“Jack?” she said over her shoulder, looking briefly and only partially away from the typewriter as he came in. “You know this last paragraph of the résumé, where you explain about your handicap? Well, look, of course I understand why you put that in, but don’t you think the résumé might be stronger without it? Because of course most people aren’t going to care, but there could easily be someone who might, and then you’d lose out on a job.”
“Oh,” he said, standing on the carpet ten feet behind her chair. “You want me to misrepresent myself.”
“I don’t see it as misrepresentation at all. Under the circumstances, considering the spot we’re in, I think it’s only common sense.” She was staring at the typewriter.
“Okay,” he said, “fuck it. I don’t care what the fuck you do with it. Do whatever the fuck you want.”
And not even that dreadful little accumulation of “fucks” was enough to make her look up. She began typing again. He was determined that she’d look at him at least once before he left the house, and so, with one unsteady hand on the knob of the front door, he said “Alice?”
She turned around in a distracted way, her fingers tucking damp strands of hair up under the bandana. Her face, at that moment, looked weary and plain.
“Alice, I want you to know you’re a lovely girl.”
And he didn’t even wait to see her expression – Bored? Puzzled? Pleased? – before he went outside and shut the door behind him. Not a bad line, he thought as his heels crunched the red pebbles of the walk to the science building. Later, when she thought about it, she might even come to understand that it was the best possible thing he could have said.
When he’d locked himself into the chemistry lab – no helpful young MacKenzie would find him this time – he stood for a while absorbing the silence and the shadowed emptiness of the place, with its pervasive smell of sulphur and the murmurous ghosts of its many, many classroom voices over the years. A faucet was dripping somewhere in the back; apart from that there were no sounds at all.
Twelve or fifteen matching chairs and small tables of lightweight blond wood were arranged to face the teacher’s desk in a loose classroom formation, and he selected one chair-and-table set that had been shoved against the wall. He calculated the height of the chair, the height of the table, and the height of an overhead steam pipe under the low ceiling. These hazards could be overcome, even by a funny little man who would have to stop and tremble and gasp for breath at each stage of his climb. Kneel on the chair first, his funny little body counselled him. Bring one foot up – good – and now the other. Take your time. Now hold onto the wall – steady – and stand. Good. Now the table. Kneel first; one foot up; hold the wall; now the other foot; stand. Wow.
It might have been dizzying to stand erect on a tabletop and see the chemistry lab from this odd new perspective, but nothing on earth could have made Jack Draper queasy now. He felt triumphant.
One of the better things about Brooks Brothers was its line of leather belts. Supple, sturdy, made in England, they were more than adequate for holding up your pants. You could pass the buckle end of one over a convenient steam pipe, make a loop and pull it tight, then bring the other end around your neck and tie it in a firm, excellent knot at the side, just under one ear.
“Okay, Alice,” Jack Draper said aloud into the empty room. “Okay, baby. I love you.”
But he couldn’t kick the table away. Any normal man, with normal legs, could easily have sent it crashing in less than a second, so that he’d drop and catch and spin – and the whole fucking world would end forever; but Jack Draper stood trembling and helplessly alive, treading the table in his pitiable shoes. He could work a toe back under the rear edge of the table but didn’t have the strength to upset it that way; he could work a heel over the forward edge but couldn’t turn it over that way either.
“Come on,” he said, almost whimpering. “Come on; come on.”
And for what seemed half an hour, though it was probably more like ten minutes, he tried and tried. He would rest, sweating, breathing hard, gathering strength, and try again. No luck.
“Draper, Draper, you’re an idiot,” he said. “You’re an asshole. You can’t even do a simple fucking thing like this.”
The knot of the belt had begun to creak faintly under his ear with each breath. The only way to stop the creaking was to untie it; when he’d done that, the belt looked so wretched dangling from the pipe that he took it down.
And getting down, for reasons he didn’t even try to understand, was harder than getting up had been. Bracing himself against the wall as he lowered one badly shaking foot to the chair, he was terrified that he might crumple and fall. Wasn’t this the God damnedest thing?
When he was safe on the floor at last, working the damned belt back through the waist-loops of his pants, he knew only that he was ready for a drink. And he wouldn’t settle for the warm piss from the tank here in the lab, either: he would have bourbon, in a big glass with plenty of ice, and he would have it seated at the kitchen table of his own home, like a man.
There was barely time to fix the drink, and to settle down with it, before Alice came to stand in the kitchen doorway. She looked troubled and oddly shy.
“I decided you were right about that,” she said.
“Right about what?”
“That place in the résumé, where you tell about your handicap. I was wrong, that’s all, and I’m sorry.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Because of course it’s better your way. It’s more honest and it’s more courageous. I was just – I don’t know; I’m sorry, that’s all.” One of her pale, slender hands came up to clasp the other at her waist; the two hands writhed together there while she seemed to gather courage. “And Jack?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“That was nice, what you said.”
