A Good School

by Richard Yates

  “Well, Larry, we certainly wish you luck,” Dr. Stone said, shaking hands with him, “and we’re going to miss you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  And Larry and Edith were alone. They began at once to clasp and writhe together, until Edith said “Oh, isn’t there somewhere we can go?”

  Larry Gaines thought it over. “Okay,” he said at last. “We can go to the Senior Club.”

  But all the way out across the quadrangle, with his arm around her, he had to fight a rising sense of panic. He was a virgin. His plan, all along, had been to lose it with some nameless girl in Algiers, or wherever the Merchant Marine might take him – he had even thought he might contrive to develop a wide range of sexual techniques before coming home to Edith – but that excellent idea was closed to him now because she was crowding him; she wanted it; she wouldn’t settle for anything less.

  For more than a year he had kept an illustrated “marriage manual” among folded sheets in the linen bin beneath his bed, but he hadn’t been able to learn much from it because whenever he read those lubricious paragraphs, in combination with those pictures, he would find himself helplessly masturbating. And he’d feel so rotten afterwards – was the President of the Student Council really supposed to jerk off? – that he would hide the book away again and swear off it entirely until the next time.

  Now, for courage – or for luck – he said “I love you, Edith,” as they walked under the dark trees, and she replied, as always, that she loved him too.

  The Senior Club was filled with moonlight and shadows. The blue-gray scent of many cigarettes hung in the air, and around the leather sofa at the fireplace there was a faint lingering tang of woodsmoke from all the log fires of the winter and spring.

  Edith stepped out of her shoes – that in itself was a pretty thing to watch – and put both hands behind her back to unfasten the hooks of her dress, letting a heavy lock of hair fall over half her face as she worked.

  He fought his way free of the seaman’s clothes, remembering only at the last moment to snatch the damned “watch cap” from his head; then he and Edith were naked and embracing and moving to the sofa, where he helped her to lie back on the wide, slick cushions, and he began to know from the very feel of her flesh in his hands that it was going to be all right.

  At his first real thrust she gave a little whimpering cry that could have been pain or pleasure, or both, or neither, and he almost stopped to say “Are you okay?” but didn’t because it seemed much better to keep going, to build and sustain a rhythm that would bring her along with him – oh, yes; now she was getting it – and soon nothing mattered at all but the strength and purity of their coupling.

  It could have been midnight or noon. The Senior Club and the whole of Dorset Academy could have evaporated into the trees and even the trees could have vanished, for all they knew; they had overcome time and space in their need to help each other arrive at the heart of the world.

  In the long aftermath they lay whispering together, saying things nobody else would ever be privileged to hear, and very gradually their circumstances closed in around them again: a smoking club, a preparatory school, a train that would have to be caught at eight o’clock in the morning.

  “. . . Can’t find my cap,” he muttered when he was dressed, groping along the shadowed floor.

  “Oh, you’ve got to find the cap, Larry; it’s adorable.”

  “Whaddya mean, ‘adorable’?”

  “You think that’s something only silly girls ever say? Well, I don’t mind; from now on I’m going to be the silliest girl in the world and you’re going to love me anyway. . . . Hey, Larry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Here it is. Your whaddyacallit. Your watch cap. It was in the fireplace.”

  “What the hell was it doing in the fireplace?”

  “I don’t know. But if you’re really glad I found it, you know what you could do? You could come over here and hold me again for a minute. Just for a minute.”

  There were ten or fifteen minutes more at the moonlit door of her house, where they stood promising to write and to wait, saying again and again what each thought the other might most want to hear. “Okay, baby,” he kept murmuring against her lips or in her hair, before he left her. “Okay, baby; okay.”

  Walking back to his room, he realized he had never called a girl “baby” before, and that alone – not to mention the astonishing impact of everything else – made him feel remarkably like a man.

  There was little or no training. Less than two weeks after he left school, Larry Gaines signed on and shipped out as one of the thirty-man crew aboard a tanker bound for North Africa and riding low in the sea with its weight of military gasoline.

