A Tragic Honesty Page 6

  Actually they were American, despite their faintly British accents. Frederick “Fritz” Rodgers, the father—perhaps patriarch is more apt—had been sent to London many years before by his employer, Cherry-Burrell, a company that designed dairy machinery. While the father traveled around Europe selling pasteurization units in countries with a high incidence of bacterial disease, his son Fred junior attended the exclusive Mr. Gibbs’s School in London, along with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy’s children and the future actor-playwright Peter Ustinov, who became Fred’s good friend. During the Blitz the family was removed to rural Surrey, until the British government advised them as Americans to leave the country. And so they came in somewhat reduced circumstances to live in that upstairs apartment on Genius Row, obligingly vacated by a bohemian aunt who painted.

  Dookie was rather smitten by the gentlemanly Fritz Rodgers, all the more so when her sociable inquiries revealed a family pedigree that must have made her swoon. Fritz’s sickly wife Louise was a descendant of John Alden, who’d come over on the Mayflower with William Bradford, and her father was a Nantucket Gardner, no less, whose home on India Street would later become an historical landmark. Nor was such distinction limited (as in the case of Dookie’s children) to one side of the family. In fact the name Rodgers is all but synonymous with American naval history: Fritz was the great-grandson of John Rodgers, the “Father of the American Navy,” and was maternally linked with Matthew C. Perry, who forced Japan to reopen trade with the West, and Oliver Hazard Perry, who won the Battle of Lake Erie. All the Rodgers men had pursued naval careers as a matter of course—a tradition that, alas, came to an end with Fritz himself, who became legally blind during his third year at Annapolis after a boxing mishap. Since then he’d dabbled in a number of things—architecture, poetry, acting, scientific inventions—and such a wide range of cultivation, coupled with Old World manners and a liking for sherry, made him an almost ideal companion for Dookie. Theirs was a platonic bond, facilitated somewhat by the fact that Louise Rodgers spent most of her time in bed.

  And then there was the man’s only son and namesake, who not only had the blood of the Aldens and Gardners and Rodgers and Perrys running through his veins, but was the spitting image of Laurence Olivier. As a former student at one of England’s best public schools, his accent was more pronounced than that of his parents or even his London-born sister, and his manners seemed impeccable. For all the surface polish, though, Fred was something of a mystery even to his own family. “Charming but opaque” is how his younger sister described him with the benefit of much hindsight; “I never did know what made him tick.” Unlike the rest of the family, Fred had little interest in books or art or for that matter anything that smacked of learning or culture. Rather than attend university he’d served a few years of apprenticeship with an engineering firm in England, and when he returned to the States he found work as a machinist with Grumman Aviation in Long Island—a job he held, with very occasional promotion, for the rest of his life. “I’m a laborer,” he liked to say in that elegant accent of his, and indeed he preferred the company of other laborers at the aircraft plant. At first blush this suave, handsome, well-born young man seemed to have little in common with the proletariat; his fine manners held him in check, though like Tony Wilson in The Easter Parade he had a good sense of humor and “seemed always to be laughing at some subtle private joke that he might tell you when you got to know him better.” And then you got to know him better and he’d tell you: “Oh, I believe in humanity. Humanity’s perf’ly all right with me. I like everyone but coons, kikes, and Catholics.” That was the Fred his friends knew.

  But all Dookie knew in 1941 was that Fred was the son of a gentleman and the descendant of many more, and probably she was being sly when she asked her daughter to take a basket of Easter eggs to the little girl who lived upstairs. By then Ruth (through her Willkie contacts) had found a paying job with United China Relief, and for publicity purposes her employer had loaned her an elaborate silk dress and Mandarin hat to wear to the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade. Thus attired, Ruth knocked on the Rodgers’s door and was met by a young man in grease-stained overalls who appeared to be Laurence Olivier blithely impersonating a laborer. The rest of her life was decided in that moment.

  * * *

  In the months leading up to her marriage, Ruth was away much of the time on all-day drives with Fred, and the fifteen-year-old Richard was lonelier than ever. As the clouds of puberty gathered around him, he began to resent his life and covet his sister’s imminent freedom. He was even getting a little tired of his adored and adoring Dookie—her constant talk, tipsy jokes, silliness about money, the magazines she always smeared with lipsticky fingers, the dusty, noisy mess of her sculpting, the whole dingy rigmarole of being “free spirits.”

  Nor was school any escape. The only subjects he tended to pass anymore were English and History (“and I only passed History because I could fake it”); such was his depression that he simply couldn’t muster the effort to work at things that didn’t interest him. And among the things that didn’t interest him were math and science, foreign languages, any kind of athletics that required his own participation, and (perhaps above all) having to relate to boys with whom he felt nothing in common, so alien was his experience to theirs. He didn’t even like to read much; rather he spent most of his time, as ever, hiding in movie theaters and imagining a different sort of life for himself, and by way of further escape he began to write about it. Such “movie-haunted” stories were consistently praised by his English teachers, even stories that the author considered “pretty awful.”* At age fifteen he’d suddenly found a vocation, and no matter how much difficulty it caused him in the years ahead, he never seriously considered a different one.

