“It’s great to meet you, bud,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Again, we shook hands. The touch of his hand felt like an electric charge.
I found my mother sipping a cup of coffee and nodding along as one of the well-dressed mothers prattled about what made Yeatman superior to Montgomery Bell, Nashville’s other elite boys’ school. Even then, my mother may have been plotting her own escape from the low-down life of Montague Village. But I knew none of this, distracted as I was by my own ascension.
Heading home, my mother waited until we’d reached the highway before lighting a cigarette.
“I saw you through the window, talking with that boy,” she said.
I nodded.
“Who was he?”
“Arch,” I said. “My big brother.”
Two narrow funnels of smoke unfurled from her nostrils and wafted out the crack in the window.
“He’s cute,” she said.
three
The spell cast by that first hour with Arch took little time to break. The various cliques in my grade had all been established long before my arrival. The school’s idiosyncrasies and traditions only made me feel that much more the outsider—an impostor bound to be exposed at any moment. I was a year behind every other boy in my grade in math and Latin, and had to take both of those courses with junior schoolers. I went from being first in my class in almost everything to fighting to stay off the bottom among boys a year younger than me.
My greatest humiliations took place under the tutelage of my Latin teacher and advisor, Dean Varnadoe. In his late sixties, Walker Varnadoe was an elegant man, slim and rangy, with a sonorous baritone and pale-blue eyes that seemed to glimmer both when he recited a favorite aphorism and when he leveled his disapproval upon us. He carried a black cane with a polished brass head, which he used not to help him walk but, rather, to point and gesticulate at the board or around the classroom and to rap on the desks of drowsy students, startling them back to rigid, chastened attention.
Varnadoe referred to his classroom as “the harbor.” We never saw him outside his harbor during the school day, not even in his office or in the dining hall for meals; he brought his lunch from home and preferred to dine alone while grading or reading from one of his numerous books of poetry, all of them aged, many in the original Latin or Greek. He was the only teacher granted a regular audience with Dr. Dodd—not in Dodd’s office, but in Varnadoe’s classroom, as if the headmaster needed the teacher’s blessing over the most vital matters that came across his desk.
The bookend of my day, my sole refuge, was an hour in the art room. The new art teacher, Miss Whitten, had been hired at the last minute after a severe stroke forced her predecessor into retirement. Young and plainly inexperienced, Miss Whitten appeared baffled by the school, with its hypermasculine traditions and persistent whiff of testosterone. She had difficulty managing the classroom; neighboring teachers popped in a few times a week to complain about the noise.
Miss Whitten didn’t smile often; she bore herself with a persistent air of mild melancholy. But she was kind, and encouraging. Drawing and painting in her classroom served as a salve on the battering my ego took everywhere else. In a period of profound disorientation, I lacked the vocabulary to express what I was experiencing in words; I channeled it all into pictures. Miss Whitten received me each day with both eagerness and relief. I would like to think she recognized in me the beginnings of an artist. More likely, she just appreciated having at least one student who took the work seriously. Or maybe she sensed, without knowing why, that I, too, like she, was a stranger in a strange land.
Near the end of the first week, as I came up the stairs, headed toward Dean Varnadoe’s room, I found Arch Creigh waiting outside the door, leaning against the wall, flipping through a copy of Richard Wright’s Black Boy.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey, bud,” he said. “Thought you’d never get here.”
“What are you reading?”
He glanced down at the book.
“Propaganda,” he said. “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow afternoon?”
“Nothing.”
“Coach is giving us a day off from practice. Want to hang out?”
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Drive around in the truck. Maybe get together with some people.”
“You can drive already?” I asked.
“I’m sixteen,” he said. “My parents held me back.”
“Did you have bad grades?” I asked.
Arch laughed.
“No,” he said. “It’s just a thing people do. Most of the kids here get held back before kindergarten.”
“Cool,” I said.
Where I came from, no one was held back; on the contrary, the mothers were eager to get us into school as early as possible; reaching school age meant nine months of free childcare and lunch.
“So do you want to come or what?”
“My mom has to work tomorrow night.”
“I can give you a ride home,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s kind of far away.”
“It’s not that far.”
“You know where I live?”
“Yeah,” he said. “East Nashville.”
Overhearing conversations about summer camps and beach vacations and country clubs, I had dreaded the moment when everyone would discover that I lived in a cheap apartment off Gallatin Pike. But I wanted to know him—to be near him—badly enough to risk the shame.
“Okay,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Meet me in the quad after school tomorrow.”
Like many of the Yeatman boys, Arch drove a truck. Arch’s was a black Ford F-150 with oversized tires and a white fiberglass camper top on the bed, a Grateful Dead steal your face sticker placed in the center of the rear window.
We drove out of the lot, down the long, dark driveway, and out into Belle Meade.
“You live alone with your mom?” he asked.
“My aunt lives with us,” I said, as if my mother had taken in Sunny and not the other way around.
“What about your dad?” he asked. “Where does he live?”
“He died.”
“Oh, man,” Arch said. “What happened?”
“Vietnam.”
“Man, that’s tough,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“He was a hero.”
“I don’t know if he was a hero.”
“Sure, he was.”
Arch asked me more questions—about where my parents were from, how we’d arrived in Nashville, and so forth. I shaped my answers to hide the seedier aspects of my history. Instead of a runaway, my mother became an orphan, and Sunny, her only living relative. My mother had left college to get married. We’d once lived in a house. With each half-truth and outright lie, I realized how easy it was. Just as my mother always presented herself at Yeatman in what seemed to me a costume, I could write myself a role and act it out. I couldn’t hide where I lived or what sort of life I’d come from. But I could recast my story in a manner that made me seem less inferior than I felt. I was sure my mother would have no problem with Arch and the rest of the Yeatman people believing her to be a forlorn war widow, scratching and clawing to give her only child a leg up in the world. And I could be the son of a fallen hero instead of a bastard whose father had never known he existed.