A Good School (17 page)

A few did well. Hugh Britt had been elected to the Student Council and was a model school leader, though some found him a little aloof. Jim Pomeroy and Steve MacKenzie were on the Council too, as was Gus Gerhardt. Anyone with the bulk, the athletic prowess and the blunt good looks of Gus Gerhardt would always be a natural for the Council, even if, as in Gerhardt’s case, he was a slow and sullen bully.

The Presidency of the Council was an unconventional choice that year: it went to a short, tousle-haired boy named Dave Hutchins who was only moderately gifted at sports or studies, who looked younger than his age and didn’t seem altogether sure of himself. His distinction was that everybody liked him, and he had drawn an unusually heavy vote from the lower forms.

“I know you’re busy,” Dave Hutchins said as he followed Grove upstairs to the
Chronicle
office one October afternoon, “but the thing is I was wondering if you might have time to help
me with this speech I have to make. I think I’ve got it pretty well organized, but it needs a little – you know – a little help.”

“Sure,” Grove said, more flattered than he would have been willing to admit. “Let’s take a look at it.”

In the office they found Lothar Brundels sitting alone, looking up from the strewn pages of his humor column. Hutchins and Brundels had been close friends since they were both fourteen, in the third form, and they’d roomed together last year; but this year, in keeping with his position as top boy of the school, Hutchins had chosen to room with Gus Gerhardt. Grove watched closely for signs of awkwardness in their greeting but found none, and he guessed this was because nobody as nice as Brundels could hold a grudge against anybody as nice as Hutchins.

That was one of the funny things Grove had begun to learn about the senior class: the guys were
nice
to each other. There wasn’t even any open scorn for Henry Weaver, or for the one or two other class pariahs, though of course those people were expected to be nice enough themselves to keep their distance.

“What’s this speech of yours, Dave?” Brundels asked.

“Ah, Knoedler wants me to do it. It’s about all the – you know – the financial trouble we’re in. The
school’s
in, I mean. He’ll be making the main speech, when the parents come for Thanksgiving, and he wants me to make a little one. Nothing big. He gave me the general theme – ‘If We Fail’ – and he must’ve talked for half an hour about the rest of it, but I swear I didn’t understand a God damn thing he said.”

Grove was going over Hutchins’ three-page manuscript. “Know what you might do, Dave?” he said. “You might work in that Shakespeare business.”

“What Shakespeare business?”

“You know, from whaddyacallit, from
Macbeth
: ‘And if we fail?’ ‘We fail. But screw your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail.’”

“Nah, I don’t know,” Hutchins said, “I don’t like that. I don’t like ‘Screw your courage.’”

“Besides, it’s all wrong, Grove,” Lothar Brundels said. “The people in the play are plotting a murder, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you see the difference?”

In the end they got Hutchins’ speech into reasonably good shape – the parents, at Thanksgiving, would be made to understand that their increased financial support was urgently needed – then, after Hutchins had left, Grove turned to Brundels and said “So what’s the deal on all this, anyway? Is the school gonna fold up, or what?”

“Shit, who knows? I know my father’s looking for another job.”

“He is?”

“Been looking since last spring. And it hasn’t been easy. I mean northern Connecticut isn’t exactly the best place in the world for a chef to find work. And I heard Knoedler asked the whole faculty to take salary cuts, and they told him to shove it. They’re all looking for new jobs too.”

“They are?”

“Dr. Stone told me there’ve been faculty meetings where they shout and argue and carry on like maniacs – that’s the way he put it – and he said they’re all in a state of panic.”

“He did?”

“Ah, you’re a funny guy, Grove,” Lothar Brundels said, turning back to his humor column. “I mean you write pretty well and you always get the paper out, but a lot of the time you don’t even know what the hell’s going on.”

*

Richard Edward Thomas Lear joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in November. There was great applause in assembly on his last day at school, while he stood alone and pressed his moist lips into a frown suggesting the spirit of the volunteer.

Several weeks later a similar ovation went up for Pete Giroux, who was said to be failing most of his courses and who now planned an immediate enlistment in the United States Marines.

