Through the Hidden Door (11 page)

“Every boy in the room stand and fold his arms in front of him!” Greeves ordered in a froggy voice. Every boy did.

He began in the center aisle. He stalked first up to Rudy and made him kick off his shoes. “Give those things to me,” said Greeves. Slowly Rudy pulled out his insoles, covered with blue ink shorthand notes. Greeves pocketed them and went on to Danny.

Rudy looked not at Greeves but directly at me. In his eyes were tears. They began running down his face. He did not bother to brush them away. It was not until Danny and Matt also turned, to look at me that I understood.

“Oh, God, no!” I whispered to myself.
They think I went up to Greeves’s desk and wrote him a note squealing on them.
All of us were dismissed but the five untouchables.”

Silks caught up with me in the dorm. “Take off those boots,” he yelled.

“Okay, okay.” I put my hands up for a moment and then bent and unlaced the boots. I kicked them in his direction. He stuffed his hands in both and came up with sand.

“Where did you throw the cheat notes, Pennimen?”

“I don’t have any cheat notes, Mr. Silks! How could I put cheat notes into laced-up boots, anyway?”

“What shoes were you wearing in the exam? Tell me. Tell me right now where they are.”

“I don’t own any shoes, Mr. Silks. I have loafers, but they don’t fit anymore. You can look in my closet. I was supposed to get new ones over Christmas, but ...

Silks held me by the shirt front, his face directly over mine. I could smell the Life Saver in the back of his mouth. “You organized this. Didn’t you, Pennimen? All five boys sitting this minute in my office say you taught them chapter and verse how to cheat and gave them the notes. You’ve been doing it for years. They told me your other six systems too. You’re a ringleader. You admitted this yourself in Mr. Finney’s office last fall. Now you’ve done it again.”

“Please, Mr. Silks.” I struggled against his arm. “They came to my room last night. They asked me for notes and I said no! They stole them while I was asleep. It’s the truth!”

“Why didn’t you tell me they came and asked you?”

“Because you said never to squeal!”

Silks dropped me. “You have destroyed the careers of five promising boys. You will not get away with this.”

He walked off like a twister.

“Then what happened?” asked Finney.

“All five boys told Silks I’d tipped off Greeves they were cheating.”

“But you did not tip off Mr. Greeves.”

“Are you kidding? I just scribbled a note to Greeves asking if I could leave the exam because I was finished. Tip off Greeves! Mr. Finney, I’m not crazy! I don’t want them to kill me! I told Silks to ask Greeves what my note said.”

“And what did Mr. Greeves say to Mr. Silks?”

“He’d forgotten about my note. I couldn’t find it anywhere in the classroom. In the wastebasket, anywhere. Mr. Finney, you know Mr. Greeves is as old as God. He forgets the boys’ names in class. Sometimes I think he’s forgotten his own name.”

Finney nodded, tapped his pipe stem against his front teeth, and focused his eyes somewhere north of me. He asked, “Why didn’t you give them the notes the night before, Pennimen? You did it in the past. They would have been off your back.”

“It ... I didn’t want to be that way anymore.”

Finney used his pipe tool to free some mud from the side of his shoe. “This is what will happen,” he said. “The boys were caught cheating in front of the whole senior class. They will be put on probation for the balance of the year, deprived of honors, team sports, et cetera, et cetera. Rudy, of course, won’t have a prayer of getting into Lawrenceville or anywhere else now. His parents will have to pay the balance of his tuition for the year, as he will lose his scholarship. I know Rudy’s father. Rudy’s a carbon copy of him. He’ll thrash Rudy to within an inch of his life and make him work as a short-order cook twelve hours a day all summer to pay up instead of letting him go to football camp. You’ll have to watch out. I think the boys will try to get even with you. Martin Silks will get holy hell from the trustees.”

“Silks? Why?”

“Makes the school look bad. His first year as head. The school likes winning championships. They like getting people into places like Lawrenceville on scholarship. It looks good in June when the school publishes all the graduates’ choices of schools. Damascus was going to Choate. Hines to Taft. That’s down the drain. Nope! The boys will have to be punished because it happened in front of everybody, and the punishment for cheating is clear as day, spelled out in the Winchester student handbook. The trustees can’t sweep this one under the rug. They will be furious, and they will take it out on Martin Silks for letting an old geezer like Greeves proctor. They will say that a younger man would have paced up and down the aisles and not let such a thing happen. The trustees are fond of blaming people, and they will blame Silks. Silks is taking it out on you, but he can’t touch you. Remember. You admitted this cheating business to me honestly, in my office, last October. You have done your punishment for that and other things. You have a witness to that. Me.”

