A Good School (11 page)

You weren’t allowed to smoke at Dorset until you were seventeen, and then only in the Senior Club. Infractions of that rule were punished with many hours of what was called hard labor – not much different from community service, except that it had to be done in addition to the community service requirements. And repeated infractions, as everyone solemnly warned one another, could lead to expulsion from school. But Bucky Ward took reckless chances, nimbly getting away each time, and it wasn’t long before he’d earned an outlaw’s celebrity.
In class, or in assembly, he would sit with a pencil stub the length of a cigarette dangling from his moody lips.

He had been afflicted with many illnesses throughout his childhood, and still enjoyed reciting their medical names in a mock-dramatic voice, but now he was emerging into good health. And whether he looked it or not, he was becoming very strong.

Grove had resented Ward’s quick rise to eccentric popularity – it didn’t seem fair, in view of his own suffering last year – but he was willing to suspend judgment today. And he had to acknowledge, as he fingered through the assignment file, that he hadn’t really minded Ward’s calling him “Mr. Editor.”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose somebody ought to cover the soccer game tomorrow. Think you could do that?”

“Sure,” Ward said, “If I can’t, I’ll fake it.”

“Doesn’t have to be much; five or six hundred words. Oh, and I guess we could use a very short feature on Thanksgiving – you know, just some dumb little thing.”

“Good,” Ward said. “Dumb little things are my favorite kind.”

Within a week they were great companions. Sitting around the office or strolling the flagstones or taking aimless walks in the woods, they seemed never to tire of each other’s company. As Grove sometimes reflected, with a touch of uneasiness, it was almost like falling in love. Bucky Ward could make him laugh over and over again until he began to feel like a girl who might at any moment cry “Oh, you keep me in
stitches!
” What saved him was the nice discovery that very often, without even seeming to try, he could make Bucky Ward laugh too.

He was so preoccupied with his new friendship that he almost missed the deadline for the paper: he and Ward had to sneak out of their dormitories late one night and meet in the office,
where they fitted “wartime discipline” blackout panels into the windows, drank dizzying amounts of coffee, and worked at writing and editing the copy until dawn.

Another night, when they’d sneaked out not to work but only to fool around the office and talk, Ward fell into one of his serious moods and told Grove about his girl. Her name was Polly Clark and she lived in a suburban village adjacent to Ward’s own, just outside of Philadelphia.

“She pretty?” Grove asked.

“I knew you’d ask that. Yes, as it happens, she’s pretty, but the point is I wouldn’t care if she were plain. I don’t suppose you’re equipped to understand something like that.”

“ ‘Equipped’? What the hell do you mean, ‘equipped’? Jesus, Ward.”

“Well, okay; it’s just that so many people mistake sex for love.”

And Grove had to think that over. “Yeah,” he said after a while, “yeah, I guess that’s true.”

Polly Clark was a wonderful person, Ward explained. She was warm, she was gentle, and he knew he would never find a girl he’d rather marry, when they were old enough, though he guessed there could be no thought of marriage until after the war. And there were other difficulties: “We care very deeply for each other,” he said, “but I’m more deeply involved than she is. She says she loves me but she isn’t
in
love with me, and when I ask her to clarify that she says she doesn’t know her own mind. That hurts. You can’t imagine how that hurts.”

But Grove thought he could imagine it; at least it seemed so romantic a predicament that he lowered his eyes and felt his own face grow sad and wistful in the look of someone more loving than loved.

“Ah, I don’t know,” Ward said. “To come so close to all
you’ve ever wanted in life and then never quite – never quite attain it – I suppose that’s the nature of the human condition.” When Ward was in one of his serious moods, he could seem more serious than anybody else had a right to be.

He had been turning an empty coffee mug around and around in his fingers, staring at it; now in a spasm of revulsion he threw it on the floor, where it bounced and rolled under a chair. He was on his feet and pacing, clawing out his pack of cigarettes, jabbing one into his mouth and lighting it savagely as he walked.

“
Things!
” he said. “Christ, Grove, do you ever get so you can’t stand
things? Ob
jects? That cup. This school. Clothes. Cars. All the God damn senseless
things
in the world. You oughta see my family’s house. Oh, it’s very nice and it’s very big and it cost my father a hell of a lot of money, but I can never make him understand it’s just another
thing
. Just another
thing
. Do you see what I mean at all?”

