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The Expectations Page 7


  And then Ben saw Manley Price walking up from an adjoining path. Just an older man, by himself, a little stiff in the knees, clearly with no awareness of Ben’s whereabouts. But something about his uprightness and indifference to being alone suggested the highest evergreen tree on a mountain slope. They met eyes, and Price made just the smallest gesture, his hand remaining by his waist, and Ben began to slow. The other boys looked back but seemed to know to let him go.

  Finally Price came near. “I heard you weren’t at captain’s practice today.”

  Ben flushed with embarrassment and a sense of moving to the end of a line. “I completely forgot. Everyone was going to the boat docks.”

  Instead of chastising him or even shaking his head, Price smiled and leaned in close as they continued to walk to the dining hall.

  “I remember your brother.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Teddy, correct?” Ben was astonished that Price would be uncertain of Teddy’s name, and he nodded to confirm Price’s memory.

  “What a waste of a body. Every time he came to the court it was like the first time he’d ever played. He just had no love for it. You could always see that he’d rather be anywhere else. A couple times I tried to kick him off the team but he would always come back.”

  Hutch and the rest had gone through the double doors out of sight, and now Ben and Price came up to the same doors, and Ben opened the left one and Price stepped through without changing his pace. Once they were in the corridor with the name plaques and the stone arches and the other kids going to dinner, Ben expected him to talk in a more private tone, but Price’s voice continued on just the same as before.

  “The last time Teddy came back to the team, his fifth-form year, I think, we had a good team but not the best I’d ever had, and we had a shot at the title but it was going to be close. And just every day when Teddy showed up, he’d bring his mildew energy with him, and I finally told him that if he infected the rest of the team, if I sensed any shrinking from the pain of the work, I’d make him pay for it.”

  Price turned toward Ben now as they walked. “Your opponent is always going to want to avoid pain, but you run toward it, you go looking for that pain. Then you’re not afraid, and you win.” He turned to look ahead again.

  “But I could tell that to excuse himself, Teddy was going to start rolling his eyes. I knew he was already doing it even if he wasn’t doing it in front of me.

  “And so I made sure he never came back, and we won.”

  “Made sure?”

  Price smiled. “I told the rest of the team that if I saw Teddy within twenty feet of the courts, all of them would have to row a two-thousand-meter erg piece. Then the slowest three would have to row another two thousand meters, and then the slowest one of that three would have to row yet another two thousand meters. And I never saw him there again.”

  As they came into the high common room Price stopped, so Ben stopped. Price looked full at him. His eyes were pale and he had outdoors skin.

  “You think that’s cruel. But it’s the best thing I could have done for him. Teddy thought that someone was going to be happy because he was playing squash—your father probably—but that wasn’t true, and he was spending hours of his life doing something he didn’t like. No one should ever do that. I just made him make a decision that he wasn’t strong enough to make on his own. And everyone on the team was happier, and he was happier.”

  “What did he end up doing?”

  Price pulled his head away and frowned. “I don’t know.”

  After a moment Price stepped closer and put a closed hand on Ben’s shoulder. Again Ben smelled his vegetal breath.

  “Don’t worry, Ben. I know you’re scared. I’m going to put a lot of pressure on you. But you have the love. I’ve seen how much pleasure you get from playing, and that pleasure gets even better when you go through a few curtains of pain. When you can go through the last curtain and your opponent can’t, that is a kind of living that you’ll never be able to find any other way.

  “So. Go to the boat docks, go play soccer or some other nonsense this fall, but then after that, it will be time.”

  Price walked away as if in that instant he had entirely cleared his mind, and it took a moment for Ben to shift himself and take a tray and get in the food line.

  * * *

  After the Jesus Rock Ben was nervous to see Ahmed again, so he went to the library that night instead of working in the dorm. At a low table in the two-story reading room, with windows looking out over the pond, two boys were taking a break from reading by playing backgammon.

