A Good School Read online

  He had been turning an empty coffee mug around and around in his fingers, staring at it; now in a spasm of revulsion he threw it on the floor, where it bounced and rolled under a chair. He was on his feet and pacing, clawing out his pack of cigarettes, jabbing one into his mouth and lighting it savagely as he walked.

  “Things!” he said. “Christ, Grove, do you ever get so you can’t stand things? Objects? That cup. This school. Clothes. Cars. All the God damn senseless things in the world. You oughta see my family’s house. Oh, it’s very nice and it’s very big and it cost my father a hell of a lot of money, but I can never make him understand it’s just another thing. Just another thing. Do you see what I mean at all?”

  “Well, sort of,” Grove said. “I guess so, yeah.” But as Ward continued to pace and smoke, haggard with tragic vision, Grove decided he liked him better when he was funny.

  Knoedler chimed his table bell after dinner one night, requesting silence, and rose to make an announcement. “I know you’ll all join me,” he said, “in extending our deepest sympathy to William Grove, whose father died this morning.”

  And the people at Grove’s table looked around to realize for the first time that he wasn’t there – that he had, in fact, been gone all day.

  Perhaps the only boy in the refectory who had missed him was Bucky Ward. He’d begun to notice his absence during school hours, and he’d missed him all afternoon. He had wondered, with rising jealousy, if Grove might somehow have arranged to spend the whole day at Hugh Britt’s bedside in the infirmary – he had even considered going to the infirmary to find out – but in the end he’d settled for a brooding, puzzled loneliness. Now Knoedler’s announcement made everything clear, and he felt better.

  But Steve MacKenzie was shaken by the news. “Oh, Jesus,” he said to Jim Pomeroy. “That’s lousy. That’s really too bad.”

  And he was depressed all through study hall that night. He couldn’t help pondering how he would feel if his own father were to die. It was unthinkable: Jock MacKenzie was in the very prime of life, a laughing, sailing, golf- and tennis-playing man who could still defeat his son at arm-wrestling any time he felt like it, and often did. Still, there were heart attacks; there were strokes; there was cancer. Nobody lived forever.

  Jock MacKenzie’s anger could be terrible, but in his gentle moods there was no finer companion in the world. Every worthwhile thing Steve knew, it seemed, was something he had learned from his father. As a condition of receiving a car on his sixteenth birthday, Steve had been made to memorize the whole of Kipling’s “If,” which later helped him earn the only “A” he’d ever had in Pop Driscoll’s course; and certain lines of that poem, remembered now as they sounded in his father’s voice, were enough to fill his eyes with tears.

  He glanced quickly up and around the study hall, to make sure no one had caught him on the verge of crying; then he pulled himself together and bent over his math assignment. This Sunday, he promised himself, he would call home and have a good long talk with the old man.

  When Grove came back to school a few days later, MacKenzie stopped him in the quadrangle and said “Bill, I was really sorry to hear about your dad.”

  “Yeah, well – thanks.”

  “Seems like only yesterday he was up here that time,” MacKenzie said. “I thought he was a real – a very nice gentleman.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks, uh, Steve.”

  Then MacKenzie noticed that a delicate gold chain hung from the lapel buttonhole into the breast pocket of Grove’s awful blue suit; he almost said “Oh, that’s nice; you’ve got your dad’s watch,” but decided against it. He had said enough. With one fist he gave Grove a soft cuff on the shoulder; then he walked away.

  “When you’re talking, Steve,” Jock MacKenzie had told him once, “and I don’t care who it’s to or what it’s about, the important thing is knowing when to stop. Never say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.”

  Sometimes the big moves in a man’s life, the big changes, announce themselves quickly. Through a journalist friend of his in New York, Jean-Paul La Prade had learned he might qualify for a commission in the O.S.S., and he was eager to pursue it; the difficulty lay in finding a way to tell Alice.

