“I’ll stop being bad when you give me a name,” he yelled back.
“Don’t you sass me, Bad Monkey,” I said.
“I am magic,” he whispered. “Don’t you get it? If you name me, all your troubles will be over. Please give me a name, and don’t leave me here in this dirty train station all alone.”
So I sat down on a bench and unlocked the suitcase. “Fred,” I said, pulling him to me and hugging him tight. “You are such a Fred.”
The Artist vs. the Barbarian
When Miss Dovecott reads my charmingly quirky, symbolic-sounding but utterly pointless story, maybe she will fall in love with me all over again. And maybe she will forgive me for all that I am about to do, for all I have already done. Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.
I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 12:35 P.M.
Running, Yesterday
It is the time of day when the sun turns treetops into keepers of light. After redoing my homework and leaving it on Miss Dovecott’s desk, I run through that light, up one side of the hill and down the other, imagining possibilities.… Miss Dovecott is only five years older than I am, and in five years, when I’m out of college and the age difference won’t matter, we can fall in love properly and go to restaurants and drink wine and whisper into each other’s eyes and get married and live in an apartment with fresh flowers on every table and bookshelf, flowers that I select myself and bring home from the corner market.
The wildflowers that grow on the banks of the French Broad River have all gone under the earth. Like Thomas. It is a Friday with no rain. The sun leaves nothing of itself on the water; cold air raises goose bumps on my legs. Birds skim across the path, leaves murmur beneath my shoes, sounds that become one with the river.
I stand on a bank far away from the headwaters, far away from the rock. The water is gray but inviting because it is moving, going somewhere. I step down into it, and it covers my shoes and socks. Cold, cold. I take another step, then another. I am up to my knees in water. I test myself to see how far I can go: top of my shorts, my balls start shriveling; up to my belly button; my gray shirt sucks up the gray water, turning my shirt darker. I make it up to my neck, and then it’s too much. I flounder back up the bank, where I fold into myself to stay warm, rocking back and forth to the pulse of the river until my heartbeat falls in unison with it.
“Oh, Alex, it’s you,” a voice says, and I jump.
When I turn my head around, Miss Dovecott steps toward me, her eyes flickering with curiosity. She must wonder what I am doing here when most guys are having dinner with their parents.
“You’re all wet,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why would you want to go swimming on a day like today?”
“Uh …” I don’t have an answer.
“You’re cold.”
“I just finished running.”
“You should dry off.”
I take off my shirt.
“You’re shaking,” she says. When she pulls her sweatshirt over her head, I see her nipples poking through her bra and into her shirt. “Here. You need this more than I do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. I’m fine. I have on a turtleneck.”
“I don’t need your sweatshirt, Miss Dovecott.”
“Alex, the tips of your fingers are blue.”
I lift my hands to look at them. She holds the sweatshirt out to me, and I take it, putting my arms through the sleeves, then pulling it over my head in one quick motion. On Miss Dovecott the sweatshirt is miniskirt length, but it fits me.
“I’m on my way back up to campus,” she says. “Want to join me?”
I nod and follow.
“I heard the cross-country team won the other day,” she says. “And a personal best for you. Congratulations.”
(I didn’t have time to write about it here in this book.)
“Thanks.” I smile, curious. “Who told you?”
“Mr. Wellfleet. He was proud.”
“Yeah, he was jumping around all over the place. You’d have thought we’d won the Olympics or something.”
Because the path is narrow, I let her walk in front. To talk face to face is impossible, and sending small talk into the back of her head feels pointless. I try not to stare at her bottom in case she suddenly turns around.
I suppress the urge to grab her by the waist and instead tap her on the shoulder. “I know a shortcut,” I say, stepping in front of her, wondering if she might be studying the muscles in my calves or the mud spattered on the back of them. As we angle away from the rush of the river, I pick up the pace. When the path disappears, I lead her over cushions of leaves, weaving in and out of trees. We are almost running, but she has no trouble keeping up, and I don’t slow down until I reach the sycamore with the low, oblong knothole. “The coolest tree on campus,” I say. I press my hand on the trunk next to the hole. “Once I found a bird’s nest here.”
I do not say that when I went running for help on the day Thomas died, I stopped here on the way up the hill to the infirmary, out of my mind with panic, and sobbed for at least two minutes.
A single bird whisks by over our heads, and we look up. The light is gone from the treetops, leaving only feathers of cloud in the sky. I take the opportunity to earn a few brownie points. “I’ve been meaning to ask if you could recommend a book for me to read. Anything you think I might like that isn’t too ‘Englishy.’ You know what I mean. I like English. It’s my favorite class. It really is; I’m not just saying that.”
She smiles. “Well, have you read Crime and Punishment?”
“I’ve seen it on my dad’s bookshelf at home.” I pause. “But to be honest, it looks kind of long, and I don’t have a lot of extra reading time.” I do not tell her that I’m in the process of slogging through Moby-Dick because at the rate I’m going, I may not make it all the way. “Can you think of something a little shorter?”
“Why don’t you try In Our Time, by Hemingway? It’s a collection of stories about a young man named Nick Adams, a soldier in World War I. I’m sure the library has a copy. If not, you’re welcome to borrow mine.”