  Ten miles out of New York Harbor, at about two in the morning, for reasons never investigated or explained, the tanker accidentally caught fire and exploded. There were no survivors.

  It took several days for the news to reach Dorset Academy, and then it didn’t break all at once. It crept and darted around the quadrangle from one cluster of stunned, unbelieving listeners to another; it seeped into faculty houses and into the kitchens of faculty wives; it went in and out of the infirmary and down to the baseball diamond and over to the track and back up to the Senior Club. More than a few people felt their faces twitch into foolish little smiles of incredulity on hearing it – smiles quickly covered with their hands. “I can’t – it doesn’t seem – I can’t believe it,” they said again and again. “Larry Gaines?” And by three or four that afternoon, everyone knew.

  “. . . He must’ve been asleep when it happened,” Robert Driscoll said, hunched on his bed with his head in his hands while his wife massaged his neck and shoulders. “The whole crew must’ve been asleep at that time of night, except for whoever dropped the fucking cigarette, or fucked around with the fucking fuse box, or whatever the fuck it is you have to do to make a whole fucking ship blow up, and oh Jesus Christ Almighty, Marge. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus fucking Christ Almighty.”

  “I know, dear,” she said. “I know.”

  Myra Stone sat alone in her living room, twisting a moist handkerchief tight in her lap and feeling abandoned by everyone she had ever loved. Was this how things turned out in life? That you weren’t even allowed to comfort your child in her grief because your husband said you were “too upset yourself”? Would everything always be this way? Would there never be an end to the pain of this rejection and this terrible, terrible loneliness?

  Edith had been put to bed upstairs with what the doctor called a heavy sedative, but it wasn’t working. Every fifteen or twenty minutes she would struggle upright, rubbing the heels of her hands into her face as if to rid herself of sleep, and say “Oh! . . . Oh! . . . Oh! . . . Oh!” Her eyes and mouth, in those moments, looked as though she might be losing her mind.

  And her father would take her in his arms and help her to lie back on the pillow until she was still. “You have your whole life, Edith,” he would say, each time. “You have your whole life.”

  Up in the Chronicle office the air was thick with smoke and dedication. Mr. Gold had agreed to break open the front page of the Commencement Issue for a two-column, three-inch, heavily black-bordered box, and he’d agreed to handset the type himself, but he had to have the copy by five o’clock and there were only twenty minutes left. Grove had written four drafts, but Britt had found something wrong with all of them (“Grove, you can’t use ‘As we go to press’ about a thing like this; don’t you see that?”). For an hour they had bickered and quarrelled and thrown crumpled paper on the floor. Then Britt had loftily agreed to try his own version and frowned over his pencil in enviable concentration, using his free hand to shield his work from Grove’s eyes. “No,” he said at last, and began tearing it up.

  “Hey, come on, Britt. Can’t I even read the fucking thing?”

  “What’s the point? It isn’t any good; it isn’t any better than any of yours. Besides, it’s not my job to do this. You’re the editor; you do it.”

/>   “Shit,” Grove said. “Shit.”

  He was close to tears of frustration and fatigue, but the high calling of letters brooked no compromise. He sat down with a clean sheet of paper and the only pencil on the desk that wasn’t broken or dull. He knew Britt would be crouched at his shoulder, watching every word, so he wrote the words with an exaggerated care for their legibility.

  It is a dark Commencement for the class of 1943. Lawrence Mason Gaines, the outstanding member of that class and one of the finest young men Dorset Academy has ever known, died in the service of his country last week. He was eighteen years old.

  “That’s it,” Britt said quietly, “that’s it; now the second paragraph. You’re getting it, Bill. You’re getting it.”

  Chapter Seven

  In the following fall the class of 1944 were suddenly sixth formers – seniors – and most of them didn’t feel up to it. Seniors had always been manly and dignified, fit companions for someone like Larry Gaines, and those standards seemed impossible to meet.

