A Good School (16 page)

“Nothing much. Just said it was nice to meet me, and stuff like that.”

“You gonna write back?”

“Well, I – sure, I guess so.”

Ward looked as if he were enduring physical pain. “It’s entirely up to you,” he said. “Whether you write back or not is entirely up to you.” Then he turned and walked away past the pool table, carrying his shoulders high.

“No, listen, hey, Bucky,” Grove said, starting after him. “Listen – wait a minute.”

“Want to talk about it?” Ward said, not looking at him. “Want to go outside?”

The bench behind the club was vacant, so they sat there in silence for a long time, smoking, while the delicate moral question hung in the air. Grove knew he would probably give in – there seemed no other way to conclude this business – but he wanted to let the tension last a while. He wanted to savor his power over Ward as the minutes of silence went by; and Ward seemed to be enjoying himself too, in a wretched way.

In the end it was Grove’s impatience with Ward’s apparent pleasure that made him say “Look: I won’t write to her if you don’t want me to.”

“It can’t
be
because I don’t want you to – don’t you see that?”

“Well then, it’s because I don’t want to,” Grove said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Ward said. “Okay, thanks.” He looked as though he regretted saying “thanks,” but it was too late.

And not until an hour later, walking alone and thinking of Polly Clark, did Grove begin to feel a sense of loss.

Another difficulty arose between them the very next week. It was the time of double-room assignments again, and Grove had scored a quiet triumph: Hugh Britt had agreed, with almost no discussion at all, to be his roommate in the coming year.

It had occurred to him that Ward might be a little hurt, or jealous, but he wasn’t ready for the look on Ward’s face when they happened to meet outside Three building. It turned out to be even worse than the crisis over Polly’s letter.

“Let’s take a walk,” Ward mumbled, and they walked a great distance – out past the infirmary and into the woods and down a long hill, until they came to a small wooden bridge across a glittering stream.

It was a lovely spot – the kind of place where lovers might meet to discuss the impossibility of their situation, only to fall into each other’s arms in the end. And that was the trouble: it
was
a place for lovers, not for anything as puerile as the sad, silent display of Bucky Ward’s hurt feelings.

“Here’s the thing, Bill,” Ward said after a very long time. “When I saw your name and Britt’s on the double-room list I felt – well, I felt let down, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry you felt that way.”

“The point is, I thought you and I were – you know, the best of friends – and I’d more or less assumed we’d be rooming together. That’s all.”

Grove didn’t know what to say. He wanted to assure Ward
that they were still “the best of friends,” but he would be damned if he’d let Ward change his mind about rooming with Britt. He thought of Polly Clark’s line – “he doesn’t
own
me” – and felt as if Ward were trying to own him too. Above all, he resented having been brought to such a romantic place for such an embarrassing conversation.

And that made it all the worse when Larry Gaines and Edith Stone emerged through the trees, holding hands, walking slowly on their way back to school. Here was a real romance, with real lovers, and it made a mockery of whatever the hell else was taking place.

There were shy greetings – “Hi”; “Hi” – then Larry Gaines and Edith Stone walked over the little bridge and continued up toward the campus.

Edith had hoped it might happen that afternoon, in the clearing she had taken him to beyond the bridge, but all they’d done there, for the most part, was sit and talk. This was the third or fourth time she had hoped it might happen, and it hadn’t. Larry liked to talk a lot, in a low, intimate voice, and he liked to kiss, often cupping one of her breasts in his hand while kissing; sometimes too he would run one hand down her back and let the other feel its way up the inside of her thigh, but he always stopped short; he always broke away from her with a heavy sigh and said something like “Oh, God, I love you, Edith.”

And she was quick to answer that she loved him too, that she loved him terribly, but it was as if those declarations were all he needed. She knew there ought to be more; there would absolutely have to be more, in the very few days that remained before he went to sea.

Then suddenly it was his last night at school. Tomorrow he would go to New York wearing the seaman’s clothes he
had chosen for himself, the costume he was self-consciously modeling now in the Stones’ house for Edith and her parents, for the Robert Driscolls and for a roomful of admiring boys: a new Levi jacket and pants, a knitted navy-blue “watch cap” worn low over one eyebrow, and rubber-soled work shoes.

