Impulse (5 page)
Frank managed to hold his temper in check the first time he missed the turn. After all, things can change dramatically in five decades. The second time he wondered again about his memory. Anger began to give way to frustration. On the third try, he gave up any semblance of patience and rehearsed the four letter vocabulary he’d learned in the Academy’s locker rooms. His landmark, an abandoned street car, had stood on that corner for as long as he could remember. For a while, it functioned as a vegetable stand where fresh produce could be bought at prices lower than at the market. Later, new owners used it as an outlet for their Silver Queen corn crop, fresh picked from adjacent farms. But the farms were gone, replaced by condominiums and townhouses and God alone knew what happened to the street car. In fact, the intersection now lay a hundred yards to the north, complete with traffic lights, turn lanes, and strangers. On his fourth pass through the intersection, he spotted a van with the school’s seal on its door turning right. He cut across two lanes of traffic accompanied by blaring of horns and verbal abuse and followed it to the Academy.
***
Scott Academy celebrated its one hundred and thirtieth anniversary in 2004. By American standards, that made it an old school. And like most things American, it had drifted significantly from its traditions and origins. It began life as The Maryland Academy for Boys, intended as a haven for poor boys from Baltimore. In the 1870s, that meant street urchins, orphans, and the discarded children the age produced. At the remove of well over a century and in an era of relative abundance, it is difficult to imagine the fate children suffered in the late nineteenth century. Dickens’
Oliver Twist
, with its London scamps, presented a prettified picture compared to the reality of street life in urban America in the era between the Civil and Spanish American Wars.
The boys selected for the Academy and sent to the country received, for the most part, a reprieve from an early death, the result of poverty—malnutrition, rickets, or any of the myriad diseases that plagued a pre-antibiotic world. They were taught penmanship, learned to read, and given a smattering of the classics. More importantly, they acquired practical skills that prepared them for a return to the city’s streets, ready to assume a productive life free from crime—the latter being the probable fate of too many of their contemporaries.
The school’s first headmaster, Colonel Anselm Quentin Armiger, served with General Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg. He lost an arm in that tragedy and sat out the reminder of the Civil War in Richmond working in the army’s quartermaster corps. He’d accepted the position as headmaster primarily because his wife had developed consumption and her doctors believed fresh country air would afford her at least a respite from the ravages of the disease if not an outright cure. The fact that he was also the second cousin of the Board Chairman and a man of unrelenting piety didn’t hurt his case either.
Faced with the first contingent of ragamuffins that climbed the hill to the school, and still without a decent classroom building or facilities to house them, he dressed his boys in uniforms—that being the simplest way to replace their rags. Each boy received a pair of butternut linen trousers, two shirts, and a high-collared tunic, all of which looked suspiciously like Confederate army uniforms. Over the years, the uniforms evolved and ended looking like those worn at West Point.
For the first six weeks of their stay, those first students lived in tents and met for their studies in a barn. Several, seeing no significant difference between their country and urban environment, and homesick, ran away. Armiger’s first faculty members were predictably male, and, like him, the shattered waste product of war. A few younger men possessed more education than ambition and needed work. He ordered the boys by age into companies and appointed older boys as their officers. He formed the companies into a battalion. Later, as the school grew and younger, paying students were added to the mix, the battalions grew into a corps.
The senior students elected a Corps Commander who wore, at first, a half dozen gold stripes on his shoulders, later a Lieutenant Colonel’s silver oak leaf. The officers descended in rank from there and in the same order as the army. It would be an awkward arrangement and one attacked periodically by alumni, parents, and faculty, all of whom yearned for the more easily recognizable president, vice president, student council model. But it held until the mid seventies when the school’s board decided to drop the military program. Any semblance it once had to West Point disappeared forever.
Colonel Armiger spent most of his first year writing letters to the Board asking for money, buildings, and the services of a medical man. They, like so many groups entrusted with substantial sums of other people’s money, took to believing it was theirs and like Silas Marner, guarded it like gold, granting Armiger’s requests reluctantly and only after endless debate and haggling. When two boys died of pneumonia and the county coroner threatened to report the school for child abuse, a relatively new breach of the law at the time, the money began to flow.
