When Jim awoke the next morning, Stephen’s bed remained untouched.
It was only later, when he found his mom crying in her bathrobe, the telephone dropped to the floor, its coiling cord unwinding slowly, that
Jim knew something unusual had happened.
His dad and brother had died in a wreck out on the icy highway the night before. The Jeep had flipped, and then a milk truck had rammed into them as both Stephen and his father hung upside down in the car, held in by their shoulder harnesses and seat belts. His brother had stopped breathing at precisely the moment that Jim had watched him enter the bedroom to give his last words of advice.
All Jim remembered, later, was that he cried his eyes out. That’s what he thought of it: that his eyes had literally been wept out of him, that they had melted down into the carpet and floorboards and he had no tears left in him ever again for anyone.
Jim had talked himself out of this memory by the time he was a teenager. For how could he have seen his brother in his room at the very moment his brother had gone to heaven?
Then, a few years later, Jim entered the same prep school his father and Stephen had both attended. The night of the visitation was long forgotten, as all children forget their brief moments with the unknowable as they learn what they are meant to believe, just as the dream of the snake had evaporated from his memory.
By that time, Jim and his mother had had to move to a town called Yonkers, and lived in a one-bedroom apartment together; Jim slept on the sofa most nights without unfolding it.
He had watched his father’s family and his mother fight, even at Stephen and his father’s funeral; he had watched his mother and the bankers fight; and he had watched his mother fight with almost anyone who came to the door. Sometimes, when the fights got awful, Jim would go into the bathroom and play his CDs— with the headphones on—but sometimes, he just closed his eyes and imagined that instead of shouts and curses, he heard furniture being thrown, glass breaking.
Once, the medicine chest mirror broke, and he couldn’t remember ever having taken his fist and smashed it.
After a few years of fighting, his mom had no spark left within her except seething resentment for Jim’s uncles and aunts and Gramma. His mother told Jim that it was his father’s dream to see one of his sons graduate from Harrow, so calls were made, rigorous academic tests were taken, scholarships and loans were applied for, and eventually—after receiving no funds from the school for seventh and eighth grade, Jim managed to get in to the prep school for his freshman year in high school. How you gonna make your big bro proud? When Jim was at school, he forgot the world that his mother now occupied: she worked at a branch of the very same bank that had taken away the Big House on the Hill; she even accepted the small checks from Gramma to make sure Jim had the right clothes and pocket money for school. But that was as far as his mother’s pride would go.
Now it was up to him.
Jim met a girl named Lark and by sophomore year was going steady; he didn’t excel at cross-country running, but enjoyed it as one of the few sports in which he could compete; and he wanted more than anything to graduate from Harrow, the school his brother had gone to, the school his father had also attended.
He knew that if he just hung in for the whole four-year stretch, he would, as his dead brother had advised, not let the bastards get him down.
And that’s when things really began to happen.
Chapter Two
From the Harrow Academy Brochure:
Harrow Academy is a college preparatory school located amid the beauty of the Hudson Valley that educates boys from seventh through twelfth grade. On graduating, it is our hope that knowledge acquired here leads to a wisdom that will serve the student his entire life. Harrow is not the end, but the beginning.
We will make a light in darkness for your sons.
The rest is up to them.
Thus, our motto:
Journey with Us into Enlightenment, and Wait for What Will Come.
The school was there, waiting for him.
Jim adapted to prep school life more easily than many others, and because his goal remained in his head—that he must get through it, that he must push out to the other side of Harrow come hell or high water, that he must make his mother proud and get the best education he could so he could one day make the kind of money to help his mother out and show his grandmother that they were worth something after all—that goal remained with him.
But as with all people burning to get something from some dire situation, Jim Hook got sidetracked at times. He wasn’t the best or the worst student. He wasn’t confident in his abilities. He didn’t feel terribly coordinated.
And then, of course, the school could, itself, be intimidating.
Architecturally, Harrow was a property that resembled a shambles more than a unified structure. It gathered up a hill and a cliff around it, like a skirt around hips. Three towers rose from its front—and from behind, the great arches of what had once been an abbey.
It defined the town of Watch Point, which existed beneath its stone and iron gaze like a disobedient, slovenly child.
No one could miss the turrets and the bell tower, no matter where one walked in the village. Few in the village commented on the Harrow Academy, and even fewer went to visit the campus, except for the basic deliveries. It was as if an invisible line had been drawn in a crooked oval around the sprawling property. Certainly, the students and faculty didn’t mingle well with the villagers, who lived a very different life of daily struggle. Harrow was the youthful Ivory Tower looking out over the river and village, and it was as different a world from Watch Point as could exist.
At the foot of the drive up to Harrow, a wall and gate rose up to mark off the school from the outer world.
The gate was often strung with vines, which were cut back every spring and which died in the fall; thistle and crown sculpture sprouted along the wrought iron of the gate spears. The gate was never locked, except in summer, when one had to park outside the wall and walk through the unattended guard booth.
