I wanted to move in with my dad and continue on at Hanover Junior High where I had had my first happy school year ever. Next fall, in eighth grade, maybe I’d get the nerve to write to Dave and see if he could ever like me again, and maybe Mom would get back together with Ray and settle down. No maybes, it was out of the question. It would have interfered too much with my father’s work. With that door slammed, it may surprise some fans of Holden Caulfield, hater of prep schools, but at age twelve I was packed off to boarding school for the remainder of my “childhood.” There was no room at either of my parents’ for me to grow up any more.
PART THREE
BEYOND CORNISH
And moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot.
—“The Lady of Shalott,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson
21
Island Redux
While this is often a very stimulating and touching place, I personally suspect that certain children in this world, like your magnificent son Buddy as well as myself, are perhaps best suited to enjoying this privilege only in a dire emergency or when they know great discord in their family life.
—Seymour Glass, “Hapworth 16, 1924”
THE BROCHURE FOR CROSS MOUNTAIN School had arrived. It was a foregone conclusion that, were I to go to boarding school, it would be Cross Mountain, since my grandmother had offered to pay for my tuition as she’d done for my cousin, Gavin’s child, to attend. All the “best” people sent their children there, dear. The Rockefellers, the Biddles, the Aga Khan’s daughter, heads of foreign dictatorships with messy wars in Central America, heiresses with messy divorces, people in the arts, writers, producers, movie stars. I looked at the pictures. The school was in the midst of the Adirondack Mountains. About eighty children, age seven or eight to thirteen, fourth through the eighth grade, had the privilege of living there September through May. Parents had the option of sending their children to camp there, too, June through August. Like Holden Caulfield’s Pencey Prep, Cross Mountain appeared to be bullish on “molding character.” Holden, reading from Pencey’s brochure, said:
“Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.” Strictly for the birds. They don’t do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn’t know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way.
(Catcher, p. 2)
Cross Mountain School promised to teach children what they called the three Rs: to mold them into persons “Rugged, Resourceful, and Resilient.” (I recall Winston Churchill referring to the B.S.s of his British boarding school. We were, he said, “Beaten, Buggered, and Starved.”) The brochure was full of photographs of smiling, pink-cheeked children harvesting vegetables on the school farm, doing barn chores—very Little Red Book. No paisley dresses with pumps and stockings here. Their list of required clothing was specific and Spartan: work boots, black buckle galoshes, denim barn jacket, long underwear, and thick socks, jeans, and work shirts. Dresses were permitted on Sunday evenings at dinner.
If I’d known how the school’s creators, Herbert and Kit Watson, had been occupied before they had students, how they came to teaching, that icy apprehension that I was entering someone else’s dream that was to become my nightmare would have been a certainty. Recently I read the Watsons’ biographies in the alumni brochure. Herbert Watson’s story is entitled, in bold letters:
All Things That Go On At The School Come Right Out Of My Childhood
As a child, I might have thought, how cool, the same way countless people have said to me, “It must be so cool to have J. D. Salinger for your father.” When young persons, for whom my father has said he writes, read Holden’s response to his little sister when she asked him what he wants to be when he grows up, I think they have a very different reaction from that of a real grown-up, one for whom all things do not come right out of one’s childhood, unmediated by maturation. Holden said:
. . . I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.
(Catcher, p. 173)
When I read this passage as an adult with a child of my own, my first reaction was outrage. Not at Holden, it’s a nice dream for a boy to have. But outrage at the fact that I once was one of those kids. Where are the grown-ups? Why are those kids allowed to play so close to the edge of a cliff? Where are the responsible adults who should build a secure place for those kids to play, or a fence at least so that some young boy like Holden or some young girl like me doesn’t have to engage in perpetual rescue?
My grown-up reaction to the title of Herbert Watson’s biography is to wonder: Have you learned nothing as an adult? On reflection, my experience at this school is a story about what can really happen when people—“nobody big”—get together and decide to play school at the edge of some crazy cliff. In Kit’s bio she said, “After college I came to New York City. . . . I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or what I could do. Mamma said that as a child I collected younger children and played school, made markets, and ran shows. I loved children. I applied at several of the progressive schools—no luck. Eventually I got a job as a playground supervisor to tide me over that first winter.” She applied for a job with Harriet Johnson at the Bureau of Educational Experiments. She was accepted, and in her interview she said she was asked, “ ‘Miss Cavendish, do you know why we gave you the job?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘Because you don’t know a thing about education.’ I didn’t have a lot of preconceived ideas!”
