Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  “And why did you not have your own eyes closed during the blessing?”

  “Because I was watching Thomas Boatwright,” she said.

  “And what was so fascinating about Thomas Boatwright?” said Warden. He accused her of mental philandering.

  “What was so fascinating,” she said, “to anyone who happened to notice, was that Thomas Boatwright was obviously troubled. Once in a while you should open your eyes yourself.”

  He let it go. He could not tell her all his reasons for being preoccupied. He needed to work them out.

  “Maybe I should go check on young Boatwright tonight,” said Warden.

  “Do you have to go out?”

  “I have to get some papers graded by tomorrow,” he said. “I left them over in my classroom.”

  But the papers were upstairs in his briefcase.

  SCENE 10

  It was 7:35 P.M. and Thomas Boatwright was supposed to be studying in his dormitory room. Quiet hours were from 7:30 to 9:30, and unless you were really dumb or your advisor hated your guts, you could work in your room. Otherwise you were assigned a seat in the supervised evening study hall. Thomas was not dumb, and his advisor, Mr. Warden, was a nice guy, and so Thomas was allowed to study in his room on Middle Stringfellow, which was the dorm on the middle floor of Stringfellow Hall. But Thomas was in Richard Blackburn’s room all the way over on Stratford House, where he sat on the bright patchwork quilt that covered Ralph Musgrove’s bed and talked with Richard, who sprawled on his own bed, and with Ralph, who sat at his desk with a book open in case somebody came into the room.

  “I can promise you it wasn’t me,” said Richard. “You really think somebody got drunk before dinner? That would be suicide.”

  “He was walking like a drunk would on television,” said Thomas. “You know, lurching around, having a hard time keeping upright.”

  “Maybe it was somebody from off campus,” said Ralph. “Some townie.”

  “That’s not as weird as what you told us about Farnham,” said Richard. He leaned back on the bed and propped himself up with his skinny, pointed elbows. The light glinted off his round wire-rims and made him look like what Thomas imagined as a starving Communist intellectual.

  “I swear to you he was pounding the floor like there was a snake on it and he wanted to kill it,” Thomas said. “He threw the stick away, and then he turned. I thought I was next.”

  “He saw you?” asked Richard.

  “I don’t know,” said Thomas. “I didn’t hang around. But I bet you if he had seen me, he’d have killed me.”

  “Farnham is Jekyll and Hyde,” said Richard. “He was nice as hell at play rehearsal today. At least for the first part, when I was there.”

  “I know why he was mad,” said Ralph. Ralph was from Mississippi and spoke very slowly. His hair was the deep red of an Irish setter, his eyes brown, his face freckled. He wore a T-shirt with Jimmy Buffett’s picture on it. The tee shirt was too small for Ralph’s 6'5" frame.

  “Why?” said Thomas and Richard.

  “Because Dean Kaufman doesn’t want to let my advisor help out with the play.”

  “Dean Kaufman?” said Richard.

  “He says Mr. Dickinson is too busy,” said Ralph.

  Out of fifty people on the faculty, Peter Dickinson was the only black member. He taught one history class and worked most of the time in the admissions office, where he recruited minority students. He traveled all over the place trying to talk black kids into coming south for a private education. Just recently he had been meeting with a group in Baltimore.

  “What was Mr. Dickinson going to do in the play?” Thomas asked.

  “Guess,” said Richard. He asked him how many parts for black guys he thought there were in the play.

  “Othello?”

  “Very good,” said Richard. He tried to imitate Farnham’s tone in English class.

  Thomas said he thought Greg, his roommate, was going to be Othello.

  “Greg’s been pathetic in rehearsals,” said Richard. “Hasn’t he told you about it?”

  “We don’t talk much,” said Thomas. He told them about Greg’s surliness this afternoon. It had not improved when Thomas returned to get ready for dinner. Just thinking about it was irritating.

  “Farnham’s been pulling in faculty members all over the place,” said Richard. “He wants Dickinson to play Othello and Mrs. Warden to be Desdemona.”

