dinner, and I closed my door.
“No locks,” my father commented. “I wonder if they ever have any problems.”
Outside old students lounged in groups, throwing Frisbees and tossing balls with lacrosse sticks. They halloed one another across the green and complimented new haircuts and tans.
Even the parents knew each other. Mothers in A-line skirtsbent their heads together, and the pastel-colored sleeves of the cardigans they’d thrown over their shoulders flattened against one another like clothes on a rack. Fathers shook hands and laughed in loud voices. At first, they all looked the same to me. People whom we had passed a couple times nodded at us like old acquaintances, and we nodded back with well-prepared poise, although I had no idea whether or not I had spoken to or even seen them before.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the landscape, I noticed different varieties of families. There were fancy white people in big foreign sedans, the women emitting, as I passed near them, a complex cosmetic aroma; there were plain, sturdy people whose hair and nails alike were cut in blunt, straight lines and whose feet were shod in brown leather sandals. Less exotic families emerged from chrome-and-wood station wagons; they wore baggy beige shorts. Almost no one was fat. I could only make out these few gradations, and it unhinged me to know that just a few hours before I had not noticed a one. We ascended the brick pathway to the Upper School building, where meals were served, and we remembered how perilous the walk had been in winter. “Get ready,” my parents teased.
After dinner chapel bells announced the First Night Service. Everywhere around us parents were climbing into empty cars and driving away. The air had grown cool. I did not know how to say good-bye to my family. I wanted the leave-taking to be over and my part done right. I wished them gone and was ashamed at the thought. “Please stay,” I begged. “Just until chapel’s over.”
The First Night Service took place, according to tradition, on the first day of each term since the nineteenth century, in the Old Chapel. The Old Chapel was built in the shape of a cross, with smooth rows of wooden pews in the three lower segments and high-backed seats along the walls. The pulpit stood where Christ’s head would have hung if he in his gauntpassion had been nailed to this most charming symbol of suffering. Unlike the grand New Chapel this church was small and homey. It did not dwarf or intimidate us.
In the Old Chapel my mind flipped through its familiar images of pious devotion: the Jesus, blond and bland, wispy beard and wistful eyes, who had smiled at me from over my great-grandparents’ bed, from the Sunday-school room at Ward A.M.E., from the illuminated cross over the pulpit, and from cardboard fans and free calendars produced by black funeral parlors; the brunet Jesus who stretched his arms out toward his disciples at the Last Supper in my laminated reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s oil.
Take, eat
.
The Rector appeared in the pulpit, shorter than he had seemed in the Rectory, and businesslike. I heard him, despite the close intimacy of the chapel, as if he were speaking from far away. Yet even from such a distance, his words—the content of them, if only I could take them out of that solid, white voice, but I could not quite—had everything to do with me right then. He talked to us of our fears and our dreams, of our new career, of the challenges of our life together.
Then he spoke of tradition. Boys had come and gone before us, sitting in these same pews, thinking and feeling these same thoughts and feelings. They had grown into men and gone out into the world prepared, by a St. Paul’s education, to do something worthwhile.
My own voices were talking back to him, and so long as he spoke, I could not control the dialogue. Part of the tradition, my eye. I was there in spite, despite,
to
spite it. I was there because of sit-ins and marches and
“No locks,” my father commented. “I wonder if they ever have any problems.”
Outside old students lounged in groups, throwing Frisbees and tossing balls with lacrosse sticks. They halloed one another across the green and complimented new haircuts and tans.
Even the parents knew each other. Mothers in A-line skirtsbent their heads together, and the pastel-colored sleeves of the cardigans they’d thrown over their shoulders flattened against one another like clothes on a rack. Fathers shook hands and laughed in loud voices. At first, they all looked the same to me. People whom we had passed a couple times nodded at us like old acquaintances, and we nodded back with well-prepared poise, although I had no idea whether or not I had spoken to or even seen them before.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the landscape, I noticed different varieties of families. There were fancy white people in big foreign sedans, the women emitting, as I passed near them, a complex cosmetic aroma; there were plain, sturdy people whose hair and nails alike were cut in blunt, straight lines and whose feet were shod in brown leather sandals. Less exotic families emerged from chrome-and-wood station wagons; they wore baggy beige shorts. Almost no one was fat. I could only make out these few gradations, and it unhinged me to know that just a few hours before I had not noticed a one. We ascended the brick pathway to the Upper School building, where meals were served, and we remembered how perilous the walk had been in winter. “Get ready,” my parents teased.
After dinner chapel bells announced the First Night Service. Everywhere around us parents were climbing into empty cars and driving away. The air had grown cool. I did not know how to say good-bye to my family. I wanted the leave-taking to be over and my part done right. I wished them gone and was ashamed at the thought. “Please stay,” I begged. “Just until chapel’s over.”
The First Night Service took place, according to tradition, on the first day of each term since the nineteenth century, in the Old Chapel. The Old Chapel was built in the shape of a cross, with smooth rows of wooden pews in the three lower segments and high-backed seats along the walls. The pulpit stood where Christ’s head would have hung if he in his gauntpassion had been nailed to this most charming symbol of suffering. Unlike the grand New Chapel this church was small and homey. It did not dwarf or intimidate us.
In the Old Chapel my mind flipped through its familiar images of pious devotion: the Jesus, blond and bland, wispy beard and wistful eyes, who had smiled at me from over my great-grandparents’ bed, from the Sunday-school room at Ward A.M.E., from the illuminated cross over the pulpit, and from cardboard fans and free calendars produced by black funeral parlors; the brunet Jesus who stretched his arms out toward his disciples at the Last Supper in my laminated reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s oil.
Take, eat
.
The Rector appeared in the pulpit, shorter than he had seemed in the Rectory, and businesslike. I heard him, despite the close intimacy of the chapel, as if he were speaking from far away. Yet even from such a distance, his words—the content of them, if only I could take them out of that solid, white voice, but I could not quite—had everything to do with me right then. He talked to us of our fears and our dreams, of our new career, of the challenges of our life together.
Then he spoke of tradition. Boys had come and gone before us, sitting in these same pews, thinking and feeling these same thoughts and feelings. They had grown into men and gone out into the world prepared, by a St. Paul’s education, to do something worthwhile.
My own voices were talking back to him, and so long as he spoke, I could not control the dialogue. Part of the tradition, my eye. I was there in spite, despite,
to
spite it. I was there because of sit-ins and marches and
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