Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (47 page)

Although I was too nervous to notice it, any other American arriving at Pomfret that day would have been struck by how, side-by-side with only a modest library and science labs, this school for a mere two hundred boys had amazingly lavish sports facilities Squash courts; tennis courts; football, baseball, and soccer fields; a track; a gym with an indoor track and rowing machines; rifles for target shooting; a ski jump on one hill and a slope with a rope tow on another. Today the school also has an indoor hockey rink and four indoor, year-round tennis courts.

The teachers were almost all men. Classes were small, seldom more than fifteen students and often fewer. Three times a day, we donned coats and ties and gathered in the Common Room next to the dining hall. Each night while we were waiting there for the dining hall doors to open for dinner, the same student always played the piano, well enough to draw a little coterie of hovering admirers. He knew only one tune — “Has Anybody Seen My Girl?” — but no one seemed to mind.

We did a great deal of talking at school: announcements to the daily assembly, reports in class, speeches and panel discussions at weekend conferences on current events, meetings of various student-faculty committees, readings at the daily chapel service. Each student ate his three meals a day with half a dozen other boys at a dining table headed by a teacher and his wife — and then was rotated weekly, by roster, to another teacher’s table. Years later, a friend asked me if we had had any special training in how to do well in corporate job interviews. No, I replied. But after I had described the daily routine, she said, “Adam, don’t you see? The
whole thing
was a practice interview!”

If there is any single thing that stands out in my memory of Pomfret from my first timid weeks at the school, it is the impression that by being there I was somehow beginning a certain path in life, a path whose destination I did not know, but whose existence was as clear as if there had been signposts along my way to class each day.

In fact there were signs everywhere, usually engraved in wood or marble or stone. Plaques in the chapel honoring Pomfret boys who had fallen in the two World Wars. Wooden tablets in the gym listing baseball and football captains back to the 1890s. Signs above the doors to all buildings, naming them after the alumni who had donated money for them. Even the many years’ worth of initials carved in the wood-topped desks, spreading across each classroom like a sea of alphabet soup. Often these names were familiar, when there was a son or grandson of the same family just up the dormitory corridor or next to you at soccer practice. It gave you the feeling of entering a web that stretched backward and forward in time, connected both to the past and to the secure future awaiting you as a Pomfret graduate.

No ticket to the future is completely secure, especially today, but a prep school diploma helps. One study of people listed in
Who’s Who
found that a graduate of one of the top ten prep schools was thirty-nine times more likely to end up listed in the book than a graduate of the average high school. The twentieth century has seen three prep school alumni as president — George Bush (Andover), John F. Kennedy (Choate), and Franklin Roosevelt (Groton) — and many more among those who tried: Adlai Stevenson (Choate), Robert F. Kennedy (Milton), and Averell Harriman (Groton), to name but a few. Ruling-class families in this country often send their children to the same prep school over the generations: Cabots have usually gone to St. Mark’s, Fords to Hotchkiss, Mellons to Choate, Vanderbilts to St. Paul’s, DuPonts to Pomfret. When we found names like these among our classmates, or found somebody’s father in the newspaper headlines, it did not seem odd. We expected it. That was part of being at Pomfret.

From the Pomfret newsletter over the years, giving news of alumni in each graduating class:

 

1909 —
John A. Morris
…is a special partner in the New York Stock Exchange member firm of Prescott, Ball and Turben. His interest, aside from that, is thoroughbred racing.

1935 —
Thibaut de Saint Phalle
is a director of the Export-Import Bank in Washington.

1938 —
Maxwell Marston, Jr.
is now living in Hilton Head Island, S.C. He reports that the second green of the Dolphin Head Golf Course is about 200 feet from his living room. He is still active in real-estate investment and construction.

1964 —
Peter Kelsey
writes that after more than eight years practicing environmental law and energy law for the U.S. Department of the Interior, he has decided to get an industry perspective on these issues. He is now assistant general counsel at the Edison Electric Institute [the lobbying arm of the nation’s private power companies] “looking for mutual respect and understanding of conflicting priorities.”

