by Sloan Wilson
“I don’ta, don’ta, don’t know, Mr. Nealy,” Bill replied.
In his bottom bureau drawer under his sweaters, Bill kept, among other things, an album of pictures his father had taken during the Second World War, which he had found in the attic of his mother’s house in New Rochelle, and had stolen. It contained cracked and yellowed snapshots of groups of young men in soiled uniforms, big guns in the mud with their barrels tilted skyward, crashed airplanes, and one terrifying picture of a tangled pile of the dead, showing one corpse in the foreground with his mouth open and a hand outstretched. “My father saw that,” Bill said proudly. “He was there.”
“My father was the captain of a ship,” John replied with equal pride.
Bill also had hidden under his clothes in the bottom bureau drawer a forbidden object, his father’s old service pistol, his most treasured possession.
“No firearms shall be kept in the rooms,” the school’s rules said, but the pistol had been given to Bill by his own father shortly before he died; it was his inheritance, and he smuggled it in. For hours he sat polishing it, and at night quite often John saw him steal from his covers, get the pistol, and take it to bed with him, as younger boys might take a Teddy bear.
“You can see,” Bill said many times, pointing to a headline in the paper. “They’re getting close to it.”
Bill Norris had a second album of pictures hidden away which John stumbled on by mistake while attempting to borrow a pair of socks, a collection of photographs of nude women. They were not pornographic photographs, such as a boy from Florida named Dick Woller surreptitiously invited friends into his room to see; Bill’s were routine art shots, some of them quite beautiful. John always remembered one of them, a photograph of a young woman leaning against a Grecian pillar on the steps of a ruined building, with dark braids falling down on each side of her full, perfectly formed breasts. Bill came into the room while John was poring over this collection and furiously grabbed it from him, both boys blushing piteously. “You shouldn’t have taken that!” Bill said, almost in tears.
Bill Norris’ Latin went from bad to worse during the few months John knew him, and John himself had so much trouble making up for his lack of instruction in Latin and algebra on Pine Island that at Mr. Caulfield’s suggestion, he dropped back a year. Mr. Nealy’s temper kept getting shorter. He threw pieces of chalk and blackboard erasers at Bill and John, and in supposedly mock fury picked up a chair once and threatened to let them have it. John had a capacity for hard, driving work, and before long he had his studies under control, but Bill Norris kept lagging farther and farther behind, like a wounded ship falling out of convoy. Because he lived with him, John shared his agonies, and of all he learned at Colchester Academy, the story of the short, sad education of Bill Norris stuck in his mind longest.
Colchester Academy Builds Men, as its brochure proclaimed. Mr. Caulfield, the headmaster, and Mr. Nealy had themselves been built there, but they weren’t sure that Bill Norris was “good material.” The curriculum they prescribed for him included a dead and a foreign language, mathematics and English. The boys’ personal lives were not considered to be the school’s business, and some kinds of ignorance were thought to be beyond its province. Many of the students, including Bill Norris, believed that masturbation would drive them insane, that their backbones would turn to liquid, and that hair would grow on the palms of their hands. Horror beyond the imagination of an adult dwelt in their minds.
Bill Norris was caught in a toilet booth. Dick Woller spied on him through a crack in the door, and called a dozen others. They quietly brought in chairs and stood on them, looking over the wall of the booth, and in unison called, “Hey Bill! What are you doing?”
He bolted, panic-stricken, holding up his pants, and ran to his room, bursting in upon John, who was trying to translate Caesar. “What’s the matter?” John said.
Bill’s eyes were crazed. From the hall the boys followed him. “Go ahead, Bill,” they said. “Don’t mind us!”
“Well, now, we’ll hear a recitation from Bill Norris,” Mr. Nealy said the next day in Latin class. “You, I suppose, Bill, have again got your lesson letter-perfect today?”
