But he stumbled and splashed good-naturedly, the confidence of his bloodline buoying him, just as the confidence of mine sometimes buoyed me. We kidded him without mercy, called him “Figgentop,” tripped him in the corridor, made so many jokes about his penurious nature that, finally, on a Saturday night near the end of senior year, he felt obliged to buy milk shakes for everyone in the Grill. But it was impossible to taunt him in any mean sense. At McKinley, he would never have been poled; it would have seemed somehow sacrilegious.
On that first night I was enchanted by him, just as Madhur Jarasapwanatha and Joey Barnard seemed to be. There was a kind of purely American glamour to him, confident, bumptious, unself-conscious. He represented everything I had worried about encountering at Exeter—the genteel snobbishness, the nonchalant bigotry—and to find it wrapped up in a harmless, foolish package like Higgenbotham immediately stripped it of most of its power. Joey and I retired to our room in time for the proctor’s check of lights, and lay in our beds with a shaft of moonlight slicing in between the shade and windowsill and across the few feet of darkness between us. “Ever know anybody like that in West Sacramento?” I asked him.
And he let out a low, sweet chuckle and said, “Man. Oh, man, no!”
Three
JOEY BARNARD HAD A SISTER named Regina (who would, ten years into the future, become my wife) and a brother named Francis Assisi Montgomery Barnard, who was serving in the navy in Vietnam and who would come home wounded but alive and eventually check into a drug-rehabilitation center outside Portland, Oregon. Both his parents were living. They rented one-half of a brick duplex, a house with a lopsided front porch and dusty backyard. Joey was Catholic; an athlete, too, a miler; and had grown up loving books in a not particularly bookish family, hating to fight in a neighborhood where street fights were part of the coming-of-age ritual of every boy. So we had the most important things in common.
I learned all this from our conversations in those first weeks, from the snapshots he showed me, the three framed pictures of his family he kept on his bureau. He was a skinny, happy, outgoing kid, but behind the bright eyes there was some slow-shifting trouble. Every now and then as the fall term progressed and the academic pressure increased, I would come back to Amen 21 and find Joey lying on his bed, rigid as a corpse, staring up at the ceiling when he should have been studying. “Having a mood,” he called it. He’d greet me with a flat “Hi, Anth,” lie there for another half an hour, completely silent and still, then go into the bathroom across the hall, wash his face six or eight times with cold water, and come back into the room and play The Impressions into his headphones, or sit at his desk writing a letter to his sister.
Little by little as the term went on, as he began to feel he could trust me, he would bring out small pieces of his Sacramento life and set them up in the room like exhibits in a museum of domestic agonies. The lights would be out. We’d be lying in our beds, ten feet from each other, and Joey would roll onto his side and talk to me in a voice without intonation. His father was a quiet man, he said, a driver for a bread-and-cupcake company, a person who just could not seem to save any money. He’d been an infantryman in World War II but had seen only a few days of combat. His mother “had some problems, too.” She’d go three or four months as a perfectly sober wife and a good mother, and then walk out of the house one day as if she were going to buy groceries, and return with two bottles of sweet, cheap wine. She’d drink steadily through dinner, glass by glass, the rest of the family trying to pretend everything was fine. After dinner she’d sit at the table and work her way into the second bottle, usually getting about halfway to finishing it. She’d stand up then—it would be just before bedtime—and begin walking through the rooms of the house like a spirit, ranting about her life: that the kitchen was dark, that the front steps sagged, that grass wouldn’t grow in the backyard, nothing would grow there, that they’d be stuck in that dark, sterile place for the rest of their lives, that her husband hadn’t been able to save fifty cents in twenty-four years of marriage, that her children were doomed. On and on it would go in this flat, brutal tone, until one by one the rest of the family slipped off to bed. Joey would lie awake in the darkness, listening to her voice as, deprived of an audience, it slowly lost volume. Once she stopped talking, his mother would begin to pace back and forth across the kitchen. He’d listen to her footsteps on the linoleum, hear her compulsively rearranging the chairs, washing the rest of the second bottle down the sink, walking, coughing, muttering. Eventually she would turn on the radio, and when he heard the faint strains of jazz, he knew it was over for another few months. Next morning, he’d see an aspirin bottle on the windowsill over the sink, and his mother would hug him and his sister and send them off to school with peanut-butter sandwiches and chocolate Kisses in their lunch boxes.
