by Fred Kaplan
When, in mid-September 1939, Gene Vidal, almost fourteen years old, was driven, in a station wagon full of boys, across the arroyo, up the razor turns of the spectacular road cut out of the sold tufa wall of the canyon, onto the high Los Alamos mesa, he could have had little idea what to expect. He had been sent into exile, expelled from his Washington world and whatever semblance of a home he had, by a mother who applied the Los Alamos doctrine of separating boys from mothers with a vengeance. It was not that Nina did not want him to cling to her apron strings. She did not want him around at all. His Western destination had been determined the previous spring when Connell, on his annual recruiting swing through the Midwest and Northeast, had visited Merrywood, probably introduced to Nina by her good friend Patrick Hurley. Hurley’s son was already a student at the Ranch School. The tall, gangly Wilson Hurley wanted to be an artist. His exacting, militaristic father, a powerful Washington political reactionary from Oklahoma who greatly admired Senator Gore, had been Secretary of War in the Hoover administration. “The General,” as he was known even to his family, was not about to allow his son to become an effete aesthete. Wilson, who needed to be straightened out, had been sent west the year before Gene. At Merrywood, Connell, a handsome man of middle height, a strong, compact build, and close-cropped, thin gray hair, exerted his twinkling blue-eyed Irish charm. With the help of photos of the school and landscape, he soon had Nina convinced that New Mexico was just what Gene needed. The $2,400-a-year tuition at a time when the Depression-deflated Eastern schools were half that did not shock her: Gene’s father was legally obliged to pay. The bills were to be sent directly to him. “I hated going to Los Alamos. I didn’t have any choice. I was shipped off. If there had been sufficient coordination between my father and me, I could have headed it off, because he didn’t want to pay that tuition. He didn’t give a damn whether I liked the school, but it was the most expensive school in America. Nina was such a liar. She would have gone to him and said, ‘Oh, he’s dying to go out there! It means everything to him!’ I can just hear her voice. She was never more rapturous than when she was lying.”
By mid-September Gene was on the train to Chicago, with hardly a chance to say good-bye to Jimmie or anyone else. In Chicago he joined other Los Alamos boys for the descent to New Mexico. On the train they wore jackets, ties, some of them even hats, all from privileged families that subscribed to the sartorial decorum that bespoke their world. At Lamy, New Mexico, they were met by the school station wagon which provided a bumpy, slow passage on dirt roads through a starkly beautiful landscape the likes of which he had seen before only in Western movies. A month before, he had been among the glories of Rome, Paris, London. Suddenly he was on a high, immense Southwestern mesa called the Pajarito, the “little bird,” whose occasional cottonwood trees gave Los Alamos its name. “The desert suddenly gave birth to a large wooden building with a high roof and a verandah, supported by round smooth wooden columns,” he wrote in The Smithsonian Institution, evoking his first sight of Los Alamos Ranch School. Sunset on the distant Sangre de Cristo Mountains seemed brilliantly red with the blood the Spanish padres had imagined there centuries before. The thin, sharp air made its breathtaking demands. “As they approached the top of the mesa, the road became narrow and rocky. Tall juniper bushes on every side and the air sage-scented.”
