by Frank Conroy
“Can I shoot?”
They looked at me quickly. “Okay.”
“He has to go first, though,” the other boy said.
We threw coins for a while, unhurried, all of us relaxed and easy in the sun. The hot-dog vendor leaned against his cart, half asleep, his chin in his hands. I was about even when the two boys called a halt and set off toward First Avenue. They turned the corner arguing about a disputed play and I started up the steps, my shadow climbing crookedly ahead of me.
The First Floor
I could have sneaked in through one of the side exits, of course, but there wasn’t much point since the new attendance taker in home room was above taking bribes and had doubtless included my name in the late list. Approaching the wide table at the head of the main corridor I felt a familiar gathering-of-self at the day’s first encounter with the enemy, represented in this instance by the student serving as late monitor. He looked up from his books and gave me a smile. “Again, huh?”
“That’s right.” I was happy to see him instead of Mr. Schmidt, the teacher who sometimes served, because as fellow students we had a bond that transcended my sins. We shared the stoicism of the helpless, the dreamy sang-froid of the abused, playing out our respective roles with tongue in cheek as if to say there’s more to me than meets the eye. As a good student he was glad to see me acting out his fantasies of rebellion, while I, the reprobate, was heartened to discover that even the good students were unhappy, that they hated school no less than myself, each in his own way.
“Three times this week and it’s only Thursday.”
“You have to stick with it to be champ.” But my heart sank. I hadn’t remembered, and three times in a single week was dangerous. The Dean might feel he should do something.
“Well, I hope you like Seward. That’s where they’ll send you.”
He wasn’t being superior, it was a flat statement of fact.
“I don’t give a shit what they do.”
He shrugged and pulled a pad of forms under his eyes, signed, and ripped off the sheet. “It’s first period. You missed home room.”
Two teachers came down the marble stairs (Staff Only) from the second floor and passed without a glance. I threw a fuck-you sign behind their backs.
The empty corridor ran the entire length of the building, one city block. The walls were green. Bare bulbs in wire cages glowed in a long line on the ceiling and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. I walked down the exact center of the passageway, directly under the lights, whispering “fuck you, fuck you, fuck you” to the rhythm of my stride.
Pushing through a door I turned into the upper level of the gym. My chair was lying folded across the banked runway and I picked it up, opened it, and sat down next to the railing. Arms dangling, I watched the scene below. A hundred boys were doing calisthenics, jumping into the air and throwing up their arms in time to the instructor’s whistle. Up, down, up, down—chasing the lost beat halfheartedly through the thunder of their heavy feet. The balcony trembled. Almost all of them were too fat, with huge womanly hips and flesh that jiggled under their T-shirts. I laughed aloud. It was too absurd. One knew from the movies what it was supposed to look like—football teams in early workouts, Hitler youth bouncing along smartly like so many machines—and for a moment the grotesque reality before my eyes seemed to reveal the truth so pointedly I wondered how the teacher could let it go on. The truth was, nobody cared. In the back rows they’d already given up, simply faking the gestures, some not even bothering to throw up their arms. Across the gym, on the opposite side of the track, I saw the other door monitor laughing in delight.
The instructor blew his whistle. “Left face! Right face! Mark time! One two, one two, one two....” His voice was drowned in the chaotic roar. As if of one mind the boys made as much noise as possible, stamping their feet like angry infants.
The five-minute warning bell had rung. I sat with my ankles on the railing reading a novel about the Second World War. I should have used the time to do my homework, but the appeal of Nazis, French girls, K rations, and sunlight slanting through the forest while men attempted to kill one another was too great. I read four or five hours every night at home, but it was never quite as sweet as in school, when even a snatch read as I climbed the stairs seemed to protect me from my surroundings with an efficacy that bordered on the magical. And if the story dealt with questions of life and death, so much the better. How could I be seriously worried about having nothing to hand in at Math when I was pinned in a shallow foxhole, under a mortar barrage, a dead man across my back and an hysterical young lieutenant weeping for his mother by my side? I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn’t made up my mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.
A boy pushed open the door and looked in. My function as monitor was to keep unauthorized people from going in and out, a responsibility I ignored, and when I turned my head it was with the pleasant anticipation of the lawbreaker about to flout authority.
“Conroy?”
“Yes.” Too bad. I could tell he was licit from his tone. Shouts drifted up from the gym floor.
He waved a slip of paper. “Two-oh-eight. Right away.” I accepted the pass and began gathering my books.
