All-American (5 page)

“And broke Goldman’s neck for him.”

“Uhuh.”

“H’m. I remember back in the Harvard game of ’16...” Oh, migosh, was he going to tell that corny story about the Harvard halfback who scored a touchdown and was called back for holding in the line! No. Ronny with relief saw this was something else, something he had never heard before. Something his father evidently didn’t talk about often. “Seems they had a top-chop quarterback; so our coach sent in a second string end at the kickoff, and during the first few minutes of play this end picked a fight with the Harvard quarter. A fist fight, right out in the open. Just by accident, y’understand. Well, of course they were both sent off the field. Harvard lost their best player and their mainspring. We lost a substitute end but the varsity end came right in so we were stronger than before. Get it?”

“I get it. That’s the same idea, I guess. Say, Dad, weren’t you a little sorry, afterward I mean, Dad?”

“Afterward, yes. In fact I’ve been sorry about that all my life. You see we won the game.”

“Sure. So did we.” After all, it was something to have a father who had played football, who understood these things. “I was sorry, too. Afterward. An’, Dad, I kind of lied about it when they asked me... when they asked me, Baldy and the Duke an’ all. I just said, I said, ‘Why, we didn’t mean to do it on purpose.’ I said we just wanted to put Goldman out of the play. Keith and Rog and Eric said the same thing. Only they felt differently, somehow, Dad. They just said, ‘Aw, he had it coming to him, the big lug.’ Or the big clunk. An’ I didn’t; really I didn’t. I felt if he was badly hurt, Dad, I never wanted to play football again, never. Never again.”

“Oh. I see. I see lots of things. That’s why you refused to take the captaincy.”

“Uhuh. Seems like I never wanted to play anymore.”

“Only the boys didn’t understand, didn’t agree with you; they didn’t like it, did they? They thought you were letting the Academy down?”

“Yessir. I guess.”

“Then what?”

“Well, Dad, then I went down to see Goldman at the hospital. He has to wear a terrible leather collar, all the time; it comes up to here, Dad. He can’t move an inch. Gee, Dad, it’s kind of terrible to see him and realize you did it all yourself, on purpose. That you might have killed him, or broken his neck for keeps if the blow had been an inch or two higher—or lower—or something. That you might have paralyzed him for life. So I wanted Keith and the other fellows to go down. Only, Dad, he’s a Jew, and they said, ‘Aw nuts, his dad used to be a gangster or something.’ They wouldn’t go.”

Red crept over his father’s forehead. “How ridiculous! His father’s in the clothing business. I know him; he’s no more a gangster than I am. He’s made a lot of money, so have a good many others. Why, I know old man Goldman. Look here, who spreads these absurd stories anyway?”

“The boys, they said it. An’, Dad, this morning I came back from the hospital; I’d been down to see him and he’s in pain some of the time still. An’ Keith and Rog and Eric were all in our room there, an’, Dad, they said the High School plays dirty football, an’ it made me mad after seeing him in that bed, so I said we do, too, an’ then, I dunno, we got into an argument. Tommy got mad the first thing I knew, an’ said, he said, ‘Why, those peasants, they couldn’t play clean football if they tried,’ an’ I said, ‘They’re no more peasants than you are.’...”

“What was that?” He laid down the cigar he was about to light. “What was that he called them?”

“Peasants. He meant Goldman and Stacey and Fronzak and that Negro end, LeRoy.”

“Let me tell you something right here, Ronald.” He lighted his cigar carefully but there was tremble on the end of the match. When he lighted a cigar that way and called him Ronald, that was bad news. Maybe he was going to talk now about the thousand dollars. It takes an awful long while to earn a thousand dollars. You can’t waste a thousand dollars like this, son.

He began slowly. “First, let me say I’m sorry about all this. I wish you could finish out at the Academy. I want you to finish out at the Academy. You’ll do much better at Yale if you come from the Academy. I don’t even know whether you could get into Yale from the High School. Don’t believe they send boys to Yale, do they? I don’t want you to leave the Academy. But I understand your feelings. And I’m glad these things bother you. I’m glad you felt that way about breaking Goldman’s neck deliberately.”

“Y’know, Dad, I can’t exactly say it, but something inside me, why, I just couldn’t help that; I couldn’t feel right with myself if I killed a man and kept on playing football....”

“A poet once said it better a long, long while ago. ‘To yourself be true.’ That was the way he put it.”