New Mexico had its glories too, and Gene was not immune to them, though it hardly attracted him to be at what seemed a glorified summer camp, a combination of a macho Boy Scout troop and an Outward Bound challenge to resourcefulness. With his usual good grace about matters he could not control, he made no fuss. “Going to Los Alamos was my fate. I had no control over anywhere that I went. I didn’t like the idea of it, and I didn’t like it when I got there.” He began scheming immediately about how to get away. As always, he determined to be impersonally congenial. He knew how to be good company for those who liked that kind of company: conversational, verbally playful, amiably careful about boundaries, arrogant but generous. It was clear to him, though, from the moment he boarded the Pullman car in Chicago, that the school encouraged, even demanded, total immersion, constant daily engagement, full exposure to the communal experience. There would be little privacy here. The life of the body demanded shared sweat rather than solitary reading. Horseback was hardly a high cultural position. Since he was stuck, he would make the best of what he was stuck with, away from St. Albans, from Jimmie, from his father in New York, from movie theaters, museums, even farther from the Europe he had just visited. As he walked into Fuller Lodge for his first meal, he could see both the best and worst of what he would have to deal with. There were the forty-odd other boys, now, like himself, dressed in their Boy Scout khaki shorts and shirts. There were the masters—Hitchcock, Church, Whelen, Steege, Wirth, and a few others—a blur of unfamiliar adults in similar uniforms, and there was the only recognizable face, the center of authority, A. J. Connell, whom everyone knew was “The Boss,” a kind of Twainian figure, like Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a man of great arbitrary energy who knew how to make the things of his world work and who believed with deep certainty that the practices and values of his school made boys into men.
Soon Gene was immersed in the daily routine. There would be no living here without that. Like the other boys, he was weighed and inspected for assignment to one of the four patrols—Piñon, Juniper, Fir, and Spruce—the assignment determined by size and physical maturity. Minds were not at issue. Assigned to Juniper, he learned that his sleeping quarters were one of the three verandahs of the Big House, the dormitory and classroom building where all but the Spruce Patrol (the oldest boys) were quartered, a three-story pine-log building surrounded on the upper floor by unheated roofless porches on which the boys slept year round. In severe storms removable awnings were dropped to keep out rain or snow, the night air cool in summer, freezing in winter. Bathroom facilities were sparse, always overworked. At night the boys had to come in to use the one toilet on each floor. Showering in the morning in the stalls on the third or on the first floor was a challenge. An unmarried master, who could retreat to a private room, usually slept on each of the three porches. Classes were held downstairs. Hitchcock and Connell had comfortable apartments on the second floor of Fuller Lodge, where a number of masters without dormitory duties also had rooms. Decorated with colorful Indian rugs, it contained the large dining hall, one end of which served as a stage for theatricals. At Fuller Lodge Gene soon discovered that the food at the Ranch School was good. Fresh vegetables came from the gardens, hearty cooking from the well-run kitchen. Upstairs Hitchcock kept his eye on the school’s academic performance. Like Connell, he sometimes had boys to his apartment for soda and cookies, to listen to musical records, for social recreation. On rare instances the tables in the dining hall were cleared away to create a dance floor where Los Alamos boys could host the girls from Santa Fe’s Brownmoor School for Girls.
Surrounding the two main buildings were small huts, storage sheds, a huge barn, workshops, a guesthouse, a trading post for extras from candy to clothes, and the corrals that contained the sixty riding and ten workhorses. Every boy had one immediately assigned to him. Horses at Los Alamos were next to godliness. You did not, though, get to name yours. Those who had come before you had already done that. Gene’s came with the name “Two-bits,” a horse apparently low enough in the equine hierarchy to be assigned to a new boy who might not deserve or even be interested in a better specimen. Later, in The Smithsonian Institution, Gene’s fictional surrogate was to gallop on Two-bits through the Los Alamos landscape. Jimmie Trimble, in historical reality now beginning the upper school at St. Albans, is in the novel the character “T.,” a prodigy physicist in a world in which some of the usual laws of nature have been expanded:
T. recognized his friend from the dormitory; the boy’s family had been threatening to send him west. Now here he was, riding up to the window and then through the window. “Watch out!” T. yelled. Father Lamy was soot
hing. “We aren’t really here. For them, that is! They’re going to ride straight through us.” So they did. T.’s friend, a blond youth, looked straight into his eyes and then said, to his horse, “Come on, Two-bits.” Then Two-bits and his rider passed straight through T. and out the other side of the mission church.
Vidal’s brief stay at Los Alamos was to take on the timelessness that combines personal and historical significance. To have been there soon before the bomb was to make the losses of World War II and the deathly explosion even more brightly searing for him.