Laughter. As in the Congressional Record, laughter had to be noted often in any true report of the doings at Colchester Academy. Bill looked up, his face pale, and said, “I’m-a, I’m-a, I’m afraid I haven’t done my lesson today, Mr. Nealy.”
“How strange!” Mr. Nealy retorted with relish. “You mean my star student has come to class unprepared?”
“I’m-a, I’m afraid so, Mr. Nealy,” Bill said.
“Try to translate the first line anyway. Page ninety-two, in case you don’t know.”
Laughter. Mr. Nealy was a great comedian.
“Caesar,” Bill stammered, “Caesar was merciful to the Gauls.”
“Very good,” Mr. Nealy said. “After two years of my expert tutelage you can now translate six simple words of Latin almost right. I guess this is as much of a triumph as we can expect today. Time’s up—class dismissed!”
A few weeks later the boys played another prank on Bill Norris. They cut letters from a newspaper to make a headline reading “Bill Norris Found Dead in Bed”—this, in the atmosphere of Colchester Academy, being an obviously obscene reference. Bill saw it on the bulletin board and blushed, but hurried on to class, anxious to escape the knot of boys waiting to see his reaction. It was John Hunter who took the sign down.
“You leave that up!” Dick Woller said. He was a broad-faced, red-haired, freckled boy a year older than John and bigger.
John walked toward him slowly, holding the pasted-up newspaper clipping in his hand. “Did you make this?” he asked quietly.
“Who wants to know?”
Quickly, without premeditation, John hit him, a full man’s blow in the mouth. The boy staggered back with blood welling from his lips, and John was all over him, pounding his fists into his face and belly. It took three boys and a master to haul him off.
“I hear you started it,” Mr. Caulfield said to John that night.
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
John said nothing because the subject was unspeakable. A wall lay between the generations through which one could not talk or see or hear.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“No.”
“Twelve demerits for fighting,” Mr. Caulfield said. “Remember, if you get twenty demerits, you’ll be expelled.”
“Yes, sir,” John said.
John went to the music building and sat for three hours playing the piano that afternoon.
There were a few good teachers. One of them, Albert Newfield, tried to tutor Bill Norris every night to help him catch up in his Latin, but Bill did not prove very co-operative. “To tell the truth, Mr. Newfield, I don’t see much point to Latin,” he said.
“It’s mental exercise. Learning it will help you to do any kind of intellectual work well,” “Will it?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t think I’m really much of an intellectual,” Bill said. “I mean, I don’t really have many ambitions that way.” With Mr. Newfield, Bill didn’t stutter so much.
“What are your ambitions, Bill?”
“I don’t know,” Bill replied. “I guess I just don’t have any. I think there’s going to be a war, and I guess that will take care of that.”
“But you need an education to fight in a war, even if one does come.”
“Do you?”
“Of course. You want to be an officer, don’t you?”
“No,” Bill Norris said.
In late April there was a dance at Colchester Academy, and John asked Molly, but her school would not allow her to come without her parents’ permission and her mother said no. Only about a third of the boys got girls for the dance. On the great night a line of Japanese lanterns was hung from the administration building to the gymnasium, where the orchestra was pl
aying love songs at one end of the basketball court. The lucky boys in white dinner coats walked with the girls to the gymnasium after supper. It was twilight, and the paper lanterns glowed against the sky. The girls wore evening gowns, and John, leaning out of his dormitory window to watch, found it almost impossible to believe that they could be so beautiful, and still walk with the boys from Colchester Academy. Even Dick Woller had a girl, a stout young lady before whom he was painfully shy, but whom he later claimed to have seduced. Dick Woller always carried a condom in his wallet and boastfully showed it to his friends. “Foolish not to carry one,” he said in his slow Florida drawl. “After all, they don’t weigh much.” Dick Woller caused John always to hate a Southern accent.
