On the Saturday before students arrived for orientation, we had an all-faculty meeting and subsequent department meetings, where I had met with Sam Hodges and my other English department colleagues. They were all earnest, low-key, pleasant men who seemed to enjoy their work and their place at Blackburne. Despite their kind welcome, I felt a bit like an imposter, especially as more than one of them had taught me as a student.
That afternoon, Sam hosted a faculty party at his house. I walked over from my apartment in Lawson-Parker, the double dormitory for fourth- and fifth formers. The sun flared out of a white sky, and a sultry heat lay on the Hill, broken only by the occasional dry rasp from a field cricket. The trees themselves looked hot and tired as they threw blurred shadows over the grass. One of the ever-present faculty dogs lying on the front porch of Huber Hall raised a shaggy head to sniff at me, and then, uninterested, went back to its nap.
Sam and his wife lived just down the Hill from Saint Matthew’s Chapel, which was a plain, austere building, its spire rising to a modest height on one end of the Lawn opposite the vast, four-story Stilwell Hall with its massive white columns and portico, its two wings sweeping around to each side as if to claim that end of the Lawn as its own. Sam’s house was more in the style of Saint Matthew’s: a brick ranch, white trim and black shutters freshly painted, the hedges clipped and grass mown, the brass door knocker gleaming against the black door. A weeping willow drooped in the front yard, its leafy branches trailing over the ground. It reminded me of my parents’ house, and the thought stirred something in me that rolled over uneasily.
Several people were already gathered on the patio in Sam’s backyard, from which you could see the entire western half of campus, the football field, the nine-hole golf course, and the green wall of trees shimmering in the near distance. Most people seemed relaxed, although Sam, in an apron and chef’s hat, looked hot and flushed from the open heat of a massive gas grill, where he stood skewering hot dogs and flipping hamburgers. I saw a few of my new colleagues, some holding beers. I hesitated at the edge of the patio. It was something of a minor shock to look at this group of mostly middle-aged men talking to one another more freely than they had in that morning’s faculty meeting—a meeting run in a dry, efficient manner by Dr. Simmons, the headmaster of Blackburne. I had known many of these men to wear ties and blazers almost exclusively, unless they were coaching on the athletic field or in the gym. There had always been a thin but impervious membrane between masters and students. And now I was about to become a master. Yet instead of feeling a sense of accomplishment, I felt reluctance, almost an aversion. Blackburne already had me as an alumnus. Now it was about to claim me as an employee. This was a mistake. I had no business being here, doing this.
“Hey! Matthias!” Porter Deems waved me over from his position by an open cooler. He was a short, dark-haired man with the intent look of someone about to sell you something you didn’t want. Grayden Smith stood next to him, frozen for a moment like a startled deer by Porter’s voice; then he raised his hand and smiled at me. Both were new Blackburne teachers like me. The three of us had met that morning.
“Fellas,” I said, strolling over. “What’s up?”
“Getting Gray here a drink. Man’s uptight, needs to relax.” Porter brought up three dripping bottles of beer from the cooler.
“I’m relaxed,” Gray said, twisting the cap off his bottle and flicking it into a nearby trash can. “Just ready for school to start.”
We drank our beers, measuring one another silently. Gray had gone to Kentucky and Georgia Tech. He wore spectacles and was quiet without being shy, measured and deliberate in his speech. He would teach chemistry. Porter was a UConn grad with a master’s in history from Columbia. He radiated self-assurance and energy, the kind of man who would always be white-water rafting or climbing a rock face.
“Hey, I read your book,” Porter said. “Liked the protagonist, that O’Keefe guy. Badass journalist. Sorta Anderson Cooper meets Indiana Jones. But the whole rebel-freedom-fighter thing? I dunno—it was too Hollywood for me.” Before I could formulate a response, he continued. “So you’re an honest-to-God novelist. What’s that like?”
“Like?”
“You get noticed in the street, laid a lot, what?”
At this, Gray nearly choked on his beer but managed to cough it up. Porter whacked him absently on the back as he waited for my reply.
“Women every night,” I said. “They send me their underwear to autograph. It’s embarrassing.”
Porter smirked. Gray cleared his throat loudly and gave me a weak but approving smile. “So,” I said, swirling my beer a bit in my bottle and intending to ask something generic about why they wanted to become teachers or what they thought of Blackburne, something to get away from the topic of my writing.
Then Porter said, nodding behind me, “There’s that creepy dude in the wheelchair.” I turned and saw the man he was referring to. Wearing a short-sleeved denim work shirt and jeans, he was rolling over to Sam at the grill, his forearms tanned and corded with muscle as he swiftly worked the wheels of his chair. He stopped to exchange a few words with Sam and then gazed out blankly at the crowd. “Snuck up on me outside of Stilwell Hall,” Porter said. “I came around the corner and he was sitting there like he was waiting for me. Fucking jumped out of my skin. Told him I hadn’t heard him, and he said he always comes from downwind.” Porter drained his beer. “What’s up with him?”
