A Good School

  He was walking past the Council hall when its heavy doors opened and ten or twelve men came out. They were men he didn’t know – all wearing dark business suits, some carrying briefcases – and he came to a stop and backed off on the edge of the path, ready to smile in case any of them should smile at him, but they swept past him without a glance. Only when he saw W. Alcott Knoedler emerge chatting among the last of them did he realize that this had been a meeting of the board of trustees. They would hurry around through the Three building archway now and out across the quadrangle to their waiting cars in front of One building; they’d disperse to Hartford and Boston and New York with the destiny of Dorset Academy in their hands.

  He waited until Knoedler had finished shaking hands with the last trustee; then he went up to him and said “How’d it go, Alcott?”

  “Oh, not well, Bob.” Knoedler’s face was still tense with the effort of his official smile. “Not really well at all, but better than I’d feared.” Slowly, as his eyes came into focus on Driscoll, he began to relax in the knowledge that the board meeting was over. “Better than I’d feared,” he said again, “and perhaps in some ways better than I’d dared hope. Do you have a minute, Bob? Want to come over to the office?”

  When he was settled behind his big desk Knoedler turned away and opened one panel of the oaken wall behind him, disclosing a little cupboard from which he removed a tray with a decanter of sherry and several glasses.

  “. . . the operating deficit,” he was saying. “Bob, I can’t tell you how tired I am of hearing about the operating deficit. It’s all these people want to talk about. You’d think we were running a factory. Well; cheers.” He took a sip of sherry and set his glass down carefully on the desk blotter. “And of course our operating deficit is alarming, but I keep trying to explain there are things that can be done. And I think I did manage to get a few points across this afternoon. I told them . . .”

  With the sherry warm and pleasant on his tongue, Driscoll sat back and let the words drift past his hearing. In no sense did Alcott Knoedler fit the role of a “beloved” headmaster; nobody loved him. It was partly that he spent almost half his time away from school, on the road, following up letters of inquiry from parents of prospective Dorset boys, “drumming up trade,” as he liked to say at faculty meetings. But even if he’d stayed home he probably wouldn’t have kindled much affection: he was a chilly man, a devious man, a talking, smiling, public-relations man, and the boys referred to him as Old Bottle-ass because he was tall and fragile-looking, with a high waist and wide hips. Possibly no man built like that could hope to cut much of a figure in a boys’ school. Nor could his wife do anything to help his career: she might once have been a pleasant and pretty girl, but now her face was forever set in a numb smile, as if injected in many places with Novocain. Other faculty wives said you could know her for years without hearing her say anything but “So nice; so nice.”

  “. . . and so you see it’s Mrs. Hooper again,” Knoedler was saying, “always, always Mrs. Hooper. Even after she dies that charter of hers will have the school hamstrung for years to come, and her being very much with us, ten miles away, only makes matters worse. She’s either eighty-two or eighty-four now, and she’s what any qualified physician would call senile. She won’t be reasoned with, won’t be reasoned with, and I must say it sometimes seems she has all the trustees in her pocket. In any case, the charter hems us in on every side. Well” – and here he ventured a little smile as he swirled the sherry in his glass – “almost every side. I’ve learned that when the financial picture gets bleak enough, some questions can be raised. I think I made some fairly good inroads today on the question of dress.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, I can’t promise anything yet, but wouldn’t it be good to tell them they can wear their own clothes next year? No more uniforms, no more monkey-suits and stiff collars at night?”

  “Well, sure,” Driscoll said, putting his empty glass on the desk, “it’s just that I still think – you know – I still think the major issue is interscholastic sports.”

  “And you’re by no means alone in that,” Knoedler said. “I agree with you, and I hear the same thing everywhere I go. Well.” He stood up, causing Driscoll to stand up too, and came around the desk to offer his hand. He had a surprisingly firm handshake; he had probably learned on the road that a good grip meant business. “Well,” he said again as he walked his guest to the door. “We’ll get there yet, Bob. One thing at a time.”

  And Driscoll was out under the trees again, heading home. He had just started up the path to the Three building archway when a group of the bigger kids came jogging up from behind and overtook him, winded and laughing, on their way back from the commando course. One of them was Larry Gaines, who dropped away from the others as they passed and fell into step with him.

  “Been through the course yet, Pop?”

  “I’m waiting for Mr. Knoedler, Larry. I’m ready whenever he is.”

  “Wow, wouldn’t that be something to see?” Larry Gaines said. “The two of you hitting the wall together? Listen, be sure and let me know when you do it, okay? I want to get a camera.”

  “They got you playing first base for the Eagles this year, Larry?”

  “I don’t know; been thinking I might go out for track.”

  “Good,” Driscoll said. “Good.”

  “Will you be coaching the milers again?”

  “I hope to be.”

  “Good. Because I’d really like to try the mile.”

  “Well, good; that’ll be good.”

  “Good.”

  They were both aware of having said “good” too many times, and it made them chuckle foolishly and look down at the flagstones. They had come to a stop inside the heavily shadowed archway now, and Larry stood with most of his weight on the raddled sneaker of one foot, his thumbs hooked in his jeans. “Well,” he said at last, looking up and smiling. “See you, sir.”