 

The segregation that reserves schools like Pomfret mainly for the rich is enforced not by rules but by cost. The percentage is higher at some better-endowed prep schools, but at the time I was there, little more than 10 percent of Pomfret students got any scholarship aid. To send your child to any of the top prep schools as a boarder approaches the cost of tuition at a good private college, something most American families simply can’t afford. The total tuition and other charges my parents paid to send me to Pomfret each year was higher than some Pomfret faculty salaries.

From this class gap between students and teachers came some tension. My teachers had generally gone to public high schools themselves; most had worked their way through college or had gone on the G.I. Bill. To make ends meet, they often took summer jobs — two of mine worked in a local lumber yard, for instance. But the students they taught were summering on Martha’s Vineyard or visiting Europe. When the teachers saw how boys at the school lived — the style of life Mel Bancroft tried so pitifully hard to mimic — they were appalled. I vividly remember a teacher telling me that one day he had found a boy throwing away a brand new pair of pants, right out of the package, into a dormitory trash barrel. Why? the horrified teacher asked. “Oh,” the boy said, “I ordered this suit because I wanted the coat. I don’t need the pants.” Little incidents like this, confided by teachers, made a deep impression on me, because it was the first time I saw my own social class through the eyes of another.

Some scholars of U.S. ruling circles say that it is precisely to learn those upper-class habits that elite families send their sons to schools like Pomfret. Not so, I think. Pomfret boys learned their values by being born to well-off parents, ranging from doctors and corporate lawyers to people who owned banks or newspapers or the inherited fortunes derived from them. The boys were sent to Pomfret to learn, instead, the middle-class virtues: ambition, hard work, good study habits — those things that the ruling class finds useful to help it keep ruling.

Many boys sorely needed such training. To make big money, especially during an entrepreneurial era like that of the robber barons, requires shrewdness and initiative. But being born into wealth three or four generations later does not engender these qualities. Often, the opposite. One boy during my time at Pomfret, a grandson of a famed turn-of-the-century sugar baron, had to repeat a year. Another, one of the DuPont clan, simply failed to do his homework and — the headmaster gravely announced in the school assembly one day — was put on the train to go home for several weeks until he got it done.

Looking back on it now, I think the school offered something you could call the Pomfret Bargain. From the point of view of parents, the bargain was: I’ll pay that astronomical tuition if you’ll get my kid into a decent college. From the point of view of Pomfret’s teachers, the bargain was: I’ll put up with those outrageously low wages so I can teach classes one-third the size of those in a public school. The role of the school administration was to make sure all parts of the bargain were kept and to provide the gloss of uplift and high purpose that covered the bargain’s everyday workings. There were prayers in chapel asking God’s blessing on “those who teach and those who learn.” And there were speeches about the pursuit of excellence and about something called the Pomfret System, which was a lofty way of saying we had a student government.

Everything at Pomfret was covered with that gloss. Instead of saying “Hedley Skeffles gave $100,000 so we’d name the new squash courts after him,” the speech at the ribbon-cutting ceremony would thank “Hed Skeffles, who has had the foresight, the courage, and the vision to understand Pomfret’s needs in the decades ahead. Especially the needs of our athletic program.” It still goes on: at an alumni gathering the last time I was back at school, I heard the headmaster refer to “the many privileges of teaching here at Pomfret and the advantages to us all of being with out the
bureaucracy
of public schools.” It soon became clear he was talking about the absence of teachers’ unions.

The terms of a hidden bargain show more clearly when the bargain breaks down. This began to happen while I was at Pomfret, and it revealed something about changes in America’s elite at that time. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Pomfret Bargain had worked: the school did the job it was contracted to do. Unless you were somewhat thickheaded, a Pomfret diploma could get you into an Ivy League college. Then, in the 1950s, several things started to happen. The U.S. population was growing rapidly, while the number of Ivy League and elite colleges, of course, stayed the same. The balance of American economic power began shifting toward the Southwest — people in previously unfashionable places like Phoenix and Houston had the nerve to want to send their kids to Harvard. And high-quality public schools, their curricula as good as any New England prep school’s, appeared in well-to-do suburbs, particularly in the midWest and Far West.

