Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (46 page)

As I’m reading this to my mother I feel odd, wondering if she notices the similarities between this passage and her own present life — the things packed away, the memories, the frailty — but I say nothing about this, though it moves me. Instead, I ask her about this film she was in, and she tells me it was an impromptu home movie in which Moe was cast as the villain, of course, and she was the protector of his children. She has never seen it but it exists somewhere. Moe’s daughter, Joan, once showed me the huge roll of home movies in her attic. Towards the end of his life, Moe took every home movie he made and spliced them all together onto one monstrous cumbersome roll that no one could ever possibly watch in its entirety. Somewhere on this roll exists a movie with my mother, age nineteen, circa 1935. Silently, I flip through other pages in my mother’s journal, as she sits near me, lost in her memories, needing no journal really.
I am not in fantasy land. I am painfully living out my loneliness and nostalgia. I dream of my son every night and wish he were here. Those who have died are intolerably absent and I feel that all the love I need and want will not come because I had my chance and lost it, and what man will be responsible for or will react to my aging, my passion, my intolerable loneliness…?

I am with her now, but not. We see each other through veils. We have battled for this moment, and neither sees the other as we would like.

William Carlos Williams dreamed of my mother’s legs, as did other men that summer of 1950 at Yaddo.

As we bend over the class photo, circa 1950, she tells me the official history of that summer, how special it was for her, how it was so exciting to be around such vital intellects, such talented writers. “It was really something, going down to breakfast and having conversations with all these people. The talent was never quite the same after that.”

I tell her I’d love to have a copy of this picture. “You could write to Yaddo,” she says. “They use it for publicity.” She tells me I could write to one of the writers pictured with her. “It’s the least he could do,” she says, with what seems like bitterness, and I let this remark wash over me because I think I know what’s behind it.

Once, a number of years ago, Beverly and my mother and I were on a drive, and I was telling her about a friend of mine who’d done his dissertation on the poetry of one of the poets pictured in the photo. From the backseat my mother blurted, “You know, he raped me.”

Beverly and I looked at one another. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t know what to say. The remark was so sudden, so unexpected, we hardly knew how to react. We were silent, all three of us. Neither Beverly nor I mentioned this to each other later.

My mother starts talking about him now, though I haven’t asked. She says, “One time, he invited me to a private party, and innocent that I was, I went there.” In memory, she’s lucid. Only the present is slippery, tricky, untrustworthy.

“There were all these men there. They were all leches. Ted Roethke kept lunging for me, just making grabs. He really had problems,” and she laughs. She mentions the name of the poet who was her friend, whom she trusted. He was younger than her, than all these other famous men. “I thought he’d protect me.” She laughs again. This time, there’s no mistaking the bitterness.

I think about asking her. What term to use? “He assaulted you?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Did it happen at Yaddo?” I ask.

She nods.

“Did you ever confront him?”

“No,” she says. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

But then she says, “There wasn’t much I could do. In those days, there wasn’t much to do. I just pretended it didn’t happen. For a little while, he became my boyfriend.”

I don’t know what to say. I probably shouldn’t say anything. I sigh. “He should have been locked up. How could he be your boyfriend after that?”

“He was drunk when it happened,” and I want to say that’s no excuse, but I keep my mouth shut and let her talk. “I left the party early and he followed me back to my room. I tried to lock the door, but the lock was broken.

“I turned things around. I had to. I was confused. In my mind, he became my protector from the other men there.”

I study the picture again. My mother’s expression and the expressions of the men. I wonder when this photo was taken, before or after the assault my mother describes. The photo has taken on the quality of a group mug shot to me. I think they look like jerks, most of them — except for Cid Corman, whom my mother says is a wonderful person, and maybe some others, too, maybe William Carlos Williams, who dreamed of my mother’s legs and “had an eye for the ladies” as my mother says. Maybe even dour Theodore Roethke, though he lunged at her as though she was something being wheeled by on a dessert tray.

“They weren’t famous for their personalities,” she tells me.

I think about these people in the photo, how unfair it seems to me that someone can go on to have a career, hide behind his smirk, have dissertations written about him, how the actions of some people seem to have no visible consequences. I think of my mother’s secret histories, her journals, her blurted comments, her assertion that she has never felt safe.

I flip the newsletter over to the section titled “Recent works Produced by Yaddo Fellows,” and see that the latest works reported are from 1987. For an absurd moment, I believe that none of the Fellows at Yaddo have been productive for over ten years, and this makes me happy, but then I realize the newsletter itself is ten years old.

My mother has taken to carrying a picture of me, Ideal Robin, I call it, skinny, sitting langorously, smiling beside a life-size cardboard cutout of Rudolph Valentino. The son she longed for in her journal perhaps hardly exists anymore — I was away at boarding school that year, my choice, not hers, and I never returned.

I have come to visit her now. I’ve knocked lightly. I’ve used my key. She can barely see me when I walk into her apartment. I’ve told her I’ve returned from Hawaii, that she can expect me around eight, but I’m late and as I push open the door she’s looking at me almost suspiciously, because really her eyesight is that bad, and until I speak she has no idea who’s entering. The Iraqi army? A stranger who wants her belongings? A poet she thinks is her “protector” but means her harm? I half expect to see signs, “Keep Off,” “Stay Out,” “Go Away.” I have brought a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. I am wearing new feet, but she doesn’t notice. Tomorrow she will have surgery on her eyes that will not improve anything, but keep things from getting worse. How much worse could things get for this woman who loves words, but can neither see nor write them anymore? Does her history go on inside her, on some gigantic roll of spliced-together home movies? Tell me the story of the “L.” Tell me the story of the wall of your apartment. Tell me the story of those talented writers who publicly display their wounds and the writers who secretly wound others. Tell me which is worse. She kisses me lightly and I give her her gift. And she says, once, only once, though I keep hearing it, the disappointment, and strangely, even fear, “Oh, I thought it was a book.”

