Alma Mater

I doubt I’ll ever know how or why my mother, Harriet, the grandmother you never met, was sent from a small farm in northwestern Massachusetts to an evangelical boarding school in Chicago in 1941. Her mother was a widow with ten surviving children, most of them beginning adulthood by then, my mother the youngest, aged 14. Those still at home lived in a farmhouse without electricity or indoor plumbing. They certainly could not have afforded the board and tuition themselves, nor even the cross-country train rides, so some sort of scholarship or charity must have been involved. I never questioned my mother closely about it while she was alive, and all the others who might have been able to explain it to me are long gone. Even her high school itself has not survived.

I wonder about a lot of things that I failed to wonder about when I was younger. What was it like for her to go back and forth between the little farm back east and those dormitories in the big city? What were her train journeys like? Did she travel alone? How often did she go home? Was she happy or depressed to be back? You’d think I would have asked her.

It’s not as though she never mentioned her life in boarding school, but she focused on the churchy stuff. She liked to tell us about the tall and handsome young Billy Graham who was a senior in the affiliated college on the same campus and how he definitely seemed like he’d been called to preaching. She mentioned a roommate with whom she’d been friends, although I don’t think the two of them stayed in touch after graduation. She told us her own mother had encouraged her and all her siblings not to stay on the farm, to scatter and spread far. But that was about it.    

I know that she was fond of the experience because her satisfaction with it played a role in my own departure for another evangelical boarding school when I was the same age. She never suggested I should go away, but when I wanted to, she persuaded my skeptical father that I would be okay. She even suggested it might help me become a preacher some day, in which hope she was very much disappointed. For myself, I had only romantic notions of boarding school as an escape from the dreary and the constrained.
 
By early 1975, when I was 12, our family had become a strange and grubby place to live. We had always been out of the ordinary in various ways. My father, Jim, the grandfather you never met, had a severe genetic bone condition that left him too brittle to stand on his own. I had inherited the same condition. My mother had grown up dirt poor and deeply religious, of course, but had become an R.N., worked as a single woman in the hospitals of several large American cities, spent half a decade as a Baptist missionary nurse in the mostly Muslim, Hausa region of Nigeria, and then married a disabled man a half decade younger than her, quite suddenly, when she was in her middle thirties and already presumed an “old maid.”
 
After marrying, they had two children and raised a protective cultural scrim around us: daily Bible readings and prayer, thrice-weekly church services, no pop, jazz, or rock music, no dancing, no card games, no movie theaters, very little TV, education at an elementary school run by a local Baptist church. The shield was effective enough through my early childhood that I was haunted for years by having only once heard Petula Clark’s “Downtown” on the radio while visiting a neighbor boy’s house to play. My hospitalizations gave me an intermittent window into the world of TV, but I still knew so little of pop culture that as an adolescent I once refused to believe that one of the Beatles had been named George because “George” seemed like an uncool name to me, and all that I knew about Rock-‘n-Roll was that it was supposed to be very cool. My parents Jim and Harriet were not cool, not even "Ozzie and Harriet " cool, not by any stretch.
 
And yet, for the first decade of my life, it was sort of an All-American childhood. Despite the intense evangelical religiosity and the faith filters that somewhat alienated our largely Roman Catholic neighborhood, despite all my fractures and frequent hospital trips, we were pretty typically, comfortably suburban. My dad had his own cabinet shop that did well throughout the sixties. My mom put aside her nursing career to be a homemaker. We had a little ranch house with a front lawn and a backyard swimming pool on a tree-lined street of modest houses in New Jersey. My sister and I never lacked for books or toys. We took winter vacations to Florida and summer vacations to New England, once even to Quebec. We were comparatively secure in an insecure world and we felt it.
 
Even after we moved onto a larger, stranger piece of property, five acres of overgrown, swampy woods, we only felt richer. My parents adopted first one, then another child, both from an evangelical orphanage in Korea. In 1972, my father sold his cabinet shop and took us on a twenty-plus state motorhome tour of the country, hitting all the tourists spots—Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Coasf, Pike’s Peak, the Gateway Arch, the Great Salt Lake, the list. Along the way, as a sop to my mother, we stopped in at the homes of all her far-flung older siblings in Vermont, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, California. In the cases of some of my maternal aunts and uncles and quite a few of my cousins, it would prove to be  the only time I ever saw them in person. Wherever we stayed, we looked for a Bible-believing church to attend.  Once in Tennessee, an ambitious Free-Will Baptist minister attempted to coax the Holy Spirit into healing me.
 
