by Irwin Shaw
“I didn’t say you had to sleep. Just that the lights have to be out.” Strand knew he sounded testy and regretted it. “Good night.”
He went out of the room, but stopped a few feet from the door to listen. What he heard came as no surprise to him. “Well, black brother,” Romero was saying, in an exaggerated Southern accent, “I see they’ve got slave quarters and everything on this good ole plantation.”
As quietly as possible Strand went down the stairs to his apartment. He looked at the bottle of whiskey in its brown paper bag on the cupboard shelf, but didn’t open it. He had the feeling he would need it more on other nights.
5
IT WOULD BE SELF-DELUSION on my part to pretend that what I am doing is actually keeping a diary. The school term is now one week old and I am too tired at the end of each day to do more than glance over notes for the next day’s classes or nod over a newspaper or magazine. The first day, when the boys arrived, was pure bedlam—greeting parents who either had special praise or special requests for their offspring or who took me aside to confide that a son had to be watched to make sure he took a certain medicine for anemia every night, or that another had a masturbation problem, or still another daydreamed in class and needed constant vigilance in respect to his studies to help keep up with his grades.
The boys, when I finally managed to sort one out from the other, seemed like an average group of well brought up young people, polite with their elders, if somewhat condescending, and boisterous with each other. I see no particular difficulties in the future with them. Romero and Rollins seem to be getting along splendidly and in fact Rollins has persuaded Romero to go out for the football team, although Romero cannot weigh more than a hundred and forty pounds and Rollins must weigh at least two hundred and ten. But in an impromptu game of touch football the first day on the campus grounds, Romero, who had been standing to one side watching, had been impressed to fill a side which had lost one of the players because of a slightly sprained ankle and ran for a touchdown the first time he got his hands on the ball. I watched him with amazement, since I had never heard him express interest in any sport, as he sprinted and wheeled and cut back and squirmed away from the arms of boys twice his size. He seemed as unpredictable as a wood dove in flight and his sudden twisting runs left his pursuers panting helplessly behind him. Perhaps, I thought, half-joking to myself, it was just this gift that had kept him from being caught and arrested by the New York City police.
That night Rollins talked to him seriously and took him down to see the football coach and somehow the next afternoon they had found a uniform small enough for him and he was on the football squad. Although I feared what the result would be when he was hit in a real scrimmage by a mass of brutes who all towered over him, it boded well for his acceptance by the other students.
A few days after the beginning of the term a message was left for Strand that the headmaster would like to see him at his convenience. When he went to Babcock’s office he was greeted warmly but nervously. “We have a little problem,” Babcock said. “It’s about Jesus Romero.”
“Ah,” Strand said.
“Exactly,” Babcock said. “Ah. It seems that Romero has been skipping chapel. As you may know, we have to abide by certain terms which we accepted when we were bequeathed the endowment fund which kept this school going when it looked as though it was going to founder in the 1960s. It was a most generous gift—most generous. The new field house is a result of it; our library, which is one of the finest in any school in the East; many other amenities…. The old lady who left us the money in her will happened to be an extremely religious woman with a strong mind of her own and one condition laid down in her will was that every student attend chapel every school day. She also added the condition that all boys wear jackets and ties in the dining room. Other schools have moved away from these customs. We can’t. I wonder if you can reason with Romero before I have to take official action against him.”
“I’ll try,” Strand said.
“You’ve seen for yourself, the services are practically nondenominational. Almost anodyne. There are quite a few Catholic and Jewish boys enrolled and they seem to have no difficulties in bending to the rules of the school. You might mention this to Romero.”
“I will,” Strand said. “I’m sorry he’s causing you all this trouble.”
“There are bound to be worse ones before the term is up. And not only with Romero,” Babcock said.
Strand called Romero in to see him after classes and told him what the headmaster had said, using all the headmaster’s arguments. Romero listened in silence, then shook his head. “I don’t care about the Jews and the other Catholics,” he said. “I’m my own kind of Catholic.”
