IT WOULD BE SELF-DELUSION on my part to pretend that what I am doing is actually keeping a diary. The school term is now one week old and I am too tired at the end of each day to do more than glance over notes for the next day’s classes or nod over a newspaper or magazine. The first day, when the boys arrived, was pure bedlam—greeting parents who either had special praise or special requests for their offspring or who took me aside to confide that a son had to be watched to make sure he took a certain medicine for anemia every night, or that another had a masturbation problem, or still another daydreamed in class and needed constant vigilance in respect to his studies to help keep up with his grades.
The boys, when I finally managed to sort one out from the other, seemed like an average group of well brought up young people, polite with their elders, if somewhat condescending, and boisterous with each other. I see no particular difficulties in the future with them. Romero and Rollins seem to be getting along splendidly and in fact Rollins has persuaded Romero to go out for the football team, although Romero cannot weigh more than a hundred and forty pounds and Rollins must weigh at least two hundred and ten. But in an impromptu game of touch football the first day on the campus grounds, Romero, who had been standing to one side watching, had been impressed to fill a side which had lost one of the players because of a slightly sprained ankle and ran for a touchdown the first time he got his hands on the ball. I watched him with amazement, since I had never heard him express interest in any sport, as he sprinted and wheeled and cut back and squirmed away from the arms of boys twice his size. He seemed as unpredictable as a wood dove in flight and his sudden twisting runs left his pursuers panting helplessly behind him. Perhaps, I thought, half-joking to myself, it was just this gift that had kept him from being caught and arrested by the New York City police.
That night Rollins talked to him seriously and took him down to see the football coach and somehow the next afternoon they had found a uniform small enough for him and he was on the football squad. Although I feared what the result would be when he was hit in a real scrimmage by a mass of brutes who all towered over him, it boded well for his acceptance by the other students.
A few days after the beginning of the term a message was left for Strand that the headmaster would like to see him at his convenience. When he went to Babcock’s office he was greeted warmly but nervously. “We have a little problem,” Babcock said. “It’s about Jesus Romero.”
“Ah,” Strand said.
“Exactly,” Babcock said. “Ah. It seems that Romero has been skipping chapel. As you may know, we have to abide by certain terms which we accepted when we were bequeathed the endowment fund which kept this school going when it looked as though it was going to founder in the 1960s. It was a most generous gift—most generous. The new field house is a result of it; our library, which is one of the finest in any school in the East; many other amenities…. The old lady who left us the money in her will happened to be an extremely religious woman with a strong mind of her own and one condition laid down in her will was that every student attend chapel every school day. She also added the condition that all boys wear jackets and ties in the dining room. Other schools have moved away from these customs. We can’t. I wonder if you can reason with Romero before I have to take official action against him.”
“I’ll try,” Strand said.
“You’ve seen for yourself, the services are practically nondenominational. Almost anodyne. There are quite a few Catholic and Jewish boys enrolled and they seem to have no difficulties in bending to the rules of the school. You might mention this to Romero.”
“I will,” Strand said. “I’m sorry he’s causing you all this trouble.”
“There are bound to be worse ones before the term is up. And not only with Romero,” Babcock said.
Strand called Romero in to see him after classes and told him what the headmaster had said, using all the headmaster’s arguments. Romero listened in silence, then shook his head. “I don’t care about the Jews and the other Catholics,” he said. “I’m my own kind of Catholic.”
“When was the last time you went to Mass?” Strand asked.
Romero grinned. “When I was baptized. I don’t believe in God. If I have to choose between chapel and leaving school I’ll go pack my bag.”
“Are you sure you want me to tell Mr. Babcock that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re dismissed,” Strand said.
When Strand reported his conversation with Romero the next day to Babcock, the headmaster sighed. A good part of his conversation, Strand realized, was punctuated by sighs. “Well,” he said, “if nobody makes a noise about it I guess we can live with it.”
“There’s another thing,” Strand said. “It’s, about my wife. She has no classes on Wednesday and none until ten in the morning on Thursdays. Would you think it an imposition if she went into New York each Wednesday? She has several pupils she doesn’t want to give up.”
“I quite understand,” Babcock said. “Of course.”
