by Irwin Shaw
“I’ll try,” Strand said.
“You’ve seen for yourself, the services are practically nondenominational. Almost anodyne. There are quite a few Catholic and Jewish boys enrolled and they seem to have no difficulties in bending to the rules of the school. You might mention this to Romero.”
“I will,” Strand said. “I’m sorry he’s causing you all this trouble.”
“There are bound to be worse ones before the term is up. And not only with Romero,” Babcock said.
Strand called Romero in to see him after classes and told him what the headmaster had said, using all the headmaster’s arguments. Romero listened in silence, then shook his head. “I don’t care about the Jews and the other Catholics,” he said. “I’m my own kind of Catholic.”
“When was the last time you went to Mass?” Strand asked.
Romero grinned. “When I was baptized. I don’t believe in God. If I have to choose between chapel and leaving school I’ll go pack my bag.”
“Are you sure you want me to tell Mr. Babcock that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re dismissed,” Strand said.
When Strand reported his conversation with Romero the next day to Babcock, the headmaster sighed. A good part of his conversation, Strand realized, was punctuated by sighs. “Well,” he said, “if nobody makes a noise about it I guess we can live with it.”
“There’s another thing,” Strand said. “It’s, about my wife. She has no classes on Wednesday and none until ten in the morning on Thursdays. Would you think it an imposition if she went into New York each Wednesday? She has several pupils she doesn’t want to give up.”
“I quite understand,” Babcock said. “Of course.”
Strand went out of his office, thinking what a decent and intelligent and flexible man. Already so early in the term, Strand had felt how easily and calmly the school was run, how discipline was kept with very little constraint. There was an easygoing friendliness between the boys and the faculty that provided an invigorating climate for the process of teaching and learning and Strand was rediscovering some of the sense of hope that he had in his early years as a teacher.
“You’re lucky Mr. Babcock is such a lenient man,” Strand said to Romero the next day. He had let the boy sweat for a night before telling him of Babcock’s decision. “He’s going to keep you on. Just don’t tell everybody about it. And you might write him a note of thanks.”
“Did you ask him if he believed in God?”
“Don’t press your luck, young man,” Strand said shortly.
Romero took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. “There’s something here you have to sign, Mr. Strand,” he said. “It’s the permission from my mother for me to play on the football team. I just got it this afternoon.”
Strand looked at the paper. It was a form printed by the athletic department, with a space for a parent’s signature and one for the signature of the housemaster attesting to the genuineness of the parent’s signature. In this case it was merely a scrawled X in pencil. As Strand looked at it Romero looked at him with the challenging direct dark stare that Strand still found uncomfortable. But even then, this evidence of the transition in one generation from an illiterate mother to an adolescent who could argue heatedly about the works of Edward Gibbon made Strand think more kindly than usual of the working of the American public school system.
When he gave the form, as required, to Mr. Johnson, the football coach, a serious and devout young man who conducted prayers before each game in the locker room in which he asked God not for victory but for the safety of the players on both teams, he raised his eyebrows at the X. “I suppose this is legal,” he said.
“I would think so,” Strand told him.
“Anyway,” he said, “the kid can read signals.” Then, with a smile, “Even though he rarely follows them. He drives the other boys crazy. They never know what he’s going to do. If he’s called to go around end and things don’t look too good for him there, he just turns around and goes through center or even around the other end. He does everything wrong and I bawl him out for it, but it doesn’t help much. And it’s hard to be too tough on him. At his size it takes guts to even be out there, and then, most of the time he gets away with it. Somehow, he’s out in the open and making big hunks of yardage. He’s like an eel—nobody can really get hold of him. It’s almost as though he’s escaping from a lynching party. I don’t think he cares whether we win or lose a game, he just wants to show everybody that he’s uncatchable. I tell you something, Mr. Strand, in all the time I’ve played football and coached it, I never set eyes on a kid like this before. He’s not like an athlete—he’s like some kind of wild animal. It’s like having a crazy panther on the squad.”
“Is he going to make the team?” Strand asked.
The coach shrugged. “I don’t intend to use him much. He’s too small to stay in there regularly. Somebody would finally eat him up alive. It’s not like the old days. The boys today are monsters, even at our level, and the big ones run just as fast as the small ones. Anyway, the kid can’t block or catch passes. If I can teach him how to hold on to punts maybe I’ll put him in to run back kicks. Otherwise I’ll just use him on special plays when we’re praying for a long breakaway run. When I told him I was going to keep him on the squad, I said, almost as a joke, he was going to have a lot of time sitting on the bench, I was only going to put him in when we were desperate. He just smiled up at me—small as he is he’s got a smile that would scare a sergeant in the marines—and he said, ‘Coach, that’s the job for me, I’ve been desperate all my life.’”
“Is he popular with the other boys?” Strand didn’t think it was the time to tell that serious young religious man that he had a Goth in his backfield.
The coach looked at Strand speculatively as though debating with himself whether to tell the truth or give him half an answer. “You have a special interest in the boy, I understand,” he said. “He’s here more or less because of you, isn’t he?”
“More or less. He was in my class in high school and was an extraordinary student.”