“When was the last time you went to Mass?” Strand asked.
Romero grinned. “When I was baptized. I don’t believe in God. If I have to choose between chapel and leaving school I’ll go pack my bag.”
“Are you sure you want me to tell Mr. Babcock that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re dismissed,” Strand said.
When Strand reported his conversation with Romero the next day to Babcock, the headmaster sighed. A good part of his conversation, Strand realized, was punctuated by sighs. “Well,” he said, “if nobody makes a noise about it I guess we can live with it.”
“There’s another thing,” Strand said. “It’s, about my wife. She has no classes on Wednesday and none until ten in the morning on Thursdays. Would you think it an imposition if she went into New York each Wednesday? She has several pupils she doesn’t want to give up.”
“I quite understand,” Babcock said. “Of course.”
Strand went out of his office, thinking what a decent and intelligent and flexible man. Already so early in the term, Strand had felt how easily and calmly the school was run, how discipline was kept with very little constraint. There was an easygoing friendliness between the boys and the faculty that provided an invigorating climate for the process of teaching and learning and Strand was rediscovering some of the sense of hope that he had in his early years as a teacher.
“You’re lucky Mr. Babcock is such a lenient man,” Strand said to Romero the next day. He had let the boy sweat for a night before telling him of Babcock’s decision. “He’s going to keep you on. Just don’t tell everybody about it. And you might write him a note of thanks.”
“Did you ask him if he believed in God?”
“Don’t press your luck, young man,” Strand said shortly.
Romero took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. “There’s something here you have to sign, Mr. Strand,” he said. “It’s the permission from my mother for me to play on the football team. I just got it this afternoon.”
Strand looked at the paper. It was a form printed by the athletic department, with a space for a parent’s signature and one for the signature of the housemaster attesting to the genuineness of the parent’s signature. In this case it was merely a scrawled X in pencil. As Strand looked at it Romero looked at him with the challenging direct dark stare that Strand still found uncomfortable. But even then, this evidence of the transition in one generation from an illiterate mother to an adolescent who could argue heatedly about the works of Edward Gibbon made Strand think more kindly than usual of the working of the American public school system.
When he gave the form, as required, to Mr. Johnson, the football coach, a serious and devout young man who conducted prayers before each game in the locker room in which he asked God not for victory but for the safety of the players on both teams, he raised his eyebrows at the X. “I suppose this is legal,” he said.
“I would think so,” Strand told him.
“Anyway,” he said, “the kid can read signals.” Then, with a smile, “Even though he rarely follows them. He drives the other boys crazy. They never know what he’s going to do. If he’s called to go around end and things don’t look too good for him there, he just turns around and goes through center o
r even around the other end. He does everything wrong and I bawl him out for it, but it doesn’t help much. And it’s hard to be too tough on him. At his size it takes guts to even be out there, and then, most of the time he gets away with it. Somehow, he’s out in the open and making big hunks of yardage. He’s like an eel—nobody can really get hold of him. It’s almost as though he’s escaping from a lynching party. I don’t think he cares whether we win or lose a game, he just wants to show everybody that he’s uncatchable. I tell you something, Mr. Strand, in all the time I’ve played football and coached it, I never set eyes on a kid like this before. He’s not like an athlete—he’s like some kind of wild animal. It’s like having a crazy panther on the squad.”
“Is he going to make the team?” Strand asked.
The coach shrugged. “I don’t intend to use him much. He’s too small to stay in there regularly. Somebody would finally eat him up alive. It’s not like the old days. The boys today are monsters, even at our level, and the big ones run just as fast as the small ones. Anyway, the kid can’t block or catch passes. If I can teach him how to hold on to punts maybe I’ll put him in to run back kicks. Otherwise I’ll just use him on special plays when we’re praying for a long breakaway run. When I told him I was going to keep him on the squad, I said, almost as a joke, he was going to have a lot of time sitting on the bench, I was only going to put him in when we were desperate. He just smiled up at me—small as he is he’s got a smile that would scare a sergeant in the marines—and he said, ‘Coach, that’s the job for me, I’ve been desperate all my life.’”