Why, of course. A new world suddenly opened up to Ronald. Mr. Wendell, the English master, had often quoted them that line. Then it meant nothing, words, a verse, a line of poetry. Something written somewhere, sometime, by some famous old geezer. Poets didn’t have any relation to life; they were just something you had to read during the nine o’clock study period in Hall. Now the whole thing came home. Now he saw poets had something to do with school after all, something to do with life, with him, with Ronald Perry. He realized more clearly why he felt as he did. Yet all he could do was mumble, “Uhuh.”

“I don’t blame you for seeing red, for feeling the way you did. Calling names like peasants and clunks and all that is no good. It’s no good in the United States. There aren’t any peasants in this nation. There are just citizens, one as good as another and no better than the others, you and Goldman and Keith and all the rest of you. All Americans. Americans together, all of you.”

“Yeah, an’ he said, Dad... I mean that’s what I said. What I tried to say, only I couldn’t say it like you do. I got mad and said, ‘They’re no more peasants than you guys’; and Tommy said, ‘Ok. You like ’em so darn well, wonder you don’t quit the Academy and go down there with your friends in the High School.’ So I said, ‘They aren’t my friends. They don’t like me.’ Know what they call me down there, Dad? They call me... Pretty Boy. Because I got yellow hair. Pretty Boy Perry. I know. I heard. But I said to Tommy, ‘Ok, they aren’t my friends; but I think I will quit the Academy, quit right now.’ So that’s why I’m here.”

His father was watching closely, saying nothing. The cigar in his hand had gone out. Ronald couldn’t tell quite what his dad’s feelings really were, what he felt about it all, whether he was still angry or whether he was beginning to think of that thousand dollars. Because his father kept silent, the cigar smokeless in his hand, all the time looking at him hard.

“Well, Ronny, I’ll say this much.” He relighted the cigar. “I’ll say this; I’m sorry you acted so impulsively in a way. I wish you’d acted more deliberately. But then again, I don’t know, I’m not sure; I suppose at your age I’d have done the same thing. I can’t say you came off second best, either. Now let’s do this. We’ll go home. We’ll think it over and talk it over together during the weekend. If you still feel on Monday morning you want to leave the Academy and go to the High School, it’s fine with me.”

Not a word about the thousand dollars. Not a single word about the money or how long it took to earn it or anything. Nothing but that.

Which is how Ronald (Pretty Boy) Perry, the star halfback of the football team, who pulled them through against the University School, who beat Country Day with three field goals, who was the whole darn team against Quaker Heights, that’s how Ronald Perry happened to leave the Academy in the middle of the term to go to Abraham Lincoln High.

S
O THIS WAS
Abraham Lincoln High!

Ronald sat on the long bench in the outer room waiting for the principal to see him. Behind a counter three girls were whacking away at typewriters. A fourth leaned over the counter talking to a student. The place was an office, a business office. Not at all like the Duke’s study where he received you on the Hill.

The Duke’s big room was attached to the rear of his house. You entered to find yourself in the midst of a library with books on shelves reaching clean up to the ceiling. The room was paneled in pine; on one side between the windows a log fire was burning, opposite was a deep leather couch.
Time
,
Life
, and other magazines were always heaped up on the tables or lying on the floor where the Duke had dropped them. Often he would be found standing before the fire, legs apart, sucking on an unlighted pipe. There was, to be sure, a small office adjoining this room where there was a desk with a telephone on it; but the Duke invariably received you in his book-lined library.

Ronald sat waiting. The moment had come. It was like going to the dentist and waiting outside. And it was going to hurt like the dentist, in another way. The one thing he couldn’t do was talk about the accident, about Goldman, about how it happened. With his father, yes, but with no one else. And these were the questions he would certainly be asked.

With a sigh he picked up the
Mercury
, the school paper, from a table beside his seat. There was a tabulation of orchestra popularity, and he ran his eye down the column.

1. Glenn Miller.......1,256
   
2. Tommy Dorsey.....1,165
   
3. Harry James.......1,000
   
4. Jimmy Dorsey.......914
   
5. Vaughn Monroe......907
   
6. Sammy Kaye........842
   
7. Benny Goodman.....769
   
8. Artie Shaw..........533
   
9. Johnny Long........412
   
10. Count Basie.........388
    

When he got that far, someone came hurrying past. It was the principal who went into his room and shut the door. One of the girls jumped up from her typewriter and followed him. In a few minutes she came out. “Mr. Curry’ll see you now.” She looked at him curiously as he went in to the dentist’s chair.

