A Good School by Richard Yates

Author:Richard Yates [Yates, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-12-18T04:00:00+00:00

Knoedler chimed his table bell after dinner one night, requesting silence, and rose to make an announcement. “I know you’ll all join me,” he said, “in extending our deepest sympathy to William Grove, whose father died this morning.”

And the people at Grove’s table looked around to realize for the first time that he wasn’t there – that he had, in fact, been gone all day.

Perhaps the only boy in the refectory who had missed him was Bucky Ward. He’d begun to notice his absence during school hours, and he’d missed him all afternoon. He had wondered, with rising jealousy, if Grove might somehow have arranged to spend the whole day at Hugh Britt’s bedside in the infirmary – he had even considered going to the infirmary to find out – but in the end he’d settled for a brooding, puzzled loneliness. Now Knoedler’s announcement made everything clear, and he felt better.

But Steve MacKenzie was shaken by the news. “Oh, Jesus,” he said to Jim Pomeroy. “That’s lousy. That’s really too bad.”

And he was depressed all through study hall that night. He couldn’t help pondering how he would feel if his own father were to die. It was unthinkable: Jock MacKenzie was in the very prime of life, a laughing, sailing, golf- and tennis-playing man who could still defeat his son at arm-wrestling any time he felt like it, and often did. Still, there were heart attacks; there were strokes; there was cancer. Nobody lived forever.

Jock MacKenzie’s anger could be terrible, but in his gentle moods there was no finer companion in the world. Every worthwhile thing Steve knew, it seemed, was something he had learned from his father. As a condition of receiving a car on his sixteenth birthday, Steve had been made to memorize the whole of Kipling’s “If,” which later helped him earn the only “A” he’d ever had in Pop Driscoll’s course; and certain lines of that poem, remembered now as they sounded in his father’s voice, were enough to fill his eyes with tears.

He glanced quickly up and around the study hall, to make sure no one had caught him on the verge of crying; then he pulled himself together and bent over his math assignment. This Sunday, he promised himself, he would call home and have a good long talk with the old man.

When Grove came back to school a few days later, MacKenzie stopped him in the quadrangle and said “Bill, I was really sorry to hear about your dad.”

“Yeah, well – thanks.”

“Seems like only yesterday he was up here that time,” MacKenzie said. “I thought he was a real – a very nice gentleman.”

“Yeah. Well, thanks, uh, Steve.”

Then MacKenzie noticed that a delicate gold chain hung from the lapel buttonhole into the breast pocket of Grove’s awful blue suit; he almost said “Oh, that’s nice; you’ve got your dad’s watch,” but decided against it. He had said enough. With one fist he gave Grove a soft cuff on the shoulder; then he walked away.

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