Gray shot a glance at Porter. “Besides that he’s a paraplegic, you mean?” he asked, taking a measured sip of his beer.
“He’s not a paraplegic,” I said. They both looked at me. “Double amputee. Lost both his legs in the first Gulf War. He just wears long pants to hide it, tucks the pants into work boots he leaves on the footrests of his wheelchair. Name’s Pelham Greer. He used to work here as a maintenance guy, and then he joined the army. When he was discharged, they gave him his old job back.”
Gray gave a low whistle. Porter looked uncomfortable. “Well, shit,” he said. “Now I feel like a tool.”
I shook my head. “He is a little creepy. Used to scare us when we were students, rolling out from behind buildings, stuff like that. But he’s all right.”
Porter gazed over my shoulder and lowered his voice. “Now there’s a guy who would scare me if I were a student.”
I casually glanced in the direction Porter had indicated. Standing off in the side yard and talking with Dave Heidel, our science department chair, was a tall, heavy man, bald as a cucumber and wearing a white suit and vest with a navy-blue tie. He had a tanned, fleshy face with a wide mouth a bit like a frog’s. “He was at the meeting this morning,” I said. “Associate headmaster. What’s his name, Ron something?”
“Ren Middleton,” Porter said. “School disciplinarian. Travis Simmons’s right-hand guy.”
Ren Middleton looked our way, and although he was too far away to have heard Porter, I felt like he had caught us talking about him. Dave Heidel then turned and gestured toward us, nodding, and Middleton headed in our direction.
“Shit,” Porter muttered.
Ren Middleton walked up. “Porter, Grayden, afternoon,” he said. His voice was Charleston to the bone, deep and heavy over the vowels, falling with a soft thud on the consonants. “Getting along?”
“Yes, sir,” Gray said. Porter nodded politely but said nothing.
“Good,” Middleton said. “I’ve found that nothing gets a man more ready for a hard job than good food and good company.” He rested his gaze on me. “You must be Matthias Glass.”
“Yes, sir.” I offered my hand, which he shook firmly.
“Ren Middleton,” he said. Middleton’s eyes were large and mud colored, and he looked at me the way a jeweler would inspect a diamond. “You were a Jefferson Scholar at Virginia, weren’t you? I also attended the university, though a bit before your time. Travis told me you’d indicated an interest in coaching track and recommended you as my assistant. I coach the varsity team.”
“Sure,” I heard myself say. “Happy to help.”
“And I’d be glad of it,” he said. “Oh,” he added deliberately, “my wife loved your book, sir. Perhaps we could get together sometime to talk about it? I’ve always wondered what it must be like to”—he cast about for a word—“create a novel.” He smiled beneficently.
I could feel my own smile tighten. “I don’t know how much writing I’ll get done this year,” I said. “I suspect I’ll be busy enough with my classes.”
Middleton nodded. “Good man,” he said. “Jumping in with both feet. Exactly what we need here.” Then he turned to Gray and Porter, talking with each of them about their thoughts on the upcoming school year. I stood and watched him. I’ve always been drawn to strong personalities, and Ren Middleton was as regal and charismatic as a Renaissance cardinal. He asked Gray what he thought about the school’s chemistry labs and seemed genuinely curious about whether Gray found them adequate. With Porter he talked UConn basketball and then asked if Porter had read a recent book on Afghanistan. This led to a brief discussion of Western involvement in the Middle and Far East, an obvious source of passion for Porter, who grew animated and gestured with his hands while Ren Middleton nodded soberly and posed an occasional question. Clearly, Middleton knew how to read people and get them to talk about subjects that interested them. I wondered how he had read me.
“I hope you’ll excuse me,” Middleton said, consulting his watch, “but I’m afraid I have to be getting home. My wife is cooking dinner. Good to see you, gentlemen.” Then, in a slightly more confidential register, he said to me, “Matthias, do you have a moment?”
I glanced at Porter and Gray, who were already moving toward the grill, and Porter shot me a look that registered somewhere between sympathy and relief. Following Middleton’s lead, I strolled with him off the patio and across Sam Hodges’s backyard, negotiating a hedge of boxwood to come upon the first tee of the golf course, which lay behind Saint Matthew’s. The boxwood hedge effectively cut us off from the party so that we were alone.
