Текст книги "Boy in the Water"

Автор книги: Stephen Dobyns

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Jessica sat about fifteen feet away from him. Kate didn’t know how long the girl had been there but she felt that the wood splitting had been continuing for a while, at least she’d been aware of the sound of the ax at some low level of consciousness. The man swung the ax, kicked the pieces aside, then positioned a new log and brought the ax up with one hand, gripping the handle with the other when the ax reached the top of its arc. The movement had an easy grace. Kate wondered if the two had spoken or if the man knew that Jessica was watching, though she suspected he knew even if no words had been exchanged. In her baggy jeans and sweatshirt, the girl looked sexless, but her roommate had told Kate how Jessica had a garish tattoo on her bottom. “One of those woman symbol things,” Helen had said.

The beginning of applause brought Kate back to the room. Hawthorne had come to the end of his talk. She turned forward and began to clap, thinking as she did that the applause lacked the enthusiasm of the applause fifteen minutes earlier. Nobody stood.

Hawthorne held up a hand for silence. His slight smile suggested to Kate that he wasn’t sure what to do with his face. It occurred to her that he wasn’t as confident and inflexible as he at first seemed.

“I expect some of you have questions,” he said.

Chip Campbell got to his feet and raised his hand. “I’d like to hear more about these regular meetings.” He glanced around him with a certain severity. “I’m sure we all would.”

“We have about 120 boarders and a dozen or so day students divided between the upper and lower schools. The faculty of each school would meet weekly to discuss what they see as problems and difficulties among the students, as well as what we can do to help.”

“Some of us teach in both schools,” said Chip. Dressed in khakis and a brown tweed jacket over a Bishop’s Hill sweatshirt, Chip stood with his hands on his hips. He had a thick red neck and oversized red ears that his short hair made seem larger.

“I’m aware of that,” said Hawthorne. He spoke patiently but coolly, as if he were discussing numbers or automotive mechanics rather than people. “Those faculty would need to attend both meetings. And I’ll be attending both meetings myself, as well as the meetings of the nonacademic staff.”

“That’s a lot of time,” said Campbell.

“Yes.” Hawthorne seemed about to say more, then didn’t.

Chip glanced around at his colleagues, obviously hoping that one or more would continue this line of inquiry, then he sat down. When Kate had gone out with him that spring, Chip had barely been able to drive by the end of the evening. On the other hand, she was impressed that he had taken a thermos of martinis to a movie. And she even slightly blamed herself for his condition. After she turned down his offers of a martini, he had drunk the whole thermos himself, as if the contents would spoil if he didn’t act quickly. Chip had asked her out two other times, but each time she’d been busy, or said she was. Kate had already spent a quarter of her life with one alcoholic and she worried about her brief attraction to Chip, as if it suggested too much about her failings.

Mrs. Sherman, the art teacher, had her hand up. She was a rather flamboyant woman in her midfifties who wore a beret. “I’m worried about what you say about the demerit system. I often feel almost incapable of controlling some of my students and without the demerit system I think I’d be completely at sea. Isn’t there a danger of too much permissiveness?”

“I don’t believe it’s a matter of permissiveness,” said Hawthorne, “but of giving the students increased responsibility and trying to remove a them-against-us type of thinking. Our kindness to them must be separated from any notion as to whether they deserve it. The student who acts out and the student who never opens his mouth may be equally in need of help, and those are issues best addressed by the weekly meetings as well as other methods.” He went on to discuss the role of the two counselors now at the school and how each would be responsible for half the students and would work with him and the school psychologist. Sometime during the year Hawthorne hoped to hire a second psychologist. And he spoke of increasing the students’ sense of connection to the school by instituting a buddy system between upper and lower classmen, starting discussion groups within each grade, and assigning students to the grounds crew, the kitchen, or the library to help with certain tasks.

Further questions were asked, ranging from the smallest of issues—a broken desk in a classroom—to the philosophical—hadn’t Freud been generally discredited? But behind them all lay the concerns about time and how the students could be controlled. Ted Wrigley, the other language teacher, was worried about what he called the ethical dimension of increased student surveillance. Wasn’t it a form of spying?

