Page 19

11

Esmond

In the days that followed, Theo basked in his heroism. He’d earned Barker’s hatred and Lewis’s respect and the idolatry of Cattermole. Alwyn, meanwhile, interviewed everybody who’d been present in the corridor and pieced together an exaggerated account of events, which he repeated to any second or third year who was prepared to listen.

But for Theo, his success soon came to seem hollow. School life was demanding but drab. He had been out of education for over a year, and everything was taught differently to how it had been in America. In the summer he would be required to sit the school certificate, and the preparation work for these exams required an endless memorization of dates and conjugations and theorems, with facile mnemonics being provided by chuckling masters to help them stick in their pupils’ wandering minds.

“All boys should come home please” gave the names of the six unfortunate wives of Henry the Eighth from Aragon to Parr, but told Theo nothing of what it had been like to be married to that terrible king. There was no point that he could see to any of the information he was cramming into his head as he hurried from one cold classroom to the next, sitting at ink-stained wooden desks carved with the initials of generations of similarly bored pupils who had passed through the gates of Saint Gregory’s before him.

And when he was not in class, he was at the mercy of house prefects like Barker, who were entitled to shout “Brat!” whenever the mood took them. This call required all the junior boys to drop whatever they were doing and run to the summons. Whoever arrived last was obliged to carry out whatever menial duty the prefect had need of—carrying messages to friends in other houses or cleaning mud-encrusted football boots or making toast on an ancient toaster, kept in a small kitchen at the end of the study corridor, that was notorious for delivering nasty electric shocks to brats at periodic intervals.

This system of indentured servitude known as fagging had existed in English boarding schools for over two hundred years, but that didn’t make it seem any less alien to Theo, for whom the customs and traditions of Saint Gregory’s were a world removed from anything he’d experienced at school in America.

It was as he returned, thankless and greasy fingered, from delivering buttered toast to a prefects’ tea party on a Saturday afternoon in early October that he almost collided with Esmond de Lisle coming out of his study.

He had thought often of the strange disheveled boy with the elaborate vocabulary and slow ironic drawl in the ten days since their first encounter. He felt grateful to him for taking his side against Barker when everyone else had kept quiet, and he had knocked on the door of his study several times with the intention of thanking him, but each time there had been no answer.

“Well, if it isn’t the conquering hero himself!” said Esmond, stepping back and making a mock bow. “Are you still on top of the world, or has fagging dented your enthusiasm for Saint Gregory’s?” he asked, glancing down at the smeared plates in Theo’s hand.

“It has a bit,” said Theo, telling the truth.

“I’m not surprised,” said Esmond. “It’s slavery by another name, you know. The oppression of the weak by the strong, except that here the weak go on to join the ranks of the strong and oppress those below them in their turn—Barker’s career to date providing a perfect example. It’s an endless recurring cycle of ‘do as thou hast been done by,’ with the children of the rich being trained up for a more general exploitation of workers and servants when they join the world outside!”

“Have you always been a Marxist?” asked Theo.

“As long as I can remember,” said Esmond. “I read the Communist Manifesto before I got to Winnie-the-Pooh.”

“Are you serious?”

“No, of course not.” Esmond laughed. “Come on. Dump those things and we’ll have tea, and don’t worry, I’ll make it. You’ve done enough fagging for one day.”

Theo sat in the armchair while the kettle whistled hopefully in the corner, and Esmond searched for mugs and spoons and sugar amid the piles of books, newspapers, and magazines that seemed to cover every surface in the room including the bed. He had a bottle of milk perched on his windowsill but sniffed it and shook his head. “It’ll have to be black, I’m afraid,” he said.

“Isn’t that how they drink it in Russia?” asked Theo, pointing up at a reproduction picture of the Kremlin hanging above his head, facing Karl Marx.

“Yes,” said Esmond wistfully as he poured the tea. “One day I’m going to stand in Red Square and see it all for myself, maybe even catch a glimpse of Comrade Stalin on the wall if I’m lucky.”

“It’s a long way from Saint Gregory’s,” said Theo, accepting his mug as Esmond sat on the swivel chair at the desk under the window and swung it around to face his guest.

“Not as far as America,” he said. “Which city are you from?”

“New York.”

“I thought so.”

“Why? You’re not a mind reader, are you?” Theo laughed uneasily, looking down to take a sip of his tea. Esmond’s penetrating blue eyes gazing into his made him nervous. He didn’t know what Esmond was going to say or do next.

“You said you saw what happened,” Esmond said, ignoring Theo’s question and referring back to their first unfinished conversation as if no time had elapsed since then.

“Over there? In New York?”

“Yes. What was it you saw?”