By now we have reached the top of the hill, where below us the school buildings cast their long shadows. A game of touch football has started in the quad, but it is too far away for me to make out the players. I feel empty, a whole Friday night without study hall stretching before me, and I almost ask Miss Dovecott if she wants to drive into town for dinner. I consider offering an observation about dark closing in on us, but that sounds stupid, too. I am almost expecting her to say something about Thomas, to pounce and try to draw the truth out of me, like a mouth on a rattlesnake bite, but she doesn’t. What she says is “I’m taking you to the infirmary.”
For a split second, I think she means her apartment, but then I realize she is worried that I might have hypothermia. When I check in with Nurse Patty, I am still wearing Miss Dovecott’s sweatshirt.
Ice Cream
In the waiting room with its clanking radiator, Nurse Patty gives me some towels and checks my temperature. Normal. She makes me drink tea from a china cup with pink roses on it, then sends me back to my dorm to shower in time for dinner. I stuff the damp sweatshirt under my bed for the time being, throw on khakis and a collared shirt, and run to the dining hall for make-’em-yourself sundaes, cold comfort for the parentless. I eat three of them, and they actually do make me feel better for a little while. I sit at the corner table usually occupied by faculty, where the tall windows come together, and I look through my own reflection out into the night, where things I know nothing about are happening. Afterward, in the darkness of my room, I lie on my bed naked with the sweatshirt in my arms, aching all over.
Old Man
The next morning (this morning) at the library, I find In Our Time, right where it should be, and I sit in my carrel for forty-five minutes, reading. I have a Latin quiz fir
st period (yes, they still make us go to Saturday class even on Parents’ Weekend) that I should be studying for, but I’m not interested in Latin right now. I am Nick Adams, the soldier who has to keep his mind shut down in order to get through a day.
By the time the bell rings, the scent of the book has worked its way into the creases of my palms. It is a nice smell, really, a grandfather’s-closet smell, and I am smiling as I walk to the circulation desk even though I am about to fail a quiz. I pull the card out of the back of the Hemingway book and sign my name. That’s when I see another name. Thomas Broughton checked out this book in March of 1956. Quick as a wink, I erase my name from the card, but the eraser smudges rather than clears, and I can still see my handwriting. I reach across the circulation desk to grab a black felt-tip pen, and I color in the whole block so that no trace of my name remains. I return the book to the shelf where it belongs and check out The Old Man and the Sea instead.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 9:15 A.M.
Saturday Night at Boarding School on Parents’ Weekend
You don’t have a lot of options. You don’t want to be the only guy on dorm other than the shy Korean kid whose family lives halfway around the world. You don’t want to feel sorry for yourself as you sit and watch girl shows like The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. You think you might sail about a little and see the watery part of the world; you think you might sign up for the mixer designed to keep the under-formers occupied and the upper-form losers like you and the Korean kid from killing yourselves. Sure enough, the evening doesn’t seem nearly as bleak when you see who the chaperone is. You tuck a paperback into your jacket pocket just in case you and she want to get literary.
The Mixer
I am one in a trail of boys streaming from the Birch School bus across the well-lit courtyard of St. Brigid, a girls’ school seventy miles away. At the table inside the heavy glass doors of the gym, two smiling middle-aged women wearing earplugs hand out name tags and markers. There are rules here (there are rules everywhere we ever go on a bus): no kissing on the dance floor, for example, and no one leaves the gym until eleven o’clock, when it’s time to get back on the bus. Only three hours to get down to the business of mixers, which is to get at least to second base, but I’m not in the mood. I find a corner with some light and remove Hemingway from the pocket of my sports coat. I scan the room for Miss Dovecott. She is standing with the other chaperones, some of them male—there are two other boys’ schools here—so I look around for anyone I know. Too dark. I decide to make a circle around the hardwood floor so maybe Miss Dovecott will take note of my swinging-single self.
In the middle of a crowd of dancers, a couple is kissing, seeing how long they can get away with it. The loud music precludes any sort of talking I might want to do with a St. Brigid girl, the well-groomed Ivory-soap type. When I bend down for a sip at the water fountain, someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s one of the Ivory girls, a small, gawky one. A couple of her friends are pointing at me and shaking their hips in time to the song, “Get Down Tonight,” by KC & the Sunshine Band. “Would you like to dance?” she squeaks.
As horny as I am, I draw the line at girls who look twelve, have braces, and sound like Minnie Mouse. I tell Minnie I’m not feeling well. She nods. As I hurry away in the opposite direction, I slip, my ankle twisting in the penny loafers I am not used to, and even though the music is loud, I hear the girls’ mocking laughter, amplified for my benefit to show that they have gotten over being rejected by Goofy. I climb into a dark row of bleachers and watch Minnie and friends disappear into the crowd in the middle of the dance floor, where boys and girls become indistinguishable, faces bobbing up and down like part of a giant machine. I am playing it cool, but I sure as hell don’t feel it.
