Whipping Boy (5 page)

{Courtesy of John Vornle}

Cesar, age eleven or twelve.

Paul gleefully obeyed, securing my wrists to the metal crossbars of a bunk with a couple of towels. Timothy was then ordered to cue up the interlude, which comes halfway through
“Trial Before Pilate.” While that was taking place, I said and did nothing. Resistance, I knew, would only prolong the performance.

When everything was set, Timothy hit
PLAY
, and Cesar began lip-syncing:

                       
PILATE
:

                       
I see no reason. I find no evil.

                       
This man is harmless, so why does he upset you?

                       
He’s just misguided, thinks he’s important,

                       
But to keep you vultures happy I shall flog him.

Pilate’s proposal—to whip the prisoner—fails to calm the bloodlust of the rabble, which demands nothing short of crucifixion:

                               
THE MOB
:

                               
Remember Caesar.

                               
You have a duty

                               
To keep the peace, so crucify him!

                               
Remember Caesar.

                               
You’ll be demoted.

                               
You’ll be deported. Crucify him!

In the Broadway version of the scene, Pilate stands firm, if only temporarily, and has Jesus whipped with clockwork precision thirty-nine times. But in the Belvedere staging, Cesar, doubling as judge and whipmaster and brandishing a belt, took liberties.

                       
One!—THWACK! . . . Two!—THWACK! . . .

                       
Three! . . . Four! . . . Five!—THWACK! . . .

                       
Six! . . . Seven!—THWACK! . . .

Not every syncopated blow heard in the song yielded a correlative crack of the whip. Cesar often lifted his arm, advanced toward me
as if to strike, and then stopped. Fake-outs were as much a part of the performance as those moments when the belt made contact. Introducing randomness into the rhythm of abuse appeared to delight Cesar as much as the abuse itself.

Once the interlude was over and I was released, I fled the room and, taking the stairs two at a time, found refuge in a dank corner of the basement filled with potatoes and mice. I stayed there until dinner, doing my best to stop crying by staring at the glowing face of my father’s wristwatch.

Although the origins of the Fountain Pen Wars remain murky, I am certain of this much: for a few months between late 1971 and early 1972, dozens of Belvedere boys turned writing instruments into semiautomatic weapons, in direct contravention of the
Rules,
which prohibited pupils below the rank of standard-bearer candidate from storing ink in the dorm. During a brief but exhilarating period of rebellion, the house was polka-dotted by fountain-pen-wielding lower-schoolers who could, with a simple flick, strafe a target fifteen feet away.

Group Captain Watts tried his best to quell our insurrection—tried his best and failed. Sure, Groupie had shot down Luftwaffe pilots during World War II, but those skills were useless when confronting a band of insurrectionists concealing improvised explosive devices in their pockets. Tally-board black marks and pensums, though well suited to the nature and color of our misbehavior, failed to stop the wars. Ink sales at the smoke shop soared.

Firing a fountain pen demands supple wrists and keen hand-eye coordination, the same skills required in foosball. So it should come as no surprise that Cesar was an accomplished sharpshooter, or that I was one of his regular targets. Of all our inky showdowns, only one
leaves an indelible mark. Forty years on, I can still conjure up the scene in cinematic detail.

The setting is a Belvedere hallway. In the presence of half a dozen boys, a scrawny ten-year-old finds himself squaring off against a beefy enemy two years his senior. In my mind’s eye, the camera travels over the face of the older kid—thick dark hair, beady black eyes, sly smile—before moving across the snow-white expanse of a freshly laundered No. 1 Dress shirt, the pocket of which holsters an ebony-black Montblanc of German manufacture.

{© Norman Perryman}

Group Captain Watts.

The twelve-year-old draws his weapon, unscrews the cap, and slips it over the barrel. He cocks his arm so that the gold nib of the pen hovers a few inches above his shoulder and then leans forward, poised to fire, while his rival bobs from side to side.

The twelve-year-old squints as he takes aim and, after a few feints, empties the Montblanc with a quick flick of the wrist.

Moments later, I look down to discover black spatter marks dotting the legs of my pants. A couple of bystanders, allies of Cesar, let out a round of cheers.

Okay, so you got me. But now it’s Nosey’s turn.
I unholster my weapon, an American-made Parker 45. The Parker might lack the elegance of the Montblanc, but like the Colt .45 revolver after which it is named, it’s sturdy and reliable.

As I take aim, anticipating the satisfaction of transforming my white-shirted adversary into a spotted dairy cow, Cesar serpentines with unexpected agility.

The tension mounts until I empty my chamber.

Flick!

A brief silence follows, during which I survey my target, my target surveys himself, and the onlookers survey us both.

