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PARTISAN REVIEW
extension of my mother's, shone out in full glory at general assem–
blies or when I sat with a handful of other boys on the bleachers
of Brimmer's new Manice Hall. In unison our big girls sang "Ameri–
ca"; back and forth our amazons tramped-their brows were wooden,
their dress was black and white, and their columns followed standard–
bearers holding up an American flag, the white flag of the Com–
monwealth of Massachusetts, and the green flag of Brimmer. At
basketball games against Miss Lee's or Miss Winsor's, it was our
upper-school champions who rushed onto the floor, as feline and
fateful in their pace as lions. This was our own immediate and
daily spectacle; in comparison such masculine displays as trips to
battle cruisers commanded by comrades of my father seemed eye–
wash- the Navy moved in a realm as ghostlike and removed from
my life as the ethereal acrobatics of Douglas Fairbanks or Peter Pan.
I wished I were an older girl. I wrote Santa Claus for a field hockey
stick. To be a boy at Brimmer was to be small, denied, and weak.
I was promised an improved future and taken on Sunday after–
noon drives through the suburbs to inspect the boys' schools: Rivers,
Dexter, Country Day. These expeditions were stratagems designed
to give me a chance to know my father; Mother noisily stayed be–
hind and embarrassed me by pretending that I had forbidden her to
embark on "men's work." Father, however, seldom insisted, as he
should have, on seeing the headmasters in person, yet he made an as–
tonishing number of friends; his trust begat trust, and something about
his silences encouraged junior masters and even school janitors to pour
out small talk that was detrimental to rival institutions. At each
new school, however, all this gossip was easily refuted; worse still
Mother was always ready to cross-examine Father in a manner that
showed that she was asking questions for the purpose of giving, not
of receiving, instruction; she expressed astonishment that a wishy–
washy desire to be everything to everybody had robbed a naval man
of any reliable concern for his son's welfare. Mother regarded the
suburban schools as "gerrymandered" and middle-class; after Father
had completed his round of inspections, she made her own follow-up
visits and told Mr. Dexter and Mr. Rivers to their faces that she
was looking for a "respectable stop-gap" for her son's "three years
between Brimmer and Saint Mark's." Saint Mark's was the board–
ing school for which I had been enrolled at birth, and was due to