Her husband Herbert’s story begins with his family’s farm on the edge of failure. After high school, he won a scholarship to Cornell’s School of Agriculture to take a twelve-week course on farm management. He worked at the liberal arts part of the college to make ends meet, he said, “waiting table for the rich college boys wearing raccoon coats” (the very same rich boys and girls whose children would be waiting table and mucking out stalls at Herbert’s Cross Mountain). He took courses in farm machinery repair, veterinary medicine, feeds, and feeding. “I came home an educated farmer after my twelve-week winter course at Cornell. I started out big guns—next summer I was going to make the farm break even. Then one hot summer’s day I was cultivating corn in a field with a horse and a cultivator, and a man came down the road and wanted to know what I’d be doing in the fall. I said I’d be tending the cows and putting out the cowshit—that’s how farmers talk. So he said, ‘I’m looking for a schoolteacher,’ and I said I didn’t know of any in the neighborhood, and he said, ‘I’m looking at you. I’ve been talking to the principal of your old high school, and he thought you could do the job.’ ” That was how Herbert Watson became a teacher at the age of eighteen. He liked teaching and enrolled in a tuition-free teachers college, but was not satisfied with it. He knew he could never afford the tuition at Cornell—about the equivalent of Cross Mountain tuition—but eventually went to Antioch, where the students could work their way through. There, he supported himself working as an assembly-line worker at Ford, a magazine salesman, and a teacher at the New Jersey State Institution for Feeble-Minded Males . . .
Herbert, in his speech to the Cross Mountain School graduating class of 1950, said, “Generally speaking, I think life is too easy, too soft, too undemanding, at least so far as natural, basic primitive experiences are concerned. It is fortunate that you have lived here close to the wilderness and tha
t you have traveled in the forest enough to be sometimes hungry, thirsty, fatigued, wet, cold, lost, fighting black flies, or surrounded by darkness and strange noises. I wish there had been time for more experiences of this nature.”
“Fanatics have their dreams,” wrote Keats, “wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.”1 But fanaticism also converts paradise into private prisons.
IN SEPTEMBER, my mother and I set off for school. I stared out the car window forgetting to blink. Hours passed, and the mountains just got higher and higher, the villages fewer and farther between. All I felt was a leaden dread. My bridges were burnt, even my house in Cornish was closed up for the year. While I was away at ski camp, my mother had packed up the essentials from the Red house and moved to a partially furnished, rented house in Norwich. Matthew would now be within walking distance of his school, and she could easily commute to attend classes at Dartmouth to finish the degree she had broken off years ago to marry my father. It all made sense, but I felt really strange about it. Mom’s stuff was in her bedroom, Matthew’s stuff was in his room next to hers, and I recognized some of the living room furniture. They would be living there. My stuff—desk, bed, toys, posters, all colors of Dannon yogurt tops glued to my bedroom door next to the Keep Out sign, Day-Glo daisies; everything but my clothes and skis—remained in our house in Cornish, where my mother, brother, and I would return for summers only. On other vacations from school, I was to stay in the guest room on the ground floor of the house in Norwich. I could choose which of the two double beds down there to sleep in. The good thing was that I had my own bathroom and phone extension downstairs. The not-so-good thing was that it felt like a motel.
As we drove, I thought of a story I’d read about young women in the eighteenth century, transported by ship to Australia, who packed whatever belongings they were able and said good-bye to home, family, and country forever. The map of the world I held in my own mind was, perhaps not unlike theirs, quite flat. You fell off the edge if you sailed too far, but not before encountering strange and terrible serpents and sea monsters. Life, for me, lay east of Cornish, in London or Venice, or in warm southern places like Florida and Barbados. We were heading in the wrong direction. Toward desolate places. Toward Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My! It was deeply, deeply humiliating to me that the words I formed in my mind were “I want my mommy.”
We lurched along the narrow highway that threads between massive, towering cliffs that plunge down into bottomless, black glacial lakes. This landscape was a favorite subject among the school of American Romantic painters who wanted to evoke the feeling of sublime awe, verging on vertigo, in the face of the dramatic forces of nature. I am aware it is supposed to be staggeringly beautiful.
My mother broke the silence of hours and said, with the best British schoolgirl good cheer that she could muster, “Well, here we are.” A small sign on the highway was all that marked the school’s presence. We turned off the highway and drove down a dirt road past the school barn and vast manure pile, past fields of “organically grown” vegetables the brochure had promised—or threatened—depending on one’s point of view. We arrived finally at a dead end where stood the school’s main building, which housed several dormitory wings, classrooms, dining room, basement art studio, and offices. We were greeted through our car window by kids with maps who directed us to the proper dormitory, or “houses” as they were called.
I had been assigned to Glass House, which was about a three-minute walk from the main building. Some of the older “Rugged, Resourceful, and Resilient” boys were in dormitories as much as a mile away, which made for quite a hike on winter mornings before dawn when, if you spit, it froze before it hit the ground—technically at about forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit—and made a cracking noise as it shattered. I learned that the beautiful dorms I’d seen in the brochures were the new Hill Houses. These had been well designed for housing institutionalized groups of children, not families, and had nice large bathrooms with multiple small sinks, and a living room rather like a ski lodge in layout with many couches and chairs around a big fireplace. Upstairs, off a wide, sunny, skylighted corridor, were rows of carpeted double bedrooms in bright colors with cozy built-ins and a picture window between the beds.