Strand went out of his office, thinking what a decent and intelligent and flexible man. Already so early in the term, Strand had felt how easily and calmly the school was run, how discipline was kept with very little constraint. There was an easygoing friendliness between the boys and the faculty that provided an invigorating climate for the process of teaching and learning and Strand was rediscovering some of the sense of hope that he had in his early years as a teacher.
“You’re lucky Mr. Babcock is such a lenient man,” Strand said to Romero the next day. He had let the boy sweat for a night before telling him of Babcock’s decision. “He’s going to keep you on. Just don’t tell everybody about it. And you might write him a note of thanks.”
“Did you ask him if he believed in God?”
“Don’t press your luck, young man,” Strand said shortly.
Romero took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. “There’s something here you have to sign, Mr. Strand,” he said. “It’s the permission from my mother for me to play on the football team. I just got it this afternoon.”
Strand looked at the paper. It was a form printed by the athletic department, with a space for a parent’s signature and one for the signature of the housemaster attesting to the genuineness of the parent’s signature. In this case it was merely a scrawled X in pencil. As Strand looked at it Romero looked at him with the challenging direct dark stare that Strand still found uncomfortable. But even then, this evidence of the transition in one generation from an illiterate mother to an adolescent who could argue heatedly about the works of Edward Gibbon made Strand think more kindly than usual of the working of the American public school system.
When he gave the form, as required, to Mr. Johnson, the football coach, a serious and devout young man who conducted prayers before each game in the locker room in which he asked God not for victory but for the safety of the players on both teams, he raised his eyebrows at the X. “I suppose this is legal,” he said.
“I would think so,” Strand told him.
“Anyway,” he said, “the kid can read signals.” Then, with a smile, “Even though he rarely follows them. He drives the other boys crazy. They never know what he’s going to do. If he’s called to go around end and things don’t look too good for him there, he just turns around and goes through center or even around the other end. He does everything wrong and I bawl him out for it, but it doesn’t help much. And it’s hard to be too tough on him. At his size it takes guts to even be out there, and then, most of the time he gets away with it. Somehow, he’s out in the open and making big hunks of yardage. He’s like an eel—nobody can really get hold of him. It’s almost as though he’s escaping from a lynching party. I don’t think he cares whether we win or lose a game, he just wants to show everybody that he’s uncatchable. I tell you something, Mr. Strand, in all the time I’ve played football and coached it, I never set eyes on a kid like this before. He’s not like an athlete—he’s like some kind of wild animal. It’s like having a crazy panther on the squad.”
“Is he going to make the team?” Strand asked.
The coach shrugged. “I don’t intend to use him much. He’s too small to stay in there regularly. Somebody would finally eat him up alive. It’s not like the old days. The boys today are monsters, even at our level, and the big ones run just as fast as the small ones. Anyway, the kid can’t block or catch passes. If I can teach him how to hold on to punts maybe I’ll put him in to run back kicks. Otherwise I’ll just use him on special plays when we’re praying for a long breakaway run. When I told him I was going to keep him on the squad, I said, almost as a joke, he was going to have a lot of time sitting on the bench, I was only going to put him in when we were desperate. He just smiled up at me—small as he is he’s got a smile that would scare a sergeant in the marines—and he said, ‘Coach, that’s the job for me, I’ve been desperate all my life.’”
“Is he popular with the other boys?” Strand didn’t think it was the time to tell that serious young religious man that he had a Goth in his backfield.
The coach looked at Strand speculatively as though debating with himself whether to tell the truth or give him half an answer. “You have a special interest in the boy, I understand,” he said. “He’s here more or less because of you, isn’t he?”
“More or less. He was in my class in high school and was an extraordinary student.”
“Well, if his roommate Rollins wasn’t so protective of him, I think somebody would have taken a swing at him by now. He doesn’t bother to keep his opinions to himself, does he?”
Strand couldn’t help smiling. “Not so you could notice it,” he said.
“When he fakes a man out on a run or somebody in front of him misses a block, he—well, he sneers at them. And he has a favorite phrase that’s getting on the boys’ nerves—‘I thought you gentlemen were here to play football.’ He divides himself and Rollins from the rest of the team with something he must have picked up in reading English literature. You know how the English newspapers used to report the lineups of cricket games—‘Gentlemen versus Players.’ The other boys aren’t quite sure what it means, but they know it’s not complimentary to them.”
“Are there any other black boys besides Rollins on the squad?”
