by Susan Isaacs
“Love me, Nicky?” It was not the time to admit he wasn’t sure. “Nicky?”
“Yes. Yes.”
She squeezed her legs tight against his hips, but instead of thrusting her pelvis back and forth again, she ground herself into him. “How much?” The village commons ceased to exist and so did the junipers and the chill earth under him. Even Heather didn’t matter. There was only sensitivity now, centered in one swollen spot, expanding until the pressure became so unendurable he began to whimper. “How much do you love me? Come on, tell me, Nicky.”
“More than anything,” he chocked. “Everything.” He was almost there. He knotted his arms around her waist and pulled her in so close she could no longer move. He pressed into her as hard as he could.
“You’ll give me your varsity sweater?”
“Yes.” The pressure became pain.
“And we’ll see each other every—”
“Yes!” An instant after he made the commitment he came, clutching Heather as the spurt of hot semen splashed forth. “Oh, boy.”
At the depot minutes later, she kissed her index finger and placed it on his lips tenderly, like a wife. “’Bye, Heather.” His madras shirt hung over his slacks. Its loose, flapping tails might have been an arrow pointing out to every passerby exactly what had happened.
“Nicky, try to come up to the Vineyard. It’s so much more fun than boring Connecticut or the boring Berkshires. Really, Mummy and Daddy would adore having you, and I know a bunch of really great kids.”
“We’re probably going to England. One of my mother’s friends—”
“Nicky, England looks just like all the pictures and you can’t get hamburgers. Come on. Promise me you’ll try.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, Heather.”
“No! I mean, ‘Okay, I’ll try to get up to the Vineyard this summer.’ Nicky, you are just so-o-o cute.”
The bus approached along the main street of East Hill, its rumble muffled by the dark green canopy of elms, and stopped. Heather held him back until the two other East Hill passengers—another Trowbridge boy and a wrinkled man in carpenter’s overalls—climbed on, and then, as the driver and passengers watched, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him a goodbye that was longer on suction than on passion. He boarded then, his muted, obligatory echo of Heather’s “I love you” making him blush. As the bus pulled away he dropped his head into his hands. His temples throbbed as if they’d been punched. His forehead felt feverish. But he lifted his head again because he heard “Nicky! Nicky!” Heather was running alongside the bus. He waved. Smiled. She was shouting something to him. He managed to drag open the window and stick his head out. “Think about Dartmouth!” she was yelling as the bus left East Hill, Massachusetts, and drove north.
Trowbridge School (the “The” had been dropped in 1884) lay on the east bank of the Connecticut River, just outside Beale, Massachusetts, a town so New England pure and Christmas-card quaint it might have had the heart of America beating inside its old clock tower. It was a cold heart, for outsiders weren’t welcome and antique dealers and amateur photographers soon learned to drive south to Felsham, where they could dine at the Powder Horn Inn and watch candles being dipped at Early Light. But the frostiness of Beale suited the Trowbridge boys, for the school was accepted as an adjunct to the town and as such the boys became honorary old-line Yankees. The boys, in turn, embraced the spirit of the town so intensely that upon graduation most felt bereft at leaving, as if they’d been kicked out of Pilgrim heaven.
Trowbridge lay in a deep green valley just by the river. From Beale, the buildings looked like thick white brush-strokes. The pristine steeple of the school’s chapel rose gracefully and modestly and gleamed against the sky. In the winter the buildings and the snow seemed to compete to be the standard of perfect whiteness.
For all its physical perfection, the school’s reputation was a little blotchy. Other prep schools consistently graduated boys who knew one end of a receiving line from another and could return a serve or parse a sentence with at least minimum competence, but people never knew what to expect from a Trowbridge boy; he might be a psychopath or a pig or the most honorable gentleman.
The school had a flexible admissions policy. Historically, many of its students came from New York families of Dutch or English stock, families who had settled in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, if a boy was sufficiently Tuttle or Sprague or Van Essendelft, whether he had a genius for mathematics or a talent for torturing cats, he would be assured a Trowbridge education.
Likewise, a man might have made his reputation and fortune as a whoremaster, but if his pocketbook was open wide enough, his boy could room with a blueblood. There were other sorts too: a few brilliant scholarship students; boys of distinguished lineage who had been rejected by or thrown out of other prep schools; rich little princes from washed-up countries.