It was during the next few years, between ‘72 and ‘75, that things at home grew more notably peculiar. For starters, when we returned from that two-month long trip, my father discovered just how hard it was to find work in a wheelchair. No one was going to hire a severely crippled man in his forties for anything to do with wood work, no matter that he had designed and built half the fancy kitchens in town.
 
Eventually, he started building cabinets and furniture in our garage, opening it as another shop. It was slow going. A gifted draughtsman and cabinet designer, he had thrived with his first shop in no small part because he had teamed up with a childhood friend named Ted, tall and blonde, who handled all the sales while my father oversaw all the actual cabinetry and designs. Now, he had to find the work himself. Customers were often as skeptical as employers. When he did get jobs, they were usually modest projects and his margins were always razor thin. To help make ends meet, my mother returned to nursing, working nights at the local senior citizens’ home.
 
Meanwhile, in a kind of faithful frenzy, my parents had also adopted four more children—three disabled boys and one severely hyperactive little girl. It was a lousy time to be doing such a crazy thing. The first energy crisis hit and runaway inflation followed. The postwar building boom in New Jersey was over. By the end of 1974, we also had two foster boys living with us. My bedroom, once shared with only my brother Jimmy, now slept four boys in bunks. We no longer had spare money for the least of frivolities. My mother kept saying that the Lord would provide and reminded us daily of her own, harder circumstances as a child.
 
We had our fun. Our property was large and we were able to keep it thanks to my grandparents’ help with the mortgage. When it snowed, we had woods to make trails in. During the summer we had the creek. We had each other to play with, although several of us had come from situations so difficult that we didn’t always know how to play.
 
We got our clothes from donations. We grew some of our vegetables in small garden plots, kept chickens for their eggs and slaughtered them for meat. (It was my job to hatchet off their heads. They tended to run around headless for a few seconds afterward, spurting blood from their necks.) We experimented with novel sources of nutrition. A bow-hunter gave us a side of venison for letting him hunt in our woods. One summer evening we collected all the frogs we could and dined on boiled frogs’ legs. We harvested strawberries at a nearby greenhouse in exchange for a portion of the fruit. If we wanted to get popsicles, we scoured the couches and chairs for any lost change.
 
I became restless within this regime, however, not because I was suffering in any meaningful way but because I was a dreamy kid who lived largely in the fantasy worlds of his library books and who hated the increasing grime, crowding, and chaos of our home. Despite all the praying and occasional fun, there was a growing disorderliness and insecurity to our world. It felt cramped and small.
 
One day, the birth mother of one of the foster boys living with us asked my parents if they would drive her oldest daughter to an interview at a boarding school on Long Island where the mother hoped a church charity would pay to send the child. My parents agreed and made a family field trip out of it, bringing along half the kids as well as the girl being interviewed, leaving the younger children behind with my grandparents for the day.
 
We left on a Saturday morning in early spring of ‘75, arriving after a three-hour drive from Jersey, straight across New York City and through to the north shore of central Long Island.  It was a mildly blustery afternoon when we got there, with a sea breeze in the trees and dampness in the sunny air. We drove onto campus up a lane lined with Norwegian maples just coming into leaf and found ourselves in a complex of wooded lawns and paths surrounding handsome brick buildings with black slate roofs, white-pillared porticos, and white wooden trim.
 
By coincidence, we had arrived on spring cleaning weekend. Students who would have normally been in their rooms or out on the practice fields in back of campus were instead marching out on to balconies and fire escapes, beating rugs and piling sacks of trash. They were industrious but playful. There wasn’t an adult in sight. My imagination immediately perceived a spontaneously ordered city of teens, a society of lost boys and girls taking care of themselves in a gracious setting. It was far from the truth, but the vision bewitched me.
 