“Our job,” said Hawthorne, “is to help prepare these youngsters for the adult world, to educate them in a variety of areas all the way from mathematics to how to interact with one another. Let’s say a girl comes to class with cuts on her arm or stops eating or refuses to brush her teeth. Surely you wouldn’t ignore symptoms like that. If we pay more attention to students’ behavior, we can do much to prevent these kinds of problems from developing, or at least keep them to a minimum.”

“Will these be one-hour meetings?” asked Roger Bennett, getting to his feet and smoothing back his blond hair. The fact that his wife was chaplain gave him a degree of unspoken authority, as if he were dean or associate headmaster. “Many of us have already committed our afternoons. What will be gained by making our busy schedules even busier?”

Kate again turned her attention to the playing fields. The shadows were longer; the girl was gone. But the man was still splitting wood—setting a log on the chopping block, then stepping back with his ax. His movements had a machinelike refinement, as if he could easily split logs all day. Kate wondered if he, too, would be included in these meetings, if he would be called upon to say how a girl had watched him splitting wood and what this might signify. Kate almost smiled. Couldn’t one say that everything had bearing on something? Really, it was impossible to provide for every contingency. If kids wanted to get in trouble, it would be hard to stop them. But wasn’t that the very attitude Hawthorne was arguing against?

The questions continued. Could students still be sent to the headmaster’s office if they acted up? Could bad behavior be punished with failing grades? The questions were as much about allaying the anxieties of the faculty as about looking for specific direction. “But it sounds like a treatment center, doesn’t it?” asked Herb Frankfurter, one of the two science teachers. The librarian, Bill Dolittle, seemed to agree. “Do you really think this will make them better?”

“You’re right,” said Hawthorne, “we don’t want to run a treatment center. The students haven’t been sent here by psychologists, nor have they been mandated here by the court. Their parents pay a lot of money for the privilege of enrolling them at Bishop’s Hill. But some of their conditions are similar, though perhaps not as severe. I don’t expect we can solve any huge problems, but, yes, I feel the students can be helped.”

“Without a demerit system,” said Tom Hastings, “I’ll become an even greater victim of their verbal abuse. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I get called.” Hastings, the other science teacher, was about Kate’s age. Whenever he got nervous, he stuttered, and the students teased him.

“I bet I’ve been called the same,” said Hawthorne. “However, they can’t abuse you.”

“Isn’t being called m-m-motherfucker a form of abuse?”

“As long as you can walk away, you can’t be abused. They’re stuck here, you’re not. And don’t get caught up in the meaning of the words. These are damaged kids. If you were a doctor and a kid came in with a broken arm, you wouldn’t take offense. For a boy to call you motherfucker is like a broken arm. And if a boy or girl is disturbing the class, you can make them take a time out or send them to my office. You can do all sorts of things, but to punish them is to avoid the problem. Basically, it’s a form of irresponsibility. And, let me tell you, it doesn’t do any good.”

There was a note of impatience in Hawthorne’s voice. Kate’s colleagues glanced at one another. The new headmaster’s tone had unsettled them.

Hamilton Burke got to his feet and put a hand on Hawthorne’s shoulder. “These issues will be worked out over the next weeks and I’m sure nobody will have anything of which to complain. In the meantime, it’s getting late. The board of trustees is hosting a little reception across the hall in the Peabody Room so we can continue our chat more informally. I hope you’ll all join us for a drink and a snack.”

Skander began applauding again to signify that the meeting was over. This time the applause was very brief. Chairs were pushed back.

“Welcome to Hawthorne’s gulag,” said Chip. “I’m sure not going to let any student of mine call me a motherfucker, no matter what this guy says or where he comes from.”

Alice Beech turned abruptly toward Chip and her white uniform seemed to hiss. “Then it’s clear you heard very little of what he had to say.”

Bill Dolittle joined them. Besides being librarian, he taught two sections of English. He was portly, balding, and reminded Kate of a friar—a rather sexless middle-aged man who liked his wine and comforts. “I’m impressed by his seriousness. It’s certainly a new idea to try to actually help out students.”

“Sounds like Do . . . little likes the new headmaster,” said Chip, mockingly. “Is that right, Do . . . little? Have you found yourself a friend?”

“I wish you’d stop that joke,” said Dolittle, pursing his lips. “I work as hard as anyone else around here and much harder than some.”

Roger Bennett came up behind Chip. “So what do you think?” Bennett raised his eyebrows ironically, as if answering his own question.

