Chapter 7 — Why Did You Do It?

Alumni Day at Kennebec Academy. Here come the old-timers, white-headed, gray-headed, some too fat, some dried up and skinny,looking odd in the baseball caps passed out at registration. Some younger ones towing sons and daughters. Some still in college looking self-conscious. Friendly people shaking hands, dimly remembering each other, straining to read the name on the sticky label. Lunch with the school in the dining hall. Extra tables set up in the adjacent common room. Clashing of knives and forks, rattle of plates, talking, talking, talking. “What was it like when you were here?” “Do they still celebrate old Captain Kenniston’s birthday?” “In my time we used to …” The Headmaster taps on his water glass. Conversation dribbles into silence. “Coffee will be served in the faculty room. When you have finished your coffee, we will gather briefly in the Assembly Hall before the soccer and football games.” In the Assembly Hall, much shuffling of feet, people climbing over people’s knees, squashing over to make room on the worn benches. The Headmaster stands. “Students, former students, friends, It is a pleasure indeed … This afternoon I am not going to tell any jokes. I am not going to ask you for money – although money is always needed and always welcome. An almost-alumnus has asked me for an opportunity to speak to you today. He has a debt to pay the schoo1 and he has come back today to pay it. It is a privilege to introduce Mr. George B. Midlander, Director of the Meteorological Research Laboratory at the Great University and well-known to our basketball team as the coach from the Youth Detention Center whose team spoiled our undefeated season last March. Mr. Midlander.” “Gentlemen – and I include Headmaster, faculty, students, and former students. Anyone else is welcome to eavesdrop. I stand before you today to answer a question that I could not answer twenty years ago. I was a senior then. We were taking the final geometry examination in the gym. You know the scene. Rows of tablet armchairs, rows of shirt-sleeved boys, heads bent, pens and pencils slanted, busy. Proctors pacing up and down the rows, patiently, watchfully patrolling. Hand up. “Sir, may I sharpen my pencil?” Whispered permission. Restless feet. Smell of new-cut June grass through the open windows. The slow march of the clock. At last, one boy stands, gathers coat, bluebook, pencils, walks to the front table, drops the bluebook, smiles, “Not too bad.” Another and then another. I finished, got up to go out, laid my bluebook on the pile. The proctor noticed that I had forgotten to write my teacher’s name on the cover of the book. I whipped my pen out of my shirt pocket and with it came a card with a number of significant geometry formulae on it. It fell, face up on the desk. That did it. I was fired. In the course of that painful process, the then Headmaster, Dr. Jennings, asked me a question I could not answer. I sat on a hard chair in his office unable to say a word. “Why did you do it?” he asked. “Why did you do it?” He really wanted to know; and I could only mumble miserably. “I don’t know.”