The school languished as a mediocre military school until Franklin Scott, a Midwestern railroad mogul and multimillionaire, at a time when even a millionaire was reckoned a rare commodity, visited the school in search of a lost nephew. Finding him in good health and safe, Scott endowed the Academy handsomely with the stipulation it be named after his errant nephew. The Board, exhausted by the irksome duties of managing a school for ungrateful boys, agreed. Scott quickly applied his considerable managerial skills to the school, empanelled a new Board of Directors and set it on a path that ultimately led to its recognition in 2000 as one of the country’s premier prep schools. Generations of young men salvaged from the mean streets matured and, for the most part, repaid with gratitude and endowments the school that had lifted them out of the gutter and from a life that held no possible future.
Armiger died before his wife and was replaced by another former Army officer, this one from the Union side but who carried more substantial educational credentials and experience. Later, in the 1920s, the school began accepting paying students and the evolution from a unique institution to a college preparatory school began. Fifty years ago, when Frank attended, it had been male. Half of the student body lived in dormitories and went home only on weekends, if at all. Somewhere in the seventies, in the confused effects of Viet Nam, it shed both its uniforms and all male status.
***
Frank followed the van to a parking lot behind Main. He didn’t remember the lot ever being there, but then half the buildings that stretched out before him were new also. He looked in the direction of the chapel, seeking the familiar bulk of the three story building where he grew up—where he and Rosemary Bartlett grew up. Gone. In its place a blockish building with too much glass and too little style had been erected. He checked his map and discovered his old apartment complex had been replaced with a building that housed a kindergarten and grades one through five. He thought that appropriate.
“Can I help you?”
He turned to see a young woman, a very young woman, in a blue blazer and khaki skirt. She balanced a stack of books in her arms and looked inquiringly at him. She looked to be twenty but could have been older or younger. Everyone looked young to him now. He thought his new general practitioner couldn’t be more than twelve.
“Thanks, Miss…ah—”
“I’m Elizabeth Roulx. I teach English literature, and you must be Meredith Smith. Am I right?”
“Yes, but…well, I’m impressed. How did you know?”
“No mystery there…sorry, no pun intended….Doctor Darnell asked me to keep an eye out for you. He said he hoped you’d come early and if you did I should ask you to speak to my classes about writing.”
“No, well, that might have been fun, but I couldn’t get away any earlier.”
“Maybe some other time,” she said. He didn’t detect any annoyance in her voice so he guessed the plan to speak had been an impulse on someone else’s part, not hers. At least it never made it onto his agenda.
“There’s a luncheon somewhere,” he said, consulting his map a second time. It felt strange needing a map to find his way around a part of the world he once knew so intimately.
“Come with me,” she said. “We’re at the same table.”
“The High Table, Doctor Darnell said.”
She chuckled. “Felix is an anglophile. He wants to make believe he’s at Eton or Oxford. He had a low platform built and set one table in the front of the dining hall reserved for himself and department chairs. All veddy Brit. Next he’ll have us in hoods and gowns.”
They made their way around a mound of very old lilacs. Frank remembered the lilacs. His mother planted them a long time ago. Somewhere in the middle should be a bird bath set in the ground with mortar he and Jack had mixed for her.
“Do you mind?” he asked and pushed his way into the thicket. The shallow dish lay in pieces but it was still there. A touchstone.
They resumed their walk, rounded the power plant, and headed toward a remarkably ugly building.
“That’s Perry Hall,” she said. “If half of what I’ve heard about Black Jack Perry is true, I think the good colonel must be spinning in his grave over that architectural monstrosity.”
Frank looked at the boxy lines and alternating glass and robin’s egg blue panels and decided it had all the charm of a toll booth.
“Perry was a hard man,” he said.
She glanced at him, one brow up. “You’re next to me, I think.”
They stepped into the dining hall. It had an under scent—that’s the only way he could describe it—fried food and spilled milk, but barely strong enough to overcome the Lysol. Too late, Frank realized he should have taken a miss on lunch, too.
Elizabeth Roulx ushered him into the dining hall. People milled about, looking for place cards that didn’t exist and faces they no longer recognized, their smiles vague but hopeful.
“Your father used to head up the English Department, didn’t he?” she asked, leading him to the front of the room to a table set on the platform raised an inch or two above the black and white tiled floor. The High Table.
“Yes, a long time ago. I doubt anyone would remember him now.”
“Oh, but you’re wrong about that, Meredith…may I call you Meredith?”
“I think you already have.” Frank hoped he didn’t sound short. He didn’t intend to be, but something about the room and its confusion set him on edge. He couldn’t think why. It might have been the odor.