“All I know,” said Kate, “is that I’d like a glass of wine.”

–

Jessica Weaver sat in her bunk, writing a letter. It was the lower bunk she had chased her roommate out of, the jerk. If possible, she would have chased her from the room altogether, but she didn’t want to call too much attention to herself. It would be dumb to wreck her plans by being foolish. After all, that’s what had happened last time and that’s why she was at Bishop’s Hill.

Jessica had tucked two blankets under the mattress of the top bunk, letting them hang down and enclose the lower bunk so she felt like an Arab in a tent. Two of her biggest schoolbooks were piled to make a small table and on them burned a red candle in a saucer she had swiped from the dining hall. The candle gave enough light to see by and even warmed the small space, making it cozy. Leaning against the books was her stuffed bear, Harold, whose one eye was focused fondly upon her. Jessica was listening to her Walkman—Beyond the Missouri Sky again, programmed to play the last song, “Spiritual,” over and over. So arranged, Jessica could imagine she was almost anyplace and not at Bishop’s Hill in the few minutes dividing Friday night from Saturday morning. She wore blue flannel pajamas and sometimes she paused in her writing and chewed the black plastic tip of her pen.

She was writing to her ten-year-old brother, Jason, but she wasn’t going to mail the letter to their home for fear that Tremblay would intercept it. That would be a disaster. No, she would send it to Jason in care of a friend of his in school as she had done before. She tried to write three times a week, telling Jason the news and how their plans were progressing. She described how the headmaster had spoken to the students that morning, saying all the stuff he would do for them. Jessica hadn’t believed it but at least Hawthorne hadn’t talked down to them. And when some of the students acted silly, Hawthorne hadn’t gotten mad but just waited for them to finish.

And now she was telling Jason about her intentions. “There’s a man here who I think will help us. I’ve only talked to him a little but I’ve been watching him. He works in the kitchen but he’s not like that. Not like a kitchen person, if you know what I mean. I like him. After all, I’ll be paying him $2,000 and he doesn’t have to do much. Just get you out of the house and I’ll do the rest.”

She considered what “the rest” might be. Her father’s younger half brother, Matthew, lived in Washington and worked for the government, something in the Department of Labor, although she didn’t know what. He wasn’t in charge, she knew that much. She hadn’t seen Matthew since her father’s funeral, but she’d talked to him on the phone and had written to him. Now, however, she meant to appear on his doorstep with Jason. Surely if Matthew knew what Tremblay had done, he would protect them. He’d probably kill Tremblay, smash him with an ax, so she knew that she shouldn’t tell Matthew just yet. He certainly knew that her mother wasn’t good for much. Even if Dolly was sober and not taking pills, she was still frightened. A sodden chipmunk, that’s what she was. She wouldn’t stop Tremblay. She didn’t care what he had done. And though that wasn’t completely true, it was at least true that Dolly was too scared to protect them.

Again Jessica thought of how Tremblay would come to her room at night. She didn’t mean to think of it but the pictures seemed trapped in her head. Now he said he’d do the same to Jason unless she stayed at Bishop’s Hill and kept quiet. And she knew he would; he wasn’t scared. Jessica thought of how she used to hear him getting up to go to the bathroom, how she would count his steps—one, two, three—it was twelve steps from his bedroom to the bathroom, and if there was a thirteenth step, then her whole stomach felt nauseous because it meant he was coming to her room. Four, five, six—she could tell by his steps how much he’d been drinking and sometimes she knew there would be a thirteenth step even before she heard it.

She’d kill him if she could, and if he touched Jason, she would kill him for sure. When Jessica was smaller, she would think of spraying bug spray in Tremblay’s mouth when he was passed out. Now she would use a knife from the kitchen, one of those expensive butcher knives he liked to brag about. He’d promised he wouldn’t touch Jason as long as she stayed at Bishop’s Hill, but he had always promised her things and then come to her room anyway. Seven, eight, nine—hearing him stumble into the wall, sometimes knocking down a picture. Then Tremblay would pause and Jessica would listen to him breathe heavily, already knowing what he wanted, that he wouldn’t stop at the bathroom but would continue down the hall. Ten, eleven, twelve. And she would look at the light under her door and wait to see his shadow fall across it.

“Just make sure you don’t make Tremblay suspicious,” she wrote. “It would be best to do it when he is away on a business trip, so you need to find out about his schedule. Don’t ask him about it. Maybe Dolly knows.”