“Is he popular with the other boys?” Strand didn’t think it was the time to tell that serious young religious man that he had a Goth in his backfield.
The coach looked at Strand speculatively as though debating with himself whether to tell the truth or give him half an answer. “You have a special interest in the boy, I understand,” he said. “He’s here more or less because of you, isn’t he?”
“More or less. He was in my class in high school and was an extraordinary student.”
“Well, if his roommate Rollins wasn’t so protective of him, I think somebody would have taken a swing at him by now. He doesn’t bother to keep his opinions to himself, does he?”
Strand couldn’t help smiling. “Not so you could notice it,” he said.
“When he fakes a man out on a run or somebody in front of him misses a block, he—well, he sneers at them. And he has a favorite phrase that’s getting on the boys’ nerves—‘I thought you gentlemen were here to play football.’ He divides himself and Rollins from the rest of the team with something he must have picked up in reading English literature. You know how the English newspapers used to report the lineups of cricket games—‘Gentlemen versus Players.’ The other boys aren’t quite sure what it means, but they know it’s not complimentary to them.”
“Are there any other black boys besides Rollins on the squad?”
“Not this year,” the coach said. “The school does everything it can to get blacks to enroll, but not with much success. I’m afraid the school has had a reputation as a WASP stronghold for so many years that it’s going to take time to change its image. I think there’re only four other blacks in the school and none of them plays football. Last year we had a black instructor who taught history of art and he was well liked, but he never felt at home. Also, he was too high-powered for a prep school. He’s teaching up at Boston U now. Good intentions aren’t always enough, are they?” He sounded wistful, this big healthy young man whose aims in life Strand would have thought were limited, because of his profession, to ten yards at a time.
The football coach was not the only member of the faculty to be puzzled by Romero. Another young teacher, a quiet woman in the English department by the name of Collins, who had Romero in a course in English and American Literature, fell into step beside Strand as he was leaving the main hall after lunch one day and asked him if she could talk to him for a few minutes about the boy. She, too, knew that he had come to Dunberry because of Strand. He hadn’t bothered to correct this notion by telling anybody of Hazen’s influence in the affair. If Hazen wanted to take the credit or the blame for Romero’s presence on the campus he was perfectly capable of doing so.
“You taught him in New York, didn’t you?” she said as she walked by his side.
“If anybody can be said to have taught him anything,” he said.
She smiled. “I’m beginning to see what you mean. Did he give you any trouble in class?”
“Let me say,” he said, trying to sound as judicious as possible, “that the views he expressed were not always in accordance with those of the accepted authorities.”
“The change of schools,” Miss Collins said, “hasn’t changed his habits. He’s got the whole class embroiled in an argument already.”
“Oh dear,” Strand said. “What about?”
“The first book we discussed was Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage,” Miss Collins said. “It’s a book boys can relate to and the style is admirably plain and prepares the way for a whole genre of American writing. When I asked for comments, Romero kept silent while two or three of the boys explained why they liked the book, then raised his hand and stood up and said, very politely, ‘Begging your pardon, ma’am, it’s all brainwashing.’ Then he made quite a speech. He said that no matter what the writer might or might not have intended, the result was that it showed that you never became a man if you ran away, you only proved yourself if you stood up and fought no matter how sure you were you’d get your head blown off, and as long as people admired books like that young men would go marching off to war singing and cheering and get themselves killed. He said he didn’t know about the other boys in the class but if he hadn’t kept running away all his life he sure as hell wouldn’t be there in that classroom that morning. Running away, he said, was the natural thing to do when you were scared and stuff like The Red Badge of Courage was just a lie that old men cooked up to get young men to go out and get themselves killed off. He said he had an uncle who was decorated in Vietnam for sticking to his machine gun in an ambush to let the other men in his platoon get away and now his uncle is in a wheelchair for life and he’s thrown his medal into the garbage can.” Miss Collins, who had a shy, apologetic manner and a pale troubled face, shook her head as she remembered the incident in her classroom. “I just couldn’t cope with that boy,” she said despondently. “He made us all feel like uneducated fools. Do you think he really has an uncle who got wounded in Vietnam?”
