The Expectations Read online

  The dorm thrummed with kids and parents intent on carrying things in and setting them up. Ben and his dad wore khaki shorts and polo shirts but not sunglasses because sunglasses were gauche. Room 24 was empty. Two beds, two surgical-green rubber-covered mattresses, two desks. Ben and his dad set the first bags on the floor. Three windows on the far wall looked out over the back parking lot and the stretch of grass to the Two-Laner, and then the cinder block gym beyond. Ben knew that if he stuck his head out the window he could see the squash courts just up the rise to the right. The wind pushed slowly through the heavy trees.

  On both desks lay the folder with the line-drawn map of the school and the schedule of first days’ activities, and on top of that, a small, dark blue leatherette book.

  THE ST. JAMES COMPANION

  was printed on the cover in stout, gold-embossed letters, and the page edges were stained red. Ben chose the bed and desk on the left, and he slipped the book into the desk’s pencil drawer.

  Outside, older kids were hugging each other and laughing. Ben carried a standing lamp and his dad carried one bookshelf speaker under each arm. They set up the stereo and hung the Escher poster of ants crawling along a Möbius strip. Ben’s dad had given him a three-by-five reproduction of an Audubon drawing of the Great Auk, a sort of penguin that looked like an affronted London aristocrat. The little print was in a worn-out, gold-painted frame, and Ben jammed a thumbtack into the outside of the room’s door and hung the frame on the tack. Ben kept imagining a short-haired girl coming to visit him. The last thing she saw before their eyes met would be this quirky, charming picture.

  Now in the parking lot it was sweat-hot. The leaves flashed white as they faced the sun. Cicadas ground off and on as though theirs was the noise of the heat itself.

  As they made trips to and from the car carrying things in, Ben nodding and half smiling to every new person he passed, girls were doing the same thing, moving with their parents between the cars in the quad parking lot and the neighboring dorms.

  Ben looked at the girls but tried not to look too hard. He noticed the pretty girls, but he also saw the cusp-pretty girls. Even in hurried glances with his arms full, Ben could tell which of these St. James girls had been awkward. There had been a couple girls like this at Sidney, his school at home. Their long necks just now belonged with the rest of their bodies, or their eyes weren’t quite so close together anymore, and even though Ben couldn’t know its precise history, the unaccustomedness was clear.

  The always-pretty girls seemed to consume attention as a matter of routine, or even as a nuisance, and Ben couldn’t blame them for that. But the cusp-pretty girls had never before been looked at so hard—by boys, by men, and by the always-pretty girls—and it seemed to make them aware of their surroundings in a way that appeared exhilarating and slightly painful for them.

  Ben felt kinship with those cusp-pretty girls, slight kinship, because now for the first time people were starting to look at him with a story in their minds too. Because Ben had in the past year gone from being a pretty good squash player to being maybe the best boys’ squash player in the country. Even in a world so tiny—he played a sport that most of America would never know about—that new celebrity, the way the coaches and parents and other players actively reassessed him, stood out clearly to him.

  Ben loved the feeling that people were going to respect him, that he could lift his shoulders and feel a mantle of dominance laid over them. But to talk too much about oneself was bad, to have too much self-regard, and so when he smiled about winning, lifted his arm above his head as he turned to the crowd—eventually that would feel natural. It was like a demented eddy in him when the triumph that he had wanted for so long, that all the other players around him worked so hard for, that his father was incandescent for on his behalf, didn’t feel exactly the way he thought it was going to. Ben could sense that every time these people looked at him, they were trying to assess how closely the real thing lived up to what this Weeks kid was supposed to be. He hoped those cusp-pretty girls were noticing him, feeling him feel kinship with them.

  All at once everything was up in the room, and so Ben and his dad decided to go see the new courts. As soon as they walked down the steps at Hawley’s back entrance, Ben again expected Manley Price to be there, knowing exactly how long Ben had already been on campus. Slowly they went up the rise toward the new building.

  The game of squash—two players in a room the size of a two-car garage hitting a rubber ball off a wall, each trying to hit a shot that bounces twice before the other can reach it—started in England in the 1830s and soon spread throughout the British colonies. St. James, from the beginning almost desperately imitating England in its architecture, curriculum, and pastimes, built in 1885 the first court in the United States. There was no standard court size at the time, and St. James’s court happened to be narrower than the ones taking shape in England. St. James, and then clubs and schools in Philadelphia and Brooklyn Heights and Canada, were playing in the winter before reliable heating, and because cold rubber doesn’t bounce easily, the Americans developed dense balls that retained heat well and moved fast even when you could see your breath on the court.

  But in the rest of the world, a wider, shorter court became standard. A ball developed that you could pinch between your fingers and that wasn’t overactive in warmer climates like India and Hong Kong. And so the two games existed in parallel: “hardball” in America and “softball” around the world, and the American game became a strange, isolated variant.

  This American game was the version that everyone around Ben played growing up. Ben’s dad, Harry, had been on the team at St. James in the mid-1960s and remained a fanatic, playing three times a week at his club. Manley Price started as coach after Harry graduated, and many times out loud Ben’s dad had expressed regret that he hadn’t been there for the Price era. Harry and his friends at the club wore paper slippers after the shower and cupped their privates in talcum powder and used combs lifted by a metal plunger out of the jar of Barbicide and drank Scotch and played backgammon.

