The Grounding of Group 6 Page 8

  Dr. Warren Worcester Winfrey never thought he’d have a girl; he had planned to name his first boy Samuel, after his father-in-law, a magnanimous tip of the hat to an old two-aspirin country doctor who made house calls, for God’s sake. He figured Sara was an accident. Also Martha, Ruth, and Stephanie, his next three children. When the fifth one was a boy, he took no chances: Warren Worcester Winfrey, II. The lad was eight years old and stuttered—the second condition as temporary as the first, Dr. Winfrey told his wife, Natalie. “The boy will grow out of it,” he said. Which was all there was to it, as far as he was concerned.

  Dr. Winfrey was a surgeon, and he charged a lot of money for his operations. He was a moderately dexterous mechanic who thought of himself as a genius, and more than a genius, a saint. Sort of an athletic and suburban Albert Schweitzer, with a decent haircut. He encouraged his patients, and their families, and his family to think the same of him.

  “I took your [your husband’s, Mr. Rothman’s] heart in my left hand, and shut my eyes for just a millisecond. And then I opened them and knew what I would have to try to do.”

  So did the first-year surgical resident, standing just behind him, slightly to the left (who never closed her eyes at all), but Dr. Winfrey never mentioned that. He never talked to the resident, either, after the first day when he told her to be sure to step well back and to one side, whenever it seemed likely she would faint.

  “The surgeon is the captain of the team,” he’d said to Sara once. “He has to be a leader and be instantly obeyed. I’m just not sure that a woman can command that kind of respect. Or should want it, for that matter. Other kinds of respect, certainly. Of course. Unquestionably. But these are life and death decisions.” He’d nodded; Sara’d nodded. She was going to be a pediatrician, and her father could operate on any of her patients who needed an operation. She wouldn’t care. Actually, it would be a sort of a relief. That’s what she’d thought when she was twelve, at least.

  Her father was an athlete. “They get all that from him,” her mother said, when speaking of her children’s skiing trophies, or their tennis skills, or the way that they could do the butterfly. Dr. Winfrey knew the girls were accidents—but just their girlness, their sex, not their existence or their tastes. He was meant to have a lot of children; he had known that all along. And children who took after him, by being strong and smart and skillful. And revered, of course, in time. Sara was his oldest, so he’d really learned the father part while practicing on her and having her respond to him. He loved it when they’d whiz on down a mountain and people at the bottom would mistake her for a boy. He also liked to hear his friends insist that “she’s a Winfrey, that’s for sure,” and he made sure she knew exactly what that meant and took a lot of pride in it herself.

  “We Winfreys don’t expect to win for free,” he told her. “You have to pay the price.” And then he laughed, for he had made a little joke.

  Dr. Winfrey’s life ran on a schedule. Every day, and every week, and every month was sectioned into blocks of time in which specific worthwhile things were done, and certain goals were aimed at and attained. So other, higher goals could then be set. Of course his children had the same modus vivendi, as Sara quickly came to understand. Being on the safety patrol was all right for now, but elections in the homeroom are next month, eh, what? Can a person get elected captain of a Color Team and also be class president? Had anyone ever been? How many years in a row? He had always liked the maths and sciences the most, but English had been one of his best subjects, too. He was sure that Sara, if she really worked, could get her English up there with the rest of her grades. How about some book reports for extra credit? Maybe they’d still be glad to do that, if she asked.

  He never missed a swim meet or a tennis match. When he learned that weights are used for training swimmers nowadays, he’d bought her school a Universal Gym, and when he’d read about the lightweight racing suits that German swimmers wore, he’d sent her swim-club coach a set. The coach, a woman, wouldn’t put them on her girls; you could see right through them, she maintained. “For gosh sakes,” Dr. Winfrey said to Sara. “Can’t you swimmers make her change her mind? Everybody’s got a body, what’s the big deal? And we’re talking maybe half a second every fifty meters, after all….”

