A Good School

by Richard Yates

  “To what do we owe this honor, Larry?” her father inquired.

  “To the beauty and charm of your daughter, Dr. Stone,” he said.

  Extraordinary things were happening to Edith. Sitting there, smiling and talking and forking down chicken-noodle casserole, she could feel the tingling surface of her skin down the whole length of her body, under her clothes; she could have sworn she felt her very womb opening up. The word “love” kept occurring to her. I’m falling in love, she thought. Oh God; oh God; I’m falling in love with Larry Gaines.

  When dinner was over he didn’t seem to mind anyone’s noticing how he steered her clear of the crowd, walking with his warm hand cradling her elbow. Then he guided her away from the quadrangle, away from everyone, and out to the sandy area behind Four building, where he gathered her up close and kissed her on the mouth for a long time. In three weeks she would be seventeen, and this was the first time she had ever been kissed.

  Larry Gaines was overwhelming. He was brilliant, he was handsome, he was good; there was too much of him for Edith to comprehend all at once. All she knew, daydreaming and sleepwalking through the requirements of her time at Miss Blair’s during the next few days, was that she was in love.

  “Oh, Larry,” she rehearsed in whispers many times, “Oh, Larry, I love you.”

  She couldn’t get home until the following Friday, and the ugly shock of that afternoon was that Larry Gaines didn’t come to tea. He didn’t come on Saturday, either, and one of the other boys explained that this was because he was busy with his duties as chairman of the Spring Dance committee. The dance was only a week away.

  So now there were two terrible things to think about as she sat with her cooling tea in a roomful of adolescent boys: she might not get to see Larry Gaines all weekend; and next week he might well show up for the dance with some sleek, lovely girl from his home town.

  The thought of her bed upstairs was dismally tempting – she could have another long rest – but if she missed dinner she would never know whether he might have come to sit at her father’s table again.

  “. . . Excuse me; did you say something?” she said to a skinny boy in an awful suit.

  “I just said I don’t think we’ve met. My name’s Bill Grove.”

  And she managed to talk to him for a while; it was probably better than keeping silent. He was nice in an awkward way, and so nervous – twisting his hands, shifting in his chair – that he made her feel calm.

  “Do you have something to do with the student government?” she asked kindly, knowing he probably didn’t.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Nothing like that. I’m editor of the school paper, is all. The Chronicle.”

  “Oh? Well, that must be very interesting.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a lot of work, but it’s – yeah, it’s pretty interesting.”

  When it was time to leave he waited until every other boy in the room had stood up; then he rose and turned so quickly, in such a flustered way, that she couldn’t help noticing what he had to hide: there was a big wobbling bulge in the front of his trousers.

  And she was embarrassed but shyly pleased. To think she could make a boy get that way just by sitting there – not moving around, not doing anything sexy at all – was enough to give her the self-confidence she’d lacked all day.

  In the refectory, everything turned out to be fine. Larry Gaines did come and sit with her; he talked to her all through the meal in an intimate, husky murmur that was probably born of his having kissed her last week, and in walking her back through the quadrangle he asked her, shyly, if she would be his “date” at the Spring Dance.

  “I’d love to, Larry,” she said.

  William Grove was reasonably sure she hadn’t seen anything. He had stood up and turned away fast; the pants of his suit were amply pleated; besides, nice girls didn’t look for things like that. Even so, it troubled him for days; it was still on his mind when Bucky Ward came into the office to ask him if he planned to go to the dance as a “stag.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m not – I can’t – what I mean is, I don’t have a tuxedo.”

  “Couldn’t your mother send it up?”

  “No, I mean I don’t have one.”

  “Oh. Well, look—” And Ward explained that his older brother, now in the Army, was about Grove’s size; it wouldn’t take more than a couple of days to have the brother’s old tuxedo sent up to school by mail, and it would probably fit. Would that be okay? “Because the thing is,” he concluded, “I’d really like you to meet Polly, Bill. I’d like her to meet you, too.”

