Graduation day

It was June, 1971, more specifically the afternoon of Friday the 5th. Yesterday's hot breezes had lifted the red clay dust off the tennis courts and brought it up-campus.  It had settled on the trees surrounding Amen (rhymes with flamin'), my dormitory, which was named after some 19th century student of the prep school and ultimately its philanthropist.  Only the oldest faculty remembered the connection.

Two miles away in an air-conditioned room of the Quality Inn, Daddy was reading a headline from the Manchester Union-Leader: "Hot Blast Smothers Northeast".   He, my Mama, and my sister, Nicki, were making the pilgrimage from North Carolina; the weather was hotter than at home -- New Hampshire had a temperature in the 100's all during the week.  I had a headache from the overpowering brightness.

My graduation was set for Saturday at 11:30.  Due to the feeble efforts of the window AC unit,  Daddy had taken off the vest to his suit, a green three-piece, inset with a subtle check.  He was wearing, as I knew, garters underneath to hold up long men's hosiery, a style detail he learned from my Grandfather that had been fresh stuff in the 1920s.

That day Nicki had chosen a red A-line skirt, black belt and white blouse with black heels. For an unforgettable look, she'd had applied foundation, eye-liner, eye-shadow, false eyelashes and rouge.  She would no doubt meet a dreamy younger man of 18 whom she could capture with her 19-year-old charms.  Mama was wearing Christian Dior, something in a bone color, and medium heels.  As bold a statement as Nicki was making, Mama's outfit spoke subtly, and lent a grace that translated easily from South to North.  Next to Nicki on the the motel couch, I wore the minimum school outfit: a light-green button-down split by a thrift-shop tie, some (we'd call them now 'distressed') jeans, winter-worn moccasins and collapsed socks.  I was clearly the item that doesn't fit in the picture.

Despite how cool Mama seemed to be, she wore an occasional flicker of concern.  She was attuned to Daddy's mood, alert to any discomfort he'd feel during the trip.  This was the first time since 1936 that Daddy (full name Alan Taliaferro Calhoun) had walked the green and stone paths of the Academy.  Students of his time had called him 'Calina', a mix of last name and home state.  He had paid a modicum amount of attention to academics during the four years he attended, but his forte was arranging and managing dances with nearby girls' schools.

The yearbook entry for Daddy exposed his boyhood interests like offenses on a rap sheet: Rifle Club (3,4) -- (where 3 stood for junior year, 4 for senior year) -- Coin Collectors (1,2), Archery (1,2,3), Archaelogy (1), Social Affairs (2,3,4), Dance Committee (3,4).   These occupations distracted him from studying.  (His focus changed: after WWII, Daddy became an English professor at Emory.)

Thirty years after Daddy's last dance, I migrated north to his prep school.  I exercised my free will invest my intellect in a school that championed academics and leadership and my social life in a virtual monastery (with side trips to Harvard Square and Fenway Park).  I cried on the phone every night with Mama and Daddy from the time I arrived in September until Christmas Break, something I block out when I talk about my experiences up North.

Before my migration, I had become increasingly challenged by opportunities to grow mentally.  Assigned solely to us,  Mrs. Linda Carter brought 15 students along from 5th- through 7th-grade work in two years.   The country day school I went to next was a bit harder still.  I discovered Latin there and learned how to do homework.  At the day school, I developed an appetite for foreign languages that couldn't be satisfied at any school in the neighborhood.

I had to go to Daddy's alma mater when I saw the the course catalog.  I would be able take Anthropology and Religion and lots of languages -- dead (Latin and Greek) and alive (French, etc., but also Russian, Italian, Japanese).

 I was staggered by the academic opportunity.  Although giving this answer to folks who asked why I went to boarding school wasn't always enough, that's the way I thought about it.  Looking back from forty years later, I figure I wanted to imitate Daddy and to get away -- 996 miles away, I calculated -- as he had in the 1930s.

Once I got there, I didn't know how smart these kids were going to be.  In a summer program I attended after 5th grade a kid named Eric had claimed his IQ was 200 points, another made a claim to 175.  Mine was much lower.  I thought I was pretty bright but not in a league with these geniuses.  It seemed that to do well at this northern school, I was going to have to work pretty hard.

It turned out I could work very hard and liked the work a lot.  As a result I won a number of cash prizes for Latin and Greek, prizes endowed so long before that they amounted to hundreds each, enough to pay half of the cost of a trip to Europe.  Hoots and hollers went up in Assemblies whenever my name was called in connection with such sums, so my humility came down with an infection.  Conversely, my social skills were not improving during the three years: the honors did not translate to popularity and my ego got no proper attention.