“Not this year,” the coach said. “The school does everything it can to get blacks to enroll, but not with much success. I’m afraid the school has had a reputation as a WASP stronghold for so many years that it’s going to take time to change its image. I think there’re only four other blacks in the school and none of them plays football. Last year we had a black instructor who taught history of art and he was well liked, but he never felt at home. Also, he was too high-powered for a prep school. He’s teaching up at Boston U now. Good intentions aren’t always enough, are they?” He sounded wistful, this big healthy young man whose aims in life Strand would have thought were limited, because of his profession, to ten yards at a time.
The football coach was not the only member of the faculty to be puzzled by Romero. Another young teacher, a quiet woman in the English department by the name of Collins, who had Romero in a course in English and American Literature, fell into step beside Strand as he was leaving the main hall after lunch one day and asked him if she could talk to him for a few minutes about the boy. She, too, knew that he had come to Dunberry because of Strand. He hadn’t bothered to correct this notion by telling anybody of Hazen’s influence in the affair. If Hazen wanted to take the credit or the blame for Romero’s presence on the campus he was perfectly capable of doing so.
“You taught him in New York, didn’t you?” she said as she walked by his side.
“If anybody can be said to have taught him anything,” he said.
She smiled. “I’m beginning to see what you mean. Did he give you any trouble in class?”
“Let me say,” he said, trying to sound as judicious as possible, “that the views he expressed were not always in accordance with those of the accepted authorities.”
“The change of schools,” Miss Collins said, “hasn’t changed his habits. He’s got the whole class embroiled in an argument already.”
“Oh dear,” Strand said. “What about?”
“The first book we discussed was Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage,” Miss Collins said. “It’s a book boys can relate to and the style is admirably plain and prepares the way for a whole genre of American writing. When I asked for comments, Romero kept silent while two or three of the boys explained why they liked the book, then raised his hand and stood up and said, very politely, ‘Begging your pardon, ma’am, it’s all brainwashing.’ Then he made quite a speech. He said that no matter what the writer might or might not have intended, the result was that it showed that you never became a man if you ran away, you only proved yourself if you stood up and fought no matter how sure you were you’d get your head blown off, and as long as people admired books like that young men would go marching off to war singing and cheering and get themselves killed. He said he didn’t know about the other boys in the class but if he hadn’t kept running away all his life he sure as hell wouldn’t be there in that classroom that morning. Running away, he said, was the natural thing to do when you were scared and stuff like The Red Badge of Courage was just a lie that old men cooked up to get young men to go out and get themselves killed off. He said he had an uncle who was decorated in Vietnam for sticking to his machine gun in an ambush to let the other men in his platoon get away and now his uncle is in a wheelchair for life and he’s thrown his medal into the garbage can.” Miss Collins, who had a shy, apologetic manner and a pale troubled face, shook her head as she remembered the incident in her classroom. “I just couldn’t cope with that boy,” she said despondently. “He made us all feel like uneducated fools. Do you think he really has an uncle who got wounded in Vietnam?”
“This is the first I’ve heard of an uncle,” he said. “He’s not above inventing things.” If he had been disposed to argue with Romero, an unprofitable exercise at best, he might have reminded him that the author he esteemed so highly, Mr. Gibbon, used the words “military valor,” with approval, on almost every page. Consistency, Strand had learned, was not the boy’s strong point
“Do you think that you could tell him that if he has opinions to express that might disturb the other boys he might first come to me privately after class and talk them over with me?” Miss Collins asked timidly.
“I could try,” he said. “I don’t guarantee anything. Privacy isn’t exactly his thing, as the boys say.” Suddenly he had a new insight into Romero’s character. He was always in search of an audience, even of one, and preferably unsympathetic to him. He seemed to find his emotional outlet in hostility and with it a sense of power over people older and in a worldly sense much more powerful than he. If Strand could foresee a career for him it was as an orator, having to be protected by the police, whipping crowds into frenzies of dissension and belligerence. It was not a comforting vision.
“One of the difficulties in handling him,” Miss Collins was going on in her frail, apologetic voice, “is that he always speaks with the utmost politeness, full of ma’am’s and if I may ask a question’s. And he’s the best prepared boy in the class. He’s got a photographic memory and he can quote verbatim whole paragraphs from books he’s read to support his arguments. When I gave the class a list of suggested books to read for the semester, he tossed it aside contemptuously and said he’d already read most of the titles and the books he hadn’t read he wouldn’t waste his time opening. And he objected because James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover weren’t on the list. Imagine that, from a boy of seventeen.”
