A Good School

by Richard Yates

  He still hadn’t cried, except in the privacy of his room late at night (and even there you couldn’t be sure of remaining alone; the doors were locked only by sliding wooden bolts, easily picked open with a knife or a screwdriver; nobody was safe) but he’d come to adopt a chronic posture of humiliation. If a wretch was what they wanted, he would be a wretch.

  “Bubba-hah!” Terry Flynn was saying to Richard Edward Thomas Lear as they walked down to the steaming shower room together, wearing only their towels. “Bubba-hah-hah!”

  Big Art Jennings, crouched in his underwear, was shining his shoes, pausing only to shove his glasses delicately higher on the bridge of his nose.

  John Haskell and Hugh Britt, the two boys on the whole of the floor with whom Grove wanted most to be friends, sat engaged in some intellectual discussion in Britt’s room. They were already dressed for dinner – they seemed to do everything well ahead of time. Haskell was homely and said to be “mature” for his years. He was too awkward for serious sports but was an excellent student – it was said that he “challenged” his teachers – and he was managing editor of the Dorset Chronicle. Britt was a new boy, admirably quiet and self-sufficient, a husky Middle Westerner whose intelligence Haskell seemed to trust. The two of them often sat like this for hours, or walked together among the trees, talking and talking, and everyone else kept a respectful distance.

  “. . . Well, but it’s the substance of the thing that matters,” Haskell was saying as Grove passed the open door. “Don’t you think? Look at it this way . . .”

  Alone in his own room, Grove sat on the edge of his bed for a while trying to think of nothing – he often did that – and then began undressing for his shower. When he was naked he gave the head of his prick the ritual tug to make it hang lower, wrapped a towel around himself and walked down the hall into the billowing steam.

  The shower room was the worst part of his day. Not only was he absurdly thin and weak-looking, but he hadn’t yet developed a full growth of pubic hair: all he had was brown fuzz, and there was no hiding it.

  “Here comes Muscles,” somebody said when he walked in, to which he replied “Up yours,” but except for that they left him pretty much alone.

  They left him alone at dinner in the refectory that night too. He ate greedily and heavily, as always, but it caused no banter around the table about his tapeworm. (“How’s the old tapeworm, Grove?” somebody’d said once, and that had started it. “Grove, who’s getting all that stuff – you or the damn tapeworm?” “Know what? Some morning we’ll see this tapeworm come down to breakfast; he’ll kind of wriggle up and sit at the table; we’ll say ‘Where’s Grove?’ And that old tapeworm’ll just sit there looking around with a shit-eating grin . . .”)

  Haskell and Britt sat talking together, still aloof from the crowd; everyone else on both sides of the long table was engaged in the tireless, self-renewing business of horsing around. They nudged each other frequently, they displayed wide mouthfuls of chewed roast pork and potato and peas when they laughed, sometimes they choked and sputtered on their milk and had to blow their noses thoroughly into their napkins.

  Then came the hushed hour-and-a-half of study hall, and Grove found himself unable to get anything done. He started off well enough – he organized all the materials for filling out the first of Frenchy La Prade’s irregular-verb sheets (though he would probably have done better to prepare for his history test tomorrow) – but soon he became preoccupied with the sight of his own right hand as it lay palm-down among the books and papers. What bothered him was not its terrible fingernails but that it looked so pale and childish, that its wrist and back held no deeply ridged tracery of veins. Then he found that if he squirmed around and hooked his armpit over the back of his chair, so that the sharp corner of wood bit deeply into the flesh, wrist and hand could be made to swell a little and turn a satisfying shade of dark pink. Heavy veins appeared, even in the backs of the fingers, and the longer he stared at it the better he felt. This was the hand of a man.

  “Grove?”

  “. . . Sir?”

  Dr. Edgar Stone was taking study hall that night. He beckoned for Grove to come up and sit beside him; then he said, in a near-whisper appropriate to their surroundings, “What’s the trouble, Grove? Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “No, sir – I mean yes, sir. I was just – I’m all right.”

  “Do you find it difficult to concentrate?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What’re you working on?”

  “I don’t know, sir. French, mostly.”

