Personal Appearance

by Paul Goodman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Local Board No. 41 had two rooms on the second floor of a building on Webster Avenue, over a store that sold sewing machines and repaired them. You came up a flight of stairs with brass treads, and on the frosted glass of the first door it said SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM in black letters and, under that, in smaller letters that someone had added later with a stencil, KNOCK AND ENTER. Nobody knocked. The front room had a counter, a bench, a radiator that knocked for them, and four green steel filing cabinets holding the folders of eleven thousand men of the West Bronx between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. The back room had a long table and five chairs, of which three were used once a month.

On Monday, the fourth of December, 1967, at about half past ten, Mrs. Agnes Fogarty, clerk of the board, opened a brown envelope that had come up from headquarters, and out of it onto the counter slid two cards and a folded sheet of typing paper.

She knew what they were before she turned them over. The Times had printed the Director's letter in November, and there had been a carbon of it in the pouch a week before that, with a covering memorandum, and she had read both standing up at the counter and then sitting down. Agnes was fifty-four. She had been clerk of No. 41 since the spring of 1951, when the boys were going to Korea, and before that she had typed for an insurance broker on Fordham Road, and she had been married to a motorman on the Jerome Avenue line, who died in 1959. She had no children. She had a niece in Yonkers, a parish, a subscription at the Loew's Paradise for Thursdays, and eleven thousand folders, and she knew where every one of them was.

The cards were a registration certificate and a classification notice, the two that every man was required by law to carry on his person at all times. They belonged to Raymond Gilhooley, of West 190th Street, born 1947, classified II-S, a student. He had dropped them into a briefcase outside the Department of Justice in Washington on the twentieth of October, together with something like a thousand others, and the Department, having refused to accept them and then accepted them, had sent each one back where it came from. That was all the covering slip said. The folded paper was a letter, and it was addressed to her board.

She did not read it yet. She took his folder out of the second cabinet and put the cards and the letter into it and put the folder on the left side of her desk, where she kept the ones the board had to see.

She read it at a quarter past five, with her hat already on and her gloves on the counter. It was typed, single-spaced, on both sides of the sheet, with the strikeovers left in, and it began To the members of Local Board No. 41, who are my neighbors. She read it through once, and put it back in the folder, and turned off the radiator valve, and went down the brass stairs to catch the bus.

---

Let me say what a local board was, since there are already young people who do not know, and in ten years there will be nobody who does.

The system was proud of being decentralized. Its Director liked to say that the men who were to be sent to war were chosen not by a bureau in Washington but by little panels of their own neighbors, who knew them and their families and their circumstances, and who served without pay. On paper this was true. The three members of No. 41 were Mr. Sigmund Adler, who had kept the pharmacy on the corner of 188th Street for forty years; Mr. Thomas Rafferty, a funeral director; and Mr. Joseph Petrillo, a foreman for the gas company, who had been in the Seabees. They were decent men. They met on the second Tuesday of the month, at seven, and they classified, on a good night, two hundred and fifty registrants in an hour and a half. You can do the arithmetic. It comes to about twenty seconds a man, and most of that was the sound of the folders being moved from one pile to another.

The person who knew the registrants was Agnes. She knew which boy's father was on disability and which one's mother had remarried; she knew who had a letter from a doctor on Grand Concourse that was worth something and who had a letter from a doctor on Tremont that was not. Before each meeting she went through the folders and clipped a slip of yellow paper to the front of every one, with what the regulations required written on it in pencil, and before each meeting she typed the minutes of it, with the decisions in, so that the three men had only to sign. In sixteen years they had overruled her yellow slip perhaps thirty times.

This is not a scandal. It is how nearly every institution in our society works, and I set it down because it is ordinary. The neighbors were real neighbors and the function was real: to decide which of the young men on these streets would go and which would stay. But the function had long since become the goal of the organization and not of the persons in it; the three men were there to sign, and the woman who knew the boys was there to see that the paper was in order. They were all personnel. A decentralized system that is run in this way has the faces of neighbors and the heart of a bureau, and it is worse than an honest bureau, because a young man can at least hate a bureau without hating the man who sold his mother her prescriptions.