  Ralph said from the desk that he’d shave his legs if he could be in a play with Mrs. Warden.

  Thomas would do more than that. Sometimes he thought about Hesta Mccorkindale and how they would probably be intimate someday, but sometimes, without anything ever really triggering the thought, he imagined walking into the Wardens’ apartment to see his advisor and finding Mrs. Warden in the shower, where she would slide back the curtain, her body all wet, and pull him in to join her. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

  “Is he going to put any students in the play at all?” Ralph asked. “Besides the usual geeks?”

  “He asked me to be in it, don’t forget,” said Thomas.

  “I said besides the geeks.”

  Richard said that Nathan Somerville was in the play.

  That was news. Nathan Somerville was not only the grandson of Mr. Somerville, the legendary history teacher, but Nathan was also the head councilman, which meant that he held the most prestigious position in the student body. He ran the whole honor council himself, and whenever there was a potential honor violation, it was Nathan Somerville who decided whether it was worth convening the council over. He was a great athlete and about the smartest person in the world, taking all AP courses and applying early to Princeton. Plus, even though he was a senior and eighteen years old, he was really friendly and nice to the under-formers. He lived on Upper Stringfellow Hall, one floor up from Thomas.

  “How?” said Thomas. “I thought he was playing varsity basketball.”

  “Not as of this afternoon,” said Richard. “He said he was tired of getting yelled at by Delaney and wanted to do something different.”

  The prospect of participating in the play had now become much more attractive. Being a member of a cast that included Mrs. Warden and Nathan Somerville could turn out to be the most prestigious thing Thomas had ever done in his life.

  “Maybe Farnham was just testing some wood for the play or something,” Thomas said.

  “Or maybe he’s just crazy,” said Richard.

  The door to the room opened and Mr. Heilman, the school minister, stuck in his head. All they could see was a face like Humpty Dumpty’s and wispy brown hair and glasses as thick as paperweights.

  “What’re you rascals up to?” he asked. That was so typical of him to call them “rascals.” Mr. Heilman was almost as big a nerd as Dean Kaufman. Heilman was afflicted with what Thomas called School Minister’s Disease, which meant that he went out of his way to convince everybody that he was really a normal person even though he was a minister. So he was always dicking around, telling dirty jokes, and trying to be one of the guys. But he wasn’t. He was thirty-eight years old and married and had only been a minister for about five years; before that he’d been a guidance counselor in some public school in Richmond. He was not exactly fat but was heading that way and his hobby was to go to the movies. He and his wife were always departing for “the cinema” somewhere, which meant that his side of Stratford House had to be supervised half the time by Mr. Warden, who lived on the other side.

  All three boys said hi to Mr. Heilman.

  “I heard voices,” he said. “And you know what the rules are about visiting during study hours.” He practically sang it, as if he were talking to people maybe six years old.

  “Sorry, Mr. Heilman,” said Thomas. “I had something on my mind, and I just couldn’t wait until 9:30.”

  “Would you like to come talk to me about it?”

  No, no, no, no. “That’s okay,” said Thomas. “I think I’ve got it al
l straightened out.”

  No counseling, no sympathy. “Get on back to your dorm, then,” said Heilman. “And if the DM catches you, so much the better.” He pulled the door hard to close it.

  Thomas wished he had just stayed on his own dorm and risked a phone call to Hesta. Now he was going to have to cross the campus during study hours, and he was sure to get caught.

  “Who is the DM anyway?” asked Thomas.

  “McPhee,” said Richard.

  “Great,” said Thomas. Just what he needed, to get into trouble with his basketball coach. Next to Mr. Warden and his dad, Coach McPhee was the adult Thomas admired most in the whole world. Unlike Coach Delaney, who stalked the sidelines and ranted and kicked the bleachers once and supposedly got called into Dr. Lane’s office for doing so, Coach McPhee never lost his temper. You would have expected an Irishman from Boston to rage, but even when somebody royally screwed up, McPhee would never yell. You could tell he was mad, of course, by what he said and by the flush of his face, but he had a knack for never making you feel worthless or stupid. He just made you want to do better.

