Chapter 26 — The River

On a Saturday morning in early October, Joe Rotch sat near the back of the bus from Boston to Portland as it rumbled along the Maine Turnpike taking him from college back to his old school. He felt disconnected, suspended between two worlds, a little apprehensive, not at all the way he had expected to feel after a month at college. His years at Kennebec Academy had been good years. He had been a successful student, occasionally even on the Honor List. He had liked his teachers. His roommate had been his best friend. He had been captain of his football team, had won letters in wrestling and rowing had played hard and won his share. He had held a position on the masthead of the school paper. When he had left last spring, diploma in hand, college bound, he had had no intention of dropping Kennebec out of his life. It was home to him, a place where he was confident, secure, successful. He had come up on the bus this morning, leaving Park Square before daylight to arrive in time to visit around the school before lunch and the football game. As he walked up the drive between the rows of pines, he felt warmly at home again. The same trees, the same thin fall sunshine, someone out on the football field pushing the lime cart, even the familiar squeak of the cart’s bent wheel. He waved to the guy pushing the cart and recognized Eddie Duff, who had been a lowly assistant manager the year before. “Hiya, Eddie. How’s it goin’?” he called heartily. Eddie looked up, squinting into the low sun. “Oh – uh, hi. Anything I can – oh it’s you, Joe. Didn’t recognize you at first. How ya been?” “Oh, good. How’s the team doing?” “Pretty good. We lost to the Hawks but won the others. I got to finish the lines or the coach’ll kill me … See you later. OK?” Well, he hadn’t known Eddie very well anyway, and Eddie always had been kind of dumb. The driveway led him to the school building; and he hesitated, wondering where to begin. Everyone would be in class now. Maybe stop in at the office and see old Moose Henshaw, Assistant Headmaster, He had always liked the Moose and surely the Moose would be glad to see him. The wooden steps were reassuringly the same with the nail heads sticking up where the wood was worn away around them. Over the door was the familiar Latin motto, and in the dimly-lit hall the Moose’s office door was open as usual. There was a small boy standing before the desk receiving the last of what was to Joe a familiar oration. The boy turned and passed him on the way out. He had never seen the boy before. New kid probably. “Well! Good morning, Joe. I’m glad to see you.” Exclaimed Mr. Henshaw,springing out of his chair and coming around the desk. Come up to see the game did you? How’ve you been?” “Fine, sir. I thought I’d like to come back and see – how things were.” Joe couldn’t say that college had overwhelmed him, that the math course was really too hard, that he hadn’t made the freshman football team, that his room mate was a strange guy from Texas who kept odd hours, rode a motorcycle and ended every sentence with “OK, Pal?” That everyone seemed to know everyone else but him, and that there were only maybe a dozen guys in the whole teeming place that he could talk to. The professors seemed miles away, formal and unapproachable, and his advisor called him George. He had come back to Kennebec not to see a game only, but to tag up with his old life, the life where there was respect and friendship – where everyone worked together to win a game or put out a paper or even to learn algebra. He wanted an infusion of the warmth and strength he had always felt at Kennebec. 120

safe. He couldn’t tell the Moose this. He couldn’t even tell himself this. It was just how he felt. “Yes, to see how things were and how you were getting along without me.” Kidding was always

“Staggering on, just barely staggering on. But tell me, how is the great university? Are you finding what you want?” Joe couldn’t tell him. It would be like getting undressed in public. “Fine, oh fine. Not quite what I expected, but I suppose things seldom are.” “That’s right. We really can’t tell you. You have to find out for yourself. How was your academic preparation?” “Good. I’m way ahead in English, but the math course is tough.” “All math courses are tough. You’ll make it, though. I have a lot of confidence in you, Joe.” Joe smiled thinly. The Moose taught history and probably didn’t remember that Joe had had to repeat both Geometry and Algebra 2 to graduate, and that he was taking the math course in college only because it was the least of the evils from which he had to choose. “Well, do stay to lunch. And visit around. I’m sure you’ll find people you know in the faculty room.” The Moose grabbed a stack of corrected papers from the corner of his desk, a book from the shelf, and whisked out of the office, leaving Joe open-mouthed. Other faculty members were the same. They all remembered him, although one man got his name wrong. They were all polite, cheerful and brief. They all asked about college and none of them wanted to hear the answer, an answer which Joe could not articulate but which he felt only as a lost feeling. Lunch would be better. The school bell rang – the same bell that once hung on the foremast of a schooner belonging to old Captain John Kenniston, founder of the Academy. The bell’s familiar sound and the familiar smell of the traditional Saturday noon beans warmed body and spirit. In the lunch line he found some of last year’s juniors, seniors now. They knew him at once and they did not brush him off. “How’s college, Joe? Havin’any fun?” “Nuts to college. How you doing here?” “OK, OK. The coach made Stan quarterback but he can’t throw good, so …” The conversation turned to football and Joe felt at home for a bit. Behind the counter, Ada, dishing out beans with a ladle, recognized Joe and called him by name. She remembered to fish out a piece of salt pork for his plate. But at the table, conversation turned to a new French teacher, to the current competition for Ivy League colleges, to discussion of an upcoming dance, to which of course Joe was not going. The dorm had the same ivy leaves, the same granite doorstep, the familiar smell of floor varnish and wax. The door to the room he and Sam had lived in for three years was ajar. Joe knocked, got no answer, and peeked in. It was a foreign land! The beds had been turned the other way. The back of his desk chair was broken, and there was a big Princeton banner on the wall. Joe fled to the locker room. The coach welcomed him warmly. “Hi Joe! Good to see you! Wish I could use you today. How about suiting up? Ha Ha. Anyone seen Stan yet? I want him taped first.” The brush-off again. But Joe lingered in the locker room. The familiar smells of wintergreen and tape and sweat, the slam of locker doors, the squeak of pads tightened, the rattle of cleats on the floor seemed to help. Joe didn’t talk to anyone. They were all busy or horsing around throwing socks or something. But being there helped. The coach gathered the team around him and gave them a pep talk. Joe had heard most of it before, and anyway he knew the coach wasn’t talking to him. He stayed through the first half of the game, sitting on the top bench in the stands between parents of boys he didn’t know. As the team ran off the field at the half, he felt strangely mixed: elated because Kennebec had come from behind to lead by a touchdown, because Stan had gotten off three really good passes, because the rush and crash and thump of the game brought him back; depressed because it wasn’t his

