I was playing basketball when I learned this. I’m fairly tall, which always leads people to think that I ought to be good at basketball, until they come to the realization that my lack of coordination offsets my height, since I’m not Gulliver or anything, just fairly tall for my age. This particular coach hadn’t caught on yet, it being my first year at this particular prep school, so I was out there on the court missing lay-ups and muffing rebounds when some kid came down with a note asking me to report to the Head’s office.
The Head — he was always called this, and while this is true of a lot of headmasters, it really fit in his case, because he had a head the approximate size of a basketball, perched on a skinny neck above an insignificant body, the head itself as hairy as a doorknob, with vague indentations and protrusions here and there to indicate eyes and nose and mouth and all that. Anyway, the Head did a lot of pacing around his office that day, and told me what had happened, more or less, and then went on to tell me more or less why my father had done this unprecedented thing.
What it amounted to, without the hemming and hawing that the Head put in, was that Chip Harrison’s parents had spent their lives as con men (well, con man and con wife) and had made a good if shaky living for many years, working one swindle or another, and had been in the process recently of pulling off a remarkable stock swindle, until suddenly the roof had fallen in, leaving my unpoor but unhonest parents (a) stone broke and (b) jailable. Evidently my father decided that there was No Way Out, whereupon he did what he did.
I can’t understand why. I mean, it seems to me that there must have been something he could have done. Gone to Brazil or joined the Foreign Legion or something. But I guess he just had the feeling that all the walls and the ceiling were coming in on him, and it seemed simpler to go bang bang and end it.
“I never knew him,” I said, dazed. “I was never around much, and then when I wasn’t at some school or other, well, I was usually off at summer camp, or else I was with them and we were traveling. They always seemed to be moving to one place or another.”
“One step ahead of the law,” the Head said darkly.
“Uh, I suppose. I guess I never really knew what he did for a living. When kids would ask, I would say he was in investments. I thought he probably was, but I didn’t have any clear idea of how.”
“Rather shady investments,” said the Head.
“I don’t suppose I thought about it too much. I took it for granted, ever since I was old enough to think about it, because little kids don’t think about the subject, or at least I didn’t until recently—”
“Would you like a glass of water, Harrison?”
“I don’t think so. What I mean is, I took it for granted we were rich. We always had everything, and then being at schools like this one, I just thought we were rich.”
“Ah, yes, errmphhh,” the Head said. “That does, errmphhh, bring up a painful subject, Harrison.”
“It does?”
It did. The subject was money, and the pain lay in the fact that I didn’t have any. I wasn’t just an orphan. I was a penniless orphan, a seventeen-year-old Oliver Twist. If my parents had seemed to be rich, they had managed this illusion by spending every ill-gotten penny as soon as they ill-got their hands on it. And over the past months they had been spending a great deal of money that they didn’t have yet, all of this snowballing up to the point when everything went blooey, so that not only did I have an inheritance of absolutely nothing coming to me, but I was in hock to the Upper Valley Preparatory Academy for a couple thousand dollars’ worth of tuition and room and board.
“I’m sure you understand the problem, Harrison,” the Head said. The light glinted off the shiny top of the Head’s head. He picked up one object after another from his desktop — a pipe, a pipe cleaner, a pencil, an ashtray, a file folder, you name it. He played with each of these things, and he watched himself do this, and I watched him, and it went on like this for a while.
Then he told me I would have to make arrangements, find relatives who would take me in and help me carve out a fresh start in life for myself. Perhaps, he suggested, someone might come to my financial assistance. I told him that as far as I knew, I didn’t have any relatives. He acknowledged that he had rather thought this might be the case.
“I really don’t know what I’ll do after graduation,” I said. “I guess college is out, at least for the time being, not that any of them have been in what you might call a rush to accept me, but—”
I got a look at his face and it put me off stride. I let the sentence die and waited.
I’m afraid you don’t entirely understand,” he said. “I don’t see how we could conscientiously let you remain here until graduation, Harrison. You see—”
“But it’s February.”
“Yes.”
“Almost March.”
“Errmphhh.”
“I mean, this is my last semester before graduation. I would be graduating in June.”
“Actually, you owe us tuition, room, and board since September, Harrison.”
“I’ll pay sooner or later. I’d go to work after graduation and I could pay—”
He was shaking his head, which in his case called for more than the usual amount of effort. I watched him do this. I felt, oh, very strange. Weird. I mean, thinking about all of this now, in what you might call historical perspective, I get all sorts of vibrations that I didn’t get then. Like what an utter shit, pardon the expression, the Head was. And like that.
But at the time, I was having my whole little world turned not only upside down but inside out, and I was like numb. I didn’t know how I felt about any of this because I didn’t feel. I couldn’t. There was no time to react because everything was too busy going on.
The Head stopped shaking and spoke again. “No, no, no,” it — he — said. “No, I think not. No, I’m afraid we’ll simply have to write off the money, chalk it up to experience. If there were mitigating circumstances, but no, no, no, I don’t think so. Your grades are not bad, but neither are they exceptionally good. Coach Lipscot tells me your performance on the basketball court is generally disappointing. And, of course, the social stigma, you must understand. Murder and suicide and confidence swindling, no, no, no, I think not, Harrison, I think not.”
I was shaking when I left his office. I don’t think I was ticked off or scared or any particular thing, but I was shaking. Everything happening at once. I went back to the dorm. My roommate was lying in his bunk, reading a sex magazine, and when I walked in he went through his little act of trying to pretend that (a) he was only interested from the standpoint of a future psychologist and (b) he had been holding the magazine in both hands. I don’t suppose the guy beat off more than average. It was his attitude that bothered me. (As a matter of fact, an obnoxious attitude in this area isn’t exactly rare. Either they’re like Haskell, going to great lengths to pretend that they don’t even have genitals, let alone touch them, or else they go to the other extreme and want to talk about it, or discuss methods, or do it right out in the open. Or worse. Either way I find it pretty disgusting. I think it should be a private thing, like religion or squeezing blackheads.)
Anyway, the sight of old Haskell draping the sex book to hide his erection was enough to turn me off to the idea of talking with him, which hadn’t been that outstanding an idea to begin with, I don’t guess. He started babbling about something or other, and I wondered what he would say if I told him everything, and I decided it wasn’t worth finding out. I turned away from him and went over to my dresser and started pulling out drawers. I thought I was trying to decide what to take and what to leave, but I guess I was looking for something without knowing what it was, something that would make everything go together in some, oh, meaningful way. If anything like that existed, it certainly wasn’t in my drawers or closet. As a matter of fact, the more I looked the more I realized that there was nothing around that I particularly wanted to see again. It was just too much trouble to decide which stuff to put in a suitcase and which stuff to leave behind. It was easier to leave everything.