Read Online Stonewall by Martin Duberman - Free Book Online

but a cold, endlessly critical, domineering parent. She was obsessed with being liked and with being socially correct, and was far too self-centered to give a child sustained affection. When alone with Foster Jr. she would, far more than her husband, castigate the boy for his imperfections. She was not above recounting the “terrible time” she had had giving birth to him (two other pregnancies had ended in miscarriages), or repeating how much she had hoped for a nice little girl. Caroline always kept her word, paid her debts like clockwork, and was generally admired for her honesty and reliability. But she was also a volcano of buried resentment: She menaced Foster Jr. with a knife several times; suggested (when he was six) a double suicide pact; and periodically threatened to call the police and have him taken away.
    Not surprisingly, Foster Jr. had frequent illnesses that confined him to bed, and when he was four or five, he developed a severe case of asthma. The family first tried sending him to Bermuda, where he got worse, and then to Richmond, Massachusetts, where he got no better. Finally, when he was nine and so underweight that serious doubts about his survival arose, the doctor suggested he be sent to board at the recently opened Thomas School in Arizona, a place that catered to children from well-to-do families. Most of the children at Thomas suffered from psychological or physical problems—it was an upper-class version of the combined school-and-orphanage that Craig Rodwell was to attend near Chicago a decade later.
    The school was set in a beautiful, barren stretch of desert on the eastern outskirts of Tucson, surrounded by the distant Santa Catalina hills, with the nearest structure, the picturesque adobe ruins of old Fort Lowell, nearly two miles away. Foster Jr. was accompanied out West by his parents, but when school started in late September 1934, they left. Foster was assailed by homesickness throughout much of his first year. But he soon fell in love with the desert, and gradually became acclimated to being away from home.
    The Thomas School had only forty students, divided between day students and boarders, and its young male teaching staff had been recruited almost entirely from Ivy League colleges. The school also kept a stable of horses (and a stablemaster). Foster quickly learned how to ride, and went out nearly every afternoon after classes to explore the desert terrain, chasing jackrabbits and rattlesnakes (he threw up the first time he watched the stablemaster skin one of the snakes to make a belt). The woman who operated the school, perhaps predisposed in Foster’s favor by his father’s gift of a library, turned him into something of a pet, letting him come into her room early each morning to snuggle in her bed with a puppy she owned while she got ready for the day. She was not a particularly warm person—indeed, she could be something of a disciplinarian—but Foster thrived on the special attention. Well before the end of his five-year stay in Arizona, his asthma had entirely disappeared.
    After he returned home in 1939, his father decided to build the largest model Gunnison Home for his own family in the Gypsy Trail compound, and for the next three years Foster Jr. and his mother were nearly year-round residents there. He attended the local Carmel high school and then spent two years at Culver Military Academy in northern Indiana, where his father had once been a summer cadet. Unpredictably, Foster Jr. enjoyed Culver: He was able to continue his riding there and, although he never achieved any substantial military rank at the school, he felt, “as a person dependent upon authority,” that the structured, disciplined, subordinate life suited him well.
    After graduating from Culver, he entered Haverford College in the fall of 1944. Foster Senior had handpicked the Pennsylvania school as suitably small and prestigious. But Foster Jr. never took to it, and in his