Black Ice (27 page)

“Even-tempered, talented, conscientious, well-mannered, he and he, or he and she, or she and she are students of sterling character and high integrity. St. Paul’s is deeply indebted to them.”

The Rector called my name. He used all three names, as was the graduation custom. And he called Tom Painchaud’s name, too.

I heard clapping, and I got up. Painchaud was coming behind. He and I stood together and received our small white boxes tied in red ribbons. Mr. Oates shook hands with each of us and kissed me. He was beaming as he told us congratulations. I thought of the plane tickets when my mother had been sick. I looked at Painchaud and remembered the friendship he had so freely given on the night of the Sixth-Form elections. After that afternoon I might never see him again. Why had I not talked more with him as we had that night? Why had I been so afraid of his eyes?

I had not loved enough. I’d been busy, busy, so busy, preparing for life, while life floated by me, quiet and swift as a regatta.

I had not loved enough. The greedy girl inside me clutched at the little white box with its red ribbons. She was heartbreaking to look upon, a spoiled child at a party grabbing up expensive gifts, no sooner opened than found wanting, grabbing up new ones, hoping for one that would seep into and fill up her soul.

I had not loved enough.

The old people sang a song in church: “Just As I Am, Without One Plea.” We’d sing it as the preacher stood at the altar, in front of the pulpit, calling one, just one, to make the decision to come to God today. “Are you ready?” he asked. “If you had to meet your Maker today, could you say, ‘I’m ready, Lord, just as I am? Not as I
hope
to be. Not tomorrow, not tomorrow, brothers and sisters, please. Because tomorrow may never come. ‘Just as I am, Thou wilt receive, Wilt pardon, cleanse, relieve.’ He wants us as we are. Only one in the world’ll take me just as I am! Thank you, Jesus.
Just
as I am.
He’ll
make you ready. He can do it. Isn’t there one?”

The old people would wave their arms in the air, and I’d never understood. I’d cried and cried at the vision. Just as I was? How I longed to believe it. I’d cried and joined the church. I’d joined the gospel choir—they’d let me, too, at eleven, and I sang with all the adults, hoping that He would fill my soul with belief.

“In every spiritual experience, Tillich says,” Reverend Ingersoll had told us, “there must be in the worshipper a ‘leap of faith.’ ”

I had leapt and leapt and leapt, and here I stood, my big feet in white pumps, standing on the ground. How could you leap at the sky?

The Chapel tolled three. The Sixth Form would depart in
half an hour. It said so on the program. The program always said so. It always would. For the first time that year, I was not ready to leave St. Paul’s. I had had all my time, all my chances. I could never do it again, never make it right. I had not loved enough.

In the bleachers I saw Nana Jackson, her hands folded in her lap. She was watching the Rector give the last awards. She looked peaceful in her blue and white suit. I remembered how she’d let me play in her hair when I was little, before she cut it, when she took out the hairpins and let it hang down her back. For the last two years, she had sent pear nectar and crackers; cards and money for holidays, even Halloween and Valentine’s Day. Pop-Pop had written me faithfully and had ordered stationery for me, white paper with my name and address—S
T
. P
AUL’S
S
CHOOL
—in red.

I was glad of the award in my lap, even though I was no longer satisfied with it. The Rector’s Medal—there was only one of those awarded each year, and he was reading it now—carried more prestige. I told myself to be grateful for my award, even though I suspected that it was a booby prize, maybe even the badge of a Tom, a palliative to the selfless-devotion types who fell short of the mark.

Graduation ended abruptly, as always, and we filed past our teachers. We cried and said thank-you. We hugged and walked on to the next teacher. I cried bitterly. I could barely speak to Sr. Fuster, Sr. Ordoñez, Miss Clinton, Mr. Buxton, Mr. Hawley, Miss Deane, Mr. Price, Mr. Shipman, Mr. Oates. Love and gratitude, hate, resentments, shame, admiration, loss. They sloshed on deck in big waves; I could only hold onto the hands that were passing me along the line. Mr. Oates was last. He said things to me, but I could not hear them by now. I could only grasp the last hand, embrace the last body, and let go to step onto the green.