“As the saying goes,” he said, “he’s wise beyond his years. Or vicious beyond his years.”
“He said that those two books were among the foundations of modern literature and ignoring them was an insult to the class’s intelligence and a denial of the sexuality of the modern man. Where do you suppose he picks up ideas like that?” she asked plaintively.
“From the public libraries.”
“I wish there were a more advanced course,” Miss Collins said. “I’d put him right into it. I’m afraid he’s some sort of genius. I never had one before and I never want to have one again.”
“Take heart,” he said. “With his temperament he’s likely to get into some kind of scrape and be expelled.”
“It can’t be too soon for me,” Miss Collins said, her voice for once decisive. As she walked sadly off to her next hour, Strand was selfishly relieved that for this semester at least Romero was in none of his classes.
Among Strand’s duties as housemaster was a biweekly inspection of the boys’ quarters, which he made when the boys were out to class. There was the expected range in orderliness—from spinsterly neatness to a kind of infantile playpen sloppiness. The room on the top floor occupied by Romero and Rollins was clean enough, but the division between the halves of the room was so clear that it was almost as though an invisible wall ran between Rollins’s side and that of Romero. On Rollins’s bed there was a brightly figured Navaho blanket and against the headboard a maroon pillow with a big felt W in yellow sewed on its cover, the major letter he had won playing for his high school team. On his desk, in a heavy silver frame, there was a colored photograph of a grave-looking middle-aged black couple, posed in front of a white front porch, inscribed “From Mom and Dad, with love.” Next to it was a photograph of a pretty, smiling black girl in a bathing suit, with the chaste inscription in fine, ladylike handwriting, “In fond remembrance, Clara.” On the wall was a large photograph of four huge young men with wide grins on their faces, the smallest of them Rollins himself, all of them wearing varsity sweaters with different letters on them, all of them clearly brothers. Rollins was holding a football, the brother next to him a baseball bat and the two others basketballs, to show that their athletic honors had not been won in only one sport. They were a formidable if friendly group and one doubted that any neighbor would recklessly engage any of them in a dispute.
On the wall above his bed was a large lithograph advertising a concert of Ella Fitzgerald’s and on the bedside table was his cassette machine and a row of cassettes, which Strand knew from experience he played at top volume. On the little shelf under his desk was a pile of Playboy magazines. Strand had found girlie magazines in other rooms also, but hidden on the floor under the beds. Rollins plainly didn’t believe he had anything to hide.
On the shelf of his closet, which had been carelessly left open and in which his clothes were rather haphazardly arranged, there were a half-dozen cartons of chocolate marshmallow cookies, which made Strand smile as he thought of the moments during the night when the pangs of hunger awakened that huge body and his groping through the dark to the cache of childish sweets which would keep him going until breakfast.
By contrast, Romero’s side of the room was bare and Spartan. The blankets were the olive drab wool ones issued to every boy and the bed was made with military crispness. There were no photographs and no magazines in evidence and the desk was bare except for a note pad and a neat row of sharply pointed pencils. It was as though Romero had resolved that nothing that he left behind him would reveal any fact to anyone who might be in a position to judge him. His clothes were arranged perfectly in his closet and on the shelf there was the famous 1909 edition, edited by J. B. Bury, in seven volumes, of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Strand knew to be of considerable value as a collectors’ item and which had added so much weight to Romero’s bag on the day of his arrival.
With the difference in tastes of the two young men, one had to wonder how it came about that they could live so harmoniously in one small room and seek out each other’s company with such pleasure, as they did at all times.
Curious about how exactly Romero had come into possession of the set of Gibbon and if he knew how valuable the books were, Strand left a note asking him to visit him after football practice that afternoon. By school rules, Strand had to grade the condition of each room in the house and post the grades on the house bulletin board. The numbers ran from one to ten and he marked down ten for Rollins’s and Romero’s room, although there was something vaguely disturbing about that invisible wall between the two beds.
