Mom would drink too much to go shopping. I don’t ever remember her Christmas shopping. She’d ask Duckie to buy us presents, and one year she forgot altogether.
One Christmas Eve, I was at Jamie and Lyn’s house and she phoned me. She’d had too much to drink and slurred into the phone, “Can you go out and buy some Christmas presents for me? I will pay you back.”
“Mom, it’s ten o’clock at night. The stores are closed.”
“No, you don’t unnerstand, I don’t have any presents to give to anyone. Can you go buy some for me, please?”
Jamie and Lyn, and Duckie too, felt angry, and rightfully so, but I couldn’t get angry. Mom just seemed like such a sad figure to me, and I had to stick up for her, but that Christmas Eve night might have been the last time that I let myself feel that much hurt for her. After that, I kept loving her but sealed off the bleeding.
29.
I arrived at Exeter in September 1964, just a few months before my fifteenth birthday. My brother John had graduated a couple of years before I arrived, and our grandfather, Skipper, had gone to Exeter as well. But it was not the school Jamie attended; the Hallowell side of the family preferred Milton Academy because Gammy Hallowell’s father had taught Latin there.
Having been first in my class every year at Fessenden, I was unprepared for the quantum leap in smarts that I would find in the kids at Exeter. Suddenly I was not number one, far from it. I had to work hard to get B’s, never mind A’s. While it was jarring not to be number one, it didn’t upset me too much because we were all in the same boat: shocked to discover that no matter how smart you might think you are, there are many people who are smarter.
Exeter cast a spell over me, over most of us. We entered as unsophisticated ninth graders, called “preps,” believing that we were smart because that’s what we’d been told and we’d demonstrated at our previous schools, having no clue, really, how to think or write and certainly not the remotest idea of how deeply the Phillips Exeter Academy would change us.
It broke some kids. Exeter could be a cruel place. Many teachers delighted in giving D’s or F’s, as if they were upholding the academic standards of the world and preserving Western civilization. We also had Dean Kesler who delighted in expelling kids. He once gave a chapel talk on the felicitous effect of being expelled from Exeter. (Each day started with a required all-school meeting called “chapel,” which began with a hymn but was in no other way religious. It included a talk by a faculty member or some guest.) Dean Kesler kept a polished rock as a trophy on his desk, given to him by a student who’d been expelled only to come back years later and tell Kesler that being kicked out of Exeter had been the key to his success. During my class’s four years, 20 percent of my classmates were expelled and another 5 percent left because they just couldn’t take it.
Exeter was in flux during those years, as was the rest of the world. We were plunging into the heart of the 1960s. Exeter’s new principal, Dick Day, started right along with us. He would bring coeducation to Exeter, along with a new library, the end of required church, and a complete review of the curriculum.
But I didn’t care about any of that. I was concerned with the meaning of life, trying to figure out what to do with mounting sexual feelings in the absence of girls, how to get good enough grades to get into Harvard (the preferred destination for almost all of us), how to speak up at the round tables that provided the setting of all of our classes, and how to stay happy in a place that seemed quite oblivious to the happiness of its students.
It was a sink-or-swim place. Our dorm head, Ted Seabrooke, legendary wrestling coach and a hero of John Irving’s, gave us monthly pep talks at dorm meetings. “Exeter gives you just enough rope to hang yourself,” he’d tell us, then chuckle, “and there’s a lot to recommend that. I’m not kidding, though. No one is going to come around and make sure your homework is done. You can waste all your time if you want to. Nobody’s gonna tell you to go study. But you won’t last long here if you don’t work. Just don’t think we’ll keep you afloat if you start to sink, because we won’t.”
I’d listen to him and think to myself, Well, I will do my work, so I won’t sink. Other kids would get scared and shut down. Not many, but a few. Seabrooke also cautioned us about our record: “Your record follows you everywhere you go. Life is starting to get serious now. It’s time for you to get serious, too.”
