El Paso: A Novel (4 page)

“No, no, it’s all right,” Mr. Shaughnessy said, suddenly appearing around a corner and ushering the boys inside. “It’s Christmas.” The tall man led them through the room, explaining in detail how the tiger was shot, and what the trophy head with the twisted antlers was, and where and when he had bagged it. They were most impressed with a big stuffed piranha fish Shaughnessy had caught in the Amazon. He showed them a deep, ugly scar on his wrist where the thing had bitten him as he tried to take it off the hook.

“Well, Mick,” asked Shaughnessy, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” The Colonel had seated himself behind his desk with his feet up on it and lit a cigar.

Mick looked at Arthur, who had gone to a cushy leather chair and sat down, already beginning to feel a little comfortable after only a day in this mansion. Arthur had no advice in his eyes.

“A policeman? A fireman?” pressed Shaughnessy.

Mick remained mute. No one had ever asked this sort of question before. It had always been as if life was lived a day at a time. At the orphanage, there had always been the dream that someone like the Colonel—some wealthy person—would swoop in and whisk him away, though Mick had long since given up hope of it. And yet now, with Arthur . . .

“Well, come, boy, have you got fur on your tongue?”

“No, sir,” Mick said.

“Perhaps you’d like to own a railroad, like I do?” Shaughnessy said.

Mick, who had finally taken off his cap, nodded stupidly, like a bird drinking water.

“Marvelous!” Shaughnessy thundered. “Well, now, when you get old enough, and get out of school, you come and see me, all right? There are jobs for good men on the NE&P.”

“I want to be an engineer,” Mick said.

“An engineer! Grand. My word, grand! We have lots of engineers running our trains,” said Shaughnessy.

“No, a real engineer. To build buildings,” Mick said.

That revelation shocked Arthur. He wasn’t even sure what an engineer was.

“Well, well—a boy with ambition!” said Shaughnessy. “That’s what I like to see. Now, you come and see me anyway, boy, when you’re finished with school. I have plenty of those kinds of engineers working for me, too.” Arthur and Mick looked at each other almost furtively; all this simply seemed too good to be true.

Christmas dinner was a feast of a kind that Mick and Arthur had only imagined. Cold sliced roasts and poached salmon and soups, hot and cold, and then a fat suckling pig with an apple in its mouth glistening in the gaslights. Neither Arthur nor Mick understood all the various utensils beside their plates. Mick picked up a salad fork and speared an oyster. All day Alexa had tried to ignore them but now could not resist becoming their mentor as Mick lifted an oyster to his mouth.

“No, that’s not it—it’s the one to your front,” Alexa rebuked him, holding up her oyster fork.

With the oyster already to his lips, Mick stopped dead in his motion, put the oyster back on his plate, scraped it off the fork, and let it sit there. Beatie shot a hostile glare at her daughter, who looked back, appearing self-satisfied and smug.

When the servants cleared away the next set of china and brought in bowls of steaming artichokes, the boys had no idea what to do with the strange vegetable. Alexa drew the boys’ attention by plucking off an artichoke leaf and putting it in her mouth, pretending to eat the entire thing. The boys followed suit.

As Shaughnessy wound up a story about elk hunting in Alaska, Beatie looked over to her new charge and his friend. Both had stuffed whole leaves of artichokes in their mouths and were chewing, almost red-faced, their cheeks bulging desperately, while Alexa sat with a beatific smirk on her face.

“Oh, I’m sorry, boys!” Beatie cried. “Let me show you how this is done.” She demonstrated the method of artichoke-eating to the boys, who stopped chewing and were watching her intently. Mick finally put his hand to his mouth and removed the huge wad of the ’choke.

“No!” Alexa cried exuberantly. “Same way in, same way out. Use your spoon.”

“I didn’t put it in with a spoon,” Mick said sullenly. “I put in with my fingers, like you showed us.”

