Old School (6 page)

George turned and started across the quad.

I followed. Are you backing out or not?

He didn’t answer.

Wait’ll he gets you alone, you big baby. He’ll chop you into little pieces.

I stopped and watched him bend into the wind, coattails streaming.

Frost didn’t turn up at Blaine Hall that night, but Mrs. Ramsey did. Her solitary entrance put everyone on alert, like a song going up an octave. Faculty wives didn’t attend such gatherings without their husbands, and as adviser to the English Club Mr. Ramsey was supposed to serve as host. Mrs. Ramsey said he had a touch of the flu, and wanted her to stand in for him, and pay his respects should Robert Frost appear. I heard her tell this to some masters and their wives as she carried a plate of cookies around the crowded room. Then she said it to Bill White and me in the same words and with the same helpless shrug, pursing her lips in sympathy for her ailing husband.

Bill and I were standing by the fireplace. We each picked a cookie, and as she told her brave little lie Bill reached out and took the plate from her and set it on the mantel, below the picture of the Blaine Boys. She relaxed and made no move to go. I was struck by Bill’s confidence. Somehow I didn’t like it, but the result was fine—having Mrs. Ramsey linger with us.

She said she’d heard Frost read once before, when she was a student at Foxcroft, and afterward he’d met with the girls and talked about everything under the sun. He was very funny, which surprised her, though she supposed it shouldn’t have, and a terrible flirt. Of course he got plenty of encouragement.

The heat from the fire brought a flush to her face and made her perfume thicker, headier. She turned to Mr. Rice, an English master and a southerner himself, who was tapping the ashes from his pipe into the fireplace. Do you think he’ll come tonight? she asked.

Frost? I doubt it. He seemed pretty well played out by the end there.

Shoot, she said. She glanced toward the door as another group of boys came in, then turned toward Mr. Rice. Ramsey says y’all’re bringing that Ayn Rand woman here.

Me—bringing Ayn Rand? What would Mrs. Rice say?

You know what I mean.

Bill and I looked at each other.

There may’ve been some talk about it, Mr. Rice said.

Oh, go on. It’s true and you know it.

Roberta.

I know, I know, she said. Boys, you didn’t hear a word. But still—Ayn Rand!

Honestly now, Roberta, have you read anything of hers?

Why, sure! Not a whole bunch. A little. A couple pages of one book, in a drugstore. I guess you’d have to say I haven’t, really.

Nor have I, Mr. Rice said. And until I do I will refrain from poisoning these innocents against her.

I’ve read her, Bill said.

We all looked at him.

The discerning Mr. White! I am shocked, Mrs. Ramsey said, but I could see that she was amused by the coolness with which he claimed this dubious ground.

She has some interesting ideas, he said.

Just then some of the boys started to sing, and others chimed in, the masters and their wives looking on tenderly. When I first arrived here I had tried not to gape whenever a bunch of boys suddenly gave voice like this, on the bus coming home from a game, in a sound-swelling stone hallway. It was like being in a movie of some Viennese operetta where everybody in the hotel lobby bursts into song, the doorman in his field marshal’s coat chiming in with a comical solo. Now I too knew the songs, and quickened to those moments when we leaned together, watching one another for cues, and joined our voices.

The singers began to gather around the fireplace. Mr. Rice gave way and drifted back toward the other masters, but Mrs. Ramsey stayed with us and was soon surrounded by the chorus we’d become. She swayed to the music, laughing softly at a witty stanza, closing her eyes at a romantic line. She didn’t so much listen to the songs as receive them, as if we were serenading her. And indeed we were. She was a woman alone among us, eyes shining, color high, a pretty woman made beautiful by tribute of song. We could see our power to charm her and make her beautiful, and this gave boldness to our voices. All the poetry of the night, the agitating nearness of this young woman, the heat of the clove-scented room and the knowledge of the cold outside—all this was somehow to be heard in the songs we addressed to her. It was exciting and not quite proper, stirring and in some way illicit. It was a kind of ravishing. When one of the masters called a halt to it after several numbers—only as an afterthought pleading the lateness of the hour—we broke off as if coming out of a trance, hardly knowing where we were.

Mrs. Ramsey seemed a little dazed herself, and skittish. She collected some dirty cups and wandered back to the cider bowl, where I saw her in conversation with the Greek master’s elderly wife. The next time I looked she was gone.

It was obvious that Frost wouldn’t show. Still, I stayed until the end, even offered to help with the cleanup, but the wives stuffed my pockets with cookies and sent me packing.

After breakfast I chanced some demerits and skipped my warm, easy chore—helping sort that morning’s mail—to join a crew of third formers who’d been assigned the job of rolling and lining the clay tennis courts overlooking the headmaster’s garden. They glanced at me curiously but said nothing, these melancholy squirts with pallid faces hunched deep in the coats they were supposed to grow into. After a brief show of helping I broke off and stood by the fence, watching the garden. I kept my vigil for half an hour or so. No one came. I figured George had chickened out after all, the big baby.

