“Well, but why do you spend so much time on the damn thing?” Britt demanded. “What’re you killing yourself for? The whole school’s going bankrupt anyway, everybody knows that. When the war’s over, you think any college in America’s going to care whether you put out the paper for some dopey little school that hasn’t existed for years? Why don’t you pay attention to your grades, Bill?”
Britt nearly always called Grove “Bill” now, and that in itself was bracing. Whenever he slipped back into calling him “Grove,” Grove knew he’d probably said something dumb in the last day or two, and would sometimes lie awake trying to remember what it was.
Soon it was time for the seniors to take their College Board examinations; and because Dorset was less centrally located than Miss Blair’s School, the authorities had arranged for the boys’ exams to be given there.
This was a vaguely thrilling prospect. Apart from Gus Gerhardt, who was wholly familiar with the place but wasn’t talking, nobody knew anything about Miss Blair’s except that Edith Stone had graduated from it last year; but didn’t it stand to reason there’d be other girls like her? They’d have long, clean hair and they’d stroll their campus in light flannel skirts and light cardigan sweaters, with their school-books hugged close to their young breasts, and they’d say wonderfully engaging things like “Hi, my name’s Susan.”
Would the Dorset guys take their College Boards in a roomful of girls? And would they stay for lunch? And would there be time afterwards for strolling with the girls and getting acquainted, and maybe making “dates” for some weekend soon?
A long yellow bus stood waiting for them in front of One building, early one chilly morning. It didn’t take long to reach Miss Blair’s; they got there so soon, in fact, that most of the campus was still shrouded in morning mist. But the building where the bus let them off was plainly visible: it had a long second-story balcony at which eight or ten girls stood leaning out on their forearms, all wearing bathrobes, a few with their hair in curlers, and they were smiling and singing to their guests on the sidewalk below. It might have been fine, but then the words of their serenade came through, sung to the tune of “The Reluctant Dragon”:
We are the Dor-set fairies
Woo-woo; Woo-woo . . .
The girls had composed only those two lines, so they sang them over and over like shrill, taunting children as the boys walked past beneath them toward the place on the ground floor where the College Board exams lay waiting.
It wasn’t fair. Dorset Academy was a funny school – everybody knew that; but “Dorset fairies”? How could something like that have gotten into their minds? Grove squared his shoulders and walked with an exaggerated manliness to prove he couldn’t possibly be a fairy, and he saw that Dave Hutchins, walking just ahead of him, was doing the same thing. He glanced quickly around to see how others were taking it, and he spotted Gus Gerhardt bringing up the rear of the wretched parade and blushing foolishly, just as one of the girls broke out of the song to call “Oh, not you, Gus; not you . . .”
There were no girls in the room where they took the College Boards, which lasted all morning and proved to be much more difficult than most of them had expected, and no plans had been made for them to stay at Miss Blair’s for lunch. They climbed back into their bus – the upstairs balcony was empty now – and rode back to Dorset Academy with a sickening new awareness of what the term “funny school” might be taken to mean. Nobody wanted to talk about the girls and their song, and so it was never discussed.
There had been three or four air-raid drills a year in that part of Connecticut since the war began; by now they’d long become as much a matter of routine at Dorset as fire drills in a grammar school. But they were a nuisance: faculty families had to turn their living rooms into “shelters” for unwieldy numbers of boys, Robert Driscoll had to run around the campus like an air-raid warden, the whole Student Council had to report for duty taking roll calls in the shelters, then prowling to look for chinks of light.
And there was an air-raid drill in the spring of 1944 when everything went wrong for Dave Hutchins. The trouble started that afternoon when his roommate, Gus Gerhardt, saw him fitting a cone of heavy red plastic over the face of his flashlight.
“Whaddya doin’ that for?” Gerhardt said.
“Air-raid drill tonight.”
“Shit. Whadda they gonna do, send long-range bombers over from Berlin tonight? Or are they comin’ from Tokyo?”
“Come on, Gus. It’s just a thing we have to do.”
“Who says?”
“Well, hell, I didn’t make the rules.”
“You didn’t? I thought you made all the rules around here, Mr. President.”
