Diary of a Yuppie (16 page)

"Aren't you going on your errand, Bobby?"

"In due course."

"Your mother said she wanted you to go now."

"I'm going!"

"I don't think you should speak to me in that tone."

"I'm sorry."

"And I suggest when your mother asks you to do something, you should do it more cheerfully."

"Why?"

"Well, you want to show that you recognize all the things she's done for you, don't you? You want to show her that you love her, surely?"

"But she knows that."

"Perhaps she doesn't always know how much."

"I think she knows just how much."

Grandma looked at me critically. "Then perhaps you should try to make her feel that you love her more than you do."

"Wouldn't that be a lie?"

"Hardly a lie, Bobby. Because if you made the effort, you might find that indeed you did love her more."

"Why should I love her more? Isn't it enough the way it is?"

"Love is never enough the way it is. And if I may say so, young man, yours could do with a bit of stretching."

"I bet I love Mummy as much as you do!"

"As
I
do? My own daughter! How dare you say such a thing? What do you know about a mother's love, you fresh young whippersnapper?"

"More than you think. You're always making Mummy wait on you hand and foot. And I've seen you deliberately delay until she was comfortably settled on the sofa before asking her if she'd go upstairs to bring you your shawl."

Grandma at this started to moan and groan as if she were having one of her heart spasms; she clutched at her chest and cried, "Oh, oh, oh!" Of course, she was faking, but self-pitying old hypocrites are capable of working themselves into dangerous states, if for no other reason than to get back at those who have done them an imagined injury. And Grandma certainly had her revenge that day, for Mother came flying out to the porch to help the old lady upstairs to bed, where she remained for twenty-four hours.

Mother waited until Father came home, and they had a conference alone before supper. At that meal Mother delivered an obviously rehearsed homily in a high, sad, hurt tone.

"Your father and I, Bobby, are deeply concerned at your treatment of a defenseless old woman. You chose, deliberately I'm afraid, to strike at her in her most vulnerable area. I cannot conceive where you could have learned such cruelty."

"From her!" I could have shouted back, but I knew it was hopeless. They would never understand. Dimly I realized that my only effective revenge would be silence, and this I rigidly maintained. But I don't think I have forgiven Mother to this day.

The second episode, which occurred when I was seventeen, was much more serious, because here the critic was a person whom I admired. It was Cy Hawkins, or "Mr. Hawkins" as he was always known to me, an English teacher at the Haverstock School in Millbrook, New York, which I attended for one year before matriculating at Columbia. But to preface the tale of my encounter with Mr. Hawkins, I should first give an account of my friendship with Lindsay Knowles.

The Knowleses lived in Keswick, not far from my family, but, oh, the difference. Their great brown multi-winged wooden mansion rambled all over the top of its little hill and was approached by a long macadam drive bordered by rhododendron. I had heard my father say that the criterion of the wealthy was that their houses should not be visible from the road, and I had at once conceived a permanent regard for those whose domiciles met this standard. Our own poor dwelling, of course, looked right out on the street, as did those of most of my high school classmates, but there were some who enjoyed the delectable invisibility, and I identified them enviously with those gateposts in Keswick through which I rarely passed: stone pillars with statues of birds or animals, or silver balls; massive columns supporting heavy opened portals of elaborately wrought iron; simple wooden farm posts, or sometimes simply a break in a well-cut hedge or, at most, two green bushes cut to resemble trees, which my mother, in her unaccountable way, found in "better taste." These estates, or "places," as I learned it was more refined to call them, seemed to me so many Elysian fields at the end of whose graveled drives rose domiciles fit for gods.

Not, I hastily add, that I thought the occupants of these stately homes to be deities. Although grounded in the American obsession with class distinctions, as exemplified in the novels of Fitzgerald, Marquand and O'Hara, and bitterly conscious of every club that might not admit me and every academy with an old-school tie, I still never harbored the smallest admiration for the rich, even the old rich, or the least envy of their superior ease in, say, ordering a meal at an expensive restaurant or acting as master of ceremonies at a bridal dinner. I and my contemporaries wanted what the rich had, but we were perfectly content to keep our manners at all times what they had been. Unlike Gatsby we would not have been impressed by Daisy Buchanan—only by her fortune. Perhaps it was not so much that we were of a later era than that of the three authors mentioned above as that we harked back to an earlier one: Dreiser's.

