This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

  Geoffrey listened without interrupting me. Once I was finished he said, “Let me get this straight. He hit you because of a little mustard?”

  I said that he had.

  “Where was Mom?”

  “Working.”

  Geoffrey was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again he sounded discouraged. “Toby, I don’t know what to say.”

  “I just thought I’d call,” I said.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “He had no right to hit you like that. Has he done it before?”

  I said he had—“all the time.”

  “That’s it, then,” Geoffrey said. “You’ve got to get out of there.”

  I asked if I could come live with him.

  “No,” he said. “That wouldn’t be possible.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “No, you don’t want to live with the old man right now, believe me.” Geoffrey said he had something else in mind, something he’d been planning to mention the next time he wrote. He asked me what the school was like in Chinook. When I told him I went forty miles downriver to the high school in Concrete, he said, “Where?”

  “Concrete.”

  “Concrete. Jesus. What are they teaching you?”

  I listed my courses. Band, shop, algebra, PE, English, civics, and driver’s ed. Geoffrey made unhappy sounds. When he asked about my grades I told him I was getting straight A’s. “That’s good,” he said. “That gives us something to go on. You’re obviously doing as well as you can, and that’s what they’ll be looking for.”

  Then he told me what he had in mind. He said that his old prep school, Choate, awarded a certain number of scholarships every year. Given the fact that I was earning top grades, he thought I might have a chance at one of these scholarships. It was a long shot, but why not try? I should also apply to Deerfield, where our father had gone for a time, and to St. Paul’s. Maybe some others. They liked jocks, he said. Was I a jock?

  I told him I was a swimmer.

  “Good, they love swimmers. You swim for your school?”

  “The school doesn’t have a team. I swim for my Scout troop.”

  “You’re a Scout? Great! Better and better. What rank?”

  “Eagle.”

  He laughed. “Christ, Toby, they’ll be eating out of your hand. Anything else? Chess? Music?”

  “I play in the school band.”

  “Terrific. What instrument?”

  “Snare drum.”

  “Yes, well, let’s stick with the grades and swimming and the Scouts.” Geoffrey told me he would send a list of schools to apply to, along with addresses and deadlines. I would have to be patient, this wasn’t going to happen overnight. “I don’t like the idea of that guy hitting you,” Geoffrey said. “Think you can hang on out there?”

  I said I could.

  “I’m going to call the old man about this. He might have some ideas. We’ll get you out of there, one way or the other.” He told me to give his love to our mother, and to keep writing. He said he really liked the wolf story.

  THIS WAS A low time for my mother. During the campaign she had traveled up and down the valley, and gone to conventions, and spent her time with people she admired. She had met John F. Kennedy. Now that the election was over she’d gone back to waiting tables at the cookhouse. She missed the excitement, but her sadness went beyond that, beyond boredom and fatigue. She had told a man who’d worked with her on the campaign that she wanted to get out of Chinook, and he offered to pull some strings to find her a job back East. Dwight somehow got wind of it. While they were driving up from Marblemount one night, he turned off on a logging road and took her to a lonely place. She asked him to go back but he refused to say anything. He just sat there, drinking from a bottle of whiskey. When it was empty he pulled his hunting knife out from under the seat and held it to her throat. He kept her there for hours like that, making her beg for her life, making her promise that she would never leave him. If she left him, he said, he would find her and kill her. It didn’t matter where she went or how long it took him, he would kill her. She believed him.

  I knew something had happened, but I didn’t know what. My mother wouldn’t tell me. She was afraid I would make things worse if I knew, stir Dwight up all over again. The fact was, she had no money and no place to go. Alone, she might have bolted anyway. With me to take care of she thought she couldn’t.

  When I told her I’d spoken to Geoffrey, her eyes filled with tears. This was unusual for her. We were sitting at the kitchen table, where we liked to talk when we were alone in the house. Geoffrey had recently been sending my mother letters, too, but they hadn’t spoken since we left Utah. She wanted to know what he sounded like, how he was, and all manner of things I had not thought to ask him. My mother grew somber, as she often did when we talked about Geoffrey. She was afraid she’d done the wrong thing in letting him go with my father, afraid he held it against her, that and the divorce, and taking up with Roy.

  I mentioned Geoffrey’s idea about Choate, about the possibility of my getting a scholarship there or maybe at some other school. I was afraid of her reaction. I thought she would be hurt by my wish to go, but she liked the idea. “He actually thinks you have a chance?” she said.

  “He said they’ll be eating out of my hand, quote unquote.”

  “I don’t know why he thinks that.”

  “My grades are good,” I said.

  “That’s true. Your grades are good. What other schools did he mention?”

  “St. Paul’s.”

  “He’s got big plans for you.”

  “Deerfield.”

  She laughed. “They’ll recognize your name, anyway. I think your father was the only boy they ever expelled.” Then she said, “Don’t get your hopes too high.”

  “Geoffrey said he’d talk to Dad about it. He said maybe Dad would have some ideas.”

  “I’m sure he will,” she said.