  “What does ‘O.S.S.’ stand for?” she asked him. It was one o’clock in the morning and they were sitting naked on the small sofa in his apartment, drinking bourbon.

  “It stands for Office of Strategic Services,” he said. “Essentially it’s an intelligence operation, very high-level, very secret. There’s nothing else like it in the Army. They go in behind enemy lines to gather information, and they report directly to the Chief of Staff. And the point is they need officers who are fluent in French. I could probably be commissioned as a captain.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t that sound nice,” she said. “ ‘Captain La Prade.’ ” There was an edge of sarcasm in her voice that put him on guard.

  “Yes, well, I’m not concerned with how it would sound so much as how it would be. I imagine it might be dangerous. Being dropped in behind enemy lines, not knowing what to expect when you—”

  “Ah, you really like saying ‘behind enemy lines,’ don’t you,” Alice said. “It makes you feel like something out of the movies, doesn’t it. Captain La Prade in Occupied France. Captain La Prade making contact with the French Underground. Jaunty, squinting fellows in berets with submachine guns slung over their leather jackets, sharing their wine and bread and cheese with you, and of course there’ll have to be a girl, won’t there – let’s make her a famished little French girl who’s been getting laid by a German Occupation officer and feeling perfectly awful about it – and you’ll meet her at sunset in a beet field or a turnip field or some damn thing, and that night she’ll come crawling into your sleeping bag, and oh, God, Jean-Paul, you make me want to throw up.”

  He didn’t know what to say, but it seemed important to get to his feet, turn away, pull on his pants and fasten them. With his back to her, he said “Well, Alice, if you want to throw up I expect you’d better get into the bathroom first. Otherwise, I think it’s probably time to put on your clothes and go home.”

  Then he risked a look at her. She was standing at the liquor table, trying to fix a drink, but her hands weren’t steady enough for that because she was crying. The dark, ragged pout of her pubic thatch turned and stared at him. Did women realize how vulnerable, how pitiable that most prized and secret part of them could make them look, at moments like this? Probably so; they probably realized everything.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” And there was nothing to do but take her in his arms and let her weep against his chest. That seemed to make her feel better, and it made him feel fine: it was exactly how he’d planned to conclude the evening in the first place.

  “Jean-Paul?” she asked, between sniffles.

  “Mm?”

  “Will they give you any training or anything? Before they start dropping you in behind enemy lines?”

  The paperwork took very little time, and the commission came through in the last week of school before Christmas.

  Alcott Knoedler was barely able to hide his irritation at the news – how and where could he find a new French teacher in the middle of the year? – but he managed to recover his sense of decorum in time for the day’s assembly.

  “One of our masters and friends,” he announced, “has volunteered to serve his adopted nation. Mr. Jean-Paul La Prade today accepts a commission as captain in the United States Army. I congratulate him personally, as I know we all will, and I know we’ll all wish him well. Mr. La Prade? Jean-Paul? Will you stand up back there please?”

  This was ridiculous. La Prade had to rise from the seated faculty and stand in a sea of applause while a hundred and twenty-five pink young faces came swivelling around to smile at him over the backs of chairs. It was as if he were Louie Brundels, called from the kitchen on Thanksgiving Day; and the worst part, the awful part, was that it brought a quick warm swelling to the walls of his throat. My God, he thoug
ht, my God, I’m going to cry. What saved him, as he crouched and turned briefly right and left to acknowledge the clapping of his colleagues on either side, was a glimpse of Jack Draper’s pale withered hands trying to clap along with the others, probably making no sound.

  Chapter Five

  Grove spent most of that Christmas vacation teaching himself to smoke. He would soon turn seventeen, and he didn’t want to be the fool of the Senior Club.

  First he had to learn the physical side of it – how to inhale without coughing; how to will his senses to accept drugged dizziness as pleasure rather than incipient nausea. Then came the subtler lessons in aesthetics, aided by the use of the bathroom mirror: learning to handle a cigarette casually, even gesturing with it while talking, as if scarcely aware of having it in his fingers; deciding which part of his lips formed the spot where a cigarette might hang most attractively – front and profile – and how best to squint against the smoke in both of those views. The remarkable thing about cigarettes, he discovered, was that they added years to the face that had always looked nakedly younger than his age.

