Expensive People Page 6

  11

  My school was a private school by the name of Johns Behemoth Boys' School, not affiliated with any religion, pure and Anglophile, like all these schools, with an unmarked bus to take care of the few “town boys” who did not board at the school. The school was one of the old estates (I promised that your heart would swell to see one), and surely no mortal human beings had ever lived in that big main house. No, I like to think that giants had lived there, archangels or monsters. And up behind it, terraced into a hill, was a garden of exquisite beauty tended by a deaf-mute, whose only justification in life was to keep the blown petals swept up off the grass, the roses trimmed, the rhododendron spiced with acid, the rich soil tilled, the insects at bay. Any monstrous hero would have cultivated this beauty as a delicious contrast to his own degradations.

  The buildings were covered with ivy, very staunch and brittle. A bit ugly, like all these schools. The architecture was solid and masculine, squat, unimaginative, English and prisonlike in an easy combination. Graveled walks for the boys to bicycle upon, and a series of waterfalls set up for visitors and parents and magazine photographers. (The water was verboten to us boys.) Rather narrow, cheerless dormitory rooms, but built solidly, with good solid imitation antique furniture. Country English. Down in the classrooms the floors were smooth and polished as if by a hundred years of feet, caressed by boys impatient for learning. Small classrooms; a table and chair for the teacher instead of a desk; desks were—shall I guess?—declasse because the public schools had them. We boys wore ties every day of our anguished little lives, and blazers, and we worked hard, very hard. I am not joking. The school started with seventh grade and took in all of the high-school grades, but Fernwood's conservative parents had been blocking and graphing out their boys' careers for over a decade before they entered Johns Behemoth. Public-school students matured before we did in every way except intellectually; the typical Johns Behemoth boy was undersized, lank, intense, nervous, and given to sarcasm and superb, automatic manners. In the presence of girls he regressed to early childhood. I believe about thirty percent of my classmates were in analysis, a good many of them with the same man, Dr. Hugg, who specialized in disturbed adolescent boys. I never advanced that far because I was kicked out of the school in a few months.

  Of all the ugly things I have to tell, stored up ripe and rotting in my memory, being expelled from that school is in a way the most shameful.

  A man can admit with a cheerful shrug of his shoulders to larceny, wife-beating, treason, even murder (as I am to do shortly), but trivialities concerning his honor arouse the most shame. This is because the ego's threads of radiation never quite stop, even in the most depraved of us, and we must always think, “Yes, but my essential honor wasn't touched. Yes, but my dignity wasn't touched. Yes, but… But…”

  But…

  It was January when we moved to Fernwood, and Nada found out at once about the schools. The public school was out, she decided, because my nervous little mind needed more stimulation. She had had an interest in the Catholic Church for a while, a fluctuating interest like all her interests, but people told her emphatically that the local Catholic school wasn't good enough for her son. (She talked in a rapid low voice about her “son,” who was me, a prodigious child never understood by his father or his teachers.) So she drove me over to Johns Behemoth one frosty morning.

  Let me describe Nada on such a morning. She was dressed in her suburban style (she had two general styles, as you will see) and most fiercely and proudly was she adorned, in her simply cut dark wool suit, and two dots of silver that were earrings, and white leather gloves that looked like baby's skin, bleached, and a purse to match, and the jeweled wristwatch that Father had given her for no particular reason—no reason that I had been able to snoop out—a month before. Her shoes were made of leather, her legs were smooth and scintillating in the vivid light, covered with invisible nylon, and she wore over her suit her sporty fur coat, which was something to wear “in the country,” alternating bands of white and caramel fur, and from all this arose a faint halo of warm perfume that might have been Nada's magic radiance. A child, I did not let on that I noticed the interested gaze of men we drove past, mere gas-station attendants or sometimes village executives strolling to work or down to the train depot. I did not even let on that I noticed the looks Father gave her sometimes, sad and yearning and vulnerable, when she would hurry into a room Father was in, looking for something she would never find in that room—or in any room he and I were in, drooping, happy Father and I, her prodigy. Much of my child's life consisted of averting my eyes and turning away from things I was not supposed to see.

