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 stacked carelessly 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.'
His telephone rang for the sixth time since I had been in his office. He said, 'Christ,' picked up the phone, and said 'Yeah,' and motioned me to put the new record on the turntable.
I tuned out and relaxed into the couch. Sherman ranted. He was a very skillful ranter. He had a law degree. Also he had an ulcer, the nerves of a neurotic cat, and what I assumed was the highest income of anyone from our class. In these days his wardrobe was always very studied, and today he wore a tan bush jacket, aviator glasses tinted yellow, and soft knee-high yellow boots. He clamped the phone under his chin, crossed his arms over his chest, leaned against the window, and gave me a sour grin.
'I'll tell you something,' he said when he had put the phone down. 'Fielding should bless his soul that he never decided to go into the music business. And he had more talent than most of these bozos we manage. Is he still trying to get his Ph.D.?'
I nodded. 'This will sound funny, but when you were leaning against the window like that just now, you reminded me of Lake the Snake.'
'Now I really wish I was out on the Island. Lake the Snake.' He laughed out loud. 'Laker Broome. I better clean up my act. What made you think of that?'
'Just the way you were standing.'
He sat down and put his boots on the long desk. 'That guy should have been locked up. He's not still there, is he?'
'He retired years ago — forced out, really. I wouldn't have worked for him.' I had just quit the school myself, after three years of teaching English there. 'I never asked you this before, or if I did, I forgot the answer. What did Lake the Snake say to you, that first day? When he kept you and Nightingale in his office.'
'The day we registered?' He grinned at me. 'I told you, but you forgot, you asshole. That's one of my favorite party bits. Ask me again after dinner on Saturday night, if you're still coming.'
Then I did remember — we had been in his father's 'den' one warm day in late fall, drinking iced tea from tall glasses with Party Time! embossed on their sides. 'I'd come just to hear it,' I said. I was in New York on my way to Europe, and Sherman and Fielding were the only people there I cared to visit. And Sherman was a good cook whose dinner parties had a bachelor's haphazard lavishness.
'Great, great.' He was already a little distant, and I thought he was thinking again of the grievances given him by his twenty-year-old geniuses. 'I saw Tom Flanagan on the street the other day,' he said. 'He looked really strange. He looked about forty years old. That guy's nuts. It doesn't make any sense, what he's doing. He's working some toilet over in Brooklyn called the Red Hat Lounge. Magic is going to come back when Glenn Miller climbs out of the Channel. When Miss America has . . . '
'Bad teeth?'
'A mastectomy,' Sherman said.
On Saturday night there was as much of a lull in the after-dinner conversation as Sherman ever permitted in the days before he moved to Los Angeles. The famous folksinger seated to my left had wiped food from his beard and described a million-dollar drug deal just concluded by two other famous folk singers; the woman with Bob, a blond with the English country-house good looks to which he was always attracted, had opened a bottle of cognac; Sherman was leaning on one elbow, picking bits of bacon out of what was left of the salad.
'My friend across the table wants to hear a story,' he said.
'Great,' said the folksinger.
'He wants to be reminded of the famous Lake the Snake, and how he welcomed me to his school. On our first day we had to fill in registration forms, and when it asked for my favorite subject, I put down 'Finance.'' The girl and the singer laughed: Sherman had always been good at telling stories. 'Lake the Snake was the headmaster, and when a fat little shit named Whipple who taught history showed him my form, he kept me back in his office after he made his welcome-to-the-school speech. Another little kid was kept behind with me, and he sent him out into the hall. I was practically shitting my pants. Lake the Snake looked like an Ivy League undertaker. Or a high-class hired killer. He was sitting at his desk just smiling at me. It was the kind of smile you'd give somebody just before you cut his balls off.
''Well,' he said. 'I see you are a comedian, Sherman. I don't really think that will do. No, it won't do at all. But I'll give you a chance. Make me laugh. Say something funny.' He braced his hands behind his head. I couldn't think of a single word. 'What a pathetic little boy you are, Mr. Sherman,' he said. 'What is the motto of this school? No answer? Alis volai propriis. He flies by his own wings. I presume that now and again he touches ground too. But he does fly, the kind of boy we want here. He doesn't look for cheap laughs and gutter satisfactions. Since you are too much of a coward to speak up, I'll tell you something. It's a story about a boy. Listen carefully.
''Once, a long time ago, this certain boy, who was, let me see, fourteen years old, left his warm cozy little house and went out into the wide world. He thought he was a funny little boy, but in reality he was a simpleton and a coward, and sooner or later he was bound to meet a bad end. He went through a city, and he made little comments that made people laugh. He thought they were laughing at his little comments, but in fact they were laughing at his presumption.
''It so happened that the king of that country was proceeding through the city, and the boy saw his golden carriage. This was a splendid affair, made by the king's craftsmen, and it was of solid gold, drawn by six magnificent black chargers. When the carriage passed the boy, he turned to the good citizen beside him and said, 'Who's the old fool in the fancy wagon? He must weigh as much as all six horses. I bet he got rich by stealing from people like you and me, brother.' You see, he was interested in finance. He expected his neighbor to laugh, but the neighbor was horrified — all citizens in that country loved and feared their king.