"Aw, now you see that, Raul, we've hurt Stephie."
"My ass."
"Now you're insisting on being naughty, Raul, I can just see that. Now if you insist, if you just insist on making an ass of yourself, I just… I just don't know what I'll do." And he burst into tears.
"Aw, now Alec, don't get upset. I'm sowwy. I'll be good. Promise."
"Do you cross your heart and hope to die?"
"Fuck, man, I'm an atheist."
"Oh, come on, how low are our jokes gonna get?"
"We should never have abandoned our cloaks."
"You sure shouldn't have," Amy said.
Raul smiled and shook his head. "Oh, you're subtle, very subtle."
"Supple, very supple."
Raul laughed loudly, giving Alec a congratulatory slap on the back. "We'd better end on that, while our luck's running good."
Richard slowed the car, pulling over to the sidewalk.
"Are we here?" Raul asked, amazed.
Richard nodded.
"How convenient life is to our purposes, is that not so, Alec?"
Stephie slid out of the car.
"That's so, isn't it?" Alec said absently.
Amy, shaking with the desire to get out, said to Richard, "Will you hurry up?"
Alec and Raul laughed. Richard, moving slowly, pulled the bucket seat forward. Amy stepped out. She and Stephie were thrown forward by the wind from Riverside Drive, their coats wrapping about their legs. The wind howled out New York's noise, and the sun bathed the apartment fronts in quiet and ease.
"Break a leg," Raul called.
"Pull a tooth."
"Disjoint an armpit."
Their voices rose strangely in the wind, and their tones rebelled against the lonely quiet of the sun. "That was awful," Alec said softly.
"It certainly was."
Richard got into the car and slumped as if exhausted. The three sat without purpose or direction.
A green station wagon with a U-Haul attached stopped next to them, and the fat man driving it leaned out, laughing, and called, "Alec, my boy, tell your friend Richard to follow me—got a little job for you."
Alec, astonished, said, "What are you doing here?"
"I'm toothless. I'm to pick up your grandmother's couch, and I'll need some help. So you follow me in your car."
"Well, Richard's waiting for Stephie," Alec said, "so how about Raul and I helping you? On one condition, though."
"Oh, you're going to bargain with me."
"Ayea. Simple bargain—after we help you, drive us to school. We have tryouts to go to."
"Sure. Get in."
Alec got out, a little too eagerly to please Richard, and let Raul out, who whispered in his ear, "Is that your father?" Alec nodded. "Who was with your mother the night of the play? Your stepfather?" Alec nodded again, and the two waved good-by to Richard's diminishing form as they drove away.
David Shaw had been pleased to escape from the small pretensions Alec's mother had developed in her modest career on Broadway. The woman he had since married pleased him more; she shared with him a scorn for stable, bourgeois life, a love for the makeshift, and indolence. He enjoyed his paunchy middle age; enjoyed even more its display.
Having hated the years he spent under strict parents, he maintained an indifference to his children's actions that eventually pervaded his emotional responses. In Alec's case, this was a comforting balance to the influence of his mother. But in the case of his stepdaughter and his son by his second marriage, it had created strangely flippant creatures. He rarely saw Alec and, almost as if he put more emotional faith in the first marriage, found himself at times awfully proud of him.
He also found himself disliking certain qualities in Alec which he attributed to Alec's mother: what he thought at first was an effeminacy, which later became dandyism, something even more distasteful to him; Alec's ambition, which seemed limitless; and the direction that ambition took—acting.
He winced at Alec's disdainful way of dealing with his half brother and stepsister; an Olympian egoism that regarded them as beings beneath him to be tolerated with a smile—an attitude that mimicked his own. Father and son in fact, were almost exactly alike.
"Your new teeth driving you crazy?" Alec asked, after they were under way.
"I'll tell you the nightmare after you introduce me."
" 'Introduce me,'" Alec mimicked. "If you had been at Aria da Capo, you'd know." Alec, in fact, had been glad, after his mother's criticisms of his performance, that his father couldn't make it.
"I can see I'll go to my grave with this shame hanging over me. Is this the actor Anita raved about?"
Alec nodded.
"I'm surprised the two of you are on such good terms."