There I grabbed up the children, Carole and Dana and Kim.
They looked with open curiosity at my tears and helped me dry them with their stares. I posed for pictures with India and Alma and Anthony and Jimmy. I stood on the end of bunches of formmates while their parents clicked away. I hugged until my skin tingled. I hugged teary lower formers. Grace was beside herself. Annette let the tears stream down her cheeks.

Parents were rounding us up and herding us into cars. Somebody had to do it. Each hug reminded me of someone I’d missed. Where was Pam Hudson? Had she already gone? Have you seen Painchaud? Did Janie leave yet? Where were Kenny and Ed? Loretta left? And Artie? Where was Michael from the Astronomy Club? Many people did not bother to say goodbye. Someone’s parents were giving a big party in New York, and they’d meet up there. Those of us who had come to St. Paul’s by accident said good-bye for real. “I’ll write you,” we promised.

Anthony and I rode with my old high-school friends from Yeadon. Karen and Gary had made the drive themselves in Gary’s purple Dodge Duster. The four of us drove to the motel. Now the party took off.

“I graduated, Oh, Lawdy,” said a friend of the family whom I called Uncle. “Girl, you tore it up! Me, I was just lucky to graduate, Oh, Lawdy!”

“Get out of here!”

“Honey, that was beautiful. You know, no pomp and circumstance and all that mess. Just simple and elegant.”

“Well, hell, they don’t need pomp and circumstance. They got the
goods
. As much money and power as they’ve got, they don’t need to advertise.”

“That’s right.
We’re
the ones who need all those caps and gowns and rings and music, because what else you gonna give the young people. God knows half of ‘em can’t read!”

“Yeah, boy. Dress those children up in all those gowns and crap, and the next week they can’t find a job.”

“But I surely did love those white dresses. Your girlfriend Alma, was she the one in the long dress?”

“Yep.”

“And a flower behind her ear. I like to see that kind of style.”

“It’s pizzazz.”

“It’s confidence, and why shouldn’t they be confident?”

“And the child with the hat. You know who I mean: blond, kind of plump, pretty face.”

“India.”

“India, right. You introduced me. She’s a doll. I hope you’ll keep in touch.”

“And Anthony, you looked so tall and handsome coming down the aisle.”

“Head and shoulders above the crowd.”

Karen and Gary said that they had to begin the drive home. “Some people,” Karen said, “are still in school!”

They offered us a ride back to Philadelphia, and we took it. Anthony did not feel as if this were his party, and, of course he was right. The irony was that I did not feel it was mine, either. We left with Karen and Gary after the adults lectured us on being careful and responsible.

“Florence Evans told me this,” my mother said. “She told me that once you let that child go, you’ll never get her back again.”

I gave my mother the little white box of school buttons to keep for me and slunk away from my own party. “… Past achievements and future hopes…,” I thought. I took with me an envelope that said “Happy Graduation.” It was from Mrs. Burrows, the housekeeper at Scudder, and a woman who collected laundry at the gym—a woman whose name I did not
even know. Inside was a fresh five-dollar bill. Mrs. Burrows told me that she’d never given a student a graduation present before; no one had ever given her a chance to get to know them.

I kept the envelope in my pocketbook for a long time. I had not passed up all my chances to give love or receive it, and I had the future, at least, to try to do better.

O
ur fifteenth reunion was held at a rustic social club at the end of a pitted road north of town. One of my formmates who lived in Concord had arranged for the place. Inside was a white kitchen, a bar not much bigger than the one my father built in my grandparents’ basement, and a large main room for eating and dancing. Wrapped around the building was a wide wooden porch that looked onto a pond and woods.

Tom Painchaud, who also lived in Concord, and worked as a regional sales supervisor for a beverage distributor, had arranged for the beer. Two kegs sat in the kitchen. The crowd around them grew big over time.

We arrived just before sunset. The spring had been the rainiest in years, and the woods sprouted green and lush. Mosquitoes had been breeding, too. They swarmed us worse than anyone could remember. As we stood talking in bunches on the porch and on the green grass, we swatted ourselves. We looked to see the faces we remembered concealed in the familiar, but different, faces before us, and we swatted each other. We brushed the mosquitoes tentatively out of each other’s hair and hit them as gently as we could on each other’s arms and necks. We sprayed ourselves from cans of repellent that the reunion organizers had wisely stationed every couple of feet
along the porch rail. We sprayed each other. And suddenly we were touching again as we had done in earlier times.