“You look like you’re on the high seas already, Larry,” Robert Driscoll said. “You look as though nothing less than a German submarine could ever bother you.”

Soon the other boys went back to the dormitories, the Driscolls went home, and it was time for Dr. and Mrs. Stone to go upstairs.

“Well, Larry, we certainly wish you luck,” Dr. Stone said, shaking hands with him, “and we’re going to miss you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

And Larry and Edith were alone. They began at once to clasp and writhe together, until Edith said “Oh, isn’t there somewhere we can go?”

Larry Gaines thought it over. “Okay,” he said at last. “We can go to the Senior Club.”

But all the way out across the quadrangle, with his arm around her, he had to fight a rising sense of panic. He was a virgin. His plan, all along, had been to lose it with some nameless girl in Algiers, or wherever the Merchant Marine might take him – he had even thought he might contrive to develop a wide range of sexual techniques before coming home to Edith – but that excellent idea was closed to him now because she was crowding him; she wanted it; she wouldn’t settle for anything less.

For more than a year he had kept an illustrated “marriage manual” among folded sheets in the linen bin beneath his bed, but he hadn’t been able to learn much from it because whenever he read those lubricious paragraphs, in combination with those pictures, he would find himself helplessly masturbating. And
he’d feel so rotten afterwards – was the President of the Student Council really supposed to jerk off? – that he would hide the book away again and swear off it entirely until the next time.

Now, for courage – or for luck – he said “I love you, Edith,” as they walked under the dark trees, and she replied, as always, that she loved him too.

The Senior Club was filled with moonlight and shadows. The blue-gray scent of many cigarettes hung in the air, and around the leather sofa at the fireplace there was a faint lingering tang of woodsmoke from all the log fires of the winter and spring.

Edith stepped out of her shoes – that in itself was a pretty thing to watch – and put both hands behind her back to unfasten the hooks of her dress, letting a heavy lock of hair fall over half her face as she worked.

He fought his way free of the seaman’s clothes, remembering only at the last moment to snatch the damned “watch cap” from his head; then he and Edith were naked and embracing and moving to the sofa, where he helped her to lie back on the wide, slick cushions, and he began to know from the very feel of her flesh in his hands that it was going to be all right.

At his first real thrust she gave a little whimpering cry that could have been pain or pleasure, or both, or neither, and he almost stopped to say “Are you okay?” but didn’t because it seemed much better to keep going, to build and sustain a rhythm that would bring her along with him – oh, yes; now she was getting it – and soon nothing mattered at all but the strength and purity of their coupling.

It could have been midnight or noon. The Senior Club and the whole of Dorset Academy could have evaporated into the trees and even the trees could have vanished, for all they knew; they had overcome time and space in their need to help each other arrive at the heart of the world.

In the long aftermath they lay whispering together, saying things nobody else would ever be privileged to hear, and very gradually their circumstances closed in around them again: a smoking club, a preparatory school, a train that would have to be caught at eight o’clock in the morning.

“. . . Can’t find my cap,” he muttered when he was dressed, groping along the shadowed floor.

“Oh, you’ve got to find the cap, Larry; it’s adorable.”

“Whaddya mean, ‘adorable’?”

“You think that’s something only silly girls ever say? Well, I don’t mind; from now on I’m going to be the silliest girl in the world and you’re going to love me anyway. . . . Hey, Larry?”

“Yeah?”

“Here it is. Your whaddyacallit. Your watch cap. It was in the fireplace.”

“What the hell was it doing in the fireplace?”

“I don’t know. But if you’re really glad I found it, you know what you could do? You could come over here and hold me again for a minute. Just for a minute.”

There were ten or fifteen minutes more at the moonlit door of her house, where they stood promising to write and to wait, saying again and again what each thought the other might most want to hear. “Okay, baby,” he kept murmuring against her lips or in her hair, before he left her. “Okay, baby; okay.”

Walking back to his room, he realized he had never called a girl “baby” before, and that alone – not to mention the astonishing impact of everything else – made him feel remarkably like a man.

