Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  Each new student stood nervously by the family car, as if trying to keep in contact with something familiar for as long as possible before his parents abandoned him. Almost all of them had braces, or big feet, or skinny legs like toothpicks poking out of shorts that seemed three sizes too large. They had not yet grown into their bodies, which were racing along in the hormonal clutch of adolescence. They appeared both defiant and fragile as they slowly unloaded their cars, stubborn in the face of the long months ahead even as a night of frustrated tears and loneliness awaited them. They murmured rather than spoke, cowed by the brick buildings and the clean walkways that were filling with people who were obviously comfortable here.

  The old boys, for the most part, succeeded in making the new boys feel more miserable, calling out excitedly to friends and playing trashcan lacrosse on the Lawn. Teary-eyed mothers did nothing to help the situation. I knew from experience that the new boys would be far too busy a week from now to feel homesick. And yet I couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for every boy with a sad, swollen face who walked grimly into Raleigh Hall or Lawson-Parker as if marching off to a deadly fate.

  BRENDSEL DINING HALL IS a vast carpeted room of long dinner tables under a high-beamed ceiling. The first night at Blackburne, and every following Sunday night, students eat a formal, sit-down dinner in Brendsel with their advisors. Each student has a faculty advisor who tracks his grades and offers advice and encouragement—at least in theory. Some advisors were better than others. Sam Hodges was famous for taking his advisees to the Charlottesville malls once a month or so, while Stuart Downing, the longtime Latin teacher, basically ignored his advisees except at Sunday meals, and sometimes even then.

  I met my advisees for the first time that night. I had inherited them from Keith Aspinwall, the English teacher I had replaced. A slip of paper with my advisees’ names lay on the stack of dinner plates at the head of the table, and when the dinner bell rang and students arrived at my table, I began counting off names. Soon all the places were filled, and I saw with a bright pop of recognition that one boy I had helped to move in that afternoon, Stephen Watterson, was in my advisory. He gave me an easy smile and waved as he sat down.

  The loud hum of conversation dropped and then disappeared as the headmaster’s voice came over the PA system. Travis Simmons preferred rather severe suits of banker’s gray, and he seethed breeding and culture like an ancient, musty library. At the first all-faculty meeting, Dr. Simmons had shaken my hand with one as dry as chalk dust, inclining his head to me in a way that accentuated his stooped shoulders as he welcomed me back to Blackburne. But he could shine brightly in front of a group, speaking eloquently and waxing rhapsodic about the school and its mission. It was this unswerving, intensely personal loyalty to Blackburne that engendered widespread respect for him, even among the students. For some reason, though, I thought about Ren Middleton and his odd lesson about killing inertness and needing my help, the throwing of the golf ball down the fairway, and I glanced at my advisees, wondering how they would react to the headmaster’s voice. They sat quietly, some heads slightly bowed; a few faces were tilted up toward a speaker mounted on the wall.

  “Gentlemen,” Dr. Simmons was saying, “I would like to formally welcome you to Blackburne. I trust today went well with moving into your rooms and getting settled. It’s an exciting time, and a busy one. I look forward to an excellent year with you. Please make the effort to turn to your masters for help of any kind. We are here for you.” A pause. “Let us pray.” Four hundred heads bowed in unison. “Lord, thank you for this good meal and for the hands that prepared it. Please be with all those who are less fortunate than we are. Watch over these students and guide them, and help them to strive for excellence. In your name we pray. Amen.”

  At the final word, nearly forty new boys, clad in white waiters’ jackets and holding battered serving trays, rushed from their tables for the cafeteria door to pick up platters of food. The senior masters had tables close to the cafeteria and thus got their food quickly. I was back in a recess of the dining hall known as Graveyard Alley and wouldn’t get my dinner for a few minutes at least. I did note with a bit of wicked pleasure that Porter Deems was at the very back of Graveyard Alley, two tables farther away from the cafeteria than I was. I caught his eye and grinned. He scowled and flipped me the bird under the table.

