I was always cold, always dirty and generally disliked. I was mocked and chastised, not only by my peers in the fifth form but by boys much younger who quickly grasped the idea that I was hopeless at fisticuffs. I was called “Frenchy” because of my suits and “Willow” because of my walk. Archie’s standards of clothes, however Spartan in contrast to Sister Sue’s, seemed grossly luxurious to St. Andrew’s. From the morning bell and my pail of icy water to evening prayers and the threat of a turtle in my bed, life was a series of hideous apprehensions.
The faculty lived in a world of their own, as remote from the daily problems of the boys as the quaint Gothic gingerbread buildings which gave to the little campus the air of an English college in a puppet show. In this they followed the example of the headmaster, Dr. Howell, a tall, spare, otherworldly cleric, garbed in rather dirty black, who never used any term of address but a vaguely benevolent “my dear” and who made no secret of his low opinion of boys, or “apes” as he blandly called them. He had the iron will of the temperless religious fanatic, and he exercised absolute authority over the small areas of school life that broke through the icy wall of his spiritual preoccupation. He cared for our souls and only for our souls; he took no interest in games or recreations and used to revile the human body as an “unlovely thing.” An uncompromising Episcopalian, he would remind boys whose families were known to be friendly with Unitarians or Baptists that members of these sects would occupy a lower social level in the hereafter, and he was said to have fired a boy who came to his study to confess that he was suffering from doubts as to the apostolic succession.
Yet the extraordinary thing about America in the last century was that Dr. Howell was not only revered by graduates; he was held in respect and awe by the boys. He is a legend in the vastly expanded St. Andrew’s School of this day, and to suggest that he was a bigot and a tyrant would be regarded as appalling heresy by a generation which knows him only from the great Chase portrait in the school dining room, a fabulous study in the El Greco manner of zealous faith and asceticism.
I myself looked up to him as a creature happily exempted from my own sordid tribulations. I admired his detachment from problems that I regarded as inevitably, if humiliatingly, my own personal doom. Watching him drive his pony cart about the campus, so blissfully unaware of the cold, the rain, the horrid little boys and all the horrid things in their horrid little minds, like a priest in the Middle Ages who has had the sense to understand that only by the cassock could he escape the armed strife and dominate the armored figures, I could almost persuade myself that I, too, might one day be a free soul.
Frank Prescott at first seemed as remote as the headmaster. He was also a fifth former but, unlike me, he had been in the school for three years, and he led our form, not only in studies but in athletics. His short, thick figure and broad shoulders made him a superb tackle in football, a game which he played with a passion and roughness that was more the way it came to be played in the nineties than it was then. But Frank, however respected and admired, was not as popular as one might have supposed. He cared too little for the opinions of others, and he could be brutally outspoken in his speech. He was a silent, moody boy, and there was an air of truculent, rather unlovable superiority in his pale square handsome face and in those big calm brooding wide-apart brown eyes.
He was an orphan of small means but of the best Boston connections, a distant cousin of the historian, and even as a boy he had the natural dignity of a New England aristocrat. To me he was a romantic, Byronic figure from the beginning, an impression that was intensified when I learned that he was an orphan, the only child of a father who had died a hero at Chancellorsville and of a beautiful, grief-stricken mother who had quickly followed him to the grave. Frank never joined the others in making sport of me, but then he never seemed to notice me at all.
The episode that brought us together was an attack launched upon me with iced snowballs by three fourth formers one early December afternoon as I was leaving the library. After pelting me unmercifully, they threw me in the snow and would have jumped upon me had not Frank at that moment appeared down the path. When he shouted at them to leave me alone, two of them ran discreetly off a ways, but one, the smallest, stood his ground.
“What business is it of yours, Prescott?” he cried shrilly. “He’s a new boy, isn’t he? He’s fair game. Who the hell do you think you are? God almighty?”
Frank stepped forward quickly and struck the boy so viciously across the mouth that he fell his length on the snow. When he struggled to his feet I saw that his lips were bleeding.
