Chapter One Just before 11:00, on a warm and feathery September morning, one of the Bahringer family vehicles arrived at the Alumni Gates of St. Matthew's School. "Look at the sign," said Joey Bahringer, who was driving. "Look at it." WE COME AS BOYS WE LEAVE AS MEN, it proclaimed. "Well, it used to be a school just for boys," said his daughter Amanda, more nervous now than she had been on the long drive from home. "But you know," her father declared, "these places went co-ed much better than girls schools did. The thing is, a lot of nice girls will come here. But you can't get a good cross-section of boys to go to a girls' school. You know what I mean? Look at that one kid over there. Big kid!" There appeared, on Mrs. Bahringer's side of the Land Rover, a tow-headed boy, tall and muscular. He looked in on them. "Welcome," he said. "Welcome to St. Matthew's. What's your name?" A silver nametape on his blazer identified him as Toby. Tess Bahringer turned around and looked at her daughter, who stammered her reply: "Amanda. Amanda Bahringer." The boy looked at his clipboard. He looked up at the mother, then at Amanda. "All right. Amanda Bahringer. Post Graduate -- a P.G. Morison Dormitory, Room 23, third building on the left. Good luck, O.K?" He withdrew, shuffling to the next car in line. Joey Bahringer eased the car forward. Tess and Amanda stared at the larger scene that now unfolded before them. It was a bright tumult of purposeful activity, set in a large oblong quadrangle enclosed by eight three-story buildings and a chapel, or some sort of assembly hall, at the far end. Within this broad space of grass, in luminous array, lay the pride of the automobile manufactory of three continents. Hundreds of cars were being unloaded. Smart gleaming Grand Cherokees and burnished Land Cruisers, bulbous Expeditions, wolfish silver Lexuses alongside chunky Suburbans and Tahoes large enough to hold the contents of a small house. There were gigantic Navigators, understated Saabs, Jaguars, Explorers, Audi A-6s and a single scarlet Durango, all with their doors and bays agape, disgorging the cargo of American adolescents: bright blankets, stacked luggage, wicker hampers, lap-tops, lacrosse sticks, skates, speakers large and powerful enough to electrify gymnasiums; dangling irons, bins full of notebooks, blow-dryers, wastebaskets with horses painted on them, North Face jackets ... Immediately in front of the Bahringers, getting out of their cars at the same time, two fathers talked into cell phones, one small enough to be concealed in the man's palm. Both fathers looked out over the dormitories at the hazy smudges of the Tuscaroras in the distance. One barked angrily into his phone, consulting a gigantic gold wristwatch. The other gesticulated suddenly, then clapped his phone shut and waved weakly at the Bahringers -- who, he saw, had been looking at him. "Imagine if it rained opening day!" "Imagine! What're you, a sadist? This is bad enough." Joey Bahringer had begun thinking about the labor of unloading and carrying and listening that lay before him, not to mention the long drive back to Long Island later, perhaps much later, that afternoon. "Can you make it down to Westchester by 6:30, you leave here by 3:00?" "I don't know," Joey answered. "We're out on the Island." "They got a program, too. We have to go to that." Tess and Amanda were at the rear of the Land Rover, taking things out. Two boys, one of them Toby, helped. "My daughter's scared to death," Joey confided to the other father. "Hi. Joey Bahringer." "Max Buck. Mine too. I don't care. She makes it into Princeton, Penn, this time next year, I'm easy with it. You like the Land Rover?" "Yeah, I do. It's the Four Point Six. A real mountain goat." "Sure is." "See you later," said Joey. "We still got a lot of stuff to move." "Twenty-six grand a year, and they got her in a tiger cage. You see the room, Tess?" Amanda's assigned room in Morison was a single, austere and meager in its furnishings. A fire ordinance on the inside of the door warned against hanging flammable materials on the walls; another, signed by a student council two years earlier, forbade any decoration of a racist, sexist, or otherwise demeaning character. There was a battered desk, and, tucked under it, a straight-backed chair. The bed was narrow, like a nun's, its mattress thin, lumpy, and stained. An odd mullioned window -- odd because the window began at the floor and rose almost to the high ceiling of the room -- offered