  The clanging of the serving trays, which rang through the dining hall as they were slapped down on the cafeteria counters or crashed into one another, seemed an appropriate, unofficial opening of Blackburne. It brought back memories of my own first year, when I had stood nervously in a starched white jacket, its collar scratching my jaw, as I waited to pick up the full tray and wondered how I would do it without spilling food everywhere. I smiled and shook my head. Then I looked at my advisees, a few of whom were looking at me as if waiting for me to speak. I nodded at a tall, dark-haired boy seated on my right. “All moved in okay?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, brushing his hair out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “The room doesn’t matter as long as I’m on the same dorm and keep my roommate, Mack.” He gestured to a freckled redhead down the table.

  I remembered then that there had been a mix-up with room assignments that morning and I’d had to ask this boy to move upstairs after he’d already started unpacking. The tall boy was named Hal Starr, and his roommate was the freckled redhead. “You’re Mack Arnold?” I asked, trying to look casually at the list of names in my hand.

  The redhead nodded. “Sure you can’t move me out of Hal’s room? The guy snores.”

  Hal rolled his eyes. “Better than what you do at night, pal.”

  Laughter ran around the table and then fell silent as the boys glanced at me. I was being tested, I knew, all of them waiting to see how the new teacher would react. Laughing with them would make me either a pushover or a buddy, both of which were fatal. Or I could frown and be the joyless martinet. Instead, I ignored the comment and asked Hal, “Do you play basketball?”

  Stephen Watterson spoke up before Hal could say anything. “He’s our starting center for varsity. We call him Rebound.”

  “Shut up, Watterson,” Hal said shyly, looking in his lap.

  “It’s true! You ought to see him rip the ball off the backboard.”

  “Well, this guy ought to try out for football,” Hal said, jerking his head at Stephen. “He can outrun anybody.” Stephen received this praise with a silent glow of appreciation.

  “No kidding?” I said. “Maybe you’d try out for track in the winter.”

  Stephen laughed. “No way. Too boring. Who wants to run around in circles all day?”

  I smiled. “That’s what I might help coach,” I said good-naturedly, reaching for the iced tea. Stephen lapsed into an embarrassed silence. “Hey, no big deal, Stephen,” I said. “No offense.” Stephen smiled, relieved, and then started talking with Hal about this year’s football team.

  I had not realized how isolating it could be to sit at the head of a table of ten boys. Teachers had always seemed to float above such considerations. Now I found myself feeling like a new boy struggling for acceptance. This is absurd, I thought. They’re fourth formers, for God’s sake. I don’t need a bunch of fifteen-year-old friends. I turned to the boy on my left, who had not said a word since quietly taking his seat several minutes ago. In fact, I hadn’t noticed him at all until just before the prayer. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Mr. Glass. What’s your name?”

  “Paul,” the boy murmured. He had mousy-brown hair and a pale complexion. Dark shadows sat under his eyes like newsprint that had been smudged there.

  “Right,” I said brightly, glancing at my list. “Paul . . . Simmons, right?”

  He nodded faintly.

  “No relation to our headmaster, are you?” I said, trying to get a smile out of him.

  “I’m his son,” he said. Stephen Watterson looked up. A couple of the other boys did, too.

  “Well, that’s great,” I said lamely. “
Your father is . . . a heck of a man.”

  “Yes,” Paul said, picking up a fork and turning it over in his hands.

  Thankfully our waiter arrived then, sweating with apologies and bringing enough food to halt conversation for the rest of dinner.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At the beginning of my fourth form year, when Fritz and I started rooming together, I met his twin sister, Abby. She was fifteen then, a girl in the process of growing into a young woman. Her hair was long and glossy black, her eyes a clear blue above a straight nose and a wide, generous mouth. Fritz and I were moving into Rhoads Hall, unloading our cars in the gravel parking lot in the back. Our parents had greeted one another, and Fritz’s mom, a kind but preoccupied woman who always seemed to have to move on to the next thing, had absently introduced Abby to me. Abby smiled and said hello, and then added that her brother had told her a lot about me and that she went to Saint Margaret’s and would start school the following week. I mumbled something in response, afraid to look at her, and was rescued by my father, who needed help with a trunk.