I didn’t need to cheat. I could have done well enough on the examination without the card. I was under no great pressure to get an A. Even with the card, I doubt if I would have had an A. I knew it was a dishonest act. I knew I was taking an unfair advantage of the rest of the class. Dr. Jennings asked again, “Why did you do it?” And I had no answer. Of course I got no diploma, and Dartherst College, which had accepted me in January, withdrew the acceptance. Ever since then, I have been searching for an answer to Dr. Jennings’ question. My uncle got me a place on a meteorological research team on an expedition to Alaska, and during a long, long night I had a chance to come at an answer, and I have been working on it ever since. It has been a painful process, and telling you the answer will be painful too, but I owe it to Dr. Jennings and to the school. “Why did you do it?” When I was in the ninth grade, three of us sat together in Latin class. We were good friends, in and out of scrapes together. One warm spring day we were having a vocabulary test. The windows were open and a lawnmower was roaring up and down outside. Mr.––I won’t tell you his name––gave the word mensa. I didn’t know it. Just then the lawnmower crescendoed under the window. I looked a question. Joe whispered, “mind.” I wrote it down. Jack kicked my ankle. I showed him my paper. Now mensa does not mean mind. It means table. There is no way in the world, however bad your handwriting, that you can make mind look like table. The next day the teacher called the three of us to his desk after class. “How did you all three, sitting next to each other, make the same mistake?” “I don’t know, sir.” “I really thought mensa meant mind.” “So did I.” “So did I.” “I can’t believe that. Which of you was cheating? Or were all three cheating?” “Oh no, sir. We wouldn’t do that.” “Well, sir,” I tried, “mensa does sound like mens. Maybe I didn’t hear you clearly.” “Mens wasn’t in the lesson. It is a third declension word, and you know very well I didn’t say it. Who cheated?” He looked at us hard, each in turn. And he dropped it. He did no more about it. He just let it go, and we got away with it. After that we developed a cooperative method of studying vocabulary. Each of us learned a third of the words and we shared the wealth. We never got caught again although we must have made the same sort of triple mistake several times. But no one did anything about it. Another time, the next year it was, we cooked up a plan for a night out in town. There was a new teacher at our table in the dining room who had not yet learned our names. We got three day boys to sit in our seats at dinner and in our desks at study hall. We had a good dinner at Leo’s Lunch and a beer and were having a smoke afterwards when Mr.––I won’t tell you his name––came in with some lady. He saw us, looked embarrassed, sat down in another booth. After a minute he came over. “What are you guys doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in study hall?” “Well, we had to go for our physical exams, and Mrs. Everhart is going to take us back to school and she said it would be all right if we had dinner first.” “She didn’t ask you to dinner?” “She had company.” “Well, … OK.” Of course he reported us. We told the same story to the Assistant Headmaster. He called Mrs. Everhart to check up and she covered for us. “Oh yes, I gave the boys permission. After the doctor, you know.” The Assistant Headmaster was

busy and the matter was dropped. We were grateful to Mrs. Everhart. “The administration is everyone’s enemy,” she said. “Glad to help. Boys will be boys.” Another time, I chipped a tooth playing hockey. The dentist fixed it up and said, “That will be twenty dollars cash, thirty if I bill your folks.” “Why the difference?” “If they pay by check and deduct it as a medical expense the IRS computer will check to see if I included it as income and take a third of it. Cash they can’t follow. Everyone deals in cash if they can.” Well, I had a twenty so we settled that. So it went. Nobody cares. Everyone does it. Boys will be boys. Down at the boathouse I needed a wrench to tighten the nut on a rigger bolt. I took a six-inch adjustable, a neat little tool out of the tool box, used it, put it in my pocket and “forgot” to put it back – never did put it back “Let them take it out of my overtime.” I said to myself. “Isn’t that my wrench?” asked the coach. “No sir. I got it at the hardware store.” His tools each had a swatch of blue paint on the handle, but he never looked to see. Would rather buy a new wrench and charge it to the school than confront me with stealing his. So it went. Nobody cares. Everybody does it. Boys will be boys. Take it out of my overtime. Don’t get involved. That’s his problem, not mine. By the time I had got to be a senior, dishonesty – for that is what it was – lying, cheating, and stealing – had got to be a habit. Conscience, the moral sense, of which I had had little at the age of fourteen, had been stunted in its development and numbed. “Everybody does it,” I said. I studied for exams, but to be on the safe side, I carried a crutch and got to depend on it. So, Dr. Jennings, that’s why I did it. Too many people – and I have not told you anything like all of them – were willing to let it slide, to avoid getting involved, to excuse or ignore what they knew very well was dead wrong by saying to themselves, “What George does is none of my business.” Then there comes a big scandal like my card on the table after the geometry exam or someone on the Naval Academy football team violating the Honor System, or Watergate, or Ed Meese, or the Iran-Contra affair or a big stock swindle; and all the little people who have been pulling shady little deals themselves look for someone big to punish publicly and they always find someone. And quite justly too, for the scapegoat in these cases is indeed guilty himself, but the essence of finding a scapegoat is to pile all the sins of everyone else on his back and enjoy one’s own purity in contrast to the blackness of the scapegoat’s crime.

I do not excuse what I did. It was wrong. And I have tried very hard not to repeat the offense in any form. But the world we live in has a great many morally slippery places. Dr. Jennings, wherever you are, I hope you can hear my answer to your question.”