  She took the Cadillac that morning. Father was at work. He had driven off that morning at seven and he was at work, in an office all his own some distance away. I will take you there eventually, but Nada is always more interesting, and this is the story (or is everything in my life only an anecdote?) of how she brought me to Johns Behemoth, saw what the challenge was, and conquered it. In the lovely yellow car she wheeled around the unpaved lanes of Fernwood Heights, which was adjacent to plain Fernwood and much more expensive. We passed stone walls and brick walls and walls of evergreens that must have hidden extraordinary homes, twisting and turning in a kind of perpetual pine forest, until we came to the wrought-iron gate and the sign

  JOHNS BEHEMOTH BOYS' SCHOOL

  PARKING FOR VISITORS

  SPEED 15 MPH

  “We're going to get you into this school, Richard,” Nada said grimly. She looked at everything and took in everything. I could feel the jolt of this place on her body, my poor mother, who was so simple in her way that all things ostentatious and expensive seemed emanations of a higher existence, which she never questioned the way Father might. She attributed this to his vulgarity.

  Quietly watching them both, which was my life's work, I could see that Nada's superior mind disqualified her entirely for judgments concerning anyone who didn't compete with her on the intellectual level. She criticized scornfully and recklessly those writers she loved best, Tolstoi and Mann, embarrassed by occasional lapses of taste or power in their writing, but any society matron or business executive with the smell of money about them rendered her helpless. It was a good thing she never made it into high society! What could she do? She was as much a child as I was, now that I think of it. She had married Father the way a girl goes on a date with a man she does not at all like, or even know, simply because he will take her to a special event where the very lights and the very sweetness of the flowers set everywhere make up a world—no people are really needed.* Father knew nothing, but where his imagination should have been, in that emptiness, where his sensitivity and taste should have been, in that larger emptiness, there was a crude common sense as reliable as a dime-store bottle-top opener.

  JOHNS BEHEMOTH

  FOUNDED 1880

  That was impressive to both of us, and the cobbled streets that wound through Faculty Row (a quaint long building of one-story houses joined amid a surplus of evergreens and pines), and the large snow-dappled opening that promised a park or a green in warmer months, where bemused bright boys might read Latin verse, and the many elms (some of them dead, but in the winter no one could tell), and the enormous library, and a building with its own modern steel sculpture out front: an angular, emaciated human being, perhaps a man, holding erect a globe that has become skeletonized but evidently no less heavy. A symbol of Science, and that was the Science Building. The Humanities Building was the big one, with a surly, encrusted look, its windows like multiple eyes with thick, leafless vines over them like eyebrows. Nada and I liked this building best. Here there were no deceptions about the torment knowledge promised, the way there was in public schools where knowledge was shuffled in with dances and basketball games and camera clubs.

  “We'll get you in here, Richard, the two of us,” Nada said. The exquisite, muted ostentation of this place had unnerved her a little, but her voice simply lowered itself and went on, grimly an
d confidentially. “When we go in for the interview, please remember to sit straight. But don't look rigid. And don't, for God's sake, look like your father, as if you're ready to fly out of the chair and slap someone on the back. Look reserved and a little abstracted. Look intelligent. How do you look today anyway?” And she turned to stare at me.