a narrow view of athletic fields, and, beyond them, woodland and hazy grey skyline. The room smelled like pine disinfectant. It struck Tess Bahringer as spartan and purposive: appropriate to its place and function, perfectly suited to Amanda's need in her new venture. The Bahringers were enrolling their daughter at St. Matthew's to recoup a disappointing senior year at Lawrence High School. Tess liked the room, approved of the narrow chamber stripped down to its essentials, unencumbered by any of the girlish clutter of Amanda's second-floor room at home. This was not all. The building itself was almost as old as St. Matthew's, founded in 1844. Generations of students had lived here, had sent their own children, indeed their grandchildren, to live and learn here. Tess sensed that simply living in such surroundings would do something more for Amanda then merely teaching her how to concentrate and helping to get her into Dartmouth College. It would confer some dim if inarticulable advantage, some membership, some network ... well, Tess didn't know exactly what it was, but it was an opportunity that she had never had, and she and Joey did not intend to pay over large amounts for their daughter to live in circumstances of luxury. They carried up the last of her things: a cello, a scale, her new computer and printer, a crate full of running shoes and athletic gear. "I'll get as aerobic as you are, I keep this up. Where you want the desk, baby?" "Right where it is, Daddy, it's O.K. where it is." "I can put it in front of the window. This is some view." "Joey" -- Tess cut in -- "she'll concentrate better with the desk where it is." There was a rattle at the door and a bustling sound out in the hallway. Max Buck, the father who had wondered how long it took to get to Westchester, appeared with his daughter Sumner and his wife. "We've got to get over to the Chapel. They have a welcoming address from the headmaster in five minutes." The six of them walked down the corridor of the third floor of Morison, in self-conscious silence. Joey and Tess walked on either side of their daughter, at the rear of the little party, Joey with his hand at the small of Amanda's back, in a gesture of reassurance and sadness at the separation that would come at the end of the day. "Hymn 125, The St. Matthew's School Hymn. All please rise." Love Divine, all loves excelling, Joy of Heav'n To earth come down Fix in us thy humble dwelling, All thy faithful Mercies crown. The sound, Amanda thought, was beautiful and radiant -- reassuring in an unexpected way. The hymn had a sweetness to it. She felt a silky rustle at her elbow and realized that it was the touch of the loose sleeve of a member of the choir brushing by her as the procession passed her pew. It moved forward at a gentle pace, the choir's faces ardent and full of hope. Minutes seemed to pass. On they came until, at the very end, alone and without a hymnal, an older man passed by. He looked directly at Amanda and smiled, and such a smile, she believed, she had never seen: it was illuminated by delighted surprise, as if in recognition of an old friend. The man was strong-looking, even under his white surplice; his face, ruddy with health and crowned with thick grey hair immaculately parted. But in fact she had only a second or two to study him. He had passed on, and now she felt a spiky touch at her other side: her mother's. "That's him," she said. "That's Dr. Passmore." And now he stood facing them, or, rather, looking down at them from the pulpit. "Dear Friends, I want to preach, not a sermon, not a homily, but to offer simply a message of welcome to St. Matthew's. Later in the term, in our annual candlelight ceremony of Ingathering, the whole school will come together for the beginning convocation of our literary year. Then I will talk at rather more length than today -- and, I fear, in the mode that the late president at Yale, Dr. Giamatti, called `High Institutional.' We will summon ourselves from our summer diversions and rededicate our energies ..." This is how they talk up here, Tess thought. The man certainly knows what he's doing. It sounded as though he was using a broad A , like an Englishman. "... that all here this day, in this venerable house of God, take deeply to their hearts the words of the School Hymn: `All Loves Excelling.' For can there be any love, other than the love of God, that excels that of a mother, of a father, for her child? Yes, we acknowledge our mission and our work. But