Skinny Island (13 page)

I left the presence on wings of elation. How easily did he dispose of my nagging problems! And, on his side, feeling that he had done something for me, the great man warmed to me. He always greeted me now, when we passed on campus, and I was on several occasions honored with the much coveted invitation to breakfast at the headmaster's house. I worshiped Mr. Widdell. It was as if I had died and gone to a paradise where everything fell into its proper place. God ruled us with an awesome benevolence, and under his sway all was for the best. Resentments and harsh criticisms of one's family were as unnecessary as they were presumptuous. How did one know that they, too, were not serving to the best of their capacity? Beyond the walls of the school lay a nation throttled in depression, but what did these few minutes of misery matter in the blaze of eternity? I learned from the headmaster that although it is our bounden duty to alleviate the sufferings of the human body, our first concern must always be with the soul. Perhaps too hastily I found myself willing to render unto Caesar just about anything Caesar claimed was his. I did not then understand that Mr. Widdell was different from me in that he had something of the saint in him and that to those who were less than saints his doctrine had pitfalls.

I had drawn pictures since I was a child, and now I took to sketching in earnest. I drew the chapel, the altar, the reredos; I made copies of the stained glass windows and illustrated biblical stories. Some of my things were reproduced in the school magazine, and I felt very holy indeed. I must have been quite unbearable.

It was in the fall of my fifth form and next-to-last year that Eric Stair, then aged twenty-five, joined the faculty of St. Lawrence's. He was a Canadian, from Toronto, an artist who had come down to New York to work on a mural in a bank, the contract for which had been canceled for lack of funds. Jobless and penniless, he had been recommended by the bank president, a St. Lawrence graduate, to fill a vacancy in the school's history department. He certainly did not seem the type for a New England prep school; he was short, heavyset and muscular, with a craggy face, small, suspicious, staring eyes and thick, messy red hair. There was a rumor that Mr. Widdell had asked him if he were willing to attend all chapel services and received the answer that he was willing—if he didn't have to pray. He was reserved and minimally polite, and seemed to look about him at the boys and the school with a faint bemusement, as if not quite believing they could be true. But his personality was strong; he had no difficulty keeping discipline. The boys knew a man when they saw one.

I had a double connection with the new master, for I was in his dormitory as well as in his class of European history. As I was very much of a "mark hound," seeking to make up for my small stature and athletic nullity with high grades, and as history had been my best subject, I was inclined to show off in class discussions. Mr. Stair watched me with a sardonic eye. He was not impressed.

"But Germany started the war, sir," I protested, when he questioned the wisdom of the sanctions imposed at Versailles. "She was greedy and cruel. The Kaiser wanted to take over the whole British empire."

"And hadn't the British wanted to take it over?"

"But the British had it, sir!"

"Hadn't they wanted it before they had it? If coveting empires be a crime, shouldn't we start our sanctions in London?"

"Well, even if there were some wrong things about acquiring their empire, haven't the British made up for it by using it as a force for civilization and world peace?"

"How wonderful that I, a colonial, should learn the glories of empire from a Yankee lad with a Scottish tag!"

The class chuckled; I was deeply humiliated.

"But whether or not the Kaiser wanted to rule the world," Mr. Stair continued, "I think we might find him easier to deal with today than this new chap, Hitler."

I could not avoid the temptation to reinstate myself in favor by impressing him with my special knowledge. "Quite so, sir. After all, the Kaiser was a grandson of Queen Victoria."

But the old queen's name did not have the magic with a "colonial" that I had anticipated.

"Is that so, Abercrombie? Well, let me ask you something. Do you know how many individuals were in domestic service in the United Kingdom when Victoria the Good breathed her last in 1901?"

"No, sir."

"More than two million. Does that tell you anything about the reign of the good queen?"

"Only that the stately homes must have been kept spick-and-span."

"Not a bad answer, Abercrombie. I can think of others."