And those departures were only the beginning. The federal law that year required every male citizen to register for the draft on his eighteenth birthday. There was a stipulation for high-school seniors: if your birthday came before January you could be drafted during that month; if it came later, the government would let you stay in school until the normal time of graduation in June. The three Dorset seniors who fell into the first category had taken summer-school courses to prepare them for a winter graduation; they received their diplomas in a makeshift ceremony one Friday afternoon.

One of the three was Bucky Ward, and in honor of the occasion Grove stayed up late with him in the
Chronicle
office. They self-consciously passed a smuggled pint of whiskey back and forth (it tasted so awful that Grove couldn’t imagine the source of its celebrated power to give pleasure, let alone to enslave the soul), but they didn’t have a very good time. Ward had recently gotten what he insisted on calling a Dear John letter from Polly Clark – she was engaged to an Army Air Force cadet – and he’d been dramatically morose for days.

“I don’t care anymore,” he announced, more than once. “I don’t care what happens to me in the Army or anything else. If they make an invasion of France, I won’t care if I’m the first little son-of-a-bitching rifleman on the beach. I mean that.”

“Oh, balls.”

“Whaddya mean, ‘balls’? I’m only telling you how I feel.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay; but shit, Bucky, everybody wants to live.”

“Wanna bet? Listen: there are certain conditions of life under which I simply don’t care whether my own life continues or not.”

And the talk went on and on that way until the small hours of the morning, when Grove had begun to ache for sleep. At last he rubbed both fists in his eyes and said “Jesus, Bucky, you’re going to be dead.”

And Ward looked at him narrowly. “How exactly do you mean that?”

“You’re going to be dead tired on the train tomorrow, going home. How the hell did you think I meant it?”

“I don’t know. I’m not putting any more interpretations on anything anybody says.”

With Ward gone, Grove was free at last to devote himself to Hugh Britt. Their being roommates had seemed to promise a great advantage, but soon there was trouble: a German-refugee boy named Westphal, who was Britt’s chief rival for brilliance in the senior physics course, had begun to move in as Grove’s chief rival for Britt’s time.

Westphal spoke English with a katzenjammer accent that only Britt seemed able to understand, but he was clearly a “cultivated” boy, an “intellectual” beyond the reach of any plans Grove might have for himself.

All three of them were frightened of hockey, so they joined a large number of students who signed up for the alternate winter sport of “open skating.” This meant that they skated in wide, easy circles around the outside of the embattled hockey rink on bitter-cold afternoons – or rather, Britt and Westphal did that, side by side in steady conversation, always at least thirty feet ahead of where Grove struggled on caved-in ankles, cursing his
luck, hating the weakness of his own heart, while the Eagles and the Beavers beat each others’ brains out on the ice within the shuddering boards.

There was one good thing: Bucky Ward had been the dorm inspector on the third floor of One building, where most of the seniors lived, and Grove was appointed to replace him. It didn’t amount to much – seniors were too old and too nice to make any real trouble – but Grove loved the job.

“Get ’em
out!
” he would bellow down one corridor at Lights each night, and then, turning, “Get ’em
out!
” down the other. And he would check each room to see if anyone was missing. No one ever was. He would stand waiting at the stairwell for Driscoll’s ritual visit – “Everything okay, sir” – and then he would saunter back to the room he shared with Hugh Britt, feeling pretty good.

Another good thing was that Westphal, however much of a fireball student he was and however nimble a skater, couldn’t possibly have gotten the Dorset
Chronicle
out every two weeks. And even Britt had to admit that the paper was getting better all the time. The writing was livelier, the editing was more dependable, and the editorial that ran beneath the masthead in each issue often seemed, to Grove, to be a little triumph of prose composition.

“Well, but why do you spend so much
time
on the damn thing?” Britt demanded. “What’re you killing yourself for? The whole school’s going bankrupt anyway, everybody knows that. When the war’s over, you think any college in America’s going to care whether you put out the paper for some dopey little school that hasn’t existed for years? Why don’t you pay attention to your
grades
, Bill?”

Britt nearly always called Grove “Bill” now, and that in itself was bracing. Whenever he slipped back into calling him
“Grove,” Grove knew he’d probably said something dumb in the last day or two, and would sometimes lie awake trying to remember what it was.