I don’t know how the girl’s interview went. I do know she never attended the school. The next day at home, I told my parents that I wanted to go there for high school myself. They gently explained to me what a long shot I was. We couldn’t afford such a place. My father worried about me and my brittle bones leaving home at all. My mother thought I’d be fine but told me I’d need a scholarship. Then she told me that if I were really motivated, I would contact the school myself. She could loan me her old portable, manual typewriter from her years in Africa two decades before, but beyond that I was on my own.
 
I had never composed a formal letter to a stranger. I had never used a typewriter. But I wanted to live on that leafy campus of free teenagers in their handsome brick halls. My mother dragged her dusty, olive-green typewriter case out of the crammed heap of junk at the bottom of her closet and handed it to me. It was supposed to be a portable, but it was solid metal and weighed me down. I found a paperback somewhere on the shelves that had a guide for writing business letters. I sat at a table with the book and the dark typewriter, fed the paper into the platen, and laboriously pecked one letter at a time. I have a vivid sensory memory of pushing those clunky, worn enameled keys and squinting to check each stroke was correct, although I can’t remember how many drafts of my letter I attempted.
 
My inquiry initiated a sequence that took fifteen months to complete. I received a reply inviting me to apply and directing me to the scholarships available. I typed more letters, including one to the DeWitt Wallace Foundation, making my case for a grant. In the fall of my eighth-grade year my parents made the drive out to Long Island again with just me this time. I met a tall man in a dark, wood-paneled room that felt mysterious, even solemn to me. I remember the conversation as stilted but pleasant, and I had the sense of being spoken to as if I were an odd discovery. Then I went into a smaller side room of similar appearance, sat at a small desk and worked my way through a battery of pencil-and-paper tests. We drove home. Three months later, I was accepted to the school, but no word on a scholarship yet. A few months after that, the DeWitt Wallace Foundation awarded me a scholarship that covered my tuition. Some additional funding was offered from the school’s general scholarship fund to account for much of my room and board. Another small grant came from the local Rotarians that would catch part of the rest.
 
Still my parents worried that they wouldn’t be able to afford the remainder. By midsummer of ‘76, while the Bicentennial celebrations were underway, we faced a deadline to make an initial payment so that I could enroll as a freshman that fall. The day before the deadline, a Lutheran minister driving by our place saw our sign for purebred St. Bernard puppies, which were another side project that my father had started, hoping to raise a little extra cash. The minister wrote a check for the two priciest puppies of the litter, and the next day my folks, convinced that the minister’s money was manna from heaven, divinely signaling I was meant to attend this school, sent the first payment in.
 
For the next four years, I was a boarder at the Stony Brook School, and as tiny and narrow a world as that campus appears to me with forty years of hindsight, it opened my horizons as wide as my devout mother could have borne, and probably a bit wider, had she known.
 
It wasn’t nearly as carefree and uncomplicated an escape as at twelve I had dreamed, but I loved that place, and I was almost always reluctant to come home. During the years I was a student there, my mother and I were both matter-of-fact about it. She had gone to a Christian boarding school for high school and liked it. I was going to a Christian boarding school and liked it, too. Neither one of us was surprised, and we pretty much left it at that. I wish we’d had more to say to each other about it.
 
Decades later, not long after my father had died, a date persuaded me to see the first Harry Potter movie, although I had thus far successfully avoided the books. Incongruously, and to my surprise, when watching the scene of the first-year students floating across a black lake at night in their torchlit boats, approaching Hogwarts Castle, what flashed through my mind was the moment when my family, packed into our old station-wagon, rolled up that long, handsome drive lined with spring maples, when I first glimpsed the colonial brick dormitories placed around those wooded lawns. The two scenes were literally as different as night and day, and yet I understood as being entirely the same that sense of wonder at approaching a new and richer form of existence.
 
And here I am, nearly another two decades on, too late now to ask my mother if she herself felt something similar or utterly different when her train finally pulled into Chicago on a late-summer day, a few months before Pearl Harbor. For the past several weeks I’ve been reading those Potter books that I so long avoided, aloud to my seven-year old daughter, you, and whenever young Harry is said to get a little thrill at returning to that Castle, although it’s much more magically unreal than my own alma mater, I get a little thrill, too. It’s the memory of returning to a greater world.