If I Forget You(10)

Bannister is a particular college. For years, it had the reputation of being the most expensive undergraduate college in the country. Yet it is a step below elite. It is not Williams or Wesleyan. Once in class Jon tells them that Vonnegut used to teach here—before his time, of course—and famously described Bannister as catering to the moronic and dyslexic sons and daughters of the ruling class.

Henry laughs the hardest at this, and Jon says, “What do you think of that, Henry?”

Henry shrugs. “I’m not a moron and I’m not dyslexic and I am certainly not from the ruling class, so it can’t be true, right?”

Everyone laughs, and for the second time, Henry feels like maybe he has won something.

One fall afternoon, Jon stops Henry after his class and asks him to sit for a minute. Jon waits until the rest of the class filters out. Henry looks past him to a big maple outside that has already turned red, the color of fire.

“Do you like this class?” Jon asks.

Henry nods. “Very much. Why?”

“You’re different from the others,” Jon says, and Henry thinks he is talking about his background, his working-class voice devoid of r’s.

“Most of these students,” Jon continues, “will take one of these classes, like some take a drawing class and never intend to become artists. You have that thing, though.”

“‘That thing’?”

“Talent, Henry. You can write. You hear language. Let me tell you a small secret.”

Henry leans slightly forward. “Yes,” he says.

“There are two reasons to teach writing, and neither of them is about teaching writing.” Jon laughs. “You teach writing for a paycheck. That’s first. Second, you teach writing to curate. Do you know what I mean by that?”

“I think so,” says Henry.

“You curate by identifying students with talent. You then encourage them to keep going. In some ways, that’s all you can do.”

“I get it,” Henry says.

“Keep going,” Jon says. “If you want this, you can do it. Okay?”

Henry nods. “Thank you.”

Walking out into the sunny afternoon, out onto the quad full of students sitting in small packs, dogs running wild, people throwing Frisbees, Henry feels better than he has in a long time. He realizes Jon has given him a gift, and though it will be a while before he realizes how important a gift it is, for Henry it is as if everything is suddenly different, smells different, looks different, and tastes different. He wants to take a bite out of all of it.





Margot, 1991

There was never a question that Margot would go anywhere but Bannister. Her father went to Bannister and her mother went to Bannister. Her sister, Katherine, graduated a year before Margot arrives. Their parents met there. Her father is on the board. The field house that opened a few years before has his name on it: The Thomas W. Fuller Field House.

Her whole life, it seems, her parents took her to Bannister every fall for at least reunion, and with Cricket also choosing Bannister, Margot arrives on campus with a familiarity that most students do not have. There is a logical order to life that has been laid out for her, though Margot, unlike her sister, has chosen to question it every step of the way. She pushes against the strictures laid out for her. She tries to find the invisible walls that a girl of her station in life is not expected to walk into and she runs through them.

Some of it is just youthful acting out, the predictable behavior of a spirited girl who is the daughter of wealthy parents. At Stoneleigh-Burnham, a small school in western Massachusetts where all the girls boarded their own horses, she was expelled as a sophomore for literally letting the horses out of the barn during commencement, all those beautiful majestic Thoroughbreds, many of them more costly than four years of tuition, wandering around confused and startling the parents and grandparents of the graduates on a sunny day on the green.

A year later, she was sent home from a Swiss school for accepting in the mail a package of marijuana from a friend she knew from the Vineyard. Her parents sent her to an outdoor leadership program for wayward girls in Wyoming, half horse camp and half boot camp, and Margot got caught in the tent of a male instructor. He was fired and she was sent home three days in.

Once, the summer before college, her parents flew to New York for a dinner. Margot had the Jones boys over, as they were known, two brothers from her summer circle who both went to Deerfield during the year. With the house to themselves, they got into the liquor cabinet and into the fridge, and a few beers and a joint led to shots of tequila. Neither of the Jones boys really interested her—they were both handsome, although short—but Margot was drawn to their energy, their recklessness, and she was at an age when these things fueled her, the fierce intensity of now.

They were outside, behind the house, looking past the wild-crafted landscape to the open ocean. The sun was still summer-high in the sky, though the evening was coming on. The night was warm and there was little wind. Twenty feet off the beach was one of her father’s prize toys, his Boston Whaler, which could sleep four.

“Dude,” one of the Jones boys said, “that is such a sweet boat.”

And as such things happen, that small germ quickly grew into a full-blown idea. There was a party the Jones boys knew about over on Nantucket, a bonfire out on the point of Madaket Beach, some thirty miles away, but that fast bitch, as one of the boys said, could get them there in about an hour.