The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (21 page)

Then the miracle occurred. I distinctly heard a window open and a voice cry:

“Cheese it, fellows! Mr. O'Neil!”

And in a second twenty hands had released me, and I heard the thump of retreating feet in the earth under my head. I sat up dazedly and looked around. Nobody was there but Billy; he was standing inside the building looking out at me through an open window. He smiled and climbed over the low sill. He was actually helping me to my feet.

“Where did they go?” I demanded.

“They beat it.”

“But why?”

He laughed.

“Didn't you hear me?”

I stared at him in perplexity.

“Then where's Mr. O'Neil?” I asked.

He laughed again.

“How should I know?”

I rubbed my head.

“Why did you do it, Billy?” I asked.

He helped me brush the grass off my blue suit.

“Because you're my cousin,” he said cheerfully. “And because they're down on you. Isn't that enough?”

I felt for the first time since I had come to Shirley that I might be going to cry.

“They'll be back,” I pointed out, “when they find out.”

“Then let's clear out.”

“You go,” I said. “They're not after you.”

Incredibly, he laughed again.

“They will be now.”

Again we heard the stamping of feet, this time from within the building. The door burst open, and they surrounded us.

“What's the idea, Prentiss?” George snarled, stepping out of the circle toward him. “Where's Mr. O'Neil?”

Billy shrugged his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets.

“Didn't you see him? He and his wife were coming over by the hedge on their way to chapel.”

He flung this off coolly, as if to him it was a matter of the utmost indifference whether or not he was believed. Then he gave his attitude a further emphasis by turning to me, quite casually, and smiling.

“We saw them, didn't we, Peter?” he said.

“Well,
we
didn't!” George cried.

“I can't be bothered with what you see and don't see,” Billy retorted. “If you didn't, you didn't.”

“Are you siding with Westcott, Prentiss?” George demanded. “Are you on the side of the new kids? Is that where you stand, Prentiss?”

He glanced from side to side at the others as he said this.

“What about it, Billy?”

“Are you with the new kids, Billy?”

“Let's
get
Prentiss!”

But just then the bell for assembly, at long last, jangled sharply from within the building, and the crowd burst apart and rushed up the steps to the door. I can still remember the fierce joy with which, as George Neale leaned down to pick up the comb that had slipped from his pocket, I stamped on it and broke it in two. He didn't even bother to look at me, but turned and hurried after his friends.

***

George was not a boy to let an assembly bell stand between him and his victim, and I lived for days in dread of a renewed effort to execute the head-shaving plan. I soon found out, however, that I had nothing personally to be afraid of. George, it was rumored, had put the new kids quite out of his mind; he was concentrating his energies on a project against the person whose basic challenge of authority he had so immediately recognized. One Sunday after chapel, when Billy was waylaid by the gang and pelted with the icy snowballs of the season's first snow, his books flung in the mud and the lining ripped from his hat, we knew that George's campaign had begun in earnest.

“I don't know if I'm quite as popular as I supposed,” Billy told me, with a sort of desperate gaiety, as he and I engaged in the sorry task of collecting his books and rubbing them off. “I would suggest that I might be a good person to stay away from for a while.”

“Cousins should help each other,” I said tersely. “You told me that.”