our consecration must be to higher duties: to works of sacrifice, of giving, of self-forgetfulness ..." Joey wondered whether they would ask everyone to give the peace sign to each other, which he always found awkward. He remembered his commissioning ceremony in the Marines, just at the end of Vietnam, when the general had said, "You're Marines now, and will be 'til the day you die." A sardonic, communal grunt from the new lieutenants reflected their knowledge that they might indeed die soon. But now, at forty-nine, he was giving his only child, their daughter, to this headmaster. He looked over at Amanda, at her mother sitting between them in the pew, saw them both in rapt and vivid profile, as tensely attentive as perched falcons. They had to go to some kind of a reception, Tess saw, a tea. She led her party towards the University Advisement Office, "U.A." It had become very hot. The breezes that had dandled and refreshed her earlier in the morning had subsided; the trios of new students and parents no longer strode from one fixture to another but began to trudge. Some began to worry about their clothes. Max Buck re-appeared just ahead of them, his heliotrope shirt soaked through at the back. "U.A.'s the real business of St. Matthew's, isn't it? It's why they call it a prep school -- right?" A cool and immaculate young man appeared. "Please take out your academic schedules. O.K. -- what's it say? How many here are P.G.s?" There was a reluctant show of six or seven hands. "O.K., I'll direct my first comments to you, because you're going to squeeze us like a sponge, and you got literally about five months, tops, to make your nut. You `P.G.' to do what you failed to do last year: get into a college that you couldn't get into then. St. Matthew's can help you! It's what we're in business to do. Brown's still a tough ticket, O.K.? Ditto Stanford, Princeton, Dartmouth. About twenty of them are. The rest of them basically want you and want your money. Buyer's market. "Of course, most of you don't want them , am I right?" Absently Tess wondered why no academic person, a dean or something, had greeted her before they stuck this university advisement man in front of them. "I don't know how many of you are going to be recruited athletes. That'll skew the process." Tess wondered what "skew" meant. It sounded like splitting a suckling pig at a barbecue. "How many are going to do SAT UP? All right. For those who don't know, SAT UP is a program we contract here at the school. They send out a man from Gloversville, twice a week. He runs it for us. It will help get your SATs up, no question about it. All right. Take your curriculum sheet out of your folders, if you will, and look at your fall and spring schedules. All right?" Tess pulled the form out of the folder and laid it on the armrest between her daughter and herself. In her last phone conversation with someone from the Dean's Office they had considered Amanda's best curriculum for the post-graduate year. Now it lay before them. U. S. History A.P. Biology A.P. Latin IV A.P. Pre-college Algebra I Hopkins & Housman U. S. History A.P. Biology A.P. Latin V A.P. Pre-college Algebra II Hopkins & Housman Only a month earlier, Tess and an associate dean had fashioned the schedule of courses in which Amanda would be enrolled. The Advanced Placements (A.P.s), were a necessity: success in them demonstrated seriousness of purpose and the ability to perform in a demanding college curriculum. Yet the courses must not overmatch the new pupil. "I don't know what her current school is like," the dean had admitted, "but St. Matthew's is rigorous and demanding. The workload is truly formidable" -- words that evoked in Tess's imagination a rock-bound fastness, a monastery on a remote coast, where all sat over benches in rigorous and demanding work. It pleased her to think of Amanda laboring like this. The courses chosen must prove her smart; the circumstances in which she studied and learned must aid in her development of concentration. The young man was finishing. "Let me say something about college recommendations and SATs. First, recommendations. Usually one of our department chairmen will take a P.G. section. These men and women write good recs. Middlebury has dealt with Mrs. Cadwallader for nineteen years. That's the kind of thing a place like this can do for you. But you can't get around the big verbal number. They all want it, no matter what they say. You want the good places, you better put up the big