A Good School (8 page)

Pierre Van Loon tried hanging around with Lear and Jennings for a while until they grew impatient with him, then he drifted down among the less popular; he might even have tried Henry Weaver, except that he’d been present on the night of Weaver’s humiliation. Eventually he settled on Grove.

“I’m doing a little better, don’t you think?” he said in Grove’s room one afternoon. “I mean I still do dumb things and everything, but I don’t do anything quite as dumb as when I first got here.”

“Well,” Grove said kindly, “it takes a little time.”

“Like, did I tell you about the first time I met Mr. Draper? I’d only been here about a week, and I don’t take chemistry, you see, that’s the thing. If I took chemistry, I’d have known him. Anyway, he came walking toward me in the whaddya callit, the quadrangle, and he was sort of smiling at me – that’s the thing; if he hadn’t been smiling I wouldn’t have said it – so I smiled right back and I said ‘What’s the matter, sir, got a stone in your shoe?’”

“Oh. So what did he say?”

“Oh, he was very nice about it; he just said ‘No, I’ve had polio.’ And then of course I spent about half an hour apologizing, and he kept saying it was all right, but still. Boy. Wow. Jesus.”

“Well, those things happen.”

“What’ve you got there, Grove? Is that English or history?”

“Just something for the
Chronicle
.”

“Oh, yeah? You really put in a lot of work on that, don’t you. Know something? That’s something I’d like to do too.”

“Well, you’d have to wait till next year now; then you could sign up for it.”

“I see. Well, I wouldn’t want to do the serious stuff or anything, but I could do the funny stuff. You going someplace?”

“Just to take this over to Haskell.”

“Mind if I come along?”

“Well,” Grove said, “the thing is I have to talk to Haskell about this, you see.” And he got out of there fast, before Van Loon could say anything else. Even for a chronic loser like William Grove, some guys were a little hard to take.

The door of the
Chronicle
office was locked; he had to knock and announce his name before being allowed inside, where Haskell and Britt were smoking cigarettes.

“Well, Willie Grove,” Haskell said. “What’ve you brought us this time?” He took Grove’s manuscript and dropped it on the desk after a cursory glance; then he went on pacing the floor. He was wearing his suit coat like a cloak, the empty sleeves dangling. “Sit down, Grove,” he said. “We’re in a mood of celebration today. A sad day in some ways, but essentially a day of brave beginnings. Our leader has stepped aside.”

“Oh?” Grove said. “So does that mean you’re the editor now?”

“It does indeed. There won’t be any formal announcement, of course, but for anyone who’s interested the old masthead will carry the news in our very next issue. And our good friend Hughie here is now managing editor. I only hope he enjoys it more than I did.”

“Well, that’s – good,” Grove said. “Congratulations.”

“Ah, Willie. I knew I could count on you to say precisely the right thing. Cigarette?”

Grove had smoked two cigarettes in his life, and they’d both made him sick. “No, thanks,” he said, and hoped Haskell wouldn’t press him.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you, Grove,” Haskell said, “how much we’ve enjoyed your stories. They’ve needed scarcely any work at all. Also, I’m delighted that you’ve cut and cleaned your fingernails. You’re almost human now.”

“Hey, John?” Britt said. “Where’d you get this phony way of talking, anyway? All this plum-in-your-mouth stuff ? Because I mean it’s really getting to be a pain in the ass.”

“Is this a faculty meeting, or what?” Myra Stone inquired of her husband as he prepared to leave the house.

“No,” he said, “just something I want to see Knoedler about.”

“Can’t you even tell me what it is?”

“Well, I think I’d rather not, dear. It’s about one of the boys, and you’re friendly with a good many of them.”

“Oh, Edgar, honestly. You and your secrets. You make me so
tired
.”

“You make me tired, too, Myra, but somehow we get along.”

She followed him as far as the front door. “Will you be back by five? Because Edith said she’d call at five. Don’t you even care about your daughter?”

“All I care about is myself,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”

“Think you’re so funny, don’t you. Well, you’re not funny at all. You’re remote and you’re distant and you’re cold. You’re cold.”