  Dr. Stone looked at him intently for a while before his eyes turned tiredly away, as people’s eyes often did after looking at Grove. “All right,” he said at last. “Go on back to your desk.”

  There were almost two hours to kill between study hall and Lights, and this was the time when trouble most often broke out on the second floor of Three building.

  “. . . Oh, Jesus, that little Edith Stone,” somebody was saying in the hall.

  “Yeah? Edith Stone? She home?”

  “Whaddya, blind? Didn’tcha see her at dinner? She was sitting at the Stones’ table, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Yeah? I didn’t see her.”

  “You wouldn’t see her if she shoved her pussy in your face.”

  “I got something to shove in your face . . .”

  “. . . No, but listen, though, I got an idea: Get Grove, strip him bare-assed, tie him up, carry him over and put him on the Stones’ doorstep, ring the bell and take off.”

  “Bubba-hah!”

  William Grove, alone in his room when he heard this, looked over to make sure the wooden bolt of his door was closed. It was, but to take no chances he got up and stood holding it shut with both hands.

  Soon the talk in the hall went on to other things – apparently he wasn’t in danger after all – and he began to feel foolish for standing here in an attitude of grim self-protection. Being “brave” hadn’t won him anything, but hiding like a coward was worse.

  “. . . You’re fulla shit,” somebody was saying now. “Whaddya mean, he threw a pass sixty yards? Nobody in this school can throw a pass sixty yards . . .”

  “. . . And so anyway, I said ‘Look, sir, you didn’t give us time to cover three chapters,’ and he said . . .” That was how the talk was going – aimless, harmless – when Grove let himself out into the hall. He intended to join one of the groups of talkers as discreetly as possible not as a participant, necessarily, but as an amiable listener: an oddball, maybe, but nonetheless one of the guys.

  Richard Edward Thomas Lear saw him coming. “Grove,” he said. “I say, Grove, how’re you feeling tonight?” His wet smile glistened.

  “Okay.”

  “Feeling okay, are you? Good. Grove is feeling okay. I say, everyone—” He raised his voice to address the hall. “May I have your attention, please? I have an announcement to make. Grove is feeling okay tonight.”

  “Up yours, Lear,” Grove said, but his voice was lost under the clamor of advancing boys. They were all over him in a second, four or five of them, sweeping him easily off his feet and carrying him. He thrashed his arms and legs, hitting someone under the chin; then all his limbs were caught and held and he rode helpless in their grip.

  “Bubba-hah-hah!”

  They had started up the hall as if heading for the stairs – good God, were they going through with the plan to leave him naked on the Stones’ doorstep? – but then, well short of the stairs, they stopped and turned and carried him into Art Jennings’ room. They laid him sideways on the bed, removed his shoes, unbuckled his belt and pulled off his pants. He worked one foot free and kicked with it, but it was quickly caught and twisted; then Art Jennings straddled him, facing his feet, and sat on his face.

  Under the stifling weight of wool-clad buttocks he could no longer see, but he could hear. “. . . Shaving cream,” somebody was saying, and somebody else said “Call that hair? Shit, you could wipe it off.” He felt warm water around
his groin and the careful scrape of a safety razor; it didn’t take long.

  But the shaving turned out to be only a preliminary action. When it was done he felt a hand close around his prick – and whose hand was that? Which of these bastards was queer enough to take somebody else’s prick in his hand? – and begin the rhythmic work of masturbation.

  “. . . Hey, now you’re getting it; now it’s coming up . . .”

  And this was true: Grove was getting a hard-on, in spite of himself. Quick taunting visions of girls’ naked breasts, of girls’ naked thighs and crotches swam in the seat of Art Jennings’ pants, and Grove knew he would be utterly helpless in a spasm of release at any moment now, unless he fought for control.

  And so he fought for control. It took all the power of concentration he could never bring to his studies, but he won.

  “. . . Ah, shit, it’s going down. You lost it . . .”

