I pass a series of carved marble plaques featuring the names of all the school’s headmasters, dating back to 1732.
Seventeen thirty-two! This place has certainly been around. Part of what you’re shelling out for is its history, and right there at the bottom of the newest plaque is the name of the guy who phoned me, the latest keeper of the flame, etched into the marble: Peter Plymouth. How fitting that a guy named Plymouth should have his name carved into rock. His start date is carved in next to his name, with a dash next to it. When he dies, quits, or gets fired, a guy with a hammer and chisel will chip in his departure date. This has got to be the only school in Manhattan where part of the tuition fees go toward a stonecutter.
There’s a secretary seated at a desk in front of the headmaster’s office, a sixtyish, owl-shaped woman with her hair up in a tight gray bun. She’s perfect for this place, the kind of woman no young male will lose valuable study time to over masturbatory fantasies.
I tell her who I am, explain that I have a one o’clock appointment. At the sound of my name her eyebrows go up, a clue to me that I’m in for some serious business. It happens to be one o’clock on the dot. She gestures at the closed door and says, “Go right in.”
But I can’t. Just being in a school setting has made me timid. I have to tap on the door first, and only when the voice from the other side tells me to come in am I able to do it.
It’s a big room, with windows facing out on the branches of a sycamore tree. Headmaster Peter Plymouth sits at a wide mahogany desk with his back to the windows. He’s wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, and his long, bony body seems to rise from his chair in sections, like a carpenter’s ruler. His hair is cut short, his face is unwrinkled, and his handshake is hard and dry. He gestures for me to sit down before returning to his own chair.
A lot had been made of this headmaster’s appointment the year before, because he’d graduated from the place twenty years earlier, gone to Yale, and then begun an academic career that took him from campus to campus all over the Northeast, with a “year out” somewhere in the middle, when he got a grant to write a book about Great Sailboat Races of the 1930s.
I know all this stuff because the school bombards my mailbox with letters, keeping me abreast of this kind of news. I throw out most of the mail without reading it, but there was something about the “Return of the Prodigal Son” memo that caught my eye.
So now we’re both seated, looking at each other. He’s giving me a bit of time to drink in the diplomas, the awards, the ribbons, and the sailing trophies that adorn his office. There’s even a ship in a bottle, right there on his desk.
“Well,” he begins, “you have quite a son.”
I have nothing to say in response to this. It means nothing—it could be good, it could be bad. If this were a tennis match, he’d have just served the ball into the net. I’m willing to sit and wait for as long as I must for his second serve, which is even weaker than the first.
“I’m sorry to drag you in here like this,” he ventures. “I know you’re busy.”
That would have been true an hour earlier, when I had a job, the kind of job this man couldn’t do in a million years. He’s never been in a newsroom full of frantic people, with editors yelling for copy and copyboys rushing around and hysterical reporters using the word “fuck” as a noun, a verb, and even an adverb (i.e., “You are the fucking slowest copyboy in the world!”).
No, Mr. Plymouth’s pressure is a different kind of pressure, the pressure to get the boys placed in Ivy League colleges so the school can maintain its prestige and continue to have desperate parents clamoring to hurl their money at him.
“Don’t apologize,” I say. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
The headmaster opens his desk drawer and pulls out a couple of sheets of loose-leaf paper covered in jagged, spiky writing I immediately recognize as my son’s.
“I’d like you to look at this,” he says softly. “It’s an essay your son composed yesterday in English class. It was a little exercise in spontaneous expression, assigned by Mr. Edmondson. The topic was ‘The Cold Truth.’”
“The cold truth about what?”
“That was entirely up to the student. He could take the title and go any which way with it. I think you’ll be interested in your son’s choice.”
He passes the pages to me. I take my time getting out my reading glasses, which I’ve only begun to wear after decades of squinting at the green glow of computer screens. I’m a little bit nervous, I’ll admit, but at the same time it’s a joy to read something that’s actually been penned by a human hand for a change, however disturbing it might turn out to be.
THE COLD TRUTH
by Jacob Perez-Sullivan
You don’t know it when you’re a kid, because nobody tells you, but the key to life is being in the right clubs, pretty much from the time you start walking.
Nobody sells it to you that way—in fact, they try to spin it the other way, so that it seems important to embrace and understand as many different kinds of people as you can in the course of your lifetime—but the truth is, that’s not the truth.
Far from it. It’s important to get into the right preschool, because this will naturally lead to the right elementary school, followed by the right high school, and then, of course, the right college.
The college is to this process what the orgasm is to the sex act. Anyone who makes it all the way through the other schools only to drop the ball when it comes to college has not understood the process. You don’t belong to exclusionary groups all your life just to start mixing in with the general population at age eighteen. It makes a mockery of your entire life, not to mention the monumental waste of your parents’ money.
The clubhouse life is a true commitment, made first by the parents and then by us, the students, by the time we’re old enough to ride a two-wheeler. We get the point. Nobody has to spell it out for us. It’s not a complicated or sophisticated strategy.
The saddest thing about the clubhouse life (there are many sad things, but we only have fifteen minutes to write this essay) is the fact that we only get to know each other. A school like ours is careful to stir the occasional African-American or Hispanic into the mix, but that’s not for the benefit of those students, who are hand-picked for their apparent harmlessness.
No, those students are here so that the rest of us won’t freak out every time we go to a cash machine and there’s a member of a minority waiting behind us.
This is part of the clubhouse process—recognizing the fact that now and then, we must step outside the clubhouse, whether we like it or not. Step out, and then quickly step back in. And shut the door fast, lest an outsider follow you inside.
You’re either in a good club, or you’re in a bad club. The walls are there, whether you see them or not. It’s all about the walls, and which side of the walls you’re on.
That’s the cold truth. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t fair, but it’s the cold truth. I can only hope the day will come when this sham just cannot go on, and the entire system collapses under the weight of its own bullshit. Maybe then, life will be fair.
When I finish reading the essay I continue holding the pages, just to stare at the symmetry of my son’s
