The Color of Trees

by Canaan Parker

  “No, no. I was just … making an observation.”

  Mr. Bennett gave my shoulder a squeeze and patted me on the back. “You don’t seem to be having any trouble, Peter.”

  “I’m fine, Mr. Bennett. Well, I’m headed over to study hall.” I cut across the grass and headed for the library. I looked back to see him skipping up the gymnasium steps. I was worried, for a second, that I might have gotten T. J. into trouble.

  Like most, or many thirteen-year-olds, I intensely desired to fit in with the boys around me. It didn’t especially matter that those boys were rich, to varying degrees, and I was not. Imitation seemed the quickest route to acceptance, and so I adopted their curious preppy lingo, with its peculiarly oral taint (I took a sneaky pleasure in spouting expressions like “Eat me, Acheson” or “Ancient history really bites”).

  I picked up the habit of using last names. Christian names (“David” or “George”) now seemed vague and superfluous, and their use even implied a genial lack of respect. It was funny to hear fourteen-year-olds addressing each other like serious, old businessmen. I assumed this was one way that prep school boys imitated their successful fathers. Still, when T. J. called me “Givens” I began to feel included.

  The boys in my dormitory were all preppy, but not as I expected. Most certainly, these boys were not effete. There was an earthiness, almost a ruggedness about them, even as they walked around in their wool blazers and talked in their mannered way. They spoke of vacations in Colorado or the Caribbean or Europe, of summer homes and sixteenth-birthday automobiles, without a trace of competitive innuendo. In their world such things were really too ordinary to impress — or threaten — anyone.

  Most, though not all, of the boys were “upper-middle” as opposed to undeniably “upper.” T.J. seemed particularly aware of his family’s status relative to the super-rich. He and Ashley would sit on the sofa in the Common Room on Sunday afternoons, toes curled in their thick crew socks, and compete not to prove who had the most money, but rather who had the least:

  “Don’t hand me that crap, Downer. Your family has three houses. We only have two.”

  “Bullshit, T. J. I’ve seen your house in Point O’ Woods. All those rooms? You’ve got twice as many rooms all told as we do.” Conversations like this left me twitching my head in confusion. It was a little hard, coming from the projects, to fathom arguments over whose family owned the least number of houses.

  Of course, T.J. did come from a wealthy family, his populist aspirations notwithstanding. Technically, his name was Thomas Jerrett Adams III, which strikes me now as almost comically bourgeois. Yet the name fit. T.J. was the classic Connecticut preppie. He’d taken a year out of school to travel in Europe. He cut his hair short at the first sign of curls (I wished he’d let it grow longer). He dressed every day in classic boarding school garb: blue blazer and gray or pastel yellow slacks, his father’s college tie, shiny brown loafers, and gray or black crew socks.

  At some point I realized that my three cotton-rayon-blend sports coats, though literally conforming to the dress code, didn’t really qualify as prep school style. The colorful pattern neckties I’d picked out just before coming to school now seemed garish, not sufficiently reserved. I left them in my closet, and alternately pressed and wore my two woolen jackets and my three dark cotton ties, so I could dress somewhat like the other boys. Of course, my dorm mates all had full Brooks Brothers wardrobes.

  Ashley Downer noticed my limited clothing supply. “Isn’t this the third time you’ve worn that jacket this week?” he asked me in front of Randy and Will. Ashley had the lowest status on the corridor, so I ignored him, answering only that it was weird to pay attention to another boy’s clothing.

  Another time we were in the Common Room complaining about the food in the dining hall. When I mentioned that my mother worked in food management and could do better, the Frog huffed in disbelief. “Your mother works?” he asked, an opaque look of surprise on his face. I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to embarrass me, or really was baffled by the idea of a woman working. Everyone in the room became quiet at Ashley’s remark. It was T.J. who thankfully broke the silence. “I met his mother, she’s cool,” he said. “She’s not a useless lump of lard like you are, Downer.”

  Despite these occasional ripples, in not too long I was happy at Briarwood. I liked most of my schoolmates. I found quite a few of them sexy — T.J. and Seam Landport, Ethan Thayer and Mark Fix. (I kept a top-ten list of the boys I liked best, updating it weekly like a racing chart.) I also liked the masters, who seemed uniformly wise and beneficent.

