Boarding School (3 page)

Deflated, and a little annoyed at having come all this way to be told to go sit down and wait, especially when we could detect no other signs of life anywhere at the Academy, the three of us then turned around and walked back to find ourselves seats in the library. As soon as we had entered the larger room with its many windows which looked out the rear of the building toward the lake, we were able right away to find some black captain’s chairs with the Academy crest painted on their backs for us to sit down in.

“Are we here on the wrong day?” my mother asked.

“No, this is the day when all students are supposed to arrive with their parents,” my dad assured us.

Blue carpeting was everywhere as we then spent a moment surveying our new surroundings. From the sitting area along the library’s south wall, where we now were, we looked north into the rest of the room. After an open area, there was a row of tables, each one surrounded by chairs, which ran from left to right (or west to east) the entire depth of the room. Beyond these tables were stacks of books which filled the rest of the room to its north wall. The catalog had referred to this as a “fine library,” but I didn’t know that a collection of books this small could even be called a library.

My mother then spotted something that convinced her that we had indeed arrived on the correct day. “Look at what they’ve left out as refreshments for the visiting parents,” my mother said as she pointed to a white dinner plate on a nearby table with three pathetic-looking Hydrox cookies on it.

A few moments later, we began to hear what sounded like some older kids horsing around down at the end of the north hallway. Soon after that, we noticed the small man, who had no time for us still, pass by the entrance to the library and head toward these sounds. A minute or so later, the sounds had ended and the small man had returned and had entered the library so he could speak to us again.

“I’m sorry you’ve had to wait. I guess nobody’s around anymore, so why don’t you all come into my office now and we’ll get you enrolled.”

“Ok,” my mother answered in a tone which conveyed her disapproval of the obvious inefficiencies in this place which were causing us to be inconvenienced.

The man caught my mother’s meaning and spoke again to defend himself as he guided us back into the south hallway. “Everyone else has already arrived today. You’re the last ones. I guess that’s why my staff has already left for the day.”

We followed the man back into his office and once we had all been seated, we then watched as he slurped his coffee without offering any to my parents. “I’m Donald Stuart,” the man offered. “I’m the headmaster here at Ulster Academy.”

Even at thirteen, I could tell that this man was overly impressed with himself. And so I sat there and listened to the conversation which ensued between my parents and this odd little man into whose care I was about to be placed. After a couple of minutes, I realized that this was one of those conversations where the child was discussed, but never engaged. And so I picked up the Academy’s yearbook for the previous year which had been lying on a table next to me and began to look through its pages. Right away I was able to find a picture of this man, so I read through his credentials. Given what I had seen so far, I was shocked when I read that my new headmaster had earned degrees from Yale and Brown and had also been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Paris. As far as I could tell, he was the only member of the faculty who was Ivy League. With an academic pedigree like his, it was no wonder that he seemed to treat we lesser people with a sort of aloof disinterest. /
wonder what this guy’s doing in a dump like this,
I thought to myself.

“Say, that’s a fine head of blond hair you have, Cliff,” the little man behind the desk finally attempted to communicate with his latest charge.

“Yes, sir, and my name is Clint, sir.” I tried to sound polite. Impressive education or not, this first acknowledgment of my existence struck me as being kind of lame. But then I noticed that he was going bald, so I presumed he was simply recalling better days.

Fortunately our meeting with Mr. Stuart didn’t last very long and a few minutes later we were standing up again and about to leave the man’s office. I now knew that instead of being assigned a room upstairs in the main dormitory, I would be living in room number two on the lower level (basement) of a building they called East Hall which turned out to be the small one-story structure we had noticed when we drove in. And I had a roommate.

“Oh, there’s one more thing,” Mr. Stuart offered as he stood up again and guided us back out into the hallway. “The kitchen is closed tonight. In fact, our food service doesn’t actually begin until tomorrow morning at breakfast.”