  Fritz, of course, had noticed my discomfort. “My folks are coming next weekend,” he said casually a few weeks later, and I grunted as I pretended to read my World History textbook. Fritz waited, letting me twist in agony as he scanned a copy of Sports Illustrated, and then said, still looking at his magazine, “Abby might be coming.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Really?” I said before retreating behind a look of indifference. “I mean, that’s cool.”

  “Told me to tell you hi.”

  “Who did?”

  “My sister.”

  “That was it?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what she said? ‘Hi’?”

  Fritz considered this. “No, that wasn’t all.”

  “Well, what else did she say?”

  And Fritz looked at me, his eyes big and round and smiling, and said, “She wanted me to tell you that she dreams about you every night, that she wants you to rescue her from the prison nuns at Saint Margaret’s”—he ducked as I threw my book at him—“and she can’t wait until the two of you make the beast with two backs.” He said this last bit while laughing out loud and running out of the room. I gave chase, swearing to beat the shit out of him if he didn’t stop.

  But nothing happened. Abby didn’t come that weekend. In fact, we didn’t see each other again until the end of the year when Fritz and I were moving out of our dorm room, by which time I was sort of seeing a girl from Oldfields. Vague plans to get together with Fritz over the summer never materialized—I had a job as a lifeguard at a local pool, and Fritz went backpacking in Europe—but the Oldfields girl, who lived in Tennessee, managed to visit Asheville with her parents, and I joined them for a tour of the Biltmore House. The girl, Dana, and I ended up making out behind a greenhouse while her parents were in one of the gift shops. We damn near had sex right there in a bed of tulips, except that I didn’t have any condoms and didn’t know what the hell I was doing anyway, not to mention that her parents were only twenty yards away. This was the equivalent of love, or so I thought, and Dana became the object of my romantic obsession for much of my fifth form year.

  Twice that year, on separate weekends, I visited Fritz’s home, a beautiful brick Colonial outside of Fairfax, Virginia. The lawn always looked as if a team of gardeners had tended to each blade of grass that morning. There was a swimming pool and a stone patio out back, and a home theater and foosball table in the basement, and Fritz and I enjoyed playing foosball and watching movies and lounging by the pool, gloriously wasting time. All of this was tempered some by Abby’s not being present either weekend.

  Mr. Davenport, Fritz’s father, was barely present himself. He ran some sort of IT firm in Arlington, and my impression was that he was a thoroughly busy man who read people swiftly in order to determine whether he needed to bother with them. Apparently I had made the cut. On my first visit to Fritz’s house, I saw Mr. Davenport use a Montblanc pen as he sat in his easy chair going over paperwork, and I made some comment about how I’d write a novel with a pen like that one day. It was a ridiculously vain and pompous thing to say, but he’d chuckled at it, not unkindly. Later that year, on my birthday in January, I received a gift box from the Davenports containing an identical Montblanc pen.

  That first weekend, Fritz also took me to visit his horse, Ranger, at a nearby stable. Ranger was a beautiful chestnut Thoroughbred with a white blaze down his face. He would nod and stomp his front hoof once when he saw Fritz. Ranger was a show hunter—Fritz had ridden him in competitive events, jumping fences and presenting excellent riding form. “Basically his job is to look good without trying,” Fritz told me, stroking Ranger on his muzzle. I was wary of Ranger, afraid he would step on my foot, but I petted him on the nose and he blew warm air on my hand. I watched Fritz as he rode Ranger in the training ring of the stable, gently putting him through his paces. Ranger was getting older, but when he and Fritz approached a fence, Ranger went over it like a dolphin arcing out of the water, a single smooth motion that hardly interrupted his canter.

  Fletcher Dupree had snorted with delight at learning that Fritz rode English style on a horse named Ranger (Fritz had been reading Tolkien when he’d first gotten him). At first, Fritz just rolled his eyes and ignored his comments, but one day at lunch, when Fletcher was talking about how gay English riding looked, Fritz put down his glass of iced tea and patiently explained that he loved his horse, that he had recently won second place at the Southwest Virginia Hunter Jumper Association Finals, and that he had done it while also playing varsity football. “So suck it,” Fritz added sweetly, causing the whole table to laugh, even Fletcher.

