We voted constantly on everything — issues and offices of every kind. We were expected at every age to have an opinion on all matters, political matters in particular. Although pressure from the teachers that year was clearly for Wallace (Henry, not George), the teachers restrained themselves — nominally because they valued our independent judgment, actually because they lived in dread of our petitions. We fired a housemother by petition. We voted in fifth-grade physics that half a pound of feathers weighed more than half a pound of steel. We were adamant. Knowledge itself was a democracy. We studied fanatically. We were as competitive as only a child state can be. We voted to stone the girl who banged her head — not because she banged her head, but because she was so fat and furtive and whining all the time. She lost a loafer running across the athletic field. None of the stones hit. We were too uncoordinated and too young to throw accurately across the distance we had also, in all fairness, voted for. The space-time continuum became clear to us with that event. So, perhaps, did the quality of mercy, after all. We did not vote to fire the shop teacher, although we wanted to. We planed and sawed and used the lathe and soldered, making Christmas presents for our families. Christmas in all wildly progressive schools was celebrated with obsessional gravity. In one year’s holy pageant, a girl’s hair caught fire, from a candle held reverently by the boy behind. A father leaped to the balcony and put the fire out. Parents were allowed to visit every other Sunday, and for pageants and plays.
Excellent evidence. “The source said that the investigators considered the responses of the dogs ‘excellent evidence,’” the Times reported. “In each case the two dogs reacted positively to Mr. Hoffa’s scent. One by standing up,” the story went on, “and the other by sitting down.” Since Will is a lawyer and I used to be an investigative reporter, we conclude that the dogs went to different schools, one to a sitting school, one to a standing school, but anyway to different schools.
There were, of course, in all such places, compulsory classes in ballet. Boys and girls, in leotards, lying around the resined floor in ballet class, were all instructed to listen, eyes shut, to Chopin or the Firebird or something, and let the mind run freely over whatever the music might suggest, all enjoined particularly to relax. The music played. Pensive children mused. Ambitious children worried. Homesick children grieved. Everyone lay still. Suddenly, the ballet teacher would swoop down and pick up somebody’s hand or foot. Newcomers were often startled into a small scream. After the first few times, they regained control. Determined then to show just how relaxed they were, they would obligingly help to raise the swooped-at hand or foot, try even to anticipate the swoop. “Why, you’re not relaxed,” the teacher — quite commonly a psychology major, born in Riverdale and recently divorced from an Algerian or Pakistani — would say, in astonishment and reproach. “Look at it. Why, just look at this foot.” She would hold the foot a moment, and then let it go. For normally nervous children, there were two possibilities: being left with a raised foot; or being just alert enough to let it drop, not limply, however, as it was meant to fall, but like a stone. In either case, in the name, it seemed, of dance, the teacher would deal in earnest with that hand or foot; and if you did not have a nervous breakdown then, you had presumably acquired — as from that wintry open porch; as, for that matter, from being sent away to boarding school at the age of six or eight — another immunity. It was always, of course, rumored that somebody in these classes, out of pure calm, fell asleep. But like that other, more flamboyant and dangerous story, which was told in public schools — that some child had lain down between the railroad tracks in town, and had remained there, relaxed and unharmed, while all the cars of a train passed over him — it was a fable. It was false.
“I’m sorry. Mr. Ellis has stepped out. He’s on another line. He’s in a meeting. Mrs. Harwell? Oh, just a minute. She’s away from her desk.”
There is a particular fanaticism about riding in progressive summer camps and prep schools. The camps may sound either drawn from Hiawatha, or like a condition that will require surgery — my brothers went to Melatoma, I to Sighing Rock. The schools will be named for an improbable condition of the landscape (Peat Cliff, Glen Willow Sands, Mount Cove, Apple Valley Heights), or for something dour and English: Gladstone Wett. The riding teachers are named Miss Cartwright, Miss Farew, Martha Abbott Struth. Ms. Struth, if she is married, will have her own academy, which teaches every horse thing from gymkhana to dressage. Mr. Struth has been away or dead for twenty years. Field hockey coaches, whistles hanging from their necks, brown and white oxfords on their feet, may stride, with their emphatic, shoulder-inflected hockey walk; they can shout, exhort, scold, shrilly whistle, keep a red and frosty silence, like their counterparts on football fields. All field coaches carry on — as though those fractures, scars, grunts, knockouts, limps, and broken noses were well worth it. Field hockey for girls, football for boys, seeming to them, perhaps, such useful skills to have in adult life. These coaches, male and female, have always had disciples. In fact, I know of no one who was a boarding student at a wildly progressive school, in those years, who did not incur a slight, though permanently laming or disfiguring injury on its fields. But it was horses that held the imagination; it has always been the riding teachers who preside.
At that school, sex and mysticism set in, simultaneously. We used to walk through the dark, from our porch, to the stables, where we imagined that a horse had died, untended and alone. We had not been told. Couples, late at night, holding hands, looking for the corpse of Gladys — who had, in fact, been sold, the school having fallen on hard times. We slept in the hay above the stalls. We returned to our porches before dawn. The school has since gone entirely to seed — heroin, LSD, precocious abortions, methedrine. In our time, we planned but did not even dare to run away. We had codes, ceremonies, aliases. We had oaths. We had marathon walks and rides. Once, on the morning of the middle children’s all-day ride, with the night to be spent in sleeping bags, a matter of great ritual importance to us then, a small girl from a theatrical family said to us, in parting, “Break a leg.” We had a unison of panic. Superstition had become intense.
Myra Miller broke a leg. It was my fault. I had a dread by then of our most skittish, lightest horse. It always seemed, in his nervousness and mine, that I was gliding on unsteady air. I was assigned that horse. The first time he shied — at a flower, I think — I fell off, deliberately. Myra, who had been given the phlegmatic nag I longed for, took advantage of the flash of fear to spur that nag, for the first time in its ten horse years, no doubt, to gallop through the woods, with frightened eyes. Myra gave a rebel yell, and used a switch. The nag galloped too close by a tree, which, like Absalom’s, singled Myra out — not by the hair but by the leg. Her leg was broken by the time she fell. I was left with her while the rest of the expedition went for help. “Anything I can do?” I kept saying. Myra would say, “Oh, Christ.” I have since heard this precise exchange many times, out here.
Then Myra’s mother came. Not a play, or pageant, or Sunday — Myra’s accident. The mother and I talked. There was a bath schedule outside the porch bathroom — each child having been allotted an uncapitalist three baths a week. “I have to go to the loo,” Myra’s mother said. She tried to commit suicide in there. Not very seriously. With nail scissors. “It’s my fault,” she kept saying, when the ambulance came. “Myra’s all my fault.” That was probably true. The fault for the leg was mine. I rode, on the school’s insistence, the same skittish horse all term after that. I reined him back till his mouth was wrecked for the snaffle, and the curb was all that would hold him back. The riding teacher used to throw stones at him to make him go. When he went, I would fall off at once.