Boarding School (53 page)

When I spoke with her upon my arrival today, I had asked the woman in the row house if she had ever known Jamie and his friend Charlie. She told me that she had and that Charlie had moved into town once he had grown up and had gone to work as a laborer of some kind. She also told me that Jamie had taken up the guitar and had played in a band for a while. This news caused me to wonder if I had influenced my friend more than I had realized. Later when Jamie had grown, she knew that he had married and moved to near by Thompson, Connecticut, but she lost track of him after that. And before I left her front porch, the woman asked me if I had known what had happened to the Friendly Inn.

“I noticed it wasn’t there when I drove past the site a while ago,” I admitted. The inn had been a local landmark during the time I lived here, so I didn’t consider it odd that she would ask me about it.

“It was a long time ago,” she went on. “Back around the time the old school building here burned down. But somehow the Friendly Inn caught fire one night and burned down also. Nobody was hurt though,” she continued. “It had been closed for a little while, I think for renovations, so there were no guests or employees there when the fire happened.”

“Gee, I replied. “That was a pretty large and rambling facility. You’d think since the place was so close to town, the fire department would have been able to have saved at least some of it.”

“I know. That’s what a lot of people said afterwards. But they didn’t.”

I’m now standing at my rental car again. I’ve seen all I’ve come to see and it’s time for me to continue on now. But as I open the door to get in, I’m stopped abruptly by a familiar sound which seems so incongruous to me in these surroundings.

RING, RING

Immediately I pull my cell phone out of my pocket to answer it. “Hello, this is Clint.”

The voice on the other end is as familiar to me as my own. “Hey, I wanted to let you know that we landed at LaGuardia a little while ago and we’re just getting into New York now. We thought we’d just go straight to the hotel and wait for you there. How soon before you’re here?” It’s Matt.

“Well, I made a little stop. You’ll never guess where I’m standing at this moment.” I hadn’t told anyone that I was coming here today.

“I give up. Where?” Matt asks.

I take a brief pause to find just the right words to convey my news. “I’m standing on the main drive at the Academy looking at our old dorm right now.”

Matt is silent for a moment. My news has taken him by surprise. “Really?” He can hardly believe what I’ve just told him. “Well what’s it like now?” he asks.

“Well, there are now houses standing where Ulster Hall used to be and the gym is a church, but everything else looks pretty much the same, only I’m finding it kind of hard to think of this place now as an open neighborhood instead of a campus where they used to keep us confined all the time.”

“I can imagine. And you say the gym is now a church? For real?” It’s hard, given Matt’s situation at this moment, for him to have an in-depth conversation with me.

“Yeah,” I go on. “It’s really strange. But I’ll tell you more about everything I’ve learned today when I see you guys later tonight.”

“Yeah, ok. You can also tell me why you decided to go there after all these years.”

“Sure,” I assure him. Then I sense that I need to change the subject. “Were you able to bring Janet and the kids with you?” I ask.

“Yeah. They’re right here in the cab with me. We had to take Frankie out of school for a few days, but it didn’t take much for us to talk him into the idea. Look, we’re crossing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge right now. So we’ll see you in a few hours. Ok?”

“Yeah, I’ll catch up with you guys at the Pierre. Bye” “Bye.” And then Matt hangs up his cell phone.

As I put my own cell phone back into my pocket, I take one last long look at our old dormitory. I owed Matt everything, and that summer in Europe I knew how I wanted to repay him. And so a few weeks after we had joined my parents, I succeeded in persuading them to adopt Matt and make him my real brother. I wanted to give my friend the one thing he needed more than anything else in the world. So by the time fall came around that year, we had made him a part of our family. With his aunt’s blessings, of course, which she wired to us from Banff. And I’ve never regretted what we did for him. In fact, today we’re all meeting down in New York to celebrate my parents’—I mean our parents’—fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. My wife and children arrived in the city with my parents last night and as Matt said, they’re all waiting for me now. Back in the car finally, I start up the engine and begin to drive once more. I guide the car around the circle—all of the trees are gone from it now—and head back along the drive toward what used to be the front entrance. In a moment I’m on the winding country road again and headed for the highway back to town. But before I go too far, I pull the car over to the right and stop so I can look for a minute out the window on the passenger side. There it is. The pine field. This place too looks exactly as I remember it. There’s been rain here recently and off in the distance I can spot two small puddles of water. “What do ya know?” I say out loud.

