A Good School (7 page)

“Three weeks ago,” he said, “I announced a contest for essays under the general title
America at War
, to be judged by Dr. Stone, for which first prize would be appointment to the editorial staff of the Dorset
Chronicle
. The results of that contest are now final, and I have the names of the winners here. First prize has been awarded to William Grove of the fourth form.”

The applause was only mild, but it struck William Grove as
astonishing that there should be any applause at all. He sat hunched in his chair, determined not to smile or to turn either right or left, and he was so concerned with his own appearance that he didn’t catch the names of the second- and third-prize winners, though he noticed they were both in the higher forms.

When he got up and faced the aisle to file out with the rest of the audience, he found he had developed a strange new ability to see himself whole, from the outside, as if through a movie camera twenty feet away. He could observe all his gestures – the drawing-back of his coat for the placing of one hand in his pocket, the slight straightening of his spine and lifting of his chin – and the movie camera went right along with him, back through the refectory and out into the sunshine.

He knew he ought to hurry to the dorm because this was a community-service day, rather than a sports day; he would spend the afternoon in his work clothes, riding around in a pickup truck with three or four other kids to clear brush or haul trash under the guidance of a disgruntled school employee, and the truck was probably waiting for them now. But he took his time anyway, strolling for the phantom camera all the way back to Three building, and what happened there was like something out of the movies too. Larry Gaines overtook him on the stairs, turned back, gave him an unforgettable smile and said “Nice going, Gypsy.”

The Dorset
Chronicle
was held in low esteem among extracurricular activities. Being a member of its staff might look good on your record, and in the yearbook, but that seemed scarcely worth the amount of work it took.

The editor-in-chief was usually a sixth-former, heavy with other honors, who delegated most of the responsibility to his managing editor. And when the managing editor was someone like John Haskell, a glutton for punishment and a stern taskmaster, it was only common sense to stay away from the whole enterprise. The paper was always understaffed – Haskell sometimes claimed to have written every word of it himself – but it came out faithfully every two weeks, in press runs of a thousand copies or more.

Knoedler called it “one of our best public-relations tools,” and you could see what he meant. There wasn’t much to admire in the way the
Chronicle
was written or edited, but it looked good: handsomely printed on slick paper in four- or six- or eight-page issues, four columns to the page, with a liberal use of photographs. Anyone picking it up and looking it over would have had to assume that a good deal of money had gone into its making. And only rarely did messages like “With the Compliments of a Friend” or “Buy War Bonds” appear in its
advertising space; most of the ads were display items from reputable merchants in Hartford and Boston and New York who must have considered Dorset a “real” enough school to warrant their business. The paper had the aspect of something settled and solvent – and that, for a school in financial trouble, amounted to good public relations indeed.

On deadline afternoons, and usually in the very nick of time, John Haskell would stack up the messy copy and pictures and send them off to a commercial printing plant in Meriden; a few days later heavy packages of freshly cast linotype and photo-engravings would arrive back at the school, and then it was time to put the thing together.

The craft of printing had been one of Mrs. Hooper’s minor enthusiasms, so there was a well-equipped, picturesque little printshop tucked into the campus. A pale, sour man named Mr. Gold was in charge there, possibly the only communist on the Dorset payroll, doing his quiet best to keep the kids from driving him crazy as he went about what he always called “the job.” Much of his time was spent in preparing sumptuous school catalogues and sleek little promotional brochures (Knoedler ordered more brochures than any of the three other headmasters in Mr. Gold’s memory), and the coming of each spring brought additional workloads in the yearbook pages and the Commencement Day programs; but at bi-weekly intervals, all through the year, everything in the shop had to be set aside for the
Chronicle
.

Haskell considered it part of a managing editor’s duty to be on hand when the paper went to press. He would stride around the printshop trailing a handful of galley proofs, pausing to peer over the shoulders of boys who stood working on page forms at the composing table or hand-setting type for the larger headlines. Only one or two of them were members of the
Chronicle
staff; the
others, mostly younger, were kids who’d drawn the printshop as their community-service assignment. Their talk bristled with terms of the printing trade – “stick,” “quoine,” “slug,” “furniture,” “carding-out” – as if in an effort to convince themselves they were really journeymen printers and not schoolboys at all.