  Ben remembered that last day in Florida with his extended family. They had all been trying to relax at the covered bar looking out over the green-clay courts at the Bath and Tennis, especially Saturday afternoon before everyone had to fly out.

  His father and uncle started a game of backgammon. Russell knew how much Harry hated it when he took a long time to roll, and so Russell shook the dice in the felt-lined leather cup, going to turn the cup over but then holding it upright again and continuing to shake.

  In the humidity both of their faces were red with sun and piña coladas. Ben’s dad didn’t lose every game, but his face was so different from his older brother’s. For Russell, this was a way to unwind, to pleasantly occupy the parts of his mind that were under strain at work and home, letting a thoroughbred out into a lush pasture so it could feel its legs.

  But Harry was full on. He held his head and upper body over the cork board, slightly moving his lips as he counted the heavy, smoky-plastic pieces from point to point. Russell shook the dice and held them, shook them and still held them and smiled, and Harry tried to smile back. Ben always thought of his dad as a success until he saw him with Russell.

  Ben found an unoccupied armchair and started reading. When he came back at check-in with so much still left to do, Ahmed smiled to him, how easily he couldn’t tell, and Ben was glad he hadn’t been the one who pushed Ahmed’s hand away from the rock.

  With no hesitation, Ahmed said he thought he would play club soccer—the first practice was the next day—but he wasn’t sure if he would be able to do that and keep up with all of the work.

  “No, it’ll help you,” Ben said. “You’ll get to run in the afternoon and then you’ll be more ready to concentrate afterward.”

  Ahmed broke into that basking smile.

  “Ben, with you I will learn just how to be.”

  4. The Sacrificial Element

  THE NEXT MORNING DURING HIS FREE THIRD PERIOD, BEN SAT ON a wooden bench outside the office of the Dean of Students on the third floor of the Schoolhouse trying to get further through his Approaches reading. After Chapel that morning, Mr. Dennett, Hawley’s Head of House, had handed him a note asking him to come see the Dean, and so here Ben was, wondering if he had already done something wrong. Had Ahmed complained?

  The Dean of Students’ office was on the same third-floor hallway as College Admissions, the Athletic Director, and the Bursar, and the name of each department was painted on each door in dull gold outlined in black. The walls up here were bare of student posters, and the smell was different too: dripped coffee burned off a warming plate, toner from a big copy machine, the perfume of the women who ran the offices. Ben heard low voices from inside the Dean’s office but otherwise the floor seemed empty.

  Ben sat across from the open door of the Bursar, looking in at a front desk covered with paper and jars of pens and an electric typewriter. There was no one inside. Quietly from a little boombox on top of a file cabinet came the saxophone of a song that Ben thoroughly recognized but couldn’t have named, “Careless Whisper” by George Michael.

  He wondered whether the Dean, Mr. Phelps, was keeping him waiting out here on purpose. He looked again into the Bursar’s office with some tip-of-the-tongue feeling, as though the solution to his wait could be found on that desk.

  He heard footsteps coming up the stairs and saw the head and body of an older woman, and as she c
ame toward him, Ben had the feeling that she would recognize him, that she was coming to sit at this empty desk in this office and that she knew all about him.

  But then the door to the Dean’s office opened, and Mr. Markson beckoned him inside.

  Ben sat in a spoke-back chair in front of Bud Phelps, the Dean of Students, whose desk was clean. Mr. Dennett with his cushiony face sat in the chair next to Ben, and Markson perched uncomfortably on the radiator cover next to the windows. Ben both wished Manley Price were here and was glad that he wasn’t.

  “So, you were there for the initiation fight?”

  Phelps was a New Hampshire native with a slight, persistent Up Above accent and silvering hair still in a high-and-tight. He was rumored to have earned a Silver Star in Korea. He smiled to Ben with the lines on his face folding together. The office was simple: tan carpet and built-in bookshelves, wire document baskets with neat stacks inside, the same swing-open windows as in the Schoolhouse classrooms. Ben wondered why Phelps had agreed to work at St. James with all these soft-handed WASPs. He drove an immaculate, all-business Ford F-150 that dozens of boys winced with desire for. Ben wasn’t sure whether the politenesses and small jokes that worked on other adults would work on him.

