“There you go. My pal Tony Mer sold me this car, said the same thing. ‘Flocks of them, Petah,’ he said. ‘You won’t know what to do with the women you’ll attract with a vehicle like this heah.’ ”
“Not as long as you keep wearing that ring, though.”
He looked down at his hand, and I could see that the anger had already washed out of him. I remembered my father’s quick temper and quick apologies, and my own—a Benedetto inheritance, for better and worse. “Forgot about it, can you imagine?” Uncle Peter pushed a button with his left little finger, and the window hummed down. “Hold the wheel, Tone.” I reached across and steadied it while he tried to pull the ring from his finger, yanking it up against the knuckle, grunting and struggling, making a show, finally giving up. He could have gotten it off easily if he’d really tried, I knew that. I said nothing.
He took the wheel from me again, and we sped north, away from the subject of my betrayal, and Aunt Ulla’s. Shortly after we crossed the New Hampshire line, there was an exit marked EXETER, RAYMOND, EPPING, which led us down a ramp to a tiny tollbooth. It looked like an outhouse there beside the road. “Five cents, please,” the collector said when we stopped. Uncle Peter pulled a roll of bills from his left pants pocket, peeled off a five, put it into the collector’s hand, and pressed his foot to the gas.
“Right there,” he said, when we were on a two-lane highway headed west, “is how you know you’re in New Hampshire. They have yellow lines on the road instead of white, and they make you stop for a nickel.”
I laughed a little two-note laugh, my half of the peace treaty. We drove on.
I had been to Exeter Academy once before, with my grandfather and Uncle Aldo, for an interview and an admissions tour, but Uncle Peter had never seen the place. I can’t honestly say I watched his expression as we went along the road and into the town—I was too busy studying the new surroundings myself—but I could sense his mood: a city dweller’s disdain for the woods, at first, and then for the single street of quaint shops, for people who would live in such a place, so far removed from the rush and tight quarters that, as the saying goes, meant the world to him.
The school itself is set just south of Main Street, separated from the commercial district by a few blocks of clapboard-sided eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes. It is a fabulous place, three hundred acres of sprawling lawns and perfectly maintained brick dormitories, a little oasis of privilege among the strip malls and pine forests of southeastern New Hampshire. But when the campus opened out in front of us in the afternoon light, Uncle Peter did not say so much as a single word, did not grunt or exclaim, did not even turn his eyes. We reached the main quadrangle; he turned left into a parking lot and stopped to ask a passing student, “Where’s Amen Hall?”
The name had been a running joke in the family since I’d gotten my dormitory assignment. “Amen,” Rosalie said, on one of the two times I’d seen her. “It’s what you say at the end of something, isn’t it, not the beginning?”
The student leaned down toward us, his eyes skittering over the Cadillac’s flashy fenders, my uncle’s improbable face, me. “ ‘A-men’ is how it’s pronounced,” he informed us. “Rhymes with Cayman, as in Cayman Islands, you see. It’s that one. You go straight down there and park wherever you wish. A-men Hall.”
“You see?” Uncle Peter said mockingly when we had started off. “That’s what you’re up against. A-men. Rhymes with Cayman. You see?”
But the moment we stepped out of the car, he seemed to shrug off all traces of whatever sense of inferiority or bitterness we might have carried with us from the sweatier kingdoms. It helped me. He stood up out of the car and did his thing with the belt buckle, shook his arms a couple of times, lifted his gaze to the specter of A-men Hall—neat brick, four stories, freshly painted white trim around the windows—and he was immediately at home again, in the world of people, absolutely fearless and sure. We carried my bags to the third floor, Room 21, and set them on one of the beds in the innermost of two rooms. He paced, poked his nose into both closets, opened and closed the drawers of the plain brown desks and bureaus, scuffed his shoe on the canvas-colored linoleum, squeezed the doorjambs, went over and stood for a minute at the window, as if the building were his castle and he was searching the grounds for a derelict gardener.
