Dream Catcher: A Memoir (54 page)

I learned a terrible law of the forced march: the person who needs the most rest gets the least. Every time the teacher and I caught up to the other kids, they had been waiting some fifteen to thirty minutes. So after five minutes of rest, it was time to push on. I felt like the biggest failure on earth. I didn’t understand the rosy glow I saw in the other kids’ faces. It became clear to the teacher and to me that I was on the verge of collapse. I was ashen, dry; I had no more sweat or tears; I couldn’t think straight. I heard myself moaning as I climbed. I hadn’t enough strength to cry. The other kids can do it. And I may die. Weak, weak, weak. Kit’s words struck home. I must be a coward. I have no moral fiber, I don’t have what it takes. Failure.

Late in the afternoon we hit the tree line. The kids were waiting, having a snack. Breathing was nearly impossible. I inhaled in harsh doglike cries and whimpers that utterly humiliated me to have all the kids hear, but it was beyond my control. Paul told me to look up at the mountain because we could see the top for the first time. It was the
worst
thing I could have done. I can’t judge distances, and though, in reality, it was about an hour further, it looked to me as though we still had to go the distance we had come, and I knew that was out of the question, beyond any glimmer of a possibility. I looked down at the snow and barren rocks of that scrubby elevation in utter despair and lay facedown in the snow to die.

I began to leave my body. I didn’t know then that I have an autonomic response that causes rapid and life-threatening dehydration. At forty, failure and collapse can occur within a half hour or so of adrenal stress or vomiting and I’m in the hospital for a day or two before I’m properly rehydrated and stable. At thirteen, I thought it was some shameful weakness. What I knew then and know today beyond a shadow of a doubt is that a boy named Charles Romney saved my life.

To this day I think of him as an angel entertained unawares.
²
I didn’t know him very well. I’m not sure anyone did. He was the boy I mentioned that some kids teased because of his slight twitching and odd gait. Lying facedown in the snow, I think the other kids were probably afraid to come near me, the way an injured animal or a sick person can be sort of sickening or creepy to witness. Charles had left the group, unbeknownst to me—I was out of it—and sat down beside me in the snow where I lay. He said, “I just want you to know I think you’re really brave.”

It was like being shocked with paddles back from death. I turned my face in the snow a little and looked at him with one eye and said, “Why?”

Charles said, “I know Kit made you do this, and I think you’re really brave, that’s all.” We didn’t say any more. He gave me some water and I slowly drank. After a time I took a piece of bread, the first my body would accept that day, and then another. Communion. I didn’t pee until we arrived back at school a full day later. I only noticed because, back at the lean-to, I thought myself lucky not to have to bare my bottom to the dull, cold wind.

When I plunged my face into the icy river by the campsite, it was a sharp pain, like cutting oneself, pain that said you’re still alive, away from the dull place beyond pain, the sluggish, sucking vortex where death comes slowly, like the thick, dark molasses that I finally urinated.

1
. “We want our students to be lost and be able to find themselves, to be cold and know they can find warmth, to be hungry and know they won’t starve,” said Kit in an interview in 1968.

2
. Hebrews 13:2—“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, whereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

T
HE BIG PURGE CAME IN
the spring. My friend Jamie and my boyfriend Dougal were expelled; Dougal’s best friend, Brion, and I were placed on probation till the end of the year. It had something to do with a pack of cigarettes, I think, but I honestly can’t remember the details. They got lost in the awfulness of the aftermath. I’m sure it was something dumb, equally sure it was not wicked or life-threatening. It was nothing like giving little kids cigarettes, I’d never ever do something like that, nor, may I say, like sending eight kids up a mountain in midwinter with only one adult.

In recounting this tale, I’m conscious of setting a bad example: I haven’t forgiven myself, as I’d urge another to do, for the betrayal I was coerced into committing. Even saying “They made me do it” sounds lame. No one had a gun to my head. I violated one of my most deeply held principles of loyalty to my friends. I didn’t tell on someone, that would have taken many, many more “sessions” with Kit. But after I wrote the hugely embarrassing letter to my mother in which I confessed to being a sick sexual pervert, a lesbian, and a crazy, paranoid person who imagined that people were out to get me, Kit had one last thing she required. (Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West.) If I was to graduate and get the hell out of that place, I had to write to my friend Jamie, who had just been expelled, a letter that Kit had composed, but in my own hand, confessing how wrong we all were and what loathsome creatures we were, etc. She told me I had an hour to
think about it and come back with my decision. Write the letter and graduate, or not.