“Blew it, Kikewheel!” Winn shouts when it becomes obvious that Cesar’s shirt is as white as it was before I discharged my pen.

Cesar smiles and takes a bow.

How could I have missed? I was standing barely ten feet away.

“No, he didn’t!” Woody suddenly yells.

All eyes turn toward Cesar, whose grimace of pleasure abruptly disappears. Confused, he again inspects himself and finds no black marks anywhere on his clothes. “What? Where?”

Woody points.

A wave of satisfaction flows through me once I realize that my shot has, in fact, hit its mark. A single blob of ink has smacked Cesar right in the kisser.

“What? Where?” Cesar says a second time.

His questions rupture the black globule. It spreads over his lips and teeth, then travels down his chin, where a subsidiary droplet begins to pool. Then, for what seems like an eternity, the secondary bead grows until it, too, bursts, and the ink, once more airborne, continues its descent until it strikes the breast pocket of Cesar’s No. 1 Dress shirt.

My triumph was fleeting. But in that moment of intense joy, I felt as if I’d channeled the determination and achievement of a Swiss underdog marksman from an earlier time, William Tell.

My reputation as an inkslinger might have been secure after the showdown with Cesar, but I was hopeless when it came to using pens as they were intended to be used. The
Rules
required me to write a letter
home once a week. My mother, true to her archival tendencies, retained seven of those dispatches: six originals addressed to her plus a photocopy of an aerogram she forwarded on to my father’s aunt, a Viennese émigré who ran a boardinghouse in South London.

None of the seven letters mentions Cesar. I only told my mother about him four or five years after I’d left the school. But the surviving correspondence does capture my loneliness, as well as some pretty shaky spelling:

Dear Mom,

How are you? I am fine. I have recieved only one letter from you!

Dear Tante Martha,

I am feeling hungry at the moment . . . I have found out that people are aloud to have some of chocolate so you can send me a bar or two.

Dear Mom,

I am a little homesick . . . I haven’t been hearing from you resently.

Dear Mom,

Mark reading is soon. (Gulp!)

Mark reading was yet another source of stress. Every two weeks the Belvedere housemaster assembled his boys in the dining hall and, while consulting color-coded report cards that distinguished “effort” from “achievement,” he would, with the tenderness of a drill sergeant, issue public appraisals of our intellectual and moral worth. One of his early assessments of my scholarship began with a single word.

“CARSWHEEL!” he bellowed.

Sniggers spread through the hall.

“CARSWHEEL!”

After a lengthy scolding for grades that put me at the very bottom of the first form, the British equivalent of sixth grade, the housemaster informed me (and everyone else) that my report card—he held the damning evidence high in the air—compelled him to compose a lengthy indictment, which he planned to send to “any school stupid enough to consider taking on Carswheel once we give him the boot!”

The longest of the seven letters my mother preserved is easier for me to quote than to analyze:

Dear Mom,

How are you? I am fine. When I look at the size of your letter and compare them with mine I feel very inferior, so today I plan to write a long letter. Last night I did not sleep well. I bet if I didn’t have my Aiglon blankets (little that I get) I am sure my toes would have gotten frost-bitten and would have fallen off! Everything is O.K. on the Aiglon Campus (except for a little student unrest). Some one ran away from school and was found with his father in
London
! I went on my second expedition with my warm sleeping bag. I went to Solalaix and farther. I am sorry I didn’t write earlier. I supose my inferiority will last . . .

Love, Allen xxxxxxxxxxxx . . .

“Found with his father in
London
!” I underlined the name of the city, but the word I should have highlighted is
father
. That was the source of my awe, and behind the awe, the source of my unacknowledged longing.

When I was seven or eight, I found a box of Dad’s stuff in the back of a dresser drawer. The keepsakes included a slipcased slide rule, a
leather billfold, two pairs of silver cuff links, an ivory-handled shaving brush, and a wristwatch.
The
wristwatch. The one my father was wearing when he was wheeled out of my life. Except for the watch, none of the uncovered personal effects had much personal effect on me. But, man oh man, how I loved the watch! Whenever Mom let me wind it up—it was an “automatic,” so all one had to do was give the thing a few shakes—the ticking set in motion memories of Villars.

{Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}

The long-lost Omega on the wrist of its original owner—my father.

As soon as I learned I’d be attending Aiglon, I began pestering my mother to allow me to take the watch to school. She said absolutely not. It was way too precious. A huge fight ensued. In the end, my mother caved, and a good thing, too, I thought. Dad’s watch, a stainless steel Omega Seamaster, became my talisman, my pacifier, my shield. Staring at its luminescent dial tempered homesickness, deferred bad dreams, and offset humiliation.