There were verbal groans of protest from Alec and Raul.
"Oh, come now," Mr. Shaw said, laughing, "aren't actors naturally jealous?"
"On the contrary," Alec said.
"Quite on the contrary," Raul agreed.
David Shaw laughed. "What is your background?" he asked Raul. "Are you Latin?"
Raul answered in an informative, exact tone. "I am one half Latin, one half Jew. The Latin in me is divided into one fourth Cuban, one fourth Spanish— the province of Galicia. As for the Jew, he is one fourth Russian, one fourth Polish."
"That's funny, and it happens often. It's true of our family. Alec's mother is Russian and, get this, French Jew."
Raul laughed. "Isn't that ridiculous? I really don't believe it's possible."
"Why not?" Alec asked.
"I'm sure it's so. It just doesn't seem likely."
"That's true," Raul said judiciously, "one doesn't think of a Jew being French."
"As for my side of the family," David went on, "it becomes perverse." They all laughed. "My mother was a converted Jew; my father was the WASP who converted her."
"Did I ever meet them?" Alec asked.
"No, no. Papa died two years before you were born. Mother obligingly died a year after."
"You sound bitter," Raul said.
He laughed in a slightly hollow way. "Just kidding."
There was an uneasy silence. They pulled over to a corner, and David got out quickly.
"Well, that was fast," Alec said, obviously to say something. Alec and Raul got out; Mr. Shaw was opening the U-Haul. "So what happened with your teeth?" Alec asked.
David Shaw grunted and shook his head. He moved toward the building they had stopped in front of, Alec and Raul following. "You know Dr. Mercer?" Alec nodded. "And sadist that he is, one can't blame him, it's natural for dentists, he told me that I had to have every one, without exception, of my teeth removed." They stopped before the elevator, David holding the door, and got in. He pressed the sixth floor.
"The bills on these things are just enormous—and sneaky. It takes him, maybe, seven to ten minutes to tell me this. I had gone to him, oh… say, a week before. He had taken X-rays, etc. That alone cost me seventy-five dollars. And now I got charged for the same things all over again."
"Why did you have to get X-rays again?" Alec asked.
"Ah. After he took those X-rays, he told me my teeth were fine."
"You're kidding!"
"No. But I went to him again and insisted. He said there had been some mix-up with the X-rays." The elevator stopped. "I'll finish the story when we get downstairs."
He rang Alec's grandparents' door. A black maid answered, telling them that Alec's grandparents were out but that they should pick up the couch anyway.
It was a Victorian couch, light green and in good condition, but the armrests were threadbare. To fit it in the elevator, they stood it on end, but since that left little room, they slid it in and sat on it while going down, a situation that caused Alec and Raul to laugh all the way. Mr. Shaw was thoughtful.
While getting the couch to the car, David Shaw said, "I don't know why your mother's side of the family believes in maids. They make me nervous."
"Mother doesn't really have a mai
d. She's an old friend."
"I suppose so," he said with mild irony.
Outside, they put the Victorian couch in the U-Haul, Raul commenting on how large it was, a pointless comment, he thought, totally pointless.
In the car, Alec asked David to continue.
"What was I saying?"
"That you had to have the X-rays taken all over again."
"Oh yes. So he took the X-rays for a second time— another seventy-five dollars—and asked me to return. So I returned and he said, 'Mr. Shaw, I think I made a mistake.' But for telling me that, just for telling me that, he charged me thirty-five dollars." He looked at Raul and Alec for sympathy.
"Oh, God!" Alec said.
"That's barbaric," Raul said.
"Isn't that crazy? So that's one hundred and eighty-five dollars, and my teeth are still rotting away. So then comes the operation and the new dentures. They cost twelve hundred dollars. Altogether—thirteen hundred and eighty-five dollars." Alec, who had been looking very seriously at his father, smiled. His father began to snicker; Alec broke out laughing.
"Come on, be quiet," David said.
Alec, still laughing, said, "Okay, okay, I will." He suppressed his amusement.
"But that wasn't all…"
Alec keeled over in laughter.
"Come on!"
"All right, all right."
