A Good School

by Richard Yates

  And that was the way it went tonight: everything was so thoroughly okay in all the dorms that he found himself standing for a long time around the Four building archway, fiddling with his flashlight, wondering how best to kill the hour or two before he could sleep.

  Only half of Four building’s dormitory space was used for that purpose – the school hadn’t yet achieved a large enough enrollment to fill it – but now the other half had come to serve as quarters for the kitchen help, since the gasoline shortage made it no longer possible to bring them out from Hartford and back each day. There were six or eight of them, gaunt, solitary-looking men in stained white cotton. They were at work before anyone else was up in the morning, but you could see them walking home at dusk, one at a time, slow with fatigue, cupping roll-your-own Bull Durham cigarettes in their hands. Driscoll had been a little uneasy about this Four building arrangement at first – boys did tend to romanticize the lives of characters like that – and the uneasiness must have been general, because the barracks were sealed-off from the rest of the school with heavy plywood partitions and locks, but nobody needed to have worried. The boys behaved as if the kitchen help didn’t exist, and the kitchen help kept entirely to themselves. It occurred to Driscoll to wonder sometimes what they must think of this place as they sat hunched in their underwear on their bunks upstairs, looking out over the quadrangle, putting themselves to sleep with bottles of cheap wine in paper bags.

  Well, the world was funny; nobody had ever said it wasn’t. And he was walking again now, beginning to feel a nice tingle of expectation, because he had decided it wasn’t too late to drop in on the Drapers for a drink.

  By daylight, the sandy area out behind Four building was the only drab part of the campus. Crazy old Mrs. Hooper had originally planned on a school twice this size, and partial foundations had been laid for a second quadrangle that would have stood here. They were like long, low ruins of an ancient place, those unfinished foundations; they jarred your sense of symmetry; they cluttered the view on your way to the infirmary, or over to the science building and the Drapers’ house. And at night, if you weren’t careful, you could stumble over the masonry.

  In the distance the Drapers’ kitchen windows blazed with light – good; they were up – and for a few moments Driscoll allowed his thoughts to dwell on what he planned to do in school tomorrow. “Oh, it’s ‘Tommy this’ and ‘Tommy that,’” he recited just under his breath as he walked, “and ‘Tommy, stay outside,’ but it’s ‘Special train for Atkins’ when the troopship’s on the tide . . .” He had taken his fifth-form class through any number of English poets this year, starting with Donne; all fall and winter they had drowsed in the tedium of verse that took an effort of will to read, let alone to understand, but now it was spring; they were well into the nineteenth century, and tomorrow he would introduce them to Kipling. “Then it’s ‘Tommy this’ and ‘Tommy that,’ and ‘Tommy, ’ow’s your soul?’ But it’s ‘Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the drums begin to roll.”

  He knew they’d like it. Oh, bless their hearts, he knew they’d like it, and he knew they’d like the way he read it aloud. It was more than a little appropriate for them, too: their own troopships would be on the tide soon enough; the drums were beginning to roll for them now.

  Jack Draper was sitting alone at the bright kitchen table. Driscoll saw that through the panes of the kitchen door as he rang the bell; then he saw him look up and smile and go through the slow procedure of getting to his feet and coming forward. “Hello, Bob,” he said. “Good to see you. Come on in.”

  “I know it’s late,” Driscoll said. “I just thought I’d drop by in case you were still up. Alice in bed?”

  “No, she’s – out,” Draper said. “Pull up a chair. Here, let me get you a drink.”

  It soon became clear, as Driscoll took small sips of the powerful highball set before him, that Draper must have been boozing here for some time. He wasn’t drunk, exactly, but he had drunk himself into the kind of expansive mood that made him apt to say the first crazy thing that came into his head.

  “. . . No, but seriously,” he was saying. “Seriously, Bob, have you ever stopped to consider what a tremendous amount of sheer sexual energy we’re harboring here? Especially at this time of night? Just imagine what we’d find if we could make those big stone dormitory walls fall away: a hundred and twenty-five kids all beating their meat at once.”

