A Good School (3 page)

“I think it’s your voice, as much as anything,” Alice Draper had told him last spring. “Your voice, and your eyes, and the way you touch me – oh, the way you touch me.” And he’d winced at that, because for many years Alice hadn’t been touched by any but the soft, jiggling hands of her pitiable husband. The worst part was that he rather liked poor Jack Draper; he’d once considered him, in fact, the closest thing to a friend he had at this funny little school.

Still, Alice had been a good mistress. For a woman of thirty-six she was remarkably firm in the flesh and remarkably girlish in her eagerness. They had tirelessly writhed and humped and fed on each other, first in his apartment (where the pleasure was heightened by their knowledge that a dormitory packed with kids lay just beyond the steam pipe overhead) and later on a blanket in the woods. In the woods one afternoon she had suddenly recoiled from him, covering her breasts, and pointed to a clumsily running, noisily retreating boy who vanished among the trees two hundred feet away. La Prade had done his best to assure her it didn’t matter, that she mustn’t worry about it, but
he’d been unsettled too. At dinner in the great stone-and-wood refectory that night he had risked occasional glances up from his plate to see if anyone in the long, wide sea of kids was looking at him. Here and there a boy sat silent, lost in loneliness over his food (and La Prade could understand that; these refectory meals were a torture). Most of them were turbulent with talk and laughter – what in God’s name did they find so
funny
all the time? – but even among the heartiest laughers and nudgers he found no hint of a gaze aimed at himself. Once he tried discreetly to catch Alice’s eye across the room – he wanted to tell her, with the faintest suggestion of a smile, that everything would be all right – but she didn’t look up. She wore a severe black dress; there was something strained about her shoulders and he couldn’t see the expression on her downcast face. At the opposite end of the Drapers’ table, many chattering kids away, poor Jack was wholly engaged in the difficulty of cutting his meat.

“You’ll forget me this summer,” Alice had predicted last June. “You’ll have all your old New York girls, and when you come back in the fall you’ll have forgotten you ever had me.”

“Good,” he’d said. “That’ll make me want to have you all over again.”

But it had been a rotten summer. Living in a dreadful hotel on upper Broadway, spending too much money on cheap food, he had failed to find work with any of his old publishing contacts – and with one exception, a languid bleached-blonde named Nancy who complained about the “tackiness” of his room, he had failed to win back any of his girls. By September, facing another year at Dorset, he’d become preoccupied with Alice. He missed her; he wanted her, and at the same time he knew he would spend the fall seeking graceful ways to extricate himself. There was no future in a thing like this.

“Ah, God, how I missed you,” she said on their first night together. “I thought you’d never, ever come back. Did you miss me?”

“I thought of you all the time.”

But now it was November, and common sense made clear that it couldn’t go on. She was nice, but she wanted too much.

He was alone in his apartment, changing into the darker of his two suits for dinner, and while knotting his tie at the mirror he went over some of the things he planned to tell her. “There’s no future in a thing like this,” he would say. “I think we’ve both known that from the beginning. Even if it weren’t for Jack, I’d feel—” And his doorbell rang.

Surely she ought to know better than to come here at this time of day. As he hurried across the small space to the front door his irritation dissolved into an invigorating, useful kind of anger: this might be the perfect pretext for the scene he had in mind; he couldn’t have asked for a better one.

But it wasn’t Alice: it was a gangling, dreary-looking boy of about fifteen. It was William Grove, one of the new boys, the dumbest kid in his fourth-form French class.

“Sir,” Grove said, “you told me to come at five-thirty for a conference.”

And La Prade almost said “I did?” before he caught himself. Then he said “Right. Come in, Grove; sit down.”

The kid was a mess. His tweed suit hung greasy with lack of cleaning, his necktie was a twisted rag, his long fingernails were blue, and he needed a haircut. He seemed in danger of stumbling over his own legs as he made his way to a chair, and he sat so awkwardly as to suggest it might be impossible for his body to find composure. What an advertisement for Dorset Academy!

