A Good School (21 page)

I corresponded with Hugh Britt until about 1950, often writing two or three drafts of my letters to improve the prose. Though he hadn’t talked much about it in our last months at school, Britt had been accepted into a Navy program called the V-12 that allowed bright students to enroll as Naval personnel in civilian universities, where they could rapidly earn both bachelors’ degrees and Naval Reserve commissions. Britt attained those goals soon after the war, without ever having left the Middle Western city of his birth; he was also married by then, and a father. Next came medical school, for which he was amply prepared, and in one of his last letters he said he thought he would be a psychiatrist. I was the one who stopped writing letters: the strain of trying to keep up with him had worn me down at last.

One day in 1955 I ran into Steve MacKenzie walking along Lexington Avenue. We had a few beers and laughed more than we meant to and punched each other’s arms; in the end, out on the sidewalk again, I think we shook hands about three times in saying goodbye. Just before turning away he said “Listen, though: don’t look back too much, okay? You can drive yourself crazy that way.”

My father has been often on my mind lately, perhaps because in
four more years I will be as old as he was when he died. My mother is long dead too, now, and so is my sister – she died young – but it is my father who haunts me most.

I keep trying to picture him as a young man, before the General Electric Company got him, when he was traveling alone around upstate New York and determined to sing for a living. He must have been brave and tense and more than a little self-important then, yet often tired and ridden with terrible doubts, until he gave up.

All I’m really qualified to remember is the sadness of his later life – the bad marriage that cost him so much, the drab little office from which he assisted in managing the sales of light bulbs for so many years, the tidy West Side apartment, redolent of lamb stew, where I can only hope he found love before his death.

Still, even now, his singing is what I try to remember best, the splendid lyric tenor voice that rang from the walls of my early childhood. Once ten years ago, driving across the middle of America late at night with the car radio buzzing and crackling in the dashboard, I suddenly heard a high, pure ribbon of sound; and there he was, if only for a moment, a young concert tenor in some town a thousand miles away:

. . . But come you back
when summer’s in the meadow,
Or when the valley’s hushed
and white with snow . . .

Then he was torn away on the air and the static closed in, and the commercials, and an all-night preacher in Missouri wanting to tell me about salvation, until I turned the thing off and tried to concentrate on the road.

If my father had lived I would certainly have thanked him for paying my way through Dorset Academy. I know he never trusted the place, and for that reason I would have persisted if he shrugged-off my thanks. I might even have told him – and this would have been only a slight exaggeration – that in ways still important to me it
was
a good school. It saw me through the worst of my adolescence, as few other schools would have done, and it taught me the rudiments of my trade. I learned to write by working on the Dorset
Chronicle
, making terrible mistakes in print that hardly anybody ever noticed. Couldn’t that be called a lucky apprenticeship? And is there no further good to be said of the school, or of my time in it? Or of me?

I will probably always ask my father such questions in the privacy of my heart, seeking his love as I failed and failed to seek it when it mattered; but all that – as he used to suggest on being pressed to sing “Danny Boy,” taking a backward step, making a little negative wave of the hand, smiling and frowning at the same time – all that is in the past.