Theo sighed, letting his mind go back. “I saw poor people when they had no jobs, lying on benches under newspaper or standing in breadlines going back as far as the eye could see with that cornered, hunted look in their eyes from where they’d lost their pride. Cold and hungry, stamping their feet by ash can fires with holes in their shoes from all that useless trudging, all that looking for work when there was no work, and the skyscrapers looking down on them night and day like they were ants, like they were nothing. And I saw them trying to fight back, too, and getting beaten for it and getting up again. Coming back for more, refusing to give in. They were brave—” Theo broke off, remembering what he’d seen from the desk in his father’s office and not wanting to go there because of what happened after.

But Esmond wouldn’t let him stop. “Who were brave?” he asked.

“The strikers.” Theo didn’t want to answer, but it was as if he had to, compelled by memory and the force of Esmond’s questions.

“Striking against who?”

“My father. He had to cut their money because of the Depression, even though they were already on starvation wages. So they went on strike, and it destroyed the business, which was what he lived for. He’d built it up from nothing, and—”

Theo stopped, realizing to his horror that he was crying. He was furious with himself for losing control. Hated that he was shaming himself in front of this boy whom he liked but hardly knew. He pulled his jacket collar up over his face and fought against the tears, so he didn’t see Esmond come over and squat down beside him on the floor, putting an arm around his shoulder. It was the first affectionate physical contact Theo had had since he arrived at the school, and he felt an intense gratitude to Esmond for his willingness to flout the unwritten law of boys and schools and express a genuine human sympathy.

“I’m sorry,” said Esmond. “I shouldn’t have asked. It’s a fault of mine: I’m too curious, pushing into people’s pain. Please forgive me.”

Theo nodded, swallowing. “He killed himself. Put a bullet in his head. And that’s why I’m here. My mother remarried—and she acts like he didn’t exist,” he said, needing to finish what he had begun and saying the words slowly so that he could get them out properly without losing his hard-won self-control. He felt instinctively that he needed to tell the truth after the lie about his father’s death that he’d told to Alwyn on the first day.

Esmond got up and pulled out a big hardbound book with a metal clasp from the top shelf of the bookcase. Holy Bible was inscribed on the front in gold lettering. Theo was mystified. Was Esmond going to read a prayer? It didn’t seem likely, if he was a Communist, but owning the book didn’t fit either.

Esmond opened the Bible and solved the mystery. Half the pages had been neatly cut out to create a niche in which a thin silver hip flask was secreted.

“It’ll help, I think. It does for me when Saint Gregory’s gets me down,” said Esmond. “I recommend it with the tea, but you can have it neat if you prefer.”

Theo pointed at his tea and Esmond poured. And after he drank, Theo felt lightheaded and started to laugh, thinking of the Bible and the brandy and Esmond putting the two together, cutting purposefully away at Isaiah and Jeremiah with his blade. And then he felt he was being rude to laugh and tried to stop but couldn’t, like with the tears before.

“Laughter’s good,” said Esmond, nodding sagely but not joining in.

“Communists aren’t known for it,” said Theo, wiping his eyes.

“Which is a pity, I think. I shall have to change that when I become an organizer. You’ll notice I kept the Song of Solomon, even though that made it a tight fit,” said Esmond, holding up the last pages of the mutilated Bible. “It’s so beautiful and erotic and so utterly unlike the rest of awful holy writ. No chance of Father Philip reading us a passage anytime soon, though. Can you imagine him up there at the lectern in the abbey, solemnly intoning: ‘Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples, and your kisses like the best wine that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth.’ Now that might make some of the boys sit up and pay attention on a Sunday morning!”

Esmond put the book down, smacking his lips. His mimicry of the headmaster was pitch-perfect, and Theo laughed even harder this time until the tears started running down his cheeks again, and he didn’t think he’d ever felt like this before—happy and sad all at the same time. Perhaps it was the brandy—he’d certainly never drunk tea like this before.

“Someone gave me a drink like this a long time ago,” he said. “Got out a silver flask when I was upset, but he had it in his pocket, not the Bible!”

“Did it help?”

“Yes. And he did too. He taught me to run. He was a Communist like you.”

“You see!” said Esmond, smiling—it was his turn to be surprised. “We’re the salt of the earth, us Communists.”

“My parents didn’t think so,” said Theo, shaking his head. “They hated Reds—my mother still does—and when they found out, they used it as an excuse to take me out of school, and that was the end of my running. My coach left too. I don’t know why.”

“I expect they found out who he was. It happens a lot—that kind of persecution. Do you think your parents told the school?”

“No. We had an agreement and they said they wouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean the school didn’t find out. He was called Eames—Coach Eames. I never knew his first name. I regret that now.”

“Eames,” repeated Esmond. “He sounds like he was a good man.”

“Yes, he was,” said Theo, nodding.