  GEOFFREY SENT THE names and addresses of the schools he had first mentioned, and also three others—Hill, Andover, and Exeter. I went to the library at school and looked them up in Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers. This book explained how the upper class perpetuates itself. Its motive was supposedly democratic, to attack snobbery and subvert the upper class by giving away its secrets. But I didn’t read it as social criticism. To seek status seemed the most natural thing in the world to me. Everyone did it. The people who bought the book were certainly doing it. They consulted it with the same purpose I had, not to deplore the class problem but to solve it by changing classes.

  Whatever he meant it to be, Packard’s book was the perfect guide for social climbers. He listed the places you should live and the colleges you should go to and the clubs you should join and the faith you should confess. He named the tailors and stores you should patronize, and described with filigree exactitude the ways you could betray your origins. Wearing a blue serge suit to a yacht-club party. Saying davenport for sofa, ill for sick, wealthy for rich. Painting the walls of your house in bright colors. Mixing ginger ale with whiskey. Being too good a dancer. He showed boxes within boxes, circles within circles. Of course you would go to an Ivy League school, but that by itself wouldn’t do the trick. “The point is not Harvard, but which Harvard? By Harvard one means Porcellian, Fly, or AD.” And he said that the key to which Harvard one attended, or which Yale, or which Princeton, and therefore which life one led thereafter, was one’s prep school. “Harvard or Yale or Princeton is not enough. It is the really exclusive prep school that counts....”

  Packard said there were over three thousand private schools in America. Only a very few satisfied his standard of exclusivity. He specified them in a brief list almost exactly the same as Geoffrey’s. I understood, pondering these names in the library of Concrete High, that the brilliant life they promised depended on leaving most people out, to loud walls and bad tailors. I did not want to be left out. Now that I had felt the possibility of this life, any other life would be an oppression.

&nb
sp; Packard made a point of saying that these schools were just about impossible for outsiders to get into. But he did mention that they gave scholarships, and that many of the scholarships went to “descendants of once-prosperous alumni who had come into difficult times.” That made me feel as if the people at Deerfield were just sitting around waiting to hear from me.

  I wrote off for application forms. The schools responded quickly, with cover letters in whose stiff courtesy I managed to hear panting enthusiasm. I did get a friendly note from John Boyden, the headmaster of Deerfield and the son of the man who had thrown my father out. He said that the school was already swamped with applications that year, and recommended that I apply to some other schools. His list was familiar. In a handwritten postscript he added that he remembered my father, and wished me all the best. I fixed on this cordial nod as a signal of favor.

  When the forms were all in, I sat down to fill them out and ran into a wall. I could see from the questions they asked that to get into one of these schools, let alone win a scholarship, I had to be at least the boy I’d described to my brother and probably something more. Geoffrey was willing to take me at my word; the schools were not. Each of the applications required supporting letters. They wanted letters from teachers, coaches, counselors, and, if possible, their own alumni. They asked for an account of my Community Service, and left a space of disheartening length for the answer. Likewise Athletic Achievements, likewise Foreign Travel, and Languages. I understood that these claims were to be confirmed in the letters of recommendation. They wanted my grades sent by Concrete High on its official transcript form. Finally, they required that I take a prep-school version of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, to be administered in January at the Lakeside School in Seattle.

  I was stumped. Whenever I looked at the forms I felt despair. Their whiteness seemed hostile and vast, Saharan. I had nothing to get me across. During the day I composed high-flown circumlocutions, but at night, when it came to writing them down, I balked at their silliness. The forms stayed clean. When my mother pressed me to send them off, I transferred them to my locker at school and told her everything was taken care of. I did not trouble my teachers for praise they could not give me, or bother to have my collection of C’s sent out. I was giving up—being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter. It was a new feeling, and one I didn’t like, but I saw no way out.

  MY FATHER CALLED. He called on a night when both Dwight and Pearl were out of the house, and that was a lucky thing, because my mother took the call and everything about her immediately changed. She became girlish. I realized who it was and stood beside her, straining to hear words in the rumble of my father’s voice. He did most of the talking. My mother smiled and shook her head. Now and then she laughed skeptically and said, “We’ll have to see,” and “I don’t know about that.” Finally she said, “He’s right here,” and handed the receiver over to me.

  “Hi, Chum,” he said, and I could feel him there. His bearish bulk, his tobacco smell.

  I said hello.

  “Your brother tells me you’re thinking of Choate,” he said. “Personally, I think you’d be happier at Deerfield.”

  “Well, I just applied,” I said. “Maybe I won’t get in.”

  “Oh, you’ll get in all right, boy like you.” He recited back to me the things I had told Geoffrey.

  “I don’t know. They get a lot of applications.”

  “You’ll get in,” he said sternly. “The question is, which school to choose. I’m simply suggesting that Deerfield may be on a more congenial scale than Choate. Let’s face it, you’re used to being a big fish in a small pond—you might get lost at Choate. But it’s your choice to make. If you want to go to Choate, for Christ’s sake go to Choate! It’s a fine school. A damn fine school.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He asked me where else I’d applied and I went through the list. He gave his approval, then added, “Mind you, Andover’s something of a factory. I’m not sure I’d send a boy of mine there, but we can talk about that when the time comes. Now here’s the plan.”