As severe as all that sounds, the fact is Ted Seabrooke had a heart as big as the world. He was a fantastic dorm head. Rather than frighten me, his monthly pep talks inspired me. Just as he coached his wrestlers on how to pin rather than get pinned, he coached us on how to do Exeter right, and by extension how to do life right.
Those talks provided stability, a feeling of confidence: I could make it as long as I kept working hard. I knew talent alone could not carry me. What his talks could not reach, however, were the dark moods swirling around inside of me.
They’d started at Fessenden, those nights when I’d stay awake praying Mom could be happy. But when I hit Exeter, the bleaker side of me took serious hold. Exeter did that to many of us.
Not everyone felt this, of course. The student body was made up of so-called “posos” and “negos.” The posos were the positive ones, the jocks, the optimists, the student council types, the cheerleaders, the ones who bought the motto of the school, inscribed in marble over the entrance to the Academy Building, where we went every morning for chapel: HUC VENITE PUERI UT VIRI SITIS—“Boys, come here that you may be men.”
The negos were the cynics, the artsy types, the sophisticated kids, the ones who had mastered the art of being cool, disdainful, and blasé. They snickered at the school motto, looked critically at the privileged base most of us came from, smoked cigarettes and soon marijuana, and in general mocked pretty much everything most people admired.
I was part poso, part nego. By the time I graduated I was pretty firmly poso, but I thoroughly understood the position of the nego. Exeter forced many students into that mold, if only to defend themselves from the daily assault on self-esteem the school could mount.
The sadness I felt at Exeter was the culmination of my first fifteen years of life. The chaos and hard times that had surrounded me in Charleston left me insecure, uncertain about what to expect next.
Furthermore, happiness and mental health simply were not WASP desiderata. Character is what counted. My aunt Nell, for example, as learned and well-read a woman as I ever met, would have scoffed at the concept of self-esteem. She emphasized humility, restraint, discipline, deference, moderation, abstinence, all subsumed under the heading of character. When we took baths under her supervision, we were allowed no more than a half inch of water in the tub. It was against her better judgment that she allowed the water warm rather than ice cold. You could say some propensity toward a gloomy disposition was bred in our bone.
I remember going alone to the Lamont Art Gallery on a gray and snowy Sunday in February at Exeter to watch Ingmar Bergman’s movie Wild Strawberries. It was in Swedish, black and white with English subtitles. It was about an old man, a doctor, revisiting his past in various ways.
The gloom of the movie totally captivated me. Yes, yes, I felt, that’s life, even though I had little idea what was going on in the film. It affected me deeply, immersing me in gloom. That movie provided an objective correlative—to use T. S. Eliot’s cumbersome term, which I use here only because I learned the term that year at Exeter—for the darkest, saddest parts of my being.
Oddly enough, the final scene in the movie depicts the old man going to sleep in his bed, a smile on his face. Somehow, after the ordeal of his journey, he finds peace at the end. Now, some fifty years later, I wonder if that final scene didn’t work its way into my unconscious, planting a seed of hope I did not feel at the time.
After the movie, I walked alone back to my dorm down the blacktopped paths of Exeter under quietly falling snow, flakes dropping aimlessly, drawing me into a dream state akin to what the movie had induced.
Crossing Front Street beneath the flashing yellow light that hung over the crosswalk in the gray winter twilight—I could hear the faint click the light made each time it flashed—then stopping for a moment to button up my jacket as it was getting colder out, I realized I felt as alone as I’d ever felt in my life. I felt like that old man in the movie, walking through scenes I didn’t understand.
I sometimes revisit that walk back to the dorm after viewing Wild Strawberries and think of it as an enactment of a part of myself that got born at Exeter, that the movie midwifed, the empty, confused, lost, depressed, despairing, hopeless part of myself that I have spent so much of my life fleeing, denying, repudiating, or in some other way trying to destroy or, at best, to minimize.
