New Moon (22 page)

When I fell back asleep, though, I found myself in the vacant classroom at night. I ran down the hallway in fear of what might come out of such an emptiness, ran all the way to the auditorium where—in pitch black, just what I feared—a rude billowing voice arose from behind the stage and roared through the room like a beast. I turned and fled out the door. I raced for blocks, but the sound pursued me, persistent against the sky.

The summer of ’56 I went, as usual, to Chipinaw, this time as a prep-school-student-to-be. We were expected to have read at least four books of our choice from a Horace Mann assigned list, so I arrived with instructions from my mother that I be given time off for the task, the precise exemption I had long sought. Taking advantage, I packed not only the required
David Copperfield
but two other Dickens novels,
Martin Chuzzlewit
and
Our Mutual Friend,
and bought the complete Sherlock Holmes rather than the recommended
Casebook.

I lived that summer in fog along the Thames, unravelling John Rokesmith’s multiple identities and accompanying Martin Chuzzlewit from America to England. Whole nineteenth-century realms passed through me as I lay in the grass, beyond the stridency of games.

Bunk 14’s regular counselor, Bernstein, had to leave for an undisclosed emergency mid-August—or maybe it was that we ran him ragged. He was a legendary disciplinarian who had sought the glory of whipping us into shape. But Bernstein was no match for our
chutzpah,
wits, and arrays of water traps and disappearing and reappearing objects. We left him apoplectic.

An older guy was hired from off campus and put in charge of Bunk 14. Rumor was that he was an escaped convict and they had found him hitchhiking. Probably not, but it fit his m.o. He carried a mean-looking knife, drank straight from a bottle of hard liquor, and cursed us with four-letter words. He didn’t care about our keeping things neat—a tip-off that he was not Chipinaw stock—though
he liked to order us around like slaves. He raided our secret food caches and, at meals, ate many of our portions too. He also invited kids to reach in his pocket while he lounged on his bed and feel a special treat he had there if anyone was hungry.

Nothing close to this redneck had ever happened at Chipinaw. In retrospect, I can’t imagine how the anally fastidious management slipped up or recall why we didn’t report the dude’s malfeasances: I mean, a weapon, alcohol, pedophilia. I guess we thought we had lost all credibility by then.

At breakfast one morning after our usual allotment (when French toast was on the menu) of eight pieces was deposited on the table, Ralph grabbed the platter and, in a deft scoop of his fork, stabbed four, leaving the rest for us to divide. I didn’t care much for Chipinaw French toast—and I had stayed mostly out of Ralph’s way—but this was an over-the-top psycho and I was incensed that he should have been put in charge of us. When the platter reached me, there was one piece left and one more person to go after me. I handed it back to Ralph and said, “Here. Maybe you didn’t get enough.” There was a hush as he surveyed me with wild eyes.

“Stand up!” he screamed. That was the supreme embarrassment in the Chipinaw dining room—public reprimand. I sat there.
“Stand up!”
He rose and pointed at me. The cavernous room had turned silent. Jay and Barry were staring in horror.

“Stand. Up!”

I complied more in fury than obedience and, with a quick swat of my hand, turned over the pot of hot coffee on him. He let out a howl and dove across the table at me. Three other counselors wrestled him to the ground. “I’m going to kill him,” he screamed. “The little bastard, I’m going to kill him.”

Despite the incident they left him in our bunk. I got only sporadic sleep after that, waking in starts, staring across the murk at his quiescent hulk, wondering if he was asleep or just pretending, and where the knife was (if not tucked under the covers with him). But I made it through the final week to the banquet alive (in some alternate reality I was murdered and Chipinaw was front-page headlines). All that last day we packed our clothes in trunks. I felt
so much frenzied energy I could barely contain it: I didn’t have to sleep there another night—our beds were stripped, our cubbies bare. Deliverance!

Near the end of the after-dinner awards ceremony, cars arrived to collect us: me, Jay, Siggy, Jay’s cousins from the girls’ camp, and Barry. No imagined escape by flying saucer was more thrilling or exotic. We were lights moving along back roads toward the Emerald City. Everything was charged, intricate, weird—billboards gateways to welcoming universes.