  The tuxedo came just in time. It didn’t fit, but the trouble was mainly in the over-large neckband of the dress shirt, and Ward convinced Grove that an ordinary white shirt would work just as well; nobody would notice.

  Then the girls arrived. They arrived all through the afternoon, meeting their “dates” outside the One building archway and walking through the quadrangle under everyone’s eyes. If they were made nervous by the scrutiny, by the clusters of walking or milling boys who stopped to stare, mouths partly open and partly smiling, they gave no sign of it. They looked and moved as if nothing in Dorset Academy could ever make them nervous, and they all had remarkably clean hair.

  A slender, graceful, pretty girl paced the flagstones with Pierre Van Loon; before they reached Three building she hugged his arm and gave a thrilling laugh at something he’d said, while he trod along beside her with his toes pointed out as always, carrying her small suitcase. The watchers could only guess that Van Loon, however inconsequential he might be among boys, must be attractive to girls.

  Art Jennings had a tiny girl, which was odd because he was so big. And she looked like the kind of tiny girl who knew how to have a good time, which was odd too because he was so shy.

  Then came Steve MacKenzie with a girl everybody had to agree was stacked. Even in her tailored spring suit you could see the proud fullness of her breasts and hips – and the funny part was that MacKenzie had lost all his customary aplomb: he looked miserably bashful at having to parade her past the observers.

  Another great surprise was that Henry Weaver had a girl – a real girl, not as pretty as some but perfectly all right-looking, a girl who clung to his arm and whose skirt switched nicely around her perfectly adequate, perfectly girl-like legs, just as though everybody didn’t know that Henry Weaver was a queer.

  When Grove saw Bucky Ward emerge from the One building archway with Polly Clark, he was careful not to stare. Her face was in shadow anyway at first, so he wasn’t missing much; when he did look he found she was trim and nice, neither beautiful enough nor fragile enough to warrant the rapt, almost religious gravity with which Ward steered her along.

  All the rugs and a great deal of furniture had been removed from the Knoedlers’ big living room, which made it enormous. There seemed to be a hundred girls, spectacular in their evening dresses, but there were probably more like twenty. A small orchestra had been hired for the evening; they played simple arrangements of popular songs, so smoothly and with such an emphasis on the rhythm section that even Grove felt he might be able to dance. But he remained paralyzed in the “stag line,” along one wall, until Bucky Ward danced up close and beckoned to him over Polly Clark’s shoulder.

  “Oh,” she said, holding up her sweet bare arms for him as Ward moved away. “You’re Bill Grove. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Well, I’ve certainly heard a lot about you, too.”

  She was exactly the right size for him. With his hand in the small of her back and her clean, fragrant hair just under his cheek, he felt manly and strong. He wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone for the world, but this was the first time he had ever held a girl in his arms. Turning, he discovered what couldn’t have been seen from where he’d stood against the wall. Two or three of the black windows on that side of the room were mottled with craning, grinning faces – boys who were either too young or too shy to attend the dance. They might well be laughing at him
(“Hey, looka Grove! Looka Grove!”) but he abruptly decided he didn’t care.

  “I’m afraid I don’t dance very well,” he said to Polly Clark, but she only tipped back her nice, smiling face and told him he was doing fine. That encouraged him to draw her closer, which she didn’t seem. to mind at all.

  “I think it’s so nice that Bucky has a good friend,” she was saying. “He hasn’t ever really had very many friends. He was sick a lot when he was growing up, you know, and he—”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “—and he never really had a normal – you know – a normal childhood or anything.”

  “Yeah.”

  He had always wondered, watching dancing couples, what the man could possibly do to hide the inevitable erection; now he was discovering that you didn’t necessarily have to do anything: you could let it fill up against the girl until she would have to be a fool not to notice it; then when it stood upright you could use it as a brave and tender prod to suggest her every movement around the floor.

  “You mustn’t apologize, Bill,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “I said you mustn’t apologize for your dancing; you’re doing beautifully.”