  A few did well. Hugh Britt had been elected to the Student Council and was a model school leader, though some found him a little aloof. Jim Pomeroy and Steve MacKenzie were on the Council too, as was Gus Gerhardt. Anyone with the bulk, the athletic prowess and the blunt good looks of Gus Gerhardt would always be a natural for the Council, even if, as in Gerhardt’s case, he was a slow and sullen bully.

  The Presidency of the Council was an unconventional choice that year: it went to a short, tousle-haired boy named Dave Hutchins who was only moderately gifted at sports or studies, who looked younger than his age and didn’t seem altogether sure of himself. His distinction was that everybody liked him, and he had drawn an unusually heavy vote from the lower forms.

  “I know you’re busy,” Dave Hutchins said as he followed Grove upstairs to the Chronicle office one October afternoon, “but the thing is I was wondering if you might have time to help me with this speech I have to make. I think I’ve got it pretty well organized, but it needs a little – you know – a little help.”

  “Sure,” Grove said, more flattered than he would have been willing to admit. “Let’s take a look at it.”

  In the office they found Lothar Brundels sitting alone, looking up from the strewn pages of his humor column. Hutchins and Brundels had been close friends since they were both fourteen, in the third form, and they’d roomed together last year; but this year, in keeping with his position as top boy of the school, Hutchins had chosen to room with Gus Gerhardt. Grove watched closely for signs of awkwardness in their greeting but found none, and he guessed this was because nobody as nice as Brundels could hold a grudge against anybody as nice as Hutchins.

  That was one of the funny things Grove had begun to learn about the senior class: the guys were nice to each other. There wasn’t even any open scorn for Henry Weaver, or for the one or two other class pariahs, though of course those people were expected to be nice enough themselves to keep their distance.

  “What’s this speech of yours, Dave?” Brundels asked.

  “Ah, Knoedler wants me to do it. It’s about all the – you know – the financial trouble we’re in. The school’s in, I mean. He’ll be making the main speech, when the parents come for Thanksgiving, and he wants me to make a little one. Nothing big. He gave me the general theme – ‘If We Fail’ – and he must’ve talked for half an hour about the rest of it, but I swear I didn’t understand a God damn thing he said.”

  Grove was going over Hutchins’ three-page manuscript. “Know what you might do, Dave?” he said. “You might work in that Shakespeare business.”

  “What Shakespeare business?”

  “You know, from whaddyacallit, from Macbeth: ‘And if we fail?’ ‘We fail. But screw your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail.’”

  “Nah, I don’t know,” Hutchins said, “I don’t like that. I don’t like ‘Screw your courage.’”

  “Besides, it’s all wrong, Grove,” Lothar Brundels said. “The people in the play are plotting a murder, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you see the difference?”

  In the end they got Hutchins’ speech into reasonably good shape – the parents, at Thanksgiving, would be made to understand that their increased financial support was urgently needed – then, after Hutchins had left, Grove turned to Brundels and said “So what’s the deal on all this, anyway? Is the school gonna fold up, or what?”

  “Shit, who knows? I know my father’s looking for another job.”

  “He is?”

  “Been looking since last spring. And it hasn’t been easy. I mean northern Connecticut isn’t exactly the best place in the world for a chef to find work. And I heard Knoedler asked the whole faculty to take salary cuts, and they told him to shove it. They’re all looking for new jobs too.”

  “They are?”

  “Dr. Stone told me there’ve been faculty meetings where they shout and argue and carry on like maniacs – that’s the way he put it – and he said they’re all in a state of panic.”

  “He did?”

  “Ah, you’re a funny guy, Grove,” Lothar Brundels said, turning back to his humor column. “I mean you write pretty well and you always get the paper out, but a lot of the time you don’t even know what the hell’s going on.”

  *

  Richard Edward Thomas Lear joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in November. There was great applause in assembly on his last day at school, while he stood alone and pressed his moist lips into a frown suggesting the spirit of the volunteer.

