I certainly knew a lot more by the end of the summer than I did at the beginning.
The kids at Woodland were in general a decent lot. They had their devilment. (Once they tied up a particularly annoying kid named Tim and pretended they were going to hang him.) But by and large they were caring and compassionate. Nevertheless, Ben could be trying for the most large-hearted bunch of youngsters. The counselors, who I think were rather in awe of Ben (all of us could relate to his extraordinary musical ability, and he played for the whole work camp on several evenings), occasionally told us, more or less seriously, “Listen to Ben. You might learn something.”
Once the following story came back to me from one of the boys in Ben’s tent. Some of Ben’s bunkmates were making a concerted effort to pay some attention to him, and Ben took the opportunity to tell them he was going to show them one of the most beautiful things in the whole world. Dutifully, they’d all fallen silent — whereupon Ben began to outline some particularly abstruse point in analytic geometry about the generating formulas for endocycloidal curves.
The guys listened for about three minutes with straight faces. Then, one after another, they began to giggle. Finally, they broke into open laughter. Ben got upset and began to sputter and rage and, finally, cry. When the counselor at last showed up, what Ben was crying was: “You’re all idiots! Everyone is an idiot! Chip is the only person who understands me! Just Chip! Everybody else is just an idiot! Everybody! Except Chip …!”
“Chip,” at Woodland, was my nickname.
6.21. Because I liked Ben and could follow some of his mathematical discussions, I have at least a sense of our sessions together as having been useful. Also, as a student in the high school I would be attending, Ben gave me some notion of what I was getting into, for which I was grateful. But there at camp, I also felt somewhat saddled with him, and I wanted to spend more of my time with other kids. There was one redheaded boy from New Jersey named Johnny (whose twin sister Margie was also at the camp), who, after lights out, would call me out of the main bunkhouse into his bed on the porch — the only bed on the bunk porch, besides the counselor’s (and the counselor didn’t come in till a couple of hours later) — and we would do warm, friendly, and pleasurable things to each other’s body in the most innocent and good-natured way. (At the same time, I had an official girlfriend, a young black camper, who pursued me with a kind of muffled hysteria into after-evening-activity necking and petting sessions, with a sense, far more developed than mine, that because we were the two black campers in that age group, we had to go together — a notion that struck me as interesting, if strange.) I very much wanted to be Johnny’s “best friend all the time,” during the day as well as at night. But Ben made that a little hard. Therefore, at August’s end, when camp was over, I was somewhat relieved to go home.
6.3. On the first day of school I took the D train up to 182nd Street, walked the two blocks up the Grand Concourse, and turned left, a block later crossed through the lozenges of sunlight falling through the Jerome Avenue elevated tracks to the concrete, and kept on down the sloping sidewalk beside the telephone company with the other students walking to the Annex, and gathered with them in the basement cafeteria, as we had done three months before at orientation. I spotted the blond boy I’d seen the last time right away — today he was in a white shirt and khaki pants. I probably went up to him and said something immediately. (Ben, a junior by now, was off in the Main Building.) I’d been voted the most popular kid in my grade a year before, and my picture of myself was that I was Someone Who Could Make Friends Easily: so, however scary it was, I’d decided I was going to make them. And as rewarding as friendships with the Bens of this world might be, I’d decided my friends here were going to be good-looking, more or less normal people.
The boy’s name was Chuck. He’d come to Science from a city Catholic school, Corpus Christi. He’d grown up in Luxembourg. His father was a career man in the US Air Force. (Chuck even spoke some Luxembourgeois.) But he and his younger sister lived with his mother here in the city. His parents were divorced.
We’d been given little cards which guided us to our class, and luck had it that Chuck and I had been assigned to the same freshman homeroom. We took our places together in line and, once again, walked up the crowded stairwell. It was nowhere near as orderly as it had been when half the group had been parents. So there was no running on ahead for Chuck today. We talked a bit more, but for a while, together in the crush, I remember he seemed to lose interest in whatever we were speaking of, and I wondered what I would have to say to catch his attention again while we made our slow way up.
Out on the red-tiled roof, with its high wire fence around the chest-high wall, the student congestion came to a complete halt under the cloud-flecked blue — as it would for three to thirteen minutes every morning for the rest of the year. Finally we crowded into the far stairwell.
6.31. Downstairs on the fifth floor, I walked into the classroom.
Chuck followed me.
I took a seat in one of the nailed-to-the-floor wooden desks toward the front of the room.
Chuck sat at the desk behind mine.
Our homeroom teacher — standing behind the desk now with his hands in his pockets, greeting us, telling us to take seats, those in the back please hurry up, we have a lot to do this morning — was the freshman algebra instructor, Mr. Tannenbaum. (He turned now to write his name on the board for us.) A thin, homely man, he wore baggy tweeds and had a shy sense of humor. He was a remarkably gentle man, for all his bony forehead and drawn-together shoulders. And he smiled if you made a joke, sometimes in spite of himself. But one of the things Science’s average 140 IQ meant was that the teachers respected the students. The school was as strict in hiring instructors as it was in admitting pupils. We all had a sense that the teachers themselves were special, as was, indeed, the whole school — despite its dilapidated housing.
Mr. Tannenbaum began to call out the names of the various kids in the class — “Please answer ‘present’”—while I looked around.
Before the end of the first session, I learned that Chuck’s full name was Charles Edward Rufus Rastus McSweeney O’Gorman Van Pelt Abramson!
(“Is that really your whole name …?”
(“Yeah. But Charles Edward Abramson is about all most people can take,” and here, on a piece of notebook paper, while I strained around at my desk, he drew a monogram, involving a C, E, and A, and the date — ’56—which, over the next year, I would find written on bathroom walls, carved into table tops, or, once, fifteen years later, but still readable, gouged with a compass point into the back of a pew at Corpus Christi Church.)
At Dalton, the classes of twelve and fourteen students had sat in movable chairs at wide blond wood tables, or pushed the tables aside and drawn the chairs into an informal circle for discussion. But here were forty-two students in a single room, desks fixed to the floor and scarred by doodling generations. Even as I was talking with Chuck, it hit me that this was not the entire freshman grade but only one class — that, indeed, there were five others of the same size at the school.
At Dalton, the entire eighth grade had been smaller than this homeroom group.
For the last year, people had been talking to me about the “transition from elementary school to high school.” But the transition was really between private school and public school — and nobody had prepared me for that.