When he’d gone she walked the floor for a long time with one hand at her forehead. She might have cried, except that it almost never occurred to her to cry when she was alone.

“Sorry to drop in on you this way, uh, Alcott,” Stone said.

“Not at all. A little sherry?”

“No, thanks.”

And as he closed the sherry cupboard Knoedler tried to compose a sentence in his mind: If it’s a question of money, Edgar, there’s no reason why we can’t get together on a satisfactory . . . The trouble with such a sentence was that it wouldn’t be true. Stone was the highest-paid man on the staff, and any further raise would break the bank. Still, they couldn’t afford to lose him: he was their only Harvard graduate and one of their only two Ph.D.s.

“It’s about one of the boys,” Stone began, and Knoedler felt his lungs loosen in relief. “It’s Haskell, in the fourth form. I think he may be heading for some sort of nervous or emotional – well, these things aren’t easy to assess, but he shows signs of being disturbed.”

“Mm,” Knoedler said. “Well, the last time Haskell’s name came up, I remember you described him as brilliant.”

“I don’t think I said that, Alcott. I think I said precocious. He’s always tended to show off in class – he doesn’t just talk, he holds forth – but lately he’s begun holding forth in a very elevated style, and sometimes I can’t make sense of it. And it’s the same in his written work, pages on pages. I tried to have a talk with him after class today, and I couldn’t seem to hold his attention.”

Knoedler was nodding slowly and steadily to show that he understood. “Well,” he said at last, “I know John’s been under pressure from overwork on the school paper, and then of course he’s always been a high-strung boy and something of an eccentric; there’s a rather bizarre family situation, and so on. In any case—”

“Bizarre in what way?”

“Well, the parents were divorced long ago; the mother’s since been married and divorced two or possibly three more times; she now lives with a young man who runs a riding stable over here in Glastonbury. But the point is a good many of the boys come from troubled homes, Edgar, as I’m sure you know, and we have to allow a certain leeway in our – our judgments.”

“I didn’t mean to be making a judgment, Alcott,” Stone said. “I simply meant – well, for one thing I wanted to ask if the infirmary has access to a psychiatrist.”

“Oh, I expect something of that sort could be arranged if necessary, yes,” Knoedler said, but he was beginning to be impatient. This, after all, was Edgar Stone’s first year here. New masters often tended to expect a schoolful of frightened little conformists; it took a while to understand Dorset Academy. “In any case I’m glad you stopped by, Edgar,” he said. “I’ll have a talk with him tomorrow.”

That evening at dinner, for the first time, William Grove found himself sitting with Haskell and Britt and being included in their talk. He could scarcely believe it.

“. . . Christianity doesn’t
begin
to answer the needs of this century,” Haskell said, while Britt nodded in agreement over a forkful of succotash, and Grove quickly saw an opening.

“That’s why we have Marx and Freud, I guess,” he said, not at all sure that it wasn’t something he’d read in
Time
magazine.

“Exactly,” Haskell said. “And very well put, Grove. Because if Marx and Freud hadn’t existed, we’d have invented them. What’s more, we’d . . .”

That was the only time Haskell said “very well put, Grove,” but the talk went happily on long after they’d left the refectory, and Grove remained a part of it. The three of them strolled around the quadrangle until time for study hall, talking and talking, making occasional sweeping gestures with their arms. Haskell had abandoned Christianity now and moved down into popular culture. The function of the movies, he explained, was to help people hide from reality.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Grove said, because it seemed important to disagree sometimes. “What about a movie like
The Grapes of Wrath?
”

“That’s an evasion of reality too, don’t you see? When everything’s tied up in a neat little dramatic package, you can forget it the minute you walk out of the theater.”

“So what do you
want
, John?” Hugh Britt said. “You want everybody to go out and be migrant workers or Russian revolutionaries or something?”

“I want people to
feel
,” Haskell told him. “I want people to experience
life
.”

All the next day, even through his afternoon of jolting around in the truck, Grove went over and over the talk in his mind. He had said three or possibly four smart things, and might have said more except that he’d had the sense to keep quiet when Haskell went off on one of his long speeches, or when Haskell and Britt were bickering. There had been two or three times too when he’d screwed-up and said something dumb, but lapses like that would be easy to correct in future dinners and strolls.

