by Tracy Kidder
He was shy around my brothers and me but didn’t seem to care if we saw him kiss my mother or heard him call her “sweetheart.” Walking to school alone one day, I realized I must have been adopted. I didn’t look like him. I had brown hair, not black. I was already taller. And he rarely lost his temper. I resembled pictures of my mother’s father, though—the long French nose, the high forehead, the myopic eyes. I went off alone into the woods to have my secret fantasies about who my father really was. My own was both too ordinary and too odd.
My mother told us we were “middle class,” a claim most of that post–World War II generation of Americans, especially those on either end of the middle, seemed afraid not to make. Her own family had been well-to-do, and then, when she was still a girl, her father’s business failed. A year or two later he died, and they lived on the charity of relatives and the wages of my mother’s oldest brother.
As for my father, he wasn’t rich compared to most of his friends, but the place where he saw wealthier people was the yacht club. Naturally, my mother liked to spend money, and just as predictably, my father hated parting with it. Every week she put a little something from the grocery money into the Christmas Club at the A & P. This was fortunate. My father one Christmas morning presented to my older brother and me a bunch of underwear he had bought at one of his favorite Manhattan stores. We opened the packages and found T-shirts with one sleeve missing and with outlandishly long waists, long as dresses, all with “Factory Reject” stamped on them. My brother and I looked at each other but didn’t protest until he was out of earshot. We knew he meant the gifts sincerely. He bought his suits at discount stores—two pairs of pants for the price of one. He once gave a New York City cabdriver a ten-cent tip and the man threw it back at him, and when I asked him how that made him feel, my father said, “Well, I was glad to have my dime back.” He didn’t want my mother to have her own bank account. As a rule, he was grumpy only once a month, when paying the household bills himself. “Do you know your mother hides them from me?” he asked me one time, with puzzled consternation. But we never wanted for anything essential, and he spent freely on our educations. I went to public school through eighth grade, then to boarding school, Andover, and then, like my father, to Harvard, where he sent me a handsome allowance, which I sometimes squandered on backgammon losses and once on a handmade suit.
WHEN I WAS A BOY, MY FATHER BOUGHT A CATBOAT, THIRTY FEET LONG AND fifty years old, named the Mayflower. A tub, my brothers and I called it. If the original Mayflower had sailed as slowly, I thought, the English would never have made it to Plymouth. Every summer when his vacation began, he and my mother and brothers and I would climb aboard and head down Long Island Sound for Woods Hole in Cape Cod, my father shedding his business suit, getting down to his underwear by the time the sail was hoisted. He had equipped the boat with an Army surplus ice chest that had been used to store plasma. HUMAN BLOOD, it read on the side. The boat’s foghorn had been a birthday present to my mother, who forgave him but never forgot. I remember sitting in the cockpit under a leaky awning, at anchor in a muddy little harbor, the rain beating down. I was slapping mosquitoes and grumbling when my father reached over and tapped me gently on the knee and said, without irony, “What could be nicer!”
He had spent his summers in Woods Hole as a boy, and his tiny, eccentric mother still kept a large, chaotic house there. One night, when most of her twenty-six grandchildren and their parents sat down to dinner, my younger cousins all yelling and running around the table, poking the adults’ butts with forks, the little old lady at the head of the table bowed her head and softly intoned, “Lord, please help us safely through this meal.” I felt more embarrassed than amused, as if the girl I dreamed about were watching from the doorway.
On a summer day in Woods Hole when I was thirteen, my parents had brought some friends along for a picnic on the Mayflower. These friends had a summer place in the town and several daughters, one about my age, Mary Anne. I studied her in glances. She had curly hair braided in pigtails and was laughing. As soon as she and her family came aboard, I started acting every bit the mariner, raising the sail, trimming the sheet. Soon we were lumbering slowly up Vineyard Sound. Continuing my exertions, I cut my elbow. I went down to the cabin, where Mary Anne had also gone to have a look around. We were alone. I found the Band-Aids and asked her to put one on my cut. She did. “Could you put another on?” I asked.
How my spirits would lift all the rest of the years of my adolescence on the last leg of my family’s voyages, coming down Vineyard Sound before a following wind, the Mayflower’s mast and boom, thick as a pair of old telephone poles, creaking under full sail, and soon Woods Hole and Mary Anne’s house heaving into view. I saw her in the summers. Sometimes we wrote to each other in the off-seasons. Her interest in me ebbed and flowed, and mine in her, but mine never fell as far as hers. The craving for distinction that I began to feel was always there underneath the hope of making her admire me, and after disappointments I’d feel as if I still had her to hope for, or at least a letter in my box in the mailroom at Andover, a letter in a blue envelope, which I’d study in my room, searching until I thought I’d found, in the news about her, news about her affection for me.
My parents had always called me by my middle name, which was my mother’s maiden name—Tracy. It was an unusual given name in those days, and my first year at Andover, wanting to be different from the boy I used to be, I decided to switch to my first name, John. When I came home that summer, a report card with D’s in math and science and this note from my housemaster followed:
Where John’s natural aptitude will serve, he can polish off assignments, but when real difficulty is faced, he is likely to shirk.… The Junior Physical Education program report substantiates our own observations. They credit him with working very hard—usually; he did well in gymnastics and in track, where he has definite aptitudes. They note, “Whenever the going got real tough and it involved real courage, he would not proceed with any test.”