My mind now shifts for a moment to that awful night here in this field when the upperclassmen broke us down. How the experience had caused Matt and me to believe that neither of us would ever have a future. And then I think about the husband and wife who were behind our whole transformation into sex slaves. Ironically, we were on holiday in the South of France with my parents when we learned of the wealthy couple who were presumed dead after their downtown Boston penthouse had been gutted by fire. Their names were never mentioned in the accounts we read, but Matt and I knew it was Fatso and Sweetie the papers were telling about. And although we were sure that the authorities would never have enough information to link all of these fires together, we knew then as we know today that they are all connected.

One thing that was quite clear to us at the time was that Joe had obviously managed to survive the slam in the head he had taken from his beloved baseball bat. Of course since we had all run away from him so abruptly that day, none of us ever saw him again. And I suppose that if I had stopped in Framingham on my way down here from Boston a little while ago, I could have confirmed for myself whether or not he had also burned down that house he had nearly killed us in. But to this day I get a chill that goes deep into my bones and sharp pains which run across my stomach where my wounds used to be whenever I think about that man. I’m sure these symptoms are psychosomatic, but I don’t care. Staying away from that killer, even after all of these years, still strikes me as the smartest thing for me to do. So as far as I know, after everything was over, Joe simply slipped back into that slimy underworld from which Matt and I were lucky enough to have escaped.

At the end of that summer in Europe, because we weren’t sure if Joe or the South Americans were still looking for us, Matt and I were able to talk my parents into letting us next attend an American school in Switzerland. Staying closer to my parents struck us both as being the smartest decision we could make. During that year and the one that followed—my dad’s assignment in Europe wound up being extended for an extra twelve months—Matt and I had long conversations about our experiences in Massachusetts and what type of men we hoped to become one day. At first we thought nothing about going after each other sexually in the way we had been taught at the Academy whenever the urge hit us. But as our conversations evolved and as we gained more distance from our past, we realized that we both wanted to put ourselves back on the track—the heterosexual track—we had been on before we had attended the Academy.

So when we all moved back to the States finally two years later, Matt and I decided that to keep temptation away, we would separate ourselves for our last two years of high school. As a result, I went off to a very fine prep school on the other side of Connecticut, and Matt found a good school up in Maine. And as things worked out, we both had very good years at these other boarding schools.

In those years leading up to our graduations from high school, through sports and other activities, I came to know many other students at a number of other boarding schools. And because I was sensitive to the subject, I became aware of a significant volume of incidents in which sexual liaisons shall we say, occurred between boys—and sometimes between teachers and boys—in nearly every boarding environment I encountered. Indeed, I was even aware of such goings-on—in one form or another—within the new schools we were attending.

For many years after boarding school, how ever, I dropped the subject from my mind entirely as I worked to build my own family and career, but in recent years I have begun to study these behaviors in greater detail. And although Golding never made mention of it in his classic
Lord of the Flies
I can only imagine that he must have been aware of the phenomenon, and that perhaps the sensitivities of his day had convinced him to leave any description of sex between boys out of his writings. Because I have found, and I suppose I will propose this now as my own theory, that whenever a decent-sized population of boys is gathered—from say the age of eight and above—there will be a percentage of these boys who will engage in sexual behavior with one another, and the degree to which this behavior is forced or voluntary will depend entirely upon how much adult supervision and discipline is present within the community.

