My school grades were never very good, but they were such a source of worry to my parents by the time I reached the sixth grade that there were concerns I might not even graduate from elementary school. I was diagnosed with what was then a little-known disorder called dyslexia. I found reading to be a stressful and insurmountable challenge. When I was nine, I’d come home with a Christmas ornament I’d made, a Reader’s Digest folded so the pages looked like a tree, spray-painted in cheery colors. I was rather proud of it, until Dad said, “Now, if we could only get you to read the magazine instead of defacing it.”
Besides the dyslexia, it was assumed I did poorly in school because I was so upset about my parents’ divorce. This couldn’t have been further from the truth, but I played along, looking doleful when the subject came up, preferring to be thought of as a sad sack rather than just plain stupid. Assuming I was either or both, it still strikes me as odd that my mother and father’s solution was to send me away, at the age of eleven, to repeat the sixth grade at a strict boys’ boarding school three thousand miles from home.
The change to a different school never improved my grades, but in the harsh Dickensian environment, I changed—learning how to cheat, steal, and lie under pressure with the steady pulse of a serial killer. I was like the kid who goes to prison on a minor charge and comes out more criminal than when he arrived.
In the last year of the Civil War, a couple of spinsters named Eliza Fay and Harriet Burnett founded the Fay School for Boys in Southborough, Massachusetts. The initial student body was made up of the sons of Yankee officers or wealthy civilians who could afford to send recently arrived immigrants to fight the Confederates in their place. The boys learned Latin, were caned when they misbehaved, and quarantined from the opposite sex. When I entered Fay in 1967, those three traditions were still firmly upheld.
The day my parents dropped me off, we rolled up to the school in a long black limousine that so embarrassed me, I had to be coaxed to step outside. My father had already leapt from the limo toward my new dormitory to announce my arrival like a vizier checking a crown prince into his floor of suites at the Plaza.
Mom wore a wool Chanel dress she called her “mommy suit” for the occasion and seemed far less excited than Dad to be leaving me behind. Maybe the reality of what they were doing, in which she was a silent partner, finally kicked in. The school was awfully far away, and I was quite young, and though not a great student, I was a kid more interested in pleasing others than causing trouble. Sensing my mother’s growing regret, I made a lighthearted crack about her “mommy dress” to lift her spirits.
“I’m going to miss you, sweetheart,” she said, closing in to engulf me in a hug.
I held up my hand. “Not here, Mom.” The limo had already attracted enough attention, and I couldn’t handle another public display. She understood and stopped herself from taking my hand as we entered the dormitory.
My barren alcove was identical to a long row of others with beaverboard walls that didn’t reach the ceiling. A heavy cloth served as a door. Dad was totally pumped by our surroundings.
“I just met the father of a kid you should get to know. He’s the chairman of Bethlehem Steel,” he said in a stage whisper. “If you get yourself invited for the weekend to their estate in Bethlehem, I want a full report.”
Not realizing that he meant Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I had assumed that being from Hollywood, I was the student who had traveled the farthest, and felt irrationally enraged to be upstaged by a kid who hailed from the birthplace of the baby Jesus. Why my father wanted me to go to the Middle East for the weekend but wouldn’t let me come home till Christmas was confusing. I was too young to recognize that my misplaced rage toward who I thought was a young Israeli was covering my bewilderment and fear of being abandoned.
A firehouse bell I’d seen only in cartoons clanged so loudly Mom nearly jumped out of her mommy suit. The bell signaled the parents to say their goodbyes, and in the following years would tell us when to wake, eat, and shit, and was the last sound we heard before lights-out. I got a handshake from Dad and a covert hug from Mom, so as not to embarrass, and off they went.
When the last of the parents filed out, a silence fell among a room full of newly abandoned youngsters. A boy from Japan, who couldn’t have been more than nine and barely spoke English, retreated to his alcove to stifle a whimper. I looked at the kid from Bethlehem and pictured him dead in a manger.
My first week I was ordered to kneel for thirty minutes on the dormitory’s hardwood floor for crying after lights-out. The kid in the next alcove was actually the culprit, but I took the rap, because if he’d had to kneel, his wailing would have kept the rest of us up all night. I didn’t last thirty minutes. No one ever did. Like my knees, I soon became calloused to the conditions I had been dealt. Rather than succumb to self-pity, I was like a POW on the Bataan Death March, grateful there were no maggots in his tablespoon of rice.
The proctor who made me kneel on the floor that night had made me his “fag.” (You read that right.) Not only was my school given the most effeminate name possible, but Fay was also one of the last institutions to still be influenced by the English boarding school custom of “fagging” that dates back to the eighteenth century, in which new students are “fags” to the older ones. The origin of the f-word was not in reference to the derisive term we know today, but to the bundle of short wood sticks, called faggots, that first-year Eton students were required to gather for their masters, who all had dorm rooms with their own fireplaces. Nine-, ten-, or eleven-year-olds would be in servitude to sadistic thirteen-year-olds, fetching them coffee, running their errands, and staying out of their sight lines before they thought of new ways to torment them. The fagging system served as the training wheels for future despots who would one day rule their corporations or seats in government with impunity. It was rumored that the older boys’ unbridled power led to hushed incidents of sexual abuse. I was no stranger to their headlocks or getting swatted on the ass in the shower room by a rat-tailed towel, but as far as being molested, I was gratefully spared. At least from an older student. The only run-in I had in that department was with a teacher.
Mr. Silver lived in a little apartment on the same floor as our dormitory. He was probably in his thirties, an age so generic it seemed to boys my age that all grown-ups were born the same year. He favored a flat-top haircut, a style made popular by rednecks who yanked Black people off lunch counters during Jim Crow. The skin on his face was wax, and tightly pulled back, as if a plastic surgeon had tried to smooth over some horrible burns.
Mr. Silver had a beagle named Fanny, who one night wandered into our dorm looking for a little attention. I was eating red licorice and gave her a strand just to see how she’d react. My dormmates and I thought it hilarious to see Fanny trying to dislodge the licorice from her teeth, when Mr. Silver appeared and stopped our laughter cold. He demanded to know who had given the candy, and when I fessed up, he summoned me to his apartment.
He sat in a club chair and made me stand before him. His hand on the armrest was directly level with my crotch, a few inches away.
“Is giving Fanny licorice something you thought would be funny?” he asked with a touch of menace. A half-empty bottle of bourbon was on his side table.
“No, I just wanted to see what would happen. I’m really, really sorry.”
“Did you think she would like it?”
“I didn’t think, and I apologize.”
“I don’t take to people being cruel to animals. Especially mine.”
I noticed that, as he spoke, his eyes never left my crotch. I’d outgrown my chinos since football season, which made my pants skintight, and I became aware that he was looking at the outline of my penis trapped to the side of my leg.
“I don’t think Fanny liked it any more than if I did this to you.”
He lifted his hand and ran a manicured index finger along the outline of my bulge, starting at the bottom of one side and rounding down the other. Silver repeated the motion two more times before speaking again.
“Is that something you like, or is that something you don’t like?”
I looked at his face, still gazing at my crotch, and thought he might be the ugliest man I had ever seen.
“Don’t like. Something I don’t like,” I said, swallowing away a stutter, enjoying the shade of self-loathing that crossed his burn-victim face.
“All right,” he said finally, “go to your room.”