My dormitory was an old house built for a family, now being used to board eight children in four small rooms at the top of a narrow staircase. Being called Glass House, it was, in this place down the rabbit hole, quite the reverse—dark and gloomy. Herbert and Kit, the headmaster and headmistress, lived in an apartment on the ground floor of Glass House. I never saw it. A large, unmarried woman who taught riding and math had a plain room at the top of the stairs. She helped my mother and me bring my trunk and bedding up to the room. I carried my precious portable record player, which I had refused to leave home without; The White Album had just been released, need we say more? My roommate had not arrived yet, so I chose the bed nearest the window, a mistake I would not have made had I known that the policy in Glass House, as in Cornish I might add, was to turn off the heat at night. A pox upon several thousand years of Stoic thought from ancient Greece to Gordonston that equates cold and moral fiber!
My mother hung up my two dresses, knowing I might not get around to it for months, and said something encouraging about the closets. That done, we walked back to the car. She waved good-bye, or at least she must have. I just remember standing there, immobile, staring dumbly at the rear of our car as it drove away, the dust rising from the road. Some timeless time passed, and I turned and walked down a path past the root-cellar shed beside the main building.
It was then that the world lurched terribly and I became unmoored. I tried to move my body toward an opening, a doorway into the main building. The sliding, flowing water I was becoming roared in my ears as I neared the edge of the falls. Into the long corridor, I flowed and tumbled past dozens of little open lockers, cubbyholes with no doors, no safe places to hide. I had heard that one had my name on it for my galoshes with name tapes inside, barn jacket with name in the collar, standard issue caught and exposed on a hook. Undulating unlockable lockers; I was sliding down the wall, blinding sunlight streaming in the corridor windows, the air thick bands of swirling haze.
A Cheshire cat’s teeth appeared, smiling in the long corridor. My size. It said, “Hi, I’m Holly. What’s your name?”
Peggy. Peggy. Peggy. The word made the leaden trek up from my lungs across my tongue, and finally, finding an opening in my mouth, it escaped: “Peggy. I . . . I hate this.”
The smile grew wider and said, “Yeah, this place really sucks. I should know, I’ve been here since I was ten.” And she rolled her eyes. Then, perhaps reading my mind, or perhaps because those Cheshire eyes spotted the movement of my body seeping out from under my clothes and running down the edge of the hall toward the drain, she said, “Come on, I’ll show you a good place to hide.”
My Cheshire friend has adopted strays of all sorts over the years. I’ve seen her befriend cats abandoned in Manhattan alleys, feral and filthy, who suddenly find themselves on her kitchen floor, lolling belly up for her to scratch, and answering to names like Mayhem, Chaos, and Fiorucci. She would spend her teens prowling backstages and backseats of limos in search of rock-and-roll tomcats. At twenty, she was the only person to show up for the first day of class at Columbia Law School dressed in a leopard-print spandex bodysuit and thigh boots. At thirty, as her law practice with a major record company skyrocketed, members of heavy metal bands with names like Faster Pussycat and the Scorpions shed their spikes and sat around her kitchen table raving about her lasagna.
When Holly befriends you, it’s for life. You know you’ll always have a place you can show up and call home. We recently toasted our fortieth birthdays with champagne and chocolate in her warm Jacuzzi in Beverly Hills. She swore, upon leaving Cross Mountain, that she’d never again be cold, hungry, or forced to play dodgeball. And I can testify that she hasn’t a single pair of sensible shoes darkening her many closets. “This s
ure beats the chimney,” she said with her big grin as we clinked champagne glasses.
The chimney was our sanctuary that long year at Cross Mountain. She shared her treasured secret hiding place with me not five minutes after we met, leading me down the corridor and into the library. Around the corner was an old fireplace, not in use, with cushions beckoning where logs had been. It was supposed to be a cozy place to read. What she had discovered was that if you crawled in and shinnied up the chimney, some sainted bricklayer in his mercy had left a ridge about three feet up where, if you leaned your back against the opposite wall, you could just about stand. On cold days, Holly and I would spend two illegal hours perched inside that chimney when we were supposed to be participating in “out-time” activities, which neither hail nor snow nor sleet nor rain excused.2
As we talked, there in the chimney, my body gradually started to flow back into its form. By the time we heard the dinner bell, it had set firmly enough to survive the jiggling and jostling corridor full of kids headed for the dining hall. Holly showed me how to read the assigned seating chart posted there. We ate in “families” of six. One teacher sat at the head of the table, one child server at the other end, whose job it was that week to bring the dishes served family-style from the kitchen to the table, and then to clear. In between were four other children, two on each side. At the table, as in most of the dormitories, the children were mixed in age and sex, again to mirror a family. Families rotated weekly.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 32