“You’ve lost a lot. I can see that,” said Esmond, uncharacteristically hesitant now as he searched for the right words for what he wanted to say. “And your father ... I can’t imagine how you deal with something like that. There’s grief, yes, but anger, too, about being left. A terrible sense of abandonment. Do you feel that?”

“Yes.”

“You blame him. But perhaps in a way it wasn’t his fault. It’s capitalism’s fault. Owners and workers are caught in its web. One must exploit the other—that is essential to their relationship—and so they become alienated not just from each other but from their own humanity. What Marx called the Gattungswesen —the species-essence.”

Theo nodded because this made sense to him. It resonated with his experience. He remembered Frank telling him how his father had climbed from the Lower East Side to the Garment District by bleeding his workers dry. Forcing them to work day and night for practically nothing. Dog eat dog, Frank had called it. What had that done to his father and his humanity? Closing his eyes, Theo could see the sullen, angry faces of the factory workers glaring venomously at his father as he made his afternoon rounds, and he remembered how ashamed he’d felt to be associated with him. That was capitalism in action. Esmond was right—everyone had been dehumanized.

He looked up and saw that Esmond was watching him intently, as if gauging his reaction.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what happened.”

“The exploitation and the suffering are at their worst now because this Depression we’re in is the death knell of capitalism,” said Esmond, leaning forward as he warmed to his theme. “It’s like a rabid dog. It gets vicious and poisonous when it’s dying, which is why it turns into Fascism. You can see that happening now all over the world. In Italy, in Japan, in Germany with Hitler, and here, too, I expect, before too long. But the workers like those in your father’s factory have learned to be class conscious. They’re ready to fight back, and they will prevail because a system built on the cruel oppression of the many by the few is doomed to fail. It’s all as Marx predicted—history is on our side.”

“You sound like a preacher,” said Theo, startled by the change in Esmond. Gone was the humor and ironic drawl, replaced by an ideological fervor that made Theo instinctively pull away. He felt like he was being talked at instead of talked to.

“Sorry,” said Esmond, smiling as he resumed his former tone. “I get excited sometimes because it’s such extraordinary luck to be alive, just when the world is going through such a profound change. It’s like Wordsworth said: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!’”

“Who was he?”

“A poet. He was talking about the French Revolution, which turned out to be a false dawn. But this isn’t. I know it isn’t. We’re at the turning point of history, and I want to be a part of it and on the right side. Is that so much to ask?”

“No,” said Theo, smiling too. “I guess it isn’t.”

The conversation with Esmond had a profound effect on Theo. In part, that was because it was unlike any he had ever had before. He had never met anyone who could explain Marx and quote poetry and make him laugh and cry all at the same time.

In the days that followed, he thought constantly about his new friend, while resisting the temptation to seek him out again too quickly. He did not want Esmond to think him an irritant.

But it wasn’t just Esmond’s personality that had affected him. It was also what they had talked about. Encouraged by Esmond, Theo had opened the door to memories of his father and of New York, which he had kept buried for so long behind a wall of numbness that only his troubled dreams could penetrate.

Now his past life came seeping back into his consciousness. He sat in class and was no longer there. Instead, he’d returned home across the ocean to the apartment off Fourteenth Street and could hear his father singing in the kitchen while his mother laughed. He reached out to open the door but, walking through, found he was not in the kitchen but in the office opposite the factory, and there was his father sitting with his shirtsleeves rolled up over his elbows and his fingers drumming on the desk as they used to do when he was impatient. He was talking on the telephone, but Theo couldn’t hear what he was saying because beside him in the drawer was the gun, waiting to be taken out, to be inserted in the mouth, to be ...

Theo imagined the moment of decision when his father’s finger enclosed the trigger. He hadn’t just pulled it. Theo knew he hadn’t. He’d hesitated, splayed out and tottering between two worlds with his thoughts scattering through his mind, until he couldn’t think anymore. Had he thought of his son? Before ...

Bitterness and anger welled up inside Theo as he sat in the main hall on a gloomy Friday afternoon, looking down at three sheets of school-issue low-quality letter-writing paper, an envelope, and a pen that he had arranged in a precise geometrical pattern on the desk in front of him.

It was the weekly half hour when junior boys were required to write letters at least 150 words in length to their parents. Some found this task impossible, and there were various suggestions for possible subjects written on the blackboard, including The weather has been wonderful (a bald-faced lie, as it had been raining almost nonstop for the previous week) and Theo’s favorite, Yesterday I attended a very interesting lecture about South Africa.

Once the letters were done, they had to be taken to the housemaster, Father Laurence, who vetted them for length and spelling and anything heretical or otherwise damaging to the school, before the envelopes were sealed and stamped, ready for mailing.

