A Good School (14 page)

“Hi, Grove,” Van Loon said. “This is my friend Wayne. Bill Grove, Wayne.”

“Hi,” Grove said.

“Hey.” Wayne’s age could have been anything from twenty-five to forty – younger than most of the kitchen help – and he had a guarded look that Grove found vaguely frightening.

“Wayne’s from West Virginia,” Van Loon said. “Got tired of coal mining, so he came up here. He’s a good friend of Ed and Mary Slovak.”

“Who?”

“Ed Slovak, works down at the power plant, and his wife Mary.
I’ve
told you about them,”

And Grove did remember. On several nights, coming back to the dormitory just in time for Lights, Van Loon had announced that he’d been out visiting the Slovaks, great people, and that they’d served him bourbon whiskey. Ed Slovak might have been a great engineer if he’d had the education, but he wasn’t bitter; that was the great thing about him. Mary wasn’t bitter either. They were just – well, they were interesting people. And now, apparently, Van Loon had found another candidate for his widening social circle among the school employees.

“Wayne’s only working here until he gets a little money together,” he explained. “Then he’s going to try his luck in Canada.”

“I see,” Grove said.

“I was just telling him I think he’ll be making a wise move,” Van Loon said, carefully flicking the ash from his cigarette. “Canada’s the country of the future.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

Wayne said something inaudible.

“How’s that, Wayne?” Van Loon asked him.

“I said the main thing’s to keep movin’.”

“Right. Yeah, you’re absolutely right about that.”

The talk petered out then; Wayne went upstairs to his quarters and Van Loon leaned back against Four building with a sigh. “I don’t suppose you understand this, Grove,” he said, “but I’m interested in people like that. I’m interested in all kinds of people, not just the kids you meet in a private school.”

“Yeah.”

“Know what I’d really like to do? For the next year, before the Army gets me? I’d like to spend the whole year bumming around this country.”

“Yeah, I know,” Grove said. “You’ve told me about that.”

They went in to the Club together just as Lear and Jennings
were coming out. “You going over to the Stones?” Lear inquired.

“No.”

“Too bad,” Lear said. “It’s another gala afternoon. Edith’s home.”

“She is?” Grove said. “Again?”

“Ah, yes, she keeps on coming home and coming home, and no one can explain it. I have my own theory, though.” And Lear carefully straightened his tie. He had recently begun encouraging people to call him by the spelling of his first three initials – “Ret” – probably because it suggested Rhett Butler in
Gone With the Wind
. “I think she comes home to see me,” he said.

When anyone asked her how she liked Miss Blair’s, Edith Stone said it was very nice. This wasn’t true at all.

She didn’t like the dormitory, which smelled of caramels and throbbed with talk of menstruation and virginity; she didn’t like the sweat and clatter and clumsy exertion of field hockey; she didn’t like any of her courses or any of the other girls.

There were several girls who admired her and sought her approval, but they laughed too much and they all wanted to talk about the same boring, boring, boring things; and there were no girls whom she admired or whose approval she sought.

“Dorset Academy?” they would cry on hearing where her father taught, and then they would giggle behind their hands in order to leave no doubt of their opinion that Dorset was a funny school. “Well,” one of them said once, in a tone of forgiveness, “it can’t be all bad if Gus Gerhardt goes there; he’s a living dream.”

And that stayed in Edith’s mind the next time she was home. Sitting beside her father in the refectory, she considered asking him to point out Gus Gerhardt to her, but decided it would be silly. Besides, she had only to glance around this table to see any number of perfectly nice, presentable boys, several of whom could be counted on for shy conversation if she felt like talking.
Only a year ago she had hated these refectory dinners at Dorset; now she looked forward to them. She liked the occasional afternoon teas with her mother, too: the guests usually included a witty English boy named Rhett Lear, who could make her laugh, and a big, bashful boy named Art Jennings who blushed a lot; and once an extraordinary-looking boy had dropped in for a few minutes, drawing everyone’s attention, making her weak and dumb until he smiled at her and introduced himself as Larry Gaines.

Still, she had to spend nine-tenths of her time in the oppressive tedium of Miss Blair’s. Brushing her hair a hundred strokes on each side every night, she would often stare into the mirror with a sense of helplessness.