“She builds it all up,” he’d tell me. “She lets it all build up inside of her, Anth. Sweet all the time, sweet and sweet and sweet and the sweetest thing you can imagine. Other people let it out in little bursts. She builds it up.”
The worst thing was, he said, that he could feel it in himself, that same sudden onslaught of sourness, that same urge to see nothing at all good in his life. “It gets passed down in the blood, Anth,” he told me. “It beats you up, then it goes and beats up on your son or daughter, and their sons and daughters. I’m going to solve it, though. I’m going to MIT and become a research scientist, and I’m gonna find the gene for whatever this is called and figure a way to bleed it right out of people.”
We had a physics class in common, a teacher named Mr. Strink, who stuttered and sprayed and walked around the lab compulsively knocking a pencil against the watchband on the inside of his wrist. We’d sit at the same table in the dining hall—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—complaining about the terrible food, finding hairs in it, pieces of newspaper, bits of buckshot, convinced the kitchen staff was out to poison us. For our fall sport we chose cross-country running—to get in shape for hockey, in my case; to stay in shape for winter track, in his—and would run together through the flat, sedate streets of the town, day after day, as the leaves turned orange and red and lay like quilts over the unfenced lawns, as the weather turned cool and rainy, then raw, then cold and sharp, as we made the transition from new boys to veterans.
If the workout consisted of sprints, I’d see Joey only from behind. But if it was a three- or four- or five-mile run, he’d jog along beside me for the first ten minutes or so. We’d make a little conversation between breaths. Then, at a certain point, he’d pat me on the shoulder, say, “See you in the showers,” and pull effortlessly ahead, lifting his knees, swinging his skinny arms, gliding through the string of runners in front of me as if he were on skates and the rest of us were slogging through snowbanks in boots. College scouts from the best track schools in America knew his name, but he kept them at bay, and kept the varsity cross-country coach at bay as well. He did not want the pressure of a varsity sport just yet, he said. Indoor track would be fine in the winter season; he wanted a little breathing room first, some time to get used to this fancy East Coast life.
Physics, math, history, English, Russian, piano lessons, mandatory chapel, dormitory meetings, student council, chess club, rifle club, mixers, cross-country practice, hours and hours of homework—Exeter’s way of dealing with the flaming hormones and nascent homesickness of a thousand boys was to keep them constantly busy. And, in my case, at least, the strategy worked. I was happy there.
Beyond the occasional mild disagreement with Joey or temporary trouble in a class, the only sour note for me in this new life was the absence of my favorite cousin. Rosalie never wrote, was never home when I called from the pay phone in the basement corridor, never came up to visit. Just after noon every other Saturday, Uncle Peter’s Cadillac would appear in front of Amen Hall, and I’d always peer out the window hoping to catch a glimpse of her. My uncle would step out, tugging the lapels of his sport coat together and fastening one button; Nana Lia and Grandpa Dom—if he
was feeling well that week—would climb out and look around as if surprised all over again by the lawns and groomed shrubbery, the well-mannered young men in neat clothing, the quietness and order and air of wealth. After some hugging and kissing, they’d take me, or more often Joey and me, to a restaurant we liked at the northern edge of town, and we’d eat half-pound hamburgers and hot-fudge sundaes and talk about home.
It got so I’d know when Uncle Peter was about to bring up the subject of Rosalie’s absence. The meal would be finished, we’d be strolling down Main Street in the cool air, past the glass storefronts, he and I would pull ahead a few steps, and he’d say something like: “I don’t know, Tonio. I don’t know what’s wrong. He’s a piece a garbage, this kid she’s runnin around with, you should see him. Big mamaluke. Doesn’t look you in the eyes when he shakes hands, always snifflin and snortin, drives around with his music blastin, his shoulders down like this heah. She falls all over him. ‘Come up and see your cousin,’ I say to her on Friday nights. ‘He misses you like you can’t bleeve.’ And she says she will, she’ll be ready to go at ten-thirty on Saturday, she promises. And then ten-thirty on Saturday comes, and she’s out, or sleepin, or in such a mood I don’t want her to come with me anyway. I tell her be in by eleven, she comes in at one. I tell her study in school, she gets all Ds. I tell her, whatever else you do, never smoke, she smokes. She’s in the house three, four minutes, then she’s on the phone, out the door again, in the mamaluke’s car, gone. I yell, we have talks. What I am suppose to do, spank her like her mother used to? What am I suppose to do?”