We stopped at the top of the fairway. Wide and straight, it unrolled like a fresh carpet of grass down a gentle slope to the track and the football field. My shirt was beginning to cling to my back again from the oppressive heat. The distant trees hung silently at the edge of the fields.
“I’m sorry to seem mysterious,” Ren Middleton said. “I just wanted a word in private.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You see, it’s been a while since a former student has returned to Blackburne to teach,” he said. “I wanted you to know how much we appreciate it.”
“We?”
“Dr. Simmons and I.” He smiled, his fleshy lips stretched wide across his face. “It’s a singular position. A young man who can truly relate to these students, their troubles, give them guidance.” He bent over and picked up a stained golf ball that had lain to one side of the tee. He rolled it between his thick fingers. “This ball is a perfect example,” he said. “It was neglected, left behind by a careless owner. It was inert, if you want to see it that way.”
He drew back his great arm and, in a smooth, powerful motion, he threw the ball down the length of the fairway. The ball, a white blur, skimmed over the green swath and then bounced twice into the shadows of the receding pine trees at the bottom of the hill.
He turned to me. “That’s what we do here,” he said. “We give boys direction, purpose. We send them into the world as better, stronger men.” He grinned. “We kill their inertness.” The grin dropped from his face, and he peered seriously at me. “I’ll be counting on your help with some of these boys. I’m afraid a few of the fourth formers need a firm hand. And they ought to respond to, well, a younger authority figure, I suppose.” He inclined his head to the left, as if to see whether I followed him.
“I’ll help in any way I can,” I said.
He clapped me once on the shoulder. “Good man,” he said. He turned and walked back toward the party, leaving me alone on the hot hillside.
ON SUNDAY, SUVS CRAMMED full of luggage toiled up the Hill in steady succession to unload their bags along with their boys. Car doors slammed shut, and voices called out in greeting. The Hill seemed to sprout dozens of loud, cheerful teenagers in polos and baseball caps. Most grinned at one another and coolly directed their parents in furnishing their rooms. These were the old boys, the returning students inured to the idea of boarding school, their self-confidence almost palpable in comparison to the new boys, who were almost all third and fourth formers.
Each new student stood nervously by the family car, as if trying to keep in contact with something familiar for as long as possible before his parents abandoned him. Almost all of them had braces, or big feet, or skinny legs like toothpicks poking out of shorts that seemed three sizes too large. They had not yet grown into their bodies, which were racing along in the hormonal clutch of adolescence. They appeared both defiant and fragile as they slowly unloaded their cars, stubborn in the face of the long months ahead even as a night of frustrated tears and loneliness awaited them. They murmured rather than spoke, cowed by the brick buildings and the clean walkways that were filling with people who were obviously comfortable here.
The old boys, for the most part, succeeded in making the new boys feel more miserable, calling out excitedly to friends and playing trashcan lacrosse on the Lawn. Teary-eyed mothers did nothing to help the situation. I knew from experience that the new boys would be far too busy a week from now to feel homesick. And yet I couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for every boy with a sad, swollen face who walked grimly into Raleigh Hall or Lawson-Parker as if marching off to a deadly fate.
BRENDSEL DINING HALL IS a vast carpeted room of long dinner tables under a high-beamed ceiling. The first night at Blackburne, and every following Sunday night, students eat a formal, sit-down dinner in Brendsel with their advisors. Each student has a faculty advisor who tracks his grades and offers advice and encouragement—at least in theory. Some advisors were better than others. Sam Hodges was famous for taking his advisees to the Charlottesville malls once a month or so, while Stuart Downing, the longtime Latin teacher, basically ignored his advisees except at Sunday meals, and sometimes even then.
I met my advisees for the first time that night. I had inherited them from Keith Aspinwall, the English teacher I had replaced. A slip of paper with my advisees’ names lay on the stack of dinner plates at the head of the table, and when the dinner bell rang and students arrived at my table, I began counting off names. Soon all the places were filled, and I saw with a bright pop of recognition that one boy I had helped to move in that afternoon, Stephen Watterson, was in my advisory. He gave me an easy smile and waved as he sat down.
The loud hum of conversation dropped and then disappeared as the headmaster’s voice came over the PA system. Travis Simmons preferred rather severe suits of banker’s gray, and he seethed breeding and culture like an ancient, musty library. At the first all-faculty meeting, Dr. Simmons had shaken my hand with one as dry as chalk dust, inclining his head to me in a way that accentuated his stooped shoulders as he welcomed me back to Blackburne. But he could shine brightly in front of a group, speaking eloquently and waxing rhapsodic about the school and its mission. It was this unswerving, intensely personal loyalty to Blackburne that engendered widespread respect for him, even among the students. For some reason, though, I thought about Ren Middleton and his odd lesson about killing inertness and needing my help, the throwing of the golf ball down the fairway, and I glanced at my advisees, wondering how they would react to the headmaster’s voice. They sat quietly, some heads slightly bowed; a few faces were tilted up toward a speaker mounted on the wall.