The result was that fairly suddenly the top Eastern colleges had so many qualified applicants that they could pick and choose. Grades and test scores rapidly came to mean a great deal. When I graduated in 1960, 30 percent of my Pomfret class went on to Harvard or Yale; during the following decade, that percentage plummeted, in some years, to zero.

During the years I was at Pomfret, this historic sea change was just beginning. Particularly for fathers, confident that their sons would go on to an Ivy League college just as they had done, it was an unexpected shock. Parents panicked and visited the school for long, anguished conferences with the headmaster: You mean I paid all this money and the best place you can get Johnny into is
Cincinnati?
During the decade or so after I graduated, with the bargain threatened, Pomfret fell into the academic equivalent of an economic depression. Desperate fund-raising appeals went out to alumni in the late sixties and early seventies. Pomfret had never quite been in the topmost rank of New England boarding schools, and so it was hit worse than most. One year it failed to fill all the places in its entering class. Faculty members had to take a temporary 10 percent pay cut, thereby seeing the terms of their part of the Pomfret Bargain eroded. There was even talk of closing down. For college admission purposes, was a Pomfret education still worth anything? Above a sheaf of toilet paper in one of the school men’s rooms appeared some graffiti: “Pomfret diplomas. Take one.” A
Newsweek
headline in 1972 asked
CAN PREP SCHOOLS SURVIVE
?

Today, however, prep schools are riding high again. The major reason is that public schools are hard hit. First came state tax-slashing measures like California’s Proposition 13, then the Reagan era’s cuts in federal aid to public schools. Those families who can afford it are looking for education elsewhere. Private schools all over the country are experiencing a big surge in the number of people trying to get in, the elite New England prep schools most of all. Don’t worry,
Newsweek:
privilege endures.

 

Candidates for Board of Trustees, one to be elected:

Lewis Turner, Jr., ’66.
In 1973 he…began working for Bankers Trust Company in New York…. Today [he] is a vice president in Bankers Trust Petroleum Division. He and his wife Beth have one child and live in New York City.

Charles Baker Wheeler II, ’40.
Charlie Wheeler attended Williams College and served in the U.S. Army…. He subsequently worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, from which he retired in 1976…. His son Gordon graduated from Pomfret in 1969.

 

The Pomfret chapel is the same: the worn stone steps and dark wooden pews, the grandeur of Bach and stained glass and the Episcopal
Book of Common Prayer
. But something is different this weekend. Many of the students filing into chapel are wearing black arm bands. It is May 1970, the tenth reunion of my Pomfret class and the first time I’ve been back to the school in almost as many years. Several days ago the United States invaded Cambodia.

The country is swept by student strikes. A hundred thousand angry protesters march in Washington, D.C. At Pomfret, things are more decorous: all that is visible are the black arm bands and solemn knots of students, gathered here and there around the campus, listening to radios reporting body counts from armored columns plunging across the Vietnam-Cambodia border. On the other side of college, everyone knows, lies the draft. For the first time, I’m seeing Pomfret students aware that events in the outside world could affect their own lives.

All this is totally ignored by the returning alumni. On Saturday morning some of them attend panel discussions with guest speakers on subjects like “Does the Independent School Have a Role to Play?” (Surprise conclusion: Yes! The independent school
does
have a role to play.) In the evening the alumni gather for an array of class cocktail parties at a hotel some miles away from school, the nearest that can accomodate everyone. They float from one function to another on a wave of alcohol and reminiscence. Eyes flit furtively to name tags, to refresh rusty memories, hands clap on shoulders; one classmate opens the back of his station wagon to reveal a portable bar, with refrigerator. “Tim, you still at the bank?” “When we were here, sex was dirty and the air was clean. But now it’s the other way ’round!” “Adam, I’d like you to meet Candy…Penny…Muffie…” New threads are revealed in the old networks: one alumnus has married another’s sister, another has a nephew at school now, a third has come back to teach at Pomfret — an embarrassing come-down, in social-class terms: did he fail in business?