And yet, in that young man taking his lonely walk in the near-darkness of New Hampshire’s winter, I see a stronger part of myself slowly growing, learning to bear the harder parts of life without sugar-coating, the parts that I’d tried, in keeping with my mother’s optimism, to pretend didn’t exist. I see a part of myself that could look up at the night sky and see absolutely nothing at all, no meaning, no reassurance, nothing but distant, indifferent stars, and not recoil in terror, but just see it as it is, like the click of the flashing yellow light.
The walk took only ten minutes or so. Soon I got back to the busyness and bright lights of my dorm, Bancroft Hall, which at that point felt like a banquet hall beaming light and life in a dark surround, with the sound of Star Trek on the TV in the common room, the clang of dishes coming from the kitchen as dinner was being whipped together and served up, the voices of my friends talking in the common room—in other words, the sounds of life, of purpose, of diversion, everything I needed after Wild Strawberries.
This was Exeter: meaning and meaninglessness; poso and nego; my dream to set the world on fire and my fear I could never do it.
30.
It wasn’t clear to me what Mom did during the day. It seemed against the laws of nature that she would be employed. Duckie worked as a real estate agent, driving all over town with the help of Jamie and me to open and close rentals during the summer; Janet worked at the town offices; but for some reason my mother never worked. We never even challenged her on this.
The more time passed, the more she became wrapped up in her daily routines and drinking. She pretty much lost interest in what I was doing, although she would ask. She just wouldn’t remember how I replied.
One night my freshman year at Harvard, she phoned and asked me where I was. I told her I was in my dorm room. “Oh, at college?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you go to college?”
“I go to Harvard, Mom, just like Jamie and Johnny.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she said. “Why don’t you call me more often?”
“I will. Why don’t you turn off your light and go to sleep now?”
In late afternoon, Duckie would come over to Mom’s house and the two of them would drink their bourbon on the rocks with water and talk, usually quarrel a bit, but also gossip. My mother would often complain to Duckie about me, especially when I got to college and became more distant, how I wasn’t spending enough time with her.
I didn’t have any friends in Chatham except Jamie and Lyn, so there was nothing for me to do except go to their house or watch TV. When I got my driver’s license, I’d drive my mother’s car to their house every night I could, and come back late, by the time Mom had gone to bed.
One night—I was still at Exeter, so I guess I was sixteen—I came in around midnight and heard noise from Mom’s room upstairs. I went to the foot of the stairs and called, “Are you awake?” When I heard more noise, I went up the stairs, steep Cape stairs with about twelve-inch risers. When I reached her bedroom, I saw my mother roll over in bed toward me, bare-shouldered, and say with a slurred voice, “Neddy? Is that you? Are you home already?”
A man next to her got out of bed and started putting on his white Jockey underpants. I saw his pasty naked butt in the moonlight.
“Steve was just giving me a back rub.”
I turned around, went back downstairs, and took a seat in the living room. I’d never seen my mother in bed with anyone except Uncle Unger. Seeing her that night shook me. I remember saying to myself, She has every right to sleep with whoever she wants to, why should you be upset by it, she’s lonely and it’s a good thing for her to have a man over.
Still, I felt upset. When Steve, who turned out to be her hairdresser, came downstairs, he handed me a glass of whiskey. “Here, drink this.”
“Thanks.”
“Would you like to talk?”
“No, thanks.”
“OK, well, I guess I’ll be going then.”
“OK.” I drank the whiskey and sat for a while staring at the wall, letting the alcohol work its magic. Then I called Lyn. She came over and we went for a drive.
Lyn and I drove around for a while. I don’t remember a word she said, just the feeling I had of immense gratitude that she was there. She looked out for me so many times, that was just one of the more poignant for me.
The next morning, Mom and I didn’t talk about the visitor from the night before. I’m not sure she remembered. I hoped she didn’t.
31.
In April 1966, Time magazine, which back then was the magazine of record, read by everyone, published its most famous cover ever, a black background upon which was written in red block letters, one word to a line:
IS
GOD
DEAD?
Had they been polled, many if not most of my classmates would likely have said yes, on most days myself included. But that made me feel like a traitor. God had had my back in Charleston, so why was I turning my back on Him now? Why was I starting to side with Aunt Marnie and believe that after death there is only blackness?