  When Ward came back, tapping Grove’s shoulder, Grove smiled at her and said “See you later, Polly,” and walked away. The jacket of Ward’s brother’s tuxedo was double-breasted; no one could see the tumescence he brought back to the stag line; and suddenly it seemed very important to dance with as many girls as possible. The girl he wanted most was Edith Stone, but she looked so pleased with Larry Gaines that he wouldn’t have dared; besides, common sense made clear that he couldn’t “cut in” on a sixth former. That left almost half the girls, and he made the most of his opportunity.

  “Oh, you’re Pierre’s roommate,” Van Loon’s girl said as Grove pressed her close. “It’s very nice to meet you.”

  Then he tried Jennings’ tiny girl and two or three others; he felt like a proud, bold lover, a smooth conqueror of many girls in that dizzy room.

  When the orchestra struck up a waltz he retired to the wall to wait it out – he knew he could never perform anything as intricate as that – and from the wall he found it unsettling to watch Henry Weaver and his girl sweep past like professional ballroom dancers. Weaver’s big, soccer-playing legs were able to do every subtle thing the waltz required, and more; his nice-looking girl seemed wholly at ease as she whirled and floated at his will.

  But soon the music was simpler and slower, so he cut in on Bucky Ward again and took Polly Clark away.

  “Hello, Bill,” she murmured as he settled his cheek against her damp temple. And he danced with her three or four more times, until the band’s slow opening strains of “Goodnight, Sweetheart” announced that this would be the last number. After the first few bars of the song somebody turned the lights off, and they were moving and swaying in darkness. Grove knew there must be a good deal of kissing and feeling-up around the big room; he wanted to bend Polly Clark’s head back and kiss her on the mouth, but lacked the nerve. Instead he held her tight and they moved only a little to the music, turning in place, and she seemed to be giving him as much of herself as the bondage of their clothing would allow. Over her shoulder he saw the dim tense shape of Bucky Ward on the sidelines, peering into the dark crowd, looking for her. He considered giving her up, but decided against it almost at once and took her deep into the middle of the room, where they stood clasped and swaying. Shyly, but with a thrust of unmistakable pride, she canted her hips forward. He knew there was supposed to be a sweet hard mound at the top of a girl’s pussy, where the hair began, but he’d never truly expected to have it pressed and rubbing up against him to the moan of a saxophone. It was almost too much.

  Dreams enfold you;

  In each one I’ll hold you;

  Goodnight, sweetheart, goodnight.

  Less than a week later Grove found a small blue envelope behind the glass of his post-office box.

  Ward, standing beside him, said “Well, I see you got a letter,” and then drifted away to let Grove read it in privacy.

  “. . . I want to tell you again,” Polly Clark had written in a neat, girlish hand, “how nice it was to meet you. Philadelphia isn’t really very far from New York, so perhaps it might be possible for us to meet again sometime. . ..” There was an inconsequential paragraph, and then:

  “I am fond of Bucky, but he doesn’t own me. I hope you will understand what I’m trying to . . .”

  Grove finished the letter quickly and stuffed it into his pocket, beginning to feel like a devil of a fellow. He avoided Ward for the rest of the day, until Ward cornered him late that afternoon in the Senior Club.

  “So what’d she say?” he asked.

  “Huh?” Grove felt his face getting warm.

  “Oh, come on. I’d know that handwriting anywhere. What’d she say?”

  “Nothing much. Just said it was nice to meet me, and stuff like that.”

  “You gonna write back?”

  “Well, I – sure, I guess so.”

  Ward looked as if he were enduring physical pain. “It’s entirely up to you,” he said. “Whether you write back or not is entirely up to you.” Then he turned and walked away past the pool table, carrying his shoulders high.

  “No, listen, hey, Bucky,” Grove said, starting after him. “Listen – wait a minute.”

  “Want to talk about it?” Ward said, not looking at him. “Want to go outside?”