  Several weeks later a similar ovation went up for Pete Giroux, who was said to be failing most of his courses and who now planned an immediate enlistment in the United States Marines.

  And those departures were only the beginning. The federal law that year required every male citizen to register for the draft on his eighteenth birthday. There was a stipulation for high-school seniors: if your birthday came before January you could be drafted during that month; if it came later, the government would let you stay in school until the normal time of graduation in June. The three Dorset seniors who fell into the first category had taken summer-school courses to prepare them for a winter graduation; they received their diplomas in a makeshift ceremony one Friday afternoon.

  One of the three was Bucky Ward, and in honor of the occasion Grove stayed up late with him in the Chronicle office. They self-consciously passed a smuggled pint of whiskey back and forth (it tasted so awful that Grove couldn’t imagine the source of its celebrated power to give pleasure, let alone to enslave the soul), but they didn’t have a very good time. Ward had recently gotten what he insisted on calling a Dear John letter from Polly Clark – she was engaged to an Army Air Force cadet – and he’d been dramatically morose for days.

  “I don’t care anymore,” he announced, more than once. “I don’t care what happens to me in the Army or anything else. If they make an invasion of France, I won’t care if I’m the first little son-of-a-bitching rifleman on the beach. I mean that.”

  “Oh, balls.”

  “Whaddya mean, ‘balls’? I’m only telling you how I feel.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay; but shit, Bucky, everybody wants to live.”

  “Wanna bet? Listen: there are certain conditions of life under which I simply don’t care whether my own life continues or not.”

  And the talk went on and on that way until the small hours of the morning, when Grove had begun to ache for sleep. At last he rubbed both fists in his eyes and said “Jesus, Bucky, you’re going to be dead.”

  And Ward looked at him narrowly. “How exactly do you mean that?”

  “You’re going to be dead tired on the train tomorrow, going home. How the hell did you think I meant it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not putting any more interpretations on anything anybody says.”

  With Ward gone, Grove was free at last to devote himself to Hugh Britt. Their being roommates had seemed to promise a great advantage, but soon there was trouble: a German-refugee boy named We
stphal, who was Britt’s chief rival for brilliance in the senior physics course, had begun to move in as Grove’s chief rival for Britt’s time.

  Westphal spoke English with a katzenjammer accent that only Britt seemed able to understand, but he was clearly a “cultivated” boy, an “intellectual” beyond the reach of any plans Grove might have for himself.

  All three of them were frightened of hockey, so they joined a large number of students who signed up for the alternate winter sport of “open skating.” This meant that they skated in wide, easy circles around the outside of the embattled hockey rink on bitter-cold afternoons – or rather, Britt and Westphal did that, side by side in steady conversation, always at least thirty feet ahead of where Grove struggled on caved-in ankles, cursing his luck, hating the weakness of his own heart, while the Eagles and the Beavers beat each others’ brains out on the ice within the shuddering boards.

  There was one good thing: Bucky Ward had been the dorm inspector on the third floor of One building, where most of the seniors lived, and Grove was appointed to replace him. It didn’t amount to much – seniors were too old and too nice to make any real trouble – but Grove loved the job.

  “Get ’em out!” he would bellow down one corridor at Lights each night, and then, turning, “Get ’em out!” down the other. And he would check each room to see if anyone was missing. No one ever was. He would stand waiting at the stairwell for Driscoll’s ritual visit – “Everything okay, sir” – and then he would saunter back to the room he shared with Hugh Britt, feeling pretty good.

  Another good thing was that Westphal, however much of a fireball student he was and however nimble a skater, couldn’t possibly have gotten the Dorset Chronicle out every two weeks. And even Britt had to admit that the paper was getting better all the time. The writing was livelier, the editing was more dependable, and the editorial that ran beneath the masthead in each issue often seemed, to Grove, to be a little triumph of prose composition.