A Good School (12 page)

“There’s little or no training,” Larry Gaines explained to a cluster of attentive listeners around the fireplace one afternoon. “It’s not like a regular branch of the service at all. You sign on and you ship out; that’s about it.”

Larry Gaines had tried to enlist in the Army, the Marine Corps, and the Navy – he had been ready to leave school at once for any of them – but they’d all turned him down because of an obscure physical ailment he’d never known he had. Now he had settled for his last resort, the Merchant Marine – and the Merchant Marine, which might otherwise have seemed drab and spiritless, was beginning to take on an aura of romance at Dorset Academy because of him. At the urging of Pop Driscoll and others he had agreed not to sign on and ship out right away, but he’d arranged with the dean to take his final exams and get his diploma a month ahead of time, so he could leave early in May.

“And of course there’s no uniform or anything,” he was saying. “Just regular work clothes; you buy your own. Except I imagine the guys keep dress clothes in their lockers too, so they can show a little class around the girls in Algiers, or wherever they’re going. Ah, look, I’m probably making it sound better than it is. It’s probably the most boring life in the world, chipping paint all day, and stuff like that, but what the hell; it’s the best I can do. Listen, I’ve gotta cut out. See you guys later.”

Larry Gaines never spent much time hanging around the Senior Club, though he could always command a respectful audience there. He was President of the Student Council now, and there seemed always to be matters that required his attention. “See you guys later,” he would say, and disappear into his responsibilities.

“Hey, Grove?” Pierre Van Loon said in the darkness of their double room that night. “You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Know something? The way Gaines was talking today, about the Merchant Marine and all – that really sounded nice.”

“How do you mean?”

“Ah, I don’t know; it just did. Be out working in the sun, chipping paint or whatever it is you have to do for maybe a couple of weeks at sea, then pull into someplace like Algiers and go to hell with yourself. I guess you don’t see what I mean.”

“Well, I think I do, sort of.” “Because the point is, kids in private schools don’t know anything about reality. Look: I figure I’ve got about a year left before the Army gets me, and you know what I’d like to do? Oh, I probably won’t
do
this, because my parents’d kill me, at least my father would, but I’d like to spend the whole year bumming around this country. Out to the West Coast and back, with side trips along the way. And I’d never pay for transportation: I’d hitchhike or I’d ride the freights. When I hit the oil fields I’d sign on as a roughneck. You know what a roughneck is?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about that.”

“Then when I got into the cattle country I’d work as a cowhand. I can ride. And wherever they’re building highways, I’d work as a hard-rock miner. You know what a hard-rock miner is?”

“I think I can figure it out.”

“Well, but do you see, the point is I’d always be moving on; moving on. Go broke, take a job for a while, hit the road again. And there’d be girls! Jesus, Grove, think of the
girls
. And I’d just be the lonesome stranger, always moving on.”

“Yeah,” Grove said. “Well, if you can’t do something like that now, I guess there won’t be much chance of doing it until after the war.”

“Oh, I know,” Van Loon said. “But after the war, boy, I’m really gonna – that’s really what I’m gonna do.”

“Gentlemen,” W. Alcott Knoedler said to his assembled faculty, “I wish I had encouraging news this afternoon, but I won’t lie to you. We’re in trouble.”

They were gathered in the extravagantly spacious living room of the headmaster’s residence – a room that embarrassed Knoedler’s wife (“What can I
do
in there, Alcott?”) and took young girls’ breath away when they first walked into it in their evening gowns, on the arms of their “dates,” for the annual Spring Dance. Old Mrs. Hooper had stocked the long panelled walls with thousands of leather-bound books whose pages would never be cut, and with oil portraits of worthy-looking men and women whom no one could identify. Except perhaps at the Spring Dance, when the kids did seem to have a pretty good time, it was a place of anxiety – a room where you sat and waited and found that your palms were damp in meetings like this.

“Like all private schools, we rely on tuition as our primary source of income,” Knoedler said. “In the past, from time to time, we’ve been able to draw on funds made available by Mrs. Hooper’s foundation, but that source is closed to us now. For reasons of her own, Mrs. Hooper has made clear that she plans no further financial aid.

