Prologue
A raw wind roars through a New England forest under a leaden sky, stripping the last leaves from their branches and sending them skittering across a lonely country road. I take this solitary walk pretty much every day, contemplating how this place can leave me so godforsakenly blue. If I go at sunset, I can hear the evening freight train rumbling across the countryside, its plaintive horn doubling the ache in my heart, so I avoid walking at that hour unless I want to really torture myself.
I ended up at this place three-thousand miles from my home in California with virtually no choice in the matter. It was just what you did when you came from a family like mine, dominated by a spoiled, inherited-wealth father whose unhappiness had turned him into a despot. I had started to become surprisingly popular in eighth grade, was getting all A’s, and had started to receive second glances from girls, when my world was suddenly blown into a million pieces. Now here I am, at the most brutally competitive prep school in the country, without a clue, not a girl in sight, and dark, bitter cold winters that last forever. I am not cut out for this, but my feeble adolescent brain can’t seem to rescue me. All the other boys appear to have the discipline to study in their rooms at night, while I struggle to even crack a book—and when I do, the words swim maddeningly off the page. Years later I realized I’d had a temporary case of dyslexia, no doubt brought on by anxiety, but there were no counsellors in those days, so we had to figure everything out on our own. In order to keep up even a C average, I had to fake my way through my classes, appeal to my teachers’ better natures, and pretend I wasn’t getting D’s in Latin and Science. What a come-down from my sunny days at Paul Revere Junior High School.
At the end of my walk I pass through an impressive pair of gates and onto campus, passing solid old ivy-draped buildings that were here long before any of us were born and will be here long after we die. Harkness Academy is a well-oiled machine that has turned out America’s leaders and captains of industry for 250 years. I have every confidence that I won’t be one of them.
Chapter One
Looking back on it now, my final year at Harkness began on the Friday before Thanksgiving, 1963. Not so much because of what happened to all of us that afternoon, but because of what it foreshadowed for the few of us who came to share a terrible secret.
The first news I had of the event two-thousand miles away was delivered by an out-of-breath freshman—a frail, somewhat effeminate boy named Ted Merrifield—as he burst out of the 4th floor stairwell of our dorm, Peabody Hall, and hurried down the hallway towards us. We were a loose-knit group of four upper classmen hanging around our rooms between classes as the Dave Brubeck Quartet played “Time Out” on someone’s stereo.
“Have you guys heard the news?” Merrifield asked excitedly in his still high-pitched voice. Our blank faces told him we had not, so he continued. “Kennedy’s been shot! They’re saying he might not live!”
None of us took him seriously, least of all now. “Shoo-hah Merry, where’d you hear that garbage?” said Percy Wagstaff, a sardonic, slightly doughy New Yorker from the Upper East Side.
“It’s on the radio! Turn it on, you’ll see!”
At that moment a door at the end of the hall opened and a rakishly handsome teacher in his early thirties, John Fletcher, stepped out of his residence looking shaken. His eyes met ours.
“Turn on your radios. President Kennedy was just assassinated in Dallas.”
We stared at him in stunned silence until he disappeared down the stairs. I bolted into my room and turned the radio on as the others gathered around. Besides Percy and Merry, there was Adolphus Johnson, a Black scholarship student from Pittsburgh whose glasses, fittingly, were held together by tape, and Nick Papadopoulus, an imposing fifth year senior from Newton, Mass., at Harkness on jock scholarship. Meaning he had been an All New England prep athlete who would now be accepted at Harvard or Yale as long as he kept up a C average.
A newscaster’s voice crackled weakly from a station in Boston, seventy-five miles to the south. “...Fitzgerald Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the United States, was pronounced dead at 12:30 PM Central Standard Time, at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. He was apparently shot with a high-powered rifle while riding in the back seat of his open limousine…”
Adolphus moaned. Merry had tears in his eyes. I felt light-headed as the immensity of the event started to hit me. I knew instinctively that this would be a defining moment in all our lives. History had been altered in an instant, as if a train we were all on had violently switched tracks and headed away from the glistening skyline we’d been watching approach in the distance.
“Well, I guess this means I won’t have to take my calculus test this afternoon after all,” Percy said morbidly. He didn’t expect the reaction he got from Papadop.
“You spoiled, snot-nosed little sh—.” Dop was too religious to ever swear, so he stopped himself in midsentence, his powerful jaw clenching, his eyes dark with anger, and then he stalked out of my room and across the hall.