“What’d I say?”
“That I was – that I’m – you know. A lovely girl.” And she started to cry, but recovered quickly. If she cried, she explained, wiping her tears, she wouldn’t be able to talk – and oh, there were so many things to say. Would he mind very much if she came over and sat with him?
This couldn’t be real: good whiskey in his veins, with plenty more where it came from; Alice close and warm beside him for the first time in God only knew how long, pouring her heart out in an avalanche of tenderness. And all he had to do was sit here and let it happen; sit here and take it in. Wow.
“. . . and Jack, remember when you first came out of the hospital, and you kept saying ‘Baby, I’m a basket case’? And do you remember what I said?”
“No.”
“Oh, I was hoping you’d remember, but if you don’t I’ll tell you. I said ‘You’re just the kind of basket case I’ve wanted all my life.’ ”
Well, all right, swell, he thought. That’s nice; she’s sorry; she wants to come back; we’ll kiss and make up like people in the movies. But what are we ever going to do about the year and a half with Frenchy La Prade?
And while he was in this cool, discriminating mood it occurred to him that he might as well admit she wasn’t really a very pretty girl. She probably never had been, except in his own lust-crazed vision, even in the best of the old days. There was too much nervous motion in her face, for one thing; besides, wouldn’t it be better if her eyes were just a tiny bit farther apart? And besides, didn’t everybody know that a girl of her age could hardly be called a girl anymore? Oh, a woman could be splendid too, of course – everybody knew that – but what about a woman who had opened her legs three and four times a week for a year and a half to welcome a muscular, posturing son of a bitch who probably looked, when naked, like an old-time photograph of the male model in the “life class” of some third-rate Paris art school at the turn of the fucking century?
Oh, yeah, yeah, there was the hell of it; there was the trouble. What would they ever be able to do, now, about Frenchy La Prade?
“. . . and you’re such a brave man, Jack,” she wa
s saying. “Oh, I know you hate that – you’ve always said handicapped people hate to be called ‘brave’ – but I don’t mean it in that sense alone. The way you sort of – carry on; the really gallant way you face each day in this awful, awful little place – oh, and Jack, have you any idea how much the children love you?”
It was the word “children” that tore him apart and made him feel good at the same time. “Children” was the word that sent blood flowing heavily into his groin, filling his prick, so that the only thing in the world to do was scrape back his chair and struggle to rise.
Alice helped him, murmuring something sweet that he couldn’t quite hear. She put her arm around his back; she took and held his funny little hand and matched her steps to those of his funny little feet, and they walked together, carefully, to their bed.
Abigail Church Hooper let it be known to Knoedler, through her lawyers, that she wished to invite the senior class to her home for tea some afternoon before the end of school.
“It’ll be a chore, Bob,” Knoedler said to Driscoll, “but there’s no one else I’d trust with it.”
And so in a short parade of cars, with Driscoll driving the first one, the class rode the ten miles of highway to old Mrs. Hooper’s estate. None of them had ever seen it before.
She had evidently bought or built her home before developing her passion for “Cotswold” architecture. The mansion was Victorian and ugly – not even the elegant blue awnings at all of its many windows could save it – but it certainly did look like money.
A middle-aged manservant appeared on the freshly raked pebble driveway to tell Driscoll where the cars were to be parked; then Driscoll and the boys were inside the place, walking down a long wide hall hung with brown oil paintings, and suddenly there she was: a small, fat old woman in purple, seated with her knees well apart and with her back to the far wall of a big panelled room. A cane rested against one arm of her chair.
“. . . Driscoll?” she said, extending one liver-spotted hand, palm down. “That’s an Irish name. Are you from Boston?”
“No, ma’am. I come from New Jersey.”
“Oh. Well, but then it always has been difficult to keep track of the Irish, hasn’t it? Is this really the whole of the senior class?”
“It was a small class to begin with, Mrs. Hooper,” he said, “and several of the boys have left to join the service.”
They were already forming a ragged line to one side of the old lady’s chair – they seemed to sense what was expected of them here – and Driscoll introduced them one by one as they filed past and took her hand.
“. . . Weaver?” she said. “That’s a good English name. . . . Van Loon? Oh, that’s a fine old Dutch name. . . .”
A maid came in, trundling a big tea cart – there would be tea and tiny squares of sponge cake to ease their discomfort in this house – and for twenty minutes or so the boys were left to themselves. They wandered around the room and back into the front hall to inspect the decorations. Then Driscoll tapped Dave Hutchins on the shoulder and said Mrs. Hooper was ready to talk to them all.
“Okay, sir,” Hutchins said, and turning away he called “Hey, you guys – I mean, uh, you boys—”
And Driscoll got a chuckle out of that. Little Dave Hutchins, President of the Student Council and certainly the most agreeable kid in school, had been afraid that “you guys” might be just the note of strident vulgarity that could make this mansion crumble and fall.