  Of course Dookie had never doubted that her son was special; if he failed in school it was because his needs were different from those of ordinary boys. Meanwhile it must have pained her deeply to see what an unhappy, brooding adolescent he’d become. More than anyone she knew how sensitive he was, how like herself, and clearly he needed more understanding than he was liable to get at a pedestrian little church school in the Village. Or so she might have thought when, early that summer, she learned of a prep school in Connecticut that believed in individuality. As Yates described this pivotal moment in A Good School, she was at the lavish wedding of one of her sculpting students (“a rich girl [who] must have romanticized my mother as a struggling artist”), when an overbearing grande dame insisted that Dookie look into Avon Old Farms for her gifted, maladjusted son; that it was the “only school in the East that understands boys.” After that it would have been quite in character for Avon’s headmaster at the time—a zealous recruiter named Brooke Stabler—to respond to Dookie’s letter of inquiry with a personal visit to Genius Row and, having come this far, to pitch the school as precisely the sort of place where the otherwise foundering son of a sculptor was likely to flourish, and moreover to offer her on the spot a scholarship for half the (rather exorbitant) tuition. And finally, of course, it was entirely like Dookie to insist that Vincent Yates see the need, whether he could afford it or not, to send their son to a proper New England boarding school—until the man relented, at last, as usual.

  Avon Old Farms was the brainchild of Mrs. Theodate Pope Riddle, though the school might have seemed (as Yates put it) “conceived in the studios of Walt Disney.” Mrs. Riddle herself might have been so conceived, for the figure she struck as a stout, glowering dowager lent itself to the cartoonist’s art. Born Effie Pope, she adopted her maternal grandmother’s name, Theodate, at the already formidable age of twelve, and from that point on led a life of exemplary activity and idealism. She was the very tissue of which legends (local ones, at least) are made: Though whacked on the head by a heavy beam and given up for dead, Theodate survived the sinking of the Lusitania and went on to become Connecticut’s first female architect. She deplored cold rationalism, and thus was able to reconcile an ardent socialism with the enormous personal f
ortune she inherited as a young woman; and finally she combined all her assets—fortune, idealism, architectural prowess, and not least an iron will—in building what would be, both in design and principle, “an indestructible school for boys.”

  For this purpose she acquired three thousand acres of lush woodlands around the Farmington River near the town of Avon, about twelve miles from Hartford. She designed her school in the English Cotswold style, and insisted it be built using red sandstone from local quarries. She further insisted, with bizarre but rather endearing fanaticism, that the five hundred or so construction workers restrict themselves to the use of seventeenth-century tools (e.g., broad axes and old-style staples and wedges), and even to “work by rule of thumb and to judge all verticals by eye.” When she discovered a worker using a modern level and plumb rule, Mrs. Riddle became furious and sacked the lot of them; she hired a smaller group of costly artisans and finally ended up spending more than five million 1926 dollars to complete the project to her exacting satisfaction. And for a while it may have seemed worth it: The campus was like a Cotswold Brigadoon buried in the woods of Connecticut, what with the “gabled slate roofs whose timbers had intentionally been installed when the wood was young so that in aging they would warp and sag in interesting ways,” as Yates described it, noting also the flagstone paths, the wide lawns, the lead-casement windows, and so on.

  But all this was only a part—arguably the lesser part—of Mrs. Riddle’s vision. Aspirando et perseverando was and is the Avon motto, and to embody this Mrs. Riddle chose as her mascot a winged beaver, hence the central tenet of her philosophy: No matter how modest one’s abilities, if one persevered like a certain tenacious long-toothed rodent, then there were no heights to which one could not aspire. And it was precisely the student of modest ability—or thwarted potential as the case may be—that intrigued Mrs. Riddle. “There were always those who were wealthy, who wanted to play polo in a relaxed atmosphere,” said alumnus Reed Estabrook, describing a typical Avon student in those days. “But most of us had been in academic trouble for one reason or another (like myself), or social trouble, at a more traditional school.” The intolerance for misfits so commonplace at such bastions as St. Paul’s, Andover, and Exeter was anathema to the arch-progressive Avon, which was innovative in a number of ways. Seventy-five years ago there was an on-site psychologist to commiserate with some of the quirkier students, as well as a remedial reading program instituted by Harvard-trained specialists. Indeed, Avon’s remarkable success with both the quirky and dyslexic was its greatest claim to fame, and nowadays on-site psychologists and remediation programs are de rigueur at all but the most benighted schools.

