CHAPTER SIX
I WAS SENT TO ANDOVER FOR HIGH SCHOOL—SENTENCED TO Andover, was how Bing put it—a concession to my grandfather’s conviction that his financial support meant he could institutionalize any of us at will. By age sixteen, I was well established at school. It was 1979, and I’d grown accustomed to living away from home as a residential student, where I was a three-year upper, which is prep-speak for being in the eleventh grade. Reluctantly, I used to come home one weekend a month at the insistence of my parents. Trying to get back to school after any holiday was a recurring nightmare. Pop was always encouraging me to relax and forget about school.
“What’s it matter?” he’d say. “Good Lord, Collie, you’re due to inherit a bundle. Take an extra day at home. Jesus, if I had your situation, I’d live like a lawn chair.”
Ma held prep schools in particularly low esteem, labeling them capitalist propaganda outlets. The main reason I was at Andover was that the Falcon threatened to cut her off financially if she didn’t give in to him on the critical issue of our education. When it came to self-preservation, Ma could be flexible.
“The priests had them for the first eight years. Now they’re mine,” he said.
Although I pretended some consternation in an attempt to appease my mother, I was quietly thrilled by the Falcon’s edict. As usual, Ma saw right through me. She referred to Andover as “Collie’s folly.”
Like a salamander that’s found its rock, I basked in the warm sunshine of Andover’s conventions and certainties, ceremonies, clean sheets, and Latin mottoes. At Andover, life was reduced to a series of rituals ruled by an unwavering sense of assured outcome. Samuel Phillips, school founder, despised idleness. In 1778, he had a beehive engraved on a silver seal along with two mottoes: Finis Origine Pendet—The End Depends on the Beginning, an admittedly scary thought in my case—and Non Sibi, which means Not for Self. My home life, in contrast, was a paean to the cult of narcissism.
Andover had pretty definite ideas about what constituted ideal young manhood, and I made an avid study of all of it. Like most prep schools, Andover was big on fostering excellence in all things, yet for much of the time the whole experience seemed to me like a protracted sigh of relief. Occasionally, though, alternating between Phillips Academy and home could feel a bit like trying to outrun schizophrenia. Every day a different voice whispered in my ear, competing for my loyalty—the inveigling voice of Samuel Phillips kept urging me to get out of bed at the crack of dawn to run five miles and still have time to practice the cello before breakfast.
Sometimes all that striving for excellence could get on your nerves, particularly when your roommate is Kip Pearson, son of the Canadian ambassador, and he never quits talking about his collection of edible underwear. And gradually I was discovering that a little Latin in the service of an epic sense of obligation goes a long way.
That’s when I’d begin to feel a twitch from another direction, like an embarrassing itch signaling the recurrence of a secret rash. I used to wait until Kip went out for his nightly troll, then I’d reach for the phone and dial home, just wanting to hear the sound of Pop’s mutinous voice.
But first I had to get by Uncle Tom.
“I’m going to spell a word, and I want you to pronounce it for me.”
I groaned.
“Cholmondeley,” he said, emphasizing each letter.
“Chumley,” I answered.
“Finally, I have it, the proof you’re a snob. That’s something only a snob knows. And you fell for it. Collie Flanagan, the so-called brain box, isn’t so clever after all.”
“You knew about it . . . so what does that make you?”
“It makes me a Renaissance man.”
“Let me speak to Pop. Is he there?”
“Charlie!” Tom hollered into the receiver. “It’s your long-lost son.”
“Collie?” Pop said into the receiver. “It’s grand to hear from you. Will you be coming to see us?”
“Sure I will, Pop. I’ve been busy with school, I’m sorry.”
“No need for apology. Everything is understood. But listen, Collie, hear me out. Slow down, don’t work so hard, and learn to take it easy. What do I always tell you? School would wear a mighty sour puss if it weren’t for recess.”
I hung up and sat for a while, staring and tossing a tennis ball into the air, and then I went back to gathering pollen to make honey for the hive.
When I was in my final year, the Falcon hand-delivered Bingo, freshly ejected from St. Paul’s School in Concorde, to the admissions office, where he enrolled him in the tenth grade—a random choice, since he hadn’t achieved a legitimate promotion since kindergarten. Holding him at arm’s length, the oval tips of his long fingers hovering in the air just above Bing’s shoulders, he was as squeamish as if he were scraping gum off the sole of his shoe.
Bingo cut into my bespoke existence at Andover like a serrated edge through fabric. I didn’t want him there, and he knew it. I resented him for insinuating himself into what felt like my secret life. There I was, all laid out like a pair of gray flannel pants, and in he came—a set of shears ready to rip me apart at the seams.
“Just stay far away from me. Don’t even look at me,” I warned him, knowing it was an exercise in futility. The more I threatened, the more he glistened like early morning grass, his eyes taking on a familiar green gleam. I might as well have thrown popcorn at an advancing tank.
I knew he was going to start it up. Bingo always insisted on going right to the seditious heart of things. In no time, the school was churning with him.