This was an astounding bit of news. How in the world, I wondered, could they have required the entire student body to show up today and then not have a meal prepared for them tonight? After all, it wasn’t as if there were any alternatives available to us. The Academy was out in the middle of nowhere. There were no shops nearby. No mini malls or pizza delivery. The nearest McDonald’s was twenty minutes away in Worcester. The only place where a person could find something to eat other than the school dining room was back in town, which was too for away to make walking feasible and I wasn’t sure yet if I could find my way back there anyway.

“So what is everybody supposed to do for dinner tonight?” my mother challenged.

“Oh, well,” my headmaster seemed to stammer for a moment. I guessed that he wasn’t used to being put on the spot by a parent who was more than willing to place him there. “Most everyone has already gone up to Boston tonight to attend a James Taylor concert.” Then Mr. Stuart looked at me. “I imagine we could make arrangements to get you up there, and we could tell you what section all of our people are sitting in so you could make connections with them and get a ride back afterwards.”

This idea sounded insane to me. I liked James Taylor’s music and I even knew how to play some of his songs, but suggesting that I go to a city I didn’t know to find people I had never met and who would not know to be looking for me—remember, this was happening long before cell phones had ever come onto the scene—so I could hopefully gain a ride back, struck me as the height of irresponsibility with my welfare. “No thanks,” I answered. “I’ll just stay here.”

“Are you sure?” Remarkably, Mr. Stuart felt called upon to press his nutty idea.

“Yeah, all I want to do is get to my room and get unpacked.” Then I looked at my parents. “I’ll be all right without dinner tonight. I’m really not that hungry anyway.”

As soon as my parents and I had returned outside and could speak freely again, my mother was quick to voice her disdain for Mr. Stuart to my father. “Did you see the bags under his eyes and how red his nose is? He has got to be a heavy drinker.”

It turned out that East Hall was right off the south end of Ulster Hall across a small parking lot which doubled as an outdoor basketball court. It seemed to me as if many people had been parked in this lot earlier in the day, but when my dad backed our car up to the front of my dorm, we had the place to ourselves.

“We’ll help you get your things inside before we go,” my dad offered once he had the car parked and the trunk open. Mr. Stuart had told us that in order to get into the lower hall where my room was, we would have to go through a door on either side of the building (left, east or right, west) which were each located at the bottom of a set of cement steps. He had suggested that we take the steps on the left as we faced the dorm because the door on that side was closer to my room. Also, he had cautioned that we could not get to my room by entering the door in front of us on the main level because apparently the main floor was completely cut off from the downstairs, which struck me as a strange way to build a dormitory.

Once my dad had my suitcases pulled out of the trunk, we all took a moment to acquaint ourselves with this area of the campus next to the lake. Right off we could see that we were standing at the top of a hill and that my dorm was sitting on a small plateau which had been dug into the side of this hill. The steps on the right terminated at the door downstairs, but the steps on the left stopped briefly at a landing next to the door on that side, and then made a ninety-degree-angle turn to the left and continued on down steeply past another dormitory until they ended at a parking lot in a lower area of the campus. This other dormitory, I later learned, was known as “the Annex,” and we could see that it was possible to enter the west end of this building by continuing on down a few steps past the landing and then jumping off to the left and following a short path in the dirt over flagstones to a door. When the three of us reached the landing, we could see further that the other end of the Annex was attached to the second floor of a small two-story building which had been built in a spot where the lower campus parking lot lay in front of it and the lake lay behind it.

The three of us then focused our attention on the large black wooden door which was all now that separated us from the knowledge of what my room was going to look like. And like everything else around this place, this door too had gone too long since its last painting.

“Well, shall we go in?” My dad then pulled open the door which immediately caused it to let out a sort of spring-loaded, mid-range groan.

“Charming,” my mother responded as she led the way inside.

We found that there was adequate lighting when we entered the stark and narrow hallway. Immediately to our right, once we were inside, was a bathroom. For an instant, I peered in through the door and found one sink, one toilet, one urinal, one shower and a window with translucent glass along the east wall. The entire room seemed barely bigger than my parents’ walk-in closet back home. The four bedrooms on this floor were all off to our left and in four or five steps we were standing in front of the second door on this side of the hall.