Soon it was time for the seniors to take their College Board examinations; and because Dorset was less centrally located than Miss Blair’s School, the authorities had arranged for the boys’ exams to be given there.

This was a vaguely thrilling prospect. Apart from Gus Gerhardt, who was wholly familiar with the place but wasn’t talking, nobody knew anything about Miss Blair’s except that Edith Stone had graduated from it last year; but didn’t it stand to reason there’d be other girls like her? They’d have long, clean hair and they’d stroll their campus in light flannel skirts and light cardigan sweaters, with their school-books hugged close to their young breasts, and they’d say wonderfully engaging things like “Hi, my name’s Susan.”

Would the Dorset guys take their College Boards in a roomful of girls? And would they stay for lunch? And would there be time afterwards for strolling with the girls and getting acquainted, and maybe making “dates” for some weekend soon?

A long yellow bus stood waiting for them in front of One building, early one chilly morning. It didn’t take long to reach Miss Blair’s; they got there so soon, in fact, that most of the campus was still shrouded in morning mist. But the building where the bus let them off was plainly visible: it had a long second-story balcony at which eight or ten girls stood leaning out on their forearms, all wearing bathrobes, a few with their hair in curlers, and they were smiling and singing to their guests on the sidewalk below. It might have been fine, but then the words of their serenade came through, sung to the tune of “The Reluctant Dragon”:

We are the Dor-set fairies
Woo-woo; Woo-woo . . .

The girls had composed only those two lines, so they sang them over and over like shrill, taunting children as the boys walked past beneath them toward the place on the ground floor where the College Board exams lay waiting.

It wasn’t fair. Dorset Academy was a funny school – everybody knew that; but “Dorset
fairies
”? How could something like
that
have gotten into their minds? Grove squared his shoulders and walked with an exaggerated manliness to prove he couldn’t possibly be a fairy, and he saw that Dave Hutchins, walking just ahead of him, was doing the same thing. He glanced quickly around to see how others were taking it, and he spotted Gus Gerhardt bringing up the rear of the wretched parade and blushing foolishly, just as one of the girls broke out of the song to call “Oh, not you, Gus; not you . . .”

There were no girls in the room where they took the College Boards, which lasted all morning and proved to be much more difficult than most of them had expected, and no plans had been made for them to stay at Miss Blair’s for lunch. They climbed back into their bus – the upstairs balcony was empty now – and rode back to Dorset Academy with a sickening new awareness of what the term “funny school” might be taken to mean. Nobody wanted to talk about the girls and their song, and so it was never discussed.

There had been three or four air-raid drills a year in that part of Connecticut since the war began; by now they’d long become as much a matter of routine at Dorset as fire drills in a grammar school. But they were a nuisance: faculty families had to turn their living rooms into “shelters” for unwieldy numbers of boys,
Robert Driscoll had to run around the campus like an air-raid warden, the whole Student Council had to report for duty taking roll calls in the shelters, then prowling to look for chinks of light.

And there was an air-raid drill in the spring of 1944 when everything went wrong for Dave Hutchins. The trouble started that afternoon when his roommate, Gus Gerhardt, saw him fitting a cone of heavy red plastic over the face of his flashlight.

“Whaddya doin’ that for?” Gerhardt said.

“Air-raid drill tonight.”

“Shit. Whadda they gonna do, send long-range bombers over from Berlin tonight? Or are they comin’ from Tokyo?”

“Come on, Gus. It’s just a thing we have to do.”

“Who says?”

“Well, hell,
I
didn’t make the rules.”

“You didn’t? I thought you made
all
the rules around here, Mr. President.”

“Look,” Hutchins said, and dropped the flashlight on his bed. “This thing of calling me ‘Mr. President’ is okay once in a while, when I know you’re kidding, but it’s getting to be a pain in the ass.”

“Oh.” Gerhardt turned his big head away to stare out the gray window. “Well. Sorry, Mr. President.”

And he kept it up all through dinner. “Wait’ll you see our President out there tonight,” he said to several other boys at the senior table, well within Hutchins’ hearing. “Think he’ll let those long-range enemy bombers turn us into rubble? Wrong. He’ll never let those long-range enemy bombers turn us into rubble.”