Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (48 page)

Much of the weekend is spent at this hotel. Despite the navy blue Pomfret School blazers many of them have brought out of the closet for this occasion, the alumni are far more comfortable mingling with each other than with students at the school. The president of Yale addresses us at a banquet. Later in the evening, when most people are watching old Pomfret football movies, several of us slip off to find a TV. Nixon assures the nation the invasion of Cambodia is only to find the secret, elusive communist military headquarters for all of South Vietnam. Four students have been shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State.

The alumni newsletter now reflects the escalation of the war. One schoolmate has flown some fifty missions in Phantom jets. Another, a former Pomfret ski-jump champion, has been killed under enigmatic circumstances in the navy, “in a scuba-diving accident at Guantanamo Bay.” Two members of a class just older than mine write that they have run into each other in Saigon: one is working for the State Department and one for Brown and Root, the huge Texas construction firm that does work for the Pentagon. They write of how, over cool drinks on a Saigon villa’s patio, they talked about all that had happened “since the class of ’58 was loosed upon the world.”

Loosed upon the world
. The image of that Saigon patio conversation has echoed in my mind ever since. It sums up something important about the school, its ambitions, its arrogance.

The roots of those attitudes go far back. The English schools on which Pomfret and its American counterparts were modeled trained the British Empire’s officials. In their mythology, even the school rebels serve king and country in the end. The classic boarding school novel is Rudyard Kipling’s
Stalky & Co.
, a high-spirited tale of pranksters always in trouble with the straitlaced school authorities. But in the final chapter Stalky is an army officer in India, heroically fighting another kind of rebel — Himalayan tribesmen resisting the Crown. In the midst of battle, Stalky rallies his troops and officers (who include a few of the old school gang) by playing a song from school days on a bugle.

Most Pomfret graduates went into the more mundane areas of imperial administration: business, banking, or corporate law. Our board of trustees even held most of its meetings at a New York bank. Yet for some students, Pomfret’s faculty and administrators had more glamorous aspirations. The school had graduated one secretary of state (Edward Stettinius) and an ambassador or two; teachers always implied that this was a highly desirable type of career. During my time at Pomfret, international relations became something of a theme: there were weekend conferences on the subject and frequent speakers — government officials, foreign students at nearby colleges. A prize catch, the son of the prime minister of Togo, a dapper man speaking Parisian French, once stayed in my room.

I was particularly encouraged to take part in these programs and to give little talks in the daily assembly on the crisis in Kashmir or whatever. One day in my senior year the headmaster was talking to me. “For every boy here,” he said, “I like to imagine that we’re helping him go in a particular direction, a direction
he
is best suited for. For you, I’ve always thought it would be something in the realm of foreign affairs, the State Department, something like that.”

Suddenly, in a blinding flash of revelation that was one of the turning points of my life, I knew with absolute certainty that whatever I did, it would
not
be in that “realm.” So: beneath all the rhetoric about the freedom to make one’s choices in life,
they
still had a plan for me after all. Their plans were no doubt hazier and less sinister than I thought then, but it was an important lesson.

Another major lesson I learned at school, and this was a more complicated one, was that
they
had serious divisions in their ranks. The typical Pomfret trustee was a Hartford insurance executive or a Philadelphia banker, large of paunch and gold of watch chain, whose definition of a good school was the one that most closely resembled the dear old Pomfret he had attended forty years before. But during my time the headmaster, like many of the teachers, was in some ways an admirable and progressive man. He wanted to make the school coed, to admit blacks, and to put less emphasis on athletics. To the pinstriped trustees these hopes seemed positively Bolshevik. The crowning insult came when he hired a school chaplain who was not an ordained Episcopalian. The long-simmering conflict finally exploded, and the headmaster resigned. These battles seem antiquated now; almost all these changes have long since been made. But at the time the issues seemed very large indeed. It was my introduction to politics: for the first time I saw that the adult world did not have a united front. Through the cracks in that façade I began for the first time to see the way to some new choices of my own.