A false guard booth made of stone waited at either side of the gate—three-foot-high carvings of griffins and unicorns, cracked and pockmarked with age and abuse. Hiding the old brick of the Great Wall of Harrow, the pricker vines and ivy grew and spread, while a sprinkling of bent and scraggly trees stretched along the periphery.
Security was lax at Harrow for several reasons. First, there had never been more than a half dozen incidents of note between the villagers and the school in the past twenty years. One teacher in the 1980s had conducted an affair with a local minister’s wife, which caused no end of scandal for a school that had a minor affiliation with the Episcopal Church. Six members of the soccer team had been expelled in 1994 for stealing shoes from McCary’s Shoe Shinery out by the highway—but in retaliation, the two McCary boys broke into the library and ransacked it. Then, there was the case of a student who set fire to Gravesend Chapel up on Bald Hill, several years back, and then a student had died and it was just one of those emotional and terrible things that happens once in a great while with adolescents.
But in general, security was not an issue. Harrow had a strict honor code; outsiders rarely came through Watch Point; and Watch Pointers tended to just keep away from the school.
Driving up to the school would’ve been impressive, had the overgrowth from the Cedars of Lebanon not blocked so much of the view— and what wasn’t tree was shrub, as boxwoods had been imported to the campus in the early 1970s. The trees and hedges had been gifts from various alumni who had actually gone on to great inheritance and fame—and yearly, more were added, as if this were the only gift former students could imagine for their alma mater. The brush had taken over the edges of paths and the narrow avenues like an encroaching jungle.
Then, the sun broke through the undergrowth and overhanging branches. There she was:
Harrow.
Much has been written over the years of its mesh of styles—the Romanesqu
e, the Gothic, the Georgian, the Medieval, the Modern, the Eastlake arches and Victorian flourishes on the West Wing, and the nearly Spanish-Moroccan rococo intricacies of the East, all of it thrown together, creating an effect that ended up being pleasing to the eye but nonetheless disturbing in its essential dissonance. The old statue of St. George and the Dragon, at the center of the fountain around which the circular drive bled, still guarded the steps up to the school as it had since before the school’s creation, when Harrow was simply a house.
Around the sides of the house were paths and walks and ways too narrow to be called roads and too wide to be properly termed paths. They went around and between buildings. If you walked too far up the middle path, nearly a mile, you’d come to what the boys called Hadrian’s Wall; it overlooked the Hudson River. The school itself was three distinct buildings. From a distance, it was more than an estate. It was a citadel.
The boys school called Harrow didn’t stand a chance, because there was too much about it that made it the wrong place—no, more than that, the most dreadful place.
Called the ‘Row by generations of boys since its founding as a school in the 1940s, it was an abnormally large mansion situated picturesquely on the Hudson River Valley. It was marble and brick and every stone and material that could possibly be a bit too much—that was the ‘Row.
Its first headmaster, a middle-aged man named Chambers, still haunted its corridors at the age of eighty, occasionally snapping at one of the younger boys whose tie was askew. He was the terror of the middle school wing (known as East), but the older boys (who attended classes in West) tended to treat him as their addled old grandfather.
The school was once quite beautiful, but owing to its rapid growth—the mansion it had once been was smallish for a growing school— an additional, and cheaply made wing had been added. It was dull and brick and square, and was perhaps a fitting tribute to the architecture of 1970—it housed the gym and rooms for some of the boys who boarded, while the rest of the “tribe,” as old Chambers himself called the Harrow boys, went home to their families down in the city or nearby daily.
The cafeteria—called the Grampion Memorial Dining Hall—was nearly elegant, with chandeliers and blessings over mashed potatoes; the chairs in the classrooms were torturous; half of the instructors were fresh out of college, and the other half had been working the Harrow system since at least the 1980s, a few a bit longer when they, too, had been fresh out of college.
The school was neither the best nor the worst—it was a solidly mediocre addition to the roster of private schools for boys, and although the occasional novelist or actor or financial wizard or presidential adviser had happened to have been born full-grown from its many passages, it was equally true that at least a half dozen corporate thieves and half-assed nothings had also emerged from its less-than-hallowed entryway.
Fourteen different classrooms were in its upper floors, twelve offices on its main floor, plus a large lounge leading to the inner entrance to the rather inadequate library, which had once been something of a conservatory, and several storage areas. There was a Romanesque look to the main house—gothic arches, with Eastlake touches—and yet the most incongruous additions and touches were added long after the original creator had passed away.
The final effect, the villagers often commented, was that Harrow had the look of a military academy or—some joked—a convent, although it was neither.
The building materials were a mix of brick and granite, brownstone and rough-hewn fieldstone; and yet, Harrow had the feel of being one piece, as if its shambling form were meant to come together under some unknown artisan’s eye.