“I asked you in, Grove,” La Prade began, “because I’m worried about you. Here we are in November, and as far as I can
tell you haven’t learned any French at all. What’s the trouble?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Sometimes,” La Prade said, “a student will fail at a foreign language because he’s deficient in basic verbal skills. But that’s clearly not the case with you: Dr. Stone tells me your work in English has been adequate.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So how do you explain it? How can someone be adequate in English and wholly incompetent at elementary French? Mm?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

The abject way he sat there, head bowed, waiting for his small ordeal to end, was beginning to get on La Prade’s nerves. “A teacher can do only so much, Grove,” he said. “Teaching is a two-way proposition. No teacher can help a student who fails to show the slightest – the faintest spark of comprehension, of willingness to learn. Do you see?”

“No, sir. I mean yes, sir.”

La Prade was on his feet now, pacing the small carpet the way he paced the head of his classroom, one hand jingling coins in his pocket. This little bastard could be the death of him. “I have my own theory about you, Grove,” he said. “I think you’re lazy. If you weren’t lazy you’d clip your fingernails and get a haircut and get your clothes cleaned. You’re adequate in English because you find it easy, and you’re incompetent in French because you find it difficult. And the point is this, Grove: the point is simply that I won’t tolerate that attitude. You’re either going to buckle down or you’re going to – to find yourself in trouble.” He was trembling. “Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. I want five irregular-verb sheets from you by the end of the week. And they’d better be correct, is that clear? All right. Go along now.”

Watching the boy gather himself up and slink to the door, he had to hold his jaws shut tight to keep from shouting. Then Grove was gone, and La Prade was alone with his fists in his pockets and his breath coming hard through his nose. It was ridiculous to let the kids upset him this way – he knew that. The thing to do was relax (That’s it, he counselled himself as he sat in his armchair, beginning to breathe more easily; that’s it; just relax) and try to think of what he would say to Alice tonight.

Darkness had fallen and the big trees were stirring when William Grove turned the corner into the quadrangle, heading back to Three building. Things could be worse. He had dreaded his meeting with Frenchy La Prade all day, but it hadn’t been so bad. He would have to do five irregular-verb sheets by Friday and he wasn’t even sure how to do one of the damn things, but that was something he could worry about later. The trouble was over for now, and Grove had learned to be grateful when trouble was over.

“Hey there, Gypsy,” said a resonant voice behind him on the stairway, and he didn’t have to turn around to know it was Larry Gaines, a fifth former and a sure thing for next year’s Student Council, a handsome, athletic boy of seventeen who lived in one of the big rooms on the third floor and who had addressed several kind, thrillingly friendly remarks to him over the past few weeks. But his pleasure was quickly spoiled by the voice of Steve MacKenzie, the second-floor dorm inspector, who was climbing the stairs with Gaines.

“‘Gypsy’?” MacKenzie inquired. “Whaddya call him ‘Gypsy’ for?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Larry Gaines said. “He sort of reminds me of a gypsy.”

“Yeah? Well, he reminds me of a puddle of piss. Hey there, Puddle of Piss.”

And Grove might have spun around and said “Fuck you, MacKenzie,” but he didn’t have that option anymore. He had done it once last month – he’d turned on him in the hall and said “Fuck you, MacKenzie,” for everyone to hear – and it had only brought on an impossible situation.

“Well, now,” MacKenzie had said, advancing on Grove with a slow, pleased smile. He wasn’t yet sixteen, but he was enormous. “Well, now. Kind of looks like this little dipshit’s asking for trouble, doesn’t it?” With his hands loose at his sides, he thrust his big face forward. “Wanna take a swing at me, Grove? Huh? Wanna be a big man and take a swing at me?”

Grove did take a swing – a hopeless right that missed by a mile and enabled MacKenzie to seize his arm, turn, crouch, and throw him over his hip to the floor, to an uproar of laughter from the crowd. Grove got up, clenched his fists and tried again, but MacKenzie kept ducking and throwing him over his hip to the floor until the fun of it wore off. “Oh, Jesus,” he said at last, “will somebody please take this fucking kid away from me before I beat the shit out of him?”

By the standards of most movies he had seen, Grove’s performance that night might have made him a hero, or at least a scrappy little guy; at Dorset Academy it made him a fool.