Romero came into the living room of Strand’s apartment fresh from a shower and, as usual, neatly dressed and controlled in his movements. Strand made him sit down and before broaching the matter of the books he asked him a few questions about his classes and about the football team, which was to play its first game that Saturday. He said he liked the classes and thought he was doing well enough in them. He said he doubted that he would get to play in the game, but that he liked the coach, although he thought he lacked imagination. Very frankly, he told Strand that he had told the coach that if he didn’t get to play at least for a few minutes by the second week of the season, he was going to drop off the squad and concentrate on his studies.
Strand asked him, routinely, if he had any complaints and he said none. He said that Mr. Hazen had written him that he had deposited a certain sum to his account at the school bank and that he was allotted ten dollars a week of it for spending money, as were all the other boys in his form. He said he had written a note to Mr. Hazen thanking him for his generosity. Strand told him that he could thank Mr. Hazen in person, as he was driving down with his wife and daughter to visit the school on Saturday morning. “I guess I’m in for another speech,” he said, smiling, but without malice.
Then Strand brought up the matter of the books. “You know,” he said, “they’re quite valuable.”
“Are they?” he said ingenuously. “That’s good news.”
“How did you happen to come by them?” Strand asked.
He looked at Strand, as though weighing his answer. “I stole them,” he said matter-of-factly. “It took me nine trips down to the secondhand bookstores on Fourth Avenue to pick them up one by one.” He stared coolly at Strand, as though waiting for comment. Strand kept quiet and he said, “Those clerks in those stores wouldn’t last ten minutes on the street. They’d be robbed naked and they wouldn’t know it until they caught pneumonia.”
“Do you want to tell me at just which stores you picked them up, as you put it?” Strand asked.
“I don’t remember their names,” Romero said and stood up. “Is there anything else, sir?”
“Not right now,” Strand said.
He went out. Strand sat at his desk, staring at the dusk growing deeper outside the window, faced with a moral problem that he did not want to try to solve. I must not get obsessed with that boy, he thought. I have other things to worry about.
The big Mercedes, with Conroy at the wheel, drove up to the entrance of the Malson Residence just before lunch-time on Saturday morning. Strand was on the steps of the house to greet Leslie and Caroline and Hazen as they got out of the car. Caroline was holding a small, wriggling black Labrador puppy. Strand was shaken by emotion at seeing his wife and daughter again but did not wish to make a scene of husbandly and parental affection in front of the two boys from the house who were watching from the steps.
For the moment, he avoided looking at Caroline. “Where’s Jimmy?” he asked. “I thought he was coming with you.”
“At the last minute Mr. Solomon sent him out to Chicago to take in some group that’s performing out there,” Leslie said. “It means he’s rising in the firmament, he tells me. He’ll try to call you when he gets back. He sends his regards.”
“Good of him,” Strand said dryly. Then, still without having taken a good look at Caroline, he asked almost gruffly, as he patted the dog, “Where did you pick that up?”
“Mr. Hazen gave him to me. Two days ago. When Dr. Laird took the bandages off.” She put the dog down. Smiling, but a little nervously, she touched her nose with the tip of her finger. “How do you like the job?”
“Fine,” he said. He thought she looked beautiful, but then he had always thought she was beautiful. “It actually looks real.”
Caroline laughed. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “can’t you curb your enthusiasm?”
“The important thing is,” Strand said, “what do you think?”
“I think the ugly duckling has turned into a swan,” Caroline said gaily, as they went into the house. “I dread to think of what I’m going to do to the fellers from now on.”
“There’s no need to exaggerate,” Leslie said, looking sternly at the two boys who were examining Caroline with evident interest. “The operation was a success, but you’re not a movie star yet. And you’ll have to get over the habit of staring at yourself in the mirror a hundred times a day.” But she spoke affectionately and Strand could see that she was almost as pleased with Caroline’s new appearance as the girl herself.
She was not as pleased with the appearance of the apartment, although Mrs. Schiller had put flowers in vases at strategic places in the living room. “I hadn’t realized this place was quite so desolate,” she said, “although it’ll look better when we move our stuff in. But it certainly can stand at least a coat of paint.”
“I’ll talk to Babcock about it,” Hazen said. “I’m sure the school won’t go bankrupt if you have the painters in here for a couple of days.”
“I wouldn’t like to seem picky,” Leslie said. “Right from the beginning.”
“I’ll tell Babcock it’s my own idea,” Hazen said. “You’ll get your paint.”
