Top of the Hill Page 2

  The result was to be expected. By the time he was twelve Michael was a fat, secretive, clumsy boy, melancholy and precociously bright in class, a trait that somehow did not gain him the affection of his teachers. When his mother observed even the slightest signs of restiveness on the part of her son—pouting at the piano, embarrassment at being delivered and picked up at school like an infant, raising his voice when excited—there were no overt punishments, no slaps, no deprivations, no going to bed without dinner. His mother, Michael learned early, could exact retribution with a sigh, a tear, a sad look up to heaven. He envied his classmates their tales of a good solid beating by irate parents. Meticulously dressed among his peers, who came to school looking like a last battalion of retreating Confederate troops, he became the natural butt of the wits and the bullies who surrounded him and he learned to dread recess periods, where, in the whirl of games and wrestling and whooping, he would be singled out for torture.

  He knew enough to keep his schoolyard agonies to himself. If he mentioned a word of them to his mother she would storm into the office of the principal immediately to complain. In two hours the entire student body would hear about it and what he had endured until then would seem like the most friendly and benign youthful mischief in comparison.

  From time to time he regarded the mantelpiece photograph of his father, handsome and negligent in a T-shirt and jeans aboard a small sailboat, and reflected upon how different his own life would have been if his father had not gone on that fatal afternoon into a bar for a drink. He had a dim memory that once or twice he had been taken onto the boat for an afternoon’s outing, tied to the mast and in a life jacket. It was almost the only memory he retained of his father, smiling and graceful at the rudder in the sunshine. The boat had been sold a month after his father was buried.

  His grandparents, to whose large house he was taken every Sunday for lunch, didn’t seem very interested in him. There were the usual routine questions about school and then he was forgotten as the grown-ups talked. He was not encouraged to join the conversations. His mother had explained that her parents, like herself, detested unmannerly children. She had told him often that when she saw how other people allowed their brats to careen noisily around at family gatherings she congratulated herself that he was so different.

  Once, on a warm Sunday afternoon when he was alone on the porch of the great old house, he overheard his aunt, a young woman whom he thought was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, saying to his grandmother, “. . . she is devouring him. We must find her a lover—or at least a husband, or he’ll turn out to be the most doleful fat mess we’ve ever seen.”

  He had known instinctively that his aunt was speaking of him and, true to his mother’s strictures on eavesdropping, had moved silently away from the window. But he had resolved then and there that one day he would show them all. He knew he was too young to escape, but his dreams were full of himself riding wild horses, fighting wars and carousing among the rouged, lascivious women whose photographs he had glimpsed in the pornographic magazines that were sometimes left behind in the classrooms.

  He was rewarded for exemplary behavior with Saturday afternoons at symphony concerts, trips to the zoo, a phonograph of his own on which he was allowed to play his mother’s classical records, and by large books with colored reproductions of the same sort of paintings he saw in the summers in Italy and France. And he developed an abhorrence of art that would last for years.

  As a gesture in the direction of physical fitness his mother hired a lady tennis pro to give him lessons in the sport, as being one in which he would meet a better class of playmates than in football or baseball. He played three times a week on the overgrown court behind his grandparents’ house, watched closely by his mother to see that he didn’t overexert himself or neglect to put on his sweater when he had finished. He was clumsy and self-conscious on the court and he knew the lady pro scorned him and was relieved when she received an offer for a job and departed for Florida, leaving him with a distaste for tennis that equalled his loathing for art.

  There was no television set in the house to give him unhealthy notions of what the adult world was like, and the only radio on the premises was in his mother’s room, which he was allowed to visit only by invitation.

  They lived in Syracuse, where the winters were rude and cold, and his mother dressed him in a manly little warm overcoat and a fur hat with earflaps. Among the seasonal diversions at recess was a game in which one of the bigger boys would grab Michael’s cap and then pass it around as Michael ran, panting, trying to intercept it as it flew from hand to hand. As the bell rang for the end of recess, the last boy would toss the hat over the wire fence, which meant that he would have to run all the way to the gate and out of the yard to retrieve it, which made him late to get in line to go up to his classroom and earned him disapproving remarks from the teachers in charge, who never appeared in the yard before the bell rang.

  What he couldn’t know at the time was that similar indignities, equal cruelties, worse repressions, had through the ages formed poets and heroes. All he could do was endure and hope that his mother would die.

  The most painful moment of his schoolboy career came when the usual game with his hat was being played and a boy his size, Joseph Ling by name, caught his hat just before it was time for the bell to ring. Ling didn’t throw the hat over the fence as usual, but held on to it and said, “If you want it, fight me for it.”

  There was a sudden hush as the other boys gathered round. Fighting, in Michael’s mother’s list of prohibitions, was the lowest of vices, lower even than masturbation. Ling had a sneering, monkeylike little snubbed face as though there hadn’t been enough stuff in his parents’ genes to give their son a full-size human nose or eyes, and Michael trembled with the desire to hit him. But his mother’s admonition—“Your father died in a fight, never forget that”—was too firmly graven on his brain for him to move. He just stood there in the iron schoolboy hush and said not a word.