He was getting dressed for dinner that night when Britt
came to his room and said “Grove? Can I come in? Can I shut the door?”

And Britt sat on Grove’s chair, looking trim and spruce as he always did in his evening clothes. “Listen,” he said. “Haskell’s cracking up. I’ve seen it coming for a long time; maybe you have too. Anyway, Knoedler called him into the office today, and when he came out he could hardly wait to tell me about it. Or I guess he
wanted
to tell me, but I couldn’t make head or tail out of it. All very emotional and overwrought. He told me he’d said to Knoedler, ‘Sir, before you go any further I want you to know that I love this school.’ I said ‘What’d you say
that
for, John? You don’t “love” the school, do you?’ And then he told me he cried – sat there crying in front of Old Bottle-ass – and he damn near cried again just telling me about it. I said ‘What’d you
cry
for?’ And all he gave me was more of this convoluted bullshit. Well, if he’s sick, let him go to a hospital. And whether he’s sick or not, I’ve had enough. So listen, Grove: let’s steer clear of him tonight, okay? I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with being his psychiatrist, or his mother, or whatever the hell it is he wants me to be.”

They couldn’t steer clear of him at dinner because he sat down with them, but he was silent throughout the meal. It was a dramatic silence, giving every sign of wanting to call attention to itself. Whenever they glanced at him they found his face set in a haggard look, or in a despairing little smile, and so they tried not to glance at him at all.

It was easy to get away from him when the refectory emptied out: all they had to do was walk fast. They hurried around to Three building, considered going upstairs but decided against it, struck out across the quadrangle and all the way through to the front of One building, and kept on walking. “I just don’t want him catching up with us,” Britt explained.

A hundred yards up the main driveway they moved out onto the lawn and sat on the grass beneath a clump of trees. From here they could look back on the long front of One building, purple in the blue haze of dusk, and they watched the dark cavity of its archway. Soon Haskell came out, alone, looking very small in the distance, wearing his coat like a cloak, and began slowly pacing right and left.

“He can’t see us,” Britt said. “We’re in shadow here, but he knows we’re up here somewhere. Watch him.”

They both watched him. Britt plucked a blade of grass and chewed it for a while, then spat it out with more force than necessary. “He’s waiting for us to go down to
him
,” he said. “Well, let him wait. Let him wait.”

“Jean-Paul?” Alice Draper inquired later that night. “If I ask you something, will you promise to tell me the truth?”

“Of course.”

She was lying in his bed with the covers thrown back, propped on one elbow so that her small, pretty breasts lolled to one side. La Prade was up and rummaging in his desk for cigarettes.

“Do you still find me attractive?”

“What a foolish question,” he said. Then he straightened up from the desk and turned to face her with a smile intended to be both reassuring and devilish. “You ought to know better than that, Alice.” And that was certainly true: if he didn’t still find her attractive, why had he failed to break off with her last fall?

“Well,” she said, “I know you like to have sex with me” (and “to have sex with” had always struck him as one of the more barbarous of American idioms, but he let it pass); “it’s just that I don’t think you’d really care very much if I stopped coming over here. You’d just have one of the infirmary nurses, or something.”

“Both the infirmary nurses are lesbians and they have each other,” he said. “I thought everybody knew that.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense. The younger one has Paul what’s-his-name, the art teacher. I thought everybody knew
that
. Anyway, the point is—”

“The point is you want me to tell you I love you,” he said, moving toward the bed. “Well, that’s easy. I love you.” And for the moment at least, it was easy indeed. He was looking at her long thighs, one partly covering the other, and at her knees. Some women’s knees had bulky caps, others had thick crescents of gristle on the insides, but Alice Draper’s were perfect. They were narrow, precise little skull-shaped formations, faintly blue-or yellow-tinted according to their degree of flexion; they looked delicious.

He was moving his lips and tongue around one of them now, while the other shyly waited for attention at his cheek; then his mouth went on up the inside of one warm thigh, which came apart from the other and opened for him.

“. . . What’s
that?
” she cried, going suddenly stiff.

“What’s what?”