Beatie immediately got up from her chair. “All right, Alexa!” she said sternly, storming toward her daughter. Beatie’s footsteps pounded around the edges of the rug. Knowing what was about to happen, Alexa clouded up as if she were going to cry. “Go to your room. I warned you!” Beatie seized Alexa by the arm and was towing her, whimpering, out of the dining room.

“Now, Mother,” Shaughnessy declared after things had gotten quiet again. “I suppose someone’s got to administer a little discipline in this household.”

The boys looked at each other. Mick smiled bravely.

“She ought to come eat where we do,” he said. “They don’t even give us a knife.”

At this, Shaughnessy roared, “Yes, my word, yes! Maybe she should at that! Here,” he said, “I will carve up the pig myself. I take pride on being the finest pig-cutter west of the Hebrides! Do you boys like pig?”

At these reassuring words the feeling of embarrassment that had overcome the boys suddenly blew away as flakes of ash from a hearth. Arthur looked at Mick, who was grinning, studying the pig. It was one thing he had no doubt he knew how to eat.

FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME IN ARTHUR’S LIFE
, the entire world spread out around him like a gift, one he was determined not to lose. Never even to let from his sight. He was enrolled in a day school and, as the years passed, his new situation settled on him mostly in ease. Arthur received a generous allowance of a dollar a week that was raised to two dollars when he turned twelve, and not only kept up his butterfly collection but also, at his father’s suggestion, took up collecting coins and stamps as well. The elder Shaughnessy taught him how to sail on small boats in Newport, and on vacations in Maine they saw bears and moose along the roads.

Still, Arthur hadn’t made any really close friendships with the other boys of the day school. They seemed different, and though they didn’t tease or make fun of him for where he came from, they always seemed apart and let Arthur alone. He kept in touch with Mick Martin, though, and every so often Mick would stay over for a weekend at the Shaughnessy house in Boston and sometimes even be invited down to their place at Newport. Mick was Arthur’s lone tie with his past and both his father and Beatie thought it best to let him deal with this in his own way. And so the years slipped by and Arthur grew up, a happy boy, if a little shy.

Then came the ordeal at Groton.

As soon as young Arthur had arrived from the orphanage into the Shaughnessy family, the Colonel began to pull strings to get him into the Groton School, just as the Colonel’s own father had pulled strings to get him into Harvard. When the time came, at age fourteen, Arthur was packed off, with the Colonel’s tales of boarding school grandeur ringing in his ears. Arthur, however, had reservations, not the least of which was that only five years earlier he had finally arrived in the most magnificent household imaginable, only to be shipped off to a place full of strangers, no matter how wealthy and sophisticated they might be.

Colonel Shaughnessy had arranged an imposing entrance into Groton for Arthur. That morning, he timed it precisely so his private railcar would deliver his son to the rail station just as the other boys were arriving on the public trains. For a few moments the ploy seemed to work. Arthur stepped down from the gleaming railcar, with Bomba carrying his bags. A hush came over the throng of Groton boys on the platform while they gaped at this strange person arriving as if from another world, a world different and even more exalted than their own. Then from the back of the crowd someone started it.

“Would Mr. Astor wish his bags to be taken for him?” came a loud voice.

Everyone took up the cry.

“Would Mr. Astor like his shoes shined?” somebody said to great laughter.

“Could someone arrange for flowers in Mr. Astor’s private suites!”

Bomba put on his fiercest expression and parted the derisive crowd, with Arthur tagging behind, mortified.

“Will someone please call Mr. Astor’s personal motor coach!” a shout went up.

It was not a good beginning for Arthur Shaughnessy at the Groton School. And in time, no matter how Arthur tried, it only got worse.

When they learned his name, Shaughnessy, there was more mockery. They called him a harp and a bog-trotter and a fish-eater. All the Irish slurs to hurt and embarrass. When Arthur protested that his family was not Catholic, they ridiculed this, too, saying behind his back that this was no better than the Jews changing their names so as to take over the country.

