Not, I hastily add, that I thought the occupants of these stately homes to be deities. Although grounded in the American obsession with class distinctions, as exemplified in the novels of Fitzgerald, Marquand and O’Hara, and bitterly conscious of every club that might not admit me and every academy with an old-school tie, I still never harbored the smallest admiration for the rich, even the old rich, or the least envy of their superior ease in, say, ordering a meal at an expensive restaurant or acting as master of ceremonies at a bridal dinner. I and my contemporaries wanted what the rich had, but we were perfectly content to keep our manners at all times what they had been. Unlike Gatsby we would not have been impressed by Daisy Buchanan—only by her fortune. Perhaps it was not so much that we were of a later era than that of the three authors mentioned above as that we harked back to an earlier one: Dreiser’s.
My parents, who had an exaggerated sense of responsibility for their progenitors and who supported both their mothers into extreme old age, were able to send me to boarding school for only one year, and Haverstock was selected because it was willing to admit boys as late as the twelfth grade. I knew that I would have a tough time there socially, as the boys would have formed all their friendships and cliques, and I resolved, in the summer before going away, to make friends with Lindsay Knowles, whom I had known in our Keswick public school before he had been sent, three years earlier, to Haverstock. There was no point, after all, in being a “preppie” if one didn’t know anyone, and Lindsay, I was sure, would be something of a leader wherever he was.
It was not easy. My parents knew Mr. and Mrs. Knowles, as I knew Lindsay, slightly. His parents asked people like us only to their big Fourth of July lawn parties. But I had early learned a simple thing: that in the absence of some hopeless barrier, such as being black or totally indigent, a dogged persistence will get you almost anywhere. I took to calling Lindsay on the telephone and asking him to play tennis or swim at our little country club, until he decided that, so long as he could see no way out of it, he might as well see me at his place. And once I had made my way past those stone gates it was not difficult to gain a permanent entry. I cultivated Mrs. Knowles, a chatty, fluffy, brainless creature who urged me to “come over and swim” whenever I wanted, which, to Lindsay’s barely concealed disgust, I did.
Lindsay was a chameleon; he took on easily the characteristics of any group in which he happened to find himself. He might have been handsome had he weighed twenty pounds less; as it was, he was cheerful and agreeable-looking, with a round, freckled face, long, unruly, sandy hair that fell over his forehead, and gray-blue eyes that could seem merry or ice cold, as his mood required. With boys he could be easygoing, jokey and very lewd; with adults he was apt to be polite with an exaggeration that caused friendly smiles, because it was a conscious exaggeration intended to evoke just such smiles. Alone with an intimate, as I was to learn, he could be moody and bitter. He was exceedingly intelligent but very lazy; he read little but his perfect memory retained every word that he read. His complete ease with people, his sharp tongue and his family’s money made him the center of any group of young people in our part of Keswick.
My selection of Lindsay as a friend-to-be was not motivated entirely by his being an “old boy” at Haverstock. There were two other youths in Keswick who also attended that institution and to whom access would have been more facile. But I had discovered something about Lindsay that only he, his parents and his doctor knew: that he was afflicted with a serious heart ailment. I had learned this in a part-time summer job with the Knowleses’ doctor, a great friend of my parents, who had entrusted me with the task of reorganizing his voluminous files according to a new system and putting aside for proposed destruction certain antiquated ones. It was thus that I happened upon his memorandum of Lindsay’s case, in which it was set forth that the boy should be told of the gravity of his condition in order to ensure his compliance with the regimen laid down. The prognosis was not wholly negative. It was possible, if not probable, that his condition would improve. It was thought best that he should continue his normal schedule at home and at school, while avoiding certain physical exercises.
If Lindsay had not revealed to any of his friends the threat under which he lived—and I have a hunch that he was too proud to have done so—would he not relish a friend who, without himself being aware of the illness, offered him a sympathy, when the dark moods fell, that could not be connected with an odious pity? And might that not prove my open sesame at boarding school?
Lindsay was inclined to resent my ready acceptance of his mother’s casual invitations, but the summer was long and hot, and the Knowleses did not leave Keswick—no doubt with the purpose of keeping their son quiet. There were times, therefore, when I found him alone, sunbathing by the pool, and, for all his desire to snub me, glad enough to have a companion. On my third visit we became almost friendly.
“Why do you come here, Bob?” he asked. “You can’t think I’ve been very nice to you.”
“You’ve got a king-size pool and an all-weather tennis court. So I take your snottiness as a kind of dues I have to pay.”
“Don’t you know other people with pools and courts?”
“Pools, yes. Courts, no. And no one I know has a pool this big. It’s great to do lengths in.”
Lindsay looked at me now with something like interest. “Well, I’ll say this for you. You put your cards on the table.”
“Isn’t that where cards belong?”
“Why are you going to Haverstock, Bob?”
“Isn’t it a good school?”
“It’s all right, I suppose, as such academies go. But it’s no better than Keswick High.”
“You mean you get nothing for all that tuition?”
