A Good School Read online

  Pierre Van Loon wasn’t in his room, and the toilet stalls were vacant too, but Grove found him fooling around to no apparent purpose in the dim storage alcove where trunks and suitcases were kept. “Hey, Van Loon?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Want to get a room together next year?”

  During that summer the parents of all Dorset students received a form letter from W. Alcott Knoedler announcing that dress would be optional in the coming year.

  William Grove came back to school with two new suits, blue and brown, both purchased by his father at Bond’s in Times Square. He thought they were fine until he began to notice that almost nobody else wore clothes like that: most people didn’t wear suits at all, but tweed jackets with gray flannel pants. Their coats had practically no shoulder padding and their pants had no pleats (he remembered now having noticed that in the old school uniforms, too). Looking around, he could count only three boys who dressed the way he did: Albert Canzoneri, whose father was the shop teacher; Lothar Brundels, whose father was the chef; and Gus Gerhardt, whose father was the groundskeeper at Miss Blair’s, a famous girls’ school twelve miles away.

  Grove couldn’t be bothered with Canzoneri, and he was afraid of Gerhardt – almost everybody was afraid of Gerhardt – but Lothar Brundels took over the humor column of the Chronicle that September, so there was an opportunity to discuss clothes with him in the office one day.

  “Whaddya mean, ‘proletarian’?” Brundels said. “You’re a funny kid, Grove. Sure we look ‘proletarian.’ Why the hell shouldn’t we? Listen. You know every Thanksgiving? When all the parents come for the big-assed turkey dinner? And afterwards old Knoedler rings his bell and makes this corny speech about how very, very much we owe the chef, and then he calls ‘Come on out here, Louie, we want to thank you’ – and everybody claps, and this funny little guy ‘Louie’ comes bouncing out of the kitchen waving his arms over his head, all smiles, all in white, with this big chefs hat and this napkin tied around his neck, and son of a bitch, Grove, that’s my father. How the fuck do you think it makes me feel?”

  Grove’s own father came up from New York for a visit later in the fall, and he looked surprisingly short when Grove met him outside the One building archway.

  “Well,” the elder Grove said as they started through the quadrangle, “this certainly is an impressive place.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s very well designed. It’s called ‘Cotswold’ architecture.”

  “So how’re you doing, Bill? Staying out of trouble?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You certainly are tall.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s the math coming? Think you might pass math this time?”

  “I don’t know. Hope so.”

  “Well, you know, with a thing like math it’s mostly a question of mental attitude.”

  “I know; I know.”

  For reasons he would never understand, Grove found it all but impossible to call his father “Dad.” He remembered having no trouble with the more childish “Daddy,” years ago, but “Dad” eluded his tongue. He tried to avoid the problem, on the rare occasions when he saw the man, by arranging his remarks in such a way as to require calling him nothing at all.

  In a sidelong look, he tried to assess his father’s clothes. There was nothing “proletarian” about his dark, three-piece business suit, though it did look a little shiny from wear, but it was decidedly middle-class. Across the vest hung a delicate gold watch chain that trembled as he walked. Grove was fairly sure most men had wristwatches nowadays, but his father probably hadn’t noticed the changing fashion, or didn’t care. He wore a pearl-gray fedora with the suit, and highly polished black shoes that looked very small and narrow on the flagstones.

  “Good lord,” he said, “it must have cost a fortune to build this place.”

  “Well, I guess it did. There’s a crazy old lady named Mrs. Hooper who built it; she probably used up all her husband’s money on it. I think he was in steel, or something.”

  “‘In steel’? How do you mean, ‘in steel’?”

  “I don’t know; he was real rich, that’s all I know, and I guess she had money of her own too.”

  “How do you mean she’s crazy?”

  “I don’t know; it’s just what I’ve heard. She’s supposed to be very eccentric and everything.”

  When they’d walked enough for his father to see most of the architecture, Grove took him up to the Chronicle office – it was all he had to be proud of – and showed him that.