I went up the hill alone to decide what to do. I asked myself, How can I bear another year in this place? If I run away, where do I have to go? I reasoned that Jamie knows Kit and won’t believe a word of it. She’ll know I’d never say anything crappy like that. I decided to copy Kit’s letter and send it. And that’s what I did. Jamie’s guardian, a great supporter of the school, wrote me a
really
nasty letter in return, which I received back at home in Cornish that summer. She said, quite rightly, that what Jamie needed now was support from her friends, not shaming, and that I should be ashamed of myself for writing such a letter. I was. Totally. “I betray you, you betray me underneath the chestnut tree,” as it says in Orwell’s
1984.
Do it to her, not me, to her.

Why I couldn’t organize myself to write back and tell her guardian what had happened I don’t know, and I sorely regret it. But Kit would probably have lied her way out of it in any case. I felt like a piece of shit for agreeing to sign the letter and copy it in my own handwriting. I really thought Jamie wouldn’t pay a bit of attention, but of course I’m sure Kit didn’t let her go without setting her up to believe she, too, was a worthless piece of shit. Jamie had been a dues-paying member of the Prob Kids Club for years and a recipient of Kit’s “help” for too long not to be thoroughly convinced that she was an orphan because no one, except Kit of course, could want such a defective kid in the first place. How could Jamie ever expect to be attractive and lose all that blubber if she persisted in sneaking in candy—as if a clandestine candy bar every month or so would cause the perhaps fifteen pounds extra she carried, perfectly natural for a twelve-year-old. Kit, whether bluntly or by intimation, let Jamie know that her guardian entrusted her to Kit to make a young lady out of her. Everyone else had given up on her, and it was Kit’s duty to help.

That was the deep mind-“melting” message: we’re the last stop before nobody takes care of you. I was convinced it was CMS or the streets. I had no idea of any other options. None. No shark-infested waters were needed around this Alcatraz. We “prob kids” were convinced that we had no place else to go, and worse, that no one else would take us in.

One kid, and only one, saw through the big lie. He was a seventh-grade scholarship boy from Harlem. After he figured out the bus schedule, he stole out of the dorm one night, about a month into the term, walked the seven miles to the bus station under cover of darkness, and was halfway to Harlem before he was discovered missing. He was the only kid we had ever heard of who ran away. You can bet his mama didn’t send him back to those crazy white folks either. From deep within the library chimney, we cheered and cheered.

T
HE SENIORS, AS WE EIGHTH
graders were called, had to apply to schools for next year. A few of us had no choice in the matter: these were legacy kids running back several generations at certain schools. For most of us, though, the matter was decided during library time where we pored over the large guide to independent secondary schools. Camilla, who lived for horses, chose a school that didn’t even bother to show the school buildings—they went right to the thoroughbred stables, Foxy Croft or something. I hope it was a lovely choice. Five of us, including Holly, chose the Cambridge School of Weston on the basis of one outstanding feature: it was the closest co-ed boarding school to a major city. The description in the book said students often took the train into Boston on weekends to take advantage of the rich cultural attractions the area has to offer. Bliss! Coffee, sidewalks, public transportation, freedom.

The girls all wore new white dresses for graduation. Mom and I found a beautiful one in Hanover with cutout lace flowers on the sleeves. Jason, who would also attend the Cambridge School in the fall, and I performed a concerto for violin and piano. I played Robespierre in the senior play. Both my parents came. I rode home in Dad’s car. My brother rode with my mother.

H
ERBERT AND
K
IT RETIRED
several years after I was graduated. They were gone by the time my brother went to Cross Mountain. He loved it. He might have loved it even if they were still in charge, who knows? He even held a fund-raiser for the school at his home in Malibu and is currently
on the board of directors. A brief perusal of the alumni magazine makes clear that some people, looking back, remember Cross Mountain as the best years of their lives. None of us is wrong about the place. Like most places it can be heaven or hell depending on the company. The point I tried to impress upon my brother is that any total environment like that—a boarding school, a prison, a mental institution, the family, the army—needs far more checks and balances built in to ensure that vulnerable populations are treated appropriately by those charged with their welfare.

This did not happen for my friends. When I left Cross Mountain for Cambridge School, I kept in touch with eight classmates out of a total graduating class of about twenty. By the end of
ninth
grade, within the year following graduation from Cross Mountain, Jason, my concertmate who had had the privilege of four years at Cross Mountain, was in a mental hospital—I watched him start having to count everything in the universe or it would blow up; Dougal was in a mental hospital and later took his own life; Jamie was in a mental hospital; Charles, the boy who saved my life, was in a mental hospital the following year and is now dead; Holly was drinking herself into a benumbed stupor; Brion was dead, Dougal told me, from an overdose of heroin; and as for me, I was not a girl who had come through with all her f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact. When I was finally scared into seeking psychiatric help at age sixteen, I was diagnosed as a “borderline,” a designation that could not have described more accurately a young person at the edge of a crazy cliff.