“With a small enrollment, and with many of the boys paying
half tuition, we can’t begin to meet our costs. We’ve been operating at a deficit for some years, and we’ve reached a point of crisis.

“I met with the board of trustees last week, and a suggestion was made which I’ll pass along to you now. If each member of the faculty were to accept a voluntary cut in salary as a temporary measure – oh, perhaps twenty-five percent – we might well be able to remain solvent.”

And they turned him down. Dr. Wilson, the old history master, was the first to speak: he said he couldn’t possibly absorb a twenty-five percent salary cut, and added that he didn’t see why the faculty should be made to suffer for Mrs. Hooper’s intransigence; then Dr. Stone spoke up in agreement, and because everybody knew that Edgar Stone was the highest-paid man on the staff it was easy to follow his lead. The refusal was unanimous.

“All right, gentlemen,” Knoedler said, “I’ve presented the board’s recommendation and I’ve noted your response. I see no point in prolonging this meeting. I’ll keep you informed of any new developments.”

On leaving the headmaster’s house, Robert Driscoll held himself down to a toddler’s stroll in order to walk beside Jack Draper. It was on the tip of his tongue to say “How’re things at home, Jack?” but he thought better of it and cast about for other things to say instead. For several months now, since La Prade had gone, he’d been nagged with curiosity about how the Drapers were getting along. Had they just sort of fallen back into sleeping together again? Was that what people did? Or were there terrible scenes at night with tears and recriminations and heavy drinking and talk of divorce, until Jack passed out on the living-room sofa and the children came down and found him there in the morning?

“Jack?” he said. “Marge and I were saying just last night that we hardly ever see you anymore. Why don’t you and Alice come over for a drink some night this week?”

Draper’s walk, as well as being very slow, required him to move his arms in a trembling parody of a British soldier on parade. His head, erect and tense now in the effort of walking, was small and handsome, with close-cut blond hair beginning to recede at the temples. Even before the polio he must have been a slight man, but it had probably been the kind of slightness many women admire. “Well, thanks, Bob, that’s nice,” he said. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of days, okay?”

Then Driscoll left him, and Draper continued to make his laborious way home. He was passing through the bleak, sandy area behind Four building now, where the unfinished foundations lay like ruins. Why had they set the science building and the science masters’ houses so far away from the main part of the school? Had some mordant architect guessed there might one day be a science master barely able to walk the distance? Or maybe they had somehow predicted, those fanciful “Cotswold” architects of Mrs. Hooper’s, that there might one day be a houseful of pain out there beyond the sand – a cuckold’s house so steeped in loss that even the children’s smiles were sad.

“Jack?” Alice called from the next room. “Was there anything new?”

“Anything new?”

“You know; about the school folding up.”

“Oh. No.”

At first, soon after La Prade’s departure, Jack Draper had been torn with wondering what his wife would do. Come back to him? Take the children and leave him? The next move seemed plainly up to her, and she had refused and refused to make her position clear.

“I have to think,” she had explained. “I have to take stock. I have to work a few things out in my mind.”

Well, okay, but what exactly did all that mean? Think about what? Take stock of what? Work
what
things out in her mind?

And now it was spring. In the evenings, after dinner and before the children’s bedtime, the four of them would sit around the living room in simulation of what real families might be expected to do. He had to admit he was stiff with drink on most of those occasions: he would usually start drinking in the lab in the afternoon and keep it going with heavy shots of bourbon in the kitchen before dinner, and more afterwards.

“Why do your lips look all funny, Daddy?” Millicent asked one night.

“My lips? I don’t know; maybe it’s because I need a kiss.”

Another time he said something dry and witty to his son – he couldn’t even remember what it was – and Alice’s sweet face fell apart in laughter. Her big, lovely eyes danced briefly for him on her side of the room; just before turning away again she said “That’s funny, Jack.”

And that took him back to a time long ago, in college, when a man of much-admired worldliness had said “Know something, Jack? You’ll find there’s no greater pleasure in life than making a girl laugh. Apart from getting laid itself, of course.”