“It’s time for lunch,” Strand said. “We’d better go over to the dining room. I told them you were coming and they’ve set up a visitors’ table with some other parents. We have the first game of the football season today and quite a few people have come down for it. By the way, Russell, our protégé Romero is on the squad.”
“What does he play—water boy?” Hazen laughed.
“No, seriously,” Strand said, as they started out of the house and walked along the path to the Main Hall. “He may not get in today but the coach told me he expects to use him in spot situations.”
“How is he doing generally?”
“I believe he’s keeping up with his classes,” Strand said cautiously. “I try not to look as though I’m meddling, but he seems conscientious enough and he doesn’t horse around in the study hours here like some of the other boys.”
“You’ll have to give me a list of his teachers. While I’m here I should have a word with them about him. I’m sure they’re not used to boys like that and I wouldn’t want them to be hard on him out of a lack of understanding of his background.”
Remembering Miss Collins, Strand thought it might be more rewarding if Hazen had a word with Romero and appealed to him not to be too hard on his teachers. He didn’t think it was wise to tell Hazen that, nor to mention anything about the set of Gibbon in Romero’s room. Hazen might fly into a rage and have the boy thrown out immediately and the experiment, which Strand now felt he had a stake in, would be over before it had a chance to begin.
He dropped behind the others to take Leslie’s arm and walk beside her. She smiled at him gratefully. “I missed you so much,” she whispered.
“I, of course, have been having the time of my young life here alone,” Strand said. “You have no idea what the orgies are like at teatime in the faculty common room.”
Leslie squeezed his arm. “You do look well,” she said. “It seems as though this place is going to agree with you.”
“It does. I hope it’s going to agree with you.”
“If you’re happy here,” she said, “I’m going to be happy here.” But there was a note in her voice, the slightest of inflections, that indicated doubt, reluctance, a shadow of fear.
When they entered the dining room, which was already filled with boys, Strand could tell by the way the boys stared at Caroline, with the puppy wobbling on a leash beside her, that the operation had indeed been a success. He noticed that Caroline even walked differently now. If he had to put a word to it, he decided, it would be haughtily.
After lunch, at which Hazen was pleased to find himself seated next to a man he knew from Washington who had something to do with the oil lobby and with whom he conversed animatedly, Strand walked Leslie back to the house, because she wanted to take a nap, while Hazen and Caroline and Conroy went over to the football field. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay with you?” Strand asked as he watched Leslie take her shoes off and lie down on one of the beds.
“There’s plenty of time later,” Leslie said. “I’m sure they’d be offended if you didn’t watch their game. And I’ve met enough people for one day.”
He bent down and kissed her forehead, then set out for the field. There were perhaps a thousand spectators in the open wooden stands but Hazen had kept a place for him next to Caroline. Hazen and Conroy sat on her other side. The game had already begun, but Hazen said nothing much had happened yet. “Which one is Romero?” he asked.
Strand scanned the bench. On one end, alone, with quite a space between him and the nearest player, Romero sat, bent over, staring at his hands hanging loosely between his knees and never looking at the field, as though he had no connection with what was happening there. “Number 45,” Strand said.
“God, he’s tiny,” Hazen said. “Next to those other kids he looks as though he should be in nursery school. Are you sure somebody’s not playing some sort of practical joke on him?”
“The coach takes him quite seriously.”
“The coach must be a sadist,” Hazen said glumly. “I think we ought to take an insurance policy out on him, full coverage, hospital, doctors and funeral expenses.”
“That might be the only way you’d ever get any return on your investment in him,” Strand said, thinking of the five hundred dollar bill at Brooks Brothers and the ten dollar a week allowance.
Hazen grinned across Caroline as Strand said this, taking it as a joke. Strand himself was not sure, after he had said it, that he really meant it as a joke.
The game was raggedly played, with many fumbles, missed plays, dropped passes and blocked kicks. A man behind them, whose son played tight end and dropped two passes in a row, kept saying “What do you expect, it’s the first game of the season.”