Courtyards grew between the stretch of buildings; the triple towers of the house seemed like anchors holding all the pieces together; and the property—forty-five acres total, although only a quarter of this was usable for the school, as the rest were woods and cliffs—seemed all of one piece, despite its disparate parts.
In back, the chapel led into the grounds. Several arches curled over the path out to the soccer field—this was part of some previous owner’s dream, an ancient bit of wall and arch brought over from Europe at a time when overly moneyed men did such things.
To the west of all this were the dull brick buildings that included the middle school classrooms, the science lab, the language lab, and the art studio that had only just been added within the past two years. Beyond these, nearly a quarter mile across the track and bleachers, was the Field House, where the swimming pool and basketball court were housed, and which doubled as a theater when the students from Harrow and the neighboring St. Catherine’s School for Girls did their once-a-year play.
To the east, what had once been a caretaker’s cottage had sprouted and grown into the Trenches, which was simply another way of saying the dormitories for upper school boys. Another more brickish building stood just behind it, called Heights, which held the rest of the boys that attended Harrow.
A total of 150 students attended Harrow in any given year, for it was small and exclusive and intended to remain that way as far as the headmaster was concerned; few classrooms held more than ten or twelve students at a time; it was one of the draws for parents who wanted their boys to get a real education. It was old-fashioned, another draw: Latin was a requirement for graduation, as was Theology and a brief course in Greek. Being an all-boys school, it harkened back for many to a simpler time, and had such a British air about it that Mr. Duvall, the Latin teacher, had begun to speak in cadences not unlike a member of the House of Lords.
It was the reason that Harrow could charge such an outrageous rate for tuition and board. No student, it was presumed, left the narrow halls of the Great House, as the main house was called, without having received a first-class education, a sense of purpose, and a highly developed moral code based on honor and hard work.
At least, this was what the brochure put forth.
This was the goal of Harrow, and had been since the school began its existence.
It was the reason Jim’s father had gone there, and why his brother had, also.
And now that they were dead, it was up to him.
The saying above The Great Door of the school (everything in Harrow seemed to be called The Great Something) was simple: Journey with Us into Enlightenment, and Wait for What Will Come.
The beginning of James Campbell Hook’s journey to enlightenment occurred one autumn day, in the unlikeliest of places.
Of course the school had a history, as everything does. Before it was a school, it was someone’s house, it’s supposed; and before that owner, another, and before him, even another. It was said in Watch Point that the man who built the original house may in fact have done something terrible, once upon a time. There was even a man who lived in Watch Point—a very old, nearly feeble man, whose weight had dropped rapidly over the past year, whose eyesight was no longer able to distinguish beyond form and shadow, and whose time was, perhaps, at hand—and he had just remarked to his nurse the summer previous that, “Crowley used to tell me it was the most awful place.”
His nurse, a young woman of twenty-three, glanced up from her chair. “Mr. Palliser?”
“He used to tell me that it wouldn’t rest. He used to tell me that seven were too many,” the man said, and then he leaned forward to whisper something in the young woman’s ear.
Later, when the breath had left the old man, the young woman was not sure that his last words should bear repeating.
But of course, for Jim Hook, then a boy of fifteen, all of this went unnoticed.
He was, after all, in love, only he was the last to know.
Sometimes, life is all about the wrong place at the wrong time.
Chapter Three
Jim held her, leaning back in the crunchy pile of fallen leaves. The leaves sighed under their combined weight, and he felt leaf stickers in his side and maybe a rock or two somewhere in there—but he didn’t mind.
It was a crispy night, crackling and sputtering like a live wire
laid out on the sleepiest town in the world. A heavy dampness hung in the air like rain was about to come down, and it was October and he could practically taste life in the back of his throat, delicious life, like he hadn’t tasted in months, perhaps even years.
And it was because of this girl, Lark Trotter, this Junior at St. Catherine’s, with her warm arms and cool glances and bursting laughs.
There was a marshy smell to the air—but it wasn’t unpleasant, it was the Hudson River, just beyond the next rise; he could see the lights on the other side of it, and he wondered if the world on that side felt as good as he did on this side right now.
Right now.
With his girl there, with the world seeming to be full of nothing but possibilities, with the night so ... prosperous. That was the only word that came to his mind. It was a night of wealth for him—not cheap money, but the wealth of feeling like a kid his age with a pretty girl in his arms and no worries beyond the moment.
Lark Trotter. His girl.
She felt like warmth personified, her breath was heat, her eyes were fire, her smile—well, his sense of metaphor ended when he saw spit fly from her lips as she laughed. Lark Trotter. Even her name got him smiling. Even her name, he thought. Everything about her.
“Jim!” she shouted, laughing. Lark had an adorable laugh, even with the spit; what was so funny? Did it matter? She was there, with him. That’s all that mattered.
“Lark!” he laughed back, and kissed her ear and then her hair and then his lips met hers in their twenty-fifth official kiss (yes, he was counting). He felt the stickers poking through his sweater, smelled the stinky wet leaf mold all around them.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 17