Perhaps with this issue in mind, Exeter required students to attend church. Most of us didn’t want to go, preferring to sleep in on Sundays. Many resourceful students discovered a way out: If you declared yourself to be Jewish, you could go to a Friday evening service, fulfill your religious requirement, and sleep in Sunday mornings. As word of this loophole got around, the Jewish population at Exeter skyrocketed, with the shorter Friday evening service supplanting church for many students.
But I opted to get up Sunday mornings and go to Phillips Church—in part because of my emotional ties going back to St. Michael’s in Charleston, and in part because of the school minister, Fred Buechner. I loved his sermons. After Exeter, Fred would go on to have an illustrious career as a preacher, a theologian, and a novelist. Widely regarded today as one of the most inspired and illuminating voices in religion, Mr. Buechner, as I knew him then, was special to me only because he held me unblinking on Sunday mornings with his earthy, passionate interpretations of the Bible and of life.
He preached more like a poet, or a fellow sufferer of this state called life, than as a man up in a pulpit delivering wise words. His words were wise, for sure, but his wisdom felt earned to me, as if he’d grappled deeply enough that we really should listen to what he had to say. We were lucky to have him up there, but we didn’t know how lucky then. That’s the way a lot of Exeter was; some improbable twist of chance provided us with far more than we ever knew we were getting.
Coming under the influence of Fred Buechner while I was gestating my faith, while my hopes were daily tested by the smart and merciless cynicism that burned through Exeter, listening, rapt, to this Lincoln-like man who had hard-won knowledge of whatever it is that lies beyond knowledge, grabbing on to the sermons he cast out to us like phosphorescent lifelines in the gloomy zeitgeist of those years, watching this man after each service embrace his wife and hug his three daughters as if they were his everything, well, to tell you the truth, it made me believe in God.
This is what set me and church apart from most people I knew, starting with St. Michael’s: I felt good there. I looked forward to seeing Mr. Buechner in that pulpit, and getting giddy on his words. There, I felt
happy. None of the fear and guilt so many people associate with church and religion. Exactly the opposite. I found church a joyful place, full of hope and love and the grandest, most transformative feelings and ideas. You knew, or at least I knew, what you were going to get in church, but you would also be surprised, in good ways. It had very little to do with belief. I could far more easily have argued against the existence of God back then, or now, than in favor. And yet I loved church. I loved the sanctuary. It was the one place where what matters most in life stood front and center.
Fred Buechner must have felt a calling as school minister preaching to a smart, largely agnostic if not atheistic student body to make a case for God and faith, to give us maybe our last, if not only, chance to take religion seriously, to be surprised by God.
But I came to church for something different, even though I didn’t know it at the time. I thought I was going because I loved Mr. Buechner’s sermons. But actually, I was there to get dosed up on feelings I didn’t often find at Exeter. Even though I do not believe giving love was Fred Buechner’s primary objective, that’s what he gave me, whether he meant to or not. Love and hope.
Of course, Mr. Buechner was very smart. At Exeter you had to be smart if you wanted to be taken seriously. To make the case for God in 1966 at Exeter, you had to be one clever person indeed. But smart didn’t matter to me. What mattered to me is what came through to me from Fred, week after week, his absolute conviction, his bone-honest testimony, that life was good no matter what.
Because he’d written about it, I knew that Mr. Buechner’s father had committed suicide when Fred was ten years old. That he could be so hopeful, so bold, so loving, so sure of the goodness in life in spite of the doubts and fears that that suicide must have instilled—that made me believe that I, too, could make my life good.
Without knowing me at all, without ever having a single one-on-one conversation with me, Frederick Buechner changed me that year, 1966, the year of the Time cover, marking me forever. Then summer came, and Mr. Buechner was gone. He moved on from Exeter to devote more time to his family and his writing. This happened two years before Exeter’s trustees, in keeping with the times, abolished the requirement of students attending any religious service whatsoever.
Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 13