Whatever the quality of the play, it was pleasant sitting out there in the warm early autumn sunshine, watching swift young men racing across the fragrant green turf. There was none of the savage passion of professional football or of the games between the big-name universities and the only penalties were for offsides and too much time in the huddle and when one boy on the Dunberry team had the breath knocked out of him momentarily, the boy who had hit him knelt anxiously beside the injured boy until he sat up. Caroline, the puppy squirming in her lap, cheered loyally for Dunberry and smiled provocatively at some boys from the other school who turned around and booed her good-naturedly. “Just leave your name and telephone number,” one of the boys said, “and we’ll get even with you.”
“You can get it from my father.” Caroline pointed her thumb at Strand. “He teaches here.”
The boy laughed. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “But I’ll have a pencil and paper with me later on in the field house.”
Tea was to be served after the game in the field house for the students of both schools and their parents. Strand didn’t doubt that the boy would show up with his pencil and paper, but Caroline would be in Arizona in three days, Strand would be happy to tell him.
There was a lot of scoring and toward the end of the last quarter the other school was leading 26 to 20. The boys on both benches were standing now, cheering on their teammates, but Romero still kept to himself, seated, studying his hands. When the whistle had blown, indicating only two more minutes to play, the coach strode down toward Romero and spoke to him. Romero stood up slowly, almost leisurely, put on his helmet and trotted out onto the field. The other team had the ball on its own forty yard line and it was fourth down and eight yards to go and a punt was the obvious play.
Romero took up his position at safety, on his own twenty yard line, his hands negligently on his hips. When the kick came and the ends came rushing down on him, he juggled the ball, then dropped it. There was a groan from the stands as it bounced erratically toward the sidelines, Romero chasing it, the opposing team’s red jerseys in hot pursuit. He grabbed the ball on a dead run, then suddenly stopped. Two of his opponents flew past him helplessly. Fleeing, he ran back almost to his own goal line, then veered just as it seemed he was about to be tackled and ran, twisting, toward the opposite sideline. He evaded another tackier, Rollins threw an opportune block, and suddenly he was in the clear, running close to the sideline with no one near him and the red jerseys helplessly outdistanced. He crossed the goal line, even slowing down contemptuously for the last ten yards, stopped and carelessly tossed the ball to the ground.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hazen said, speaking loudly to be heard over the cheers of the crowd, “I thought I was sending a student to Dunberry and it turns out I sent a rabbit.”
Romero’s teammates crowded around him, clapping him on the back and shaking his hand, but he submitted to the gestures of approval rather than acknowledging them. It was only when he started trotting back toward the bench and Rollins grabbed him and lifted him as though he were a child that he permitted himself a smile.
As he went off the field he waved once, casually, without glancing toward the stands, where everyone was standing and applauding.
He trotted slowly toward the bench, his face calm, and went to the place at the end where he had been sitting for almost the entire game. He took off his helmet and once more sat staring at his hands hanging loosely between his knees. As the teams lined up for the point after touchdown the coach came over and patted him on the shoulder, but he didn’t look up even then.
The place kick was wide and there was just time for a final kickoff when the time ran out with the final score twenty-six to twenty-six. Romero hurried to the field house to shower and dress before he could be reached by the crowd of fellow students who rushed after him.
Tables and chairs had been set out in the field house, and there was a long buffet with small sandwiches and cakes behind which faculty wives stood to pour tea. Strand and Hazen sat at a table while Caroline and Conroy went to get the tea. Strand smiled as he saw the boy who had asked for Caroline’s address at the game quickly intercept her and walk with her to the buffet.
There was a quiet murmur among the groups of parents and students and a general sharing of pleasure in the way the afternoon had turned out.
As he watched the polite movement of the hearty, convivial middle-aged men and their handsomely turned out wives, Strand suddenly had the feeling that by some unacknowledged bond they were all related to Russell Hazen. They were the bankers, the lords of trade and commerce, the chairmen of the boards, the quiet movers and shakers, the judges and interpreters of the laws, the managers of great fortunes and institutions, the architects of political victories, the men who had the ear of senators and lawmakers, their children the princelings of a class which in America would not admit it was a class but, as Romero would recognize, comprised what the old Romans honored as the equestrian order.
As for the teachers, both men and women—the men deferential or at least reticent in manner, struggling against humility, the women willingly being of service—they were like the learned slaves imported to the capital to instruct the privileged young in virtue, valor and the arts of government.
As the students and guests of the school passed the table, Strand heard Romero’s name mentioned several times with approval. Strand was not sure if it was the praise bestowed on a gladiator who had shone that afternoon in the arena or a token that the equestrian order was open from time to time to barbarians of merit.