“Not really. What the prep schools are good at is bringing along the dumb guys. They have enough faculty to give individual tutoring. But now they won’t take the dumb guys. So what’s the use of them?”
I knew better than to tell him that there might be social advantages for me in going to a prep school. He was sure to sneer at that. “I guess my old man’s pretty keen on having me go. Personally, I think the bright guys teach themselves. Give ‘em the books; they’ll read.”
“And you’re a bright guy?”
“I am. Aren’t you?”
“Maybe I am at that.” He appeared to consider this, almost gravely. “Anyway, what does it matter? The bomb should take care of us all.”
Was he trying to console himself by including the world in his own doom? “I figure nothing ever happens that everyone thinks will happen,” I observed sententiously.
“So you believe the world will survive to become Robert Service’s oyster?”
“And Lindsay Knowles’s. I’ll share it with you.”
“Because of my pool?”
“Because of your father’s pool.”
“Actually, I believe the place is in Mummy’s name.” He laughed. “And, come to think of it, there is a master at Haverstock who might teach you more than you can get out of a book. It’s Mr. Hawkins.”
“What’s he like?”
“Well, you’ll see. He’s not like the others. He’s somehow … real.” Lindsay became suddenly self-conscious. “He makes poetry seem something more than a lesson, or a thing to quote and impress people with. It’s like religion to him. Except a religion you really believe in, not just Sunday stuff. Oh, I don’t know. It’s a lot of crap, of course.”
And that was all I could get out of him about Mr. Hawkins. But it was a start, anyway, for after that Lindsay greeted me with a more resigned good will when I appeared, and once, on a rainy afternoon, actually telephoned me to ask me over to play backgammon.
He was certainly unhappy. He would sometimes be silent for minutes on end, not even acknowledging a direct question. This might be followed by ribald moods in which he would giggle inanely at anything that was said. At other times he could be sour, critical, even corrosive. He would say scathing things to me and did not seem to
note that I never answered back. He appeared to have accepted me as a hanger-on whom it was not worth taking the trouble to be rid of, perhaps as a kind of courtier. For there was something oddly imperial about Lindsay. He took for granted that he should be an object of some kind of deference, not so much because of his money (his family was only rich by Keswick standards) or his brain (which was no better than mine), but perhaps simply because he had been dignified by the probability of an early demise.
Haverstock School was a medley of rather dull, oblong, red-brick buildings spread out over a long low hilltop with a superb view of the rolling verdant landscape of upper New York. I entered a form of some fifty boys and found that, as I had anticipated, Lindsay’s support was a valuable social asset. But there were liabilities to it as well. In one mood he might include me in a hiking expedition across country with one or two of the school leaders, but in another he would make cruel public fun of me and imply that he had to be nice to me only because I was from his home town.
He did, however, make me part of his relationship with Mr. Hawkins, and he and I would go to the latter’s study on Saturday evenings to drink cider and talk of poetry.
The English teacher was a large man with beautiful wide friendly eyes, a very pale countenance and thick red curly hair. Motionless he might have seemed the statue of a Greek discus thrower. But his actions and demeanor seemed to deprecate the outer man, not from any sense that his exterior might be too shining a coat of armor for the soul cringing within (the initial interpretation of some observers) as from a deep and almost desperate sense of genuine humility. Cy Hawkins, one felt, would be ready, if not to fight, certainly to die—and die in flames—for a cause, but it would be difficult for him to believe that any enemy or condemning judge could be more sinful than he.
His religious faith, unlike any that I had observed at home, was ardent. How far it went was revealed in a discussion that he and I and Lindsay had one Saturday night about Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Mr. Hawkins read aloud the stanzas in which the tall nun, facing imminent death as the tumultuous sea pounded over the deck of the stranded vessel, calls out, “O Christ, O Christ, come quickly!” He read this with a passion that almost choked him, and then broke off to explain his belief that there had been an actual appearance of Christ in that stormy sky.
“You mean that he really appeared, or that Hopkins is inventing it?” I asked.
“Both, perhaps.”
“Then why didn’t the other people see him?”
“How do you know they didn’t?”
“The survivors would have told, wouldn’t they?”
“Maybe he appeared only to the tall nun,” Lindsay suggested. “Wasn’t that common with visitations?”
“Or maybe only the pure in heart could see him,” I added.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Hawkins responded gravely. “It seems to me that he must have been visible to all who looked. What an ineffable experience!”
“A rather cold and damp one.”
“Not to say fatal,” Lindsay added.
“But that is not the way Hopkins saw it,” Mr. Hawkins protested. “He believed that God sends terrible deaths to those he most loves. He held that suffering was an honor, and martyrdom the greatest of all. The early Christians seem to have felt that way, too. There is evidence that they marched into the arena joyfully.”
“And Hitler’s holocaust, was that a blessing?” I demanded.
“You could argue it,” Mr. Hawkins replied sturdily. “For its victims anyway. The diary of Anne Frank has elements of sainthood in it.”
“Can a Jew be a saint?” Lindsay asked.