Of course. Getting laid itself. And having now made a girl laugh, was it wholly unreasonable to imagine he might have improved his chances in the area of getting laid itself? Wasn’t getting laid itself a thing almost everyone deserved? Wasn’t it what made the world go around? Even for a funny little polio victim whose arms and legs didn’t really amount to arms and legs at all, and whose wife had been fucked out of her mind by a Frenchman for a year and a half?

But every night, as he struggled out of his Brooks Brothers
clothes – oh, yes, and fuck you too, Brooks Brothers, with the terribly tactful bastards in your fitting room (“I expect you’ll want it taken in quite a bit here, sir, am I right? And the trousers taken in quite a bit here? Am I right? And here?”) – every night, as Jack Draper crawled wretchedly naked into his marriage bed, he knew his wife would not join him there. He even knew, with a cripple’s resignation and a drunkard’s terrible calm, that she would probably never join him there again.

Hugh Britt sometimes complained that his leg was “acting up”; he would sit in the
Chronicle
office kneading the thigh muscles with one strong hand while he winced in pain and blew thin, fatalistic jets of cigarette smoke that billowed back from the open pages of
The Brothers Karamazov
.

“Is that any good?” Grove asked him once.

And Britt looked up in irritation. “What do you mean, ‘any good’? It’s one of the great works of all time.”

“Yeah, well, what I really mean is, how come you can read it when your leg hurts? I mean, when I’m in pain I just want to lie down and wait for it to be over. See what I mean?”

“Grove, there are times when I simply
don’t
see what you mean. If I were to lie down now I’d be screaming, or tearing the pillow to shreds with my teeth. I happen to have a good power of concentration and I’m grateful for it in situations like this. Reading takes my mind off the pain.”

“Oh.” And Grove went back to his half-written editorial. It had started off well enough, something about how “our men overseas” might wish for Dorset Academy to become “a better school than the school we know,” but in trying to bring that idea around to a conclusion he had messed up the whole damn thing twice. He knew he could probably write smarter editorials if he read
The Brothers Karamazov
and some of the other great works
of all time, but there was the trouble: if he sat around reading the great works of all time, in or out of pain, how would he ever get his editorials written?

Then Bucky Ward came into the office, dragging a ten- or twelve-foot length of twine with many tin cans attached to it.

“I thought this might be interesting,” he said. “We could tie it to the back of Knoedler’s car and he might not notice it until he’s on the road.”

“You know something, Ward?” Britt said. “That’s the kind of thing people do when they’re nine or ten years old.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I’m slow in the head, then. Always knew there was something funny upstairs. Listen, though, you want to do this, Bill, or not? Because if not I’ll throw it away.”

“Leave it here under the desk for now, okay?” Grove said. “I’ve got to finish this damn thing.”

“Take your time,” Ward said, and he assumed a self-conscious saunter, holding his shoulders high, as he left the room. “No hurry at all.”

All winter, and well into the spring, Grove had been in the quandary of having two friends who didn’t much like each other. Sometimes it seemed that he couldn’t really consider Britt a friend – how could anything as warm and sloppy as friendship apply to an ice-cold perfectionist like Britt? – but he had to acknowledge that Britt was still the one person in the world whose approval he wanted most. And there were signs that he might soon win it, if he watched his step and didn’t fall into dumb stuff like asking if
The Brothers Karamazov
was any good. Several times Britt had expressed distaste for his present roommate, the plump Kimball, whose bed quaked in its frame every night with the vigor of his masturbation (“I don’t think he cares whether I hear it or
not
, for God’s sake”) and more than once he had left an implication, too vague to be
pressed, that he might be open to the idea of rooming with Grove next year.

As for Bucky Ward, it couldn’t be denied that the fine companionship of last fall had begun to dwindle as soon as Britt got out of the infirmary. It was strengthened from time to time – there were still long nights in the
Chronicle
office when they were hilarious or sad together, depending on Ward’s mood – but it was troubled now, at best, and that seemed to be one of the things that made Ward sad.