  “You were there? In the basement?”

  “Initiation fight?” asked Ben.

  Phelps smiled again and didn’t say anything, seeming to prepare himself for a long wait. This smile was less warm.

  Ben wondered who had told. He considered Ahmed for a moment but that didn’t feel right. In fact, Leon Carey had been comparing notes with Reid Pillsbury from Gordon House, where the newbs had just had an egg-and-spoon race while upper-formers sprayed them with Super Soakers. Reid had in turn told Fraser Grossman in his stairwell, saying out loud that two Hawley kids had thrown up, and the junior faculty member in Gordon had overheard it and gone to Phelps. The administration didn’t like throwing up.

  “We know it happened, Ben, so we just need more information. No one’s going to get in trouble, so just help us understand more about it.” Phelps had stopped smiling.

  Ben paused. Phelps’s face didn’t look angry, but rather sincerely anxious, and Ben felt some thrill of power over these adults.

  Ben cleared his throat. “I would definitely help you, but I think there must be bad information out there. Someone said the newbs were fighting each other?”

  Phelps continued not to smile. This was only Phelps’s second year as Dean of Students after thirteen years as chemistry teacher and hockey coach. As a scholarship boy (Class of ’49) and as a new enlistee, Phelps had known what it was like to be at the mercy of other young men, and he had no nostalgia for it. The administration had implemented the hazing talk in dorms the previous year, but Phelps had known it wouldn’t change anything. He understood why hazing endured.

  Phelps looked at Ben, so transparently filled to the top with the knowledge of what had happened in the basement, so full of admiration for himself for not telling. Ben brought to mind the knee joint of a young horse. Phelps had seen boys built just this way pressing themselves into shelterless hillsides.

  Phelps knew a great deal about Ben: his family, his brother, Manley Price’s hopes for him. As Phelps laid out the hazing question, he thought about the conversations he couldn’t have with Ben. Like most St. James students, Ben didn’t appreciate how much effort it took to secure his well-being.

  Phelps prayed with sincere intention in Chapel, in the middle of all the student and faculty daydreams, and he often asked God for the forbearance to treat well those who thought he was stupid, including now the new Rector. Aston was trying to make his mark, showing that he rejected the laissez-faire attitude of the previous administration, and so he badly wanted Phelps to just deal with this hazing issue correctly and have it pass away. Phelps needed enough detail to bring in the Hawley sixth-formers and make them think he knew everything, to play the role of the drill sergeant that everyone wanted him to play, and then they would be back on the beam. The Board of Directors wouldn’t find out. Neither would other schools, the Doverton Sentinel, the Boston Globe.

  Phelps and the other two adults in the room also had two specific events in mind related to this hazing, history that Ben had heard about but didn’t think to apply to this moment.

  Two years before, the wrestling team at the Horatio School in Rhode Island had won the ISL championship in a huge upset over Belmont Hill. To celebrate, five members of the team had convinced a fifteen-year-old sophomore girl to give them blow jobs and then to swallow their ejaculate out of the ISL championship trophy. Talk of the incident had spread, and when the local paper ran a front-page story on the moral decay at the school, the girl had decided to withdraw and the wrestling seniors were expelled. Over the next two years, Horatio’s applications declined by twelve percent.

  The year before that, a new student at Philadelphia’s St. Luke’s School had been forced into a metal garbage can and rolled down the stairs of his dorm after making fun of his roommate’s permanent-press dress shirt. Halfway down the stairs, the student’s front teeth met the rim of the trash can and flattened against the roof of his mouth. All the other kids in the dorm believed they had justly punished snobbery and so none of them would admit who had been responsible, and the student’s family had sued St. Luke’s and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

  In both cases the administration had been slow to respond, hoping that handling things discreetly would make them go away unnoticed, but discretion had been seen as indifference, and was in fact partially indifference, and so the incidents became not only scandals but signs that the souls of these schools weren’t right.