Jessica had stopped referring to her as “mother” when she married Tremblay. She’d become Dolly—a stupid big sister with whom Jessica was obliged to live. The candle flickered and she stared at the page. LeBrun could fuck her if that’s what he wanted; she’d do anything to get him to help. But the thought of sex was awful to her. Men’s moist, fat hands, their awful knees; their underwear that smelled of pee. At the club men would wiggle their tongues at her to show how much they wanted her, as if that would make her excited and dance even wilder rather than make her sick and want to puke on them. With LeBrun, she hoped the money would be enough—four thousand saved from table dancing, from pushing her small breasts into the faces of drunken men. Two thousand for LeBrun and two thousand for her and Jason to get to Washington and maybe beyond.

She hadn’t asked LeBrun yet. She had to be sure. Yet the more she waited, the more dangerous it was for her brother. Even if Matthew wouldn’t hide them, she could still go back to the titty bars. She had her fake ID. They would go to the West Coast, someplace warm. In December she’d be sixteen. Then she’d have five years until she came into her trust fund. She and Jason each had one and they had to be twenty-one before they got the money. And then Tremblay would have nothing because Dolly would no longer get an allowance or be paid child support. Jessica hoped Tremblay would be dead by that time. How brilliant if she could get LeBrun to kill him. But she was letting her fantasies get in the way. It would be hard enough to get him to rescue Jason, much less kill someone.

“Unless he’s going on a business trip, the best time to get you out of the house is between Thanksgiving and Christmas,” wrote Jessica. “Both Tremblay and Dolly drink more then. A few days before, you need to put a bag with some of your stuff over at Chuckie’s. You can’t take too much. No trucks or stuffed animals.”

What she liked about her Uncle Matthew was that he looked like her father, even though he was only a half brother. There was another half brother, Eddie, in Tucson, but he never wrote or showed any interest. Even here at Bishop’s Hill, Jessica had already gotten a letter from Matthew, a note really, saying he was glad she was safe and he hoped to see her sometime during the year but he was very busy right at the time.

“A few people here aren’t bad. I like my Spanish teacher but my English teacher is a dope. He’s also the librarian and he reads us dumb books. The kids are absolute nothings. My roommate cuts her arm with a razor blade. I don’t know if she thinks it’s cool or what. Some kids try to talk to me but I ignore them. They’re all babies. But the woods are pretty and the trees right now are really beautiful. A couple of times I’ve gone for long walks by myself. People say there are moose and black bears, I haven’t seen any, but LeBrun said they can’t leave the garbage cans outside because the bears will get them and make a mess—”

The blanket curtain was suddenly pulled aside. Jessica looked up and saw the upside-down head of her roommate, her brown hair hanging down. She almost yelled she was so startled. Helen was talking but Jessica couldn’t hear over the Walkman. She took off her earphones.

“. . . completely crazy,” Helen was saying. “You could start a fire with that candle. We could burn up. I knew I smelled something. If you don’t put it out immediately, I’ll tell Miss Standish. I’ll go down there right now. What’s wrong with you?”

Jessica leaned forward and blew out the candle, leaving Helen in the dark. Then she put on the earphones again so the bass repetitions of the song filled her ears. “Bitch,” she said, but even she couldn’t hear the word, it was so soft with her earphones on, almost a kiss. The song “Spiritual” had again reached the part that she liked—Dut-dut-dut-dut . . .

–

The French windows of the headmaster’s apartment opened onto a terrace that looked out across the school’s playing fields. The apartment was in Adams Hall, where classes were held, but it seemed homelike and included enough bedrooms for a big family—a feature that Hawthorne, now that he was single again, couldn’t consider without bitter irony. At the moment he was leaning against the balustrade that divided the terrace from the lawn some half-dozen feet below. The night was cloudy and windless. In the distance he could hear coyotes yapping.

Hawthorne wished he could pray, but the sky looked especially empty, a black chasm disappearing above him. Lights burned in the windows of several buildings although it was past midnight. More lights lined the walkways. At the corner of the playing fields a security light cast a yellow tint across home plate. But between those lights and whatever existed overhead, Hawthorne sensed only emptiness. He zipped up his jacket and buried his hands in the side pockets.