“I am the school’s archivist, too. The responsibility of cataloging and filing all sorts of documents falls to me. I recently came across your father’s old teaching notes. Your father is over there, by the way.” He looked in the direction she indicated. Sure enough, his father, or what passed as a portrait of him, smiled back.
“Dad got a light,” he said, surprised. It looked new. An extension cord connected it to an outlet in the next panel over. Apparently electrical service only went to every other panel. You got position first, he thought,, the light went with location. He formed a question: What criteria determined location? Then the obvious struck him. His father had received the lamp only recently.
“Yes, well, he’s highly thought of, did you know that?” Ms. Roulx looked nervous, like something, some task assigned to her wasn’t going very well and she needed to regain her position.
“I didn’t know. When did he get his light?” he asked. Meanness did not play a significant part in Frank’s personality as a rule. His wife used to complain about that. She thought he rolled over too easily. But today he still smarted from his confrontation with Powers, and even his time with Rosemary had not completely erased that. And then, this morning’s session with his daughter had stirred it up all over again. Now, he smelled a rat and gave in to the opportunity to stick it to the school.
“Pardon me?” Ms. Roulx had the decency to blush. Maybe he should be a bit easier on her.
“The light over his portrait…it’s a terrible rendering, by the way…when did you all decide to light him up?”
A tall, thin man wearing a carefully worn and patched Harris tweed coat sidled up to them. “Smith, isn’t it?” He stuck out his hand. “Paisley Rehnquist, here. I am, if it can be so stated, your late father’s successor.”
Frank shook the slightly damp, limp hand of Paisley Rehnquist and surreptitiously wiped it on his trousers.
“I think it’s a very decent likeness,” Rehnquist said, peering over his half-lens reading glasses. Rehnquist had body odor.
“You never met him—how would you know?” Frank stepped back a foot or two.
“Well, I…people who knew him said so.”
“I see…and that is sufficient?”
“Um, yes, certainly.”
“Then you should know, as his successor, so to speak, that the artist painted that disgrace from a photograph. My father refused to sit. The only reason it’s there at all is that one of his former students paid for it and the school had to accept it as part of a sizable donation made by said student. This is the first time I’ve seen it and I assure you, it is perfectly dreadful. When did he get his light?”
Elizabeth Roulx looked embarrassed, but Paisley Rehnquist charged ahead.
“Really, well…times change. We don’t use the old methods anymore, you know. Your father taught the classic way. We are into the new.”
Frank thought he said
the new
like he’d discovered an addition to the periodic table of the elements.
“New? As in what, exactly?”
“Ah, no more doting on dead white men, literary fossils. I’m sure you had that introduction to literature, and many did, but it’s over, passé. We are contemporaneous now.”
“Which dead white men were you referring to?”
“Oh, you know, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner—”
“James Baldwin?”
“Um…well, yes, if you wish.”
“Paisley—may I call you Paisley? Here’s the problem—when I read Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Kerouac, and the aforementioned Baldwin, they weren’t dead, and Baldwin wasn’t white. They were…what was that word you used? Contemporaneous. If you wish to divorce yourself from your cultural heritage, that is your right, but I think it intellectually disingenuous to short-change your students as well.”
Elizabeth Roulx glanced to her left at Brad Stark, apparently seeking some help. Frank could not be sure if Stark had been listening to their conversation or not. He guessed he had.
Stark stepped forward and smoothly disengaged Rehnquist from the group and then led them to their places at the High Table. They sat. Frank picked at his salad. Perry Dining Hall presented as bleak a face on the inside as it did out. Portraits of faculty members, mostly long forgotten, hung on panels between sheets of plate glass. Some had lights attached to their frames; some did not. He wondered again what constituted the criteria for being awarded a light. Elizabeth Roulx watched him, followed his eyes.
“Brad,” she said, showing more teeth than necessary, “Meredith has been telling me about his father’s portrait.”
“Really?” Stark leaned forward to peer around her so he could say something. Frank noted that as he did so, his tie drooped into his salad. Considering the amount of oil and vinaigrette applied in the kitchen, there would be a stain—a big one.
“Your father meant a lot to the school,” Stark said and showed a lot of teeth as well. Everyone seemed to be a graduate of smile school today.
“Did he? How nice. He did not leave here a happy man.”
“No, I suppose not. But that doesn’t change the way the students felt or the important impact he had on the school. He wrote our first textbook. We used it for years.”