  Sara’s father had once written a book about being a surgeon, and about the various duels he’d fought with the Grim Reaper over the very nearly lifeless bodies of a lot of very famous people (“I always called him ‘Corky.’ ”), and their cooks and cleaning women, too. “Disease does not discriminate,” he’d written, “but neither does my steel. It speaks the same sharp words to everyone: cut, slice, excise, section, scarify. Rotarians or Rastafarians,” he wrote, “morbid tissue always smells the same.” Dr. Winfrey had once rented a villa near Montego Bay.

  In spite of Dr. Winfrey, or because of him, Sara always had done well at school: in sports, in grades, in popularity. She’d been made to eat (and like) nutritious foods since infancy and, too, she exercised a lot, and both her parents had good features and straight spines. She was used to doing just exactly what “they” told her, and not sulking about it either. Learning wasn’t hard for her to do, especially in math and science. Successful, she was happy, friendly; smooth of skin, bright of eye, wide of mouth, and round of hip and breast, if never heavy. Though every now and then she wished she were a boy, she’d come to womanhood with no regrets, knowing she was near the top of what she had been born, so far. It never struck her that she didn’t have close friends, or crushes; everybody seemed to like her fine—as you could tell from all the presidents and captains she’d been. Her only major weakness was: she wasn’t any good at writing.

  Oh, she could write reports, all right—like on “The Economy of Brazil” or “The Voyages of Discovery.” And she could also do a decent job on “Conservative Elements in the U.S. Constitution,” or “Good vs. Evil in the Red Badge of Courage.” The writing that she couldn’t do was what they called “free writing” at her school: stories and poems. “Journeys to the worlds inside yourselves,” as Mrs. Martin (English 10) would put it.

  She dreaded those assignments all through seventh, eighth, and ninth; the very words “free writing” drenched her palms. She couldn’t think of anything, and if she did, she couldn’t make it come out sounding any good. Everything she did, no matter what her subject, came out seeming like her sister Ruth had written it, or someone stupider than Ruth, in her same grade.

  But in the summer just before her tenth-grade year, she’d stumbled on her savior, one Terence Arthur Updike. Not that she ever met the guy. She’d like to meet him now, and kill him. But where she found his work was in the college library, in her hometown. She liked to go there when she felt like being by herself, away from all the other kids at home, away from all the items on her schedule. All she’d do was poke around and look at things: old magazines and picture books of different kinds; there were just rows and rows and rows of open stacks.

  On this one day, the twenty-eighth of August, she wandered into one big section where she’d never been before. In it there were hundreds, even thousands, of slim bound volumes, all nine-by-twelve in size, all typewritten instead of printed, and almost all of them by writers never to be known as writers, other than this once. What she’d found were stacks of senior theses, written by whoever’d been an English major at the college, 10 these past one hundred years.

  Terence Arthur Updike ’54 had loved free writing. He wasn’t awfully good at it; in fact, the only story that he ever sold (he kept on “writing” five years after college) was a “little thing” he’d sent to Peek (that was the porno mag, and not the self-awareness monthly by the name of Peak, but if a friend of Terence Arthur’s just assumed the opposite, he didn’t get corrected). The piece, for which he got a fifty-dollar check, was actually a dream he’d had about a college guy whose Saab broke down on some back road in Georgia.…His senior thesis wasn’t much like that, though. It was called Ten Stories, which is what it sort of was
: ten odd, uneven stories he had (mostly) written, most of them about the pressures on young people, poor and black included.

  Sara found she could take parts of Updike’s stories and, changing just a word or two (like “fuchsia” into “purple”), make them quite presentable as her “free writing.” Mrs. Martin mostly gave them 83, or 86, or sometimes 92, and often added words like “Nice,” “Perceptive,” “Taut,” or even “Stunning!” So everything went well until the day in May when Sara handed in a story fragment that began, “Imagine, if you will, the letter ‘A,’ of which the right-hand leg becomes the road from Littleton to Crawford’s Corners. …” The place names were her own, the rest was as she’d found it. How was she to know that Terence Arthur Updike was a lousy plagiarist—and that Mrs. Martin was a Victor Hugo freak?