How strange that when the summons came I always felt good. The blood would rush through my body, warming me with its cheerful, lively heat. If there was a slight dryness in my mouth there was also a comfortable tingling of the nerves, a sharpening of the reflexes, and a sense of heightened awareness. The call produced a mild euphoria, not out of any perverse desire to be punished but in anticipation of a meeting with fate, in expectation of plunging deeper into life. The Dean was less the Dean and more my dead father than either of us suspected at the time. I sustained a fantastic belief that the mechanical clichés of our disciplinary interviews were only the prelude to eventual mutual recognition. His threats seemed of no more importance than the how-do-you-dos and so-nice-to-meet-yous one mouthed to any new person, and in my eagerness to begin a real exchange I hardly heard them. I misread the boredom and irritation in his face, thinking it came from frustration at the slow pace of love, investing his dry soul with juices that had doubtless drained before I was born. The truth, that among the thousands of students I was no more than a number to him, that he was so overworked he couldn’t possibly have remembered me from one time to the next without his records, that in fact everything between us was totally procedural—that truth was unthinkable.
The Second Floor
Three boys were on the bench. I sat down with them and watched the floor for a moment, not, as a naïve observer might have thought, to dramatize penitence, but simply to maintain my privacy in an important moment. Drawn close by their delinquency, the other boys whispered and passed notes, holding off fear with artificial camaraderie. I kept quiet, acclimating slowly to the electric air, knowing that where there was danger there might also be salvation.
I never rehearsed a defense. I must have thought the Dean preferred a boy who walked in and took his medicine to one who groveled, however cleverly. And of course when the moment of recognition came, when the barriers fell and we stood revealed, I didn’t want to be in the midst of an elaborate lie. To hasten the emergence of love I could only be completely honest. Lies might make it difficult for him to reach me, and vice-versa.
I wanted to be won over by him, but not cheaply. If he won me cheaply he might betray me. The sense in which I knew this is hard to explain. It wasn’t a principle I’d deduced from experience, it was knowledge without thought. Had someone asked me at the time what it meant to be betrayed by another person I couldn’t have answered. Without being able to conceive betrayal I none the less protected myself against it, unconsciously, in my expectation of a commitment from the other person equal to my own. A perfectly valid stance between individuals but a tragic ab
surdity between a child and authority.
A side door I’d never noticed before opened and a student came out smiling. I caught a glimpse of a man at a desk, and for no reason at all I became convinced he was a policeman.
“Fischberg,” the Dean’s secretary called without looking up. The boy next to me left the bench and went through the side door. I heard the man inside tell him to close it.
The smiling student picked up a pass from the secretary and started out. As he passed I touched his arm. “Who’s that in there?”
“I don’t know. Some jerk asking if I had a happy home life.”
“No talking there!”
A soft buzz sounded on the secretary’s intercom. “Next,” she said.
There was a momentary paralysis on the bench.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” She shuffled some papers on her desk. “Conroy? Is one of you Conroy?”
I walked to the Dean’s door and went in.
“All right Conroy, step over here.”
I crossed the carpet and stood in front of his desk. He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and put them on again. After a moment he pushed against the edge of the desk and swiveled away to face the wall, leaning back with a sigh and then letting his chin come down slowly like a man dozing off.
“Why were you late?” he asked the wall.
“There was no reason, I guess.”
“No reason?”
“I mean I don’t have an excuse.”
“You didn’t miss your bus? You didn’t forget your transit pass? The subways didn’t break down?”
“No sir.”
“I suppose not, since you’ve been late three times this week. You can’t possibly have an excuse so you don’t give one. Isn’t that right?” He stared at the wall.
I didn’t answer.
“Isn’t that right?” he asked again in exactly the same flat tone.
“If you say so, sir.”
He turned his head to look at me for a moment, his face expressionless, and then went back to watching the wall. “I don’t have time for trouble-makers, Conroy. I get rid of them.”
“I don’t know why I’m late so often. I try to get here on time but somehow it just happens.”
“Don’t make a mystery out of it, Conroy. You’re late because you’re lazy and inattentive.”
I could feel myself beginning to close down inside, as if my soul were one of those elaborate suitcases street peddlers use to display their wares, the kind that fold up from all directions at the approach of the law.
He lifted some papers from his desk. “You’re nothing but trouble. Constantly late if you get here at all, inattentive in class, disrespectful to your teachers, twice reprimanded for gambling ...”
“It was just pitching pennies, sir.”
“I know what it was. Don’t interrupt.”
“Yes sir.”
“At this moment you are failing three subjects.”
“We haven’t had any tests yet. I’m sure I’ll pass the tests.”
He looked up, his eyes narrowing in irritation. “You’re failing three subjects. That leaves the decision up to me. You stay here or you get transferred to another school. You’re in that category now.”
I turned away, instinctively hiding the fear that might be on my face. Getting kicked out of Stuyvesant would be a catastrophe surpassing anything in my experience, perhaps because it seemed to eliminate the possibility of turning over a new leaf. I disbelieved in self-betterment. By turning a new leaf I meant no more than avoiding the more obvious forms of trouble.
Secretly, I did hope that things would get better. That I didn’t know how they’d get better was balanced by my inability to understand why they were bad in the first place. It was a delicate world in which one had to move carefully, dealing with elements one understood vaguely if at all, knowing only that some elements seemed to sustain life and some to threaten it. Getting thrown out of school would disrupt things profoundly. I would no longer be able to experiment with those balanced elements, probing them gingerly here and there, adding some, taking away some, trying, in the least dangerous way, to find out what they were. In a trade school, my bridges burned behind me, I imagined myself in total isolation and darkness, unable to reorganize, unable to make the slightest adjustments in the course of my life, finally and irrevocably in the hands of a disinterested fate.
