Bread Upon the Waters (34 page)

“I do, indeed. I might be a little vague myself, but my wife is a demon of responsibility.”

“Just tell me when you expect her to arrive and I’ll cut some flowers and put them around to welcome her. It’s a wonder what a few flowers can do for this old house. And I’ll have some wood brought in for a fire. Some of the boys make a little extra money clearing branches and cutting down dead trees and sawing them up for firewood. The nights get nippy around here and a fire’s a comfort. Well, I won’t disturb you anymore. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of work to do preparing for the invasion. And if you don’t mind my saying so, I think you ought to take a little time off and take some walks. It would help your complexion.” She sounded more like a nurse who had been in the family for years than a cleaning woman he had just met a few minutes ago. As she went out of the room, Strand felt he had something on the plus side to report in his next conversation with Leslie.

He looked in the mirror over the fireplace. The tan of the summer had vanished from his face and he decided he did look a little greenish. He went out. He would heed Mrs. Schiller’s admonition and take a long walk to town, improving his complexion and finding a shop where he could buy a bottle of whiskey.

Romero arrived in the dark, after dinner, which Strand had eaten in town, still postponing the moment when he would have to make small talk over food with the men and women of the faculty. If Leslie had been there he knew that she would have been calling at least half a dozen of them by their first names and would have made estimates of their various characters that later would turn out to be mysteriously accurate. He did not have that quick talent and depended upon time and slowly growing familiarity to develop his judgment of people. It saved him, he told Leslie, from unpleasant surprises.

He was standing at the entrance of the Malson Residence, looking up at the stars, a little reluctant to go into the empty house, when he saw a small figure, carrying a bag much too large for him, toiling across the campus from the direction of the main building. Under the light of the lamps along the asphalt paths he saw that Romero was wearing some of the clothes from Brooks Brothers, slacks and a tweed jacket and a collar and tie.

“Good evening, Romero,” he said as the boy came up to him. “I’d just about given up hope of seeing you here today. What happened? You get lost?”

“I never get lost,” Romero said, letting the heavy bag down on the lawn and rubbing his shoulder. “Nobody has to send out search parties for me. I met a girl on the train, she was on her way to New London for a job as a waitress and we got into a conversation and she seemed okay, she used to be a stripper, she told me, and we decided to stop off and have an afternoon in New Haven. I never had anything to do with a striptease artist before and I thought this might be the last chance in a long while and I bought her lunch and we saw the sights of New Haven and then I put her on the train again and I grabbed the bus and here I am, ready for further education.” He looked around him with distaste. “This place sure is dead. What do they do—shoot everybody who’s out on the street after dark?”

“Wait until tomorrow,” Strand said. “You’ll need a traffic cop to get across to the dining room. Have you eaten? There are some things in the refrigerator.”

“I’m not hungry. But I sure could use a drink. Got any beer in the joint?”

“I’m afraid not,” Strand said coldly. He didn’t mention that in one of the kitchen cupboards there was a bottle of whiskey still in the plain brown paper bag in which he had carried it back from town. “I believe that there’s a rule here that the students are not permitted to drink.”

“Beer is
drink
!” Romero said incredulously. “What is this, a convent?”

“This is a boys’ school,” Strand said. “Notice I said
boys.
Here, let me help you with that bag. It looks awfully heavy. I’ll show you to your room.” He bent to pick up the bag and had trouble lifting it from the ground. “What have you got in here—bricks?”

Romero grinned. “Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
In seven volumes.”

As they climbed the stairs to the top floor, with both of them taking turns carrying the bag, Strand said, “Your roommate’s already here. He’s the only one besides you until tomorrow. He’s on the football team.”

“I would have brought my football jersey that you liked so much, Professor,” Romero said, “but they’re retiring my number and putting it in a glass case in the high school gymnasium.”

“You’ll find, Romero,” Strand said, “that your sense of humor will not be admired as much here as it was in New York.”

As they neared the top floor they heard rock music, being played very loudly.

“What’ve they got up there—a disco?” Romero said. “By the way, what’s the policy on girls, Professor?”

“I don’t believe your striptease artist will be welcomed here,” Strand said. “Dunberry is connected to a sister school. But it’s five miles from here.”

