By Charles Kraus
There is some debate, at least in my mind, about how I ended up being enrolled in boarding school. It had something to do with Holden leaving Pencey Prep. Or having attended it. In 1960, the concept was going around.
I used to send for things. Dear Piper Cub President, I am interested in purchasing one of your airplanes. Please mail me a picture post card of your latest model. Dear Connie Stevens, I think you are a wonderful singer, and beautiful. Can I have your 8 x 10, with your autograph? It was in this vain that I sent for the Hansley Hall catalog. Like the plane, boarding school was a fantasy that involved postage. I was a kid of the neighborhood, and in my neighborhood, no one owned, or even flew on a plane, went away to school or received any kind of private education, except Hebrew. We were of the modest middle class. Just ‘regular’ people leading ‘ordinary’ lives.
In retrospect, I probably wished to get away from my family because it was not a very congenial assemblage. Also, the thought of attending boarding school had dramatic appeal. But it was aspirational. Only that. Except that I happened to bring up the idea at a time having me out of the house, away from my parents’ faltering relationship, made more sense than I’d imagined.
Sometime in early December, mom, dad and I went into the Manhattan to meet with Dr. Stevensonn, the headmaster of Hansley Hall. We were having dinner with him at the Baltimore Hotel, across from Grand Central Station. It was a cold, crisp night. Snow had recently fallen then been collected and reconfigured along the edges and curbs of the illuminated evening. The Biltmore, one of those older, elegant, midtown hotels, was decked out for Christmas in layers of muted charm and what I supposed was class. It felt sophisticated, as did I, immersed in a refinement generally missing from my day-today Bronx existence.
Dr. Stevensonn, was a very pleasant middle-aged gentleman, comfortable to be with, easy going, with a gift for interacting with teens. The principal at DeWitt Clinton High School scared the shit out of me. Dr. Stevensonn, Doc, he suggested we call him, told jokes, put me at ease.
We discussed his school. At least, I’m guessing that is what we talked about. I recall the setting more than the conversation. Strangely, I remember the wallpaper, the carpets, the grand piano being played by a musician dressed as if he was providing Dickens with a sound track. I have no idea what we ate or said. At some point, shortly before desert, papers got signed. I would go to Hansley Hall.
Perhaps I was elated. More likely, I was ambivalent. But it turned out, there was no time to reflect. My parents produced my camp footlocker, apparently all packed and ready for my journey. It was placed into the luggage rack on top of Dr. Stevensonn’s VW bus. Evidently I was leaving for boarding school that very evening and we needed to hit the road. Mom provided one of her hug-kiss combos, complete with sound effects (Mmmmah!) but applied with restrained formality appropriate to the Biltmore setting. Dad offered his standard hand shake. Nice to meet you. Nice to have met you.
Off we sped north toward New England, toward snow covered hillsides, moonlight dancing on frozen lakes, glistening ice coated foliage, through Connecticut, Rhode Island, destined for North Egermont, Massachusetts. Doc said a few words, then settled on a classical radio station. I’d never been in a van. Even on this dark evening, it ‘looked’ peculiar. I did my best to doze in my first ever bucket seat. Shortly after midnight, I was dropped off at the dormitory, Miller Hall. The main campus was half a mile away, Doc explained. The school’s bus would be by at 7:30 sharp.
New England had its established boarding schools, Andover, Stockbridge, Phillips-Exeter, Choate, Groton. Some, such as Phillips-Exeter, were literarily hundreds of years old. They served as home base for children of the wealthy, as feeder schools to Ivy League colleges.
And then, there were the Hansley Halls. Recent, sketchy, better on paper than on campus, holding tanks, mostly for boys who had not done well elsewhere. Ads for these institutions could be found on the classified pages of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. A sense of attempted legacy worked its way into the quasi-traditional, dignified names given to these educational ventures. An impression of permanence, of stability, seemed the goal. Were these places dispensers of the King’s Knowledge? Let us say they appeared to be, yet anyone could find an abandoned New England farm house and convert it into an instant boarding school. Some efforts reflected sincere scholastic motivation. Most reflected financial boondoggling.
Hansley’s campus looked like the picture on the brochure. The exterior of the school’s learning center, Alexander Hall, parts of it, a façade that worked best from a distance, resembled the precisely cropped image that dominated the pamphlet. This photo was true, but misleading, as it only showed the exterior of the building, which had until recently been some sort of warehouse. The rest of the necessary improvements – architectural, paint and plaster, updated wiring, serious lighting, were yet to be addressed.
The dining facility, a converted barn, was also located on the main campus. There they stood, two lonely, aging structural mishaps, snowed into place, quaintly set against a backdrop of Berkshire Mountains. The student lounge, previously a bar, sat across the lane. Actually, it was still very bar-like. The alcohol had been replaced with cola bottles, and the words, Laura’s Pub, had received not quite enough paint, leaving the letters subdued but unconquered. Someone who was either very sincere, but simpleminded, or who possessed a satirical disposition, had scattered random text books on shelves and counters. Most likely, the same decorator was responsible for camouflaging a dart board by covering most of it with a Rand McNally map of the lower forty-eight. I spotted a few trophies assigned to various alcoves, none having anything to do with Hansley Hall. The carpet smelled of stale beer. Historical men’s room graffiti provided perspective. Evidently, a local named Evelyn had been highly admired by the regulars.