  Contemptuously, Ling dropped the pretty fur hat into the dirty snow at his feet and ground it with his boot.

  Then the bell rang. Silently Michael walked over and picked up the hat and put it on his head and got into line. As he marched toward the classroom he decided to kill himself, and spent the rest of the school day contemplating the various modes of suicide open to him. Later, through the years, he would dream of the moment and awake, sweating at the memory of it.

  The next day, the game was repeated. Only now, even the bare tolerance that the boys had shown of him before was gone. As he ran after his hat, he was tripped and sent sprawling and a chant of “Pansy! Pansy!” echoed mockingly on all sides. Finally, Ling got the hat and, just as he had the day before, stood still with it and said, “If you want it, fight for it.”

  Michael knew there was no other way out. And suddenly he didn’t want any other way out. He walked slowly up to Ling and hit him in the face with all his force. Ling fell back a step, more surprised than hurt, and Michael was all over him, hitting wildly, oblivious of everything but the sneering, unfinished face in front of him, an exaltation he had never known before sweeping over him as he hit, was hit, fell tangled with the boy in the muddied snow, felt his nose begin to bleed, punching, kicking, trying to strangle, being strangled in turn, unconscious that the bell had rung, that a man was bending over him, trying to tear the boys apart.

  Finally they were pulled to their feet, the two faces bloodied, the hat a trampled mess, the manly little coat torn at the shoulder and filthy. “You wanted a fight, you motherfucker,” Michael said, “you got it.” He didn’t know where the word came from, or what it really meant, and he certainly had never used it before, but it gave him great satisfaction to say it and he repeated it loudly. “Motherfucking little shit.” It was like a stream of pure music and he listened to himself, marveling, ignoring the teacher, who was saying, “Enough of that, Storrs, enough. You’re in enough trouble as it is.”

  “Go fuck yourself,
Mr. Folsom,” Michael said, high on his personal wave.

  “Your mother is going to hear of this, Storrs,” Folsom said. He was a bachelor of thirty-five who had made a point of talking archly to his mother from time to time when she came to fetch him.

  “Let her hear of it,” Michael said, suddenly weary.

  “Now, get in line,” Mr. Folsom said.

  Michael didn’t put his hat on but threw it over the fence himself. And he didn’t try to brush the dirt off the manly little coat, not on the way up to the classroom or when school was over and he went out of the gate to where his mother was waiting beside her car.

  When she saw him she began to weep.

  “What’s there to cry about, for Christ’s sake?” he said.

  “Get in the car,” she wept.

  “I’m walking home.” And hatless, carrying his briefcase, the blood caked on his face, he walked steadily away.

  He never went back to the school that was just five blocks from his home and was considered one of the best public schools in Syracuse. Instead, he was put in a private school a hundred miles from home, where, his mother said, boys were taught to be gentlemen and fighting was not permitted. He bore everything in silence, even the interview with the headmaster, where his mother made it clear to the headmaster that her son was not to be allowed to go out for any of the teams, was to be punished when he used bad language and was on no occasion to be allowed off the school grounds, except in the company of herself or a designated member of her family.

  He had said nothing but “Yes, Mother” or “No, Mother” since the fight and he said nothing when she kissed him good-bye after inspecting his room in the dormitory. As she left him, he smiled. Now he knew it was not necessary for her to die. Escape was possible.

  He made no more friends at the new school than he had at the old, but it was a small quiet place with a teacher for every ten boys and so rigidly disciplined that there was no fighting or bullying. Students who wished to be left alone were permitted to go their own way as long as they kept their marks up to a respectable standard and broke none of the school rules.

  What Michael’s mother had not realized was that adjoining the school grounds there was a hill with a tow to which the entire student body was led by the physical education teachers four times a week to ski. For the first time in his life, Michael began to feel the exhilaration of grace and speed and soon became so daring a skier he had to be warned time and time again by his instructors to slow down. When the coach of the ski team suggested that he write a letter to Michael’s mother explaining that Michael could become the star of the team, Michael shook his head obdurately and forbade him to communicate with his mother. When she came to visit him on Saturday afternoons, he hid his ski clothes and boots in a locker in the gymnasium basement. His skiing was a secret he guarded for himself. He did not mean to offend his mother or worry her; he merely wished to deceive her.

  His deception went further. Having glimpsed on skis the zestful uses of his body, he made a grim resolve to lose weight. He worked out regularly in solitary dedication, on the pulleys, ropes and parallel bars in the school gymnasium, and was rewarded by the newfound tone and strength of his muscles, the leanness of his face, the loose-limbed spring in his step. His mother, when he accompanied her in his gray flannel slacks and blue blazer to a nearby restaurant on Saturday afternoon, was pleased by the improvement in his looks and demeanor and innocently congratulated herself on her choice of the school for her son, without wondering how the change had come about. His manners with her were docile and respectful and it was easy for him to maintain them, since he only saw his mother for a few hours every weekend. She, in her turn, went back to Syracuse to boast to her parents that Michael had suddenly grown into a very handsome tall young man and advised all of her friends with boys around Michael’s age to send them to the school.

