Authors: Peter Straub
The pencil continued to rattle against the master's table.
When I had finished, I looked up and saw one or two other boys gazing idly around the murky room. Most of the others were still writing. Dave Brick's two curls had fallen over his forehead, and he looked red and sweaty and confused. He held up a hand, and Mr. Fitz-Hallan slowly lounged up toward his table.
'He's cool,' Bob Sherman whispered to me, and both of us watched Fitz-Hallan idly lean over Brick's paper, hands thrust in his pockets holding out at an elegant angle the bottom of his well-cut jacket. Fitz-Hallan was a stylish figure whose elegance seemed so deeply ingrained as to be unconscious, but it was not merely that to which Sherman had referred. He was one of the younger teachers, perhaps not quite thirty, and even his languor was youthful: it seemed detached and kindly at the same time, and separated him from the other teachers as surely as we were separated from them. Fitz-Hallan straightened up, strolled to the librarian's desk, and returned with a ballpoint pen. This he presented to Brick with an abrupt gesture which somehow conveyed both sympathy and amusement. The perfection of this little charade mysteriously contained in it the information that Fitz-Hallan had once been a student at the school, and that he was akind of living exhibit, a model of what we should try to become.
And that is the first of the three images I retain from the school, less remarkable than the two which followed but which in its way also led inexorably to all that happened. With hindsight I can see that here too was betrayal, delicately implied by the teacher's elegant clothing and manner, his amused sympathy: the way he thrust a cheap ball-point pen toward sweaty, doomed Dave Brick. We were so raw that we could be seduced by civility.
The half-dozen other sheets before the boys contained mimeographed data. The words to the school song
(Arise and sing the praises/Of the school upon the hill)
and the fight song
(Green and gold, gold and green!),
the school motto,
Alis volat propriis.
A translation thoughtfully followed:
He flies by his own wings.
'He' may have been B. Thurman Banter, who had founded the school's first incarnation, the Lodestar Academy, in 1901; Carson began flying under its present name in 1914, under the headmastership of Thomas A. Rowan. 'Of Irish extraction and English birth,' read the sheet. There followed a list of all headmasters from Rowan to the present, ending with Laker Broome; a list of present faculty, some thirty names, of which the last, Alexander Weatherbee, had been added in ink; the number of books in the library, twenty thousand; of pupils in the Upper School, one hundred and twelve; of football fields and baseball diamonds, two. Another sheet gave the names of all the boys in the senior class, with stars by the names of the prefects. A commotion at the back of the library made me turn suddenly about. Mr. Ridpath was on his feet behind one of the tables, shouting, 'What? What?' His narrow face flamed. With his left hand he gripped Nightingale's collar; with his right he groped beneath the table, trying to capture something which panicked Nightingale was attempting to pass to his table-partner, Tom Flanagan. Both boys looked frightened, Flanagan slightly less so than Nightingale. Mr. Ridpath's question had deteriorated into a series of animal grunts. When his right hand closed over the infuriating object, he withdrew it and heldIt up, giving his high-pitched snort. It was a pack of Bicycle playing cards. 'Cards? Cards?' The flap of the box was still open, suggesting that the cards within had been replaced only a moment before. The three other teachers seated behind Mr. Ridpath looked as startled as the boys, all of whom had by now turned around on their seats. Mr. Ridpath snorted down his nose again. His face was still very red. 'Who brought these here? Whose are they? Talk!'
'Mine,' Nightingale uttered. He looked like a drowning mouse in Ridpath's grip.
'Well, I'm . . . ' The teacher jerked harder on the boy's collar and looked around the room in angry disbelief. 'I can't understand this. You. Flanagan. Explain.'
'He was going to show me a new card trick, sir.'
'A. New. Card. Trick.' He tightened his grip on the mouse's collar, twisting it so that Nightingale's necktie slid up toward his ear. 'A new
card
trick.' Then he released both the Bicycle cards and the boy. When the pack struck the table, he slammed his hand down over it. 'I'll dispose of these. Mrs. Olinger?'
She strode down between the tables, Ridpath lifted his hand, she walked back up to her desk. The metal wastebasket rang. She had never even glanced at the deck.
'You jokers,' Mr. Ridpath said. 'First day. You get away with it this time.' He was leaning on the table, glaring at each boy in turn. 'But no more. This is the last time we see cards in any room in this school. Hear me?' Nightingale and Flanagan nodded. 'Jokers. You'd better stop wasting your time and start memorizing what's on those sheets. You'll need to know it, or you'll be doing card tricks, all right.' He had one final threat. 'Your Upper School career is getting off to a bad start, Flanagan.' He returned to the teacher's table and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.
'Pass the registration forms to the ends of your rows, boys,' said Mr. Fitz-Hallan. I saw that little olive-skinned Nightingale's face was gray with shock.
A few minutes later we were snaking down the dark hall toward a small wooden staircase, on our way to our first glimpse of Laker Broome.The headmaster's office was at the bottom of the original manor, at the heart of the old building. Mrs. Olinger went before, illuminating her way down the black staircase with her big flashlight. She was mumbling to herself. The other teachers followed her, followed in turn by Mr. Whipple with a wavering candle for the boys' benefit. Whipple's candle was momentarily paled by the light from a window in a door on a small square landing. The light endured until another right-angled bend in the staircase, and after that we followed Whipple's bobbing candle down into an antechamber.