He smuggled a girl into his room, and when he was found out, he claimed she was our sister. The first week of school and already he was threatened with expulsion. The only thing that saved him was the Falcon and the universal terror he inspired. For punishment, he was supposed to clean the windows in the downstairs floor of his residence. Later that night, he and twelve apostles removed all the glass from the windows and in the morning offered up the air for inspection.
“They’re so clean they’re invisible,” Bingo said as the headmaster did a double take.
Bing insisted that he didn’t have anything to do with the missing window glass but reluctantly confessed that he knew who did, describing where they could find the proof right underneath my bed.
“Don’t worry. I wasn’t born yesterday, Mr. Flanagan,” the headmaster said as I sputtered inelegantly about my innocence.
A few days later, Bingo rigged up a dummy to look like a student and then waited until nighttime, when he and the boys laid their jerry-rig corpse in a pool of ketchup in the middle of the road leading into the school and lingered in the bushes for their hapless victims to arrive on the scene.
It took a pile of the Falcon’s dough to save him from that one. Mr. Fadras, the biology teacher, called Fat-Ass by just about everyone, including his colleagues, swerved into a ditch at first sight of a bloody corpse in his headlights and damaged the front end of his car.
When a cheating scandal erupted in the early fall—someone stole the answers to the second-year math midterm—Bingo was a natural suspect and spent hours undergoing the third degree.
“Let me get this straight,” I confronted him in my room, where he was collapsed on the bed, both exhausted and invigorated by yet another grueling interrogation. “You stole the answers to the exam and you still failed? That must be some kind of a world record for dumb. Or, don’t tell me, you were too lazy to memorize them.”
“I didn’t steal the answers.”
“Then who did?”
“Teagan.”
“Mark Teagan stole the answers and sold them. . . .”
“Yup.”
“But he says that you did it.”
“Yeah, well, he’s lying. His old man will kill him if he gets turfed from the school.”
“So what? He’s an a*shole. His dad is his problem. For once you didn’t do it. You’ve got to tell them.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m no rat.”
“Are you insane? This isn’t the Cosa Nostra. Why are you protecting that little creep? He sure as hell isn’t worried about you. Come on, Bing, you don’t want to get expelled for cheating. Stuff like that follows you. . . . It’s one thing to shit on the roof of Fat-Ass’s Toyota . . .”
He laughed at the memory. I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh, too, both of us side by side on the bed, so close we were touching, our shoulders adhering through the glue of habit, both of us staring up at the ceiling, laughter gradually subsiding, not looking at each other. In the end, my tone was pleading.
“Come on, Bing, save yourself. . . .”
But he wouldn’t, and I knew he wouldn’t because he was so goddamn unrelenting. I felt my throat pound and constrict. Bingo’s stubbornness was its own desolate country. Sometimes trying to navigate that barren landscape, I thought my heart had altered its geography, relocating to my feet, throbbing away inside my shoes.
“Why does it always have to be like this? What’s wrong with you? Are you missing some crucial chromosome? Even Ma and Pop will make concessions when it suits them. Why is everything a crisis with you? Can’t you ever just stand down?”
“Hey, Collie, just because you lack conviction . . .”
“Lack conviction? Holy shit! You terrorize everyone with your behavior, and then you peddle all these moral absolutes. . . . Fine, get expelled, get branded a cheater . . . what do I care?”
“You know what your problem is, Coll? You’re obsessed with what other people think.”
I pulled myself up into a sitting position and looked down at Bing, who smiled back up at me. He didn’t have a clue.
“No. You know what my problem is? My problem is caring about what you and Ma and Pop and Uncle Tom think. That’s my problem.”
“You don’t give a shit what we think. You’re too busy sucking up to the Falcon to care about us. Anyway, we’re all nuts, isn’t that right, Collie? It must be hell to be so sane in a crazy world.”
I couldn’t sleep thinking about what to do. The next morning, my insides tossing and turning like a washing machine, I went to the headmaster and told him that Mark Teagan stole the answers. He looked thoughtful and thanked me for coming forward. As he spoke, I glanced down at the tiny crack between the closed door and the floor, feeling small enough to crawl underneath.
At lunchtime I was standing around outside my residence, scuffing the recessed ground with my running shoe, digging a deeper hole, surrounded by a bunch of guys, friends of mine, who were reassuring me that I’d done the right thing by ratting out Mark.
“Teagan is a little prick,” somebody said.
“Yeah, well, so is Bingo,” I said, staring down at the ground.
“Yeah, but he’s a likable little prick,” someone else chimed in. “And he’d never hang your ass out to dry to save himself.”
“Uh-oh, here comes trouble,” said my friend Crunchie, whistling, glancing up and nudging me with his elbow, nodding in the direction of Bingo, who broke into a run at first sight of me.
I stepped out from inside my circle of friends to confront him, but before I had a chance to speak, he threw down his knapsack and let me have it, socked me right in the eye.
“You son of a bitch!” he said as the other guys, scrambling, reached in and dragged him away. I fell down on one knee, momentarily stunned, trying to get my bearings, feeling as if the world around me had exploded.
“Christ, Bing . . . ,” I muttered, tears streaming down my cheek. I watched out of my good eye, my hand forming a patch over the other eye, as Bingo reached for his knapsack, turned, and walked away.