  In truth, Fritz had several trophies that he had won with Ranger, but what he enjoyed far more was to just ride across the fields by the horse stable. He tried to get me to go riding with him once, but I demurred, uncomfortable with the sheer size of the horses. I regretted that later, because that summer, when I was working as a lifeguard at the country club pool in Biltmore Forest, Fritz sent me a letter saying that Ranger had contracted Potomac horse fever and that they had had to put him to sleep. Ranger had been old, Fritz wrote, and he had known his horse wouldn’t be around forever, but it was a hard thing to lose him. It’s like he stamped a hole through my heart, he wrote. I realized then that Fritz had loved riding Ranger, and I had been offered an opportunity to share that passion with him, and now that opportunity was gone forever.

  IN THE FALL OF our sixth form year, Fritz harassed me to invite Abby to the Fall Dance, a semiformal in October. I’d still been seeing Dana, but things had unraveled some since fourth form year, and when I had asked her to the dance, she said she’d already made plans to be in D.C. that weekend, so I didn’t have a date. Still, I resisted Fritz. “Oh, come on,” Fritz said. “Abby’s fun, I’m taking her roommate, and you like her. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a little weird, you know? I mean, she’s your sister.”

  He laid his hands on my shoulders and looked earnestly into my face. “I give you permission to date my sister, you dipshit,” he said.

  Oddly enough, that settled it, and I called Abby—this was before Blackburne allowed students to have cell phones—from one of the old house phones in the hallway of Walker. She spoke brightly into the phone when she realized it was me, and I stumbled through a nonchalant invitation, holding my breath and my heartbeat as I waited for a reply. When Abby said she would love to come, I thought I would lift out of my shoes.

  The weekend was a lot of fun, not least because she and her roommate, Heather, were two of the most attractive girls at the dance, and Fritz and I enjoyed the complimentary stares of our classmates. Around most girls I was either tongue-tied or babbled like a fool. I did both with Abby, but only at first, and as the weekend progressed and Abby spoke easily with me, my discomfort melted away. I even told her I wanted to become a writer, something I hadn’t told anyone at Blackburne except for Fritz. In turn, s
he told me her dreams about going to Juilliard and becoming a concert cello player like Yo-Yo Ma. I remember we were walking across the Lawn toward Mr. Hodges’s house where she was staying, and she turned to me with a smile. “So we’re both artists,” she said. “How cool is that?” She linked her arm with mine as easily as if we had been doing so for years, and I thought in a haze of rapture that I wanted to keep walking with her on my arm forever.

  I enjoyed the dance, but I don’t remember much about the dinner beforehand, or the music, or the dancing. What I do remember is that Abby and I engaged in a few long, warm kisses with the promise of real heat behind them. The next morning, when she boarded the bus that would take her back to Saint Margaret’s, I kissed her good-bye in front of Fritz and everybody, and then stayed to watch the bus leave, standing there long after its brake lights had winked one last time before it drove into the trees and out of sight.

  After the dance, we exchanged a few desperately romantic letters and hoped to see each other over Christmas break, but her father announced a surprise family vacation to a dude ranch in Montana, and we had to settle for a couple of long and maudlin phone conversations. During one of them, a week before exams and Christmas vacation, I said, “Play something for me. On your cello.”

  She laughed. “What, over the phone?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve never heard you play. I’d like to hear you play.”

  Max Goren, who was walking down the hall, started making gagging noises as he passed me. I flipped him off and turned my back on him, hunched over the phone.

  Abby snorted on the other end. “Do you know how big a cello is? It’s not like a harmonica or something. You can’t just pull it out of your pocket and play. I don’t even keep it on dorm. It’s in the music studio.”

  I grinned. “No problem,” I said. “I’ll wait for you to get it.” I wasn’t sure where this cocky bravado came from, or why I was pushing Abby on this, but I liked it and suspected she did, too.