“What do you think I should do?” he asked.
“I want to stay. I can make it.”
“What the hell is the matter with you, Conroy?”
I looked down at the edge of the desk. Something strange was happening. I seemed to be at two removes from reality, crouching behind my own body like a man manipulating a puppet through a curtain. “I don’t know.” My arms were reaching in through my back to make me talk. “That’s the truth.”
“If you don’t,” he said slowly, “you had better find out.”
I climbed back into myself and nodded.
He opened the drawer of his desk and took out a small notebook. “Early report for two weeks. Get here fifteen minutes before the first bell and sign in with the hall monitor.” He uncapped his pen and made a notation. “Leave plenty of time. Miss once and you’re out. Understand?”
“Yes sir.”
“That’s all.” He didn’t look up.
I had my hand on the doorknob when he spoke again. “And see the man in the other room before you go back to class.”
The bench had refilled and the boys turned as if to read their fates in my expression. I walked past and went up to the secretary. “He says I should see the man in there.”
“Go on in, then. There’s nobody with him.”
I tapped the door lightly and entered.
“Come in. Sit down.” He was standing over a desk. “You are ... ah ...” He looked down at his papers.
“Conroy.”
“Oh yes, Conroy.” He smiled nervously, poking one of the papers across the surface of the desk with his fingers. Hunched over, he coughed into his fist as he quickly read it. “Well now, Frank,” he began. (It was a slight shock to be so addressed. My official name was Conroy, and neither teachers nor students called me anything else.) “I want to ask you some questions. Understand that I have nothing to do with the school or the Dean. I’m here simply as an observer, and to help if I can. You can answer freely without fear of ...” he hesitated, searching for the right word.
“Repercussions?”
“Yes. That’s right.” He sat down. “Now let’s see. You’re fourteen years old. Any brothers or sisters?”
“An older sister,” I said. “And oh yes, the baby. Jessica. She’s only a few months old.”
“I see. She would be your half-sister, I imagine, since I see here your father passed away some time ago.”
‘Yes.” I began to pick at some lint on my trousers, feeling slightly uncomfortable.
“Do you get along with them all right?”
“What do you mean?” I understood him, but the question irritated me.
“Well, there are always little fights now and then. We all lose our tempers occasionally, I wondered if outside of that you got along with them all right.”
“Of course I do.”
“Okay.” He paused, watching me indirectly. There was no more lint to pick from my leg so I began to brush out the cuff with a finger. “Do you have a job in the morning?”
“Yes. I work in a library.”
“How do you like that?”
“It’s okay.”
“What do you do when you get home from school at night? Do you have any hobbies? Stamp collecting, that sort of thing?”
“No hobbies.”
“Well, how do you pass the time?”
“I read a lot. Sometimes I play the piano.”
“What kind of books?”
I hesitated, not sure how to answer. “All kinds, I guess.”
“I suppose you don’t like school very much.”
“I
don’t think about it very much.”
The bell rang, all over the building, and was followed instantly by the sound of thousands of students moving through the halls. I listened abstractedly, luxuriating in the knowledge that for the moment I’d escaped the routine. How can I explain the special pleasure of listening to the machine operating all around me while I myself was removed from it? I’d cut class and climb the stairs past the top floor to the deserted landing above. I’d sit with my back against the door to the roof listening to the bells, to the boys shouting on the stairs below, and to the long silences after the halls had emptied. The mood was quietly Olympian.
I hadn’t realized how much the Dean had shaken me up, but now, as the bell I didn’t have to answer rang again, I felt a tremor of release play over my body. Muscles everywhere began to relax and I threw back my head in an enormous involuntary yawn.
“What does your stepfather do for a living, Frank?”
Instantly I was alert. I knew the man was harmless, but my deepest rule, a rule so deep I maintained it without the slightest conscious effort, was never to reveal anything important about life at home. “He’s a cab driver,” I said slowly.
“Does your mother work too?”
I stared at the floor. “Sometimes.” It occurred to me that my initial relief at getting away from the Dean might have made me careless with the man I now faced. He obviously had some image of me in his mind, some psychological cliché, and by answering carelessly I might unknowingly have supported it. I moved to the edge of my chair and sat up straight.
“Is there trouble at home?” he asked quietly.
My face flushed. A stupid question. An insulting question, as if I were a case to be dealt with by the book, as if he suspected some hidden deprivation or abnormality. “No, of course not. Nothing like that.” I knew what he had in his mind. He held images of drunken fathers who beat their kids, slut mothers who roamed the house in old nightgowns, and long, screaming fights with crockery flying through the air. We weren’t like that. I knew we were much better than that. I stood up. “Is that all?”
