A Good School

by Richard Yates

  In the Stones’ house it was Edith who did the typing. She was good at it – she had worked all year as a secretary in the headmaster’s office – and the sound of her steady, rapid drumming on the machine seemed a terrible reproach to her mother as she puttered aimlessly in the kitchen or tried to rest upstairs.

  Didn’t everyone need and deserve to feel useful sometime? Even if only near the end of a lonely, neglected life? Oh, they’ll miss me when I’m gone, Myra Stone thought, but the worst part was that she couldn’t even be sure of that.

  Dr. Stone spent much of his time on the telephone. Application letters and résumés were all very well, but for a man of his age, with his credentials, a decent job was more likely to come about through personal contacts.

  “. . . Howard?” Edith heard him saying. “Edgar Stone here . . . Oh, we’re all well, thanks, and how’ve you been? How’s Ellen? . . . Good, good. Howard, there’s been something of a disaster here; the school’s gone bankrupt, and I wondered if you might know of any – what? . . . Oh, the usual sort of mess; years of mismanagement and so on; but I was wondering if you might know of any . . .”

  Edith got out of the house before waiting to hear the end of that conversation – it was too much like all the others that had come to nothing – and set off to take her finished stack of mail over to the office, where she would place it in the “Out” basket. On her way there, in the quadrangle, she looked up to find she was walking beside a boy she had always rather liked and never paid much attention to – Bill Grove. He was out of breath; apparently he’d been running to catch up with her.

  “Hello there, Bill.”

  “Hi, Edith.” There were people who said Edith Stone had looked “awful” since Larry Gaines’ death, but she still looked pretty nice to Grove.

  “That’s a funny thing,” she said. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “You were?”

  “Because my father was talking about you last night. He thinks you’re a good writer.”

  “He does?”

  “Oh, come on; you knew that. People who’re good at something never need to be told. Anyway, I wanted to wish you a lot of luck in the service. When do you think you’ll be going in?”

  “Oh, right after graduation, I guess.”

  “Well, look,” she said, coming to a stop at the little path to the office, and she swept back her hair with one hand in order to look up at him. “I may not see you again before – you know; before school’s out – so take care of yourself, okay, Bill?”

  “Thanks – and you too. You too, Edith.”

  He hoped she might pause on the path and turn back to wave, or maybe even to blow him a kiss – that would be a marvelous thing to take into the Army – but she went on walking all the way to the door and inside, her hair floating at her sweet shoulders and her skirt shifting nicely around her legs.

  Then it was the last day of school. Classes were only a formality and some of the masters barely managed to turn up for them, but it was considered important to keep everyone on campus because tomorrow was Commencement Day. Parents would be arriving from all over, most of them scarcely able to hide their indignation. What parents, after all, would ever have sent a son to this school if they’d had any idea it was failing, that it would hit the skids and go down and out like some sleazy little commercial venture?

  And the Commencement ceremony itself, no matter how hard everyone tried, would almost certainly be a lame and awkward thing. Still, they would all have to go through with it.

  Robert Driscoll was uneasy all day about the possible kinds of trouble there might be in the dormitories tonight, but nothing prepared him for what he found on his rounds: almost the whole of the sixth form, the graduating class, was missing. Henry Weaver and two other social outcasts were the only seniors in their rooms.

  “Is this supposed to be some kind of a prank, or what?” Driscoll asked, letting his flashlight stare into Weaver’s wincing, blinking face. “Where are they, Weaver?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  And Driscoll decided to drop the beam of the flashlight to Weaver’s chest. Even a pariah might have sensitive eyes. Then Weaver said “You might try Ed Slovak’s house. The guy that works in the power plant? You know him? He’s friendly with a few of the guys; there was some kind of talk about a party there.”

  “Oh. Okay, thanks.”

  And Driscoll did know Slovak, a big, smiling man in a dirty T-shirt, always scratching his armpits, as if it had never occurred to him that taking a bath and changing his shirt might get rid of the itch. The Slovaks lived in a raw clapboard bungalow strung with many electrical wires, on a patch of bald earth just inside the woods a few miles down the road.

  Driscoll had started up his car before he realized that a car wouldn’t do the job; instead he went to the school garage and got the big yellow pickup truck.

  The Slovaks’ house was ablaze with light when he brought the truck bouncing to a stop in the turnaround of its dirt driveway, and he could see the heads and shoulders of many boys inside. But he was greeted at the door by a haggard, Spanish-looking man of about his own age – one of the kitchen help, still wearing the stained whites of his day’s work.