While we were hanging up my shirts and sport coats, there was the sound of shuffling feet in the outer room, and a slim, handsome black boy about my own size put his face in through the doorway and beamed a warm smile at us. “Joey Barnard,” he said, taking Uncle Peter’s hand and pumping it up and down. “You must be Mr. Benedetto.”
“Peter,” my uncle said, in a state of shock.
“And you must be Anthony. We’re roommates.”
“Tonio,” I said.
“Joey Barnard. West Sacramento, California. I’m all moved in. I’ll give you a hand if you want.”
It took us ten minutes to carry up the second load from the car, and about half that time for me to decide how I felt about Joey Barnard. He had the same natural ease as my uncle—in fact, they were chatting like old pals when I came back from the bathroom. You could see the tracks of some kind of heartache in the skin around his eyes, though he had a graceful way of covering it with a smile and tilted head, his hands opening out and up as he spoke.
Uncle Peter shook Joey’s hand again, squeezed his shoulder, said, “Alright then, I’m leavin you two guys to your studies and so on, your girl-chasin. Walk me down to the car, Tonio. Joe, we’ll see you weekend after this one. You’re comin out to lunch with me and Tonio’s grandparents, it’s all set.”
We stood beside the car in the New Hampshire light, older boys sauntering past with an air of comfort and ease that seemed the stuff of dreams to me. “Alright,” Uncle Peter said, “he seems like a nice kid. They’re good people, some of em. Your grandpa used to have a colored friend when he worked in Boston. Shocked the whole neighborhood when he invited the guy home. Mr. Earl. Never forget it as long as I live. Grandma’s mother was livin with us then. She hid in the parlor and peeked out at him like he was from Mahs. Mr. Earl.” He took the roll of bills from his pants and peeled off two fifties. “Had one of my miracle days at Suffolk. Heah.” There was no point in trying to refuse. I folded the bills into my palm and pushed them into my pocket. His eyes swung up to mine, old scars, gray-green irises, a little water. “Lissen,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders and squeezing me, “don’t ever let nobody make you feel less than they are, that’s all. Okay?”
I could not answer.
“Alright. Nothin wrong with cryin. Your pa and your mother would have been proud as hell that you’re in a place like this. Do good, alright?” He was crying himself now. We were a warm flotsam of Mediterranean emotion on the cool North Atlantic tide of passing students, parents, teachers in tweed.
He hugged me very hard, climbed into his car, and drove away without glancing back. I stood there and watched him go, watched the great cloud of guilt that followed him, a guilt that would never be washed away, the sense that he had somehow rubbed his weird awful luck off on my mother and father, and would have to spend the rest of his life now making it up to me. I stood there with tears on my face and watched until the gold fenders disappeared.
Upstairs, Joey Barnard was sitting sideways at his desk, studying the orientation schedule. He looked up and said, “What a great guy your dad is.”
Two
FOR A BOY LIKE ME, a boy who loved sports as much as he loved school, Exeter was a three-hundred-acre paradise: baseball diamonds, basketball courts, two indoor hockey rinks that had been built the year before, just across the road from Amen Hall. The classes were never larger than thirteen students, all of us sitting around a hardwood table on the same level as the teacher. No poling, no fights, no problem being seen carrying home a stack of books. It was, in a sense, a community of orphans, which meant that the salt of seeing parents and children together was not constantly being dribbled into the raw blood
y wound left by the death of my mother and father.
Instead of the regular Monday-through-Friday schedule, we had classes on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, and half days on Wednesday and Saturday. Mandatory sports at least four days a week—six days for varsity or junior-varsity teams—and, on the four full days, there were even two class slots after sports and before dinner. Jackets and ties had to be worn in class and at the dining hall. Lights out at 10:30 for juniors like Joey and me, with the occasional extension to 11:00. Anyone caught out of the dormitory after the check-in hour could be placed on probation. Any student found using drugs or drinking alcohol—one time—would be expelled immediately. Girls from the town or from other boarding schools were allowed only in the Common Room on the first floor, and only during certain weekend hours.