They gathered around her then, most of them sitting on the carpet – nice kids, polite kids, kids whose fathers had spent far too much to send them through a funny little school that nobody ever heard of, who only last month had learned their school was bankrupt and who very likely did feel some of the “emotions” described in Grove’s fervid editorial, but who for the most part, bless them, probably didn’t give much of a shit.
“Gather around me, boys,” Mrs. Hooper said, as though she’d rehearsed that line and was determined to deliver it even though they’d already gathered around her. “I’m very glad to see you all today because you’re the last graduating class of what I shall always think of as – my school.
“I always wanted to be a boy, you know. Oh, yes—” And here her puckered lips came apart to reveal glistening, smiling false teeth – “oh, yes; as a child, as a girl, I always wanted to be a boy. Because men do things in the world, you see. Men run the world. And so, not long after my late husband’s death, I had a dream. I dreamed of a school for boys that might be just the kind of school I’d have wanted if I’d been a boy. Do you see? Well, it’s all gone now, isn’t it?
“But I want you to know I tried to save it. I tried for years. I don’t wish to discuss your man Knoedler today because I have my blood pressure to think about, but I’ll tell you this much: he never understood Dorset Academy. He never understood Dorset Academy at all. So now it’s gone – all my years of work and planning, all my devotion. All gone. And I understand you boys are going into the Army and that sort of thing.
“Well, my father was a cavalry officer with General Burnside in the Civil War. He was decorated three times, and oh, my, he was a handsome figure. I’ll never forget how fine he looked on horseback, even in later life. He was a man born to ride. And now of course there’s no cavalry anymore, is there, so you boys will miss all that. I expect you’ll be pushing automatic buttons sort of thing in this dreary war of Mr. Roosevelt’s.
“I call it Mr. Roosevelt’s war, you see, because I believe it’s only part of his plan to turn us all into Communists and Negroes. Have you thought of that? You may ask how it’s possible to turn people into Negroes, and I’ll tell you. The male Negro has an enormous – an enormous procreative power. That’s his one great advantage over most white men, you see, and then of course there will always be impressionable white girls. So you have two or three generations of Communist propaganda, you see, and there you are. Well. Mr. Murphy? Mr. Murphy?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry; my name’s Driscoll.”
“Yes, well, unless some of the boys have questions, I’m feeling a little tired.”
There were no questions.
Going home, going back to school, Driscoll turned once from the wheel of the first car in their little motorcade and started to say something like “Guess you guys are glad to be out of that sweatbox, huh?” but he swallowed the impulse. It wouldn’t have been tactful; it wouldn’t have been what Knoedler called discreet. Besides, the boys did seem to have gotten through the afternoon with no great strain: they had chewed their sponge cake and sipped their tea and listened with apparent patience to the old woman’s talk; it may not have been much worse than paying a dutiful visit to their grandmothers, if they had grandmothers – and some of them, come to think of it, probably came from families rich enough to have grandmothers every bit as awful as that.
There was one final announcement concerning Dorset Academy’s bankruptcy. The United States Army, Knoedler said at assembly one day, had leased the buildings and grounds, the “physical plant” of the school, to use as a rehabilitation center for blinded veterans. The men and their medical staff would begin to occupy the premises immediately after graduation.
That was a nice break for Grove: it gave him the material he’d lacked for his editorial in the Commencement Issue. He worked on it for days; when the final draft was finished, just before the deadline, he offered it up for Britt’s approval.
A SALUTE
It is fitting that Dorset Academy, on delivering its final senior class to the war, will now serve to accommodate blinded Army veterans.
Men who have lost their sight in combat can hardly be expected to take comfort in a greeting of any kind as they feel their way into a dark and bewildering new place; even so, the class of 1944 would like to offer them this assurance: There is nothing to fear here. We here before you have seen it all.
We have seen the play of sun and shadow on the blood-red stone and sweeping slate of these beloved buildings. We have seen the trees. We can watc
h one another rise today to take our diplomas; we can remember how each of us looked in saying goodbye.
Our vision will guide us through military training, but soon, as we move out to the battlefronts of the world, there will be no further certainties. We will then enter into our own time of blindness – if not in the physical, surely in the spiritual sense of the word. And when we come back, if we come back at all, it will be to find ourselves forever changed.
You, the young soldiers soon to occupy our dormitories, have far less reason for hope than we do, but our hope is qualified too; and so in a spirit of comradeship we salute you.
Welcome, veterans. Blind though you are, embittered though you may be, rest well here and learn what you can. This place is yours.
“That’s nice, Bill,” Britt said. “I think it’s the best one you’ve done.”
“Well, it sure as hell oughta be,” Grove said. “It took me about forty-nine fucking hours.”
“There’s just one thing. In the third paragraph, I’d take out ‘beloved’ before ‘buildings’. You don’t really ‘love’ the buildings, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“Okay,” Britt said. “It’d be stronger without that word. But the rest of it’s very nice.”
A Good School Page 15