In the motel room that June Friday, I was displaying the bored bravado I always showed at winter and summer breaks in North Carolina -- despite my sense of inadequacy.  I knew that the next day my closest friends would be surrounded by their many other friends.  I dreaded feeling alone, having no one else to introduce my family to after my teachers, of being awkward in the smiling crowd.  I was in 'the Slough of Despond', as John Bunyan had written of the Pilgrim in 1698.  (I was elated to leave the school for a college where the ratio of men to women was forty-nine per cent to fifty-one per cent.  The girls admitted to prep school my senior year had brought the number of girls on campus from zero to ten and the ratio up to one to twenty-eight.)

I said to Daddy,  "If we want some pictures, we had better go before it gets too hot."

"Be careful, gentlemen," Mama said, "It's hot already and not even eleven-thirty."

"I want to go, too," Nicki said."

"Well, get ready and we can go," he said turning to Nicki.

She was about to say something but stopped and blurted out, "Daddy!"

Daddy picked up his jacket and moved toward the door with Nicki behind him.  I quickly turned my mind to the series of shots I'd arranged for Daddy to take, including his old dorm, the Academy Building, Wheelwright (where all the big social events had taken place), my dorm and the view from Academy down over the main quad toward the post office.  With the weather in mind, I would have to economize.

I still have the photograph of Daddy and me that Nicki took.  I am standing next to Daddy, who is puffing out his chest,  jacket over his forearm, dressed in a standard white shirt and a wool hat whose band clinches a small feather.  Given the width of his smile he is making no attempt to hide the temporary dental bridge Dr. Ivey has installed the week before. The picture captures a smile on me that I usually reserve for the beach and sports events.

On the 1st, the Monday before their visit, I'd found a note in my campus P. O. box, "Until the following 12 (twelve) books are returned to the Academy Library, your Diploma will be withheld."  The warning deepened the growling of my morning stomach -- this final week seniors were displaying our nervelessness partly by staying in our beds until noon or after -- so that the Peanut-Between sandwich I consumed at the Grill didn't sit well.  Up-campus, I searched my room.  I found nine books on the shelf in the closet. Hitting the floor, I found two more, Ernest Hemingway in Spain and, from the prior year, The Cartoons of the New Yorker, the First Twenty-Five Years.  The remaining piles were composed of clothes and shoes.  With a navy kit bag slung over my shoulder, I walked to the library, taking the route with the most shade trees to avoid the hammering sun.

The assistant, a boy I remember from the dining hall, looked at my overdue notice and left the desk right away, apologizing for the delay.  Ten minutes later, the chief librarian arrived and scanned the notice, comparing the list to the spines of the books.  "Where is The Elite Brigade?"  I was confident I would not find it and told him so. "You'll be paying the forty-dollar replacement fee."

"I'll just charge it to my campus account."

He smiled at me with eyes as cold as the November Maine ocean, "Very well.  As you are aware, the senior students' accounts must be cleared by Thursday at three PM."  This was said with the intonations of both a question and a command he believed I would not obey.  He then pushed the stack of returned books to his left hand.  He turned the the Hemingway book over, opening it at the back cover, wrote down the date due. He lifted his eyes to a framed calendar of the school year, each week numbered in sequence in order to make it easy to calculate fines.  It was past due by about sixteen weeks.

According to formal Library mathematics, a penny per day was due up to four days, but five days to seven was accounted the same as five days, as the Librarian did not work on weekends and could therefore not be there to settle any matter of subtlety. At a 5 cents per day, a quarter a weeks, the librarian calculated the fine for the a late period of 16 weeks by the formula .25 x 16 = $4.00.  Four books had been checked out the same day, for a subtotal of $16.00.  Six books at ten weeks late added on $15.00.

 The New Yorker Cartoons, at the bottom of the stack, had been due in the first week of May (of junior year).   I lifted a non-chalant glance to the angels on the painted ceiling while the librarian started counting from the date, praying that he'd take in only the month and date.  I heard his official count -- "five weeks and four days" -- and waited with a clutched stomach for the rest of the sentence, ''plus one year, that is, fifty-two weeks."  Instead he spoke the total, "one dollar, twenty-nine cents".  I was relieved, more to avoid the embarrassment in front of my family than even to rack up the additional $12.00 in fines.  "The grand total is thirty-one dollars and twenty-nine cents," said the Chief Librarian.   "Would you like to add this total to the cost for replacing the twelfth book?"

"No, I'll can pay for this right now," I said, a statement that brought a sly smile to his face.  The fines or the lost book charge could appear on my last Academy bill, I thought, but not both. These fines would count as a a relatively small sum for my parents.  I was yet to learn my parents had paid $30,000 for tuition and room and board.  Added to this was the cost of three years of travel up and back: two flights for each Winter Break, two flights for Spring Break, two for Christmas and one each for the beginning and end of the year, back in the day of Eastern Air Lines, when seats were wide and made of leather and when travel was a high privilege for fourteen-year-olds.  And finally, clothes for the three sizes I grew over three years.