“This is the first I’ve heard of an uncle,” he said. “He’s not above inventing things.” If he had been disposed to argue with Romero, an unprofitable exercise at best, he might have reminded him that the author he esteemed so highly, Mr. Gibbon, used the words “military valor,” with approval, on almost every page. Consistency, Strand had learned, was not the boy’s strong point
“Do you think that you could tell him that if he has opinions to express that might disturb the other boys he might first come to me privately after class and talk them over with me?” Miss Collins asked timidly.
“I could try,” he said. “I don’t guarantee anything. Privacy isn’t exactly his thing, as the boys say.” Suddenly he had a new insight into Romero’s character. He was always in search of an audience, even of one, and preferably unsympathetic to him. He seemed to find his emotional outlet in hostility and with it a sense of power over people older and in a worldly sense much more powerful than he. If Strand could foresee a career for him it was as an orator, having to be protected by the police, whipping crowds into frenzies of dissension and belligerence. It was not a comforting vision.
“One of the difficulties in handling him,” Miss Collins was going on in her frail, apologetic voice, “is that he always speaks with the utmost politeness, full of ma’am’s and if I may ask a question’s. And he’s the best prepared boy in the class. He’s got a photographic memory and he can quote verbatim whole paragraphs from books he’
s read to support his arguments. When I gave the class a list of suggested books to read for the semester, he tossed it aside contemptuously and said he’d already read most of the titles and the books he hadn’t read he wouldn’t waste his time opening. And he objected because James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover weren’t on the list. Imagine that, from a boy of seventeen.”
“As the saying goes,” he said, “he’s wise beyond his years. Or vicious beyond his years.”
“He said that those two books were among the foundations of modern literature and ignoring them was an insult to the class’s intelligence and a denial of the sexuality of the modern man. Where do you suppose he picks up ideas like that?” she asked plaintively.
“From the public libraries.”
“I wish there were a more advanced course,” Miss Collins said. “I’d put him right into it. I’m afraid he’s some sort of genius. I never had one before and I never want to have one again.”
“Take heart,” he said. “With his temperament he’s likely to get into some kind of scrape and be expelled.”
“It can’t be too soon for me,” Miss Collins said, her voice for once decisive. As she walked sadly off to her next hour, Strand was selfishly relieved that for this semester at least Romero was in none of his classes.
Among Strand’s duties as housemaster was a biweekly inspection of the boys’ quarters, which he made when the boys were out to class. There was the expected range in orderliness—from spinsterly neatness to a kind of infantile playpen sloppiness. The room on the top floor occupied by Romero and Rollins was clean enough, but the division between the halves of the room was so clear that it was almost as though an invisible wall ran between Rollins’s side and that of Romero. On Rollins’s bed there was a brightly figured Navaho blanket and against the headboard a maroon pillow with a big felt W in yellow sewed on its cover, the major letter he had won playing for his high school team. On his desk, in a heavy silver frame, there was a colored photograph of a grave-looking middle-aged black couple, posed in front of a white front porch, inscribed “From Mom and Dad, with love.” Next to it was a photograph of a pretty, smiling black girl in a bathing suit, with the chaste inscription in fine, ladylike handwriting, “In fond remembrance, Clara.” On the wall was a large photograph of four huge young men with wide grins on their faces, the smallest of them Rollins himself, all of them wearing varsity sweaters with different letters on them, all of them clearly brothers. Rollins was holding a football, the brother next to him a baseball bat and the two others basketballs, to show that their athletic honors had not been won in only one sport. They were a formidable if friendly group and one doubted that any neighbor would recklessly engage any of them in a dispute.