Every persecution has a pattern, and George soon revealed the nature of his. It was to establish that Billy was really not a boy at all, not even an effeminate boy, but a girl. This was carried out with the special vindictiveness which old kids reserved for other old kids who had been disloyal. George devised not one but several nicknames for his victim; Billy became known as “Bella,” then as “Angela” and finally, with a venomous simplicity, as “Woman.” George trained his boys to carry through the identification with a completeness that would have done credit to a secret police. He knew at an early age that the way to break a human being is never to relax, to follow him through the day and into the night until he lets down his guard for just a moment, a private moment, alone in his cubicle, in the lavatory, in his seat at chapel, and then to strike hardest. If George and the others found Billy taking a shower in the morning when they came into the lavatory, they would act like men who have stumbled into a ladies' room. “Eek!” they would shriek. “It's Angela! Excuse me.” And they would leave the lavatory and insist in waiting outside even when the prefect on duty came by and ordered them in to take their showers, shouting in voices clearly audible to poor Billy: “But we can't go in! There's a naked woman in there,” until the bewildered prefect would go in and find Billy and order them in, but not without a leer to show that he sided with the conspirators, grinning at their joke and looking the other way when, upon entering, they pelted Billy with pieces of soap, crying, “Cover her up! For the sake of decency cover her up!” George was careful to carry the use of the female pronoun into every department of life at school; if commenting on a translation of Billy's in Latin class he would say, even if reprimanded, “She left off the adjective in line ten, sir,” or filing into the schoolroom for prayers he would always step aside, pushing the others with him, on Billy's arrival and cry, “Ladies first!” Even in chapel, the sacred chapel, where the headmaster, lost in illusion, believed that freedom of worship existed, I have seen Billy, intensely religious as one can only be at thirteen, interrupted from his devotions by having a hat jammed on his head by George, crouching in the pew ahead, and hearing him hiss: “Ladies always wear hats in church. Didn't Saint Paul say so?”

Billy's reaction to all of this seemed designed to bring out the worst in George. He simply appeared to ignore the whole thing. He would stare blankly, at times even pityingly at the crowd that baited him and then turn on his heel, carefully smoothing back the hair which they would inevitably have rumpled. He never seemed to lose his temper or strike back except when he was physically overwhelmed and pinned to the ground and then in a sudden galvanization of wheeling arms and legs, with closed eyes, he would try to fight himself free with an ineffective frenzy that only aroused laughter. But such moments were rare. For the most part he was remote and disdainful, like a marquise in a tumbrel looking over the heads of the mob.

The very fact that I think of a marquise and not a marquis shows the effectiveness of George's propaganda. I saw it all, for I stayed close to Billy throughout this period. The fact that he was in trouble on my account overcame, I am glad to say, my instinctive, if rather sullen, deference to the majority. And then, too, I should add, there was a certain masochistic pleasure in sacrificing myself on the altar of Billy's unpopularity. My real difficulty came less in sharing his distress than in sharing his attitude of superiority to it, for I believed, superstitiously, in all the things that he sneered at. I believed, as George believed, in the system, the hazing, in the whole grim division of the school world into those who “belonged” and those who didn't. The fact that I was one of the latter, partly at my own election, was not important; I was still a part of the system. It bothered me that Billy, on our Sunday walks in the country, insisted on discussing faraway, unreal things—home and his mother and her friends and what they did and talked about. He would never talk about George Neale, for example. One afternoon I made a point of this.

“Do you suppose there will always be people like Neale in life?” I asked him as we walked down the wooded path to the river. “Will we always have to be watching out for them?”

“George?” Billy queried, as if not quite sure to whom I had referred. He paused. “Why, people like George simply don't exist in my parents' world.” He shrugged his shoulders. “After all, you can't spend your time throwing snowballs at people and expect to be invited out much. You don't make friends by going up to your host at a party and calling him by a woman's name.”

“But he might learn to do other things, mightn't he?” I persisted. “Spread lies and things like that?”

“My dear Peter,” Billy said with an amiable condescension, “George will be utterly helpless without his gang. And his gang, you see, will have grown up.”

But he couldn't quite dispel my idea that some of the ugliness that was George might survive the grim barriers of our school days. Billy's faith in the future was a touching faith in a warm and sunny world where people moved to and fro without striking each other and conversed without insults, a world where the idea was appreciated, the mannerism ignored. I could feel the attraction of this future, so different from the Shirley future of struggle and success; I could even yearn for it, but try as I would, I could never quite bring myself to believe in it. As the sky grew darker and we turned back to the school and saw ahead over the trees the Gothic tower of the chapel, my heart contracted with a sense of guilt that I had been avoiding, even for an afternoon, the sober duty of facing Shirley facts.