When he gave me only a B on my paper on the influence of Colonel House on Wilson, an essay that I had entitled rather flamboyantly "Gray Eminence," and I protested to him, he replied:

"You see history too dramatically, Abercrombie. Your mind is full of kings and cardinals and royal mistresses. You must learn that it's also full of little people. Slaves. Serfs. Abercrombies. Stairs."

Stair did not advocate any political policies, domestic or international, in his classroom. Like Socrates, he simply questioned everything. But because a certain antiestablishmentarianism emanated from his very failure to enunciate or endorse any of the usual school values, he became popular with the more sophisticated members of my form, who saw in cultivating him a way of developing their own independence of home and academic rule, an independence that largely boiled down to the desire to indulge in activities neither permitted nor even possible on the campus: smoking, drinking and necking. Talking more freely than they could to other masters in Stair's study before "lights," they could at least pretend they were doing those things.

My own position with Stair was different. Because I was determined to make him give me better marks, I studied ways to please him, and I soon discovered that, for all his craggy integrity, he was not entirely immune to flattery. My genuine fascination at his utter freedom from all my hang-ups may have tempered the unctuosity of my approach and made me less objectionable. He was also amused by my drawings and in helping me to improve them. Although I could at first make nothing of the dots and squiggles of his own abstract designs, subjects of considerable mirth in our dormitory when he was not present, I was already enough of an artist to perceive that the few strong lines he would introduce into one of my sketches had radically improved it.

I was very much surprised and pleased when he asked me to sit for a charcoal sketch, although I could not help asking why an artist of his school needed a model.

"I do not limit myself to abstracts, Abercrombie," he retorted. "Every now and then I feel inclined to do a likeness."

"Why me, in particular?"

"Let's put it that I want to catch the spirit of this remarkable academy in which I find myself. As the headmaster is not an available sitter, I must seek the next closest. I think you may do very nicely."

I knew him too well now to take this as a compliment, but I was nonetheless flattered to be considered the "spirit" of anything. Something, however, a bit more serious than his gibing came out on the second and final sitting.

Stair had a bad cold and was in a foul mood, something rather rare with him. I made the mistake of asking him why he thought me representative of the school.

"You're not," he snapped. "You're representative of what they're trying to turn the boys into."

"And what is that?"

"A man who believes in the whole bloody mess." He worked vigorously for a silent minute on his sketch, as if he were cutting me into slices. "For God, for country and for a small New England church school named for a minor saint roasted on the gridiron by Romans who, perhaps because of their very lack of imagination, may have had some small glimmer of reality."

"And the other boys don't believe in that?"

"They take it for granted, which is different. I suppose one can't really blame them. They're cooped up here nine months out of the year. Hardly a whiff of the great depression outside gets through. Their families are basically unaffected. Oh, true, they've had to give up a butler or an extra cook, or close down the cottage in Maine or the fishing camp, and a few, perhaps, have actually gone to smash, but they're mostly still rich—stinking rich in contrast to ninety-nine percent of the other ants in the heap. And I suppose it's only human not to give a damn about other humans. If their parents and teachers don't, why the hell should they? But you, my lad, are a different breed. You have some kind of pygmy sense of the misery outside the gates, but you resent it. You fear it. You're like my old granny in Toronto. You think the poor are poor because they drink."

"Aren't you being a bit stiff with me, sir?"

"I don't think so. And you don't have to 'sir' me when we're alone. Well, all right, you may not be as bad as my granny, but you believe in the upper classes. You believe the Royal Navy is keeping the peace, and the British tommy is preventing his little black and yellow brothers from killing each other, and that over here, in God's country, Mr. J. P. Morgan is fighting to keep the madman in the White House from wrecking the economy. Isn't that about how you see it?"

"Well, I certainly don't think everything's so fine in the Soviet Union."

"That's right. Win the argument by calling me a commie." He made a vigorous stroke now, as if he were slashing a line through my countenance. But he wasn't. A model was a model, however much of a fascist.

"Well,
aren't
you a socialist?"

"Never you mind what I am, sonny. I told the headmaster when I came here that I wasn't going to be political, and I shan't be. But that doesn't mean I can't prick an occasional bubble of self-satisfaction."