"So," Mr. Shaw continued, smiling, "dentures make you whistle when you speak."
"Yes?" Alec drew the word out, mocking.
"Since I'm a radio announcer, I had to go to a speech class to learn how to avoid that. It took me two weeks. Two weeks' pay."
Alec gasped, laughing.
"And the cost of the lessons."
Alec banged his hand on the dashboard repeatedly, his amusement having no other outlet. Raul looked from Mr. Shaw to Alec, trying to understand.
Mr. Shaw glanced at Alec, whose face was a vibrant red. "The poor boy's going to die."
"I don't understand this at all," Raul said with an embarrassed laugh.
"It certainly is confusing," David said. The two looked at Alec: Mr. Shaw, calm and knowing; Raul's face fixed in wonder. David returned his attention to driving, Raul gazed on at Alec. Alec sighed for a time, looking out the window, occasionally letting out a reminiscent guffaw.
A silence followed that left the situation so unrelieved that Raul burst out with, "What the hell were you laughing at?"
Alec giggled. "Nothing. Nothing at all."
A thin line of Mr. Shaw's lips extended themselves in profile. Alec leaned over to Raul. "I'll tell you later," he whispered.
"We're here," David said. Alec opened the door. "By the way," Mr. Shaw continued naturally, "altogether it cost two thousand twenty-eight dollars." Alec nearly fell into the street. Raul laughed appreciatively and got out to greet a bent-over Alec. "Thanks for helping with the couch, boys." And Mr. Shaw drove off smiling.
"What were you laughing about?"
They started down the steps that led to the rear courtyard of the theater.
"Listen to how insane this is. My father had that operation two years ago."
"You're kidding!"
"Two years ago. And it was nothing. It was an ugly operation, but it didn't cost anything like he said it did. He did have to go to a speech school, but he's manager of the station. He does his program because he wants to—he doesn't depend on it for money. Anyway, ever since then, it doesn't matter who it is, he tells this story. I used to be his accomplice, but I haven't done it with him in a long time, and the price has just soared to incredible heights. So I had to laugh at one point. From then on, I was in a rut."
They had gone up the metal stairs of the side entrance to the theater. Ignoring the door leading to the auditorium, they climbed a short flight of stairs past the ladder up to the hellhole and opened a heavy black door leading onto the backstage of the theater. They were laughing all the way, Raul not yet conscious that he was in the school. Once on the stage, crossing over, both posed before the empty auditorium.
A backdrop was down, two lights lit the bleak stage. Raul, in black, moved in the imagery of that blurred heat. Alec was posed tragically upstage; Raul, downstage center, scanned the audience with a gaze "as blank and pitiless as the sun."
" 'Death is a twofold enormity,'" Raul quoted, low and fierce.
"Or a one-sided grotesque."
A hideous smile passed over Raul's face.
Alec moved downstage to meet Raul coming upstage. Meeting, they bowed with great exaggeration. Raul, coming up from the bow, was badly shocked by Mr. Miller's voice.
"There you are," he said with anxiety. "Where have you been?" But without waiting for an answer, he turned around and went offstage left, toward the phone. Alec had followed him; Raul, stunned, dumbly followed both. Mr. Miller said into the phone, "Mr. Henderson's office, please." He looked at Raul. "I'm making an appointment for you."
Alec also looked at Raul, frightened and anxious. "Yeah, it will be good for you to speak to him. Tell him the truth. Tell him exactly what you feel about the school." Alec implored the only way possible—by order.
Raul gave a little hysterical laugh. "Oh, I see. I see. I'll do that."
Mr. Miller murmured into the phone. A heavy, hot drop of sweat fell down Raul's armpit, broadening when absorbed by the fabric of his shirt. He watched a small cloud of dust rise up on the stage. He took the velvetlike material of the backdrop between his fingers. Mr. Miller replaced the phone. "Go over there right now," he said.
4
Mr. Franklin A. Henderson, headmaster of the Cabot School, had taken over the job as recently as this school year. He was, however, no stranger to Cabot. He had graduated from it, gone on to college, getting his master's and Ph.D. in English, returning there to teach. He was hired as headmaster for a less prestigious school, when, with the retirement of Harold Barrow, he was surprisingly chosen for the job—surprisingly, because older, more experienced administrators, a number of whom had been at Cabot longer than Mr. Barrow, were available.
