In the same week, I heard a radio production of Giraudoux’s The Apollo of Bellac, and I found it enthralling. One of our assistant teachers recommended I read some of Anouilh’s charming dramatic representations of Greek myths; Sartre’s more weighty, if less elegant, retelling of the Orestia, The Flies, came about here; and then O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Elektra and The Great God Brown.
During the term of Chinese and Indian history, we were also given a French class; our regular Natural Science teacher was taking a year off to devote himself to sculpture, and no replacement could be found. His works were on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, where my parents took me once to see them. Our art teacher (whose works were occasionally to be seen at the Whitney) used to say of his, while swinging her long arms back and forth against her gray apron: “Well, I don’t think they’re very good — too formal, too congested. But it has something…”
With a yellow pointer wielded in chalk-whitened fingers, Madame Geritsky, shorter than most of her pupils, made us memorize pages of French prose, which we had to recite alone and in unison, our u’s, r s, and Fs constantly corrected.
I was never a good language student: but I was a bold one. Years later, when I actually spent time in other countries, I found that, armed with the all-important sentences well memorized (“How do you say that in Greek/Italian/Turkish…”), I could pick up in weeks, or even days, at least temporarily, what took others months to acquire.
We reconstruct from memory a childhood that, as adults, we can bear. I think of mine as one in which I liked many people and was liked in return. If I was as happy as I remember, one reason is that I went to a school where athletic prowess and popularity were not necessarily synonymous. Among the three classes of ten to thirteen that formed our grade, there were only three boys I recall as particularly good at sports. And two of these used to vie for position as Class Bully. Everyone cordially despised them.
In gym, three mornings and three afternoons a week, we indulged in an amazingly sadistic game called “bombardment”: two teams hurled soccer balls at one another, taking prisoner anyone hit. Our gym teacher, named (I kid you not) Muscles, had several times pulled Arthur out for purposely hitting another player so hard with the ball he brought the boy to tears.
During one of my early lapses with Robert (was I seven? eight?), Arthur tried to pick a fight with me on the school roof. He was a head taller than everybody else in the class, possibly slightly older. As he was shoving me back into the wire fence at the roof’s edge, I said to myself: “This is silly!” So I announced to him that, indeed, it was silly of him to push me around: I was his friend. So he should stop. After the third time I said it, he looked perplexed and said, “Oh.” I straightened my clothes and suggested we play together. For the next two weeks I went regularly to his house in the afternoons, invited him, regularly, to mine, and spent inordinate amounts of time helping him with his arithmetic homework.
Finally, I got bored.
He was not bright; he was lonely; he was belligerent. Friendship with Robert did not cut me off from friendship with anyone else: Robert was just strange. Friendship with Arthur did: Arthur was actively antisocial. Because he was ill-practiced in keeping friendships going, it was extremely easy to maneuver my way out of it, by being otherwise occupied here, too busy there, all the while counting on the fact he valued me too much to protest. In another week, without any particular scenes, we were no longer even speaking.
Anywhere outside the gymnasium, Arthur was subjected to a needling harassment that certainly fed his belligerence and, in its way, was much more vicious than that first day’s attack on Robert. Robert’s attack lasted minutes. Arthur’s, practically without let-up, went on for years.
Arthur had committed some particularly annoying offense. A bunch of us got together and decided we must teach him a lesson. We agreed that, for the rest of the week, no one in the class would speak to him, or acknowledge he was there in any way. After a couple of hours, he hit a few people. They scooted out of the way, giggling. An hour after that, he was sitting on the hallway floor by the green book-box, leaning against it, sobbing. The teachers finally realized what we were doing and demanded we stop. So we did — while any teachers were around.
On the last day of this treatment (and there were others, dreamed up for him practically every month), Arthur managed to confront a bunch of us in the narrow, fenced-in enclosure in front of the school. He yelled at us angrily, then began to cry. We watched, mild embarrassment masked with mild approval, when, in the middle of his crying, Arthur suddenly pointed to me and exclaimed: “But you’re my friend! You’re my friend!”
Had it not been the last day, I would have stayed with my group. As it was, I spoke to him, left my friends, and went with him to the corner where he caught his bus home. I may even have explained to him why we’d done it. But I doubt, at this point, if he either understood or cared.
I think, however, this was where I began to realize that such cerebral punishments teach the offender nothing of the nature of annoyance, injury, or suffering he has inflicted: They teach only the strength of the group, and the group’s cruelty — the group’s oblivion to the annoyance, injury, and suffering it can inflict — the same, basic failing of the offender.
I didn’t consider Arthur my friend. After walking him to the corner, I made no other efforts to be friendly. As other harassments came up, I was just as likely to be party — except that I now stayed more in the background to avoid being called to witness. But in gym class, Arthur no longer hurled at me his bombardment ball.
At six and seven, Arthur was a bully. By eleven or twelve, he was class clown; last in his school work, still incredibly aggressive in sports, now, whenever there was any tension between him and any teacher or classmate, he would drop his books all over the floor, belch loudly, or give a shrill, pointless giggle. We, at any rate, laughed — and despised him nonetheless. Our harassments had been effective: He was no longer likely to hit you. Frankly, I’m not sure that his earlier reactions weren’t the more valid.
I am sure, however, that given another time, another place, another school, and children from families that had indulged different values, Arthur might have been the well-liked, admired student while I, an eccentric weakling of a different race, who lived half his life in another world, might have suffered all the harassment I so cavalierly helped in heaping on him.
Dalton prided itself in its progressiveness and courted an image of eccentricity. (The bizarre elementary school in Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame is supposedly Dalton.) The eccentricity went no further than the headmistress announcing to each class, at the beginning of each year, in a very guarded tone: “If you really have something worthwhile, creative, and constructive to do, then you may arrange to be excused from regular classes.” The announcement was made once and never repeated, though, in the Dalton brochures, this aspect of the school’s individualized approach to each student was made much of. To my knowledge, I was the only student from my year who ever got to wheedle his way out of some of the more arduous classes: I developed an incredibly complex art project that involved paintings, sculptures, and electric lights, and announced to my math teacher that I wanted special instruction in calculus, and wanted it now.