A spring day of brilliant sunshine, with bright yellow buttercups bubbling up across the lawns and the scent of fresh-cut grass on the breeze. On the hillcrest opposite the school is still the weathered old farmhouse and barn, home of unknown neighbors from a different world. Returning to Pomfret after another ten years’ absence, I would like to feel unsentimental, superior, but despite everything, part of me still loves this place. I notice many familiar buildings are now replaced or rebuilt, and briefly I catch myself feeling, to my amazement, angry: how could they change things so?

I walk along the path with my alumni name tag, nodded at vaguely by young and unfamiliar teachers, perpetrating the great fraud that I have become a grown-up. In the center of the school grounds is a tall flagpole where we used to run up a string of brooms when the football team had an undefeated season: a clean sweep. But today this pole’s American flag is at half-mast. It is May 1980, my twenty-year reunion. Several days ago a helicopter crash killed eight commandos in a failed attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran.

Despite this perfunctory acknowledgment of troubles in the outside world, the campus mood is one of celebration. Many students are wearing a pin of crossed hockey sticks; the team won some sort of championship and next winter will play in Finland and Sweden. The sports action today is at the crew regatta. Along the lakeshore are ranged Mercedes, Audis, BMWs with New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts plates. One alumnus, wearing his old letter sweater, stands with a stopwatch and calls out how many strokes a minute a boat is making.

In chapel today prayers ask God’s blessing on the work of the school. The chaplain, resplendent in white robes, leads the singing in a strong baritone, then reads the roll of Pomfret alumni who have died in the past year and prays for the welfare of their souls, “these Thy humble servants, whom Thou has called to Thee.” But with names like William Ross Proctor, Standish Bourne Taber, and Charles Leo Abry IV, it is hard to imagine them being humble servants of anyone.

Later I’m back in a familiar classroom. A year of chemistry I studied here: into what hidden recess of my mind did that vanish? And a year of trigonometry: what
was
trigonometry, anyway? Something about angles. Today I’m here talking with a group of students interested in careers in journalism. But I also get the chance to question them. One thing I ask about is that tension between middle-class faculty and upper-class students. Is this still as strong as when I was at school?

A young woman in the back row sits up and says with great feeling, “Yes, I know
just
what you mean.” I had taken her to be a senior, perhaps, but she turns out to be a new teacher. “It’s still the same way,” she goes on. “I’ll tell you something I don’t think the students here know. There has always been a yearly ritual here at Pomfret. When the students go home in June, they’re always told to take all their stuff with them; the school isn’t responsible for anything left in their rooms. On that last day, we — the faculty — go through all the dorms collecting for ourselves things that the kids have left behind. It’s just incredible: brand-new tennis rackets, bicycles, skates, stereo equipment — I’d say about 90 percent of the kids here have better stereos than I could afford. Last year I got a wonderful long wool cape for myself — somebody just didn’t want to bother to pack it away during the summer.”

That night it is moonless and warm; the stars are out. A teacher’s house stands on the other side of a football field. A car drives up; a figure gets out to open the garage door, and for a moment, a woman’s body is silhouetted in the light. Back in these familiar surroundings, I feel automatically, for the first time in two decades, the emotion I felt here constantly: the wracking ache of desire and of outrage at this sexless environment. And of envy of those privileged teachers:
they’re doing it every night
.

Did those Pomfret faculty wives ever know how much they were lusted after, how often their every attribute was discussed, by two hundred boys? Distant and unattainable, they were the only women we saw. It was only after I graduated that it fully dawned on me how perverse it is to keep someone for four years almost totally isolated from the other sex. You could invite a girl to the school for only one Dance Weekend each term — two days tightly packed with chaperoned activities, during which, legend had it, the school authorities put saltpeter in the milk. Sometimes we had to vacate a dormitory to make room for the girls to stay; afterward, we would go through our rooms carefully to see if we could find anything feminine accidentally left behind — a hairpin, a lipstick, a whiff of perfume. If we did, there was a lot of raucous joshing, but underlying it an unspoken loneliness.

