Chuck and his brothers.

• Author: Belanger, Greg
• Position: College fraternities

I've never gotten over the fact that Chuck didn't tell me he planned to join a frat. After all, we had grown up together, spending our summers clamming in open skiffs on Long Island's Great South Bay. We were childhood friends. It's the kind of decision friends typically sweat through together.

Chuck enrolled at Alfred University in 1978 during my junior year, after taking time off to work and travel, In the first weeks of school, we fell into the habit of meeting in the union pub. We would stand at the end of the bar and talk about friends back home, the boats, ale price of clams. But my thoughts were a long way from the bay and outboard motor oil. And Chuck gensed it. An awkwardness crept into our meetings, Chuck was struggling to make the transition to college life, one few find easy.

I made some fitful attempts to bring him into my world of history majors and left-leaning political acfivists, but more and more I'd see Chuck with the Greek crowd, About half the male students belong to one of the five fraternities. I knew some of them and they knew me. But Alfred is a small, rural campus and the Greek and non-Greek world divides social life. From the day I was shoved over a porch railing for flirting with a brother's girlfriend at a rush party, I had chosen sides. I was no more comfortable joining the Greeks around a table full of beers than Chuck was sitting with my friends.

Just two days before he died I saw him in the pub. Sensing the boundaries as much as 1, Chuck got up from a table of fraternity brothers and joined me, leaning on his elbows with his back to the bar, his wiry, six-foot frame tilting on his heels like a shovel against a barn wall.

"So what are your plans for school, Chuck?" I asked and lifted a beer.

As if he were prepared for the question, Chuck explained he had decided to major in history like me. I saw his reply as a signal that he too was looking for new common ground. Within minutes I had him in my adviser's office filling in the paperwork.

As we bounded down the worn oak stairs of the history building, I felt we had closed a gap between us. We headed back to the pub. I ordered more beer to celebrate, But as I carried on, recommending classes to take and professors to avoid, Chuck's eyes kept glancing back toward the Greeks. Soon I stopped talking. Chuck said nothing. I found myself rolling a cigarette butt back and forth under my foot, staring down on the beer-soaked carpet. Before long Chuck returned to his...