  Sara’s world came down around her ears that May. At school, the operative words were “heavy disappointment,” though what a lot of teachers really felt was “hatred.” Their best girl, the girl who’d always best personified the strengths and values of the school (so like their own!) had cheated; if they couldn’t trust a Sara Slayman Winfrey, well then, who could they ever trust?

  The Discipline Committee met and said she could not come back into school that year, although she could return to take her finals after school—a special set, of course, prepared by each department chairman and proctored by the Dean of Students, in the flesh. And if she really wanted to, she could (because—and just because—she’d always been so good before) return the following September. On probation, naturally. For all the first semester. A person on probation couldn’t represent the school in sports, or hold an office on the Student Council. And she would certainly be watched, for reasons she could surely understand. A hawk could take a watching lesson from a teacher who’d been personally (and professionally) “let down.”

  But anything her teachers may have felt, Sara’s father felt as well, and multiplied by fifty thousand, say. The family had been disgraced (“La famille, c’est moi,” the doctor might have said). He’d been repaid for all those skiing trips, and Universal Gyms, and unworn racing suits—by One Unconscionable Crime.

  Forgiveness? Forget it!

  Forget it? Never in this life!

  There could be no question of Sara returning to her old school. Her life was ruined. Coldbrook was the only answer, Dr. Winfrey realized. Perhaps, he told his wife, they’d have another child. Another boy, he thought.

  When Sara grabbed the door of Foote Hall and opened it, everyone at Coldbrook Country School was eating supper. Except, that is, for the kitchen staff (who ate early), one or two girls (on diets), and Homer Cone and Mrs. Ripple, who weren’t anywhere around.

  Levi Welch had found, as he had feared, that the Land Rover’s transmission was “actin’ up just turrible.” And he had had to work on it all day, right up to six o’clock. Then he’d gotten in and started it right up and sailed along the indicated roads till he met Homer Cone and Mrs. Ripple, who had walked and stopped and stamped and stopped and limped and stopped for fifteen miles, since nine o’clock that morning—but still had eight more miles to go before they’d get to school. To say that they were out-of-sorts would be ridiculous—“killing mad” was closer, but still mild. Levi gave them lots of earnest shakings of the head—his country-stupid act; “just tryin’ to do what Doctor said”—and short of giving him the SATs, they couldn’t prove that he was smarter than he seemed. Knowing they were late for supper, they made him drive them all the way to Boynton Falls, where they had three Manhattans each and Brook Trout Amandine at a restaurant where Levi’s sister Patsy was a waitress, so he wouldn’t eat there. They made a lot of substitutions in their orders and, after much discussion, stuffed the tip inside the slender tulip glass that Homer’s Neapolitan had come in. “That’ll fix him,” Homer Cone opined.

  Foote Hall, the building Sara entered, was where the offices and classrooms were and so, right there in front of her when she came in, was one whole huge official wall of notices, thumb-tacked where the students learned to find them.

  “Check your locker number” said a printed sign, in big red magic-markered letters. Sara went and did so, without thinking: “Westwood, Madie; White, Armitage; Wolsey, Caitlin; Woodson, Jeffrey,” she read. That was odd; somebody goofed. They didn’t have her name. So, just for fun, she looked for “Sullivan” (she didn’t know his real first name) and then “DeCoursey, Coke” (or something). No Sullivans and no DeCourseys. And no “Locke, Louise,” either. She couldn’t look up Marigold, because Marigold had flatly said she wasn’t going to use that other name of hers and so there wasn’t any point in telling it to them. But still…She scratched her head, and then she had a thought. Probably the new kids weren’t even given lockers yet. Let’s see, she thought, that girl she’d sat with on the bus coming up—what was her name? Everybody on the bus was new. Heron, was it? Guerin? No, Ferron, that was it. Molly Ferron. She ran her finger down the names: Farley, Fellows, Fields… ah ha. No Ferron either. But then her eyes strayed up the list a little ways, and there was “Fairen, Mary.” Was Molly short for Mary? She really wasn’t sure. She didn’t know the name of anybody else.

  Well, she thought, what else is there up here? Yay, look: a list of all the teachers at the school, and where they lived (with phone numbers), and subjects they might teach. But…this was really funny: no Nat Rittenhouse at all.

