In Revere, In Those Days by Roland Merullo

Author:Roland Merullo [Merullo, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-42634-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Two

FOR A BOY LIKE ME, a boy who loved sports as much as he loved school, Exeter was a three-hundred-acre paradise: baseball diamonds, basketball courts, two indoor hockey rinks that had been built the year before, just across the road from Amen Hall. The classes were never larger than thirteen students, all of us sitting around a hardwood table on the same level as the teacher. No poling, no fights, no problem being seen carrying home a stack of books. It was, in a sense, a community of orphans, which meant that the salt of seeing parents and children together was not constantly being dribbled into the raw bloody wound left by the death of my mother and father.

Instead of the regular Monday-through-Friday schedule, we had classes on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, and half days on Wednesday and Saturday. Mandatory sports at least four days a week—six days for varsity or junior-varsity teams—and, on the four full days, there were even two class slots after sports and before dinner. Jackets and ties had to be worn in class and at the dining hall. Lights out at 10:30 for juniors like Joey and me, with the occasional extension to 11:00. Anyone caught out of the dormitory after the check-in hour could be placed on probation. Any student found using drugs or drinking alcohol—one time—would be expelled immediately. Girls from the town or from other boarding schools were allowed only in the Common Room on the first floor, and only during certain weekend hours.

At my grandparents’ house, I had been accustomed to an almost unlimited freedom—walking wherever I wanted, staying up as late as I wanted (often they went to bed before me)—but I did not chafe very much under the thick blanket of Exeter rules. And, though there were some extraordinarily wealthy boys among my classmates, the distance between their lives and mine didn’t seem so large.

In those years, boasting about a family’s means went against the prevailing social winds. It was the late sixties, a brief moment in which American materialism was called into question, prior to the all-out worship of things and money that would mark the next thirty years. Scholarship boys like Joey Barnard and me were required to wait on faculty tables at dinner one out of every three terms—a practice that has since been abandoned—but even that did not trouble me. In fact, aside from a boy named Higgenbotham, and some faculty members—who seemed, in their tweed, tortoiseshell, and proper, reserved manner, like another species of adults than the one I’d grown up with—the issue of class and wealth was not much of an issue for me in my two years at Exeter. I was an innocent in such matters then. I knew that some of my classmates had fathers and even grandfathers who’d graduated from “the Academy,” as it was called; that some of them went to the Riviera over summer break, that some of them had famous last names from the worlds of industry or government service.

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