“Yes,
An Introduction to American Literature
,” Frank recited. “He made a little money on that book. It helped pay for my mother’s constant care—Alzheimer’s,” he added, seeing the question on Elizabeth Roulx’s face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her smile faded but the confusion remained. Her head rotated back and forth between the two men as she tried to follow the exchange. Frank leaned back in his chair to break contact with Stark and made an attempt to eat. Stark gave up trying to catch his eye.
“Yesterday,” she said, softly turning toward him.
“What?”
“The light…yesterday.”
“Thank you, I thought so. And I can expect some personal attention from Felix Darnell before I get out of here?”
She smiled. “Yes. They think you have money and hope you will contribute or something.”
“I make a comfortable living, but I am not rich, not the way they think.”
“But your books, your TV show?”
“I do not write blockbuster best sellers. I am a moderately successful writer of small mystery stories. What do you know about writing and publishing?”
“I teach creative writing.”
“That’s not what I asked. What do you know about the business of writing? Very few writers live on their royalties. Most teach, practice law or medicine—keep their day jobs, in fact. I am one of the few lucky ones who makes enough to live on from writing. I am not rich by anyone’s standard. Is that what you all think? I will make a big gift to the school?”
Elizabeth Roulx looked at him, evidently disappointed. He wondered if she realized she had a shred of spinach on one front tooth. He heard Stark’s chair scrape back, saw him move toward Darnell’s end of the table. Darnell, apparently misreading his intention, stood and tapped his knife blade on his plate. Before Stark could deliver what Frank assumed must be the bad news, Darnell launched into his speech. Stark scribbled furiously in a little notebook he pulled from his hip pocket while Frank contemplated the spreading stain on his tie. Stark proffered the note he’d written. Darnell took it and slipped it in his vest pocket without reading it, never missing a beat. Stark rolled his eyes and returned to his seat.
“Elizabeth, it’s been very nice meeting you, but I’ll be going now,” Frank said.
“Now? But the Headmaster planned to speak to you after—”
“Our prodigal, so to speak,” Darnell intoned and gestured in Frank’s direction, “has returned. The son of our beloved Doctor Charles Addison Smith and a writer of national reputation in his own right, Meredith Smith has joined us today.”
Darnell led a polite round of applause. Frank nodded and sat down again and contemplated his lunch.
“I might as well eat this. It seems I’m stuck here for the duration,” he said.
***
Rosemary ate her sandwich while she read her paper. She, unlike most people who devour their morning paper with breakfast, saved hers for lunch. She believed that people’s minds worked too slowly early in the morning to absorb anything important. She’d come to that conclusion after she discovered that crossword puzzles that had her stumped before ten in the morning were a breeze after two in the afternoon. She relegated non-mental tasks to mornings—gardening, laundry, and so on. Her late husband thought the whole notion silly. He had been one of those early risers who didn’t require an alarm clock to bounce out of bed at five-thirty. He’d be showered, dressed, and out the door about the time she began to have the first inklings that a world existed on the other side of her closed eyelids.
The front page of
The Sun
carried the same depressing news it had the day before. Shootings, terrorists, political corruption. Nothing changed. She tried to remember if it had always been that way. She didn’t think so. Years ago, crime and violence seemed far away. They never locked their doors and left the car keys in the ignition. She frowned.
You sound like an old lady.
“We’ve had this conversation once already. Leave me alone.”
Her thoughts drifted, to Scott, to another, gentler age, and finally to Frank Smith.
He’s a man with a lot of hurt.
“I suppose so. Is that why I’m feeling this way?”
It doesn’t matter why you feel that way. Carpe diem
.
“Oh please, I’m not some thirty-something, perky breasted, one-hundred-twenty-pound career woman. I’m old and subject to the laws of gravity. I can’t just move in and out of relationships depending on the state of my hormones. I don’t even have hormones.”
Right. You’re an old bag ready for the scrap heap. Come on, the buzz on the street is fifty is the new thirty, so what does that make you, forty?
“That is horse hockey. Boomers, unwilling to admit they’re getting old, are in mass denial. They think they drank from the fountain of youth at Woodstock. But when the cartilage disappears from their knees and arthritis kicks in, they’ll give up that nonsense and pay attention to what their body is trying to tell them. So, I’m not young and people my age just don’t…whatever.”
Where is it written that people in their “golden years’”aren’t allowed to fall in love, have sex, or enjoy themselves?
“That’s not what I was thinking about.”
Yes it was, you hussy. Stop feeling guilty and go for it.
“Go for it? Go for what?”
Should she? Could she? Well, why not?
