The house at Sea Cliff was so vast, and its inhabitants always so busy, that the children’s games went unnoticed. If one of the adults suddenly noticed that Nathaniel was spending hours with a much younger girl, the interest soon passed, because there was always something else to attend to. Alma had grown out of what little devotion she felt for dolls, and instead learned to play Scrabble with a dictionary and chess out of pure determination, since strategy was never her strong point. For his part, Nathaniel had grown bored of collecting stamps and going camping with Boy Scouts. Both became absorbed in the plays for two or three characters that he wrote and then they put on together in the attic. The lack of an audience never bothered them, because the process was far more interesting than the outcome, and they were not seeking applause: the pleasure resided in fighting over the script and rehearsing. Old clothes, discarded curtains, battered furniture, and odds and ends in various stages of decay were the raw material for their disguises, props, and special effects; their imagination supplied everything else. Ichimei, who often came to the house because he had no need of an invitation, was only allowed to take on minor roles in their theater company because he was such a lousy actor. This lack of talent was compensated for by his prodigious memory and his skill at drawing. He could recite verbatim lengthy monologues inspired by Nathaniel’s favorite characters, from Dracula to the Count of Monte Cristo. He was also in charge of painting the backdrops. But this camaraderie, which helped rescue Alma from her initial sense of being an abandoned orphan, was not to last long.
The following year Nathaniel began his secondary education at a boys’ school based on the British model. His life changed overnight. As well as starting to wear long trousers, he had to face the endless brutality of youths learning to be grown-ups. He was not ready for this: he looked more like a ten-year-old than the fourteen he actually was. He was not yet suffering from the merciless bombardment of hormones; he was introverted, wary, and unfortunately for him loved books and hated sports. He would never be boastful, cruel, or vulgar like the other boys, and since none of this came naturally, he tried in vain to copy them; his sweat smelled of fear. On the first Wednesday of classes he came home with a black eye and his shirt stained from a nosebleed. He refused to answer his mother’s questions and told Alma he had bumped into the flagpole. That night, for the first time he could remember, he wet his bed. In his horror, he stuffed the soaking sheets up the chimney, where they were only discovered at the end of September, when the fire was lit and the house immediately filled with smoke. Lillian could not get her son to explain what had happened to the sheets either, but she guessed the reason and decided to intervene. She went to see the headmaster, a red-haired Scotsman with a drinker’s nose, who received her behind a regimental desk in a dark-paneled room presided over by a portrait of King George VI. He told Lillian that a proper dose of violence was seen as an essential part of the school’s educational methods. That was why they encouraged tough sports, quarrels between students were resolved in a ring with boxing gloves, and discipline infractions were punished by caning on the backside, which he himself administered. Blows made men. That was how it had always been, and the sooner Nathaniel learned how to gain respect, the better for him. He added that Lillian’s intervention made her son look ridiculous, but since Nathaniel was a new pupil, he would make an exception and not mention it.
Furious, Lillian rushed off to her husband’s office on Montgomery Street but got no support there either.
“Don’t get involved in this, Lillian. All boys have to go through these initiation rites, and almost all of them survive,” Isaac told her.
“Did you get roughed up as well?”