In a way, it isn’t that cool to go to mixers because it means you don’t have a girlfriend back home. It is fine if you’re a new boy, but after that, not nearly as cool, although you redeem yourself ever so slightly if you hook up with a fox or if your girlfriend attends the boarding school and you hang out with her all night in the bushes. Joe Bonnin has a younger sister at St. Brigid, and I wonder if I should go look for her. But what do I do if I find her? She’s not that foxy. I check my watch—8:36—and scan the room. When I see who is coming my way, I pull out The Old Man and the Sea, book in one hand, sore ankle in the other. I am massaging it absent-mindedly when Miss Dovecott sits down.
“Too much dancing already?” she says.
I laugh and tell her I tripped.
“Do you think you sprained it?”
“No, no,” I say, “it’s not that bad. Just twisted it. I’m kind of clumsy.”
She is smiling at me. “Have you started In Our Time yet?”
I lift up my paperback. “I couldn’t find it in the library, so I tried this one.”
“You can borrow my copy, then.”
“That would be great,” I say, and she smiles. “Hey, why aren’t you dancing?”
“That’s really not my job here tonight, is it?”
“I don’t know. Aren’t chaperones allowed a little fun every now and then?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not a very good dancer.”
“Join the club.”
“What club is that?”
I pause, then shrug. “I don’t know, whatever you call the People Who Can’t Dance Club.”
“I think we can come up with a better name than that.”
“Okay. You go first.”
Miss Dovecott laughs. “You’re the creative one around here.”
“But you’re smarter than I am. You went to Princeton.” And my mind flashes to her sweatshirt tucked away in my room. “By the way, thank you for lending me your sweatshirt. I’ll return it to you after I wash it.”
“That’ll be fine,” she says.
And then, I go for it. “I liked wearing it,” I say.
She looks down at her feet and changes the subject. “Well, back to chaperoning.”
“Is it as boring as it looks?”
“Never boring,” she says. “Too many people to watch and talk to. Just a few minutes ago, the chaperone from St. Mark’s was telling me about a suicide at their school your freshman year.”
“Yeah, we had an assembly about it.”
“This teacher’s theory is that the boy took all those pills because he was struggling with his sexuality.” She pauses. “He might have been gay.”
“Huh,” I say, “they didn’t tell us that part. But you know how it is at boarding schools.”
“No, I didn’t go to one. How is it?”
“Rumor Central.”
“Well, any closed community is that way.”
“Was it like that at Princeton?”
“Are you trying to change the subject?”
“What subject?”
“You know, Alex, I have a theory.”
“Shoot.”
“My theory is that you boys plaster your walls with pinups because you feel the need to present yourselves as heterosexual.”
“Go on.”
“And, statistically, there has to be a small percentage of gay students at Birch.”
“Look, Miss Dovecott. Here’s the thing. If you go to a boys’ boarding school, people who don’t know the culture think you’re either gay or a troublemaker. I get tired of explaining that I don’t go to a military academy and that I’m not being punished for anything. Like this mother at the pool where I worked last summer, when she found out I went to Birch, she said, ‘Well, you don’t seem like a bad kid.’ ”
“I know you’re not a bad kid.”
“But maybe I am. Maybe I ought to be at a military academy.”
“Why do you say that, Alex?”
“Because. Because I think I might feel better if somebody kicked my ass.”
“You feel guilty about Thomas,” she says.
“You’re damn right I do,” I say, and I sling The Old Man and the Sea to the darkest corner of the bleachers. “But I don’t want to talk about
it, not with you, not with anybody.”
“I think I know why.”
I look at her sideways.
“Because the whole story hasn’t come to light yet.”
I am about to shit my pants, but I hear Glenn’s voice calming me down. Cool it, Stromm, cool it. “I’m not sure I follow you,” I say.
“I think we should wait and talk about this at school with Mr. Parkes, don’t you?” Miss Dovecott rises, looking in the direction of where I threw the book. “Before you get back on the bus,” she says, “make sure you pick up after yourself.”
Green Fields
My freshman year, the only thing I ever did at the river was wade into it and fish. The fact that it could be used for jumping into, for drinking alongside of, did not occur to me. Vodka? I barely knew it existed; my dad drank beer, and not even very much of it. I knew Michelangelo and Andy Warhol existed, Monet and Manet, and I was tested on the difference between them, but if you had asked me the difference between Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam, I would have said one played baseball and the other basketball.
Glenn and I were paired together about a month into school by our art appreciation teacher to do a presentation on Jan Vermeer (an artist we should appreciate). I owe my friendship with Glenn to Vermeer because it was after that that Glenn took me in. He thought I was smarter than anyone else in the class. He couldn’t believe the stuff I noticed in the paintings, like how Vermeer painted a story behind the scene by inserting a single suggestion of movement in the stillness. I actually appreciated Vermeer, but I was not a fan of Monet or the impressionists—all that haze and suggestion. Glenn agreed wholeheartedly. He invited me swimming one night when there was Open Swim at the indoor pool, and we played water tag and Marco Polo with some other guys, and we all took turns doing silly jumps and dives off the board. Glenn was nicer back then, when he wasn’t suspicious of everybody and everything.
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