  And I was enchanted by the school itself, by all the green, fresh trees and grass fields, the berry-scented air. I felt enclosed by the school, by the forest ring that surrounded the campus and blocked our view of the horizon. The school was like a womb, or like warm arms in which I nestled comfortably. So quickly I’d forgotten about junkies and winos, the Black Panthers forcing their party newspapers on intimidated customers on Amsterdam Avenue. There had been the two assassinations, just a year before. Then the lootings, and the special riot police. Megaphones and mounted machine guns on the hoods of police cars. Even in New York, it had all floated over my twelve-year-old head, like smoke, but still I was aware. Now I was not aware. I was at peace, a happy, childhood peace, in my erotic paradise spanning the top of a great Connecticut hill.

  3

  The Briarwood School was not one of the great, old, mountainously endowed private schools of legend. A visitor to our school might think he’d wandered onto a country farm. The campus was flat and simply organized. The Chase Building, four stories high, was painted a faded, autumnal yellow, bordered in faded green, and covered spottily with ivy. It housed a dormitory for the Fourth Form, the dining hall, and the Headmaster’s office. One narrow wing of the building housed the school infirmary, another a small library and study that we called the Common Room. Behind this main building was the school chapel, where students and faculty met three times weekly for moral instruction. Standing just a few feet from the steep edge of the hill, in the center of a spread of unused land, the chapel was the most isolated structure on campus. With its light beige brick, sharply angled wings, and very tall, narrow steeple, it seemed to gleam in a far corner of the campus like a star.

  To the north of the Chase Building was a great quadrangular lawn, bordered by three red-bricked dormitories and crisscrossed by narrow paved walkways. Beyond the dormitories were tennis courts, the gymnasium, and athletic fields. Farther still were the row houses for junior faculty, brown or white wood two-story cabins with stone-pillared front steps, splintered white porch posts, white and yellow flower gardens out front, and portable grills and Volvos parked in back. On the outskirts of the campus were the large colonial homes of the senior masters and their families.

  For all the oddness and newness, I was, after all, in high school. Every morning after showering and dressing, I walked the quarter mile across the main lawn to breakfast in Chase Hall, and then to class in the Petty Academic Center. My first class every morning was English, which was also my favorite. We read The Pearl by John Steinbeck and Silas Marner. I identified with poor Silas, and wondered whether my bouts of compulsive shyness weren’t early signs of catatonia.

  In ancient history class we read about the birth of civilization in the Fertile Crescent and the great Persian emperors Darius and Cyrus. We also learned about Hannibal, the black general who campaigned to destroy Rome, and whose legacy was Dido’s vow of vengeance against the West. There were five other black students in the freshman class, and Hannibal was our hero.

  I made friends with a black boy from Long Island named Keith Hanson. Keith was short and stocky and wore thick black plastic glasses. He had already decided he was headed for engineering college. He was fourteen, like me a half year young for a high school freshman, but he looked older. He shaved once a week, his baritone voice sounded almost comic as it resounded from his tiny body, and he was already growing tufts of hair on his
chest and arms. Keith and I argued over the great generals as if they were baseball players:

  “Do you think Hannibal could have beaten Napoleon?’’

  “Hannibal would have kicked Napoleon’s butt. The man was too slick. He would use Napoleon’s ego to trap him. But Darius would have been tough.”

  “Yeah, Darius was bad. He was African too, you know. Persia is part of Africa.”

  “Cyrus wasn’t that great.”

  “Hannibal and Alexander would have been the best fight.”

  Keith wore an African flag pin in his tie to class every day. He wasn’t very happy in prep school. He objected to calling the masters “sir,” and he especially objected to having to stand up when our teacher, Dean Sanford Press, entered the room each morning. When Keith asked why our study of ancient civilizations stopped south of the Sahara, Mr. Press answered that he didn’t consider himself qualified to teach the history of Black Africa.

  Keith pressed him on the point. “If you’re not qualified to teach history, then how did you get this job?”