“Well, if his roommate Rollins wasn’t so protective of him, I think somebody would have taken a swing at him by now. He doesn’t bother to keep his opinions to himself, does he?”
Strand couldn’t help smiling. “Not so you could notice it,” he said.
“When he fakes a man out on a run or somebody in front of him misses a block, he—well, he sneers at them. And he has a favorite phrase that’s getting on the boys’ nerves—‘I thought you gentlemen were here to play football.’ He divides himself and Rollins from the rest of the team with something he must have picked up in reading English literature. You know how the English newspapers used to report the lineups of cricket games—‘Gentlemen versus Players.’ The other boys aren’t quite sure what it means, but they know it’s not complimentary to them.”
“Are there any other black boys besides Rollins on the squad?”
“Not this year,” the coach said. “The school does everything it can to get blacks to enroll, but not with much success. I’m afraid the school has had a reputation as a WASP stronghold for so many years that it’s going to take time to change its image. I think there’re only four other blacks in the school and none of them plays football. Last year we had a black instructor who taught history of art and he was well liked, but he never felt at home. Also, he was too high-powered for a prep school. He’s teaching up at Boston U now. Good intentions aren’t always enough, are they?” He sounded wistful, this big healthy young man whose aims in life Strand would have thought were limited, because of his profession, to ten yards at a time.
The football coach was not the only member of the faculty to be puzzled by Romero. Another young teacher, a quiet woman in the English department by the name of Collins, who had Romero in a course in English and American Literature, fell into step beside Strand as he was leaving the main hall after lunch one day and asked him if she could tal
k to him for a few minutes about the boy. She, too, knew that he had come to Dunberry because of Strand. He hadn’t bothered to correct this notion by telling anybody of Hazen’s influence in the affair. If Hazen wanted to take the credit or the blame for Romero’s presence on the campus he was perfectly capable of doing so.
“You taught him in New York, didn’t you?” she said as she walked by his side.
“If anybody can be said to have taught him anything,” he said.
She smiled. “I’m beginning to see what you mean. Did he give you any trouble in class?”
“Let me say,” he said, trying to sound as judicious as possible, “that the views he expressed were not always in accordance with those of the accepted authorities.”
“The change of schools,” Miss Collins said, “hasn’t changed his habits. He’s got the whole class embroiled in an argument already.”
“Oh dear,” Strand said. “What about?”
“The first book we discussed was Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage,” Miss Collins said. “It’s a book boys can relate to and the style is admirably plain and prepares the way for a whole genre of American writing. When I asked for comments, Romero kept silent while two or three of the boys explained why they liked the book, then raised his hand and stood up and said, very politely, ‘Begging your pardon, ma’am, it’s all brainwashing.’ Then he made quite a speech. He said that no matter what the writer might or might not have intended, the result was that it showed that you never became a man if you ran away, you only proved yourself if you stood up and fought no matter how sure you were you’d get your head blown off, and as long as people admired books like that young men would go marching off to war singing and cheering and get themselves killed. He said he didn’t know about the other boys in the class but if he hadn’t kept running away all his life he sure as hell wouldn’t be there in that classroom that morning. Running away, he said, was the natural thing to do when you were scared and stuff like The Red Badge of Courage was just a lie that old men cooked up to get young men to go out and get themselves killed off. He said he had an uncle who was decorated in Vietnam for sticking to his machine gun in an ambush to let the other men in his platoon get away and now his uncle is in a wheelchair for life and he’s thrown his medal into the garbage can.” Miss Collins, who had a shy, apologetic manner and a pale troubled face, shook her head as she remembered the incident in her classroom. “I just couldn’t cope with that boy,” she said despondently. “He made us all feel like uneducated fools. Do you think he really has an uncle who got wounded in Vietnam?”
“This is the first I’ve heard of an uncle,” he said. “He’s not above inventing things.” If he had been disposed to argue with Romero, an unprofitable exercise at best, he might have reminded him that the author he esteemed so highly, Mr. Gibbon, used the words “military valor,” with approval, on almost every page. Consistency, Strand had learned, was not the boy’s strong point
“Do you think that you could tell him that if he has opinions to express that might disturb the other boys he might first come to me privately after class and talk them over with me?” Miss Collins asked timidly.
“I could try,” he said. “I don’t guarantee anything. Privacy isn’t exactly his thing, as the boys say.” Suddenly he had a new insight into Romero’s character. He was always in search of an audience, even of one, and preferably unsympathetic to him. He seemed to find his emotional outlet in hostility and with it a sense of power over people older and in a worldly sense much more powerful than he. If Strand could foresee a career for him it was as an orator, having to be protected by the police, whipping crowds into frenzies of dissension and belligerence. It was not a comforting vision.
“One of the difficulties in handling him,” Miss Collins was going on in her frail, apologetic voice, “is that he always speaks with the utmost politeness, full of ma’am’s and if I may ask a question’s. And he’s the best prepared boy in the class. He’s got a photographic memory and he can quote verbatim whole paragraphs from books he’s read to support his arguments. When I gave the class a list of suggested books to read for the semester, he tossed it aside contemptuously and said he’d already read most of the titles and the books he hadn’t read he wouldn’t waste his time opening. And he objected because James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover weren’t on the list. Imagine that, from a boy of seventeen.”
