They were playing Albemarle Academy. Thomas got into the game in the second quarter but got yanked for not passing to Staines, who was open on a back-door twice. Coach McPhee was furious at halftime.
“Man’s open, you pass him the ball,” he said to Thomas in front of the team. The boys sat on the benches in the locker room while the coach paced. “That ball isn’t your private property.”
“Sorry, Coach.” They were down by three points.
“Sorry, nothing. You play ball the way we practice it.”
In the second half Thomas got into the game again. He passed the ball inside to Staines, but the pass never arrived. Albemarle was ready for the back-door play and stole it. Coach McPhee said nothing the first time it happened. The second time he pulled Thomas out again.
“See me after the game,” he said.
Staines got hot in the fourth quarter. He hit two shots from outside and stole a pass for a lay-up, and Montpelier was ahead by one with thirty seconds to go. Coach McPhee signaled for the four corners slowdown.
“Make them foul you,” he yelled. But with fifteen seconds to go, Staines got the ball on the baseline, drove toward the basket, and put up a fifteen-foot jump shot that missed. Albemarle got the rebound and scored at the buzzer. Montpelier lost by a point.
“I got fouled on that shot,” Staines said in the locker room afterward.
“You never should have taken it,” said Coach McPhee. “We didn’t play smart ball today, boys. We didn’t use our heads.”
“If I’d gotten the ball more, we could have won,” said Staines.
Coach McPhee grabbed a ball and threw it hard into Staines’s chest. It bounced off on the floor. Thomas was shocked to see Coach McPhee lose his temper, but glad to see Staines as the target.
“You don’t make excuses,” Coach said. “We lost as a team. We didn’t play well as a team.” He left them alone.
The coaches’ office was across the hall from the locker room. After Thomas dressed, he dragged himself over. He wished that he could start the day all over again, beginning with lunch.
Coach McPhee was there alone. You could tell he was peeved about the loss, but he wasn’t going to hit Thomas with a ball or anything.
“What was the matter with you today?” he said. He pointed to a wooden chair across the desk from his own. Thomas sat.
“I wasn’t concentrating,” said Thomas.
“What were you and Staines spatting about?”
“Sir?” It amazed Thomas how teachers seemed to know everything.
“The passes that didn’t get thrown or got thrown a second too late, the looks, the comments. You think I’m Helen Keller?”
Thomas told him about the argument at the training meal.
“Let me get this straight,” said Coach McPhee. “Staines supposedly popped in on the Wardens and caught them in the middle of doing what husbands and wives do?”
“He said that. I think he was exaggerating.”
“And he said some nasty things about them?”
“He called Mr. Warden ‘Red Label,’” said Thomas. “I hate that.”
Coach McPhee said he hated it, too.
“Let me tell you something, Boatwright,” he said. “When I was fifteen years old, my parents left me to babysit for my two-year-old brother. It was just the two of us alone in the apartment. I was supposed to give my brother a bath, and then dress him, and then put him to bed. You got the picture so far?”
Thomas did. He had heard this story before, but he dreaded it nonetheless.
“I was too preoccupied with my own little world to look after my baby brother properly,’’ said Coach McPhee. “He drowned in the bathtub, Boatwright. I was irresponsible. I left him alone in that big claw-footed bathtub, and he drowned. Not a day in my life goes by without my thinking of that little boy in that pool of water. I should have been there, and I wasn’t. You understand why I’m a teacher now? You understand why I’m a coach? I owe a debt. I had a responsibility, and I blew it. You had a responsibility today, and you blew it, too. The difference for you is that it was only a game. But responsibility still matters. Your responsibility was to the team.”
Thomas felt like a cockroach in front of a can of Raid.
“All right, Boatwright, get out of here,” he said. “You need to learn how to overcome your personal grudges.”
“Yes sir.”
“And I’ll talk to Staines later on.”
But Coach McPhee never spoke a word to Staines again.
SCENE 18
On the evening of Saturday, December 4, the only adult in the dining hall at Montpelier School who was clearly enjoying a good mood was Kevin Delaney. His varsity basketball team had won by ten points over Albemarle Academy, and he was now undefeated for the season. One win, zero losses.
Delaney was a big man, pumpkin-sized head on top of a weather-balloon-shaped torso, arms reminiscent of fire-plugs, and thighs like tuba cases. His mood tonight was as expansive as his body. His boys had won—even with the defection of Nathan Somerville to that damn Shakespearean production going on, they had won in double figures—and Delaney was proud of himself.
Delaney’s spirits withered quickly, however, after five minutes of sitting at the table with four other adults and waiting in vain for a compliment on his victory. Felix Grayson, the DM for the day, was griping because eight bus loads and a couple of vans were bringing almost 250 girls to the campus and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to supervise the place properly. Dean Samuel Kaufman was complaining of a dull ache in his lower back, brought on by a visit this afternoon from Benjamin Warden, who wanted Robert Staines dismissed from school for entering a faculty apartment without permission. Cynthia Warden, who sat at the head of the table, was angry because one bus load of girls had arrived an hour early with a chaperone who refused to drive three miles into the town of Montpelier for dinner. And Patrick