“Love will find a way,” Romero said airily.

The door to the room was open and the light from it poured into the corridor. Rollins was lying on his bed with his shoes off and was reading a book. A cassette machine was blaring on a table just a few inches from his ear. But he stood up quickly when he saw Strand and Romero and turned off the machine.

“This is your roommate, Rollins—Jesus Romero.”

“My name is pronounced, Haysooss,” Romero said.

“Sorry,” Strand said. He never had had the occasion to use the Christian names of his students at the high school and he was afraid that his mispronunciation of Romero’s name was a bad start for his relations with the boy at Dunberry. “I’ll remember from now on.”

Rollins put out his hand and after a suspicious glance Romero shook it. “Welcome, Haysooss,” Rollins said. “I hope you like music.”

“Some music,” Romero said.

Rollins laughed, a deep, rumbling, good-natured sound. “At least you won’t take up much space, brother,” he said. “That’s right considerate of Mr. Strand, considering my size and the size of the room.”

“I had nothing to do with it,” Strand said quickly. “It’s all done alphabetically. Well, I’ll leave you two to get acquainted. Lights’re supposed to be out by ten thirty.”

“I haven’t gone to bed by ten thirty since I was two,” Romero said.

“I didn’t say you had to sleep. Just that the lights have to be out.” Strand knew he sounded testy and regretted it. “Good night.”

He went out of the room, but stopped a few feet from the door to listen. What he heard came as no surprise to him. “Well, black brother,” Romero was saying, in an exaggerated Southern accent, “I see they’ve got slave quarters and everything on this good ole plantation.”

As quietly as possible Strand went down the stairs to his apartment. He looked at the bottle of whiskey in its brown paper bag on the cupboard shelf, but didn’t open it. He had the feeling he would need it more on other nights.

I
T WOULD BE SELF-DELUSION
on my part to pretend that what I am doing is actually keeping a diary. The school term is now one week old and I am too tired at the end of each day to do more than glance over notes for the next day’s classes or nod over a newspaper or magazine. The first day, when the boys arrived, was pure bedlam—greeting parents who either had special praise or special requests for their offspring or who took me aside to confide that a son had to be watched to make sure he took a certain medicine for anemia every night, or that another had a masturbation problem, or still another daydreamed in class and needed constant vigilance in respect to his studies to help keep up with his grades.

The boys, when I finally managed to sort one out from the other, seemed like an average group of well brought up young people, polite with their elders, if somewhat condescending, and boisterous with each other. I see no particular difficulties in the future with them. Romero and Rollins seem to be getting along splendidly and in fact Rollins has persuaded Romero to go out for the football team, although Romero cannot weigh more than a hundred and forty pounds and Rollins must weigh at least two hundred and ten. But in an impromptu game of touch football the first day on the campus grounds, Romero, who had been standing to one side watching, had been impressed to fill a side which had lost one of the players because of a slightly sprained ankle and ran for a touchdown the first time he got his hands on the ball. I watched him with amazement, since I had never heard him express interest in any sport, as he sprinted and wheeled and cut back and squirmed away from the arms of boys twice his size. He seemed as unpredictable as a wood dove in flight and his sudden twisting runs left his pursuers panting helplessly behind him. Perhaps, I thought, half-joking to myself, it was just this gift that had kept him from being caught and arrested by the New York City police.

That night Rollins talked to him seriously and took him down to see the football coach and somehow the next afternoon they had found a uniform small enough for him and he was on the football squad. Although I feared what the result would be when he was hit in a real scrimmage by a mass of brutes who all towered over him, it boded well for his acceptance by the other students.

A few days after the beginning of the term a message was left for Strand that the headmaster would like to see him at his convenience. When he went to Babcock’s office he was greeted warmly but nervously. “We have a little problem,” Babcock said. “It’s about Jesus Romero.”

“Ah,” Strand said.

“Exactly,” Babcock said. “Ah. It seems that Romero has been skipping chapel. As you may know, we have to abide by certain terms which we accepted when we were bequeathed the endowment fund which kept this school going when it looked as though it was going to founder in the 1960s. It was a most generous gift—most generous. The new field house is a result of it; our library, which is one of the finest in any school in the East; many other amenities…. The old lady who left us the money in her will happened to be an extremely religious woman with a strong mind of her own and one condition laid down in her will was that every student attend chapel every school day. She also added the condition that all boys wear jackets and ties in the dining room. Other schools have moved away from these customs. We can’t. I wonder if you can reason with Romero before I have to take official action against him.”