I reverted to my middle name the following year, and I didn’t get another bad report card until basic training, when the officer in charge of the platoon, another sort of housemaster, gave me, on the standard form, a mediocre grade in “Moral Courage.” I went to him and said, “I resent this, sir.” He told me that he didn’t mean to impugn my morals or my courage. He gave me the grade because I’d gotten flustered when leading the platoon in close-order drill and had sent them marching in two different directions.
I remember standing, at thirteen, in the study of my Andover housemaster, asking for help with algebra and then becoming so afraid that the severe look on his face would turn into something worse that I lost track of everything he said until he started yelling that I wasn’t paying attention. I remember this with a vividness that surprises me, a measure of how infrequently I was mistreated as a boy. The masters liked to say that at Andover students enjoyed “complete freedom tempered by expulsion.” But I remember assigned seats at daily chapel and a master in the balcony recording the names of absentees, and punishments for missing chapel or church on Sundays or for getting a few bad grades.
What the masters actually granted us students, maybe out of laziness or maybe by design, was license with one another. Out of four years of daily sermons, I don’t remember one, or any other adult intervention, that addressed the cruelty within the student body. There were only two Asians in my class. One was a small, lonely Chinese boy. Passing him, some of my classmates would pull their eyelids outward with their fingers and say, “My name Charlie Chan.” After a few months at Andover, he disappeared and was found three days later hiding in the rafters of the music building.
There were other victims. I joined in the hazing of several. Of course I was afraid of being ostracized myself, but I was over six feet tall and a good athlete, in spite of nearsightedness. During one baseball game freshman year, a fly ball hit me on the head, but I was teased about it for only a day or two because earlier that game I’d hit two
home runs. Besides, I was good at football, the ultimate immunity. I felt as though I lived for the local prestige of playing football and for its licensed violence, but my chief ambition those four years was getting through that school.
I got good grades in history and Spanish, and the summer after graduation I saw Marlon Brando in The Ugly American. It made a strong impression. America, I realized, was in the midst of a great struggle with the Soviet Union, a struggle between democracy and tyranny, which we Americans would lose unless we learned to present our case properly to the lesser nations. So I would become a diplomat. Harvard was a good place to start. At Harvard, the major in political science was called “Government,” and Harvard had produced a lot of those who did govern us, including President Kennedy, of course. I had been in Cambridge only a few months when he was assassinated. All over Harvard Yard, students streamed from the doorways of the freshman dorms. I stood among a group outside Wigglesworth Hall. Someone had a portable radio. President Johnson had just been sworn in, and we listened as he declared that America would honor her commitments from somewhere or other all the way to “Viet-nam”—the last syllable rhyming with ma’am. Someone in that crowd of freshmen said it was a great relief to hear this, and looking back, I see faces nodding in agreement—as I was—faces that, three and four years later, were chanting, “Hell no, we won’t go!”
I had spent my four years at Andover without much access to girls or alcohol. In Cambridge, I had no problem getting alcohol, at the Varsity Liquor Store in Harvard Square, with my fake Montana driver’s license. Girls were harder to come by. I drank a lot, and I read Marx and Engels, Locke and Rousseau, Hobbes and Kant. I studied introductory economics and American pressure-group politics. I wrote a hopelessly muddled paper about agriculture in Argentina. And just for fun, I took a creative writing course. The first stories I wrote—there was one about a girl who looked like a duck, but a good-looking duck—contained some plausible dialogue, and the instructor liked them. More important, so did some of the young women in the class. Here, it seemed, was a way to meet and impress girls.
Sophomore year, on the strength of those first short stories, I got into a writing seminar taught by Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator of Homer. The class convened in a long, narrow room in the ancient Sever Hall, no doubt renovated many times, and unadorned. A window looked out on Harvard Yard, the snow and leafless trees against dark brick and stone. The messages in architecture were mostly hidden from me but not unfelt. I loved the plainness of that room long before I realized that I did. But I felt that I was being inducted into something old and important as soon as Mr. Fitzgerald entered the room.
He was a small man in his early sixties. He wore a beret and carried a green cloth book bag. He sat down at the head of the long seminar table and then eyed each of us. He had a pair of reading glasses, half-glasses. He lowered them and, looking at us over the rims, he said, “The only reason for writing is to produce something classic. And I expect that you will produce classic work during this term.”
He let that sink in, then double-jabbed a finger at the wastebasket beside him. “The greatest repository I know of for writers. And I do hope that it will precede me.”
During the first part of every class, he would talk about the craft of writing and read aloud to us, occasionally a student’s poem or story, and more often works by famous writers he had known. He read us a story by his old friend Flannery O’Connor and said when he finished, “That story unwinds like a Rolex watch.” In the second half of every class, he had us write. He warmed us up, then made us exercise, and somehow I could always write something in that room for him. In his presence, even poetry seemed possible. Mr. Fitzgerald insisted I try a poem now and then. I struggled and finally got one off that he seemed to like. It came back from him with this comment at the bottom: “This is very like a poem.”