  The bench behind the club was vacant, so they sat there in silence for a long time, smoking, while the delicate moral question hung in the air. Grove knew he would probably give in – there seemed no other way to conclude this business – but he wanted to let the tension last a while. He wanted to savor his power over Ward as the minutes of silence went by; and Ward seemed to be enjoying himself too, in a wretched way.

  In the end it was Grove’s impatience with Ward’s apparent pleasure that made him say “Look: I won’t write to her if you don’t want me to.”

  “It can’t be because I don’t want you to – don’t you see that?”

  “Well then, it’s because I don’t want to,” Grove said. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” Ward said. “Okay, thanks.” He looked as though he regretted saying “thanks,” but it was too late.

  And not until an hour later, walking alone and thinking of Polly Clark, did Grove begin to feel a sense of loss.

  Another difficulty arose between them the very next week. It was the time of double-room assignments again, and Grove had scored a quiet triumph: Hugh Britt had agreed, with almost no discussion at all, to be his roommate in the coming year.

  It had occurred to him that Ward might be a little hurt, or jealous, but he wasn’t ready for the look on Ward’s face when they happened to meet outside Three building. It turned out to be even worse than the crisis over Polly’s letter.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Ward mumbled, and they walked a great distance – out past the infirmary and into the woods and down a long hill, until they came to a small wooden bridge across a glittering stream.

  It was a lovely spot – the kind of place where lovers might meet to discuss the impossibility of their situation, only to fall into each other’s arms in the end. And that was the trouble: it was a place for lovers, not for anything as puerile as the sad, silent display of Bucky Ward’s hurt feelings.

  “Here’s the thing, Bill,” Ward said after a very long time. “When I saw your name and Britt’s on the double-room list I felt – well, I felt let down, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry you felt that way.”

  “The point is, I thought you and I were – you know, the best of friends – and I’d more or less assumed we’d be rooming together. That’s all.”

  Grove didn’t know what to say. He wanted to assure Ward that they were still “the best of friends,” but he would be damned if he’d let Ward change his mind about rooming with Britt. He thought of Polly Clark’s line – “he doesn’t o
wn me” – and felt as if Ward were trying to own him too. Above all, he resented having been brought to such a romantic place for such an embarrassing conversation.

  And that made it all the worse when Larry Gaines and Edith Stone emerged through the trees, holding hands, walking slowly on their way back to school. Here was a real romance, with real lovers, and it made a mockery of whatever the hell else was taking place.

  There were shy greetings – “Hi”; “Hi” – then Larry Gaines and Edith Stone walked over the little bridge and continued up toward the campus.

  Edith had hoped it might happen that afternoon, in the clearing she had taken him to beyond the bridge, but all they’d done there, for the most part, was sit and talk. This was the third or fourth time she had hoped it might happen, and it hadn’t. Larry liked to talk a lot, in a low, intimate voice, and he liked to kiss, often cupping one of her breasts in his hand while kissing; sometimes too he would run one hand down her back and let the other feel its way up the inside of her thigh, but he always stopped short; he always broke away from her with a heavy sigh and said something like “Oh, God, I love you, Edith.”

  And she was quick to answer that she loved him too, that she loved him terribly, but it was as if those declarations were all he needed. She knew there ought to be more; there would absolutely have to be more, in the very few days that remained before he went to sea.

  Then suddenly it was his last night at school. Tomorrow he would go to New York wearing the seaman’s clothes he had chosen for himself, the costume he was self-consciously modeling now in the Stones’ house for Edith and her parents, for the Robert Driscolls and for a roomful of admiring boys: a new Levi jacket and pants, a knitted navy-blue “watch cap” worn low over one eyebrow, and rubber-soled work shoes.

  “You look like you’re on the high seas already, Larry,” Robert Driscoll said. “You look as though nothing less than a German submarine could ever bother you.”

  Soon the other boys went back to the dormitories, the Driscolls went home, and it was time for Dr. and Mrs. Stone to go upstairs.