There was no riding through or away for Gene, at least for that year. Day began each school morning at 6:30 A.M. By 6:45, regardless of the weather, the boys did calisthenics outside. If it had snowed, Connell made sure the exercise field had been shoveled. At seven o’clock, breakfast. The sleeping quarters would be straightened and cleaned to the required standards. Classes ran from 7:40 to 1 P.M. Class assignments and work schedules were determined by Hitchcock on an individual basis, the forty-four boys moving through a small number of classrooms mostly devoted to various levels of English, history, math, chemistry, French, and Latin. The main meal of the day was lunch, followed by a half-hour rest. Monday afternoons everyone did community service, usually physical labor on the grounds. On the other weekday afternoons athletics and recreation dominated, particularly horseback riding, which Gene quite liked. From 5 P.M. on, there would be study hall, dinner, study hall again, then gradually to bed on the open porches. Each Saturday there was the mandatory all-day horseback excursion for the entire school, intensified occasionally by overnight camping trips at Camp May, near the Jemez crest: a caravan of men on horseback and muleloads of supplies wending their way up to the beautiful high valleys for the ultimate, idealized Western experience. At night, around the blazing campfire, Connell would lead them in songs and cheers. As at Sidwell Friends and St. Albans, Gene found classroom routines insufferable. Unusual questions were discouraged, unconventional thinking mostly unwelcome. As usual, his grades were poor. Nina fulminated. His grandfather cajoled. “I am proposing,” he wrote to him, “that you and I enter into a CONSPIRACY, not a deep, dark conspiracy, but just a deep one…. Let’s conspire to give [your mother] the surprise of her life. The best way I can think of to do that is for us to resolve to make your grades for the last month the best that you have scored for the entire session!!! … That would surprise as well as please her…. My surprise, knowing you, is that you do not lead your classes each and every month.” Gene’s fantasy was to be free from all this as soon as possible, to be a writer, to be a senator, to rise to blessed adulthood where no one, or at least fewer people, would be able to tell him what to do.
There were also formal musical occasions at Los Alamos. One was the annual Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, that year The Gondoliers. Gene was a talented listener. So too was the older boy standing to the right, Alan Meyer. They did themselves and the production a favor by mouthing the words. From a modestly well-to-do Houston Jewish family, Alan had had a poem published in the New Mexico Magazine, perhaps the only other boy at Los Alamos with whom Gene shared a literary interest. The two poets became friends, which had nothing to do with Alan Meyer having already made it clear to everyone that his sexual interest was in males. Connell “knew about my sexual life at Los Alamos. In the year or two before Gene came to that school, I had made adolescent advances to some of the other kids in a rather tenuous and distant way, not doing any of the things that the books say that homosexual boys do to one another…. I was called in and told that if I didn’t cut that stuff out I’d be expelled, so I cut it out. Mr. Connell certainly knew that if a pretty boy or a pretty girl passed through the room, my eyes would most likely follow the boy. I knew about Mr. Connell, but in detail no. I would have told on him? No!” Connell himself was perceived to be a threat. Sexual rumors circulated among the boys about masturbation—the arch sin of 1930s mid-puritan America—about two boys supposed to be actively sweet on one another, about Connell’s proclivities. Rumors circulated that Connell had a special crush on a boy whom he “was teaching to have intercourse with a pillow.” Some claimed he made advances to boys on the overnight trips, particularly the swimming parties to the hot springs and pools in the area or to the nearby Rio Grande. “He would go on tours,” Gore Vidal remembered, “picking the better-looking boys to go with him. I would be on some of these trips. He’d always make overtures. I kept out of reach.” One of the boys reported “rather grimly” on his experience. “During an overnight trip somewhere—perhaps Santa Fe—they shared a bed. I don’t think even Connell would dare go any further than masturbation together. But even so….” Gene’s friend David Osborne, a talkative young man of great energy, confiding that he had resisted such an advance, made it clear he would protest publicly if Connell didn’t stop. “It was a small place, and David told everybody. He told him not to harass him sexually, and then Connell stopped.” “He did love boys,” Alan Meyer remembered, “but I don’t think he did anything to them other than fondle them.” Even at the physical examinations “he never made a pass at anyone.” Connell “would not have had any of his boys do anything to him, nor would he have penetrated any of them. I don’t think there would have been anything Greek or French coming or going. I don’t think so. That would have got around. We knew about such things, but on a very distant basis.”