I had dreams of Horace Mann before I went there. Hiking up marble steps, I passed between pillars fronting a Greek temple. As I entered, it turned into a large industrial building. Once inside, I could find no classrooms, only hallways through which crowds of people rushed. I saw no kids either, just preoccupied adults carrying papers and books.

My mother took me to Saks Fifth Avenue and had me fitted for an entire wardrobe of sports jackets, ties, slacks, and shoes. As at Chipinaw accouterings, I was only an incidental mannequin to the deliberations of a woman and a salesman, as though they were deciding how some abstract child might look if he were properly attired. I could barely imagine attending a boys’ academy where jackets and ties were required and the teachers had to be addressed as “Sir,” so I felt like an impostor in these expensive duds.

On the evening before the first day of Horace Mann my mother and Bob marked the occasion by taking me out to dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. He spoke with his familiar adman flamboyance: “I hope you appreciate where you’re going. This is your chance to join the archons of our society.”

“I don’t think he realizes how much work it will be,” my mother inserted.

I was silent; I already feared the worst. “This is his last free night,” she continued, staring at me, “for six years!”

“Don’t be ghoulish,” Bob chided.

Lying in bed on the eve of a new life, I tried to grasp what was happening. Why had they even admitted a boy who barely made it through P.S. 6?

Awakened by Bridey’s cheery 6 a.m. summons—“New school for the lad, rise and shine”—groggily I pulled pins and tissue paper out of a shirt and, before the bathroom mirror, knotted a red-and-brown striped tie. Trepidation warred with suspense, layers of sleepiness stirring remembrances in nausea-like aftertastes of breakfast: the dragons of Blueland, Flash Gordon at the Martian court. My mind kept supplying guises of stern, unsmiling masters like the signers of the Declaration.

I glanced at the harlequin child in the mirror. Six years! I didn’t think I could do this for a week.

By phoning the school my mother had gotten the names of two older students who lived in our neighborhood and arranged for them to teach me the route. I left Jon waiting for the Bill-Dave wagon at the 1235 canopy and proudly strode west across Park, then north across 96th Street to where a group of Horace Manners had gathered at the bus stop. My chaperones quickly identified themselves.

Boarding, we dropped coins into the driver’s box, then found seats along the rear window. There they taught me a game played with serial numbers on the transfers we had requested (but didn’t need). We raced each other to be the first to make our consecutive digits end up at ten by trying out sequences of addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and squares until we landed on the decimal ten at the end (for instance, 71435 could hit the target as 7 squared minus 1 divided by 4 plus 3 minus 5). It would be months before we tired of this exercise (it now seems apropos that my first contact with Horace Mann was a cerebral math game). Meanwhile, Madison and Fifth flew by as we zipped into the Park through its tunnels to the less familiar West Side. After Central Park West came Columbus and Amsterdam, foreboding side streets before the years of gentrification. We disembarked next at commercial Broadway and plunged into the tenebrous IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit).

Purchasing fifteen-cent tokens from the lady at the booth, we bombed through the turnstiles to catch a pausing train. In later weeks I would simply flash my student pass at the agent as I opened the gate.

Barely beating the thud of metallic doors, we sat in contemplative silence as—stop by stop—the car filled with attendees of different
schools, most of the further uptown arrivals having to stand. Then the train rattled out of the underworld onto stilts and wound above the northern city, emptying by portions onto streets in the 200s.

Horace Mann shared the last station with Manhattan College: 242nd Street—all off—the train emptying in a bustle verging on pandemonium. From there we hiked four blocks up a hill to 246th. (Unaccompanied on my second day, I overrated the age of Horace Mann upperclassmen, joined the wrong crowd, and ended up at an edifice resembling the temple of my dream.)

I was expected to report to Pforzheimer Hall, its sleek modern box hugging a slope below ivy-covered classrooms. Designated expressly for the Lower School, it was like an elongated space station with entry ports. We were its baptizers, which postponed the start of classes for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting. I was grateful for a few extra hours before any action was required other than getting my schedule from an alphabetical stack—no way to mess up yet. On the other hand, I had a full calendar card of classes in separate rooms—not one teacher for everything like at P.S. 6—and a new last name. This was getting serious!