The Tuttles were loyal, sentimental, and lazy Trowbridge alumni. It never occurred to them that their children might get a better education elsewhere. And since James Cobleigh’s attendance at a public school had disqualified him from offering an opinion in the matter, it was Samuel Tuttle who made the decision. Samuel called the headmaster—bypassing the director of admissions entirely—and announced Trowbridge’s newest Tuttle, whose name happened to be Cobleigh. The headmaster declared he anticipated Nicholas’s arrival with pleasure. So Nicholas (and later his brothers Thomas, Michael, and Edward) followed his uncles Jeremiah, Caleb, and Jesse, his Grandpa Samuel, and Tuttles of earlier generations to Trowbridge. There he roomed with Charlie Harrison, the son of a fifth-grade dropout who had founded a chain of supermarkets that speckled a map of the East from Bangor to Baltimore.
Charlie was everything Nicholas wished he was: six feet tall, hairy, worldly, a whiz at math. From his mother, a willowy Boston Irish-Catholic girl, Charlie had gotten his height, his fine looks—dark hair, sparkly black eyes, a button of a nose—and his charm. Mrs. Harrison had worked as a bookkeeper for a cheese processor and had met Mr. Harrison when she was seventeen and he was forty, an overweight, fat-mouthed bachelor who had transformed his family’s corner grocery into (then) twenty-six Corner Groceries. Of course he won her, but not before he agreed that the house and children would be her business. They both flourished, for Mrs. Harrison was bright and ambitious but never so eager for advancement that she seemed embarrassed by her husband’s lack of polish. He continued to chew cigars, spitting bits of the ends into ashtrays, and sit on her Federalist wing chair spouting off about the Red Sox to her Preservation Society friends, his undershirt gaping where the buttons of his shirt had popped. Mrs. Harrison merely explained that her husband was a character, and he was, and no one had to be told he was a very rich character as well.
The Harrison children, Charlie and a younger sister who unfortunately resembled their father, were molded with capital care. While the six Cobleigh children had that series of English nannies, the two Harrisons had nannies and a French governess. They had piano, violin, elocution, drawing, dancing, and riding instructors. While Nicholas spent most of his summers at his family’s cabin in the Berkshires or at his grandparents’ farm in Connecticut—with an occasional awed weekend at his Uncle Jeremiah and Aunt Polly Tuttle’s mansion in Newport—Charlie spent his summers in Europe, grandly touring with his mother, her maid, his sister, and the annual Harvard student who had been hired as Charlie’s tutor, instructing him obstensibly in art history or German but really in social graces. Nicholas, who had not inherited James’s facility for languages, was awed by Charlie’s mastery of French, Italian, and German and wowed by Charlie’s experiences with the prostitutes of Nice, Rome, and Munich. Not that Charlie was a braggart; one of his charms was his willingness to tell elaborate, humiliating tales of being an arriviste, of paying top price for ballet tickets to impress an international socialite and discovering the seats were behind a pillar at the Paris Opera House,
of being at dinner in the Midlands, seated next to an earl’s daughter, and having the first course, woodcock—a game bird that resembled a roasted parakeet—go flying as he stabbed it, soaring from his plate into her lap.
From his father, Charlie got his sense of reality as well as his most dominant trait: ambition. He was not as fine a natural athlete as Nicholas, but he trained with a dedication incomprehensible to Nicholas, slogging across a swampy football field until it was dark, long after Nicholas was back in their room, long after the coach, huddled in a blanket and sick with a cold and fatigue, ordered him to stop. He became Trowbridge’s finest athlete. Nicholas had never met anyone who tried so hard.
Charlie drove himself in schoolwork too. Nicholas was bright, his work was solid, but when he finished an assignment he’d lay down his pen and smile. Charlie would write an essay over and over, whittling it down to perfection until the moment it had to be handed in. Nicholas tried to emulate him once, but, by his third trip to the library to glean still more information on Woodrow Wilson’s relationship with Congress, he grew irritable and resentful of Charlie’s unbroken string of perfect grades. But his resentment did not last long. Nicholas was too good-natured to be covetous, and realistic enough to understand that he already was where Charlie was trying to go.
