by ALEXANDER_
You’d think, considering the way we feel about each other, that she’d be happy to have me in boarding school when she’s home. But it isn’t so. The only thing I can figure is that it’s some kind of power thing with her. Once, long ago, when Gloria was up to her usual bag of tricks, I asked Mother, “Why does she act like that to me? I mean—what did I ever do to her?’’
Mother was ironing at the time and I think we were up here on the Island. I do remember she was wearing shorts and a long pink shirt abandoned by one of her husbands. With her dark hair down she looked, I swear, younger than Gloria—more like Meg after a successful diet. Anyway, she ironed for a minute, then said, “You got born, Charles, that’s what you did to her.”
“But that’s not my fault.”
“No. But when she was three, which is when you were born, she didn’t know that. All she knew was that somebody had arrived to take not only my attention away from her, but also her brand-new stepfather’s whom she was already flirting with.”
“But she hated my father. She’s always telling me what a jerk he was—the way you do.”
That was one of those minutes when I had the curious feeling that something that might have made me understand
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the whole business between Mother and me almost happened but didn’t quite. For a minute she looked terribly unhappy—sort of stricken. When she looks like that a queer desire to protect her comes over me and I have to hold onto myself and remember that if I give in the gates will clang to and lock behind me. So I clenched my teeth and said nothing.
“Charles—I never meant ... I didn’t want ...”
I wanted to tell her everything was all right and I didn’t mean it. (Mean what? I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter.) I wanted to kiss her cheek and tell her I’d take care of everything. Yes, I did. It’s incredible, but I did. I remember it very well—and then the door opened and Gloria walked in. Mother’s face closed up. She turned her back to pick up something else to iron and when she turned around again she just said, “We didn’t always feel like that about him.”
We, I thought. All of a sudden she and Gloria were a team again. They were on one side and Dad and I were on the other and never the twain would meet and all that jazz. Only it’s a little lopsided, because I can barely remember my father. I remember a big man with blond hair like mine and a smile, and his putting me on his shoulders that felt about a mile high. The sea was behind him. I remember the feeling more than the way it looked. And the feeling was being happy. Like everything was relating to everything else and making sense.
Anyway, I knew that apart from my freaked-out sister, it would not be a good idea for me to broadcast the fact that I was going to be hobnobbing with The Man Without a Face. People were leery of him and Mother is conventional. She doesn’t like anyone going around doing oddball things. And McLeod was definitely an oddball.
4I
My absence during the day needn’t cause any flutter because I was nearly always up and out before the rest of the family and down with the kids in the harbor. More often than not I wouldn't touch base again till dinnertime. So there’d be no problem there. It all looked very neat. Now all I had to do was to get the books I had brought to the Island up to McLeod’s house, and there was a hefty load of them.
CHAPTER 3
I arrived, sweating, at McLeod’s gate at seven thirty the next morning, lugging the books in two shopping bags I had stolen from the kitchen, after occasional rests on the way.
After puffing a bit I pushed the gate open and started up the path. Sure enough, there was a familiar, bone-crunching growl, and my great friend Mickey bounded around the bend. I stood stock still.
“Good Mickey,” I said, pinning my hope to flattery.
The huge beast came straight at me. I closed my eyes. There was silence. I knew I was still alive because I could feel my heart beating. Very slowly, I opened my eyes. Mickey was sitting two feet from me, tongue out, ears forward, head on one side. Behind him about twenty feet was McLeod. On top of a horse.
“You’re early.”
“Yes.”
“What are the bags for?”
“Books from school.”
“You needn’t have brought them. I have others.” I thought,
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Thanks a lot for telling me. McLeod’s horse was sure nervous. He kept backing and sidling and tossing his head, which was queer, because his rein wasn’t tight. I looked to see if McLeod had on some kind of a spur, which would be just like him, but he didn’t. The horse was really beautiful, a goldenly bay. Next to airplanes I like horses. “Why’s he so nervous? Your horse?”
“Because you’re standing there. He doesn’t like strangers. Go on up to the house.”
You could see just how psychotic the man was, I thought, as I lugged the books up that practically ninety-degree incline. Well—at least forty-five degree. I have ridden on and off most of my life whenever I could get a chance, and it’s been my observation that it’s the rider that makes a horse nervous, not some inoffensive bystander—particularly when he’s already being threatened by man’s best friend, Mickey.
A few minutes later I came through the last clump of trees and now, in daylight, got the whole effect of the headland, with the house on it, and it was really something. At least, the view was. The house faced straight into the Atlantic, which this morning, under the early sun, was kind of a gauzy purple, a little blurred at the horizon. From where I was standing the top of the cliff seemed to jut halfway to the sky. Nothing below—the rocks, the peninsula, the harbor, and the village, which I knew were off to the right— was visible. Between me and the house was a wide stretch of grass, and dotted here and there were some trees, gnarled and bent backward.
The house was old, you could tell by the roof and the windows and the walk on top of it. And there was something about the house, maybe because it needed a coat of paint, that made me think about that widow’s walk and how some
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woman had walked around it for hours and days and maybe years, watching and hoping for a ship that never made it home. It was that kind of a house.
