Whipping Boy (6 page)

You’d think a watch bearing the name Seamaster would be waterproof. It wasn’t. Steam had a way of fogging up the crystal. So to play it safe, when taking a shower, I would unstrap the watch from my wrist and hide it under my pillow.

A few months into the school year, I returned one day from the shower room, lifted my pillow, and discovered that Dad’s watch was gone. My first reaction was disbelief. I put the pillow back down and counted to five with my eyes shut tight. I was breathing heavily when I removed the pillow and opened my eyes. The watch was still missing.

I searched under the bed. Nothing. I tore the sheets and blanket off my mattress. Nothing. I looked around the room, hoping some
prankster had moved the watch from its usual resting place. It was nowhere to be found.

Even now I find it difficult to describe the queasiness that came over me as the consequences of the theft began to sink in. I begged my roommates to return the watch or at least help me identify the thief. Each one disavowed any role in or knowledge of the crime. That seemed extremely unlikely. I had no evidence of a conspiracy, but the more upset I became, the more Paul giggled and looked at Cesar.

The pair knew something. I was sure of it. I pleaded and pleaded until Cesar smiled and traced the curve of his nose with index finger and thumb. “Don’t be so nosy, Nosey.”

A few days later, Paul admitted that he had hurled Dad’s watch from a balcony. When asked why, he explained he had been dared—
duped
is probably a better word—after being told this grade-school riddle:

Question: Why did the man throw his watch out the window?

Answer: He wanted to see time fly.

The identity of the riddler never surfaced. But rightly or wrongly, I felt in my bones Cesar had had a hand in the crime.

Knee-deep snow covered the ground, but that didn’t stop me from combing the area where the watch might have fallen. I lasted outside about an hour before the cold forced me to suspend the search.

Two weeks after the crime, Mom drove up for a visit. “Where’s Dad’s watch?” she asked as we were sitting down for lunch at a local café. I tried changing the subject. She persisted. I told her that I’d forgotten the watch in my room. She knew I was lying and pressed further. “I dropped it out the window,” I improvised. My powers of deception were no better than Paul’s, and by the time dessert arrived, I had spilled the beans.

Over my protests, Mom did the unthinkable. She told. Group Captain Watts immediately commanded the Belvedere housemaster to undertake a search. The housemaster passed the order along to the
house captain. The house captain responded by telling a prefect, and he in turn ordered a couple of subalterns to poke about in the snow with ski poles.

The watch never resurfaced. The loss left me bereft—more than bereft. I felt annihilated. I would have done anything—gulped down an entire bottle of Cesar’s hot sauce or submitted to “The Thirty-Nine Lashes” thirty-nine times—if I’d thought it would return the watch to my wrist. (I still would.)

Yet oddly enough—there’s no other way to put this—time began to fly soon after the Omega was launched from the tower. There were two reasons for this. First, Paul left the school. The watch incident, plus lapses in judgment that didn’t implicate me, compelled Groupie to inform Paul’s parents, the heiress and the huntsman, that their child required a degree of oversight Aiglon could not provide. (Paul eventually found his way to a Connecticut boarding school with a one-to-one student/teacher ratio.)

The second reason things improved was even more extraordinary: Cesar disappeared. From one day to the next—
poof!
—he just vanished.

He didn’t get expelled. I was sure of that. His poster collection and knives remained in the room. At the time, I didn’t initiate a full-scale investigation into his whereabouts—that would only come much later—but I did ask around. No one could explain his absence. Among the lower-school boys (at least the smaller ones) news of Cesar’s departure provoked palpable relief.

For me, probably more than for anyone else, the payoff was immediate and wide-ranging. My mood improved dramatically, and so did my schoolwork. At one mark reading, I even managed to get the top grades in my class (of ten students), a turnaround that Belvedere’s ill-tempered housemaster was forced to announce before a dining hall full of boys. I was repromoted to the rank of red badge. I learned to “wedel,” a difficult and outmoded downhill maneuver requiring one to wiggle one’s butt side to side while barreling down the slope. (Think Chubby Checker doing the Twist—on skis.) My exes grew
increasingly audacious. One hike included a near-vertical climb up a succession of iron ladders bolted to a rock face, followed by a ten-kilometer ridge walk to a stone hut perched some ten thousand feet above sea level. Derek Berry, a mountain climber allergic to hype, called the trek “fearsome” in his year-end expeditionary review.

By May 1972, the puncture wound on my left foot had closed, and my verrucas had been eradicated. A star was added to my red badge. My sleep improved, as did my bank shot, and thanks in large part to Woody, I learned to slide down the full length of the Belvedere banister hands-free (though my dismount remained unsteady).

Graduation took place on the Fourth of July. The commencement speaker, the widow of a distinguished American ambassador, offered her audience some reflections on the nature of courage.

“Say NO to self-pity,” she urged in a speech that drew a distinction between anxiety and fear. “Fear has an object,” she declared. “Anxiety does not.”

That difference was lost on me back then, and even now I’m not sure I buy it. Cesar had done a first-rate job fusing those two emotions into a general sense of dread. But where the widow’s talk
did
hit home was in its closing quotation, an apt, if now overused, line from Nietzsche recently sampled in a ballad by pop singer Kelly Clarkson: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

I declared my independence from Aiglon by tearing my school blazer to shreds. It turned out that the gesture of subversion was both ineffectual and misdirected.