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On the Thursday, in the middle of the afternoon, Raymond Gilhooley came up the stairs with the brass treads and did not knock.

She had known him since he was in a carriage outside the church. His mother, Nora, did the altar flowers with her in May. He was twenty now, tall, too thin for his overcoat, with the bare red wrists of a boy who has grown since the coat was bought, and he had a pamphlet in his hand rolled up into a tube, which he held like a stick. He stood at the counter and did not look at the bench.

"I want to see my file," he said. "I have a right to see my file."

"You do," said Agnes. "Sit down. I'll get it."

"I'll stand."

"Then stand." She went to the left side of her desk, where the folder was, and brought it to the counter and opened it and turned it around to face him. On top was his letter, and under the letter were the two cards.

He looked at the letter, which he had written himself, and then at her. He had expected, she could see, that the folder would have to be fetched from somewhere, that it would be a fight to get it, and that there would be things in it he was not allowed to read. It is the same expectation that a boy brings to the principal's office. It made him look, for a moment, about twelve.

"You read it?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"And the board meets Tuesday," Agnes said, "and they'll declare you delinquent, and they'll take away your student deferment and put you in I-A. They'll do it because the Director has told them that they may, and the regulation lets them, and I've never seen those three men go against a letter from Washington in my life."

He had prepared for a good deal, but not for that. He unrolled his pamphlet, and rolled it up again.

"So you're going to send me."

"I don't send anybody. I type."

"That's what Eichmann said."

It was the year when every young man in New York had read about Eichmann, or had read about someone who had read about him, and they said it to clerks and teachers and their fathers. Agnes had heard it once before at that counter, in the summer, from a Fordham boy whose father had then telephoned her to apologize. She had not known what to answer him. She had thought about it since.

"Then don't let me be one," she said. "Listen to me, instead of telling me. You'll get a notice from us next week, a card like this one, that says I-A. On the back of the card it says how long you have to ask in writing to come in and appear before the board in person. Not before me. Before them. Has your pamphlet got that in it?"

He looked down at the pamphlet. "It says you have a right to a personal appearance."

"And does it say that nobody uses it? I've been here sixteen years. I've had eleven thousand men through those cabinets, and I could count on my two hands the ones who asked to come in and sit at that table and let three men look at them. The rest write letters." She put two fingers on his letter. "It's a good letter. It's very well written. Mr. Adler will read the first line of it, and Mr. Rafferty won't."

"What good would it do, appearing?"

"I don't know."

"Then why should I?"

"Because then they'd have to look at you," Agnes said. "For fifteen minutes three men from this parish would have to look at a boy they've known since he was in short pants and say it to his face. I don't know what that does. Nobody's tried it."

He was quiet. The radiator knocked twice and stopped. Outside on Webster Avenue a truck changed gears going up toward Fordham Road, and the glass in the door hummed.

"And after that," he said, "if they still put me in I-A."

"Then you can appeal to the appeal board, and it goes downtown, and they'll put you in I-A too. Delinquents go first in the call. You'd have an order to report in a month, six weeks. If you go, you go. If you don't go when you're ordered, it's a felony, and it's up to five years and ten thousand dollars. That's the law. I'm not saying it to frighten you. I'm saying it because you came in here with a pamphlet, and nobody should have to find out what's going to happen to him from a pamphlet."

He sat down then on the bench, with his knees up, the coat open.

It is a thing worth observing that in twenty minutes at a counter on Webster Avenue Raymond Gilhooley learned more about the law that governed his life than he had learned in two years of courses at City College, and he learned it because he wanted to know it, because it was his own life, and from the person who did it every day. He was not being taught. Nobody in that room was teaching anybody. That is how most people have always learned what they know, and the schools are the last to find it out.

"Can I ask you something?" Agnes said.

"Go ahead."

"What do you want? Not what you're against. I can read what you're against, it's both sides of a sheet. What do you want?"

He took a long time. "I want to finish," he said finally. "I've got three semesters. I'm in surveying. Civil. I want to finish and go out with a transit and a rod and lay out a road somewhere. Up in the country. That's all. That's a stupid thing to say."

"It isn't stupid," said Agnes. "Say that to them."