  “I think it’s fine that you’ve done so well on the paper,” his father said, looking uncomfortable in one of the office chairs. “And it’s an interesting paper; I enjoy reading it. Still, I wonder if you’re not giving it too much of your time.”

  “Yeah, well, the thing is I enjoy it.”

  “I know you do. But don’t they have a rule here that you can’t take part in extracurricular activities unless you keep your grades up?”

  “No, there’s no rule like that.” And Grove risked a small, cynical smile that he was aware of having copied from Haskell. “It’s a pretty funny school,” he said.

  “A funny school?”

  “Well, I mean – you know – they sort of encourage the extracurricular stuff whether you’re a good student or not. They believe in individuality here.”

  “I see,” his father said. “Well, I believe in individuality too, Bill, but I’m not sure how I feel about failing grades in math and failing grades in chemistry and failing grades in French.”

  This was a jolt: Grove had assumed that his report cards were sent only to his mother, who viewed all such failures as signs of a soul as artistic as her own.

  “Why do you suppose you have this trouble with math, Bill?” his father said. “You know something? There are only ten numbers in the world, based on the ten fingers of your hands. The whole science of mathematics follows from that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think it’s mostly a question of mental attitude, don’t you? You think it’s going to be difficult, so it is difficult. You think ‘I can’t do this,’ and then you can’t.”

  “I guess so, yeah,” Grove said, and for the first time that afternoon he noticed that his father’s face was deeply lined under the eyes and gray with fatigue.

  “If you can lick that attitude, Bill, you’ll lick the course. You’ll be surprised how easy it is. And the same goes for chemistry, because that’s mostly just numberwork too. As for the French – well, the French is another matter. There was quite a long note from Mr. – Le Grande?”

  “La Prade.”

  “Right. There was quite a long note from him with your last report card. He feels you have psychological problems.”

  Grove looked down. “Mental attitude” might be an acceptable term, but any word beginning with “psych” had come to frighten him. All such words spoke of a darkness beyond hope. They reminded him of Haskell. And the worst thing about them, according to what little he’d been able to read of Sigmund Freud, was that they had their roots in sexual anxiety.

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t agree with that. I don’t think I have any psychological problems or anything; French is hard for me, that’s all. I’ll try to do better at it, that’s all.”

  And soon he managed to turn the conversation back to the Chronicle. He gave his father an advance copy of the next issue, still warm from the press, and pointed out his major contributions to it – the solemn editorial, a humorous feature on the commando course, the Football Roundup on the sports page.

  “Good,” his father said, putting the folded paper away in his inside pocket. “This’ll give me something to read on the train.”

  Then they were out in the quadrangle again, and they had almost reached One building when Steve MacKenzie approached them on the stone walk. Grove hoped MacKenzie might settle for a nod in passing, but MacKenzie had other ideas.

  “Hi, uh, Bill,” he said. “This your dad?” And for three o
r four minutes he stood chatting with Grove’s father, while Grove shifted his weight from one foot to the other. At last MacKenzie held out his hand – it seemed to Grove that they’d shaken hands at least three times – and said “Well, I won’t keep you, Mr. Grove. Good to meet you, sir.”

  “There’s a nice boy,” Mr. Grove said as they walked away. “He a good friend of yours?”

  Out in front of One building, waiting for the taxi, Grove composed a final sentence in his mind and resolved to deliver it without stammering. He even rehearsed it, twice, just under his breath. When the cab pulled up he took his father’s hand in a grip that he hoped was as strong as MacKenzie’s and said “Thanks for coming out, Dad.” It sounded almost as natural as he’d meant it to.

  Terry Flynn and Jim Pomeroy had gotten off to an uneasy start as roommates on the very first day of school, when Terry opened a suitcase, said “Look what I’ve got,” and pulled out a set of yellow curtains, pleated and flounced, that his mother had made especially for their windows.

  “Well, that’s – nice, Terry,” Jim Pomeroy said.