Their friendship was a warm one, closer than most of the era, because both boys had ascended to the mountaintop of 1950s manliness and stayed there without a struggle. They excelled in sports, were adored by girls, and so they were relaxed, exchanging views and confidences fairly freely, for it did not occur to them to feel embarrassed about being intelligent or even occasionally emotional.
By October of their last year at Trowbridge, Nicholas and Charlie were the most admired sixth-formers in the school. Nicholas was viewed as cool, able, and stylish. His quietness was held to be the epitome of self-containment, his faithfulness to Heather Smith clear proof he must be getting it.
Charlie was considered godlike. He had it all: a chest full of curly hair, a drawer full of love letters from twin sisters in Boston—two exquisite blond china-doll girls—and offers from every Ivy League college to come and play on their football team.
Charlie sat at his desk in his gym shorts, rubbing the hair on his chest as if it were a beloved pet, occasionally making notations for a solution to a problem for his calculus tutorial. He banged his heels together in no discernible meter. The soles of his feet were dark gray from walking across the unwashed dormitory floor.
As sixth-formers, they were deemed young men, not boys, and so were not required to open their door for room inspection or even the twice-weekly swish of the janitorial mop. Most of the class responded to this expression of confidence in their maturity by allowing their rooms to degenerate into microcosmic slums, wallowing in their own filth like gleeful baby pigs. As in everything else, Nicholas and Charlie excelled; their room was the piggiest.
Nicholas sprawled in yellowed undershorts on a bare mattress. He’d spilled an illicit beer on his sheet the week before and had not bothered to remake the stripped bed. A book lay beside him on the stained rose and tan mattress ticking. Every few minutes he’d lethargically underline a phrase in red pen for his Shakespeare seminar paper, “Meteorological Imagery in King Lear.” His pillow was a pair of gray flannel slacks he’d worn to church the second week of school and then crumpled into a scratchy but adequate ball. Although he was not as dirty as Charlie—whose weekly bath was a plunge into the swimming pool before a mixer and who never changed his wool socks, allowing the perspiration to evaporate overnight—Nicholas’s half of the room looked more degenerate. Class notes, candy wrappers, T-shirts littered the floor, and he shared his bed with his lacrosse stick and his applications to Brown, Williams, and Amherst. Nicholas yawned and scratched his scrotum.
A moment later Charlie scratched his armpit, then lifted his arm and sniffed under it. “Mmm. Smells great. Sweets for the sweet.” He covered his math notes with his textbook and glanced over to Nicholas. “Now?” he asked softly. “It’s late enough.”
“Now.” Nicholas slithered down his mattress and flicked off the light switch with his foot. The room went black. Charlie’s desk drawer creaked open and closed. “You have it?” Nicholas demanded.
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Here. You first.”
Nicholas swished his hand in the dark until it touched the vodka bottle. “Cheers,” he whispered, then hoisted it and took two long swigs. “Holy shit,” he croaked.
“Good stuff?” Charlie grabbed for the bottle. Nicholas heard a glugging like water going down a clogged drain. “Jee-sus! High octane.”
The bottle was passed many times. Within minutes Nicholas had trouble holding up his head, but he ascribed that to being disoriented in the dark. Certainly he did not know he was drunk, and when Charlie announced “All gone!” in a baby voice, Nicholas was surprised. The bottle rolled on the floor, making what Nicholas thought was a catastrophic racket for glass on wood. “Wowie,” Charlie said. “It goes straight to your dick.”
“Shut up, Charlie. You’re talking too loud.”
“No, I’m not. Wow. Hey, Nick, wouldn’t it be great if Babs was here right now? I mean right now, this minute. Oooch, bad Babs. I’d stick it in so far it’d come out the back.”
“What about Betty?” Betty and Babs were Charlie’s identical twins. “If you’re doing it to Babs, what would you do about Betty?”
“Do her later. Or give her to you. Hey, how about that? Betty’s nice, Nick. Just like Babs. You’d really like her.”
Nicholas let his feet drop to the floor. He tried to remember where the door was, but he kept confusing the room with the one he had had the year before. He could not recall in which direction Charlie was either. “Oh, shit.”
“You sick?”
“No.”
“Listen, Nick. You can have Betty or Babs. Which one do you want?”