These conversations lay like stones in my pockets. I’d carry them around with me for days afterward. I’d write Rosalie upbeat letters filled with anecdotes about the boys I was getting to know, the food I was eating, the things I was learning, funny stories from the dorm, from class. I’d tell her to come up and bring me a sub sandwich from Rosa’s, that I was shrinking away on the dining-hall food. All through September and October, I called Uncle Peter’s house after dinner two or three nights a week, hoping to catch her, giving up, finally, after a night when I realized she was there, a few feet from the phone with a finger to her lips, shaking her head at her father.
One sour note.
SO I BEGAN TO make myself not care so much about Rosalie. I practiced not caring about her, not thinking about her. It didn’t help much. I believe we are joined to certain people in this life and that we have to live out our joint fates fully, squeeze every last drop of blood and tears and laughter out of the relationship, live and suffer with them until whatever cable it is that holds us gradually wears away and snaps. Rosalie has been dead for years now, and the cable has not broken; I still can’t really make myself not care.
But my rich new life went on. I became accustomed to its rules and rigor, to the feeling of waking up in a strange bed in a brick building filled with people I barely knew. There were fresh layers to my sexual education: Mr. Pleverer loitering in the locker room after sports and staring into the showers; the piano teacher running a hand over my back once, in a lingering way, as I played my lessons for him in our weekly class; someone—Higgenbotham, we guessed—taping Playboy centerfolds up inside the door of the john. We stared out our windows at the teachers’ daughters crossing the quadrangle toward their parents’ apartments, as if we were staring at goddesses disguised in braids and backpacks.
I wrestled with Russian grammar and the laws of physics. On Thursdays I came to expect, in my post-office box, an envelope with my grandfather’s handwriting on the front. Inside, there would always be a new five-dollar bill and one folded page of stationery with his wavering script: “Caro Tonio, Qui tutto a posto, ma ci manchi molto.”
The campus was bounded to the east by playing fields, a river, and woods. Once or twice during the week and always on Sunday afternoons, I’d take walks there, stopping to sit on a stone or a fallen tree and reread Grandpa Dom’s latest letter, to say a prayer for my father and mother, to try to find a way to push two worlds together inside me. Then I’d get up to wander the paths along the shore of the river, swinging out into unfamiliar territory, farther and farther away from the warm orbits I had known.
Four
THE WEEK OF THANKSGIVING marked the beginning of the winter sports season, and tryouts were held then for varsity and junior-varsity teams. Joey and I skittered nervously through our classes on the Monday of that week, our thoughts fleeing the somber avenues of eighteenth-century English literature for the terror and thrill of the track, in Joey’s case, and the ice rink, in mine.
That Monday afternoon I walked with him in a light snow from the main quadrangle, across the campus, past Amen Hall, and up the long concrete ramp of the new sports complex. Even by New Hampshire standards it was a cold November day. An inch of fluffy snow had already accumulated; the soles of our shoes squeaked as we went. We were too nervous to say much. Others were making the same trip—a parade of boys, in hats or hooded jackets, walking alone or in small groups—with the same hopes. But for Joey and me I think there was an extra charge to that hour. Comfortable as we had grown at the Academy, there was still a way in which we had something to prove to ourselves. There was, still, a subtle demon living in us, something we’d carried there from coarser places, rougher places, places where people came of age feeling the little nagging spank of inadequacy. For Joey, naturally, the demon was an older, crueler one. It would have been easy for him to hear, in the proper accents that surrounded him at every moment of every day there, the voice of the oppressor. It would have been easy for him to read the word nigger—a word I heard spoken aloud at Exeter only two times—on the walls of the Academy Building, where the portraits of the white-faced principals of the school—1781 to the present day—hung in a neat row, where all the triumph and disgrace of American history seemed to reverberate from the old walls. It would have been easy enough for me to remember that fifteen friends in the Amen Hall Common Room had chanted, “Beat the Wop,” while we watched a boxing match between the Italian champion Nino Benvenuti and the U.S. Virgin Islander Emile Griffith, and use that moment to fuel a kind of continuous victim fantasy. But Joey and I weren’t made that way. We weren’t angry young men, we didn’t aspire to be; we wanted to succeed at Exeter for our own sakes, not as mascots for a beleaguered race or ethnic group.
