Try, Try Again

I tried out for varsity sports. Tall as a reed, fragile as a stick, I ended up in the band playing the bass drum. Ted Lamont carried the drum, as I recall, on his back like a mammoth papoose, while I went along behind him, whacking it with a big felt-covered hammer.

I wanted so much to succeed, to make a noise. I wrote for the Exonian, but if you were on probation you couldn't use your real name. My pen name was "Vague," thought by many to be my state of mind most of the time. I wrote a column and got into trouble because I made up items about famous Exeter graduates ("Who was that woman seen with Robert Benchley at the Stork Club?"). What on earth prompted me to write such a thing? Dean Kerr called me in. He knew I wrote under the name "Vague"; he knew everything. "Yessir," I said, looking at my feet.

I tried out for varsity sports. Bill Clark, the baseball coach, never took the care to find out that he had a youth, "a barefoot boy with cheek," who could throw a lazy, roundhouse curveball. I was cut. Football, the same. Hockey, the same. Tennis, the same. Tall as a reed, fragile as a stick, I ended up in the band playing the bass drum. What a little group we had back there! Ted Lamont carried the drum, as I recall, on his back like a mammoth papoose, while I went along behind him, whacking it with a big felt-covered hammer. Buzz Merritt played the cymbals, Jake Underhill, the snare drum. Jake was telling me the other day that the younger kid who played the snare alongside him has just retired from his position as chief judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

I tried other things. I took piano lessons from Mr. Landers. He assigned me a Debussy piece called "Bells," as I recall. I went down to the practice rooms, which were located under Phillips Church and which had just enough room in each for a standup piano and a seat. The walls were paper thin, so you could hear five other pianos going at the same time. The next week I appeared at Mr. Landers' quarters and sat down to play. Mr. Landers said, "Well, that's very fine, but that's not Debussy's 'Bells.' "

I tried drama. I tried out for a play called Seven Keys to Baldpate. They found a minor role for me, that of a young widow. My part was, to put it mildly, small-one line or so and then I was required to let out an unearthly scream, perhaps at the sight of a corpse, I've forgotten what. I did so- unleashed a high-pitched vocal effort that blasted the drama coach, John Mayher, back in his chair. My scream carried far out over the quadrangle, down the hill past Langdell and into the Jeremiah Smith Building, past the mailroom with its letterboxes-where in those days I received only my father's letter, once a week, with its admonitions-and up the stairs to Dean Kerr's office, where he sat comfortably smoking his pipe, when suddenly this high-pitched shriek wandered in, and his blood curdled and he said aloud, "My God, what's Plimpton done now?"

So I was in a play. I wore a dress. It wasn't bad. Someone took a picture and I sent it to my father to show him that I was applying myself. I've always had the suspicion that he took it to my mother and said, "Look what you've done."

Girls

There were no girls in Exeter at the time. The nearest girls were in Montpelier, VT. So the big thing was the spring dance. Susie Mills came up by train. She carried a little suitcase. She was put up someplace. She came out and we walked around. It was like being with Dean Kerr. I didn't know what to say to her. We wandered about like figures in a Fellini film. I was in and out of my Riders of the Purple Sage mode, and I walked slightly bowlegged. I said I was going to be a cowhand for the summer. "Is that so," she said after a while. She was so pretty I didn't dare look at her for fear my heart would jump out of my body. "Would you like to hear me play Debussy's 'Bells'?" I asked. She said she didn't see why not.

I led her down into the cellar of Phillips Church where the music rooms were. My heart was in my throat. "In here," I said huskily. I closed the door, soundproofed so that it closed with a slight whoosh. "Would you like a Camel?" I said. "I smoke Camels these days, though this summer I intend to roll my own."

"Is that so." She took one.

"You inhale," I said, surprised. She let out a thin stream of smoke that went by my ears, and then coughed. We played with smoke the way children play with toys.

I oozed a smoke ring out over her head, reached past her shoulder and switched off the light. Instant, stygian blackness except for the two fireflies of our cigarette ends.

Just then, in the practice room next door, there was a crash of piano keys, as if someone had sat abruptly on the keyboard. Spennie Welch was in there, I knew, because he had told me as much, that he was going to be in there with his date, a girl who was rumored to have been accepted by Vassar. Tall, red-haired girl. Wore a red-dyed mink boa to match. In there I heard what sounded like a slap, followed by a shout, dim, through the wall: "What do you think you're doing!"

In my own compartment, suddenly and thunderously, not more than an inch from my ear in the pitch darkness, Susie Mills called out, "Turn on the light!" Fumbling desperately against the wall, my hand sweeping it with great arcs, I found the light switch, and the little room blazed with light. And we stared shocked at each other.

I asked Spennie Welch about it a couple of evenings later . . . in the butt room. He had his feet up on the table, leaning back, a Camel cigarette in his mouth. The place was full of smoke. Spennie hadn't learned to inhale. Many of us hadn't. We puffed the stuff out, Bill Clinton-style. So I asked him, "Well, how'd it go, pard?"

"How did what go?"

"The Vassar woman?"

He puffed and coughed. "A walk in the park," he said. He was very blasé, and talked like that.

"And you?" he asked.

"We had a right good time," I lied. I thought of her getting on the train with her little suitcase, never looking back.

I have always thought, in fact, that one learns as much from one's peers at school as one does from the teachers. I recall writing a story which received a C-. It was a story based on a curious ritual that used to be one of the features of Sports Day at St. Bernard's School in New York City-an occasion held out in the country somewhere. One of the last races of the afternoon was the chauffeur's race-these being the long-gone days when a large number of boys (present company excluded) were delivered to the school by large black Packards and picked up by same. Many of the chauffeurs, an astonishing number, almost as many as raced in the fathers' race, competed on Sports Day, lining up their black shoes at the starting line and racing in their black stockings.

My story was about a young girl from the Chapin School who adored the family chauffeur-a portly gent, Perkins in name, as I recall-in the way young girls fall in love with large dogs. She had pleaded with him to run in the chauffeur's race, which, against his better judgment, he had done. Halfway through, he keeled over and that was it. The poignant conclusion of my story found the Chapin girl leaning over him and saying something like, "Oh, Perkins, how could I have done this to you?" And this came back with a C- and such comments as "Unconvincing. Improbable. Watch overuse of exclamation points."

Toby Wherry, of pleasant memory, happened to read my story. Quite angrily, ripping the paper with his eraser, he tried to rub out the C- and replace it-not with an A, but an A-, because perhaps he wasn't sure of it himself.

Gore Vidal was a class ahead of me. He was so persuaded of his own abilities way back then that he sent in his own pieces to the school's literary magazine, the Review, signing them with a fictitious name, perhaps that of a first year boy who lived in Dunbar, and then sat at the editorial meeting glorying in the praise heaped by other editors on what was actually his own work ("Who is this kid?"). Vidal later read a long, epic free-verse saga of mine about being lost in the Exeter woods one night, far beyond the river. Although the other editors dismissed it out of hand, he wrote me a note or spoke to me about it-a faint note of praise, but it was like a thunderclap from above.

There is always an epiphany when you think about wanting to write, and that (and Toby Wherry's A-) was surely one of them.

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