I was standing there gawking (and resting for the umpteenth time) when I heard the sound of hooves back and to the left. Turning, I saw McLeod leap the bay over a barred gate between two trees at the end of what looked like a path going down through the trees in another direction. Then he cantered back of me to a small bam attached to the other side of the house. Dismounting, he took the horse in.
When he came out and towards the front door I was waiting.
“It’s open,” he said curtly.
I opened the door and walked into the hall that I vaguely remembered from the night before. In the daylight it looked smaller. There were wide oaken floor planks, the staircase. No carpet, just a chest along one wall.
“To your left,” McLeod said, coming up behind me.
We went into a big room. The outside of the house might be crummy, but the inside was really together. That is, if you like books. There were two walls of them. There was also a big desk near the windows that looked over to the cliff, a table, and two big chairs.
“Put the books there on the table,” McLeod said. He had on dark pants of some kind stuffed into rough-looking boots and a gray sweater. It was hard to tell what age he was. He was lean and athletic-looking, but his hair had as much gray scattered throughout as it did black and the half of his face that wasn’t raw steak was lined. Maybe forty, maybe fifty.
I hauled the bags over and emptied out the books. McLeod turned them over. “All right,” he said, after a while. He went over to the desk and opened a drawer. “Here’s some
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paper. Write me three hundred words on any subject you choose.”
Straight off he hit a nerve. I don’t like to write—at least not for school. “But that’s not part of—” I waved my hand towards the books, “of what I have to know.”
“I thought you agreed to do it my way.”
“Yes, but—”
“But what?”
“I have to bone up on social science, math, Latin, and English.”
“This is English composition, or hadn’t it occurred to you?” Pause. “Haven’t you ever written any compositions?”
“Not for a while—and besides, they’re not going to ask me to do one for the exam.”
“How do you know?”
“They didn’t last time.”
“All right, Charles. Pick up your books. I’ll drive you as far as the Peninsula Bridge.”
We had a little silence while I hated him. Mickey, in front of the unlit fireplace, found a flea and went to work on it. I thought about the Air Force and whether if I stuffed vitamins and exercised all summer I could con them into believing I was seventeen. And I knew the answer to that. No.
“We do it my way or not at all,” McLeod said, in case I had missed the point, which I hadn’t.
“Don’t I have any say at all?” I knew the answer to that, too. Who the freaking blazes did he think he was? A teacher, of course, the kind I had forgotten about. Learn my way or else.
“All right,” I said, staring down at the table.
“Look at me!”
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Stubbornly, I didn’t.
“I said look at me.”
I can’t say his voice was any louder, but despite my determination not to, I snapped my head up sharp and fast.
“Now listen to me, Charles. I’ll say this once and that’s all. I agreed to coach you out of a moment of—pity—that I now regret. But I keep my word. And if you stay you’re going to keep yours. I’m not going to explain my teaching. I’m not interested in your good opinion. I don’t care whether you like me or hate me. But you’re going to pass that exam, and if at any moment I think you’re not, because you’re not doing what I tell you, then we stop. Is that clear? Do you accept it? Because if you don’t—entirely—you can leave now.”
The “pity” was deliberate; even in the midst of the rage I felt, I knew that. And it made everything clear to me— the needling, the bullying: He wanted out. But he didn’t have the guts to tell me he’d changed his mind. People like him don’t ever admit to changing their minds. They make you do it for them. I realized that in one way he’d really won the brass ring—he’d made Gloria look almost good. But—for the moment—she’d stopped being that important. Then, inside, I started turning it all off because it was all so wormy. I could feel myself doing it. Things began not to hurt so much. I was backing, at least in my mind I was, and he was watching me. There was a line going from the side of his nose on the unscarred side down to his mouth. It made him look mean as a snake, I decided. And his eyes, pinched deep into the burned flesh, were so pale it was like looking through windows into nothing. I heard my voice, almost as though it were coming from a distance.
“I’m staying.”
“Why?”
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Because I hate your guts, was the reason. “I want to pass the exam.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.” It was queer how calm I suddenly felt.
He nodded towards the sheets of lined paper. “All right. Three hundred words.”
I did his lousy three hundred words, sitting there at the table while he sat in one of the comfortable leather chairs and went again through the books I had brought, and Mickey lay in front of the empty fireplace, snorting and twitching as he dreamed of chasing rabbits, or more probably people. My only pain was in getting the thousand words of the original essay by Jake Rodman, Joey’s older brother, down to three hundred.
Jake had won a prize with it at his school, which was luckily not Joey’s and mine, and his proud mother had saved it. I had already used it three times on three different teachers—with a different title each time—and the first time I was told that at last I was showing not only creative talent but a maturing social consciousness. The original title was Why the System Must Be Changed. When Jake wrote it, it was published in his school paper and a team of upperclassmen debated it before the assembled school, faculty and parents. It was a really big deal. His parents were so pleased they gave him a trip to Europe and the school persuaded him to put in an application to Harvard, which accepted him. How could I do any better? Joey had offered it to me when I was about to cut my throat over a paper I couldn’t hack, saying no one would know. So I changed a few words here and there, just for safety’s sake, and turned it in.