“Look,” Hutchins said, and dropped the flashlight on his bed. “This thing of calling me ‘Mr. President’ is okay once in a while, when I know you’re kidding, but it’s getting to be a pain in the ass.”
“Oh.” Gerhardt turned his big head away to stare out the gray window. “Well. Sorry, Mr. President.”
And he kept it up all through dinner. “Wait’ll you see our President out there tonight,” he said to several other boys at the senior table, well within Hutchins’ hearing. “Think he’ll let those long-range enemy bombers turn us into rubble? Wrong. He’ll never let those long-range enemy bombers turn us into rubble.”
By the time of the drill itself, Hutchins was badly shaken. He vowed he wouldn’t risk seeming to pull his rank tonight, and to keep that promise he stayed well apart from the rest of the Student Council guys. He was standing alone in the darkness near Four building with his flashlight turned off, hiding from responsibility and waiting for the damned thing to be over, when Pop Driscoll came up to him and said “Dave? Is that you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How come those guys haven’t turned their lights out over there?”
And Hutchins knew what he meant. Over in front of Two building, the whole width of the quadrangle away, the redconed flashlights of the assembled Student Council glowed like burning cigarettes in the dark. Hutchins had stood here for ten minutes hearing the distant sound of Gerhardt’s voice in the rhythm of a comedian’s, setting up punch lines, and at the expected intervals he’d heard all their laughter rise and break and fall away.
“Hey, you guys!” Driscoll called. “Lights out over there! Lights out!”
But they couldn’t hear him across the quadrangle; it was a windy night and the trees were making a lot of noise.
“Dave,” he said, “run on over there and tell ’em to douse those lights, okay?”
Hutchins would have given anything for the courage to say You go; you go, Pop, but he went himself, jogging across the dark flagstones. “Uh—” he began as he approached them, and that brought on a happy chorus of “Uh—”; “Uh—”
“Look,” he said. “Mr. Driscoll wants you to turn off your flashlights.”
“Okay, Mr. President,” several voices said.
He had turned away even before he heard that and started to run back toward Four building, but he didn’t make it; he had to stop in the very center of the quadrangle, where he could only hope the big trees would muffle small sounds, and burst into tears against the heel of his hand.
It seemed very unlikely that any other President of the Student Council had ever done anything like that.
For Driscoll, the most annoying thing about air-raid drills was that they disrupted the normal process of getting the kids bedded down; sometimes it was more than an hour after Lights before all the dorms were quiet. But tonight his rounds went fairly smoothly: it wasn’t until he hit the second floor of Three building that he found anything wrong.
The dorm inspector, a fourth former named Frank Bishop, wasn’t there to greet him on the landing, and when Driscoll stepped inside to peer down both halls he felt a chill around his heart. One hall was dark and quiet, but the other – and this was Bobby’s hall – was loud and bright with the light flooding out of a single room. It was Bobby’s room, and as Driscoll hurried there, hi
s shoes crunching a few spilled Ritz crackers on the floor, he wished he could remember some of the Catholic prayers of his childhood. “Oh, God help me,” was all he could manage.
Bobby Driscoll, fat, naked and fifteen years old, lay splayed on his back across his bed. His face was hidden by a fully dressed boy who was sitting on it; four other fully dressed boys were pinning his limbs down, and one of them was rhythmically pumping his stiff, swollen prick in his hand. The boy doing the job looked up – it was Frank Bishop – and with a funny little twitch of mortified surprise in his face he said “Oh – hi, Pop.”
“Everybody out,” Driscoll said in the doorway. All the moisture had gone out of his mouth, but he could still speak. “Everybody out of here fast, and wait for me in your rooms. I’ll be around to see you all shortly, and here’s a piece of advice: you’d damn sure better be there.”
Released from bondage, trying to hide his erection with his hands, Bobby skittered into bed, pulled the covers up and flopped over to face the wall. His straight, sweaty hair stuck out in all directions; nothing could be seen of his expression except that his temple and cheek were pink with shame.
Robert Driscoll closed the door, sat down on the edge of the bed and extended one hand to hold his son’s shoulder. It seemed a long time since he had done that.