  But the paramount issue for Mrs. Riddle was breeding—an elusive concept, to be sure. Though Avon was “founded for the sons of the gentry,” the phrase is misleading; the socialist founder was stern in pointing out that “good breeding is not dependent on birth” but rather cultivated after a fashion that Mrs. Riddle, in her Deed of Trust, was at pains to prescribe in rather byzantine but not wholly unreasonable terms. The matter almost defies summary (though the Deed is an interesting and readable document) but goes something like this: Manners, character, breeding if you will, are far more important than any academic test, which is not to say that intellectual discipline isn’t important, merely that it needs to be pursued in terms of one’s individual abilities and interests, and in conjunction with some form of creative manual labor—hence the “community service” requirement for every Avon student. “The Founder believes that a boy who has never known the hardship of work on a farm, in a forest, or in shops … has been deprived of one of the most valuable experiences that life can offer for the development of character.” But all this is moot if one doesn’t maintain “smartness in attire,” and to this end the founder insisted on an almost Wodehousian dress code: During the day students wore either a herringbone tweed jacket or the official Avon blazer (burgundy, brass buttons, a winged beaver on the pocket), and at night they dressed for dinner in Oxford gray pin-striped trousers, black double-breasted suit jackets, white shirts with stiff detachable collars and hand-tied bow ties. “A slovenly, slouching lad is pleasing to no one,” wrote Mrs. Riddle, and added a quote from William James: “‘If a young man does not dress well before he is twenty, he will never dress well.’”

  All very true, no doubt, and undeniably influential in the moral and sartorial development of one Richard Yates. “Given good-enough clothes and shoes,” one of his characters reflects, “you could always look dignified whether you were or not, and almost everybody could be counted on to call you ‘sir.’” Now is not the time to pause over how much Yates took all this to heart, except to note that it went well beyond clothing and is best summarized by the inscription above the entrance to Scarborough Country Day: Manners Maketh Man. Frank Vanderlip and Theodate Riddle were alike in that essential sentiment, which was much impressed on Yates before, during, and even after Avon.

  Prior to the decadent reforms of Headmaster Stabler, Mrs. Riddle had directed her students to buy uniforms exclusively at Brooks Brothers, by far the most traditional American clothier. But in an effort to make Avon more accessible to its growing number of scholarship students, Stabler had defied the Deed of Trust and switched the school’s exclusive franchise to the more downscale Franklin Simon.* Avon students were advised to buy at least two tweed jackets, two sets of evening clothes, and one (optional) Avon blazer—but even at Franklin Simon’s moderate prices, Yates could only afford one of each (and no blazer), as well as a few pieces of “community service” attire such as dungarees, work shirts, and boots from an Army and Navy store.

  Finally, before his departure, Yates spent a rare evening in his father’s company. “His home was refreshingly clean and neat after the chaotic sculpture shop where I lived,” Yates noted in A Good School. “When we’d stacked the dishes we sat around talking for a couple of hours—hesitantly and awkwardly, as always, but I remember thinking we’d done better than usual.” Before long Yates would have reason to be glad about the relative success of this visit, and in the meantime his father—determined to be gracious despite the “preposterous” expense of Dookie’s latest venture—presented him with an old heavy suitcase and a “fitted leather shaving kit, new-looking and stamped with his initials,” which Yates managed to keep for several years until he lost it in Germany during the war.

  “And in 1941, there arrived at the School a young man by the name of Richard W. Yates,” wrote Gordon Ramsey in his history of Avon, “who combined shrewd powers of observation and even more vivid powers of guesswork to salt away reminiscences for a novel, patently about Avon Old Farms, which appeared in 1978 under the title A Good School.” According to Ramsey, the reactions of Yates’s former classmates and teachers to “this obvious roman à clef” ranged from “apoplectic” to “philosophic and amused.” In fact the latter was far more the norm (among the few who actually read the book), and naturally such reactions depended on the reader’s sense of humor as well as how lightly one got off. As for denying that a particular character was (essentially) oneself, Yates made that difficult by hardly bothering to change names or physical details, and most of the novel’s key episodes are based memorably on life. “That’s me, all right,” said Harry Flynn of the character Terry Flynn, when told of the latter’s crooked pinkie, and such a formula applies pretty much to the rest of the characters as well.* “What a flood of memories your top-notch cast brought back,” Mason Beekley (Avon ’44) wrote Yates after the book appeared, and his response was representative. “Aside from being just plain well-written and excellently crafted, your book—so close to being biographical—provided an immensely poignant experience for me, and I thank you for that.” Most of Yates’s classmates have a generally fond memory of the school, as well as a sense that their experience—as the last class of the old Avon, drafted almost entirely into the war—was extraordinary, a story that needed to be told, and those who read the book were (mostly) glad Yates had seen fi
t to tell it.

  And unlike most of his stories, this one began unhappily and ended on a somewhat hopeful note. As with his characters Robert Prentice and Phil Drake and William Grove, Yates’s first year at prep school “was almost unalloyed in its misery.” Apart from being poor, unathletic, untidy, and immature in every respect, Yates fancied himself a writer of all things, and (whether he meant to or not) looked the part. What he had to endure is the sort of everyday hazing that, however silly and unfounded, the victim never quite forgets. At the time Yates internalized his rage, and later sublimated it into his work; in fact one of his most common themes is pertinent, what he described (in a note to his story “A Really Good Jazz Piano”) as “the pain implicit in any form of condescension.” Yates came to despise condescension and sensed it everywhere, at all times, and the cathartic power of art went only so far toward calming him. Those who knew him as an adult and wondered at his bizarre outbursts—not always explicable in terms of alcohol or mental illness—would do well to consider what he suffered as the poorest, weakest boy at a New England prep school (much less as the smothered son of an unstable, alcoholic sculptress).