  And Driscoll laughed – it was pretty funny – but when Draper’s voice started up again, building toward the next laugh, he glanced out into the shadowed hallway beyond the kitchen and turned quickly back with one forefinger against his lips, saying “Sh-sh.”

  Millicent Draper came in, seven years old, shading her eyes against the brightness. Her rich tan hair was rumpled from bed; she was wearing what looked like a brand-new cotton nightgown, and she carried a very old stuffed animal that could have been either a dog or a bear.

  All the drink seemed to vanish from Jack’s face and voice. “Well,” he said. “Hello, lovey.”

  “Daddy? Mommy said we could each have a cookie if we woke up.”

  “Well, then, I guess you’d better go and get one. Can you reach them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Jeff wake up too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I guess you’d better get two. Have we been talking too loud down here?”

  “No,” she said, “we just woke up anyway.”

  Draper watched her as she moved through the kitchen. Then he said “Wow. That certainly is a nice-looking nightgown. Is that one of the nightgowns Mommy bought in Hartford today? With Mrs. Driscoll?”

  “Yes. The other one’s pink and the other one’s blue.”

  When she was ready to leave he turned partly away from the table and said “How about a hug?”

  And she gave him a good one, both arms going up and around his neck, both wrists turned back to accommodate the animal and the cookies. The sight of Jack Draper’s crippled hands pressed against her back brought a sweet rush of pain to Driscoll’s eyes and throat. He wished he had a daughter.

  When she was gone Draper sat looking at his drink for a while; then he glanced over and saw that Driscoll’s glass was empty. “Help yourself, Bob,” he said. “Here, wait, I’ll get you some ice.” And he began the struggle to stand up.

  “No, really,” Driscoll said, “I’d better get home.”

  “Sit still.”

  “Well, okay, one more. But hell, let me get the ice, Jack.”

  “Sit still, I said.” He sounded angry, making his way to the refrigerator, and he added “I can do some things.” Then came the clatter of an ice tray in the sink and the hiss of hot water running over it, while Driscoll sat feeling apologetic. It wasn’t easy to know how to behave with a handicapped person.

  “So where were we?” Draper demanded when he was settled at the table again. “Oh, yes. Sexual energy. What we’re harboring here.” And he took a long drink. “Well, old man, I don’t suppose I’m telling you anything you don’t know, or haven’t heard, or haven’t guessed, but the fact is we’re harboring a short little rat-faced bastard here whose sexual energy knows no bounds, and of course it wouldn’t do to reveal his identity, but his name is Frenchy Fucking La Prade.”

  “I don’t get it,” Driscoll said.

  “You don’t get it? Why not? Everybody else seems to get it, all the way down to about the kids in the third form – you oughta see the way those little buggers look at me all day. Come on, Driscoll, don’t be dense. Where the hell do you think she is tonight? Where do you think she’s been damn near every night since way back last spring when I was too dumb to know what the hell was going on?”

  It broke over Driscoll in little waves of incredulity – Alice Draper? Frenchy La Prade?– and then the worst thing was that he didn’t know what to say. He was afraid he might be blushing. “Well, Jack,” he said at last, “I had no idea you were going through something like this.”

  And Draper looked
wretched now, probably hating himself for having divulged it. “Yeah, well, it hasn’t been very jolly,” he said. “Sometimes I think I’d rather be dead.”

  “You don’t mean that. You know you don’t mean that.”

  When he’d first met the Drapers, Driscoll had performed a secret little arithmetic problem in his head, and now he did it again, just to make sure. Jack had been stricken with polio when he was twenty-nine, the year after his marriage. He was thirty-eight now; Millicent was seven and Jeff was five, and that proved the disease hadn’t affected his reproductory system.