My parents, who had an exaggerated sense of responsibility for their progenitors and who supported both their mothers into extreme old age, were able to send me to boarding school for only one year, and Haverstock was selected because it was willing to admit boys as late as the twelfth grade. I knew that I would have a tough time there socially, as the boys would have formed all their friendships and cliques, and I resolved, in the summer before going away, to make friends with Lindsay Knowles, whom I had known in our Keswick public school before he had been sent, three years earlier, to Haverstock. There was no point, after all, in being a "preppie" if one didn't know anyone, and Lindsay, I was sure, would be something of a leader wherever he was.

It was not easy. My parents knew Mr. and Mrs. Knowles, as I knew Lindsay, slightly. His parents asked people like us only to their big Fourth of July lawn parties. But I had early learned a simple thing: that in the absence of some hopeless barrier, such as being black or totally indigent, a dogged persistence will get you almost anywhere. I took to calling Lindsay on the telephone and asking him to play tennis or swim at our little country club, until he decided that, so long as he could see no way out of it, he might as well see me at his place. And once I had made my way past those stone gates it was not difficult to gain a permanent entry. I cultivated Mrs. Knowles, a chatty, fluffy, brainless creature who urged me to "come over and swim" whenever I wanted, which, to Lindsay's barely concealed disgust, I did.

Lindsay was a chameleon; he took on easily the characteristics of any group in which he happened to find himself. He might have been handsome had he weighed twenty pounds less; as it was, he was cheerful and agreeable-looking, with a round, freckled face, long, unruly, sandy hair that fell over his forehead, and gray-blue eyes that could seem merry or ice cold, as his mood required. With boys he could be easygoing, jokey and very lewd; with adults he was apt to be polite with an exaggeration that caused friendly smiles, because it was a conscious exaggeration intended to evoke just such smiles. Alone with an intimate, as I was to learn, he could be moody and bitter. He was exceedingly intelligent but very lazy; he read little but his perfect memory retained every word that he read. His complete ease with people, his sharp tongue and his family's money made him the center of any group of young people in our part of Keswick.

My selection of Lindsay as a friend-to-be was not motivated entirely by his being an "old boy" at Haverstock. There were two other youths in Keswick who also attended that institution and to whom access would have been more facile. But I had discovered something about Lindsay that only he, his parents and his doctor knew: that he was afflicted with a serious heart ailment. I had learned this in a part-time summer job with the Knowleses' doctor, a great friend of my parents, who had entrusted me with the task of reorganizing his voluminous files according to a new system and putting aside for proposed destruction certain antiquated ones. It was thus that I happened upon his memorandum of Lindsay's case, in which it was set forth that the boy should be told of the gravity of his condition in order to ensure his compliance with the regimen laid down. The prognosis was not wholly negative. It was possible, if not probable, that his condition would improve. It was thought best that he should continue his normal schedule at home and at school, while avoiding certain physical exercises.

If Lindsay had not revealed to any of his friends the threat under which he lived—and I have a hunch that he was too proud to have done so—would he not relish a friend who, without himself being aware of the illness, offered him a sympathy, when the dark moods fell, that could not be connected with an odious pity? And might that not prove my open sesame at boarding school?

Lindsay was inclined to resent my ready acceptance of his mother's casual invitations, but the summer was long and hot, and the Knowleses did not leave Keswick—no doubt with the purpose of keeping their son quiet. There were times, therefore, when I found him alone, sunbathing by the pool, and, for all his desire to snub me, glad enough to have a companion. On my third visit we became almost friendly.

"Why do you come here, Bob?" he asked. "You can't think I've been very nice to you."

