A Good School (2 page)

But it would take me years to see what brighter people seemed to notice right away, that there was something fanciful and even specious in the very beauty of the place – a prep school that might have been conceived in the studios of Walt Disney. And this was another thing I was a long time in learning, though I suppose I might have guessed it from the tone of the woman’s voice at Jane’s wedding: Dorset Academy had a wide reputation for accepting boys who, for any number of reasons, no other school would touch.

Back in New York and filled with high purpose, my mother made an impassioned telephone call to my father, at the office, to get the money. I think it took several such calls, but eventually, as usual, he came through. The academic paperwork was accomplished with surprising dispatch, and I was enrolled as a member of the fourth form (tenth grade), to begin my studies in September.

The next step was to buy my school uniform, for which the men’s clothing department at Franklin Simon’s held the
exclusive franchise. In the daytime, Dorset boys wore tasteful gray tweed suits – the clerk said two of these were customary, but we held the line at one – and there was an option to wear the official Dorset blazer, of burgundy flannel with blue piping and the school crest on its breast pocket, which we declined to buy. There was a separate, mandatory uniform for evening: a double-breasted black jacket and striped trousers, a white shirt with a stiff detachable collar (regular or wing) and a black bow tie.

“Now,” my mother said as we left the store. “You’re a Dorset boy.”

Not quite. The part of the headmaster’s spiel that had interested me most was that Dorset boys performed “community service” – they felled trees, they did farm work, they rode around like laborers in the beds of pickup trucks – and so our shopping wasn’t complete until I’d taken my mother to an Army and Navy store and picked out the right kind of dungarees and work shirts, the right kind of high-cut work shoes and an imitation Navy pea coat. If all else failed, I felt I could hold my own at Dorset Academy in an outfit like that.

It isn’t hard to guess how my father must have felt about all this. The notion of an expensive boarding school must have struck him as preposterous, and the cost of it must surely have put him into debt. But he was very agreeable about it to me. He took me on a rare visit to his West Side apartment, just the two of us, and served a good dinner of lamb stew that I think his girlfriend must have left simmering on the stove for us that afternoon (I had met her on several nervous occasions, but she’d probably decided to leave us alone that evening). His home was refreshingly clean and neat after the chaotic sculpture shop where I lived; when we’d stacked the dishes we sat around talking for a couple of hours – hesitantly and awkwardly, as
always, but I remember thinking we’d done better than usual. And he sent me home that night with two gifts that he thought might be useful for a boy going away to school – a well-worn, heavy suitcase of the old-fashioned kind called a “Boston bag” that finally fell apart during my senior year, and a fitted leather shaving kit, new-looking and stamped with his initials, that stayed with me all through my time in the Army until I lost it somewhere in Germany.

And I imagine he must have been agreeable about it to everyone else. I can picture a scene that might have taken place in the outer office of his floor when he and another employee, in their shirtsleeves, each with a handful of business papers, might have paused to exchange friendly greetings over the allday clatter of business typewriters. I see the other man as being bigger and heartier than my father, possibly extending his free hand to clasp my father’s shoulder.

“How’s the family, Mike?” he would say. My father’s name was Vincent, but everyone in the office called him “Mike”; I’ve never known why.

“Oh, they’re fine, thanks.”

“That pretty little girl of yours gonna be getting married soon?”

“Oh, I don’t know – not too soon, I hope; but sure, pretty soon, I suppose.”

“You better bet she is. She’s a sweetheart. And how’s the boy?”

“Well, he’ll be going off to prep school in the fall.”

“Yeah? Prep school? Jesus, Mike, isn’t that costing you an arm and a leg?”

“Well, it’s – not cheap, but I think I can handle it.”

“Which prep school?”

“Place called Dorset Academy, up in Connecticut.”

“Dorset?” the man would say. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard of that one.”

And I can see my father starting to turn away then, concluding the pleasantries, looking tired. He wasn’t old that summer – he was fifty-five – but within eighteen months he would be dead. “Well,” he would say, “as a matter of fact I’d never heard of it either, but it’s – you know – it’s supposed to be a good school.”

