A Good School (9 page)

“That light – there was a streak of
light
across the wall.”

“Oh, it’s only Bob Driscoll with his silly flashlight; you know he goes past here every night.”

“Well, but it wasn’t just going past; it was like someone trying to look
in
.”

“Don’t be silly, Alice. Nobody could see through these curtains.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Will you please try to relax?”

Alone on the second-floor landing of Three building, Steve MacKenzie stood slumped and waiting with his fingers in his
hip pockets. His big face looked righteous; when the wavering beam of Driscoll’s flashlight came up the stairwell, he was ready for it.

“Sir, Haskell’s not here,” he reported.

“Oh?” Driscoll said. “Any idea where he is?”

“No, sir. I saw him in study hall, but not since then.”

And when Driscoll had gone, MacKenzie felt a pleasant sense of having done the right thing. If it had been Terry Flynn or Jim Pomeroy, or even Lear or Jennings, he would have covered for them: those guys would only have been up to some devilment, and could always be counted on to look out for him as well as for themselves. But where was the percentage in sticking your neck out for a creep like Haskell?

“. . . And you did say to keep an eye on him, Alcott,” Robert Driscoll said in Knoedler’s living room, “so I thought you’d want to know about this. I’ve looked everywhere.”

Knoedler, roused from bed and wearing a surprisingly cheap-looking bathrobe and pajamas, rubbed his face. “I knew I shouldn’t have let him leave the office alone today,” he said. “I should’ve taken him over to the infirmary, if nothing else. Well, what now? Should we call the family first, or the police?”

“Police first, I guess,” Driscoll said.

“No, wait, Bob. He’s probably only trying to get home. Glastonbury isn’t far. Let’s start over there, and I imagine we’ll find him walking along the road. Give me five minutes to get dressed.”

And they set out, in Knoedler’s car, on a white Connecticut highway under a full moon. Dense black masses of trees sped away on either side of their headlights; there were no other cars on the road. Driscoll rode in silence. He was reasonably sure that in a real school there wouldn’t be situations like this.

“Well, it’s only three or four more miles,” Knoedler said at the wheel. “This is very – distressing.”

And then the headlights picked him out – a small figure trudging along the right-hand side of the road, wearing what looked like a short cloak, turning, as the car approached, to raise one thumb in a hitchhiker’s appeal.

Knoedler brought the car to a stop and switched on the ceiling light to let Haskell see who they were.

“Oh, my God, Mr. Knoedler,” he said. “Mr. Driscoll. This is – God, I—” His eyes were round, and there were black ridges of dust-caked spit on his lips. He had removed his stiff collar and tie, but the tiny knob of his gold collar-button gleamed in the moonlight; any cop for miles around would have spotted him as a Dorset boy.

“Get in, John,” Knoedler said. “All we want to do is take you home.”

“Sir, I’m not going back to school, and that’s final. That’s final.”

“I didn’t mean school, John, I meant home. That’s probably best now, don’t you think?”

“Ah.” Haskell took three steps backward onto the shoulder of the road and stood glaring at them, giving a little toss of his head to show how ludicrous all this was. “Ah. So now I’ve been expelled.”

Driscoll sighed and said “Oh, Lord.” Then he got out of the car, leaving the door open, and climbed into the back seat. “Come on, Haskell,” he said. “Let’s quit fooling around. You ride up front.”

It took a few more minutes of trying to reason with him, but he came along. They made another stop at a telephone booth where Knoedler called Haskell’s mother, remembering just in time that she preferred to be called Mrs. Atwood, the name of
her second or third husband; then they found their way to a modest white house among many trees.

They were greeted by a man of twenty-eight or thirty, handsome enough to be a romantic actor, whose name was lost in the mumbled introductions and who looked a little lost himself as he ushered them into the living room. “Mrs. Atwood’ll be right down,” he said. “Can I get you something?”

“Oh, no, thanks,” Knoedler said, settling himself in an upholstered chair.

Driscoll, who had chosen a straight chair as if to prove his readiness to leave at any moment, was looking around the room in mild surprise: he would have thought most Dorset boys came from wealthier homes than this.