  “You better go,” said Ralph.

  “Yeah,” said Thomas. Why was it that the more he had to do, the less he wanted to get started? He stood up slowly and put on his coat.

  “Don’t let Farnham get you with a stick,” said Richard.

  “Don’t let McPhee stick you,” said Ralph. That was a joke. “To stick” at Montpelier meant to issue demerits.

  “Don’t let your roommate talk you deaf,” said Richard.

  “How can I walk back if I’m laughing this hard?” said Thomas. “You guys are the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life.”

  Back in the cold, he walked south on the sidewalk bordering the Quad. It was only 100 yards or so to Stringfellow, but he was sure that McPhee would catch him off dorm during study hours. Or if not McPhee, some other duty master. The faculty here was unbelievable. Some of them were completely out of it, like Heilman; when he was on duty, you could practically light up a joint in the dining hall and he wouldn’t notice. But most of them seemed to have radar.

  He went up the back stairs of Stringfellow. Damn, it was cold outside and very warm in here. The building was shaped like a U, and Thomas had just entered the left-hand prong. He was in the administrative wing, but that was okay, since nobody would be in the offices at night. He still had to make it around to the lobby in the base of the U and then up the stairs to his dorm. But he was lucky. Although frequently masters on duty sat in the lobby, nobody was there tonight. Thomas was feeling uneasy. If the Stringfellow duty masters weren’t in the lobby, that meant they were probably circulating around the dorms, so he was just as likely to get nabbed in the hallway. And there was always the slight threat of the omnipresent day master, in today’s case McPhee, who wandered all over the campus and checked not only on the students, but on the faculty members who were supposed to be checking on the students. If Thomas got caught for being off dorm, he’d get stuck for five demerits, which would be enough to put him in Saturday night demerit hall from 7:30 to 9:30. That would be very uncool, since this Saturday night Montpelier was having a mixer for eight girls’ schools, and Hesta was coming down. He could imagine himself sitting in D-hall while Hesta was at the mixer without him, with all those other horny guys around asking her to dance and talking to her. What if somebody like Robert Staines tried to move in on her? Thomas crossed the lobby and headed up the stairs praying for luck. He just couldn’t get caught, not tonight.

  There was nobody in the hallway on Middle Stringfellow. The gray carpeting muffled his footsteps, though the bright overhead fluorescent lamps made him visible from probably 200 miles away. Why the hell did Montpelier have to be so rich? The building was practically older than Beowulf, but they remodeled the place eight years ago and put in new bathrooms and new closets and stuff and these damn big lights. Of course, they also carpeted it, which was working to his advantage. Everything was absolutely quiet. In the spaces under the brown wooden doors of the rooms he was passing, he could see lights on. Every-the-hell-body on campus was studying now, and he would be, too, in just a few more minutes.

  First, though, he was going to let his roommate have it. Nobody had the right to be as rude as Greg had been this afternoon. You don’t ignore people because you happen to be reading.

  He turned a corner, and there it was, his room, just a few yards away. I’m going to make it, he thought. Boatwright, you lucky bastard, you prime-cut devil you, you did it. He turned the knob on the dark wooden door and fled into the lighted interior as if he were being pursued by Nazis.

  The first person he saw was Greg, sitting with his back to the door at his own desk with the study lamp on. The second person was Mr. McPhee, the DM, sitting at Thomas’s desk next to Greg.

  Mr. McPhee was looking straight at him.

  SCENE 11

  “Where have you been?” said Coach McPhee.

  Thomas told him. There wasn’t any choice under the honor system, but Thomas would have told him anyway. Coach McPhee listened with his long legs stretched out and his ankles crossed and his hands locked behind his head, his elbows sticking out like Dumbo’s ears. He dressed like an adult version of a Montpelier boy: lace-up leather moccasins from Bean’s, khaki pants, a white shirt with loosened tie and collar, and a Carolina-blue sweater. The difference was that he still had his coach’s whistle on a cord around his neck. Because Coach McPhee had really thick black curly hair in ringlets around his head, you would have thought he was younger than late thirties, except that up close you could see the permanent wrinkles around his eyes. His eyes were bright green, and they never seemed to wander or even to blink while Thomas talked.

