My father called. He called on a night when both Dwight and Pearl were out of the house, and that was a lucky thing, because my mother took the call and everything about her immediately changed. She became girlish. I realized who it was and stood beside her, straining to hear words in the rumble of my father’s voice. He did most of the talking. My mother smiled and shook her head. Now and then she laughed skeptically and said, “We’ll have to see,” and “I don’t know about that.” Finally she said, “He’s right here,” and handed the receiver over to me.
“Hi, Chum,” he said, and I could feel him there. His bearish bulk, his tobacco smell.
I said hello.
“Your brother tells me you’re thinking of Choate,” he said. “Personally, I think you’d be happier at Deerfield.”
“Well, I just applied,” I said. “Maybe I won’t get in.”
“Oh, you’ll get in all right, boy like you.” He recited back to me the things I had told Geoffrey.
“I don’t know. They get a lot of applications.”
“You’ll get in,” he said sternly. “The question is, which school to choose. I’m simply suggesting that Deerfield may be on a more congenial scale than Choate. Let’s face it, you’re used to being a big fish in a small pond—you might get lost at Choate. But it’s your choice to make. If you want to go to Choate, for Christ’s sake go to Choate! It’s a fine school. A damn fine school.”
“Yes sir.”
He asked me where else I’d applied and I went through the list. He gave his approval, then added, “Mind you, Andover’s something of a factory. I’m not sure I’d send a boy of mine there, but we can talk about that when the time comes. Now here’s the plan.”
The plan was that I should come down to La Jolla as soon as school was over. Then Geoffrey would fly out from Princeton after graduation and the three of us would spend the whole summer together. Geoffrey would work on his novel while I started preparing for classes at Deerfield. When we wanted a break we could go for a swim at Wind and Sea Beach, which was just down the street from the apartment. And later, when she saw how well everything was going, my mother would join us. We would be a family again. “I’ve made some mistakes,” he told me. “We all have. But that’s behind us. Right, Tober?”
“Right.”
“You damn betcha. We’re starting from scratch. And look, no more of this Jack business. You can’t go off to Deerfield with a name like Jack. Understand?”
I said I understood.
“Good boy.” He asked if it was true that my stepfather had hit me. When I said yes, he said, “The next time he does it, kill him.” Then he asked to speak to my mother again.
After she hung up I told her what he’d said to me.
“Sounds real nice,” she said. “Don’t bank on it.”
“He said you would come too.”
“Hah! That’s what he thinks. I’d have to be crazy to do that.” Then she said, “Let’s see what happens.”
My mother drove me down to Seattle for the tests. I took the verbal section in the morning and immediately began to enjoy myself. I recognized, behind the easy-seeming questions on vocabulary and reading comprehension, a competitive intelligence out to tempt me with answers that were not correct. The tricks had a smugness about them that provoked me. I wanted to confound these sharpies, show them I wasn’t as dumb as they thought I was. When the monitor called the tests in I felt suddenly alone, as if someone had walked out on me in the middle of a good argument.
The other boys who were taking the test gathered in the hallway to compare answers. They all seemed to know each other. I did not approach them, but I watched them closely. They wore rumpled sport coats and baggy flannel pants. White socks showing above brown loafers. I was the only boy there in a suit, a salt-and-pepper suit I’d gotten for eighth-grade graduation, now too small for me. And I was the only boy there with a “Princeton” haircut. The others had long hair roughly parted and left hanging down across their foreheads, almost to their eyes. Now and then they tossed their heads to throw the loose hair back. The effect would have been careless on just one of them, but it was uniform, an effect of style, and I took note of it. I also took note of the way they talked to each other, their predatory, reflexive sarcasm. It interested me, excited me; at certain moments I had to make an effort not to laugh. As they spoke they smiled ironically, and rocked on their heels, and tossed their heads like nickering horses.
After lunch I walked around the campus. The regular students had not yet returned from their Christmas vacation, and the quiet was profound. I found a bench overlooking the lake. The surface was misty and gray. Until they rang the bell for the math test I sat with crossed legs and made believe I belonged here, that these handsome old buildings, webbed with vines of actual ivy to which a few brown leaves still clung, were my home.
Arthur hated shop, which was a required course for boys at Concrete High. After making his eighth or ninth cedar box he revolted. He was able to negotiate his way out by agreeing to work in the school office during that period. I thought he would help me, but he refused angrily. His anger made no sense to me. I did not understand that he wanted out, too. I backed off and didn’t ask again.
But a few days later he came up to me in the cafeteria, dropped a manila folder on the table, and walked away without a word. I got up and took the folder to the bathroom and locked myself in a stall. It was all there, everything I had asked for. Fifty sheets of school stationery, several blank transcript forms, and a stack of official envelopes. I slipped them into the folder again and went back to the cafeteria.