“I’ll try,” Strand said.

“You’ve seen for yourself, the services are practically nondenominational. Almost anodyne. There are quite a few Catholic and Jewish boys enrolled and they seem to have no difficulties in bending to the rules of the school. You might mention this to Romero.”

“I will,” Strand said. “I’m sorry he’s causing you all this trouble.”

“There are bound to be worse ones before the term is up. And not only with Romero,” Babcock said.

Strand called Romero in to see him after classes and told him what the headmaster had said, using all the headmaster’s arguments. Romero listened in silence, then shook his head. “I don’t care about the Jews and the other Catholics,” he said. “I’m my own kind of Catholic.”

“When was the last time you went to Mass?” Strand asked.

Romero grinned. “When I was baptized. I don’t believe in God. If I have to choose between chapel and leaving school I’ll go pack my bag.”

“Are you sure you want me to tell Mr. Babcock that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re dismissed,” Strand said.

When Strand reported his conversation with Romero the next day to Babcock, the headmaster sighed. A good part of his conversation, Strand realized, was punctuated by sighs. “Well,” he said, “if nobody makes a noise about it I guess we can live with it.”

“There’s another thing,” Strand said. “It’s, about my wife. She has no classes on Wednesday and none until ten in the morning on Thursdays. Would you think it an imposition if she went into New York each Wednesday? She has several pupils she doesn’t want to give up.”

“I quite understand,” Babcock said. “Of course.”

Strand went out of his office, thinking what a decent and intelligent and flexible man. Already so early in the term, Strand had felt how easily and calmly the school was run, how discipline was kept with very little constraint. There was an easygoing friendliness between the boys and the faculty that provided an invigorating climate for the process of teaching and learning and Strand was rediscovering some of the sense of hope that he had in his early years as a teacher.

“You’re lucky Mr. Babcock is such a lenient man,” Strand said to Romero the next day. He had let the boy sweat for a night before telling him of Babcock’s decision. “He’s going to keep you on. Just don’t tell everybody about it. And you might write him a note of thanks.”

“Did you ask him if
he
believed in God?”

“Don’t press your luck, young man,” Strand said shortly.

Romero took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. “There’s something here you have to sign, Mr. Strand,” he said. “It’s the permission from my mother for me to play on the football team. I just got it this afternoon.”

Strand looked at the paper. It was a form printed by the athletic department, with a space for a parent’s signature and one for the signature of the housemaster attesting to the genuineness of the parent’s signature. In this case it was merely a scrawled X in pencil. As Strand looked at it Romero looked at him with the challenging direct dark stare that Strand still found uncomfortable. But even then, this evidence of the transition in one generation from an illiterate mother to an adolescent who could argue heatedly about the works of Edward Gibbon made Strand think more kindly than usual of the working of the American public school system.

When he gave the form, as required, to Mr. Johnson, the football coach, a serious and devout young man who conducted prayers before each game in the locker room in which he asked God not for victory but for the safety of the players on both teams, he raised his eyebrows at the X. “I suppose this is legal,” he said.

“I would think so,” Strand told him.

“Anyway,” he said, “the
kid
can read signals.” Then, with a smile, “Even though he rarely follows them. He drives the other boys crazy. They never know what he’s going to do. If he’s called to go around end and things don’t look too good for him there, he just turns around and goes through center or even around the other end. He does everything wrong and I bawl him out for it, but it doesn’t help much. And it’s hard to be too tough on him. At his size it takes guts to even be out there, and then, most of the time he gets away with it. Somehow, he’s out in the open and making big hunks of yardage. He’s like an eel—nobody can really get hold of him. It’s almost as though he’s escaping from a lynching party. I don’t think he cares whether we win or lose a game, he just wants to show everybody that he’s uncatchable. I tell you something, Mr. Strand, in all the time I’ve played football and coached it, I never set eyes on a kid like this before. He’s not like an athlete—he’s like some kind of wild animal. It’s like having a crazy panther on the squad.”