No matter how she held it, her face wasn’t quite right. It had a nice oval shape on a long neck, her brown eyes were set well apart, and her mouth, though possibly too big, was of the kind called “sensual”; the trouble was in her chin. It didn’t jut. It wasn’t “pert.” It didn’t have the delicately firm, bony look of chins in every pretty face she had ever seen. Turning, examining her profile with a hand mirror, she could only hate the sight of it.

“You’re a
lovely
girl, Edith,” her mother would say; but then, everybody’s mother said stuff like that. Besides, her mother had a decent chin; even the most terrible girls at Miss Blair’s had decent chins, so there was nothing to do but drop the hairbrush and the hand mirror on her bureau and pace the floor of her room with both small fists at her temples.

On other nights the mirror was more agreeable. Then she was sometimes able to see a romantic, even a mysterious girl there, a girl who didn’t mind letting a heavy lock of hair fall over half her face because throwing it back only emphasized the sparkle in the deep browns and whites of her eyes, the subtle shape of her generous, sensual mouth and the proud column of her neck. At
times like that even her chin looked all right. And she would picture the apartment she planned to have as soon as possible, either in Cambridge or New York: a high, white room with a guitar hung on the wall above the studio couch (she didn’t yet know how to play a guitar, but there’d be time for everything). There would be a fireplace, too, and a coffee table with a wooden bowl of oranges, and she would move gracefully around wearing sandals, a man’s shirt with the top several buttons unfastened, and a full skirt – or better still, a pair of close-fitting, well-faded blue jeans (“You ought to wear jeans more often, Edith,” one of the girls had told her; “they look really sexy on you”).

One afternoon when the weight of Miss Blair’s seemed too great to be borne, she took a navel orange off her bureau and left the dormitory and walked out across the campus, crunching raked pebbles decisively under her heels, offering only the most cursory nods of greeting to everyone she passed. She wanted to get away.

There was a place she had gone to before at times like this, a grassy knoll hidden by trees from all the distant windows of the school and overlooking one of the huge, flat lawns that kept the campus away from the world. Sitting here, with her legs tucked up under her skirt, using the nails of her thumbs to peel her orange, she could be reasonably sure of privacy. All day she’d had difficulty in breathing. Her lungs felt tense and shallow, as if she might have to gasp for breath at any moment.

Slowly, so as to make it last, she began separating the segments of the orange and picking off the little white shreds from each one before eating it. She dried her fingers in the grass beside her thigh, and that made her think of a poet she had recently discovered named Edna St. Vincent Millay.

God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on your heart.

“Well, I suppose that kind of thing can be affecting at your age,” her father had said in the dry, tolerant, infuriating way that ruined all the talks they ever had about books. “Later on, I expect you’ll grow impatient with sentimentality; most bright people do.”

“Well, but I mean what do you
mean
, sentimentality, Daddy?”

And he had reached out to tousle her hair as if she were six instead of sixteen. “What do you
mean
, you mean what do I mean sentimentality?” he said. “What’s the meaning of meaning? Ever think of that?”

“Oh, your father’s impossible,” her mother had said with a shudder. “Your father’s so jaded and distant and cold he doesn’t like anybody at all. He doesn’t even like Alice Duer
Miller
.”

“Well,” Edith said, because it always seemed necessary to clear the air in that house, “as a matter of fact I don’t much like Alice Duer Miller either, Mother.”

And that caused her mother to look stricken. “Have you no heart, then? Have you lost your heart, like everyone else I’ve ever loved? Am I doomed, Edith? Am I doomed to die alone? Tell me. Tell me the truth. I can’t live with lies.”

What was the meaning of meaning? As she chewed and swallowed the last of her orange, she stared out over the enormous lawn and watched the slow approach of a tractor pulling a rig of mowers in what was probably the first lawn-mowing job of the year. The tractor shimmered and gave off a sound disproportionate to its size, a harsh thrumming that suited her mood because it suggested the ugliness of the world. The old German groundskeeper, Mr. Gerhardt, rode hunched over the
wheel with the stub of a cigar in his dumb, grumpy mouth. Everything, everything was ugly; there was no peace to be found even on this grass, beneath these trees.