  “They’re easy to put up,” Terry assured him. “I’ve got the curtain rods, and the brackets and stuff.” And that wasn’t all: he also had eight framed color photographs of rural New England – from spring wildflowers to autumn foliage to deep snow – that his mother had thought might brighten their walls. And he had another photograph, in a stand-up leather frame to be placed on his side of the windowsill, showing his mother and father on their wedding day.

  “Yeah, well, that’s – nice,” Jim Pomeroy said. But he worried about the decorations all day, especially the curtains, until one of the more popular members of his class dropped in that night and said “Wow, you guys’ve really fixed your place up. Looks terrific.”

  Other visitors soon confirmed that view, and Pomeroy was able to relax. Still, from time to time, he couldn’t help wishing the curtains weren’t quite so flouncy, or that there could be perhaps four – or six, tops – rather than eight of the framed New England scenes. It was a very small room. He wished too that Terry Flynn wasn’t two years behind him in school.

  Football season made everything all right. He and Terry were both Eagles, which everybody said was too bad for the Beavers, and they made an unbeatable combination that year. Because they were both so light (and probably too because they weren’t seniors) the Eagles’ coach didn’t use them for the whole of any game, but when they were in they were tremendous. Pomeroy would fade back, wait for the last possible moment, then leap and throw a long, perfectly spiralling pass, and far down the field the sprinting Flynn always knew just when to turn, reach up, and pick it out of the air.

  Grove, who covered the games for the Chronicle, soon found he was running out of adjectives for Pomeroy and Flynn, and so as the season wore on his accounts for the sports page lost some of their exuberance. But he enjoyed the work. He himself, on other afternoons, was an absurdly incompetent end on what was called the “intermediate” Beavers’ team, but being well known as a non-athlete seemed only to enhance his role as sportswriter. He would shamble along the sidelines, carrying a clipboard and a chewed pencil to record each play; when a game was stalled he would squat and write, holding the clipboard on one tense thigh and very much aware that a number of smaller kids were peering over his shoulder; when the game broke open again he’d get up and run with it, almost as fast as the ball carrier, with the little kids racing in his wake.

  His stories usually managed to mention the excellent tackling and blocking of Hugh Britt, who was a sturdy member of the Beavers’ line. Even when Britt did nothing distinguished in a game, there would be a sentence near the end about how “sturdy” he had been. Then one afternoon a tangled heap of Eagles and Beavers sorted themselves out, got to their feet and disclosed Hugh Britt lying alone on the grass, face down.

  Choppy Tyler blew his whistle and came running, natty and muscle-bound in his referee’s uniform of black-striped shirt and white knee pants with black stockings. Miss Logan, the younger and prettier of the two school nurses, walked gravely out onto the field with her hands deep in the pockets of her polo coat. Grove waited until several other people had gathered around Britt; then he tucked the fluttering clipboard under his arm and went out to join them, hoping it might look as though this were part of a journalist’s job, but he couldn’t see much except the big grass-stained numerals on Britt’s jersey.

  In the end Britt was carried off the field on a stretcher, to a spatter of applause, and slid into a cream-colored ambulance that took him away to the infirmary. His right leg was broken above the knee.

  During the time Britt was laid up, Grove found an easing of pressure in his life. There was no one to admire, no one to please, no one to fear.

  He visited Britt in the infirmary once or twice but they couldn’t think of much to say, and it was a relief when the visits were over. Most of the time he moved around the campus with a new sense of freedom – and even, occasionally, with a sense of his own importance. There was only one school newspaper, after all, and he was its editor-in-chief. Little kids shyly asked him questions, and boys of his own age and older seemed never to find him ridiculous.

  One afternoon there was a knock on the Chronicle office door, and he opened it to find a boy named Ward smiling there in a wry but not unfriendly way.

  “Mr. Editor,” Ward said, “I was just wondering if it’s too late to try out for a place on the staff.”

  “Well, technically, it is too late,” Grove told him, “but we always need help. I can let you have a couple of assignments. Come on in.”