“Well, sort of,” Grove said. “I guess so, yeah.” But as Ward continued to pace and smoke, haggard with tragic vision, Grove decided he liked him better when he was funny.

Knoedler chimed his table bell after dinner one night, requesting silence, and rose to make an announcement. “I know you’ll all join me,” he said, “in extending our deepest sympathy to William Grove, whose father died this morning.”

And the people at Grove’s table looked around to realize for the first time that he wasn’t there – that he had, in fact, been gone all day.

Perhaps the only boy in the refectory who had missed him was Bucky Ward. He’d begun to notice his absence during school hours, and he’d missed him all afternoon. He had wondered, with rising jealousy, if Grove might somehow have arranged to spend the whole day at Hugh Britt’s bedside in the
infirmary – he had even considered going to the infirmary to find out – but in the end he’d settled for a brooding, puzzled loneliness. Now Knoedler’s announcement made everything clear, and he felt better.

But Steve MacKenzie was shaken by the news. “Oh, Jesus,” he said to Jim Pomeroy. “That’s lousy. That’s really too bad.”

And he was depressed all through study hall that night. He couldn’t help pondering how he would feel if his own father were to die. It was unthinkable: Jock MacKenzie was in the very prime of life, a laughing, sailing, golf- and tennis-playing man who could still defeat his son at arm-wrestling any time he felt like it, and often did. Still, there were heart attacks; there were strokes; there was cancer. Nobody lived forever.

Jock MacKenzie’s anger could be terrible, but in his gentle moods there was no finer companion in the world. Every worthwhile thing Steve knew, it seemed, was something he had learned from his father. As a condition of receiving a car on his sixteenth birthday, Steve had been made to memorize the whole of Kipling’s “If,” which later helped him earn the only “A” he’d ever had in Pop Driscoll’s course; and certain lines of that poem, remembered now as they sounded in his father’s voice, were enough to fill his eyes with tears.

He glanced quickly up and around the study hall, to make sure no one had caught him on the verge of crying; then he pulled himself together and bent over his math assignment. This Sunday, he promised himself, he would call home and have a good long talk with the old man.

When Grove came back to school a few days later, MacKenzie stopped him in the quadrangle and said “Bill, I was really sorry to hear about your dad.”

“Yeah, well – thanks.”

“Seems like only yesterday he was up here that time,”
MacKenzie said. “I thought he was a real – a very nice gentleman.”

“Yeah. Well, thanks, uh, Steve.”

Then MacKenzie noticed that a delicate gold chain hung from the lapel buttonhole into the breast pocket of Grove’s awful blue suit; he almost said “Oh, that’s nice; you’ve got your dad’s watch,” but decided against it. He had said enough. With one fist he gave Grove a soft cuff on the shoulder; then he walked away.

“When you’re talking, Steve,” Jock MacKenzie had told him once, “and I don’t care who it’s to or what it’s about, the important thing is knowing when to stop. Never say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.”

Sometimes the big moves in a man’s life, the big changes, announce themselves quickly. Through a journalist friend of his in New York, Jean-Paul La Prade had learned he might qualify for a commission in the O.S.S., and he was eager to pursue it; the difficulty lay in finding a way to tell Alice.

“What does ‘O.S.S.’ stand for?” she asked him. It was one o’clock in the morning and they were sitting naked on the small sofa in his apartment, drinking bourbon.

“It stands for Office of Strategic Services,” he said. “Essentially it’s an intelligence operation, very high-level, very secret. There’s nothing else like it in the Army. They go in behind enemy lines to gather information, and they report directly to the Chief of Staff. And the point is they need officers who are fluent in French. I could probably be commissioned as a captain.”

“Oh, wouldn’t that sound nice,” she said. “ ‘Captain La Prade.’ ” There was an edge of sarcasm in her voice that put him on guard.