  The dean’s face quaked, turned red, and then relaxed into a Brit-like composure. “You’re welcome to do your term paper on ancient African history, Mr. Hanson. And I’ll do the work to verify your facts.”

  Keith nodded, then turned to me with a grimly triumphant smile.

  T. J. Adams was also in my ancient history class. Just as in the dormitory, he was always doing something distracting. He twitched and shifted up and down in his seat, crossed and uncrossed his legs constantly, kicked his loafers off and on. Most students were afraid of Mr. Press, but he and T.J. held a running conversation of wisecracks in most classes. The dean called T.J. “Thomas” or “urchin” or “little waif.” T.J. always answered “Yes, Dean Press?” with just a touch of mockery in his voice. T.J. actually did well in ancient history. He was interested in the Roman emperors and the ancient city-states of Sumer. Though T.J. was fifteen, it was hard at times not to think of him as a little kid. I thought Mr. Press was treating him like a son.

  In geometry class, I sat next to Sean Landport, the red-cheeked, dark-haired basketball player I’d met my first night at school. Sean was as tall and thin as I was, and had the perfectly squared teeth of a movie star. (Squared teeth like Sean’s I assumed were the intended product of the dental braces which many of the boys wore, and which I’d never seen before.) Like T.J., Sean also called me “Givens” instead of Peter, which I liked.

  Sean and I were partners in geometry class, doing problems together and combining our wits against our teacher Mr. Craig’s teasing and trick questions. Mr. Craig imposed a rule that any student who complained in his class, either about unfair test questions (“jip tests”) or heavy homework assignments, had to pay a quarter into the year-end spring barbecue party fund. Carter “Gorilla” Waxton, a lumbering sophomore who was repeating geometry, seemed never to get the point and was the fund’s main contributor. I deliberately called Mr. Craig the all-time super jip, and paid into the party fund just to be funny. Sean shook his head and thought I was stupid. This budding young capitalist saw no humor in surrendering money willfully, not even a quarter.

  On a regular basis Sean informed me that he was God’s gift to women, which I didn’t doubt. I liked Sean’s bragging, and always tried to bait him into talking about his sex life. He wasn’t suspicious, and didn’t seem to notice that I didn’t compete with him over girls, as most boys would have. In the locker room he demonstrated for me his bedding technique, mimicking female moans of satisfaction (“Oh, Sean! Oh, Seannieee!”) while he dipped his long legs and humped his hips against his corner locker, his long red penis swirling in the air like a lariat. Sean spent his Christmas vacation in the Caribbean. When he returned I saw for the first time that uniquely Caucasian oddity called a tan line, and couldn’t stop laughing or staring, it seemed so odd, as if Sean had a skin disease. I suggested that next year he should tan in the nude and wrap a ribbon peppermint-style around his dick. Not amused, Sean said he would do it if I promised to suck it when he got back.

  Parents’ Day at Briarwood came in early November. It was a cold Saturday morning, and just after my second-period class I walked over to Chase Hall to meet my mother. I hadn’t seen her in two months, the longest I’d ever been away. I was wearing my blue blazer and my new Briarwood school tie, hoping and half expecting to impress her. When I walked into the lobby, she looked me up and down, then her face spread into a smile.

  “You should be wearing a sweater, at least,” she said, brushing a speck of lint off my shoulder and smoothing down my collar. She never mentioned my daunting new boarding school manner. She just plucked and brushed, as though I were an adorably dressed doll.

  We walked across to the academic center and she sat in with the other parents on my biology and English classes. In English we were reading Henry V. I volunteered to recite Henry’s famous exhortation, hamming it up horribly to show off for my mother.

  After classes there was a seafood buffet in the dining hall. Keith Hanson and his parents were there. Keith’s brother Cliff had also driven up to visit. Cliff was a sophomore at Colgate University. Like Keith, he was stocky and broad-chested. Cliff liked to laugh, and had a deep, naturally loud voice. My mother mingled with the other black parents while I waited in the buffet line. When I returned with two plates of food, she was talking with the Headmaster’s wife, Mrs. Chase. “He’s much more confident now,” I overheard her say. “He didn’t use to speak at all.” Mrs. Chase had a small, presumptuous smile on her face.