At my grandparents’ house, I had been accustomed to an almost unlimited freedom—walking wherever I wanted, staying up as late as I wanted (often they went to bed before me)—but I did not chafe very much under the thick blanket of Exeter rules. And, though there were some extraordinarily wealthy boys among my classmates, the distance between their lives and mine didn’t seem so large.
In those years, boasting about a family’s means went against the prevailing social winds. It was the late sixties, a brief moment in which American materialism was called into question, prior to the all-out worship of things and money that would mark the next thirty years. Scholarship boys like Joey Barnard and me were required to wait on faculty tables at dinner one out of every three terms—a practice that has since been abandoned—but even that did not trouble me. In fact, aside from a boy named Higgenbotham, and some faculty members—who seemed, in their tweed, tortoiseshell, and proper, reserved manner, like another species of adults than the one I’d grown up with—the issue of class and wealth was not much of an issue for me in my two years at Exeter. I was an innocent in such matters then. I knew that some of my classmates had fathers and even grandfathers who’d graduated from “the Academy,” as it was called; that some of them went to the Riviera over summer break, that some of them had famous last names from the worlds of industry or government service. But I had no drawer in which to file that information. I had been outside of Massachusetts twice, both times to visit my mother’s sister Janice in New Jersey: how was I to react to the idea of the Riviera? And my last name was famous, too, in the place I’d come from.
The other part of it was that I just did not feel like playing the working-class ethnic kid at Exeter, because I discovered almost immediately that I had at least as much in common with my new friends as I did with the Leos, Peters, and Alfonses I’d left behind. Now, in middle age, the pendulum has swung back. I find myself drawn to old friends from Revere and tugged away from some of the people I know in the wider world—people who grew up with summer homes purchased by their grandparents, who went to places like Exeter without any of their family members being upset about it, or surprised. How strange it has all turned. How much more of my own prejudice I have to confront now, when I encounter a person like Higgenbotham.
Jeffrey Lewis Higgenbotham IV was his full name, but I did not know that until I saw it on the program at graduation. He was a junior, like me, and lived on the third floor of Amen Hall, too, in a double with someone named Madhur Jarasapwanatha, a tremendously wealthy, unnaturally quiet boy from what was then called Ceylon. As if everyone else at the school had shrugged them from their own shoulders onto Higgenbotham’s (no one called him Jeffrey or Jeff), he carried around with him every imaginable symbol of class and wealth. Grandfathers on both sides of his family were Exeter graduates—his parents, he told me the second time we spoke, had gotten engaged at Palm Beach. (“What a coincidence,” I said. “Mine got engaged at Revere Beach.”) He lived an hour northwest of New York City in a rural enclave of polo fields, golf clubs, and Tudor mansions. His maternal grandfather had patented the rounded piece of metal on which garden hoses are hung in loops, and made a fortune from it; his father and one of his uncles played polo; one or two of his aunts sat on the boards of charitable foundations. At Exeter, he had a closet packed with beautifully tailored sport coats, three tennis rackets in presses; he wore a gold watch; he taught me to play bridge in the basement smoking room (I taught him the Italian card game briscola); he went around with his chin in the air, his wise proclamations falling upon the heads of the rest of us like coins tossed out the castle window. He was a breathing, living, walking-around cliché … and the first time I saw him he was pissing out the window of his third-floor dorm room into the New Hampshire night.
Joey and I had become fast friends with Madhur at orientation, and on the second day of classes we wandered down to his room after dinner to sit and talk. He had a two-room double, just as we did, though in the northwest corner of the building. As I followed Joey through the door, I became aware of a tall, narrow-shouldered boy standing with his back to us at a dark window. “Course, course,” he said, looking at us over his shoulder, but keeping his pissing apparatus discreetly out of view. This “course,” I would soon learn, was Exeter jargon for “of course,” and was supposed to be inserted into speech wherever possible. If asked whether or not you were prepared for a history test, for example, the right answer was either “Course I am,” with a slight emphasis on the last word, or “Course not, course, course,” delivered with the tailing-off inflection one finds in eastern Maine.