Hazing became an art form.

They short-sheeted his bedclothes and put toads and beetles in his desk drawers in his dorm room. Someone even taped a piece of Limburger cheese to the back of his closet—it took him a week to find the source of the odor. Once he returned from class to find lace curtains put up around his window. Arthur became a loner, which of course made it worse. Boys often got the treatment from the Groton elite and were expected to be good-natured about it. But Arthur kept sullenly to himself, thinking that at the orphanage at least they all tried to get along. Then one day the dam burst.

It was the end of the first term, and so far Arthur had made good marks in all of his studies. But when he was called on and stood to read a class paper on the history of the Ostrogoths, he discovered his hands were black after he reached into his satchel. Someone had poured ink into it, ruining the work. Arthur turned red; his breath caught in his throat. He thought he was going to choke. Tears welled in his eyes as his classmates smirked at one another and the instructor stood waiting impatiently. Finally Arthur burst out, “I hate all of you! You’re wicked bastards! You’re . . . you’re . . .”

People began laughing. The instructor marched to Arthur and snatched his wrist and led him from the room to the dean’s office for punishment. Arthur could hear the scathing laughter from the classroom all the way down the stairs and out of the building. Back in his room, he stared out of the window until it was dark and even afterward. He envied the birds he saw wheeling in the air and wished he could be like them. When he got back to Boston for the holidays two days later, Arthur informed his father that he would not be returning to Groton.

“You cannot quit, Arthur! It’s the worst thing you can do. All boys get hazed at boarding school.” They were sitting in the study, the Colonel behind his desk, distressed, Arthur in his chair.

Arthur merely looked at him. The Colonel knew that when Arthur made up his mind it was hard to change it, and tried a different tack.

“Look, son, why don’t you think about it over the holidays? Just think about going back for the last term. It might be bad, but then, next year, you’ll be an upperclassman. It will let up, I promise you.”

Arthur said nothing. He could not begin to explain the indignities he felt had been heaped on him at Groton. He had told his father only that the other boys were rude to him, but could not bear to go into details.

“All right, Arthur,” the Colonel said at last. “Just promise me you will think about it—is that fair? It’s your decision to make.” Even though the Colonel knew Arthur well enough to believe that the situation was bad, he did not like this business of quitting. It could be habit-forming.

Arthur nodded, appreciating this concession by his father. He’d always felt he was treading on thin ice in the Shaughnessy home. To make matters worse, Alexa made him feel like a leper at every opportunity. She declined to introduce him to friends she brought over to the house and, recently, when the Colonel had asked Arthur if he might want to get a dog, she loudly complained that fur made her sneeze.

Beatie and the Colonel, however, were warm, obliging, and kind: the Colonel told him that what he did mattered; Beatie complimented him on his curiosity, and told him that he had a destiny to fulfill, though she had not ventured what it was.

Still, Arthur felt a little knot of anxiety deep down inside him. He’d developed a hunger for a place of his own in the world, and ever since the first day at the Shaughnessys’ there was that little lurking fear that it could all be taken away just as fast as it had come. Even though there wasn’t a whit of evidence that such a thing might happen, Arthur seemed incapable of severing relations with the harshness of his past, a past weighted with his childhood loneliness.

Next afternoon he went to the Laura Bostwick Home to see Mick Martin. Mick had quit school and at the age of sixteen looked almost like a grown man, tall and muscular, with a handsome rugged face set off by a chiseled nose and a short mustache. Now he ran a lathe in a shoe factory and on the side he had a rather murky job that he didn’t much talk about. But from what Arthur guessed, it had to do with one of the gangs that controlled the gambling, shakedowns, and prostitution in Southie.

They took a walk around the old neighborhood. Mick told Arthur he was going to move out of the orphanage pretty soon and find a place of his own. Soon as he got up enough money. He told him he had a girlfriend, too, who worked in the shoe factory. After a while, Arthur told him his own story.