"You've got a king-size pool and an all-weather tennis court. So I take your snottiness as a kind of dues I have to pay."

"Don't you know other people with pools and courts?"

"Pools, yes. Courts, no. And no one I know has a pool this big. It's great to do lengths in."

Lindsay looked at me now with something like interest. "Well, I'll say this for you. You put your cards on the table."

"Isn't that where cards belong?"

"Why are you going to Haverstock, Bob?"

"Isn't it a good school?"

"It's all right, I suppose, as such academies go. But it's no better than Keswick High."

"You mean you get nothing for all that tuition?"

"Not really. What the prep schools are good at is bringing along the dumb guys. They have enough faculty to give individual tutoring. But now they won't take the dumb guys. So what's the use of them?"

I knew better than to tell him that there might be social advantages for me in going to a prep school. He was sure to sneer at that. "I guess my old man's pretty keen on having me go. Personally, I think the bright guys teach themselves. Give 'em the books; they'll read."

"And you're a bright guy?"

"I am. Aren't you?"

"Maybe I am at that." He appeared to consider this, almost gravely. "Anyway, what does it matter? The bomb should take care of us all."

Was he trying to console himself by including the world in his own doom? "I figure nothing ever happens that everyone thinks will happen," I observed sententiously.

"So you believe the world will survive to become Robert Service's oyster?"

"And Lindsay Knowles's. I'll share it with you."

"Because of my pool?"

"Because of your father's pool."

"Actually, I believe the place is in Mummy's name." He laughed. "And, come to think of it, there is a master at Haverstock who might teach you more than you can get out of a book. It's Mr. Hawkins."

"What's he like?"

"Well, you'll see. He's not like the others. He's somehow ... real." Lindsay became suddenly self-conscious. "He makes poetry seem something more than a lesson, or a thing to quote and impress people with. It's like religion to him. Except a religion you really believe in, not just Sunday stuff. Oh, I don't know. It's a lot of crap, of course."

And that was all I could get out of him about Mr. Hawkins. But it was a start, anyway, for after that Lindsay greeted me with a more resigned good will when I appeared, and once, on a rainy afternoon, actually telephoned me to ask me over to play backgammon.

He was certainly unhappy. He would sometimes be silent for minutes on end, not even acknowledging a direct question. This might be followed by ribald moods in which he would giggle inanely at anything that was said. At other times he could be sour, critical, even corrosive. He would say scathing things to me and did not seem to note that I never answered back. He appeared to have accepted me as a hanger-on whom it was not worth taking the trouble to be rid of, perhaps as a kind of courtier. For there was something oddly imperial about Lindsay. He took for granted that he should be an object of some kind of deference, not so much because of his money (his family was only rich by Keswick standards) or his brain (which was no better than mine), but perhaps simply because he had been dignified by the probability of an early demise.

Haverstock School was a medley of rather dull, oblong, red-brick buildings spread out over a long low hilltop with a superb view of the rolling verdant landscape of upper New York. I entered a form of some fifty boys and found that, as I had anticipated, Lindsay's support was a valuable social asset. But there were liabilities to it as well. In one mood he might include me in a hiking expedition across country with one or two of the school leaders, but in another he would make cruel public fun of me and imply that he had to be nice to me only because I was from his home town.

He did, however, make me part of his relationship with Mr. Hawkins, and he and I would go to the latter's study on Saturday evenings to drink cider and talk of poetry.

The English teacher was a large man with beautiful wide friendly eyes, a very pale countenance and thick red curly hair. Motionless he might have seemed the statue of a Greek discus thrower. But his actions and demeanor seemed to deprecate the outer man, not from any sense that his exterior might be too shining a coat of armor for the soul cringing within (the initial interpretation of some observers) as from a deep and almost desperate sense of genuine humility. Cy Hawkins, one felt, would be ready, if not to fight, certainly to die—and die in flames—for a cause, but it would be difficult for him to believe that any enemy or condemning judge could be more sinful than he.