“State o’Maine!” he cried.
“I shot a bear!” the boy on the dock was calling. “I shot a whole bear!” He was a boy in dungaree coveralls and a soft flannel shirt; both knees were gone out of the coveralls and his carrot-coloured hair was stiff and shiny from saltwater spray; he had a curious rash on his pale face; he had very poor teeth; he was only thirteen or fourteen years old. “I shot a bear!” he screamed. He was very excited, and the fishermen out on the sea must have wondered what he was yelling about. They couldn’t hear him, over their trolling motors and the wind off the water, but they slowly gathered their boats around the dock and came bobbing in to land, to see what the matter was.
Earl lay on the dock with his big head on a coil of tarred rope, his hind paws crumpled under him, and one heavy forepaw only inches from a bucket of baitfish. The bear’s eyes had been so bad for so long, he must have mistaken the boy with the rifle for Father with a fishing pole. He might even, dimly, have remembered eating lots of pollack off that dock. And when he wandered down there, and got close to the boy, the old bear’s nose was still good enough to smell the bait. The boy, watching out to sea—for seals—had no doubt been frightened by the way the bear had greeted him. He was a good shot, although at that range even a poor shot would have hit Earl; the boy shot the bear twice in the heart.
“Gosh, I didn’t know he belonged to anybody,” the boy with the rifle told my mother, “I didn’t know he was a pet.”
“Of course you didn’t,” my mother soothed him.
“I’m sorry, mister,” the boy told Father, but Father didn’t hear him. He sat beside Earl on the dock and raised the dead bear’s head into his lap; he hugged Earl’s old face to his stomach and cried and cried. He was crying for more than Earl, of course. He was crying for the Arbuthnot, and Freud, and for the summer of ’39; but we were very worried, we children—because, at that time, we had known Earl longer, and better, than we really knew our father. It was very confusing to us—why this man, home from Harvard, and home from the war, should be dissolved in tears, hugging our old bear. We were, all of us, really too young to have known Earl, but the bear’s presence—the stiff feel of his fur, the heat of his fruity and mud-like breath, the dead-geranium and urine smell of him—was more memorable to us, for example, than the ghosts of Latin Emeritus and my mother’s mother.
I truly remember this day on the dock below the ruined Arbuthnot. I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself—as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me. The man with the strong body and the gentleman’s face was my father, who had come to live with us; he sat sobbing with Earl in his arms—on a rotting dock, over dangerous water. Little boats chugged nearer and nearer. My mother hugged us to her, as tightly as Father held fast to Earl.
“I think the dumb kid shot someone’s dog,” a man in one of the boats said.
Up the dock’s ladder came an old fisherman in a dirty-yellow oil-skin slicker, his face a mottled tan beneath a dirty-white and spotty beard. His wet boots sloshed and he smelled more strongly of fish than the bucket of bait by Earl’s curled paw. He was plenty old enough to have been active in the vicinity in the days when the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea had been the grand hotel it was. The fisherman, too, had seen better days.
When this old man saw the dead bear, he took off his broad sou’wester hat and held it in one hand, which was big and hard as a gaff. “Holy cow,” he said, reverently, wrapping an arm around the shoulders of the shaken boy with the rifle. “Holy cow. You kilt State o’Maine.”
The first Hotel New Hampshire came about this way: when the Dairy School realized it had to admit women to its student body, in order to survive, the Thompson Female Seminary was put out of business; there was suddenly a large, unusable piece of real estate on the Dairy market—a market that was forever depressed. No one knew what to do with the huge building that had once been an all-girls” school.
They should burn it,” Mother suggested, “and turn the whole area into a park.”
It was something of a park, anyway—a high plot of ground, maybe two acres, in the dilapidated heart of the town of Dairy. Old clapboard houses, once for large families and now rented piecemeal to widows and widowers—and to the retired Dairy School faculty—surrounded by dying elms, which surrounded the four-story brick monster of a school building, which was named after Ethel Thompson. Miss Thompson had been an Episcopal minister who had successfully masqueraded as a man until her death (the Reverend Edward Thompson, she’d been called, rector of the Dairy Episcopal parish and notorious for hiding runaway slaves in the rectory). The discovery that she was a woman (following an accident in which she was crushed while changing a wheel of her carriage) came as no surprise to a few of the Dairy menfolk who had taken their problems to her at the height of her popularity as rector. She had somehow acquired a lot of money, not a penny of which was left to the church; it was all left to found a female seminary—“until,” Ethel Thompson wrote, “that abomination of a boys’ academy is forced to take in girls.”
My father would have agreed that the Dairy School was an abomination. Although we children loved playing on its athletic fields, Father never ceased reminding us that Dairy was not a “real” school. Just as the town of Dairy had once been dairy land, so had the athletic fields of the school been a pasture for cows; and when the school had been founded, in the early 1800s, the old barns were allowed to stand beside the newer school buildings, and the old cows were allowed, like the students, to wander freely about the school. Modern landscaping had improved the fields for sports, but the barns, and the first of the original buildings, still occupied the scruffy centre of the campus; some token cows still occupied the barns. It had been the school’s “game plan,” as Coach Bob called it, to have the students care for the dairy farm while going to school—a plan that led to a lax education and poorly cared-for cows, a plan that was abandoned before the First World War. There were still those on the Dairy School faculty—and many of them were the newer, younger faculty—who believed that this combination of a school and a farm should be returned to.