“Where are you living?” We asked it of each other just as we had once asked “What house are you in?” It was an opener. You could talk forever about a city or a town. From that start you could get as intimate or remain as distant as you liked.

“Where are you staying this weekend?” The answer to that question could give some indication of an alumnus’s present connection to the school. I answered, several times, that my husband and daughter and I were guests of my friends, the Gillespies.

“The Rock? Were you friends with them at school?”

“We became friends when I went back to teach for a year in ’eighty-two. We shared a house. He was the housemaster and I was the second faculty in Corner.”

“Whoa! Gillespie ran a tight ship.”

“Sure did. You know what I did when I got the letter telling me that I was assigned to Corner, with Cliff as head? I stood in my living room—here I was, a grown woman—and I screamed: ‘Oh, no! Not the Rock! How could they have given me the Rock?’

“I was scared to death.”

“But it was good?”

“I can’t tell you. I learned more about teaching from watching that man in action. Him and Fuster. Opposite ends of the spectrum. But they both pour their souls into, teaching.”

I had, too. I taught Third-, Fourth-, and Sixth-Formers: essay-writing, Greek mythology,
Huckleberry Finn
, poetry,
Native Son, Paradise Lost
, grammar,
Macbeth
, vocabulary, the Book of Job. The chairman of the department was Rich Lederer, the teacher under whom I’d student-taught black literature in my senior year.

The Rector was brand-new. The Reverend Charles Clark was a tall Episcopalian clergyman from California. He’d been the
Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, and before that, he and his wife, Priscilla, had worked in the Philippines. Kelly Clark had a West-Coast brand of upper-class elegance that was sunnier and more gentle than the Yankee faculty had come to expect. I watched the upheaval as the old regime gave way. Masters who had long felt stifled sought to establish themselves with the new Rector.

The faculty that had appeared to my teenaged eyes as a monolith of critical white adulthood now revealed itself as a community of idealists, all trying, each according to his or her ability, to help young people. Our job, it sometimes seemed, was to stuff as much Christian charity into our arrogant charges as possible before the world began rewarding them so richly for being so beautiful, charming, and accomplished (which we helped them become).

I felt the zeal of it, the ironic, subversive missionary zeal. I felt the frustration. Like the kids, I stayed up too late. I accepted too many assignments. Like the other faculty members, I exerted too much pressure on my already stress-filled students. Without words, I exuded it like sweat from my pores. No doubt they could smell it on my skin as I bent over their shoulders to point out how they could improve their theses on the third rewrite. And yet, it took all my control to keep from shaking them sometimes, from jacking them up against the wall and screaming into their faces: “Look at what you have here. Buildings, grounds, books, computers, experts, time, youth, strength, ice rinks, forests, radio equipment, observatories. Learn, damn you! Take it in and go out into the world and
do
something.”

One afternoon I sat with a student from Japan, listening as she translated into her own language a passage from the
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
, a book that I had added, with my department chairman’s permission, to my Fourth-Formers’ readings in American literature. Mochi giggled, at
first, to hear Douglass’s abolitionist bombast coming from her lips, in her language. I asked her to reread the paragraph. Again and again she repeated the same words. Her voice changed, and her face changed, and I could hear Douglass’s passion. The language became transparent for a moment, like the words of an opera. She spoke to me with her voice and her eyes and her body. I felt a jolt of love for this hardworking girl—and, in its wake, a hard knot of feeling toward the black girl who had traveled here from Yeadon ten years before.

Asked to coach an aerobics class (“Oh, by the way, do you think you could help us out with something …”), I, who had never taken one, drove into town to buy one of Jane Fonda’s books, skimmed it that night, and showed up the next afternoon in the training room at the gym as ill-prepared as my students (most of whom chose aerobics to avoid the standard, competitive offerings). We grunted and groaned through the fall in a regimen that was more akin to boot camp than aerobics. I watched them resist and yet progress, and I remembered when my body, for all its supple youth, had seemed just beyond the reach of reason, a clumsy pet whose care and feeding often required more discipline than I could muster; a carnival bumper car that banged from one side of the arena to the other while I spun the steering wheel wildly trying to get control.