Over the next couple of nights I filled out the transcripts and the application forms. Now the application forms came easy; I could afford to be terse and modest in my self-descriptions, knowing how detailed my recommenders were going to be. When these were done I began writing the letters of support. I wrote out rough copies in longhand, then typed up the final versions on official stationery, using different machines in the typing lab at school. I wrote the first drafts deliberately, with much crossing out and penciling in, but with none of the hesitance I’d felt before. Now the words came as easily as if someone were breathing them into my ear. I felt full of things that had to be said, full of stifled truth. That was what I thought I was writing—the truth. It was truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed in the facts arrayed against it. I believed that in some sense not factually verifiable I was a straight-A student. In the same way, I believed that I was an Eagle Scout, and a powerful swimmer, and a boy of integrity. These were ideas about myself that I had held on to for dear life. Now I gave them voice.
I made no claims that seemed false to me. I did not say that I was a star quarterback or even a varsity football player, because even though I went out for football every year I never quickened to the lumpen spirit of the sport. The same was true of basketball. I couldn’t feature myself sinking a last-second clincher from the key, as Elgin Baylor did for Seattle that year in the NCAA playoffs against San Francisco. Ditto school politics; the unending compulsion to test one’s own popularity was baffling to me.
These were not ideas I had of myself, and I did not propose to urge them on anyone else.
I declined to say I was a football star, but I did invent a swimming team for Concrete High. The coach wrote a fine letter for me, and so did my teachers and the principal. They didn’t gush. They wrote plainly about a gifted, upright boy who had already in his own quiet way exhausted the resources of his school and community. They had done what they could for him. Now they hoped that others would carry on the good work.
I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face….
I had done well on the tests I’d taken in Seattle. But not long after my scores came in I got a rejection letter from Andover.
Then St. Paul’s turned me down. Then Exeter. The letters were polite, professed regret for the news they bore, and wished me well. I never heard back from Choate at all.
The rejections disappointed me, but I hadn’t really counted on these schools anyway. I was counting on Deerfield. When I got their letter I went off by myself. I sat by the river and read it. I read it many times, first because I was too numb to take it all in, then to find some word or tone that would cancel out everything else the letter said, or at least give me hope for an appeal. But they knew what they were doing, the people who wrote these letters. They knew how to close the door so that no seam showed, no light glimmered at the edges. I understood that the game was over.
A week or so later the school secretary summoned me out of class to take a telephone call in the office. She said it sounded long distance. I thought it might be my brother, or even my father, but the caller turned out to be a Hill School alumnus who lived in Seattle. His name was Mr. Howard. He told me the school was “interested” in my application, and had asked him to meet with me and have a talk. Just an informal chat, he said. He said he’d always wanted to see our part of the state, and this would give him a good excuse. We arranged to meet outside Concrete High after classes let out the next day. Mr. Howard said he’d be driving a blue Thunderbird. He didn’t say anything about wanting to meet my teachers, thank God.
“Whatever you do, just don’t try to impress him,” my mother said when I told her about the call. “Just be yourself.”
When Mr. Howard asked me where we might go to talk, I suggested the Concrete drugstore. I knew there would be kids from school there. I wanted them to see me pull up in the Thunderbird and get out with this man, who was just old enough to be my father, and different from other men you might see in the Concrete drugstore. Without affecting boyishness, Mr. Howard still had the boy in him. He bounced a little as he walked. His narrow face was lively, foxlike. He looked around with a certain expectancy, as if he were ready to be interested in what he saw, and when he was interested he allowed himself to show it. He wore a suit and tie. The men who taught at the high school also wore suits and ties, but less easily. They were always pulling at their cuffs and running their fingers between their collars and their necks. To watch them was to suffocate. Mr. Howard wore his suit and tie as if he didn’t know he had them on.
We sat at a booth in the back. Mr. Howard bought us milk-shakes, and while we drank them he asked me about Concrete High. I told him I enjoyed my classes, especially the more demanding ones, but that I was feeling a little restless lately. It was hard to explain.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “It’s easy to explain. You’re bored.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t going to speak badly of the teachers who had written so well of me.
“You wouldn’t be bored at Hill,” Mr. Howard said. “I can promise you that. But you might find it difficult in other ways.” He told me about his own time there in the years just before World War II. He had grown up in Seattle, where he’d done well in school. He expected that he would fall easily into life at Hill, but he hadn’t. The academic work was much harder. He missed his family and hated the snowy Pennsylvania winters. And the boys at Hill were different from his friends back home, more reserved, more concerned with money and social position. He had found the school a cold place. Then, in his last year, something changed. The members of his class grew close in ways that he had never thought possible, until they were more like brothers than friends. It came, he said, from the simple fact of sharing the same life for a period of years. It made them a family. That was how he thought of the school now—as his second family.
But he’d had a rough time getting to that point, and some of the boys never got to it at all. They lived unhappily at the edge of things. These same boys might have done well if they’d stayed at home. A prep school was a world unto itself, and not the right world for everyone.
If any of this was supposed to put me off, it didn’t. Of course the boys were concerned with money and social position. Of course a prep school wasn’t for everyone—otherwise, what would be the point?