“Course, course,” Higgenbotham said. “It’s Barnaby and Benetto. Benetto, step over here. My mum saw your name on the dorm list and warned me about you. Not to go home with you on weekends and so forth, never to form too close an attachment to the criminal worlds. So that’s the first thing I’d like to do.”
He shook himself with great flair, yanked the zipper up, slammed the window down, slapped his hands together as a substitute for washing them, and crossed the room with a couple of manly strides. “Benetto,” he said, as if we were two colonial explorers meeting in a sub-Saharan outback, “Higgenbotham.” And then: “Barnaby, very pleased.”
How, I wondered, could a fifteen-year-old boy act like this without getting his ass kicked every time he opened his mouth?
“You were peeing out the window?” Joey asked him.
“A privilege of the four-year boy,” he said.
“You’re a senior?”
He shook his oversized head and turned his eyes toward me for a second appraisal, as if, by coming into the room with someone who asked questions like this, I had confirmed his mother’s worst suspicions. “Upper Middler, same as you and Benetto here, same as Maddy. However, I will be a four-year boy when I’m a senior, and we’re all supposed to be crazy by then, so the authorities are bound to make allowances. Come, sit down.”
We arranged ourselves on his bed and desk, while he struck a pose in the one soft chair. “Benedetto,” I corrected him, at the first opportunity, and he gave me a puzzled look, squinted, paused, then said, “Higgenbotham, as I mentioned.”
Higgenbotham, it turned out, was a hockey player, too. When he learned I would be trying out for the squad, he began to give me profiles of the coaching staff, the varsity stars, my likely competition for the team from last year’s JV. This was done with complete disregard for the fields of interest of the other two boys, but for a while at least, for the first few weeks, we were all a bit hypnotized by Higgenbotham, by the apparent seamlessness of his act, and were content to listen to him the way he seemed to expect to be listened to. “Mr. Rislin, you see, was a star at Princeton. All-America, in fact. Don’t let the quiet voice fool you. He’ll work you to skin and bone in practice if you earn a spot, and he likes fellows that can hit.” And so on.
What saved Higgenbotham, to the extent that he was saved, was that once we’d gotten past that first blinding display of what we took for sophistication, it was easy enough to see that he was just a boy underneath, like the rest of us: a thin wrapping of adolescent arrogance over the normal pubescent anxieties. That fall, I saw him once in the presence of his polo-playing
father. They were walking laps around Amen Quadrangle on a particularly fine October afternoon, the father smoking a pipe and talking, and Higgenbotham going along with him shoulder to shoulder. His father had an odd gait, elbows pulled stiffly back as if he were in uniform and at attention, the legs swinging in his trousers like puppet’s legs, loose, thin, weightless. It was Higgenbotham’s gait; it had looked very original on him until you saw the father. I was struggling valiantly to make small talk with the daughter of one of my teachers when they passed. Higgenbotham acknowledged me with a tiny nod, but made no introductions. When they were just beyond us, I heard him say, “But Father, don’t you think they’d prefer …”—and the voice was a little boy’s voice, a third-grader’s warbling plea.
He had a bit of a speech impediment, too, a very slight lisp, and the habit of being careless with people’s last names. The thin shoulders, the splay-footed gait, the struggles with Latin and calculus—try as he might, he was one of us. It would turn out that he was a fairly good hockey player—not good enough to play at Yale, where he ended up enrolling after graduation, but good enough to play second defense on the varsity team, junior year. And it would turn out that this was his only athletic ability, a rare occurrence in my experience of people who play hockey. He could not throw or catch a Frisbee on the lawn when we played on Sunday afternoons. He swam across the new Olympic-sized pool like a harpooned whale, splashing and gasping and throwing his mouth open in an expression of agony. Wrestling with smaller boys on the carpet of the Common Room, he always lost, and usually he tripped at least once running the bases in club baseball games, tripped, scraped his forearms, banged his nose, banged his bat off the catcher’s mask as he took his flailing swings.
In Revere, In Those Days Page 16
