The beginning of the semester at Walker’s passed in a blur. I remember spending a lot of time marveling at how difficult it was to be new—something I hadn’t experienced since I was six years old, when everyone else starting at camp or Kew-Forest was new, too. I’d learned that it was unusual, and ill-advised, to start boarding school as a junior. Both of my roommates were new juniors, too, which might have helped, but they had a lot in common with each other and bonded quickly. They didn’t leave me out, and we all got along; I just didn’t fit in with them.
I tried out for the soccer team, read through my syllabi, bought my books and school supplies. I was surprised by how much independence we had. Despite being in the middle of nowhere and having no real amenities off campus other than a small group of stores a couple of miles down the road, including a McDonald’s and the drugstore where everybody bought their cartons of cigarettes, we were left to our own devices when we weren’t in class. Small groups pulled all-nighters in the lounge downstairs or in each other’s rooms. Students could smoke in a room in the basement called the Fish Bowl or in designated areas outside, pretty much whenever they wanted. We had the run of the dining room long after meals were over.
And then, at ten o’clock on a Saturday night a couple of weeks in, Dunn, a PE teacher at Walker’s whom I’d known since the early 1970s because she was also a counselor at camp, walked up to me in the auditorium where we’d been watching a movie, a piece of scrap paper in her hand. She told me she needed to tell me something, and as we walked out, she relayed the message: call your mother, or your grandparents if she isn’t home.
When I got back to my dorm, I made a collect call to my mother from the pay phone in the stairwell right next to my room. When she didn’t answer, I called the House. My grandfather picked up, sounding the same as ever. Although he conceded that my father was sick enough to be admitted to the hospital, he told me it was nothing to worry about. “Call your mother in the morning,” he said. It was only when I pressed him that he acknowledged my father’s situation was serious. Yes, it’s his heart. Yes, I’d say it’s serious. But he spoke with no sense of urgency at all. He told me again to go to sleep and call my mother in the morning. She’d fill me in.
I called her again immediately after hanging up, and this time she answered—she’d been on her way back home from the House when I called the first time—and she was crying. My father was dead.
I don’t know how long I sat on the floor of the stairwell with the phone receiver hanging on its cord next to me. Eventually, Kate, the dorm proctor who had the room next to mine, came to check on me. She put the phone to her ear and hung it up. “Are you OK?”
I looked at her but didn’t say anything.
Only half an hour earlier, I’d been talking and laughing with people who might become my friends. I thought maybe I would belong there someday.
I learned later that an ambulance had been called in the afternoon. My grandfather called his other four children to tell them my father had been taken to the emergency room, but he reached only Donald and Elizabeth, who drove out to Queens to join their parents. Donald called my mother to let her know Dad was in bad shape, and she drove immediately to the House even though my father had been taken to Queens General Hospital only five minutes from our building. Then he and Elizabeth went to the movies. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that they should be with my father.
It was just before 9:30 P.M. when Donald and Elizabeth returned (they probably saw Arthur; they probably ate popcorn). The hospital had just called my grandfather with the news that my father was dead. Donald left to drive back to the city, and Elizabeth, after making a cup of tea, went upstairs to her room without saying a word.
My grandmother followed Elizabeth upstairs and my mother stayed in the library with my grandfather to discuss how my brother and I should get home. At first, my grandfather insisted it wasn’t necessary for Fritz, who was at college in Orlando, to return home at all. My mother told him her cousin Van lived near the campus and he could make the arrangements and take Fritz to the airport. Walker’s was only a two-hour-and-forty-five-minute drive from New York, so they agreed I should take a bus in the morning.
My mother called Van first; she wanted to make sure somebody was with Fritz when she broke the news. Van drove to the dorm and brought my brother back to their house to spend the night. Then she called my house parents to tell them what had happened, and they gave Dunn the message for me to call home.
As soon as I got back to my room, Dunn told me I’d be staying with her that night. I packed my bags, and told Dunn and my roommates that I didn’t want anybody else to know what had happened. I was adamant about this. I felt it would make it impossible for me to be myself if everybody knew, as if the news of my father’s death would taint me somehow.
We walked to the dorm where Dunn was a house parent. A few students were waiting outside of her apartment. I didn’t look at them and stepped inside as soon as Dunn opened the door.
Dunn and I spread a couple of sheets and a blanket on the floor and she threw me a couple of pillows. People started knocking on the door. By eleven, a steady stream of students came by to tell me how sorry they were, to see how I was doing, to gawk. I hadn’t even met most of them and barely recognized the rest. I felt very speeded up; everything was brighter than it should have been. I sat on the floor, leaning against the couch with a blanket around my shoulders, wondering aloud why it was so cold.
Eventually, they all left, but I couldn’t sleep. I spent the night shivering, and by the time the sun rose, I was numb with exhaustion. After Dunn woke up, she offered to make breakfast, but I wasn’t hungry. She got ready and drove me to the bus station in Hartford.
I fell asleep as soon as I took my seat, and I didn’t wake up until the bus pulled into a bay at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. My vision was blurry from exhaustion and the fluorescent lights glared as I walked through the terminal, my bag slung over my shoulder, trying to find the right exit. I hadn’t been to Port Authority in years, and I was so tired—more tired than I’d been before I slept—that it took me a while to orient myself. I finally found the sign for the Forty-Second Street exit. When I got outside, I saw my mother’s car idling at the curb halfway down the block.
My mother had already picked my brother up from the airport and he was in the passenger seat, so I slid into the back. We all said hi. Mom asked me how the trip had been. I shrugged.
One of my best friends from Kew-Forest was waiting for me in the lobby when we got back to the Highlander. Upstairs, I grabbed a couple of Pepsis out of the refrigerator and she and I went to my room. After I stood awkwardly for a few minutes— I rambled about Walker’s, about what a weird experience it had been so far, how different the people were—she finally told me to sit down.
I leaned against the wall, a couple of pillows propped behind me. She put Billy Joel’s Streetlife Serenade on the turntable, then sat at the end of the bed facing me, legs crossed. We talked a bit—about Kew-Forest and our friends—but mostly we listened to the music, which we’d heard hundreds of times before. She stayed with me as the sky darkened. Without meaning to, I fell asleep.
When I woke up, I was alone. The merest sliver of a crescent moon hung outside my window.