  Well, hmmm, she thought. Another heading: “Room assignments.” And another list. Once again, she couldn’t find her name, or Sully’s, or Ludi’s, or Coke’s. This is really getting weird, she thought.

  “Hi!” A woman’s voice from down the hall.

  Sara turned and stared. It was a rather heavy girl in tailored jeans, with long red hair, a girl who looked to be a little older, but a student anyway.

  “You look freaked out,” the girl was saying. She had a lot of bracelets on one wrist, and now she shook them up her arm. You could tell she was the friendly type. “Is there anything that I can help you with?” she asked. “I know it all seems really different for a while. When I was new,” she rattled on, “I kept on calling home and crying for the first three weeks, I swear. The way we organize the classes is the strangest part, if that’s what’s bugging you. You see, what happens is, tomorrow, in the morning, everyone convenes at …”

  The girl was clearly in the mood to tell her lots of things that Sara didn’t want to know right then, but at least this chatter gave her time to think. The thing that she had come to find out first was where Group 6 was meant to be right then.

  So when the redhead paused for breath, she said, “Oh, boy, that helps a lot. And just one other thing. There was this girl who came up on the bus with me who seemed real nice. I think she’s in Group Four. Is there any place it says when different groups get back?”

  The heavy girl smiled at Sara. “All the groups are back,” she said. “You didn’t go to supper, did you? Well, that’s O.K., if you’re not feeling well, or just want to go without a meal from time to time. I’m dieting myself. But if you’re smart, you’ll stick your nose in for Announcements. That’s what I did. Everybody’s back. If you hurry, you can catch your friend before she’s finished eating maybe.”

  Sara said, “You’re sure that all the groups are back?”

  “Absolutely,” said the girl. “One through Five, inclusive. Two nights out is all that anybody spends; tomorrow is for organizing classes, like I said—and then the next day they get started. And anyway, I heard it all with my own two ears. Doctor said,” the redhead smiled, “and Doctor never lies.”

  Sara did her best to match the smile. “You’ve really been a help,” she said. “I hate to ask, but one last thing… is there a phone around? A sort of private one? I have to make a call—collect. My parents are expecting …,” Sara lied.

  “Sure. Of course.” The heavy girl was serious-maternal now. “I understand. Just down the hall and to the left. The second door’s a phone booth. Nice and private. Believe me, I know.”

 
; “Thanks,” said Sara as she moved in that direction.

  “Sure,” the girl replied. “Say, what’s your name? I’m Sandy Salton—fourth year class.”

  “Molly,” Sara said, and fled. “Molly…Mason, third year class. And thanks a lot now. ‘Bye.” And she had turned the corner.

  The phone booth was a little room, with just a phone on a shelf, and a straight-backed wooden chair. There was a bare lightbulb screwed into a fixture on the wall, and a hand-painted sign that said “Collect Calls Only.” Somebody had inked a diagonal between the two I’s in “call” to make the sign read “Collect CaNs Only.” The yellow wall in back of the phone had been washed fairly recently, it looked like, but you could still see a lot of faint writing on it, from the year before, she supposed. “There once was a girl from Peoria,” she could barely read, but they’d done a better job of washing on the next three lines of the limerick. The last line was “And the band at the Waldorf-Astoria.” Sara picked up the phone and started to dial.

  And then she stopped.

  What did she think she was doing? It had been a kind of reflex, really. When in doubt, punt. When confused, call home. But what would they know, really? It’d sound like crazy talk: my teacher’s disappeared; my name’s not up there on the locker or the room-assignment lists, and neither are my friends’; and Doctor said that all the groups are back, but we’re not. She could imagine how her father would respond to that: “Well, go to Doctor. Tell him that your group has not come back, and ask him for a locker and a room. Some secretary’s bungled up her job, that’s all. I’d think that even you could handle that, at sixteen years of age.…”

  But if she got her mother, they could talk a little, anyway. And that’d feel good. Here’s what she’d do: if her father answered, she’d say hi, and everything is fine, and then she’d ask to talk to Mom.