“Hey, I need more furniture,” one of them said one afternoon.

“Need more what?” Haskell inquired.

“Furniture.”

“What’s that?”

And wholly unaware that he was being kidded, speaking as patiently as if Haskell were an apprentice in the shop, the boy explained what “furniture” was, while Haskell listened and nodded with a straight face. Afterwards, Haskell ventured a conspiratorial wink at Mr. Gold, who had heard it all, and Mr. Gold allowed himself a qualified smile as he bent over his own part of the job again.

Mr. Gold despised all Dorset boys on principle – rich, spoiled little snot-noses – but he had to admit that this particular fellow, this Haskell, was kind of an interesting kid. He was smart, witty, and very well-read for his age; last fall the two of them had hung around the shop for half an hour after quitting time one day, talking politics, and Haskell had displayed a surprisingly sound grasp of Marxist theory. But when Mr. Gold tried to tell his wife about it that night, in the kitchen of their home in Unionville, she didn’t want to listen. “ ‘Interesting’?” she repeated. “You’re telling me ‘interesting’ and ‘sophisticated’ about some fifteen-year-old
prep
school kid? Come on. I think you’re going soft in the head, Sidney.” And he guessed she was right; he had probably been taken in. Besides, there were unattractive things about Haskell too: the supercilious manner, the theatrical way he talked and moved around.

If Haskell could be theatrical in the printshop, he was worse in the
Chronicle
office. And he spent as much time as he could in the office, far more time than was necessary.

“And do you realize?” he demanded of Hugh Britt one evening, pacing the floor for emphasis, “Do you realize I’ve written the last four editorials for him?
And
made up the staff assignments.
And
edited all the copy, not to mention writing most of it. He sits up there wrapping friction tape around his hockey stick, or rubbing neat’s-foot oil into his baseball glove, and saying he’s too busy. Too busy. Well, it’s got to stop, that’s all. It’s got to stop.”

“Why don’t you lay it on the line with him, John?” Hugh Britt said. “Tell him if you’re going to do the editor’s work you want to
be
the editor.”

Haskell hadn’t expected such a clear-cut suggestion. After a moment, smiling vaguely as he paced, he said “Ah, yes, Hughie; if only it were that simple.”

The office was in an upstairs section of Four building, well away from the kitchen help’s quarters, and it looked as much like a real newspaper office as Haskell could make it. There were two paper-strewn typewriter desks, and there was a hotplate and a coffee percolator with several chipped mugs. Haskell drank more coffee than he wanted, especially on deadline days; often, when the door was locked and the windows open, he and Britt smoked cigarettes here too.

Haskell took up a slumped, staring posture at the windows, his homely features set in the look of someone for whom one crisis is never enough. “And on top of everything else,” he said, “we now have
Grove
to contend with.”

“I don’t know why you say ‘contend,’ John.”

“Because he’ll be around our necks, that’s why. We’ll be contending with his funny face and his dirty clothes and his
awful fingernails, and we’ll spend all our time just keeping him
down
. He was up here sucking around and sucking around all afternoon.”

“You’re making too much of it,” Britt said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Haskell was his best friend, but there were times when he got on his nerves. Tonight Haskell had brought him up here after study hall, apparently for no other purpose than to dramatize himself. Another thing: Britt wished Haskell would quit calling him “Hughie.”

“Shall I put some coffee on?” Haskell inquired.

“No, thanks; I want to get on back.”

“What for? There’s plenty of time.”

“I want to get on back, that’s all.” And Britt stood up. “John?” he said. “You coming or staying?”

“My goodness,” Haskell said, “how abrupt we are this evening.”

They didn’t talk on their way back to Three building, and it wasn’t a companionable silence. Britt walked with a hard ringing of his heels on the flagstones, holding his big shoulders square and tight, wondering how he could possibly admire anyone who said things like “My goodness, how abrupt we are this evening.”