She had just gotten to her feet to go back to the dorm, because there was nothing else to do, when a Model T Ford pulled up to a stop on the road beside the lawn and a broad-shouldered boy got out, wearing jeans and a blazing white T-shirt. He walked up to the idling tractor and said something to Mr. Gerhardt, who left the engine running and climbed down. There was a brief conference; then the boy swung up onto the tractor and put it into gear, and the old man plodded out to the car and drove away.

It had to be Gus Gerhardt. And all at once it became very important for Edith to get a closer look at him. She hurried down the slope and began walking. He was still many yards away, coming toward her; there was time to compose herself, and she willed her legs to slow down to a stroll. She could make out his blond, frowning face now, and as he came up close she stopped, smiled, and waved to him.

He gave her a hesitant, doubtful look; then the terrible noise of the tractor swept past her in a great smell of gasoline, with the mowers racketing along behind it, and she was standing on cropped grass in which bugs were jumping. After a moment he brought his machinery to a stop, cut the engine and turned around in the high iron seat to peer back at her.

“Did you want something?” he called.

“No, no; that’s all right; I just—”

“Huh?”

And all she could do was walk toward him over the stubble, feeling like a fool. “I just wanted to say hello, that’s all,” she said when they were within speaking distance. “I think I may have seen you a few times, over at Dorset. I’m Edith Stone.”

“Oh, yeah.” His smile was a fraction of a second too slow in breaking, and it looked guarded even then. “Yeah, I’ve seen you too sometimes, in the refectory. Only thing is I didn’t – you know – didn’t recognize you.”

For what seemed at least ten seconds they had nothing to say. “Do you – work over here often?” she asked at last.

“Once in a while,” he said. “Whenever there’s – you know – whenever my father needs the help.”

“Well, there certainly must be a – lot of work to do around a place like this.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“Well. Nice to see you.”

“Yeah.” And the noise of the tractor was deafening as he pulled slowly away. There was no peace in the world; there was no beauty; there was no air to breathe; there was nothing at all.

That Friday, in her parents’ house, Edith went to bed at four o’clock in the afternoon and stayed there for twenty-four hours.

At intervals, her mother would tiptoe into the room with anxious looks. “Dear, are you sure you don’t want me to call the doctor?”

“No. I mean yes, I’m sure.”

“Well, but what do you suppose it could be?”

“I told you. It’s nothing. I just don’t happen to feel like getting up.”

“But you haven’t eaten anything at all since—”

“I may have a glass of milk later on.”

“Oh, Edith. You’re having one of your things, aren’t you.”

“I don’t know. I really don’t feel too much like talking, Mother.”

At last, when it was teatime on the second day, her mother came in looking bright and pretty and a little distracted, as if by
flirtation. “Some of the boys are downstairs, Edith,” she said, “and I know they’d like to see you. Why don’t you get up and come join us.”

Edith rolled heavily away to face the wall, dragging the wrinkled bedclothes behind her.

“Oh, come on,” her mother said. “You’ll feel better in no time. Lear’s here, I know you like him, and Jennings, and a few others – oh, and Larry Gaines is here too.”

Edith rolled back, hoping the eagerness wouldn’t show in her face, and said she guessed she might be down in a little while.

“Oh, good. They’ll be so pleased.”

As she hurried through a hot shower and then into the best dress she could find, Edith’s heart beat so soundly and rapidly she could only assume that this was what happened when you rushed into activity after too long a rest; she had to stand at the top of the stairs for a long time, breathing hard, holding the newel post with both hands, before she felt calm enough to go down.

There was a great stirring of tweed and flannel as five or six boys got to their feet; there were bashful smiles and a ragged chorus of “Hi, Edith” – and there he was, looking older and more manly than any of the others, his head made golden in the afternoon light: Larry Gaines.

“Can I get you some tea or something, Edith?” he said. Even then he seemed to know that she’d come down especially for him, that she wanted to talk to him, that she wanted to sit with him and watch his face.

When they were settled together, hesitantly sipping tea, the other boys might as well have vanished from the room. “I hear you’ll be going into the service soon, Larry,” she said.