Not a true antechamber, it was formed by the end of the black corridor housing the school offices, from which Mrs. Olinger had first appeared. At that end, a curved wooden arch created the illusion that we were in a room. An oriental carpet lay on the floor. An antique table held a library lamp and a Persian bowl. Opposite the arch was a vast wooden door like the entrance to a medieval church, cross-braced with long iron flanges.
We stood silent in the flickering light of the candle. Mr. Fitz-Hallan knocked once at the big door. Mrs. Olinger said, 'Farewell, boys,' and took off down the corridor with her characteristic air of irritated urgency, lighting her way with the flashlight. Fitz-Hallan swung open the door, and we jostled into Mr. Broome's office.
Sudden brightness and the smell of wax: on every surface sat at least two candles. The sense of being in a church was much stronger. The headmaster sat behind his desk, his coat off and his hands laced together behind his head. His elbows were sharply pointed triangular wings. He was smiling. 'Well,' he said. 'Step forward, boys. Let me get a good look at you.'
When we were ranked in two rough rows before the desk, he lowered his arms and stood up. 'Whatever you do, don't knock over a candle. They're pretty, but dangerous.' He laughed, a short thin man with gray hair cut down to a bristly cap. Deep grooves beside his mouth cut into the flesh. 'Even when school is not in session, the headmaster must slave away at his desk. This means that you will almost always find me here. My name is Mr. Broome. Don't be shy. If you have a problem you want todiscuss with me, just make an appointment with Mrs. Olinger.' He stepped backward and leaned against a dark wooden bookshelf, his arms crossed over his chest. The headmaster wore horn-rimmed glasses the color of a marmalade cat. His shirt was very crisp. I see now that he was perfect — the 'final detail in his whole paneled, oriental-carpeted, book-filled office, the detail around which the delicate, deliberate, old-fashioned good taste of the office cohered.
'Of course,' he said, 'it is rather more likely that your visits here will be in the service of a less pleasant function.'
His mouth twitched.
'But that should concern only a small portion of you. Our boys are generally worked pretty hard, and they don't have the time to find trouble. One word of warning. Those who do find it don't last long here. If you want to enjoy the benefits of being a student at this school, work hard, be obedient and respectful, and play hard. Considering the advantages, it is not too much to ask.' Again, his taut, measured replica of a smile. 'Just what we have the right, not to mention the duty, to ask of you, I should say. It is my intention, it is the school's intention, to leave our mark upon you. Wherever you go in later life, people will be able to say, 'There is a Carson man.' Well.'
He looked over our heads at the teachers; most of us too swiveled our heads to look back. Mr. Whipple was leafing through the forms we had filled out. Mr. Ridpath stood at a sort of soldierly ease, his feet spread and his hands behind his back. The other two stared at the floor, as if putting themselves at a private distance from the headmaster.
'You have them, Mr. Whipple? Then please bring them here.'
Whipple moved quickly around us to the desk and laid the pile of forms immediately before the headmaster's leather chair. 'The two on top, sir,' he muttered, and vanished backward..
'Ah? Yes, I see.' He uncoiled, the frames of his glasses glowed red for a moment as he passed before a stand of candles, and he lifted the top two forms. 'Messrs. Nightingale and Sherman will stay behind amoment. The rest of you may return to the library to pick up your textbooks and schedule cards. Lead them away, Mr. Ridpath.'
Fifteen minutes later Nightingale and Sherman appeared in the door of the library and moved aimlessly toward the now book-covered tables. Sherman's cheekbones were very red.
'Well,' I whispered to him, 'What'd he say?' Sherman tried to grin. 'He's a frosty old shit, isn't he?' We compared our schedule cards before our lockers in the second-floor front corridor of the modern addition, where the inner walls were tall panes of glass looking out onto a gravel-filled court with a single lime tree.
I heard weeks later from Tom Flanagan why Bob Sherman and Del Nightingale had been kept behind by Mr. Broome. Nightingale had not filled in the blanks for parents' names. He had not done so because his parents were dead. Nightingale lived with his godparents, who had just moved from Boston into a house on Sunset Lane, four or five long blocks from the school. Sherman had been dressed down.
4
New York, August, 1969: Bob Sherman
'Why am I here?' Sherman asked. 'Can you answer that? What the fuck am I doing here when I could be out on the Island sipping a Coors and looking at the ocean?' We were in his office, and he was speaking loudly to be heard over the rock music pumping put of the stereo system. The office was a suite of rooms in the old German embassy, and all of the rooms had twelve-foot ceilings decorated with plaster molding. Leather couches sat before his long desk and against the wall. A big green Boston fern beside the Bose speakers looked as though it had just taken a vitamin pill. Records were stackedcarelessly on the floor, flattening out the deep pile of the carpet.
'You usually have an answer. Why am I in this shithole? You're here because I'm here, but why am I here? It's just another one of those eternal questions. Do you want to take that record off? I'm sick of it.'