  That afternoon was the biggest football game of the year, against the Whitehaven Academy Greycoats. Before the game, my mother came over to visit my dorm. She searched around my room like a cop, staring in surprise at my wall poster of the three TV amazon commandoes in soaked fishnet t-shirts (I’d put it up just to be cool — I didn’t know yet that I didn’t actually like girls). She turned and eyed me suspiciously. I could almost hear her mind clicking like a ticker tape machine, calculating silently, giving away no thoughts, but trying to figure who I was turning into.

  T.J.’s parents had also come to visit. I looked across the hall and saw him sitting on his bed, his blue jacket folded in his lap. His mother was picking at his hair with her fingers. T. J. was sitting passively with a pestered look on his face, allowing his mother to fuss over him. His father, a white-haired man in a brown tweed jacket, was resting his elbow on the bureau, smoking a pipe, and concentrating hard on his boy.

  Ashley Downer’s father was also in our dorm. Mr. Downer was on the board of trustees of Briarwood. I knew because I’d seen his name in the school yearbook — Ashley H. Downer III, which made our Ashley Ashley the Fourth. T.J. had claimed that each generation of Downers was identical, and that they bred asexually, like amoeba. (“Who would have sex with an Ashley Downer?”) I saw the two of them in Ashley’s room and indeed Mr. Downer did appear to be an adult replica of his son, except that he was a very large man, and it was hard to imagine that the Frog would ever grow that big. Ashley sat stiffly upright on his bed, as though he were skewered on a beam, with both hands cupped on his kneecaps. His father seemed to be speaking in a whisper.

  Just two nights before, Ashley had talked to me, for the first time really, in the bathroom as we were preparing for bed. He’d looked at me strangely while I was flossing my teeth, and asked if my parents were coming up for the weekend.

  “My mother is, but not my pop.”

  “Why not your father?” he asked, his eyes lighting up as though he’d stumbled onto a painful secret.

  “One’s enough,” I’d answered him flatly. He’d searched my face for hidden trouble, and, finding none, returned to applying his acne medicine.

  T. J.’s mother was calling to him now from his room. I looked into the hall and saw T.J. standing with his foot propped against the wall just outside Ashley’s doorway. His head was cocked. He was apparently listening to Ashley and his father. He looked up at me with an unreadable stare as his mother called again. “Th
omas? Your father wants to ask you a question.” He came walking back down the hall, grinning guiltlessly as he darted into his doorway. I could smell the scent of his hair, washed in oat brown soap, on the breeze he stirred up as he rushed past.

  My mother and I walked out to the football field and found Keith Hanson and his parents. The six of us found seats in the bleachers and watched the game together. Whitehaven took an early lead, and the mood on our side of the field turned sour. We booed the referee and taunted Whitehaven’s quarterback. Keith’s brother Cliff made an extreme amount of noise, including some frat house cheers he must have learned at Colgate. Cliff thought the name Whitehaven was amusing, and he bantered throughout the game in a fiercely put-on English accent.

  “Pip pip! What say we stuff old Whitehaven? Bugger off, Greycoats.”

  Keith was so serious compared to his brother, I thought. When Gorilla Waxton tackled the Greycoats’ quarterback, Cliff went off again into his stuffy Brit routine.

  “Ripping show! Sod the blooming QB. Off with his head.”

  My mother smiled at Cliffs carrying-on but otherwise yawned through most of the game, since she didn’t know the rules or the point of football. She did get excited when Briarwood scored a touchdown to win in the final minutes of the game.

  After the game we walked back to the dorm. The Bennetts were serving cocktails in their apartment just for the parents.

  “Will you be all right here?” I asked.

  “I’ll be fine. We’re going out to dinner later, right?”

  “Okay.” I paused and thought. “It’s good to see you,” I said. She nodded and smiled privately. I had an impulse to shake her hand, but didn’t. I left her at the Bennetts’ and went back outside. A group of about twelve Third Formers were huddled in front of the dorm, chattering excitedly.