“I don't know if the world will be so terribly different from school,” I said gloomily. “I bet it's very much the same.”

Even Billy's face clouded at this. It was as if I had voiced a doubt that he was desperately repressing, a doubt that if admitted would have made his troubles at school too much to bear. He gazed up at the tower, anticipating perhaps all that we were returning to, the changing of shirts and collars, the evening meal, the long study period amid the sniggering, the note-passing, the sly kick from the desk behind.

“It should have gargoyles, like cathedrals in Europe,” he said suddenly. “Grinning little gargoyles like George Neale.”

***

Even George could not keep a thing going forever, and the persecution of Billy at length became a bore to his gang. We had been through the long New England winter, and in the spring of second-form year we were beginning to emerge as individuals from the gray anonymity of childhood. We were even forming friendships based on something besides mutual insecurity and joint hostility to others, friendships more intense than any relationships that we were to know for many years. It was a time in our lives that the headmaster viewed with suspicion, conducive, as he believed it to be, to a state of mind which he darkly described as “sentimental,” but it was nonetheless exciting to us to be aware of ourselves for the first time as something other than boys at Shirley. We were beginning to discover, in spite of everything, that there were not only blacks and whites, but reds and yellows in the world around us and that life itself could be something more than a struggle.

It seems clear to me now that George must have resented our maturing and the breakup of the old hard line between the accepted and the unaccepted. He tried to maintain his waning control over his group by reminding boys of their ungainliness and ineptitudes of a few months before, by reviving old issues and screaming the battle cries that used to range the group against the individual. He sought new victims, new scapegoats, but public opinion was increasingly unmanageable. George represented the past, or at most the passing; he was like an angry Indian medicine man who finds his tribe turning away to the attractions of a broader civilization. Though he could beat his drum and dance his dance, though he could even still manage to burn a few victims, essentially his day was over. But if George had been left behind, so, oddly enough, had Billy. Instead of stepping forward to take his place among the boys who would now have received him, he preferred to remain alone and aloof. He seemed tired, now that the ordeal was over, discouraged, just when there was hope. It was as if, in the struggle, he had received a small, deep wound that was only now beginning to fester. George, deprived of other victims, seemed to sense this, for he pressed the attack against Billy all alone, with a desperate vindictiveness, as if to deliver the last and fatal blow of which his declining power was capable. Their conflict had come to be an individual thing, almost a curiosity to the rest of us. They stood apart, fighting their own fight, quaint if rather grim reminders of a standard of values that had passed.

Toward the middle of spring Billy developed the habit of reporting sick to the infirmary. He would go there for two or three days at a time, using the old trick of touching his thermometer to a lamp bulb when the nurse was out of the room. The infirmary had its pleasant side; like the library it was sanctuary, an insulated white box where one could stay in bed and read the thick, rebound volumes of Dickens and Baroness Orczy. It so happened that we were both there, I with a sinus infection and he with the pretense of one, on the day of the game with Pollock School, the great event of the baseball season. I hated to miss the game, for it involved a half holiday, a trip to Pollock and a celebration afterward if we won. Billy, less regretful, was sharing a room with me on the empty second floor.

Late in the afternoon of the game, as we were working on a picture puzzle, Mrs. Jones, the matron's assistant, hurried in, greatly excited. One of the masters had just telephoned from Pollock to report that we had won the game. I gave a little yell of enthusiasm, partly sincere, partly perfunctory. Billy looked at me bleakly.

“Now we'll have that damn celebration,” he said curtly. “Drums and cheers, drums and cheers, all night. God! And for what?”

He lost all interest in what we were doing and refused to discuss it with me. He lay back in bed and simply stared at the ceiling while I turned back to the unfinished puzzle.