During those lonely months John’s face and body, plagued by the difficulties of adolescence, grew more splotchy, and he felt himself to be unclean. Looking at himself in the mirror, he was certain he was growing up to be ugly, hideous beyond redemption, and it did not seem in the least surprising to him in retrospect that his mother had chosen his sister to take with her. How could any woman love a face like his? It was nice that he and Molly just exchanged letters, he thought.
As the brochure also said, Colchester Academy fits its program to the individual child. Early one Sunday morning a group of the individual children led by Dick Woller stole into the room where Bill Norris was sleeping and ripped the covers from his bed. “Just want to make sure you’re behaving yourself, boy!” Dick Woller said.
But the joke didn’t work out quite the way Dick Woller expected. Bill Norris in his rumpled pajamas awoke with a start, sat up, his eyes wild, and in his hand was a gun. The evil black pistol emerging suddenly from beneath the white pillow was such an astonishing sight that the boys stood gaping, crowding back against the wall. There was a click as Bill cocked the gun. His hand did not tremble. “You bastards leave me alone,” he said, “or I’ll kill you, every one.”
The boys fled, but the story, or at least part of it, soon got to Mr. Caulfield, the headmaster, who was shocked to learn that a Colchester Academy boy would do such a terrible thing, that he should have a gun he hadn’t registered with Mr. Nealy, who was in charge of the rifle range. Bad stuff. Not in the tradition of Colchester Academy. Not at all. Mr. Caulfield called all the boys who had seen the incident to the administration building. They stood in a semicircle around his desk.
“Was the gun loaded?” Mr. Caulfield asked.
“No,” Bill Norris replied. “I didn’t put the bullet in it.”
“But you have a bullet?”
“Yes. One.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I found it in my father’s collar box.”
“This is very serious,” Mr. Caulfield said.
“He never loads the gun, sir,” John Hunter said, trying to be helpful.
“It’s always the unloaded guns which kill people,” Mr. Caulfield said. “To think that a Colchester Academy boy kept a gun in his room is bad enough. To think that he threatened other boys with it is intolerable. I will of course have to confiscate the gun.”
“No,” Bill Norris replied.
“Bring it to me immediately,” Mr. Caulfield thundered. John and the other boys who had been called as witnesses glanced apprehensively at each other. “You will have to leave this school immediately if you do not conform to the rules,” Mr. Caulfield said to Bill Norris.
“All right,” Bill replied in a low voice.
“That’s better,” Mr. Caulfield replied, sounding relieved. “Just tell us where you’ve hidden it, and I’ll ask one of the masters to pick it up.”
“I’ll get it myself,” Bill said and walked out of the room, looking as he always did, a little pale, but not visibly upset.
Mr. Caulfield picked up the telephone. “Mr. Nealy,” he said. There was a pause. “He just left here to get it for me,” Mr. Caulfield said. “I think you better stay with him.”
Putting the receiver down, Mr. Caulfield turned in his swivel chair and faced the witnesses. “How did this incident start?” he asked.
“We were just teasing him a little,” Dick Woller said.
“How were you teasing him?”
“Just fooling around,” Dick Woller replied. “We pulled the covers off his bed.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Mr. Caulfield said, “but of course it’s no excuse for him to…”
“But you don’t understand,” John said.
“Don’t understand?” One of Mr. Caulfield’s eyebrows went up. He was quite proud of being able to make one go up that way, while the other stayed still.
“No, you don’t understand,” John repeated.
At that moment there was a scream from outside. John looked out the window and saw Mr. Nealy running in the quadrangle, his mouth agape. He arrived, gasping for breath, in Mr. Caulfield’s office and said, “He’s gone! He’s gone!”
Mr. Nealy wasn’t very coherent, but finally he was able to explain what had happened. His car had been parked in front of his apartment in the dormitory; he had left it there because his wife had planned to drive to the hospital to continue special treatments for her shoulder. Bill Norris had stolen it. Coming out of the dormitory beside Mr. Nealy with the gun in his hand, Bill had threatened to shoot himself if anyone tried to stop him. He had got into the car, had started it, still holding the gun in one hand, and a half dozen boys, besides Mr. Nealy, had been afraid to stop him because of the look on his face, Mr. Nealy said; a terrible look. Suddenly Bill had raced the engine, and with a screech of tires had careened right across the lawn to the school’s driveway, disappearing in the direction of the state highway.