“Well,” the young man said to Haskell. “How’re you doin’, buddy?” And he looked embarrassed as soon as he’d said it, even before Haskell fixed him with a wan little smile of disdain. It was clear that “How’re you doin’, buddy?” was the young man’s standard salutation for this strange, homely boy, this sixteen-year-old intellectual who could never be wholly relied on to stay out of sight.

“As far as you’re concerned,” Haskell told him carefully, giving full weight to each word, “I’m fine.”

The young man strolled over to the foot of the stairs, as if that might bring Mrs. Atwood down sooner. He was graceful in his uneasiness, standing with his thumbs in the pockets of his Western jeans, studying the carpet.

When she did come down, Driscoll couldn’t take his eyes off her. She wasn’t exactly pretty – there was too much of Haskell in her face for that – but she was as regal as the leading actress in some Broadway play of which he’d seen only still photographs, and she seemed to smolder as she walked.

She went first to her son and told him he looked “dreadful”;
then she turned to the young man and said “Evan, why don’t you and John go out on the porch, so I can talk to these gentlemen alone.”

It seemed to be the last thing either of them wanted to do, but they went; apparently she was accustomed to having her way.

“Could we start at the beginning, please, Mr. Knoedler?” she said, and she seated herself in a way that emphasized the swing and rustle of her full skirt. “Can you tell me what’s been going on in that romantic-looking little school of yours?”

Knoedler cleared his throat. “Well, John’s been under a good deal of pressure lately, Mrs. Atwood,” he began, “and he’s always been a high-strung boy, as you know. I’m not a physician, but I understand that sometimes the nerves reach a kind of crisis point, and then it’s advisable to seek therapeutic help . . .”

The talk went on for perhaps another twenty minutes, and Driscoll contributed nothing to it. This was Knoedler’s baby; let Knoedler handle it. Besides, it was too late at night for being helpful in anything, let alone in something he didn’t understand. He wanted to go home and sleep.

Then suddenly Mrs. Atwood got up, piqued by something Knoedler had said – something Driscoll hadn’t even caught – and walked away to the mantelpiece, where she whirled to face him again.

“It strikes me, Mr. Knoedler,” she said, “that you people run a pretty funny school. What do you
do
to the kids there? What do they do to each other? I send you a great deal of money to prepare my son for college and he comes home looking crucified, and all you can do is sit around making little innuendos about my private life.”

“I was aware of no innuendos, Mrs. Atwood,” Knoedler said, blushing. “I certainly meant nothing of the sort, and I—”

“Oh, come off it, Knoedler.” She snatched up a cigarette and
lighted it swiftly; then she started talking again with the cigarette wagging in her lips. “You’re
dying
to know about Evan. Well, apart from the fact that it’s none of your business—” She tore the cigarette from her mouth – “Evan is the finest riding instructor in this part of the state. He and I are partners in what happens to be an excellent stable, and I imagine we bring a great deal more care and professionalism to our work than you do to yours.”

They were all on their feet now. “Mrs. Atwood,” Knoedler said. “I hope you’ll understand that I—”

“Thank you for bringing my son home,” she said, “and beyond that, thank you for nothing. Thank you for nothing at all.”

When she switched on the porch light for them it disclosed Evan seated alone at one end of the long porch and Haskell at the other. Neither of them got up to say goodnight.

In the car going back to school Knoedler said “I don’t see what more we could have done.”

“No,” Driscoll said.

They were both silent for a few miles, until Knoedler started to talk in a rambling way about “values.”

“. . . and the family structure as you and I know it is rapidly disappearing, Bob,” he was saying. “If the school stays in business I imagine we’ll see more and more evidence of that in the next few years.”

“Yeah,” Driscoll said; and at least two more miles went by before he said “Alcott?”

“Mm?”

“How do you mean, ‘if the school stays in business’?”

There was a rule at Dorset that you had to room alone during your first year; having a roommate was a privilege reserved for “old” boys. This made for a good deal of emotional tension every May, when the double-room assignments were given out.

“Hey,” one boy would say shyly to another. “Want to get a room together next year?”

“Well, the thing is I’ve already promised somebody else.”

“Oh.”

For a week the quadrangle pulsed with awkward little conversations like that; it was a time of subtle pursuit and hurt feelings and last-minute settlings for second best.