They knew something was up as soon as they’d reached the second floor, and they could sense it was something bad. Both ends of the hall were unnaturally quiet. Boys stood in clusters, near and far, their mouths partly open, and they were all staring at the closed door of Henry Weaver’s room. Ordinarily, nobody paid much attention to Henry Weaver; it wouldn’t have been hard to forget he existed. He was big and muscular and mild, a good soccer player, a pleasant, smiling fellow who had no friends.

“Weaver’s got a little kid in there with him,” somebody said. “Little kid from Two building.”

Then Pete Giroux went up with a bar of soap in his hand and wrote “HOMO” across Weaver’s door. All the dormitory doors were made of dark wood, finely and deeply grooved; it would be impossible to wash the lettering out of those grooves. A plainly legible ghost of it would be there next year, when somebody else moved into the room; it would be there forever, unless workmen came and replaced the door.

“Come on outa there, Weaver,” Pete Giroux called like a cop in the movies, “or we’re coming inta get ya.” Another boy was crouched and working with a jackknife at the wooden bolt of the door.

It opened suddenly and very briefly, just enough to let the little kid out into the hall. He stood there blinking in his rumpled dinner clothes, trying to look as if he didn’t know what this was all about. He was twelve or thirteen. Haskell, who knew the names and faces of everyone in school from his work on the
Chronicle
, identified him as Dwight Reeves of the first form.

“Arright,” Giroux told him, “getcher ass outa here, punk. Fast.”

Then they concentrated on “getting” Henry Weaver, though there was no clear plan for what to do when they got him. The jackknife couldn’t pick the bolt open when Weaver’s hands were holding it shut, so they fell back on other tactics. Somebody came from the shower room with a water-filled condom and shoved the bulging, wobbling thing over the transom into Weaver’s room, where it fell and burst with a heavy splash. Soon a chant went up from the crowd, quietly at first and then louder: “Ho-mo; ho-mo; ho-mo . . .”

Weaver was evidently trying to outlast them, to stick it out until Lights, when they’d all have to disperse, and he might have made it except that Steve MacKenzie came strolling lazily into the hall and said “What the hell’s going on?” When he’d heard
the news he went up very close to Weaver’s door and said “Weaver? I guess you know that if I report this you’ll be expelled tomorrow. Now. I want you to come on out of there.”

And Weaver came out. He looked terrible, and the worst part was that he was smiling.

Pete Giroux took the scruff of his neck in one hand and the seat of his pants in the other; they frog-marched him down to the shower room, pushed him fully dressed into a cold shower and held him there for a long time. He smiled under the water, too, and all the way back to his room, where he closed and bolted his door again.

“And so ends another night of fun and frolic in the dorm,” Haskell said to Britt, who wasn’t listening.

Two new boys had come to the second floor of Three building in January, and by now it was clear how they were turning out. One of them, Jim Pomeroy, was small and trim and athletic, so it had been assumed at once that he’d be a neat companion for Terry Flynn. Pomeroy was in the fourth form, as befitted his age, but apart from that he and Flynn seemed to have everything in common. They even looked something alike, except that Flynn was blond and Pomeroy dark. Pomeroy had muscle definition too. On spring afternoons they would jog and sprint around the big lawn in front of One building until dusk, expertly and gracefully passing a football back and forth, two peppy little Irish-American guys without a care in the world. It soon developed too that Pomeroy was “sophisticated” – he knew a lot about girls and could talk about them without seeming to boast. This might tend to make some of his listeners withdraw in an envious, embarrassed silence after a while, but it went over very well with others, and especially with Steve MacKenzie: there was nothing MacKenzie liked better than talking about girls.
Almost every night, after Lights and after Mr. Driscoll’s rounds, he and several others would drop into Pomeroy’s or Flynn’s room, and the sounds of their murmuring and lewd laughter would float down the hall for hours.

The other new boy was tall and slim with a strikingly handsome face, a bad complexion, and the unfortunate name of Pierre Van Loon. From the very beginning he’d made the mistake of talking too much, and the further mistake of talking about boring things: he would tell in painstaking detail the plots of rocket-ship stories from
Astounding Science Fiction
magazine, or relate with wonderment his father’s adventures as an artillery officer in the First World War. At other times he could be found in one of the toilet stalls with his pants around his ankles, sitting much longer than necessary in the smell of his own excrement and wholly absorbed in a comic-book.