But I put on a thoughtful expression and said that I was aware of these problems. My father and my brother had given me similar warnings, I explained, and I was willing to endure whatever was necessary to get a good education.
Mr. Howard seemed amused by this answer, and asked me on what experience my father and brother had based their warnings. I told him that they had both gone to prep schools.
“Is that right? Where?”
“Deerfield and Choate.”
“I see.” He looked at me with a different quality of interest than before, as I had hoped he would. Though Mr. Howard was not a snob, I could see he was worried that I might not fit in at his school.
“My brother’s at Princeton now,” I added.
He asked me about my father. When I told him that my father was an aeronautical engineer, Mr. Howard perked up. It turned out he had been a pilot during the war, and was familiar with a plane my father had helped design—the P-51 Mustang. He hadn’t flown it himself but he knew men who had. This led him to memories of his time in uniform, the pilots he had served with and the nutty things they used to do. “We were just a bunch of kids,” he said. He spoke to me as if I were not a kid myself but someone who could understand him, someone of his world, family even. His hands were folded on the tabletop, his head bent slightly. I leaned forward to hear him better. We were really getting along. And then Huff showed up.
Huff had a peculiar voice, high and nasal. I had my back to the door but I heard him come in and settle into the booth behind ours with another boy, whose voice I did not recognize. The two of them were discussing a fight they’d seen the previous weekend. A guy from Concrete had broken a guy from Sedro Woolley’s nose.
Mr. Howard stopped talking. He leaned back, blinking a little as if he had dozed off. He did not speak, nor did I. I didn’t want Huff to know I was there. Huff had certain rituals of greeting that I was anxious to avoid, and if he sensed he was embarrassing me he would never let me get away. He would sink my ship but good. So I kept my head down and my mouth shut while Huff and the other boy talked about the fight, and about the girl the two boys had been fighting over. They talked about another girl. Then they talked about eating pussy. Huff took the floor on this subject, and showed no sign of giving it up. He went on at length. I heard boys hold forth like this all the time, and I did it myself, but now I thought I’d better show some horror. I frowned and shook my head, and stared down at the tabletop.
“Shall we go?” Mr. Howard asked.
I did not want to break cover but I had no choice. I got up and walked past Huff’s booth, Mr. Howard behind me. Though I kept my face averted I was sure that Huff would see me, and as I moved toward the door I was waiting to hear him shout, “Hey! Dicklick!” The shout never came.
Mr. Howard drove around Concrete for a while before taking me back to school. He was curious about the cement plant, and disappointed that I could tell him nothing about what went on inside it. He was quiet for a time. Then he said, “You should know that a boys’s school can be a pretty rough-and-tumble place.”
I said that I could take care of myself.
“I don’t mean physically rough,” Mr. Howard said. “Boys talk about all kinds of things. Even at a school like Hill you don’t hear a whole lot of boys sitting around at night talking about Shakespeare. They’re going to talk about other things. Sex, whatever. And they’re going to take the gloves off.”
I said nothing.
“You can’t expect everyone to be, you know, an Eagle Scout.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“I’m just saying that life in a boys’ school can come as a bit of a shock to someone who’s led a sheltered life.” I began to make an answer, but Mr. Howard said, “Let me just say one more thing. You’re obviously doing a great job here. With your grades and so on you should be able to get into an excellent college later on. I’m not s
ure that a prep school is exactly the right move for you. You might end up doing yourself more harm than good. It’s something to consider.”
I told Mr. Howard that I had not led a sheltered life, and that I was determined to get myself a better education than the one I was getting now. In trying to keep my voice from breaking I ended up sounding angry.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Mr. Howard said. “You’re a fine boy and I’ll be happy to give you a good report.” He said these words quickly, as if reciting them. Then he added, “You have a strong case. But you should know what you’re getting into.” He said he would write to the school the next day, then we’d just have to wait and see. From what he understood, I was one of many boys being considered for the few remaining places.
“I assume you’ve got applications in at other schools,” he said.
“Just Choate. But I’d rather go to Hill. Hill is my first choice.”
We were parked in front of the school. Mr. Howard took a business card from his wallet and told me to call him if I had any questions. He advised me not to worry, said whatever happened would surely be for the best. Then he said good-bye and drove away. I watched the Thunderbird all the way down the hill to the main road, watched it as a man might watch a woman he’d just met leave his life, taking with her some hope of change that she had made him feel. The Thunderbird turned south at the main road and disappeared behind some trees.
DON ASHER (1926- )
Don Asher is a novelist and jazz pianist. Born in Massachusetts, educated at Cornell University, Asher has played both the East and West coasts, including a long stint at San Francisco’s The hungry i. He also worked for a year as a research chemist.
His most recent novel is Blood Summer. He and pianist Hampton Hawes together wrote Hawes’s biography, Raise Up Off Me.
“Shoot the Piano Player” is a short version of his 1992 musical memoir, Notes from a Battered Grand. Harper’s magazine first published it, subtitled “Tales of an Ivory Tickler.”