But I was wrong. We walked to our dorm together after dinner that night—George couldn’t hold a grudge—and he told me he’d spent over an hour alone with Frost in the headmaster’s parlor. They’d started talking and never made it outside. Frost hadn’t said much about George’s poem, not in so many words, anyway, but he recited a few of his own and gave George some pointers. He also gave him an inscribed copy of his
Complete Poems,
and an invitation to drop by for a visit should he ever find himself in the neighborhood.

Ah, I said. Great.

We walked along. Then George said that Frost had left him with some advice.

What was that?

Do you know where Kamchatka is?

Not exactly. Alaska? Somewhere up there.

Mr. Frost told me I was wasting my time in school. He said I should go to Kamchatka. Or Brazil.

Kamchatka? Why Kamchatka? Why Brazil?

He didn’t explain. He was going to, but then he had to leave.

Jesus. Kamchatka.
Kamchatka.

Later that night I went to the library and looked it up. A peninsula in the remote far east of the Soviet Union, on the Bering Sea. Very few people lived there. It was dark half the year. They lived on the salted meat of salmon and also of bears, which greatly outnumbered the people and proved a sorrow to the unwary. When the taiga wasn’t frozen over, it swarmed with biting insects. There were many volcanos and they were still active. The only picture in the Kamchatka entry showed two figures in parkas watching the top of a mountain being carried skyward on a fist of flame.

I closed the encyclopedia and sat listening to the wind rattle the mullioned panes behind me. What was it about Kamchatka, that a young writer should forsake his schooling to go there? Spectacle, maybe. The drama of strange people living strangely. Danger. All this could be good matter for stories and poems. But Frost himself had lived in New England all his life at no cost to his art, and I wondered if he’d ever even been there. I guessed not. But it meant something to him, Kamchatka, something to do with the writer’s life, and what else could it mean but hardship? Solitude, darkness, and hardship. But he had also mentioned Brazil. I rose from my deep chair and crossed the room past boys dozing over books and exchanged the
K
volume for
B.

ÜBERMENSCH

The rumor was true—Ayn Rand would be our next visiting writer. Some of the masters were sore enough about this to let the story of their failed protest sift down to steerage. It seemed that the chairman of the board of trustees, Hiram Dufresne, an admirer of Rand’s novels, had insisted on the invitation. Mr. Dufresne was also very rich and rained money on the school—most recently the new science building and the Wardell Memorial Hockey Rink, named in honor of his roommate here, who’d been killed in the war. He visited often and liked to give the blessing before meals, serving up plenty of Thees and Thous and Thines; and afterward he would join us in Blaine Hall and lend his surprisingly high voice to the singing—a big, happy-looking man with an obvious orange hairpiece and a shiny round face and little square teeth like a baby’s. He once stopped me on the quad to ask where I hailed from and how I liked the school, and as I gave my gushing answers he smiled and closed his eyes like a purring cat.

The headmaster invited Ayn Rand—so the story went—only because he was about to start a drive for scholarship funds and needed Mr. Dufresne’s support. A small party of masters came to object, and Mr. Ramsey used an impertinent metaphor, at which point the headmaster blew up and sent them home with hard feelings against both him and Dean Makepeace, who’d taken his side. It was a measure of their resentment that these masters let us hear so much about this dispute.

Ayn Rand would visit in early February. By the time the announcement went out, just before Christmas break, I’d already heard the story behind it and was trying to figure out who held the high ground. Was the headmaster selling out, or were these masters indulging a mandarin snobbery regardless of the result? As a scholarship boy, I knew how I’d feel about losing my shot because some pedant wanted to show off his exquisite taste; but I was also affected by the masters’ conviction that Ayn Rand simply did not belong in the company of Robert Frost or Katherine Anne Porter or Edmund Wilson or Edna St. Vincent Millay or any of the other visitors whose photographs hung in the foyer of Blaine Hall. The school, they believed, would lose no less than part of its soul by playing host to her, and to them the money made it even worse—
whoring after strange gods,
as Mr. Ramsey supposedly had put it.

By now I’d picked up enough swank to guess that Ayn Rand was as bad as she was popular, and she was very popular. In a smirky spirit I pulled a copy of
The Fountainhead
off a book rack in the train station as I was leaving for Christmas break, read a few pages for laughs, forgot to laugh, and got so caught up I decided to buy it. There was still a man ahead of me at the cash register when the conductor began his last call. The clerk was old and slow, damn his eyes. I stood there in a sweat, knowing I should give up and leave but unable to surrender the novel. In the end I made the train at a dead run, suitcases nearly wrenching my arms out of their sockets. But I had it—the fat book swinging in my raincoat pocket, banging against my thigh.