If he could pray, what would he ask for? To see his wife and daughter once more? To gaze on their living faces? But if he believed in prayer, then wouldn’t he believe that he would see them again? And there unfolded in his mind all the possibilities of an afterlife, as if he were pushing through one after another, expecting their faces to emerge from the confusion. If only he could see Meg and Lily one more time, he would surrender himself to any belief, do anything to breach the dark wall that kept them from him. Hawthorne felt a constriction in his chest; his heaven was empty and he was sure that when he died his own particular light would simply blink out. Meg and Lily were dead. He had brought their ashes back to New England to bury in Ingram in western Massachusetts, where they had lived before moving to San Diego. He had thought of driving out to Ingram before coming to Bishop’s Hill to see if their stones were in place and how the cemetery looked at the beginning of fall. But he hadn’t gone. Perhaps he would go later; he lacked the courage now.

Hawthorne hoisted himself up on the balustrade, kicking his heels against the small columns supporting the railing. Before him rose three stories of Adams Hall with its ivy and crumbling brick. At the corners of the roof were dragonlike gargoyles, looking foolish by day but in the moonlight full of menace. His apartment—or “quarters,” in the idiom of the school—took up a sizable portion of the first floor and showed signs of having been lately vacated by Fritz Skander. Hawthorne had been willing to let him stay, but he understood the symbolism of the move: there was no way Skander could live in the headmaster’s quarters. Anyway, there was a house for him on the grounds. It amused Hawthorne. Here he wanted to make a clean break and give himself over to a labor that would completely fill his mind, but already he was restricted by the customs of the new place. Maybe he would have done better digging ditches or dedicating himself to the improvement of an Indian tribe deep in the Amazon jungle—but such a tribe would also have its rituals, no better or worse than those at Bishop’s Hill.

And Hawthorne was digging a ditch; or rather, bringing Bishop’s Hill back from the near dead was equally labor-intensive. Unhappily, it wasn’t intensive enough. It didn’t block his other thoughts, because here he sat recalling all those aspects of his wife and daughter that formed the major continent within his skull, until he wanted to hammer his head with his fists and shout, Stop! Was this why people went crazy, to keep something out of their brains? All his training as a psychologist denied such old-fashioned ideas. He was overcome with hatred for the language of his trade, its clumsy diagnoses and efforts to describe the human condition, because here he was and his sky was still empty. But how else could he shut down his thoughts if not by ferocious work? Even his own death he had rejected—not for moral reasons but for a logic that, Hawthorne felt, approached the absurd. Meg and Lily now existed only in his seemingly limitless memory—again and again they moved across the stage of his thoughts. Meg might be doing no more than arranging flowers in a vase or Lily might be putting a pair of tiny shoes on the feet of a Barbie doll. Were Hawthorne to die, wouldn’t it kill them once again since their only remaining life was in his head? Once he was gone, they would be nowhere.

As for the other distractions, the more common forms of self-medication—alcohol, drugs, women—he felt he knew too much to give them credence. Even if his heaven was empty, it held more than the illusion extended by alcohol, and this paradox almost made him smile—Hawthorne, a man to whom smiles no longer came easily. No, he had chosen himself a ditch to dig, though in the past week he’d found himself thinking more of Sisyphus shoving his boulder up the hill. Hawthorne wondered how long it had taken Sisyphus to realize he wouldn’t succeed, that it wasn’t a matter of working harder or of there being a right way or a wrong way. The boulder would never perch motionless on top of the mountain and allow Sisyphus to say, “I did it.”

Was Bishop’s Hill like that? Hawthorne couldn’t let himself think in such terms. He had chosen to come to a place where he wasn’t known, where the details about what had happened in San Diego remained vague. He wouldn’t have to talk about it and deal with people’s curiosity, whether kindly meant or not. He was well aware that taking the job at Bishop’s Hill after having been at Wyndham was like a colonel, even a general, voluntarily returning to the ranks, becoming at best a sort of staff sergeant. Krueger had asked him if he meant to write a book but Hawthorne had none of that left inside him. After all, his being an innovator in his field had been one of the causes of the fire. Better to be a sergeant and concern himself with daily chores, better to dig a ditch. He would fully give himself to Bishop’s Hill, and if that wasn’t enough, the trustees would close the school and that would be that. Whether he succeeded or failed was beyond his concern. Like Sisyphus, he thought, pushing for the sake of pushing, the very Zen of pushing, and again he almost smiled.