Theo didn’t need suggestions for what to write. He wanted nothing more than to tell his mother what he felt about being sent away to school, but he knew it wouldn’t pass the censor, and he was also deterred by the effect such a letter might have on her fragile state of health. And yet writing an anodyne letter reporting on the weather and his progress with construing Virgil would be to let her off the hook of any guilt she was feeling, which he was not prepared to do.

He sat and stared at the white paper and then suddenly pulled it toward him and began to write quickly, without stopping to think:

Dear Frank,

How are you? Earning a bit more money I hope—you deserve it!

Is the Babe still hitting it out of the park? I wish we’d gone once like I did with Dad, but I didn’t know then how everything would turn out. I guess there’s a lot of things I didn’t know.

I’m at school now, boarding school, and a lot of it is just plain dumb. Most of the people here don’t seem to know anything about real life. It’s like they’re just playing games. And they’re different to me too. I mean, we speak the same language, but then we don’t and they look at me like they don’t understand what I’m talking about. It’s hard to explain.

I miss you. I remember the dinners we had in the apartment when you came over and how you helped us through the bad times. If I had the time over, maybe I would have stayed in New York but I remember what you said about going being an opportunity, and hey, maybe it’ll still turn out that way.

There’s a boy here I like. He’s called Esmond and he understands some of all this. I talked to him about Dad and it helped. I wish you were here so we could talk too. Well, not really—I think you’d find this place even more bedbug crazy than I do!

Your friend,

Theo

He sat back in his chair and sighed. He hadn’t written to his mother and he’d insulted the school, so the only place his letter was headed was Father Laurence’s wastepaper basket. But at least he’d expressed what he really thought, and he felt better for it.

He took the envelope and wrote out Frank’s address, which he’d been careful to memorize before leaving New York, and then went down the hallway to Father Laurence’s study. He was the last one with a letter, and after he knocked, he was called straight in.

Theo had had few dealings with Father Laurence up to now. He was a tall, thin man with an austere, scholarly face, and he had earned some renown in monastic circles for a monograph he had written on the subject of Saint Anselm’s theory of atonement. He was an “abbey monk” who had had very little to do with the school until recently, when his predecessor as housemaster, Father Boniface, had upped and died in the middle of Sunday Mass. (Alwyn had provided a full description of this event to Theo, including the detail that Father Boniface’s death rattle had occurred at the moment of consecration and so had been audible throughout the church, amplified by the building’s excellent acoustics.) Father Laurence had been a stopgap choice as housemaster and was expected to be replaced as soon as a more suitable candidate could be found, and in the meantime he seemed content to follow school policy and leave the administration of the house as much as possible to Lewis and the prefects.

Theo stood in front of Father Laurence’s desk while his housemaster read over his composition. When he’d finished, he looked up and pointed Theo to a chair.

“Who is Frank?” he asked.

“He’s my friend,” said Theo with a hint of defiance in his voice.

“But he’s not related to you?”

“No.”

“I see,” said Father Laurence. “Well, we can’t have everything, can we? He sounds like a man with many other qualities.” He smiled and raised his steepled index fingers to stroke his chin in a gesture that reminded Theo of Father Juan in the presbytery of the church in Gramercy Park long years before.

“I can quite imagine that it’s not easy for you coming here,” he said. “You have clearly suffered, and your life experience is very different from many of the other boys, but I hope you will not rush to judgment. The school has much to offer, even if that’s not immediately apparent.”

“Yes,” said Theo. He had not been prepared for kindness, and it left him temporarily tongue-tied.

“And Esmond de Lisle has much to offer too,” Father Laurence continued thoughtfully. “He is a clever boy—one of the cleverest in the school—but I fear he has made his mind up, and that can be dangerous.”

Father Laurence paused, looking at Theo, who saw for the first time that the monk’s eyes were as penetrating as Esmond’s. It was just that he kept them veiled most of the time.

Theo shifted in his chair. He sensed that he was expected to respond, but he felt that saying anything about Esmond would be disloyal, and so he remained silent.

“Well, I hope that Frank will enjoy his letter and send you a reply soon,” said Father Laurence, handing the envelope to Theo to seal. “You will need some more stamps for America, I think.”

At the door, he called Theo back. “I forgot to mention I had a telephone call about you today, from your stepfather.”

“What did he want?”

“To see how you were getting on, and to increase your allowance. He said he felt he hadn’t given you enough.”

Hush money! thought Theo meanly, but he said nothing.

Father Laurence paused and then went on, as if having made a decision to continue: “It is never easy for a child when a parent dies and the other marries again. All sorts of emotions arise. But I think you are lucky to have Sir Andrew as your stepfather. He is a good man, and he has been a true friend to the Church in places where such friends are sorely needed, as I’m sure you know.”