  It was the first time that day she had bothered to look at me, and I felt the anxiety of her solemn dark eyes though she tried to show nothing. Nada had fine clear skin, rather pale. Suburban style dictated her hair, which was “done” once and sometimes twice a week so that from behind or at a distance she looked like an ordinary resident of Fern-wood, a housewife who had no housewifely chores but wasn't “society” either and was terrified of seeming pretentious—short hair, set to rise above her elegant head in feathery sections that fascinated me, everything smooth and disciplined and rather familiar. Nada's hair was very dark, almost black. Suburban style dictated her entire face, actually, because she wore nothing on her eyes—no messy black goo, no blue or green eyeshadow of the kind up in her bedroom awaiting the minute she would tire of this life—and her mouth was a handsome, wholesome, unsurprising red. Her manner this morning was suburban and wholesomely nervous, American as the flag that rose above the frigid evergreens in the park at the center of enormous Johns Behemoth.

  She said, “What's that on your face? Nothing? Fix your hair, push it back. Darling, you look fine. You look”—and she cast her mind about for the best word—”you look like a little scholar.”

  We parked the car in an area designated for visitors. Walking up the cobbled path to what had once been the Behemoth mansion, we drew in the fresh air as if we expected strength from it. I had to hurry to keep up with her. If Nada and Father had nothing else in common, they both walked fast. They were always striding and rushing as if trying to break through crowds or anxious to see what was attracting a crowd up ahead.

  “Remember, look intelligent. Don't fail me,” Nada whispered.

  Like all mothers, she tended to whisper one last piece of advice that is given too late, too close to the zone all children know should be dignified by silence. We were inside the building when she told me this, and at once a middle-aged woman appeared in a doorway and cast upon us a bemused look. She glanced at me in a kindly way as if to assure me that I did look intelligent.

  “Mrs. Everett?” she said. “Dean Nash will be with you in a minute.”

  We were led into a curiously modern room, like a doctor's office where everything has been ordered from a catalogue, even the abstract paintings and the fake ferns, and there we both reached for the same copy of the Scientific American, scorning the Reader's Digest. “Come, sit by me, we can read it together,” Nada said. She might have thought the magazines were set out as part of a test. I ignored her, my face still hot from the encounter with the kindly woman.

  That woman returned to her desk and began typing something, paying no attention to us. She had the look of a hospital matron who had seen many mothers and sons come and go, wistful and rejected. As she rolled yellow forms of varying sizes into her electric typewriter, skillfully and with a long-fingered grace that reminded me of Nada, she raised her eyebrows and inquired of us politely, “Are you new to Fernwood?”

  Yes, we were new, Nada said. We lived on Burning Bush Way. (She wanted to let the woman know we weren't wealthy but at least respectable.)

  “Very nice,” said the woman. “And Richard is … twelve?” She peered at me as if she thought this rather incredible.

  “No,” Nada said carefully, “he is almost eleven. But he's been attending seventh-grade back in Brookfield.”

  “Oh, I see. That's very interesting,” the woman said, her eyes turning a little watery as if she were in the presence of a crippled boy. “You know, Mrs. Everett, this is such a fine school, and so many fine boys want to attend it, but, of course as in everything else, there is so much pressure and only a limited number of openings.”

  “I understand,” Nada said.

  When we went into the Dean of Admission's office Nada poked her finger into the small of my back to indicate that I should stand straighter. I was already walking with my spine stretched so tight I thought I might faint with exhaustion. Was it my fault I was only ten, and small for ten? But never mind, on with my miserable story. I won't blame Nada for my inadequate height or for whatever else has come to pass.

  Dean Nash was an interesting man: about fifty, stylish and dandyish, as if he'd just stepped out of a Hollywood movie filmed on the set of a prep school. He was someone's idea of an Anglicized American headmaster. He smiled a dazzling dentured smile at Nada and said, “We're very happy to hear of your interest in Johns Behemoth, Mrs. Everett. Our institution represents something of an experiment, as you may know if you read the literature I sent to you—yes? fine, Mrs. Everett— an experiment set up by the executor of the Johns Behemoth estate some years ago, with the specific recommendation that this school start its program in the early grades. We did experiment with younger children, but this aspect of the venture was gradually phased out so that we could concentrate more intensely on individual, private work in the higher grades. I believe you know, Mrs. Everett, that Johns Behemoth provides one instructor for each five boys in certain classes, and for a senior desiring intensive study an adviser who will devote upward of six hours weekly to this student, and a faculty of several people constantly available to him. We have work-study clubs, foreign-language clubs and tables in the dining room, and a quite successful Overseas Year for our juniors.”