  They hadn’t jerked him off; they hadn’t made him come, and he knew now that they wouldn’t. It might be a dismal triumph, but it was a kind of triumph all the same. Then Jennings shifted his weight, moving from Grove’s face to somewhere below his throat, and by squirming and craning around Grove could see the hand that still worked on him. Its little-finger was elegantly stiff: it was Terry Flynn.

  It took some seconds for Grove to realize that his mouth was free; he could shout now, and he did: “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! . . .”

  “Shut him up; he’ll get Driscoll up here.”

  Flynn’s hand was still pumping – he wouldn’t give up, and he frowned soberly over his task – but Grove felt he had outwitted them all. Except for the shaved hair it couldn’t even be said that they’d humiliated him; the whole episode might still be written off as a dormitory prank, and to encourage that view he began laughing artificially and shouting through his laughter: “Yeah, yeah, keep trying, you sonsabitches, keep trying – wow, are you guys ever having yourselves a good time. Go ahead, try! Try a little harder! . . .”

  He was still shouting and laughing – looking, probably, the picture of depravity – when John Haskell and Hugh Britt came strolling past the open door. Haskell looked down at Flynn’s laboring hand with an embarrassed smile; Britt glanced at Grove’s face, and his own face winced as if he’d smelled something rancid.

  MacKenzie called “Lights!” then; Grove was set free and ran to his room, and for hours after that, alone in the darkness, he lay wondering how he was going to live the rest of his life.

  Chapter Two

  The news of Pearl Harbor seemed to have little effect on Dorset Academy for a few weeks; then the changes began.

  Speaking in his most solemn tones at assembly, W. Alcott Knoedler announced a new program of “wartime discipline.” He didn’t make clear exactly what this would entail, beyond an increase in the community-service workload, a more austere diet, and the need to black-out all windows during air-raid drills, but he managed to imbue it with a spirit of sacrifice. “Our nation is at war,” he said, “and we will conduct ourselves accordingly.”

  The Alumni News column of the Dorset Chronicle became filled to overflowing with reports of military assignments, and soon there was even a death: someone from the class of ’38 had been killed in the Pacific.

  Harold “Choppy” Tyler, the athletic director, designed and built what he insisted on calling a “commando course” in the woods behind the refectory. It was finished by early spring, and everyone in the three upper forms was required to go through it once a day. First you dropped into a chin-deep foxhole and had to scramble out, then came a high wooden wall that you had to scale (some boys went over it easily, others had to hang trembling by the hands or armpits until they managed to work one foot over the top, still others sneaked around it when Choppy wasn’t looking). There were ropes to climb and parallel bars to negotiate, and at the end there was a low tunnel roofed with chickenwire that you had to crawl through like a snake.

  Choppy Tyler would stand near the starting line, a short, massive, humorless man described as “muscle-bound” by the boys, and blow his whistle to send them off two at a time. Between heats, with the whistle silent on its thong against his sweatshirt, he would cup both hands to his mouth and call things like “You kids think this is rough, wait’ll you get in the Army.”

  Robert Driscoll, the assistant English master and school disciplinarian, would sometimes come out and stand beside him to watch the boys go through the course.

  “Think they’re getting the hang of it, Chop?” he asked one afternoon.

  “Some of ’em are,” Tyler said. “A few of ’em are, but most of ’em are still goofing off.”

  “Well, it’s bound to take a little time.”

  Except that his eyes looked startled when he took off his glasses, everything about Robert Driscoll suggested balance. His thick, wiry hair might have been hard to control if he let it grow, so he kept it short. His lean face was broad in the jaw, and his mouth gave shape to the quality of fairness.

  A prep school teacher was all he had ever wanted to be. The ambition had come to him during his own student days at Deerfield (where he’d set two records in track that remained unbroken to this day), and it hadn’t wavered at Tufts. He had started his career in a small New Jersey school that went under in the Depression; then he’d had to sell insurance for a living until 1937, when he heard that a new man named Knoedler was hiring a new staff at a place called Dorset Academy. Knoedler was said to be the fourth headmaster in twelve years – that didn’t sound too good – but other things about the school were promising, or at least challenging; besides, what did he have to lose?

