The Lockwood Concern (16 page)

of treacherous water-holes. The boys learned to swim and to skate at the canal, and to skin-the-cat in various barns, steal plums and cherries from various orchards, hop ice wagons, experiment with stogies and chewing tobacco, attempt sexual intercourse with the grocer's daughter, commit vandalism in the week preceding Halloween, and try Roman riding with George's and the physician's sons' ponies. George skinned his forehead and nose in a dive at the quarry, and Penrose fractured his left arm in a fall from a chestnut tree. Punishment was by spanking; bare-handed by Adelaide when they were young; with an old trunk strap by their father when they were older. Ostensibly the boys throughout the grammar school years led lives that were no different from their contemporaries'. Abraham Lockwood was not making a conscious special effort to teach the boys equality. On the contrary, his eventual purpose was to send his sons to boarding school at the earliest possible age, and so to arrange their vacation schedules that they would have very little time to spend with the sons of the brakeman, the porter, the schoolteacher, and the cousin of the Bundy brothers. But he did not want his sons to grow up as bookish freaks, as sissies, as latcherson-to-Momma's-apron-strings. It was likewise his wish to let his sons have an early acquaintance with all classes in the town, so that when the time came for them to assume the position they would occupy according to the Concern, they would not do so as strangers or virtual newcomers. His own father, and even more so his own grandfather, had mental records and working acquaintance with every citizen in the town, and so had he himself. His sons would not be absentee landlords; they would follow the proprietary tradition of the resident gentry, who knew their people, and George and Penrose were off to a good start. Abraham Lockwood's Concern was not a bothersome thing, a chore, and it interfered amazingly little with his business career. With the Concern to guide him it was easy to make small and great decisions governing the raising of the two boys, despite the mystification of and occasional opposition from their mother. Nearly everything relating to the boys' present could be related to the future of the Concern: the boys' education, manners, attire, appearance, and the subtler items of pride, hauteur, independence, honesty, self-control, moderation and ambition. Oddly, as they grew older into adolescence, the boys developed a filial love that was to Abraham Lockwood quite unexpected, and to their mother seemed somewhat perverse. They went to her for warmth, but they esteemed his approval. This thin, sharp man, who said no to so many of their requests, was nevertheless a positive factor in their daily lives, omnipresent even when they were secretly disobeying him, and always the adult they were most eager to please. Their love was his reward for his interest in them, which at their ages they accepted without looking for a reason behind it. With the same unquestioning submission, George, completing the eighth grade in 1887, departed for St. Bartholomew's, an event of major significance in his father's Concern, and one that had taken a great deal of serious consideration. The school was now old enough to have graduated some thirty classes, members of which had gone on almost without exception to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Williams, and the University of Virginia, or to theological seminaries. It was a church school, the church being the Episcopal, situated in Eastern Massachusetts, and except for a handful of Southern boys, the students came from cities and towns in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. Although not themselves alumni, Harry Penn Downs and Morris Homestead were sending their sons to St. Bartholomew's. This fact, while influencing Abraham Lockwood, was of secondary importance in his consideration of suitable schools. Of major importance was the school's New England location and its graduates' records at the colleges - needless to say, their extra-curricular records. Abraham Lockwood had already decided upon Princeton for his sons, but he wanted them to have friends at Harvard, Yale, and Penn as well, and since the majority of St. Bartholomew's boys went to Harvard or Yale, the school provided the right opportunities for such friendships. Abraham Lockwood carefully avoided the appearance of imitating Downs and Homestead, and did not ask them for help in placing George at St. Bartholomew's. Instead he went about it through Gabriel Bromley, assistant rector of Trinity Church, Gibbsville, and Joe Calthorp, a classmate and Zeta Psi at the University, both personal friends of the rector-headmaster of St. Bartholomew's. Abraham Lockwood wisely decided not to attempt to impress the school with his modest claim to social correctness, but to underplay his Philadelphia trumps. In the course of