“Mr. Finney, can’t you talk to Silks?”

Finney took off his glasses, breathed on them, polished them, and squinted through them. “Silks’d sooner listen to the birds in the trees than to me,” he said. “But I can do one small thing for you, Pennimen.” He reached into a drawer beside him, fumbled through a pile of junk, and came up with a ring of keys.

“I don’t even have to ask you, Pennimen, if you will call your father, report all this, and ask to be transferred to a school in California?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. You still excused from sports?”

“No one seems to notice.”

“All right. How do you get to the stables to meet Snowy?”

“I just cut across through the trees near the old building.”

“Try a new way.” Finney took two keys off the ring. “You know where the music room is? Downstairs in the old building?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Just around the corner from the music room is a door. Before they built the new wing in 1951, that door led to the kitchen. The old kitchen hasn’t been used in over thirty years. This key opens the door that leads to it. Go down the stairs into the kitchen. Look to your right. There’s a pantry there, also not used, and opening off of it, a very long passageway. Follow the passageway to the end. Go up a set of stairs, and you’ll find another door. This second key unlocks that. You will find yourself in the middle of some brick cold frames behind the stable. No one can see where you go once you unlock the first door to the kitchen stairs. Now get back to the campus before lights out. Go on!”

I scuffed over the frosty grass in the quad. Rudy, his eyes full of tears, grew like a fat blister on my mind. I despised Rudy. I hated his guts. But his life would now change for better or for worse because of me, though I wanted no part in Rudy Sader’s life. The west dorm, choked over with leafless ivy vines, towered on one side of the quad. Such comforting lights glowed in its windows.

Just then a groan—half pain, half anger—cut into the winter night. So like the collie’s cry, but human. Rudy Sader’s voice. I felt for him and his stupid wrecked dreams of being a pro quarterback. I don’t know why, I just did, and I wanted to tell him, man to man, that I was sorry about what had happened and that I had not turned him in. I sprinted up two flights and knocked on Sader’s door.

Very slowly I opened the door. Rudy and his friends froze. The five boys stared at me as if I were a zebra. I imagined hearing the seconds, loud and angry, tick by in the air. Were they all planning to spike my chipped beef on toast with ground glass? Rudy lay on his bed in his underwear, holding a half-empty bottle of Bacardi rum against the pillow. His hair was wildly matted and his face blotched. The room contained a sick, sweet smell.

Rudy spat at me from the bed. I ducked. He got to his feet and spat right in my face. “Wait, Rudy,” I said. “I didn’t have anything—”

“You filthy little Nazi Jewboy scum,” he snarled.

I heard my own voice at a distance, as if it were on a tape. “I came to thay,” I said, “I didn’t turn you guyth in. I didn’t thay anything to Greevth. It wathn’t my fault. I’m thorry, Rudy. I—”

Danny grabbed both my arms, kneed me in the small of the back, and doubled me over head first onto Rudy’s bed.

“I’ll thcream!” I threatened him. “You’ll all be thrown out for good. You can’t drink liquor in thchool!”

Somebody dumped a dose of rum on my head. “Yeah? And you’ll smell just as drunk as we do, pretty boy.” It was Shawn.

“What do we do to him?” asked Brett.

“I wanna kill the bastard,” said Rudy. “I got nothing to lose.”

“Don’t be a jerk. You wanna wind up in the state pen?” Danny said, and through my legs, upside down, I could see him guiding Rudy to the back of the room, gently, as if Rudy were a bobbing prizefighter. Matt Hines slouched with his back against the door. Brett’s body, about a hundred and thirty pounds, held me on the bed.
Pennimen,
I asked myself,
how in hell are you going to get out of this?

“Open his mouth,” said Rudy. “Open his mouth and hold it open.”

“No!” I screamed. “What are you going to do? No!”

“Can’t leave a mark on him, Sader,” Danny warned.

“I’m gonna make him eat a stick of deodorant,” said Rudy. “You keep swallowing, Pennimen, or I’ll push it down your throat anyway.”