  The boys called Driscoll “Pop” but they called him “sir” too; he had to admit he liked that. And he had to admit, moving out into the quadrangle, that this wasn’t the first time he had come away blushing and pleasurably embarrassed from a small conversation with Larry Gaines. What was it about that kid? He was a top student, for one thing, and a good athlete – not great, not what could be called a natural, but good enough for any varsity football team that Dorset might field in the future (and wouldn’t it be good if he turned out to be a good miler too?) – and it was clear now that he’d be elected to the Student Council next year and would almost certainly be its President, the highest of all student offices. But when you’d said all that you had only begun to describe Larry Gaines; there was much more. He was so nice. There was nothing of the campus politician about him, ingratiating himself with other kids to win votes; he was just considerate and kind and nice to almost everyone. And he was – well, it might sound funny to say aloud, but he was just about the best-looking boy in the school. Looking into his bright face could make you almost as shy as looking into the face of a beautiful girl.

  The quadrangle was crawling with kids at this time of day; they were coming back to the dorms to take showers. Some of them called to one another across the wide space, and their blurred cries of greeting and teasing and reproach echoed up into the trees.

  The second floor of Two building was where the little kids lived, the first and second formers, and Driscoll felt a stirring of uneasiness when he glanced over at that particular line of windows. His only child, Bobby, who with dizzying suddenness had become thirteen years old, was now in residence up there as a member of the second form. Bobby was overweight and his teeth needed straightening; worse, he seemed to like to play the fool, the kind of kid most other kids find silly and tiresome. Marge had insisted on letting him live at home during his first-form year, and that had probably been a mistake: he simply hadn’t yet learned how to act right; how to handle himself; how to get along.

  Still, there was plenty of time. A lot of kids
went through an awkward age. Bobby would grow and change and develop, and meanwhile Driscoll knew it was wrong to worry about him. The worry, if it showed, would only compound the trouble.

  Besides, it was too nice an afternoon, too sweet a time of year to worry about anything. The subtle, smoky taste of Knoedler’s sherry lingered with him as he walked, and so did the benediction of Larry Gaines’ smile. Marge would be back from Hartford by now; she would have her purchases displayed in the living room (“Do you really like it, Bob? I did think it was a bargain because I got it on sale, and I thought it might go well with . . .”). And as she talked and moved around the room in that happy, home-from-shopping mood she would absently wipe a short lock of hair from her brow with one finger, a pointless little gesture that could sometimes make his throat ache with tenderness.

  The remarkable thing about Marge was that she was still a girl. Oh, she was mature and responsible and all the other things a woman of her age was supposed to be, but she hadn’t lost that shy young freshness. Even after all these years of marriage he thought of her as a girl, and never more so than when they were in bed. It wasn’t just that she felt as slender and firm as ever; it was that her little shoulders, her narrow back and limbs looked almost adolescent, almost childish, so that when she turned to let him take her in his arms – especially when she turned slowly, with a pout of desire on her pretty face – there was always a sweet surprise in her offering of real, grown-up woman’s breasts, and then of a big, proud, grown-up woman’s bush coming up at the juncture of her thighs. Ripe sensuality arising out of innocence – that was the quality he had tried and tried to catch in those foolish charcoal drawings long ago; that was what had filled him, as a bridegroom, with the wish that there were some final authority, some arbiter, some God to whom he might go and say “Do you mean this marvelous creature is mine? Do you mean I can have her?”

  And it was only five o’clock in the afternoon. He would go home and approve of all the things she’d bought, he would smile and nod as she talked and he’d fix them a couple of drinks; then he’d look at her long and hard and move up close and kiss her on the mouth. She had worn her blue jersey dress today, and he knew how that particular fabric felt sliding under his hands against her back; it felt like sex itself. And maybe she’d laugh and try to fend him off but he knew she liked it in the afternoons – they had agreed long ago that afternoons were even better than nights – and he would take her upstairs and have her. He would have her and have her, while the big trees stirred and rustled new leaves beyond the windows, and she’d say “Oh, Bob; oh, Bob . . .” and the sky would turn from blue to red to black and they’d miss dinner, and they wouldn’t care.

  Bobby lay sprawled on the living room sofa, eating a marshmallow. That was the first thing he saw when he let himself into the house, and he said “What’s this? Why aren’t you up in the dorm?”

  “Aw, gee, Dad, I’m only—”

  “And don’t give me ‘Aw, gee, Dad,’” Driscoll said. The harshness of his own voice surprised him, but he couldn’t stop. “If you want to be a member of the second form you’ve got to be a member of the second form. You’ve got to—”

  “Bob!”

  Only then did he realize Marge was in the room. She was standing at a chair filled with department-store boxes and wrappings, and there was sudden anger in her face. “I won’t have you railing at him,” she said.

  “I’m not ‘railing’; I’m simply saying he ought to be up in the dorm and he knows that as well as I do, and so do you. He isn’t supposed to live here anymore, Marge.”