We were each assigned a locker on the ground floor of Pforzheimer and given the combination to the lock on it. Mine was 22-36-10. I had no idea how to rotate the nob onto those numbers in such a way that the pins would drop. Arnie Goldman, alphabetically one locker to my left, taught me that you had to make a full circle and then, after lining up the black notches of each digit, reverse direction. Like a parent he put his hand over mine and turned it with me until I got the flair.

My first day as Richard Grossinger seemed an eternity among mobs of First Formers scurrying with and against traffic. Each teacher, though amiable, without fail warned that his course would take at least an hour’s homework every night and that we had better pay scrupulous attention to his lessons. “Every pearl of wisdom that comes from my ruby-red lips,” advised Mr. Allison in American History when asked by an earnest lad, “What are we responsible for, sir?” Maybe this
was
the end of freedom. But for one precious day I was snug and anonymous among the masses, no different from
any other plebe. The second morning, lectures began in earnest.

Almost immediately I realized that I couldn’t maintain a folio of interplanetary adventures and stay alert. That had been true, of course, at P.S. 6, but I didn’t take the matter seriously there. The spaceship I launched in Miss Tighe’s class had an irresistible appeal. Here I was a new person, caught up: I didn’t want to slide back into truancy and forsake this exciting new world.

In a series of elaborately plotted installments I concluded my odyssey among the stars. That was no mean feat, for, though imaginary, the ship was an intricately conceived machine, each detail of its manufacture and function committed to memory. I couldn’t just expel such an object from myself. I had to unravel its history with the same care and credibility with which I had invented it.

To dismiss the craft and its adventures fliply—easy come, easy go—would have broken faith with my samaritans as well as the characters I had adopted over the years. They had been faithful companions and I would miss them.

I extricated myself by making the end of the narrative as meticulous and definitive as its beginning. While falling sleep those first nights of Horace Mann, I flew back to Earth and returned everyone to their lives. I needed the logic and maturity of a twelve-year-old to break a seven-year-old’s spell.

Sometimes the great vehicle crashed; sometimes it was returned to its makers; sometimes it was hurtled out of the Galaxy and swallowed into infinity; but it had to be put irretrievably beyond reach. Without a clean break, I risked relapse. Although I reclaimed the vessel briefly in later years, it would never again be real.

In jacket and tie, scrawling till my hand ached, I tried to capture the gist of recitations and blackboard demonstrations—arithmetic formulas, families of languages, parts of speech, the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. All around me in jackets and ties were fellow scholars, scribbling away. No one knew that Richard Grossinger had never been a scholar, that he was dressed like a gentleman for the first time, that he was really Richard Towers.

I was mostly cheerful, for I felt a respite from both the family
hothouse and the premonition of a Horace Mann beyond reach. The math turned out to be no harder than what Mr. Hilowitz had taught me. General Language, English, and history were straightforward exercises in the roots of common words, sentence structure, and the laws of the Constitution. I regurgitated from heart the rules of parliamentary order. I learned how to diagram sentences: subject, verb, object in a horizontal row; vertical lines with hooks for adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions. I solved equations that had letters as well as numbers.

In Music I learned to identify composers and their symphonies. I loved hearing the anthems and guns hidden in Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture,
the aroused skeletons of Saint Saëns’ bewitching-hour graveyard. Here again were symbols wrapped in façades. I even had Daddy get me
Danse Macabre,
my first-ever classical disk in its fancy cardboard wrapper.

Twice a day a random cull of us rotated into study hall, a silent period during which the rest of our classmates were at a lesson. There we were expected to start our night’s homework.

Yanking me out of the academic spell were two hours of gym that capped each afternoon. At two o’clock the whole First Form straggled from separate classrooms in Pforzheimer to the campus walkway and around it into the basement of a gray fortress on the far side of the playing fields. There we were assigned a second set of lockers and ordered to get into sweat clothes pronto.

The gazes of our coaches, credentialed deliverers of male authority, bore right through cowed young scholars. Calling us by last name only, often preceded by a scornfully prolonged “Mister,” they explained that we would be issued instructions “just once, faggots, so you better get it on the first try.” After imparting each drill, they stood back with folded arms and squinched eyes to observe our renditions.