Daughters of the Revolution (8 page)

When Carole returned in the fall, she refused to read the book that every Goode student read. Why would she not read the book that every student read? asked God. Because it bored her. And how could this book, which contained all the seeds of humanity,
Heart of Darkness, bore
her? It just did. She liked some other books by white men—for example,
Moby-Dick
. A book about a whale—a book that took on the separateness of a species. “If only someone would acknowledge that ‘some of us’ are whales!” “Whales?” “Yes, fearful symbols.”

“And what are you a symbol of?” asked God.

“I just said. Of your fear.”

She was supported in her rebellion by some of the female faculty—Julia Singer in particular—and by many of the boys, black and white, and even by the new girls, who had no basis to complain.
The Goodeman
ran a front-page photograph showing the awful rally of protest, students carrying crude placards that read
ANGRY BLACK WHALE, WHITE WHALE
and
SPERM WHALE
and
WHO IS MOBY-DICK?

It was, finally, her stance, hands on hips, her face, the placid look, when he was accustomed (from the boys, from everyone but his wife) to slightly glazed expressions of admiration. God’s famous equipoise suddenly cracked open like an egg.

“What makes you think you know what art is? What makes you so sure that you know what is real and what is false, what is good and what is not?
What makes you think you know the answers?
”

She just knew, she said, and she knew what she knew. She didn’t remember a time not knowing. She flunked chemistry; she never turned in her final paper on the
Odyssey
because, it turned out, she was interested only in the
idea
of the book, the hero’s journey; she couldn’t actually read it; she couldn’t, actually, stand it.

“It takes discipline to be a scholar,” God thundered to Mrs. Graves. “It even takes discipline to be an artist. Who the hell does she think she is?”

“Carole lacks discipline; she is casual and loose,” God wrote to the mother, Mrs. Faust, in a letter of probation he dictated to Mrs. Graves, who typed furiously.

As more girls and more students of color arrived, it became clear that the issues of integration and coeducation were not only about ethnicity and gender but also about class and culture. In time, the chapel became a “cultural center”; Father Reiss was released from his part-time duties. Carole herself, who seemed to embody blackness, oppression, sexism, equal opportunity and “religious tolerance”—a muddy commingling of any faith that anyone suggested—grew tired of representing these ideas, tired of masters habitually tilting in her direction when they mentioned slavery or civil rights, a long history of racist and sexist assumptions burning brightly in their apologetic eyes.

In her second year, instead of entering into the traditions of the school with an open, humble mind, Carole created a spectacle in the back of the field bus—beyond the purview of the rearview, Mrs. Graves told God drily. Kissing boys was one thing—the school had prepared for that eventuality. But a girl kissing another girl, in the bus, in front of the boys—on the way to Lake Winnipesaukee! These girls were not innocents, Mrs. Graves assured him. They understood power and seduction and manipulated boys who’d been, let’s face it, pretty protected.

“She likes girls?” God asked, incredulous.

“Evidently,” said Mrs. Graves, “as she is kissing them.”

“Then what did she come to a boys’ school for?”

“I’ll ask her.”

Mrs. Graves unfolded her half-glasses, slid them on her face and read, “The girls made a bet with each other—a dare. A dare to kiss. Tongues were used.” Mrs. Graves read the passive construction with distaste, then looked up. “Is this correct?”

Carole looked away, smiling slightly.

“This is neither a racial nor a sexual issue, Carole; this is a point of character. You are sabotaging yourselves. You are sabotaging this beautiful revolution. Don’t you realize how fortunate you are?”

Carole shrugged.

“Coeducation—it was not just for you. It was for all of us who dream of equality for women, equality for all people. Have you read the school’s policy on diversity and inclusion?”

“No,” said Carole.

“Well, it is a beautiful statement—a beautiful idea. I hate it that you did this
to yourself
, Carole,” Mrs. Graves said. Her hands wound around each other. Carole said nothing, the sleeves of her boy’s undershirt peeled up over her shoulders like a sneer.

“After so many people have been so kind to you. The Rebozos family, for example. They have been tremendous, Carole—tremendously kind.”

Carole said nothing.

“Do you envy the boys, dear?” Mrs. Graves asked gently. “Is that why you’re dragging yourself down?”

“Who wouldn’t envy the boys?” Carole asked.

After she sent Carole Faust away, Mrs. Graves ate an apple at her desk. She felt strong and clear, like the time after her divorce a year ago, when she lived alone in the big house she’d won in the settlement, with the bathroom chests full of pharmaceuticals from her ex-husband’s company, and her ex-husband’s gun. A rabid skunk had come around and lived under the house for three days, foaming and threatening her safety and peace, the white stripe down the back of the black animal bristling and quivering. Instead of becoming hysterical or calling a man or
taking pills, she calmly stood on the porch and shot the miserable thing.

“By the twenty-four testicles of the twelve apostles of Christ,” God remarked to Mei-Mei as he stirred gin into the urinal. “What do women want? Women on the syllabus when they haven’t read what’s
on
the syllabus. Birth-control pills! Hup! They want to be lesbians! They don’t know what they want; they’re ungrateful, hostile and sexed-up. We have been
notoriously
liberal and fair-minded. The boys all read Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind’ in ninth grade!”

“And the girls,” I said.

“What’s that?” said God, who had trouble hearing female voices.

“The boys and the girls. Everyone reads it.”

“So they do,” said God.

“If
you
don’t lead the way, who will?” said Mei-Mei. “Did you read that book by the teacher who was fired for reading a Langston Hughes poem to his students in Roxbury?”

God’s eyes lit up. “Kozol! I taught him English,” he said.

“Exactly. If you aren’t out front on attacking inequity and segregation, who will be?”