  “So you had this really important subject you just had to discuss with Richard Blackburn,” said Mr. McPhee.

  “Yes sir.”

  “You can’t tell me what it was, but you had to tell Richard right away.”

  “I just had to tell somebody.”

  “So why didn’t you talk it over with your roommate?”

  I tried, I tried, Thomas wanted to shout. Coach, can I help it if my roommate is a jerk? “I guess I figured I could talk it over with him anytime,” said Thomas.

  Greg was motionless at his desk. He had changed from dinner clothes into a red tee shirt from the University of Maryland.

  Mr. McPhee asked Thomas if he was planning to quit basketball to take a part in the play.

  “No,” said Thomas.

  “Because Mr. Farnham asked me after dinner what time I let you out of practice today. He said he was expecting you for an audition.”

  “It wasn’t anything as formal as an audition,” said Thomas.

  Mr. McPhee said nothing.

  “Believe me, Coach,” said Thomas, “if I do take a part in that stupid play, it’s just going to be a little one. I want to play basketball.”

  “I believe you,” said Mr. McPhee. “But I don’t like to hear you use the word ‘stupid’ so carelessly.” Mr. McPhee still spoke with the Boston accent he’d grown up with. Everybody in Virginia said it was a New York accent, but they said that about every Yankee, even the ones from Ohio. Mr. McPhee, who had played basketball for Boston College, was the only major college basketball player Thomas had ever met.

  “Tell you what,” said Mr. McPhee. He uncrossed his ankles and put down his hands and stood up. “I’ve got to make my rounds. I’m not going to stick you tonight, Boatwright.”

  Thomas was ready to start believing in God.

  “But I’m going to check back here later,” said Mr. McPhee. “You need to get two things accomplished before lights out tonight. Are you listening? I want you to do all your homework. And I want you to find out about your roommate’s art project. He and I were just having a very interesting conversation about all sorts of things. You talk to him after study hours are over. You understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  He picked up his hat, coat, scarf, and gloves from Greg’s bed and le
ft.

  Thomas sat down at the desk next to Greg and pulled out his heavy black Pelican edition of Shakespeare, just in case McPhee decided to pop back into the room immediately. Greg was sitting and staring straight ahead at the open notebook in front of him.

  To hell with waiting until study hours were over.

  “What’s the problem?” said Thomas. “I come into the room before dinner, I want to talk with you, and you act like I’m poisonous.”

  Greg didn’t answer.

  “What’s wrong with you?” said Thomas. “Why have you turned into such a snob?”

  Greg stared hard at the switch on the light in front of him. Thomas assumed he was not going to answer and opened his Shakespeare anthology. At least he had covered his agenda.

  “I guess maybe I’m jealous,” said Greg.

  That was not what Thomas had expected to hear.

  “Jealous of me?”

  “You got it so good here,” said Greg. “You do what you want, nobody tries to pigeonhole you.”

  Thomas asked him what in the hell he was talking about.

  “Everybody pressuring me to play on your football team and your basketball team. Everybody pushing me to perform.”

  Thomas argued that they merely wanted him to be one of the guys. “Everybody else plays basketball. You’re good at it. Why shouldn’t you play, too?”

  “I play.”

  “On the team, I mean.”

  “I don’t like the way your team operates,” said Greg. “All you care about is a winning score. You don’t care about the people at all.”

  Thomas said that wasn’t true, they were all friends on the basketball team.

  “You and Robert Staines? You can’t stand the guy, but you put up with him because he’s good,” said Greg.

  “So?” said Thomas. “Being on a team is all about getting along with other people.”

  “I’m not talking about just getting along,” said Greg. “You let the guy run without a leash because he’s the best player. Whatever he does, whatever he says, nobody confronts him. If you guys didn’t care so much about winning, you’d tell him to go to hell.”