Happy to have Alan Meyer’s company, essentially at ease with the other boys, Gene responded to Connell with neither outrage nor withdrawal. He simply wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. Private reading became his main sustenance, particularly a multivolume history of the world and books that came regularly from The Book-of-the-Month Club—which he had joined—a memoir by the last British ambassador in Berlin, Thomas Mann’s entire Joseph tetralogy. “Practically nobody could read those books but me. I liked history. I made no difference in my head then between history and the historical novel. I came to know the difference, and in my old age I find that they are the same again. I’ve come full circle. There’s no difference between the two in the light of eternity.” Fascinated, he read Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene, narrated from the point of view of Judas Iscariot, which he later concluded “was a great influence on me, and you might argue the case that both Julian and Burr come out of it.” He “devoured every book that came.” And then Shakespeare. “I’ve never read one of his plays,” he wrote to his grandmother, “so I’m starting now.” In a few months he eagerly read through the ornament of the Ranch School library, a complete Yale Shakespeare, one play a volume. It strengthened his language, sharpened his perceptions, provided alternative worlds. Words flowed from his pen into poems with the adolescent ease of a boy facile with language and ambitious to be a great writer himself. He enjoyed being witty, sarcastic, verbally aggressive. Entertaining the other boys with clever paraphrases, he especially impressed the impressionable Wilson Hurley with his take-offs on popular song titles. “‘It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.’ He would come up with the title, ‘It seems to me I’ve listened to that ditty previously.’ ‘Beat me daddy eight to the bar’ was ‘chastise me father an octave to the measure.’ … We tried to excell each other in expression and vocabulary and make it humorous at the same time…. I remember Gore’s favorite entry. He would walk in and with all solemnity say, ‘I represent the papacy, and this is no bull!’ He got so proud of that joke that we had to shut him off.” As his contribution to a discussion of obscenity, Gene remarked about one of the noticeably narcissistic boys that “the most obscene thing I’ve ever seen is John Curtis putting suntan oil on himself.”
Life at Los Alamos was not all isolation, tedium, resentment. A skillful painter, Gene did the stage sets for an abbreviated version of The Comedy of Errors. “A charming little kid,” so he seemed to the older Alan Meyer, “full of bounce and smiles, and if he hated it, Lord, it didn’t show, it didn’t show at all. Walking over from some meeting at the Big House on the way to the lodge for lunch, I would fall in with him as wit
h various other people for that little walk, and we did that, people did that. I remember him as a happy person.” So did Wilson Hurley. “A bright, pleasant, bouncy little fellow, a happy young fellow,” handsome, blond, slim but well built, he rode his horse competently, skied well, and did his chores with no more than the ordinary amount of complaint. That he had at least his fair share of physical courage was much in his favor.” Indian culture interested him. Santa Fe was a growing white settlement surrounded by the remnants of ancient civilizations. Bright sun. Vivid blue juniper berries. “Intense blue sky. Desert. Clusters of silver-barked trees wherever there was a stream or a well.” Mudcolored adobe huts where white people lived, “set back from the rutted dirt road. Indian villages were built against—or into—the sides of abrupt hills whose tops were flat.” A half dozen local tribes still hovered between ancient customs and modern diminishment. The Los Alamos Ranch School had fascinating neighbors, though it did little, reflecting its times, to connect the school to that aspect of the history of New Mexico. But invited to the ranch, Indians from San Isidro, dressed in their totemic eagle costumes, performed their traditional dances, distant cousins of the Oklahoma Indian chiefs whose headdresses Gene had seen at Rock Creek Park.