“Listen, Bobby,” he said. “I want you to listen to me. This doesn’t matter, do you understand me? This doesn’t matter. It’s just a dumb little thing that happens in prep schools. And the point is I don’t want you worrying about it, Bobby. I don’t want you thinking there’s something wrong with you, or anything like that, because there’s nothing wrong with you, do you understand me? It was you this time and it’ll be somebody else another time. It’s just a dumb little prep school thing and it doesn’t matter. Don’t let it make you worry about yourself, will you promise me that? Do you understand me, son?”
Then he was out in the empty hall, the flashlight slippery with sweat in his hand. It was time to face the other boys in their rooms, one at a time, starting with Frank Bishop; and the trouble was that he didn’t know what the hell he was going to say.
But he had made up his mind on one thing, anyway: as long as he lived, he would never tell Marge about this.
Mr. Gold broke out the largest typeface in the shop, never used before, in order to fill Grove’s requirements for a frontpage banner headline in the Chronicle’s issue of April 20, 1944:
DORSET ACADEMY WILL CLOSE
Beneath that, down the top of the right-hand column, ran a three-line bank:
Knoedler Cites
‘Insurmountable’
Fiscal Troubles
And then came the story, written exactly as Knoedler had asked for it, personally approved by him after three close readings, revealing nothing and enlightening no one in seven dense paragraphs with a runover on page two.
Grove’s editorial in that issue spoke with what he’d hoped was eloquence of “our feelings” and “our emotions” on having “our worst fears confirmed.” It wasn’t one of his better editorials; he explained for days, to anyone who would listen, that it would have been better if he’d had more time.
With the news out at last, a sense of relief settled over the school. All anxiety and dread had come to an end in the luxury of collapse.
Marge Driscoll was vacuum-cleaning her rugs one morning, preparing them to be rolled up and stored for the summer, when it occurred to her to think: No, wait; we won’t even be here this summer. Then she decided the rugs had better be rolled up anyway, for the moving van that would take all their stuff to wherever they’d be going; and it was another little shock to realize – as if for the first time – that she didn’t know where they’d be going.
She switched off the vacuum cleaner and sat for a long time in a slowly settling cloud of house dust, thinking it over; she was still doing that when her husband came home and said “Honey, listen. Can you listen a minute? This is pretty important.”
And he told her he’d just come from Knoedler’s office. Knoedler had secured a job for himself as headmaster of a small new prep school in Michigan – it must have been something he’d worked on for months, during those protracted “drumming up trade” trips of his – and this morning, just now, he said he had learned there was a vacancy for an English master out there too.
“Oh?” Marge said.
“So first I tried to ask him about the school, and it turned out he doesn’t really know much – I think he’s so glad to have a job he doesn’t care. All he could tell me was that it’s – you know – that it’s ‘a good school’ Oh, and he told me they have interscholastic sports, because he knew I’d like that, which of course I do, and he said he couldn’t quote the actual salary figure they’ll be offering, but he said he was pretty sure it would be all right.”
“I see,” Marge said, carefully smoothing her skirt over her thighs. “Well, Bob, it’s up to you. We’ll talk it over some more – although of course it’s too bad we don’t have more information – and I think we ought to discuss it with Bobby too, don’t you? He’s old enough to have a part in making decisions like this. And then after we’ve all talked it over, you decide. Because you see in a thing like this, Bob, all Bobby and I can do is help you make your decision. Ultimately, it’s up to you.”
“Yeah,” Driscoll said, looking tired. He took off his glasses, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose hard between thumb and forefinger. “Yeah, well, listen. Don’t get mad, Marge, but here’s the thing. I already said yes. I mean I already talked to the Michigan guy on the phone and I said yes to the whole fucking deal.”
Three or four days later, on her way to the post office, Marge felt reasonably good. Things could be worse in this warm, wartime spring; it wasn’t as if Bobby were of military age.
“Hi, Mom,” one of the younger boys said, passing her in the quadrangle; it troubled her that she couldn’t think of his name, but she put a little extra brightness into her answering “Hi” to make up for it. Then she saw Alice Draper up ahead and hurried to fall into step with her.