“What did you do that for?” he shrieked, but for all his outrage he dared not make a move to strike at Frank, nor did his two friends, hovering, take any step to come to his aid.
“To teach you a lesson about upperclassmen.”
“But he’s a new boy!” my persecutor insisted again.
“I don’t care. He’s a fifth former, and you’d better remember it.”
When I was alone with my rescuer, I tried to thank him, but in the suffocation of my gratitude I stammered so badly that I made no sense. Frank cut me short with words as brutal as his blow to the other boy’s cheek.
“I didn’t do it for you, Frenchy, don’t worry. I did it for the honor of the form. Pick up your ridiculous hat. You’re a disgrace to us, allowing yourself to be beat up by fourth formers. Why didn’t you even put up a fight?”
“They were three to one!”
He did not deign to answer this, but strode off, leaving me to the shame that he felt I ought to feel. But I have never wasted much time on shame. I have always freely accepted myself and my limitations. What struck me most as I stared after that broad, retreating back was the vision of how different life would be if I could always count on such a protector. Might it not make life even at St. Andrew’s bearable?
Now the reader may wonder how one of my lowly position in the school could possibly aspire to a friendship with such a boy as Frank Prescott, particularly after the rebuff which I had just received. There were two reasons: first, that I was quick enough to grasp that the rebuff had really come from Frank’s dislike at being thanked for striking a smaller boy, and second, that I was already unconsciously developing the theory of friendship around which I was to build my life. This theory was simply that any man who wants strongly enough to become the friend of another will succeed if there are no unbridgeable class or racial gaps and if he wastes no time in worrying about his own inferior attainments. The unlovable Boswell pursued and captured Paoli, Rousseau and Voltaire before he even started on Johnson. I am known today as a veteran collector of paintings and bibelots, but the collection of which I am proudest is that of my friends. They are a distinguished and variegated lot, beginning with Frank Prescott, and ending (at least to date) with Scott Fitzgerald.
Two days later I walked as boldly as I knew how down the fifth form study corridor to knock on Frank’s door. “I know you don’t want to see me,” I began, “but one good turn deserves another. I’ve been thinking of what I could do for you in return for what you did for me, and I’ve decided the only thing I’m any good in is French. I had a real mademoiselle and used to talk it with her. I can help you, if you’ll let me try.”
Frank stared at me with unfeigned astonishment for several moments and then broke into a rude laugh. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “If Frenchy doesn’t want to teach me to be a frog!”
“Very well, if that’s the attitude you want to take,” I retorted with what I hoped was a chilling dignity. “But I meant it nicely, Prescott.”
I went back to my own study, and fifteen minutes later he knocked at the door. “I’m sorry, Havistock. May I sit down? I’m having the devil of a time with this chapter of émilie.”
I discovered that winter that I was a first class tutor. Indeed, I could have made my living at it had my situation in life so required. I even gained a small headway against Frank’s Boston accent which must be one of the greatest obstacles
the Gallic tongue has ever encountered. But the friendship, for all my assiduousness, developed very slowly. Frank had too little time for human relationships. He studied hard, read a great deal and exercised violently. When he did allow me to accompany him on one of his long Sunday hikes, I would be too exhausted keeping up with his quick stride to have the energy to break his silences.
Yet he tolerated me, that was the great thing. I never had to fight with him the usual adolescent’s snobbishness which frowns on the least companionship between a popular and an unpopular boy. Frank may have cared little enough for me, but I was quick to note that he cared as little for anyone else.
Gradually, a more personal note came into our colloquies as we walked together to chapel or as we sat side by side at meals. Frank had an aunt, a Miss Jane Prescott, to whom he was very devoted, and I told him about Sister Sue. It was a bond, if a tenuous one. Others followed. We discovered that we both liked Greek drama and despised Lord Tennyson. That we both liked chess and sneered at checkers. That we both revered the shade of Lincoln and deplored a civilian Grant. But Frank had terrible prejudices which would sometimes make a clean sweep of all the little ropes and grappling hooks that I kept casting up to his decks. He passionately believed that an age of heroes had died with his father in the red clay of Virginia and that a generation of jackals now gorged itself on the bloated carcass of valor. He completely blew up at me when I suggested that the Civil War might have been avoided had more people, like my own father, tried to compromise the issues.