He shook his head impatiently, displeased with the way his thoughts had run, and stood up to greet Johnson, the football coach, who was approaching the table, a smile on his face. Strand introduced the coach to Hazen, who also stood. “Too bad you fellows couldn’t make that extra point,” Hazen said.
The coach shrugged. “I tell you, sir, I was happy to settle for a tie today. That boy is something, isn’t he? I was ready to kick him off the squad right then and there when he started running back toward our own goal.” He laughed. “But nothing succeeds like success, does it? Two or three more runs like that and we’ll have to change the name of your house from the Malson Residence to Romero Gardens.”
“Frankly, Mr. Johnson,” Hazen said, “Mr. Strand and I are more interested in the boy’s attitude toward his studies than his exploits on the football field. What do you hear about him from his teachers?”
“Well,” Johnson said, “the coaching staff keeps a pretty close watch on how our boys are doing in their studies. We aren’t one of those schools that look the other way when an athlete falls behind in class. So far, I’m happy to say, the word on Romero is most satisfactory. He’s highly intelligent, they say, and is always thoroughly prepared in class. He’s somewhat argumentative, as you probably know”—Johnson smiled—“but always polite and clever in the way he states his positions. Of course his…uh…background is considerably different from the usual run of Dunberry students, so his teachers realize that there must be a certain give and take in the way he has to be handled, but I’d say that if he continues as he’s begun there’s nothing to worry about. Except that he doesn’t seem to be interested in being liked by his fellow students or the boys on the squad and except for his relationship with Rollins he doesn’t seem to want any friends.”
“I’ll have a little talk with him,” Hazen said. “Allen, let’s take him to dinner with us tonight. The restaurant at the inn where I’m staying in town is quite good and maybe in a different atmosphere he’ll unbend a bit. And I’d like to get Caroline’s opinion about him. I haven’t the faintest notion of how he reacts to girls who have been—ah—more gently reared than the girls he’s been used to.”
Strand wondered what Hazen would say if he told him about the striptease artist on the train and the afternoon in New Haven. “Well,” he said, “I haven’t seen him with any girls, either here or back in the city, but Mrs. Schiller, our housekeeper, says he’s her favorite. He treats her like a lady, she says, which is more than she can say about most of the other boys. And he’s the neatest boy she’s ever had anything to do with in all her years at the school.”
“I’d say that’s a good sign,” Hazen said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I would,” Strand said. “A very good sign.”
By this time the members of the two squads had come into the field house, fresh and rosy from their showers and swarming hungrily around the buffet table. “Do you see him?” Hazen asked. “If he’s here, I’ll invite him myself.”
“I don’t think he’s here,” Johnson said. “He was the first one out of the locker room and I heard him say to Rollins that he’d meet him later back at the house. Tea parties obviously are not his favorite form of entertainment.”
Strand saw Rollins carrying a plate piled with sandwiches away from the buffet table and waved to him to come over. As Rollins approached, he looked a little embarrassed to be caught with the evidence of gluttony on his plate, but grinned and covered the sandwiches with his hand jokingly. “Caught red-handed, sir, I’m afraid. All that open air sure gives a man an appetite.”
“Rollins,” Strand said, “this is Mr. Hazen. He was instrumental in getting your friend Romero to come to Dunberry.”
“Glad to meet you, sir.” He put his plate down on the table and shook Hazen’s hand. “This afternoon, at least, you’re the most popular visitor on the campus.”
“Congratulations on your game,” Hazen said.
“Thank you, sir. We didn’t win, but we didn’t lose either. We’ll do better later.”
“That was a nice block you threw on Romero’s run,” Johnson said. “He’d have been nailed if you hadn’t made it.”
“Well, coach,” Rollins said, grinning again, “us players have to show the gentlemen we know how to help each other.”
“Rollins,” Johnson said sharply, “I think you and Romero could drop that private joke of yours from now on. We’ve all had enough of it.”
“Sorry, coach,” Rollins said quietly. “I’ll pass the word along.” Carrying the plate piled with sandwiches, he walked off toward a group of his teammates. Rollins, Strand thought, deadly blocker, nighttime devourer of chocolate cookies, another candidate for the equestrian order.