  Then he was confronted by what seemed a significant moral question: should he tell Marge about this? And he had just resolved that he wouldn’t – a thing like this was much better kept to himself – when it occurred to him that Marge might already know. She and Alice could easily have discussed it at length on those drives into Hartford, or over their chicken salad at the Drake hotel, and maybe Marge had decided to keep it from him. Well, but why would she want to do that?

  “Listen, Jack,” he said, leaning across the table, and he would have clasped Draper’s arm if he hadn’t been afraid to find out how thin it was. “Listen: I don’t understand women any better than you do, but you can’t let yourself go to pieces over this. You’ve got to take care of yourself, that’s the main thing now. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

  “Thanks, old friend,” Draper said in a flat voice, “but you’re missing the point. I’ve been taking exquisitely good care of myself for years. All cripples do.”

  Dining tables occupied only half the refectory; the other half, the far end of it, was used as the assembly area. Every day, at the chime of a small table bell after the lunch dishes were cleared away, the entire student body and faculty would rise and move, heavy with food, to the rows of folding steel chairs that stood facing a speaker’s podium against the far wall. The faculty sat in the rear, and the boys were ranked ahead of them from the sixth form down, with the little kids in front. Knoedler always made the day’s announcements when he was home – any of several other masters took over when he was gone – and he liked to make a little drama out of them: he would start off with unimportant things and save the big stuff for the end. When there wasn’t any big stuff, which was most of the time, he would contrive to give his final announcement the sound of something more important than it was; sometimes too, as a change of pace, he would save some comic item for last, though he usually spoiled those jokes by telegraphing them with a sly little smile.

  From his bearing at the podium one Monday in April, as he neared the climax of his performance, everyone could tell it was the most ordinary of days: there would be no big stuff, no funny stuff, probably nothing even Knoedler could dramatize.

  “Three weeks ago,” he said, “I announced a contest for essays under the general title America at War, to be judged by Dr. Stone, for which first prize would be appointment to the editorial staff of the Dorset Chronicle. The results of that contest are now final, and I have the names of the winners here. First prize has been awarded to William Grove of the fourth form.”

  The applause was only mild, but it struck William Grove as astonishing that there should be any applause at all. He sat hunched in his chair, determined not to smile or to turn either right or left, and he was so concerned with his own appearance that he didn’t catch the names of the second- and third-prize winners, though he noticed they were both in the higher forms.

  When he got up and faced the aisle to file out with the rest of the audience, he found he had developed a strange new ability to see himself whole, from the outside, as if through a movie camera twenty feet away. He could observe all his gestures – the drawing-back of his coat for the placing of one hand in his pocket, the slight straightening of his spine and lifting of his chin – and the movie camera went right along with him, back through the refectory and out into the sunshine.

  He knew he ought to hurry to the dorm because this was a community-service day, rather than a sports day; he would spend the afternoon in his work clothes, riding around in a pickup truck with three or four other kids to clear brush or haul trash under the guidance of a disgruntled school employee, and the truck was probably waiting for them now. But he took his time anyway, strolling for the phantom camera all the way back to Three building, and what happened there was like something out of the movies too. Larry Gaines overtook him on the stairs, turned back, gave him an unforgettable smile and said “Nice going, Gypsy.”

  Chapter Three

  The Dorset Chronicle was held in low esteem among extracurricular activities. Being a member of its staff might look good on your record, and in the yearbook, but that seemed scarcely worth the amount of work it took.

  The editor-in-chief was usually a sixth-former, heavy with other honors, who delegated most of the responsibility to his managing editor. And when the managing editor was someone like John Haskell, a glutton for punishment and a stern taskmaster, it was only common sense to stay away from the whole enterprise. The paper was always understaffed – Haskell sometimes claimed to have written every word of it himself – but it came out faithfully every two weeks, in press runs of a thousand copies or more.