Typically, parents sent their troubled children off to Hansley and the kids suddenly start getting excellent grades. D students turned into A students almost overnight. Parents marveled. Finally, their wayward sons were encountering teachers who could get these truants to buckle down. Unfortunately, that was not the situation. Poor students received little encouragement. One or two teachers, like Mr. Bressler, were resourceful, dedicated educators. Most either didn’t care, or couldn’t teach. Just about the only demand made on the kids was that they were not to run away. The reward for staying on campus was an impressive report card.
The teaching staff was composed of men at loose ends. People with no immediate plans. The school did not require a teaching credential, nor previous teaching experience. It asked instructors to work for room, board and subsistence wages. It hired men willing to remain pretty much imprisoned in the Berkshire Mountains. Not the kind of opportunity taken by those with better options.
Despite the required gray slacks and blue blazers, most of the sixty-odd kids looked and acted as if they’d spent more time sniffing glue than confronting academic aspirations. Properly medicated, they seemed to say, it was possible to have a good time just about anywhere, even in North Egermont.
I was the only Jew, found that smelling airplane glue gave me a headache, and just to insure my unpopularity, was not interested in skiing. Snow related recreation was what you did in the New England winter.
There was unanimous student body opinion that the school sucked. I’m sure even the teachers held this view. Hate ruled. Teachers hated students. Students hated teachers. We all hated the kitchen staff. But unlike most of my classmates, my strongest objections derived from the comparison I continued to make between Hansley Hall and more reputable boarding schools, particularly the fictional Pencey Prep. Hansley would not have asked Holden to leave.
Ray Foley, my one genuine friend, understood my disappointment. He too felt betrayed by Doc’s high regard for the school’s feeble attempts to teach us things. The seven boys in Mr. Soto’s Spanish class paid no attention to the old guy, talking over him, making fun of his quiet pleading for cooperation. Bruce Bolock once pulled the desk, the desk!, out from in front of Soto, notes and all, leaving the exasperated man stranded on his chair, knees shaking, tears in his eyes.
Two years, Foley kept telling me, two years he’d been left in Dr. Stevensonn’s care. He said this as if suffering from a condition that Doc was supposed to treat, as if the Headmaster had studied medicine rather than anthropology. From day one, Ray had written his parents about how they were wasting their money, called them with updates, and when he was home for vacations and summer recess, described ongoing derelictions. His father laughed as if he was supposed to be amused by these stories. The one time his mother and father drove up from Delaware, Doc took them on a personal tour, directing their attention to the blazers and gray slacks, to the ski tow, to the bus that took students back to the dorms.
Mr. and Mrs. Foley sat in on Bressler’s Algebra class, impressed by the small class size and unaware that shortly before they entered, Bressler told his students, “you behave or it’s your ass. I’m going to ask questions. I want full participation. If you know the answer, raise your left hand. If you don’t, raise your right hand.”
There was a certain freedom in leaving home, in finding that my current peers considered me brainy. Brainy? These kids thought I was smart? I found that interesting. Ray Foley and I went for long walks, conducting conversations that took us into town, beyond the frozen afternoons, through snow storms, walking-talking, we used to say, explaining why the future held levers of revenge, complaining, extolling. Wondering. It turned out there was, I had, so much to say.
Still. First impressions set a kind of standard, a benchmark, a norm against which you judged further evidence. Salinger didn’t spend all that much time describing Pencey Prep, but I knew his school had a fencing team. I surmised a certain quality, a tone. The place projected the kind of refinement required by wealthy mothers and fathers who held knowledgeable expectations. It had carpets, drapes, paintings hanging on papered walls. People were very civil to one another. Students knew how to learn. Masters knew how to teach. Decorum. It had decorum.
Hansley lacked all of this. It offered mud, and drafts, clueless teachers and an old bus. It was a phony school, and my being there made me a phony.
Spring break. It took two trains to get back to Manhattan. The first, a lone railroad car, long and absurdly bipolar, with engineer booths at each end, obviously designed so it could reach a final destination then start back without having to turn around. Riding it felt like you were part of a prank, and also part of an expanding party. For at each stop, and it was a local, more students, boarding school and college, pressed their way into the available space. Kids seated themselves everywhere, on suitcases, in the aisles, half a dozen to a bench, food, guitars, books, music, discussions, romance, shaken to contentment by the clatter and agitation created when a uniquely independent railroad car mastered tracks conforming to the Berkshire Mountains. At Boston’s South Station, we deboarded and rushed to catch the Yankee Clipper, an express to New York City.
I reached home in time for dinner. Nothing classy. Nothing remotely refined or sophisticated. Left over chicken soup, actually. And since my mother hadn’t given much thought to the meal, salami and eggs.
“How’s it going,” my father asked?
I put the Sunday Times magazine on the table, opened it to the classifieds, where I’d circled: The Roosevelt School, Shippan Point, Stamford, Connecticut.
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