Ten North Frederick (48 page)

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Gibbsville Country Day was in the tradition of the private school that prepared the sons of gentlemen for preparatory school. It was possible to stay at G.C.D. from the fifth grade through senior high-school year, but almost no boy did so. In Buffalo there was Nichols; in Pittsburgh, Shady Side; in Wilmington, Tower Hill; in New York, Buckley and Allen-Stevenson. In Gibbsville the well-born boy went to Miss Holton's until it was time to go to G.C.D., remaining there until it was time to acquire the polish and the label of Andover, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville, The Hill, Mercersburg—among Gibbsville parents, the most popular of the noted prep schools. Gibbsville alone could not have supported a G.C.D., but it attracted the sons of the quality from the nearby mining and farming towns, and it struggled along year after year, with the annual deficits made up by private subscription by men who believed in the private-school idea. Scholastically, G.C.D. was sometimes a little better and never any worse than the public grammar and high schools. It did not field a representative football team (which was in its favor with the mothers) but it had a baseball team that played, and was always beaten by, Gibbsville High and the high schools of the nearby towns. Once or twice in a decade G.C.D. would beat G.H.S. in a dual track meet, and there were always some good tennis players at G.C.D., but the boys were aware that in most team sports they were outmanned by the public schools. The students of G.C.D. were known to the public-school boys and girls as Willie-Boys and Sissies, and the only support they got was from their sisters and cousins at Miss Holton's; but it probably did no harm to have G.C.D. take its beatings from G.H.S., and it probably did no harm when a G.C.D. boy gave a G.H.S. boy a bloody nose. It balanced things to have the rich reminded that they were outnumbered and to have the poor reminded that a rich boy could also use his fists.

The original G.C.D. building was a converted mansion at
16
th and Christiana, once the home of the Rutter family, of the Rutter Brewery. When Jacob Rutter built his house he bought a block of land, with a stand of trees, and he had what amounted to a private park within the borough limits of Gibbsville. The Rutter line died out with Jacob and for more than a year the house was not occupied, until the gentlemen who were organizing Gibbsville Academy, predecessor of G.C.D., bought the property. Half of the block was promptly sold for middle-class home sites, leaving adequate grounds for the school.

Joby Chapin was in one of the last classes to start at the Rutter house, just before the school removed to the new plant farther out on West Christiana Street. The school made real estate money on the move to the new plant, which had all modern facilities, and there was even some talk about making G.C.D. a boarding school, but the objections were too numerous and the enthusiasm too slight. Classes always got smaller after the first high-school year, when the boys were usually sent to the established prep schools. By the time a boy reached senior high-school year his class was so depleted that he was practically being tutored, which would have meant an expensive education if the teachers had been better paid.

The trustees of Gibbsville Country Day would have liked an Oxon. or a Cantab. for headmaster of the school, a pipe-smoker with a blazer and with cricket in his conversation. But Fred M. Koenig had his defenders. Frederick Miller Koenig, as his name eventually appeared in the
Daybook
, the school annual, had gone to Kutztown Normal for two years, taught for two years for money to pay his college bills, graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Lafayette, which was an acceptable college, taken his M.A. at Princeton, which gave him a Big Three label, and had been a lieutenant in the Service of Supply in France (which gave him an army record and some European travel). He was teaching English and French at Gibbsville High when he received the call from Gibbsville Country Day, a call to which he responded with dignified alacrity. He was a Reading boy, who had met his bride-to-be at Normal, and since his bride-to-be was the daughter of the third-largest grocery store in Gibbsville, the post at Gibbsville High had always been on his mind and in the mind of his father-in-law. The Country Day job meant $
200
above the high-school pay, but more desirable than that was the quick prestige.

Fred Koenig's strongest supporter on the G.C.D. board was Joe Chapin, who had originally been in favor of a Rhodes Scholar, any Rhodes Scholar. But when none was to be had, Joe suggested they look into Koenig's record, Koenig having been suggested to Joe by his father-in-law, F. W. Huntzinger, a McHenry & Chapin client and one of the most respectable Lutherans in Lantenengo County. Koenig always remembered that Joe Chapin had been his sponsor, and when Koenig took over at G.C.D., Joby was marked for special consideration. Indeed, for
special
special consideration, for as Joe Chapin's son, Joby was automatically special, without Joe's intercession in Koenig's behalf.

Koenig was always so careful not to show any favoritism that he became self-conscious about it. He would pass Joby in one of the halls, and say “Good morning, Chapin,” so stiffly that a duller boy than Joby would have sensed the self-consciousness. And Joby was not a dull boy. He had long since learned the relative positions of the citizens of Gibbsville: there were people like Harry and Marian Jackson, who worked for the family but were not afraid of you. There were people like Uncle Arthur and Aunt Rose McHenry, who gave you presents, but did not care much about you one way or the other. You stood up when they came in the room. There was Uncle Cartie Stokes, to whom Harry and Marian were respectful, but to whom your father was not respectful. There was Peter Kemp, the farmer, who worked all the time and worked for your father and mother but to whom your father and mother were respectful, not in the same way that Harry and Marian were respectful to Uncle Cartie, but still in a different way from the way your father and mother were polite to Harry and Marian. There were the people in the Main Street stores: if they did not know your name, they treated you like just another kid: if they knew your name, they called you Mister Chapin, although you were only twelve or thirteen years old. There were men and women, usually older than your father and mother, who liked all children. And there were people like Mr. Koenig, who was known to be fair, but whose treatment of you was cold and almost rude while at the same time he was a little afraid you would think he was cold or rude. In a boys' school the reputation for fairness is a master's greatest asset, greater than a reputation for efficiency (“he knows his subject”) or for jolly good fellowship or even for athletic prowess. Among the boys at G.C.D., Mr. Koenig was said to be strict but fair, but Joby did not agree. Mr. Koenig was strict but the fairness was doubtful.