I was thoroughly angry now. If he wasn't to be "sirred," he could take potluck in the dialogue. "If anyone pricked yours, it might blow up the campus!"

Stair threw back his head at this and emitted a roar of laughter. "So you can bite back. Good. There may be hope for you yet." He paused, his head to one side as he contemplated his work. "Well, I guess that's it," he said in a milder tone. "Want to have a look at it?"

That look may have changed my life. For what I saw in that dark, brooding, huddled figure, drawn with amazing power in so scant a number of strokes, was something more than the fear and the resentment in the features. These emotions I had known about. What I saw for the first time was the intensity of concern in the eyes fastened on the painter. The boy was alive! Alive as the painter was alive! It had never occurred to me that I was alive. And it had certainly never occurred to me that a painter obsessed with geometrical figures that were never completed, lines that went nowhere and dots that floated in limbo, could be the one to prove my existence. "I am in a Stair drawing," I could murmur after Descartes, "therefore I am!" I knew then and there that I was in the presence of a great artist.

From now on I attached myself, as much as the school schedule permitted, to Eric Stair. Perhaps because he regretted the harshness of his strictures on one so young, perhaps because every man has a corner in his heart for a worshiping slave, a devoted spaniel, he tolerated me. He even allowed himself at times to be amused by me. And he gave me serious instruction now in my art.

The headmaster, the angels, the glory of God, disappeared in a clap of thunder like Kundry's castle in
Parsifal.
I made desperate plans in my mind—not daring to tell my family—of skipping college and going straight to art school. And then there came a chance of actually introducing my new hero to my family.

Mother and Father never came up to school, but in the Easter vacation of that year they had received the loan of a large apartment in New York from a cousin of Mother's, and all the Abercrombies moved joyfully into town. I had a room with two beds, so I could have a guest, and when I heard that Mr. Stair had no place to go over Easter and was planning to stay at the school, I made bold to invite him to come to us. He accepted, with evident surprise, but with alacrity. I did not know at the time that he had a girl friend in New York.

He and Mother hit it off immediately. I was rather disgusted to note that she seemed to be actually flirting with him! They both showed me sides of themselves I had not seen before: Eric lost his sardonic, superior, detached school air and was full of chuckles and slightly off-color jokes, while Mother showed a concern about modern art and letters that I had not previously suspected.

"Your ma likes a man around," Eric told me one morning when we were alone at breakfast. "She hasn't totally forgotten she's a woman."

I was a bit shocked. "Why should she? She has Father."

"What is it they say? Thirty years is a long time with the same piece of meat?"

"If you're implying, Mr. Stair, that my mother—"

"Isn't dead below the waist? Yes, I am, my friend. Of course, no son can abide the idea that his mother is subject to sexual urges. But that doesn't mean she's neuter."

I was startled by this idea of Mother, so stout and matronly. But my respect for Eric was all-encompassing. What I minded far more than the impertinence of his suggestions was the ease with which Mother had taken him away from me.

He was not, however, as it turned out, discussing sex—or even the fantasy of it—between himself and Mother. He was discussing sex between himself and somebody else. What Mother was doing, incurable romantic (like so many gossips) that she was, was persuading him to marry his girl friend then and there and present the headmaster, at the beginning of the spring semester, with a fait accompli. And she succeeded. One morning at breakfast, as she beamed at him down the table, Stair announced to my bewildered and disapproving self that he and I and Mother would be going at noon to the Municipal Building, where he was to be joined in wedlock to a Miss Janice Hart.

Mother had not met Miss Hart, and even she was a bit disillusioned when we encountered this handsome, marble-faced, raven-haired, and only too evidently efficient and officious young woman in the little lavender room where the godless marry without benefit of clergy. Miss Hart would have given the back of her hand or worse to a priest. She greeted Mother and me in a clipped, perfunctory manner and proceeded to take over Eric and instruct him on what had to be done as if he were a tousled schoolboy and she a matron who could spare little time with recalcitrant pupils. When we repaired to our apartment afterwards to drink a bottle of champagne, she offered a mock toast to the school whose faculty family she was about to join.