  And without raising her voice – she almost never raised her voice – she said “Will you calm down, please? Will you try to control yourself? He came over because I asked him to, so he could try on the jeans and the sweatshirts I bought in town. Now; don’t you feel foolish?”

  He did; he certainly did, and there was no way to laugh it off. But he wasn’t quite ready to apologize, either, so all he said was “Okay; okay.” After a while he said “Any mail?”

  “Nothing much. It’s there on the table.”

  There were only bills and a magazine, but fingering through them gave him something to do.

  Sometimes, trying to see his son as others did, Driscoll was encouraged to believe that Bobby wasn’t really fat, that the teeth and the braces didn’t really spoil his mouth, that his face showed signs of intelligence and humor and manliness, but this wasn’t one of those times. Bobby hadn’t stirred from his heavy collapse on the sofa. He lay staring at nothing, and there was a fine dust of confectioner’s sugar on his petulant lips.

  Turning away from him, Driscoll looked shyly at his wife. “Did you – drive in alone today?” he inquired. “Or with Alice?”

  “With Alice. We had lunch at the Drake.” She was folding paper bags and flattening boxes, and she sounded tired but didn’t sound mad at him anymore. She never stayed mad for long; she was, in fact, a girl in whom anger never seemed very convincing in the first place. “I got those slipcovers I told you about,” she was saying, “and a couple of dresses – one of them I think I’ll take back. Oh, and I looked at a few raincoats, for you, but they were terribly expensive.”

  “That’s okay,” he assured her, “my raincoat’s okay.”

  So it was turning into almost as nice a homecoming as he’d planned, after all. When she carried out the store wrappings he followed her into the kitchen, noticing the shift and float of the blue jersey skirt, and did his best to keep the good mood going. “I feel sort of like having a martini,” he said. “Don’t you? Do we have any gin?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  There was no liquor at all in the cabinet except an inch of dry vermouth in a cloudy green bottle. “Oh,” he said. “Well, it doesn’t matter.” And he went to the refrigerator to look for beer, but there was no beer either.

  After a moment he went over to the counter near the drain-board and hitched himself up onto it, one foot dangling. “You know,” he said, “I really like that dress of yours. I always have.”

  “Oh?” And instead of looking up into his eyes she looked down at the dress. “Well,” she said, “it’s as old as God.”

  Bobby had left the sofa when they went back into the living room; he was over near the far wall, keeping his distance, fooling around with a fielder’s glove. He would repeatedly sock his fist into its pocket and then stand with his feet well apart, squinting along his left shoulder with the glove and the imaginary ball nestled close to his chest in a fairly good imitation of what real pitchers do when they’re holding a man on first. At nine and ten and eleven he had done things like this for hours, lost in fantasy, sometimes audibly whispering to himself.

  But he seemed to tire of it quickly now. He put the glove away in the closet under the stairs, where Marge kept a lot of his belongings, and came toward her across the carpet. “Hey, Mom?” he said. “Be okay if I take a shower here?”

  And that did it for Driscoll. Days and even hours later he was able to acknowledge the innocence of the question, but at the time no power on earth could have held back his rage.

  “No,” he said. “No, it would not be okay. You’re going to pick up your stuff, right now, and you’re going to go up to the dorm and take your shower with the other boys. If you’re ashamed to get undressed in front of the other boys that’s not at all surprising, and it’s regrettable, but maybe it’s something you ought to think about the next time you want to lie around stuffing yourself with marshmallows all day.”

  Bobby’s eyes seemed to have gone out of focus. He was just standing there and taking it; and Marge, over by the fireplace, didn’t look angry this time. It was worse: she looked hurt – stunned and waiting for the pain to start – and she looked older than her age.

  Driscoll sat down, taking off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes hard and slowly with his fingers. After a while he said “I’m sorry, Marge,” but she didn’t say anything.

  With the new jeans and sweatshirts folded over his arm, Bob
by walked to the front door. When he opened it Driscoll called, softly, “Bobby?”

  The boy turned back, but they didn’t quite look at each other. “I’m sorry, son,” Driscoll said.

  Much later that night, when he left the house carrying a flashlight in one hand and a clipboard in the other, to make his rounds, Driscoll was able to assure himself that it hadn’t been too bad. He had managed to make it up with Marge – not in the way he would have liked to, but they’d had what he now considered a good talk. The only unfortunate part had been at the end, when she’d said she was too tired to wait up for him.

  “Oh? How come?”

  “What do you mean, ‘how come’? I’m tired, that’s all.”

  Things would be all right in the morning – he was certain of that – and time would settle it all out.

  There was rarely anything out of the ordinary to be dealt with on his nightly rounds: he would proceed counter-clockwise around the quadrangle, and at each stairway landing a dorm inspector would be waiting to say “Everything okay, Pop,” or “Everything okay, sir.” Some of them were more reliable than others – he never felt wholly comfortable with MacKenzie, for instance, on the second floor of Three building; there was something a little shifty about MacKenzie’s face, suggesting that perhaps he shouldn’t have been appointed a dorm inspector in the first place – but in general the rounds were a time of peace and satisfaction.