Perce, who could normally shake off anything, looked apoplectic. “I just meant it as a joke. Jeez…”
None of us rescued him, even if we’d had a mind to. We were in a state of shock, as was the vast majority of the six-hundred-student campus. There was an eerie silence emanating from every dormitory, and as the academy bell tolled in the distance, the boys walking back from their classes looked like a stream of refugees, if refugees wore coats and ties. But there were exceptions. There are always assholes.
They came up the stairs with a boisterous clamor, so utterly counter to every emotion we were feeling. The clique at the far end of the hall was comprised of four seniors: the undeclared leader, Granville Lord II, the eldest son of a prominent Maryland family; Mac Kennedy, a Virginian, cool and casual to a fault; Kurt Von Schiller, a tall, crewcut conservative from Wisconsin; and Charlie Wise, the pilot fish and court jester to the three sharks. I pretty much hated all four of them.
Doors opened and several faces peered out to see what the ruckus was about. Then someone shouted, “It’s on television!” and the floor was soon vacated as everyone headed downstairs, where the television was turned on in the Common Room. The entire dorm population gathered there, transfixed, as the details started to come out, confirming the magnitude of the event.
I remember that weekend as shrouded in a mist, as if we were all in a waking dream: Grainy black & white television footage of Walter Cronkite, our communal father, in tears; the shocking moment of Jack Ruby shoving past several hapless Texas Rangers and shooting Lee Harvey Oswald at point blank range; the funeral caisson en route to Arlington, the military drums’ staccato clatter, the horses’ hooves clopping on the pavement, the vast crowd pressed forward to watch the grieving widow and her young family in total silence.
Monday morning dawned with a chilling rain, and we poured out of our dorms to the central academy building, where the bell atop the tower tolled at decreasing intervals, calling us to morning “chapel.” Grimacing and shivering, everyone funneled inside and up one of two wide marble stairways, above which was a century’s-old inscription in Latin: "HUC VENITE PUERI, UT VIRI SITIS." "ENTER HERE BOYS, THAT YOU MAY BECOME MEN." I always found it a bit pompous, but that may just be me.
As the last chime of the bell died, everyone had taken their assigned seats in fifty long black pews, decades of initials carved into their backs. The walls on either side of the room were lined with dark, formal oil portraits of men prominent in the school's history. Then, just as a red light went on above the two doorways, a pale, unkempt boy walked unapologetically into the hall to take his seat. It happened every morning, as if he planned it as his personal protest. He didn’t seem to give a shit that the Dean, an imposing fifty-year-old bulldog who could freeze you with a look, always gave him a simmering stare until he took his seat. The boy lived on the other side of campus, so I didn’t know him at all, but his indifference fascinated me. I was the polar opposite—I never wanted to stick out, though I definitely had a streak of insubordination waiting to blossom in the next few years.
I won’t bore you with what our Headmaster had to say when he took the podium, but suffice it to say he claimed Kennedy as one of our own. Nothing profound or emotional, just bolstering the myth of our preparatory school system’s supremacy.
By that afternoon the rain had stopped and I decided to walk out across the playing fields and past the football stadium, which was visible across a river in the distance, instead of my usual route, perhaps to mix things up in this strange new world. Lost in thought, I hardly noticed Ted Merrifield emerging from the other side of the clay tennis courts, walking in the same general direction. Merry waved, and though I wasn’t looking for company, I nodded in acknowledgement. He trotted up alongside me.
“Hi. Where are you going?” he asked.
“Nowhere in particular. Just going to walk to the other side of the river.”
“Mind if I walk with you?”
He was so upbeat I couldn't say no. “Okay. If you want to. It's not going to be too exciting.”
“Good. I walk to relax, get away from the dorm. You homesick?”
The question took me by surprise. I gave him a look, not a hostile one, but enough to make him feel slightly embarrassed.
“I-I mean I know you're not anymore. But your first year here, were you?”
“Yeah, sometimes.” I wasn’t being completely honest. My first year there, as I said
at the beginning, I had been an absolute larval mess. Ten pounds heavier and three inches
shorter, barely able to do a pushup, and now I was a lean six-footer and on the varsity basketball
team. If only a sub.
“Me too. I don't like this place too much yet. But then it's only been a couple of months.”
I think I nodded. Merry gestured toward the woods.
“You ever go walking in the woods? You can, you know. The Academy owns them.
I've got a favorite spot by the river. You want to see it?”
The school had bred its characteristic wariness into me, but Merry's open friendliness was so disarming I just smiled. “Sure.”