God sipped his drink, puffed up a little.

“Besides, who isn’t ungrateful, hostile and sexed-up? It’s like a viral infection.”

“Hup.”

I knew Carole Faust from God’s stories; I think I remember every word he ever said about her, every chapter from their existential agon. God and Carole were opposites, drawn to each other for the purpose of some struggle that took place almost before my eyes and formed my consciousness. (I wanted to be him, and wanted to be her.) I was nine her first year—the year of
the first girl—and ten her second year, when Carole was sixteen. But I never met her in person until much later, long after we’d left God’s house, when Mei-Mei and I attended her final project, an answer to the question posed to every senior at Goode: “Is the history of mankind a relentless search for freedom?” Her answer was a series of portrait paintings of the fourteen heads of the school, from 1827 down to the present—fourteen men in high middle age—ending with Goddard Byrd. Carole painted them formally, under the direction of Julia Singer. In the absence of a studio art department—the school emphasized history, though it maintained a potter’s wheel for troubled boys—Carole set up paints and an easel in a disused alcove in the basement near the girls’ bathroom.

She painted from old etchings, drawings or photographs, with particular, almost obsessive attention to their facial features—beaks, brows and jowls. Because God was, in contrast to her other subjects, alive, she’d gone to his office one afternoon in the fall of her senior year to take his picture herself. She loosened him up by asking questions: “What’s your favorite animal, Mr. Byrd?” (A tiger.) “Favorite vegetable?” (Corn on the cob.) She encouraged him to recite poetry—Shakespeare’s sonnets, that John Masefield chestnut about the seas. I imagined how he would become more real, reciting. Before Carole began painting a week later, she showed him the photograph—God at his desk, his watery blue eyes scanning the playing fields, his mouth pensively ajar—which he approved.

She mounted her portrait series at a regular Friday-evening soirée in the castle, an event that also featured a musician named Ray—a prodigy God had plucked himself from Roxbury—who played a Bach cello suite entitled “Falling Down Stairs.” There was also a symposium on “The Goode School Experience from the Perspective of the Black Day Boy,” organized by God himself in response to statistical reports that boarders earned better grades, liked school more and were substantially more likely to
contribute to the annual fund in the future than those who lived at home. At the last minute, the air filled with static—faculty, girls and students of color objected to the word
boy
. Ms. Inge, who taught American History, proposed that everyone correct “her or his” programs to read “students.”

“What’s this?” God asked, his eyes glittering. “In what kind of a school is a head not permitted to use the word
boy
?” His words hung in the air of the chilly castle (imported brick by brick from Scotland by Dick Whitehead, ’18) while God looked around the Great Hall and waited for someone to agree with him.

In the second part of the evening, Julia Singer stepped forward and introduced Carole Faust and her project: “The Venerable Heads.”

Carole wore blue jeans—against the rules, even for boys—and a tight green military jacket. She remained in the back of the room with her slide projector, even after applause called her forward.

“In my first year at Goode,” Carole began, “I tried to fit in, excel and follow the path described to me by my mother and by all the adults around me as the path toward freedom. My mother—who can’t be with us tonight because she works a minimum-wage job with no protections and doesn’t own a car—is an exceptionally strong-willed person, and for a long time I thought I wanted what she wanted. Here at Goode, I began to see freedom as the actual opposition to racist and sexist oppression, although the subject of ‘freedom’ begs the question of who is ‘free’ and at what cost—and includes the whole history of oppression and the whole history of the oppressor. Instead of coming to Goode and learning to identify with the oppressor and gain freedom that way, I’ve come to define myself
by
my difference and otherness—inhabit and
suffer
it in the sense of
the Latin root, meaning ‘to endure.’ To suffer includes the act of bearing suffering; it’s a form of transcendence and action. In the same way, I’ve chosen to take power over my art by painting only the Other—the white, the male, the symbols of oppression to me personally and to the culture as a whole.

“My project,” Carole went on, “is called ‘The Venerable Heads.’ It’s a series of portraits exploring representations of the venerable. What do we venerate and what does the object of our veneration have in common with what we have venerated before? What signals the presence of authority and power? In traditional portraiture, the subject presents the face of his venerability. He’s depicted with his special finery, against a backdrop that serves as evidence of his wealth or position. In this slide, Gilbert Stuart’s ‘unfinished’ portrait of George Washington suggests through unpainted canvas that Washington, the figure, the character, is not yet ‘finished’ or sealed by history. The impression of humanity, or progress of the individual, is in this way heightened.” She ran through some slides of seventeenth-century Dutchmen and portraits by John Singleton Copley, showing men posed with their dogs and tools. “In more contemporary work,” she went on, “portraits consolidate social, moral, political or economic influence—heads of state or heads of corporations or organizations. The subject is made as static as possible to convey the impression of stability and solidity, as much as these impressions can be conveyed by a head.

“I’ve tried, for my senior project, to learn these techniques of the patriarchy, so that I can subvert them in my own work.”

She walked along the exhibition wall and pulled away the black cloths that covered six of the heads, each rendered in a yearbook-style black and white, except for some canny work she had done with the eyes, every pair a different color—blue, green, brown, yellow, gray and red. Finally, she unveiled God’s portrait as head of the school. It met with silence, followed by a yelp of laughter. A classical portrait, it lacked any of the usual
fastenings—chest, shoulders, neck. The head simply rested on the bottom of the canvas, and offered a likeness that slightly flattered its subject.

“What a shame,” said Mrs. Graves. “It would have been lovely to hang these in the hall.”

“It
would
be fascinating to actually hang them,” said Ms. Bruns, who taught drama. “Something interesting to look at and provocative to think about.”