Shadowland

    A small man with horn-rimmed glasses and a rumpled jacket over shoulders set in a permanent slouch lifted his head and grinned at us.

    'Next to Mr. Weatherbee is Mr. Fitz-Hallan. He teaches English. Amherst.' A rather languid-looking man with a handsome boyish face lifted a hand in a half-wave. He had made the joke about efficiency, and he looked bored enough to fall asleep standing up.

    'Mr. Whipple, American history.' This was a rotund, bald, cherub-faced man in a stained blazer to which the school crest had been affixed with a safety pin. He put his hands together and shook them before his face. 'University of New Hampshire.'

    Mr. Ridpath glanced back down the black corridor now to his left, where a single dim light wavered behind flat glass. 'See if you can help her, hey?' Whipple/New Hampshire padded off into the dark. 'We'll have those papers in a minute. Okay. Talk among yourselves.'

    Of course none of us did, but just jittered in the dark corridor until Mr. Ridpath thought of something else to say. 'Where are the two scholarship boys? Let's see some hands.'

    Chip Hogan and I raised our hands. Chip was already standing with Tom Flanagan and the others from the Junior School. Everybody looked curiously at the two of us. Compared to us, all the others, even Dave Brick, looked rich.

    'Good. Good. Call out your names.'

    We did.

    'You're the Hogan who ran seventy-five yards last year in the eighth-grade championship against St. Matthew's?'

    'Yeah,' Hogan said, but Mr. Ridpath did not seem to mind.

    'You two boys know the great opportunity you're getting?'

    We said 'Yes, sir' in unison.

    'All of you new boys?'

    There was a general sibilant mutter.

    'You'll have to work, you know. Work like you never have in your lives. We'll make you break your backs, and then we'll expect you to play harder than you ever have in your lives. And we'll make men out of you. Carson men. And that's something to be proud of.' He looked around scornfully. 'I don't think some of you are gonna cut the mustard. Wait till Mr. Thorpe gets his hands on you.'

    A large old woman in a brown cardigan shuffled out of the corridor, followed by Mr. Whipple, who carried a flashlight. She too wore rimless glasses, and toted a large bundle of papers sorted so that they were stacked crosswise, in different sections. 'Behind the duplicator, wouldn't you know? Frenchy never washes his cups, either. He couldn't put these on the counter like anyone else.' While she spoke, she dumped the stack of papers on the first desk. 'Help me distribute these — different piles on different desks.'

    The knot of teachers dissolved, each of the men picking up a separate stack of papers and moving to a different desk. Mr. Ridpath announced, 'Mrs. Olinger, school secretary,' in a parade-ground voice, and the old woman nodded, snatched her flashlight back from Mr. Whipple, and marched up the stairs into the light.

    'Single file,' Ridpath ordered, and we clumsily jostled into each line and went down the desks, picking up sheets from each.

    A boy behind me mumbled something, and Mr. Ridpath bellowed, 'No pencil? No pencil? First day of school and you don't have a pencil? What's your name again, boy?'

    'Nightingale, sir.'

    'Nightingale,' Ridpath said scornfully. 'Where are you from, anyway? What sort of school did you go to before you came here?'

    'This sort of school, sir,' came Nightingale's girlish voice.

    'What?'

'Andover, sir. I was at Andover last year.'

    'I'll loan him a pen, sir,' said Tom Flanagan, and we passed down the line of desks without any more bellowing. At the far end of the corridor, we stood and waited in the darkness to be told what to do.

    'Upstairs, single line, library,' Ridpath said wearily.

3

We went, like Mrs. Olinger, up the stairs into sunlight, which fell and sparkled through the mullioned glass set beside the high, thick scarred front door. The light was already dim and gray up here, but across the hall was the library, which had rows of big windows set between bookshelves on either side. If the library had not been so naturally dark, it would have shone. Cordovan-colored wood and unjacketed spines of books blotted up the available light, and on normal schooldays the big chandeliers overhead burned whenever the library was in use. Without this light, the library was oddly tenebrous.

    Two rows of long flat desks, also of the cordovan-colored wood, filled the center of the front main section of the room, and we took our papers to them. Across the room ahead of us was a waist-high shelf of reference books behind which sat the librarian's desk and file cabinets in a kind of well with clear sight lines to all the tables. Mrs. Olinger watched us file into the library and take our seats, standing beside a thin woman with tightly penned white hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She wore a black dress and a strand of pearls. The teachers came in last and sat all at one table behind us. They immediately began to mutter to each other.

    'Masters?' Mrs. Olinger queried, and the teachers quietened. One of them drummed a pencil in a triplet pattern, and continued to do so as long as we were in the library.

    'This is Mrs. Tute,' said Mrs. Olinger, and the thin woman wearing the pearls gave a nervous nod like a tremor of the head. 'Mrs. Tute is our librarian, and this is her domain. She will be present while you fill out the registration forms and digest some of the information on the other sheets, after which she will provide you with an orientation to the library. If you have any questions, raise your hand and one of the masters will help you.'

    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 youthfuclass="underline" 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 a kind 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.