his correspondence and his single interview with Arthur Francis Ferris he told the headmaster that he hoped to have his sons accepted at St. Bartholomew's because their background for a hundred years had been solid Pennsylvanian, on both sides of the family, and since he could afford it, he wanted them to have the benefit of New England education. He lightly mentioned New England origins, but candidly stated that neither he nor his father nor his grandfather had any personal acquaintance with those Lockwoods. His strategy, he well knew, fitted in nicely with Arthur Francis Ferris's cautious, slow-moving plan to admit a few boys who were not quite the usual type of St. Bartholomew student. Ferris had accepted one boy from Chicago and one from Buffalo, in his hesitant program against what he called inbreeding; and while not committing the school to an acceptance of Penrose Lockwood, he took the old brother George. He had already satisfied himself that the financial present and future of the Lockwood family was safe, and any misgivings he may have had in regard to Abraham Lockwood were put at rest by Joe Calthorp and Gabriel Bromley, who assured him that Lockwood was being over-modest in his social and business attainments. Joe Calthorp, who had not been a member of The Ruffes, mentioned that organization to Ferris, and Ferris noticed approvingly that Abraham Lockwood never brought it up. Bromley reported to Ferris that Lockwood and father had built the Lutheran church in their home town, and here again Lockwood had been silent. Abraham Lockwood, to be sure, had had the advantage of knowing that Arthur Francis Ferris had a Concern of his own - St. Bartholomew's School. And so, in the autumn of '87, those old friends Morris Homestead, Harry Penn Downs, and Abraham Lockwood were together again on a sleeping car to Boston. The Homestead and Downs boys, meeting the Lockwood boy for the first time, drew closer together in blank hostility to the stranger, to the embarrassment of the three fathers. It was the first setback for Abraham Lockwood's Concern as well as the first time he had ever felt the rush of love and protective hatred that a parent experiences when his child is abused. For his son's stupid cruelty Harry Penn Downs was to pay with his life. But in spite of the inauspicious beginning of his boarding school career, George Lockwood was a delight to the Rector. The boy went rapidly into the lead in first-year algebra and Latin, and he was one of the best foot-racers in his class. His room was orderly, he kept his person clean, and his early homesickness lasted only until the masters gave public recognition to his excellence in his studies. Arthur Francis Ferris congratulated himself on his judgment; in spite of his misgivings about the boy's father, Arthur Francis Ferris had allowed the good of the program to prevail over prejudice, and his instinct was proving sound. Every boy at St. Bartholomew's was given - for fifty cents, chargeable to his bill for books and incidentals - a small wooden box, 4" deep by 12" wide by 16" long. The box had a hasp, and for an additional fifteen cents the boy was given a padlock and two keys. He retained one key, and the other key was held by the head prefect. But the privacy of the box was respected. No boy was supposed to open another boy's box, and no master was supposed to open the box without the boy's permission. Every boy kept his own special treasures in his box: letters, pen-knives, candy (forbidden), extra collar and cuff buttons, shoelaces, family photographs, horse chestnuts, Indian arrowheads, medals for scholastic and athletic accomplishment, journal-diaries, watches and watch fobs, stamps, money (forbidden), locks of girls' hair, Sunday neckties. The boys had learned from handed-down information that the boxes were sometimes opened, in their absence, by masters in search of suspected pipes and tobacco and dirty pictures. Although candy and money were forbidden, punishment was not meted out for their possession; the illusion was maintained that the boxes were not opened by masters, and small sums of money - under a dollar - and bits of taffy were not considered serious contraband. Every boy had his own special hiding place for his key; some kept it around their necks on a string. And it was not considered bad form for a boy to go off by himself with his box rather than allow his roommates to see the contents; on the other hand, it was considered a fighting offense and violation of the boys' own code for one boy to force open another boy's box. Most boys had special places for their boxes, and a boy returning to his room would know immediately that the location of the box had been changed. "Who moved my box?" he would demand, and the question was the next thing to an outright accusation, was in itself often enough to touch off an argument that would lead to a fight. The supreme compliment was for one boy to show a friend the souvenirs and trinkets in