He stood up, and rolled the pamphlet into its tube again, and then, as if he did not know what else to do with it, put it in his coat pocket. At the door he stopped with his hand on the frosted glass.

"Do you think I'm right?" he said. "About the war."

"I think it's four o'clock," said Agnes, "and your mother doesn't know you're here, and your coat is open. Button it."

He buttoned it. He went down the stairs, and she heard him stop on the landing, where the window looked out over Webster Avenue, and stand there a while, and then go on.

---

On Tuesday the twelfth she went through the folders for the meeting as she always did, two hundred and thirty-eight of them, and clipped a yellow slip to the front of each, and at four o'clock she put a fresh sheet in the typewriter and typed the minutes, as she always did, so that the three men had only to sign. She typed two hundred and thirty-seven decisions. Where the two hundred and thirty-eighth should have been she typed GILHOOLEY, RAYMOND F., and his number, and left the rest of the line empty. She took the yellow slip off his folder. She put his letter on top, open, and the two cards under it, and she laid the folder on the table in the back room by itself, at Mr. Adler's place, apart from the piles.

They came at seven, out of the cold. Mr. Rafferty hung up his coat and his white scarf and Mr. Petrillo kept his on, because the radiator in the back room never did more than knock. They went through the piles in an hour and ten minutes. Then Mr. Rafferty turned over the minutes to sign them and found the empty line.

"Agnes. You missed one."

"No," she said, from the door. "That one's for you."

"What do you mean, for us? What's the recommendation?"

"There isn't one. You decide it."

Mr. Rafferty looked at her as a man looks at a familiar machine that has made an unfamiliar noise. Mr. Petrillo reached for the folder, but Mr. Adler had it already. He had put his glasses on, and he was reading the letter, and he read it to the end, both sides, while the other two waited, and nobody in that room could remember the last time all three of them had waited for anything.

"He's Nora Gilhooley's boy," Mr. Adler said. "The asthma."

"I know who he is," said Mr. Rafferty. "I buried his grandfather."

"He writes here that we are his neighbors." Mr. Adler turned the page over. "He writes here that I used to give him the comic books with the covers torn off, which is true. He writes that he has known me his whole life, and that he would rather go to prison in front of us than go to that war behind our backs." He took the glasses off. "He's a little bit of a showoff."

"He's a kid that threw his draft card on the floor in Washington," said Mr. Petrillo. "In front of the cameras. It's in the regulation. Washington says."

"Washington says we may," said Mr. Adler. "It doesn't say we must. Agnes, does it say we must?"

"It says may."

They argued for twenty minutes, which was longer than they had ever spent on one man, and they argued it badly, in the way of men who are not used to it, with long pauses and a good deal about their own sons and about Korea and about a cousin of Mr. Petrillo's who had been at Anzio. Nobody convinced anybody. At a quarter to nine they voted, two to one, to declare Raymond Gilhooley delinquent and to reclassify him I-A, Mr. Adler against. Mr. Rafferty wrote it in on the empty line, in ink, in his undertaker's hand, and initialed it.

Then Mr. Adler, who was putting his coat on, stopped with one arm in it.

"If he asks to come in," he said, "we'd see him. In person."

"You'd have to," said Agnes. "It's in the regulation."

"Good," said Mr. Adler. "I'd want to see him." He got the other arm in. "I'd want to see what he looks like now."

---

When they had gone down the brass stairs and out into Webster Avenue, Agnes went to the front room and turned on the light over her desk and took a classification notice out of the drawer and put it in the typewriter. It was cold, and the street was quiet. She typed his name and his number and his class, I-A, and the date the board had acted, and took it out of the machine and turned it over.

On the back of the card, in small type, was printed what every man in the country had a right to and almost no one used: that he might, within so many days, file a written request to appear in person before his local board. She read it through, although she knew it by heart. Then she took a pencil from the tray and made a small tick in the margin beside it, the kind of tick she had made for sixteen years on folders that were complete, and she put the card in one of the board's envelopes, the kind with the penalty for private use printed in the corner where a stamp would go, and laid it in the tray for the morning mail.

Then she rolled a fresh sheet into the machine, and for the first time in sixteen years she typed the minutes of a meeting after it had happened.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Paulō Goodmanō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Paul Goodman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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