The same month I said my good-byes to Aiglon, my mother said hers to the Marxist. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had secretly married the man six months before, in the kitchen of Emily Dickinson’s house. (This was before the homestead was turned into a museum.)
Exchanging vows in the home of America’s most celebrated spinster? What the hell was she thinking?

Mom must have had her doubts. She didn’t tell me about the ill-fated union until after she had it annulled. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one inclined to hide roommate problems.

In August 1972, the two of us returned to New York, where the plimsolls, anoraks, and rucksacks I wore at Aiglon reverted to sneakers, parkas, and backpacks. I no longer had to address my teachers as
sir
and
ma’am
. The crossbars disappeared from my sevens and I scuttled my schooner-sail fours, but memories of Cesar persisted.

He visited at night, in dreams of burning tree limbs and endless free falls, and by day, as well. A few months after leaving Aiglon, I had to sketch a map of Europe, circa 1648, for seventh-grade social studies. (We were finishing up a unit on the Thirty Years War.) To accommodate my completionist tendencies, and with an eye toward extra credit, I crammed as many territories as I could onto my map, no matter how small or remote: Iceland, Cherkassy, the Khanate of the Crimea. So it’s curious that I left a penny-size area at the center of my map untouched and unlabeled. The very spot where I had been teased, burned, whipped, and robbed remained blank, an omission that expressed graphically what I refused to say out loud. I wanted to wipe Cesar off the face of the earth. Hardly a practical solution. I ended up dealing with the lingering rage by transforming my memories into a series of amusing narratives.

{Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}

Me, the year after my year at Aiglon.

I recounted the whipping as if it were a comic pantomime and told tales of madcap expeditions free of adult supervision. When I revealed to my mother the stuff
Cesar did to me, she was horrified. Yet rather than endorse her distress and milk it for pity, I downplayed my humiliation and laughed off my pain. Doing otherwise would have forced me to confront feelings I preferred to forget.

{Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}

Months after leaving Aiglon, I drew a map for my seventh-grade history class that obliterated my boarding school and everyone in it.

When I graduated from high school, my mother unknowingly resurrected my boarding school anguish. “Remember how you tried to tell me Dad’s watch had accidentally fallen out of the window? I knew immediately that wasn’t possible. You would
never
have let that happen. You cried and cried when you finally admitted that one of your roommates, that tall troubled boy who lived in a château, had thrown it out the window. I was so annoyed at myself for having given it to you—that I hadn’t been more firm. I should have kept it, despite your pleading. I should never have given in. Maybe this will make up for my mistake.”

Mom handed me a box containing a brand-new Omega that she
hoped would serve as a worthy replacement for the one lost in the snowbank. It was a thoughtful and extravagant gift, and I had no right to be anything other than grateful. And I was, up to a point. But the watch never, not even for a day, left its velveteen cradle.

I gave little thought to Cesar during my early twenties. He’d pop up in conversation now and then, the way bullies do, but when that happened, I continued to cover up the pain in diverting narratives of boarding school hijinks. Humor kept the sorrow at bay. I got through college, had my heart broken a few times, worked at a newspaper in Rome, toyed with the idea of graduate school, and then, in fits and starts, embarked on a career as a journalist. Eventually I found a few editors willing to accommodate a freelance writer whose obsessive research habits all too often got in the way of deadlines.

In mid-July 1985, I received an assignment from the
International Herald Tribune
to write about a television station launched by a group of Warlpiri Aborigines in Central Australia. Five hours after I drove into Yuendumu, a desert settlement three hundred kilometers northwest of Alice Springs, a French anthropologist named Françoise Dussart spotted me wandering toward a sacred site off-limits to visitors. Concerned for my safety, she drove up and warned me away. She was sitting in the cab of a Toyota Land Cruiser and cradling a baby kangaroo. How could I
not
fall in love?

After four months of courtship—a long-distance affair chronicled in correspondence that now fills a small file cabinet—we decided to live together.

Françoise packed up her field journals and reel-to-reel audiotapes. I packed up notes for a novel and a personal computer the size of a carry-on suitcase. She flew west, from Alice. I flew east, from New York. We met each other halfway, in Paris, broke and in love.

For more than a year we lived in penniless bliss. Our needs were minimal, our indulgences restricted. We rented a crêpe-sized fifth-floor Latin Quarter walk-up facing the exhaust vent of a Lebanese shawarma joint and buried ourselves in our work. Françoise had a thesis to write on the ritual life of Warlpiri elders. I had my novel. Once a week we’d either catch a film at the local revival house or share a mango.

A few months after moving to Paris, Françoise and I blew off work and spent the morning roaming the Louvre. Toward the end of our ramble, I stopped short in front of a fourteenth-century altar cloth depicting the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Françoise caught me staring at one panel in particular, a gruesome scene of flagellation.

Her forehead wrinkled. “You like that?”

“No. It’s just that it reminds me of something that happened at boarding school.”

“
Ah, oui, le Cesar,
” Françoise said. She had heard my stories. “Do you ever wonder what became of him?

This was the first time anyone had asked me point-blank a question I often asked myself. “Of course.”