I was bound for Baltimore to spend the holidays with my mother’s father and his wife. The poky local was packed with boys from school, and on any other trip I would have been horsing around with the rest of them, but this time I found a nearly empty car and settled in with the novel. At the next stop down the line we took on a bunch of girls from Miss Cobb’s Academy. I watched them milling around on the platform, waiting to board, and saw a girl I’d met at their Halloween dance. Her name was Lorraine—Rain, she called herself. By the third slow-dance we’d been pushing up close together, so close that one of the monitors wandering the floor tapped me on the shoulder with her pointer, which meant we had to retreat to opposite sides of the room and couldn’t dance with each other again. Later I saw her making out with my classmate Jack Broome, which didn’t stop me from writing her an ironically jocular letter a few days later. She never wrote back. Whenever I thought of that letter, as I often did, every phrase glowed with stupidity, made even more garish by the dead silence of its reception.

Rain came into my car, another girl at her elbow. Cigarette smoke curled from her nostrils. They stopped in the doorway and looked the car over. Her friend said something and Rain laughed, then she saw me and stopped. She was thrown. So was I. I had to force myself not to look away. A few weeks ago I’d been nudging a boner against her and she’d been sort of nudging back, the two of us holding this thing between us like an apple in some birthday game. Then she’d betrayed me and snubbed me. Now what?

I could see her decide to brazen it out. She said something to the other girl and came down the aisle, steadying herself on the seatbacks, long camel overcoat swaying to the rhythmic sideways lurch of the train. She was a redhead with beautifully arched eyebrows and pouty lips, her pale forehead faintly stippled with acne scars. When she talked to you she leaned back and narrowed her eyes as if sizing you up. She stopped beside me and asked where I was going, and when I said Baltimore she wondered if I knew some friend of hers who lived there.

I repeated the name thoughtfully, then said no, I didn’t think I knew her.

Well, you should, Rain said. She’s stupendous great fun. I’ll tell her to look out for you.

Terrific.

She dropped her cigarette and ground it out, her leg flashing forward from the pleats of her skirt. She had on black stockings. Then she glanced back at her friend. Well, she said—Oh, don’t tell me! She plucked the novel off my lap. Do not tell me you’re reading this book!

It seemed useless to deny it.

She flipped through the pages, then stopped and began to read. Oh, God, she said, and went on reading long enough for her friend to look impatient. I waited, smiling idiotically. Dominique is my spirit guide, Rain said. You know what I mean?

Well, sure, I said. Absolutely.

Roark too, she said, but in a different way. I have a
completely
different thing with Roark. I’m not even going to try to describe that.

I know what you mean, I said, then added, Probably like what I have with Dominique.

Her friend called out and jerked her head toward the next car. Rain held the book out, then pulled it back. Can I borrow it? I don’t have a
thing
to read.

No. Afraid not.

Please? Then, in a low voice: Pretty please?

No. Sorry.

She looked at me in that measuring way of hers. Maybe she was wondering whether I would take the book by force if I had to. She came up with the right answer.
Okay,
she said, and handed it over.

Rain hadn’t bothered to close the book. I glanced over the pages she’d been reading and found this exchange between Dominique and Roark:
I want to be owned, not by a lover, but by an adversary who will destroy my victory over him, not with honorable blows, but with the touch of his body on mine. That is what I want of you, Roark. That is what I am. You wanted to hear it all. You’ve heard it. What do you wish to say now?

Take off your clothes.

I read without stopping until we pulled into New York, where I took an empty bench in the station and went back to the book as my schoolmates played the fool around me. One boy had gotten plastered on the train and was puking into an ashtray, and a couple others were pretending to be drunk. What sheep!

It was dark when I boarded the train to Baltimore. Now and then I stopped reading to study my reflection in the window.
His face was like a law of nature—a thing one could not question, alter, or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.

My cheeks weren’t hollow and my eyes weren’t gray, but my mouth surely tightened with contempt over the next weeks as I read and re-read
The Fountainhead
and considered how shabbily this world treats a man who is strong and great, simply
because
he’s strong and great. A man like the architect Howard Roark, who refuses to change even one angle of a design to advance his career and who, when his finest work—a housing project—is secretly modified during construction, goes there and personally dynamites the whole thing to smithereens rather than let people live in such mongrelized spaces. His genius is not for sale. He is a free man among parasites who hate him and punish him with poverty and neglect. And he has sex with Dominique.

Dominique seems like a regular glacier as she rolls over the men in her path. With her
air of cold serenity
and her
exquisitely vicious mouth,
she treats Roark like dirt, talking tough to him, even smacking his face with a branch, but underneath she’s dying for him and he knows it and one night he goes to her room and gives Dominique exactly what she wants, with her fighting him all the way, because part of what she wants is to be broken by Roark.
Taken.