Terry Flynn and Jim Pomeroy formed a happy exception – everybody knew they were made for each other – and there were other logical pairings such as Lear and Jennings.

Britt and Haskell would have been naturals too, but Haskell was gone – and this filled William Grove with a terrible mixture of doubt and hope. He knew he had almost no chance with somebody like Hugh Britt; still, Britt did tolerate him in ways that showed every sign of turning into liking. And they had spent a great amount of time together lately, if only in preparing the
Chronicle’s
eight-page Commencement Issue.

“Hey, Grove,” Britt said in the office one afternoon, “I don’t
like this headline of yours, ‘ “Smudge” Parker Dies Hero’s Death.’ ”

“Well, but he did, though,” Grove said. “The point is, he could’ve bailed out, but he stayed in his plane and steered it away from this English village; that’s why they gave him the—”

“I know, I know,” Britt said impatiently, “but the headline doesn’t have any dignity. The story doesn’t either, for that matter – all this gee-whiz, boy’s-magazine stuff. It’s vulgar. It’s tawdry. Don’t you see? Look. Make it something like this: ‘James Parker Killed in England.’ Then your lead ought to be: ‘James H. Parker, class of ’39, was killed after steering his crippled fighter plane away from the English village of Whaddyacallit last month,’ period. ‘He was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross,’ period.

“New paragraph: ‘A first lieutenant with the such-and-such Fighter Command of the something Air Force, Parker had served so-and-so many months overseas,’ and so on. Then you can save your ‘Smudge’ business for the third or fourth paragraph: ‘Parker, known affectionately as “Smudge” to his Dorset friends,’ and et cetera. See?”

“Oh,” Grove said. “I guess so, yeah. Okay, I’ll do it over.” Britt seemed always to be right in matters where vulgarity and tawdriness were concerned.

They worked in silence for an hour or so, long after Britt had approved Grove’s second version of the Smudge Parker story; then Britt said “Hey, Grove?”

“Yeah?”

“Listen. I’ve been thinking. I don’t really want to be editor of this thing next year. It takes up too much time, and I can’t afford to let my grades slip. I wouldn’t mind helping out here, but I don’t want the responsibility. How about you doing it?”

Grove was astonished. “Editor-in-
chief
, you mean?”

“Oh, come on. It’s only a dumb little school paper. You can handle it.”

Nobody had ever before expressed confidence in Grove’s ability to handle anything. “Well,” he said, “I guess I could give it a try.”

“Okay. Let’s set it up that way, then. You be editor and I’ll be managing editor – or maybe we could call it ‘associate editor’; that suggests less authority. I think it’ll work out. And I mean hell, we certainly aren’t going to find anyone
else
to do it.” Britt had finished his share of the day’s work. He got up, put on his Dorset blazer and pulled it straight as he made for the door.

“Hey, Britt?” Grove said. “You got a roommate for next year?”

Britt hesitated. “Well, Ed Kimball’s asked me,” he said. “I guess I’ll probably go in with him.”

“Oh.” Ed Kimball was a hunched, plump fellow, a wizard at math and chemistry; all he and Britt had in common was that they were both straight-A students.

With his hand on the knob of the open door, Britt seemed to be thinking it over. “I don’t know, Grove,” he said. “I can see where it might be all right to room with you; I’ve considered it – we have a lot in common and all that – but I don’t know. There’s something a little too undisciplined about you. For me, anyway.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, you know. You’re always late for everything; you flunk courses and don’t seem to care; you’re sloppy; that kind of thing could make trouble if we roomed together. Besides, you’re – well, you’ve come a long way this year, that’s true, but last fall I thought you were – unwholesome, sort of.”

Grove’s mouth went dry. “How do you mean, ‘unwholesome’?”

“Oh, come on, Grove. You know. I was there the night those guys ganged you and jerked you off.”

“They
didn’t
jerk me off ! They couldn’t even get me to—”

“What the hell’s the difference? If it’d been me I’d have killed them. I’d have killed the first son of a bitch that touched me.”

“How? Whaddya gonna do when eight guys are holding you down?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Britt said. “All I know is you were lying there laughing and talking away; you might as well’ve been saying ‘Do it more.’”

“I
wasn’t
. I was trying to make
a joke
of it. Can’t you see that?”