At fifteen, Terry Flynn had the face of an angel and the body of a perfect athlete. He was built on a small scale, but he was utterly beautiful. Walking fully dressed among his friends, he moved with a light, nimble, special grace that set him apart from everyone; just by watching him walk you could picture the way he would leap to catch a forward pass, evade any number of potential tacklers and run alone into the end zone for the winning touchdown as the crowd went wild.

And if Terry looked good in his clothes, that was nothing compared to his performance every day in the dormitory when he stripped, wrapped a towel around his waist and made his way down the hall to the showers. He had what is called muscle definition: every bulge and cord and ripple of him was outlined as if by the bite of a classical sculptor’s chisel, and he carried himself accordingly. “Hi, Terry,” the boys would call as he passed, and “Hey, Terry”; within a very few days after his arrival at Dorset Academy, Terry Flynn had become the only new boy in Three building to be universally called by his first name.

In the shower room, which also contained the two toilet stalls and four sinks on that end of the hall, he was splendid. He would make a modest little show of whisking the towel away from his loins, proving he was hung like a horse; then he would step into
the hot spray and stand there posing, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, a soaked and glistening statue. The little-finger of his right hand had been broken once in a football game and never mended properly; it wouldn’t bend, and the delicate stiffness of that finger, which looked at first like an affectation, lent just the right note of insouciance to his personality.

Dorset was Terry’s fourth prep school, but he was only in the second form – he was still learning to read – and so his classmates were not his contemporaries. In the hours before lunch he associated with his classmates, a cluster of thirteen-year-olds each of whom would feel warm and silly all over whenever Terry smiled at him; the rest of his time he gave to his contemporaries. His room was the most popular gathering-place in that section of Three building and was sometimes honored by the presence of older boys, sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds, who would drop in to join the horsing around. Terry didn’t talk much, but he usually managed to say the right thing when he did. And he had a memorable laugh, an explosive “Bubba-
hah!
” that could be heard all up and down the hall.

“Hey, d’ja hear about Mr. Draper and his home brew?” someone said on one of these social occasions. Mr. Draper was the chemistry master, a frail man so crippled by polio in all four limbs that he could barely walk and barely hold a pencil. “MacKenzie had to go over to the lab last night to get a book or some damn thing, and when he turned on the lights there’s Draper on the floor, flat on his back, waving his arms and legs around in the air like some – you know, like some bug tryna turn himself over? So MacKenzie gets down and picks him up – he says he only weighs about sixty-five pounds – and this terrific smell of alcohol hits him: Draper was
plastered
.”

“Bubba-
hah!
” Terry Flynn said.

“He’d been sucking up all that home brew he makes in the
back of the lab – you ever seen that big whaddyacallit? That big tank, like, with the hose kind of thing sticking out of it? – and he’d gone and fallen all over himself. Jesus, if MacKenzie hadn’t of come along he’d of been on his back all night. So MacKenzie puts him into a chair and old Draper looks like he’s gonna fall out of that too, and he says ‘Please get my wife.’ So MacKenzie takes off to the Drapers’ house and gets Mrs. Draper—”

“Was she alone?” another voice interrupted. “Was she alone, or was Frenchy La Prade in bed with her?”

“Bubba-
hah!
Bubba-hah-
hah!
” Terry Flynn said.

“—I don’t know, I guess she was alone; anyway, the two of ’em manage to get old Draper home and everything, and then Mrs. Draper says to MacKenzie, she says ‘This can be just between ourselves, all right?’”

There were a number of English boys at Dorset that year, refugees from the war, and they tended to be favored at faculty teas because of their good manners. One of them was Richard Edward Thomas Lear, who roomed across the hall from Terry Flynn. He stood very straight, he had rich black hair and bright eyes and might have been a handsome boy except for his mouth, which was as loose and wet as a rooting animal’s.

