Shadowland

    Years ago, when John Kennedy was still a senator from Massachusetts and Steve McQueen was Josh Randall on television and McDonald's had sold only two million hamburgers and narrow ties and tab collars were coming in for the first time, Carson was Spartan and tweedy and a bit desperate and self-conscious about its status; now it is a place where rich boys and girls go if they have trouble in the public schools. Tuition was seven hundred and fifty dollars a year; now it is just under four thousand.

    It has even changed sites. When I was there with Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale and the others, the school was chiefly situated in an old Gothic mansion on the top of a hill, to which had been added a modern wing-steel beams and big plates of glass. The old section of the school somehow shrank the modern addition, subsumed it into itself, and all of it looked cold and haunting.

    This original building, along with the vast old gymnasium (the field house) behind it, was built mainly of wood. Parts of the original building — the headmaster's office, the library, the corridors and staircases — resembled the Garrick Club. Old wood polished and gleaming, oak bookshelves and handrails, beautiful slippery wooden floors. This part of the school always seduced prospective parents, who had the closet anglophilia of their class. Some of the rooms were jewel-box tiny, with mullioned windows, paneled walls, and ugly radiators that gave off little heat. If Carson had been the manor house some of its aspects suggested, it would have been not only haunting but also haunted.

    Once every two or three years when I go back and drive past the school's new Quantum Hills site, I see a long neo-Georgian facade of reddish brick, long green lawns, and a soccer field far off — all of it fresh green and warm brick, so like a campus, so generalized that it seems a mirage. This cozy imitation of a university seems distant, remote, sealed within its illusions about itself. I know looking at it that the lives of its students are less driven than ours were, softer. Is there, I wonder, a voice still in the school which whispers: I am your salvation, squirt: I am the way, the truth, and the light?

I am your salvation — the sound of evil, of that flabby jealous devil of the second-rate, proclaiming itself.

2

Registration Day: 1958

A dark corridor, a staircase with an abrupt line of light bisecting it at one end, desks with candles dripping wax into saucers lined along a wall. A fuse had blown or a wire had died, and the janitor did not come until the next morning, when the rest of the school registered. Twenty new freshmen milled directionlessly in the long corridor, even the exceptionally suntanned faces looking pale and frightened in the candlelight.

    'Welcome to the school,' one of the four or five teachers present joked. They stood in a group at the entrance to the even darker corridor which led to the administration offices. 'It isn't always this inefficient. Sometimes it's a lot worse.'

    Some of the boys laughed — they were new only to the Upper School, and had been at Carson, down the street in the mansard-roofed Junior School, all their lives.

    'We can begin in a moment,' another, older teacher said flatly, cutting off the meek laughter. He was taller than the others, with a narrow head and a pursy snapping turtle's face moored by a long nose. His rimless spectacles shone as he whipped his narrow head back and forth in the murk to see who had laughed. He wore the center-parted curling hair of a caricatured eighteen-nineties bartender. 'Some of you boys are going to have to discover that the fun and games are over. This isn't the Junior School anymore. You're at the bottom of the pile now, you're the lowest of the low, but you'll be expected to act like men. Got that?'

    None of the boys responded, and he gave a high-pitched whinnying snort down his long nose. This was obviously the characteristic sound of his anger. 'Got that? Don't you donkeys have ears?'

    'Yes, sir.'

    'That was you, Flanagan?' ' .

    'Yes, sir.' The speaker was a wiry-looking boy whose red-blond hair was combed in the 'Princeton' manner, flat and loose over the skull. In the moving dim light from the candles, his face was attentive and friendly.

    'You coming out for JV football this fall?'

    'Yes, sir.'

    All the new boys felt a fresh nervousness.

    'Good. End?'

    'Yes, sir.'

    'Good. If you grow a foot, you'll be varsity material in two years. We could use a good end.' The teacher coughed into his hand, looked behind him down the black administration corridor, and grimaced. 'I should explain. This incredible . . . situation has come about because School Secretary can't find her key to this door.' He banged a heavy arched wooden door behind him with his knuckles. 'Tony could open it if he were here, but he doesn't report until tomorrow. Be that as it may. We can all function by candlelight, I suppose.' He surveyed us as if it were a challenge, and I noticed that his head was as narrow as the side of a plank. His eyes were so close together they all but touched.

    'By the way, you'll all be on the junior-varsity football team,' he said. 'This is a small class-twenty. One of the smallest in the whole school. We need all of you out on the gridiron. Not all of you will make it through this . . . crucial year, but we have to try to make football players out of you somehow.'

    Some of the other teachers began to look restive, but he ignored them. 'Now, I know some of you boys from the good work you did with Coach Ellinghausen in the eighth grade, but some of you are new. You.' He pointed at a tall fat boy near me. 'Your name.'

    'Dave Brick.'

    'Dave Brick, what?'

'Sir.'

    'You look like a center to me.'

    Brick showed consternation, but nodded his head.

    'You.' He pointed at a small olive-skinned boy with dark liquid eyes.

    The boy squeaked.

    'Name.'

    'Nightingale, sir.'

    'We'll have to put some meat on you, won't we, Nightingale?'

    Nightingale nodded, and I could see his legs trembling in his trousers.

    'Speak in sentences, boy. Yes, sir. That is a sentence. A nod is not a sentence.'

    'Yes, sir.'

    'Tackle?'

    'I guess so, sir.'

    The teacher snorted, surveyed us all again. The waxy smell from the candles was beginning to build up, hot and greasy, in the corridor. Suddenly he snaked out one thick hand and grabbed Dave Brick's hair, which was combed into two small curling waves meeting in the center of his forehead. 'Brick! Cut that disgusting hair! Or I'll do it for you!'

Brick quailed and jerked back his head. His throat convulsed, and I thought he was choking back vomit.

    The narrow-faced man snapped his hand back and wiped it on his baggy trousers. 'School Secretary is sorting out some papers you will need, forms for you to fill out and things like that, but since we . . . seem to have some time, I'll introduce you to the masters who are here today. I am Mr. Ridpath. My subject is world history. I am also the football coach. I will not have any of you in class for two years, but I will see you on the field. Now.' He took a step to the side and turned so that his face was in darkness. Oily tendrils of hair above his ears shone in the candlelight. 'These men are most of the masters you'll have this year. You will have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Thorpe, your Latin master, the day after tomorrow. Latin is a compulsory subject. Like football. Like English. Like Mathematics. Mr. Thorpe is as tough as I am. He is a great teacher. He was a pilot in World War One. It is an honor to be in Mr. Thorpe's Latin I. Now, here is Mr. Weatherbee — he will be your Mathematics I teacher, and he is your form tutor. You can go to him with your problems. He comes to us from Harvard, so he probably won't listen to them.'