“Yes, well, I’m not concerned with how it would sound so much as how it would be. I imagine it might be dangerous. Being dropped in behind enemy lines, not knowing what to expect when you—”

“Ah, you really like saying ‘behind enemy lines,’ don’t you,” Alice said. “It makes you feel like something out of the movies, doesn’t it. Captain La Prade in Occupied France. Captain La Prade making contact with the French Underground. Jaunty, squinting fellows in berets with submachine guns slung over their leather jackets, sharing their wine and bread and cheese with you, and of course there’ll have to be a girl, won’t there – let’s make her a famished little French girl who’s been getting laid by a German Occupation officer and feeling perfectly awful about it – and you’ll meet her at sunset in a beet field or a turnip field or some damn thing, and that night she’ll come crawling into your sleeping bag, and oh, God, Jean-Paul, you make me want to throw up.”

He didn’t know what to say, but it seemed important to get to his feet, turn away, pull on his pants and fasten them. With his back to her, he said “Well, Alice, if you want to throw up I expect you’d better get into the bathroom first. Otherwise, I think it’s probably time to put on your clothes and go home.”

Then he risked a look at her. She was standing at the liquor table, trying to fix a drink, but her hands weren’t steady enough for that because she was crying. The dark, ragged pout of her pubic thatch turned and stared at him. Did women realize how vulnerable, how pitiable that most prized and secret part of them could make them look, at moments like this? Probably so; they probably realized everything.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” And there was nothing to do but take her in his arms and let her weep against his chest. That seemed to make her feel better, and it made him feel fine: it
was exactly how he’d planned to conclude the evening in the first place.

“Jean-Paul?” she asked, between sniffles.

“Mm?”

“Will they give you any training or anything? Before they start dropping you in behind enemy lines?”

The paperwork took very little time, and the commission came through in the last week of school before Christmas.

Alcott Knoedler was barely able to hide his irritation at the news – how and where could he find a new French teacher in the middle of the year? – but he managed to recover his sense of decorum in time for the day’s assembly.

“One of our masters and friends,” he announced, “has volunteered to serve his adopted nation. Mr. Jean-Paul La Prade today accepts a commission as captain in the United States Army. I congratulate him personally, as I know we all will, and I know we’ll all wish him well. Mr. La Prade? Jean-Paul? Will you stand up back there please?”

This was ridiculous. La Prade had to rise from the seated faculty and stand in a sea of applause while a hundred and twenty-five pink young faces came swivelling around to smile at him over the backs of chairs. It was as if he were Louie Brundels, called from the kitchen on Thanksgiving Day; and the worst part, the awful part, was that it brought a quick warm swelling to the walls of his throat. My God, he thought, my God, I’m going to cry. What saved him, as he crouched and turned briefly right and left to acknowledge the clapping of his colleagues on either side, was a glimpse of Jack Draper’s pale withered hands trying to clap along with the others, probably making no sound.

Grove spent most of that Christmas vacation teaching himself to smoke. He would soon turn seventeen, and he didn’t want to be the fool of the Senior Club.

First he had to learn the physical side of it – how to inhale without coughing; how to will his senses to accept drugged dizziness as pleasure rather than incipient nausea. Then came the subtler lessons in aesthetics, aided by the use of the bathroom mirror: learning to handle a cigarette casually, even gesturing with it while talking, as if scarcely aware of having it in his fingers; deciding which part of his lips formed the spot where a cigarette might hang most attractively – front and profile – and how best to squint against the smoke in both of those views. The remarkable thing about cigarettes, he discovered, was that they added years to the face that had always looked nakedly younger than his age.

By the time of his seventeenth birthday he was ready. His smoking passed the critical scrutiny of his peers – nobody laughed – and so he was initiated.

The Senior Club opened new horizons for all its members. It was a long, wide room with a flagstone floor, converted from one of the unused study halls of Four building. There was a pool table that seemed always to be in use, there were deep leather
sofas and chairs, there was a phonograph with many records and a carefully neat display of current magazines. There was a big stone fireplace, too, and the pungent smell of woodsmoke, combining with the blue tobacco haze as the billiard balls clicked, gave flavor to everyone’s sense of maturity. Only rarely did anything shrill or silly occur in the Senior Club; it was a place for learning how to behave in college – except, of course, that neither the class of ’43 nor that of ’44 could make plans for college until after the war.