“Not me personally,” he said, studying his pastrami sandwich. “It was a nephew of mine. Bright kid. Lived down on the other side of Boston, too far to commute really. Got himself a scholarship to come up here, covered practically the whole thing. End of his first year, he’s got a B minus average, and they decided that ’he has not shown the ability to succeed in a sophomore year at Windsor.’ A B minus average. Can you believe that? What’s wrong with a B minus average? So I checked into it a little. There were two dozen kids in his class with averages of B minus or less. Only three were asked to leave. Every one of them was on a scholarship. And nobody on a scholarship with a B minus or less was allowed to stay. But lots of people with less were allowed to stay, and all of them had money.”
“How did you get that information?”
Brian shrugged. “The secretaries live in town, don’t they, and they didn’t migrate here from Boston or New York. They’re local. And most of them are Catholics.”
Gregor thought it was probably not an easy time to be a Catholic in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, but he let it go. Brian was ripping apart his pastrami as if he were a saber-toothed tiger going at raw meat.
“The thing is,” he said, while Gregor accepted the second round of beers from Sheila, “I’ve got to tell you the truth. I can’t do anything about it because it would mean my job in the long run, but I’d love to see something happen that would make the shit hit the fan at that place. The sooner the better. There gets to be a point where I just don’t feel like putting up with their bullshit anymore.”
Chapter Five
1
There were very few things that James Hallwood didn’t like about living at Windsor Academy, but there was one thing he truly hated, and that was the requirement that all teachers eat lunch and dinner in the common cafeteria with the students throughout the school term. His faculty apartment had a perfectly respectable kitchen. It was more than respectable. He’d had expensive apartments in Boston that had had fewer amenities and even more expensive flats in London where it had been impossible to cook at all. He objected to everything about the common cafeteria. The food was invariably bad. That went without saying. Institutional food was always bad. The public exposure was at the least annoying and often repressive. He found himself picking over wilted salads or overcooked cod, more aware than he wanted to be that people were staring at him. Students and faculty both stared. David said that was because he was “gay”—God, how he hated that word “gay;” he used it, but he hated it—but he knew it was because he was something else, something far worse in this place. Nobody at Windsor Academy cared whether he was gay or not. They cared that he was an elitist.
I am an elitist, James told himself, as he packed himself into his coat and scarf to make the trek over to the Student Center. It was egregious. If they had to make them all eat together in the common cafeteria, the least they could have done was to put the common cafeteria somewhere convenient, on the quad, instead of out in back with all the classroom buildings. The other thing they could have done was to set dinner at a reasonable hour instead of at five thirty. He had no idea why the school—and not only this school; every school he had ever been involved with—felt the need to feed its students as if they were day laborers in Liverpool who couldn’t wait for tea. He only wished that they could establish the kind of tradition here that they had at places like Exeter, where everyone ate at tables with tablecloths, and students took turns being waiters. That was probably elitism, too.
He let himself out the back door of Doyle House, then went down the path to the left and across the broad field to the Student Center. To his left, he could just see the top of Maverick Pond, down at the bottom of the slope that made it possible for the library to have an “above-grade lower level.” He made a face at the memory of all those recruiting brochures and alumni bulletins and bent his head against the wind coming up from the open expanse to his left. Of course it was only relatively open. On the other side of the pond there were about two hundred feet of open ground. Then there was a high fence, and on the other side of that fence was some town building James had never understood the function of. He only knew it wasn’t Windsor-Wellman High School, the local public school, which was from all reports a godforsaken place without facilities or standards. On the one hand, it was odd that a town as rich as Windsor, Massachusetts, wouldn’t spend what it had to to make its high school a first-rate place. On the other, the whole situation seemed entirely typical. James had never seen the point in public schools on any level but the most elementary, and that in spite of the fact that he had gone to one.