  When the skiing season was over, still obeying his mother’s injunction to keep away from team sports, he ran cross-country, a lonely, melancholy, determined figure, four miles every afternoon. When the students from an associated girls’ school came over for a dance, he even managed to kiss a chubby pretty little girl of fourteen he had smuggled out of the gymnasium and lured into the shadow of the field house.

  By now convinced that he could plan his own life, subterraneously, so to speak, he worked unflaggingly at his studies and led his class, with especially high marks in mathematics, for which he had a special talent. He had set his heart on going to Stanford University-first because it was the farthest he could get from Syracuse and secondly because California, with its benevolent climate and athletic population, would give him the widest choice of the sports that had begun to capture his imagination, such as skiing, surfing and sex. Older than his years, honed by duplicity, he aimed himself like a projectile toward a life that would outrage his mother and serve as a revenge for the first twelve years he had suffered.

  Each summer, a few selected boys, accompanied by teachers, made a bicycle tour of France. With the help of a letter from the headmaster, he wheedled his mother into allowing him to go along. With some coaching from Michael, the headmaster in his letter said little about the rough means of travel and the primitive hostels at which the group would be quartered but emphasized the educational advantages of the tour. Michael had told the headmaster about his mother’s summer voyages with him on the Continent and the headmaster cleverly suggested that Mrs. Storrs could join the group at certain selected temples of culture. Not without many misgivings,

  Mrs. Storrs had finally agreed and had busied herself furnishing a large suitcase with medicines against all varieties of European illnesses that Michael might be likely to contract on the voyage.

  Then, just before Mrs. Storrs was due to fly to Paris to join Michael at the group’s stop there, her mother had died. Mrs. Storrs had to cancel her trip to care for her father and Michael enjoyed the most glorious summer of his life and, with the help of the smattering of French he had picked up on his travels with his mother, lost his virginity to a waitress in Rheims and became furiously addicted to women from that time on.

  Again and again, he blessed the name of Joseph Ling.

  He was graduated at the age of seventeen, a handsome, powerful young man, a loner who had won the first prize in mathematics and had been accepted by Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Stanford. Without telling his mother about it, he had made a secret trip to Syracuse to talk to his grandfather, who would have to pay for his years at college. In a long session with the old man, who had gone to Yale, but who had not liked it there, Michael had pointed out that Stanford was preeminent in the country in the fields of mathematics and the sciences and that his future would most certainly be brighter if he attended there. His grandfather, who was pleasantly surprised by the intelligent, persuasive and good-looking young man who, he thought, resembled himself at that age and who had developed so unexpectedly from the most unlikely material, agreed with Michael’s choice and told him that he would make his mother see the light, although she had decided on Harvard for her son, since Cambridge was easily accessible from Syracuse. But the grandfather had made one proviso. He had known other brilliant students who had fallen in love, with the academic life, had gone on to years of M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s and had wound up teaching in piddling, unheard-of colleges, and he wanted Michael to promise that when he got his degree from Stanford he would go to a business school, either Harvard or Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania, and thereafter devote himself to a sensible career in the business world.

  Michael promised and went back gaily to the graduation exercises at the school.

  His mother wept as she drove him back to Syracuse and accused her father of never having loved her enough and of preferring her younger sister and of having no respect for family ties and of having kept a mistress through the last ten years of her mother’s life and of having an unreasonable hatred of the Ivy League because he had graduated at the bottom of his class and never had made Skull and Bones. But M
ichael had bribed her by agreeing to go with her to Venice and Yugoslavia that summer and in the end, faced with a fait accompli, still doubtful of her son’s love, she had allowed that perhaps Stanford was a good idea and she had friends in San Francisco who were constantly inviting her to visit them and it wouldn’t be as though she would lose him entirely for four years.

  When he left Stanford three and a half years later it was with a degree granted summa cum laude. While he was at the college he had earned a pilot’s license for single-engine planes, had had it suspended for buzzing the stadium during a football game, had become a dazzling skier on weekends and winter holidays, had taken up skydiving and had made twenty-five free-falls, had surfed up and down the California coast in all sorts of weather and tried some scuba diving, had talked his way out of having his driving license revoked for repeated speeding, had grown to be six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds, had paid no attention to his male classmates and a great deal of attention to his female ones, had made no friends, had attended a symphony concert in San Francisco with his mother and had made a plausible pretense of enjoyment and given her great pride, she said, in the way he had turned out. He had paid for his expensive pleasures by winning at high stakes at backgammon, where he had a considerable edge on his opponents because of his mathematical bent and training. To the men who knew him on the campus he seemed lonely and somewhat mournful. To the men with whom he skied or dove both in the air and under the sea and to the boys he met casually on the surfing beaches, he seemed dangerously reckless and coldly gay. To the girls and women he slept with he seemed charming, irresistibly handsome in a dark, brooding way, insatiable and fickle. When he broke three ribs surfing and was in the hospital for a couple of weeks, he successfully kept the fact from his mother, who worried that he was threatening his health by overdoing his studies and advised in her letters that he take walks in the fresh air to balance the long hours he spent at his books. To one of the girls he particularly liked he spoke a little about his mother and said, “I could write a book about what she doesn’t know about me.”