Yesterday he had talked to the faculty, this morning he had addressed the students. After lunch he had talked to the staff—secretaries, grounds crew, housekeepers, the people who worked in the kitchen. The faculty had looked at him with fear, the students with suspicion, and the staff with disbelief. But no, that wasn’t true, there were some who seemed to listen with open minds. And others might be convinced, although slowly.

That afternoon he had talked to the school secretary, Mrs. Hayes, about her computer skills. She had come into his office and refused to sit down, saying that she preferred to stand. In her self-presentation, not a single hair was out of place. Her old-fashioned dress, cameo brooch, string of artificial pearls, practical shoes—her display was seamless. It turned out she had no computer skills. The board had offered to buy her a computer but she had refused. Her old Underwood was good enough for her. Hawthorne told her that he had ordered several computers, a printer, and a scanner and would show her how they worked. In no time, Mrs. Hayes unraveled. One tear slid down her cheek, then another. She told Hawthorne that she knew he intended to let her go.

“I have no intention of firing you,” he had said.

“That’s what you say now, but I know differently.”

“Please believe me. I need you here.”

But she didn’t believe him. She had worked at Bishop’s Hill for more than thirty years but she understood that changes were necessary.

“I’m only asking you to familiarize yourself with a perfectly simple machine. It will make your job and mine far easier.” He hadn’t had the courage to mention the Internet and e-mail, all the things that could be done online.

In the end, Hawthorne spent his time reassuring her that her position was safe. “Has anyone told you that I mean to fire you?”

“People talk.” Mrs. Hayes had patted her nose with a handkerchief. “And I know I’m not young anymore. I’m a slow learner.”

Hawthorne wondered what would happen if Mrs. Hayes refused to use a computer. Well, then, she would stay on till her retirement; she provided valuable continuity. But what bothered him was that she didn’t believe him. No matter what he said, she remained convinced that he would force her out of Bishop’s Hill. And he again thought of the faculty members the previous afternoon, how they tried to conceal their doubts and fears—what would he have to do before they realized he was trying to save their jobs and not preparing to fire them?

At least Fritz Skander understood the difficulty.

“They need to trust you,” Skander had said in his soft voice. “I can help you with that. I know them. It won’t take long. They’re basically good people.”

Hawthorne had felt so grateful that he had shaken Skander’s hand. In response, Skander had given him a smile of such warmth and willingness that Hawthorne’s doubts receded.

“It’ll be hard for a while,” said Skander, “but they’ll come around.”

“I’m depending on you,” Hawthorne had told him.

Skander patted Hawthorne’s arm. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Hawthorne’s meeting with the students had been less daunting even though they were less welcoming. But they were adolescents and Hawthorne felt he knew the breed. Their suspicion, indifference, and cynicism lacked the inflexibility that age gave a person. Although they were wary, it would be easier to win them to his side. They were quieter than kids in a treatment center, better able to keep themselves under control. And they were more sophisticated, more capable of channeling their energies in a single direction, even more analytical. So they had watched him.

He would always be available to them, he’d explained; if they had complaints they felt were being ignored, they could come to him at any time.

“What about the food?” one boy asked. “It sucks.”

“We’ve hired a new assistant cook and yesterday he made fresh bread for lunch. Personally, I thought it was wonderful. The problem at the moment is the kitchen’s budget but I’m sure it can be increased a little. The new cook has placed a suggestion box outside the kitchen. If there’s a kind of food or particular dishes that you want made, just leave a note and maybe he can do it. I know he’d like to.”

“Can we get wine with meals?” asked a boy.

“Or beer?”

There had been more joking suggestions. Hawthorne had waited for them to quiet down. But he liked their energy. Some seemed sullen or hostile but most were good-humored. He spoke about the difficulties the school was experiencing but also how the board was committed to making the school better. Money was being raised but they had to be patient.

Meeting with the staff, he had again spoken about the idea of a milieu and the need to prepare students for the adult world, not just by teaching the three Rs but by teaching them age-appropriate behavior and raising their sense of self-esteem. He knew the staff often had contact with students and he was sure they could make helpful suggestions. He would begin meeting with them weekly to discuss the school and the work it was doing. There would be refreshments; the atmosphere would be relaxed.