The following morning at 7:45, when Dad dropped me off in front of Hanover, I felt absurdly nervous. I had no idea why. I was as familiar with First Days of School as Jane Goodall her Tanzanian chimps after five years in the jungle. And yet, my linen blouse felt two sizes too big (the short sleeves creased off my shoulders like stiffly ironed dinner napkins), my red-and-white checkered skirt felt sticky and my hair (usually the one feature I could count on not to disgrace me) had opted to try a dried-dandelion frizz: I was a table in a bistro serving Bar-B-Q.
“‘She walks in beauty, like the night,’” Dad shouted through the unrolled window as I climbed from the car. “‘Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes’! Knock them dead, kiddo! Teach them what educated means.”
I nodded weakly and slammed the door (ignoring the Fanta-haired woman who’d stopped on the steps and turned around for Dad — Dr. King’s drop-off sermon). A campus-wide Morning Announcements was scheduled for 8:45, so after I found my locker on the third floor of Hanover, collected my books (throwing a friendly smile to the teacher frantically running in and out of her classroom with photocopies — the soldier who’d woken up to realize she had not sufficiently planned the day’s offensive), I made my way outside along the sidewalk to Love Auditorium. I was still nerdily early, and the theater was empty apart from one diminutive kid in front trying to look absorbed in what was clearly a blank spiral notebook.
The section for seniors was in the back. I sat down in my assigned seat, given to me by Ronin-Smith, and counted the minutes until the deafening student stampede, all the “What ups” and “How wuz your summers,” the smell of shampoo, toothpaste and new leather shoes, and that scary kinetic energy kids emitted whenever they were in large numbers so floors throbbed, walls buzzed and you thought if only you could figure out how to harness it, get it through a few parallel circuits and straight through a power station, you could safely and economically light up the East Coast.
I’m obliged to reveal an old trick: implacable self-possession can be attained by all, not by pretending to look absorbed in what’s clearly a blank spiral notebook; not by trying to convince yourself you’re an undiscovered rock star, movie star, top model, tycoon, Bond, Bond Girl, Queen Elizabeth, Elizabeth Bennett or Eliza Doolittle at the Ambassador’s Ball; not by imagining you’re a long-lost member of the Vanderbilt family, nor by tilting up your chin fifteen to forty-five degrees and pretending to be Grace Kelly in her prime. These methods work in theory, but in practice they slip away, so one is left hideously naked with nothing but the stained sheet of self-confidence around one’s feet.
Instead, stately dignity can be possessed by all, in two ways:
1. Diverting the mind with a book or play
2. Reciting Keats
I discovered this technique early in life, in second grade at Sparta Elementary. When I couldn’t help but overhear details of Eleanor Slagg and Her Recent Exclusive Sleepover, I pulled a book out of my bag, Mein Kampf (Hitler, 1925), which I’d randomly stolen from Dad’s library. I tucked my head between the hardback covers and, with the severity of the German Chancellor himself, made myself read and read until the words on the page invaded Eleanor’s words and Eleanor’s words surrendered.
“Welcome,” said Headmaster Havermeyer into the microphone. Bill was built like a Saguaro cactus that had ultimately had gone too long without water, and his clothes — the navy jacket, blue shirt, the leather belt with a giant silver buckle portraying either the Siege of the Alamo or the Battle of Little Bighorn — looked as dried out, faded and dusty as his face did. He paced the stage, slowly, as if reveling in the imaginary clinks of his spurs; he held the cordless microphone lovingly: it was his high-crowned Stetson.
“Here we go,” whispered the hyperactive Mozart next to me who wouldn’t stop tapping out The Marriage of Figaro (1786) in the space of seat between his legs. I was next to Amadeus and some sad kid who was the spitting image of Sal Mineo (see Rebel Without a Cause).
“For those of you who’ve never heard Dixon’s Words of Wisdom,” Bill went on, “those of you who’re new, well, you’re lucky ’cause you get to hear it for the first time. Dixon was my grandfather, Pa Havermeyer, and he liked young people who listened, who learned from their elders. When I was growing up he’d pull me aside and he’d say, ‘Son, don’t be afraid to change.’ Well, I can’t say it any better. Don’t be afraid to change. That’s right.”
He certainly wasn’t the first headmaster to suffer from the Ol’-Blue-Eyes-at-The-Sands Effect. Countless headmasters, particularly male, confused the slick floors of a dimly lit cafeteria or the muddled acoustics of a high school auditorium for the ruby-walled Copa Room, mistook students for a doting public who’d made their reservations months in advance and shelled out $100 a pop. Tragically, he believed he could sing “Strangers in the Night” off-key, croon “The Best Is Yet to Come,” lose a strand of the lyrics and never mar his reputation as Chairman of the Board, The Voice, Swoonatra.
In truth, of course, he was being ridiculed, mocked and mimicked.
“Hey, what’re you reading?” a boy asked behind me.
I did not think the words were directed at me until they were repeated very close to my right shoulder. I stared down at the worn-out play in my hand, p. 18. Do ya make Brick happy?
“Hello, miss? Ma’am?” He leaned even closer, leaving breath-hotness on my neck. “You speak English?”
A girl next to him giggled.
“Parlay vu fronsai? Sprekenzee doyche?”
According to Dad, in every circumstance when it was difficult to flee, there was what he called The Oscar Shapeley, a man of great repugnance who’d mysteriously come to the conclusion that what he had to offer in the way of conversation was intensely fascinating and what he had to offer in the way of sex was wholly irresistible.
“Parlate Italiano? Hello?”
The dialogue in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams, 1955) trembled before my eyes. “One of those no-neck monsters hit me with some ice cream. Their fat little heads sit on their fat little necks without a bit of connection…” Maggie the Cat wouldn’t withstand such harassment. She’d cross her legs in her flimsy slip and say something passionate and shrill and everyone in the room, including Big Daddy, would choke on the ice they were chewing from their mint juleps.
“What’s a guy gotta do to get a little attention around here?”
I had no choice but to turn around.
“What?”
He was smiling at me. I expected him to be a no-neck monster, but to my shock, he was a Goodnight Moon (Brown, 1947). Goodnight Moons had duvet eyes, shadowy eyelids, a smile like a hammock and a silvered, sleepy countenance that most people wore only during the few minutes prior to sleep, but which the Goodnight Moon sported all day and well into the evening. Goodnight Moons could be male or female and were universally adored. Even teachers worshiped them. They looked to Goodnight Moons whenever they asked a question and even though they answered with a drowsy, wholly incorrect answer, the teacher would say, “Oh, wonderful,” and twist the words around like a thin piece of wire until they resembled something glorious.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”
He had blond hair, but he wasn’t the sort of washed-out Scandinavian blond person who desperately looked as if he needed to be dyed, tinted, hand dipped in something. He wore a crisp white shirt, a navy blazer. His red-and-blue striped tie was loose and slightly askew.