  “Nobody here,” the man said.

  “Come on. I’m from the school.” And Driscoll showed him the extinguished flashlight in his hand, from the hip, as if it were a badge.

  They were all there, in the kitchen and small living room of this crude house, with its bright mail-order furniture and its blaring radio, and four or five other kitchen-help men were among them. Mrs. Slovak, a plump woman in a floor-length housecoat and dirty pink slippers, was too intent on fussing with the radio dials to notice his arrival, but her husband, standing near the liquor supply, was very much the jovial host.

  “Mr. Driscoll!” he called. “What’s your pleasure, sir?”

  “No, thanks,” Driscoll called back. “Not tonight.”

  None of the boys looked really embarrassed at his entrance – and why should they? How could it really be said, now, that they were doing anything wrong? With the exception of Van Loon, who was conversing with a befuddled-looking kitchen man, they didn’t even seem to have been having a very good time. Some looked drunk – poor Dave Hutchins looked ready to pass out, or throw up, or both – but they all faced Driscoll with a suggestion of relief, as though they were glad rather than sorry that he’d come for them.

  “All right, listen,” he announced, raising his voice to compete with the radio. “I think it’s about time we broke this up. I’ve got the truck outside.”

  Then he left the house and stood in the dirt near the open tailgate. He knew they’d come out without coaxing, and they did. “I’m surprised to see you here tonight, Dave,” he said, “and you too, Hugh.” But Hutchins was too tired or ill to answer, and Britt only gave him a look as melancholy as anything in the Russian novels he’d been reading.

  “Get on in there,” he said as they came singly or in clusters, swaying toward the truck. “Get on in there.” Jennings, Pomeroy, MacKenzie, Westphal, Van Loon . . .

  And finally, the last to leave the party, came Grove. For three years now, Driscoll had wondered what it was that put him off about this particular kid. Was it just that he couldn’t run or throw or catch, and that he’d daydreamed his way through school and done badly everything but the courses he liked? Well, yes, and then there was his self-dramatizing role as maestro of the damned school paper (and why had Knoedler let him do that, with failing grades?). There would probably always be kids like Grove in prep schools: you would find only irritation in trying to help them, or to like them, and you could probably never bring yourself to call them by their first names until ten years later, when they came back to visit the school with their wives.

  “Well, Mr. Dorm Inspector,” he said. “I suppose you realize that under normal conditions you’d be in bad trouble tonight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why’d you do this, Grove? Huh? Why’d you
want to pull a silly stunt like this?”

  And Grove lowered his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “We just thought we’d – I don’t know. I mean everything’s over anyway, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Driscoll said. “Yeah, everything’s over. Okay.” Then, without quite realizing what he was up to, he clapped the boy hard on the shoulder in what anyone would have said was affection. “Okay, Bill. Get on in there.”

  And it hadn’t really cost him anything to say “Bill.” How could he have saved that for a better time when there would now be no other times at all?

  When Grove had vaulted awkwardly into the truck, Driscoll slammed the tailgate shut and secured it with the heavy little hooks on the heavy little chains. Then he walked around to the driver’s seat and started up the engine and set off for home, taking them back to school.

  There were no lights along the road, and it was speckled with spine-jolting pot holes that wouldn’t be repaired until after the war. Driving wasn’t easy, if you weren’t used to a truck, and Driscoll was grateful to let that occupy most of his mind, but then he heard them singing.

  He had known they would probably sing, but he’d expected some war song, one of the bawdy, rollicking soldiers’ songs with many verses that every kid in America must know by now, like Roll Me Over, or Bless Them All. Instead, in hesitant voices, they had taken up a tame little college boys’ beer-drinking song that he remembered from his own freshman year at Tufts, long ago:

  Drunk last night;

  Drunk the night before;

  Gonna get drunk tonight

  Like I’ve never been drunk before . . .

  There was no readiness for soldiering in this truck, no stern and cocky welcoming of challenges. They sounded – oh, Mother of God – they sounded like children.

  Sing glo-o-rious,

  Glo-o-rious,

  One keg o’ beer

  For the fo-o-ur of us . . .

  And Robert Driscoll was damned if he knew how anyone could blame him, ever, for what he did then. He slowed down to twenty-five miles an hour, for safety; he hunched over the wheel and held it tight in both hands; he kept one eye open and steady on the road, and he let everything else fall apart inside him while he cried and cried.

