Yale University

Yale University is the distant but powerful center of several episodes in Esther Greenwood’s early relationship with Buddy Willard. Its name lends glamour to a prom invitation and social weight to Buddy’s plans, yet the romance associated with it repeatedly fails to match Esther’s expectations. In retrospect, Yale marks not the beginning of a secure future but the setting through which she comes to recognize the gap between Buddy’s appearance and his character.

Yale in Esther’s Social World

Yale enters Esther’s story through the people who go there and the status the university confers. During a crowded theater-hour rush, Esther’s cab is wedged between Betsy’s cab and another carrying four of the other girls; the congestion forms the backdrop to her recognition that Buddy, a Yale man, is stupid in the way that matters to her. He has earned good marks and had an affair with a waitress named Gladys on the Cape, but Esther sees him as lacking intuition. By contrast, Doreen’s remarks feel to Esther like a secret voice speaking from within her. The distinction is not simply between academic accomplishment and ignorance: Yale credentials do not give Buddy the perceptiveness Esther values.

That judgment sits against the earlier force of Buddy’s attention. Their mothers had been school friends, married their professors, and settled in the same town, but Buddy’s absences—for prep school on scholarship in fall and work fighting blister rust in Montana in summer—had made the mothers’ friendship seem inconsequential to Esther. She usually saw him only at church on Sundays, from a distance. When he unexpectedly appeared at her house during Christmas vacation in a thick white turtleneck, looking handsome, and said he might visit her at college, she was flabbergasted. He explained that he had run the two miles between their houses for cross-country practice, but Esther could not understand what had prompted him to seek her out.

The Junior Prom Invitation

The invitation that turns Yale into a personal destination arrives in a pale blue envelope bearing the university’s crest. Buddy leaves it with Esther after visiting her and explaining that he cannot stay because he is going to the Sophomore Prom with Joan. Esther feels like a prize idiot and asks coldly how Joan is. When Buddy leaves, she opens the envelope and discovers that it invites her to the Yale Junior Prom. The withheld question he had said she could answer by mail had concealed the invitation itself.

Esther’s response is immediate and exuberant: she yips, runs into the house shouting that she is going, and embraces the senior on watch. The Yale invitation changes how the other seniors treat her. They begin speaking to her, sometimes answer the phone for her, and stop making loud remarks outside her door about her wasting her college years with her nose in a book. The prom therefore carries a social consequence beyond the date itself: an association with Buddy and Yale grants Esther recognition among women who had previously treated her as an outsider.

The invitation also sets the scale of Esther’s hopes. She imagines that Buddy will fall in love with her over the weekend, ending her worry about what she will do on Saturday nights for the rest of the year. Yet the experience offers little confirmation of that fantasy. At the prom, they dance about a mile apart; during “Auld Lang Syne,” Buddy rests his chin on the top of her head as if tired. They then walk five miles back in the cold, black, three-o’clock wind to the house where Esther is staying on a short couch that costs fifty cents a night, rather than two dollars for one of the places with proper beds. She feels dull, flat, and full of shattered visions.

Courtship and Disillusionment

As they approach the house after the dance, Buddy asks Esther to go to the chemistry lab, saying there is a beautiful view behind it. The request catches her aghast: she had imagined a romantic culmination to the weekend, while his attention turns to a place associated with his studies. Even later, when Buddy kisses her in front of the house steps and Esther is nearly fainting with excitement, the future she envisions remains hers rather than a promise they have clearly made together. She thinks she could manage to see him every third weekend and is eager to return to college to tell everyone.

The prom thus binds Yale to a courtship built on unequal expectations. Esther takes what Buddy tells her as the honest-to-God truth, while his handsome appearance and academic standing help sustain her belief in him. The pale blue envelope, the crest, the dance, and the kiss all seem to confirm a romantic story; the actual weekend leaves her with distance on the dance floor, a tired gesture, and an invitation to the chemistry lab. The contrast makes Yale’s prestige an unreliable guide to the intimacy Esther hopes to find.

The following fall, Buddy’s scholarship to medical school leads Esther to visit him there instead of going to Yale. On that visit, she discovers how he had fooled her over the years and what a hypocrite he was. The revelation comes on the day they see a baby born. This later discovery recasts the prom and the early courtship: the Yale invitation had made Buddy seem worthy of Esther’s trust, but it could not protect that trust from the truth she eventually learns. Yale remains a recurring reference point in their history, associated both with the bright promise of being chosen and with the retrospective recognition that prestige and good marks had concealed no special insight or honesty.