Two paths diverged in the woods, and Merry took the one leading toward the river. After
three years I knew this trail well enough to walk it in my sleep, but I let Merry lead as if it was
my first time. After a few moments a bird sang from a tree somewhere above us. At the end of
its song Merry let out three high-pitched whistles, startling me. A moment later the bird
answered him with three nearly identical whistles of its own. I looked at Merry in astonishment.
“Pine Grosbeak,” he said. “We have them in Iowa.”
“Wow. That's really cool. Do you know a lot of bird calls?”
“Pretty many. Don't tell anyone in the dorm though. I'd never hear the end of it.”
I smiled weakly, understanding what he meant all too well. He was too innocent, and too pretty, to not be brutalized by the meaner adolescent boys. The bird whistled again, seeming to call to Merry, but we just kept walking. Eventually we came to a narrow, overgrown path off the main trail.
“Here it is.”
I followed him down the secondary path, and we emerged a few seconds later in a small
clearing by the river. The slate-black water was swollen from the rains; it moved swiftly,
powerfully, mysteriously by.
“I like it here,” he said softly. “Back home my best friend and I used to spend a lot of
time in the woods. We'd pretend we were Indians.”
He turned to me with a sheepish smile, and I smiled back. With his childlike
vulnerability, Merry was an endangered species at Harkness. I hoped he would build a tougher
shell, and soon, to withstand the cruelties he was going to endure, but I didn’t feel it was my
place to advise him.
We walked back as the sun began to set, Merry talking, me listening. As we drew within
sight of Peabody, I noticed the clique shooting the breeze outside the dorm and I slowed to a halt.
“What's the matter?” Merry asked, noticing my mood change.
“I...just remembered I've got to pick up a book from this guy in Barrett. I think I'll do it
now, before dinner.” I hated myself for being so cowardly.
“Oh. Okay... Well, I'll see you later.”
I nodded and we went our separate ways.
“I enjoyed the company!” he called.
Definitely an uncool thing to say. A passing student looked at us curiously. I gave
Merry the briefest of nods, then walked away, casting a sidelong glance toward Peabody.
The four boys had gone inside by the time Merry reached the door and entered. I continued walking for a beat...then turned and headed back toward Peabody. Not only could I not stand up for an innocent boy who knew no better, but I, who did know better, couldn’t even stand up for myself.
That evening as I stood at the end of the line waiting to get into the dining hall for dinner, the clique was carrying on near the front of the line with their customary boisterousness, always used to being the center of attention. Granville Lord, commonly known as Granny, was on a roll.
“...The last thing he heard was Connally's wife saying, ‘Well, Mr. President, you can't say Dallas isn't friendly today...’"
Crewcut Kurt Von schiller aimed an imaginary rifle as Granny quoted Mrs. Connally, "fired" the instant he finished.
“That's what cracked me up,” Granny smirked.
There were snickers and good-natured groans from the others in line, no one willing to
stand up to the cruelty of the clique.
“Sick, Granny,” was as much as anyone could muster.
“Hey, I'm only quoting from the New York Times...”
At that moment Merry, looking painfully self-conscious, descended the stairs. Halfway down he tripped and, in full view of the boys in line, missed several steps before finally catching
the bannister and saving himself.
The response from his schoolmates ranged from stifled laughter to guffaws and scattered
applause. As Merry reached the bottom of the stairs and passed the clique, Charlie Wise, the
pilot fish to the three sharks, spoke up.
“Twitch much, Fairy?”
Merry avoided his eyes, heading toward the back of the line. As he did, Mac Kennedy
held a hand out towards Merry, "presenting" him as he would a trained seal act. Merry reached
the end of the line where I was standing, laughing along with the others.
“Not bad, Merry,” I said. “You may have a future in falling down stairs.”
Merry said nothing, just looked down at the floor, terribly hurt and embarrassed. I felt
like a shit heel about my comment, and tried to make amends.
“Hey, don't worry about it. My first year I walked into the dining hall with my tie in my
soup. I think everyone in the place saw it before I did.”
“Really?”
I nodded. Merry smiled a little, then looked down dejectedly.
“I hate it when they call me that.”
“Call you what?”
“Fairy.”
“Just pretend like you don't care. If you want to survive here.” They were among the only words of advice I really ever gave him, though I had my chances. I saw him again on my next walk, and realized he had timed his run-in with me so he'd have an older "friend" to talk with. It was understood, if unspoken, that we wouldn't see each other back on campus, that these walks would be the extent of our relationship. He didn't understand exactly why, but I did. It was because of my fear that I would be judged for being his friend.
I live with my lack of courage to this day.