  Afterword

  Pierre Van Loon died of shrapnel wounds inflicted by German artillery in the last week of what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

  A month later, on the other side of the world, Terry Flynn was killed in the second or third assault wave on the beach at Iwo Jima.

  Those, with Larry Gaines, are the only Second World War deaths I’m certain of among the boys I knew at Dorset Academy. There may well have been others, but without the Alumni News column it was impossible to know.

  I saw Bucky Ward briefly in 1946 and ’47, in New York, and he was full of war stories. He limped a lot, saying he’d been wounded in the knee and had refused a Purple Heart, but there were embarrassing times when he would walk the streets for miles, deep in conversation, without limping at all. He talked of having repeatedly volunteered to serve as first scout on dangerous patrols and of taking personal risks that caused other men to say “No! Don’t!” Twice, he said, once in the Bulge and again at the Siegfried Line, the force of concussion from enemy artillery had “blown every stitch of clothes off my back – when the guys got to me I was lying there naked as a baby.” And all this had sent him home with a profound new sense of his own potential value to mankind.

  “It’s only reasonable to wonder why I was saved,” he explained, staring earnestly into his coffee in a Bickford’s cafeteria at one o’clock in the morning. “Why me? Out of all those others, why me? Oh, I’ll never be sure, I suppose, but I think I know. I think it’s Christianity. I think it’s Jesus.” And so he had resolved to become a man of the cloth. I haven’t seen or heard from him in thirty years.

  I corresponded with Hugh Britt until about 1950, often writing two or three drafts of my letters to improve the prose. Though he hadn’t talked much about it in our last months at school, Britt had been accepted into a Navy program called the V-12 that allowed bright students to enroll as Naval personnel in civilian universities, where they could rapidly earn both bachelors’ degrees and Naval Reserve commissions. Britt attained those goals soon after the war, without ever having left the Middle Western city of his birth; he was also married by then, and a father. Next came medical school, for which he was amply prepared, and in one of his last letters he said he thought he would be a psychiatrist. I was the one who stopped writing letters: the strain of trying to keep up with him had worn me down at last.

  One day in 1955 I ran into Steve MacKenzie walking along Lexington Avenue. We had a few beers and laughed more than we meant to and punched each other’s arms; in the end, out on the sidewalk again, I think we shook hands about three times in saying goodbye. Just before turning away he said “Listen, though: don’t look back too much, okay? You can drive yourself crazy that way.”

  My father has been often on my mind lately, perhaps because in four more years I will be as old as he was when he died. My mother is long dead too, now, and so is my sister – she died young – but it is my father who haunts me most.

  I keep trying to picture him as a young man, before the General Electric Company got him, when he was traveling alone around upstate New York and determined to sing for a living. He must have been brave and tense and more than a little self-important then, yet often tired and ridden with terrible doubts, until he gave up.

  All I’m really qualified to remember is the sadness of his later life – the bad marriage that cost him so much, the drab little office from which he assisted in managing the sales of light bulbs for so many years, the tidy West Side apartment, redolent of lamb stew, where I can only hope he found love before his death.

  Still, even now, his singing is what I try to remember best, the splendid lyric tenor voice that rang from the walls of my early childhood. Once ten years ago, driving across the middle of America late at night with the car radio buzzing and crackling in the dashboard, I suddenly heard a high, pure ribbon of sound; and there he was, if only for a moment, a young concert tenor in some town a thousand miles away:

  . . . But come you back

  when summer’s in the meadow,

  Or when the valley’s hushed

  and white with snow . . .

  Then he was torn away on the air and the static closed in, and the commercials, and an all-night preacher in Missouri wanting to tell me about salvation, until I turned the thing off and tried to concentrate on the road.

  If my father had lived I would certainly have thanked him for paying my way through Dorset Academy. I know he never trusted the place, and for that reason I would have persisted if he shrugged-off my thanks. I might even have told him – and this would have been only a slight exaggeration – that in ways still important to me it was a good school. It saw me through the worst of my adolescence, as few other schools would have done, and it taught me the rudiments of my trade. I learned to write by working on the Dorset Chronicle, making terrible mistakes in print that hardly anybody ever noticed. Couldn’t that be called a lucky apprenticeship? And is there no further good to be said of the school, or of my time in it? Or of me?

  I will probably always ask my father such questions in the privacy of my heart, seeking his love as I failed and failed to seek it when it mattered; but all that – as he used to suggest on being pressed to sing “Danny Boy,” taking a backward step, making a little negative wave of the hand, smiling and frowning at the same time – all that is in the past.

 

 

 
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