Adam Hochschild

 

ADAM HOCHSCHILD
, born in New York City, is the author of
Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son
;
The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey
;
The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
;
Finding the Trapdoor: Essays
,
Portraits
,
Travels
, winner of the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the art of the essay; and
King Leopold’s Ghost
, a
New York Times Book Review
and
Library Journal
notable book of the year, also awarded the 1998 California Book Awards gold medal for nonfiction. Hochschild’s books, translated into five languages, have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club of America, the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, and the Society of American Travel Writers. He has also written for
The New Yorker
,
Harper’s
,
The Nation
,
The New York Times Magazine
,
The New York Review of Books
, and
Mother Jones
, which he cofounded. A former commentator on National Public Radio’s
All Things Considered
, Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1997–98 he was a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in San Francisco.

 

On the night Mel Bancroft was expelled, most of Pomfret School was up past midnight. In a school of only some two hundred boys, you got to know each other well, and we all knew Mel — or thought we did. He was a superb athlete, and at Pomfret this was important: he earned his letters early in soccer and hockey and he danced agilely across the tennis court in a white Pomfret shirt and Bermuda shorts. Mel was popular, but there was an uneasiness in his eyes, and he talked a little too fast. He wore the madras jacket, white socks, chinos, and brown loafers that were the unofficial uniform of New England prep schools in the late 1950s. He let the word get around about how he continued his athletic exploits during vacations: skiing in Europe, rock-climbing expeditions, scuba diving — all trips he was ferried to in his family’s limousine and private planes. “No, not plane,
planes
,” insisted one boy who had it straight from Mel, the horse’s mouth.

One spring day, when the leaves were out on the elms and the crack of baseballs echoed across the school’s green lawns and ivy-covered buildings, this whole picture of Mel’s life cracked down the middle. Mel Bancroft was found to be embezzling money from the Tuck Shop, the small student-run candy-and-stationery store in the school basement. The same day it was discovered that the sizable array of skis, climbing boots, tennis rackets, and the like in Mel’s closet, and some of the cash in his wallet, had been stolen from other boys. Mel Bancroft, it turned out to the astonishment of the entire student body, was not from a wealthy family after all. He was on scholarship. A solemn-faced Mel was interrogated by the headmaster and several teachers. Late that night — in a modest sedan, not a limousine — his parents arrived to pick him up, and his Pomfret career was over.

Mel Bancroft is not his real name, but all other details about him here are unchanged; he went on, incidentally, to became the CEO of a highly successful corporation. Pomfret School is still in business, on a beautiful rural hilltop in northeastern Connecticut. Now, as then, it is basically a school for the rich. Until the day Mel’s world collapsed, I never realized how difficult life there must have been for a student whose family did not have money. Since then, I’ve often wondered what Mel Bancroft must have felt, for it takes vast emotional energy to keep up a façade with all your friends year upon year. Mel felt driven to steal not just ski boots, but an entire biography for himself. Behind his anxious darting eyes lay a desperation. He must have felt like a light-skinned black person who successfully “passes” for white in a Southern town, and who is at last found out.

Pomfret is one of the many boarding schools that were built, mostly between 1850 and 1900, as New England copies of the British model. Both Pomfret’s official language and slang were redolent of British class distinctions: teachers were “masters”; freshmen were “weenies.” Until the early 1950s, new boys still underwent hazing from the older ones, that ritualistic preparation for distinctions of class and rank in the world outside. At Pomfret, entering freshmen were herded on some pretext into a squash court, then pelted with wet tennis balls by seniors in the spectators’ gallery above.

Depending on how far in the air your nose is when you name them, there are one to two dozen American schools like Pomfret. I do not mean private schools in general, or even private boarding schools, whose number is at least in the hundreds. Rather, I mean that select group of well-established schools, mostly in Connecticut and Massachusetts, all a century old or more, with names as familiar as those of the powerful families whose children they educate, so that, in ruling-class circles when somebody asks a mother what her son is doing now, she need only say, “Oh, Danny? He’s at Pomfret.” And no further explanation is needed. As Danny’s life goes on, he will find that the world is laced by a network of other prep school alumni, and that by little signs — a stray reference, a phrase, a touch of accent — they can recognize each other. I have often found this happening to me, particularly when I least expect it, and in those moments of mutual recognition I suddenly see myself as part of a tribe and subtribe to which, however unwillingly, I belong.

Even before I could articulate the feeling, I always thought that my four years at Pomfret were pivotal in my life and in my awareness of the world, or at least of the narrow slice of it into which I was born. I found myself thinking about the school even more once my children grew old enough to be curious. You mean you
lived
there? And there were no blacks? And no
girls?
Today it more and more strikes me how bizarre and unjust is the entire world of prep schools. And yet a significant percentage of the people who run this country are among their graduates. These schools cannot, like monasteries, be dismissed as irrelevant.

I arrived at Pomfret at the age of thirteen, on a crisp fall day at the height of the cold war. Eisenhower was in the White House, God was an Episcopalian, and I was miserably homesick at being away from my parents for the first time. The school was a cluster of red-brick buildings with white trim and a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. The window of my room looked across a football field, down into a wooded valley, and up to the top of a hill on the other side, where an old farmhouse and barn stood out against the horizon. The dormitories had a distinct musty smell, a smell of sweat and steam heat and decades of sunlight seeping into wooden walls. I occasionally catch a whiff of that smell in an old, sun-warmed paneled room that hasn’t been dusted, and it brings everything back.