  Phelps—the entire St. James administration—knew that over the decades scandals just like these had caused the undeniable decline of other schools that had once been in the top tier. Almost all of these selective secondary schools had once had first and second forms, equivalent to seventh and eighth grades, but in the 1950s, at the Halyard School outside Washington, DC, and at Vernon-Brighton in western Massachusetts, both top-fifteen schools at the time, several incidents of teachers exercising their power over younger boys became widely if quietly talked about. Eventually first and second forms were phased out; by third form, it was thought, boys are not as attractive to a certain kind of older man. But a stain stayed on Halyard and Vernon-Brighton, and slowly their alumni giving suffered, and they began to send one or two fewer kids to Princeton and MIT each year, and their admissions yield forced them to accept more and more mediocre students, and now both schools were ranked in the low thirties.

  St. James still traded positions in the top five year after year, but the era when the school had without a second thought moved back that chapel wall was far gone. St. James’s carrying costs were much higher than those of most colleges, they had extended more and more financial aid to try to diversify the student body, and the St. James endowment was healthy but somewhat sleepily managed. Several other schools were making savvy investments in technology and energy and had alumni who had prospered in the mid-nineties economy, and those schools had been able to build planetariums and concert halls and dorm rooms with duplex living spaces. In 1950, sixty percent of all students who applied to Ivy League schools got in; now it was closer to ten percent and only getting tougher. For the previous two years, St. James had had an uncomfortable admissions season.

  It was exactly this combination—scandal and slippage—that had eroded other schools just as prominent as St. James was now. The new Rector, David Aston, had been brought in from a California boarding school founded in 1980 by an Andover alum. The board sensed that St. James was far from invulnerable, and so they needed Aston to inject the vigor and historylessness of the West Coast, with Phelps providing East Coast ballast.

  Sometimes scandals made alumni feel embattled, galvanized, could in fact stoke their loyalty to a school. But Phelps had no appetite for risk. And most of all he didn’t want a scandal to distract from what he saw as his slightly subversive
mission to fold some kernel of idealism into these students before the world heaped them with wealth and position. Society thought that places like St. James created unfairness, and of course that was true, but Phelps saw himself as a laborer in the vineyard, and he and many of his fellow teachers took seriously the task of creating ethical leaders. So to preserve the good he thought St. James could accomplish, Phelps was in the unfamiliar position of needing a certain outcome.

  Phelps stayed quiet and looked at Ben. The other adults stayed quiet. Ben felt an urge to fill the silence, but then he realized that Phelps was creating this silence to make him say something, and so Ben settled back to wait, and Phelps seemed to know this immediately and cleared his throat to speak.

  “You want to protect the older kids. I understand that. But who’s protecting the other new students? What if something had gone wrong down there? What happens when it goes wrong next time? That’s what you have to think about, Ben. If something goes wrong next time and you could have prevented it, how are you going to feel?”

  Even though Ben was still enjoying his intangible advantage, it now seemed slight, and he felt guilty, exactly as he knew Phelps wanted him to feel.

  “I’ll let you know if I hear about anything like that.”

  Ben felt the possibility of the adults not being disappointed with him drain out of the room.

  “I should probably go. I still need to get books from my room for next period.”

  “Well,” said Phelps, “you change your mind, come back.” Ben nodded, but then worried that the nod would be interpreted as an admission of guilt. Then he stood up and nodded again.

  When Ben came out into the hallway, the door to the Bursar’s office was closed. Ben started down the quiet stairs back into it all, but he heard a door open behind him, and when he turned he saw Markson taking a few jogging steps to catch up. Ben waited, and Markson came down two steps.