  Nada glanced over at me, warmly and kindly, as if I had already been granted a year in Greece.

  “Our record for scholarships, Mrs. Everett, is quite frankly the highest in the country with the exception of one school in New England, rather more heavily endowed than Johns Behemoth,” the good dean said. He was sitting on the edge of his glass-topped desk and smiling down into Nada's excited face. With a silver pen he tapped his knee and said, “I haven't yet had time to glance through Richard's application forms, and is his health report in?—it is?—and his recommendations are in, yes, one is right here on my desk I see. Fine, fine. Now today he will be taking the entrance examination, you know. You are all prepared, Richard, for our little tests?”

  He squinted at me as if, after Nada's brilliance, I was a kind of dark, dim light.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you brought pen, pencil, and eraser?”

  “Yes, sir, and paper.”

  “We provide the paper,” he said a little softly, as if I had said something foolish. “Mrs. Everett, I do sincerely wish you and your son the very best luck, but I must remind you that our openings are extremely limited, and it is rare, rare indeed, that we accept a boy in the middle of the year.”

  “I understand perfectly, Dean Nash.”

  “I thought you would, yes, yes,” he said, smiling vaguely.

  Nada sat with her white-and-caramel coat open about her and her legs crossed, and for once I was glad of her being so beautiful; maybe it would help.

  “Our examinations are in five parts, Mrs. Everett, each consisting of an hour section, and so … Should I explain the examination to you, Mrs. Everett, while Richard begins it?”

  I felt a sharp pang of disappointment. I wanted to hear about the exam myself.

  “Yes, that's an excellent idea,” Nada said. “Richard is very anxious to begin, Dean Nash. He's a perfectionist—I mean, he's very happy when he's doing exams, writing papers, reading. He's a very dedicated child … boy.”

  “I assume that you and your husband have provided him with the proper kind of cultural background, in that case,” Dean Nash said happily.

  “I hope so.”

  “You would be surprised, my dear Mrs. Everett, astonished at the irregularity of the cultural backgrounds of some of the boys who take our entrance exams! Boys from, need I say, homes in this immediate vicinity.” He stared at Nada for a moment in silence to let the profundity of this remark sink in. “But
I must say, without keeping it back any longer, that I am not quite unfamiliar with you, Mrs. Everett, and … and here, so you see,” he said and reached around to pick off his cluttered desk Nada's first book, a novel published three years before. The blank white cover with its fluted red lettering startled me, as if it were a private, personal part of her suddenly given out to a stranger's hand.

  “Oh,” Nada said, leaning forward in surprise, letting her coat fall farther open about her. She touched her mouth with one gloved hand in a neat and exquisite and not at all spontaneous gesture I had seen her make many times before. “But how did you know—I mean, I write under my maiden name—”

  “I have always been interested in literature, passionately interested,” Dean Nash said with a grin. He called attention to his appearance by involuntarily glancing down at himself—impeccable heavy tweed suit, dark tie, polished dark shoes, everything perfect. For a big man he looked light on his feet. He smelled faintly of shaving cologne, as Nada did of perfume. “Eve made a few attempts at writing myself, but above all I am interested in contemporary American writers. I subscribe to four of the ‘little’ magazines, including The Transamerican Review, in which you've just had a story, right? And may I say I have quite a collection of our fellow contemporaries? A sizable collection you might be interested in seeing. I have your two books on the side of my library devoted to living authors.” And he laughed with an embarrassment that seemed to be feigned. “Of course you are still alive, Mrs. Everett. I would like to show you my library and get your opinion, and I would hope that, if I'm not being too aggressive, I might have you autograph your books.”