  By the time of his seventeenth birthday he was ready. His smoking passed the critical scrutiny of his peers – nobody laughed – and so he was initiated.

  The Senior Club opened new horizons for all its members. It was a long, wide room with a flagstone floor, converted from one of the unused study halls of Four building. There was a pool table that seemed always to be in use, there were deep leather sofas and chairs, there was a phonograph with many records and a carefully neat display of current magazines. There was a big stone fireplace, too, and the pungent smell of woodsmoke, combining with the blue tobacco haze as the billiard balls clicked, gave flavor to everyone’s sense of maturity. Only rarely did anything shrill or silly occur in the Senior Club; it was a place for learning how to behave in college – except, of course, that neither the class of ’43 nor that of ’44 could make plans for college until after the war.

  “There’s little or no training,” Larry Gaines explained to a cluster of attentive listeners around the fireplace one afternoon. “It’s not like a regular branch of the service at all. You sign on and you ship out; that’s about it.”

  Larry Gaines had tried to enlist in the Army, the Marine Corps, and the Navy – he had been ready to leave school at once for any of them – but they’d all turned him down because of an obscure physical ailment he’d never known he had. Now he had settled for his last resort, the Merchant Marine – and the Merchant Marine, which might otherwise have seemed drab and spiritless, was beginning to take on an aura of romance at Dorset Academy because of him. At the urging of Pop Driscoll and others he had agreed not to sign on and ship out right away, but he’d arranged with the dean to take his final exams and get his diploma a month ahead of time, so he could leave early in May.

  “And of course there’s no uniform or anything,” he was saying. “Just regular work clothes; you buy your own. Except I imagine the guys keep dress clothes in their lockers too, so they can show a little class around the girls in Algiers, or wherever they’re going. Ah, look, I’m probably making it sound better than it is. It’s probably the most boring life in the world, chipping paint all day, and stuff like that, but what the hell; it’s the best I can do. Listen, I’ve gotta cut out. See you guys later.”

  Larry Gaines never spent much time hanging around the Senior Club, though he could always command a respectful audience there. He was President of the Student Council now, and there seemed always to be matters that required his attention. “See you guys later,” he would say, and disappear into his responsibilities.

  “Hey, Grove?” Pierre Van Loon said in the darkness of their double room that night. “You awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Know something? The way Gaines was talking today, about the Merchant Marine and all – that really sounded nice.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Ah, I don’t know; it just did. Be out working in the sun, chipping paint or whatever it is you have to do for maybe a couple of weeks at sea, then pull into someplace like Algiers and go to hell with yourself. I guess you don’t see what I mean.”

  “Well, I think I do, sort of.” “Because the point is, kids in private schools don’t know anything about reality. Look: I figure I’ve got about a year left before the Army gets me, and you know what I’d like to do? Oh, I probably won’t do this, because my parents’d kill me, at least my father would, but I’d like to spend the whole year bumming around this country. Out to the West Coast and back, with side trips along the way. And I’d never pay for transportation: I’d hitchhike or I’d ride the freights. When I hit the oil fields I’d sign on as a roughneck. You know what a roughneck is?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about that.”

  “Then when I got into the cattle country I’d work as a cowhand. I can ride. And wherever they’re building highways, I’d work as a hard-rock miner. You know what a hard-rock miner is?”

  “I think I can figure it out.”

  “Well, but do you see, the point is I’d always be moving on; moving on. Go broke, take a job for a while, hit the road again. And there’d be girls! Jesus, Grove, think of the girls. And I’d just be the lonesome stranger, always moving on.”

  “Yeah,” Grove said. “Well, if you can’t do something like that now, I guess there won’t be much chance of doing it until after the war.”