“Sit down, Mr. Nealy,” Mr. Caulfield said. “You boys run along and leave us alone now.”
But Mr. Nealy couldn’t wait. “He was going to shoot himself,” he said, and put his face on his knees and wept.
“You boys run along and come back here in half an hour,” Mr. Caulfield said, and picked up the telephone.
John and the others walked outside. All the masters in the school appeared almost by magic, like the crew of a ship in time of disaster. The superintendent of grounds immediately began to erase the tire marks on the lawn. An elderly football coach walked around the quadrangle saying, “Let’s get up a game, boys! We’ll set up two teams chosen by lot, and I’ll put up a trip to New York for the winners!”
“Tonight we should have a special movie,” a mousy English teacher said. “I’ll arrange it.”
“Where are you going?” a French instructor asked John.
“I thought I’d take a walk.”
“Why don’t you come up to the room with me and have a glass of sherry? I think you’re old enough.”
It was an order, not an invitation. John followed him dutifully, and sat on a couch sipping the cheap sweet wine.
Mr. Caulfield didn’t like to call the police when the boys ran away from school. It wasn’t good to give the youngsters even a juvenile record, and it was bad publicity for the school. Usually a quiet telephone call to the home did the trick, or the homes if the son of a broken marriage was the offender, as was so often the case. Some judicious waiting usually produced the boy within twenty-four hours, but this case seemed to Mr. Caulfield to be different. The image of a fifteen-year-old boy careening along the highway with a gun on the seat beside him was appalling. As soon as he got Mr. Nealy to the infirmary, where he was given a sedative, Mr. Caulfield called the state police.
A trooper caught sight of Bill Norris in Mr. Nealy’s car about twenty miles outside of Hartford. He was driving toward New York at a normal speed, but when the trooper tried to wave him down, he stepped on the gas. The chase lasted almost an hour, because the trooper was a fifty-year-old man with four children and he didn’t want to risk his life unnecessarily chasing some crazy hopped-up kid with a gun. Some of these juvenile delinquents are worse than the hardened criminals, the trooper reflected darkly as he held his speedometer at eighty,
and tried to get headquarters on the radio to have a road block set up ahead. I don’t know what the world is coming to, he thought; for Christ’s sake, a fifteen-year-old kid with a gun, and from a rich family too, coming from a school like that. If he points his goddamn gun at me, I’ll shoot his eyes out, the trooper thought, and unbuckled his holster. “Yes,” he said, when he finally got contact on his radio. “I’ve got him—just keeping him in sight. Get the boys in Draytown on the job, will you? The way he’s going, he’ll roar through there in about ten minutes, so for Christ’s sake get the people off the street.”
Bill saw the road block way ahead; they had put it on a straight stretch of road so he would have plenty of room in which to stop. Two state police cars were parked there with their red lights blinking and their sirens going full blast, and beside the road three men stood with drawn guns. I might kill somebody if I sailed into those police cars, Bill thought, and picked a telegraph pole instead. The car snapped it and ripped a swath two hundred yards long through the earth before it stopped, and by that time it was so crumpled and enveloped in flame that it was hard to tell whether it was right side up or upside down. The policemen came running and stood in a semicircle around it calling for fire extinguishers. It wasn’t necessary for Bill to wait for a hydrogen bomb: the flames in the automobile were quite hot enough.
A special meeting was called in the study hall with all boys who knew Bill present.
“A very sad thing has happened today,” Mr. Caulfield said. “Bill Norris was killed in an accident.”
He paused. “Now it would be very unfair to repeat much about this,” he continued. “Unfair to Bill Norris, and to his mother.”