“You New Yorkers would compromise with the devil himself to save your pocketbooks!” he exclaimed bitterly. “You must have all fainted with relief when you found out, after war did come, that you could still make money out of it. We Bostonians, poor idealistic fools, went south to fight while you bought substitutes. The Prescotts died poor while the Havistocks filled their cashboxes!”
He was a strange, proud, bitter boy, and he could be very cruel indeed when he wanted. I did not mind his outbursts against New York or my family which I felt were more or less justified, but I minded very much one night, in front of the whole dormitory, when he volunteered a wicked parody of my early ablutions on a cold winter morning. It was such an unexpected blow, so brutally repudiating to what I was just beginning to look upon as friendship, and he did it with such unexpected and fiendish skill, that I burst into tears and embarrassed everybody. Everybody but Frank himself.
In the spring I made my great bid. Archie had suggested to Father that I be allowed to ask a friend to visit us in Newport, and I invited Frank. I had an unfair advantage in that I already knew that his only alternative to a hot summer in Boston with his Aunt Jane was to tutor a rich brat of a Prescott cousin on the Cape. Perfectly fairly, he expressed no gratitude when I made my offer; he simply informed me that he would have to consult his guardian. The latter, fortunately for me, approved of this solution of his ward’s summer and even advanced the funds for an outfit that would not disgrace a Prescott amid the Havistocks, and Frank was delivered to me in early July, bound, so to speak, in summer wrappings. It was a curious reversal of our roles, that he, the athlete and school leader, should become a boy put up, almost as a charity, for the summer to be a playmate for the delicate and difficult Horace. But, needless to say, it did not take him long to put things back in their proper place.
Newport in the seventies was beginning to show signs of turning into the silly jumble of derivative palaces that it later became. The little white hand to which Henry James was to liken the summer colony of his childhood was already filling with gold. But the essence of the old Newport was still there, the Newport of Julia Ward Howe and romantic Gothic and ladies’ archery contests on small bright green lawns, the Newport, as James was again to put it, “of a quiet, mild, waterside sense, one in which shores and strands and small coast things played the greater part.” It was a Newport that had not yet succumbed to the Vanderbilts and Goelets, and the only Newport I have ever cared for.
Our house, which was grand for those days, stood in the center of a twenty acre plot on Bellevue Avenue surrounded by a huge, beautiful lawn shaded with great elms. It was an Alexander Jackson Davis structure of smooth brown stucco, utterly asymmetrical, with many little balconies and unexpected porches and odd, protruding conservatories. As its arched windows, though multitudinous, were tiny, it was utterly dark within. Father, still magnificent at seventy-seven, with his five young sons, four of whom, at least, were handsome blades, continued to be an impressive figure in the summer colony. His bays were the sleekest, his carriages the most gleaming, and when the six of us, in black coats and striped grey trousers, marched down the aisle to our pew in Trinity Church of a Sunday morning, it must have been a pretty good show.
All of the family were immediately attracted to the silent, handsome boy whose good manners (for Frank’s manners with adults were always perfect) never seemed to compromise his rugged independence of thought. He had a bit of a row with Father over the reconstruction of the South, but he won it decisively. Father was one of a small persistent group who, despite the posthumous sanctification of Mr. Lincoln, still regarded the late President in the rail-splitter tradition. He had actively supported McClellan in the 1864 campaign and thought Lincoln “soft” on the South, positions that might seem inconsistent today but which then quite commonly went together. When Frank, one night at dinner, spoke up loudly to condemn the loss by the living of the precious unity for which the dead, including his own father, had been sacrificed, there was no further waving of the bloody shirt.