I clenched my teeth together against the slick green cylinder as Rudy pressed on my mouth. His rummy breath drifted over the acid perfume of the Old Spice. “Open, Pennimen, or I’ll put it somewhere else.”

“No!”

“Take his belt off.”

Danny reached under my belly for my belt. At that moment I pumped both my legs out like a kangaroo and caught Danny in the nose.

What Danny would have done next I don’t know, as there was a sudden racketing on the open window. For a second I thought it was a hailstorm. It was gravel. Bits of it landed on the floor and bed. Someone down in the quad was hurling handfuls of it at the window.

The whole dorm began stirring. Windows were opened. Lights went on. Boys began running out into the quad. The pebbles stopped. A set of footsteps jogged down the hall and stopped at Rudy’s door, and a voice yelled something I couldn’t make out.

They poured the rum out the window and hid the bottle in a clutch of vines under the outside sill. Brett yelled at the voice in the hallway to run and get some bandages and iodine. “That’ll take him fifteen minutes,” Brett whispered. They let me go. On my way out Danny bent the middle finger of my right hand farther back than it would bend.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise ...

“Go on,” said Silks. He was peering at my swollen hand.

I began the second verse of “If.” He glanced at his watch and stopped me there. “Better get that finger taped, Pennimen,” he said. “Baseball season starts soon. Since we’ve lost half our team, we need all the boys we can get.”

“Yes, sir. Do you want me anymore, Mr. Silks?”

His eyes, round and piercing, like black moons in a white sky, ran over me, up and down.
“Want
you, Pennimen? I don’t want you at all, boy. Not at all. I never did want you. You have destroyed the senior class here. There is nobody I want less than you.”

He grasped his blotter by its leather corners. “You systematically taught five of our most promising boys to cheat. You guided innocent boys in your dirty ways. You admitted this last October when you were told that you would not be expelled if you pointed the finger at others. You are no better than a mobster who sings to the police in exchange for immunity. You are no better than an experienced pickpocket who teaches a youngster his skills. You are a communicable disease in this school.”

I tried to meet his eyes. They were expressionless and still focused on my finger. “But what do you want me to do, Mr. Silks?” I asked.

“This is what I want you to do, Pennimen,” he said softly, running his tongue over his teeth. “I want you to go away.”

“Go away?”

“After that disgraceful incident in the fall when you incited the same boys to torture the headmaster’s dog, your—”

“But I didn’t, Mr. Silks. I didn’t.”

“You led them in cheating. There is no doubt in my mind that you perversely led them in everything bad you could dream up. At any rate, Pennimen, your father called the school last November. He wanted to withdraw you and send you to another school in California. You apparently refused. Think about it again.”

“I don’t understand, Mr. Silks.”

“Let me put it this way. Since you are no better than a jailbird who makes a deal with the district attorney, I will be the district attorney and you will be the jailbird. All right? This is my deal with you. You want to enter Hotchkiss next fall, am I right?”

“Yes, Mr. Silks. I was hoping to if I kept my grades up. Mr. Finney said he’d give me a clean record.”

“I am headmaster now, not Mr. Finney! Is that clear, boy?”

It was very clear. I nodded and swallowed and tried to look like an injured bird.

“I will also give you a completely clean record at Winchester, Pennimen. But you must choose to transfer immediately, right now! You may go to any boarding school that has an eighth grade—a middle school. From there, given your three-point-nine average and your completely clean record, you will easily get into Hotchkiss next year. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Well ... yes.”

“Good. Now you’re beginning to see the light. Do that, Pennimen. You may call your father now. I will arrange things quickly, and you can be in any prep school in the country by next Monday. Groton, St. Andrew’s, Milford ... If you want, I will personally recommend you to Middlesex. I happen to know the headmaster there well. From any of these schools you can get into Hotchkiss easily. You may even get into Exeter if you like. But only if you do it now, Pennimen.”

“But I ... I ...

“If you choose to stay at Winchester, I am afraid it will be my duty as headmaster to write a letter on your Hotchkiss application telling them exactly what I think of you. Then you won’t get in. Think about it, Pennimen.” Silks slipped the blotter neatly back under the corner pieces where he’d pulled it out. Then he handed me my science exam. “You’ll take the rest of your exams sitting in my secretary’s office, away from all the other boys. Believe me, Pennimen, she’ll watch you like a hawk.”