“Why not? God is not an Episcopalian. Nor even a Catholic.”
“But if persecution is a blessing,” I pursued, “must not the persecutors be benefactors?”
“‘It must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!’”
“So the Nazis will go to hell?”
“If you believe there is such a place, Bob. If ever I am tempted to become a Catholic, it will be because they have learned to face the vilest in human nature. It doesn’t shock them, and it shouldn’t shock them. It’s simply truth. God’s truth.”
“But surely the Nazis were worse?”
“Than whom? Us? Which life would you choose, Bob? A Berlin physician, brilliant and recognized, who is gassed with his wife and children at Auschwitz, aged thirty-five, or a black in our old South who dies in peace, illiterate, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, at eighty?”
“The doctor, of course.”
“I thought so. What thinking man would not prefer death to enforced darkness? Where cruelty is concerned, there’s not much to choose between humans.”
It is difficult for me to describe the peculiar excitement that Mr. Hawkins’s thinking gave me. And yet I was not, oddly enough, even much attracted by his faith. I did not imagine that the God in whom he believed with such passion would preserve his throbbing soul after death any more than he would Adolf Hitler’s. But it thrilled me to be in contact with a man so devoid of sham who believed, in perfect simplicity, that a hideous and cruel death might be a blessing, not even in disguise. It was as if Mr. Hawkins had somehow got the better of a coldly mechanical universe; he was a hot, bright little coal lying on a desert of rock, doomed to go out but shining bravely while it could.
As the year progressed, Lindsay became more extreme in all his attitudes. With those who talked smut he was smuttier; with snobs he was snobbier, and he continued to be sharp and critical with me when we were in the company of other boys. Yet he would seek my company for solitary weekend walks to the river, never apologizing for his earlier treatment. He was one of those who could divide his life into unconnecting departments. If he wanted to be an aristocrat on Monday, or a jokester on Tuesday, he saw no reason why that should keep him from being a poet or philosopher on Saturday.
I particularly remember a talk that we had one Sunday in April. Lindsay now tired very easily, so instead of taking our usual walk we had climbed to the top of the chapel tower and stood looking out on the panorama of the countryside and the diminished school.
“I suppose Mr. Hawkins would think that now we’re closer to heaven.”
“I think he finds heaven everywhere,” I responded.
“He is fortunate.”
“A fortunate fool?”
“If that’s what a believer is.”
“Would you like to be one?”
“And a fool? Why not? But sometimes I think heaven is only for older people. That they’ve had time to earn it. That it couldn’t be for someone our age. Does it seem likely that a baby could have an afterlife?”
The subject was spooky to me; I changed it. “Why do you only like me when we’re just the two of us together, Lindsay?”
He laughed. “What makes you think I do then?”
“Because you act so differently. Sometimes, in a gang, you seem ashamed of me.”
“I’m not. It’s just that I find it easier to say the things people expect. Just as it’s easier to wear the things they wear. None of it means anything. But with Mr. Hawkins—and with you at times, when you’re not showing off about something you’ve read—I can almost think. Or kid myself that I’m thinking.”
I was divided between pique and pleasure. Did I really show off? And then I felt a sudden shock of pity. Lindsay seemed remote as he stared at the hills to the west. He looked older and puffier.
“What do you want to think about?” I asked.
“Oh, anything!”
I felt constrained. I had no idea what he needed. I racked my brain for a subject. “Do you think Hopkins would have been a better poet if he hadn’t been a Jesuit?”
“I don’t know and care less,” he snapped, turning on me impatiently. “The trouble with you, Service, is that you’re an atheist who’s trying to create a deity. You should beware of graven images. You want to throw away Hopkins’s God and deify his
poetry. You’re like all those tourists in Europe squinnying at stained glass windows and holy statues and religious paintings and yacking about ‘tactile values’ or ‘significant form,’ as if God had had nothing to do with all that art. Well, maybe he hadn’t. But what’s the point of it all if he didn’t? God, if God there be, must despise people like you!”
“And what about people like you?”
“Oh, I’m out of it. Or will be soon.”
Poor boy, he was. He had a bad attack the very next week and had to be taken out of school. He did not write, but his parents informed the headmaster that he was going to Arizona for a better climate and would not be coming back to Haverstock.
Mr. Hawkins seemed much upset by Lindsay’s departure; he had had no previous suspicion of a grave illness. I suppose he asked himself if he should not have given more time to the unfortunate lad, and he made himself freely available to me, perhaps to ensure that he should at least have done his duty by me should I too come down with a complaint of angina. That may sound silly, but it was the kind of man Mr. Hawkins was. I took full advantage of his kindness, realizing that this was a greater academic opportunity than any other offered by the school.
One Saturday afternoon we hiked many miles across the meadows, climbed a little hill and paused on the summit to recline and take in the exquisite sylvan scene. Mr. Hawkins seemed unusually exhilarated, and he intoned solemnly the great lines from Tintern Abbey:
“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.”
Diary of a Yuppie Page 13