This was new and interesting to me—the idea that a woman’s indifference, even her scorn, might be an invitation to go a few rounds. I felt like a sucker. It seemed that all my routine gallantries and attentions had marked me as a weakling, a slave.

I was discovering the force of my will. To read
The Fountainhead
was to feel this caged power, straining like a dammed-up river to break loose and crush every impediment to its free running. I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desires—nothing between me and greatness itself—but the temptation to doubt my will and bow to counsels of moderation, expedience, and conventional morality, and shrink into the long, slow death of respectability.

That was where the contempt came in. I had stayed with my grandfather and his wife on other vacations, and found them kindly but dull. Grandjohn was a retired air force colonel whose specialty had been photo analysis. While studying pictures of German trains during the war, he’d spotted a certain marking that led to an important bombing run. My mother told me that story. Grandjohn didn’t tell stories. After the war he’d worked in an office at the Pentagon before getting put out to pasture. At first I’d attributed his blandness to a professional habit of secrecy, and made it romantic—monotony as cover.

This time, though, I watched Grandjohn and his wife with a cold eye. How could he have spent so many years in the air force without learning to fly? Thirty years around Mustangs and Tomcats and Saber Jets, and he seemed happy to pilot a desk to his retirement party.

Patty was his second wife, a friend of my grandmother’s who’d married him after Grandmargie died. Patty was boring too. She read him the day’s news while he peered at the crossword puzzle through his half-moon glasses.
They say they’re going to widen the road where that car went off with all those kids.
She had covered the floors of their house in thick white carpets that deadened the air and made whatever you said in that woolen silence sound like the sudden caw of a crow on a damp day.

I began to feel their kindness as a form of aggression. Patty was pitilessly solicitous. I couldn’t touch a book without getting grilled about the sufficiency of light and the comfort of the chair. Was I warm enough? Did I need a pillow for my back? How about one of the five thousand Cokes they’d stored up in anticipation of my visit? Grandjohn kept telling me how lucky I was to have my mother’s eyes, and how proud of me she would have been. Sometimes I had to go into the bathroom and scream silently, rocking from side to side like a gorilla, my head thrown back, my teeth bared.

This, I decided, this sadistic dullness, this excruciating compulsion to please, was how you ended up after a lifetime of getting A’s in obedience school. Roark had worked in a quarry, hewing granite blocks with a chisel, rather than take a job doing tame architecture. He refused to think as others would have him think. Had Grandjohn ever done anything else? Had Patty ever thought at all? Christ! How could they last another hour like this without cutting each other’s throats?

I fled the house every chance I got, riding a bus the ten miles into Baltimore from Wilton Oaks, their housing development. It rained steadily through Christmas into the new year. I walked the glistening streets in a fury of derision, wet and cold, sneering at everyone except the drunkards and bums who’d at least had the guts not to buy into the sham. Despising any sign of uniformity, I saw uniforms everywhere—not only on soldiers and policemen, but on high school girls and housewives out shopping. The businessmen struck me as especially pathetic in their hats and suits and London Fogs, each with some laughable flag of individuality hanging from his neck.

The Fountainhead
made me alert to the smallest surrenders of will. Passing a shoe store, I saw a young salesman in the act of bending over a customer’s foot. I stopped by the window and stared at him, hoping he’d sense my rage and disgust.
You—is this your dream? To grovel before strangers, to stuff their corns and bunions into Hush Puppies? And for what—a roof overhead and three squares a day? Coward! Fool! Men were born to soar, and you have chosen to kneel!

But he never looked my way. Instead he continued to chat up his customer, a grizzled old guy in overalls, all the while cradling the man’s stockinged foot in one hand, examining it as if it were an object of interest and value. The salesman laughed at something the geezer said, then lowered the foot gently to the sizing stool. He rose and walked toward the back of the store. The old guy, smiling to himself, fingers laced across his stomach, stared past me into the street.

I returned to school three or four days before we were actually due back. Only a few boys were around, luckless scholars retaking tests they’d flunked, red-eyed swimmers tuning up for the season; otherwise the place was deserted. My reason for cutting the break short wasn’t just to get away from Grandjohn and Patty. Our entries for the Ayn Rand competition were due the third week of January, and I wanted to get a jump on my story before classes started. But I wrote nothing. I took long walks through the snowy woods and fields, watching myself do it, admiring my solitude as if from a great height. Like Howard Roark, I kept a cigarette clamped in my executioner’s lips—once I got a safe distance from the campus—and between these bouts of passionate striding I pigged out with the jocks at the training table and lay on my bed reading
The Fountainhead
for the third time.