“As the saying goes,” he said, “he’s wise beyond his years. Or vicious beyond his years.”
“He said that those two books were among the foundations of modern literature and ignoring them was an insult to the class’s intelligence and a denial of the sexuality of the modern man. Where do you suppose he picks up ideas like that?” she asked plaintively.
“From the public libraries.”
“I wish there were a more advanced course,” Miss Collins said. “I’d put him right into it. I’m afraid he’s some sort of genius. I never had one before and I never want to have one again.”
“Take heart,” he said. “With his temperament he’s likely to get into some kind of scrape and be expelled.”
“It can’t be too soon for me,” Miss Collins said, her voice for once decisive. As she walked sadly off to her next hour, Strand was selfishly relieved that for this semester at least Romero was in none of his classes.
Among Strand’s duties as housemaster was a biweekly inspection of the boys’ quarters, which he made when the boys were out to class. There was the expected range in orderliness—from spinsterly neatness to a kind of infantile playpen sloppiness. The room on the top floor occupied by Romero and Rollins was clean enough, but the division between the halves of the room was so clear that it was almost as though an invisible wall ran between Rollins’s side and that of Romero. On Rollins’s bed there was a brightly figured Navaho blanket and against the headboard a maroon pillow with a big felt W in yellow sewed on its cover, the major letter he had won playing for his high school team. On his desk, in a heavy silver frame, there was a colored photograph of a grave-looking middle-aged black couple, posed in front of a white front porch, inscribed “From Mom and Dad, with love.” Next to it was a photograph of a pretty, smiling black girl in a bathing suit, with the chaste inscription in fine, ladylike handwriting, “In fond remembrance, Clara.” On the wall was a large photograph of four huge young men with wide grins on their faces, the smallest of them Rollins himself, all of them wearing varsity sweaters with different letters on them, all of them clearly brothers. Rollins was holding a football, the brother next to him a baseball bat and the two others basketballs, to show that their athletic honors had not been won in only one sport. They were a formidable if friendly group and one doubted that any neighbor would recklessly engage any of them in a dispute.
On the wall above his bed was a large lithograph advertising a concert of Ella Fitzgerald’s and on the bedside table was his cassette machine and a row of cassettes, which Strand knew from experience he played at top volume. On the little shelf under his desk was a pile of Playboy magazines. Strand had found girlie magazines in other rooms also, but hidden on the floor under the beds. Rollins plainly didn’t believe he had anything to hide.
On the shelf of his closet, which had been carelessly left open and in which his clothes were rather haphazardly arranged, there were a half-dozen cartons of chocolate marshmallow cookies, which made Strand smile as he thought of the moments during the night when the pangs of hunger awakened that huge body and his groping through the dark to the cache of childish sweets which would keep him going until breakfast.
By contrast, Romero’s side of the room was bare and Spartan. The blankets were the olive drab wool ones issued to every boy and the bed was made with military crispness. There were no photographs and no magazines in evidence and the desk was bare except for a note pad and a neat row of sharply pointed pencils. It was as though Romero had resolved that nothing that he left behind him would reveal any fact to anyone who might be in a position to judge h
im. His clothes were arranged perfectly in his closet and on the shelf there was the famous 1909 edition, edited by J. B. Bury, in seven volumes, of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Strand knew to be of considerable value as a collectors’ item and which had added so much weight to Romero’s bag on the day of his arrival.
With the difference in tastes of the two young men, one had to wonder how it came about that they could live so harmoniously in one small room and seek out each other’s company with such pleasure, as they did at all times.
Curious about how exactly Romero had come into possession of the set of Gibbon and if he knew how valuable the books were, Strand left a note asking him to visit him after football practice that afternoon. By school rules, Strand had to grade the condition of each room in the house and post the grades on the house bulletin board. The numbers ran from one to ten and he marked down ten for Rollins’s and Romero’s room, although there was something vaguely disturbing about that invisible wall between the two beds.
Romero came into the living room of Strand’s apartment fresh from a shower and, as usual, neatly dressed and controlled in his movements. Strand made him sit down and before broaching the matter of the books he asked him a few questions about his classes and about the football team, which was to play its first game that Saturday. He said he liked the classes and thought he was doing well enough in them. He said he doubted that he would get to play in the game, but that he liked the coach, although he thought he lacked imagination. Very frankly, he told Strand that he had told the coach that if he didn’t get to play at least for a few minutes by the second week of the season, he was going to drop off the squad and concentrate on his studies.
Strand asked him, routinely, if he had any complaints and he said none. He said that Mr. Hazen had written him that he had deposited a certain sum to his account at the school bank and that he was allotted ten dollars a week of it for spending money, as were all the other boys in his form. He said he had written a note to Mr. Hazen thanking him for his generosity. Strand told him that he could thank Mr. Hazen in person, as he was driving down with his wife and daughter to visit the school on Saturday morning. “I guess I’m in for another speech,” he said, smiling, but without malice.