I wrote story after story, sometimes two a week. I set one at boarding school and depicted a pair of boys: a popular one who feels stirrings of compassion for another who is tormented by his classmates. It had a certain complexity; the tormented boy is truly obnoxious. I called it “The Tabor’s Sound,” after a line from Wordsworth. I stayed up two entire nights to write it, then showed it to a friend. He’d been to prep school, too, and was trying to write about the experience himself. “Your story stinks,” he said. This was the first and at the time the only literary friend I’d acquired, and I thought him very wise and perspicacious, because once he had encouraged me. After he pointed out my story’s flaws, I saw them clearly, too. But I decided to leave the thing in Mr. Fitzgerald’s box, just so he’d know that I was working.
I was in my seat when he walked into class a few days later. I always arrived early. “It’s not a fit day out for man nor beast,” Mr. Fitzgerald said and stamped the snow off his galoshes. Then he greeted us as usual, first with a smile, and then with a sigh, as he heaved his green book bag onto the table. Mr. Fitzgerald’s green bag contained our poems and stories, my story, with his comments written on them. I could not have been more interested in that book bag if Mr. Fitzgerald had been our guardian, returning with food he’d found out in the world. But the way he sighed as he heaved his sack onto the table insinuated that what lay inside wasn’t as valuable as food. Certainly it looked like a heavy load for one professor to carry.
“I’m going to read a story by one of the writers in this class, a story I particularly liked,” he said. “It’s called ‘The Tabor’s Sound.’ ” He lowered his glasses and looked around the room. “I assume that all of you know where the phrase comes from.” Suddenly the mellifluous voice that had read to us from the likes of James Agee and Wallace Stevens and Flannery O’Connor was reading my story. He’d made it through several sentences before I realized that my mouth was hanging open. I closed it fast. I hoped no girls had noticed. I wanted to ask Mr. Fitzgerald to stop. Then I wished he never would.
Mary Anne had come to Boston that year for college. We had gone on a couple of dates. On each I felt as if I were looking in a mirror, trying desperately to find the angle where my face would become handsome. These were the first times I had seen her away from Woods Hole, and I felt lost without the things we had in common, without the sea and sailboats. The pigtails had turned into a complicated bun, from which small curls escaped, like jewels on her neck. I wished I could touch them, tracing their spirals with a finger. She wore small pearl earrings. She was animated as always, but now her silly name for me—Tray-Tray—came out with an extra touch of irony. She laughed and then bent over and slapped herself on the thighs, just as I remembered her doing. She’d always made exaggerated movements, pantomiming mirth or horror or grave injury. When she made herself look awkward, it only reminded me of her gracefulness.
“So what have you been up to?” I asked.
“Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that,” she said, with a closed-lipped smile and her eyebrows lifting.
Well, I could be mysterious, too. Maybe I’d been up to dangerous, adult things myself. I made up a story about a girl, a casual liaison. She’d given me a venereal disease, I said, in a low voice, trying to imitate Mary Anne’s smile.
She smiled back, but without her usual certainty.
I hadn’t seen her much since then. But I called her often at the pay phone in her dorm, dialing again and again to get past the busy signal. Then I’d read my latest story. I had told her I was going to be a writer. I knew she approved. I didn’t imagine her listening in a hot phone booth while other students banged on the door. That wouldn’t have stopped me anyway. Occasionally I’d hear her yawn but would read on undeterred. I called her up that night after Fitzgerald’s class and started to read her “The Tabor’s Sound.”
“Oh,” she said about half an hour later. “I like that.”
“Did you really like it?”
“Yes, of course. I did, I really did. Now I have to get some sleep.”
A few days later, I quit studying government. My first writing teacher had told me that I
shouldn’t major in English, because if I wanted to be a writer I ought to learn about something besides literature so as to have something to write about. But I didn’t believe that anymore. I didn’t think a writer should be interested in politics. I certainly wasn’t interested in the sort taught at Harvard. I was reading fiction, consuming it at a rate I’ve never equaled since: Dickens and George Eliot, Henry James and Emily Brontë, Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway—all of Hemingway, who gave me the concept of the writer as himself a hero. Meanwhile, I’d acquired a sleep disorder and an assigned-reading disability. I couldn’t read any book that was on an official reading list, and I stayed up all night writing stories for Mr. Fitzgerald and went to sleep around the time my classes in government began.
Henry Kissinger taught one of those, a course in the political history of World War II. He was just another professor, not famous yet. I had gone to only a few classes. “France was a de-morel-ized nation after World War I,” he kept explaining. One day I straggled into the lecture hall and found that something else was going on, a debate of sorts, Kissinger at the podium, graduate students in the audience politely arguing with him. A student friend whispered to me that Kissinger had given over this lecture period to argue about the Vietnam War. “The conflict,” it was called. The debate was very polite and academic, and puzzling to me. I listened for a while, then whispered to my friend, “I’m getting out of here. I’m going to go major in English.” I picked up my books and slipped out of the room. I didn’t stick around long enough to get the hang of either side of the argument. One should always stay at least that long.