  Harry somehow never became true friends with the other men whose families had always belonged to clubs like this, had founded clubs like this. His real friends—and more or less the only friends he had, rather than his wife’s friends’ husbands—were Chip and Paul, the two guys he played squash with most often. Chip was an engineer from Wilmette, Illinois, and Paul was an insurance executive from Houston, and they had moved to Connecticut to work for United Technologies and Cigna, respectively. Chip and Paul had both picked up squash as adults. Late-to-the-gamers are always the most intense, and they were the only two guys at the club who played hard enough for Harry’s liking. The three of them never entered official tournaments; they just played endless winner-stay-on-court games. The three of them dove for the ball, their knees bled, they wore complicated braces, but they never missed a court time.

  Even though he would have been ashamed to catch himself thinking it, Harry thought he was the social better of these two men. Partly he enjoyed their company so much because he didn’t have to impress them, and because they couldn’t accurately assess the nuances of his class and how closely he did or didn’t adhere to its rules. When he was around real WASPs, Harry sometimes had a feeling that he’d been wasting his time with Chip and Paul, but he was always relieved to see them again.

  Harry used squash as his handle on St. James. It was his way of counterbalancing the influence of his brother, Russell: Russell Weeks, founder and chairman of Landreach Capital. A home at 80th and Park and one in Amagansett. Served on the St. James board, audited the school’s books each year, and co-authored the Annual Report. In 1992 Russell had given the majority gift for a major addition to the school’s observatory, including a telescope seven times more powerful than the previous one. Harry gave every year too, but he prided himself on spending time: when the SJS squash team played a school in Connecticut or southern Mass, Ben’s dad would go cheer and talk with Manley Price abo
ut strategy and training approaches.

  At Harry’s club he and Chip and Paul played the American game, but Chip had first learned to play squash on International courts with a softball while working for Siemens in Munich, and so when he came back to the US, playing the American game felt like hitting a Super Ball in a closet. In a long, patient fit of pique he built an International court out of cinder block and plaster in his backyard, and he called it the “µm Club,” or the “Micron Club” after his favorite unit of measurement. He gave Ben and a few other local kids the keys and said they could use it whenever they wanted.

  From Ben’s house to the country club was a sixteen-minute drive, but it was only a seven-minute bike ride to the Um Club, and so almost entirely out of inertia Ben at age eleven began spending ninety percent of his playing time on the International-size court playing with the International ball. He and the other kids who ended up at the Um Club were generally in better shape than their tournament opponents because a softball is harder to put away. Their points lasted longer, but their timing was off for the American game, their movement not as precise, and so they would almost inevitably lose in the second or third round of any tournament they entered.

  On certain weekend days Ben played with the other kids at the Um Club for four or five hours at a stretch, going through three or four changes of T-shirts and socks. And sometimes after school or after dinner or when he couldn’t sleep, Ben would bike over and just hit balls, straight long shots (“rails”) and drop shots. He would stay there for hours, and would be surprised when he saw the time as he walked off court. Chip would look out his bathroom window while brushing his teeth and see the court lights on, then hear the faint sound of the ball against the racquet and the slightly louder sound of the ball against the wall.

  Ben couldn’t have told you why he was doing it, exactly; there was just something soothing about the limits of the court, the consistency of that world, just a few walls, and the ball, and the racquet, and he could submit to those boundaries and make only the very few decisions that they dictated.

  Ben’s mom, Helen, would hear Ben come in at eleven p.m. on a Wednesday, and it occurred to her what a strange kind of worry she felt. She knew he wasn’t out doing drugs and breaking windows. She knew he wasn’t getting the neighbor’s daughter pregnant. Instead he was digging into some deep solitude, some absorption that she worried he wouldn’t be able to extricate himself from. Harry told her to let it go; didn’t she remember being a kid, being caught in little fixations? She did. Days during the summer when it would have been too much effort to actually begin any real activity—practicing the piano like her mother kept reminding her to do, going to the beach with friends—she remembered taking out all of her jewelry—the thin chain with the St. Christopher on it, the charm bracelet with the flexible fish and the spinning Ferris wheel, the thin strand of freshwater pearls—then heaping everything all together and mixing it around until it was tangled, then untangling it all again. “See?” Harry said. “All kids do that, he’s just doing it with squash.”

  And still, what if this rule-bound thing shaped him to its shape? What if he never felt the pull of rulelessness? And she knew that Harry wasn’t impartial about this, that he would have responded differently if the fixation had been something other than squash. So for a couple years Ben played, and he and his Um Club friends stayed toward the bottom of the middle of the pack.

  But then, in the early nineties, US squash got tired of being a backwater, and colleges wanted to be able to recruit international players, and so gradually everyone started playing softball on narrow courts. And then when colleges and clubs one by one started renovating their courts, they went International-size, and suddenly Ben didn’t have to adjust. When he reached for the ball, his racquet was there, when he forgot himself the default was right. All of the Um Club kids went up in the rankings, but Ben had spent the kind of time that none of the rest of them had spent, and so he could always get to one more ball, always made the better choice, always had the decisive half inch.