“You’ve got the key don’t you, Clint?” my dad puffed as he set one of my heavy suitcases down.

“Yeah, I do,” I answered as I pulled it out from my pocket and slid it into the lock. And when I turned the lock and pushed open the door, I encountered a boy my age with a thick head of straight black hair who looked back at me with an expression of surprise. “Oh sorry,” I reacted quickly. “I didn’t know anyone was in here. I think we’re supposed to be roommates.”

The boy then smiled and put out his hand. “Oh, I didn’t want to go to the concert tonight. Hi, I’m Matt Ramsey.”

Immediately, I put down my suitcase and shook the kid’s hand. “I’m Clint Adams. Nice to meet ya.” I then introduced Matt to my parents and we all spent a few minutes after that in conversation.

Matt turned out to be a fairly chatty fellow. “I hope you don’t mind, but I went ahead and took the bed next to the window.”

“No, that’s fine,” I replied.

As the four of us talked, my parents and I learned, among other things, that this boy was from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and had been brought to the Academy by his aunt whom he now lived with after his parents had been killed in a traffic accident some seven or eight months earlier. He seemed capable of talking freely about the incident, but we could tell that he was still bothered by his loss. And happily, we discovered that Matt had picked up a large deer salami and bag of potato chips in town before his aunt had brought him to the campus that day, plus my new roommate knew where the TV lounge was in Ulster Hall where we could get pop and candy bars from the vending machines which were there. So dinner, I resolved, was no longer a problem.

“I thought of stopping in town for some provisions,” my dad admitted. “But someone in the back seat was in too big of a hurry to get out here.”

“Ok, Dad.” I knew he was joking so I pretended to feel insulted.

“Did you aunt stay here in the area tonight?” my mother asked my new roommate.

“No.” Matt smiled. “She’s meeting her new stock broker for dinner down in New York tonight. I think they’re dating.”

“Oh,” my mother continued. “Your aunt isn’t married?”

“No, but she’d like to be,” Matt answered.

My mother then smiled. She had spent as much time on campus now as she considered bearable. “Well, perhaps we should be going now so you two boys can become better acquainted.”

“Yes,” my dad joined in. “We’ve still got a good three-hour drive to New York ourselves, and I’ve made dinner reservations for us tonight at 21. So we need to be leaving here pretty soon, I’m afraid.”

The time had come for my folks to be on their way, and for me to finally be on my own. My parents said good-bye to Matt, and then I followed them back out to their car. It had been cloudy all afternoon and by the time we had gotten outside again, the clouds overhead had grown dark and were looking now as if they were about to open up on us.

“I’ve arranged for you to have an allowance of five dollars a week. You can pick up your money every Monday from the bursar’s office in Ulster Hall,” my dad told me as he took his place behind the steering wheel again. Later I found I was able to stretch my allowance out so that I could pay for one three-dollar small pepperoni pizza from one of the three pizzerias in town, and one can of pop per day for six days every week. “But here’s fifty dollars so you can run into town this weekend and get a desk lamp and whatever else you may need for your room.” My dad then smiled as he handed me the cash.

“Thanks.” I appreciated the thought.

“Try to get something that will cheer up your room too, dear,” my mother suggested as she took her seat in the car next to my father. “All of that pine-colored paneling against that light gray linoleum looks so dreary.”

“Ok, Mom, I’ll try,” I answered.

There was still a little more information my dad wanted me to know as thick drops of rain began to fall on me. “Tomorrow I’m going to be spending some time in our New York office while your mother goes out and does some shopping. So we’ll be spending tonight and tomorrow night at the Pierre. Then the day after tomorrow, our flight for Paris leaves first thing in the morning. So if you need us before we leave, you can reach us at the Pierre. After that, you can go to Mr. Stuart if you have any problems. He does seem a bit odd I suppose, but I think he’s got everything under control around here.”