He visited often and liked to give the blessing before meals, serving up plenty of Thees and Thous and Thines; and afterward he would join us in Blaine Hall and lend his surprisingly high voice to the singing—a big, happy-looking man with an obvious orange hairpiece and a shiny round face and little square teeth like a baby’s. He once stopped me on the quad to ask where I hailed from and how I liked the school, and as I gave my gushing answers he smiled and closed his eyes like a purring cat.
The headmaster invited Ayn Rand—so the story went—only because he was about to start a drive for scholarship funds and needed Mr. Dufresne’s support. A small party of masters came to object, and Mr. Ramsey used an impertinent metaphor, at which point the headmaster blew up and sent them home with hard feelings against both him and Dean Makepeace, who’d taken his side. It was a measure of their resentment that these masters let us hear so much about this dispute.
Ayn Rand would visit in early February. By the time the announcement went out, just before Christmas break, I’d already heard the story behind it and was trying to figure out who held the high ground. Was the headmaster selling out, or were these masters indulging a mandarin snobbery regardless of the result? As a scholarship boy, I knew how I’d feel about losing my shot because some pedant wanted to show off his exquisite taste; but I was also affected by the masters’ conviction that Ayn Rand simply did not belong in the company of Robert Frost or Katherine Anne Porter or Edmund Wilson or Edna St. Vincent Millay or any of the other visitors whose photographs hung in the foyer of Blaine Hall. The school, they believed, would lose no less than part of its soul by playing host to her, and to them the money made it even worse—
whoring after strange gods,
as Mr. Ramsey supposedly had put it.
By now I’d picked up enough swank to guess that Ayn Rand was as bad as she was popular, and she was very popular. In a smirky spirit I pulled a copy of
The Fountainhead
off a book rack in the train station as I was leaving for Christmas break, read a few pages for laughs, forgot to laugh, and got so caught up I decided to buy it. There was still a man ahead of me at the cash register when the conductor began his last call. The clerk was old and slow, damn his eyes. I stood there in a sweat, knowing I should give up and leave but unable to surrender the novel. In the end I made the train at a dead run, suitcases nearly wrenching my arms out of their sockets. But I had it—the fat book swinging in my raincoat pocket, banging against my thigh.
I was bound for Baltimore to spend the holidays with my mother’s father and his wife. The poky local was packed with boys from school, and on any other trip I would have been horsing around with the rest of them, but this time I found a nearly empty car and settled in with the novel. At the next stop down the line we took on a bunch of girls from Miss Cobb’s Academy. I watched them milling around on the platform, waiting to board, and saw a girl I’d met at their Halloween dance. Her name was Lorraine—Rain, she called herself. By the third slow-dance we’d been pushing up close together, so close that one of the monitors wandering the floor tapped me on the shoulder with her pointer, which meant we had to retreat to opposite sides of the room and couldn’t dance with each other again. Later I saw her making out with my classmate Jack Broome, which didn’t stop me from writing her an ironically jocular letter a few days later. She never wrote back. Whenever I thought of that letter, as I often did, every phrase glowed with stupidity, made even more garish by the dead silence of its reception.
Rain came into my car, another girl at her elbow. Cigarette smoke curled from her nostrils. They stopped in the doorway and looked the car over. Her friend said something and Rain laughed, then she saw me and stopped. She was thrown. So
The headmaster invited Ayn Rand—so the story went—only because he was about to start a drive for scholarship funds and needed Mr. Dufresne’s support. A small party of masters came to object, and Mr. Ramsey used an impertinent metaphor, at which point the headmaster blew up and sent them home with hard feelings against both him and Dean Makepeace, who’d taken his side. It was a measure of their resentment that these masters let us hear so much about this dispute.
Ayn Rand would visit in early February. By the time the announcement went out, just before Christmas break, I’d already heard the story behind it and was trying to figure out who held the high ground. Was the headmaster selling out, or were these masters indulging a mandarin snobbery regardless of the result? As a scholarship boy, I knew how I’d feel about losing my shot because some pedant wanted to show off his exquisite taste; but I was also affected by the masters’ conviction that Ayn Rand simply did not belong in the company of Robert Frost or Katherine Anne Porter or Edmund Wilson or Edna St. Vincent Millay or any of the other visitors whose photographs hung in the foyer of Blaine Hall. The school, they believed, would lose no less than part of its soul by playing host to her, and to them the money made it even worse—
whoring after strange gods,
as Mr. Ramsey supposedly had put it.
By now I’d picked up enough swank to guess that Ayn Rand was as bad as she was popular, and she was very popular. In a smirky spirit I pulled a copy of
The Fountainhead
off a book rack in the train station as I was leaving for Christmas break, read a few pages for laughs, forgot to laugh, and got so caught up I decided to buy it. There was still a man ahead of me at the cash register when the conductor began his last call. The clerk was old and slow, damn his eyes. I stood there in a sweat, knowing I should give up and leave but unable to surrender the novel. In the end I made the train at a dead run, suitcases nearly wrenching my arms out of their sockets. But I had it—the fat book swinging in my raincoat pocket, banging against my thigh.
I was bound for Baltimore to spend the holidays with my mother’s father and his wife. The poky local was packed with boys from school, and on any other trip I would have been horsing around with the rest of them, but this time I found a nearly empty car and settled in with the novel. At the next stop down the line we took on a bunch of girls from Miss Cobb’s Academy. I watched them milling around on the platform, waiting to board, and saw a girl I’d met at their Halloween dance. Her name was Lorraine—Rain, she called herself. By the third slow-dance we’d been pushing up close together, so close that one of the monitors wandering the floor tapped me on the shoulder with her pointer, which meant we had to retreat to opposite sides of the room and couldn’t dance with each other again. Later I saw her making out with my classmate Jack Broome, which didn’t stop me from writing her an ironically jocular letter a few days later. She never wrote back. Whenever I thought of that letter, as I often did, every phrase glowed with stupidity, made even more garish by the dead silence of its reception.
Rain came into my car, another girl at her elbow. Cigarette smoke curled from her nostrils. They stopped in the doorway and looked the car over. Her friend said something and Rain laughed, then she saw me and stopped. She was thrown. So
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