“Jesus,” Crunchie said, concerned but a little titillated, too. “Are you all right?”
I nodded, though my eye hurt like hell. I stared after Bing until he vanished into a crowd of admiring girls who parted like the Red Sea to let him through—it looked as if I were his free pass to getting laid that night.
“If that was my little brother, I’d kick his ass,” Crunchie said as we headed back to my room.
Bingo got expelled from Andover for giving me a black eye.
“Say,” Uncle Tom said when I called home to give my side of the story, “it’s about time somebody took a poke at you.”
After he got tossed from Groton for wearing a hand buzzer, the next stop for Bingo was Upper Canada College in Toronto, where he distinguished himself by failing every course he took. His overall percent was 1, which intrigued Pop and Tom as they speculated forever about whatever he did to earn one mark.
“It doesn’t seem mathematically possible. You don’t suppose it was something to do with carnal relations?” Pop voiced his worst fears.
“No, surely he would have earned a passing grade in that case,” Uncle Tom said, looking thoughtful as the two of them sat on the front porch rocking, nodding, sharing a beer. I could hear them from my bedroom above, the sounds of their conversation floating upward through my open window. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I stuck my head out the window. “He got one percent because he only wrote one test and he scored one out of a hundred on it, that’s all. It’s not a great mystery.”
“I say it was the pomegranate. I gave him a pomegranate to give to his geography teacher, who’d expressed an interest in tasting one, that’s the source for sure,” Uncle Tom said, oblivious to my intrusion, his voice holding steady and full of knowing.
“Oh, that would be it!” Pop exclaimed. “The pomegranate, of course! Jesus, you can’t beat fruit! The tales I could tell about what I achieved with a little help from an apple and an Olympian sense of timing.”
Weirdly, despite his academic record, they liked Bing in Toronto and expressed hope for his future. Equally inexplicable, he seemed to like it there, too, and was making plans to return in the fall.
“Canadians have a high tolerance for eccentricity,” the Falcon said when I indicated amazement at the turn of events. “For morons, too, apparently,” he continued, adding his trademark sprinkle of cyanide.
Bingo had a more direct explanation. “I’m making it with the headmaster’s daughter, and she’s got her old man wrapped around her little finger.”
“Nice,” I said to him, but he just laughed. Bing’s attitude toward sex could probably best be summed up in a single word, “Woo-hoo,” and that’s when he was feeling pensive. For some bizarre reason, Ma found his promiscuity oddly charming, though she didn’t extend the same latitude to me. When it came to my love life, Ma assumed the role of disgusted adolescent being forced to contemplate her parents “doing the hoob,” as Uncle Tom referred to intercourse, insisting it was a proper biological term. Thanks to him, I got the strap in grade five for referring to coitus as hoobalah in sex ed class after Uncle Tom “corrected” my terminology.
Unlike Bingo, who lost his virginity at thirteen to the island’s official deflowerer, Melanie Merrick—he had to scramble around the kitchen, emptying cupboards to find Saran Wrap to create a makeshift condom—I was a late bloomer, relatively speaking, struggling to catch up with my younger brother. When it came my turn, I was sixteen and I told Ma I was spending the night at a friend’s house.
Instead I pitched a tent in the conservation area near home, and that’s where I lost it to Eleanor Parrish, who undid the zipper on my jeans as casually as if she were pulling her blond hair into a ponytail.
Her parents found out and went nuts, though their response was mild compared with Ma’s reaction. She let out one long scream when she saw me the next morning, and gathering up my shirt in her fists, twisting it into a noose around my neck, she pinned me against the nearest wall.
“How dare you take advantage of that innocent girl,” she said. “Animal! You have no idea what you’ve unleashed! Girls are very emotional about sex. She may never recover from you exploiting her.”
Pop looked at me as accusing and disappointed as if he’d caught me trying to set fire to him while he was sleeping. He and Ma grounded me for three months.
Years of Catholicism burning a hole in my conscience, I crawled into the study and stretched out on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling and thought about how much I loved Eleanor Parrish.
“Say, what were you thinking?” Uncle Tom appeared in the doorway.
I don’t know who was more horrified, Uncle Tom or me, when I began to cry. I covered my face with my hands.
“I just wanted to see what it was like,” I said, sobbing and unable to stop. I hadn’t cried in front of anyone since I was a little kid.
“Well, I could have told you that you’d like it,” he said, wandering over to the sofa. He sat next to me and took my hand.
“It’s all right,” he said. “And you’re not grounded.” He reached into his pocket. “Would you like some peanut brittle?”
“No thanks,” I said, starting to regain some composure, rubbing my eyes with the sleeves of my shirt.
Uncle Tom and I sat together in silence, the only sound the persistent buzz of a circling fly.
“I’ve been listening to him for the last few minutes. It’s true what they say about flies humming in the middle-octave key of F. And it’s a good thing they do,” Uncle Tom said, pausing, inviting the question, refusing to continue unless he was satisfied I was fully engaged.
“Why?” I asked him, powerless after so many years to resist.
“Think about it. The possibilities are staggering. You wouldn’t want a common housefly with a magisterial high C. Say, he’d have the power to break your heart.”