numbers." Tess was riveted. She and Joey and Amanda were sitting in a horseshoe around the briefer, in those little plastic chairs that remind adults of everything they hate about schools. An immense bulletin board, twenty feet long, stretched along the front of the room like an old Cinemascope screen, covered by dozens of bright pictures and posters representing American universities and colleges. Tess studied them. They had a curious sameness: reddish-brown towers and huge overhanging boughs of trees; clusters of smiling students carrying books. Great care had been taken to populate each poster with certain numbers of Hispanic, Black, and Asian students. There were dazzling snow scenes; huge throngs in football stadiums; earnest scientists in white coats looking at translucent tubes they held up to the light; cityscapes to suggest the cultural resources of the urban schools. Tess searched vainly for a photograph of Dartmouth's lovely campus. She heard the briefer call for questions. Max Buck spoke up: "Class rank mean anything? Because if it does, a lot of these kids may go down. Very bright youngster here, she may get lower grades than she did at a public school." "No, Sir. You're wrong on that one. Halfway down the class here is top ten per cent anywhere else. The point is, they know us. They know Bronx Science and Horace Mann, Exeter. St. Matthew's. Last year we got nine into Harvard, eight into Duke. One of the Duke kids was second quintile here. See my point?" Joey whispered to Amanda, "Anything else you want to know? Now's your chance." But she shook her head. No. During the long drive up the New York State Thruway Tess Bahringer had been considering her clothes for the tea. You get only one chance to make a first impression. All that she was prepared to show the world was calculated for effect and detail. Depth and mystery must be communicated to those meeting her for the first time; she liked to imagine people saying to one another, "Who is that woman over there, who is she?" Already her mind's eye had framed the scene: a lustrous lawn, willows at its boundaries, the house of the headmaster at its far flank; a soft afternoon of early, gauzy autumn haze. A few men and women, vaguely Nordic in appearance, the women with their jaws slightly overslung, would be murmuring private witticisms to one another. Tess couldn't tell whether the children would attend the tea; she was in fact uncertain whether they were to be called children or young people or students, or what. She hoped they would not be present, as Amanda did not do well in such settings. There would be faculty. They would be called masters, all in their fifties, their faces rubicund and etched, all with thick salt-and-pepper hair. And at their center would be the famous Dr. Passmore, formidable in appearance yet engaging and witty. She had read about him in the school literature and, from time to time, in Town and Country . He would take her by the hand and "My Dear" her, and she would give good daughter. How old was he -- 65? She would captivate him. Tess's imagination, if a trifle superheated, was at least within stalking distance of what the Bahringers actually encountered. She wore a lavender silk Vittadini dress, moderately scooped at the neck, a tiny ocelot pin with citrines and diamonds as its only garnish. She stood, however, in a rubbernecking line of sweaty parents drinking warm tea out of plastic cups, and waiting to meet one of the deans, Dr. Passmore having left for the West Coast it was said, to raise money in Pasadena. They drank their tea, and now they walked silently, Amanda between Tess and Joey, towards the dwindling ranks of automobiles parked on the grass inside the quadrangle. A rough band of football players huffed by in their silver and garnet. The rear windows of the remaining cars were filled up like trophy cases with testimonials to the academic successes of the older children of their owners. Tess considered them. A solitary YALE had a simple authority to it. PRINCETON was to die for, though the colors were jarring. There was an eccentric flag of OBERLIN, but no DARTMOUTH. They came to their own car. Tess turned to her daughter, to frail, frightened Amanda, whom she and Joey had put into St. Matthew's for her own good. She kissed her, and she offered her this parting advice: "Don't let us down." She pressed a fifty-dollar bill into Amanda's hand. "Call us." FALL TERM SPRING TERM Copyright (c) 2001 Josiah Bunting III. All rights reserved.