“You must miss your family terribly,” Mrs. Edgar Stone said to him one October afternoon, leaning over to pour more tea into his cup. “And I do wish you’d tell me more about Tunbridge Wells. Has there been much bombing there? I’ve just finished reading
The White Cliffs
and I found it wonderfully moving, though of course my husband says it’s not a good book.” Mrs. Stone was the scatterbrained wife of the English master, and this was an important house to visit because the Stones had a sweet, shy daughter of fifteen named Edith. She was seldom home, but there was always a chance. Besides,
Mrs. Stone herself wasn’t half bad: when she leaned over with the teapot that way, if you were lucky, you could get a nice view of ample, creamy breast all the way down to the nip.

“I hope Tunbridge Wells isn’t much changed, Mrs. Stone,” Richard Edward Thomas Lear said. “I shall want to see it again as I’ve remembered it.” Then, knocking back his tea, he stood up. “I’m afraid I must go now. Thanks ever so much.” And when Mrs. Stone turned away to call her husband from the study, Lear reached out one hand, gathered up six expensive chocolate-dipped cookies and thrust them into the side pocket of his Dorset blazer.

“Good having you, uh, Lear,” Dr. Stone said, blinking in the doorway.

“It’s been a pleasure, sir.” Smiling there with one hand sunk in his blazer pocket, he was the picture of a courteous departing guest. “Thank you both again.”

He ate all the cookies in rapid succession as he walked out across the quadrangle toward Three building. Upstairs in his room, feeling a little queasy from the surfeit, he got undressed for his shower. Lear had nothing to fear from the scrutiny of the shower room: he might not be as spectacular as Terry Flynn but he was all right, his prick was adequate, and he had powerful, admirably hairy legs. Another thing: he knew better than anyone how to snap a wet towel against the buttocks of other bathers.

Sometimes, though, and particularly at this hour of the day, an unaccountable melancholy settled on him. He wanted to punch and wrestle and shout; those were the only activities that could make him feel fit again. With his shower completed and his clothes changed for dinner, he went out into the hall and found Art Jennings intently flicking specks of lint off his black jacket. Jennings was a hulking, amiable, nearsighted boy; he was bigger than Lear, but that would only make it more stimulating.

“My God! Look!” Lear cried in a shocked voice, pointing dramatically toward the shower room, and when Jennings turned to look he stepped in and punched him with all his strength on the upper arm.

“
Ow!
Son of a
bitch!
” Jennings tried to punch him back but missed – Lear had stepped out of range and stood smiling there, his wet mouth glistening – and then they were all over each other, locked in a series of clumsy wrestling holds as they swayed and fell into Jennings’ room. First they were on the floor, where they knocked over the chair and Jennings’ glasses fell off; then they were on the bed, where one of Lear’s flailing feet scraped a long rip in the sailing chart Jennings had used to decorate his wall. Six or eight other boys passed the open door and saw them, without much interest. In the end it was Terry Flynn who broke them up, as casually as if he were separating two puppies. “C’mon, guys,” he said. “That was the three-minute bell.”

Gasping for breath, rubbing their sore limbs and necks and ribs, they got dizzily to their feet. Their evening clothes were ruined: one shoulder seam of Lear’s jacket was torn out, both their shirts were gray with sweat and their starched collars and bow ties had come absurdly apart. Lying silver on Jennings’ lapel was a long, ropy strand of Lear’s spit.

“Get you next time, you bastard,” Jennings said.

“You and who else?” Lear inquired. He felt marvelous – and Jennings, squinting and fitting his glasses back into place, looked as if he felt good too.

In his second year as French master at Dorset Academy, Jean-Paul La Prade had established an uneasy truce with the place. He would much rather have been back in New York, making ends meet as a translator and occasionally doing what he called “a spot of journalism” – he had been able to stay in bed till noon every
day in New York, often with a lively girl – but a man had to change with changing times. The work wasn’t hard here, once you’d learned to keep the little bastards off your neck; the pay was wretched but there wasn’t anything to spend it on anyway; the daily regimen might be Spartan, but with a little imagination one could manage to live like an adult.

La Prade was thirty-eight. Several girls had called him “wonderfully Gallic” in his New York days, which helped him emphasize his piercing stare and his jaunty short man’s gestures and movements; he liked his looks, and tended to strut a little while lecturing his classes. He was fond of his voice, too: it was precise and deep, melodious in encouragement and fearsome in reprimand, with just enough French accent to give it authority.