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Simmons was saying, “I would like to formally welcome you to Blackburne. I trust today went well with moving into your rooms and getting settled. It’s an exciting time, and a busy one. I look forward to an excellent year with you. Please make the effort to turn to your masters for help of any kind. We are here for you.” A pause. “Let us pray.” Four hundred heads bowed in unison. “Lord, thank you for this good meal and for the hands that prepared it. Please be with all those who are less fortunate than we are. Watch over these students and guide them, and help them to strive for excellence. In your name we pray. Amen.”
At the final word, nearly forty new boys, clad in white waiters’ jackets and holding battered serving trays, rushed from their tables for the cafeteria door to pick up platters of food. The senior masters had tables close to the cafeteria and thus got their food quickly. I was back in a recess of the dining hall known as Graveyard Alley and wouldn’t get my dinner for a few minutes at least. I did note with a bit of wicked pleasure that Porter Deems was at the very back of Graveyard Alley, two tables farther away from the cafeteria than I was. I caught his eye and grinned. He scowled and flipped me the bird under the table.
The clanging of the serving trays, which rang through the dining hall as they were slapped down on the cafeteria counters or crashed into one another, seemed an appropriate, unofficial opening of Blackburne. It brought back memories of my own first year, when I had stood nervously in a starched white jacket, its collar scratching my jaw, as I waited to pick up the full tray and wondered how I would do it without spilling food everywhere. I smiled and shook my head. Then I looked at my advisees, a few of whom were looking at me as if waiting for me to speak. I nodded at a tall, dark-haired boy seated on my right. “All moved in okay?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said, brushing his hair out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “The room doesn’t matter as long as I’m on the same dorm and keep my roommate, Mack.” He gestured to a freckled redhead down the table.
I remembered then that there had been a mix-up with room assignments that morning and I’d had to ask this boy to move upstairs after he’d already started unpacking. The tall boy was named Hal Starr, and his roommate was the freckled redhead. “You’re Mack Arnold?” I asked, trying to look casually at the list of names in my hand.
The redhead nodded. “Sure you can’t move me out of Hal’s room? The guy snores.”
Hal rolled his eyes. “Better than what you do at night, pal.”
Laughter ran around the table and then fell silent as the boys glanced at me. I was being tested, I knew, all of them waiting to see how the new teacher would react. Laughing with them would make me either a pushover or a buddy, both of which were fatal. Or I could frown and be the joyless martinet. Instead, I ignored the comment and asked Hal, “Do you play basketball?”
Stephen Watterson spoke up before Hal could say anything. “He’s our starting center for varsity. We call him Rebound.”
“Shut up, Watterson,” Hal said shyly, looking in his lap.
“It’s true! You ought to see him rip the ball off the backboard.”
“Well, this guy ought to try out for football,” Hal said, jerking his head at Stephen. “He can outrun anybody.” Stephen received this praise with a silent glow of appreciation.
“No kidding?” I said. “Maybe you’d try out for track in the winter.”
Stephen laughed. “No way. Too boring. Who wants to run around in circles all day?”
I smiled. “That’s what I might help coach,” I said good-naturedly, reaching for the iced tea. Stephen lapsed into an embarrassed silence. “Hey, no big deal, Stephen,” I said. “No offense.” Stephen smiled, relieved, and then started talking with Hal about this year’s football team.
I had not realized how isolating it could be to sit at the head of a table of ten boys. Teachers had always seemed to float above such considerations. Now I found myself feeling like a new boy struggling for acceptance. This is absurd, I thought. They’re fourth formers, for God’s sake. I don’t need a bunch of fifteen-year-old friends. I turned to the boy on my left, who had not said a word since quietly taking his seat several minutes ago. In fact, I hadn’t noticed him at all until just before the prayer. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Mr. Glass. What’s your name?”
“Paul,” the boy murmured. He had mousy-brown hair and a pale complexion. Dark shadows sat under his eyes like newsprint that had been smudged there.
“Right,” I said brightly, glancing at my list. “Paul . . . Simmons, right?”
He nodded faintly.
“No relation to our headmaster, are you?” I said, trying to get a smile out of him.
“I’m his son,” he said. Stephen Watterson looked up. A couple of the other boys did, too.
“Well, that’s great,” I said lamely. “Your father is . . . a heck of a man.”
“Yes,” Paul said, picking up a fork and turning it over in his hands.
Thankfully our waiter arrived then, sweating with apologies and bringing enough food to halt conversation for the rest of dinner.