  The plan was that I should come down to La Jolla as soon as school was over. Then Geoffrey would fly out from Princeton after graduation and the three of us would spend the whole summer together. Geoffrey would work on his novel while I started preparing for classes at Deerfield. When we wanted a break we could go for a swim at Wind and Sea Beach, which was just down the street from the apartment. And later, when she saw how well everything was going, my mother would join us. We would be a family again. “I’ve made some mistakes,” he told me. “We all have. But that’s behind us. Right, Tober?”

  “Right.”

  “You damn betcha. We’re starting from scratch. And look, no more of this Jack business. You can’t go off to Deerfield with a name like Jack. Understand?”

  I said I understood.

  “Good boy.” He asked if it was true that my stepfather had hit me. When I said yes, he said, “The next time he does it, kill him.” Then he asked to speak to my mother again.

  After she hung up I told her what he’d said to me.

  “Sounds real nice,” she said. “Don’t bank on it.”

  “He said you would come too.”

  “Hah! That’s what he thinks. I’d have to be crazy to do that.” Then she said, “Let’s see what happens.”

  MY MOTHER DROVE me down to Seattle for the tests. I took the verbal section in the morning and immediately began to enjoy myself. I recognized, behind the easy-seeming questions on vocabulary and reading comprehension, a competitive intelligence out to tempt me with answers that were not correct. The tricks had a smugness about them that provoked me. I wanted to confound these sharpies, show them I wasn’t as dumb as they thought I was. When the monitor called the tests in I felt suddenly alone, as if someone had walked out on me in the middle of a good argument.

  The other boys who were taking the test gathered in the hallway to compare answers. They all seemed to know each other. I did not approach them, but I watched them closely. They wore rumpled sport coats and baggy flannel pants. White socks showing above brown loafers. I was the only boy there in a suit, a salt-and-pepper suit I’d gotten for eighth-grade graduation, now too small for me. And I was the only boy there with a “Princeton” haircut. The others had long hair roughly parted and left hanging down across their foreheads, almost to their eyes. Now and then they tossed their heads to throw the loose hair back. The effect would have been careless on just one of them, but it was uniform, an effect of style, and I took note of it. I also took note of the way they talked to each other, their predatory, reflexive sarcasm. It interested me, excited me; at certain moments I had to make an effort not to laugh. As they spoke they smiled ironically, and rocked on their heels, and tossed their heads like nickering horses.

  After lunch I walked around the campus. The regular students had not yet returned from their Christmas vacation, and the quiet was profound. I found a bench overlooking the lake. The surface was misty and gray. Until they rang the bell for the math test I sat with crossed legs and made believe I belonged here, that these handsome old buildings, webbed with vines of actual ivy to which a few brown leaves still clung, were my home.

  ARTHUR HATED SHOP, which was a required course for boys at Concrete High. After making his eighth or ninth cedar box he revolted. He was able to negotiate his way out by agreeing to work in the school office during that period. I thought he would help me, but he refused angrily. His anger made no sense to me. I did not understand that he wanted out, too. I backed off and didn’t ask again.

  But a few days later he came up to me in the cafeteria, dropped a manila folder on the table, and walked away without a word. I got up and took the folder to the bathroom. and locked myself in a stall. It was all there, everything I had asked for. Fifty sheets of school stationary, several blank transcript forms, and a stack of official envelopes. I slipped them into the folder again and went back to the cafeter
ia.

  Over the next couple of nights I filled out the transcripts and the application forms. Now the application forms came easy; I could afford to be terse and modest in my self-descriptions, knowing how detailed my recommenders were going to be. When these were done I began writing the letters of support. I wrote out rough copies in longhand, then typed up the final versions on official stationary, using different machines in the typing lab at school. I wrote the first drafts deliberately, with much crossing out and penciling in, but with none of the hesitance I’d felt before. Now the words came as easily as if someone were breathing them into my ear. I felt full of things that had to be said, full of stifled truth. That was what I thought I was writing—the truth. It was truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed in the facts arrayed against it. I believed that in some sense not factually verifiable I was a straight-A student. In the same way, I believed that I was an Eagle Scout, and a powerful swimmer, and a boy of integrity. These were ideas about myself that I had held on to for dear life. Now I gave them voice.

  I made no claims that seemed false to me. I did not say that I was a star quarterback or even a varsity football player, because even though I went out for football every year I never quickened to the lumpen spirit of the sport. The same was true of basketball. I couldn’t feature myself sinking a last-second clincher from the key, as Elgin Baylor did for Seattle that year in the NCAA playoffs against San Francisco. Ditto school politics; the unending compulsion to test one’s own popularity was baffling to me.

  These were not ideas I had of myself, and I did not propose to urge them on anyone else.

  I declined to say I was a football star, but I did invent a swimming team for Concrete High. The coach wrote a fine letter for me, and so did my teachers and the principal. They didn’t gush. They wrote plainly about a gifted, upright boy who had already in his own quiet way exhausted the resources of his school and community. They had done what they could for him. Now they hoped that others would carry on the good work.