Wednesday the 3rd, a school bus took a load of us to Harvard Square in Boston, where shoppers crowded the Harvard Coop (pronounced like a chicken's house), a campus store that catered also to the general public.  The course material -- say, half-a-dozen items for each of two thousand Harvard and Radcliffe classes -- was sold in the Coop. The shelves contained all the Harvard University merchandise, sweatshirts and pants, glasses and calendars as well as all the sportswear and trinkets for Radcliffe.  I had bought a Harvard lacrosse varsity jersey there in sophomore year. The thickness of it and its hood were still repelling the misery of cold wet days.  You could buy clothes there, jackets, Topsiders and khakis for boys, sweaters, Villager blouses with Peter Pan collars.  Posters, checked blankets, incense, LP records, toothpaste, mittens, everything the college student needed to live, could be bought at the Coop.

The Academy bus let us out at 1400 Massachusetts Avenue.  Splitting from our group, Phil Woodhall and I crossed over to the odd-numbered side of the street to the Salvation Army store.  Phil was looking for a special tie to wear on Saturday; I was looking for a suit. (My major concern at the last minute was finding one whose pants were the right length.)  I needed a suit coat sized 36 and began along the boys aisle at 12.  "14, 16 18, Husky, 32, 34.  Here, 36."  There stretched a half-a-dozen feet of size 36 suits.   I fingered through the hangers, thumbs cracking an opening in between suits to reveal the patterns and lapel sizes.   Not three minutes into this, I put my hand on a three-piece houndstooth number.  I knew this would be worth trying on.  I proceeded along the rack, looked at a few; one purple three-piece with a turquoise sheen was very sharp, but that was the only possible competitor.

The fitting room door was warped but did lock; it was long and tall enough for me to be comfortable.  The jacket fit, although maybe a little snugly.  I held my breath as I pulled on the pants.  Would the waist be OK? They passed that test. And the length?  The cuff came straight to the top of my mocassins!  And I found that the vest hung well off my shoulders, buttoning perfectly over my shirt and tie.  The sole drawback -- the ensemble was made from wool.  With the suit back on the hanger, I pushed the changing room door open.  I saw Phil up near the cash register at one of the tie carousels.  To get to him, I walked up the way I had come.

January 6th.  The heat at dawn was making the same promise as the day before.  More than that, the humidity was going to stay in the high 80s.  My shower did little except to transition me from one temperature of wetness to another.

At ten, I put the houndstooth vest over the suspenders and finished the outfit with the coat.  Phil came into the communal bathroom and stopped two steps in.  "Wow," he said.  His tongue clicked as he took in a sudden breath.  With raised eyebrows, he exhaled, "My parents would kill me."  He helped me adjust the suit, but said,  "I'm inviting trouble already by wearing my khakis instead of a suit."

"My couture will be cool.  They'll be cool, too.  Plus this is a big day of celebration and they'll want me to celebrate it my way."

To keep everybody as comfortable as possible, Daddy'd drive from the motel in their air conditioned car, we'd all meet in the Amen-Bancroft parking lot at 9:45 and not leave the car until the ceremony, except for the time I hustled to stands to save three seats.  We were planning to get an hour's head start on the crowd.  Mama would bring some sandwiches -- she was on the ball and brought ham, the most breath-neutral -- so that we could eat in the car once we parked near the stand down at Abbot" dorm.

I saw the car pull up in the parking lot and checked my pants for my wallet and room key.  I could see through the windshield that Daddy was smiling and expectant, each detail in his face visible under the shade of an ancient tree. For the briefest moment before I pushed the brass bar of the door, I thought  he'd see me smiling through the shaded door pane.  I stepped out, down from the single granite stair,and the sun hit me like platinum dinner plate.  I raised my hand to defend my eyes.  When I looked again at Daddy, he now looked bewildered.  Mama's head was turned toward him and she wore a flat, thin smile. In the next moment followed two faces of cheer although I noticed that some enthusiasm had leaked away.

I had a sense of what might be wrong.

At the Salvation Army, after I found the suit that fit, my eyes had strayed to where the bigger sizes were hanging.  I saw a houndstooth suit in a size 50.  Against long odds, when I compared the 36" to the 50", the fabrics were the same in pattern and weight, were equally tinted and equally worn from use: a textile miracle!  I'd thought, "This is a big suit. A short man wore this but he was huge." A new strategy took hold.  I 'd keep the size 36 vest and put it together with the bigger pants and coat.  The total had been twenty-dollars, sixteen dollars for the suit, four for the vest.  "For the price nobody can beat this," I'd thought.  "Yesss!  An outfittt fit for my exittt!"

So, there through the early Saturday heat I crossed the path toward the car, fitted out in the clothes-pinned pants, the vest and the huge coat.

Today the 12th of June, 2011, I found a picture of Mama, Nicki and Daddy with a milling crowd of parents and graduates holding their black gowns over their arms.  I am the fourth one in the picture.  Below my squinting eyes, I have on a mortar board and a black and white suit a fat man once wore.  I see that Daddy's face has the skin of a tomato and the blank eyes of a man who has suffered too much sun.