  He had lost nothing, and it seemed to him now that he’d gained a great deal. At forty, he was the most respected and the most popular man on the Dorset faculty. He and his wife were called “Pop” and “Mom” by the boys, and it pleased him to think of this place as the setting for the rest of their lives.

  “No, no, “Choppy Tyler was calling. “You gotta hit that wall. You can’t go creeping up on it like some girl or something, you gotta hit it.” But then a couple of fifth formers went over the wall nicely, making it shudder, showing a lot of hustle as they bore down on the next obstacle, and Choppy’s face went solemn with satisfaction.

  “Well,” Robert Driscoll said. “I’ll see you, Chop.”

  “See you, Bob.” And two other kids were able to sneak around the wall as Choppy turned to watch Driscoll walk away. With the wet whistle poised at his chin, he was enviously studying the way Driscoll’s tweed jacket seemed to encase his shoulders like an agreeable second skin, without the slightest hint of stretch or bulge. However Choppy Tyler held himself in three-way mirrors, however he quarrelled with the little men who made the alterations, he could never get his own coats to fit and hang like that.

  Robert Driscoll often assured himself that Dorset Academy was a good school; even so, there was a nagging qualification: if only it were more like a real school. And almost everyone else here seemed to carry that sense of inauthenticity around with them – the faculty, the boys – you could see it in their faces.

  For one thing, whoever heard of a school that didn’t field varsity teams in competition with other schools? Wasn’t that the very heart of prep school life? But because of a peevish stipulation in the crazy old lady’s charter (and that, of course, was another thing: whoever heard of a school whose charter had been written by a crazy old lady?) they were isolated. They were stuck with intramural sports. The Eagles played the Beavers every week, and that was that. In football season, since there weren’t enough players for regulation teams, they played sixman football – a center and two ends, a three-man backfield. It was a fast game and sometimes lively to watch, but it was a sloppy game too, with far too many touchdowns.

  The boys were nice enough about it, for the most part; they did their best to cultivate a sense of loyalty and pride as Eagles or Beavers, and when the scores were announced after dinner their cheers rang heartily from the big refectory walls; but Driscoll, s
tirring his coffee under the tumult of that cheering, would often think No, no; this isn’t right. This isn’t right.

  All he could do – all anyone could do – was hope for growth and change and improvement in the future. And certainly the materials for a real school were here; the “physical plant” was here; you had to hand it to the old lady for that. Walking now along the side of the refectory he decided once again, as he often did, that this was probably the best single view of the campus. From here you could see a whole sweep, a whole intricate frieze of the school’s lovely “Cotswold” architecture. It began with a quaint little cluster of low-roofed buildings where the guest house and the post office were, it moved across the long, stern façade of the Council hall to the dean’s office, then on around the curve of the wide flagstone path to the archway of Three building, which formed the rear of the quadrangle; and on the other side of that curve, set apart on its own lawn, lay the handsome structure of the headmaster’s residence.

  Still, there were other views. He could never make the drive back from Hartford without admiring the way the school looked as it was meant to be seen for the first time: you came around the side of the enormous water tower and there it was, three hundred yards straight ahead down the broad red driveway. There stood One building, with the stout little squared-off tower above its archway, and there, off to the right in the trees, was a partial view of smaller buildings promising other fine things to be discovered.

  Then sometimes during duck-hunting season, when he came trudging home for breakfast up the steep wooded hill below Two building, he would stop with the broken-open shotgun in his elbow and wonder if this might not be the most dramatic view of all – the high glistening monolith of Two building, all stone and slate, looming out of the morning mist like a medieval fortress.

  Occasionally, on warm Sunday afternoons, he would take a pad of drawing paper out on the grass and try to capture some of his feeling for the place in charcoal. He never tried for much – the play of sun and shadow in an archway, say, or a receding row of slate-gabled windows, or a juncture of chimney-top and roofline against the trees – but even when his wife called some of the sketches “beautiful” he knew he had failed. The essence of a beloved place was as elusive as that of a beloved person – and he’d tried to capture that too, long ago, when he and Marge were first married. He’d made many charcoal drawings of her sweet young face, and many more, despite her blushing objections, of her achingly sweet young body in the nude, but he’d thrown them all away.