  Knoedler called it “one of our best public-relations tools,” and you could see what he meant. There wasn’t much to admire in the way the Chronicle was written or edited, but it looked good: handsomely printed on slick paper in four- or six- or eight-page issues, four columns to the page, with a liberal use of photographs. Anyone picking it up and looking it over would have had to assume that a good deal of money had gone into its making. And only rarely did messages like “With the Compliments of a Friend” or “Buy War Bonds” appear in its advertising space; most of the ads were display items from reputable merchants in Hartford and Boston and New York who must have considered Dorset a “real” enough school to warrant their business. The paper had the aspect of something settled and solvent – and that, for a school in financial trouble, amounted to good public relations indeed.

  On deadline afternoons, and usually in the very nick of time, John Haskell would stack up the messy copy and pictures and send them off to a commercial printing plant in Meriden; a few days later heavy packages of freshly cast linotype and photo-engravings would arrive back at the school, and then it was time to put the thing together.

  The craft of printing had been one of Mrs. Hooper’s minor enthusiasms, so there was a well-equipped, picturesque little printshop tucked into the campus. A pale, sour man named Mr. Gold was in charge there, possibly the only communist on the Dorset payroll, doing his quiet best to keep the kids from driving him crazy as he went about what he always called “the job.” Much of his time was spent in preparing sumptuous school catalogues and sleek little promotional brochures (Knoedler ordered more brochures than any of the three other headmasters in Mr. Gold’s memory), and the coming of each spring brought additional workloads in the yearbook pages and the Commencement Day programs; but at bi-weekly intervals, all through the year, everything in the shop had to be set aside for the Chronicle.

  Haskell considered it part of a managing editor’s duty to be on hand when the paper went to press. He would stride around the printshop trailing a handful of galley proofs, pausing to peer over the shoulders of boys who stood working on page forms at the composing table or hand-setting type for the larger headlines. Only one or two of them were members of the Chronicle staff; the others, mostly younger, were kids who’d drawn the printshop as their community-service assignment. Their talk bristled with terms of the printing trade – “stick,” “quoine,” “slug,” “furniture,” “carding-out” – as if in an effort to convince themselves they were really journeymen printers and not schoolboys at all.

  “Hey, I need more furniture,” one of them said one afternoon.

  “Need more what?” Haskell inquired.

  “Furniture.”

  “What’s that?”

  And wholly unaware that he was being kidded, speaking as patiently as
if Haskell were an apprentice in the shop, the boy explained what “furniture” was, while Haskell listened and nodded with a straight face. Afterwards, Haskell ventured a conspiratorial wink at Mr. Gold, who had heard it all, and Mr. Gold allowed himself a qualified smile as he bent over his own part of the job again.

  Mr. Gold despised all Dorset boys on principle – rich, spoiled little snot-noses – but he had to admit that this particular fellow, this Haskell, was kind of an interesting kid. He was smart, witty, and very well-read for his age; last fall the two of them had hung around the shop for half an hour after quitting time one day, talking politics, and Haskell had displayed a surprisingly sound grasp of Marxist theory. But when Mr. Gold tried to tell his wife about it that night, in the kitchen of their home in Unionville, she didn’t want to listen. “ ‘Interesting’?” she repeated. “You’re telling me ‘interesting’ and ‘sophisticated’ about some fifteen-year-old prep school kid? Come on. I think you’re going soft in the head, Sidney.” And he guessed she was right; he had probably been taken in. Besides, there were unattractive things about Haskell too: the supercilious manner, the theatrical way he talked and moved around.

  If Haskell could be theatrical in the printshop, he was worse in the Chronicle office. And he spent as much time as he could in the office, far more time than was necessary.

  “And do you realize?” he demanded of Hugh Britt one evening, pacing the floor for emphasis, “Do you realize I’ve written the last four editorials for him? And made up the staff assignments. And edited all the copy, not to mention writing most of it. He sits up there wrapping friction tape around his hockey stick, or rubbing neat’s-foot oil into his baseball glove, and saying he’s too busy. Too busy. Well, it’s got to stop, that’s all. It’s got to stop.”

  “Why don’t you lay it on the line with him, John?” Hugh Britt said. “Tell him if you’re going to do the editor’s work you want to be the editor.”