team any more. The stands emptied as the crowd hurried to see the cross-country team finish. Joe sat on the bottom bench and shivered. The Headmaster came by. He seemed to be the only person in the whole of Kennebec Academy – he and Ada serving beans – who had any time for Joe. The headmaster sat down next to him, plucked a long spear of fall grass and bit the end of it. “How’s it going, Joe?” he asked, and pulled the grass slowly between his fingernails. He waited. He wasn’t going somewhere else to do something important. He wanted to know. He waited. “Well, not the way I thought,” began Joe. The Head pulled the grass through his fingers again and waited. “Somehow, no one knows I’m there. I’m not good enough to be any good at anything and I don’t know but only a few guys and I don’t know – maybe I’ll drop out for a year.” That outrageous idea had never occurred to Joe before. It just burst out. The Headmaster understood all that Joe had not told him. “I guess it is natural that you should feel pulled up by the roots.” “But college is so different!” “It has to be. Every institution has its own character. But maybe the problem is as much with you as it is with the college. You who were football captain have been cut from the freshman team. Then who are you? Not a football player. You who finally earned a B in math, made the Honor List, and were accepted at the Great University now have a D. You who were proud of being a successful scholar are now hanging on desperately to the knot on the end of the academic rope.” “You mean I need to find myself?” “You have no idea, Joe, how much I dislike that expression. It suggests that you have to drop what you are doing, go somewhere else and look under rocks to find something lost. If you look for yourself that way, you may not like what you find. People don’t find themselves; they build themselves. A person is part of all that he has seen and heard and been and done, yes, and read. You don’t have to go to the Antarctic or a Quaker work camp to find yourself. Do the work that is put into your hands to do as enthusiastically, as imaginatively, as effectively as you can, and you will build not only yourself but also every institution and organization you touch. But be sure that you are building the kind of person, the kind of organization, the kind of world you want to build, because you can’t go back – ever.” “I can’t even come back here. It just isn’t the same as it was.” “No, it isn’t. It isn’t, because a school is a living creature. It grows and changes from year to year and even from day to day. Perhaps years ago the character of Captain Kenniston was the character of the school, but through the years the school has absorbed into its life the characters, not only of successive Headmasters, but of every man and boy – yes, and girl and woman – who has touched it. You had your share in it.” “’What did I ever do?” “The way you held that losing football team together last fall made a tremendous difference to the morale of the school. It is part of the reason the boys came from behind in the second period today. Your final success in math, the editorial you wrote about co-education, somewhat to the distress of some of the trustees, they all had an effect.” “But those things will soon be forgotten.” “Yes, they will. That is, they will soon cease to be identifiable as your achievements and will be absorbed into the pattern and fabric of the school, losing their identity like yesterday’s dinner, but they will always be there. The school will be what it is partly because you were here. And you can never get away from it, because you have left part of yourself here. “In a living school, this process goes on inexorably. You can’t expect to come back today and find it as it was on June 3, preserved forever in a block of clear plastic. You and your classmates have left. We

have about 60 new boys and three new teachers. They have already begun to affect us. Everyone who returned from last year is a year older and has changed and grown. It will never be the same as it was last spring or as it is today. The important thing is that we must be sure that it grows, as we want it to grow, for we can never go back – ever. “One of those cryptic oriental sages whom scholars love to quote once said, ‘No man can step in the same river twice.’ He meant, you see, that men are always growing and the river always flowing.”

The leaders of the-cross country race broke out of the distant woods beyond the baseball field, pushing for the finish. The Head stood up, and they walked that way, unhurried. Joe felt stronger, more confident, as if he had always known what he had just learned. He turned to the Headmaster, shook his hand, and said conventional words with more than superficial meaning. “Thank you, sir. It has meant a lot to see you.” “Press on, Joe, and come again often. I am going over to see if I can whoop these runners of ours on to a victory. They need one.” Joe headed for the early bus.