Columbia University is the first major threshold in Willie Keith’s naval life: the campus receives him as a recent college graduate and becomes the setting for his early training as a midshipman. Furnald Hall, the school’s former law-student dormitory, is both his point of entry into military routine and, later, a place where the past confronts him in familiar rooms and corridors.

Arrival at the Midshipmen School

In December 1942, Mrs. Keith drove Willie from their home in Manhasset to the midshipmen school at Columbia University. He had wanted to take the train, which would have felt more like a departure for war, but his mother insisted on bringing him herself. Near Broadway and 116th Street, beside the family Cadillac and the campus’s dingy gray-and-red buildings, they stopped to say goodbye. The scene places Willie’s first step toward naval service inside a family parting: he is eager to make the departure his own, yet still accompanied and cared for by his mother.

After a final kiss, Willie walked past the School of Journalism and down to Furnald Hall. At the entrance, a Navy chief handed him a bundle of papers. Willie briefly considered whether to salute, then decided the gesture did not suit his civilian coat and hat; by the time he reached the doorway, he had already forgotten his mother. The small hesitation and abrupt shift of attention make the entrance a practical as well as emotional boundary: outside it, he is still dressed as a civilian son; inside, he is being taken into the Navy’s system of instruction.

Furnald Hall and Military Display

Furnald Hall was not an academy purpose-built for naval officers but a former dormitory for law students repurposed as a midshipmen school. Its institutional setting expanded beyond the building during a review at South Field. Midshipmen from Furnald, Johnson Hall, and John Jay Hall assembled with rifles and dress equipment as part of a force of about twenty-five hundred novice naval officers. A sixty-piece band played marches while spectators gathered beyond the field’s wire fences.

The review presented a striking contrast between the massed formation and the individual students within it. In the ranks, the young men appeared uniform and imposing; individually, they were frightened novices trying not to draw attention. Willie’s own early difficulty with the school’s disciplinary standards surfaced during inspection: after accumulating demerits, he stood at twenty-five, far ahead of the nearest contender’s seven. Columbia University therefore serves not simply as a backdrop to his enlistment, but as the place where ceremony, institutional discipline, and his uneven adjustment to military life first meet.

Return to a Changed Present

After the mutiny proceedings, Willie returned alone to Columbia University and walked through Furnald Hall. The building’s lobby seemed unchanged, but its familiar objects carried a different weight. He recognized the leather couch where he had once told his father about his forty-eight demerits and the telephone booth where he had spoken with May Wynn many times. Outside it, another group of impatient midshipmen waited; inside, a young student talked and laughed on the phone.

The return sets Willie’s present uncertainty against the rhythms of his earlier training. The salutes of the midshipmen first flattered him and then depressed him, while the unchanged lobby made the intervening years feel like lost time. Furnald Hall, once the entrance to a new identity, now becomes a place where old relationships and youthful routines remain visible even as Willie can no longer inhabit them in the same way.