Even so, on that cold afternoon, I believe we were carrying some small banner before us as we made the walk across campus. For someone like Higgenbotham, there was, no doubt, the pressure of his lineage, a whole genealogy to live up to. For us it was wider than that. Failure—in sports especially—would hold a bit of extra pain in it. Coming from West Sacramento, coming from Revere, it would be one thing to carry home a report card with a few Cs on it; something else entirely to be chased off the playing fields.
I remember being in the middle of the elaborate dressing ritual that hockey requires—jockstrap and protective cup, shin guards, shoulder pads, the white athletic tape, and long knit stockings—when Joey came by my locker and tapped me on the shoulder. He was already dressed—in sweatpants and running shoes and a sweatshirt with JAMES MARSHALL WILDCATS on the front—and he had a deadly serious expression on his face, as if we were going into battle. My hands were sweating. I wiped my palm on the lucky red T-shirt my grandfather had bought me, and we shook hands, sternly, like three-quarter-sized men.
In order to reach the rinks from the locker room, you walked down a tunnel so new you could taste the concrete in the air. You passed through a set of glass fire doors and into another tunnel with benches along the walls and black rubber matting on the floor. You put on your skates there, lacing them up slowly so as not to cut off circulation to your feet, pushed your hands down into the huge scarred gloves, grabbed your stick, and waddled up toward the ice.
The sport of hockey has become associated now with bare-knuckle brawls and raving fans. But that is professional hockey, that’s the corruption of money. On the college and high-school level, it was then, and still is, a sport of
tremendous grace. There is contact, of course—the game would not be the same without it, and it helps to be rough and fearless—but the true heart of ice hockey is speed and awareness of others, not force. When I stepped onto the ice that day and took my first long strides, I felt released from the plodding pace of the walking world, half-freed from the chains of gravity, set loose in space. Two or three flexes of the leg muscles and I entered another universe, a quicker, smoother, more exciting zone in which sticks clacked against the glassy surface and pucks boomed against the boards, and the coach’s whistle shrieked and echoed like the sharp cry of a hawk hunting a frozen canyon.
Coach Rislin threw handfuls of pucks out onto the ice from a burlap sack, and set to studying us as if we were objects in a medical experiment. Over the course of the next two afternoons, he ran us through skating drills, passing drills, shooting drills, sent us flying toward the net, two forwards against one defenseman, had us sprint from goal line to blue line, stop and sprint back, sprint to the red line and back, the opposite blue line and back, the opposite goal line and back, until we were huffing out clouds of vapor and pulling mouth guards from between our teeth to take in more air.
All the running I’d done that fall, all the afternoons spent shooting at Vito Imbesalacqua’s plywood goalie, all the early-morning hours of Bantam, JV, and Varsity hockey at the MDC rink in Revere, the bruises and sprains, the little bursts of fear and elation, the awkward hours with Grandpa Dom holding the hood of my sweatshirt in the Public Gardens—all of that sailed around with me on the ice during those two days. It was as if I’d been studying a language for years, then traveled for the first time to the country where that language was spoken, and found I could make myself understood there without too much trouble. On the Wednesday before the holiday, we had only half a day of school. Just after the noon meal, Joey and I made the walk across campus again, climbed the ramp, went through the fire doors, and saw our names on the bulletin board under a heading that said, “The Following Students May Pick Up Varsity Gear from Ricky on the Monday After Thanksgiving Between 12:00 and 2:30.”
In Revere, In Those Days Page 17