  Something changed as he started beating the Um Club kids and then going on to win tournaments. Before, they had all just been hacking around, turning up the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin on the shitty all-in-one stereo unit behind the Um Club court, clapping for each other during hard-fought losses in the quarters. They had all sat on the thin carpeting of various college gyms and private club lounges, stretching and making fun of each other, folding over gauze pads and taping them to the undersides of their feet where the calluses had pulled off in a flap as thick as an orange rind, eating PowerBar after PowerBar in miniature bites so as never to get on the court too full, pressing sweat-soaked clothes into plastic shopping bags and squeezing the air out, tying them shut and forgetting to open them when they got home, then discovering civilizations of mildew. They made jokes together about the preening kids in the top five whose parents went paper-faced when they lost.

  But when Ben started winning, winning by a lot, the faces of the other guys went a little quieter toward him, and soon a kind of lacquer began to come over their eyes when they looked at him. When he was still on court, Ben saw all of them sitting together, showered and in long sweats. Suddenly there were jokes that he hadn’t been around to help invent. The only one this didn’t seem to happen with was Tim, but then Tim never really seemed to care about squash that much to begin with.

  And now when his mom came to see him play, when she saw him beat the other kids, she worried that maybe Ben was getting too used to it. He seemed to expect the awe already; she saw him compress his lips into a smile after coming off court early in a tournament, treating the applause almost as a sudden rain shower. To her he looked so beautiful—thin but strong, those flash-gray eyes—but she truly couldn’t tell if this was just a mother’s bias or real information in the world. And so even though she rooted for him, when he came off court and looked for her, she could feel herself trying to be a little clay-faced, to stand on the other side of the scale, to convey to him that winning was important but not more so than other things, not more than being respectful and kind and not thinking too much of oneself.

  But to see him play, to see his arms and legs moving in such a coordinated way, so soon after he had hardly been able to stand up on his own, to see him brush the slate-black hair out of his eyes, to see him fold a bandanna to the perfect width in a way she had never showed him how to do and then knot it behind his head—all of it, his mere supple existence, sometimes surprised her, made her afraid that he would turn out to be less gentle than his father, less openhearted.

  Teddy was out of her hands; she had known even before Teddy could speak that he would be out of her hands. She had to concentrate to remember the times when of his own volition Teddy had treated something or someone gently. But there was tenderness in Ben, and so it worried her when Ben became so good at squash because she knew that tenderness needed tending. There was something of her brother-in-law, Russell, in him that had maybe received too much oxygen when Ben started beating everyone.

  Even with his mother’s apparent worry, and with the changes in his old Um Club friends, Ben luxuriated in the future waiting for him on the St. James squash team, Manley Price’s legendary team, the Tide. The wood plaques in the St. James lounge listed in gold paint the thirty-four times they had won the New England Championships. Eleven times between 1979 and 1991: the Long Streak. SJS number one Blake Perkins had won the Independent School League individual championship four straight years starting in 1984, and twice he had beaten the number two SJS player for the title.

  This dominance had two causes. One of course was Price, whose two constantly repeated maxims were now stitched on felt banners in the lounge:

  SOME OTHER TEAM MAY BEAT US

  BUT THEY WILL HAVE TO BLEED TO DO IT

  and:

  PLAY THE PERCENTAGES

  Price ran sprints with his kids, even into his fifties. He could clearly explain stroke mechanics but stopped before making a player s
elf-conscious. He was a widower and a rumored late-night alcoholic, which gave him a tragic majesty that allowed the kids to build a kind of crusade narrative for each season: the world had wronged their coach and they could rectify that through their own selfless contribution.

  The second cause of the Long Streak was the furnace under the St. James courts. Since the forties it had been the pet of Ed Poniatowski, the school’s head maintenance man, and he had made so many provisional fixes and had memorized such a vast complex of minute adjustments that when he died in 1976, the furnace left the control of men. The Athletic Director set aside funds to replace it, but Price convinced him to leave it alone and instead coached directly to it.

  Eighty percent of the time the heat hardly worked at all, and the St. James courts were almost as cold as the outside air. Squash balls bounce much less when they’re cold, and although they get warm mainly by being hit, the temperature of the court determines the pace of the game. Cold courts make the ball slow and so it’s easier to win with drop shots but harder to win with power. SJS players wore long underwear and wool sweaters, and they learned to scrape every ball off the floor, pry every shot out of the back corners, and get the ball deep in the court by hitting it high on the front wall.

  When the furnace woke up, though, the air quavered over the radiators, and players would set balls on top of them until they were almost painful to pick up. When the court is hot, the ball bounces higher and is harder to kill. St. James players learned to run and run and run, to be patient and not try to force the end of a point, to play for reliable shots instead of outright winners. They learned to lay the ball into the nick—the seam where the wall and floor meet—in order to keep their drop shots from bouncing up too high. They learned to lob gentle balls over their opponents’ heads and let them die in the back corners.