Certainly this man wasn’t a personality like the Duke. That was Ronald’s first impression. The Duke was big and tall; sort of man made you wonder who he was if you met him on the street. No one would ever wonder about Mr. Curry. You’d just never see him. You’d walk right past. No one would ever guess he was the headmaster—that is, the principal—of a big high school like Abraham Lincoln.

“Ronald Perry? How d’you do. Mighty glad to have you with us, Ronald.” Ronald mumbled something. He disliked people who called him Ronald the first time they saw him. Somehow this wasn’t working out quite as he’d expected.

Mr. Curry began asking questions, the usual sort of questions. Ronald replied eagerly.

If only he won’t ask about the game, if only he won’t talk about Goldman and the injury.

In a dry monotone he inquired whether Ronald was going to college. To Yale. H’m... taking fourth term work... h’m... that would correspond to the junior class, pretty much... h’m... let me see, you’re eighteen... no, seventeen, yes, the junior class... that would be about right for you as a junior, wouldn’t it?

Ronald thought that it would. Yes, he’d be a junior.

The principal continued, talking still in the same undertone. Ronald looked at him, at his glasses, at his clothes. Nothing at all distinctive about the man. When he spoke he seldom looked at you. Always he seemed to be glancing out of the window, at the wall, at the ruler in his hands—anywhere except at his caller. The Duke looked directly at you. The Duke sat you in that red leather couch and stood with his hands behind his back in front of the fire, fixing you with his eyes. If you were sent over by one of the masters you could be sure of a bad half hour. Somehow you couldn’t feel that way about this man, the way you felt about the Duke. The Duke, as Ronald was more and more realizing, was a personality. Mr. Curry was not.

He pushed a button. The girl appeared. She looked curiously at Ronald again.

“Get Jim Stacey.” Then to him, “You must know Jim. Played end on our team last fall.”

Here it comes! He held on to the chair. Here it comes. What’ll I do! What’ll I say!

But the principal went on without a pause. “He’ll show you around the school and introduce you to your teachers. You’ll be in Mr. Kates’ room.”

Gosh! Isn’t he going to talk about it? Isn’t he really going to mention the injury, or Goldman, or anything? Maybe he won’t. Maybe he isn’t going to talk about it. His respect for the quiet man in the glasses rose quickly. Then Stacey entered.

His red hair was all on end, his freckled face was grinning. He was not in the least disturbed by being called to the office of the principal. He shook hands with Ronald, his smile widening as he listened.

“Yessir. Sure. Yessir.” He knew. He understood. The principal called him Jim and not Stacey. It seemed strange to Ronald for all the teachers at the Academy called you by your last name.

The principal shook hands and wished him luck. Ronald mumbled something, and together they left the room and went into the hall. The wide corridors had murals on each side; scenes of sport—baseball and football and basketball. Stacey said nothing. Ronny said nothing. Presently his guide broke the silence.

“You gonna come here? To school?” Ronny felt immensely alone and unsure of himself in that strange place. There was a sort of defiant sound in the other boy’s tone.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Oh.”

Not exactly a cordial welcome and he’d hardly expected a cordial welcome. Why should they be cordial? Then before anything more could be said, a bell rang, they were in the corridor and caught up in a noisy mob of boys and girls.

Everything was so different. It was all different, even the school building was different from what you saw on the outside. Naturally he knew things would be different; but not as different as they were.

The Academy had tradition. Hargreaves and Main and Belding were old and familiar and warm, with thick ivy vines climbing up their stone walls. Inside, the floors were scuffed; so were the battered doorsills, and each building had the accumulated odors of generations of boys who had lived there. They gave, even to a stranger, a kind of friendly homeliness.

Abraham Lincoln had nothing of the sort. It was all different. For one thing, it was modern and impersonal. Its bricks were fresh, not old and faded by age, and the trim around the windows was clean white stone, not carved and battered white woodwork. Instead of being scuffed and worn, the floors were large tiles of gray and black. The whole building was as warm and friendly as an ice cream factory. Carried along by that noisy human tide down the hallway, he suddenly remembered one of the masters at the Academy referring to Abraham Lincoln as an “educational factory.” That phrase meant something now.