And things hadn’t gone much better in his second fight, a few weeks later, with a wiry French-Canadian kid named Pete Giroux who lived at the other end of the hall – though that fight had started, at least, more classically in the Hollywood tradition. Giroux, fancying some insult – or pretending to – had challenged Grove to go to the gym with him. Grove had accepted, and five or six other boys had gone along to watch. Even MacKenzie had gone along, to serve as referee and to make sure they all got back before Lights, and in the gym there were elaborate preparations: tumbling mats were dragged and fitted
together to form a ring; corners were assigned; a timekeeper was appointed to establish three-minute rounds. William Grove knew that if he could do well it might make all the difference – he might still become a member of this school in good standing – and he squared off against Giroux with a heartful of hope, but it didn’t work. He tried and tried but couldn’t hit Giroux, and Giroux hit him time and again. They were still in the second round when they stumbled and fell together; then it became a wrestling match that Giroux quickly won by twisting Grove’s arm until Grove gave up. Nobody slapped Grove on the back or said anything nice to him, and all the way back to the dorm he walked in the grip of a desperate effort to keep from crying.

He still hadn’t cried, except in the privacy of his room late at night (and even there you couldn’t be sure of remaining alone; the doors were locked only by sliding wooden bolts, easily picked open with a knife or a screwdriver; nobody was safe) but he’d come to adopt a chronic posture of humiliation. If a wretch was what they wanted, he would be a wretch.

“Bubba-
hah!
” Terry Flynn was saying to Richard Edward Thomas Lear as they walked down to the steaming shower room together, wearing only their towels. “Bubba-hah-
hah!
”

Big Art Jennings, crouched in his underwear, was shining his shoes, pausing only to shove his glasses delicately higher on the bridge of his nose.

John Haskell and Hugh Britt, the two boys on the whole of the floor with whom Grove wanted most to be friends, sat engaged in some intellectual discussion in Britt’s room. They were already dressed for dinner – they seemed to do everything well ahead of time. Haskell was homely and said to be “mature” for his years. He was too awkward for serious sports but was an excellent student – it was said that he “challenged” his teachers – and he was managing editor of the Dorset
Chronicle
. Britt was
a new boy, admirably quiet and self-sufficient, a husky Middle Westerner whose intelligence Haskell seemed to trust. The two of them often sat like this for hours, or walked together among the trees, talking and talking, and everyone else kept a respectful distance.

“. . . Well, but it’s the
substance
of the thing that matters,” Haskell was saying as Grove passed the open door. “Don’t you think? Look at it this way . . .”

Alone in his own room, Grove sat on the edge of his bed for a while trying to think of nothing – he often did that – and then began undressing for his shower. When he was naked he gave the head of his prick the ritual tug to make it hang lower, wrapped a towel around himself and walked down the hall into the billowing steam.

The shower room was the worst part of his day. Not only was he absurdly thin and weak-looking, but he hadn’t yet developed a full growth of pubic hair: all he had was brown fuzz, and there was no hiding it.

“Here comes Muscles,” somebody said when he walked in, to which he replied “Up yours,” but except for that they left him pretty much alone.

They left him alone at dinner in the refectory that night too. He ate greedily and heavily, as always, but it caused no banter around the table about his tapeworm. (“How’s the old tapeworm, Grove?” somebody’d said once, and that had started it. “Grove, who’s
getting
all that stuff – you or the damn tapeworm?” “Know what? Some morning we’ll see this tapeworm come down to breakfast; he’ll kind of wriggle up and sit at the table; we’ll say ‘Where’s Grove?’ And that old tapeworm’ll just sit there looking around with a shit-eating grin . . .”)

Haskell and Britt sat talking together, still aloof from the crowd; everyone else on both sides of the long table was engaged
in the tireless, self-renewing business of horsing around. They nudged each other frequently, they displayed wide mouthfuls of chewed roast pork and potato and peas when they laughed, sometimes they choked and sputtered on their milk and had to blow their noses thoroughly into their napkins.

Then came the hushed hour-and-a-half of study hall, and Grove found himself unable to get anything done. He started off well enough – he organized all the materials for filling out the first of Frenchy La Prade’s irregular-verb sheets (though he would probably have done better to prepare for his history test tomorrow) – but soon he became preoccupied with the sight of his own right hand as it lay palm-down among the books and papers. What bothered him was not its terrible fingernails but that it looked so pale and childish, that its wrist and back held no deeply ridged tracery of veins. Then he found that if he squirmed around and hooked his armpit over the back of his chair, so that the sharp corner of wood bit deeply into the flesh, wrist and hand could be made to swell a little and turn a satisfying shade of dark pink. Heavy veins appeared, even in the backs of the fingers, and the longer he stared at it the better he felt. This was the hand of a man.