“I don’t know. How can you tell them apart?”
“I’m not really sure. Anyway, what’s the difference? They’re both good.”
“Charlie, I don’t know. What about Heather?”
“Jesus, you’re nuts. I mean, she’s an Epsilon semi-moron. Fat, and all that dumb fuzz on her face, like a goddamn tennis ball. No one gets her, Nick. You could have any girl in the world—you know how they all get crushes on you—and you stick with that toad-load Heather. She’s so dumb! Don’t you want to have a girl you can talk to? Now listen, Babs is crazy about you. So is Betty. Great girls. They’re what girls should be. You know. Gorgeous. Smart. Fun. And they’re nice too. You can have either one. Come on, let’s call them.”
“No.”
“No? You don’t want one?”
“Well, I don’t know, but we can’t go out of the room. Remember? Not even to go to the john. If we have to piss, we piss out the window. Open the door, trouble.”
“We can go, Nick. Come on. Betty or Babs? We’ll be quiet. Just take your pick.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.” Charlie rose. His desk chair crashed to the floor. Nicholas covered his ears. Seconds later, Charlie opened the door. Hall light streamed in. Nicholas shut his eyes. “Come on. Move ass, Cobleigh. We’re going to the phone.”
“What about Heather, Charlie?”
“Forget her. She’s bad news.” Charlie dragged a limp Nicholas out of the room and into the hall. It was filled with the silence of the sleepers behind their doors. “We’re gonna get it!” Charlie called so loudly that the first of the wakened boys began murmuring almost immediately.
“Gonna get it?”
“I’m gonna call Babs and Betty and say come over right now and give it to us.” Nicholas tried to walk faster along the narrow hall to get to the telephone at the end, but he stepped on his own instep and crashed against a wall, slamming his shoulder and the side of his head. He reached toward his head to rub it but then sank to the floor laughing, quie
tly at first, then with huge whoops. “Up, Nick,” Charlie said. Doors opened, but just a crack. Charlie grabbed Nicholas’s wrists to yank him up, but Nicholas crashed back, pulling Charlie face down on the floor with a monstrous thud.
“How’re we gonna call if we can’t get up?” Nicholas asked. He assumed his voice was modulated. In fact, he was shouting. “How’re we gonna get it if we can’t get up?”
Charlie lifted his head. “We can get up. Hey, wait. Get it up! Get it up! Get it, Nick?”
“Hello, Babs,” Nicholas yelled. “Hi, Babs. You really like me, Babs? You wanna get it? I’m gonna give it to you!” He began laughing again, holding his sides to keep control. He made a fist and banged the wall beside him. “Babsie, open up. Knock, knock. Gonna knock you, Babsie.”
“Bang, asshole,” Charlie shrieked. “Bang, bang, bang.”
“Mr. Harrison! Mr. Cobleigh!” The housemaster, Mr. Keil, loomed above them, his bony shins shining white behind the spidery hairs on his legs. He yanked the belt of his bathrobe. “What have you done?”
“Bang,” Nicholas said to him, in a very small voice.
Martin Wigglesworth looked more like an Indiana funeral director than headmaster of a New England preparatory school. His skin appeared thick and waxy, as if over the years he’d sniffed too much embalming fluid. His chin came to such a sharp point that from a distance it looked like a goatee, and his pursed mouth and eagle-beak nose added to his air of a professional nonsmiler. He eschewed reassuring tweeds, preferring instead solid black broadcloth suits and somber, skinny ties. When he greeted visitors with “Good morning” or “Good evening,” his tone implied the “good” was mere convention.
The scores of silly nicknames his last name inspired died on the tongues of new boys. The students of Trowbridge spoke of him as Dr. Wigglesworth, as did their parents, nearly all of whom were just as afraid of him as their sons were.
Winifred Cobleigh for example, answered Dr. Wigglesworth’s “I assume you know what Nicholas has done?” with a “No” so high and quavering she might have been a three-year-old accused of soiling her bloomers. She wrapped the straps of her alligator handbag round and round her index finger. She was seated before the headmaster’s desk, her back toward Nicholas. He was standing beside Charlie, leaning against the closed office door. He wished he could see her face and give her a little smile, just so she’d stop fidgeting, anticipating the crime of the century.