his box, but two boys could be the best of friends all through school years without such a gesture. A boy carved or burned his name in the lid of his box, and even when he had nothing very interesting to disclose, the box was still his, private and secret and precious. Since there were no locks on any of the dormitory doors, a boy's box and the moments he had alone with it provided the only one way - short of a solitary walk around the pond - to get away from his schoolmates and the masters. A boy who opened another boy's box risked not only a fight with the offended one but a beating by the offended one's friends. Originally intended as a container for such articles as shoe blacking and brushes, hair combs, handkerchiefs and such necessary items and possessions, the box was a St. Bartholomew's institution and tradition, and graduates of the school always took their boxes home with them, sometimes to use them all through college; and already there were boys at St. Bartholomew's who were using boxes originally owned by their fathers. Boys like Francis Homestead and Sterling Downs, sure enough of themselves on their own ground, got a quick lesson in humility by being reminded that they had new boxes, not their fathers'. The contents - and sometimes the emptiness - of a boy's box were always examined with self-consciously penetrating care by the masters, especially by the newer, younger masters, who were readers of Arthur Conan Doyle. They could not, however, be present when a boy opened his box privately, in a far corner of the study-hall, when the boy, out of the needs of loneliness and unhappiness, would select one or two items to look at and fondle, rejecting all the rest. Nor could they know that some boys never reached that point where the box and its contents were preferable to human company. Some boys used their boxes just to keep things in. George Bingham Lockwood's box, which had G. B. Lockwood burned in the lid by a poker from the common-room fireplace, may have been unique. Instead of being a catch all, with numerous unrelated items in a scramble, it had four compartments, each containing its own more or less homogeneous articles. George had had slots cut in the inner lengthwise sides of the box to hold three little fences that made the four compartments. His silver watch-and-chain, collar and cuff buttons and safety pins were in one compartment; his handkerchiefs and neckties in another; his money and postage stamps in a third; his letters from home and his soap and eau de Cologne in the fourth. Except for the separating panels the box and its contents offered no strikingly unusual reward to the snooping masters. A few silver and copper pieces were the only contraband, and a curious master would close the box in short order. But the box had more to offer: it had a false bottom. The little fences that formed the compartments also deceived the eye. The fences, or panels, could be slid out of their slots, the contents of the box dumped on a desk, the box turned upside down, and by gently tapping the exterior bottom of the box, George would cause the interior "floor" of the box to fall out, and with it his secret treasure, two five dollar gold pieces and a ten-dollar banknote. The possession of so much cash could have led to his expulsion, since no explanation he could give would be satisfactory to the masters or to Arthur Francis Ferris. George Lockwood - who went through four years at St. Bartholomew's without a nickname - had been given his box in the general distribution a week after his arrival at the school. For the first four months he used the box to protect the kind of personal possessions that roommates borrow - soap, hair combs, shoe blacking - and since George had no need to have recourse to the box for solace, and since he always knew with gut reexamination what was in the box, the only fun he had with it was in keeping it locked and unlocking it in private. Then, a few weeks after being given the box, he learned that masters sometimes opened the boxes without warning their owners, and this violation of privacy so angered him that he studied his box more intently, until he worked out a plan to defeat them. At Christmastime he took his box home with him and for fifty cents Mr. Dunkelberger, a Swedish Haven carpenter-and-joiner, fashioned the compartments and the false bottom. Mr. Dunkelberger was an artist in his line and had made many such hiding places in desks and bureaus and trunks, and he enjoyed the conspiratorial nature of George's commission. ("Vat you keep in it, Cheorchie? Luff letters, say?") George put his Christmas presents from his Hoffner grandparents - the gold pieces - and the ten-dollar bill from his father in the false bottom of the box, and returned to St. Bartholomew's with a gleefully defiant attitude toward the snooping masters. He would open his box once a week, and from time to time he could tell by the rearrangement of his possessions that a master had