To be sure, the experiences that Matt and I and others went through at the Academy should be thought of as occurrences at the extreme edge of the scale. And the obvious question, I suppose, that anyone would ask after reading our story is whether or not we feel as if our lives since the Academy have been irrevocably destroyed in the way so many pop psychologists and self-proclaimed experts seem eager to pronounce every time a case of child sexual abuse comes to light in the media. I know I speak for Matt when I say that such assertions are utter nonsense.

I ask the question. Which is more devastating to a young person: being victimized sexually by another, or being told after the fact by a so-called expert that his future is now thoroughly destroyed? Of course being the victim of a sexual assault can be an enormously traumatic event for anyone. And I will admit that I do feel much better now that I’ve written about my experiences at the Academy after I’ve kept them all hidden inside of me for so many years. But I can’t say that I feel particularly damaged as I conclude my reflections on the events of those days. On the one hand, the boys we became while we lived at the Academy defined who we were at that time. But in the years which have followed, Matt and I have worked very hard to become the men we have wanted to be. So in the end I would say that our experiences at the Academy have simply been a part of the overall mix which defines who we are today. And since we are both happy with our lives today, I’m not sure that either one of us would want to go back into the past to change anything that had happened to us—even if we could. Suffice to say we have become the men we have chosen to be. Of course there are all kinds of bad in this world and I do not presume here to be all knowing, but it seems to me that as humans we always get only two choices. We can quit when adversity comes around and allow ourselves to be beaten by it, or we can use the misfortunes in our lives as a foundation to make us stronger and wiser. Matt and I merely made the latter our choice.

Although I know thousands of people, today I have just a handful of very close friends whom I trust implicitly. The rest of the world I hold at arm’s length. If there is any aspect of my personality which I can point to as a negative result of my experiences at the Academy, I would suspect it is this tendency I have to keep to myself. But I have observed this same response in people who have a physical impairment of some kind and who have suffered ridicule and scorn throughout their childhood at the hands of the others within their peer group. Such behavior today is considered out of vogue, but when I was growing up it was standard operating procedure for anyone who was even slightly different from the others to be subjected to such abuse.

Our experiences do serve notice to parents and school administrators that sexual behavior in children in general does occur and as such is something which responsible adults should, at the very least, be aware of. And there is no question that we should all work to insure that no young person is ever forced into having sex by another. But enough of my post mortem on my life at Ulster Academy. I’ve really got to be on my way now or I’ll miss our dinner reservations tonight at 21.

Once more I look ahead and press my foot down on the accelerator. I should reach the highway in about two minutes. If I remember correctly, I eventually need to find my way to I-84which coincidentally will take me right past the boarding school I attended after I left the Academy. That school is still in business today though they no longer take boarders. The place is now just a school for day students, but they still call me every year to ask for a donation just the same.

It has been a wrenching day for me emotionally as I have relived events from more than thirty years ago. And it suddenly occurs to me that if it had been pre-ordained for me to go through the things they forced me into at the Academy, it was fortunate for me that I wound up having these experiences while I was a boy because as an adult, I don’t believe I could have survived the constant physical and mental abuse. Kids are more adaptable than adults. In many ways young people can adjust better to stresses, and withstand adverse circumstances which others force upon them, in ways which those of us who are fully grown are simply not equipped to put up with.

I’m ok these days. In fact, I’m better than ok—and so is Matt. Like my brother, I have a loving wife, well-adjusted and successful children, a nice home, and a career I enjoy. In most ways that matter, I feel as if I have accomplished the things in life I set out to achieve all those years ago. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of things I have before me which I still need to complete. But all in all, I feel as if things these days are moving along just fine. And as I turn my car onto Highway 193,I leave the town of Ulster as well as the state of Massachusetts with a feeling of accomplishment. For I have lived in hell on earth itself, and I have come through it all and gone on to build for myself the type of life which any person can be proud of. And this is a fact which no one, despite any experience in my past, can ever take away from me.