“How’re you doing, Alice?”
“Oh, fair, I guess. Been doing a lot of typing; how about you?”
“Well, there’s been quite a bit of typing in our house too,” Marge said. That was a lie, but she’d promised Bob she wouldn’t tell anyone about the Michigan job.
It was startling to see how shabby Alice Draper looked, as though she’d stopped taking care of herself months ago. Even now, Marge wasn’t sure if she had ever “approved” of Alice’s affair with La Prade – and she’d felt awfully sorry for Jack, as everyone had – but it couldn’t be denied that Alice had looked better in those days; she’d been better company, too. Since then she had grown so drab, inside and out, that these little how’reyou-doing talks were all Marge could muster for her. Even on their occasional shopping trips to Hartford, when Alice had once been all vivacity and urged Marge along with her until they’d giggled like schoolgirls all the way home – even those trips were dull and mostly silent now, and a relief to be done with.
“Oh, look, that’s nice,” Marge said in the post office. “You’ve got a letter from Jean-Paul.”
“Ah, yes,” Alice said in a flat voice. “That’ll be pleasant for me, won’t it. A little light in my life.”
And Marge felt – well, irritated. Alice being cynical about Jean-Paul? Was there now nothing she wasn’t cynical about? Could a person really be cynical about everything in the world and still expect to have friends?
“I’ll see you, Alice,” she said.
“See you, Marge.” Then Alice Draper moved away toward home, walking very slowly in order to read the badly typed, single-spaced, three-page letter.
“. . . And so I remain at my desk in Washington, wearing captain’s bars but performing duties more appropriate to a corporal. My colleagues are mostly enlisted men, former graduate students and such, who openly resent my rank and pay. Yet every time I ask our commanding officer about an o
verseas assignment I am answered condescendingly in a language neither English nor French but pure U.S. Bureaucratic: no openings are contemplated in the foreseeable future. And oh, Alice, are you aware of what a deadly place this Capital City of yours is? Everything here is Spam and powdered milk and slow, hideously overcrowded taxicabs. . . .
“. . . Alice, I hesitate to bring this up – it may only drive us farther apart – but there has been a chilling tone of indifference in your last few letters that I can neither account for nor understand. When you say, for example, that you are ‘tired of feeling sorry’ for me, I can only interpret that as meaning you find my unhappiness boring. Can this really be the voice of the woman I knew? If so, where did it all go, the passion and the love that nourished us both for so long?
“I knew from the start, of course, when we first met, that you found me ‘romantic’ only because your own life had grown dull; and so at any point in our time together I might easily have said I was ‘tired of feeling sorry’ for you. Do you see the irony here? Do you see the unfairness?
“Love is nothing unless it includes friendship – and how can we be friends, Alice, if I must sense in your letters the dwindling and cooling of your interest in me?
“Let me put it this way: Unless I soon receive a letter conveying some of the old vitality, the old spark, some suggestion of the Alice I knew, I will have no choice but to sever our correspondence. I hope . . .”
Alice finished reading just in time to pause at a big rusty trash container, out in the sandy area behind Four building. She tore the letter into halves, into quarters and into eighths; then she threw it away and went home.
Several hours later she was typing steadily, well into the rhythm of it, making almost no mistakes and beginning to feel a sense of accomplishment – did professional typists feel this, after their first few days on the job? – but something had begun to bother her about the material she was typing.
Jack Draper had come home a while ago from his final class of the day. He was in the kitchen, finishing his second drink, when he heard her machine clatter to a stop. For days now – more days than he wanted to count – Alice had worked and worked on this borrowed typewriter in the living room, making many copies of his letter of application and his employment résumé. When you wrote down the names and addresses of all the private secondary schools in America – and who cared which of them were “good” schools or “bad” schools or any of the different kinds of “funny” schools in between? – you ended up with quite a long list of places to apply to for survival, and that meant a great deal of typing. Today, he discovered on going into the living room, she had worn an old pair of slacks for her work, and a badly frayed shirt that had once belonged to him, and she’d put her hair up, for business, under a hastily tied rayon bandana that wasn’t quite clean.
A Good School Page 14