  E. Bucknell “Bucky” Ward was one of the new boys in the fifth form that fall, and he had quickly called attention to himself as a campus character. He was pale and sad and looked under-nourished; his chest was sunken; he had a deep, hoarse voice and a heavy smoker’s cough – that, combined with the nicotine-stained fingers that trembled when he covered his mouth in coughing, provoked most of the laughter that broke around him.

  You weren’t allowed to smoke at Dorset until you were seventeen, and then only in the Senior Club. Infractions of that rule were punished with many hours of what was called hard labor – not much different from community service, except that it had to be done in addition to the community service requirements. And repeated infractions, as everyone solemnly warned one another, could lead to expulsion from school. But Bucky Ward took reckless chances, nimbly getting away each time, and it wasn’t long before he’d earned an outlaw’s celebrity. In class, or in assembly, he would sit with a pencil stub the length of a cigarette dangling from his moody lips.

  He had been afflicted with many illnesses throughout his childhood, and still enjoyed reciting their medical names in a mock-dramatic voice, but now he was emerging into good health. And whether he looked it or not, he was becoming very strong.

  Grove had resented Ward’s quick rise to eccentric popularity – it didn’t seem fair, in view of his own suffering last year – but he was willing to suspend judgment today. And he had to acknowledge, as he fingered through the assignment file, that he hadn’t really minded Ward’s calling him “Mr. Editor.”

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose somebody ought to cover the soccer game tomorrow. Think you could do that?”

  “Sure,” Ward said, “If I can’t, I’ll fake it.”

  “Doesn’t have to be much; five or six hundred words. Oh, and I guess we could use a very short feature on Thanksgiving – you know, just some dumb little thing.”

  “Good,” Ward said. “Dumb little things are my favorite kind.”

  Within a week they were great companions. Sitting around the office or strolling the flagstones or taking aimless walks in the woods, they seemed never to tire of each other’s company. As Grove sometimes reflected, with a touch of uneasiness, it was almost like falling in love. Bucky Ward could make him laugh over and over again until he began to feel like a girl who might at any moment cry “Oh, you keep me in stitches!” What saved him was t
he nice discovery that very often, without even seeming to try, he could make Bucky Ward laugh too.

  He was so preoccupied with his new friendship that he almost missed the deadline for the paper: he and Ward had to sneak out of their dormitories late one night and meet in the office, where they fitted “wartime discipline” blackout panels into the windows, drank dizzying amounts of coffee, and worked at writing and editing the copy until dawn.

  Another night, when they’d sneaked out not to work but only to fool around the office and talk, Ward fell into one of his serious moods and told Grove about his girl. Her name was Polly Clark and she lived in a suburban village adjacent to Ward’s own, just outside of Philadelphia.

  “She pretty?” Grove asked.

  “I knew you’d ask that. Yes, as it happens, she’s pretty, but the point is I wouldn’t care if she were plain. I don’t suppose you’re equipped to understand something like that.”

  “ ‘Equipped’? What the hell do you mean, ‘equipped’? Jesus, Ward.”

  “Well, okay; it’s just that so many people mistake sex for love.”

  And Grove had to think that over. “Yeah,” he said after a while, “yeah, I guess that’s true.”

  Polly Clark was a wonderful person, Ward explained. She was warm, she was gentle, and he knew he would never find a girl he’d rather marry, when they were old enough, though he guessed there could be no thought of marriage until after the war. And there were other difficulties: “We care very deeply for each other,” he said, “but I’m more deeply involved than she is. She says she loves me but she isn’t in love with me, and when I ask her to clarify that she says she doesn’t know her own mind. That hurts. You can’t imagine how that hurts.”

  But Grove thought he could imagine it; at least it seemed so romantic a predicament that he lowered his eyes and felt his own face grow sad and wistful in the look of someone more loving than loved.

  “Ah, I don’t know,” Ward said. “To come so close to all you’ve ever wanted in life and then never quite – never quite attain it – I suppose that’s the nature of the human condition.” When Ward was in one of his serious moods, he could seem more serious than anybody else had a right to be.