He was young, in his early forties: ambitious, it was rumored that the headmastership was merely a steppingstone for an administrator's post at a college; enterprising, he had, within the first month, changed two very basic, traditional rules—the hair and dress restrictions—and a man sympathetic to student needs.
This capsule, this image of the man, was swallowed whole by students, faculty, and parents, but not without adverse reactions. A few faculty were openly hostile, nearly all trustees were decidedly hostile, and a group of parents had joined together using their sons as spies for any marked deterioration in the student body, pushing for his ouster. In the middle of the school year one parent from the group, armed with a list of all students suspected of smoking marijuana and demanding their expulsion, would present it to him and Mr. Henderson, in the company of that parent, was to tear up the list.
Mr. Henderson, for reasons not completely unselfish, wished to be in closer contact with students than had been the rule in the past. He was, however, diverted from that purpose on all sides. He was expected, as all past headmasters had done, to speak at luncheons for donations to the school; to smile and nod to donors who were particularly generous; to be at all board meetings; and to give all the stilted speeches yearly inflicted upon the students. Mr. Henderson had wanted to teach a course of his own; in fact he had cherished the idea. One of the more influential trustees, when the idea was presented to him, said with a blank look, "Why, Franklin? What for?"
Every facet of his life was under pressure. His wife and older daughters constantly complained of the necessity of living in Yonkers; the trustees never ceased to grumble about the ninety thousand dollars spent to build his house—a demand his wife had forced him to make. He had had an ugly scene with his son, with whom his relations were normally good. It was known that John had been friendly with a student notorious for his drug activities, and Mr. Henderson had had to ask him to see the boy less often. Though he had known that his son s
moked, he had carefully avoided mentioning it, until the necessities of his image forced him to ask him to stop. It created a painful gap. But Mr. Henderson believed that, if this year went well, the pressure would let up.
To Raul, Franklin Henderson seemed like a Robert Kennedy of the American educational scene—Robert Kennedy, about whom Raul had marvelously ambivalent feelings. He admired Henderson the way one would admire the blatant ego of a Napoleon and destested him as a man who would prevent polarization and thereby perpetuate the system for another twenty, thirty years. Reforms merely smoothed over the manifestations of the real problem: changing hair and dress rales didn't change the arrogance and condescension of the educational process.
But Raul was silent on the subject. He loved watching the enthusiasm' the students had for Henderson. He observed with reverence the power of an image. And though he knew all the students were in for either a disappointment or a shock, he said nothing, for there were enough cynics about.
Today as he walked in the gray light of Porshe Hall, his usual emotions of respect and contempt were mingled with fear. Under past administrations, his first cutting spree would have been greeted with suspension or expulsion, and this one, the second, definitely by the latter. His fear was amplified by the fact that he had not yet spoken personally to Henderson. Behind closed doors, the man might be a lot less liberal than he was in the auditorium.
As for Henderson, he had no idea what to think. Two weeks of cutting! Without even an attempt at covering up. The opposite, in fact. Every day, promptly at two-thirty, Raul showed up for rehearsals. The boy was either emotionally disturbed or he was protesting something. Or—it was not unusual—his parents were insisting that he go to Cabot and he was trying to get thrown out. His parents had, after all, when called after a week's absence, lied, saying he was home ill. They confessed to that when called a second time. Considering everything—the number of recommendations from Raul's teachers (the most glowing from Mr. Miller, who had said that Raul was the best actor he had worked with in thirty-five years), the suicidal manner in which the boy cut—this seemed the most plausible idea and the most distasteful. Distasteful, since a power struggle had developed because of him. Two joint faculty-administration meetings had been held over the issue, a dubious honor no other student had yet received. If Raul as Mr. Bowden, Raul's English teacher, and Mr. Miller both suggested, was protesting the lack of time he had for his own work, then Henderson's position was clear. It was symbolic of what he was calling for—meeting individual needs. The rest of the faculty and the administration had been vehemently against this. He cut —he should be thrown out. He had already been given one warning.
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