My father resisted the plan to return the Dairy School to what he called “a barnyard-experiment in education.”
“When my kids are old enough to go to this wretched school,” he would rage to my mother, and to Coach Bob, “they will no doubt be given academic credit for planting a garden.”
“And varsity letters for shovelling shit!” said Iowa Bob.
The school, in other words, was in search of a philosophy. It was now firmly second-rate among conventional prep schools; although it modelled its curriculum on the acquiring of academic skills, the school’s faculty grew less and less able to teach such skills and, conveniently, less convinced of the need for such skills—after all, the student body was decreasingly receptive. Admissions were down, hence admission standards fell even lower; the school became one of those places you could get into almost immediately upon being thrown out of another school. A few of the faculty, like my father, who believed in teaching people how to read and write—and even punctuate—despaired that such skills were largely wasted on students like these. “Pearls before swine,” Father ranted. “We might as well teach them how to rake hay and milk cows.”
“They can’t play football, either,” Coach Bob mourned. “They won’t block for each other.”
“They won’t even run,” Father said.
“They won’t hit anybody,” said Iowa Bob.
“Oh yes they will,” said Frank, who was always picked on.
“They broke into the greenhouse and vandalized all the plants,” said Mother, who read of this incident in the school paper, which was, Father said, illiterate.
“One of them showed me his thing,” Franny said, to cause trouble.
“Where?” Father said.
“Behind the hockey rink,” Franny said.
“What were you doing behind the hockey rink, anyway?” Frank said, disgusted as usual.
“The hockey rink is warped,” Coach Bob said. “There’s been no maintenance since that man, whatever his name was, retired.”
“He didn’t retire, he died,” Father said. Father was often exasperated with his father, now that Iowa Bob was getting older.
In 1950 Frank was ten, Franny was nine, I was eight, and Lilly was four; Egg had just been born, and in his ignorance was spared our dread that we would one day be expected to attend the much accused Dairy School. Father was sure that by the time Franny was old enough, they would be admitting girls.
“Not out of anything resembling a progressive instinct,” he claimed, “but purely to avoid bankruptcy.”
He was right, of course. By 1952 the Dairy School’s academic standards were in question; its admissions were steadily falling, and its admission standards were even further in question. And when the admissions continued to go down, the tuition went up, which turned away even more students, which meant some faculty had to be let go—and others, the ones with principles and other means, resigned.
The 1953 football team went 1-9 for the season; Coach Bob thought that the school couldn’t wait for him to retire so that they could drop football altogether—it was too costly, and the alumni, who had once supported it (and the entire athletic programme), were too ashamed to come back and see the games anymore.
“It’s the damn uniforms,” Iowa Bob said, and Father rolled his eyes and tried to look tolerant of Bob’s approaching senility. Father had learned of senility from Earl. But Coach Bob, to be fair, had a point about the uniforms.
The colours of the Dairy School, perhaps modelled on a now-vanished breed of cow, were meant to be a deep chocolate brown and a luminous silver. But with the years, and the increasingly synthetic quality of the fabrics, this rich cocoa and silver had become dingy and sad.
The colour of mud and clouds,” my father said.
The students at the Dairy School, who played with us kids—when they were not showing Franny their “things”—informed us of the other names for these colours, which were in vogue at the school. There was an older kid named De Meo—Ralph De Meo, one of Iowa Bob’s few stars, and the star sprinter on Father’s winter and spring track teams—who told Frank, Franny, and me what the Dairy School colours really were. “Grey like the pallor of a dead man’s face,” De Meo said. I was ten and scared of him; Franny was eleven, but behaved older with him; Frank was twelve and afraid of everybody.
“Grey like the pallor of a dead man’s face,” De Meo repeated slowly, for me. “And brown—cow-brown, like manure,” he said. “That’s shit to you, Frank.”
“I know,” said Frank.
“Show it to me again,” Franny said to De Meo; she meant his thing.
Thus shit and death were the colours of the dying Dairy School. The board of trustees, labouring under this curse—and others, going back to the barnyard history of the school and the less-than-quaint New Hampshire town the school was plopped down in—decided to admit women to the student body.
That, at least, would raise admissions.
“That will be the end of football,” said old Coach Bob.
The girls will play better football than most of your boys,” Father said.
“That’s what I mean,” said Iowa Bob.
“Ralph De Meo plays pretty good,” Franny said.
“Plays with what pretty good,” I said, and Franny kicked me under the table. Frank sat sullen and larger than any of us, dangerously close to Franny and across from me.
“De Meo is at least fast,” Father said.
“De Meo is at least a hitter,” Coach Bob said.