  “Oh, I know,” Van Loon said. “But after the war, boy, I’m really gonna – that’s really what I’m gonna do.”

  “Gentlemen,” W. Alcott Knoedler said to his assembled faculty, “I wish I had encouraging news this afternoon, but I won’t lie to you. We’re in trouble.”

  They were gathered in the extravagantly spacious living room of the headmaster’s residence – a room that embarrassed Knoedler’s wife (“What can I do in there, Alcott?”) and took young girls’ breath away when they first walked into it in their evening gowns, on the arms of their “dates,” for the annual Spring Dance. Old Mrs. Hooper had stocked the long panelled walls with thousands of leather-bound books whose pages would never be cut, and with oil portraits of worthy-looking men and women whom no one could identify. Except perhaps at the Spring Dance, when the kids did seem to have a pretty good time, it was a place of anxiety – a room where you sat and waited and found that your palms were damp in meetings like this.

  “Like all private schools, we rely on tuition as our primary source of income,” Knoedler said. “In the past, from time to time, we’ve been able to draw on funds made available by Mrs. Hooper’s foundation, but that source is closed to us now. For reasons of her own, Mrs. Hooper has made clear that she plans no further financial aid.

  “With a small enrollment, and with many of the boys paying half tuition, we can’t begin to meet our costs. We’ve been operating at a deficit for some years, and we’ve reached a point of crisis.

  “I met with the board of trustees last week, and a suggestion was made which I’ll pass along to you now. If each member of the faculty were to accept a voluntary cut in salary as a temporary measure – oh, perhaps twenty-five percent – we might well be able to remain solvent.”

  And they turned him down. Dr. Wilson, the old history master, was the first to speak: he said he couldn’t possibly absorb a twenty-five percent salary cut, and added that he didn’t see why the faculty should be made to suffer for Mrs. Hooper’s intransigence; then Dr. Stone spoke up in agreement, and because everybody knew that Edgar Stone was the highest-paid man on the staff it was easy to follow his lead. The refusal was unanimous.

  “All right, gentlemen,” Knoedler said, “I’ve presented the board’s recommendation and I’ve noted your response. I see no point in prolonging this meeting. I’ll keep you informed of any new developments.”

  On leaving the headmaster’s house, Robert Driscoll held himself down to a toddler’s stroll in order to walk beside Jack Draper. It was on the tip of his tongue to say “How’re things at home, Jack?” but he thou
ght better of it and cast about for other things to say instead. For several months now, since La Prade had gone, he’d been nagged with curiosity about how the Drapers were getting along. Had they just sort of fallen back into sleeping together again? Was that what people did? Or were there terrible scenes at night with tears and recriminations and heavy drinking and talk of divorce, until Jack passed out on the living-room sofa and the children came down and found him there in the morning?

  “Jack?” he said. “Marge and I were saying just last night that we hardly ever see you anymore. Why don’t you and Alice come over for a drink some night this week?”

  Draper’s walk, as well as being very slow, required him to move his arms in a trembling parody of a British soldier on parade. His head, erect and tense now in the effort of walking, was small and handsome, with close-cut blond hair beginning to recede at the temples. Even before the polio he must have been a slight man, but it had probably been the kind of slightness many women admire. “Well, thanks, Bob, that’s nice,” he said. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of days, okay?”

  Then Driscoll left him, and Draper continued to make his laborious way home. He was passing through the bleak, sandy area behind Four building now, where the unfinished foundations lay like ruins. Why had they set the science building and the science masters’ houses so far away from the main part of the school? Had some mordant architect guessed there might one day be a science master barely able to walk the distance? Or maybe they had somehow predicted, those fanciful “Cotswold” architects of Mrs. Hooper’s, that there might one day be a houseful of pain out there beyond the sand – a cuckold’s house so steeped in loss that even the children’s smiles were sad.

  “Jack?” Alice called from the next room. “Was there anything new?”