When Joby was called to the principal's office for a lecture, Mr. Koenig would tell the boy about what a fine family the Chapin family were, what high hopes they had for him, what ability he had if it was only directed in the proper channels—and end up without meting out the punishment Joby had been expecting. For certain infractions of the rules a boy could expect to be kept in during recess or after school, but for the same infractions Joby would get a lecture. And Joby knew it, and so did his schoolmates.

Then in
1927
-
28
, the school year, when a more serious offense was committed, Joby was overpunished, for the word had reached Koenig that he was being overlenient with Joby.

“Take your hands out of your pocket,” said Mr. Koenig. “What's this I hear about you smoking a cigarette in the toilet?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“You
don't know?
What kind of talk is that, you don't know?”

“I don't know what you heard, sir,” said Joby.

“Oh, you want to be fresh,” said Mr. Koenig. “You think because we've been lenient out of consideration for your parents, you think you're lord and master around here. Well, you're not, Chapin. You're not. Where did you buy the cigarettes?”

“I didn't buy them, I took them from my father's box.”

“What would he say if he knew you were stealing cigarettes out of his private box?”

“I don't know,” said Joby.

“Well, I think I do. He'd say you were a thief as well as a smoker.”

“No he wouldn't. He wouldn't call me a thief.”

“Isn't that what you are?” said Mr. Koenig.

“ . . . I don't know.”

“You stole them. Isn't that what a thief does?”

“Yes.”

“Yes
sir
. You're not here to receive a medal. You're here to be punished, and don't forget that. When you speak to the masters and the principal you say
sir
, you're no better than any other boy in this school and don't think for one minute that your father wants you treated any differently, because he doesn't. Your father is a fine man and one of the leading citizens of this town, and he doesn't expect any privileges for you, young man. Well?”

“Sir?”

“Well, what have you got to say for yourself?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“Are you guilty, or are you not guilty? You know that much, don't you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, then, what are you? Guilty, or not guilty?”

“I didn't know that's what you were asking me, sir.”

“What do you think I've had you in my office for? To talk about baseball?”

“No, sir.”

“Then answer my question.”

“Which
question, sir? Gosh, you ask me a thousand questions, and I don't know which I'm supposed to answer.”

“There's only one question. Are you guilty of smoking cigarettes in the toilet and endangering the property, the lives and property of this school?”

“I smoked. You know that, sir. I was caught.”

“And I suppose if you hadn't been caught, you'd go right on smoking every day, I don't know how many times a day. Is that about the size of it?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“You don't know. You—don't—know.”

“
Go ahead and punish me!
”

“Just a minute, there. Just a minute. I'll punish you, don't worry about that. But don't you start giving orders around here, young Mister Chapin. I'll punish you, and you're not going to wish you hurried me.
Tried
to hurry me. You might have received the ordinary punishment for smoking, but we can't tolerate students giving orders and disrespect or we'd have a bedlam, not a school. Once we let the students give the orders around here we might as well close up shop. We won't have a school, we'll have a bedlam, that's what we'll have. All right, since you're so anxious to be punished, you can start now, as of this minute. You are suspended for one week.”

“Suspended?”

“For one week. One week from tomorrow you may return to school and resume your classes.”

“You mean I'm not to come to school at all?”

“I mean exactly that. An enforced vacation. And when you return you may make up the lost work, if possible. Go put your things in your locker and then leave the school and go home. I will see to it that your parents know, in case you have the mistaken idea that you are going to spend the rest of the afternoon at the moving-picture show.”

“I'll flunk if I miss a week.”

“You should have thought of that when you were endangering the lives and property of this school, and giving me disrespectful answers when I tried to question you. That's all, you may go.”

The severity of the punishment removed the active suspicion among the other boys that Joby was a suck, their word for a teacher's pet who was liable to be an informer. But the disgrace did not have the compensating effect of making him a hero. There were too many boys in the school who did not like Joby anyway, who were glad to see Chapin get what was coming to him. No boy had ever been formally expelled from Gibbsville Country Day, although a few had abruptly transferred to boarding school. Joby's suspension therefore ranked historically among the major punishments and had the effect of convincing parents as well as students that Frederick Miller Koenig was a man of character, who had the courage to stand up against the prestige of the Chapin-Stokes clan. The unfairness of the punishment also had a curious effect on Koenig himself. He knew, without going so far as admitting it, that the punishment had been disproportionately severe and that he had acted not so much on principle as on pique at the boy's manner. It taught Koenig a lesson in self-control, but of course the person who paid for the lesson was a boy just entering his teens, and in the transcript of Joby's school record there was no credit for instructing a headmaster. It was a situation calling for a variant of the medical joke that the operation was a success but the patient died.

The episode of the suspension had the effect of opening an undeclared war between Joby and authority. It was not in Edith to question the established order and she accepted the Koenig verdict without inquiring into the justice of it. In the inevitable meeting between parents and son, behind the closed doors of Joe's den, Joby told the truth, but his account of the interview with Koenig was not phonographic and only contributed confusion. He could not remember exactly what Mr. Koenig had said or what he had said in reply, and Edith lost patience when the boy said: “Mother, you're just as bad as he is.”

“How dare you!” said Edith.

“Look here, don't you speak that way to your mother,” said Joe.

“I don't care,” said the boy.

“You're going to have to be punished at home, too, I can see that,” said Edith.

“I don't care! Just leave me alone,” said the boy and ran out of the room.

“Really!” said Edith. “Now don't you go and be sympathetic with him. If you do, Joe, he'll never learn to obey.”

“Oh, I won't,” said Joe. “After all, I was the one that picked Koenig.”