Boy! Did I ever get the blue ribbon treatment there for a bit. Even our junior SDS chapter looked impressed. It
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was really exhilarating. So, when I had to do another paper a year later in English, I doctored a few more words, changed the title once more, put in a large quote that Joey found in the current Ramparts mag, and turned it in again. It, too, got an A—the second one in my life. The English teacher was not turned on to the school scene as much as the social science guy since, as he explained, he was undergoing therapy and his shrink felt that his libido had to be chiefly directed towards his psychodrama class that met every night. This was after he had gone to sleep in class while we read aloud Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” and discussed its relevance to the current revolution. One or two of the reactionary kids suggested he might be strung out on pot, but the responsible leaders shouted them down and told them any more such counterrevolutionary garbage and they wouldn’t get out of the school yard with all their parts. . . Anyway, the teacher’s libido being otherwise occupied, he didn’t make a big thing out of the essay, I mean read it aloud or anything, which was just as well, since quite a few of the kids in class would have recognized it in a minute. He just gave me an A. So, heartened by all this success and feeling that there was no point in abandoning what was so obviously a good thing, I tried it once more on the new current events teacher. . . .
Well, after all the dust settled, and Mother had been summoned to the principal’s office and I went the round of the school analysts again, I realized I had overdone it, and there was plainly some truth in the hoary old cliche Moderation in everything. . . .
However, Quasimodo-Ivan-the-Terrible McLeod hadn’t been exposed to it, and by this time I pretty well knew it by heart. So, occasionally stopping to frown into the fire
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place or chew my ballpoint pen for effect, just in case he might be looking, I hotted the old stew and served it up.
It was a mistake, and I saw instantly that I should have known it would be. He flipped through it like lightning.
“So,” he said when he had read it, “you are a ponderer on social issues. Who would have thought it?”
It seemed safest not to say anything.
“It’s a pity that your grasp of the major contemporary problems is not equaled by your mastery of spelling and grammar.”
Well I could answer that one. ‘ ‘Grammar is a racist device for repressing the language of the people.”
“Indeed? Well, I am afraid that you’re either going to have to abandon your revolutionary principles regarding grammar and spelling, or give up your idea of getting into St. Matthew’s. Which is it going to be? They’re extremely reactionary about things like grammar and spelling.”
“I thought St. Matthew’s was supposed to be third- rate—practically anybody could get in.”
“Apparently you couldn’t.”
“Weil, you know what I mean.”
“You mean a school where you can get away with the rubbish you’ve been used to turning in at your current establishment—like this, for instance.” And he threw the sheets of paper onto the table.
Gingerly I felt my way. “You mean you think it’s wrong?” “Whether it’s right or wrong is not the point. You didn’t write it.”
Right on. But how did he know? None of the others I had offered it to had, not even the last one, until in his initial enthusiasm he had started to read it aloud to the class and got instant feedback.
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“Did you?” The strange, light
gray eyes bored into me over puffy cliffs of red flesh.
“No.”
“Who did?”
“Jake Rodman. He’s the older brother of my best friend, Joey. He’s now at Harvard.” I don’t know why I added that, maybe to show him that I copied only the eighteen- karat best. He surprised me by giving a short laugh, only there was more bite than ha-ha in it. “If you ever give me anything phony again, the old rules as stated apply. Out. Remember, it’s your choice. Do you want to learn or not? You came to me. Not I to you. Just who’s doing whom a favor?” After another of our silences he said, “Have you ever written anything entirely of your own?”
Back to the sore nerve. “Yes.”
“What was it about?”
I saw I couldn’t dodge the issue so I said grudgingly, “It was about an airplane, like it was a person; how it got started and how it felt when it first took off.”
“Well? What happened? What did you get on it?” “The teacher said it was ungradable.”
“Why?”
It was an occasion I don’t really care to remember. The new social science teacher had pulled the same trick as McLeod—write something on any subject you want. So I did this thing on the plane. How was I to know that he went rabid over any invention since the wheel, that he was a one- man antitechnocracy lobby?
Well, by the time he got through with my paper everybody knew. You would have thought it was Bob Hope up there, as he read aloud with expressions and gestures and a kind of between-sentences running commentary. He had them
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rolling between the desks. It was one of the great comic turns of the school year. Except I didn’t find it so funny.. When he finished and took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes and got serious he gave the class a pep talk on ecology and nature and living in harmony with the earth and what America and technocracy had done to ruin the planet. Then he tore the paper up and threw it into the wastebasket and went on to the next. . . .
Even The Hairball, who was then married to Mother, said the teacher had gone a bit far, after he and the police had tracked me down on the New Jersey Turnpike where I was trying to hitch a ride to Colorado. (The Air Force Academy is in Colorado, and while I knew I didn’t have a chance of getting in—certainly not at my age and without at least a high school certificate—I thought I could nose around long enough and be near enough to leam the best approach. But I only got-as far as the first gas station past the tunnel!)