The only other occasion we got to mingle with girls also came only once or twice a term: joint glee-club concerts and dances held with Pomfret’s counterparts among girls’ boarding schools. You were assigned a blind date for dinner and the evening. The busload of girls from Miss Porter’s School, or wherever, would arrive in the afternoon, pulling into a parking lot below the huge bay windows of the dining hall. Thirty or forty boys would stand in the windows, leaning on each other’s shoulders, leering and ogling down at the girls as they filed off the bus. But all I felt was total terror. What would I
say
to my date, whom I had never seen before and whom, after five tongue-tied hours, I would likely never see again?

Perhaps only the women who live with male prep school graduates can be the ultimate judges, but my guess is that no man comes out of such an adolescence with out some emotional crippling. It was not that we looked on women only as sex objects; it was that they were no kind of object at all. They weren’t there. They didn’t exist. Except on these rare weekends. Talking to a girl your own age was an
event
, like shaking hands with the president; it was analyzed and discussed and agonized over for months afterward. Should I have said this? Asked her that? To go from such an atmosphere to one in which you live, study, or work with women as equals each day requires a major adjustment, and I think some prep school graduates never made it.

I went to Pomfret about a decade too early. Today it and almost all the other major prep schools are coed. Why did they hold out so long? Even longer, in fact, than it took most of them to become racially integrated? Ultimately these schools were set up with the same hope that is behind all institutions that are by design for men only, from infantry battalions to the Catholic priesthood: the hope that sexuality will be sublimated into zeal for achievement. The appalling thing about this is that it works. I studied harder at Pomfret — sometimes six, seven hours a day, after classes — than I ever have elsewhere, before or since. But the price was too high, and I wish I had never had to pay it. I don’t just mean the price in the dammed-up sexuality of those years, but in all the unexperienced gentleness, laughter, and, for want of a better word, roundedness of life, which cannot exist to the full where one half of the human race is kept separate from the other.

I wish I could say that I saw all these problems with prep school while I was there, but I have to admit that my four years at Pomfret were one of the sunniest stretches of my life. Yes, it was the place where I first came to understand something about social class in America. But my experience there had many other layers as well. In traditional classroom terms, I got a superb education. I learned for the first time that words could mean more than their surfaces. I learned that music could say things words could not. I entered as a boy who did his homework; I left as one who read books and, in some rudimentary way, thought about them. I had private tutorials in subjects I was especially interested in. As part of its international affairs focus, Pomfret organized summer seminars involving trips to Asia, Africa, and Latin America; I went on one of these and saw the Third World through nontourist eyes for the first time. Our seminar had three Pomfret boys and seven students from other schools; we studied race relations in the American South and in Africa. For a group of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds this was an overwhelming, life-changing experience. More than half of us eventually returned to the South as civil-rights workers, or to Africa to work or study.

There you have it: the paradox. Only by being in an elite, able to go to a place like Pomfret, did I gain access to so broadening an opportunity. The real injustice about prep school was not in the content of what we learned in the classroom or in occasional outside ventures like that trip, but in the fact that all that wealth of experience was available, with rare exceptions, only to the few who could pay. For those rich enough to afford them, schools like Pomfret are the greatest affirmative action program in the land.

However, despite occasional windows onto the outside world like that trip to Africa, the school was a little minisociety quite far from the democratic ideal. Of course, American society as a whole falls far short of that ideal also. But certain key parts of it have usually been
socially
democratic: the draft-era military, for example, and many public high schools. There, for at least one portion of their lives. Americans of all classes and colors must rub shoulders with each other, learn to speak with each other, learn that we all share the same country. On our hilltop at Pomfret there was none of this. We knew that poor and black and working-class people existed out there somewhere, but, as if we were vacationers on a yacht, they were invisible.