack of Summer School girls prowling the walk in search of males. "Mouse-trap," "parietal rules," and "sports car" drifted back from their grim and whispered ruminations.

Portia stumbled out of the doorway and riverward with a shudder. Through the crowd of tennis racquets. sweat socks, low leers and pared fingernails, she plowed to the Charles. And, stepping lightly to avoid the couples seeking those several stolen seconds, she advanced to the banks and squatted to reflect on the floating refuge and the distant sails.

Her room-mates reported her missing to Weld Hall two days later. "She was pretty sensitive," muttered the brewer's daughter from Milwaukee. "Maybe an incident at the mixer."

And there remained only the rumors. Some said she plunged into the river and drifted toward Martha's Vineyard; others that she was cut down in a frisbee cross-fire and buried at the Business School. A few are known to whisper of a midnight motorcycle kidnap and a shotgun wedding over two steins at Nick's (that's South of here). But Portia Parsley is now a legend, murmured at midnight over English muffins in the Bick, and remembered sometimes at a Yard punch. She never returned to North Dakota.