There was little or no training. Less than two weeks after he left school, Larry Gaines signed on and shipped out as one of the
thirty-man crew aboard a tanker bound for North Africa and riding low in the sea with its weight of military gasoline.

Ten miles out of New York Harbor, at about two in the morning, for reasons never investigated or explained, the tanker accidentally caught fire and exploded. There were no survivors.

It took several days for the news to reach Dorset Academy, and then it didn’t break all at once. It crept and darted around the quadrangle from one cluster of stunned, unbelieving listeners to another; it seeped into faculty houses and into the kitchens of faculty wives; it went in and out of the infirmary and down to the baseball diamond and over to the track and back up to the Senior Club. More than a few people felt their faces twitch into foolish little smiles of incredulity on hearing it – smiles quickly covered with their hands. “I can’t – it doesn’t seem – I can’t
believe
it,” they said again and again. “Larry
Gaines?
” And by three or four that afternoon, everyone knew.

“. . . He must’ve been asleep when it happened,” Robert Driscoll said, hunched on his bed with his head in his hands while his wife massaged his neck and shoulders. “The whole crew must’ve been asleep at that time of night, except for whoever dropped the fucking cigarette, or fucked around with the fucking fuse box, or whatever the fuck it is you have to do to make a whole fucking ship blow up, and oh Jesus Christ Almighty, Marge. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus fucking Christ Almighty.”

“I know, dear,” she said. “I know.”

Myra Stone sat alone in her living room, twisting a moist handkerchief tight in her lap and feeling abandoned by everyone she had ever loved. Was this how things turned out in life? That you weren’t even allowed to comfort your child in her grief because your husband said you were “too upset yourself”? Would everything always be this way? Would there never be
an end to the pain of this rejection and this terrible, terrible loneliness?

Edith had been put to bed upstairs with what the doctor called a heavy sedative, but it wasn’t working. Every fifteen or twenty minutes she would struggle upright, rubbing the heels of her hands into her face as if to rid herself of sleep, and say “Oh! . . . Oh! . . . Oh! . . . Oh!” Her eyes and mouth, in those moments, looked as though she might be losing her mind.

And her father would take her in his arms and help her to lie back on the pillow until she was still. “You have your whole life, Edith,” he would say, each time. “You have your whole life.”

Up in the
Chronicle
office the air was thick with smoke and dedication. Mr. Gold had agreed to break open the front page of the Commencement Issue for a two-column, three-inch, heavily black-bordered box, and he’d agreed to handset the type himself, but he had to have the copy by five o’clock and there were only twenty minutes left. Grove had written four drafts, but Britt had found something wrong with all of them (“Grove, you
can’t
use ‘As we go to press’ about a thing like this; don’t you see that?”). For an hour they had bickered and quarrelled and thrown crumpled paper on the floor. Then Britt had loftily agreed to try his own version and frowned over his pencil in enviable concentration, using his free hand to shield his work from Grove’s eyes. “No,” he said at last, and began tearing it up.

“Hey, come
on
, Britt. Can’t I even
read
the fucking thing?”

“What’s the point? It isn’t any good; it isn’t any better than any of yours. Besides, it’s not my job to do this. You’re the editor;
you
do it.”

“Shit,” Grove said. “Shit.”

He was close to tears of frustration and fatigue, but the high calling of letters brooked no compromise. He sat down with a clean sheet of paper and the only pencil on the desk that wasn’t
broken or dull. He knew Britt would be crouched at his shoulder, watching every word, so he wrote the words with an exaggerated care for their legibility.

It is a dark Commencement for the class of 1943. Lawrence Mason Gaines, the outstanding member of that class and one of the finest young men Dorset Academy has ever known, died in the service of his country last week. He was eighteen years old.

“That’s it,” Britt said quietly, “that’s it; now the second paragraph. You’re getting it, Bill. You’re getting it.”

In the following fall the class of 1944 were suddenly sixth formers – seniors – and most of them didn’t feel up to it. Seniors had always been manly and dignified, fit companions for someone like Larry Gaines, and those standards seemed impossible to meet.