The summer was a happy one for me. Frank, as a guest, reined in much of his natural sarcasm and took me sailing almost every clear day. He loved to poke about the rocky inlets along the coast and to fish and swim from the boat, and he loved returning in the early evening and watching the spires of old Newport against the setting sun. I was asked to parties now, because all the girls were interested in Frank, and I discovered, not without a pang of adolescent jealousy, that he had a very distinct taste for their company. I wanted to keep him to myself, but I was shrewd enough, even at seventeen, to know that the smallest effort in this direction would be fatal to our still precarious relationship. It had to be my consolation to remember that back at St. Andrew’s there would be no silly girls to giggle at his least funny remarks and to lead him on to talk, unbecomingly, of his prowess in sport. I believed then, as I believe today, that men are at their most attractive in the company of other men.
I paid for the entire happiness of that summer in a single incident that occurred after our return to school. I do not know if it happened because of Frank’s restlessness under the burden of his imagined duty of gratitude, or because he felt cut off from the other boys at so marked an association with one who was stìll considered “different,” or because he was stifled by the now compulsory blanket of friendship that the summer had seemed to throw over us. At any rate, one night at the sixth form table during a general discussion of our future careers, he answered my innocent question about his own by lashing back at me in a voice for all to hear: “Oh, I’m going to Newport in a red and yellow blazer to court the richest heiress I can find. And when I’ve married her, I’ll lie back in silk sheets like a Havistock and puff at Turkish cigarettes and be so, so above the poor old vulgar world.”
My eyes filled with tears (I still hadn’t learned to repress them), and I abruptly left the table. In my room alone I reviewed the history of my relationship with Frank. I considered each aspect with what I hoped was a minimum of self-pity and decided in the end that the pain outweighed the pleasure. The little bits of kindness that he occasionally tossed me did not compensate for his cruelty. I was not even angry as I came to my sad conclusion. I felt sincerely sorry for him. He would probably go through his life antagonizing everyone who tried to be nice to him, slapping away helping hands and spitting in sympathizing eyes. Well, so it would have to be. It was better to have no friend than the like of him.
I did not speak to Frank for the next
two weeks, and he took no notice of it. He was busy with football, and as one of the school prefects he had to act as an assistant to Dr. Howell. But one afternoon, when he had sprained his wrist and was unable to play his favorite game, he appeared at the door of my study and without the least hint of an apology for his past conduct, blandly suggested that we take a walk. When I told him that I did not care to associate with a person who had pretended to be my friend and later made public mock of me, he simply laughed.
“Don’t be an ass,” he said. “Come along. I thought we might sit in chapel for a bit and then watch the football.”
“Why sit in chapel?” I asked in surprise.
“Because it’s nice.”
He walked down the corridor, and I sat looking after him until it broke in upon me that this was his way of apologizing. I could choose between my pride and Frank, and I have never been one to spite my face by hacking off its features. I hurried after him, and we walked to chapel where we sat for half an hour in adjoining choir seats, absolutely still and silent, while Frank stared up at the big, beautiful altar window that portrayed, in glowing whites and reds, the transfiguration.
I found the experience a bit embarrassing, as if we had happened uninvited into God’s house and caught him in his dressing room. Religion to the Havistocks was a formal matter. God and man met only in their Sunday best, and one did not talk about him, any more than one talked about one’s hostess at a party, except in terms of perfunctory respect.
I suspected, however, that God meant more than this to Frank, not from anything that he had ever said, but from the way he closed his eyes in prayer. One knew then that he was not thinking of games or girls. In that half hour at chapel he may have been with the father whom he had never known, coughing blood in the mud at Chancellorsville or with the poor little white shadow of a mother, roaming the dark corridors of the Marlborough Street house with crooning moans. Or he may have simply been opening the pores of his soul to the Holy Spirit and passively allowing it to enter. I have never had any faith of my own other than one in that of others, a curious kind of heretical suspicion that God would not abide in such as me but might abide in such as have been my friends. Call it what you will, faith or superstition, it has got me through most of a long life.
The Rector of Justin Page 7